by Hans Holzer
* * *
This of course was perfectly true, but she could not have known it from standing in an almost dark hull. The Constellation preceded the Constitution by a very short time.
“1795 important to this boat.”
That was the year work on her had begun.
Gradually, I was able to sort out the various tenants of the ship’s netherworld.
The eleven-year-old boy was somehow tied to the date of August 16, 1822. He was, Mrs. Leek stated, the victim of murder by two crew members in the cockpit of the orlop deck. Mr. Stewart later confirmed that very young boys were used aboard old ships to serve as lolly boys or servants to naval surgeons. The area where the ghostly boy was most active, according to the psychic, was precisely what had been the surgeon’s quarters!
The man who had been executed as a coward during action against the French, as the medium had said, could not materialize because he was in bits and pieces and thus remembered “himself” in this gruesome fashion.
The man who had condemned him was Captain Thomas Truxtun, and the man’s name was something like Harsen. But here confusion set in. For she also felt the influence of a person named Larsen—a Swede, she thought—and he gave two figures similar to the other figures mentioned before, 73 and 66, and we’d know him by those numerals!
It now became clear to me that Mrs. Leek was getting impressions from several layers at the same time and that I would have to separate them to come to any kind of rational evaluation of the material.
I brought her out of her semi-trance state and we started to discuss what had come through her, when all of a sudden the large doors at the bottom of the ladder approximately ten feet away slowly opened by themselves. The curator, who saw this, reports that a rush of cold air followed. He had often noticed that there was a temperature differential of some five degrees between the after crew’s ladder area and the rest of the ship, for which there was no satisfactory explanation.
It was 10 o’clock when we left the ship, and one by one we descended the perilous ladder. It wasn’t easy for me until I left my equipment behind for the moment and bravely grabbed the rope ladder in the dark. The fact that I am writing this account is proof I did not plunge into chilly Baltimore Harbor, but I wouldn’t want to try it again for all the ghosts in America!
* * *
We repaired to a harbor tavern, and I started to question Mr. Stewart about the information received through Mrs. Leek. It was there that I first learned about Captain Truxtun, and his connection with the ship. It should be noted that only I was in close proximity of Mrs. Leek during most of the séance—the others kept a certain distance. Thus, any “reading of the minds” of the others who knew this name is not likely, and I did not as yet have this knowledge in my own mind.
But there was more, much more. It would appear that a man was indeed executed for cowardice during the action against the French in 1799, just as Mrs. Leek had said. It was during the battle with L’Insurgente. A sailor named Neil Harvey deserted his position at gun number 7 on the portside. Found by a Lieutenant Starrett, the traditional account has it, he was instantly run through by the officer.
Had Sybil’s “Harsen” anything to do with Harvey? She had stated the gun was number 3, not 7, but on checking it was found that the gun position numbers had been changed later—after the killing—at the time the ship was rebuilt, so that what is today gun 7 was actually gun 3 in 1799!
It was customary in the British (and early American) navies to execute traitors by strapping them to the mouths of cannon and blowing them to bits. If Lieutenant Starrett, in hot anger, had run the sailor through—and we don’t know if he was dead from it—it may well be that the captain, when apprised of the event, had ordered the man, wounded or already dead, subjected to what was considered a highly dishonorable death: no body, no burial at sea. These bits of information were found by the curator, Mr. Stewart, in the original ship’s log preserved at the Navy Department in Washington.
Apparently, Neil Harvey’s job was that of a night watchman as well as gunner. This may have given rise to another version of the tradition, researched for me by Jim Lyons. In this version, Harvey was found fast asleep when he should have stood watch, and, discovered by Captain Truxtun himself, was cursed by his master forever to walk the decks of his ship, after which the captain himself ran him through with his sword.
The records, however, report the killing by Lieutenant Starrett and even speak of the court-martial proceedings against the sailor. He was condemned, according to the log, for deserting his position and was executed aboard by being shot. This would bear out my suggestion that the sword of Lieutenant Starrett did not finish the unfortunate man off altogether.
I had now accounted for the boy, the captain, and the unhappy sailor named Neil Harvey, blown to bits by the gun. But there was still an unresolved portion to the puzzle: the “Swede” Sybil felt present. By no stretch of the imagination could Neil Harvey be called a Scandinavian. Also, the man, she felt, had “spent the happiest days of his life aboard ship as an employee.”
One can hardly call an eighteenth-century sailor an employee, and Harvey did not spend any happy days aboard; certainly, at least, this would not be his memory at the time of sudden death.
But the curator informed me that another watchman, curiously enough, had seen Harvey’s ghost, or what looked like an old sailor, while playing cards aboard ship. He looked up from his game, casually, and saw the transparent figure going through the wall in front of him. He quit his position in 1963, when an electric burglary alarm system was installed aboard. Originally a Royal Navy cook, the man had come from Denmark—not Sweden—and his name was Carl Hansen. It occurred to me then that Sybil had been confused by two different entities—a Harvey and a Hansen, both of them watchmen, albeit of different periods.
After Hansen retired from his job aboard the Constellation, he evidently was very lonely for his old home—he had lived aboard from 1958 to 1963. He had written hundreds of letters to the Constellation restoration committee begging them to let him have his old position back, even though he had planned to retire to a farm. It was not possible to give him back his job, but the old man visited the ship on many occasions, keeping up a strong emotional tie with it. He died in 1966 at age seventy-three.
Here again one of those strange similarities had confused Sybil. On one occasion she had mentioned the figures seventy-two and sixty-six as applying to a position at sea, while later saying that the man from Sweden could be recognized by the numerals 73 and 66. It struck the curator that he was giving his age and death year in order to be identified properly!
Who then, among these influences aboard, was responsible for the continued resurgence of the old ship? Who wanted her to stay afloat forever, if possible?
Not the eleven-year-old boy, to whom the ship had meant only horror and death.
But perhaps the other three had found at last, something in common: their love for the U. S. F. Constellation.
Captain Truxtun certainly would feel himself bound to his old ship, the ship that shared his glories.
Neil Harvey might have wished to find justice and to clear his name. So long as the ship existed, there was a chance that the records would bear him out.
And lastly, the twentieth-century watchman Hansen, inexorably mixed up with the ship’s destiny by his love for her and his lack of any other real focal point, might just have “gotten stuck” there upon death.
The only thing I can say with reasonable certainty is that the Constellation is not likely to disappear from the sea, whether out in the open ocean or safely nestled at her Baltimore dock. She’s got three good men to look after her now.
* 19
The Truth About Camelot
WAS THERE A CAMELOT?
Did King Arthur preside in its splendid halls over the Round Table and its famous knights amid medieval splash and chivalry?
Musical comedy writers Lerner and Loewe thought so when they created the Broadway music
al Camelot. Basically, this version presents Arthur as the champion of justice in a world of corruption and violence. He and his chosen knights of the Round Table challenge the sinister elements around them—and usually win. The religious elements are subdued, and Arthur emerges as a good man eventually hurt by his closest friend, when Lancelot runs off with Queen Guinevere. This treachery makes Arthur’s world collapse. The major point made here is that breach of faith can only lead to disaster.
* * *
I have been fascinated by the King Arthur tradition for many years, wondering if there ever was a Camelot—if, indeed, there ever was a real King Arthur. Historians have had a go at all this material over the years, of course, and the last word isn’t in yet, for the digs are still fresh and new evidence does turn up in forgotten or lost manuscripts. Also, reinterpretations of obscure passages shed new light on ancient mysteries.
In 1965 I stood in the inner portions of the ruined abbey of Glastonbury in the west of England. Near me was a bronze tablet neatly stuck into the wet soil. “King Arthur’s tomb,” it read, and a little farther on I found Queen Guinevere’s tomb. I had not come to search for these tombs, however, but to see for myself the remnants of this “holiest spot in all Britain,” which had been discovered through a combination of archaeological prowess and psychic gifts. A professional archeologist named Bligh Bond had discovered that he was also psychic. Far from being incredulous, he did not reject this gift, but put it to a prolonged and severe test. As a result of this test, he received alleged communications from a monk who claimed to have lived at Glastonbury in the early Middle Ages. These communications came to Bond through automatic writing, his hands being guided by the unseen person of the monk. This, of course, sounds fantastic, and Bond was attacked for his lapse into what his fellow professionals thought was pure fantasy.
The location of Glastonbury Abbey was unknown then, yet Bond’s communicator claimed that it was there, beneath the grassy knoll near the present town of Glastonbury. He even supplied Bond with exact details of its walls, layout, and walks. Eventually, Bond managed to have excavations started, and the abbey emerged from its grave very much as predicted by the ghostly monk.
As I said, though, I had not come to study King Arthur’s grave, but to look at Glastonbury Abbey. Yet the trail seemed to lead to Camelot just the same. Glastonbury is 12½ miles due northwest of the area I later learned was the site of Camelot. Originally a Celtic (or British) settlement, it is the Avalon of the Arthurian legends.
My interest in the subject of King Arthur and Camelot was temporarily put aside when more urgent projects took up my time, but I was suddenly brought back to it in 1967 when I was contacted by a man named Paul Johnstone, who had read one of my previous books.
Johnstone is a scholar who specializes in historical research and is also a free-lance writer. His articles on British history have appeared in Antiquity and Notes and Queries, his fiction in Blue Book and other magazines. His writing leans toward medieval historical subjects, and after twenty-five years of research, in 1963 he completed a book called The Real King Arthur. That year his mother passed on, and he felt that her spirit might want to communicate with him. Although Paul Johnstone is a rationally inclined individual, he had never discounted the possibility of such communications, particularly in view of the fact that as a youngster he had had some ESP experiences. By means of a “fortune-telling board” he had purchased for his own amusement, he was able to come into communication with his late mother, and although at first he asked her only the most obvious questions, she eventually made it known to him that Artorius wanted to talk to him.
Now, the legendary King Arthur and his Camelot were merely fictional re-creations of old ballads, mainly French, which Sir Thomas Malory condensed into La Morte d’Artur in the fifteenth century. These ballads, however, in turn were only re-creations of older Welsh tales that, while not accurate, were nevertheless closer to the truth. According to Godfrey Turton in The Emperor Arthur, the medieval trappings “are completely inappropriate to the historical Arthur, who lived nearly a thousand years before Malory was born.”
The only contemporary source extant from the late fifth century when Arthur lived is a book called De Excidio Britanniae, written by Gildas, a monk who later became an abbot. Arthur himself is not mentioned in this work, but according to The Life of Gildas, Gildas and Arthur had been enemies since Arthur had put the monk’s brother to death for piracy.
In the ninth century a man named Nenius described Arthur’s reign and victories in great detail. This Arthur was a late-Roman chieftain, a provincial commander whose military leadership and good judgment led him to be chosen to succeed the British chief Ambrosius as head and defender of post-Roman Britain. At this period in history, the Saxons had not completely taken over Britain and the Western part in particular was still free of their savage rule. Although the Romans no longer occupied Britain, centuries of occupation had left their mark, and Artorius was as much a Roman general as any of his Italian colleagues.
Because of Johnstone’s twenty-five years devoted to research into King Arthur’s life and times, he had evidently attracted the attention of the King’s spirit, who now wished to reward him by conversing with him directly and setting the record straight wherever he, Johnstone, might have erred in his research. According to Johnstone’s mother, Arthur had for years tried to tell Johnstone his side of the story directly, though Johnstone had not been aware of it. But now, with her arrival on the other side, a missing link had been supplied between Arthur and Johnstone, and they could establish direct communication.
I have examined the transcripts of these conversations, and since Johnstone himself is writing a book about his experiences with communicators like Arthur and others, it will suffice to say that they are amazing and detailed. The question of course immediately presents itself: Is this really King Arthur of the Britons speaking, or is it a figment of Johnstone’s imagination, caused by his preoccupation with the subject and fed by the accumulated knowledge in his conscious and unconscious minds? That this also occurred to Johnstone is clear and he started the talks by asking the alleged Artorius a number of questions that had not been satisfactorily answered before, such as exact sites of battles and places mentioned in the records but not yet discovered. The answers came via the board in a mixture of Welsh, Latin, and modern English. Many of the names given were unknown to Johnstone, but he looked them up and found that they fit.
Paul Johnstone questioned the communicator calling himself Artorius extensively about the main events of his life, and thus was able to adjust or confirm some of his own earlier ideas about the period—ideas obtained purely archeologically and through research, not psychically. Thus we have a date for Arthur’s birth, 459 A.D., and another for the battle at Badon Hill, 503, where Arthur decisively defeated a coalition of Saxons and their allies, and established his kingdom firmly for twenty peaceful years.
To me it did not even matter whether Arthur spoke through Johnstone or whether Johnstone, the psychic, obtained factual information not previously known or confirmed. The knowledge was gained, one way or the other, through paranormal means. When I brought up this delicate point, Johnstone referred to a number of instances where his own knowledge and opinion had been totally different from what he received psychically from Arthur. For example, when he asked what Castle Guinnion was, he was told it was a refuge of the Picts. His own views had been that it was a British stronghold, assailed by the Picts.
* * *
All this correspondence came to a sudden climax when Johnstone informed me that new digs were going on at what might or might not be the true site of Camelot.
* * *
Now the question as to where Arthur’s famed stronghold was situated—if there was indeed a Camelot—has occupied researchers for centuries. The Tourist Board insists it is Tintagel Castle in Cornwall. Arthur spent his boyhood there, according to Mr. Johnstone, and there was a monastery on the spot, but the castle itself is many centuries l
ater than Arthur. Cadbury Hill, west of Ilchester, was a more logical choice for the honor. This hill fort in Somerset overlooks the plains all the way to Glastonbury, which one can clearly see from its ramparts. Johnstone suggested it as the site of the true Camelot when he wrote his book in 1963. His opinion was based on archeological evidence, but the “establishment” of professionals rejected this possibility then. The Cadbury Hill ruins were considered pre-Roman, and any connection with Arthur’s fifth-century Britain denied. It was the opinion of Leslie Alcock of the University of Wales, one of the men digging at Cadbury, that in Arthur’s time warfare did not use fortified positions of this size. But after digging at the site in the summer of 1966, he expressed a different view in the March 1967 issue of Antiquity: Cadbury was a vital strongpoint in Arthur’s time.
What Johnstone suggested to me was simply this: Why not take a good medium to Cadbury and see what she can get? Let us find out, he asked, if Cadbury Hill is Camelot. He himself would not come along with us, so that no one might accuse my medium of being influenced by knowledge in his mind or subconscious. But he was willing to give me exact instructions on how to get to the site, and to a few other sites also connected with the Arthur-Camelot lore, and afterward help me evaluate the material I might obtain on the spot.
I enthusiastically agreed to this, and made arrangements to visit Britain in the early fall of 1967, with Sybil Leek serving as my psychic bloodhound.
Our plans would be made in such a manner that Sybil could not guess our purpose or where we were headed, and I would take great pains in avoiding all sensory clues that might give away our destination. Thus I made my arrangements with the driver whenever Sybil was not within sight, and confined our conversations to such innocent topics as the weather, always a good one in uncertain Britain.