Weapons of Class Destruction

The Haunting in Connecticut made use of two rhymes/poems I remember from when I was little and now they've stuck in my head. After some thought, I recalled (vaguely) that both, I believe, appeared in an Edward Gorey book along with appropriately bizarre illustrations, which must be the book the character is referring to in the movie.

The first is one of the best examples of "nonsense verse" and is often used to illustrate the concept along with Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:

One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight.
Back-to-back they faced one another,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
One was blind and the other couldn't see,
So they chose a dummy for a referee.
A blind man went to see fair play,
A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
And came and shot the two dead boys.
A paralysed donkey walking by,
Kicked the copper in the eye,
Sent him through a rubber wall,
Into a dry ditch and drowned them all.
(If you don't believe this lie is true,
Ask the blind man -- he saw it too!)


The other is a poem by Hughes Mearns, Antigonish and was originally written about a haunting in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada:

As I was going up the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away

And so ends your little bit of unwanted literary education. xP

Peace, Ghani