The Transferred Ghost

by Frank R. Stockton

The country residence of Mr. John Hinckman was a delightful place to me, for many reasons. It was the abode of a genial, though somewhat impulsive, hospitality. It had broad, smooth-shaven lawns and towering oaks and elms; there were bosky shades at several points, and not far from the house there was a little rill spanned by a rustic bridge with the bark on; there were fruits and flowers, pleasant people, chess, billiards, rides, walks, and fishing. These were great attractions, but none of them, nor all of them together, would have been sufficient to hold me to the place very long. I had been invited for the trout season, but should, probably, have finished my visit early in the summer had it not been that upon fair days, when the grass was dry, and the sun not too hot, and there was but little wind, there strolled beneath the lofty elms, or passed lightly through the bosky shades, the form of my Madeline.

This lady was not, in very truth, my Madeline. She had never given herself to me, nor had I, in any way, acquired possession of her. But as I considered her possession the only sufficient reason for the continuance of my existence, I called her, in my reveries, mine. It may have been that I would not have been obliged to confine the use of this possessive pronoun to my reveries had I confessed the state of my feelings to the lady.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

14 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 3, 2011

About the author

Frank Richard Stockton was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century. Stockton avoided the didactic moralizing common to children's stories of the time, instead using clever humor to poke at greed, violence, abuse of power and other human foibles, describing his fantastic characters' adventures in a charming, matter-of-fact way.

Reviews

[Quirkyreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story was a hoot.

[Elinor Loredan]

This one, although about a ghost, is really fun with a clever twist ending in which all turns out well by accident. Stockton always turns expectations around. In this story he does that by making the ghost terrified of the human rather than the other way around. Stockton also demonstrates his creativity by inventing a "system" in which ghosts can transfer to another human.

[Alexa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gustó el final sobre todo, porque hace un buen contraste con todas las reflexiones del protagonista a lo largo de la historia. Fue una suerte leerlo en ingles porque en español no hubieran tenido sentido ciertas frases que se prestan a confusión.

[Malachi · Rating 3 out of 5]

As found in Otto Penzler's Big Book of Ghost Stories
Goodreads does not make it easy to add books so this is my record of this story