# Young Halpin — Can Such Things Be? character guide

> Young Halpin in Can Such Things Be? by Ambrose Bierce.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Halpin, young Halpin

**First appearance:** 0000-the-death-of-halpin-frayser

## Snapshot

A dreamy Nashville son bred for law but haunted by a poet's blood, Halpin wanders into a wood and finds his mother's ghost.

## Who they are

Halpin Frayser is the spoiled, indolent youngest of a well-to-do Tennessee family, more drawn to literature than the politics his father and brothers pursue. His mother secretly shares his poetic temperament, but the family dismisses him as an intellectual black sheep descended from a Colonial versifier. Alone in a haunted wood, he confronts a spectral figure in grave clothes, and the encounter sets him on a path where his inherited sensitivities become a matter of life and death.

## Links

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