The American writer J. K. Bangs evidently regarded his books of short stories “The Water Ghost and Others” (1894) и “Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others” (1902) as some kind of parody review of ghost stories, a popular and commercially successful genre those days. That is why his stories are highly intertextual, and among other sources E. T. A. Hoffmann's works are prominent. Bangs refers to them on different levels of textual organization: he uses tropes widely associated with Hoffmann's stories (Doppelgänger, a suffering artist, magic shown as commonplace, etc.), mentions the German writer directly as a master of literary horror and writes “The Speck on the Lens” as a loose paraphrase of “The Sandman”. Evidently Bangs was interested in Hoffmann as one of the founders of European gothic tradition (also highly influential in America) and shared his ironical attitude to all kinds of literary conventions.