According to Haasse, the Alps, which figure frequently in Vestdijk's poetry and prose, represent a type of hell, a place which in all its whiteness and height attracts people and simultaneously rejects them: Haasse notes the similarity with Herman Melville's white whale in Moby-Dick, and the resemblance with the words Alp (German for nightmare) and Albe (denoting white priestly vestments but also suggesting elf or gnome). His epistolary novel De overnachting (1947) has a plot line involving a love triangle in the Alps, his trilogy Symphonie van Victor Slingerland (1957-1959) is likewise partly set in the Austrian Alps, and De arme Heinrich (1958), Een Alpenroman (1961), and Het genadeschot (1964) are also Alpine novels. Het spook en de schaduw is set in the Eastern Alps of Tirol, in the Mieminger Chain, renamed Diedinger chain in the novel, with the mountain Serles (renamed Erles) from the Stubai Alps dominating the view.