Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  The gist of it was a request to go to “the white house in the country” and find certain papers in a metal box. “This will prove my innocence. I am not guilty of treason. There is written proof. Written October 18, 1802 or 1803.” The message was specific enough, but the papers of course were long since gone.

  The white house in the country would be the Jumel Mansion.

  I thanked Alice and decided to hold another investigation at the site of the Cafe Bizarre, since the restless spirit of the late Vice-President of the United States had evidently decided to be heard once more.

  At the same time I was approached by Mel Bailey of Metromedia Television to produce a documentary about New York haunted houses, and I decided to combine these efforts and investigate the Burr stables in the full glare of television cameras.

  On June 12, 1967 I brought Sybil Leek down to the Bizarre, having flown her in from California two days before. Mrs. Leek had no way of knowing what was expected of her, or where she would be taken. Nevertheless, as early as June 1, when I saw her in Hollywood, she had remarked to me spontaneously that she “knew” the place I would take her to on our next expedition—then only a possibility—and she described it in detail. On June 9, after her arrival in New York, she telephoned and again gave me her impressions.

  “I sense music and laughter and drumbeat,” she began, and what better is there to describe the atmosphere at the Cafe Bizarre these nights? “It is a three-story place, not a house but selling something; two doors opening, go to the right-hand side of the room and something is raised up from the floor, where the drumbeat is.”

  Entirely correct; the two doors lead into the elongated room, with the raised stage at the end.

  “Three people…one has a shaped beard, aquiline nose, he is on the raised part of the floor; very dark around the eyes, an elegant man, lean, and there are two other people near him, one of whom has a name starting with a Th….”

  In retrospect one must marvel at the accuracy of the description, for surely Sybil Leek had no knowledge of either the place, its connection with Burr, nor the description given by the other witnesses of the man they had seen there.

  This was a brief description of her first impressions given to me on the telephone. The following day I received a written account of her nocturnal impressions from Mrs. Leek. This was still two days before she set foot onto the premises!

  In her statement, Mrs. Leek mentioned that she could not go off to sleep late that night, and fell into a state of semiconsciousness, with a small light burning near her bed. Gradually she became aware of the smell of fire, or rather the peculiar smell when a gun has just been fired. At the same time she felt an acute pain, as if she had been wounded in the left side of the back.

  Trying to shake off the impression, Mrs. Leek started to do some work at her typewriter, but the presence persisted. It seemed to her as if a voice was trying to reach her, a voice speaking a foreign language and calling out a name, Theo.

  I questioned Mrs. Leek about the foreign language she heard spoken clairvoyantly.

  “I had a feeling it was French,” she said.

  Finally she had drifted into deeper sleep. But by Saturday afternoon the feeling of urgency returned. This time she felt as if someone wanted her to go down to the river, not the area where I live (uptown), but “a long way the other way,” which is precisely where the Burr stables were situated.

  * * *

  Finally the big moment had arrived. It was June 12, and the television crews had been at work all morning in and around the Cafe Bizarre to set up cameras and sound equipment so that the investigation could be recorded without either hitch or interruption. We had two cameras taking turns, to eliminate the need for reloading. The central area beneath the “haunted stage” was to be our setting, and the place was reasonably well lit, certainly brighter than it normally is when the customers are there at night.

  Everything had been meticulously prepared. My wife Catherine was to drive our white Citroën down to the Bizarre with Sybil at her side. Promptly at 3 P.M. the car arrived, Sybil Leek jumped out and was greeted at the outer door by me, while our director, Art Forrest, gave the signal for the cameras to start. “Welcome to the Cafe Bizarre,” I intoned and led my psychic friend into the semidark inside. Only the central section was brightly lit.

  I asked her to walk about the place and gather impressions at will.

  “I’m going to those drums over there,” Sybil said firmly, and walked toward the rear stage as if she knew the way.

  “Yes—this is the part. I feel cold. Even though I have not been here physically, I know this place.”

  “What do we have to do here, do you think?” I asked.

  “I think we have to relieve somebody, somebody who’s waited a long time.”

  “Where is this feeling strongest?”

  “In the rear, where this extra part seems to be put on.”

  Sybil could not know this, but an addition to the building was made years after the original had been constructed, and it was precisely in that part that we were now standing.

  She explained that there was more than one person involved, but one in particular was dominant; that this was something from the past, going back into another century. I then asked her to take a chair, and Mrs. Renée Allmen and my wife Catherine joined us around a small table.

  This was going to be a séance, and Sybil was in deep trance within a matter of perhaps five minutes, since she and I were well in tune with one another, and it required merely a signal on my part to allow her to “slip out.”

  At first there was a tossing of the head, the way a person moves when sleep is fitful.

  Gradually, the face changed its expression to that of a man, a stern face, perhaps even a suspicious face. The hissing sound emanating from her tightly closed lips gradually changed into something almost audible, but I still could not make it out.

  Patiently, as the cameras ground away precious color film, I asked “whoever it might be” to speak louder and to communicate through the instrument of Mrs. Leek.

  “Theo!” the voice said now. It wasn’t at all like Sybil’s own voice.

  “Theo…I’m lost…where am I?” I explained that this was the body of another person and that we were in a house in New York City.

  “Where’s Theo?” the voice demanded with greater urgency. “Who are you?”

  I explained my role as a friend, hoping to establish contact through the psychic services of Mrs. Leek, then in turn asked who the communicator was. Since he had called out for Theo, he was not Theo, as I had first thought.

  “Bertram Delmar. I want Theo,” came the reply.

  “Why do you want Theo?”

  “Lost.”

  Despite extensive research I was not able to prove that Bertram Delmar ever existed or that this was one of the cover names used by Aaron Burr; but it is possible that he did, for Burr was given to the use of code names during his political career and in sensitive correspondence.

  The Cafe Bizarre—once Aaron Burr’s stables

  What was far more important was the immediate call for Theo, and the statement that she was “lost.” Theodosia Burr was Burr’s only daughter and truly the apple of his eye. When she was lost at sea on her way to join him, in 1813, he became a broken man. Nothing in the up-and-down life of the American Phoenix was as hard a blow of fate than the loss of his beloved Theo.

  The form “Theo,” incidentally, rather than the full name Theodosia, is attested to by the private correspondence between Theodosia and her husband, Joseph Alston, governor of South Carolina. In a rare moment of foreboding, she had hinted that she might soon die. This letter was written six months before her disappearance in a storm at sea and was signed, “Your wife, your fond wife, Theo.”

  After the séance, I asked Dr. Samuel Engle Burr whether there was any chance that the name Theo might apply to some other woman.

  Dr. Burr pointed out that the Christian name Theodosia occurred in modern times only
in the Burr family. It was derived from Theodosius Bartow, father of Aaron Burr’s first wife, who was mother of the girl lost at sea. The mother had been Theodosia the elder, after her father, and the Burrs had given their only daughter the same unusual name.

  After her mother’s passing in 1794, the daughter became her father’s official hostess and truly “the woman in the house.” More than that, she was his confidante and shared his thoughts a great deal more than many other daughters might have. Even after her marriage to Alston and subsequent move to South Carolina, they kept in touch, and her family was really all the family he had. Thus their relationship was a truly close one, and it is not surprising that the first thought, after his “return from the dead,” so to speak, would be to cry out for his Theo!

  I wasn’t satisfied with his identification as “Bertram Delmar,” and insisted on his real name. But the communicator brushed my request aside and instead spoke of another matter.

  “Where’s the gun?”

  “What gun?”

  I recalled Sybil’s remark about the smell of a gun having just been fired. I had to know more.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Hiding.”

  “What are you hiding from?”

  “You.”

  Was he mistaking me for someone else?

  “I’m a friend,” I tried to explain, but the voice interrupted me harshly.

  “You’re a soldier.”

  In retrospect one cannot help feeling that the emotionally disturbed personality was reliving the agony of being hunted down by U.S. soldiers prior to his arrest, confusing it, perhaps, in his mind with still another unpleasant episode when he was being hunted, namely, after he had shot Hamilton!

  I decided to pry farther into his personal life in order to establish identity more firmly.

  “Who is Theo? What is she to you?”

  “I have to find her, take her away…it is dangerous, the French are looking for me.”

  “Why would the French be looking for you?” I asked in genuine astonishment. Neither I nor Mrs. Leek had any notion of this French connection at that time.

  “Soldiers watch….”

  Through later research I learned that Burr had indeed been in France for several years, from 1808 to 1812. At first, his desire to have the Spanish American colonies freed met with approval by the then still revolutionary Bonaparte government. But when Napoleon’s brother Joseph Napoleon was installed as King of Spain, and thus also ruler of the overseas territories, the matter became a political horse of another color; now Burr was advocating the overthrow of a French-owned government, and that could no longer be permitted.

  Under the circumstances, Burr saw no point in staying in France, and made arrangements to go back to New York. But he soon discovered that the French government wouldn’t let him go so easily. “All sorts of technical difficulties were put in his way,” writes Dr. Samuel Engle Burr, “both the French and the American officials were in agreement to the effect that the best place for the former Vice-President was within the Empire of France.” Eventually, a friendly nobleman very close to Napoleon himself managed to get Burr out. But it is clear that Burr was under surveillance all that time and probably well aware of it!

  I continued my questioning of the entity speaking through an entranced Sybil Leek, the entity who had glibly claimed to be a certain Bertram Delmar, but who knew so many things only Aaron Burr would have known.

  What year was this, I asked.

  “Eighteen ten.”

  In 1810, Burr had just reached France. The date fit in well with the narrative of soldiers watching him.

  “Why are you frightened?” I asked.

  “The soldiers, the soldiers….”

  “Have you done anything wrong?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend, sent to help you!”

  “Traitor! You…you betrayed me….”

  “Tell me what you are doing, what are you trying to establish here?”

  “Traitor!”

  Later, as I delved into Burr’s history in detail, I thought that this exchange between an angry spirit and a cool interrogator might refer to Burr’s anger at General James Wilkinson, who had indeed posed as a friend and then betrayed Burr. Not the “friend” ostensibly helping Burr set up his western colony, but the traitor who later caused soldiers to be sent to arrest him. It certainly fit the situation. One must understand that in the confused mental state a newly contacted spirit personality often finds himself, events in his life take on a jumbled and fragmentary quality, often flashing on the inner mental screen like so many disconnected images from the emotional reel of his life. It is then the job of the psychic researcher to sort it all out.

  * * *

  I asked the communicator to “tell me all about himself” in the hope of finding some other wedge to get him to admit he was Aaron Burr.

  “I escaped…from the French.”

  “Where are the French?”

  “Here.”

  This particular “scene” was apparently being re-enacted in his mind, during the period he lived in France.

  “Did you escape from any particular French person?” I asked.

  “Jacques…de la Beau….”

  The spelling is mine. It might have been different, but it sounded like “de la Beau.”

  “Who is Jacques de la Beau?”

  Clenched teeth, hissing voice—“I’m…not…telling you. Even…if you…kill me.”

  I explained I had come to free him, and what could I do for him?

  “Take Theo away…leave me…I shall die….”

  Again I questioned him about his identity. Now he switched his account and insisted he was French, born at a place called Dasney near Bordeaux. Even while this information was coming from the medium’s lips, I felt sure it was a way to throw me off his real identity. This is not unusual in some cases. When I investigated the ghost of General Samuel Edward McGowan some years ago, it took several weeks of trance sessions until he abandoned an assumed name and admitted an identity that could later be proven. Even the discarnates have their pride and emotional “hangups.”

  The name Jacques de la Beau puzzled me. After the séance, I looked into the matter and discovered that a certain Jacques Prevost (pronounced pre-voh) had been first husband of Aaron Burr’s first wife, Theodosia. Burr, in fact, raised their two sons as his own, and there was a close link between them and Burr in later years. But despite his French name, Prevost was in the British service.

  * * *

  When Burr lived in New York, he had opened his home to the daughter of a French admiral, from whom she had become separated as a consequence of the French Revolution. This girl, Natalie, became the close companion of Burr’s daughter Theodosia, and the two girls considered themselves sisters. Natalie’s father was Admiral de Lage de Volade. This name, too, has sounds similar to the “de la Beau” I thought I had understood. It might have been “de la voh” or anything in between the two sounds. Could the confused mind of the communicator have drawn from both Prevost and de Lage de Volade? Both names were of importance in Burr’s life.

  “Tell me about your wife,” I demanded now.

  “No. I don’t like her.”

  I insisted, and he, equally stubborn, refused.

  “Is she with you?” I finally said.

  “Got rid of her,” he said, almost with joy in the voice.

  “Why?”

  “No good to me…deceived me…married….”

  There was real disdain and anger in the voice now.

  Clearly, the communicator was speaking of the second Mrs. Burr. The first wife had passed away a long time before the major events in his life occurred. It is perfectly true that Burr “got rid of her” (through two separations and one divorce action), and that she “deceived him,” or rather tricked him into marrying her: He thought she was wealthier than she actually was, and their main difficulties were about money. In those days people did not always marry for
love, and it was considered less immoral to have married someone for money than to deceive someone into marrying by the prospects of large holdings when they were in fact small. Perhaps today we think differently and even more romantically about such matters; in the 1830s, a woman’s financial standing was as negotiable as a bank account.

  * * *

  The more I probed, the more excited the communicator became; the more I insisted on identification, the more cries of “Theo! Theo!” came from the lips of Sybil Leek.

  When I had first broached the subject of Theo’s relationship to him, he had quickly said she was his sister. I brought this up again, and in sobbing tones he admitted this was not true. But he was not yet ready to give me the full story.

  “Let me go,” he sobbed.

  “Not until you can go in peace,” I insisted. “Tell me about yourself. You are proud of yourself, are you not?”

  “Yes,” the voice came amid heavy sobbing, “the disgrace…the disgrace….”

  “I will tell the world what you want me to say. I’m here as your spokesman. Use this chance to tell the world your side of the facts!”

  There was a moment of hesitation, then the voice, gentler started up again.

  “I…loved…Theo…. I have to…find her….”

  The most important thought, evidently, was the loss of his girl. Even his political ambitions took a back seat to his paternal love.

  “Is this place we’re in part of your property?”

  Forlornly, the voice said,

  “I had…a lot…from the river…to here.”

  Later I checked this statement with Mrs. Leroy Campbell, curator of the Morris-Jumel mansion, and a professional historian who knew the period well.

  “Yes, this is true,” Mrs. Campbell confirmed, “Burr’s property extended from the river and Varick Street eastward.”

  “But the lot from the river to here does not belong to a Bertram Delmar,” I said to the communicator. “Why do you wish to fool me with names that do not exist?”

  I launched this as a trial balloon. It took off.