How I Met Your Mother Season 9 spoilers on a ghost haunting Farhampton Inn?!

How I Met Your Mother aired its Season 9 midseason finale on Monday and ended the first half of its final season on a strong note with a bountiful appearance by The Mother, Marshall's long-awaited arrival in Farhampton and the closest thing we've had to Ted meeting The Mother in a long while. But now, things are apparently going to get wacky.

The "Spoiler Chat" column at E! Online reports that a ghost (yes, a ghost) will be haunting the Farhampton Inn when HIMYM returns in January:

"David: HIMYM me, my scoop gods!
Gods? Stop, you're making us blush! But back to the scoop at hand: Robin and Barney's wedding may be under attack. By a ghost. It seems the Farhampton Inn has itself a bit of a ghost problem, in the form of a peg-legged and hook-handed pirate."

HIMYM has done goofy ideas like this many times before in recent seasons, and it's highly unlikely that the show is going to try to convince us that ghosts are real within their world. Then again, Season 9 has been all sorts of crazy, so anything is possible.

Fans may remember that this season's episode "No Questions Asked" also featured the ghost of Captain Dearduff the Hooker, a serial killer from 1843 who froze to death when his hook got stuck in the wall. He supposedly haunted room 13, the room in which Lily stayed.

HIMYM returns on Jan. 13 with its next new episode entitled "Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra" in which Marshall delivers the long-awaited penultimate slap to Barney.