La Maison ensorcelée (1907) The House of Ghosts (Pathé)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1548598/
Director: Segundo de Chomón
Production Company: Pathé frères
Country: France
Notes: "Sometimes the world of similarly titled early shorts causes a certain amount of confusion, and this is surely a prime example of that. The movie about three travelers, identified on YouTube and at IMDb alike as LA MAISON HANTÉE (1906), is in fact no such thing. Rather, it's de Chomón's LA MAISON ENSORCELÉE, released in December 1907, which is in turn as blatant a scene-for-scene rip-off of another movie as you'll ever find, the original being J. Stuart Blackton's THE HAUNTED HOTEL (1907). By contrast, de Chomón's 1906 short LA MAISON HANTÉE was a very different beast indeed; it ran only around two minutes and was a much less ambitious trick film. To quote the synopsis in the February 1906 Pathé Supplement in its entirety:

'A servant putting the dining room in order is suddenly surprised when two large vases on either side of the fireplace transform into dancers, with the furniture also joining in with their dance. Horrified, he runs off to fetch the mistress of the house - only to find everything restored to its normal state when they return together. She treats him as if he's an idiot and orders him to finish laying the table. Thereafter, the master of the house arrives for his evening meal, but the soup has scarcely been served when the table starts to revolve before rising up towards the ceiling with ferocious force. The two would-be diners attempt to pull the table back down, but are violently repelled and thrown to the ground, completely stupefied by events.'

The confusion of LA MAISON HANTÉE (1906) and LA MAISON ENSORCELÉE (1907) actually predates the Internet. Although Carlos Fernandez Cuenca mentions LA MAISON HANTÉE in his groundbreaking 1972 book-length study Segundo de Chomón - maestro de la fantasia y de la tecnica, 1871 - 1929, what he actually describes sounds like LA MAISON ENSORCELÉE. The Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin long claimed to have a print of LA MAISON HANTÉE in its collection, but de Chomón specialist Juan-Gabriel Tharrats could locate only a copy of LA MAISON ENSORCELÉE there and was otherwise unable to find a surviving print of LA MAISON HANTÉE in any archive; in his 2009 study Segundo de Chomón - un pionnier méconnu du cinéma européen, his entry on LA MAISON HANTÉE extends merely to citing Cuenca's comments from 1972... followed by a large question-mark! The Gaumont-Pathé Archives are likewise unaware of any surviving locatable print of LA MAISON HANTÉE.

I looked a little further into LA MAISON HANTÉE, and it seems that the British Film Institute at one time had an incomplete print, which was described in detail in the National Film Archive Catalogue from 1948; however, there is no mention of this incomplete print in recent decades, and the BFI currently claims to have no holdings of any kind on this title... so it may be that this too was lost to the ages many years ago.

However, there's no doubt from the write-up that it was the 1906 short, no matter what became of it:

'No main title. A servant is cleaning the sitting room with a feather duster. A woman [played by a man] enters. The servant sits down to read. He then 'dusts' the woman and she leaves. He dusts a shelf on which are two statues of young blackamoors. The figures begin to dance and the chairs move. He fetches the woman in fear. When she returns the figures have disappeared (to be replaced by vases of flowers) and the chairs are stable. The woman's husband (?) enters. The servant brings in a table laden with crockery and begins to serve the meal. There is a large lamp in the centre of the table. The table levitates. The woman holds on to the table leg. Her husband holds on to her legs as she disappears upwards and is left holding her skirt (138ft). Incomplete.' " - Dr. Robert J. Kiss

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