Seeing as there’s always so much American stupidity to discuss, it’s not often that we delve into the stupidity of people in other countries – particularly England, where, probably thanks to the number of Brits in positions of authority on American reality TV contests, most Americans think human stupidity somehow ceases to exist.

But for this story we’ll go there.

A grandmother in Kent county, England, recently told a local newspaper that she can no longer sleep at night in her flat (that’s Brit-speak for “apartment,” for our uncultured American audience) because a ghost as been showing up in the night and groping her.

“It’s like an octopus,” the former nursing home assistant told the paper. “People are going to think I am mad but it is as real as the day to me.”

For her part, her 16-year-old granddaughter thinks she must be kidding.

A local husband and wife team of spirit mediums have been called in, proclaiming they’ll “envelope [the ghost] in a ‘vortex of light’ and send it to the ‘other side.’”

“Sometimes [spirits] need to alleviate some stress,” said the better half of the ghost-hunting duo, as to why the apparition in question might have decided to bother this particular victim.

No one involved seems to be onto the obvious answer: That the ghost is the spirit of one of the perverted old men from a nursing home in which the victim once worked, and whose crush on the victim carried into the afterlife. (For those in our audience who’ve never seen The Benny Hill Show, the Brits are not remotely as stuck up sexually as we are in our priggish country. Cheeky!)

On the other hand, it’s also possible that the woman in question is simply hallucinating, judging from a recent study which reveals that people who report to have been abducted by aliens may in fact have just been having a vivid dream.

In his book The Terror That Comes in the Night, folklorist David J. Hufford estimates that about 15 percent of people report being assaulted in their sleep by an unknown entity at some point in their lives – but that this is often the result of ordinary brain functions, and that the specifics of the attacks are shaped by the victims’ belief systems.

Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, explains that the experiences reported by the Kent county granny are not at all uncommon in history, and that such reports likely gave birth to that wicked creature of medieval lore so popularized by South Park: the succubus, a she-demon which sexually attacks men as they sleep.

Anyway, one thing’s for sure: the local Methodist Minister, who was approached by the woman for help in the matter and told her that in his opinion the offender is a lost spirit, thinks there’s nothing he can personally do about the ghoulish groper. “I am neither a trained counsellor nor from a church with a tradition of exorcism such as the Catholic Church,” he said. “It is very difficult to know how to respond.”

How about responding by telling her to see a doctor? Would that have made too much sense?