midnight
The uncanny voice that ominously echoes Montoni 's words is not the cry of a bodiless visitant striving to awaken `` that blushing , shamefaced spirit that mutinies in a man 's bosom , '' but belongs to an ordinary human being , the prisoner Du Pont , who has discovered one of Mrs. Radcliffe 's innumerable concealed passages . The bed with the black velvet pall in the haunted chamber contains , not the frightful apparition that flashed upon the inward eye of Emily and of Annette , but a stalwart pirate who shrinks from discovery . The gliding forms which steal furtively along the ramparts and disappear at the end of dark passages become eventually , like the nun in Charlotte Bronte 's _ Villette _ , sensible to feeling as to sight . The unearthly music which is heard in the woods at midnight proceeds , not from the inhabitants of another sphere , but from a conscience stricken nun with a lurid past . The corpse , which Emily believed to be that of her aunt , foully done to death by a pitiless husband , is the body of a man killed in a bandit 's affray . Here Mrs. Radcliffe seems eager to show that she was not afraid of a corpse , but is careful that it shall not be the corpse which the reader anticipates . She deliberately excites trembling apprehensions in order that she may show how absurd they are .