English | Science fiction | Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain | Học tiếng Anh

A Ghost Story, alternate title A Ghost’s Tale (1870), is Twain’s unique twist of the ghost story genre, mocking superstition, and proving he’s a master employing satirical wit across his broad range of works. Featured in our Halloween Stories. I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom. The story is based on the infamous 19th-century hoax of the Cardiff Giant, in which a “petrified giant“ was carved out of stone and buried in the ground for others to “discover.“ P