At the turn of the 20th century, Kate Masterson was a prolific, rangy writer. She wrote jocular poems and witty plays. She contributed to The New York Times and Harper’s Weekly. Her essays offered useful advice to emerging writers: “verse that is bright and jingly, containing some timeliness, an original thought or, maybe, humor, is one of the best opening wedges in the profession of literature.” 

It worked for her. After writing flighty poems, New York’s The Journal newspaper dispatched Masterson to Cuba, where she risked her life for a series of dynamic reports — which included impersonating the wife of a prisoner to gain access to a Havana jail, where rebel leaders were executed at night. “I know that women newspaper representatives are supposed to be very brave,” she wrote, “but I confess that I was the most frightened woman on earth while in that rock-bound Spanish fortress.” The experience reveals that although Masterson plied her trade as a humor writer, she was devoted to her craft; she believed that writing was worth the risk.

Sadly, her writing is largely forgotten — but one of her light-hearted fables is eerily prescient. In 1899, Masterson wrote “The Haunted Typewriter” for Life magazine. Tucked among pithy verse and cheeky cartoons, the fable is chilling. 

A poet bought a used typewriter, and awoke one night to hear it “clicking” on its own. The machine was “turning out unintelligible, ungrammatical stuff, written in a sort of ragtime that resembled poetry in its form.” After a few nights of the same action, as “no visible fingers touched the keys,” the poet decided to take the works, give them titles, and “sent them to one of the big magazines.”  The magazine put the poet’s face on the cover, and printed his automated poem on the first page. The editors “sent him a large check and an order for more of the same kind.”