SOURCE: Thompson, G. R. “The Apparition of this World: Transcendentalism and the American ‘Ghost’ Story.” In Bridges to Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, pp. 90-107. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Thompson contends that Transcendentalism was one of the main reasons why few American authors wrote ghost stories in the nineteenth century.

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. … Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not...