The Canterville Ghost

The Canterville Ghost is a short story by the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, the first of his stories to be published, appearing in two parts in The Court and Society Review in February and March 1887.

The Otis family comes from a country where nothing is older than a century, and their response to a haunted house is to treat it as a maintenance problem: the bloodstain in the library is scrubbed out with an American cleaner, the twins fire their pea-shooters at the ghost, and the youngest son tells him that he will have to oil his chains. Wilde uses the comedy to say something about the two nationalities at once, since the ghost is the embodiment of English history, complete with an ancestral crime, and the Americans are imperturbable in a way that does not distinguish between a tradition and an inconvenience. The story takes a quieter turn when the family's daughter takes pity on him, and the humour is at the service of a story about remorse and forgiveness rather than the other way round. It appeared in the collection Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories in 1891 and has been adapted for stage and screen many times.