Review of “A Ghost Story” by Mark Twain: Halloween Countdown

Plot:

The narrator recounts that he took a large room in a huge old building. The upper stories, where his room is, have been unoccupied for years and have long given up to cobwebs, solitude, and silence. He feels he’s invading the privacy of the dead. For the first time in his life, a superstitious dread overcomes him.

He locks the door. While a cheery fire burns, he sits and thinks of bygone times, faces of friends he’ll never see again, voices fallen forever silent, and once familiar songs no one sings anymore. Outside, it begins to rain. He turns in for the night and sleeps profoundly.

He wakes suddenly with the feeling of someone or something tugging the covers toward the foot of the bed. He hears noises of someone walking—no, stomping like an elephant—around the bedroom and the building. He sees disembodied faces floating above the bed…

Thoughts:

While this story begins in traditional gothic ghost story form—the long-unused room, the cobwebs, the rain, the narrator’s ruminations on lost friends and loved ones, and the appearance of the ghost, which terrifies him—it turns on a dime. After all, Mark Twain wrote this tale.

After a second look, he realizes his visitor is a little out of sorts. And stark naked. One can’t be at his best when he’s knocking around a stranger’s room in the middle of the night in the all-in-all.

It ends in farce. Good for Twain. He brings in one of the day’s great hoaxes, the so-called Cardiff (New York) Giant. According to Wikipedia, the Cardiff Giant was created by New York tobacco retailer George Hull after an argument at a Methodist revival meeting about biblical references to giants in the earth. Showman P. T. Barnum then created a replica. It had already been exposed as a hoax when Twain wrote the story.

This is a cute little tale.


Bio: Mark Twain (legal name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910) was an American writer, novelist, and journalist. He was known primarily as a humorist. As a young man, he worked as a boat captain on the Mississippi River until the Civil War disrupted river trade. He recounted the time in Life on the Mississippi. Among his most well-known books are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which have lately had their share of controversy.


This story can be read here:


The story can be listened to here: (14:38)


Title: “A Ghost Story”
Author: Mark Twain (legal name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910)
First published: Mark Twain’s sketches, new and old, 1875
Length: short story