The Intoxicated Ghost, and other stories — Inside the Classic

A Ghost with Manners

The title story establishes a comic voice through Irene's inherited ghost-sight. Bates writes that she "believed in them only because she could not help seeing them," a logical inversion that frames the supernatural as a social inconvenience. When a headless phantom appears, Irene scolds it for "shockingly bad taste," and the wraith collapses in astonishment, leaving a bloodstain that "may be seen to this day." The humor derives from treating spectral visitations as breaches of etiquette, not threats. This suggests Bates is more interested in character and social codes than in terror. The story's tone aligns with the catalog's "social life and customs" category, but the mechanism—inherited ghost-sight—pushes into fantasy territory.

The Psychical Club's Scientific Séance

In "A Meeting of the Psychical Club," the supernatural is approached through rationalist inquiry. A stranger performs feats that challenge physical laws: merging three colored globes into one intersecting shape and growing an orange tree from seed in moments. He invokes the "fourth dimension" and the "penetrability of matter," framing his acts as demonstrations of advanced science rather than magic. The club members, including a judge and a professor, treat the events as experiments, not miracles. Bates uses precise, almost clinical language—"the three bases being moved nearer together"—to describe impossible phenomena. This story leans heavily into science fiction and philosophical speculation, diverging from the domestic realism implied by the catalog subjects.

Between Social Comedy and Speculative Fiction

The excerpts reveal a collection that resists easy categorization. The catalog lists "Historical, Psychological & Social Fiction" and "general-literature;science-fiction," and the stories indeed straddle these labels. Irene's ghost story is a social comedy of manners; the Psychical Club tale is a rationalist fantasy. Both share a detached, ironic narrator who reports extraordinary events with understatement. Bates avoids sensationalism: the ghost is rebuked for bad taste, the magician's tricks are explained as natural law. This restraint may reflect the author's background as a critic and professor. Readers expecting either pure horror or straightforward realism will find instead a hybrid that uses the supernatural to examine human credulity and composure.

The collection's range—from Welsh castles to Boston parlors—suggests Bates was experimenting with genre boundaries at a time when American short fiction was diversifying. Readers may find it useful to approach each story on its own terms, noting how the tone shifts between satire, wonder, and psychological observation. The excerpts offer no evidence of overarching plot or character continuity, so treat the volume as a sampler of Bates's interests rather than a unified work.

I have often thought that the ghost-seeing heroine in Arlo Bates's tale, a woman who treats the spectral with tea-time politeness, shares a quiet kinship with the rambunctious youth in Red Head and Whistle Breeches — Text and Context. Both worlds take the odd and unruly as simply part of the day's business, without a fuss. That matter-of-factness, I find, is a rare and tender kind of magic.