The Night the Ghost Got In

“The Night the Ghost Got In” is a short story from the comedic semi-autobiographical memoir My Life and Hard Times published in 1933 by James Thurber. Thurber is best known for his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which has been twice adapted for film. This guide references the 1999 Harper Perennial Classics Reprint edition of My Life and Hard Times.

“The Night the Ghost Got In” tells the first-person account of a young James Thurber and the sequence of bizarre events involving Thurber and his family on the night of November 17, 1915. At a quarter past one in the morning, Thurber hears someone walking around the dining room table downstairs. Though the bathroom light shines down into the dining room, he is unable to see the table. At first, Thurber thinks it is his father or his brother Roy, home from Indianapolis. Then, believing the noise is a burglar, Thurber sneaks into his brother Herman’s room.

Upon awakening Herman, the sound stops briefly before resuming. Instead of walking, the sound of the steps now resembles running, then it startles the boys as the steps sound like a man running up the stairs two at a time. Herman slams his bedroom door, and Thurber slams the door at the top of the staircase, arousing their mother. This is the last time the family hears the ghost.

Having also heard the running downstairs, Thurber’s mother demands to know what her sons are up to. Herman denies having made any noise, and their mother presses again, deciding the noise must be burglars before either boy can answer. Thurber attempts to quiet his mother by starting downstairs, but his mother insists they call the police, despite the phone being downstairs. On an impulse, Thurber’s mother opens her bedroom window and throws a shoe through Mr. and Mrs. Bodwell’s window. Mr. Bodwell, who experiences unspecified “attacks,” is initially enraged, but he calms down enough to phone the police for the family.

The police arrive quickly and break in the door. On entering, the police find Thurber at the top of the stairs in his bath towel. They question him and then his mother, who says there were at least two or three men causing a commotion in the house, though she doesn’t mention that she never saw them. The mob of police officers begins to search the premises, moving furniture and looking through the family’s things. One of the officers finds a zither (a small, stringed musical instrument) that Thurber honestly says their guinea pig used to sleep in, but it only makes the officers more suspicious. The officers eventually decide that Thurber’s mother is over-excitable. They hear creaking in the attic and burst into the room before Thurber can explain that the room is occupied by his grandfather, who is prone to confusion and believes that he is battling alongside General Meade’s men in the Civil War. Awakened by the arrival of the police in the attic, Grandfather is convinced that they are Confederate deserters planning to hide in the attic. He slaps one officer and shoots another with the officer’s own gun before the family can intervene.

Disappointed that their search has produced no results, and suspicious that they were called to a fake emergency, the police officers briefly search for more evidence. A reporter asks Thurber what happened and is also disappointed when he answers, “We had ghosts” (39). Thurber assures the shot police officer that he will bring his gun by the station the following day, and the police and reporter leave. The next morning, Grandfather is cheerful and appears not to remember the night’s events until he asks what all the police were doing in the house the night before.