"The Screaming Skull" by Francis Marion Crawford

This story is intriguing because it is written as a monologue in a play, both the past-narrative part, and the happening-right-now part.  It ends with a purported clip from a newspaper about the death of the Captain from human-teeth biting wounds on his neck.  The style and voice of the story separate it from the ocean of mediocre ghost stories from the Victorian period, which all seem to follow the same pattern and style.

The old English legend of a Screaming Scull is the topic of the story, and there's a footnote at the end that it is based on real events.  How real, we can only imagine, in that age of superstition and primitive beliefs, although less than century-and-a-half distant from present time.  Pretty much even the most refined Victorian gentleman would be considered superstition-obsessed, women-oppressing, racist, chauvinist, patriarchal bigot by today's standards.

The story also uses as a literary device killing people by pouring molten led in their ears.  This was a common torture used by states and churches around Europe, and even native american Indians, up to the end of the 1890s.  The Captain tells a story of a woman who killed three husbands by pouring just a drop of lead in their ears while drugged and sleeping in a stupor.  The led could not be traced as a murder weapon because of the small amount, but the bead would travel to the brain and kill the person instantaneously.  The only way the woman was caught was by exhuming the bodies of her three late husbands and finding a bead of led rattling in each skull.

When the Doctor hears the Captain's story, his hated wife mysteriously dies a short while after.  The Doctor however acquires a strange, polished white skull at the same time, which drives all the servants out of the house with it's incessant shrieking at night.  The Doctor dies in the same way as the Captain, and the story hints throughout that the Captain might not have been just an innocent observer in the whole matter.

A great example of a somewhat-different Victorian Ghost Story.  Francis Marion Crawford was an interesting person himself.  American by citizenship, but born in Italy and spent most of his life outside the US.  Initially he was going to be an opera singer, but the Boston Opera principal told him he will never be able to follow a tune.  Since his father was a sculptor and his aunt a well-known poet, he made contacts with publishers in New York who were more than glad to publish his novels set in India and Italy, which were considered exotic locales at the time.  A self-called Romantic-Realist, Crawford rejected all suggestions that novels, and fiction in general, should teach something and be didactic, but saw them mostly as amusement, but intellectual and elevated amusement.