“Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.”
Thus begins one of the most famous fragments of verse ever to slip through the cracks of English literature – part nursery rhyme, part ghost story, part psychological confession. Hughes Mearns’ Antigonish (1899) was written in the playful spirit of nonsense, yet like all nonsense worth remembering it edges disturbingly close to truth.
For what’s a ghost, if not a ‘man who wasn’t there’? The Christian theologian might call him a disembodied soul, the psychologist a projection, the philosopher an existential contradiction. We live, after all, haunted by absences – parents who are gone, mistakes we can’t repair, opportunities unseized. They’re not there, and yet they loom larger than the furniture in the room.
Mearns sets his scene on the staircase, a place of in-between – neither here nor there, neither upstairs nor down. I almost hear the echo of Hamlet’s Ghost, ‘I am thy father’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night.’ Yet unlike Shakespeare’s grave apparition, Mearns’ phantom is less majestic, more irritating. He keeps coming back not to avenge, but simply to loiter, like a draught you can’t quite shut out.
Psychologically, the verse is almost Freudian in its economy: the repressed returning, the unconscious knocking at the stair. ‘He wasn’t there again today, oh how I wish he’d go away.’ But repression never obliges. What we drive away by day returns at three in the morning, waiting in the hall. Dostoevsky knew this when he spoke of the ‘underground man’ – the double that mocks us, invisible yet inescapable.
And socially, the poem captures our modern malaise. We’re surrounded by things that aren’t there: ‘virtual friends,’ phantom vibrations of a phone in the pocket, promises of political utopias that evaporate like mist. The man who wasn’t there is our contemporary companion – absence masquerading as presence.
There is, too, a streak of comedy. The repetition, the childlike wish — ‘Oh, how I wish he’d go away’ – is less Gothic shriek than schoolyard chant. It reminds us that the uncanny is never far from the absurd. Kierkegaard said that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom; Mearns shows it’s also the giggle of the absurd.
And the title? Antigonish – the name of a town in Nova Scotia. Legend has it the place was famous for poltergeists, objects moving of their own accord, doors slamming without a hand upon them. The poem, like the town, suggests that the supernatural is both local and laughable, a small haunting that won’t leave us alone.
In the end, the poem’s genius lies in its brevity. Four lines are enough to capture what philosophy and theology wrestle with across volumes: the stubborn reality of the absent. The ghost is the image of all that can’t be dismissed. You can’t argue him out of existence; you can only wish him away – and he never goes.
So let’s raise a glass to the man who wasn’t there. He is, after all, the most faithful of companions. He walks beside us as memory, regret, and conscience. He’ll not be seen, but he’ll not be silenced. And one day, upon the stair, when we too are ‘not there,’ perhaps someone else will wish we would go away.
Wording 
I am willing to haunt anyone’s stairs. For a reasonable price of course. And as a bonus, I’ll actually BE there, not like the guy in this rhyme 😉
Now that’s service! Finally, a ghost who shows up on time. You’ll put the whole spectral industry out of business.
And as a real bonus, I’m ghostbuster proof since I’m really there. No more pesky ghostbusters with nuclear backpacks wrecking your house and then charging you 😀
Ha! Better the company of a courteous ghost than the chaos of hired zealots with nuclear rucksacks. At least spectres glide politely through the furniture – Ghostbusters tend to redecorate with scorch marks and then send you the bill.