The Bowlegged Ghost
A Halloween Tale of Specters, Rickets, and Politics
How about a Halloween tale from the spirit world, but set in an America where legions walked the streets on visibly bent legs?
My story comes from “The Bow-Legged Ghost,” a short story written in 1899 by American humorist Leon Mead. One June midnight, our narrator (let’s just call him Mead), suffering from insomnia, goes for a ramble in the country. Suddenly he hears “scraping footsteps” from up the road: a “large, or rather a broad, figure” is approaching through the miasmatic air, walking “with a peculiar wobbling gait,” puffing “as though winded with exertion.” Mead realizes instantly this white-robed pedestrian is “without doubt, a ghost.”
“Good evening,” the ghost wheezes. Mead chokes back his terror, and man and ghost strike up a conversation. The spirit informs Mead that he is “Peter Simpkins, late of Buffalo, N.Y.” Like so many upstanding late nineteenth-century American men, the ghost is on his way to a meeting—“the Annual Convention of Unfortunate Spirits.” The association’s members are deemed “second-class” ghosts because of the bodily deformities they carried in life: “People who are badly misshapen,” the ghost explains, “or who have any physical or mental abnormalities, carry them into the spirit world after death.” Simpkins is a second-class ghost because he is bowlegged. This means he probably suffered from rickets as a child.
By the late 1800s, after a century of increasingly smoky and crowded cities, the aftereffects of childhood rickets were abundant—and plainly visible. One Ohio doctor insisted in 1895 that anyone who didn’t believe rickets was a perennial problem was ignoring the “evidence perambulating the streets of almost every village,” in the form of rickety deformities “plainly evident to the eye.”
Mead is taken aback momentarily when the specter pulls back his robes to expose his “phosphorescent skeleton” revealing him to be “the most hopelessly and ridiculously bow-legged individual I had ever seen.” Though tempted to laugh out loud, he’s restrained by “the intense glance from his fiery eyes.” Simpkins explains that in life his debility had no effect on his status in society or business, but that in the afterlife any such defect “will exclude you from the higher spirit circles.” The ghost is chairing the Convention of Unfortunate Spirits and hopes to be elected the association’s president. He is going to speak on the topic “Can Second-Class Ghosts Be Happy?”
Leon Mead’s stories appeared in Frank Leslie’s, Saturday Evening Post, and dozens of Gilded Age newspapers. In 1899, rickets and its skeletal consequences were not well understood. Bowed legs and knock knees were attributed to everything from diet to excessive street-car riding. Mead posits that his ghost’s bowed legs were the product of Peter Simpkins’ weight, as he “must have tipped the scales at two hundred and eighty pounds.”
Today it’s natural to recoil at Mead’s casual mockery of people—or ghosts—with disabilities, which he takes to even further extremes when describing the parade of specters the pair observe shuffling by on their way to the convention of second-class ghosts: “hunchbacks, several deaf and dumb ones… male and female cranks and lunatics…and divers other ghostly freaks and monstrosities.” And while we shouldn’t expect satire from over a century ago to align with our rules for respectful discussion of disabilities, Mead’s attitude seems as remote to modern sensibilities as the spectral plane is to Mead—a powerful vantage point for seeing what has changed in our attitudes…and what hasn’t.
Popular magazines then bristled with stories of Americans with bowlegs, knock knees, and other skeletal signs of rickets, from dancers and actors, baseball players, and beachgoers, as well as runaway slaves and criminals. These stories often cataloged a laundry list of flaws, with a few skeletal references thrown in for good measure. For example, under the headline “An Editor Lost,” the Macon Telegraph sought “a sway-backed, knock-kneed, box-ankled, pigeon-toed, hump-shouldered, cross-eyed dude.” In these reports, an imprecise and inconsistent distinction arose around how different rickety defects were moralized. Leon Mead’s choice to make his second-class ghost bowlegged and not knock-kneed probably reflected this distinction. “Knock-kneed” had become pejorative—often associated with cowardice. “Bow-legs come from courage and strong will,” one commentator insisted, citing the example of the child who stands and walks before its time. “Men with knock-knees are weak, vacillating, cowardly,” he continued. “Hounds have knock-knees, bull-dogs are bow-legged. Charles the First was knock-kneed; Cromwell (like Caesar) had bow-legs.” In life Simpkins may have been prosperous family man; in death he is doomed to be “second-class.” A thorough reading of popular culture and the press in his day suggests that contrary to the ghost’s assertion, bowleggedness conveyed second-class status on earth as it did in heaven.
The ghost asks our narrator to sit and wait for him to return from the convention. After “three hours of torturing suspense” the ghost returns, “limp, dejected, and evidently deeply chagrined” over the outcome of the election. He has lost to a Civil War general who “read a paper describing his military achievements at the Battle of Antietam, where both his legs were shot off.” The ghost has decided to resign from the association and stay out of politics: “After all, I am only a bow-legged ghost, but to be beaten in race by a man without any legs at all is a terrible blow to me.” And with that, “like a flash of lightning, the bow-legged ghost disappeared.”
Boo!
Want more rickets and vitamin D content? Subscribe to this blog, sure. But also buy my book, Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency, published in mid-November, 2024, by the University of Chicago Press. (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo236934960.html )
