Reality or hallucination? and The ghost of David Garth are, as the subtitle of this publication anticipates, two ghost stories.

The narrating voice is that of Johnny Ludlow, a boy who was orphaned and adopted by the squire's family of the country where he lives, who through his disenchanted and witty observations presents two strange episodes of which he himself was the involuntary witness. In both cases he will have to deal with disturbing visions - souls who find no rest in the afterlife and who seem to want to torment the living by subjecting them to the weight of remorse - which will wreak havoc among the inhabitants of the village of North Crabb. But are these visions real ghosts or are they just the projections of the feelings of guilt that harbor in the human soul?

Ellen Wood (1814 - 1887) after having known success in England in the nineteenth century was unfairly swept away by Modernism, which considers her a bulwark of traditional genres, ignoring its imaginative capacity and silent attack on Victorian morality.