The apparition of the murdered man in “The Story of the Three Apples”

Record summary

In “The Story of the Three Apples,” a famous tale in the Arabian Nights tradition, a murdered woman’s body, the discovery of a distinctive apple, and the caliph’s investigation create a supernatural-adjacent mystery involving concealed identity and the persistence of the dead in narrative memory. Nineteenth-century translations by Edward Lane and Richard Burton made the story widely available to European readers. It is valuable for comparing Baghdad crime, revenant expectation, and textual transmission, but it is a literary tale rather than a reported apparition. Manuscript and translation histories complicate any claim about an original version.