1 January 1863
“More Ghosts” is preserved in a clipping from the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in one of the scrapbooks Orion kept for his brother. Orion wrote “Sams Column” at the top of the clipping and thus identified it as part of the new local editor's daily contribution.1 The clipping is undated, but Orion pasted a second item from the local column, “New Year's Day” (no. 35), immediately below it. Since it seems likely that both pieces are from the same column, and since “New Year's Day” must have appeared on 1 January 1863, “More Ghosts” has been assigned that date as well.
Clemens' allusion in this sketch to “the haunted house humbug” implies that “More Ghosts” was occasioned by “A Ghost Story,” an article that had appeared in the Enterprise probably on 25 or 26 December 1862 and that is preserved in the same scrapbook.2 “A Ghost Story” relates in about fifteen hundred words a tale of apparitions, ominous footsteps and groans, and the miraculous materialization of “large gouts of fresh blood” in “a real, old-fashioned haunted house” on E Street in Virginia City.
The shooting gallery with its sidewalk effigy described in “More Ghosts” has not been identified. But the nearby Winn's International Hotel was the finest in the city, a newly built three-story brick building on Union and C streets.3
Are we to be scared to death every time we venture into the street? May we be allowed to go quietly about our business, or are we to be assailed at every corner by fearful apparitions? As we were plodding home at the ghostly hour last night, thinking about the haunted house humbug, we were suddenly rivetedⒶemendation to the pavement in a paroxysm of terror by that blue and yellow phantom who watches over the destinies of the shooting gallery, this side of the International.Ⓐemendation Seen in daylight, placidly reclining against his board in the doorway, with his blue coat, and his yellow pants, and his high boots, and his fancy hat, just lifted from his head, he is rather an engaging youth than otherwise; but at dead of night, when he pops out his pallid face at you by candle light, and stares vacantly upon you with his uplifted hat and the eternal civility of his changeless brow, and the ghostliness of his general appearance heightened by that grave-stone inscription over his stomach, “to-day shooting for chickens here,” you are apt to think of spectres starting up from behind tomb-stones, and you weaken accordingly—the cold chills creep over you—your hair stands on end—you reverse your front, and with all possible alacrity, you change your base.
The first printing appeared in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, probably on 1 January 1863. The only known copy of this printing, in a clipping in Scrapbook 4, p. 34, MTP, is copy-text. There are no textual notes.