The Screaming Staircase

Lucy Carlyle is the novel’s protagonist and narrator. She is the only female member of Lockwood & Co. and is hired after she aces Lockwood’s tests and proves her abilities to hear the voices of spirits and sense their emotional energies. She can also sense residual events and experience them to a degree that allows her to bring clarity to the origins of many hauntings. Where Lockwood & Co. once focused solely on ridding houses of ghosts, Lucy’s abilities bring a new sense of interest to the origins behind the apparitions as the team tries to ascertain what originally happened to them and why they continue to haunt the living. Lucy takes particular interest in the spirit of Annabel Ward, whom she believes was murdered by her lover, Hugo Blake. After picking up Annabel’s necklace one afternoon and experiencing her death through the emotions of the moment, Lucy resolves to help vindicate Annabel, saying, “Because of my Touch, I do understand something of what she went through. I understand her pain. And that means I want justice for her now. I don’t want her forgotten” (212). She spends much of the novel guarding Annabel’s necklace and carrying it with her and consequently forms a bond with Annabel.