10 Best Ghost Stories by Washington Irving (Other Than Sleepy Hollow)
He was the greatest American writer of his time: mentor to Poe, Dickens, and Hawthorne, his country’s first professional author, and a writer of uniqely American ghost stories about growth, change, and identity. His was the complex personality of an existentially anxious, emotionally complex man disturbed by his fame and haunted by loneliness. These disquieting themes course through his Gothic tales – “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Devil and Tom Walker,” and more – tales haunted by spectres of anxiety.
Though he was once more famous for his social satires and ironic humor, Irving’s fictional oeuvre is primarily devoted to speculative fiction: ghost stories, weird tales, fantasies, and horror. And there’s far more than the Headless Horseman to frighten readers: ghost pirates, vengeful Doppelgangers, guillotined women, haunted treasure chests, hanged men’s ghosts, rural superstitions, dancing furniture, portraits with moving eyes, hellhounds, goblin horses, enchanted princesses, supernatural caves of wonder, haunted paintings, ghostly nuns, spectral crusaders, and possessed bedchambers are among his many bogeys.
His universe is among the sunniest in horror fiction – brighter certainly than Le Fanu’s, Hodgson’s, or Stoker’s – but its sunnyside hides a dark posterior, engulfed in shadow and swallowed up in night. Here, for your pleasure, are ten of his best stories of mystery and the macabre.
10. A CHRONICLE OF WOLFERT’S ROOST
If you enjoyed “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” don’t miss out on this nonfiction sequel of sorts: in “A Chronicle of Wolfert’s Roost,” Irving tells a series of legends, ghost stories, and superstitions surrounding the Van Tassel farmhouse. Irving himself bought the property when he returned from Europe, renamed it Sunnyside, and lived there for years. He relates genuine local superstitions about his house, including how Sleepy Hollow was bewitched by an Indian wizard, how it was cursed by witches (including one who lived in his home), some of the wartime adventures of the historical Van Tassel family, and a series of ghosts whom he saw himself: a weeping female in his orchard, and a haggard skeleton doomed to row past his house on the Hudson. These are the true legends of Sleepy Hollow.
9. THE TWO DISCREET STATUES
Most of Irving’s Spanish supernatural tales are closer to fantasy and fairy tales than horror, but a few of them have some truly Gothic moments. In this story a poor girl finds a magic charm which allows her to visit a ghostly party on St. John's Eve – Spanish Halloween – where the souls of gloomy Moorish aristocrats, wizards, and ladies are commiserating their loss of Granada. Here the girl helps to free the soul of a Spanish prisoner, and the woman rewards her with the location of the buried Moorish treasure. Things look good for her family, until her mother tells her confessor – a lecherous snake with a brood of pudgy offspring – who coyly blackmails them into “gifting” his church huge amounts. The family decide to flee in the night, and when the priest hears of their plan, he prepares an ambush – but as Ichabod Crane found out, he who seeks to ruin the hopes of decent, hardworking people may end up racing goblin horsemen – or riding a goblin steed!
8. THE GRAND PRIOR OF SAN MINORCA
Like much of his later work (after he retired to Tarrytown and began reviewing his life), this ghost story reads more like Edgar Allan Poe than the writer of “Knickerbocker’s History of New York.” Mirthless, wild, and gloomy, it tells the story of two Army officers who run afoul of one another over the attentions of a pretty girl. The younger, petulant officer demands to duel his older, graver colleague on Good Friday, despite the sacriligeous undertones. In a brieft struggle, the older man is mortally wounded. Horrified that he will die before the Easter holiday (and without last rites), he begs his killer to return his sword to his ancestral hall in France so that his soul might at least have some rest. Hounded by nightmares of the blood-stained man pleading with him, the hotheaded victor finally agrees and journeys to the gloomy mansion – but the ghost in his nightmares is not the only one he must face: the oil paintings in the dusty hall decide that the murder of their descendent calls for a family reunion – one to which his murderer is forced to attend.
7. THE ADVENTURE OF MY GRANDFATHER
A fairly bawdy, sexy tale of desire and deception, “The Adventure of My Grandfather” is probably a ghost story in the same way that “Sleepy Hollow” is: it isn’t. But its strangely woven story of dancing furniture and low-boil eroticism have kept it one of Irving’s most popular ghost stories. A dashing Irish dragoon decides to spend the night in a Flemish inn where he flirts with and arouses the attentions of every female in sight (he has a favorite habit of slapping his buckskin-clad thigh when making a point that seems to melt the women’s hearts). In the middle of the night the inn is aroused by a horrible cacophony coming from the dragoon’s room: his cabinet has fallen over and some chairs are strewn about. Shocked himself, he tells how he awoke to the raucous only to see an old man playing a bellows (a symbol of deception: blowing hot air) like a bagpipe (a traditional symbol of lust) which caused the furniture in his room to spring to life and dance. The goblin bagpiper is explained by one of the women who claims that a mad juggler died in that room. Satisfied the sleepy men and perky women go back to bed, and the reader is left wondering which woman (or women) might know the truth about the nighttime rumble.
6. DOLPH HEYLIGER
