“The Ghoul and the Corpse” appeared in the very first issue of Weird Tales (March 1923). From that title you’d expect some Lovecraftian dudes with dissimilar eyes at the very least. What we actually have is a strange Northern that might be the very first “frozen caveman” story. I’ve written about these suspended animation critters a lot in comics and even Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw” but this tale by G. A. Wells is fourteen years earlier that Argosy tale. Weird Tales predates the first all-Science Fiction magazine, Amazing Stories by three years. For Pulp “cavemen corpsicles” to appear before Wells, it would have had to be in a soft weekly like Argosy or All-Story. I have yet to find such a tale. I have discussed Jack London’s “A Relic of the Pleistocene” as it relates to this theme before.
This story begins with the narrator, MacNeal, telling us that Chris Bonner is a liar. Bonner relates his adventure with the caveman but we aren’t to believe anything we hear. At Aurora Bay in Alaska, MacNeal sat with Bonner and shared a meal and a pipe of tobacco. Bonner discusses how the Earth’s poles shifted long ago, causing the Arctic to freeze. Then he hands MacNeal a strange knife made from ivory. It is covered in old blood.
Chris Bonner goes on to tell how he got the knife. He was prospecting near where the Tukuvuk live. The region is taboo, supposedly haunted by spirits. Bonner finds placer gold and tries to locate the mother lode. He suspects it is under a glacier that bleeds the gold downstream. While searching for this, he comes across a caveman frozen in the glacier. He has the knife in the ice alongside his body. Bonner’s first thought is to dig him out and give him a decent burial. His second thought is to give him to scientists. This will make him famous.
Once he has the caveman out of the ice, he places him against his lean-to wall. He can’t sleep because the presence of the frozen corpse haunts him. Eventually, Bonner gets sick. The only way he can survive the fever is to burn a big campfire. This thaws out the caveman. He brings the corpse into his lean-to shack. The ancient man begins to revive. Soon Bonner is face-to-face with a living prehistoric man. The man shoots the caveman in the chest then has a hard time as he is attacked. The body smells like ten garbage piles. Bonner grabs the knife and stabs his attacker. The caveman is destroyed when the shack catches on fire.
MacNeal calls Bonner a liar. The man’s reply is “Then where in hell did I get the knife?” The title “The Ghoul and the Corpse” only refers to Bonner being ghoulish in dealing with a dead body. (Sorry, no Lovecraft here.) That title kept the story hidden from me for a long time.
It is not a long story. Not long enough to get an illustration by Heitman. But it does have all the earmarks of the later stories. The body is found in solid ice; there is a slow revival; things don’t work out so well. The people involved usually have a profit motif in mind and don’t try to help the iceman. Two films Iceman (1984) and Encino Man (1992) use some of these tropes as well but for different purposes.
I suppose the idea of finding a long-dead caveman has become a silly Pulp notion after almost a hundred years (yes, “The Ghoul and the Corpse” will be 100 next year!) That being said, the world was fascinated in 1991 when they discovered Otzi the “Ice Man”. He didn’t get up and run around but we all wanted to know more about life before the pyramids were build. They made a film about him in 2017.
