The Judge's House, Part One

Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 369 The Judge’s House, Part One

But before we go any further, I want to announce that Celebrate Poe has now had downloads in 100 countries and territories.

Now I have another surprise for you from Bram Stoker’s 1914 Dracula’s Guest - a short story called The Judge’s House.  I admit that I first thought about covering Dracula’s Guest in just one episode - but that made the episode way too long. 

So I am splitting The Judge’s House into two sections.  It is not Draculesque (if that is a word) and it may not seem like much is happening, but has a build-up to the climax in the second half that is really powerful and well worth the wait.

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Poe.

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 369 The Judge’s House, Part One

But before we go any further, I want to announce that Celebrate Poe has now had downloads in 100 countries and territories.

Now I have another surprise for you from Bram Stoker’s 1914 Dracula’s Guest - a short story called The Judge’s House.  I admit that I first thought about covering Dracula’s Guest in just one episode - but that made the episode way too long. 

So I am splitting The Judge’s House into two sections.  It is not Draculesque - if that is a word, and it may not seem like much is happening, but has a build-up to the climax in the second half that is really powerful and well worth the wait.

But first - a little background - Bram Stoker’s was born in Dublin in 1847. He was bedridden until age 7 due to an unexplained illness. His mother, Charlotte, entertained him with chilling tales of cholera epidemics and accidental live burials—stories that later may have seeped into his horror fiction. Stoker’s math degree from Trinity College Dublin honed his analytical mind, yet his heart belonged to Gothic storytelling.

Stoker managed London’s Lyceum Theatre for actor Henry Irving, a role that immersed him in dramatic pacing and suspense. Critics speculate Irving’s commanding presence influenced Stoker’s aristocratic villains. 

While Dracula (1897) overshadowed his 12 novels, The Judge’s House and other stories (1891) showcases Stoker’s knack for psychological terror. Lesser-known works like The Lair of the White Worm (1911) blend folklore with horror, but The Judge’s House remains a masterclass in slow-burn dread.

Published in 1891 in Holly Leaves - a Christmas magazine, the story juxtaposes festive cheer with macabre horror—a Stoker hallmark. Though less famous than Dracula, it’s praised for its atmospheric tension.  Stoker’s story fits squarely within Victorian Gothic traditions, emphasizing haunted architecture and psychological unraveling. 


And protagonist Malcolm Malcolmson’s rationalism crumbles under supernatural forces, mirroring Poe’s doomed intellectuals (e.g., The Fall of the House of Usher).

The decaying mansion, the Judge’s House, echoes Poe’s obsession with oppressive settings as extensions of characters’ psyches. 
The vengeful Judge parallels Poe’s themes of unresolved guilt (e.g., The Tell-Tale Heart), though Stoker leans into folkloric justice.

Rats infesting the house symbolize impending doom, while the bell rope—crafted from the Judge’s noose—ties the protagonist to his fate. Stoker’s use of mundane objects as harbingers of terror recalls Poe’s “single effect” technique.

Poe’s narrators often descend into madness from within (The Black Cat), while Stoker externalizes horror through folklore (e.g., the Judge’s ghost). Both challenge 19th-century faith in science.

You could say that Poe pioneered psychological horror; Stoker fused it with Victorian anxieties about morality and progress. The Judge’s House bridges their styles—a cerebral setup meets visceral payoff - and it is quite a payoff.

A bit of trivia - Stoker wrote The Judge’s House while researching Dracula. The story’s rats foreshadow Count Dracula’s shape-shifting into vermin.
While Poe’s The Raven (1845) popularized talking animals in horror; Stoker’s rats carry silent, collective menace.

Stoker’s character of Malcolmson, like many of Poe’s protagonists (e.g., Roderick Usher), clings to rationality until it crumbles. His dismissal of local superstitions mirrors Poe’s doomed intellectuals, but Stoker externalizes terror through folklore (the Judge’s ghost) rather than internal madness. Both authors critique 19th-century faith in science, while at the same time suggesting some forces defy explanation.

The Judge’s House—a decaying Jacobean mansion—echoes Poe’s oppressive settings. (Its infestations (rats) and artifacts (the bell-rope noose) symbolize unresolved guilt and retribution, blurring the line between past and present. Stoker’s house becomes a character itself, reflecting the Judge’s malevolence.

Malcolmson’s self-imposed isolation parallels Poe’s themes of seclusion leading to psychological collapse. His arrogance in dismissing warnings mirrors the hubris of Poe’s narrators, though Stoker ties his downfall to external supernatural forces rather than internal decay.

The rats infesting the house—particularly the giant, human-eyed rat—foreshadow the Judge’s spectral return. Their collective menace contrasts with Poe’s singular raven, embodying a more primal, inescapable terror.

Originally used to summon help, the bell-rope becomes a tool of execution, symbolizing the Judge’s lingering cruelty. Its transformation from safety to peril mirrors Gothic tropes of corrupted innocence - and hopefully this will all make sense by the end of the story.

Dust-covered and initially overlooked, the painting of the judge gradually reveals his malevolence. His eyes, mirroring the rat’s gaze, symbolize the inescapable past haunting the present—a motif shared with Poe’s The Oval Portrait

While Poe pioneered psychological horror, Stoker fused it with Victorian social anxieties. The Judge’s House bridges their styles: cerebral setup meets visceral climax, offering a blueprint for later supernatural fiction.

And both Poe’s death (1849) and Stoker’s in (1912) were shrouded in mystery—fitting for masters of the macabre.

Finally, The story’s slowly-building tension between reason and folklore mirrors Stoker’s own life: a math graduate enthralled by the irrational.

And now - The Judge’s House

When the time for his examination drew near Malcolm Malcolmson made up his mind to go somewhere to read by himself. He feared the attractions of the seaside, and also he feared completely rural isolation, for of old he knew its charms, and so he determined to find some unpretentious little town where there would be nothing to distract him. He refrained from asking suggestions from any of his friends, for he argued that each would recommend some place of which he had knowledge, and where he had already acquaintances. As Malcolmson wished to avoid friends he had no wish to encumber himself with the attention of friends’ friends, and so he determined to look out for a place for himself. He packed a portmanteau with some clothes and all the books he required, and then took ticket for the first name on the local time-table which he did not know.
When at the end of three hours’ journey he alighted at Benchurch, he felt satisfied that he had so far obliterated his tracks as to be sure of having a peaceful opportunity of pursuing his studies. He went straight to the one inn which the sleepy little place contained, and put up for the night. Benchurch was a market town, and once in three weeks was crowded to excess, but for the remainder of the twenty-one days it was as attractive as a desert. Malcolmson looked around the day after his arrival to try to find quarters more isolated than even so quiet an inn as “The Good Traveller” afforded. There was only one place which took his fancy, and it certainly satisfied his wildest ideas regarding quiet; in fact, quiet was not the proper word to apply to it—desolation was the only term conveying any suitable idea of its isolation. It was an old rambling, heavy-built house of the Jacobean style, with heavy gables and windows, unusually small, and set higher than was customary in such houses, and was surrounded with a high brick wall massively built.  But all these things pleased Malcolmson. “Here,” he thought, “is the very spot I have been looking for, and if I can get opportunity of using it I shall be happy.” His joy was increased when he realised beyond doubt that it was not at present inhabited.
From the post-office he got the name of the agent, who was rarely surprised at the application to rent a part of the old house. Mr. Carnford, the local lawyer and agent, was a genial old gentleman, and frankly confessed his delight at anyone being willing to live in the house.
“To tell you the truth,” said he, “I should be only too happy, on behalf of the owners, to let anyone have the house rent free for a term of years if only to accustom the people here to see it inhabited. It has been so long empty that some kind of absurd prejudice has grown up about it, and this can be best put down by its occupation—if only,” he added with a sly glance at Malcolmson, “by a scholar like yourself, who wants its quiet for a time.”
Malcolmson thought it needless to ask the agent about the “absurd prejudice”; he knew he would get more information, if he should require it, on that subject from other quarters. He paid his three months’ rent, got a receipt, and the name of an old woman who would probably undertake to “do” for him, and came away with the keys in his pocket. He then went to the landlady of the inn, who was a cheerful and most kindly person, and asked her advice as to such stores and provisions as he would be likely to require. She threw up her hands in amazement when he told her where he was going to settle himself.
“Not in the Judge’s House!” she said, and grew pale as she spoke. He explained the locality of the house, saying that he did not know its name. When he had finished she answered:
“Aye, sure enough—sure enough the very place! It is the Judge’s House sure enough.” He asked her to tell him about the place, why so called, and what there was against it. She told him that it was so called locally because it had been many years before—how long she could not say, as she was herself from another part of the country, but she thought it must have been a hundred years or more—the abode of a judge who was held in great terror on account of his harsh sentences and his hostility to prisoners at Assizes. As to what there was against the house itself she could not tell. She had often asked, but no one could inform her; but there was a general feeling that there was something, and for her own part she would not take all the money in Drinkwater’s Bank and stay in the house an hour by herself. Then she apologised to Malcolmson for her disturbing talk.
“It is too bad of me, sir, and you—and a young gentlemen, too—if you will pardon me saying it, going to live there all alone. If you were my boy—and you’ll excuse me for saying it—you wouldn’t sleep there a night, not if I had to go there myself and pull the big alarm bell that’s on the roof!” The good creature was so manifestly in earnest, and was so kindly in her intentions, that Malcolmson, although amused, was touched. He told her kindly how much he appreciated her interest in him, and added:
“But, my dear Mrs. Witham, indeed you need not be concerned about me! A man who is reading for the Mathematical Tripos has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious ‘somethings’, and his work is of too exact and prosaic a kind to allow of his having any corner in his mind for mysteries of any kind. Harmonical Progression, Permutations and Combinations, and Elliptic Functions have sufficient mysteries for me!” Mrs. Witham kindly undertook to see after his commissions, and he went himself to look for the old woman who had been recommended to him. When he returned to the Judge’s House with her, after an interval of a couple of hours, he found Mrs. Witham herself waiting with several men and boys carrying parcels, and an upholsterer’s man with a bed in a car, for she said, though tables and chairs might be all very well, a bed that hadn’t been aired for mayhap fifty years was not proper for young bones to lie on. She was evidently curious to see the inside of the house; and though manifestly so afraid of the “somethings” that at the slightest sound she clutched on to Malcolmson, whom she never left for a moment, went over the whole place.
After his examination of the house, Malcolmson decided to take up his abode in the great dining-room, which was big enough to serve for all his requirements; and Mrs. Witham, with the aid of the charwoman, Mrs. Dempster, proceeded to arrange matters. When the hampers were brought in and unpacked, Malcolmson saw that with much kind forethought she had sent from her own kitchen sufficient provisions to last for a few days. Before going she expressed all sorts of kind wishes; and at the door turned and said:

“And perhaps, sir, as the room is big and draughty it might be well to have one of those big screens put round your bed at night—though, truth to tell, I would die myself if I were to be so shut in with all kinds of—of ‘things’, that put their heads round the sides, or over the top, and look on me!” The image which she had called up was too much for her nerves, and she fled incontinently.
Mrs. Dempster sniffed in a superior manner as the landlady disappeared, and remarked that for her own part she wasn’t afraid of all the bogies in the kingdom.
“I’ll tell you what it is, sir,” she said; “bogies is all kinds and sorts of things—except bogies! Rats and mice, and beetles; and creaky doors, and loose slates, and broken panes, and stiff drawer handles, that stay out when you pull them and then fall down in the middle of the night. Look at the wainscot of the room! It is old—hundreds of years old! Do you think there’s no rats and beetles there! And do you imagine, sir, that you won’t see none of them? Rats is bogies, I tell you, and bogies is rats; and don’t you get to think anything else!”
“Mrs. Dempster,” said Malcolmson gravely, making her a polite bow, “you know more than a Senior Wrangler! And let me say, that, as a mark of esteem for your indubitable soundness of head and heart, I shall, when I go, give you possession of this house, and let you stay here by yourself for the last two months of my tenancy, for four weeks will serve my purpose.”
“Thank you kindly, sir!” she answered, “but I couldn’t sleep away from home a night. I am in Greenhow’s Charity, and if I slept a night away from my rooms I should lose all I have got to live on. The rules is very strict; and there’s too many watching for a vacancy for me to run any risks in the matter. Only for that, sir, I’d gladly come here and attend on you altogether during your stay.”
“My good woman,” said Malcolmson hastily, “I have come here on purpose to obtain solitude; and believe me that I am grateful to the late Greenhow for having so organised his admirable charity—whatever it is—that I am perforce denied the opportunity of suffering from such a form of temptation! Saint Anthony himself could not be more rigid on the point!”
The old woman laughed harshly. “Ah, you young gentlemen,” she said, “you don’t fear for naught; and belike you’ll get all the solitude you want here.” She set to work with her cleaning; and by nightfall, when Malcolmson returned from his walk—he always had one of his books to study as he walked—he found the room swept and tidied, a fire burning in the old hearth, the lamp lit, and the table spread for supper with Mrs. Witham’s excellent fare. “This is comfort, indeed,” he said, as he rubbed his hands.
When he had finished his supper, and lifted the tray to the other end of the great oak dining-table, he got out his books again, put fresh wood on the fire, trimmed his lamp, and set himself down to a spell of real hard work. He went on without pause till about eleven o’clock, when he knocked off for a bit to fix his fire and lamp, and to make himself a cup of tea. He had always been a tea-drinker, and during his college life had sat late at work and had taken tea late. The rest was a great luxury to him, and he enjoyed it with a sense of delicious, voluptuous ease. The renewed fire leaped and sparkled, and threw quaint shadows through the great old room; and as he sipped his hot tea he revelled in the sense of isolation from his kind. Then it was that he began to notice for the first time what a noise the rats were making.
“Surely,” he thought, “they cannot have been at it all the time I was reading. Had they been, I must have noticed it!” Presently, when the noise increased, he satisfied himself that it was really new. It was evident that at first the rats had been frightened at the presence of a stranger, and the light of fire and lamp; but that as the time went on they had grown bolder and were now disporting themselves as was their wont.
How busy they were! and hark to the strange noises! Up and down behind the old wainscot, over the ceiling and under the floor they raced, and gnawed, and scratched! Malcolmson smiled to himself as he recalled to mind the saying of Mrs. Dempster, “Bogies is rats, and rats is bogies!” The tea began to have its effect of intellectual and nervous stimulus, he saw with joy another long spell of work to be done before the night was past, and in the sense of security which it gave him, he allowed himself the luxury of a good look round the room. He took his lamp in one hand, and went all around, wondering that so quaint and beautiful an old house had been so long neglected. The carving of the oak on the panels of the wainscot was fine, and on and round the doors and windows it was beautiful and of rare merit. There were some old pictures on the walls, but they were coated so thick with dust and dirt that he could not distinguish any detail of them, though he held his lamp as high as he could over his head. Here and there as he went round he saw some crack or hole blocked for a moment by the face of a rat with its bright eyes glittering in the light, but in an instant it was gone, and a squeak and a scamper followed. The thing that most struck him, however, was the rope of the great alarm bell on the roof, which hung down in a corner of the room on the right-hand side of the fireplace. He pulled up close to the hearth a great high-backed carved oak chair, and sat down to his last cup of tea. When this was done he made up the fire, and went back to his work, sitting at the corner of the table, having the fire to his left. For a little while the rats disturbed him somewhat with their perpetual scampering, but he got accustomed to the noise as one does to the ticking of a clock or to the roar of moving water; and he became so immersed in his work that everything in the world, except the problem which he was trying to solve, passed away from him.
He suddenly looked up, his problem was still unsolved, and there was in the air that sense of the hour before the dawn, which is so dread to doubtful life. The noise of the rats had ceased. Indeed it seemed to him that it must have ceased but lately and that it was the sudden cessation which had disturbed him. The fire had fallen low, but still it threw out a deep red glow. But There on the great high-backed carved oak chair by the right side of the fireplace sat an enormous rat, steadily glaring at him with baleful eyes. He made a motion to it as though to hunt it away, but it did not stir. Then he made the motion of throwing something. Still it did not stir, but showed its great white teeth angrily, and its cruel eyes shone in the lamplight with an added vindictiveness.
Malcolmson felt amazed, and seizing the poker from the hearth ran at it to kill it. Before, however, he could strike it, the rat, with a squeak that sounded like the concentration of hate, jumped upon the floor, and, running up the rope of the alarm bell, disappeared in the darkness beyond the range of the green-shaded lamp. Instantly, strange to say, the noisy scampering of the rats in the wainscot began again.
By this time Malcolmson’s mind was quite off the problem; and as a shrill cock-crow outside told him of the approach of morning, he went to bed and to sleep. He slept so sound that he was not even waked by Mrs. Dempster coming into make up his room. It was only when she had tidied up the place and got his breakfast ready and tapped on the screen which closed in his bed that he woke. He was a little tired still after his night’s hard work, but a strong cup of tea soon freshened him up and, taking his book, he went out for his morning walk, bringing with him a few sandwiches lest he should not care to return till dinner time. He found a quiet walk between high elms some way outside the town, and here he spent the greater part of the day studying. On his return he looked in to see Mrs. Witham and to thank her for her kindness. When she saw him coming through the diamond-paned bay window of her sanctum she came out to meet him and asked him in. She looked at him searchingly and shook her head as she said:  “You must not overdo it, sir. You are paler this morning than you should be. Too late hours and too hard work on the brain isn’t good for any man! But tell me, sir, how did you pass the night? Well, I hope? But my heart! sir, I was glad when Mrs. Dempster told me this morning that you were all right and sleeping sound when she went in.”
“Oh, I was all right,” he answered smiling, “the ‘somethings’ didn’t worry me, as yet. Only the rats; and they had a circus, I tell you, all over the place. There was one wicked looking old devil that sat up on my own chair by the fire, and wouldn’t go till I took the poker to him, and then he ran up the rope of the alarm bell and got to somewhere up the wall or the ceiling—I couldn’t see where, it was so dark.”
“Mercy on us,” said Mrs. Witham, “an old devil, and sitting on a chair by the fireside! Take care, sir! take care! There’s many a true word spoken in jest.”
“How do you mean? Pon my word I don’t understand.”
“An old devil! The old devil, perhaps. There! sir, you needn’t laugh,” for Malcolmson had broken into a hearty peal. “You young folks thinks it easy to laugh at things that makes older ones shudder. Never mind, sir! never mind! Please God, you’ll laugh all the time. It’s what I wish you myself!” and the good lady beamed all over in sympathy with his enjoyment, her fears gone for a moment.
“Oh, forgive me!” said Malcolmson presently. “Don’t think me rude; but the idea was too much for me—that the old devil himself was on the chair last night!” And at the thought he laughed again. Then he went home to dinner.
That evening the scampering of the rats began earlier; indeed it had been going on before his arrival, and only ceased whilst his presence by its freshness disturbed them. After dinner he sat by the fire for a while and had a smoke; and then, having cleared his table, began to work as before. 

Join Celebrate Poe for episode 370 - The Judge’s House, Part Two - an episode with a climax that this episode has only been building up to - a climax that just might keep you awake.

Sources include: The Judge's House - A Gothic Horror Classic by Bram Stoker

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