The narrator - the old nurse of the title - is an old family retainer who has worked in the service of the same family for three generations. She tells the young children about a dark incident that she experienced in the company of the children's mother, when she was a young woman and visiting her mother's ancestral home. This story hits all the marks of a classic ghost story: an isolated manor, creepy music sounding from a disused organ, ghostly apparitions begging to be let inside. Despite all the hallmarks of a ghost story, the true horror of the story is in the very real, all-too-capable cruelty people and in their inability to right the wrongs of the past, showing readers how ghosts are not the only beings capable of creating terror.