A Not So Ghostly Ghost Story “The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” These short two sentences by the infamous writer Fredric Brown are enough to hook a reader head to toe and suck one into the black hole that is a horror story. The very kind of story that Mark Twain’s tale, A Ghost Story, mocks. A Ghost Story is a short story about a man who buys a room that had been uninhabited for many years. On the first night of his stay he finds mysterious happenings are afoot as the place is haunted by a ghost, in particular, the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. Mark Twain introduces the tale with a haunting tone true to a ghost story, although he doesn 't stray from his realistic style of writing instead relying