Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  When Albert took over the body of the instrument, I was still in the dark about the connections between this woman and Smith and André. “Albert,” I therefore asked with some curiosity, “who is this entity?”

  “There are three people here,” Albert began. “One is gone on horseback, and one went across. They came here to escape because they were surrounded. One of them was Major André.”

  “The historical Major André?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yes,” Albert replied. “They took asylum here until the coast was clear, but as you may well know, André did not get very far, and Arnold escaped across the water.”

  “What about the woman? Is her real name Smith?”

  “Yes, but she is not related to Joshua Smith. She is a woman in charge of properties, living here.”

  “Why does she give the name Jenny Smith?”

  “She was thinking more of her employer than of herself. She worked for Joshua Smith, and her name was Jennifer.”

  “I see,” I said, trying to sort things out. “Have you been able help her?”

  “Yes, she is out of a vacuum now, thanks to you. We will of course have to watch her until she makes up her mind that it is not 1780.”

  “Are there any others here in the house?” I asked.

  “There are others. The Tories were always protected around this neck of the woods, and when there was an escape, it was usually through here.”

  “Are all the disturbances in this house dating back to the period?”

  “No, there are later disturbances here right on top of old disturbances.”

  “What is the most recent disturbance in this house?”

  “A woman and a child.”

  Immediately this rang a bell. It would have been strange if the medium had not also felt the most recent emotional event in this house, that involving a woman and a child. According to Jonathan Davis, Mrs. Brown had heard the sound of a child in a room that was once used as a nursery. Even her young daughter, then age five, had heard the sounds and been frightened by them. But what about the woman?

  “The woman became very disturbed because of the entity you have just released,” Albert responded. “In fact, she had been taken over. This was not too long ago.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She became possessed by the first woman, Jennifer, and as a result felt very miserable.”

  “Am I correct in assuming that Jennifer, the colonial woman, was hanged?”

  “That is right.”

  “And am I further correct in assuming that the more recent woman took on the symptoms of the unfortunate Jennifer?”

  “That is right, too.”

  “I gather Jennifer died in this house. How?”

  “Strangulation.”

  “What about the more recent case? How did she die?”

  “Her inner self was tortured. She lost her breath. She was badly treated by men who did not understand her aberration, the result of her possession by the first spirit in the house. Thus, she committed suicide. It was poison or strangulation or both, I am not sure.”

  “Do you still sense her in the house now?”

  “Yes. She is always following people around. She is here all right, but we did not let her use the instrument, because she could stay on, you know. However, we have her here, under control. She is absolutely demented now. At the time she committed suicide, she was possessed by this woman, but we cannot let her speak because she would possess the instrument. Wait a moment. All right, thank you, they have taken her.” Evidently, Albert had been given the latest word by his helpers on the other side. It appeared that Kaye was in safe hands, after all.

  “Is there any connection between this woman and the present occupants of the house?” I asked.

  “Yes, but there will be no harm. She was not in the right mind when she died, and she is not yet at rest. I’m sure she would want to make it clear that she was possessed and did not act as herself. Her suicide was not of her own choosing. I am repeating words I am being told: it was not of her own volition. She suffered terribly from the possession, because the colonial woman had been beaten and strangled by soldiers.”

  “Before you withdraw, Albert, can we be reasonably sure that the house will be quiet from now on?”

  “Yes. We will do our best.”

  With that, Albert withdrew, and Ethel returned to her own self, seemingly a bit puzzled at first as to where she was, rubbing her eyes, yawning a couple of times, then settling back into the comfortable chair and waiting for me to ask further questions, if any. But for the moment I had questions only for the owner of the house. “How old is this house, and what was on the spot before it was built?”

  “It is at least a hundred years old, and I remember someone telling me that something happened down here on this spot, something historical, like an escape. There were soldiers here during the Revolutionary War, but I really don’t know exactly what happened.”

  It is important to point out that even Miss Brown, who had lived in the area for some time, was not aware of the full background of her house. The house, in fact, was far more than a hundred years old. It stood already in September 1780, when Major John André had visited it. At that time, there was a ferry below the house that connected with the opposite shore, and the house itself belonged to Joshua Smith, a good friend of General Benedict Arnold. It was to Joshua Smith that Arnold had entrusted the escape of Major André. Everything Ethel had said was absolutely true. Three people had tried to escape: André, a servant, and, of course, General Arnold, who succeeded. Smith was a Loyalist and considered his help a matter of duty. To the American Army he was a traitor. Even though André was later captured, the Revolutionary forces bore down heavily on Smith and his property. Beating people to death in order to elicit information was a favorite form of treatment used in the eighteenth century by both the British and the American armies. Undoubtedly, Jennifer had been the victim of Revolutionary soldiers, and Kaye, perhaps psychic herself, the victim of Jennifer.

  Ethel Meyers had once again shown what a superb medium she is. But there were still some points to be cleared up.

  “How long have you had the house now, Miss Brown?” I asked.

  “A year and a half. Kaye’s suicide took place after we had been here for two months. We had bought the house together. She had been extremely upset because her husband was going to cut off his support. Also, he had announced a visit, and she didn’t want to see him. So she took off on a Sunday with her child, and in Newburgh she committed suicide along with the child. They didn’t find her until Thursday.”

  “After her death, what unusual things did you experience in the house?”

  “I always felt that someone was trying to communicate with me, and I was fleeing from it in terror. I still feel her presence here, but now I want it to be here. She always said that she wanted to stay here, that she loved this river bank. We both agreed that she would always stay here. When I heard all sorts of strange noises after her death, such as doors closing by themselves and footsteps where no one could be seen walking, I went into an alcoholic oblivion and on a sleeping-pill binge, because I was so afraid. At the time, I just didn’t want to communicate.”

  “Prior to these events, did you have any psychic experiences?”

  “I had many intuitive things happen to me, such as knowing things before they happened. I would know when someone was dead before I got the message; for instance, prior to your coming, I had heard noises almost every night and felt the presence of people. My little girl says there is a little Susan upstairs, and sometimes I too hear her cry. I hear her call and the way she walks up and down the stairs.”

  “Did you ever think that some of this might come from an earlier period?”

  “No, I never thought of that.”

  “Was Kaye the kind of person who might commit suicide?”

  “Certainly not. It would be completely out of character for her. She used to say, there was always a way, no matter what
the problem, no matter what the trouble. She was very optimistic, very reliable, very resourceful. And she considered challenges and problems things one had to surmount. After her death, I looked through the mail, through all her belongings. My first impression was that she had been murdered, because it was so completely out of character for her. I even talked to the police about it. Their investigation was in my opinion not thorough enough. They never looked into the matter of where she had spent the four days and four nights between Sunday and Thursday, before she was found. But I was so broken up about it myself, I wasn’t capable of conducting an investigation of my own. For a while I even suspected her husband of having killed her.”

  “But now we know, don’t we,” I said.

  The ferry at Haverstraw hasn’t run in a long, long time. The house on Riverside Avenue still stands, quieter than it used to be, and it is keeping its secrets locked up tight now. The British and the Americans have been fast friends for a long time now, and the passions of 1780 belong to history.

  * 18

  “Ship of Destiny”: The U. S. F. Constellation

  THE DARK BUICK RACED through the windy night, turning corners rather more sharply than it should: But the expedition was an hour late, and there were important people awaiting our arrival. It was 9 o’clock in the evening, and at that time Baltimore is pretty tame: Traffic had dwindled down to a mere trickle, and the chilly October weather probably kept many pedestrians indoors, so we managed to cross town at a fast clip.

  Jim Lyons had come to pick us up at the hotel minutes before, and the three committee members awaiting us at the waterfront had been there since 8 o’clock. But I had arrived late from Washington, and Sybil Leek had only just joined us: She had come down from New York without the slightest idea why I had summoned her. This was all good sport to my psychic associate, and the dark streets which we now left behind for more open territory meant nothing to her. She knew this was Baltimore, and a moment later she realized we were near water: You couldn’t very well mistake the hulls of ships silhouetted against the semidark sky, a sky faintly lit by the reflections from the city’s downtown lights.

  The car came to a screeching halt at the end of a pier. Despite the warmth of the heater, we were eager to get out into the open. The excitement of the adventure was upon us.

  As we piled out of Jim Lyons’ car, we noticed three shivering men standing in front of a large, dark shape. That shape, on close inspection, turned out to be the hull of a large sailing ship. For the moment, however, we exchanged greetings and explained our tardiness: little comfort to men who had been freezing for a full hour!

  The three committee members were Gordon Stick, chairman of the Constellation restoration committee, Jean Hofmeister, the tall, gaunt harbormaster of Baltimore, and Donald Stewart, the curator of the ancient ship and a professional historian.

  Although Sybil realized she was in front of a large ship, she had no idea of what sort of ship it was; only a single, faint bulb inside the hull cast a little light on the scene, and nobody had mentioned anything about the ship or the purpose of our visit.

  There was no superstructure visible, and no masts, and suddenly I remembered that Jim Lyons had casually warned me—the old ship was “in repair” and not its true self as yet. How accurate this was I began to realize a moment later when we started to board her. I was looking for the gangplank or stairway to enter.

  The harbormaster shook his head with a knowing smile.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to rough it, Mr. Holzer,” he said.

  He then shone his miner’s lamp upon the black hull. There was a rope ladder hanging from a plank protruding from the deck. Beyond the plank, there seemed to be a dark, gaping hole, which, he assured me, led directly into the interior of the ship. The trick was not to miss it, of course. If one did, there was a lot of water below. The ship lay about two yards from the pier, enough room to drown, if one were to be so clumsy as to fall off the ladder or miss the plank. I looked at the rope ladder swaying in the cold October wind, felt the heavy tape recorder tugging at my back and the camera around my neck, and said to myself, “Hans, you’re going for a bath. How do I get out of all this?”

  * * *

  Now I’m not a coward normally, but I hate taking chances. Right now I wished I were someplace else. Anyplace except on this chilly pier in Baltimore. While I was still wrestling with words to find the right formula that would get me off the hook, I saw Sybil Leek, who is not a small woman, hurry up that rope ladder with the agility of a mother hen rushing home to the coop for supper. In a second, she had disappeared into the hull of the ship. I swallowed hard and painfully and said to myself, if Sybil can do it, so can I. Bravely, I grabbed the ladder and hauled myself up, all the while sending thought messages to my loved ones, just in case I didn’t make it. Step by step, farther and farther away from firm ground I went. I didn’t dare look back, for if I had I am sure the others would have looked like dwarfs to me by now. Finally I saw the wooden plank sticking out of the hull, and like a pirate-condemned sailor in reverse I walked the plank, head down, tape recorder banging against my ribs, camera hitting my eyeballs, not daring to stand up lest I hit the beams—until I was at the hole; then, going down on my knees, I half crawled into the hull of the ship where I found Sybil whistling to herself, presumably a sailor’s tune. At least I had gotten inside. How I would eventually get back out again was a subject too gruesome to consider at that moment. It might well be that I would have to remain on board until a gangplank had been installed, but for the moment at least I was safe and could begin to feel human again. The others had now followed us up the ladder, and everybody was ready to begin the adventure.

  There was just enough light to make out the ancient beams and wooden companionways, bunks, bulkheads, and what have you: A very old wooden ship lay before us, in the state of total disrepair with its innards torn open and its sides exposed, but still afloat and basically sound and strong. Nothing whatever was labeled or gave away the name of our ship, nor were there any dates or other details as the restoration had not yet begun in earnest and only the outer hull had been secured as a first step. Sybil had no way of knowing anything about the ship, except that which her own common sense told her—a very old wooden ship. For that reason, I had chosen the dark of night for our adventure in Baltimore, and I had pledged the men to keep quiet about everything until we had completed our investigation.

  The U. S. F. Constellation as she used to look

  * * *

  I first heard about this remarkable ship, the frigate Constellation, when Jim Lyons, a TV personality in Baltimore, wrote to me and asked me to have a psychic look at the historic ship. There had been reports of strange happenings aboard, and there were a number of unresolved historical questions involving the ship. Would I come down to see if I could unravel some of those ancient mysteries? The frigate was built in 1797, the first man-of-war of the United States. As late as World War II she was still in commission—something no other ship that old ever accomplished. Whenever Congress passed a bill decommissioning the old relic, something happened to stay its hands: Patriotic committees sprang up and raised funds, or individuals in Washington would suddenly come to the rescue, and the scrappy ship stayed out of the scrapyard. It was as if something, or someone, was at work, refusing to let the ship die. Perhaps some of this mystic influence rubbed off on President Franklin Roosevelt, a man who was interested in psychic research as was his mother, Sarah Delano Roosevelt. At any rate, when the Constellation lay forgotten at Newport, Rhode Island, and the voices demanding her demolition were louder than ever, Roosevelt reacted as if the mysterious power aboard the frigate had somehow reached out to him: In 1940, at the height of World War II, he decreed that the frigate Constellation should be the flagship of the U. S. Atlantic Fleet!

  * * *

  Long after our remarkable visit to Baltimore on a windy October night, I got to know the remarkable ship a lot better. At the time, I did not wish to clutter my unconscious mi
nd with detailed knowledge of her history, so that Sybil Leek could not be accused of having obtained data from it.

  The year was 1782. The United States had been victorious in its war for independence, and the new nation could well afford to disband its armed forces. Commerce with foreign countries thrived, and American merchant ships appeared in increasing numbers on the high seas. But a nation then as now is only as strong as her ability to defend herself from enemy attacks. Soon the marauding freebooters of North Africa and the Caribbean made American shipping unsafe, and many sailors fell into pirate hands. Finally, in 1794, Congress decided to do something about this situation, and authorized the construction of six men-of-war or frigates to protect American shipping abroad. The bill was duly signed by George Washington, and work on the ships started immediately. However, only three of these ships, meant to be sister ships, were built in time for immediate action. The first frigate, and thus the very oldest ship in the U. S. Navy, was the U. S. F. Constellation, followed by the Constitution and the United States. The Constellation had three main masts, a wooden hull, and thirty-six guns, while the other two ships had forty-four guns each. But the Constellation’s builder, David Stodder of Baltimore, gave her his own patented sharp bow lines, a feature later famous with the Baltimore Clippers. This design gave the ships greater speed, and earned the Constellation, after she had been launched, the nickname of “Yankee Race Horse.”

  * * *

  On June 26, 1798, the brand-new frigate put out to sea from Baltimore, then an important American seaport, and headed for the Caribbean. She was under the command of a veteran of the Revolutionary War by the name of Thomas Truxtun, who was known for his efficiency and stern views in matters of discipline. A month after the ship had arrived in the area to guard American shipping, she saw action for the first time. Although the North African menace had been subdued for the time being in the wake of a treaty with the Barbary chieftains, the French menace in the Caribbean was as potent as ever.