The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Author:  Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (1887–1943) was one of the great American comedic figures of the first half of the 20th century – as a person, a raconteur and a writer. Rotund, self-opinionated with a waspish wit, he was the inspiration for the main character, Sheridan Whiteside, in the play, The Man Who Came to Dinner by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart – the title of which became his soubriquet. After graduating from Hamilton College in New York, Woollcott was soon a hugely influential literary and drama critic on the New Yorker and a member of the famous Algonquin Round Table. He also became famous for his weekly radio programme that ran from 1929–40 and his savage remarks about plays – of one poor production he remarked, “The scenery was beautiful but the actors got in front of it” – and was one of the most quoted men of his generation. His florid, ornate style was best seen in his book, While Rome Burns (1934), which was voted one of the “52 Best Loved Books of the 20th Century” in 1954. Woollcott’s interests ranged the spectrum from drink (he is credited with inventing the Brandy Alexander) to tall stories and humorous ghost yarns – of which this little gem written for the New Yorker a couple of years before his death is exemplary.

This is the story just as I heard it the other evening – a ghost story told me as true. It seems that one chilly October night in the first decade of the present century, two sisters were motoring along a Cape Cod road, when their car broke down just before midnight, and would go no further. This was in an era when such mishaps were both commoner and more hopeless than they are today.

For these two, there was no chance of help until another car might chance to come by in the morning and give them a tow. Of a lodging for the night there was no hope, except a gaunt, unlighted frame house which, with a clump of pine trees beside it, stood black in the moonlight, across a neglected stretch of frost-hardened lawn.

They yanked at its ancient bell-pull, but only a faint tinkle within made answer. They banged despairingly on the door panel only to awaken what at first they thought was an echo, and then identified as a shutter responding antiphonally with the help of a nipping wind. This shutter was around the corner, and the ground-floor window behind it was broken and unfastened.

There was enough moonlight to show that the room within was a deserted library, with a few books left on the sagging shelves and a few pieces of dilapidated furniture still standing where some departing family had left them, long before. The sweep of the flashlight which one of the women had brought with her showed them that on the uncarpeted floor the dust lay thick and trackless, as if no one had trod there in many a day.

They decided to bring their blankets in from the car and stretch out there on the floor until daylight, none too comfortable, perhaps, but at least sheltered from that salt and cutting wind.

It was while they were lying there, trying to get to sleep, while, indeed, they had drifted halfway across the borderland, that they saw – each confirming the other’s fear by a convulsive grip of the hand – standing at the empty fireplace, as if trying to dry himself by a fire that was not there, the wraithlike figure of a sailor, come dripping from the sea.

After an endless moment, in which neither woman breathed, one of them somehow found the strength to call out, “Who’s there?”

The challenge shattered the intolerable silence, and at the sound, muttering a little – they said afterwards that it was something between a groan and a whimper – the misty figure seemed to dissolve. They strained their eyes, but could see nothing between themselves and the battered mantelpiece.

Then, telling themselves (and, as one does, half believing it) that they had been dreaming, they tried again to sleep, and indeed did sleep until a patch of shuttered sunlight striped the morning floor. As they sat up and blinked at the gritty realism of the forsaken room, they would, I think, have laughed at their shared illusion of the night before, had it not been for something at which one of the sisters pointed with a kind of gasp.

There, in the still undisturbed dust, on the spot in front of the fireplace where the apparition had seemed to stand, was a patch of water, a little circular pool that had issued from no crack in the floor nor, as far as they could see, fallen from any point in the innocent ceiling. Near it in the surrounding dust was no footprint – their own or any other’s – and in it was a piece of green that looked like seaweed. One of the women bent down and put her finger to the water, then lifted it to her tongue. The water was salty.