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A note of thanks to Mark Twain scholar and researcher Michael Marleau for
discovering this previously unknown work,
March 31, 2023.
MARK TWAIN SEES THE "GHOST"
"Mark Twain" having seen the "Ghost," thus informs the Virginia
City ENTERPRISE of the fact: -- "The new-fangled ghosts made their first
appearance here last night, at Maguire's and at the Eureka theatre. I went to
Maguire's first, and afterwards to Eureka. Neither ghost came up to my conception
of what a ghost ought to be; Maguire's was too brilliant, too vivid, too close
a counterfeit of life itself; and Sam Wells' was so vague and indistinct as
to leave me in a state of painful uncertainty as to whether it was really visible
or not. At Maguire's all the gas was turned off, and then the ghost of Miss
Lulu Sweet suddenly appeared in the air a foot or so about the centre of the
stage. She looked precisely as her reflection would have looked in a mirror,
with a dazzling light thrown upon it. It was simply the living, thinking, feeling,
hash-eating Lulu Sweet, glorified by gas-light--nothing more. The most inspired
imagination could not have invested the figure with anything ghostly or supernatural.
Miss Sweet was dressed in a voluminous ball dress of white tarletane [tarlatan],
every fold and wrinkle and ruffle in which was vividly represented, and the
handsome, healthy young face was as little in keeping with her character as
a dead woman as anything I can conceive of. As a "tableau vivant"
the picture surpassed anything I ever saw, but as a ghost--well, a ghost like
that wouldn't scare an infant. I was pleased with the beautiful vision, but
I was very bitterly disappointed at the same time. I thought I was going to
see a vague, cloudy hideous shape, like a man of smoke, dimly glowing with a
ghastly phosphorescent light, and suggestive of damp, gloomy vaults far down
among the subterranean habitations of the dead--something fearful, something
horrible, something that would freeze the marrow in my bones and send a chilly
shudder home to my heart--in short, I expected a solemn, mysterious intangible,
phantom, such as haunt my dreams sometimes, and oppress my slumbers with their
awful presence. Instead of which, I simply saw the living picture of a blooming
young girl, as if reflected in an illuminated mirror. And do you know it occurred
to me that the ghost might be speculating as to whether a pink ribbon about
her waist would not have added to the grace and beauty of her spectral toilet?
That unlucky thought swept away the last spark of romance that glimmered in
my breast. After that the phantom was disagreeably real, intensely matter-of-fact.
Reprinted in Sunday Mercury (San Francisco, California), October 11,
1863, p. 3.
