The Adventure of the German Student: Washington Irving's 1824 Ghost Story

"The Adventure of the German Student" is a short horror story by the American writer Washington Irving, first published in 1824 in his collection Tales of a Traveller. Despite the "Adventure of" title, which modern readers may associate with Sherlock Holmes, it has nothing to do with detective fiction. It is a compact Gothic tale set in Paris during the Reign of Terror. A young German student meets a beautiful woman at the foot of the guillotine, takes her home, pledges himself to her, and finds her dead the next morning. When a police officer loosens the black band around her neck, her head falls to the floor.

The story is only a few pages long, but it has had a long afterlife. Irving said it was based on a French anecdote. Similar plots appear in works by Alexandre Dumas and Gaston Leroux. The image of a woman whose head is held on only by a ribbon passed into children's books and campfire lore, most famously as "The Green Ribbon" in Alvin Schwartz's 1984 collection In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories. In 2014 Carmen Maria Machado reworked it in her acclaimed story "The Husband Stitch."

This article explains the story and its setting, the book it belongs to, where Irving said he got it, the older "dead bride" tradition it draws on, and the many retellings it has inspired.

At a glance

Not a Sherlock Holmes story

Because many Sherlock Holmes stories are titled "The Adventure of the...", it is natural to wonder whether "The Adventure of the German Student" is a Holmes pastiche. It is not. Irving's story was published in 1824, long before Holmes was created, and has no detective, no mystery to be solved and no connection to Arthur Conan Doyle. "The Adventure of..." was simply a common way of titling short tales in the period, and Irving uses it for several stories in the same book, including "The Adventure of My Uncle", "The Adventure of My Aunt" and "The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture".

Washington Irving and Tales of a Traveller

Irving in 1824

Washington Irving was born in New York on April 3, 1783 and died at his home near Tarrytown, New York, on November 28, 1859. He is best remembered for "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," both published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819 to 1820), which made him one of the first American writers to win fame in Britain. He wrote under the pen name Geoffrey Crayon, a gentle, observant narrator.

After The Sketch Book he published Bracebridge Hall (1822), a series of sketches set at an English country house. He then travelled in Europe. He lived for a time in Dresden, in Germany, in the winter of 1822 to 1823, and in Paris, where he collaborated on stage translations with the playwright John Howard Payne. Tales of a Traveller was compiled during these years and published in August 1824.

The book

Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. appeared in two volumes and four parts. Its contents show how varied it is:

Besides "The Adventure of the German Student," the best-known story in the book is "The Devil and Tom Walker," a New England tale of a man who sells his soul.

Reception

Irving thought highly of the collection. He told his sister: "I think there are in it some of the best things I have ever written." The critics disagreed. The United States Literary Gazette wrote that "the public have been led to expect better things," and the New-York Mirror called Irving "overrated." The critic John Neal was harsher: "We hardly know how to speak of this sad affair.... No wonder that people have begun to question his originality." Irving was hurt by the response, and by the early 20th century critics generally ranked the book below The Sketch Book.

Over time, though, "The German Student" has become one of the most frequently anthologized pieces from the book. The Library of America includes it in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (2009), where it opens on page 21, and featured it as a "Story of the Week" in March 2016.

The frame: a dinner of ghost stories

The nervous gentleman

Part First is presented as a set of stories that Geoffrey Crayon heard from a "nervous gentleman." Irving's introductory note says the adventures "were related to me by the same nervous gentleman who told me the romantic tale of THE STOUT GENTLEMAN, published in Bracebridge Hall."

Irving uses the note for a literary joke. Readers had assumed "The Stout Gentleman" described something that happened to Irving himself, and Sir Walter Scott, then the anonymous "author of Waverley", had hinted in the introduction to his novel Peveril of the Peak that he was the stout gentleman. As a result, Crayon complains, he has "ever since been importuned by letters and questions from gentlemen, and particularly from ladies without number, touching what I had seen of the great unknown." The poor nervous gentleman, meanwhile, has been pestered to appear at parties as "the gentleman who has had a glimpse of the author of Waverley."

This playful opening sets the tone. The stories that follow are presented as tales told by others, at second or third hand, and the reader is invited to wonder how much of each is true.

The hunting dinner and the old gentleman

The stories are told at "a hunting dinner, given by a worthy fox-hunting old Baronet, who kept Bachelor's Hall in jovial style, in an ancient rook-haunted family mansion," where the guests begin trading ghost stories. The narrator of the German Student's tale is introduced earlier in the evening:

"He was an old gentleman, one side of whose face was no match for the other. The eyelid drooped and hung down like an unhinged window shutter. Indeed, the whole side of his head was dilapidated, and seemed like the wing of a house shut up and haunted. I'll warrant that side was well stuffed with ghost stories."

From then on he is called "the old gentleman with the haunted head." Other guests include an "inquisitive gentleman," who keeps interrupting with questions about whether the stories are true, and a "knowing old gentleman." Their interruptions are part of the comedy. In this company of jokes and skeptical questions, "The Adventure of the German Student" stands out as almost entirely serious.

Ghost stories that deflate

The stories told before "The German Student" mostly end in anticlimax, and seeing how they work makes Irving's choice in "The German Student" clearer.

• "The Adventure of My Uncle." The old gentleman with the haunted head tells how his uncle, travelling in Normandy "a long time before the French revolution," spent a night in an old château and was visited in his bedroom by a mysterious lady. The next day he recognizes her in a family portrait. When he tells the Marquis, his host, "I saw that lady last night," the Marquis takes a long pinch of snuff, says "Bah!" and walks away. The narrator stops. "And is that all?" asks the inquisitive gentleman. "That is all," the narrator replies, "filling a glass of wine."
• "The Adventure of My Aunt." A widow living in the country notices that the eye of her late husband's portrait seems to move. She orders the picture pulled down, and behind it the servants find a former servant hiding with a long knife, planning to rob her. The narrator reports that she had him "drawn through the horsepond," and believes he "was sent on a voyage of improvement to Botany Bay," the penal colony in Australia. The apparent ghost was a burglar.
• "The Bold Dragoon." The narrator's grandfather, a soldier, has a wild night at an inn during which the furniture seems to dance. The household's explanation is that the room's previous occupant "was a famous juggler who had died of St. Vitus's dance, and no doubt had infected all the furniture."

Each of these tales raises the possibility of the supernatural and then either explains it away or simply refuses to finish. The inquisitive gentleman's questions keep puncturing the mood.

"The Adventure of the German Student" breaks the pattern. It is told straight, without jokes or interruptions, and its horrifying ending is not explained away. Only in the last three lines does the dinner-table comedy return, when the inquisitive gentleman asks "And is this really a fact?" Placed among comic ghost stories, the tale is all the more startling. It is followed by "The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture" and "The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger," which lead into the longest and most serious tale in Part First, "The Story of the Young Italian."

The story

The summary below follows Irving's text. Quotations are from the story as printed in Tales of a Traveller, which is in the public domain.

Gottfried Wolfgang

The tale begins in the middle of a storm, then steps back to introduce its hero:

"On a stormy night, in the tempestuous times of the French revolution, a young German was returning to his lodgings, at a late hour, across the old part of Paris. The lightning gleamed, and the loud claps of thunder rattled through the lofty, narrow streets—but I should first tell you something about this young German."

Gottfried Wolfgang is "a young man of good family" who has studied at Göttingen. Being "of a visionary and enthusiastic character," he has "wandered into those wild and speculative doctrines which have so often bewildered German students." His health suffers and his imagination becomes "diseased." Like the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, he has built "an ideal world of his own around him," and he becomes convinced that "there was an evil influence hanging over him; an evil genius or spirit seeking to ensnare him and ensure his perdition."

His friends send him to Paris for a change of scene. He arrives just as the Revolution breaks out. At first "the popular delirium" excites him, but "the scenes of blood which followed shocked his sensitive nature," and he withdraws into a solitary apartment in the Pays Latin, the students' quarter near the Sorbonne. He spends his days in libraries, and Irving calls him "a literary goul, feeding in the charnel house of decayed literature."

The dream

Shy with women but "a passionate admirer of female beauty," Wolfgang has a dream "of a female face of transcendent beauty." It returns again and again until it becomes "one of those fixed ideas which haunt the minds of melancholy men, and are at times mistaken for madness."

The woman at the guillotine

On the stormy night of the opening, Wolfgang crosses the Place de Grève, "the square where public executions are performed," near the Hôtel de Ville. It is "the height of the reign of terror," and the guillotine stands ready. He shrinks back from it, and then sees "a shadowy form cowering as it were at the foot of the steps which led up to the scaffold." It is a woman dressed in black, her face hidden, her long hair streaming with rain.

When she raises her head, he sees by the lightning "the very face which had haunted him in his dreams." He offers to take her to her friends. She points to the guillotine:

"I have no friend on earth!" said she. "But you have a home," said Wolfgang. "Yes—in the grave!"

Moved, Wolfgang offers her his "humble dwelling as a shelter; myself as a devoted friend." She accepts, and he leads her across the Pont Neuf, past "the place where the statue of Henry the Fourth had been overthrown by the populace," to his lodgings, an old hotel in the quarter of the Luxembourg palace "which had once belonged to nobility."

The black band

By candlelight Wolfgang sees her more clearly. Her face is "pale, but of a dazzling fairness," framed by "a profusion of raven hair." Her eyes have "a singular expression approaching almost to wildness." Irving adds one detail that becomes the key to the story:

"The only thing approaching to an ornament which she wore was a broad, black band round her neck, clasped by diamonds."

"For ever"

Wolfgang tells her about his dream, and she admits to "an impulse towards him equally unaccountable." Irving places their romance firmly in the revolutionary moment. "It was the time for wild theory and wild actions," he writes. "Old prejudices and superstitions were done away; every thing was under the sway of the 'Goddess of Reason.'" Marriage ceremonies had come to be seen as "superfluous bonds for honourable minds," and Wolfgang "was too much of a theorist not to be tainted by the liberal doctrines of the day."

So they make their own vows:

"If form is necessary, form shall be observed—there is my hand. I pledge myself to you for ever." "For ever?" said the stranger, solemnly. "For ever!" repeated Wolfgang.

The morning

The next morning Wolfgang goes out early to look for larger rooms. When he returns he finds her lying with her head hanging over the side of the bed. "On taking her hand, it was cold—there was no pulsation—her face was pallid and ghastly.—In a word—she was a corpse."

The police are called. The officer recoils at the sight of the body:

"Great heaven!" cried he, "how did this woman come here?" "Do you know any thing about her?" said Wolfgang, eagerly. "Do I?" exclaimed the police officer: "she was guillotined yesterday!" He stepped forward; undid the black collar round the neck of the corpse, and the head rolled on the floor!

Wolfgang breaks down: "The fiend! the fiend has gained possession of me!" shrieked he: "I am lost for ever!" He is "possessed with the frightful belief that an evil spirit had reanimated the dead body to ensnare him. He went distracted, and died in a madhouse."

The final exchange

Irving then returns to the dinner table:

"Here the old gentleman with the haunted head finished his narrative. "And is this really a fact?" said the inquisitive gentleman. "A fact not to be doubted," replied the other. "I had it from the best authority. The student told it me himself. I saw him in a madhouse at Paris."

Reading the story

Ghost story or madness?

The story never settles whether anything supernatural happened. Several details point toward madness. Wolfgang has a "diseased" imagination long before he arrives in Paris. He is already convinced that an evil spirit is pursuing him, and when the head falls, he interprets the event in exactly those terms. The last word on the matter comes from a source of doubtful reliability: a man with a "haunted head," passing on the testimony of a student he met in an asylum.

At the same time, the facts reported in the tale are hard to explain naturally. The police officer recognizes the woman as someone executed the day before, and the band around her neck is literally holding her head on. Irving leaves both readings open. That balance between the supernatural and the psychological is one reason the story has been admired by later writers of horror.

A narrator who cannot quite be trusted

The framing adds a layer of irony. There is a small inconsistency in the ending. The tale says Wolfgang "died in a madhouse," yet the narrator claims, "The student told it me himself. I saw him in a madhouse at Paris." Both can be true if the narrator met Wolfgang before his death, but the phrasing invites the reader to share the inquisitive gentleman's skepticism. Some summaries of the story describe Wolfgang as still living in the madhouse when the story is told; the text itself says he died there.

The narrator's insistence that it is "a fact not to be doubted," coming at the end of an evening of tall tales, is typical of Irving's humour. He tells a genuinely frightening story, then gently reminds readers that ghost stories always come from someone who heard them from someone else.

The Revolution as setting

Irving uses the French Revolution for more than atmosphere. The guillotine on the Place de Grève, "continually running with the blood of the virtuous and the brave," is presented as the symbol of a society that has lost its bearings. The narrator is openly critical of the age's "wild theory and wild actions," and the lovers' decision to dispense with "sordid forms" of marriage leads directly to horror. Readers can take this as a warning about romantic idealism, or as Irving's comment on revolutionary politics, or simply as a way of making the setting as unsettling as possible.

The dream lover

The motif of a lover who first appears in a dream and is then met in waking life is an old one in Romantic literature. Here it makes the encounter feel fated. It also makes Wolfgang a willing participant in his own downfall: he has been half in love with a phantom from the start.

Irving's lighter and darker sides

Irving is usually remembered for humour and whimsy. Even "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" leaves room for a comic explanation of its headless horseman. "The German Student" is unusually dark for him. The horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, noted that although most of Irving's ghosts "are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature," he showed "a distinct inclination in this direction," and called "The German Student" "a slyly concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride."

Irving and the American short story

Irving's place in the history of the American short story helps explain why this small tale gets attention. Lovecraft wrote that in American literature "Washington Irving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic." Edgar Allan Poe, the writer most associated with American horror, was more critical. In 1838 he wrote that "Irving is much over-rated, and a nice distinction might be drawn between his just and his surreptitious and adventitious reputation—between what is due to the pioneer solely, and what to the writer." Even Poe's criticism concedes the point that matters here: Irving was a pioneer. "The German Student" shows that, years before Poe's own tales, an American writer could produce a short, tightly built story whose whole effect depends on a single horrifying final image.

Where Irving got the story

"Somewhere in the French"

According to the Library of America, Irving wrote in a note that "the story, or rather the latter part of it, is founded on an anecdote related to me as existing somewhere in the French." He did not identify the French source, and no one has firmly identified it since. Wikipedia describes the story as "inspired by a French tale of unknown origin."

Thomas Moore

Irving's journals, as reported by the Library of America, show that the anecdote was told to him by Thomas Moore (1779 to 1852), the Irish poet best known for his Irish Melodies and the long poem Lalla Rookh (1817). The timing fits. Moore had left for France in September 1819 to avoid debtors' prison, after a deputy he had appointed in Bermuda embezzled £6,000 for which Moore was liable, and he lived for a time in Paris, where Irving also spent much of this period. Moore himself took an interest in macabre themes; Lovecraft's essay notes that "Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre."

The "dead bride" tradition

Lovecraft placed Irving's story in a very old line. In the same essay he traced it to the Greek writer Phlegon of Tralles, a freedman of the Roman emperor Hadrian:

"It is in Phlegon that we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, 'Philinnion and Machates', later related by Proclus and in modern times forming the inspiration of Goethe's 'Bride of Corinth' and Washington Irving's 'German Student'."

Phlegon of Tralles

Phlegon's On Marvels (also translated as the Book of Marvels) is a collection of anecdotes, drawn from sources as varied as the poet Hesiod and the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder, each recounting a fantastical or paranormal event. Among them is the story of Philinnion and Machates, which Lovecraft calls a "corpse-bride" tale: a dead young woman who returns to a living lover. A modern English translation with commentary by William Hansen was published by the University of Exeter Press in 1996.

Goethe's "The Bride of Corinth"

In 1797, the year in which Goethe and Friedrich Schiller wrote a famous series of ballads, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe drew on Phlegon for his ballad Die Braut von Korinth ("The Bride of Corinth"). It has 28 stanzas of seven lines each. In Goethe's version a young man from Athens visits a family in Corinth to whose daughter he was once promised. The family has converted to Christianity, and the daughter, forced into a life of chastity, has died of grief. She returns at night as a vampire-like ghost and spends the night with him. Like Irving's story, it combines love, a promise, a night together and a discovery that the beloved is dead.

What Irving added

Irving's version moves the dead bride into a modern and political setting. Instead of an ancient household, the scene is revolutionary Paris. Instead of a ghost returning from a tomb, the woman is a victim of the guillotine, and the physical detail of the band holding her head on gives the story its shocking final image. This guillotine twist is the element that later retellings keep.

Later versions

Alexandre Dumas: "La femme au collier de velours"

The French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote a much longer story with a strikingly similar ending, La femme au collier de velours ("The Woman with the Velvet Necklace"). Sources differ on the date: French Wikipedia gives 1850, while English Wikipedia and the Library of America give 1851. It is not known whether Dumas was influenced by Irving or whether both drew on a common French source. Some later collections of Irving's stories even use Dumas's title for "The German Student."

Dumas frames his novel as a story told to him by his friend, the writer Charles Nodier. The hero is a fictionalized version of the real German writer and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann. In the story Hoffmann leaves his fiancée Antonia in Mannheim to visit revolutionary Paris, where he sees the execution of Madame du Barry and becomes obsessed with Arsène, a dancer and mistress of Danton, who wears a velvet collar fastened with a small silver guillotine. After Danton's arrest, Hoffmann finds Arsène at the foot of the scaffold. They spend the night together, and in the morning she is dead. When a doctor unfastens the velvet collar, her head rolls to the floor. Hoffmann then learns that Antonia has also died.

Gaston Leroux

Gaston Leroux, the author of The Phantom of the Opera, published a story in 1924 with the same French title and a similar plot. The American pulp magazine Weird Tales, founded in 1922 with its first issue dated March 1923, printed Irving's story in February 1927 under the title "The Lady of the Velvet Collar," and in October 1929 published a translation of Leroux's story as "The Woman with the Velvet Collar."

Children's versions: the velvet ribbon and the green ribbon

In the 20th century the tale moved into children's literature, where it lost its Paris setting and its guillotine and became a story about a ribbon that must never be untied.

• "The Velvet Ribbon" (1970). Ann McGovern (1930 to 2015), an American author of more than 55 children's books, included a version in her book Ghostly Fun. An unnamed woman always wears a black velvet ribbon around her neck. Her husband becomes more and more frustrated that she will not remove it. One night he takes scissors from her sewing basket and cuts it, and her head rolls onto the floor. The story was reprinted the same year in The Haunted House and Other Spooky Poems and Tales, an anthology edited by Vic Crume and Gladys Schwarcz and published by Scholastic.
• "The Green Ribbon" (1984). Alvin Schwartz, best known for the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series, included the most famous version in In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories (1984). A girl named Jenny always wears a green ribbon around her neck. She meets a boy named Alfred, and even after they marry she refuses to tell him why she wears it. In old age she finally lets him untie it, and her head falls off.

Schwartz's version became a lasting childhood memory for many readers. Popular culture writers have described it as one of the most frightening stories of their childhoods, and it is regularly listed among the stories that inspired Schwartz's books.

Shel Silverstein: "Long Scarf"

The American poet and cartoonist Shel Silverstein wrote a comic variation, the poem "Long Scarf," included in his collection Falling Up. The speaker explains that he was once beheaded and now wears a scarf to keep his head on, then invites the reader to untie it.

Carmen Maria Machado: "The Husband Stitch"

The most celebrated modern reworking is "The Husband Stitch" by Carmen Maria Machado. It was first published in the British literary magazine Granta on October 28, 2014, and became the opening story of her collection Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017). The collection was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and won the Shirley Jackson Award.

Machado's narrator wears a green ribbon around her neck and tells the story of her sexual awakening, marriage and motherhood, with a husband who cannot stop asking about the ribbon. In her world every woman has a ribbon of her own, in a particular colour and place. The story draws openly on "The Green Ribbon" and other folklore, and it turns the old tale into a story about a woman's boundaries and what happens when they are not respected.

How the versions compare

From literature to legend

"The Adventure of the German Student" is now often listed alongside urban legends, and Wikipedia classifies it in that category. This reflects how the story has travelled. Irving claimed it came from an oral anecdote. After him, the core image, a head held on only by a band around the neck, was told again and again with the original details stripped away. By the time it reached children's books and sleepovers in the late 20th century, many people who knew "The Green Ribbon" had never heard of Irving.

The path also runs the other way. Irving presented his tale as an anecdote "related to" him and passed on through a chain of tellers: the student, the old gentleman, the nervous gentleman and finally Geoffrey Crayon. That is exactly how legends travel. Irving's frame, with its skeptical listener asking "And is this really a fact?", anticipates the way people have always responded to stories like this one.

Why the story lasts

Several features help explain why a five-page story from 1824 is still read and retold:

1. One unforgettable image. The final moment, when the collar is undone and the head falls, is shocking and simple. It works in any setting and for any age group.
2. Economy. Irving tells the whole story in a few pages, with no wasted scenes. Lovecraft's word was "concise."
3. Ambiguity. The story can be read as a real haunting or as the delusion of a sick young man. Neither reading is fully satisfying, and that keeps readers thinking.
4. An old root. The dead-bride motif goes back to antiquity, so the story feels at once new and familiar.
5. Adaptability. Each generation has changed the setting, the colour of the ribbon and the meaning of the tale, from political horror to children's scare story to feminist fable.

Where to read it

Because it was published in 1824, the story is in the public domain and easy to find:

Reading the story inside the full Part First of Tales of a Traveller, rather than on its own, is worthwhile. The frame of the hunting dinner, the nervous gentleman and the inquisitive guest is what gives the final line, "A fact not to be doubted," its sly edge. For readers interested in the later history of the tale, Schwartz's "The Green Ribbon" and Machado's "The Husband Stitch" make a revealing pair with Irving's original.

Timeline

Key points

• "The Adventure of the German Student" is an 1824 horror story by Washington Irving, part of Tales of a Traveller. It is not a Sherlock Holmes story.
• Set in Paris during the Reign of Terror, it tells of Gottfried Wolfgang, who takes in a mysterious woman found at the foot of the guillotine; she is dead by morning, and when her black neckband is undone her head falls off.
• It is told as a fireside tale by "the old gentleman with the haunted head," who insists it is "a fact not to be doubted."
• Irving said it was founded on a French anecdote; his journals credit Thomas Moore with telling it to him. Lovecraft linked it to the ancient dead-bride tale of Phlegon and to Goethe's "Bride of Corinth."
• The plot reappears in Dumas, Leroux, children's stories such as "The Green Ribbon," Shel Silverstein's "Long Scarf" and Carmen Maria Machado's "The Husband Stitch."

Sources

• The Adventure of the German Student (Wikipedia)
• Tales of a Traveller by Washington Irving (Project Gutenberg)
• The Adventure of the German Student: full text PDF (Library of America)
• Story of the Week: The Adventure of the German Student (Library of America)
• Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft (hplovecraft.com)
• Tales of a Traveller (Wikipedia)
• Washington Irving (Wikipedia)
• Thomas Moore (Wikipedia)
• La Femme au collier de velours (French Wikipedia)
• Die Braut von Korinth (German Wikipedia)
• Her Body and Other Parties (Wikipedia)
• The Haunted House and Other Spooky Poems and Tales, ed. Crume and Schwarcz, 1970 (Internet Archive)