The Canterville Ghost is Oscar Wilde's funny, tender ghost story. Here is why his tale of a tired old spook and a brave young girl still works today.
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November is the month I go back to ghost stories, and one I return to more than most is Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost. Wilde was a Dublin man, born in 1854, and this was one of his first stories, published in 1887 in The Court and Society Review. It is short, it is very funny, and it has a heart that sneaks up on you.
The set-up is simple. An American family buys an English country house that comes with a ghost. The ghost tries to frighten them. They refuse to be frightened. What could have been a one-joke sketch turns into something much warmer, and I think that is why people still read it, adapt it and teach it more than a hundred years on.
What Happens in The Canterville Ghost
Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister, buys Canterville Chase from Lord Canterville, who warns him honestly that the house is haunted. Mr Otis does not mind. If there were such a thing as a ghost in Europe, he says, America would have it in a museum within a year.
The ghost is Sir Simon de Canterville. He murdered his wife, Lady Eleanore, in 1575, and he has haunted the house for some three hundred years. He is very proud of his work. Over the centuries he has frightened butlers, duchesses and visiting clergymen half to death, and he keeps a mental list of his greatest hits.
The Otis family are not impressed. A bloodstain on the library floor gets scrubbed away with Pinkerton's Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent. When Sir Simon clanks his chains, Mr Otis leaves him a bottle of Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator. The twins pelt him with pea-shooters and lay a butter slide on the stairs. Only the quiet daughter, Virginia, treats him as a person.
A Ghost Who Can't Scare Anyone
The great comic engine of the story is that the haunted have become the haunters. Sir Simon plans his appearances like a stage actor, with costumes and names for each role. Every one of them flops. The twins even build a fake ghost out of a turnip, a sheet and a kitchen knife, and Sir Simon runs from it in terror.
The bloodstain is my favourite running joke. It keeps coming back, but in strange colours, from bright red to emerald green. We later learn Sir Simon has been borrowing paint from Virginia's paint box to top it up. It is silly, and it is also quietly sad: a proud old performer reduced to pinching a child's watercolours to keep his act going.
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The Otis Family: Modern, Practical and Unbothered
Wilde has great fun with the Otises. They are kind enough, but they meet every gothic horror with a product or a remedy. When Sir Simon groans, Mrs Otis offers him a tincture for indigestion. Wilde is poking fun at the Americans and at the British aristocracy in the same breath, and neither side quite comes out on top.
Sir Simon: More Tragic Than Terrifying
The longer you spend with Sir Simon, the more you feel for him. He is tired. He has not slept in three centuries. Once his tricks stop working, he has nothing left but his pride, and Wilde lets us see that the pride is covering something lonelier.
Old World Meets New
Under the jokes, the story is about two worlds bumping into each other. Sir Simon belongs to old Europe, where tradition matters for its own sake. The Otises belong to a newer, brasher world that wants things to be clean, useful and explained. Neither is entirely right.
Wilde, an Irishman writing for a London audience about Americans, was well placed to see all sides of that joke. It still lands today, because most of us live with the same tug between respecting the past and wanting to sweep it away.
Virginia and the Garden of Death
The turn comes when Virginia finds Sir Simon sitting alone and talks to him. She scolds him for stealing her paints, but she also listens. He tells her he longs to rest in the Garden of Death, where the grass grows long and the nightingale sings, and that only a pure girl who weeps and prays for him can open the way.
Virginia is frightened, but she goes with him. She vanishes from the house, the family search in a panic, and she comes back at midnight with a casket of jewels and a calm face. Sir Simon is finally laid to rest. She never tells anyone exactly what happened, not even the young Duke of Cheshire, who later becomes her husband.
That ending is what lifts the story above satire. After all the pranks and the detergent, it is kindness, not cleverness, that sets the ghost free.
What Writers Can Learn From The Canterville Ghost
I think every writer can take a few lessons from Wilde's little ghost story:
- Flip the expectation. A ghost who is scared of the living is funnier, and more memorable, than one more scary ghost.
- Let comedy carry feeling. We laugh at Sir Simon for most of the story, so his sadness hits harder when it arrives.
- Give one character a different eye. Virginia sees what her family cannot, and the whole story turns on her.
- Use running jokes with a payoff. The shifting bloodstain is a gag, then a clue, then a reveal about Virginia's paint box.
If you are writing a ghost story of your own this winter, it helps to keep track of your rules, your characters and your running jokes in one place. That is exactly what I built Story Bible Studio for. And if you would rather write a ghost story with other people, try a spooky chain on Chain Story Online, where each writer adds the next part.
Final Thoughts on The Canterville Ghost
The Canterville Ghost still works because it does two things at once. It makes fun of every creaking gothic cliché, and then it asks us to care about the creature behind them. It is short enough to read in an evening by the fire, so if you have not met Sir Simon yet, this is a good month to do it. For more from me, have a wander around Enda Storrie.
Next step: Writing a ghost story of your own? Grab the free Story Bible Starter Kit, try a collaborative tale on Chain Story Online, and compare the best writing apps.
Related reading: Irish Ghost Stories to Read on a Dark Winter's Night · Bram Stoker's Irish Roots: The Real Inspiration for Dracula
Enda Storrie is a writer and the creator of Story Bible, the planning journal and app for writers, and Chain Story Online, a free collaborative storytelling platform.
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