The whole family were now quite interested; Mr Otis started to think that he had been wrong to deny the existence of ghosts. Mrs Otis wanted to join a club of people interested in ghosts, and Washington wrote a long letter to a detective agency about the Difficulty in Removing Sanguineous Stains Connected with Crime.

That night something happened which took away for ever all their doubts about the objective existence of phantasmata.

It had been a warm and sunny day, and in the cool of the evening, the whole family went out of the house. They did not return home till nine o'clock, when they had a light supper.

Their conversation was not about ghosts. Often people see ghosts because they have been talking about it before, and they are expecting to see something. But not with the Otis family that evening. I have since learned from Mr Otis that they talked about just the sort of things you will find in the ordinary conversation of educated Americans.

For instance, they discussed the immense superiority of the American actress Miss Fanny Davenport over Sara Bernhardt, the English actress.

Also the difficulty of obtaining green corn, buckwheat cakes, and hominy, even in the best English houses; why the city of Boston made the world a better place; why railway travel was done much better in the United States; and why the New York accent was so much nicer than the London one.