"Ghost in the Corn Crib" (1959/1973)

“The last story is always true until it is superseded.”— "Cabrito" (1957)

“Gees, his eyes were bugged out when they cut him down. He wasscared to death by the ghost all right. That ghost made about a dozenmore hang themselves up there too.” “That many?”

“Ghost in the Corn Crib” is an exciting piece of prenucleation period Lafferty, showing, in a nascent form, how his later preoccupation with consensus reality can be created, revised, and forked over a short period. It is a methodological salvo, and it is also just a good, memorable ghost story, with Lafferty working local color and his rural-versus-city boy theme, which more often shows up in the form of the southern-versus-the-northern boy.

Jimmy Laterdale tells his townie friend, Jimmy Johnston, that Old Shep, his German Shepherd, won’t go near a corn crib. Old Shep has seen the ghost that haunts it. After some back and forth about this, Laterdale himself “clarifies” that the haunting occurs not in the crib itself, but in a little tool room upstairs next to it, where a spirit is said to appear nightly at midnight. The two boys then consult the adult George, who seems to be a more reliable storyteller, and George builds on these storytelling details. In this way, the ghost story takes on lineaments as details are revised. It creates a narrative with important switchbacks, a bit like the way improvisation mostly relies on the “Yes, and” formula.

George adds his own spooky anecdotes to what the boys have ginned up. The ghost is the angry spirit of a man who was unjustly hanged and now seeks revenge. And there have been victims of the ghost, including a hired man who vanished without a trace and a tinker who disappeared because "a ghost comes in like the wind and blows out the light. Then he gets you in the dark." We are told that the corn crib ghost targets anyone sharing the last name of the man who betrayed him. The victim receives a grim ultimatum: hang yourself with the rope it provides or suffer a fate a hundred times worse.

Jimmy Laterdale’s father later makes a prediction. A supernatural event is due that very night, something that happens in a seven-year cycle. "I guess you boys better stay in bed," he says. "I'd like to see you both at breakfast in the morning," practically inviting the boys to conduct a midnight vigil. This takes place. It ends in a panicked flight and two conflicting stories. Here consensus diverges. Jimmy Laterdale says Jimmy Johnston was scared and ran, while Jimmy Johnston says he stayed behind manfully to face the malevolent ghost whose eyes "bugged out like a cow's in the dehorning chute." He says he was only spared when the spirit realized it had mistaken his name, Johnston, for its true target, Johnson, one of the story’s big jokes and deflations of the revenging revenant tale. This plays on the idea of the shibboleth in Judges 12:4-6 where being one letter of gets a guy killed. What does shibboleth mean in Hebrew? Ear of corn. Hence the ghost of the corn crib. This is a story about language haunting.

So which boy is telling the truth? If this has all been about what happened, then the naturalist short odds favor Jimmy Laterdale. On the other hand, this is not about that approach to reality but about the dialectical exchanges of the storytelling process, how story feeds on story. At the end of it, Lafferty steps in to place some fun spin on the outermost diegetic level, which he does in several other stories. The one that first comes to mind is “Rain Mountain,” because it, too, centers on childhood and storytelling. “Rain Mountain” has a more sophisticated version of the device. Here, Old Shep begins to growl menacingly, but only at Jimmy Johnston. Despite the dog's age, his instincts are infallible; he smells the supernatural on the town boy and "knew that Jimmy'd had the dead man's rope around his neck." So Lafferty’s narrator gets the last word on the ghost in the corn crib.

The rest of this will be a little technical to show how the story works on a formal level. This semester I delivered two guest lectures as introductions to Lafferty’s formalism; in the future, I might use this story to do the same. It is an easy place to jump start a student into thinking about what Lafferty does exceptionally well with his storytelling voice, especially on the issue of how it interacts with character dialogue as vehicle for puzzle and plot.

Consider the “ghost” in the corn crib. It is an open variable, an incipient concept that gets contradicted immediately by the behavior of Old Shep, who undercuts Jimmy Laterdale’s first statements that construct the ghost legend. From here on, most of the story’s events are speech acts, meaning that the metafictional order of narrative presentation (syuzhet) can overwrite and reorder the reality (fabula) of the corn crib myth as different characters pull and tug on the story space.

More precisely, in classical narratology, the presentation (syuzhet) does not overwrite the fabula; the reader reconstructs the reality (fabula) from the representation (syuzhet) and revises it whenever the presentation (syuzhet) shifts. The classic instance of this is the unreliable narrator. All of the presentation has to be rethought to arrive at the base reality. A reader of John Dowell’s version of the events in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier has to be reconstructed. Sometime writers make this reconstruction textually undecidable, as in the case of James’s The Turn of the Screw or Nabokov’s Pale Fire. That tends not to be Lafferty’s way because he is so didactic: his horizon is higher than art, at least on his own terms. So this is a metafictional story in which the characters’ presentational speech overlaps, “corrects,” and diverges over competing versions (fabula) of the ghost in the corn crib while constructing it through their own speech acts. The performative and the constative pull apart.

We see this in the early phase of the story, where the ghost lore about the corn crib is mostly undefined. Jimmy Laterdale drafts the reality of the open-variable ghost, and then has to issue what might be called “patch notes.” He shifts the location from the corn crib to the tool room and changes the victim from his brother to a hired man. The reality of the ghost in the corn crib seems to depend on the storyteller’s ability to edit previous contradictions in real time to maintain suspension of disbelief—an early intimation of Atrox Fabulinus or Enniscorthy Sweeny.

As storytelling authority shifts from the children to George and then to Laterdale’s father and dirempts at the corn crib ladder at midnight, the story accretes more “deliverables” and patches, each one further reifying the corn-crib myth.

I’ve made a table to show how these speech acts accumulate and harden the narrative: what begins as loose boy talk becomes a structure governed by narratized constraints: a “seven-year cycle” that summons the ghost on the last day of threshing; immutable animal behaviors, such as a pony that runs for exactly three days after a sighting; a bureaucratic Name Curse that targets specific surnames; the sub-structural etymological shibboleth idea; and the absurd mechanics of the hanging, which demand the victim somehow hoist the death rope over a rafter and hold onto the far end until he dies. It is a remarkable example of Lafferty refining his craft, an Algebra II anticipation of the higher mathematics of where he is headed as an artist.

Ghost in the Corn Crib Notes.pdf

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