Three Live Ghosts (novel)

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Three Live Ghosts
Three Live Ghosts.png
Title page for Three Live Ghosts (1918)
Author Frederic S. Isham
LanguageEnglish
GenreComedy
Publisher Bobbs-Merrill
Publication date
1918
Publication place United States
Media typePrint
Pages250

Three Live Ghosts is a 1918 comic novel by American writer Frederic Isham. Set in London around Armistice Day, it follows three escaped Allied POWs who return home only to find they are officially listed as dead, prompting farcical complications in post-war society.

Contents

Adaptations

Stage

A stage adaptation by Isham and Max Marcin opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre on 29 September 1920 and later transferred to Broadway, running into 1921. [1]

Film

A British silent film, Three Live Ghosts (1922), directed by George Fitzmaurice with title cards designed by a young Alfred Hitchcock, was long thought lost until a Soviet-archive print surfaced and was publicly screened in 2015. [2] [3] Two U.S. screen versions followed: a 1929 talkie and a 1936 remake; trade papers and release lists document both. [4]

Plot

Three PoWs - an English aristocrat with shell-shock, a Cockney whose mother has claimed his insurance, and an American - return to London and, compelled to remain dead, entangle themselves in mistaken-identity scrapes before each is restored to his former life. [5]

References

  1. "Three Live Ghosts".
  2. "Lost Hitchcock film to be shown publicly for the first time in nearly 100 years". www.dmu.ac.uk. Retrieved September 13, 2025.
  3. "Missing believed garbled: Hitchcock's first steps in film". BFI. September 26, 2016. Retrieved September 13, 2025.
  4. Variety (1930). Variety (March 1930). Media History Digital Library Media History Digital Library. New York, NY: Variety Publishing Company.
  5. Isham, Frederic Stewart; Bobbs-Merrill Company. pbl; Braunworth & Co. prt (1918). Three live ghosts. New York Public Library. Indianapolis : The Bobbs-Merrill Company.