Recently I started a thread on a Pepsi commercial about a boy and his girlfriend will turn out to be dead at the end of the commercial and didn’t know it. This commercial came out in about 2003 which is four years after The Sixth Sense, so nothing particularly original there per se.
But then just now I learned there was an episode of are you afraid of the dark from 1994 called the tale of the dream girl where the same thing happens. So Shyamalan wasn’t completely original either.
My question is what was the very first fictional story to have a main character turn out to be a ghost at the end but he didn’t know it?
I seem to recall a morbid folk song in which a girl is being pursued by her former (and jealous) lover despite being married now and has to take the fellow’s hand and put it into his own wound to make him realize he’s been dead lo these fifteen years.
I didn’t interpret that story as saying Farquhar was a ghost. He was just imagining returning to his family in the final moments of his life. The cliche here is “It was all a dream.”
I’m going to put out Thomas Tryon’s 1971 novel, The Other, as an early example of this plot.
Wow, if somebody knows what folk song this is, let me know! This may be the real winner for the “first plot to have a Sixth Sense type ending” contest.
I just read the two sentence summary of that on Wikipedia; which character turns out to be dead? The good twin, the evil twin, or someone else?
I’ll say right now I saw the movie but haven’t read the book.
There were two young twin brothers, Niles and Holland. Throughout the story, we see them together talking to each other. Holland is the bad twin, who is committing a series of crimes, including murder. Niles is apparently the good twin, who is trying to stop Holland from committing crimes but is loyal enough to his brother that he helps cover up his crimes. It’s finally revealed that Holland had died a year earlier and Niles is only imagining he’s still alive. It’s actually Niles who has been committing the crimes.
There was a story (summarized, from memory) in a Bennett Cerf collection (he did mostly humor, but occasionally scary stories) about a young man named John who suddenly finds himself walking down a street in his hometown. When he greets people, they look at him in horror, and back away from him. He eventually finds a pay phone and calls his mother’s home. When he asks to speak to her, the person who answers asks, “Now why would you expect to find her here? Everyone in town knows she’s at the funeral of her poor son John, who was gruesomely killed in a sawmill accident two days ago”.
I forgot to include the date on the Bennett Cerf story: the collection was published in the late 1940s-early 1950s, so the story probably dates to the early part of that range.
There was a story (by Lord Dunsany, I think) in the very early 20th century about a fellow telling a story in a bar, which ends with him trapped in an unescapable fatal situation. “My word, how did you survive?” “I didn’t”
My grandmother told us a Halloween story she heard as a little girl, about a revenant/vampire who came back, and did not realize it was dead. That would be around the 1900’s. Mind you the details are a bit different.
I think this goes back pretty far.
Owl Creek bridge is not after he is dead- it apparently is a story his mind tells him in the short time between being released and dying: wiki- It is revealed that Farquhar never escaped at all; he imagined the entire third part of the story during the time between falling through the bridge and the noose breaking his neck.