MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

In Chattanooga, by the Tennessee River, stands a three-story wooden building, the Cairo Hotel. This hotel is the most haunted in America. So haunted that not even ghosts dare to inhabit it. Therefore, you might think that the hotel is deserted; but nothing is further from reality. The Cairo Hotel is full of haunted stuff. But haunted stuff of a kind subtler than ghosts, elemental creatures, vampires, werewolves et cetera... Of a kind that made President John Quincy Adams say, when he stayed overnight there after unsuccessfully trying to solve the Muskogee Indians' mess (the Muskogee Indians had drunk all the coffee from the southern states in protest against the Treaty of Indian Springs). He said “Fiddlesticks! How awful, Sweetie!”, and immediately went to invite the Muskogees to spend a night at the hotel. The next morning, the Muskogees agreed to sign a new treaty by which they ceded most of their land to Georgia and gave Adams a bandolier bag.

Well of course I would! Ghosts, elves, trolls, pandas… any creature that can haunt a house doesn't bother me in the least! That even makes me laugh! Living with a ghost can not be worse than living with my current partner! Tonight she's done it again! While I was asleep she's been rubbing those stinky herbs over my face! Is there a right to this?! Is there a right to humiliate a man like that?! Ghosts? That's a laugh! I don't care about ghosts in the least! Do you know what it's like to live in permanent fear of being rubbed stinky weeds on your face?! Is that tolerable?! Does anyone know how to remove weed stains from skin? Oh my, here she comes again! Never marry an obsessive-compulsive herbalist!

Did you know that, in the last decade of the 19th century, the Madison Square Garden concert hall remained closed for almost a year for reasons still unexplained? Well, that's right. But those reasons stopped being unexplained not long ago, when the archives of the American Society for Psychical Research were made available to the public. The story is one of the most surprising that is documented on those files, and was as follows. It all started on May 7, 1891, just one year after the original Madison Square Garden was demolished and a new one erected in its place. That evening, Frederic Chopin's Piano Concert No. 1 was being performed by the Russian pianist Igor Ostrgovinski accompanied by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Suddenly, the pianist is mistaken in a note: a major Re instead of an E-flat. It is an insignificant mistake, nobody notices it except Ostrgovinski himself. Two minutes later, a Do sounds instead of a Fa. This time not only Ostrgovinski notices it but a...

A man named John Burgess spent the nights in Highgate Cemetery with the hope of contacting some dead person, that is, a lost soul. For that tortuous way he aspired to be admitted as a member in the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). That was his great aspiration in life, but he did not have a qualification that would support him. He had tried to impress them by doing some somersaults, but Gurney was a much better acrobat, besides they did not need any acrobat at all. What they required -he was told- was someone who maintained contact with the dead. So Burgess made that decision to walk at night among the tombs, which for any other would have been unbearable, but not for him. Burgess was not afraid of anything except of his wife Mildred, and that only when she was present. In fact, that was an added reason to spend the nights away from home. He invented an excuse: he told her that he hunted owls and other nocturnal raptors. However, he never brought any wild game, to which he argued ...

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....