Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  The matter became interesting again. I asked her what became of “A.” “There are three or four men in the boat,” Shawn said. “They are transporting someone, and I think it is ‘A’ on his way to his execution.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything—that is the sad part of it. He was just a victim of circumstances. He is an innocent victim.”

  “Who did his captors think he was?”

  “An important person.”

  “Did this important person commit a crime or did he have something they wanted?”

  “He had nothing on him, but the initials K.A.E.A. are of importance here. That is an important name. But they have the wrong man. But they kill him anyway. There is a design on his cloak, which looks to me like the astrological Cancer symbol, like the crab.”

  “What happens further on?”

  “They are leaving the windmill now. But something is going to happen because they are headed that way. Other people are going to die because of this. Many.” Without my telling her to, Shawn touched the object again. “I feel the period when Marie Antoinette lived. I have the feeling they are going off in that direction. They are going to France. There is a general here, and I get the initials L.A.M.* He, too, was killed in the war.”

  “But why is ‘A’ brought to this general?”

  “Well, ‘A’ looks to me as if he had changed clothes, and now he wears black with a little piece of white here. They are obviously conferring about something. ‘A’ is conferring with someone else. It doesn’t look like someone in the military, and he is hard to describe, but I never saw a uniform like this before. He has on a beret and a medal.”

  “What about ‘A’? Is he a civilian or an officer?”

  “Truthfully, he is really an officer. I think this is what the whole thing is all about. I think they captured someone really important. He probably was an officer in disguise, not wearing the right coloring. It is treason, what else? Could he have sold papers, you know, secrets?”

  Shawn felt now that she had gotten as much as she could from the object. I found her testimony intriguing, to say the least. There were elements of the André story in it, and traces of Andreas’s life as well. Just as confusing, it seemed to me, as the mistaken-identity problems which had caused Andreas’ downfall. All this time, Shawn had no idea that Major André was involved in my investigation, no idea of what the experiment was all about. As far as she was concerned, she had been asked to psychometrize an old pewter jar, and nothing else.

  On October 3, 1972, I repeated the experiment with Ethel Johnson Meyers. Again, the pitcher was in the brown paper bag. Again, the medium requested to hold it directly in her hands. “I see three women and a man with heavy features,” she began immediately. “Something is going on, but the language doesn’t sound English. Now there is a man here who is hurt, blood running from his left eye.”

  “How did he get hurt?”

  “There are some violent vibrations here. I hear loud talking, and I feel as if he had been hit with this pitcher. He has on a waistcoat or brown jacket, either plush or velveteen, and a wide collar. Black stockings and purple shoes. Knickers that go down to here, and of the same material as the coat.”

  “Can you pinpoint the period?”

  “I would guess around the time of Napoleon,” Ethel said, not altogether sure. That too was interesting since she obviously wasn’t judging the jar (which was far older than the Napoleonic period) by its appearance. As far as the Major André incident was concerned, she was about twenty years off. “I am hearing German spoken,” Ethel continued. “I think this object has seen death and horror, and I hear violence and screams. There is the feeling of murder, and a woman is involved. I hear a groan, and now there is more blood. I feel there is also a gash on the neck. Once in a while, I hear an English word spoken with a strange accent. I hear the name Mary, and I think this is at least the seventeenth century.”

  I realized that she was speaking of the early history of the object, and I directed her to tune in on some later vibrations. “Has this object ever been in the presence of a murder?” I asked directly.

  “This man’s fate is undeserved. He has been crossing over from a far distance into a territory where he is not wanted by many, and he is not worthy of that protection which he has. He has not deserved this; he has no political leanings; he has not offended anyone purposely. His presence is unwanted. God in heaven knows that.”

  It sounded more and more the way Andreas spoke when Eileen Garrett was his instrument. Protection! That was the word he kept repeating, more than any other word, protection from those who would do him injustice and hurt him.

  “What nationality is he?”

  “It sounds Italian.”

  “What name does he give you?”

  “Rey…Rey.† …Man betrayed.” Ethel was sinking now into a state of semi-trance, and I noticed some peculiar facial changes coming over her; it was almost as if the entity were directing her answers.

  “Betrayed by whom?” I asked, bending over to hear every word.

  “The ones that make me feel safe.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Bloody Englishmen.”

  “Who are your friends?”

  “I’m getting away from English.”

  “Is there something this person has that someone else wants?”

  “Yes, that is how it is.”

  “Who is this person to whom all these terrible things are happening.”

  “Coming over. A scapegoat.”

  Again, Ethel managed to touch both the earlier layer and the involvement with the Revolutionary period, but in a confusing and intertwined manner which made it difficult for me to sort out what she was telling me. Still, there were elements that were quite true and which she could not have known, since she, like Shawn, had no idea what the object was or why I was asking her to psychometrize it. It was clear to me that no ghostly entity had attached to the object, however, and that whatever the two mediums had felt was in the past. A little lighter in my heart, I replaced the object in my showcase, hoping that it would in time acquire some less violent vibrations from the surrounding objects.

  As for Andreas and André, one had a brief moment in the limelight, thanks chiefly to psychical research, while the other is still a major figure in both American and British history. After his execution on October 2, 1780, at Tappan, André was buried at the foot of the gallows. In 1821 his body was exhumed and taken to England and reburied at Westminster Abbey. By 1880 tempers had sufficiently cooled and British-American friendship was firmly enough established to permit the erection of a monument to the event on the spot where the three militia men had come across Major André. Actually, the monument itself was built in 1853, but on the occasion of the centennial of André’s capture, a statue and bronze plaque were added and the monument surrounded with a protective metal fence. It stands near a major road and can easily be observed when passing by car. It is a beautiful monument, worthy of the occasion. There is only one thing wrong with it, be it ever so slight: It stands at the wrong spot. My good friend, Elliott Schryver, the eminent editor and scholar, pointed out the actual spot at some distance to the east.

  In studying Harry Hansen’s book on the area, I have the impression that he shares this view. In order to make a test of my own, we stopped by the present monument, and I asked Ingrid to tell me what she felt. I had purposely told her that the spot had no direct connection with anything else we were doing that day, so she could not consciously sense what the meaning of our brief stop was. Walking around the monument two or three times, touching it, and “taking in” the atmosphere psychically, she finally came up to me, shook her head, and said, “I am sorry, Hans, there is absolutely nothing here. Nothing at all.”

  But why not? If the Revolutionary taverns can be moved a considerable distance to make them more accessible to tourists, why shouldn’t a monument be erected where everyone can see it instead of in some thicket where a prospect
ive visitor might break a leg trying to find it? Nobody cares, least of all Major André.

  * 16

  Benedict Arnold’s Friend

  “I WAS COMPLETELY FASCINATED by your recent book,” read a letter by Gustav J. Kramer of Claverack, New York. Mr. Kramer, it developed, was one of the leading lights of the Chamber of Commerce in the town of Hudson and wrote a column for the Hudson Register-Star on the side. “During the past three years I have specialized in writing so-called ghost stories for my column,” he explained. “We have a number of haunted houses in this historic section of the Hudson Valley. President Martin Van Buren’s home is nearby and is honestly reputed to be the scene of some highly disturbing influences. Aaron Burr, the killer of Alexander Hamilton, hid out in a secret room of this estate and has reliably been reported to have been seen on numerous occasions wandering through the upper halls.”

  This was in 1963, and I had not yet investigated the phenomena at Aaron Burr’s stables in lower Manhattan at the time. Perhaps what people saw in the house was an imprint of Burr’s thought forms.

  From this initial letter developed a lively correspondence between us, and for nearly two years I promised to come to the Hudson Valley and do some investigating, provided that Mr. Kramer came up with something more substantial than hearsay.

  It wasn’t until July 1965 that he came up with what he considered “the house.” He explained that it had a cold spot in it and that the owner, a Mrs. Dorothea Connacher, a teacher by profession, was a quiet and reserved lady who had actually had a visual experience in the attic of this very old house.

  My brother-in-law’s untimely and unexpected death postponed our journey once again, so we—meaning Ethel Johnson Meyers, the medium, my wife Catherine, and I—weren’t ready to proceed to Columbia County, New York, until early February 1966. GHOST HUNTER VISITS HUDSON, Gus Kramer headlined in his column. He met us at the exit from the Taconic Parkway and took us to lunch before proceeding further.

  It was early afternoon when we arrived at Mrs. Connacher’s house, which was situated a few minutes away on a dirt road, standing on a fair-sized piece of land and surrounded by tall, old trees. Because of its isolation, one had the feeling of being far out in the country, when in fact the thruway connecting New York with Albany passes a mere ten minutes away. The house is gleaming white, or nearly so, for the ravages of time have taken their toll. Mr. and Mrs. Connacher bought it twenty years prior to our visit, but after divorcing Mr. Connacher, she was unable to keep it up as it should have been, and gradually the interior especially fell into a state of disrepair. The outside still showed its noble past, those typically colonial manor house traits, such as the columned entrance, the Grecian influence in the construction of the roof, and the beautiful colonial shutters.

  New York State in the dead of winter is a cold place indeed. As we rounded the curve of the dirt road and saw the manor house looming at the end of a short carriage way, we wondered how the lady of the house was able to heat it. After we were inside, we realized she had difficulties in that respect.

  For the moment, however, I halted a few yards away from the house and took some photographs of this visually exciting old house. Ethel Johnson Meyers knew nothing about the house or why we were there. In fact, part of our expedition was for the purpose of finding a country home to live in. Ethel thought we were taking her along to serve as consultant in the purchase of a house, since she herself owns a country home and knows a great deal about houses. Of course, she knew that there were a couple of interesting places en route, but she took that for granted, having worked with me for many years. Even while we were rounding the last bend and the house became visible to us, Ethel started getting her first impressions of the case. I asked her to remain seated in the car and to tell me about it.

  “I see two people, possibly a third. The third person is young, a woman with a short, rather upturned nose and large eyes, but she seems to be dimmer than the impression of the men. The men are very strong. One of them has a similar upturned nose and dark skin. He wears a white wig. There is also an older woman. She seems to look at me as if she wants to say, Why are you staring at me that way?” Ethel explained to the spirit in an earnest tone of voice why she had come to the house, that she meant no harm and had come as a friend, and if there were anything she could do for them, they should tell her.

  While this one-sided conversation was going on, Catherine and I sat in the car, waiting for it to end. Gus Kramer had gone ahead to announce our arrival to Mrs. Connacher.

  “What sort of clothing is the woman wearing—I mean the older woman?” I asked.

  “She’s got on some kind of a white dusting cap,” Ethel replied, “and her hair is sticking out.”

  “Can you tell what period they are from?”

  “He wears a wig, and she has some sort of kerchief, wide at the shoulders and pointed in back. The blouse of her dress fits tight. The dress goes down to the floor, as far as I can see. The bottom of the dress is ruffled. I should say she is a woman in her sixties, perhaps even older.”

  “What about the man?”

  “I think one of the women could be his daughter, because the noses are alike, sort of pug noses.”

  “Do you get any names or initials?”

  “The letter ‘B’ is important.”

  “Do you get any other people?”

  “There is a woman with dark hair parted in the middle, and there is a man with a strange hat on his head. Then there is someone with an even stranger hat, octagonal in shape and very high. I’ve never seen a hat like that before. There is something about a B.A. A Bachelor of Arts? Now I pick up the name Ben. I am sorry, but I don’t think I can do any more outside.”

  “In that case,” I said, “let us continue inside the house.” But I asked Ethel to wait in the car while I interviewed the owner of the house. Afterward, she was to come in and try trance.

  Mrs. Dorothea Connacher turned out to be a smallish lady in her later years, and the room we entered first gave the impression of a small, romantic jumble shop. Antiquities, old furniture, a small new stove so necessary on this day, pictures on the walls, books on shelves, and all of it in somewhat less than perfect order made it plain that Mrs. Connacher wasn’t quite able to keep up with the times, or rather that the house demanded more work than one person could possibly manage. Mrs. Connacher currently lived there with her son, Richmond, age thirty-six. Her husband had left three years after she had moved into the house. I asked her about any psychic experiences she might have had.

  “Both my husband and I are freelance artists,” she began, “and my husband used to go to New York to work three days a week, and the rest of the time he worked at home. One day shortly after we had moved in, I was alone in the house. That night I had a dream that my husband would leave me. At the time I was so happy I couldn’t understand how this could happen.”

  The dream became reality a short time later. It wasn’t the only prophetic dream Mrs. Connacher had. On previous occasions she had had dreams concerning dead relatives and various telepathic experiences.

  “What about the house? When did it start here?”

  “We were in the house for about five months. We had been told that everything belonging to the former owners had been taken out of the house—there had been an auction, and these things had been sold. There really wasn’t anything up in the attic, so we were told. My husband and I had been up a couple of times to explore it. We were fascinated by the old beams, with their wooden pegs dating back to the eighteenth century. There was nothing up there except some old picture frames and a large trunk. It is still up there.

  “Well, finally we became curious and opened it, and there were a lot of things in it. It seemed there were little pieces of material all tied up in bundles. But we didn’t look too closely; I decided to come up there some day when I had the time to investigate by myself. My husband said he was too busy right then and wanted to go down.

  “A few days later, when I was home alone
, I decided to go upstairs again and look through the trunk. The attic is rather large, and there are only two very small windows in the far corner. I opened the trunk, put my hands into it, and took out these little pieces of material, but in order to see better I took them to the windows. When I got to the bottom of the trunk, I found a little waistcoat, a hat, and a peculiar bonnet, the kind that was worn before 1800. I thought, what a small person this must have been who could have worn this! At first I thought it might have been for a child; but no, it was cut for an adult, although a very tiny person.”

  As Mrs. Connacher was standing there, fascinated by the material, she became aware of a pinpoint of light out of the corner of her eye. Her first thought was, I must tell Jim that there is a hole in the roof where this light is coming through. But she kept looking and, being preoccupied with the material in the trunk, paid no attention to the light. Something, however, made her look up, and she noticed that the light had now become substantially larger. Also, it was coming nearer, changing its position all the time. The phenomenon began to fascinate her. She wasn’t thinking of ghosts or psychic phenomena at all, merely wondering what this was all about. As the light came nearer and nearer, she suddenly thought, why, that looks like a human figure!

  Eventually, it stopped near the trunk, and Mrs. Connacher realize it was a human figure, the figure of an elderly lady. She was unusually small and delicate and wore the very bonnet Mrs. Connacher had discovered at the bottom of the trunk! The woman’s clothes seemed gray, and Mrs. Connacher noticed the apron the woman was wearing. As she watched the ghostly apparition in fascinated horror, the little lady used her apron in a movement that is generally used in the country to shoo away chickens. However, the motion was directed against her, as if the apparition wanted to shoo her away from “her” trunk!