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Ghosts of Authors Past

© Ella Robinson

When touring the home of a favorite writer, it is easy to imagine the family's presence in years past. The creak of a screen door, the sun glinting off a picture frame--an author's home turned museum is a great place to look for ghosts.

Some historic authors' homes, William Faulkner's Rowan Oak for example, have an eerie presence. The homes remain virtually the same as the day the author died. An old bottle of horse liniment and a carpenter's pencil lay on Faulkner's writing table. A rusting horse trailer sits in its original place outside, and an abandoned wasp nest hangs from the high porch ceiling. If college students from nearby Old Miss haven't watched an apparition of the lanky novelist walking up the shaded driveway to the mailbox, I'd be surprised.

Ernest Hemingway's ghost is said to have returned to Finca Vigia, his Cuban estate in San Francisco de Paula. He made his first appearance in 1998, a year before his 100th birthday. Since then, people have seen him walking the plazas of Havana.

Mark Twain's ghost returned in the early 1900s to write, or so said authors Ida Belle White, author of Spirits Do Return (1915) and Emily Grant Hutchings, author of Japn Herron (1917). Both writers claimed that Twain helped them with their manuscripts. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem that he helped the publishers much; only a few copies of the books were sold. Today the books are collector's items. Reportedly, Twain's ghost has suffered from writer's block in recent years.

Tourists of the John Dickinson Plantation in Dover, Delaware, say that Dickinson, the "Penman of the Revolution," is often seen writing in the den, and several unexplained accounts of rumpled bed linens in his old bedroom have been documented. Dickinson wrote many essays on colonial rights and liberty including an influential document calling for the overthrow of the Stamp Act.

Boisterous sounds come from the Beauregard-Keyes House in New Orleans. The rowdy behavior from resident ghosts seem to be General Beauregard and his troops acting out the Battle of Shiloh. The presence of the house's other resident, Frances Parkinson Keyes may also be evident. Some believe the ghost of the novelist's dog, Lucky, has returned, and an account of music and furniture moving has been documented. Read more about this ghost story.

Perhaps the most popular literary ghost hunt in the United States is in Baltimore at the Westminister Presbyterian Churchyard, where Edgar Allan Poe is buried. Each Halloween a rose and a bottle of cognac is placed on the grave by an unknown admirer.