This is how I saw a ghost -- if it was a ghost. It was dead, anyhow.
Short story written by F. Marion Crawford in 1885. It was originally published in "The Broken Shaft: Tales in Mid-Ocean," an anthology of stories with a framing device that the tales are being told by travelers aboard a ship disabled by a broken drive shaft. The anthology included seven stories, including one, "Markheim," by Robert Louis Stevenson -- but "The Upper Berth" is the one that's still remembered to the present day.
"The Upper Berth" itself has a framing device -- a group of blokes in a traditional British gentlemen's club are sitting around late in the evening bored out of their minds when a fellow named Brisbane steps up and says, "It is very singular, that thing about ghosts. People are always asking whether anybody has seen a ghost. I have."
So Brisbane tells the group he used to be a sailor and on one occasion needed to cross the Atlantic Ocean on the steamship Kamtschatka. He's assigned to the lower berth (a berth being where a sailor sleeps -- on many ships, you'd have an upper and lower berth, similar to a bunk bed, just without the actual beds, and with a curtain fastened across the berth to give the sleeper a little more privacy) in Cabin 105.
That night, Brisbane is already in bed when he sees his cabinmate enter the room and climb into the upper berth. In the middle of the night, the cabinmate lurches out of the upper berth and runs out of the cabin. When Brisbane awakens the next morning, the cabin is cold and damp, the porthole has been fastened open, and he hears his cabinmate groaning in his bunk.
He meets the ship's doctor, who is unhappy to hear that he's been staying in Cabin 105, because people sleeping in that cabin have gone overboard on the ship's last three trips. He's later summoned to meet the captain, who tells him the cabinmate has vanished. The captain offers to let him move to a new cabin, but Brisbane declines.
When he returns to 105 that evening, Brisbane finds the porthole fastened open again and goes to complain to the steward about it. The steward tells him there's nothing they can do -- the porthole opens itself at night. So that night, Brisbane realizes the porthole is fastened open again -- and he hears someone groaning in the upper berth again. He reaches through the curtains and encounters cold, damp air, the stench of seawater, and something that seems like a man but is also "a clammy, oozy mass, as it seemed to me, heavy and wet, yet endowed with a sort of supernatural strength."
The thing runs out of the cabin. Brisbane gives chase but loses it. When he returns to the cabin, it smells of seawater, and that damned porthole is open again.
Brisbane invites both the ship's doctor and the captain to stay up with him in Cabin 105 to try to solve the mystery; only the captain agrees. While they wait up overnight, the cabin's lantern is extinguished, and the porthole opens despite their attempts to force it shut. Brisbane grapples a spectral creature in the upper berth that resembles a long-drowned corpse, but it has frightening strength. It breaks Brisbane's arm, knocks the captain unconscious, and slips away through the porthole.
As Brisbane finishes his tale, he tells that the ship's carpenter ended up screwing the door of Cabin 105 shut, with all future passengers informed that the room has been engaged for another party. Neither Brisbane nor the captain ever sail on the Kamtschatka again.
Well, the story is an absolute slambanger. It's considered a horror classic for a good reason. The mood and atmosphere are sublime, the eerie tone rises gloriously throughout the story, and Brisbane's encounters with the dead thing are chilling, terrifying, and thoroughly gooey. The story is 140 years old, and it's still pleasantly readable -- a quality shared by very few stories of similar ages. It also reads like a very British ghost story despite Crawford being American by birth. But he did spend his entire life bouncing between the United States, Europe, and India, and I'll bet most of his literary influences were British.
The story has been well loved by horror writers as well as readers. H.P. Lovecraft and H. Russell Wakefield both greatly admired the tale, and M. R. James, the greatest writer of ghost stories ever, once said: "Marion Crawford and his horrid story of 'The Upper Berth', which (with 'The Screaming Skull' some distance behind) is the best in his collection of Uncanny Tales, and stands high among ghost stories in general."
The story is frequently anthologized, but if you want to read it online, Project Gutenberg has a copy located here. It's been adapted a few times. On Christmas Eve 1972, it was read by Tom Vernon on the BBC Radio London program "Something from the Dark." In 2001, it was adapted on the BBC Choice program "Nick Moran Presents 'The Fear'." And clear back in 1950, it was adapted in Tales from the Crypt #20 under the title "The Thing from the Sea!" with writing and art by the great Al Feldstein.
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