THE WAUPACA REPUBLICAN

July 5, 1907

 

LAW ABOUT SPOOKS

Illegal to Shoot Them in England – Other Court Rulings.

 

           

            Lawsuits about alleged ghosts, of a nature similar to the one which was threshed out the other day before Mr. Justice Grantham, are far from uncommon.

            Indeed, there is quite a library of books relating to the subject, all of them full of musty, fusty precedents, and each and every one of them bound in that peculiar, underdone pie-crust colored material known to booksellers as law calf.

            From these books one may learn many things about ghosts, and the proper way to treat them.

            It is, for instance, illegal to belabor a “ghost” after it has cried out that it is not a ghost; while a man who goes gun-hunting after an alleged ghost, and shoots and kills a human being who is masquerading in spook attire, is guilty of murder.

            You may not summarily give up possession of a house of which you are tenant, simply because you believe it to be haunted, nor yet even if it be currently alleged and reputed to be haunted.

            But, on the other hand, damages have been recovered against a landlord who let a notoriously spook-infested dwelling to a tenant without first informing him of its evil reputation.

            A father has, too, obtained a verdict against a schoolmaster whose school was haunted by a ghost which frightened his boy into fits, and it has been held to be illegal to shut up a prisoner in a reputedly haunted jail.

            Once a woman sought a judicial separation from her spouse on the ground that he was in league with a familiar spirit, which haunted his bedroom by night and his study by day.

            But her petition was refused, the judge remarking that she had taken her husband for worse as well as for better, and that she might as well ask to be relieved of him because he had developed a wart on his nose as a sprite at his elbow. – Pearson’s Weekly.