Lonesome Ghosts 1937

In the creaky, shadow-filled Old McShiver mansion, four resident ghosts—Jasper, Boo, Moss, and Grubb—live a quiet afterlife, feeling there’s no one left to scare. Their lonely routine is shaken when they stumble upon a full-page ad for the Ajax Ghost Exterminators, a team that includes Mickey Mouse [Walt Disney], Donald Duck [Clarence Nash], and Goofy [Pinto Colvig], and they hatch a plan to prank the living by hiring them for a haunting of their own home. Grubb disguises himself as a woman to make the call, with the others helping to stage the haunting and keep the illusion alive.

When the trio arrives at the mansion, they are met with a series of impossible gatekeeping tricks. A knock on the front door makes it tumble off its hinges, the door itself seems to lift and drop them inside, and a mousetrap snaps shut on Goofy’s nose, all while the sprawling mansion pretends to be empty. After a moment of eerie laughter from the ghosts, Mickey decides to split up to surround them, hoping to outmaneuver the playful specters.

The chase bursts into a carnival of mischief. Jasper slams into Mickey’s head and sticks fingers into the barrels of Mickey’s shotgun, causing it to explode in a burst of cartoon chaos. Mickey barrels upstairs in pursuit, trying to open a door that seemingly disappears with him, only to fall away as the door tumbles down. Out of one door, the four ghosts emerge in formation, like a marching band, and glide through another door, while water gurgles out of a newly opened path. Jasper, Boo and Moss ride surfboards on the streaming water, as Grubb controls a motorboat that circles around Mickey until both vanish in a splash.

Grubb turns his attention to Donald, frightening him with the clatter of breaking dishes and rattling chains, and gives him two sharp whacks with a wooden board. Donald responds with a punch, sending Grubb crashing to the floor, where he briefly dissolves into water and then vanishes again. The scene shifts to Goofy, who is taunted by Moss—a wooden spoon on a pan and a blasting trombone create a raucous cadenza that sends Goofy sprinting into a bedroom. A quick mirror gag reveals Moss’s image in the glass, not his reflection, and after a tangle in a dresser, Goofy ends up with a pin in his backside from a mistaken poke, leaving him stuck and flustered.

The finale unfolds as the dresser—with Goofy still inside—is shoved into the basement where Mickey and Donald take cover behind barrels and sacks of molasses, flour, and syrup. The dresser crashes into them, coating the trio in the sticky, gluing mixture. They emerge looking like ghosts, a gleaming, goofy approximation of their quarry, and the sight of the three emulsified intruders terrifies the real ghosts out of the mansion, leaving Jasper, Boo, Moss, and Grubb to retreat from their own joke that finally backfires on them.