The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

After that the sisters scuttled out and sat in their car, until a passerby gave them a tow to the nearest village. In its tavern at breakfast they gossiped with the proprietress about the empty house among the pine trees down the road. Oh, yes, it had been just that way for a score of years or more. Folks did say the place was spooky, haunted by a son of the family who, driven out by his father, had shipped before the mast and been drowned at sea.

Some said the family had moved away because they could not stand the things they heard and saw at night.

A year later, one of the sisters told the story at a dinner party in New York. In the pause that followed a man across the table leaned forward.

“My dear lady,” he said, with a smile, “I happen to be the curator of a museum where they are doing a good deal of work on submarine vegetation. In your place, I never would have left that house without taking the bit of seaweed with me.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” she answered tartly, “and neither did I.”

It seems she had lifted it out of the water and dried it a little by pressing it against a window pane. Then she had carried it off in her pocket-book, as a souvenir. As far as she knew, it was still in an envelope in a little drawer of her desk at home. If she could find it, would he like to see it? He would. Next morning she sent it around by messenger, and a few days later it came back with a note.

“You were right,” the note said, “this is seaweed. Furthermore, it may interest you to learn that it is of a rare variety which, as far as we know, grows only on dead bodies.”

The Night the Ghost Got In

James Thurber

Location:  Jefferson Avenue, Columbus, Ohio.

Time:  17 November, 1915.

Eyewitness Description:  “Instantly the steps began again, circled the dining-room table like a man running and started up the stairs towards us, heavily two at a time. The light still shone palely down the stairs; we saw nothing coming; we only heard the steps . . .”

Author:  James Grover Thurber (1894–1961) was a contemporary of Alexander Woollcott at the New Yorker and left an even more remarkable legacy of humorous works and cartoons. Born in Columbus, Ohio, he studied at the Ohio State University and, after serving as a code clerk in France during World War One, joined the staff of the magazine where he made his name in 1927. Despite losing one eye due to a childhood injury, Thurber’s perception of life and observation of the comedy of human beings was vividly illustrated in books like The Seal in the Bedroom (1932), the sixties TV series My World and Welcome To It and the enigmatic Walter Mitty. His interest in ghosts stemmed from his mother’s fascination with the occult and living in a haunted house, 77, Jefferson Avenue, from 1912, which inspired this story. Initially, Thurber’s friends dismissed the tale as just another example of his humour, but he insisted: “In his play, The Potting Shed, Graham Greene has a character say, ‘No one who has ever experienced a ghost can be argued out of believing he did.’ After laughing off my own ghost in my story, I now share with Greene the conviction that it was a supernatural phenomenon.” Years later, Thurber discovered that a man who once lived in an upstairs room of his old home had shot and killed himself there.

The ghost that got into our house on the night of 17 November 1915, raised such a hullabaloo of misunderstandings that I am sorry I didn’t just let it keep on walking, and go to bed. Its advent caused my mother to throw a shoe through a window of the house next door and ended up with my grandfather shooting a patrolman. I am sorry, therefore, as I have said, that I ever paid any attention to the footsteps.