Mr. Eberdeen's House by Blanche Colton Williams

STARTING POINT AND FIRST PROCESSES. "Mr. Eberdeen's House" was to have been originally only the effect of an old New England House upon a New Englander who had become rather enfranchised from his austere beginnings, and returned to find them only more crabbed, more grim, than ever, and himself strangely, inexplicably connected with them. The explanation of how he was connected with this distasteful setting, and of why it was distasteful to him evolved the author's theme. The hero's great-grandmother had fled from the same grimness and straight-lacedness and puritanism by running away with a Frenchman, just before the birth of her child, of whom Mr. Eberdeen was, contrary to his bleak, orthodox suspicions, the father. The author's plan was to have Mr. Eberdeen, representing all that was distasteful to the hero (Hastings) in the New England character, the hero's ancestor without his knowing it -- the great-grandmother after she had fled, having presumably taken the name, for herself and child, of Tremaine.

The ghosts seemed to Mr. Johnson the only media through which to tell the story pictorially. Whether one believes ghosts in a story real or not is, in his opinion, beside the point, so long as they _seem_ real enough for the sake of the telling. They may be compared to the _deus ex machina_ of Euripides, of to the scenes in motion pictures which show what some one is dreaming or thinking.