by Hans Holzer
It did not to me.
“We’re in 1928 now. Men in long dresses…religious, perhaps…men in long clothes? A group of men, no women. Perhaps ten men. Long coats. Sitting in front of a big fire.”
“The one you feel hung up in the atmosphere here—is he of the same period?”
“No,” Sybil replied, “this is of a later period.”
“How did he get here?”
“This is someone who was living here…died in this room…fire…the people in the long clothes are earlier, can’t tell if they’re men or women, could be monks, too…but the one whom I feel in the atmosphere of this room, he is from 1928.”
We left the room and walked out into the corridor, the same corridor connecting the area in which we had just been with number 2, farther back in the hotel. It was here that the ghost had been observed by the maid, I later learned. Sybil mentioned that there were ten people with long clothes, but she could not get more.
“Only like a photograph,” she insisted.
We proceeded to the lovely library, which is adorned with wooden paneling and two rather large paintings of Saints Brigid and Patrick—and I noticed that St. Brigid wore the long, robe-like dress of the ancient Gaelic women, a dress, incidentally, that some of Ireland’s nineteenth-century poets imitated for romantic reasons. It reminded Sybil of what she had felt in the room upstairs.
From her own knowledge, she recalled that William Butler Yeats had a lady friend fond of wearing such ancient attire! Far-fetched though this sounded, on recollection I am not so sure. We left the house, and Paul Hughes drove us up a mountain road to the cottage in which the maid who had seen the ghost lived.
Hughes would go in first and try and persuade her to talk to me. Should he fail, he would then get the story once more from her and retell it to us afresh. We waited about fifteen minutes in his car while the manager tried his native charm on the frightened servant woman. He emerged and shook his head. But he had at least succeeded in having her tell of her experiences to him once more.
“About a year ago,” Hughes began, “in the ground floor corridor leading to room number 2, Mrs. Coine saw a man come through the glass door and go into room 2.”
“What did she do?” I interrupted.
“It suddenly struck Miss Coine that there was nobody staying in room 2 at the time. So she went down into room 2 and could not see anybody! She suddenly felt weak, and the housekeeper was coming along wondering what had happened to her. But she would not talk about it at first for she thought it would be bad for business at the hotel.”
“Ridiculous,” I said. “American tourists adore ghosts.”
“Well,” Hughes continued, “earlier this year—1966—there was a lady staying in room 2. Her daughter was in room 38. After two nights, she insisted on leaving room 2 and was happy to take a far inferior room instead. There were no complaints after she had made this change.”
I discovered that rooms 2 and 27 were in distant parts of the hotel, just about as far apart as they could be.
There was a moment of silence as we sat in the car and I thought it all over.
“Did she say what the man looked like that she saw?” I finally asked, referring to Miss Coine’s ghost.
“Yes,” Hughes replied and nodded serenely. “A tall man, a very tall man.”
“And a flesh and blood man could not have left the room by other means?”
“Impossible. At that stage the new windows had not yet been put in and the windows were inoperable with the exception of a small fan window. This happened about lunchtime, after Mass, on Sunday. In 1965.”
“And the strange behavior of the lady?”
“Between Easter and Whitsun, this year, 1966.”
We walked back into the main lobby of the hotel. There, among other memorabilia, were the framed pictures of great Irish minds connected with Renvyle House.
Among them, of course, one of William Butler Yeats.
I looked at it, long and carefully. Yeats was a tall man, a very tall man….
* * *
In the winter of 1952–1953, Oliver St. John Gogarty wrote a brief article for Tomorrow magazine, entitled “Yeats and the Ghost of Renvyle Castle.”
To begin with, the term castle was applied by Tomorrow’s editors, since Gogarty knew better than to call Renvyle House a castle. There is a Renvyle castle all right and it still stands, about two miles south of the hotel, a charred ruin of medieval masonry, once the property of the celebrated Irish pirate queen Grania O’Malley.
Gogarty’s report goes back to the house that stood there prior to the fire. Our visit was to the new house, built upon its ruins. The popular tale of séances held at the Renvyle House must refer to the earlier structure, as none were held in the present one, as far is I know.
Gogarty’s report tells of Yeats and his own interest in the occult; of one particular time when Mrs. Yeats, who was a medium, told of seeing a ghostly face at her window; of a séance held in an upstairs room in which the restless spirit of a young boy manifested who had died by his own hands there. Morgan Even, a Welshman who apparently was also a trance medium, was among the guests at the time, and he experienced an encounter with the ghost which left him frightened and weak.
“I felt a strange sensation. A feeling that I was all keyed up just like the tension in a nightmare, and with that terror that nightmares have. Presently, I saw a boy, stiffly upright, in brown velvet with some sort of shirt showing at his waist. He was about twelve. Behind the chair he stood, all white-faced, hardly touching the floor. It seemed that if he came nearer some awful calamity would happen to me. I was just as tensed up as he was—nightmare terrors, tingling air; but what made it awful was my being wide awake. The figure in the brown velvet only looked at me, but the atmosphere in the room vibrated. I don’t know what else happened. I saw his large eyes, I saw the ruffles on his wrists. He stood vibrating. His luminous eyes reproved. He looked deeply into mine.
“The apparition lifted his hands to his neck and then, all of a sudden, his body was violently seized as if by invisible fiends and twisted into horrible contortions in mid-air. He was mad! I sympathized for a moment with his madness and felt myself at once in the electric tension of Hell. Suicide! Suicide! Oh, my God, he committed suicide in this very house.”
As it transpired, the ghost had communicated with Yeats through automatic writing. He objected to the presence of strangers in his house. But Yeats responded to his objection with a list of demands of his own such as the ghost could hardly have expected. First, he must desist from frightening the children in their early sleep. He must cease to moan about the chimneys. He must walk the house no more. He must not move furniture or terrify those who sleep nearby. And, finally, he was ordered to name himself to Yeats. And this he did.
How could Yeats, a visitor, have known that the children used at times to rush down crying from their bedroom? Nor could he have guessed that it was the custom of the Blake family to call their sons after the Heptarchy. And yet he found out the ghost’s particular name. A name Gogarty had never gleaned from the local people though he lived for years among them.
The troubled spirit had promised to appear in the ghost room to Mrs. Yeats, as he was before he went mad sixty years before.
Presently, Mrs. Yeats appeared carrying a lighted candle. She extinguished it and nodded to her husband. “Yes, it is just as you said.”
“My wife saw a pale-faced, red-haired boy of about fourteen years of age standing in the middle of the north room. She was by the fireplace when he first took shape. He had the solemn pallor of a tragedy beyond the endurance of a child. He resents the presence of strangers in the home of his ancestors. He is Harold Blake.”
And now it became clear to me what Sybil Leek had felt! Upstairs, in the room nearly on the same spot where the ghostly boy had appeared in the old house, she had suddenly felt a terrible discomfort in her neck—just as the psychic Welshman had, all those years ago! Was she reliving the tragedy or was the pale b
oy still about?
But the maid had seen a tall stranger, not a young boy, and not in the haunted room, but far from it. Yeats had been terribly attached to this house, and, being a man of great inquisitiveness, was just the type to stay on even after death. If only to talk to the melancholy boy from his own side of the veil!
* 28
Is This You, Jean Harlow?
IF ANY MOVIE actress deserved the name of “the vamp,” it certainly was Jean Harlow. The blonde actress personified the ideal of the 1930s—slim and sultry, moving her body in a provocative manner, yet dressing in the rather elegant, seemingly casual style of that period. Slinky dresses, sweaters, and colorful accessories made Jean Harlow one of the outstanding glamor girls of the American screen. The public was never let in on any of her personal secrets or, for that matter, her personal tragedies. Her life story was carefully edited to present only those aspects of her personality that fit in with the preconceived notion of what a glamorous movie star should be like. In a way, Jean Harlow was the prototype of all later blonde glamor girls of the screen, culminating with Marilyn Monroe. There is a striking parallel, too, in the tragic lives and sometimes ends of these blonde movie queens. Quite possibly the image they projected on the screen, or were forced to project, was at variance with their own private achievements and helped pave the way to their tragic downfalls.
To me, Jean Harlow will always stand out as the glamorous goddess of such motion pictures as Red Dust, which I saw as a little boy. The idea that she could have had an earthbound life after death seems to be very far from the image the actress portrayed during her lifetime. Thus it was with some doubt that I followed up a lead supplied by an English newspaper, which said the former home of the screen star was haunted.
The house in question is a handsome white stucco one-family house set back somewhat from a quiet residential street in Westwood, a section of Los Angeles near the University generally considered quiet and upper middle class. The house itself belonged to a professional man and his wife who shared it with their two daughters and two poodles. It is a two-story building with an elegant staircase winding from the rear of the ground floor to the upper story. The downstairs portion contains a rather large oblong living room which leads into a dining room. There are a kitchen and bathroom adjacent to that area and a stairway leading to the upper floor. Upstairs are two bedrooms and a bathroom.
Jean Harlow’s former living room—Beverly Hills
When I first spoke on the telephone to Mrs. H., the present occupant of the house, asking permission to visit, she responded rather cordially. A little later I called back to make a definite appointment and found that her husband was far from pleased with my impending visit. Although he himself had experienced some of the unusual phenomena in the house, as a professional, and I suppose as a man, he was worried that publicity might hurt his career. I assured him that I was not interested in disclosing his name or address, and with that assurance I was again welcomed. It was a sunny afternoon when I picked up my tape recorder and camera, left my taxicab in front of the white house in Westwood, and rang the bell.
Mrs. H. was already expecting me. She turned out to be a petite, dark-blonde lady of around thirty, very much given to conversation and more than somewhat interested in the occult. As a matter of fact, she had read one of my earlier books. With her was a woman friend; whether the friend had been asked out of curiosity or security I do not know. At any rate the three of us sat down in the living room and I started to ask Mrs. H. the kind of questions I always ask when I come to an allegedly haunted house.
“Mrs. H., how long have you lived in this house?”
“Approximately four years.”
“When you bought it, did you make any inquiries as to the previous owner?”
“I did not. I didn’t really care. I walked into the house and I liked it and that was that.”
“Did you just tell your husband to buy it?”
“Yes. I told him, ‘This is our house.’ I had the realtor go ahead and draw up the papers before he saw it because I knew he would feel as I did.”
“Where did you live before?”
“All over—Brentwood, West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills. I was born in Canada.”
“How many years have you been married?”
“Seventeen.”
“You have children?”
“I have two daughters, nine and twelve.”
“Did the real-estate man tell you anything about the house?”
“He did not.”
“After you moved in and got settled, did you make some changes in it?”
“Yes; it was in kind of sad shape. It needed somebody to love it.”
“Did you make any structural changes?”
“No. When we found out the history of the house we decided we would leave it as it was.”
“So at the time you moved in, you just fixed it?”
“Yes.”
“When was the first time that you had any unusual feelings about the house?”
“The day before we moved in I came over to direct the men who were laying the carpet. I walked upstairs and I had an experience at that time.”
“What happened?”
“My two dogs ran barking and growling into the upstairs bedrooms; I went up, and I thought I heard something whisper in my ear. It scared me.”
“That was in one of the upstairs bedrooms?”
“No, in the hallway just before the master bedroom. The dogs ran in barking and growling as if they were going to get somebody, and then when they got in there they looked around and there was nobody there.”
“What did you hear?”
“I could swear I heard somebody say, ‘Please help me!’ It was a soft whisper, sort of hushed.”
“What did you do?”
“I talked to myself for a few minutes to get my bearings. I had never experienced anything like that, and I figured, ‘Well, if it’s there, fine.’ I’ve had other ESP experiences before, so I just went about my business.”
“Those other experiences you’ve had—were they before you came to this house?”
“Yes. I have heard my name being called.”
“In this house or in another?”
“In other homes.”
“Anyone you could recognize?”
“No, just female voices.”
“Did you see anything unusual at any time?”
“I saw what I assume to be ectoplasm…. It was like cigarette smoke. It moved, and my dogs whined, tucked their tails between their legs, and fled from the room.”
Jean Harlow’s old bed upstairs
“Did you tell your husband about the whisper?”
“I did not. My husband is skeptical. I saw no reason to tell him.”
“When was the next time you had any feeling of a presence here?”
“The night we moved in, my husband and I were lying in bed. Suddenly, it was as if the bed were hit by a very strong object three times. My husband said ‘My God, I’m getting out of here. This place is haunted.’ I replied, ‘Oh, shush. It’s all right if someone is trying to communicate. It’s not going to hurt.’ And to the ghost I said, ‘You’re welcome—how do you do; but we’ve got to get some sleep—we’re very, very tired—so please let us be.”’
“And did it help?”
“Yes.”
“How long did the peace last?”
“Well, the jerking of the bed never happened again. But other things happened. There is a light switch on my oven in the kitchen. For a long time after we moved in, the switch would go on every so often—by itself.”
“Would it take anyone to turn it physically, to turn on the light?”
“Yes, you’d have to flip it up.”
“Was there anybody else in the house who could have done it?”
“No, because I would be sitting here and I’d hear the click and I would go there and it would be on. It’s happened ten or fifteen times, but recently it has stopped.”
“Any other phenomena?”
“Something new one time, at dusk. I was walking from one room to the other. I was coming through the dining room, and for some reason I looked up at the ceiling. There it was, this light—”
“Did it have any particular shape?”
“No. It moved at the edges, but it really didn’t have a form. It wasn’t a solid mass, more like an outline. It was floating above me.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“Not at that time. I have on one occasion. I was sitting right in the chair I am in now. My Aunt Mary was in that chair, and we both heard sobs. Terrible, sad, wrenching sobs coming from the corner over there by the mailbox. It was very upsetting, to say the least.”
“Were these a woman’s sobs?”
“Definitely.”
“Did you see anything at the time?”
“No. I just felt terribly sad, and the hair stood up on my arms. Also, in this house there are winds at times, when there is no window open.”
“Are there any cold spots that cannot be explained rationally?”
“Very frequently. Downstairs, usually here or in the upstairs bedroom, sometimes also in the kitchen.”
“At the time your Aunt Mary was sitting here and you heard the sobs, did she also hear them?”
“Oh, she did, and I had to give her a drink.”
“Have you heard any other sounds?”
“Footsteps. Up and down the stairs when nobody was walking up or down.”
“Male or female?”
“I would say female, because they are light. I have also felt things brush by my face, touching my cheek.”
“Since you came to this home, have you had any unusual dreams?”
“Definitely. One very important one. I was in bed and just dozing off, when I had a vision. I saw very vividly a picture of the upstairs bathroom. I saw a hand reaching out of a bathtub full of water, going up to the light switch, the socket where you turn power on and off. It then turned into a vision of wires, and brisk voltage struck the hand; the hand withered and died. It upset me terribly. The next morning my husband said, ‘You know, I had the strangest dream last night.’ He had had the identical dream!”