The Ghostly Rental

The Ghostly Rental is a lesser-known Gothic tale by Henry James, written in 1876 and first appearing in the London periodical Atlas. The narrative centers on a young theological student who encounters a mysterious retired officer living in isolation and sustained by rent payments delivered by a spectral figure. As the story unfolds, it is revealed that the ghostly tenant is the officer’s own deceased daughter, whose tragic fate is bound up with her father’s harshness and remorse. The tale exemplifies James’s early experimentation with supernatural motifs, where the ghost operates less as a sensational apparition than as a moral symbol embodying guilt, punishment, and the persistence of past wrongs. Though comparatively brief and rarely ranked among James’s major works, The Ghostly Rental anticipates many of the author’s later thematic preoccupations—particularly the psychological dimensions of haunting and the intricate interplay between the seen and the unseen, the natural and the supernatural.