by Hans Holzer
Then came the revolution and the Buxhoevedens lost their ancestral home, Count Alexander and the present Count Anatol, my brother-in-law, went to live in Switzerland. The year was 1923. One day the two men were walking down a street in Lausanne when a stranger approached them, calling Count Alexander by name.
“I am the brother of the major domo of your castle,” the man explained. “I was a plumber on that job of restoring it after the fire.”
So much time had passed and so many political events had changed the map of Europe that the man was ready at last to lift the veil of secrecy from the case of the vanishing workmen.
This is the story he told: when the men were digging trenches for the central heating system, they accidentally came across an iron kettle of the kind used in the Middle Ages to pour boiling oil or water on the enemies besieging a castle. Yet this pot was not full of water, but rather of gold. They had stumbled onto the long-missing Buxhoeveden treasure, a hoard reputed to have existed for centuries, which never had been found. Now, with this stroke of good fortune, the workmen became larcenous. They opted for distributing the find among themselves, even though it meant leaving everything behind—their families, their homes, their work—and striking out fresh somewhere else. But the treasure was large enough to make this a pleasure rather than a problem, and they never missed their wives, it would seem, finding ample replacements in the gentler climes of western Europe, where most of them went to live under assumed names.
At last the apparition that had appeared to the young officer made sense: it had been an ancestor who wanted to let her descendants know where the family gold had been secreted. What a frustration for a ghost to see her efforts come to naught, and worse yet, to see the fortune squandered by thieves while the legal heirs had to go into exile. Who knows how things might have tuned out for the Buxhoevedens if they had gotten to the treasure in time.
At any rate there is a silver lining to this account: since there is nothing further to find at Lode Castle, the ghost does not have to put in appearances under that new regime. But Russian aristocrats and English lords of the manor have no corner on uncanny phenomena. Nor are all of the haunted settings I have encountered romantic or forbidding. Certainly there are more genuine ghostly manifestations in the American Midwest and South than anywhere else in the world. This may be due to the fact that a great deal of violence occurred there during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also, the American public’s attitude toward such phenomena is different from that of Europeans. In Europe, people are inclined to reserve their accounts of bona fide ghosts for those people they can trust. Being ridiculed is not a favorite pastime of most Europeans.
Americans, by contrast, are more independent. They couldn’t care less what others think of them in the long run, so long as their own people believe them. I have approached individuals in many cases with an assurance of scientific inquiry and respect for their stories. I am not a skeptic. I am a searcher for the truth, regardless of what this truth looks or sounds like.
Some time ago, a well-known TV personality took issue with me concerning my conviction that ESP and ghosts are real. Since he was not well informed on the subject, he should not have ventured forth into an area I know so well. He proudly proclaimed himself a skeptic.
Irritated, I finally asked him if he knew what being a skeptic meant. He shook his head.
“The term skeptic,” I lectured him patiently, “is derived from the Greek word skepsis, which was the name of a small town in Asia Minor in antiquity. It was known for its lack of knowledge, and people from skepsis were called skeptics.”
The TV personality didn’t like it at all, but the next time we met on camera, he was a lot more human and his humanity finally showed.
* * *
I once received a curious letter from a Mrs. Stewart living in Chicago, Illinois, in which she explained that she was living with a ghost and didn’t mind, except that she had lost two children at birth and this ghost was following not only her but also her little girl. This she didn’t like, so could I please come and look into the situation?
I could and did. On July 4, I celebrated Independence Day by trying to free a hung-up lady ghost on Chicago’s South Side. The house itself was an old one, built around the late 1800s, and not exactly a monument of architectural beauty. But its functional sturdiness suited its present purpose—to house a number of young couples and their children, people who found the house both convenient and economical.
In its heyday, it had been a wealthy home, complete with servants and a set of backstairs for the servants to go up and down on. The three stories are even now connected by an elaborate buzzer system which hasn’t worked for years.
I did not wish to discuss the phenomena at the house with Mrs. Stewart until after Sybil Leek, who was with me, had had a chance to explore the situation. My good friend Carl Subak, a stamp dealer, had come along to see how I worked. He and I had known each other thirty years ago when we were both students, and because of that he had overcome his own—ah—skepticism—and decided to accompany me. Immediately upon arrival, Sybil ascended the stairs to the second floor as if she knew where to go! Of course she didn’t; I had not discussed the matter with her at all. But despite this promising beginning, she drew a complete blank when we arrived at the upstairs apartment. “I feel absolutely nothing,” she confided and looked at me doubtfully. Had I made a mistake? She seemed to ask. On a hot July day, had we come all the way to the South Side of Chicago on a wild ghost chase?
We gathered in a bedroom that contained a comfortable chair and had windows on both sides that looked out onto an old-fashioned garden; there was a porch on one side and a parkway on the other. The furniture, in keeping with the modest economic circumstances of the owners, was old and worn, but it was functional and the inhabitants did not seem to mind.
In a moment, Sybil Leek had slipped into trance. But instead of a ghost’s personality, the next voice we heard was Sybil’s own, although it sounded strange. Sybil was “out” of her own body, but able to observe the place and report back to us while still in trance.
The first thing she saw were maps, in a large round building somehow connected with the house we were in.
“Is there anyone around?” I asked.
“Yes,” Sybil intoned, “James Dugan.”
“What does he do here?”
“Come back to live.”
“When was that?”
“1912.”
“Is there anyone with him?”
“There is another man. McCloud.”
“Anyone else?”
“Lots of people.”
“Do they live in this house?”
“Three, four people...McCloud...maps...”
“All men?”
“No...girl...Judith...maidservant...”
“Is there an unhappy presence here?”
“Judith...she had no one here, no family...that man went away...Dugan went away...”
“How is she connected with this Dugan?”
“Loved him?”
“Were they married?”
“No. Lovers.”
“Did they have any children?”
There was a momentary silence, then Sybil continued in a drab, monotonous voice.
“The baby’s dead.”
“Does she know the baby’s dead?”
“She cries...baby cries...neglected...by Judith...guilty...”
“Does Judith know this?”
“Yes.”
“How old was the baby when it died?”
“A few weeks old.”
Strange, I thought, that Mrs. Stewart had fears for her own child from this source. She, too, had lost children at a tender age.
“What happened to the baby?”
“She put it down the steps.”
“What happened to the body then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is Judith still here?”
“She’s here.”
“Wh
ere?”
“This room...and up and down the steps. She’s sorry for her baby.”
“Can you talk to her?”
“No. She cannot leave here until she finds—You see if she could get Dugan—”
“Where is Dugan?”
“With the maps.”
“What is Dugan’s work?”
“Has to do with roads.”
“Is he dead?”
“Yes. She wants him here, but he is not here.”
“How did she die?”
“She ran away to the water...died by the water...but is here where she lived...baby died on the steps...downstairs...”
“What is she doing here, I mean how does she let people know she is around?”
“She pulls things...she cries...”
“And her Christian name?”
“Judith Vincent, I think. Twenty-one. Darkish, not white. From an island.”
“And the man? Is he white?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see her?”
“Yes.”
“Speak to her?”
“She doesn’t want to, but perhaps...”
“What year does she think this is?”
“1913.”
“Tell her this is the year 1965.”
Sybil informed the spirit in a low voice that this was 1965 and she need not stay here any longer, that Dugan was dead, too.
“She has to find him,” Sybil explained and I directed her to explain that she need only call out for her lover in order to be reunited with him “Over There.”
“She’s gone...” Sybil finally said, and breathed deeply.
A moment later she woke up and looked with astonishment at the strange room, having completely forgotten how we got here, or where we were.
There was no time for explanations now, as I still wanted to check out some of this material. The first one to sit down with me was the owner of the flat, Mrs. Alexander Stewart. A graduate of the University of Iowa, twenty-five years old, Alexandra Stewart works as a personnel director. She had witnessed the trance session and seemed visibly shaken. There was a good reason for this. Mrs. Stewart, you see, had met the ghost Sybil had described.
The Stewarts had moved into the second-floor apartment in the winter of 1964. The room we were now sitting in had been hers. Shortly after they moved in, Mrs. Stewart happened to be glancing up toward the French doors, when she saw a woman looking at her. The figure was about five feet three or four, and wore a blue-gray dress with a shawl, and a hood over her head, so that Mr. Stewart could not make out the woman’s features. The head seemed strangely bowed to her, almost as if the woman were doing penance.
I questioned Mrs. Stewart on the woman’s color in view of Sybil’s description of Judith. But Mrs. Stewart could not be sure; the woman could have been white or black. At the time, Mrs. Stewart had assumed it to be a reflection from the mirror, but when she glanced at the mirror, she did not see the figure in it.
When she turned her attention back to the figure, it had disappeared. It was toward evening and Mrs. Stewart was a little tired, yet the figure was very real to her. Her doubts were completely dispelled when the ghost returned about a month later. In the meantime she had moved the dresser that formerly stood in the line of sight farther down, so that the explanation of the reflection would simply not hold water. Again the figure appeared at the French doors. She looked very unhappy to Mrs. Stewart, who felt herself strangely drawn to the woman, almost as if she should help her in some way as yet unknown.
But the visual visitations were not all that disturbed the Stewarts. Soon they were hearing strange noises, too. Above all, there was the crying of a baby, which seemed to come from the second-floor rear bedroom. It could also be heard in the kitchen, though it was less loud there, and seemed to come from the walls. Several people had heard it and there was no natural cause to account for it. Then there were the footsteps. It sounded like someone walking down the back-stairs, the servant’s stairs, step by step, hesitatingly, and not returning, but just fading away!
They dubbed their ghostly guest “Elizabeth,” for want of a better name. Mrs. Stewart did not consider herself psychic, nor did she have any interest in such matters. But occasionally things had happened to her that defied natural explanations, such as the time just after she had lost a baby. She awoke form a heavy sleep to the intangible feeling of a presence in her room. She looked up and there, in the rocking chair across the room, she saw a woman, now dead, who had taken care of her when she herself was a child. Rocking gently in the chair, as if to reassure her, the Nanny held Mrs. Stewart’s baby in her arms. In a moment the vision was gone, but it had left Alexandra Stewart with a sense of peace. She knew her little one was well looked after.
The phenomena continued, however, and soon they were no longer restricted to the upstairs. On the first floor, in the living room, Mrs. Stewart heard the noise of someone breathing close to her. This had happened only recently, again in the presence of her husband and a friend. She asked them to hold their breath for a moment, and still she heard the strange breathing continuing as before. Neither of the men could hear it, or so they said. But the following day the guest came back with another man. He wanted to be sure of his observation before admitting that he too had heard the invisible person breathing close to him.
The corner of the living room where the breathing had been heard was also the focal point for strange knockings that faulty pipes could not explain. On one occasion they heard the breaking of glass, and yet there was no evidence that any glass had been broken. There was a feeling that someone other than those visible was present at times in their living room, and it made them a little nervous even though they did not fear their “Elizabeth.”
Alexandra’s young husband had grown up in the building trade, and now works as a photographer. He too has heard the footsteps on many occasions, and he knows the difference between footsteps and a house settling or timbers creaking. These were definitely human noises.
Mrs. Martha Vaughn is a bookkeeper who had been living in the building for two years. Hers is the apartment in the rear portion of the second floor, and it includes the back porch. Around Christmas of 1964 she heard a baby crying on the porch. It was a particularly cold night, so she went to investigate immediately. It was a weird, unearthly sound—to her it seemed right near the porch, but there was nobody around. The yard was deserted. The sound to her was the crying of a small child, not a baby, but perhaps a child of between one and three years of age. The various families shared the downstairs living room “like a kibbutz,” as Mrs. Stewart put it, so it was not out of the ordinary for several people to be in the downstairs area. On one such occasion Mrs. Vaughn also heard the breaking of the invisible glass.
Richard Vaughn is a laboratory technician. He too has heard the baby cry and the invisible glass break; he has heard pounding on the wall, as have the others. A skeptic at first, he tried to blame these noises on the steam pipes that heat the house. But when he listened to the pipes when they were acting up, he realized at once that the noises he had heard before were completely different.
“What about a man named Dugan? Or someone having to do with maps?” I asked.
“Well,” Vaughn said, and thought back, “I used to get mail here for people who once lived here, and of course I sent it all back to the post office. But I don’t recall the name Dugan. What I do recall was some mail from a Washington Bureau. You see, this house belongs to the University of Chicago and a lot of professors used to live here.”
“Professors?” I said with renewed interest.
Was Dugan one of them?
Several other people who lived in the house experienced strange phenomena. Barbara Madonna, who works three days a week as a secretary, used to live there too. But in May of that year she moved out. She had moved into the house in November of the previous year. She and her husband much admired the back porch when they first moved in, and had visions of sitting out there drinking a beer on warm e
venings. But soon their hopes were dashed by the uncanny feeling that they were not alone, that another presence was in their apartment, and especially out on the porch. Soon, instead of using the porch, they studiously avoided it, even if it meant walking downstairs to shake out a mop. Theirs was the third-floor apartment, directly above the Stewart apartment.
A girl by the name of Lolita Krol also had heard the baby crying. She lived in the building for a time and bitterly complained about the strange noises on the porch.
Douglas McConnor is a magazine editor, and he and his wife moved into the building in November of the year Barbara Madonna moved out, first to the second floor and later to the third. From the very first, when McConnor was still alone—his wife joined him in the flat after their marriage a little later—he felt extremely uncomfortable in the place. Doors and windows would fly open by themselves when there wasn’t any strong wind.
When he moved upstairs to the next floor, things were much quieter, except for Sunday nights, when noisy activities would greatly increase toward midnight. Footsteps, the sounds of people rushing about, and of doors opening and closing would disturb Mr. McConnor’s rest. The stairs were particularly noisy. But when he checked, he found that everybody was accounted for, and that no living person had caused the commotion.
It got to be so bad he started to hate Sunday nights.
I recounted Sybil’s trance to Mr. McConnor and the fact that a woman named Judith had been the central figure of it.
“Strange,” he observed, “but the story also fits that of my ex-wife, who deserted her children. She is of course very much alive now. Her name is Judith.”
Had Sybil intermingled the impression a dead maidservant with the imprint left behind by an unfit mother? Or were there two Judiths? At any rate the Stewarts did not complain further about uncanny noises, and the girl in the blue-gray dress never came back.
As he drove as out to the airport Carl Subak seemed unusually silent. What he had witnessed seemed to have left an impression on him and his philosophy of life.
“What I find so particularly upsetting,” he finally said, “is Sybil’s talking about a woman and a dead baby—all of it borne out afterwards by the people in the house. But Sybil did not know this. She couldn’t have.”