Here are three stories that will make you chuckle and shiver at the same time. Spirits can be funny when they turn out to have issues and problems of their own, and the authors of these stories, John Kendrick Bangs and H. G. Wells, have a fine time putting smiles on our faces - and wiping them off again!
The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall
What do you do about a ghost who is both terrifying and exasperatingly damp? After all, even if a fellow has to spend his Christmas Eve entertaining a ghost that turns all his rooms into masses of humidity, does he have the right to some say in the matter? And if he does not, well, there are ways of dealing with damp ghosts that might not be obvious to everyone. John Kendrick Bangs gives us his chuckling take on that in this classic story.
The Mystery of my Grandmother's Hair Sofa
John Kendrick Bangs turns his attention to another difficult question of ghostly etiquette: What happens when you are looking forward to meeting a ghost, and it decides not to show up - or maybe it did appear after all? And how would you know? Bangs lets us know just what to expect from such as situation.
The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost
Then we join H. G. Wells, who poses a somewhat more serious question: If you meet a ghost that doesn't seem to know what it is doing, should you try to follow it home? And if you do, just where would home be, and just how would you get there? In this story, he combines elements of science fiction, the supernatural, and the comic ghost tale to create a fascinating and many-layered narrative. The men who experience the events in his story argue, scientifically, about whether the afterlife is real, whether ghosts exist, and whether human beings can visit the afterlife while alive - and if so, just how it might be done. Then, in classic H. G. Wells fashion, someone tries to take the journey.
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