Meet the right ghosts in your formative years—or help someone else to do the same in theirs—and a lifelong love of the stories and films in which they feature may be the result. Many children first came to know what fun a ghost can have after watching Disney’s 1937 short, Lonesome Ghosts. It’s an eight-minute delight that you seemed bound to see early in life, whether at the movie theater, courtesy of a VHS tape, or on the Disney Channel, as if it was somewhere waiting for you to chance upon it—or it you.
The premise is droll: it’s winter and snow blankets the grounds surrounding an abandoned old house at some remote spot. Shutters bang in creepy, but apparently well-rehearsed, syncopation with the wind, like Bruno Walter is calling the shots with the baton. Inside is a quartet of spectral beings. One stretches and yawns in a chair, faced with another afternoon of reading from a volume of—what else—ghost stories (an anthology, it appears). Another plays cards while a comrade tries to content himself/itself by making like an angler and dipping his unbaited hook into a tin of sardines, while the fourth peruses a newspaper on the ground, because our ghost gang keeps up with the world they’ve technically departed.
The ghosts discover an ad for the Ajax Ghost Exterminators and decide that their doldrums could be relieved by pretending to be humans and bringing the team in to frighten the wits out of them. Keep those ghost muscles sharp. A call is then made to the offices of these self-styled eradicators, who are no less than Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. We see them with their Ghost College degree displayed—need to tout those bona fides in a profession that invites incredulity—along with an axe, net, and blunderbuss. The tools of the trade. After all, ghost removal has never been, and is unlikely ever to be, an exact science.
We’re quick to associate ghosts with pain as a reason for why they stick around—the old unfinished business theory—and as a source of fear. And yet, in an indirect fashion at least, the ghost can provide so much pleasure to the life of the horror fan. M.R. James advised his readers to treat them gently, because they are a wellspring, and not in a misery sense either. James himself fell in love with the idea of ghosts after watching a Punch and Judy show as a child. This Disney short functions in the same manner. The ghosts are witty and oh-so-human. Prey to boredom, requiring stimulation, and needing to overcome ennui of the spirit, pun very much intended; for are there not times in which each of us is a ghost in all but name?
To their credit, these ghosts do something about their collective funk that’s more inventive than what we’re apt to turn to in binge-watching whatever cookie-cutter offering from one of our myriad streaming services for the latest time. We expect the investigating trio to come in knees a’shakin’, but it turns out they’re seasoned professionals, if not exactly masters of their craft. Then again, you’re always shooting in the dark a bit when it comes to ghosts.
The ghosts have a fondness for water, or else it’s just easy for them to make it the center of their parlor tricks. They manifest it for swimming, boating, and surfing; stash it in closets, cause the floorboards to turn into it, but only for them and not their pursuers. They shoot it from their mouths to chill the living; it’s said that the temperature goes down when ghosts are on the scene, but the idea of that being a matter of proper hydration from beyond the grave is a new one.
If you are a child, you probably root equally for ghosts and non-ghosts in this battle of representatives from different planes whose day and dimensions have overlapped. What strikes the adult now is the wit that was commonplace in ostensible children’s fare at the time. The lowest common denominator was much higher, if you will. This wouldn’t have rotted your brain but rather stirred your imagination. The desire to play at being a ghost, or draw a ghost, or try to write a ghost story must have been high after viewing.
Donald is impassioned, Mickey leads the way, and Goofy is the Marcus Aurelius of the team. “I’m brave, but I’m careful,” he says as much to himself—because we’re smart to remind ourselves of what’s important—as to us. The team takes a tumble into the disused—but still stocked—pantry in the short’s final sequence, which creates an inversion: a case of mistaken identity thanks to some flour and molasses that causes the ghosts to react as we so often react to them. Our empathy is real, even if ghosts are not. But who is to say? After all, the Ajax Ghost Exterminators had themselves a successful business, and the child—plus the adult—who watches them in action here is likely to think they’ve done them a service on this ghostly score as well. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
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