The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  Several persons stated that a young man had been killed in or near the building long ago, and that he still hangs around and wants to dance and play basketball and have fun as he used to. (Unfortunately for the veracity of the tale, checks with the police since then have revealed no record of a killing in or near the school. An Associated Press reporter made a serious effort to track down verification of a murder, but with no results).

  We first decided to try to hold a seance in an area of the basement that had an unpaved dirt floor and old boards and boxes stacked in the corners. There we turned off the lights and sat at first with only one small candle. After a moment, we put that out and sat in the dank dark. Fortunately for my peace of mind, after later developments, some of the girls decided that there might be rats down there, and so we adjourned upstairs. At that time, none of us was in the least afraid of the ghost.

  We finally chose a small room on the second floor, just large enough to hold the ten of us, and we put opaque screens over the windows and turned out all the lights. Just enough glow came in around the edge of the screens from the streetlight outside so that we could dimly see those closest to us. Keith and I sat on a short couch, and the others milled about in the dark for a while.

  In order to learn if there might be any spirit about who wanted to make an effort to communicate, all those in the room except Keith and me put their fingers on the top of a tall stool. Almost at once it began to move around, so fast that they kept up with it only with difficulty. The stool banged itself with great force against the floor and the wall. It was asked to answer questions in code, with one rap for “Yes” and two for “No”; and it did give some answers this way to a few questions. But whatever was propelling the stool had no interest in such attempts to talk. It preferred to show off its great force by banging itself senselessly against the wall.

  Keith and I got monstrously bored watching this – it is very routine in mediumistic circles. Catching me yawning, he asked if we should call it all off and go home.

  “In a few minutes,” I said, “if nothing else happens.”

  Soon the game with the stool palled on the participants, and they all settled down quietly, pulling their chairs into a circle facing Keith and me. After a few moments of extreme silence, when the full impact of the darkness crept over us, I glanced toward Keith – and suddenly realized that he was staring at me fixedly with the most malevolent expression I have ever had directed my way. He kept it up, not moving, for at least three minutes. The way he looked, with his dark hair, glittering eyes, mustache, and goatee, one could almost suspect that the devil himself had become incarnate in our midst. Not being quite unsophisticated enough to believe that, I decided instead that the medium must have been taken over into trance, and prepared myself for a discussion with some spirit entity who was obviously “earthbound” and must be convinced that he should stop haunting this school. I began racking my brain for suitable phrases from those who had published their experiences involving other such delicate situations.

  “Who are you?” erupted suddenly and loudly from the medium.

  I jumped a foot and a half into the air and started to shake. “We’re here to help you,” I quavered. Then I began to explain to him that he had passed through the experience called death and that he must adjust himself to that fact and go away and stop bothering the people at this school – that there were helpful spirits around him who would give him advice and assistance if he would but listen to them. . . .

  “I’m not dead,” he shrieked, interrupting me. Then he lunged at me, waving his arms, and shouted, “Get out! Get out, all of you!” And no matter how much I talked to him he kept repeating this refrain with the appropriate motions. It was coming to my attention that the techniques that may have worked for those glib writers who had calmed obstreperous entities with a few well-chosen words were not likely to be so successful in my case. I started on a new tack.

  “Did you know it is the year 1965?” I asked.

  Keith almost leaped out of his seat. ‘No, no,” he cried. Then apparently taking a second to estimate, he added, “That would make me sixty years old. I’m not old. I’m young!” Yet, as if the idea of his death were beginning to penetrate after all, he began to mutter about blood and a knife. “Blood all over everything,” he said, and then such things as: “He got me in the back. I just wanted to stay here and play games and dance but John did me in. He did it; blood, blood, it spurted! The knife dripped blood! John did it. He always hated me.” Then, as if taking me for his false friend John he leaned toward me once again, with a look of utter viciousness, and shouted into my face, “Get out, all of you. Go away and leave me alone.”

  As this dialogue is now written, from notes made the day after the episode, I am appalled by how silly it all was. Even as I sat there participating in this drama, the realization was very present that it was overplayed and amateurish. In retrospect the whole evening seems a trivial travesty of a bad movie or a television turkey.

  But while the events were going on and I was participating in them, it was rather necessary to take them at face value, which was not in the least comfortable when the entranced medium kept jumping my way threateningly from time to time. Finally, he lunged and waved his arms in my direction just once too often and I got up and moved over to a bench just opposite the couch. The Thing, whoever it was, by then was muttering irresponsibly to himself, and I saw him glance down at my expensive camera which was on the floor beside where my feet had been. Lest he be inspired to break it, I reached over and picked it up.

  As I did so, the maniacal look on Keith’s face made me think, “Oh, if I could just get a picture of this for the book.” I began to sight the camera at him. Fortunately, I did not have time to flash the bulb – for if it is true, as I have since learned that all spiritualists believe, that any flash of light or sudden shock might kill an entranced medium, it might have been I instead of a ghost who was the villain of this piece.

  When the camera went up to my eye, Keith cried, “What are you doing?” and made a leap for me.

  I shouted, “Don’t you touch me!” and kicked him. It was just a little kick – and it barely connected with his leg; but he plummeted to the floor as if I had landed a rock on his skull. I didn’t do anything then for a minute but sit and quiver. Then I began to worry for fear the medium was badly injured, because he was lying there prone, breathing as if each gasp might be his last. I had not more than touched him, but it was evidently enough to have caused the entity to lose his hold.

  All of us sat with eyes glued on him, to see if he would come out of it; finally, we heaved sighs of relief as we heard the deep sonorous tones of the medium’s special “spirit guide,” who acts as his “control” and takes care of him, saying through him, “This is Dr. Robert John Kensington, and we have things in hand.” Keith, still entranced, but now by his proper control, got up and sat back on the couch, Dr. Kensington apologizing all the while for having allowed him to be taken over by such an irresponsible entity. He said that he had not realized that the spirit was actually insane until he had gotten into Keith’s body; and that the number of mediums present acted as a battery that gave the entity more power.

  Keith then came out of his trance, asked for a drink of water, and sat holding his head, complaining of a violent headache. He asked what had happened, and somebody began to tell him. I was doing a lot of thinking, very negatively. If this had all been an act, it was such an overdone performance that it was hardly worthy of Keith’s histrionic ability . . . yet if it had not been put on – Good Heavens! I’d been in real danger! I turned and said, perhaps a bit sarcastically: “How did it happen, may I ask, that all of you sat there so calmly while I was being attacked by a maniac?”

  The Aquarian Foundation members told me that they knew that touching the medium when he was in such a state would have injured him.

  “But what if I had been injured?”

  “You didn’t have a thing to worry about,” they assured me.
“We were surrounding everyone with protective thoughts, so everything was completely under control.” Under control? I almost had a camera wrapped around my head!

  Keith had nearly been clobbered, too, Jess Cauthorn told me later. When we had a long retrospective chat about the evening’s experiences he said that he and John Nelson had been sitting on the edges of their chairs, signaling each other, and ready to spring if the medium got one inch closer to me. They had been considering the entire thing to be a clumsy hoax; but they wondered why, if it was a hoax, Keith had not known he was going too far and would be in danger from them if he got the least bit rough. This was part of the whole big mystery. If he was putting on an act, why did he not realize the possibility of being physically restrained by those two men so much larger than he? There were many mysteries about this evening that have never been resolved; and this was one of them. Yet the biggest mystery of all occurred after we left the seance room. It put a slightly different light on the whole performance. But it did not solve anything. It only made the confusion worse.

  Rather depressed by the episode that had just taken place, I had gathered my nerve, my wits, and my camera and walked out of the seance room to try to get another picture or two of the school building. I was accompanied by Keith and Clyde Beck. The others remained in the room and then spread out, eventually going downstairs. The three of us walked back down the hall and into the auditorium, around a corner and about fifty feet from the seance room. After discussing the possibility of getting a photo of the large room, and deciding it would be useless to try with my equipment, I started to walk back up the hall. Hearing a funny sound from Keith, I turned to look at him. His eyes were getting that glassy, glittery look again, and he began to mumble, “I told you there was something I could do you couldn’t” and other phrases that weren’t particularly intelligible. He approached me menacingly.

  “It’s got him again,” I shrieked, rushing up the hall away from him. “Clyde, do something!” Clyde did something; he watched to see what was going to happen next. I moved on as quickly as possible, hollering to the people downstairs. Aquarians came bounding up, and as they did the medium began to speak once more in the deep tones of his control. “This is Dr Robert John Kensington,” he said. “The entity got back in once again because there was something he insisted on saying. Will you please call the owner of the building?”

  Jess Cauthorn was just arriving up the stairs on a run, and he said breathlessly, “I’m here.”

  “Do you recall if there was a rock about the size of a brick in that room where the seance was held?” Dr Kensington asked.

  “No, I don’t think so,” answered Jess. “I’m almost sure there was not.”

  “Well, the entity was trying to say that he had the power to bring apports,” the voice went on. “Now if you will go into the seance room you will find a rock there close to where Miss Smith was sitting.”

  We all rushed into the room, and sure enough, right where my feet had been when I sat on the end of the bench, there was now a smooth, oval rock as large as a brick. It could not have been there when my feet were cringing in that spot a few minutes before.

  The next day, at my suggestion, students went into the basement of the school building and reported that they found a hole the exact size, into which the rock fit neatly. It was in an area of the dirt where there were a few other similar stones scattered about. They immediately decided that this was the proof they needed that the whole thing had been a hoax. But it really wasn’t necessarily that convincing. Even if the rock had come from there, this would not prove it wasn’t an apport, because an apport has to come from somewhere; and the spirit would not in that brief interval have gone wandering afar to dig one up. He was said to be haunting this place. If he had decided he wanted a rock to heave at me, would he have thought of looking anywhere else for it?

  As can be imagined, we all did a great deal of arguing and conjecturing for days afterward. All except Keith Milton Rhinehart, who went home with a terrible headache and was said to have been confined to his bed. As we thought about the apport and tried to explain it, we realized that the medium, being a rather slight man, could not possibly have hidden so large a rock on his person in order to bring it up from the basement without being observed. If one of the women members of the Aquarian Foundation had managed to secrete it somewhere (in some oversize handbag?) how did Keith, down the hall with me, know about it?

  The only answer, except one really dealing with ghosts and apports and other supernormal things, is that the whole event was an extravaganza put on by the entire group of mediums in collaboration, to show the visiting author a good time and give her something to write about. But Keith and all the others knew that I was prepared to write scathingly about them if I discovered them in anything fraudulent, or even in anything particularly suspicious looking. They were aware, moreover, that they had much more at stake than a haunted school, for I was in Seattle investigating whether or not the phenomena of all Keith’s services and seances were genuine; and I had a magazine contact that they knew was eager for the story. Why, under those circumstances, would they play stupid games with me? Why also would Keith have run the risk of being injured when he leaped at me, knowing full well that the non-Aquarians in the group would certainly have defended me?

  Although my experience at the Burnley School was effective enough to scare me temporarily out of my wits, it could not have been permanently convincing. Of all the questions raised by this incident, the biggest that remains is this: If the Aquarians had decided to put on an act, why wasn’t it a better act? These were intelligent adults, not children; they couldn’t have been stupid enough to have produced such an overblown, overacted melodrama and expected it to be believed.

  But an old, earthbound spirit so dumb as to hang around a school for sixty years without knowing it was time to graduate – he might have acted just the way he did that night. After all, we were in a building in which a great many genuinely unexplainable manifestations had already occurred.

  I came out of this whole adventure with only one conclusion: You’d better keep your cool if you’re going to fool with an old school ghoul.

  HANS HOLZER is probably the best-known ghost hunter in America. Director of the New York Committee for the Investigation of Parapsychology and Psychic Research, he has investigated countless hauntings, written over 150 books and made numerous radio and television appearances. He is a scientifically trained archaeologist and historian, which has given an added dimension of authenticity to his most popular works such as Ghost Hunter (1963) and The Great British Ghost Hunt (1975). Holzer has written of several personal encounters with the supernatural of which this story from his own neighbourhood of New York is one of the eeriest.

  THE MAN IN THE UNIFORM

  Location and date:

  Riverside Drive, New York, 1963

  “Please help me find out what this is all about,” pleaded the stranger on the telephone. “I’m being attacked by a ghost!” The caller turned out to be a young jeweler, Edward Karalanian of Paris, now living in an old apartment building on Riverside Drive.

  For the past two years, he had lived there with his mother; occasionally he had heard footsteps where no one could have walked. Five or six times he would wake up in the middle of the night to find several strangers in his room. They seemed to him people in conversation, and disappeared as he challenged them on fully awakening.

  In one case, he saw a man coming toward him, and threw a pillow at the invader. To his horror, the pillow did not go through the ghostly form, but slid off it and fell to the floor, as the spook vanished!

  The man obviously wanted to attack him; there was murder in his eyes – and Mr Karalanian was frightened by it all. Although his mother could see nothing, he was able to describe the intruder as a man wearing a white “uniform” like a cook, with a hat like a cook, and that his face was mean and cruel.

  On 9 March, I organized a seance at the apartment, at which a teacher at A
delphi College, Mr Dersarkissian, and three young ladies were also present; Mrs Ethel Meyers was the medium.

  Although she knew nothing of the case, Mrs Meyers immediately described a man and woman arguing in the apartment and said there were structural changes, which Mr Karalanian confirmed.

  “Someone is being strangled . . . the man goes away . . . now a woman falls and her head is crushed . . . they want to hide something from the family.” Mrs Meyers then stated that someone had gone out through the twelfth-floor window, after being strangled, and that the year was about 1910.

  In trance, the discarnate victim, Lizzy, took over her voice and cried pitifully for help. Albert, Mrs Meyers’ control, added that this was a maid who had been killed by a hired man on the wife’s orders. Apparently, the girl had had an affair with the husband, named Henry. The murderer was a laborer working in a butcher’s shop, by the name of Maggio. The family’s name was Brady, or O’Brady; the wife was Anne.

  After the seance, I investigated these data, and found to my amazement that the 1812 City Directory listed an “A. Maggio, poultry,” and both an Anne Brady and Anne O’Grady. The first name was listed as living only one block away from the house! Oh, yes – Mr Karalanian found out that a young girl, accused of stealing, had killed herself by jumping from that very room!

  MARC ALEXANDER claims that his interest in the supernatural began as a child when he was given a book of stories by Algernon Blackwood, one of the great ghost story writers of the twentieth century, who, he learned had based a number of his fictions on events that occurred to him in places as varied as the backwoods of Canada, the heart of New York City and the rural English countryside. Alexander began collecting and investigating stories of hauntings in the 1950s and published a series of collections during the next thirty years. Despite his intense research, he admitted to never having seen a ghost – although this had done nothing to dampen his enthusiasm – although he did have one very unnerving experience in the late 1950s that left an indelible impression on him as he recounted in Phantom Britain (1975).