5 Books That Were Written by Ghosts
If you’ve ever done NaNoWriMo or just tried to write a book the normal way, you know it’s harder than it seems to type that many coherent sentences in even a few months. Well, imagine how hard it must be without a physical body. People have done it, through mediums who, let’s be honest, were probably just trying to shield themselves from bad reviews.
Mark Twain
In 1917, Emily Grant Hutchings published a novel named Jap Herron that she claimed Mark Twain’s spirit began dictating to her via Ouija board in 1915. (Hey, it’s a painstaking process.) The next year, Twain’s daughter sued Hutchings and her publisher, forcing them to either admit the book was a fraud or risk all profits going to Twain’s estate. Instead of doing either, they chose to pull all existing copies from the shelves. It’s not like it was any good anyway. One reviewer noted, “If this is the best that ‘Mark Twain’ can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary.” That was a huge burn in 1917.
O. Henry
My Tussle With the Devil, and Other Stories, which is literally credited to “O. Henry’s Ghost,” begins with a foreword by its “editor,” Albert Houghton Pratt, explaining that if the stories don’t sound like O. Henry, that’s because people’s writing styles change after they die, and also, shut up. Pratt goes on to explain that the stories were communicated to him via Ouija board in 1917 (it was a big year for them) in the presence of large groups of friends, who were sometimes kept up into the wee hours of the morning listening to “O. Henry’s” new stories. It was possibly the only time someone’s friends stayed late to watch their improv show.
Patience Worth
Pearl Curran was a true inspiration — a high school dropout who never displayed much talent for anything besides singing and failed to make a career even out of that who managed to marry rich, affording her the time to become a successful author by claiming to be channeling a colonial settler named Patience Worth. She actually got the idea from Emily Grant Hutchings, who happened to be a friend and convinced her to mess around with a Ouija board in 1913. By all accounts, the Patience Worth books aren’t bad, and the fact that no such woman has ever been identified and she had a suspicious level of knowledge about modern language and Victorian life doesn’t change that.
Seth
We’re not calling Jane Roberts a liar, but if you’re an artist in the ‘60s and you have to specify that an experience was “very unpsychedelic,” there’s a good chance it wasn’t. What she describes — being “flung through the tissue paper” between dimensions and a sudden flood of “radical new ideas” — certainly sounds like it. Whatever the case, she ended up with a manuscript she called the Seth Material, dictated by the otherworldly voice in her head that called itself Seth, and spent the next few decades publishing books by Seth with titles like The Nature of Personal Reality and Adventures in Consciousness (she also occasionally channeled Rembrandt and Cézanne). The Seth Material has been cited as a foundational work for the New Age movement, and we wouldn’t want that on our consciences, either.
Humberto de Campos
Unlike Hutchings, Chico Xavier wasn’t afraid to get his hands legally dirty with a ghost’s estate. He’d made a career out of being a literal ghostwriter, publishing more than 450 books that he claimed were dictated by ghosts, including Humberto de Campos, a Brazilian poet and journalist who died in 1934. A decade later, Campos’ widow sued Xavier, arguing that she was entitled to copyright protection of her late husband’s late work. Hutchings should have stuck it out, because the court ruled in favor of Xavier. It turns out people can’t claim copyright after they die, even if they keep working.