La Belle Assemblée,  1 (1806), 129–33.

Valeria; or, The Ghost Alive!

Anon

Genre:

Short Fiction

Subjects:

Supernaturalism, Feeling, Disease, Death, Miracle


    The narrator relates how, at a Christmas house party in Languedoc, when the youthful company were telling each other stories of 'the marvellous, ghosts and apparitions', a young Italian lady called Valeria introduced her story by calling herself a ghost. She related how, having been refused permission to marry her lover Octavian, she was deceived into marrying a cousin. Discovering the deceit immediately after the wedding, she fainted and became delirious, 'the disease rapidly encreased, and after a paroxysm of sixty hours' she expired (131). She was placed in the family vault, but Octavian having obtained access to the vault and kissing her, felt her breathe. He warmed her in his embrace and took her to his house where a physician 'answered for [her] life' (132). Appearing to her parents and husband as a ghost, she caused the former to repent their actions, and the latter to relinquish his claim.



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