There are ghosts in Hamlet and Macbeth and Don Giovanni. What does it mean that figures who populate the lower literary orders also appear in some of the central works of our culture? Is a belief in ghosts merely a childish superstition, surmounted by those adults who read ghost stories as a form of titillation? Or is a belief in ghosts a serious acknowledgment of evil? Are these literary questions, or theological ones? Such are the night thoughts that arise while reading an anthology of ghost stories.

In his introduction to this anthology, Brad Leithauser contests the psychological interpretation of “The Turn of the Screw” that Edmund Wilson advanced in his essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” Wilson was, as ever, determined to bring order to an unruly landscape, and he settled the numerous ambiguities of “The Turn of the Screw” through a consistent psychological reading that precluded the actual existence of the ghosts that the governess in the story claimed to have seen. Mr. Leithauser, caustically noting that Wilson’s essay “might still serve as a prime illustration of how on occasion even the most brilliant thinker can become, in the fervent pursuit of a half-truth, a half-wit,” argues against finding a solution to “The Turn of the Screw.” Mr. Leithauser asserts that without an allowance for the external, material existence of ghosts, entirely apart from their internal, psychological meanings, the reader too readily forecloses and therefore simplifies the interpretation of the ghost story. He writes: “Ghostly