The Marvelous Mrs. Muir (and Her Ghost)

By Debra Mitchell

“Someday I’ll tell you the truth about the Captain.”
— Mrs. Muir (Gene Tierney) to her publisher in The Ghost in Mrs. Muir.

What is the truth about the romantic, swashbuckling sea captain who haunts Gull Cottage in the classic 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir? Like the most compelling ghost stories, there’s more than one answer, and it took me years to reach my own conclusions. You could say I’ve been haunted by this movie for a long time, in the best way.

Honestly, I’m not sure when I saw Mrs. Muir for the first time. Sadly, not in a movie theater where I could’ve reveled in the lustrous black-and-white cinematography by Charles Lang (who received an Oscar nomination for the film). This was the pinnacle of Hollywood’s studio system, when technical artistry had reached a distinctive peak of elegance and sophistication. The film’s design elements blend seamlessly under the direction of Joseph Mankiewicz (All About Eve), and the viewing experience is almost organic. Like the easy enjoyment of a perfect autumn day, ending with a fine sunset and a smooth glass of wine. Every moment is perfectly balanced, delicious, and soul satisfying. After seeing the film at least a dozen times, I’m always impressed by how well-crafted it is. Each scene starts and stops at precisely the right spot. It’s a joy to notice the deft use of shadow and light framing the ghostly parameters of each shot. Unlike many Hollywood classics (including many I love), the actors aren’t playing a version of themselves. They fully embody their characters and make them feel alive (yes, even the ghosts!) onscreen. The pace never lags, and I’m always sucked into the atmosphere and the story.

If I could travel back in time and see any movie in a palatial theater at a glamorous Hollywood premiere, I’d choose The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. But instead, I’m pretty sure that I first met Mrs. M. and her charismatic Captain on a small suburban TV set.

I grew up in the era of cheesy, local television stations that programmed “old movies” late at night, followed by a warbly “Star-Spangled Banner” and the eerie, blue static immortalized in Poltergeist. I miss that element of serendipity, especially during childhood, when I’d come across an unknown movie that swept me away unexpectedly. Sometimes this happened on stormy nights when I couldn’t sleep, adding to the mystique. My night owl, movie-loving mom would let me stay up past my bedtime and watch the late, late shows with her. That’s how I came to know so many classic films. They seeped into my imagination with the impact of special children’s books like The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables and Ballet Shoes. They fed and formed my creative soul.

This deep connection to imagination and creativity plays a big role in Mrs. Muir and how it’s haunted me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been drawn to ghost stories and a gothic sensibility. Dark Shadows was my favorite TV show when I was in fourth grade. I loved windswept moors, haunted houses, gutsy heroines, broody heroes, moody seas and spooky tales, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir plays with many of these intoxicating elements. The story begins in Victorian London (always a good thing!) when the recently widowed Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) tells her dreary relatives that she’s leaving home. She packs up her daughter Anna (Natalie Wood) and the housekeeper/cook, Martha (Edna Best), and they strike out on their own toward a life of freedom and independence.

They land in Whitecliff, a craggy, windblown cove by the sea (the ultimate symbol of free spirits and creativity; just look at Shakespeare’s The Tempest). Lucy finds a cottage to lease, but discovers it has a sinister reputation. Gull Cottage is wildly imaginative. It doesn’t look anything like the other rentals. This house has character – literally. A character named Captain Daniel Gregg lives inside. He’s the ghost of a scandalous, seafaring man who designed and built the house. He scares every potential renter away. But he doesn’t frighten Lucy. She’s intrigued that the house is haunted and by the end of her first night in Gull Cottage, she persuades Captain Gregg to let her stay.

When Lucy’s money runs out, she needs a new source of income to stay afloat, and the Captain suggests they collaborate on a book about his life, with the hilarious title Blood and Swash. The plan works, and Lucy and the Captain fall in love in the process. But Lucy is wooed by an oily children’s book writer, “Uncle Neddy” (played to slimy perfection by George Sanders). Captain Gregg must leave, knowing that Lucy has to live in a human world. Then Uncle Neddy turns out to be married, and Lucy lives out her days at Gull Cottage as independently as she started. Decades later she dies, and the ghostly Captain returns for her.

The story can be enjoyed purely as it appears on the surface: a romantic fantasy about an author falling in love with a ghost. But there’s so much more, and the word “author” is the key. I started to understand this when I began writing my first novel. It was the story of a girl who falls in love with a character from her favorite British fantasy novel. She becomes an expert in the invented languages within the book. As an adult, she gets to work on a film adaptation of the novel, coaching the actors to speak imaginary languages. Of course, she falls for the brilliant actor who plays the character she’s loved since she was a teenager. How could she help it? He’s her ultimate book boyfriend made flesh!

During the first year that I worked on my novel, “Rayner” – the actor character – started   “appearing” to me. I remember vividly the first time it happened. I was driving to the grocery, thinking about a transformative scene in the novel. Suddenly I felt a distinct presence in the passenger seat and a prickling sensation creeping down my neck. Exactly the way people describe feeling in a house that’s supposed to be haunted. I didn’t see an apparition, but I heard Rayner’s voice clearly in my mind. He spoke to me about the scene and told me what he thought should happen. I listened, and his suggestions helped make the scene better.

As time went on, I found that I could “talk” to Rayner, and we could bandy ideas back and forth. I couldn’t conjure him whenever I needed help. He came of his own accord. It happened in my writing room, on walks in the woods near my house, and frequently at an old, atmospheric library in town, in a glassed-in room overlooking the Des Plaines River. Rayner and I had long conversations, and I grew attached to this unpredictable mental projection of my character. We had a genuine relationship during that first year of my writing. In the book, Rayner’s story with my heroine doesn’t end happily. She realizes that she’s been in love with a fantasy, a romantic illusion, and their affair ends painfully. (One of the book’s main themes is about love as fantasy.)

After the first full draft of my novel was finished, Rayner stopped coming. It sounds silly, but I missed him. Not long afterward, I saw The Ghost and Mrs. Muir again – a particularly beautiful print shown on Turner Classic Movies. This time, I saw a different film, and certain scenes were illuminated in a brand new light.

Near the end of the movie, Mrs. Muir’s daughter Anna comes home as an adult and asks her mother about the ghost who haunted their house and inspired Blood and Swash. Lucy states that there wasn’t any ghost. There was only the real-life Captain Gregg who built the house and died, leaving behind an evocative portrait and personal belongings that stimulated Lucy’s imagination to write the book.

We’re supposed to think that Lucy doesn’t remember the ghost of the Captain because he told her to forget him before he left. But that didn’t ring true for me anymore. I saw something else: an uncannily accurate dramatization of what it feels like to be a writer. To be deeply creatively engaged. Inspired by a location, a house, a story, a portrait. To create something from those sensations that becomes interactive, a tangible physical experience of authorship. And I saw a truthful expression of the ephemeral nature of such states – how they can disappear without warning leaving elusive memories, like mostly forgotten dreams, behind. Now I felt a stronger connection with Mrs. Muir, and I let it simmer inside me.

A few years later, I was sitting by a crackling fire on a rainy Halloween night. The wet weather had kept most of the trick-or-treaters away, which made me sad because giving out treats and talking to kids in costume is something I truly love to do. But I embraced that cozy feeling of being snug and warm inside while listening to the wind and thunder. I poured a glass of mellow red wine and started to read another of my favorite gothic tales, Jane Eyre.

By the time Jane arrived at Thornfield Hall, my living room had grown dim except for a reading lamp and the fire, flickering low in the hearth. Once again, I felt an odd prickling sensation and an eerie sense that I wasn’t alone. The atmosphere was vaguely similar to a scene in Mrs. Muir  right before she first sees the Captain’s ghost. It takes place during a storm, and she’s alone in a dark kitchen trying to light a fire to make tea.

I had gotten to one of the many scenes in Jane Eyre in which Mr. Rochester accuses Jane of having supernatural powers. (He’s always calling her a witch, an elf, or a fairy.)  A quick shiver shot up my spine and I thought: What if that were true? What if Jane was a witch but couldn’t tell anyone? The thought was so strong, I felt a physical force attached to it, like a poltergeist striking with an unseen hand.

It still amazes me to think that within a few minutes, a complete fantasy novel inspired by Jane Eyre unfolded in my imagination. I saw the whole thing from start to finish. I knew that it took place in Victorian-era  Wales, and I knew that I wanted to use Welsh myths and fairy tales to help create the fantasy world. I started writing the novel the next day and finished a rough draft in three months. I worked obsessively in my writing room late at night. And every so often I felt there was someone in the room with me. I never heard anything. It wasn’t a specific character from the book this time. It was more like the lingering presence of that spark of inspiration. Which was in reality Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre.

Now I don’t believe that the ghost of Charlotte Bronte visited me as I wrote my novel, but I was captivated by another variation of the Mrs. Muir story playing in my imagination. An author writing a novel is visited by the spirit of another novelist from the past who inspires her. Their stories and interests overlap... It prompted me to do more research on Charlotte Bronte while I was working on my book.

One of the surprising things I discovered was a short story Charlotte had published called The Fairy’s Gift. I had never heard of it, and the story is rarely mentioned in standard biographical information. But it shows that she was interested in writing fantasy fiction, and it made me wonder… If fantasy had been an established genre in Bronte’s day, would she have written Jane Eyre as a fantasy novel herself?

In Bronte lore, there’s much speculation about who inspired Edward Rochester, the man with whom Jane Eyre falls in love. There are several candidates from Charlotte’s life who have been credited with generating this strange, multi-dimensional character. But for me, none of them seemed remotely fascinating enough to create such an extraordinary person – full of intense emotions, infinitely curious, mercurial, and mentally ferocious. He often seems to defy gender (as does Jane!).

The more I considered Mr. Rochester, the more he reminded me of Charlotte herself. He was infused with her passions and did things that she could not as a woman in 1847. I kept a journal at the time, and I started musing about Rochester as a distinct part of Charlotte’s psyche, a kind of “ego state” to use a Jungian term. In the midst of my ruminations, I happened to see The Ghost and Mrs. Muir again. And now I saw Captain Gregg and Lucy as something akin to Mr. Rochester and Charlotte Bronte.  One scene in particular brought this home to me. The Captain is about to leave Lucy (who he calls “Lucia”) and tells her:

“How you’d have loved the North Cape and the fjords in the midnight sun... to sail across the reef at Barbados, where the blue water turns to green... to the Falklands, where a southerly gale rips the whole sea white! What we've missed, Lucia... what we've both missed.”

That speech has always moved me. Rex Harrison performs it with gusto. But I had never heard it as a Victorian woman talking about a life that she might’ve lived if prescribed gender roles had not been so limiting.

When Mrs. Muir takes her manuscript to Mr. Sproule (a publisher), he reads the book, loves it, and says in the most condescending manner, ”You’re not going to pretend that YOU wrote this?” At first Lucy demurs. “Oh no!” she says and explains the real author is off on a seafaring adventure. But there’s a later scene with Mr. Sproule in which he asks Mrs. Muir if he can please meet her thrilling captain. She shoots him a superior glance and replies, “Someday I’ll tell you the truth about the Captain.” And that is the line that truly resonates with me. Yes, the truth about the Captain! The Captain is oh-so-many things, but he is not a supernatural being who wrote a book that poor little Lucy could not have imagined on her own.   

The real author of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (the novel that the film’s based on) was an Irish woman, Josephine Leslie, who wrote under the very male-sounding pseudonym R. A. Dick. Charlotte Bronte had to disguise herself as Currer Bell. Not so long ago, even Jo Rowling was advised to publish her Harry Potter series as J. K. Rowling so that she wouldn’t appear too “feminine” and boys would buy her fantasy novels.

Wonderfully, Mrs. Muir is content to be herself in the end. It’s not that she needs a real man in her life. The “real” man is a complete ass. Mrs. Muir has a pithy line about meeting Uncle Neddy again years later. She says, “He was old and fat and bald. And he cried.”

There’s a final dimension of the Captain that I’ve come to more recently, during this period when millions, including my own dad, have died of Covid. But before I get to that, there are two other aspects of Mrs. Muir and a writer’s imagination that have become essential to me. One is the gorgeous film score by Bernard Hermann. He considered The Ghost and Mrs. Muir to be his finest work. That’s saying something given his resume: Citizen Kane, Cape Fear, The Day the Earth Stood Still, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Taxi Driver to name a few. I love this lush orchestral score, and I’ve listened to it thousands of times. It’s come to mean more to me than just music from a favorite film. It’s part of me and my own melancholy. The music sounds like the churning ocean and the changing seasons. More than anything it sounds like yearning. And being any kind of artistic spirit is mostly about yearning. Every time I listen to this soundtrack, I hear the soundtrack of a different story.

The other element of Mrs. Muir that speaks to me creatively is the house. Oh god, I love Gull Cottage! I’m a total sucker for stories in which the house is a major character. Like “Manderley” in Rebecca. And lately, director/writer Mike Flanagan has mastered the art of making fantastic house characters: “Bly Manor” and “Hill House” in his Haunting of… series are stellar examples. But Gull Cottage is a house that inspires. At the end of the film, we find out that Anna and Martha have encountered the Captain, too. They have their own stories with him, the creative spirit of the house.

I once visited such a place on a trip to Scotland. It was called Arisaig House, situated on the western coast. The location was used by British special forces to train spies during World War II. It was a grand house with towering windows looking out to sea. While I was a guest, a gale blew in from the ocean and trapped us tourists inside. All outdoor activities were cancelled. The wind wailed incessantly, and I spent the day in a study worthy of an Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie tale. The room had a vast stone fireplace, bay windows, a writing table, leather chairs, and an oaken bar stocked with single malt whiskies. Feeling like Mrs. De Winter, I took my correspondence into that room and wrote letters for hours as the gale raged outside. Isla, one of the generous staffers, built a blazing fire in the great hearth. She brought me luxurious trays of hot tea and freshly baked scones. I felt like I had died and gone to Writer Heaven. Letters flowed out of me.  I think I could’ve written a dozen  novels in that room if I had lived there for the rest of my life. And I could imagine a peaceful death like Mrs. Muir’s as she sat in her armchair by the Captain’s telescope. Which brings me to the last time I saw her story.

I had invited some friends over for a movie night near Halloween, and we decided that a ghost story would be right for the occasion. It’s always fun to share a treasured film with friends who haven’t seen it, and I was happy that Mary, the youngest member of the group, enjoyed it so much. We took an intermission break, and I asked Mary what she thought. She said, “I don’t know this genre. So I don’t know how the story is going to end.” I thought that was telling. The fact that the film doesn’t feel formulaic after 75 years is part of its enduring charm.

But as I said, on this particular viewing, I was focused on death. The past few years have been steeped in loss and grief. I’ve been thinking more and more about dying and the usual related questions: Is there anything after death? Where’s my dad? What will I see and feel when I die? We know from science that chemicals in the brain create visions to help us transition out of life. People who have experienced clinical death report seeing deceased family members, floating through a tunnel toward a bright light, or a sensation of hovering above their own bodies. Ernest Hemingway described a near-death experience as slipping out of his body as neatly as a silk handkerchief pulled out of a jacket pocket.

Lately I’ve been training myself to dream conversations I want to have and people I want to meet. And to think about what I want to see as I die. Sort of like designated lucid dreaming. I’ve considered numerous death images. One I keep coming back to is the TARDIS from Doctor Who, a transport to all of time and space. When the TARDIS appears, I become the Doctor. A Time Lord. All of time and space lies waiting! Because, hey, you never know, right?

So my friends and I watched the end of Mrs. Muir together. Lucy dies… Oh, but first, she has a tiff with Martha, her longtime housekeeper and companion, which I found authentic and poignant. Lucy is sharp-tongued with Martha, and then she never has the chance to take back her words or tell Martha that she loved her. Lucy’s just gone. And the death vision she sees is the Captain. Her creation. Her potential. Her dreams fully realized as a seafaring scallywag, a lover, poet, world traveler, and eccentric architect of Gull Cottage.

Lucy and the Captain walk downstairs together. The front door opens. Outside is an endless horizon, the open sea, and we hear the final swell of Bernard Hermann’s marvelous score. It’s The End. And it’s brilliant. Nicely done, Mrs. Muir! She remains an author and a free spirit up to her last conscious moment.

I hope that I might do the same.