Ghosts
Page 37
At the time Danton Walker bought the house, it was in a sad state of disrepair, but with patience and much money he restored it to its former appearance. During the time when the house was being rebuilt, Walker stayed at a nearby inn but would occasionally take afternoon naps on an army cot in the upstairs part of his house. On these occasions he had the distinct impression of the presence of a Revolutionary soldier in the same room with him. Psychic impressions were nothing new for the late News columnist; he had lived with them all his life. During the first two years of his tenancy, Walker did not observe anything further, but by 1944 there had developed audible and even visible phenomena.
One afternoon, while resting in the front room downstairs, he heard a violent knocking at the front door caused by someone moving the heavy iron knocker. But he found no one at the front door. Others, including Walker’s man Johnny, were aroused many times by knocking at the door, only to find no one there. A worker engaged in the restoration of the house complained about hearing someone with heavy boots on walking up the stairs in mid-afternoon, at a time when he was alone in the place. The sound of heavy footfalls, of someone, probably male, wearing boots, kept recurring. During the summer of 1952, when Walker had guests downstairs, everyone heard the heavy thumping sound of someone falling down the stairs. Other, more tangible phenomena added to the eerie atmosphere of the place: the unmistakable imprint of a heavy man’s thumb on a thick pewter jar of the seventeenth century, inexplicable on any grounds; the mysterious appearance on a plate rail eight feet above the kitchen floor of a piece of glass that had been in the front-door window; pictures tumbling down from their places in the hallway; and a pewter pitcher thrown at a woman guest from a bookshelf behind the bed.
One evening, two Broadway friends of Danton Walker’s, both of them interested in the occult but not really believers, came to the house for the weekend. One of the men, L., a famous Broadway writer, insisted on spending the night in the haunted bedroom upstairs. An hour later the pajama-clad guest came down to Walker’s little studio at the other end of the estate, where Walker was now sleeping because of the disturbances, and demanded an end to the “silly pranks” he thought someone was playing on him. The light beside his bed was blinking on and off, while all the other lights in the house were burning steadily, he explained. Walker sent him back to bed with an explanation about erratic power supply in the country. A little over an hour later, L. came running back to Walker and asked to spend the rest of the night in Walker’s studio.
In the morning he explained the reasons for his strange behavior: he had been awakened from deep sleep by the sensation of someone slapping him violently about the face. Sitting bolt upright in bed, he noticed that the shirt he had placed on the back of a rocking chair was being agitated by the breeze. The chair was rocking ever so gently. It then occurred to L. that there could be no breeze in the room, since all the windows had been closed!
Many times, Walker had the impression that someone was trying desperately to get into the house, as if for refuge. He recalled that the children of a previous tenant had spoken of some disturbance near a lilac bush at the corner of the house. The original crude stone walk from the road to the house passed by this lilac bush and went on to the well, which, according to local tradition, had been used by Revolutionary soldiers.
Our group of investigators reached the house on November 22, 1952, on a particularly dark day, as if it had been staged that way. Toward 3 o’clock in the afternoon, we sat down for a séance in the upstairs bedroom. Within a matter of seconds, Eileen Garrett had disappeared, so to speak, from her body, and in her stead was another person. Sitting upright and speaking in halting tones with a distinct Indian accent, Uvani, one of Mrs. Garrett’s spirit guides, addressed us and prepared us for the personality that would follow him.
“I am confronted myself with a rather restless personality, a very strange personality, and one that might appear to be, in his own life, perhaps not quite of the right mind,” he explained to us. The control personality then added that he was having difficulty maintaining a calm atmosphere owing to the great disturbance the entity was bringing into the house. As the control spoke, the medium’s hands and legs began to shake. He explained that she was experiencing the physical condition of the entity that would soon speak to us, a disease known as classical palsy. Dr. Laidlaw nodded and asked the entity to proceed.
A moment later, the body of Eileen Garrett was occupied by an entirely new personality. Shaking uncontrollably, as if in great pain, the entity tried to sit up in the chair but was unable to maintain balance and eventually crashed to the floor. There, one of the legs continued to vibrate violently, which is one of the symptoms of palsy, a disease in which muscular control is lost. For two minutes or more, only inarticulate sounds came from the entranced medium’s lips. Eventually we were able to induce the possessing entity to speak to us. At first there were only halting sounds, as if the entity were in great pain. From time to time the entity touched his leg, and then his head, indicating that those were areas in which he experienced pain. Dr. Laidlaw assured the personality before us that we had come as friends and that he could speak with us freely and without fear. Realizing what we were attempting to convey, the entity broke into tears, extremely agitated, and at the same time tried to come close to where Dr. Laidlaw sat.
We could at last understand most of the words. The entity spoke English, but with a marked Polish accent. The voice sounded rough, uncouth, not at all like Eileen Garrett’s own.
“Friend…friend…mercy. I know…I know…,” and he pointed in the direction of Danton Walker. As we pried, gently and patiently, more information came from the entity on the floor before us. “Stones, stones…. Don’t let them take me. I can’t talk.” With that he pointed to his head, then to his tongue.
“No stones. You will not be stoned,” Dr. Laidlaw assured him.
“No beatin’?”
Laidlaw assured the entity that he could talk, and that we were friends. He then asked what the entity’s name might be.
“He calls me. I have to get out. I cannot go any further. In God’s name, I cannot go any further.”
With that, the entity touched Danton Walker’s hands. Walker was visibly moved. “I will protect you,” he said simply.
The entity kept talking about “stones,” and we assumed that he was talking about stones being thrown at him. Actually, he was talking about stones under which he had hidden some documents. But that came later. Meanwhile he pointed at his mouth and said, “Teeth gone,” and he graphically demonstrated how they had been kicked in. “Protect me,” the entity said, coming closer to Walker again. Dr. Laidlaw asked whether he lived here. A violent gesture was his answer. “No, oh, no. I hide here. Cannot leave here.”
It appeared that he was hiding from another man and that he knew the plans, which he had hidden in a faraway spot. “Where did you hide the plans?” Walker demanded.
“Give me map,” the entity replied, and when Walker handed him a writing pad and a pen, the entity, using Mrs. Garrett’s fingers, of course, picked it up as if he were handling a quill. The drawing, despite its unsteady and vacillating lines due to palsy, was nevertheless a valid representation of where the entity had hidden the papers. “In your measure, Andreas hid…not in the house…timber house, log house…under the stones…fifteen stones…plans for the whole shifting of men and ammunitions I have for the French. Plans I have to deliver to log house, right where the sun strikes window. Where sun strikes the window…fifteen stones under in log house…there I have put away plans.”
This was followed by a renewed outburst of fear, during which the entity begged us not to allow him to be taken again. After much questioning, the entity told us that he was in need of protection, that he was Polish and had come to this country as a young man. He threw his arms around Walker, saying that he was like a brother to him. “Gospodin, gospodin,” the entity said, showing his joy at finding who he thought was his brother again. “Me André, yo
u Hans,” he exclaimed. Walker was somewhat nonplussed at the idea of being Hans. “My brother” the entity said, “he killed too…I die…big field, battle. Like yesterday, like yesterday…I lie here…English all over. They are terrible.”
“Were you with the Americans?” Dr. Laidlaw asked.
Apparently the word meant nothing to him. “No, no. Big word. Republic Protection. The stars in the flag, the stars in the flag. Republic…. They sing.”
“How long have you been hiding in this house?”
“I go away a little, he stays, he talk, he here part of the time.”
Uvani returned at this point, taking Andreas out of Eileen’s body, explaining that the Polish youngster had been a prisoner. Apparently, he had been in other parts of the country with the French troops. He had been friendly with various people in the Revolutionary Army, serving as a jackboot for all types of men, a good servant. But he hadn’t understood for whom he was working. “He refers to an André.” Uvani went on to say, “with whom he is in contact for some time, and he likes this André very much because of the similar name…because he is Andrewski. There is this similarity to André. It is therefore he has been used, as far as I can see, as a cover-up for this man. Here then is the confusion. He is caught two or three times by different people because of his appearance; he is a dead-ringer, or double. His friend André disappears, and he’s lost and does what he can with this one and that one and eventually he finds himself in the hands of the British troops. He is known to have letters and plans, and these he wants me to tell you were hidden by him due east of where you now find yourselves, in what he says was a temporary building of sorts in which were housed different caissons. In this there is also a rest house for guards. In this type kitchen he will not reveal the plans and is beaten mercilessly. His limbs are broken and he passes out, no longer in the right mind, but with a curious break on one side of the body, and his leg is damaged. It would appear that he is from time to time like one in a coma—he wakes, dreams, and loses himself again, and I gather from the story that he is not always aware of people.”
We sat in stunned silence as Uvani explained the story to us. Then we joined in prayer to release the unfortunate one. To the best of my knowledge, the house has been free from further disturbances ever since. The papers, of course, were no longer in their hiding place. French auxiliary troops under Rochambeau and Lafayette had been all over the land, and papers must have gone back and forth between French detachments and their American allies. Some of these papers may have been of lesser importance and could have been entrusted even to so simple a man as Andreas.
The years went by, Danton Walker himself passed away, and the house changed hands, but the pewter jar which Danton had entrusted to my care was still in my hands. Johnny, who had served the late columnist so well for all those years, refused to take it. To him, it meant that the ghost might attach himself to him now. Under the circumstances, I kept the jar and placed it in a showcase in my home along with many other antiquities and did not give the matter much thought. But roughly on the twentieth anniversary of the original expedition to the house in Rockland County, I decided to test two good mediums I work with, to see whether any of the past secrets clinging to the pewter might yet be unraveled.
On September 25, 1972, I handed Shawn Robbins a brown paper bag in which the pewter jar had been placed. But Shawn could not make contact, so I took out the object and placed it directly into her hands. “I pick up three initials and a crest,” she began. “The first thing I see are these initials, someone’s name, like B.A.R.; then I see a man with a beard, and he may have been very important. There is another man, whom I like better, however. They look Nordic to me, because of the strange helmets they wear.”
“The person you sense here—is he a civilian or a soldier?”
“I’m thinking of the word ‘crown.’ There is someone here who wears a crown; the period is the 1700s, perhaps the 1600s. The King wore a crown and a white, high neck, like a ruffled collar, and then armor. That is one of the layers I get from this object.”
I realized, of course, that the object was already old when the American Revolution took place. Danton Walker had acquired it in the course of his collecting activities, and it had no direct connection with the house itself.
It seemed to me that Shawn was psychometrizing the object quite properly, getting down to the original layer when it was first created. The description of a seventeenth-century English king was indeed quite correct. “The armor is a rough color, but all in one piece and worn over something else, some velvet, I think. On his head, there is a crown, and yet I see him also wearing a hat.” I couldn’t think of a better description of the way King Charles II dressed, and the pewter pitcher originated during his reign.
“What are some of the other layers you get?” I asked.
“There is a man here who looks as if he either broke his neck or was hanged. This man is the strongest influence I feel with this object. He is bearded and slightly baldish in front.”
“Stick with him then and try to find out who he was.”
Shawn gave the object another thorough investigation, touching it all over with her hands, and then reported, “He is important in the sense that the object is haunted by him. He was murdered by a person who had an object in his hand that looks like a scepter to me, but I don’t know what it is. The man in back of him killed him: he got it in the back of his neck. The man who killed him is in a position of power.”
“What about the victim—what was his position?”
“The only initials I pick up are something like Pont, or perhaps Boef.”
While this did not correspond to Andreas, it seemed interesting to me that she picked up two French names. I recalled that the unlucky Polish jackboot had served the French auxiliaries. “Can you get any country of origin?”
“It is hard to say, but the man who was murdered had something to do with England. Perhaps the man who killed him did.”
I then instructed Shawn to put her thumb into the dent in the wall of the pitcher where the ghostly hand of Andreas had made a depression. Again, Shawn came up with the name Boef. Since I wasn’t sure whether she was picking up the original owner of the pewter pitcher or perhaps one of its several owners, I asked her to concentrate on the last owner and the time during which he had had the object in his house.
“The letter V is an important initial here,” she said, “and I sense a boat coming up.”
I couldn’t help thinking of the sloop Vulture, which Major André had wanted to use for his getaway but didn’t, and which saved the life of General Arnold. “Do you feel any suffering with this object?” I asked.
“Yes,” Shawn replied. “A man was murdered, and a woman was involved: a woman, an older person, and the murderer; this was premeditated murder. The victim is a good-looking man, not too old, with a moustache or beard, and it looks as if they are taking something away from him which is part of him, something that belonged to him.”
“Was it something he had on his person?”
“When he was murdered, he didn’t have it on him, and it is still buried somewhere,” Shawn replied.
Shawn, of course, had no idea that there was a connection between the object she was psychometrizing and the Rockland County Ghost, which I had written about in the 1960s. “What is buried?” I asked, becoming more intrigued by her testimony as the minutes rolled by.
“There is something he owns that is buried somewhere, and I think it goes back to a castle or house. It is not buried inside but outside. It is buried near a grave, and whoever buried it was very smart.”
“Why was he killed?” I asked.
“I see him, and then another man, besides, who is involved. He was murdered because he was a friend of this man and his cause. They are wearing something funny on their heads. One of them is holding up his two hands, with an object with a face on it, a very peculiar thing.”
“Can you tell me where the object he buried is located?”
“Who is this ‘A’?”
“‘K’ would be another initial of importance. This is the hat they are wearing.”
Shawn then drew what looked to me like the rough outlines of a fur-braided hat, the kind soldiers in the late eighteenth century would wear in the winter. The initial “A” of course startled me, since it might belong to Andreas. The “K” I thought might refer to Kosciuszko, the leader of the Polish auxiliary forces in America during the Revolutionary War, who wore fur hats. “The hat is part metal, but there is a red feather on it, actually red and green,” she said. The colors were quite correct for the period involved.
“This man is in love with an older woman; he is a very good looking fellow. This is how he looks to me.” Shawn drew a rough portrait of a man in the wig and short tie of an eighteenth-century gentleman. She then drew the woman also, and mentioned that she wore a flower or some sort of emblem. It reminded her of a flower or a crest and was important. “It is a crude way of saying something, and the letters V.A.R. come in here also. A crest with V.A.R. across it,” Shawn said.*
“Tell me Shawn,” I said, steering her in a somewhat different direction, “has there ever been any psychic manifestation associated with this object?”
“Somebody’s heavy footsteps are associated with this. Things would move in a house. By themselves.”
“Is there any entity attached to this object?”
“I want to say the name Victor.” Was she getting Walker?
As I questioned Shawn further about the object, it became increasingly clear that she was speaking of the period when it was first made. She described, in vivid words, the colors and special designs on the uniforms of the men who were involved with the object. All of it fit the middle or late seventeenth century but obviously had nothing to do with the Revolutionary War. I was not surprised, since I had already assumed that some earlier layer would be quite strong. But then she mentioned a boat and remarked that it was going up a river. “I must be way off on this,” Shawn said, somewhat disappointed, “because I see a windmill.”