Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  According to the autopsy report, Rudolph could have killed Mary Vetsera, but he could not have killed himself. Whose gun was it that was found in his hand? At the funeral, Rudolph’s right hand had to be covered because the fingers were still bent around the trigger of a gun. Had someone forced the fingers after Rudolph’s death to make it appear he pulled the trigger? The conditions of the hand seem to suggest this. No investigation, of course, in the usual criminal sense had been permitted; thus we cannot now answer such vital questions. It is now a century later and still the mystery remains. No trace of any unknown person or persons having had access to the hunting lodge at Mayerling has turned up, nor has the strongbox Archduke John Salvator claimed appeared. But then, John Salvator himself got lost, not much later, “in a storm at sea,” or if Henry Lanier’s tale is true, living a new life as a farmer in South America.

  We may never know the full truth about Rudolph’s death. But we do know, at last, that Mary Vetsera was not a suicide. A planned suicide never leads to the ghostly phenomena observed in this case. Only a panic death, or murder, leaving unresolved questions, can account for her presence in the castle. To the unfortunate victim, a century is as nothing, of course. All others who were once part of this tragedy are dead, too, so we may never know if Count von Taaffe ordered Rudolph killed, or the royal family, or if he himself committed the act.

  The strange disappearance of the most vital documents and the way things were hushed up leads me personally to believe that the medium had the right solution: The Hungarian plot was the cause of Rudolph’s downfall. There was neither suicide nor a suicide pact at the time the pair was in Mayerling. There was an earlier intention, yes, but those letters were used as a smoke screen to cover the real facts. And without accusing some presently honorable names, how can I point the finger at Rudolph’s murderers?

  Let the matter rest there.

  * * *

  But the matter did not rest there, after all. In the late 1970’s, documents bearing on the case were discovered by accident—apparently contained in the long-lost box of the late Archduke John Salvator who had so mysteriously “disappeared.”

  From these documents, it was clear that Mayerling was not suicide, but cold-blooded murder.

  * 23

  Royalty and Ghosts

  ACCORDING TO THE German newspaper, Neues Zeitalter of April 18, 1964, Queen Elizabeth II has had a number of psychic experiences. She accepts the reality of spirit survival and maintains a lively interest in the occult. In this respect she follows in the tradition of the House of Windsor, which has always been interested in psychic phenomena. King George V, for instance, took part in séances and, after his death, communicated with noted researchers through a number of mediums, including the late Geraldine Cummins. It was the same Miss Cummins, parenthetically, who brought through some extremely evidential messages from the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is not surprising, since Miss Cummins was a disciplined medium, well trained to receive intricate and detailed messages.

  Whenever word of Spiritualist séances at Buckingham Palace gets out, the press has a field day, especially the British press, which displays, with rare exceptions, a singularly disrespectful attitude towards the reality of psychic phenomena. Under the circumstances one cannot blame the palace for the usual blanket denial of such rumors, even if they happen to be based on fact.

  But a Frenchman by the name of François Veran claimed to have had reliable information that Spiritualist séances were taking place in Buckingham Palace and that Queen Elizabeth II had confided in friends that her late father, King George VI, had appeared to her no fewer than six times after his death. There had been a particularly close relationship between father and daughter, and prior to his death King George VI had assured his daughter he would always be with her in times of need, even from the beyond. The queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, is known to be interested in psychic research, and Prince Philip, the royal consort, has lent his name as patron to a research effort by the great medical pioneer Dr. Douglas Baker, a parapsychologist and member of the College of Surgeons. This cautious involvement by members of the British royal family is not a recent inclination, however, for Queen Victoria maintained a close and continuing relationship with seers of her time, notably John Brown, who served ostensibly as the queen’s gilly or orderly, but whose real attraction lay in his pronounced psychic gift, which he put at the disposal of his queen.

  Nearly all the royal residences of Britain are haunted. There is a corridor in the servants’ quarters of Sandringham, the castle where Queen Elizabeth II was born, where servants have frequently observed the ghost of a footman of an earlier age. There is Windsor Castle near London, where the face of George III has appeared to witnesses, and there is the Bloody Tower of London with all its grisly memories and the ghost of at least two queens. There may be others at the Tower, for nobody has yet had a chance to go in with a competent trance medium and ferret out all the psychic remains. British authorities, despite reputations to the contrary, take a dim view of such endeavors, and I for one have found it difficult to get much cooperation from them. Cooperation or not, the ghosts are there.

  Probably the most celebrated of British royal ghosts is the shade of unlucky Queen Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, who ended her days on the scaffold. Accused of infidelity, which was a form of treason in the sixteenth century, she had her head cut off despite protestations of her innocence. In retrospect, historians have well established that she was speaking the truth. But at the time of her trial, it was a political matter to have her removed from the scene, and even her uncle, who sat in judgment of her as the trial judge, had no inclination to save her neck.

  Anne Boleyn’s ghost has been reported in a number of places connected with her in her lifetime. There is, first of all, her apparition at Hampton Court, attested to by a number of witnesses over the years, and even at Windsor Castle, where she is reported to have walked along the eastern parapet. At the so-called Salt Tower within the confines of the Tower of London, a guard observed her ghost walking along headless, and he promptly fainted. The case is on record, and the man insisted over and over again that he had not been drinking.

  Perhaps he would have received a good deal of sympathy from a certain Lieutenant Glynn, a member of the Royal Guard, who has stated, also for the record, “I have seen the great Queen Elizabeth and recognized her, with her olive skin color, her fire-red hair, and her ugly dark teeth. There is no doubt about it in my mind.” Although Elizabeth died a natural death at a ripe old age, it is in the nature of ghosts that both the victims and the perpetrators of crimes sometimes become restless once they have left the physical body. In the case of good Queen Bess, there was plenty to be remorseful over. Although most observers assume Queen Elizabeth “walks” because of what she did to Mary Queen of Scots, I disagree. Mary had plotted against Elizabeth, and her execution was legal in terms of the times and conditions under which the events took place. If Queen Elizabeth I has anything to keep her restless, it would have to be found among the many lesser figures who owed their demise to her anger or cold cunning, including several ex-lovers.

  Exactly as described in the popular English ballad, Anne Boleyn had been observed with “her ’ead tucked under,” not only at the Tower of London, but also at Hever Castle, in Kent, where she was courted by King Henry VIII. To make things even more complicated, on the anniversary of her execution she allegedly drives up to the front door of Blickling Hall, Norfolk, in a coach driven by a headless coachman and drawn by four headless horses, with herself sitting inside holding her head in her lap. That, however, I will have to see before I believe it.

  A number of people have come forward to claim, at the very least, acquaintanceship with the unlucky Anne Boleyn in a previous life, if not identity with her. Naturally, one has to be careful to differentiate between the real thing and a romantically inclined person’s fantasizing herself or himself back into another age, possibly after reading some books deal
ing with the period or after seeing a film. The circumstances surrounding Anne are well known; her history has been published here and abroad, and unless the claimant comes up with some hitherto unknown facet of the queen’s life, or at the very least some detail that is not generally known or easily accessible in the existing literature, a prima facie case cannot really be established.

  As I am firmly convinced of the reality of reincarnation and have published two books dealing with this subject, I am perhaps in a position to judge what is a real reincarnation memory and what is not. Thus, when Mrs. Charlotte Tuton of Boston contacted me in early 1972 with a request to regress her hypnotically, I was impressed with her attitude and previous record. To begin with, Mrs. Tuton is the wife of a prominent professional man in her community, and her attitude has been one of cautious observation rather than firm belief from the beginning. “I feel such a strong attachment to the person of Anne Boleyn,” she explained to me, “and have from the time I was about eleven or twelve years old. Many features of my own life and circumstances lead me to believe that I either was she or was very closely associated with her.”

  It didn’t occur to Mrs. Tuton until recently to put all these so-called clues together, although she has lived with them all her life. Her interest in the subject of reincarnation was aroused by the literature in the field, notably Ruth Montgomery’s work. Eventually she read my book Born Again and approached me. “At the age of eleven I read a book called Brief Gaudy Hour by Margaret Campbell. It concerned the life of Anne Boleyn and her short time as Queen of England. The odd fact is that though I read scores of historical novels and literally hundreds of other books all through childhood and adolescence, majoring eventually in French literature at Wellesley, I never had a feeling—visceral knowledge—to compare with that which I had experienced as a child reading the short life of Anne Boleyn.”

  From early childhood, Mrs. Tuton had an almost pathological terror of knives and sharp metallic objects, while other weapons did not affect her in the least. The very mention of a blade produced an attack of goose bumps and shivers in her. “I also have frequently experienced a severe sensation of the cutting of a major nerve at the back of my neck, a physical feeling intense enough for me to have consulted a neurosurgeon at the Lahey Clinic about it. No known physiological cause for the sensation could be found, yet it continues to appear from time to time.”

  Mrs. Tuton also pointed out to me that her given names were Charlotte and Anne, yet from her earliest recollections she had told her mother that Charlotte was the wrong name for her and that she should have been known only as Anne. Her mother had named her Charlotte after her own name but had selected Anne as the second name from an obscure relative, having given the choice of a second name for her child a great deal of thought and finally settling upon one that she considered perfect.

  “Another theme has run through my life which is rather twofold,” Mrs. Tuton continued her account. “It is a sense of having lost a way of life in high places, among people whose decisions affected the course of history at every turn, and an accompanying sense of having been wrongly accused of some act that I did not commit, or some attitude that I did not hold. None of these feelings can be explained in any way by my present lifetime.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Betty Thigpen of South Carolina spent her childhood and adolescence in what she describes as “uneventful middle-class surroundings” and worked for some time as private secretary to a local textile executive. Later she became the personal secretary of a well-known United States senator and eventually managed his South Carolina office. After her marriage to a banking executive, she retired and devoted herself to her children. Mrs. Thigpen’s interest in reincarnation is of comparatively recent origin and was prompted by certain events in her own life.

  “Since early childhood, I have had certain strong identification feelings with the personality of Anne Boleyn. From the time I was old enough to read, I have also been captivated by sixteenth-century English history,” Mrs. Thigpen explained. “I have never been to England but feel strong ties with that country, as well as with France. When I saw the movie, Anne of the Thousand Days, sitting almost hypnotized, I felt somehow as if all of it had happened before, but to me. I am almost embarrassed to admit feelings of spiritual kinship with a queen, so I keep telling myself that if there is some connection, perhaps it is just that I knew her, maybe as scullery maid or lady in waiting, but in any event I do feel a definite identification with Anne Boleyn and that period of history that I have never felt with anyone or anything else.”

  I would like to note that I tried to hypnotize both Mrs. Tuton of Boston and Mrs. Thigpen of South Carolina, but without much success. Both ladies seemed too tense to be able to relax sufficiently to go under to the third stage of hypnosis where regression into a possible previous life might be attempted. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to assess the evidential value of the ladies’ statements, but there were far more glamorous and luckier queens to identify with, if this were merely a question of associating oneself with someone desirable. Possibly, as time goes on, these individuals will remember some historical detail that they would not otherwise know, and in this way the question of who they were, if indeed they were, in Queen Anne Boleyn’s days may be resolved.

  * * *

  If Anne Boleyn had just cause to be dissatisfied with her sudden death, a relative of hers who also made it to the throne was not so innocent of the charges leveled against her. I am speaking, of course, of Catherine Howard, whom Henry VIII married when he was of advanced years and she was much younger. Catherine took a lover or two and unfortunately was discovered in the process and accused of high treason. She too lost her head. According to the magazine Country Life, Hampton Court is the place where she does her meandering, causing all sorts of disturbances as a result. “Such was the fear of an apparition,” states Edward Perry, “that for many years the haunted gallery was shut off. Servants slipped past its doors hastily; the passage outside it is rarely used at night. And still inexplicable screams continue.”

  * * *

  No other historical figure has attracted so much identification attention as Mary Queen of Scots, with the possible exception of Cleopatra. This is not surprising, as Mary was a highly controversial figure in her own time. She has been the subject of several plays and numerous books, the best of which is, I believe, Elizabeth Byrd’s Immortal Queen. Her controversial status is due not so much to an untimely demise at the hands of the executioner, acting on orders from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, as to the reasons why Mary was dispatched into eternity in the first place. Nearly all dramatizations and books make a great deal of Queen Elizabeth’s hatred and envy of her cousin, and a lot less of the fact that Mary was next in line to the English throne and conspired to get it. While the justice of Mary’s imprisonment by Elizabeth may be open to question and could be construed as an act of envy and hatred, Mary’s execution, after so many years of imprisonment “in style” in a country castle, is directly traceable to overt actions by Mary to remove Elizabeth from the throne. Under the circumstances, and following the rather stern dictates of her time, Elizabeth was at least legally justified in ordering Mary’s execution.

  Much has also been made in literature of Queen Mary’s four ladies in waiting, all first-named Mary as well. They shared her triumphant days at Holyrood Castle in Edinburgh, and they shared her exile in England. “The Four Marys” are reasonably well known to students of history, although these details are not taught on the high school or even average college level in the United States. I think it is important to know the background of what I am about to relate in order to evaluate the relative likelihood of its being true.

  In July of 1972 I was approached by Marilyn Smith, a young housewife from St. Louis, Missouri, who had strong reincarnation memories she wished to explore further. At least two of the reincarnation memories, or previous lives, had nothing to do with Scotland, but seemed rather evidential from the details Mrs. Smith
was able to communicate to me when we met the following spring in St. Louis. Despite the reincarnation material, Mrs. Smith does not have a strong history of ESP, which is in line with my thinking that true reincarnation memories preclude mediumship. Her involvement with Scottish history began eighteen years before she met me, in 1954.

  “When I was seventeen years old, I was curled up in a chair reading and halfway watching television, where a live performance of Mary Queen of Scots was being presented. One particular scene caught my attention. In it, Mary, the Queen, is ready to board a boat for an ill-fated journey to England. A woman is clinging to Mary, pleading with her not to go to England. Suddenly I said to myself, ‘That woman there, the one who is pleading, is me,’ but immediately I dismissed this notion. When the queen did get into the boat, I felt a terrible, cowardly guilt.”

  Mrs. Smith has no Scottish blood in her, has never been to Scotland or England, and has not even read much about it. A few months later she had a vision. “I lived in the country at the time, and because it was a hot summer night, I took my pillow and a blanket and crawled upon a huge wagonload of hay to sleep. I lay there looking up at the beautiful starlit sky, wondering why I hadn’t appreciated its beauty before. Then I felt a magnetic force engulf me, and I began predicting the future for myself. ‘The stars will play a very important role in my life someday and I’m going to be very rich and famous because of them.’ Then I saw the face of a very beautiful blond woman, and somehow I knew she would play an important role in my future. ‘We were almost like sisters,’ I said to myself. But then I caught myself. How could we have been like sisters when I hadn’t even met her yet? At this moment I suddenly recalled the television program I had watched with such strange feelings, and the word Mary seemed to be connected with this face. Also, something about a Mary Beaton or Mary Seaton came through, but I didn’t understand it.”