When the senior staff of the Society for Psychical Research learned that the city of Savannah in Georgia had the largest number of haunted houses per square kilometer in America, an expedition was organized with that destination. They went to a real estate agent and asked him to rent the most enchanted house of all. The greatest specialist in haunted houses of the SPR was Frederic W. H. Myers, who for a whole year had lived with a ghost in his house in London: the spirit of a woman with an apron, cap and broom who had an obsession for cleanliness. At the end of the year he discovered that she was the cleaning lady that the SPR had provided him without mentioning it. In any case, this misunderstanding had helped him acquire the experience required to coexist with a ghost. The house they rented had a most dismal aspect, consistent with its long history of tragic events that had happened in it, the most recent of which had been the accidental drowning of its previous owner in a washbasin. They agreed to sleep during the day and stay awake at night, as this is the period of the day most conducive to ghostly apparitions. The first night, nothing happened except for the bitter dispute over the only room that included a bed among its furniture. The commotion began the next night, when a man with a washbasin on his head as a hat chased Dr. Lodge all over the house with the apparent intention of making him swallow a toad. For his part, Sir W. Crookes was involved in an unpleasant incident with an extraterrestrial-looking creature. In the end, however, it was ruled out that this creature belonged to the phantasmagoric genre, being simply an alien visiting Earth. Myers, the most experienced in matters of ghosts, was not intimidated at any time, even when invisible hands tried to strangle him. The most frightened was Sir William James, who escaped from a white rabbit by throwing himself through a window on the second floor, what led to the breakage of several ribs. In any case, the worst came the third night, when the house itself rose through the air, causing the majority of its occupants to lose their balance. I mean their mental balance, for whose recovery all of them had to remain hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic for several weeks before being able to return to England.
SILLY HUMOR FOR SMART PEOPLE 