Author: Jay Tobias

Publisher:

Published: 1955

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13:

A masterly mixture of mirth and mystification which will have the audience sitting tensely on their edge of their chairs one minute and screaming with laughter the next! Pretty Sylvia Kidd has invited several week-end guests to Eerie Heights, a spooky old mansion high on a cliff, which she has lately inherited from a distant cousin. Sylvia palns to make a martyr of herself and marry the rich Jervis Smythe, for the sake of her beloved younger brother and sister, fourteen-year-old twins. But Billy and Candy are rooting for Brad Ewing, with whom Sylvia has quarreled. The Terrific Twins play all manner of side-splitting pranks upon Jervis and his haughty sister Annabel, hoping to frighten them away. Candy tosses tantrums, Billy throws violent wing-dings, and both invent weird tales about other members of the family until the Smythes are firmly convinced all the Kidds are crazy and mixed-up in their heads! Billy play ghost but succeeds principally in scaring Gloriola Glubb, the family cook, into a state bordering on idiocracy. But two real specters haunt the ancient halls--Captain Kidd, the pirate, and old Ebeneezer Skaggs, the carpenter who built Kidd a secret room--and got murdered for his pains! Other characters: Cletus Kidd, an elderly cousin, who believes he is the reincarnation of his notorious ancestor--and comes charging down the stairs at all hours, wildly waving his 'cutlass' (cane) and shouting that he is the Terror of the Seven Seas! Ardella McArdle, a writer of mystery novels, who comes to Eerie Heights looking for a copy; and Sarah Twiggles, the mournful cockney ''ousekeeper.' How the ghosts turn out to be crooks--how the hilarious twins rout the snobbish Smythes and get the right fiancé for Sister--all builds to a roaring climax.