James thus poses, in somewhat clumsy form, the sorts of questions that will bedevil interpreters of his later ghost stories. When the narrator returns to the old, haunted Diamond house, it has burned to the ground and the daughter has disappeared.

The next day, it turns out that the father, about three miles away from the confrontation, has indeed died in the night. For, a moment after the skeptical theology student tears the veil of the daughter's costume, he hears a thud at the bottom of some stairs, and the daughter claims to see her Arizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 6 10 34 Pericles Lewis father's ghost. The narrator seems to have succeeded in debunking a tale of the supernatural.2 Yet a suggestion of occult forces lingers. I gave it a violent jerk, dragged it nearly off, and stood staring at a large fair person, of about five-and-thirty' (187). Later in the story, he confronts the ghost in the Diamonds' haunted homestead, pulling off the veil of the Captain's flesh-and-blood daughter, who has disguised herself in a ghost suit in order (it seems) to punish her father for his reaction to her youthful love affair: 'Instinctively, irresistibly, by the force of reaction against my credulity, I stretched out my hand and seized the long veil that muffled her head.

But I have seen it with these eyes I have touched it with these hands!' (CS 2:i75).1 The student, though attracted to Captain Diamond and his story, remains skeptical. Hopkins chopping logic over it, and deciding, by chapter and verse, that it is true.

PERICLES LEWIS 'The Reality of the Unseen': Shared Fictions and Religious Experience in the Ghost Stories of Henry James IN a ghost story from Henry James's early period, 'The Ghostly Rental,' printed in Scribner's Monthly in 1876 and never reprinted during James's lifetime, Captain Diamond, a man haunted by the ghost of his daughter, lectures the narrator, a young student at the Harvard Divinity School: 'You have read about the immortality of the soul you have seen Jonathan Edwards and Dr. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Henry james ghost stories