Lafcadio would later in life write that he “was dropped moneyless on the pavement of an American city to begin life.” The lack of specificity showed just how meaningless Cincinnati was to this young man. It was a city chosen for him and not by him. Arriving in 1869, he slept on park benches and in horse stables until finding a job as a typesetter. He dropped Patrick and became the far more enigmatic and curious-sounding Lafcadio and embarked upon a career in journalism at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he wrote about the bizarre, the grotesque, the criminal, and the rough fringes of the city. He also met and married his first wife, Alethea Foley, a young Black4 woman, who worked as a cook at a boarding house where he was a lodger. For a man who reveled in the lives of the socially dispossessed, he was remarkably naïve about what it would mean to join their ranks in an America that was post-slavery but with anti-miscegenation laws firmly in place in states such as Ohio. Citing his cohabitation with a “Negress,” his newspaper abruptly fired him for his “deplorable moral habits.” Hearn continued to live with Alethea as husband and wife and found employment with a rival newspaper, the Cincinnati Commercial, but he never forgot the humiliation of his dismissal.

In “Some Strange Experience,” written for the Cincinnati Commercial,5 Lafcadio gave readers a portrait of a “healthy, well built country girl … good looking, robust and ruddy” who was none other than Alethea. The article’s subheadline read, in part, “the Result of a Chat on the Kitchen Stairs,” which according to the article’s second paragraph was situated in a boarding house. This was evidently a recreated scene from the early days of their courtship, though “the girl” was left unnamed.

I cannot help but note that Alethea’s name, which Lafcadio willfully chooses to omit, is a variation on the Greek word aletheia, meaning “disclosure” or “truth.”

Lafcadio’s began with the “low, soft” melody and the “enthralling charm” of the girl’s conversation and added that he could not “attempt to do justice” to her storytelling gifts. He nonetheless placed quotation marks around the rest of the article, signaling and honoring that it was indeed she who was narrating and not the reporter. What followed were various ghost stories “told” in a breezy, engaging language free of the heavy-handed colloquialism that was often assigned to Black speech by white writers of the era, Lafcadio included.