The American ghost is a new and quite up-to-date kind of a spook, very unlike the superior old crusted goblins on this side of the water. Instead of taking up its abode in a haunted house, to be examined at leisure by a society for the investigation of its little psychic ways, the American ghost, without any regard for the rules of the game, proceeds to turn a soap factory into a pandemonium by playing pitch and toss with the bars of soap.
This, with due allowance for exaggeration, is what apparently has happened in a San Francisco factory, and the unfortunate workpeople lived in such terror of flying soap cakes that they called in the city detectives to arrest the malicious spook. The detectives suffered severely, but failed to discover the cause of the soap dance.
It is difficult to understand why disembodied spirits want to go “fooling round” with soap, which can be no sort of use to them. If this particular and peculiar spook were not located in America, we should suggest that he is the ghost of the legendary character who, after crying “What, no soap!” died, whereupon somebody else very imprudently married a barber.
Westminster Gazette, 3rd September 1897.