The high-spirited American twins play quite a few tricks on the poor Canterville ghost, who can't cope with the Yankee spirit of can-do practicality that invades his ancestral English home with the Otis family.
The twins shoot peas at the ghost with their pea shooters. They stretch strings across the hallway so he will trip in the dark, and once they melt butter to make a "butter slide" on the floor so that the ghost will slip and fall. They put a water jug on the top of a door so that when he opens the door he is drenched with water. Another time they hide in a dark corner and then run at him waving their arms and shouting "BOO!" They also hang up a white sheet, which the ghost mistakes for another ghost. The trick works: the frightened real ghost runs away in fear.
All of the twins' tricks are the standard fare of summer camp or boarding school pranks, showing that the twins don't take the ghost seriously as a threat and underscoring the comic way this story inverts the normal ghost tale.
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