“It is Mighty Hard to Fully Believe What You Don’t Know”: Mark Twain & Ghosts
Ghost stories of one variety or another haunted Mark Twain’s life…and even beyond.
It is not surprising, then, that I should have my own spooky tale related to my experience as an independent Twain scholar.
Before digging up that anecdote from my past on this Halloween, it might be worthwhile first to provide a brief autopsy of some of Twain’s netherworld narratives.
I wrote about two of these stories here a few years ago, one from when Twain was a boy, the other allegedly from beyond his grave. The former involved a ghostly folktale (“The Golden Arm”) that Twain loved to hear during long summer visits to his Uncle John Quarles’ farm. In the evening before bed, one of the slaves there, Uncle Dan’l, would tell Twain and the other children on the farm, black and white, the scary yarn of a restless spirit returning from the grave to reclaim her stolen golden arm.
The latter story involved claims that the specter of Mark Twain himself communicated from beyond the grave…to co-author a book. Five years after his death in 1910, Emily Grant Hutching claimed that the prolific author dictated a book (Jap Herron) to her through their Ouija board collaboration. Understandably, Twain’s daughter Clara and his publisher Harper & Brothers doubted the legitimacy of this ethereal authorial agreement and successfully sued Hutching and her publisher over copyright infringement.
If Twain did collaborate with Hutching from his Octagonal Study in the Sky, he refused to materialize in court to confirm the veracity of her claim. Perhaps it was the poor reviews that Jap Herron received or the fact that the next Halley’s Comet Express would not be returning to Earth for a few more decades, this dead man would tell no tale.
During his time in this earthly realm, Twain was skeptical about such claims of otherworldly phenomena. His comical “A Ghost Story,” published in 1870, pokes fun at the archeological hoax of the Cardiff Giant, in which the giant’s ghost yearns to reunite with his fake alabaster body. However, Twain also remained open-minded about the ghostly realm (when not looking for a way to joke about it).
These traits were on display early in his career as a journalist/burgeoning humorist in San Francisco during the 1860s. For over a month, Twain commented on a controversy roiling around public séances that a radical Spiritualist group, the “Friends of Progress,” was conducting in the Bay Area. These gatherings were apparently causing some attendees to go insane.
Twain attended at least two séances, a phenomenon that was growing in national popularity in the aftermath of the Civil War’s carnage. He wrote a number of commentaries on the matter, ranging from the comical to the thoughtful. In one joke-laden account, he described the attractive Spiritualist woman leading the séance as “standing on a little stage behind a small deal table with slender legs and no drawers,” before hastily clarifying that he was referring to the slender legs and missing drawers of the table, not the lady. In a more earnest article, he reported the insights on the afterlife that the spirit of a “frolicksome old parson” supposedly communicated through a medium.
Despite what he witnessed during this strange spectacle, Twain did not dismiss it as a sham. Conceding that a “remarkable intelligence” could very well be at work behind it, he also concluded that it was ultimately “impossible to know—and it is mighty hard to fully believe what you don’t know.”
That’s the conclusion that I have reached regarding the possible paranormal predicament I found myself in late one night as a research fellow at Quarry Farm. As part of the fellowship, I was residing in the old farmhouse overlooking the Chemung Valley where Mark Twain and his family summered for over twenty years. Twain wrote a number of his classics at Quarry Farm, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, so it’s the perfect place to channel the creative muse when contemplating all things Twain…and perhaps for unwittingly conjuring up some otherworldly entity as well.
My situation there seemed like something you would find in a formulaic horror movie: I was alone in an isolated house working on a book about Mark Twain’s unconventional religious beliefs, which include his views on spirits and mysterious strangers from beyond. Had I been watching a movie with such an eye-rolling premise, I would have laughed. But when I was awakened after midnight by what sounded to me like footsteps slowly shuffling across the hardwood floor in another room, I failed to see the humor.
Very rarely have I felt the hair rising on my neck, but at that moment I experienced that prickly sensation as I clearly heard a slow and steady shwip, shwip, shwip coming from the other room. I remained quiet there beneath the covers in the dark, refusing the move.
Fortunately (or was it unfortunate?), the conclusion of my Quarry Farm ghost story was anti-climactic. The specter of Mark Twain did not suddenly appear before me in a cloud of cigar smoke, demanding to know whether I had his golden arm. Instead, the noises from the other room simply faded away and, eventually, I drifted back to sleep.
As I think about that night now, it’s hard to say what actually happened. Was my sleep disturbed by strange, otherworldly sounds coming from beyond the dark in another room? Or was it the half-conscious reverie of a restless mind after a long day of research (and a few glasses of wine)? Or have I unwittingly embellished an incidental moment over the years into a creepy encounter with the unknown?
In either case, the more I ponder it, the more I can almost hear Mark Twain’s droll, wraithlike voice on the whispering wind wondering, “Which was the dream?”
Dwayne Eutsey is an independent scholar, Quarry Farm Fellow, and occasional correspondent for CMTS. His forthcoming book, There is No Humor in Heaven: Mark Twain and Religious Liberalism, is available for pre-order from University of Missouri Press.