The House by the Churchyard: Forensic Anthropology and Investigative Countermeasures

Abstract

At once a Gothic novel and traditional ghost story, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard remains one of his more arcane works as well as one of the lesser-known texts in the catalogue of the Victorian Gothic. This is so despite its being the quintessence of a Gothic narrative replete with decaying and haunted settings, secrets and obsessions, wrongful convictions and persecutions, and—not surprisingly—murder. As a horror writer in earnest and as part of a larger movement known as Dark Romanticism, Le Fanu is perhaps best remembered for the prototypical piece of vampire lore in his 1871 short story “Carmilla” in addition to his 1864 novel Uncle Silias drawing on the locked-room mystery first established by Poe twenty years earlier in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Apart from being an early contribution to the Victorian Gothic, the forensic legacy of The House by the Churchyard, first published in Ireland 1863 and written in the wake of the great Irish famine, is Le Fanu’s important contribution to FS² with a narrative that resonates in terms of its establishing the future of forensic efficacy with respect to the recovery of human remains. In so doing, The House by the Churchyard, like the other text explored here and which reconcile two or more forensic methodologies in a literary context, prevails as didactic narrative that proved well ahead of its time. Unlike the other titles referenced in the book, however, its convoluted structure is in part is why it remains one comparatively seldom discussed in literary circles and rarely read among fans of the Gothic. This chapter, it is hoped, can help overcome some of the novel’s difficulties and elucidate its enduring value with respect to FS².