THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE HILL
When the owner showed me the little cottage on a hill in Mill Valley, California, nearly forty years ago, she made a strange remark.
We were on the sun porch, which had big glass windows around three sides. “If these windows ever break,” she said, “you will have to pay to have them replaced.”
I assured her that it was very unlikely we would ever open them. But a few weeks later I understood what she meant. The windows had heavy hasps, almost beyond my strength to move. On the windiest days they stood firm. But often, on calm, clear days, one of them would suddenly fly open and bang against the trees outside.
Finally, my husband, Maynard Shipley, tried an experiment. He went out on the sun porch and spoke aloud.
“If this is a demonstration of some sort of extrasensory power,” he said, “please find another way to demonstrate. We can’t afford to have these big windows replaced if you break them.”
They never opened again.
But that was not the first “manifestation” to occur in the little house, furnished with the owner’s own belongings.
One Saturday afternoon I brought home a bag of fruit. My husband picked out a pear, then observed that it was too pretty to eat, polished it, and laid it on the bare center table in the living room.
We were both sitting near the table, reading, he facing it and I with my back turned to it, when I heard a strange bumping sound. Subconsciously I counted; there were twelve bumps in all, in rhythmic pairs. I thought he was kicking a table leg, and asked him to stop. He did not answer, and I turned around to see his eyes fixed on the pear.
I was just in time to see its last two vibrations; it was jumping up and down, rising about two inches each time.
Perhaps this is the place to explain that neither my husband nor I believed (nor do I now; he died in 1934) in occult phenomena. He was a writer and lecturer on scientific subjects, I was and am a freelance writer and a labor journalist. We were both agnostics, with no faith in survival of the personality after death. But we both had open minds and we could not deny the evidence of our senses – though the experiences we underwent made neither of us a Spiritualist convert.
In fact, my husband’s first thought was that the pear was abnormal – perhaps that some parasite was in it. He cut it open, and it was perfectly sound. As he lifted it from the table there was a tinkle like that of a silver bell, and a tiny whiff of white smoke arose from below the table and was dissipated in the air.
That was the first peculiar phenomenon we witnessed in the cottage. Here are some of the others; I am not including any that were not seen by at least two persons.
There was a whirring, metallic sound sometimes that we tried in vain to locate. Finally we went into the bedroom, the doors and windows of which were closed, so that there was no breeze. Hanging on a nail on one of the doors was a metal coathanger, which was vibrating like mad.
In the bathroom was an old-fashioned bureau with drawers which had brass pulls, so stiff that they stayed in any position in which they were placed. Twice, when my husband entered the room, all the brass pulls began to dance up and down.
In the kitchen was a wooden gadget fastened to the wall, on whose arms we hung various utensils – basting spoons, can openers, spatulas, things of that sort. Frequently when Maynard approached them, all of these started to vibrate.
A door led from the kitchen to the bedroom. It was always closed at night. Every night, precisely at eleven, there would be a sound like that of a wet mop striking the kitchen side of this door. When it was opened, nothing was there.
We brought home a trailing piece of wild blackberry vine and put it in a hanging vase on the living room wall. It started to swing back and forth like a pendulum and kept it up for forty-eight hours. Maynard tried to account for this on scientific grounds, and in fact had an article published in The Scientific American in which he discussed the movement as a possible effect of radiant energy on a living plant, since it happened to be halfway between a window into which the sun poured, and a wall light which was on at night. But later, when we tried the experiment with many other plants, the vase did not swing at all.
We heard constant raps, day and night, and nearly every evening small bluish-green lights, like faint electric bulbs, used to move horizontally across the room, about four feet from the floor, and then vanish; this happened in both the living room and the bedroom.
In the living room was an old-fashioned Franklin stove – all the furniture was of turn-of-the-century vintage – which burned wood. In its lid was fixed a common iron stove-lifter. One night, in full electric glare, we saw this lifter raise itself about three inches from the lid and sail horizontally across the room, dropping with a thud on the floor at the other end of the living room. Another time we saw a large china bowl on the top shelf of an open china closet in the kitchen lifted as if somebody had hold of it, and deposited gently on the floor beneath; it was not even cracked.
But the prize exhibit was the folding bed. For those who have never seen such an object, it is a bygone piece of furniture which when closed is just like a big closet door against the wall. This one was in the living room, and we never thought of using it until I was ill with the flu, and my husband tried to sleep in it. (It opened out into a regular double bed.) I say “tried,” because every time he got into it he had the distinct impression that he was not alone – that somebody else he couldn’t see was in the bed, somebody who didn’t want him in it. He stuck it out for three nights, and then he said, “Well, if you want the bed you can have it,” and got out and spent the rest of the night in a chair.
After I was well we decided to try an experiment with a weekend guest. Our visitor told everybody that she was “a natural medium” and a devout believer in Spiritualism. So without mentioning anything about the bed we put Genevieve in it. About two o’clock in the morning there was a knock on the bedroom door. Genevieve said she couldn’t sleep in that bed because somebody else was in it! We fixed her up on the sun porch, but we never told her why we had given her the folding bed.
We found our Mill Valley “ghosts” extremely interesting, and we hated to leave them when the owner decided to sell the house and we had to move. Later the house was destroyed in a fire which burned all that part of the town.
We never had anything again approaching the crowding phenomena of our “haunted house,” but perhaps the “ghosts” did follow us for a while in San Francisco and later in Sausalito, where we lived until my husband’s death.
One day I received a letter telling me of the death of a very dear old friend. That evening Maynard and I were washing and drying dishes together in the kitchen of another rented cottage. We were facing the window and it was very dark outside. I was talking to Maynard about my friend, whom he had never known, when suddenly there was a crashing blow at the window – enough, one would think, to have broken it. “Cats,” Maynard said, and went outside to look. No cats, no anything. He came in again and we started to talk it over. It came again, just the same as before. This time we didn’t even look.
Almost the same thing happened later in another house. This time we were in the dining room. I was seated with my back to the front window, which looked on the porch; my husband sat opposite me, facing it. Again we were talking about somebody recently dead. And again there was a smashing blow at the window. This time Maynard caught a momentary glimpse of something round and white that had struck the blow. But when we both dashed out on the porch, seconds afterward, there was nothing whatsoever there.
In the apartment in which we first lived in Sausalito, there was a big bare kitchen with wooden walls. On a nail on one of the walls hung several big paper shopping bags. We had a close friend whose husband had one day taken a train for a short business journey and had never been seen again; no trace was ever found of him, and nobody knows to this day whether he is alive or dead, though it is probable that he is dead.
One morning at breakfast we were talking about
our friend’s dilemma; after searching and waiting for several years, she had decided to get a divorce to remedy her anomalous position.
“My own belief is that Charlie is dead,” my husband said.
At which moment, suddenly, with no breeze anywhere, all the paper shopping bags on that nail raised themselves slowly to a horizontal position and then as slowly fell back again.
If either of us could be considered a “physical medium” – whatever that really is – it was not I, but my husband, in whose presence metallic objects shook and danced. After he died, I would have given anything, including my life, for some evidence that something of him still lived and could communicate with me – as we had often promised each other to try to do, if it were possible – but it never came. There was just one slight and unexplained happening.
About a week after his death, while I was still living alone in our Sausalito home, preparing to leave it, one of our friends came to visit me. We were sitting before the fireplace, and I was saying to her what I have just said above. There was a silence. And then we both distinctly heard a strange sound. It was like a large, soft, heavy object falling to the ground from a short height – the nearest analogy I could think of was a bag of laundry.
We searched the house systematically, from cellar to attic. Nothing was disturbed nor was there anything out of position that in the least resembled what we both had heard.
Nothing of the sort ever happened to me again. It was not enough evidence.
Only twice in my life, before I met Maynard, have I had inexplicable experiences. Once, in 1917 in Hollywood, I saw a “phantom of the living” – so distinct that I took it for granted it was the man himself, and spoke to him – when he vanished. And later that same year, in Spokane, a friend whom I was visiting and I both heard heavy footsteps climbing the cellar stairs to the locked kitchen door, and then cross the floor. We not only searched the house but we called a policeman, who searched again for us with a bored air that we soon understood when a week later, at precisely the same hour, the whole thing happened over again – and several times more. This too was a rented house, and apparently the police had often been called to find the phantom burglar.
I never heard any story to account for this. In our Mill Valley house I made inquiries, and discovered that the owner had lived in the cottage with her old father until he died, and that he slept in the folding bed; that was all. I might add that after we left, she was unable to sell the house after all, and rented it again. I was told by neighbors that it was rented three or four times before the fire, but that nobody every stayed more than a month or two.
As for my husband, he had one other strange experience during our years in Sausalito, though it did not occur there. I tell it to complete the record, though he had only a quasi-witness.
In the course of a lecture tour in northern California, he had a speaking engagement in the town of Woodland. He could not get a hotel room, and had to take a room for the night in an apartment over a grocery store. All night he was kept awake by constant sawing and hammering downstairs; apparently the grocery store was being repaired or remodeled, and the workmen for some reason were doing the job at night. He was very much annoyed when he paid the landlady in the morning, and was about to make some caustic comment when she said, with a queer mixture of bravado and timidity, “Were you able to get any sleep in that room?”
Puzzled, he glanced in at the store when he got outside. It was precisely as he had seen it the night before when he went there after his lecture. There was no sign that any carpentry had been done on it.
Just how and why we should have had that intensive period of unexplained phenomena for the year and a half in Mill Valley, gradually tapering off for three or four years more, and then never recurring, neither of us ever knew. The last thing I can remember of this nature that we experienced was also in our last Sausalito house. One moonlit night I happened to glance from a front window, and saw on the steps leading to the front porch a curious thing – a sort of cone of light, about two feet tall and about a foot at the base, milky and solid-looking in texture. We both went out and stood directly above it; there it sat, looking like crystallized soapsuds, but with the line of the steps visible through it. It glowed faintly as if with its own light; no moonlight struck anywhere near it.
Maynard was all for stooping down and touching it, but I held him back; I had a foolish nervous feeling that it might give him an electric shock, or be in some other way unpleasant to touch. Just then an automobile passed the house, down our hilly street, and instantly the cone vanished. If it had been some trick of light which the auto’s headlights had reversed, it should have reappeared when the car had passed. It did not return, and we never saw anything like it again. It was some time later that it occurred to us that the thing, whatever it was, resembled pictures we had seen of ectoplasm.
If my husband was one of those people somehow in tune with so-called parapsychic phenomena, it seems peculiar that he had not had similar experiences in the past, instead of just during this limited period. It may have been that for some reason he was in a particularly receptive condition in those years; or it may have been that I, though not myself a “medium,” in some way supplemented his receptivity. The whole question is one which was beyond our powers of explanation. “There can be no such thing as the supernatural,” he used to say. “Everything that occurs is a part of nature. All we can say is that these things occurred, that they were not subjective, and that therefore they will be susceptible to scientific explanation some day, even though they are not now.”
In an attempt to secure some informed outside judgment of the phenomena, we wrote an account of them and sent it to Dr Walter Franklin Prince, of the Boston Society for Psychic Research. He was extremely interested (though no better able than we to explain our experiences), and intended to publish the account in a forthcoming volume in his series of Human Experiences, based on an extensive questionnaire sent out by the Society; but he died before another volume could be compiled.
After Maynard’s death I again wrote a statement of what had happened in the Mill Valley house and sent it to Harry Price, the well-known English psychic researcher. He too was both interested and baffled.
About all one can say at the present stage of our comprehension is that the house was “haunted” – whatever that word really means – and that we, and especially my husband, were susceptible media through whom the haunting became objectified. Any more satisfactory elucidation will have to come – for me, at least – as a result of further objective investigation on a purely scientific basis. I offer this detailed description, minus dubious or very minor phenomena and those witnessed by only one person, as a document for such research.
1959: A second seasonal article from The Illustrated London News, Christmas Number, 1959 challenged readers with a thought about the ghosts of England that, “the more seriously you take them, the more irritating they prove to be”. The author ROBERT AICKMAN (1914–81) has been declared “one of the best ghost story writers ever to take pen in hand” yet also had a variety of other interests including the theatre, travel and inland waterways. Interestingly, he believed the human psychological reaction to ghosts was more important than the spirits themselves, as he demonstrates when confronting such entities as . . .
THE ELEMENTALS
Particularly restricting is the law, in my experience, when we wish to deal with what are known as Elementals. Elementals are, it is thought, exceedingly primitive entities: they squat in a single place, and to stare full at one, even in the dusk (though it seems that occasionally they appear also in the fullest horror of daylight), is instant insanity. For this reason, no one knows exactly what an Elemental looks like. A prominent British statesman who had a great interest in psychics (many will know who he was) went with others to visit the Elemental that occasionally materialises in the cellar of a Somerset manor (which I must not name): one of the party looked too long, and was never at all the same man. The statesman ne
ver visited another Elemental.
When, during the late war, I used to visit Hertfordshire’s Art Colony at Chipperfield, and buses were few and early (though not so few and early as today), the girls of the village were complaining that there was a place on the road from King’s Langley where they felt cold and frightened. Only years later did an authority on Elementals mention to me quite by chance that the nearest one to London stood beside the Chipperfield – King’s Langley road. He defined the precise spot. Of course, it was the same spot. I could point to it now, but I smell the faint, stale odour of the Law Courts. I shall risk the simple statement that the spot is nearer to King’s Langley; much nearer.
There is a major Elemental infestation in a churchyard about five miles from Northampton; though the thing only appears in the small hours of the morning. Not far from the village there are always gipsies: the spiteful persecution of gipsies by local authorities is another good reason for changing the subject. But the rule is this: when you think you see an Elemental, look away at once. To meet, in particular, its eyes, is spiritual suicide.
1962: There are a number of stories of biographers being haunted by their subjects after they became immersed in the minutiae of that person’s life. CONSTANTINE FITZGIBBON (1919–83), the American-born writer who became famous for his novels, including When The Kissing Had To Stop (1961), also wrote several biographies. The most critically acclaimed was Life of Dylan Thomas (1965) which produced a moment Fitzgibbon recalled thereafter as a . . .
THE GHOST OVER MY SHOULDER
For some years I owned and lived in a house called Waterston Manor, in Dorset. It is a most handsome house, of immense antiquity but no particular period. An Elizabethan thug called Lord Thomas Howard built a fine, Renaissance, carved stone western front in 1586. Another front is Jacobean. The rest is principally Victorian for the house was burned out – though not burned down – on Christmas night, 1862. Only a well-panelled corner room, which I used as my study, remained from the old interior. And of course the house was said to be haunted, though neither I nor any member of my family ever saw the ghost of the eighteenth-century girl who is said to have jumped to her death from an upper window. For me it was a beautiful house, and not at all a spooky one: save for two incidents.
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 52