The mistaken ghost is an old form, for most of Mrs. Radcliffe's interesting apparitions belong to this class and others of the Gothic writers used subterfuge to cheat the reader. In the early romance there was frequently deliberate deception for a definite purpose, the ghosts with the histrionic temperament using a make-up of phosphorus, bones, and other contrivances to create the impression of unearthly visitation. Recent fiction is more cleverly managed than that. Rarely now does one find a story where the ghost-seer is deliberately imposed upon, for in most modern cases the mistake occurs by accident or misapprehension on the part of the percipient, for which nobody and nothing but his own agitation is responsible. Yet there are occasional hoax ghosts even yet, for example, _The Ghost of Miser Brimpson_,[74] where a specter is rigged up as the scheme of a clever girl to win over an obdurate lover, and _The Spectre Bridegroom_, which is a well-known example of the pseudo-spook whose object is matrimony. _His Unquiet Ghost_[75] is a delightful story of a fake burial to evade the revenue officials. Watt, the "corp," says: "I was a powerful onchancy, onquiet ghost. I even did my courtin' whilst in my reg'lar line o' business a'harntin' a graveyard!" His sweetheart sobs out her confession of love to "his pore ghost," an avowal she has denied the living man. Examples of the apparitions that unwittingly deceive mortals are found in _The Ghost at Point of Rock_,[76] where the young telegraph operator, alone at night on a prairie, sees a beautiful girl who enters and announces that she is dead,--how is he to know that she is in a somnambulistic stupor, and has wandered from a train? Another is[77] a story where the young man falls in love with what he thinks is a wraith of the water luring him to his death, but learns that she is a perfectly proper damsel whose family he knows. _The Night Call_[78] is less simple than these, a problematic story that leaves one wondering as to just what is meant.[79] [74] By Eden Phillpotts. [75] By Charles Egbert Craddock. [76] By F. H. Spearman. [77] _By the Waters of Paradise_, by F. Marion Crawford. [78] By Henry Van Dyke. [79] As Dr. Blanche Williams points out in her discussion of the short story.