GENERALLY RANKED AT OR near the top of every list of the greatest American novelists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Hathorne) (1804–1864) endowed most of his major work with classic elements of occult happenings, superstition, allegory, horror, and the supernatural. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the great-great-grandson of a judge in the Salem witch trials. He was extremely solitary as a child, a state which endured throughout most of his life. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850), is filled with such fantastic elements as a great glowing “A” in the sky, and another apparently burned into the chest of the cowardly minister. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) also contains numerous if nuanced overtones of Gothic fantasy, including a well whose water turns foul when an injustice is done, the hereditary curse of a wizard, a skeleton with a missing hand, and a portrait that seems to change expressions. In his short stories, especially those collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837; expanded in 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), and The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1852), otherworldly creatures such as ghosts, demons, witches, etc., abound, though they are often rationalized or made to seem as no more than entities in dreams. In his finest short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” the title character encounters a witch, a coven attended by virtually everyone he knows, and the devil himself—or, in fact, he encounters no one, having either fantasized the episode or dreamed it; Hawthorne does not resolve whether or not it occurred, leaving it to the reader to decide.
“The Ghost of Dr. Harris” was written in a single day on August 17, 1856, but remained unpublished until a small printing of a chapbook in 1900. Hawthorne claimed the story to be a true account of his own real-life experience.