The Real Thing

The Real Thing by H.D. Umbstaetter

The Real Thing, by H.D. Umbstaetter, follows Malcolm Joyce of New Haven, a sceptic about ghosts, who on the night of December 9, 1881, is visiting friends in a home near the summit of Nob Hill in San Francisco. Shortly before midnight, from the bay window of his chamber, he sees a human skeleton in a flowing white shroud, one arm raised, gliding through the air above the middle of the street. Shaken, he applies an old hunter's "spook test," asking whether he is awake, sober and sane. He confirms his sanity by trying to read a copy of London Punch. Later, after the cable cars pass again, the figure returns, gliding up the hill past his window. That convinces him he has seen it, and he goes to bed calm. At breakfast he says nothing, though he privately wonders whether the sight is an omen against his hopes of winning a young woman at the table. He had met her two years earlier in Maine, after rescuing her brother, a college student, from a bear trap. Joyce then tells his lawyer friend, Lucien Nelson, who teases him but agrees to join an armed watch that night. At midnight the two men wait in the bay window. Joyce again sees the skeleton rise from behind a departing cable car and glide up the hill, and Nelson, who had mocked him, is horrified. They conceal themselves in a doorway three blocks down to ambush it on its return. A sharp tapping sounds on a window above, the next car passes, and the ghost reappears at the summit. As the two rush into the street to shoot it, a figure with a long club darts from a doorway opposite and knocks the spectre to the ground. Nelson seizes the clubman, a frightened Chinaman who protests, "Him not my glost." They take him and the fallen figure to a locked room on Kearney Street. Under the drapery they find a simple device: a human skull fixed to a twelve-foot gas pipe, flattened at the bottom to slide through the cable road's grip slot and fitted with nickel spring nippers that act as a grip. Boards form the shoulders and give the shroud its spread, and a skeleton arm is attached. After Joyce and Nelson toss for who will pay him a dollar, the prisoner gives his name as Sing Lo, a laundryman. He tells the story behind the ghost. Wun Lung owned a laundry on Dupont Street. Michael O'Brien, a local politician, wanted the site for a saloon. When Wun Lung refused to sell, O'Brien wrecked the laundry and shot him. A compatriot on the bench released O'Brien with a five-dollar fine, accepting a plea of self-defence. O'Brien then set up his home and saloon on the dead man's premises. A junior Wun Lung devised the ghost to drive the murderer away. Sing Lo and a fellow laundryman, Ah Wing, hooked the dummy to the cable and removed it each midnight. Meanwhile Wun Lung roused the drunken saloon keeper by tapping on his window with a "tick-tack." The figure's single raised arm echoed the real Wun Lung, who had only one arm in his last years. Asked why the device was made of nickel, Sing Lo answers that Wun Lung said, "Put-um nickel in slot, Ilishman see-um glost." With another dollar as a "witness fee" and the ghost under his arm, he disappears into Chinatown. Joyce passes the Dupont Street corner on his way home and reads a sign there. Some months later he returns with his bride from a honeymoon in Washington and Oregon. The saloon's black and gold liquor sign is gone, replaced by a smaller gold and red board. Joyce concludes that on the night of his adventure Michael O'Brien had taken the bony semblance of his Celestial victim for the real thing.

By H.D. Umbstaetter · Genre: Ghost story, Mystery, Satire · 4,015 words

First lines

Just before midnight on the ninth day of December in the year 1881, Malcolm Joyce, of New Haven, made the acquaintance of the real thing. Prior to that time he had been a sceptic. At the time of his startling experience, he was in San Francisco, visiting friends whose home was charmingly situated near the summit of Nob Hill, that conspicuous eminence on California Street, once the scene of "sand-lot" riots, and famous for its palaces of millionaires.

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Tags

ghost story · supernatural mystery · exposed hoax · San Francisco · Nob Hill · Chinatown · cable cars · 1881 · 19th-century fiction · Victorian era · skeleton ghost · revenge

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The Real Thing is listed on Textopian as a short story by H.D. Umbstaetter, dated Date unknown.

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