During Christmas, Arthur Kipps, a solicitor, is asked to tell a ghost story by his stepchildren from his second marriage. He is agitated by the question, but decides to write his recollections of a case from his youth in the hope that doing so will exorcise them from his memory. Years earlier, while a junior solicitor, Kipps is summoned to Crythin Gifford, a small market town on the northeast coast of England, to attend the funeral of Mrs. Alice Drablow and settle her estate. He is reluctant to leave his fiancée, Stella, but eager to get away from the dreary
London fog. The late Mrs. Drablow was an elderly, reclusive widow who lived alone in the desolate and secluded Eel Marsh House. On his train ride there, he meets Samuel Daily, a wealthy landowner. At the funeral, Kipps sees a woman dressed in black and with a pale face and dark eyes, whom a group of children are silently watching. When a local coachman takes Kipps to the Eel Marsh House, he learns that it is a
tidal island joined to the mainland by Nine Lives
Causeway. At high tide the causeway is submerged; the house is surrounded by
marshes and
sea frets. As Kipps sorts through Mrs. Drablow's papers at Eel Marsh House, he endures an increasingly terrifying sequence of unexplained noises, chilling events and appearances by the Woman in Black. In one of these instances, he hears the sound of a horse and carriage in distress, followed by the screams of a young child and his maid, coming from the direction of the marshes. Most of the people in Crythin Gifford are reluctant to reveal information about Mrs. Drablow and the mysterious woman in black. Any attempts Kipps makes to learn more causes pained and fearful reactions. From various sources, he learns that Mrs. Drablow's sister, Jennet Humfrye, gave birth to a child, Nathaniel. Because she was unmarried, she was forced to give the child to her sister. The Drablows adopted the boy, and insisted that he should never know that Jennet was his mother. Jennet went away for a year. Upon realising she could not be parted for long from her son, she made an agreement to stay at Eel Marsh House with him as long as she never revealed her true identity to him. She secretly planned to abscond from the house with her son. One day, a pony and
trap carrying the boy across the causeway became lost and sank into the marshes, killing all aboard, while Jennet looked on helplessly from the window. The child's screams that Kipps heard were those of Nathaniel's ghost. After Jennet died, she returned to haunt Eel Marsh House and the town of Crythin Gifford as the malevolent Woman in Black. According to local tales, a sighting of the Woman in Black presaged the death of a child. Kipps returns to London, putting the events at Crythin Gifford behind him by marrying Stella and having a child of his own. At a fair, while his wife and child are enjoying a pony and trap ride, Kipps sees the Woman in Black. She steps out in front of the horse and startles it, causing it to bolt and wreck the carriage against a tree, killing the child instantly and critically injuring Stella, who dies ten months later. Kipps finishes his reminiscence with the words, "They have asked for my story. I have told it. Enough." ==Stage play==