“The Spectre Bridegroom” (1819)

[spoilers] This story by Washington Irving may be his best known after “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” although in my opinion (with all due respect for him as a pioneer) “The Adventure of the German Student,” which came five years later, is his best I’ve seen. The earlier classics are all from Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. This story is a little proud of its own cleverness but comes by it honestly as it is actually clever, and well done, though it never takes itself much seriously. Really it is the story of a prank, but a strange and macabre one. It turns out Irving was another Anglo-American infatuated with Germany. I don’t know how I missed this (maybe the Nazis). I know my Humanities 101 class in college started with Goethe, so it’s always been there for me to see. Irving based both “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” on German folklore and here he doesn’t even bother to move it out of Germany. It is a sitcom premise though it broods with gloomy atmosphere. A man is to marry a woman he has never met, arranged by their parents, but is attacked and killed by highway robbers on the way to the wedding. He and his old bosom buddy were already late, now this really tears it. The dead fiance’s companion—as it happens, an enemy of the bride’s family—immediately goes on to the wedding party to pass the news. Now comes the comedy part. The bride’s family is so happy and relieved he has arrived he can’t get a word in edgewise. They presume he is the groom none of them has ever seen. Yes, we’re approaching stretcher territory now. In all the confusion he and the bride fall in love at first sight. More sitcom: our pretender has the presence of mind to strike on a brilliant idea. Granted he has the whole evening to work it out, but basically he makes himself more and more gloomy as the evening goes along. At midnight, he announces dramatically that he must leave—he was killed earlier tonight by robbers and must be buried tomorrow. He leaves the wedding party stunned. At first they think he is astoundingly rude and then they are just astounded when they get the news. A more modern sensibility might end it somewhere around here as a kind of conte cruel with a sharp twist. This being 1819 and horror as we know it in its infancy, we carry on with the romance. He appears to the bride and conducts some other shenanigans as a ghost before cluing her in. The ending is also very sitcom, with all revealed and all forgiven and this former enemy of the family welcomed to marry their daughter, who loves him true, and happily ever after.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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