Although he is more closely – and rightfully – associated with weird fiction, fantasy, and sci-fi than with the traditional ghost story, O’Brien’s first speculative tale of mention features a chilling haunting. A classic Victorian-era ghost story, “The Pot of Tulips” presents an Americanization of the classic English genre. The Victorian ghost story was rarely content with mere fright. More often, it served as a moral instrument—a means of probing guilt, particularly the guilt of the prosperous toward those they had wronged or displaced.
Masters of the genre like Rhoda Broughton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Amelia B. Edwards, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and (the chief among them) J. Sheridan Le Fanu used the supernatural tale as a socially permissible space in which to explore spite, bitterness, and shame without resorting to overt social polemic. The short ghost story allowed such writers to dramatize moral failures quietly, letting the past return of its own accord to demand recognition. The English convention was to describe a family sin committed in the Georgian Era (or the reign of Queen Anne at the earliest) which is reenacted in order to either illuminate the truth or atone for a crime.
O’Brien transports the setting to Old New York, filling it with flavors of New Amsterdam, peppering it with New York architecture and references to the city’s colonial history. It is reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” – a clear analogue published three years prior. In that tale, an old manor is haunted by the specter of a woman cast out into a winter storm by her cruel father, where she froze to death. Decades later, the sister who enabled the eviction—now worn down by age and remorse—witnesses the ghostly reenactment of that night and collapses in a fatal swoon, crying, “what is done in youth can never be undone in age!”
The haunting does not introduce new horrors; it merely forces the living to confront what they have already done. Guilt, long suppressed, is given form and agency. O’Brien was acutely sensitive to the fractures created by class hostility, and “The Pot of Tulips” functions as a ghostly parable of social responsibility. Society is imagined as a family—one founded on mistrust and resentment, incapable of functioning until justice is restored between the greedy patriarch and his struggling offspring.
The supernatural intrusion does not punish at random; it corrects an imbalance, insisting that prosperity built on cruelty carries a debt that cannot be buried forever. In this way, O’Brien aligns himself with the finest practitioners of the Victorian ghost story, using the return of the dead not to terrify, but to compel moral reckoning.
The narrator recounts how, some years earlier, he was invited to stay at an old Dutch-style house on the outskirts of New York City, near what was then a semi-rural stretch beyond Madison Square. The house belonged to an elderly man named Van Koeren, a wealthy and austere figure whose manners were cold, precise, and faintly oppressive. The building itself reflected its owner’s temperament: solid, antiquated, and severe, surrounded by a formal garden laid out in rigid geometric patterns, utterly unlike the fashionable landscape designs of the day. Though the narrator initially finds the house merely old-fashioned, he soon becomes aware of an atmosphere of unease that seems to hang over it.
Van Koeren lives alone, attended by servants who speak of him with a mixture of fear and resignation. During the narrator’s stay, he learns fragments of the household’s history. Years earlier, Van Koeren had been married to a gentle and devoted woman, Marie, who bore him a son.
Though she was universally regarded as virtuous and affectionate, Van Koeren became consumed by jealousy and suspicion, convincing himself that his wife had been unfaithful. Without proof, he subjected her to emotional cruelty, withdrew his affection, and eventually forced her to live in isolation within the house. Marie wasted away under the strain and died young, protesting her innocence to the end. Their son grew up under his father’s stern rule, deprived of warmth and trust.
After Marie’s death, Van Koeren’s behavior toward his son hardened further. Though the young man loved his father and longed for his approval, Van Koeren treated him with cold severity. At some point, Van Koeren drafted a will that disinherited his son, secretly transferring the family fortune elsewhere. The son, unaware of this betrayal, fell ill and died prematurely, still hoping to reconcile with his father. Van Koeren was left alone in the house, wealthy but isolated, haunted by his own past actions.
As the narrator becomes more familiar with the house, he notices a strange phenomenon. Late at night, a female figure appears in one of the rooms, silent and sorrowful, gesturing repeatedly toward the garden outside. The servants whisper that the house is haunted, though none dare speak openly of it to Van Koeren. The narrator himself begins to witness the apparition: a pale woman, calm rather than frightening, who seems to be pleading rather than threatening. She does not speak or behave violently, but her presence is persistent and unmistakable.
Van Koeren, for his part, is tormented by these manifestations. He attempts to dismiss them as hallucinations or nervous delusions and consults books on science and spiritual phenomena, hoping to find a rational explanation. He subjects himself to cold baths and other supposed remedies for nervous disorders, but the visions do not cease. Instead, the ghostly figure continues to appear, always directing attention toward the garden and, more specifically, toward a particular flowerbed where a large pot of tulips stands.
Eventually, Van Koeren confesses the haunting to the narrator and begs for his help. Though skeptical at first, the narrator agrees to observe the phenomenon carefully. One night, both men witness the apparition together. The figure again gestures toward the tulip pot, then slowly fades away. Convinced that the ghost is attempting to communicate something specific, the narrator urges Van Koeren to investigate the spot indicated.
Reluctantly, Van Koeren orders the servants to dig beneath the pot of tulips. As the soil is removed, a small iron chest is uncovered. When opened, it is found to contain legal documents and papers. Among them is the missing will—the document that would have left Van Koeren’s estate to his son. The revelation strikes Van Koeren with overwhelming force. He realizes that his wife’s spirit has returned not to accuse him verbally, but to restore the justice he denied in life by revealing the truth he tried to conceal.
Confronted with the evidence of his cruelty, Van Koeren is overcome by remorse. His health rapidly declines as the weight of guilt he has carried for years finally breaks him. Shortly after the discovery, he falls gravely ill. The narrator remains with him during his final days, witnessing his mental and physical collapse. Van Koeren dies soon afterward, haunted to the end by the consequences of his actions.
Following Van Koeren’s death, the narrator ensures that the recovered documents are made known, restoring the truth of the son’s inheritance, though there is no heir left to receive it. The house is eventually abandoned, and the haunting ceases. The tulip pot remains as a silent marker of the buried injustice that once lay beneath it.
The narrator reflects on the events, concluding that the ghost’s purpose was neither vengeance nor terror, but restitution. The spirit returned not to punish indiscriminately, but to reveal a hidden wrong and compel acknowledgment of guilt. With the secret uncovered and justice symbolically restored, the restless presence vanishes, leaving behind only the memory of a household undone by jealousy, suspicion, and moral blindness.
Although “The Pot of Tulips” falls short as a literary masterpiece (it is largely a conventional Victorian ghost story which, like so many, tells of a poor man who is helped in his search for love and a fortune by a supernatural agent) it is neither without literary merit nor O’Brien’s famous knack for farsightedness. In the first respect, it is structured around the tension between hidden truth and moral blindness, using the conventions of the ghost story to explore guilt, inheritance, and delayed justice.
At its thematic center stands Van Koeren’s jealousy—a corrosive, self-justifying obsession that warps paternal authority into tyranny and converts domestic life into a site of cruelty. The haunting does not arise from a simple crime but from a failure of moral recognition: the old man’s refusal to believe in his wife’s innocence and his deliberate moral sabotage of his son. The ghost’s inability to speak and its reliance on symbols underscores one of the story’s key ideas—that truth, when repressed too long, becomes fragmented and indirect, intelligible only through patient interpretation.
The tulip pot functions as a symbolic cipher, linking beauty, cultivation, and buried corruption, while the calm, watchful presence of the wife’s spirit introduces a counterforce of forgiveness that stands in stark contrast to her husband’s restless anguish. At the same time, the narrative reflects Victorian concerns about heredity, legitimacy, and the destructive consequences of patriarchal absolutism. Van Koeren’s attempt to control lineage and inheritance through secrecy ultimately fails, suggesting a moral universe in which wealth and authority cannot be secured by cruelty without generating their own supernatural reckoning.
In terms of its farsightedness, “The Pot of Tulips” strikingly anticipates the deductive ghost story, a mode in which the supernatural presents itself not as an inexplicable terror but as a problem to be interpreted and solved. Rather than overwhelming the narrator with dread, the apparition communicates through symbols that demand rational decoding, transforming the haunting into a kind of investigative puzzle. This approach prefigures later narratives such as J. H. Riddell’s “The Open Door,” where spectral manifestations point insistently toward a concealed secret, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Brown Hand,” in which the ghost’s unrest is resolved through methodical inquiry and moral restitution.
O’Brien’s narrator functions as an early occult rationalist, blending spiritualist belief with quasi-scientific reasoning, much as Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence or William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki would later employ psychic sensitivity, theory, and experiment to render the uncanny intelligible. In framing the haunting as a symbolic riddle whose solution restores order—both materially, through recovered wealth, and ethically, through posthumous justice—O’Brien anticipates a lineage of supernatural fiction in which ghosts are not merely intruders from beyond, but messages waiting to be read.
It is also critical to note that O’Brien’s “The Pot of Tulips” anticipates—and very likely helps shape—the later development of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s moral ghost stories. Le Fanu remains the greatest of all Victorian ghost story writers and his chilling tales of uncanny intruders in liminal spaces is almost single-handedly responsible for the modern ghost story. Although Le Fanu never acknowledged O’Brien directly – and although the utterly predictable “Pot of Tulips” is anything but a convention-breaking, slow-cooking, Lefanuvian creeper – the structural and thematic affinities between their work suggest a line of influence running from the Irish-American writer to his Anglo-Irish successor.
O’Brien’s tale already contains the essential machinery that Le Fanu would later refine: ghosts who return not to terrify indiscriminately but to compel restitution for acts of greed, cruelty, or moral cowardice. In this light, stories such as “Squire Toby’s Will” and “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” appear less as isolated inventions than as elaborations upon a narrative logic O’Brien had already articulated—most notably the idea that wealth unjustly withheld generates a supernatural demand for redress, even if the rightful heir perishes before the truth can surface.
The resemblance extends beyond plot to moral atmosphere. Like Van Koeren, Le Fanu’s tyrants are not flamboyant villains but inwardly corroded men whose guilt slowly hollows them out. “Mr. Justice Harbottle” and “The Familiar” similarly stage encounters in which the afterlife confronts the living with the ethical consequences they hoped time or authority would erase. O’Brien’s innovation lies in fusing this moral reckoning with a restrained, almost procedural haunting, where meaning emerges through symbols rather than spectacle—a method Le Fanu would later employ with even greater psychological subtlety. Both writers recognize the ghost story as an ideal instrument for dramatizing the persistence of injustice and the inadequacy of worldly power to suppress it.
What distinguishes O’Brien, and arguably makes him foundational, is his unflinching contemporaneity. Where Le Fanu often displaced his anxieties into the past, into rural enclaves or foreign settings, O’Brien consistently aimed his accusations at modern urban life, implicating the mercantile, scientific, and social ambitions of New York itself. In doing so, he helped establish a moralized supernatural fiction that spoke directly to the ethical failures of industrial modernity. Le Fanu would go on to perfect this mode, but “The Pot of Tulips” stands as a crucial early articulation of its themes—one that suggests O’Brien was not merely working alongside Le Fanu in spirit, but quietly clearing the imaginative ground upon which Le Fanu would later build.
On a related note, M. R. James, Le Fanu’s greatest pupil, constructed a brilliant tale on the same theme – thoroughly crafted with “Squire Toby’s Will” in mind, and including the romantic subplot of locating a girl’s hereditary fortune O’Brien uses – called “The Tractate Middoth.” It is far grimmer than this tale, however, be forewarned: while this specter merely exuded the smell of death, James’ wears it on his face, which is little more than a skull of peeling flesh with cobwebs stretched over the empty sockets.
