"The Canterville Ghost" makes fun of (parodies) the typical ghost story. In the typical story, a frightening ghost haunts an ancestral English hall, terrorizing the people who live there. In this story, Wilde turns that idea on its head: a practical American family terrorizes a ghost. They are not afraid of it at all. When it leaves bloodstains on the library floor, they simply rub the stains out with a new cleaning formula. When the ghost tries to scare them, the young Otis boys shoot at it with a pellet gun and make a water slide so it will slip and fall.
But beneath the comedy, Wilde has a more serious purpose. He raises our sympathy and compassion for the ghost. The ghost is not simply a "thing" that is out there and must be destroyed, but a human being (albeit one existing between the living and the dead) with emotions and problems. In encouraging the reader not to stereotype an "other," such as a ghost, Wilde calls into question the ways we stereotype people who are not quite like us.
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