Yesterday Upon the Stair (Antigonish)

DESCRIPTION: Original text: "Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there! He wasn't there again today, Oh how I wish he'd go away!" Often slightly changed, e.g. the Withers-EenieMeenieMinieMo version ends "how I wish he'd stay away"
AUTHOR: Words: (William) Hughes Mearns
EARLIEST DATE: 1899; first published 1922 (source: Wikipedia)
KEYWORDS: ghost nonballad
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Withers-EenieMeenieMinieMo, p. 43, "(Yesterday upon the stair)" (1 text)
NOTES [126 words]: Hughes Mearn's title "Antigonish" for this apparently was bestowed because the poem was inspired by the report of a ghost on the stairs of a building in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. In 1939 Harold Adamson adapted the words, to become the song "The Little Man Who Wasn't There," with music by Bernie Hanighen, but this does not appear to be the source of the Withers-EenieMeenieMinieMo version, since it doesn't mention the "little man."
This is by far Mearns's best-known poem; he himself wrote several parodies that he called "Later Antigonishes."
Obviously just about everyone has heard this poem, or at least the first verse, but it doesn't really seem to have gone into tradition; at least, no one but Withers seems to have claimed to have collected it. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: WEMM043B

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