Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  A Baltimore police sergeant visited Mrs. Florence Sternfels of Edgewater, N.J., who calls herself a psychometrist. On her advice, when he got back to Baltimore he dug in a neighbor’s cellar. The body of the girl was found two feet under the dirt floor.

  Lt. Cronin also noted that Gerard Croiset, the Dutch clairvoyant, is credited with finding 400 missing children.

  “Right now, ESP is a hit and miss proposition. It’s in an elementary stage, the stage electricity was in when Ben Franklin flew his kite,” Lt. Cronin said.

  “But it does exist. It is a kind of sixth sense that primitive man possessed but has been lost through the ages. It’s not supernatural, mind you. And it will be the method of the future.

  “Once it is gotten into scientific shape, it will help law enforcement agencies solve certain crimes that have been baffling them.”

  Stressing that ESP will grow in police use, he said:

  “In Europe some of the ESP people have been qualified to give testimony in court. It will come here, too.”

  More specific and illustrative of the methods used by psychics in helping solve crimes is a column devoted to a case in Washington State, written by Michael MacDougall for the Long Island Press of May 3, 1964, in which he suggests that someone with ESP should be on the staff of every police department in order to help solve difficult crimes. MacDougall makes a very strong case for his conviction in his report on a case that took place a month earlier.

  DeMille, the famous mentalist currently touring for the Associated Executives Clubs, checked into the Chinook Hotel in Yakima, Wash., at 2 P.M. on Friday, April 3. He was tired, and intended to shower and sleep before that evening’s lecture. But hardly had he turned the key in the lock when the phone rang.

  It was a woman calling. “My friend has had her wallet stolen,” the feminine voice said. “It contained several articles of sentimental value which she would like to recover. Can you help her find it?”

  “Perhaps,” said DeMille. “I’ll do my best. But you’ll have to wait until after my speech. Call me about ten-thirty.”

  DeMille hung up, tumbled into bed. But he couldn’t sleep. The thought of that stolen wallet kept intruding. Then, just on the edge of unconsciousness, when one is neither asleep nor awake, he envisioned the crime.

  Two teen-age boys, one wearing a red sweater, stole up behind a woman shopper. One stepped in front, diverting her attention, while his partner gently unfastened her handbag, removed the wallet, and scampered around the corner, to be joined later by his confederate.

  DeMille saw more. The boys got into a beat-up Ford. They drove away, parked briefly in front of a used car lot. Opening the wallet, they took out a roll of bills, which were divided evenly. DeMille wasn’t sure of the count but thought it was $46. Then the boys examined a checkbook. DeMille saw the number 2798301, and the legend: First National Bank of Washington. He also received an impression that it was some kind of a meat-packing firm.

  Now fully awake, DeMille phoned K. Gordon Smith, secretary of the Knife and Fork Club, the organization for which DeMille was speaking that night. The secretary came up to DeMille’s room, listened to the story, and advised calling the police.

  Soon DeMille had callers. One introduced himself as Frank Gayman, a reporter for the Yakima Herald. The other was Sergeant Walt Dutcher, of the Yakima Police. Again DeMille told his story. Gayman was skeptical but willing to be convinced. The sergeant was totally disbelieving and openly hostile.

  DeMille suggested they call the First National Bank and find out if a meat-packing company had a checking account numbered 2798301. Then it would be easy to call the company and discover whether or not any female employee had been robbed.

  The report was negative. Account #2798301 was not a meat-picking company. In fact, the bank had no meat packers as customers. Fruit packers, yes; meat packers, no.

  Sergeant Dutcher, after threatening DeMille with arrest for turning in a false crime report, stamped out of the room. Frank Gayman, still willing to be convinced, remained. The phone rang again. It was for Gayman; the bank was calling.

  There was an account numbered 2798001 carried by Club Scout Pack #3. Could this be the one? Immediately, DeMille knew that it was.

  The president of the Knife and Fork Club, one Karl Steinhilb, volunteered to drive DeMille about the city. Following the mentalist’s directions, Steinhilb drove to an outlying section, parked in front of a used car lot. And sure enough, in the bushes fronting a nearby house they found the discarded wallet.

  The Yakima Police Department was not quite the same after that.

  The cases of cooperation between psychics or psychic researchers and police departments are becoming more numerous as time goes on and less prejudice remains toward the use of such persons in law enforcement.

  In July, 1965, the Austin, Texas, police used the services of a Dallas psychic in the case of two missing University of Texas girls, who were much later found murdered. At the time of the consultation, however, one week after the girls had disappeared, she predicted that the girls would be found within twenty-four hours, which they weren’t, and that three men were involved, which proved true.

  But then the time element is often a risky thing with predictions. Time is one of the dimensions that is least capable of being read correctly by many psychics. This of course may be due to the fact that time is an arbitrary and perhaps even artificial element introduced by man to make life more livable; in the nonphysical world, it simply does not exist. Thus when a psychic looks into the world of the mind and then tries to interpret the conditions he or she is impressed with, the time element is often wrong. It is based mainly on the psychic’s own interpretation, not on a solid image, as is the case with facts, names, and places that he or she might describe.

  One of the institutes of learning specializing in work with clairvoyants that cooperate with police authorities is the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, where Dr. W. H. C. Tenhaeff is the head of the Parapsychology Institute. Between 1950 and 1960 alone, the Institute studied over 40 psychics, including 26 men and 21 women, according to author-researcher Jack Harrison Pollack, who visited the Institute in 1960 and wrote a glowing report on its activities.

  Pollack wrote a popular book about Croiset, who was the Institute’s star psychic and who started out as an ordinary grocer until he discovered his unusual gift and put it to professional use, especially after he met Dr. Tenhaeff in 1964.

  But Croiset is only one of the people who was tested in the Dutch research center. Others are Warner Tholen, whose specialty is locating missing objects, and Pierre van Delzen, who can put his hands on a globe and predict conditions in that part of the world.

  The University of Utrecht is, in this respect, far ahead of other places of learning. In the United States, Dr. Joseph B. Rhine has made a brilliant initial effort, but today Duke University’s parapsychology laboratory is doing little to advance research in ESP beyond repeat experiments and cautious, very cautious, theorizing on the nature of man. There is practically no field work being done outside the laboratory, and no American university is in the position, either financially or in terms of staff, to work with such brilliant psychics as does Dr. Tenhaeff in Holland.

  For a country that has more per-capita crime than any other, one would expect that the police would welcome all the help they could get.

  In the following pages you will read about true cases of hauntings, encounters with ghosts and apparitions of spirits, all of which have been fully documented and witnessed by responsible people. To experience these phenomena, you need not be a true “medium,” though the line between merely having ESP or being psychic with full mediumship, which involves clairvoyance (seeing things), clairaudience (hearing things), and/or clairsentience (smelling or feeling things), is rather vague at times. It is all a matter of degree, and some people partake of more than one “phase” or form of psychic ability. Regardless of which sensitivity applies to your situation, they are natural and need not be feared.
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  CHAPTER FOUR

  What Exactly Is a Ghost?

  FROM CLOSED-MINDED SKEPTICS to uninformed would-be believers, from Hollywood horror movies to Caspar the Ghost, there is a great deal of misinformation and foolish fantasy floating around as to what ghosts are and, of course, whether they do in fact exist.

  I was one of the first people with a background not only in science, but also in investigative journalism to say to the general public, in books and in the media, Yes, ghosts are for real. Nobody laughed, because I followed through with evidence and with authentic photographic material taken under test conditions.

  What exactly is a ghost? Something people dream up in their cups or on a sickbed? Something you read about in juvenile fiction? Far from it. Ghosts—apparitions of “dead” people or sounds associated with invisible human beings—are the surviving emotional memories of people who have not been able to make the transition from their physical state into the world of the spirit—or as Dr. Joseph Rhine of Duke University has called it, the world of the mind. Their state is one of emotional shock induced by sudden death or great suffering, and because of it the individuals involved cannot understand what is happening to them. They are unable to see beyond their own immediate environment or problem, and so they are forced to continually relive those final moments of agony until someone breaks through and explains things to them. In this respect they are like psychotics being helped by the psychoanalyst, except that the patient is not on the couch, but rather in the atmosphere of destiny. Man’s electromagnetic nature makes this perfectly plausible; that is, since our individual personality is really nothing more than a personal energy field encased in a denser outer layer called the physical body, the personality can store emotional stimuli and memories indefinitely without much dimming, very much like a tape recording that can be played over and over without losing clarity or volume.

  Those who die normally under conditions of adjustment need not go through this agony, and they seem to pass on rapidly into that next state of consciousness that may be a “heaven” or a “hell,” according to what the individual’s mental state at death might have been. Neither state is an objective place, but is a subjective state of being. The sum total of similar states of being may, however, create a quasi-objective state approaching a condition or “place” along more orthodox religious lines. My contact with the confused individuals unable to depart from the earth’s sphere, those who are commonly called “ghosts” or earth-bound spirits, is through a trance medium who will lend her physical body temporarily to the entities in difficulty so that they can speak through the medium and detail their problems, frustrations, or unfinished business. Here again, the parallel with psychoanalysis becomes apparent: in telling their tales of woe, the restless ones relieve themselves of their pressures and anxieties and thus may free themselves of their bonds. If fear is the absence of information, as I have always held, then knowledge is indeed the presence of understanding. Or view it the other way round, if you prefer. Because of my books, people often call on me to help them understand problems of this nature. Whenever someone has seen a ghost or heard noises of a human kind that do not seem to go with a body, and feel it might be something I ought to look into, I usually do.

  To be sure, I don’t always find a ghost. But frequently I do find one, and moreover, I find that many of those who have had the uncanny experiences are themselves mediumistic, and are therefore capable of being communications vehicles for the discarnates. Ghosts are more common than most people realize, and, really quite natural and harmless. Though, at times, they are sad and shocking, as all human suffering is, for man is his worst enemy, whether in the flesh or outside of it. But there is nothing mystical about the powers of ESP or the ability to experience ghostly phenomena.

  Scoffers like to dismiss all ghostly encounters by cutting the witnesses down to size—their size. The witnesses are probably mentally unbalanced, they say, or sick people who hallucinate a lot, or they were tired that day, or it must have been the reflection from (pick your light source), or finally, in desperation, they may say yes, something probably happened to them, but in the telling they blew it all up so you can’t be sure any more what really happened.

  I love the way many people who cannot accept the possibility of ghosts being real toss out their views on what happened to strangers. They say, “Probably this or that,” and from “probably” for them, it is only a short step to “certainly.” The human mind is as clever at inventing away as it is at hallucinating. The advantage in being a scientifically trained reporter, as I am, is the ability to dismiss people’s interpretations and find the facts. I talked of the Ghosts I’ve Met in a book a few years ago that bore that title. Even more fascinating are the people I’ve met who encounter ghosts. Are they sick, unbalanced, crackpots or other unrealistic individuals whose testimony is worthless?

  Far from it.

  Those who fall into that category never get to me in the first place. They don’t stand up under my methods of scrutiny. Crackpots, beware! I call a spade a spade, as I proved when I exposed the fake spiritualist camp practices in print some years ago.

  The people who come across ghostly manifestations are people like you.

  Take the couple from Springfield, Illinois, for instance. Their names are Gertrude and Russell Meyers and they were married in 1935. He worked as a stereotyper on the local newspaper, and she was a high-school teacher. Both of them were in their late twenties and couldn’t care less about such things as ghosts.

  At the time of their marriage, they had rented a five-room cottage which had stood empty for some time. It had no particular distinction but a modest price, and was located in Bloomington where the Meyerses then lived.

  Gertrude Meyers came from a farm background and had studied at Illinois Wesleyan as well as the University of Chicago. For a while she worked as a newspaperwoman in Detroit, later taught school, and as a sideline has written a number of children’s books. Her husband Russell, also of farm background, attended Illinois State Normal University at Normal, Illinois, and later took his apprenticeship at the Bloomington Pantograph.

  The house they had rented in Bloomington was exactly like the house next to it; the current owners had converted what was formerly one large house into two separate units, laying a driveway between them.

  In the summer, after they had moved into their house, they went about the business of settling down to a routine. Since her husband worked the night shift on the newspaper, Mrs. Meyers was often left alone in the house. At first, it did not bother her at all. Sounds from the street penetrated into the house and gave her a feeling of people nearby. But when the chill of autumn set in and the windows had to be closed to keep it out, she became aware, gradually, that she was not really alone.

  One particular night early in their occupancy of the house, she had gone to bed leaving her bedroom door ajar. It was 10:30 and she was just about ready to go to sleep when she heard rapid, firm footsteps starting at the front door, inside the house, and coming through the living room, the dining room, and finally coming down the hall leading to her bedroom door.

  She leapt out of bed and locked the door. Then she went back into bed and sat there, wondering with sheer terror what the intruder would do. But nobody came.

  More to calm herself than because she really believed it, Mrs. Meyers convinced herself that she must have been mistaken about those footsteps.

  It was probably someone in the street. With this reassuring thought on her mind, she managed to fall asleep.

  The next morning, she did not tell her new husband about the nocturnal event. After all, she did not want him to think he had married a strange woman!

  But the footsteps returned, night after night, always at the same time and always stopping abruptly at her bedroom door, which, needless to say, she kept locked.

  Rather than facing her husband with the allegation that they had rented a haunted house, she bravely decided to face the intruder and find out what this was
all about. One night she deliberately waited for the now familiar brisk footfalls. The clock struck 10:00, then 10:30. In the quiet of the night, she could hear her heart pounding in her chest.

  Then the footsteps came, closer and closer, until they got to her bedroom door. At this moment, Mrs. Meyers jumped out of bed, snapped on the light, and tore the door wide open.

  There was nobody there, and no retreating footsteps could be heard.

  She tried it again and again, but the invisible intruder never showed himself once the door was opened.

  The winter was bitterly cold, and Russell was in the habit of building up a fire in the furnace in the basement when he came home from work at 3:30 A.M. Mrs. Meyers always heard him come in, but did not get up. One night he left the basement, came into the bedroom and said, “Why are you walking around this freezing house in the middle of the night?”

  Of course she had not been out of bed all night, and told him as much. Then they discovered that he, too, had heard footsteps, but had thought it was his wife walking restlessly about the house. Meyers had heard the steps whenever he was fixing the furnace in the basement, but by the time he got upstairs they had ceased.

  When Mrs. Meyers had to get up early to go to her classes, her husband would stay in the house sleeping late. On many days he would hear someone walking about the house and investigate, only to find himself quite alone.

  He would wake up in the middle of the night thinking his wife and gotten up, and was immediately reassured that she was sleeping peacefully next to him. Yet there was someone out there in the empty house!

  Since everything was securely locked, and countless attempts to trap the ghost had failed, the Meyerses shrugged and learned to live with their peculiar boarder. Gradually the steps became part of the atmosphere of the old house, and the terror began to fade into the darkness of night.

  In May of the following year, they decided to work in the garden and, as they did so, they met their next-door neighbors for the first time. Since they lived in identical houses, they had something in common, and conversation between them and the neighbors—a young man of twenty-five and his grandmother—sprang up.