by Noel Hynd
Osaro’s spirits seemed low. “I have to think you might be right,” the minister said.
Brooks picked up the ball and tossed it to the minister. Osaro swished two gems back-to-back from the left side comer. They were so neat and clean that they were almost out of character.
“Where did those come from?” Brooks asked.
“Fury. Magic. Divine intervention,” Osaro said, meaning it, Brooks supposed, as a joke. “And couldn’t we all use some?” He returned the ball to Brooks.
Osaro began to remove his sweatshirt.
“Have a bad day?” Brooks asked.
“No thanks. I just had one.”
Brooks hit a jump shot. Osaro took the ball and sank an easy toss from underneath.
“I’m serious,” Brooks said.
“Horrible day,” Osaro answered. “I got my transfer.”
Brooks stopped short. He turned. “What?”
“You deaf? I got my transfer.”
“So quickly?”
“Effective in thirty days. The bishop wants me to join a parish in Oregon before the end of summer.” He grimaced. Brooks stared at him in disbelief.
“It’s all the usual bull from the bishop, Timmy: ‘The need is great. You must go where your calling leads you. You must bring your skills to new places and open new human hearts.’ What drivel! He just wants me out of his fat white face.”
Brooks cursed low and bounced the ball hard on the asphalt. “I can’t believe it, George. How can they do that to you?” He shook his head.
“I suppose you could say I was looking for it,” Osaro said. “And if you look for something, you often find it. Don’t you?”
The sun was setting. The sky blazed with a screaming pink and orange beyond the tall trees that ringed the court. In the distance, there were shouts from a softball game upon a nearby field contained by goalposts.
“On the other hand, I can’t believe he really did this to me,” Osaro said. “I like this parish, Tim. I like this island. And I’m finished here.”
There was little Brooks could say. He felt as sorrowful as if someone had died.
“But there is an upside,” Osaro said. “For you, I mean. One good will come of this.”
“I can’t imagine. What’s that?”
“Well,” Osaro said, picking up the basketball, “now I don’t have to worry about being transferred, because I’ve been transferred. See? The Bishop Bunghole of Boston has fired his only shot. He’s already shipped me out of his bailiwick, so there’s not much more he can do.”
“So?”
“It means I can be as spiritualist as I want for the remainder of my time on this island, Timmy. So we can fly Miss Annette’s checkerboard table. We can go spirit hunting all we want at Seventeen Cort Street and we can summon up Uncle Satan himself if we see fit.”
Brooks looked at his friend strangely.
“Just kidding about that,” Osaro said. “But we can fly the table. Look for your Henry Flaherty. You still game?”
“Yes.”
“What about Miss Carlson?”
“She’ll do it.”
Brooks felt his own apprehension suddenly start to build.
“Then tomorrow?” Osaro asked. “How about that. Quick, to get it done. In the evening. After it’s dark. That will be the best time.”
The next day was out, Brooks said. Annette was going to Boston to see Dr. Rossling again. And she had asked him to accompany her. As it was his day off, he had agreed. He had his own tasks in mind for Boston.
“Thursday, then?” Osaro asked.
“Thursday. The thirteenth.”
“In the evening,” Osaro said. “That’s when the spirits rise. With darkness. Get a good night’s sleep the day before. Sometimes these things can take hours. If contact is made, which sometimes it isn’t.” Osaro looked at his friend. “But in this case,” he said, “I expect contact.”
Brooks nodded. He turned with the basketball, twenty-five feet from the bucket, and lofted it toward the hoop without taking aim.
Perfect arc. Straight through the hoop.
Brooks later remembered the thought that shot through his mind when the ball zipped through the hoop:
“Enjoy this one. Remember it. For this will be the last truly great shot for a long, long time.”
Part Three
Purgation
“Everything that has being has being in the flesh.”
—D.H. Lawrence
Chapter Fifty-one
While Annette Carlson kept her second appointment with Dr. Gary Rossling elsewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Tim Brooks sat in a quiet corner of the Lowenstein wing of the Harvard University Library. He plodded through the books, academic papers and pamphlets that he had assembled on the long reference table.
It was eleven A.M. on Wednesday morning. He sat, as he had for the last two hours, poring through oblique and sometimes baffling writings drawn from the Eksman Collection of Paranormal Psychic Studies.
He sought facts in a field where theories were plentiful and facts were as elusive as phantoms themselves. He tried to draw analogies out of case studies, psychiatric transcripts, exhibits and files. Even out of the occasional police report. Anything that would lend him a deeper insight into what was happening on Nantucket Island.
Having traveled to the mainland by air with Annette that morning, Brooks had set to work comparing the experiences of other men and women to his own. He sought conclusions that no rational man or woman—which he had been just a few short weeks earlier—would normally choose to believe.
Theory: The “poltergeist effect.” Several articles conjectured whether poltergeists were the spirits of the dead or some other disembodied entity. A predominant number of poltergeist cases involved children with preexisting psychiatric problems. All the papers Brooks read rejected the theories surrounding disembodied spirits. The most popular option, the most prevalent interpretation of the “poltergeist effect,” suggested the existence of “spontaneous psychokenisis” of an electromagnetic field that human science does not yet understand. The field can move furniture, break windows, or make small objects move of apparently their own accord.
Facts, Brooks demanded. What were the facts?
Fact: The crash of the china cabinet at 17 Cort Street was a much more powerful manifestation than any incident described in any paper before him. It was one thing for a pencil to fly loose from a table. Quite another for an eight hundred-pound cabinet—Brooks had carefully calculated the weight—to rip loose from solid moorings anchored in wood.
Theory: Poltergeist manifestations, it was noted, often accompanied a young girl passing through puberty. Therefore, poltergeist manifestations may be presumed to carry sexual overtones.
Fact: No such circumstances were relevant in the case of 17 Cort Street. Yes, a woman was involved. But not a teenager. And if there were any sexual overtones at the outset of the haunting, Brooks did not know them.
Brooks noted the mention of psychiatric disturbance. He recalled that Annette had previously mentioned mental problems. And she was in fact at a psychiatric evaluation that day, he reminded himself.
Cause and effect? Effect and cause? Or simply coincidence? He set his poltergeist pamphlets aside. He wondered if people who had legitimately seen ghosts in previous generations were chalked up as disturbed, even if they had actually experienced something paranormal.
He continued to research. He looked through several volumes about purported ghosts and hauntings. Brooks found a volume titled American Hauntings, written by Edgar Murphy, an American psychic researcher, in 1973.
Murphy had been on the faculty at Harvard. Brooks scanned several cases—contemporary and historical—that Murphy had investigated.
Some were laughable. Others were chilling.
Eventually, Brooks’ attention settled upon a case in Hydesville, New York, a small town outside of Rochester. The year was 1871 and the focus of the case was a small farmhouse inhabited by a Methodist minister named
William Bay, his wife and four children, who were new to the Hydesville community. In late March of that year, a few weeks after the Bays had moved in, the entire Bay family was kept awake by a strange series of rappings that appeared to have no point of origin. The rappings continued for several weeks, usually at nightfall, often around bedtime. Failing to find any other explanation for the noises, the Bays concluded that they had a ghost.
Mrs. Bay gathered her family around her in the bedroom one April evening. Determined to ask the “ghost” a question that no one outside the family could answer, she inquired the ages of her children.
The “ghost” proceeded to successively rap the correct ages of all four Bay daughters. Chillingly, it also included five final raps to denote the age of a Bay son, the most recently born, who had died of influenza two years earlier at the age of three.
“Are you a Christian human being making these raps?” Reverend Bay asked.
There was no answer.
“Are you a spirit?” the preacher asked.
A sharp knock, much closer than the previous ones, came in return.
On subsequent evenings, the Bays summoned their neighbors to record the haunting and act as witnesses. Half of the neighbors were terrified. The other half were skeptical. In response to further questioning, the spirit revealed that his name was Abraham Warren, a peddler who had been murdered in the house before the Civil War.
The spirit went on to reveal that he had been shot in the head by a local citizen and that his body had been buried in the cellar of the structure. His spirit had been unable to rest as a result.
The story caused a sensation. Older members of the community remembered the peddler and recalled his abrupt and inexplicable disappearance while passing through their community. Visitors flocked to the house. The rappings continued. Accounts of the “haunting” swept through the northeastern United States and were picked up by the mainstream newspapers in Boston and New York.
Later in the spring, sentiment arose to verify the Bay family’s story. A team of townsmen plus Reverend Bay thus set to work with shovels one day in the basement of Bay’s house. They dug.
At a depth of two and a half feet, they encountered water and had to stop. But when they returned in July, a drier season, and proceeded further, they found a series of heavy oak planks five feet below the earthen floor of the basement.
Below the planks, there were a few bones and a few books, both badly disintegrated.
Intriguing, but inconclusive.
Years passed. The Bay sisters, knowing a good commercial undertaking when they were on to it, claimed to have developed their skills at communicating with the dead. Inevitably, they became professional mediums. They traveled to different parts of the country and around the globe, going into darkened rooms with strangers and—for very modest fees—offering their skills at conversing with spirits.
The eldest, Clara Bay, was the most famous and renowned of the sisters, as well as the most skilled. She became the most famous medium of her generation. And it was she who popularized the act of turning tables.
Brooks read with fascination.
It was said that Clara Bay could levitate human beings as well as tables. “Table Moving,” she called her art, and her notoriety at it preceded her to Europe. The English press lampooned her and her alleged talent. The Times of London proclaimed her “a fraud” and denounced her art of table-turning as “a craze of the ignorant American masses, not much different from tribal rites of dusky savages in Africa.”
“English audiences,” sniffed the Newcastle Guardian, “are too sensible and educated to fall for this low-minded sham of an act.”
Oh, really?
In London, according to more than two hundred witnesses, Clara Bay became one of the most famous women in the city when she levitated a “possessed” child ten feet out of a fourth floor window of the Hyde Park Hotel. Eventually she performed her magic—or whatever her skill was—before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, both of whom concluded that Clara Bay was “convincing” and “beyond trickery.”
Beyond a doubt, Brooks concluded as he read, Clara Bay was either endowed with a supernatural talent or was an early-day master of illusion, a nineteenth-century Harry Houdini in skirts.
All of this resulted in the great craze of table-turning of the 1880s and 1890s across the United States and England. Clara Bay’s fame was worldwide. Amateur attempts at table-turning followed, some with possible success, the rest with evident chicanery. The table-turning craze lasted some two decades, after which time, Clara Bay, as well as her sisters, retired in financial comfort.
As the trend faded, skepticism about table-turning grew, accompanied not coincidentally by a revival of Protestant fundamentalism in North America. The entire movement was in disfavor by 1900. Clara Bay died in 1901.
Then in 1904, a lengthy book was published on Clara Bay, denouncing Miss Clara and her sisters as catty little charlatans.
Said the author:
No evidence of any burial in the Bay residence was ever found, nor even the existence of the Yankee peddler said to have been murdered. Nor is there any reason to believe that Clara Bay ever lifted a table without the canny use of hidden strings or called forth a single soul.
The book was written by a self-ordained Baptist minister, a man, naturally, and published in New Orleans by a Christian publishing house. It attained a wide circulation and was serialized in many newspapers.
There the matter rested until 1918, when the old Bay home in Hydesville collapsed from age and rot. As carpenters took away parts of the old dwelling to make way for a new structure, it was discovered that the old Bay house had two cellar walls.
A real one and a fake one. Between the two was found, in a remarkably good state of preservation, the skeleton of a man with a bullet hole in the temple. With him was a peddler’s tin box bearing the name of Abraham Warren. Experts of the World War I era deduced that Warren appeared to have been murdered in the 1850s, at least a few years before Clara Bay’s birth.
Brooks drew back from his reading and rubbed his eyes, still trying to decide what he could make of the Clara Bay case. Did it give credibility to the art of turning tables? Or had the Bays somehow known of the body in their basement and hatched out profitable careers as clever fakes?
Then again, how could the Bays have even known about the murder of the peddler, being new to the Hydesville corn munity? And if the skeleton of Abraham Warren was intended to have been their proof of legitimacy, why had they never raised it themselves?
Brooks sighed. Interpretations of events in this field were like turning a kaleidoscope, ever opening onto complicated new vistas and arrangements.
He went for coffee. He consumed a large cup. Black as night. Hot as hell. Then he found and opened a book titled The Ghosts of Pennsylvania. He browsed through.
This book, like the one before it, came with good academic credentials. Its author was Dr. Frederick Mann, a retired professor of the humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. The author didn’t shy away from his controversial subject. He offered readers “close to a hundred—ninety-seven in point of fact—case studies of ghosts that were said to be “well documented, witnessed and scientifically investigated.”
The work was relatively modern. It had been published in 1966. Brooks found himself quickly absorbed in it.
Dr. Mann made the traditional “spiritualistic hypothesis,” about ghosts, concluding that such visions, such manifestations are, like poltergeists, the spirits of the dead. He went on to note differences, however.
Poltergeists interact with the living world via the movement of objects and then can be contacted through mediums. Yet of the many cases of ghosts presented, the ghosts appear, but do not appear to have interacted with their witnesses. They behave as if they were a part of a film image projected into a room. This gave rise to the theory that certain apparitions were no more than a “recording” upon the physical surroundings of a room or place.
The ex
amples were given of haunted houses in which some horrible tragedy or trauma took place many years earlier. The hypothesis held that the original tragedy had imprinted itself on the place through the intensity of the emotions of those who originally experienced it. In persons capable of picking up such impressions—here Brooks thought of George Osaro—a certain hallucinatory effect resulted.
The author wrote,
This theory accounts for the feeling one has upon entering certain chambers in a house, that there is a paranormal or supernatural presence within, though it remains invisible to normal senses.
Here Brooks again thought of George Osaro. But he also thought of himself and Annette, and the very definite feelings they had entering certain rooms.
And then again there was Boomer, with his wet, suspicious canine nose, who wanted no part of certain places and people. Brooks followed closely. Dr. Mann set forth several cases which he claimed would support his eventual conclusions that ghosts, as discarnate spirits of the dead, existed.
Typical was the case of a graduate student named Al Dawger at the same university who in May 1953, when he was about to exit a comrade’s room in the Birthday House dormitory, stopped short when he saw a man in a tweed suit and overcoat enter Room 313.
Dawger assumed that the well-dressed man was either a faculty member or a parent and said nothing as they passed. Two days later, encountering the friend at a political science lecture, Dawger inquired what the visitor had wanted. The friend denied that anyone had come into the room as Dawger had departed. It then struck the student that a breeze of frigid air—icy cold, frosty as mortality—had followed the man in tweed.
Over the course of the next several months, it emerged that others had witnessed the man as well, only to have him disappear through walls as abruptly as he appeared. It was only then, after Dawger’s initial inquiry, that those on the floor realized that they were party to a haunting.
It was a benevolent haunting, perhaps, but a haunting nonetheless. The ghost was eventually identified, in theory at least, as one Professor Harold Pepper, a historian who had visited Europe following World War II and died in Naples during the great cholera outbreak of 1949, never to return to the university. He died leaving unfinished the last few years of his life’s study on the Italian Renaissance.