Stories of witches can be found in the Bible (the Witch of Endor), Shakespeare (in Macbeth, c.1600), Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," and even Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953). Supernatural occurrences have served fiction in such works as Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, and Goethe's Faust (1790) develops the theme of the devil's ambition to bring down a human, much as Lasher attempts occasionally. Considering The Witching Hour from the point of view of its detailed creation of the atmosphere of New Orleans, George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) is an earlier book that makes a similar attempt.