I have never been quiet about how much I dislike humorous fantasy, and that includes funny ghost stories. “The Ghost Extinguisher” by Gellett Burgess (Cosmopolitan, April 1905) is the perfect example. But it is an important one so I will stow all my baggage for now. The story was anthologized in one of the collections of Dorothy Scarborough, Humorous Ghost Stories (1921) where readers could find a mass of such tales. (The book features the usual suspects: Frank Stockton, J. Kendrick Bangs, Oscar Wilde, Richard Middleton, Washington Irving and Richard Barham.)
Burgess did not invent the funny ghostbreaker. The play The Ghost Breaker: A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts (1909) by Paul Dickey and Charles Goddard had poked fun at all the Flaxman Lows and John Silences in the Victorian and Edwardian magazines. (Bob Hope and Martin & Lewis would do film versions.) Ghostbreaker characters had been born out of the interest in Spiritualism in the 1800s . By 1909 the idea of a professional ghostchaser was beginning to wear thin. This was the feeling behind Rudyard Kipling’s “The House Surgeon” (Harper’s, September 1909) as well. (World War I would produce a renewed interest in Spiritualism and the Pulps would give us Jules De Grandin and John Thunstone in the decades to come.)
What do we know about Gellett Burgess? First off, he is the man who coined the word “blurb”. As an artist and writer, he created many works, which became movies back in the silent era. This was mostly of the popular mainstream variety (The Smart Set, Collier’s, Century and Cosmopolitan) though his friendship with British ghost story writer, Oliver Onions, shows he had another side. Gellett encouraged the author of Widdershins to write his own stories that are not inherently “humorous”.
“The Ghost Extinguisher” begins with the narrator explaining his long process of becoming a ghost hunter. He starts in San Francisco when he notices that the local Japanese do not worry about ghosts like white Americans. The landlords of the city would rent haunted properties to Asians at a low rent then kick them out after the stigma was gone. (The author makes haunting sound like a real problem in the rental industry.)
The man befriends one of the Japanese, Hoku Yamanochi. Hoku invites him to stay at one of the low-rent houses until a ghost shows up. Three days later, Yamanochi demonstrates how, with the right herbs and a bowl, he can engage the spirit. The Japanese sends the narrator to another room to fetch the bellows from the fireplace. He sucks the ghost up and places it in a jar. The guest inquires what happens to the jars? They are sent to Buddhist temples to be used in ceremonies.
Now armed with this information, the narrator begins experimenting. Being a scientist, he reduces the herbs to their chemical elements and improves them. He finds a powerful bicycle pump works better than bellows. To locate ghosts to experiment on, he joins the local chapter of the Society for Psychical Research. With work, he perfects a containment device.
The finishing stroke comes when he invents the actual “Ghost Extinguisher”. Some ghosts are so insubstantial, hiding and catching them is difficult. He solved this problem by putting his chemicals into a fire extinguisher.
The ordinary fire-extinguisher of commerce gave me the hint as to how the problem could be solved. One of these portable hand-instruments I filled with the proper chemicals. When inverted, the ingredients were commingled in vacuo and a vast volume of gas was liberated. This was collected in the reservoir provided with a rubber tube having a nozzle at the end. The whole apparatus being strapped upon my back, I was enabled to direct a stream of powerful precipitating gas in any desired direction, the flow being under control through the agency of a small stopcock. By means of this ghost-extinguisher I was enabled to pursue my experiments as far as I desired.
Having conquered the scientific aspects, the inventor now applies the device to the market. He produces the Gerrish Ghost-Extinguisher, and we finally learn his name. He also produces the Gerrish Ghost-Grenades for quick usage. These products don’t make him a millionaire in America so he tries England. To his disappointment he discovers the Brits cherish their ghosts so he changes to marketing his ghosts to people who want a ghost to haunt their place.
At first this fails because the ghosts take so long to re-materialize. Gerrish solves this problem by introducing radium. The radioactive nature of the isotope helps the ghost to become instantly available. This new development proves profitable except the ghost hunter has a further problem: the quality of the spirits he has on hand is poor and Gerrish will need a new supply.
He decides to use the famous location of the Battle of Waterloo to gather fresh material. With several assistants (each armed with an extinguisher), he waits in the dark night for the war phantoms to appear. He is frightened when a squad of charging French horsemen attack. But the venture is successful and he gathers many spirits.
Right after this he returns to America because of a big job. A sanatorium is built on the site of a burned down lodge where many people died. Gerrish charges $5000 to remove the ghosts, which he does. But the customer won’t pay when he finds out that the ghost hunter sells the captured spirits. The sanatorium owner feels his bill should be reduced and refuses to pay. Thus the world of commerce enters the realm of the supernatural. Gerrish retaliates by releasing the Waterloo ghosts into the hospital.
This causes a new problem. The ghosts follow him from New York back to his laboratory. They don’t like being used in this fashion. The lab catches on fire and all the other ghosts in jars escape as well and attack their jailer. The story ends with the news that all one hundred of the inmates at the sanatorium have been cured by the ghostly attack. We are left to imagine the ghosts’ revenge.
Why should we care about “The Ghost Extinguisher”? The idea of a scientific individual who can capture ghosts and rid victims is the basis of a very popular franchise, Ghostbusters. The origins of those movies began with Dan Aykroyd’s family being into Spiritualism in rural Ontario. But the concept of a “ghost-catcher”, like a dog-catcher, in a humorous fashion starts here with Burgess. The humor of the idea is manifest in those films: Ray, Egon, Winton and Peter chasing phantoms through New York (and all the versions to follow).
And as we can see, Burgess can be credited with some important ideas: the ghost containment device as well as the ghost extinguisher. Ghostbusters would modernize these to a foot-released trap and a laser-like proton pack with its nozzle-like dispenser but in most ways the Ghostbusters don’t really do anything different than Gillett did in 1905. The use of radioactive materials is also found in Burgess’s story. Now, I am not suggesting that Harold Ramis and Dan Ackroyd were cribbing from Burgess directly. After eighty years, most of the ideas in Ghostbusters had been used and re-used. That was what made it fun. We all knew Scooby-Doo and Kolchak and many other descendants of Sherlock Holmes and Martin Hesselius. The humor was first, ghost lore second. (Though you got the feeling Dan Ackroyd would have preferred it the other way around. He later did Psy Factor.)
Conclusion
Finally, when we look at both tales (ignoring the last third of the film, with Zuul and the giant marshmallow man) we see that Ghostbusters is also a comedy about commerce. The idea of scientists chasing ghosts in pretty standard. The humor comes in when they go into business. Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) answering the phone: “Ghostbusters” as if it were a plumber’s office to the cheezy tv ad, all these are the best part of the middle of the film where they have gone from an old church and hearse to a successful business. All the ghosts will gather as they do at the end of “The Ghost Extinguisher” for the finale. That will be a Lovecraftian showdown that Gellett Burgess had noting to do with.
