Link: On the Trail of Lonesome Ghosts

I’ve been watching Disney’s “Lonesome Ghosts” from 1937 and wondering… where did Dick Friel get the story idea and how much it relates to the ghostbreaker tradition dating back seventy years. Now, if you’ve lived under a rock and never seen the cartoon I’m talking about, it appeared originally on December 24, 1937. (Like Mr. Dickens, Mr. Disney enjoys a ghost at Christmas.) But most of us saw it later: on Disneyland (1954), with The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Wonderful World of Color (1958), The Mouse Factory (1972), with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in 1982, or in 1983, 1989, 1997, 1998, and on. Fisher-Price even had a silent, hand-cranked version as a toy. If you were like me, you saw it on The Wonderful World of Disney on the CBC back into the ’70s. It doesn’t matter. Most people have seen Mickey, Donald and Goofy go into the haunted house and try to deal with its mischievous inhabitants, laughed, and forgotten about it.

This cartoon has been haunting me though. I have to think “Lonesome Ghosts” was probably the very first piece of media to suggest the idea of “ghost busters” to me. I never saw The Ghost Busters with Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch in 1975. By then I had moved onto Kolchak the Nightstalker. (I was twelve after all!) 1975 was a good time to be a horror kid. My parents would never have let me see The Exorcist or anything like that, but television had Dan Curtis and other TV movie producers creating shows like Gargoyles, Moon of the Wolf, and The Night Strangler. And as long as you weren’t allergic to Bradford Dillman, you got some kid-sized scares that worked you up to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.

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https://www.michaelmay.online/2015/08/on-trail-of-lonesome-ghosts-guest-post.html