As with his other plays, Henrik Ibsen wrote Ghosts in Danish, the common written language of Denmark and Norway at the time. The original title, in both Danish and Norwegian, is Gengangere, which can be literally translated as "again walkers", "ones who return", or "revenants".[7] It has a double meaning of both "ghosts" and "events that repeat themselves" which the English title Ghosts fails to capture.
Ibsen wrote Ghosts during the autumn of 1881 and published it that December.[10] As early as November 1880, when he was living in Rome, Ibsen was meditating on a new play to follow A Doll's House. When he went to Sorrento, in the summer of 1881, he was hard at work upon it. He finished it by the end of November 1881[11] and published it in Copenhagen on 13 December.
