hear him, and the driver didn't have the time to stop. The narrator asks the driver what he shouted out and the driver tells him he shouted, "Below there! Look out! Look out! For God's sake clear the way!'" It is almost the same phrasing that the signal man had said the ghost had used six hours before a terrible accident had occurred a few years before. The tragic thing is that this time the ghost was foreseeing the death of the signal man.

Ironically and tragically both, the signal-man is killed in the same manner as the man in his frightening vision, making his vision a ghostly premonition. That his premonition has been about himself is very disturbing.

Certainly, there is a Gothic setting to this disturbing story in which there is a tunnel

“...in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air....So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it...

From living such an isolated life, the signal-man's ghostly tale seems to be merely the imaginings of a man who lacks human company. Nevertheless, he repeatedly hears the bell and sees a specter near the Danger light. Tragically, despite the signal-man's cautionary and painstaking actions, he is "cut down" by a train, and it is, in fact, he who becomes the apparition that he has repeatedly seen.

In this ghastly story beginning in media res of a strange, isolated railroad employee, whom the unnamed narrator encounters as he treks downward from a ridge, Charles Dickens expresses his disdain for the technology of the new Industrial Age. With his first encounter with this man, the narrator finds him edgy and haunted by an idea; moreover, he is daunted by the signal-man. Nevertheless, he talks with the man after he steps back and the signal-man seems fearful of him, dispelling the narrator's trepidation for this man.

On a subsequent visit, the narrator learns that the signal-man was very disturbed by the narrator's first call to him because the words were exactly the same as those he has heard before. Perhaps to better explain himself, he narrates some of his past: he was formerly a student of natural philosophy, but he squandered his opportunities and has come to this repetitious job just like so many others who work in factories performing menial tasks well below their talents. At any rate, the signal-man explains that on a night on which the moon was bright, he heard someone cry out, "Halloa! Below there!" Startled, the employee looked up and saw someone standing by the red light which hangs near the tunnel; he was waving frantically and warning the signal-man to "Look out! Look out!" Then the man calls out, "Halloa! Below there! Look out!"

Because he admits to being very troubled by this vision, the narrator feels that the signal-man could use some professional help, which he offers to bring him on his next visits. However, when the narrator again comes by the lonely location, he discovers to his horror that the signal-man has died in a terrible accident. On this scene are investigators and a train engineer who relates that he yelled to a figure on the tracks, "Below there! Look out! Look out!" These words are eerily close to what the signal-man has related to the narrator. Then, when he hears the engineer says that he yelled out "Halloa! Below there!" and covered his eyes and continued to wave his other until the end. Further, the engineer expresses his wonder that the signal-man did not heed his warnings because the man was always so diligent and cautious.

What is so eerie is that what has happened to the signal-man is precisely what he has feared, but above this, not only were the words of the engineer precisely what the signal-man had told the narrator, but in a bizarre coincidence

...also the words which I myself -- not he -- had attached, and that only in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated.

When, at the end of the story, the narrator returns to visit the signalman once more, he is gripped by a sense that something is wrong, not least because a "little low hut" has appeared on the railway line by the Danger-light. This fear is borne out when one of the men waiting by the light tells him that the signal-man has been killed that morning.

He was, this man explains, run over by a railway engine, having not managed to entirely clear the outer rail. He was standing at the Danger-light with his lamp in his hand, his back to the tunnel, when the train came out of the tunnel and hit him. The driver of the train explains further that he saw the man at the end of the tunnel as he came through it, and, having had no success blowing his whistle, he called out to him: "Below there! Look out! For God's sake clear the way!" He also waved his arm continually to try to alert the signal-man, but to no avail—he was hit by the train and killed.

The words recounted to him by the engine-driver cause the narrator to start in alarm, because they represent not only the phrase which the signal-man had been haunted by, but also "the words which I myself—not he—had attached, and that only in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated."

At the end of the story, the narrator returns to the signal box to meet with the signalman. On his arrival, however, he learns that the signalman died early that morning. In fact, he is told by a witness that he was "cut down by a train" as he carried out his duties. The narrator is then introduced to the driver who hit the signalman. He explains that he called to the signalman as he approached, but the signalman did not hear his warnings. His exact words were:

Below there! Look out! Look out! For God's sake, clear the way!

In an ironic twist, these are the words which forewarned the signalman of an accident on the line earlier in the story. What he did not realize, however, is that these words (spoken by the ghost) were signaling his own untimely demise.