Halloween might not have been big in Victorian Britain, but Charles Dickens certainly knew a thing or two about giving us the willies. He created the world’s most famous ghost story (with a little help from Scrooge) and wrote a pile of lesser-known tales of suspense that continue to unnerve even today’s jaded readers.

Indeed, Dickens knew all about giving his audience the creeps. He was, after all, the first writer to print the expression — “the creeps” — appearing in “David Copperfield” in the mid 1800s.

That quirky phrase is still with us today, though we can’t say the same for all of Dickens’ wonderfully weird words. Most are lost in nearly two-centuries of historic cobwebs and confusing context.

So it’s time to get out those Dickensian dictionaries and resurrect some creepy Victorian words from his stories that might like a Halloween outing, like these:

Ugsome



“There is the belated traveller, going home with bag on back, and stick in hand, who recoils from the ugsome devils and long-necked monsters which the moon creates out of the trees and bushes before him.”

— All the Year Round (Dickens’ weekly literary magazine)

Why ugsome fell out of popular use is anybody’s guess. It’s a fantastically potent word describing anything both horrible and frightening— anything, actually, that makes you go “ugh!” (yes, both words are linguistically related). You might guess that it comes from the same guttural place where our modern word “ugly” derives — the old Norse ugga, meaning “to dread.” Dickens was one of the last writers to use this ancient and almost unknown word, and it’s rarely been resurrected since. Ugh!

Phantasmagoria

“Quilp said not a word in reply, but walking so close to Kit as to bring his eyes within two or three inches of his face … like a head in a phantasmagoria.”

— “The Old Curiosity Shop”

If the word phantasmagoria reminds you of some sort of fancy light show you might see at Walt Disney World, you wouldn’t be far off the mark, though it was a tad bit scarier than that. From the Greek noun phantasma (“ghost, specter”), a phantasmagoria was a primitive slide-projector show that spooked a multitude of Victorians in its day.

Invented in the 1790s, the basic concept went something like this: Get a group of gullible Victorians, sit them in front of a semi-transparent screen, lower the lights and start projecting a medley of scary images (ghosts, witches, goblins, whatever you’d prefer). The projection of these images came from behind the screen so, ostensibly, nobody knew where they were originating from. And by simply rolling the projector closer to and further from the screen, the images would shrink and grow to diabolically strange proportions. Yep, this was definitely a smelling-salts moment.

Winding sheet



“The pair of coarse, fat office candles that dimly lighted Mr. Jaggers as he wrote in a corner were decorated with dirty winding sheets, as if in remembrance of a host of hanged clients.”

— “Great Expectations”

If you’ve ever burnt a tall candle and one side started dripping wax in large, congealed folds, well that, for Victorians, was called a “winding sheet.” And it freaked most people out. The superstitious considered it an omen of death — not a difficult leap to make as winding sheets in candles looked an awfully lot like the draped folds of a burial cloth (then also called a winding sheet). It was never a good sign to even see the semblance of one in a candle, and Dickens, always a sucker for symbolism, wrote about these weird-looking waxings a lot.

Burked

“You don’t mean to say he was burked, Sam?” said Mr. Pickwick, looking hastily round.”

— “The Pickwick Papers”

It isn’t easy getting a scary verb named after you, though William Burke was too infamous not to have deserved one. He and partner William Hare went down as some of the worst serial killers of their age. For about 10 months in 1828, Burke and Hare roamed the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, murdering at least 16 strangers before selling the bodies for medical study. Burke was hanged for his heinous crimes in 1829, though his name was obviously still striking fear into the heart of feeble Mr. Pickwick almost a decade later.

Mephistophelean



“[The major’s] face and figure were dilated with Mephistophelean joy.”

— “Dombey and Son”

Simply put, Mephistophelean is just a big, bulgier synonym for “devilish.” You might, of course, more accurately define it as “devilishly clever or cunning” since the word owes its very existence to Mephistopheles, the name of the diabolically tricky devil in the German legend of Faust. For Dickens, it was the perfect convoluted word to sum up the complex villainy of Major Bagstock in “Dombey and Son.” “He’s hard-hearted,” admits another character in the novel, “He’s tough, sir, tough, and de-vilish sly!”

Bryan Kozlowski is the author of “What the Dickens?!: Distinctly Dickensian Words and How to Use Them” (Running Press), out now.