Undercover at the university, Laura Holt responds "Egyptology" when asked what her major was. This is an inside joke referring to Stephanie Zimbalist's starring role in the 1980 film The Awakening, where she plays daughter to Charlton Heston's Egyptologist and gets possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian queen.
Remington's tale of an ancestor who is cursed to linger as a ghost until one of his descendants commits an act of extraordinary courage appears to be partly cribbed from the plot of The Canterville Ghost (1944), which itself took huge liberties from the Oscar Wilde short story it is based on.
This supernaturally themed story draws upon the previous year's hit movie Poltergeist (1982) with such scenes as blood gushing from faucets. But the story also presages the following year's hit movie Ghostbusters (1984), with the casting of Annie Potts (Annie Carpenter) and a scene of a ghostly apparition appearing among the stacks of a university library.