#AScareADay – Day 8 – The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing but the Truth by Rhoda Broughton
October 8th – Rhoda Broughton – ‘The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing but the Truth’ (1868) – Read it
Catch up on the scares and read ahead with the list: romancingthegothic.com/2025/09/21/the-scare-a-day-challenge-october-2025/
I really loved this one. I loved getting to know the characters via their letters, and that made the horror of what happened to others, second-hand, the more chilling (for me, at least).
The characters themselves were really engaging, and I loved their back and fore at the start, and their domestic banter. I had to look up what ‘short skirts’ meant in the 1860s, and it turns out it means skirts that show off your ankle boots, so they’re not dragging in the street. Scandal!! I thought this was really funny because I always thought about the skirts being ~w i d e~ and not how ‘short’ some fashion trend made them. I also loved how catty the women were in their letters, saying how that style (ankle showing) didn’t suit tall women or short women…
But I digress, that’s not the point of the story.
The really scary thing here is that you never see the thing that terrifies a maid literally out of her wits and into an asylum, or scares a young man so badly he drops down dead in front of his friends. I love not knowing what that was, or what it could be.
I had a few ideas about this one, but I just loved it as it was. It made me think about the unknown, and absences, and things that consume you. I didn’t really want to write anything for this one, but instead I’ve got some recs for other media – and some folklore – that tackles similar themes.
As the title is The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth, I thought a non-fiction response would be appropriate! So here are some recommendations and notes!
One film that does some really interesting things with sight, not seeing things, and not needing to see things, is the Spanish horror, Hermana Muerte / Sister Death (2023) dir. Paco Plaza. There’s so much going on with the visions and whether they were even real, whether what was seen was really seen, and the girls seeing what the teacher could not. Seeing, in the end, leads to a catastrophic showdown.
A book (MG/younger YA) that has the autistic-coded protagonist never seeing what his siblings and friends can see as an otherworldly threat approaches, is Down In The Cellar by Nicholas Stuart Grey, published in 1961. It is told from the first person perspective of an autistic-coded boy, and relates the tale of how he and his siblings find and care for a mystAs the protagonist can’t see what the others can, but has to have the phantom procession of eerie lights marching down the hill described to him, for example, or see the effects of what might be in the cellar on his cousins and siblings while never experiencing them himself, he has to take everything on trust, and that’s a really interesting perspective.
You can include this in your trans books list, as Nicholas was a trans man. He was also an actor who loved playing the part of the pantomime cat, and would stay in costume and in character backstage. Cats are often main characters in his work, and he loved to play the parts he wrote for them. So not only a trans man but a proto-furry icon?? I really hope he was nice in real life. The more I learn about him and read his work, the more I like him. Much of his work is harder to get hold of now, but well worth it if you can find it second-hand.
Some actual folklore about an entity haunting a room which you never see, is, of course, the vampire furniture of Glamorgan, and in particular the Jacobean four-poster bed in a Cardiff home which claimed the life of a baby, and nearly claimed the grown men who stayed in it. These stories are recorded in Folk-lore and folk-stories of Wales, by Marie Trevelyan, 1909. I wrote about them here in my post about Welsh vampires. The book is available on the Internet Archive here. The passage is reproduced in a more accessible format here.
Hopefully that intrigues you! Have a read of my vampire post and the series on Welsh Gothic fiction, going through Jane Aaron’s book, Welsh Gothic, chapter by chapter, and looking at the texts and the folklore and history behind them.
If I’ve inspired you, shown you something you hadn’t heard of before, or sparked something for you, feel free to leave me a tip if you can! It would be much appreciated.
