Ghosts
Page 59
Two weeks later I received a letter from Paula Davidson. She was having lunch with a friend of hers, director William Beaudine, Sr., who had been well acquainted with both John and Lionel Barrymore. Paula mentioned her experience at the house with Jill and me and the description given by Jill of the entity she had felt present in the house. When she mentioned the vicious dogs, Mr. Beaudine remarked that he remembered only too well that John had kept some Great Danes. They might very well have been the vicious dogs described by Jill.
Since that time Paula Davidson has moved away from the house on Summit Ridge. Others have moved in, but no further reports have come to me about the goings-on at the house. If the noisy party we witnessed during our visit was any indication of the present mood of the house, it is most unlikely that the Barrymores will put in an appearance. For if there was one thing the royal family of the theater disliked, it was noisy competition.
* 30
The Latest Adventures of The Late Clifton Webb
WHEN I WAS in my twenties Clifton Webb was one of the funniest men on the screen. To me, at least, he represented the epitome of Anglo-Saxon coolness and wit. Only later did I learn that Mr. Webb came from the Midwest and that his English accent and manner were strictly stage-induced. There is hardly anyone in this country who doesn’t remember his capers as Mr. Belvedere, the deadpan babysitter, or his many other roles in which he portrayed the reserved yet at times explosive character that contained so much of Clifton Webb himself. I saw him on the New York stage in one of Noel Coward’s plays, and in the flesh he acted exactly as he had on the screen: cool, deadpan, with a biting, satirical sense of humor.
With the success of his Mr. Belvedere and several motion pictures based on it, Webb moved into a newfound financial security and consequently went casting about for a home corresponding to his status in the movie industry. His eyes fell upon a white stucco building in one of the quieter parts of Beverly Hills. The house, set back somewhat from a side street not far from busy Sunset Boulevard, had a vaguely Spanish-style wing paralleling the street, to which a shorter wing toward the rear of the house was attached, creating an enclosed courtyard—again in the Spanish tradition. The house was and still is surrounded by similar buildings, all of them belonging to the well-to-do of Beverly Hills. It has had a number of distinguished owners. Grace Moore, the singer, spent some of her happiest years in it. Later, actor Gene Lockhart lived there, and his daughter June, who is quite psychic, had a number of uncanny experiences in it at that time. Clifton Webb himself was on friendly footing with the world of the unseen. He befriended Kenny Kingsley, the professional psychic, and on more than one occasion confided that he had seen Grace Moore’s spirit in his house. Evidently the restless spirit of the late singer stayed on in the house throughout its occupation by Clifton Webb and his mother, Maybelle. For it appears to me that the “dancing figure of a woman,” which the current lady of the house has reportedly seen, goes back to the Grace Moore period rather than to the time of Clifton Webb.
Clifton Webb was inordinately happy in this house. At the height of his motion picture career, surrounded by friends, he made up for the arid years of his youth when he had had to struggle for survival. In 1959 his mother passed away, bringing an end to a close and sometimes overpowering relationship. Webb had never married, nor would he have wanted to. His leanings had never been hidden from the world, and he was quite content to let matters be as they were. When his mother died, Webb became more and more of a recluse. In semi-retirement, he kept to his house most of the time, seeing fewer friends as the years went on. In mid-October of 1966 he himself died, almost eight years after his mother. During those eight years, he probably continued his relationship with Maybelle, for Clifton Webb was psychic and believed in life after death. Her clothes and belongings remained in a locked room in the house right up to the time of Clifton’s death.
During his twenty years of residence in this house, Webb had remodeled it somewhat and added a room that he dubbed the Greek room, which he had furnished and decorated to his particular taste, taking great care that everything should be exactly as he wanted it to be. By mid-January of 1967 the house was on the market. Word of the availability of this house came to the attention of a producer at one of the major motion picture studios in Hollywood. He and his writer-wife had been looking for precisely such a house. Within a matter of days they purchased it and prepared to move in. With the need for redecorating and making certain alterations on the house, the C.s were not able to move in until sometime in May. Two days before their actual move, they were showing the house to a friend. While they were busy in another part of the house, the gentleman found himself alone in the Greek room. He was wearing contact lenses and felt the need to clean his lenses at that point. There is a bathroom, decorated in gray, off the Greek room. He entered the bathroom, put the contact lenses on the shelf and turned on the water faucet. When he raised his head from the sink the lenses were no longer there. He searched everywhere but couldn’t locate them, and they were never found.
The new owners of the house thought nothing of the matter, but shortly afterwards another event took place that shook their confidence. On the first night of their stay in the house Mr. C.’s mother happened to be staying in the Greek room. Unfamiliar with the bathroom, she found herself unable to locate either a toothbrush receptacle or a glass. She therefore left her toothbrush on the sink. The next morning when she entered the bathroom she found the wall receptacle open and exposed and her toothbrush firmly placed into it. Since there had been no one in the room during the night but herself, she became frightened and tried to run from the room. To her amazement the door was locked and resisted opening. In panic, she fled through the window. Later, calmed down, she returned to the room.
The following morning she awoke in bed and found her cigarettes broken in half, tobacco scattered all over the bed and the package crushed. It then occurred to Mr. and Mrs. C. that the late Clifton Webb had been vehemently against smoking in his final years.
Earlier that night Mr. and Mrs. C and Mr. C.’s mother had been standing near the pool in the courtyard. All three were looking toward the house through the master bedroom into what was then Mrs. C.’s bathroom. Suddenly they saw a ghostly swaying figure looking somewhat like the legendary ectoplasmic ghost. They rubbed their eyes and looked again, but the figure had disappeared.
Over the next few weeks several more apparitions were observed by the C.s. In the courtyard in front of the house they always saw the same tall gray forms, shadowy, yet with some substance. There was no doubt in their minds that they were seeing human figures.
Late in July Mrs. C. was coming home one night around midnight. Stepping into the courtyard, she saw a form like an hourglass (this time completely stationary) in the living room to the left of the couch. Finally she got up enough courage to move closer; when she did so, the form remained still until it gradually dissolved.
All during those first few weeks the animals in the house behaved strangely. The C.s had several cats and dogs, and whenever they would go to certain spots in the house they would scream in terror and bolt from the area. One of the dogs would not go into the Greek room no matter how much he was coaxed. Instead he would howl at it, and his hackles would rise.
Even the master bedroom was not free from phenomena. Frequently the C.s would awaken in the middle of the night to the sound of curtains rustling and perceive a form of sorts standing in the corner of the room, observing them.
At first the producer and his wife wondered whether their own imagination and their knowledge of the background of the house were creating fantasies in them. Their doubts were dispelled, however, when they gave a dinner party and were showing a number of guests through the house. One friend, a producer who was staying with the C.s, suddenly stopped dead while walking from the master bedroom into the hallway, which was then being used as Mr. C.’s study. He claimed he felt something cold enveloping him. Since he is a man not given to hallucinations and has no inte
rest in the occult, his statement carried weight with the C.s. At the time, the producer employed two servants, a Mexican maid and a butler who slept in a cottage to the rear of the house. On several occasions the maid claimed that a cold presence had attacked her and that lights had gone on and off without explanation. It terrified her and she wanted to know what was going on. The producer could only shake his head, saying he wished he knew himself.
The Greek room seemed to be the center of the activities. Women, especially, staying in the Greek room often had personal articles moved. Mr. C.’s sister, a great skeptic, visited them and was put up in that room. On the third night of her stay she awoke toward dawn feeling a warm, enveloping embrace from behind her. She screamed, jumped out of bed, and turned on the lights. There was no one in the room. The bathroom adjoining that room was also the scene of many experiences. The toilet paper in it unrolled itself on numerous occasions. Even more fantastic, the toilet had several times been used by parties unknown during the night and left unflushed, even though no human being had been in the bathroom.
In September Mrs. C. took on additional duties as a writer and hired a secretary and assistant who worked in the house with her. But it appeared as if “someone” wasn’t too pleased with the arrangements. All during the winter, things kept disappearing from her office or getting moved about. Her engagement calendar would turn up in the Greek room, and certain files that were kept in cabinets in her office would disappear and turn up in other parts of the house, although no one had placed them there. It appeared that someone was creating havoc in her professional life, perhaps to discourage her or perhaps only to play a prank and put the new owners of the house on notice that a previous resident hadn’t quite left.
The worst was yet to come. In October there was an occurrence the C.s will never forget. All that evening the dog had been howling and running about the house wildly as if anticipating something dreadful. Sounds were heard for which there seemed to be no natural explanation. Then, in the middle of the night, Mr. and Mrs. C. woke up because of noises both of them heard. Someone was moaning in their bedroom, and as they looked up they saw a gray figure forming in the corner of the room.
The next morning they realized they had been through the night on which Clifton Webb had died, exactly one year to the day. What they had heard was a reenactment of that terrible moment. From then on the moaning seemed to abate.
Although neither Mr. nor Mrs. C. were exactly believers in the occult, they were open-minded enough to realize that something was terribly wrong in their house. By now they knew that the previous owner, most likely Clifton Webb, was dissatisfied with their presence in the house. They did not understand why, however. True, they had made certain changes in the house; they had rearranged the furniture, and they had used the Greek room as a guest room. They had also made some changes in the garden and courtyard, especially around the rose bushes, which had been Mr. Webb’s favorites. But was that enough of a reason for Mr. Webb to want them out of the house?
In January of 1968 they were approached by a real estate agent, out of the blue, on behalf of a couple who had passed the house once and immediately become interested in acquiring it. The C.s had no intention of selling, so they named a fantastically high price, thinking this would end the matter. They discovered to their surprise that the couple wanted to buy the house anyway. The C.s then reconsidered and decided to look for another house. But they discovered that prices for similar houses had risen so much that they might as well stay where they were, and after some discussion they decided to turn down the offer.
That very night Mrs. C. was awakened at 3:30 A.M. by a rustling sound among the curtains in the master bedroom. She looked toward the disturbance and noticed an ectoplasmic form moving across the room and back. As she stared at it in disbelief, she heard a voice saying, “Well, well,” over and over. It had the sound of a fading echo and gradually disappeared along with the apparition. Several days in a row Mrs. C. saw the same figure and heard the voice exclaim, as if in amusement, “Well, well, well, well.” At the same time, she received the telepathic impression that the ghost was not feeling unfriendly toward her anymore and that he wanted her and her husband to know that he didn’t mind their staying on in the house.
By now Mrs. C. was convinced that the ghost was none other than Clifton Webb, and she approached F. M., another producer, who had been a close personal friend of the actors, with a view toward asking some personal questions about him. When she reported the voice’s saying, “Well, well, well, well” over and over, Mr. M. remarked that Webb had been in the habit of saying “Well, well” frequently, sometimes for no apparent reason. With that Mrs. C. felt that the identity of the ghostly visitor was firmly established.
That night she was awakened again by a feeling that she was not alone. She looked up and saw the silhouette of a man. This time it was clearly Clifton Webb. He was standing just outside the bedroom window in the courtyard. As she looked at the apparition, it occurred to her that he seemed taller than he had been in his movie roles. For what seemed to her several minutes, but may have been only a few seconds, she was able to observe the shadowy apparition of the actor looking into the house directly at her. Shortly afterward it dissolved into thin air. The tall appearance of the figure puzzled her somewhat, so she checked into it. To her amazement she discovered that Webb had actually been six feet tall in life.
A few days later she encountered Mr. Webb again. Her attention was drawn by the strange behavior of her cats, which ran into her office from the courtyard. She was in the habit of taking a shortcut from her office to the kitchen by walking diagonally across the courtyard. As she did so this time, she noticed the tall, erect figure of Mr. Webb in the living room. He seemed to be walking slowly across the living room as if in search of something.
It had become clear to Mr. and Mrs. C. that Webb was not altogether satisfied with the way things were, even though he seemed to be somewhat more friendly toward them. So they invited me to the house to investigate the situation with the help of a reputable psychic. I in turn asked Sybil Leek to come along with me.
On a Thursday night in October 1968 a group of us met at the house. Besides Sybil and me there were my wife Catherine, Sybil’s son Julian, and several people who had known Clifton Webb intimately. They had been asked not out of curiosity but to help identify any material of an evidential nature that might come through Sybil in trance. There was the distinguished playwright Garson Kanin, his actress wife, the late Ruth Gordon, Rupert Allen, a public relations man who had worked for Webb for many years, and two or three others who had known him.
Sybil, of course, knew nothing about the circumstances of the case, nor why she had been brought to this house. During dinner I was careful to steer the conversation away from the occult, and Sybil and I stayed out of the Greek room. But on her way to the house Sybil had already had her first clairvoyant impression. She described a tall, slender and “sexless” individual who had not been born in California. She also mentioned that she felt the initial V or something sounding like it connected with a personality in the house.
After we had grouped ourselves around Sybil in the Greek room, I began the proceedings, as is my custom, by asking the medium for clairvoyant impressions. My hope was that Mr. Webb might pay us a visit, or at any rate tell Sybil what it was that he wanted or what had kept him tied to his former home in so forceful and physical a manner.
“Sybil,” I said, “do you get any impressions about the room?”
“I don’t like this room,” Sybil said sternly. “I wouldn’t choose to be in it. I have a strange feeling on my right-hand side toward the window. I feel somebody died here very suddenly. Also I’ve had for some time now the initial V and the word Meadows on my mind. I would say this is the least likable room in the house. The strange thing is, I don’t feel a male or a female presence; I feel something sexless.”
“What sort of person is this?”
“I feel an atmosphere of frustration, an
inability to do anything.”
“Why is this personality frustrated?”
“Bad relationships.”
I decided it was time to begin trance. After brief suggestions Sybil went under quickly and completely. I addressed myself now to the unseen presences in the atmosphere. “Whoever might be present in this room, come forward, please, peacefully and as a friend, so that we may speak to you. We have assembled here as friends. We have come to help you find peace and happiness in this house. Use this instrument, the medium; come peacefully and speak to us so that we may be of help to you in whatever may trouble you.”
After a moment Sybil started to toss, eyes closed, breathing heavily. “Can’t do it, won’t do it. No, I won’t do it,” she mumbled.
I asked that whoever was speaking through her speak somewhat louder since I had difficulty making out the words. A sardonic smile stole across Sybil’s face now, very unlike her own expression. “I’m thirsty, I want a drink, get me a drink.”
I promised the entity a drink a little later, but first I wanted to know who it was who had come to speak to us. Instead, Sybil sighed, “It’s so cold here, chill, chill. I want to sing and sing. Sing, sing, sing, la, la, la, jolly good time.”
“What kind of a song do you want to sing?” I asked, going along with the gag.
“Dead men tell no tales.”
“Wouldn’t you like to talk to us and tell us about yourself?”
“I want to sing.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Writing, writing a song.”
“Are you a writer?”
“I do a lot of things.”
“What else can you do?”
“Anything, anything.”