Blackbeard's Ghost

Steve Walker arrives in a small New England town to take up a coaching post at Godolphin College, where the notorious pirate Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, is said to have lived centuries earlier. After buying an old bed warmer at an auction, Steve finds a spell hidden in its handle and reads it aloud as a joke, summoning the pirate's ghost. Blackbeard is trapped in a kind of limbo that he can escape only by performing a good deed, so he attaches himself to Steve, who is also trying to help elderly Emily Stowecroft and her friends keep their group home from being taken over by people who want the land for a casino. Meanwhile, Steve's college track team has little prospect of winning, and the ghost's interference complicates his attempts to sort out his own life.

The film was directed by Robert Stevenson for Walt Disney Productions, from a screenplay by Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi, with Walsh producing. It is the twelfth of the fourteen features Stevenson directed, made between The Love Bug and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Peter Ustinov plays Blackbeard, Dean Jones plays Steve, and Suzanne Pleshette, Elsa Lanchester, Richard Deacon and Stefanie Powers appear among the credited cast of thirty-eight. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.8 from around 7,400 votes, and on TMDB 6.7 from 165 votes, while a smaller group of critics rated it 5.8 from eleven reviews.