Humorous Ghost Stories

Ghosts as a social nuisance: the Canterville ghost routed by an American family armed with stain remover, a water ghost who soaks her ancestral hall every Christmas Eve, a transferred ghost, a haunted photograph, and Washington Irving's spectre bridegroom. Dorothy Scarborough, who had written the standard study of the supernatural in English fiction, gathered the collection in 1921 to make the case that the ghost story has always been half a joke — the terror and the drawing-room comedy were born together. Fifty-eight plates of paintings from 1800 to 1902, among them Goya and Odilon Redon, run the same gamut of shudders and smiles that Scarborough found in the fiction.