The Night the Ghost Got In

“The Night the Ghost Got In” is a story that explores how imagination influences the perception of the unknown in humorous ways. The events and publication of the story itself both occur during periods of war, and while Thurber refrains from directly addressing it, the effects of war and its impact on social consciousness bleed through, nevertheless. A sense of paranoia is very present throughout the story, amplified by the unknown “threat” the characters believe they are facing.

One of the ways war impacts the social consciousness of the characters is through absurdism. Absurdism is a philosophical concept that refers to the conflict between humanity’s tendency to search for meaning and the inability to find hard evidence of such meaning. Absurdism became prevalent during the 20th century in the aftermath of World War I, when the horrors of the war left people to grapple with meaning in a world that they believed was meaningless. Thurber portrays this struggle to find meaning through the characters’ attempts to find the culprit of the noise and to find an identifiable source where there isn’t one. When the source cannot be identified and meaning cannot be made, the characters are left with what they do have: their imagination and feelings of paranoia.

While one of the marks of absurdist fiction is its more individualistic focus, Thurber subverts this by using the fictionalized Thurber family to indirectly make observations about the wider community around them. For instance, the neighbor character Mr. Bodwell is only briefly featured in the story, but Thurber makes a strong statement about his community when he mentions that his neighbor, like most everyone the family knows, is prone to some form of “attacks.” The effects of the war have impacted the community enough that “attacks,” presumably of panic or rage, are commonplace to the point that Thurber only mentions it offhand.

Outside of “The Night the Ghost Got In,” Thurber establishes that his immediate family is not a unique case among his relatives. In the first story of the collection, “The Night the Bed Fell,” other extended family members also possess levels of paranoia. The other members of the family are not all plagued by fears of burglary, but one aunt in particular goes to great lengths to ensure she is not chloroformed by burglars; she piles all her valuables outside her bedroom door and leaves a note begging the burglars not to chloroform her. Another aunt is convinced burglars have been breaking into her home every night, and she throws shoes down the hall to scare them off.

It is significant that the ghost first walks around the dining room table, a place where family members commonly gather as a collective. The height of the story’s suspense occurs when the ghost runs up the stairs, directly at the family. The ghost’s movements point to an absence surrounding the family, especially considering the absence of Thurber’s father and brother Roy. While Thurber notes that his father and brother are on a trip to Indianapolis, and not off at war, their extraction from the story becomes inhabited by the ghost. He at first believes that the noise is perhaps his father and brother returned from their trip, and he’s horrified when he realizes that this isn’t the case. Without the security of the father and brother, paranoia takes over, and the family anticipates the worst, immediately believing that the source of the noise must mean a tangible threat: burglars. The story becomes one of absence, or how the characters respond in the face of an absence, whether that absence is a physical one, such as the family members missing from the story, or an emotional/philosophical one. That absence, more than the noise, becomes what the characters respond to.