The Little Ghost is a 1966 children's book written by Otfried Preußler with illustrations from Franz Josef Tripp.
[2][3] The Little Ghost lives in Eulenstein, a former castle now converted into a museum overlooking the city of Eulenberg.
Its best friend is an eagle owl named Mr. Schuhu, who lives in a hollow tree on the castle grounds.
However, all its tries to stay awake after the witching hour fail, and Mr. Schuhu also discourages this notion due to personal bad experience.
Due to the large amount of pipes of the channel system, it cannot find its way back home to the castle, although it opens every channel output and causes a lot of panic among the inhabitants of Eulenberg, who start to call the Little Ghost Schwarzer Unbekannter ("Black Stranger").
Finally, after two weeks of vain searching, the Little Ghost causes a disaster during the 325th anniversary of the siege of Eulenberg by a Swedish army under the command of General Torstenson, believing that the General came back after the Little Ghost had frightened him away so long ago.
Upon realizing its mistake, the Little Ghost asks the children for help, whereupon the three go to Castle Eulenstein to speak with Mr. Schuhu.
While reuniting with Mr. Schuhu, it gets hit by a moon beam and finally its color changes back to white, sending it dancing happily around the castle's walls.
One of these stories was about a White Lady who predicted births and deaths in the family of her descendants and who moreover protected her home very often.
Once, the white lady closed away the Swedish General Torsten Torstenson from the castle of her father, by shooing him out of his bed, giving him a telling off, while he was only wearing his night clothes and begging for mercy.
[4] The original Thienemann edition was later published with different front pages and with different publishers, like the German Bücherbund, the Büchergilde Gutenberg, Bertelsmann Lesering (RM book and media) and with its successor Club Bertelsmann.
One edition was published in color for the first time and available as an e-book, together with his other books The Little Water Sprite, The Little Witch and the three volumes of The Robber Hotzenplotz.
A new edition, which was published by Karussell with the label Spectrum Junior, reached the platinum status in 1998.
[12] In 1998 and 2005, two different audio plays, with the title “Learning English with The Little Ghost” were published by Karussell.
[15] Soviet television released the live action film Ghost from Eulenburg (Russian language: Привидение из города Ойленберга, Transliteration: Privideniye iz goroda Oylenberga), which is based on Preußler's book.
Wolfgang Hess gave his voice to the eagle owl and Uwe Ochsenknecht acted as the mayor and the General Torsten Torstenson.
[17] In the 1970s, the Berliner Spielkarten GmbH published a Happy Families card game with the illustrations of Preußler's book.