A BBC journalist has been arrested in one of Africa's poorest states for reporting the president is afraid of "ghost mice".
A local reporter and a civil servant have also been detained by authorities in Malawi after reports that president Bingu wa Mutharika had left his residence because it was haunted.
Mabvuto Banda of the influential daily Nationnewspaper, who also works for Reuters, and Raphael Tenthani of the BBC, who also works for the Associated Press, were taken separately in dawn raids at their homes in the commercial capital Blantyre.
Local sources said Horace Nyaka, an aide to vice president Cassim Chilumpha, was also arrested in connection with the reports.
Malawi newspapers and radio stations carried the story on the ghosts on Sunday, quoting a senior presidency official.
Mr Mutharika, a former economist with the World Bank, angrily told reporters at the weekend that he had not met any ghosts in the palace.
The president's advisor on Christian affairs also denied telling journalists priests had been called to exorcise the "evil spirits".
The reports emerged after an unnamed presidential aide said Mr Murathika was unable to sleep at night because he felt invisible creatures crawling over his body. "Sometimes the president feels rodents crawling all over his body but when lights are turned on he sees nothing."
Reports then emerged that the president was afraid of "ghost mice".
"I have never feared ghosts in my life," Mr Mutharika declared on his return from a trip to Belgium. He blamed the stories on his predecessor, Bakili Muluzi.
Mr Muluzi hand-picked Mr Mutharika to succeed him as leader of the ruling UDF party and he won elections last year but the two fell out when Mr Mutharika launched a fight against corruption.
The massive presidential State House in Lilongwe had been the focus of an earlier dispute in Mr Mutharika's administration after the 73-year-old reversed earlier policy and began to use it as his residence - displacing the country's parliament, which had been borrowing the building.
The president justified his decision by arguing the New State House had originally been built as a presidential residence. Parliament now convenes in a motel.
Kamuzu Banda, Malawi's founding president, spent only 90 days in the palace which took 20 years to build and cost $100m. It has 300 air-conditioned rooms and is set in 1,332 acres of land outside the official capital Lilongwe .
When Bakili Muluzi, Mr Mutharika's predecessor, came to power in 1994 he refused to live there, condemning its "obscene opulence". Instead, he used the Sanjika Palace in Blantyre.
Agencies