MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

The night begins to fall when Michael knock on the door of an old house in Harlem. "Why are you knocking?" Jacob asks. "Well, you never know. Imagine that there is someone inside." And then he proceeds to open the door with the key that the owner of the house, Lady Cardbridge, has given him hours before. Both penetrate the dark and narrow hall. Jacob fires a kerosene lamp, in whose light they move slowly. The interior is also very old, with furniture from past centuries and paintings blackened by the accumulation of soot and dust that permeates the entire house. Suddenly they hear a woman's voice clearly: "Benjamin, is that you?" -You see? There is someone in here. We should have waited until they opened the door. -Ghosts don’t usually open the door when one knocks, Michael. -Mrs. Cardbridge says it's a ghost, but that voice has sounded more like that of a flesh and blood woman. They both climb up some narrow stairs to the top floor. "Benj...

Maybe there is not a profession more useful and at the same time more ungrateful than that of inventor. And I'm going to mention a case that exemplifies it. George W. Newton had patented more than a hundred inventions without any of them having brought him the slightest profit. I will enumerate some. A “gender recogniser”: a self-service machine that at the touch of a button informs you whether you are a man or a woman or a mixture of both (this information can be very useful to obtain a passport or any other identification document). A “direction marker” (a kind of compass that tells you where it is below, above, right and left). The "Governor of the State of Texas", a robot designed specifically to perform this task. Or the “pin dispenser”, an extremely versatile device which could also serve to govern Texas if necessary. All of them, inventions with an advanced technology for its time, but that did not find any investor interested in its commercialization. Ah, but th...

Phil Oldcorne had just taken possession of the house that his Aunt Maggie had left him in inheritance in her will. Aunt Maggie was a sullen woman who disliked people, especially when they were awake. While they slept she could still tolerate them, but awake they became unbearable for her. Hence she had lived isolated in an isolated house in an isolated village in an isolated county of an isolated island. Phil never knew her, even though when he was a child she came home weekly to visit them. But her visits were nocturnal, when everyone in the house was asleep. Maggie's sister (Phil's mother, may she rest in peace) left a key hidden in the garden so that her sister could enter the house. Phil's mother had a kind of sixth sense to know when Aunt Maggie was visiting them, but she always feigned to be asleep. According to her, the aunt lit a candle with which she moved through the various rooms where the family members slept. She stayed with each of them for a while watching th...

My dear, a ghost is a lonely being by nature. You will never see a ghost accompanied by another ghost. In fact you will never see a ghost: at least that is the most likely. And the most advisable, I assure you. A ghost is not a pretty thing to see. And I’m not speaking from hearsay! Yes indeed, my dear, I have seen a ghost. In the typical haunted house, you know: those isolated houses on the top of a hill that seem to be built expressly to be inhabited by a ghost. How did I end up there? You will see. I was on my way to Sausalito to attend a cocktail party. But while I combed my hair looking in the rear mirror, my yellow Bentley decided to veer off the highway into a dirt road. I was hoping to find some place where I could manoeuvre to get back on the highway, but the road was so narrow that I had no choice but to follow it until the end. The end turned out to be a lugubrious house with a gabled-roofed tower embedded in the middle. "My god, what a bad taste!" I thought, ...

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....

I will explain it to you through an example and you will understand it right away. For this example I will use the detailed account of some paranormal facts that was recently sent to me by Frederick Hermite Sinclair, professor in the Department of Applied Archeology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. It says: I prefer to keep my name and credentials secret, so when I talk about myself I will refer to me with the word "I". A month and a half ago, the University where I work (whose name I prefer to remain anonymous as well) approved my project of excavation in the O'Malley Castle with a view to the end-of-course work of my forty-one students of Applied Archeology. In the company of three students chosen drawing lots (the budget of the department is not very buoyant in recent times, so I am forced to resort to this procedure too often), we moved in the van of one of them to the castle in question. It is a half-ruined medieval castle that has been abandoned for centur...

Never! That would be a sacrilege, a betrayal of Science! In my already long crusade against paranormal and metaphysical phenomena I have never stopped applying the scientific method with scrupulosity. I'll give you an example. Last year I decided to spend my summer vacation in a town in the Midwest where it was said that there was a haunted house. Due to this bad reputation, the owner could not rent it, so he was very surprised when he saw me sign the lease for a month. The house in question was located just outside the town right in the middle of what had once been a Sioux cemetery. Modestly, I consider myself an outstanding disciple of the great Harry Houdini, the greatest unmasking of paranormal frauds that has militated in the ranks of Science. So, following the example of my teacher, the first thing I did was to review the rooms one by one in search of hidden devices that could explain the strange voices that were said to be heard at night. I did not find any, which does not m...