The Spectre Barber

"The Spectre-Barber" is a short story written by Johann Karl August Musäus, included in his satirical retellings of collected folk stories, Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1786). The story was translated into French by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès as part of his collection of German ghost-stories Fantasmagoriana (1812), which inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and John William Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1816). This French translation was then partially translated into English in Tales of the Dead (1813), followed by more complete translations from the original German, such as those by Thomas Roscoe (1826) and Thomas Carlyle (1827), with a child-friendly abridged version being published in 1845.