Spooks go on strike after a 3-day revel.
Quit throwing household furnishings and pulling hairpins from woman’s head.
Newark, N.J. – Mr and Mrs Stanislaus Lysaj are getting weary of being haunted. After a three-day revel invisible presences throwing household furnishings at Mr and Mrs Stanislaus have taken a day off and the Lysajs are devoutly hoping that they have gone away to spend the week in the country and they never will come back.
Mr Lysaj’s sister died two months ago and on her deathbed she swore she would “get even” for a quarrel they had had, according to the story told by the couple.
The wildest yarns ever spun in an old sailors’ home are outdone by the tales now circulating in the vicinity of the “haunted house.” Monday night, the narrative runs, a flock of mysterious footsteps ran all around the Lysajs’ four-room apartment, and the footsteps had no feet attached to them. On Tuesday the invisible visitors descended to low, slapstick comedy, and loose ornaments around the place jumped off mantels and tables and hit Mrs Lysaj while her back was turned. A flatiron crawled off the back of the stove and knocked Mrs Lysaj down, she testifies, without leaving a mark of any kind.
Mrs Lysaj, so the story goes, called in a priest, who is reported to have seen pictures fall off the mantelpiece and all the hairpins merrily jump out of Mrs Lysaj’s Psyche knot.
Wednesday Mrs Lysaj also called in some of the neighbours, who were treated, they assert, to a regular Simon pure spiritual seance, in which the hairpin trick was repeated. The Lysajs then summoned two priests to view the proceedings. It is stated that the pictures, aided and abetted by a powder box, again performed their act of flitting around the place. The priests are said to have brought in half dozen more members of the cloth then, at which the bogies became bashful and refused to disport themselves.
All was quiet Thursday also, much to the delight of the Lysajs and to the vast disappointment of crowds that have been blockading the house. Stanislaus and Mrs Stanislaus are bravely holding the fort. They intend to keep right on living in the “haunted house,” they say, and it is hinted that they don’t even intend to ask the landlord to lower the rent.
The Gazette (Cleveland, Ohio), May 25th, 1918.