The house surgeon

On board ship, the narrator makes friends with Mr M'Leod, a wealthy business-man, who tells him that his fine country house is haunted by a sense of depression which afflicts everyone who enters it. On their return to England he asks him down for the weekend to see for himself, and indeed, as he settles into his bedroom he feels a sense of 'swift striding gloom ... despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear after fear...' First published in Harper’s Magazine for September and October 1909.