Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  The house in question was 104 years old, stashed away in what New Yorkers call “Hell’s Kitchen,” the old area in the 40s between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, close to the theater district. Built on the corner of Forty-fourth Street and Ninth Avenue, it had been in the possession of the Rodenberg family until a Mr. Payne bought it. He remodeled it carefully, with a great deal of respect for the old plans. He did nothing to change its quaint Victorian appearance, inside or out.

  About three years later, glamorous stage and television star June Havoc bought the house, and rented the upper floors to various tenants. She herself moved into the downstairs apartment, simply because no one else wanted it. It didn’t strike her as strange at the time that no tenant had ever renewed the lease on that floor-through downstairs apartment, but now she knows why. It was all because of Hungry Lucy.

  The morning after Gail’s call, June Havoc telephoned me, and a séance was arranged for Friday of that week. I immediately reached British medium Sybil Leek, but I gave no details. I merely invited her to help me get rid of a noisy ghost. Noise was what June Havoc complained about.

  “It seems to be a series of insistent sounds,” she said. “First, they were rather soft. I didn’t really notice them three years ago. Then I had the architect who built that balcony in the back come in and asked him to investigate these sounds. He said there was nothing whatever the matter with the house. Then I had the plumber up, because I thought it was the steam pipes. He said it was not that either. Then I had the carpenter in, for it is a very old house, but he couldn’t find any structural defects whatever.”

  “When do you hear these tapping noises?”

  “At all times. Lately, they seem to be more insistent. More demanding. We refer to it as ‘tap dancing,’ for that is exactly what it sounds like.”

  The wooden floors were in such excellent state that Miss Havoc didn’t cover them with carpets. The yellow pine used for the floorboards cannot be replaced today.

  June Havoc’s maid had heard loud tapping in Miss Havoc’s absence, and many of her actor friends had remarked on it.

  “It is always in this area,” June Havoc pointed out, “and seems to come from underneath the kitchen floor. It has become impossible to sleep a full night’s sleep in this room.”

  The kitchen leads directly into the rear section of the floor-through apartment, to a room used as a bedroom. Consequently, any noise disturbed her sleep.

  Underneath Miss Havoc’s apartment, there was another floor-through, but the tenants had never reported anything unusual there, nor had the ones on the upper floors. Only Miss Havoc’s place was noisy.

  We now walked from the front of the apartment into the back half. Suddenly there was a loud tapping sound from underneath the floor as if someone had shot off a machine gun. Catherine and I had arrived earlier than the rest, and there were just the three of us.

  “There, you see,” June Havoc said. The ghost had greeted us in style.

  I stepped forward at once.

  “What do you want?” I demanded.

  Immediately, the noise stopped.

  While we waited for the other participants in the investigation to arrive, June Havoc pointed to the rear wall.

  “It has been furred out,” she explained. “That is to say, there was another wall against the wall, which made the room smaller. Why, no one knows.”

  Soon New York Post columnist Earl Wilson and Mrs. Wilson, Gail Benedict, and Robert Winter-Berger, also a publicist, arrived, along with a woman from Life magazine, notebook in hand. A little later Sybil Leek swept into the room. There was a bit of casual conversation, in which nothing whatever was said about the ghost, and then we seated ourselves in the rear portion of the apartment. Sybil took the chair next to the spot where the noises always originated. June Havoc sat on her right, and I on her left. The lights were very bright since we were filming the entire scene for Miss Havoc’s television show.

  Soon enough, Sybil began to “go under.”

  “Hungry,” Sybil mumbled faintly.

  “Why are you hungry?” I asked.

  “No food,” the voice said.

  The usually calm voice of Sybil Leek was panting in desperation now.

  “I want some food, some food!” she cried.

  June Havoc’s former townhouse—haunted by a colonial soldier’s lady friend

  I promised to help her and asked for her name.

  “Don’t cry. I will help you,” I promised.

  “Food...I want some food...,” the voice continued to sob.

  “Who are you?”

  “Lucy Ryan.”

  “Do you live in this house?”

  “No house here.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A long time.”

  “What year is this?”

  “Seventeen ninety-two.”

  “What do you do in this house?”

  “No house...people...fields....”

  “Why then are you here? What is there here for you?”

  The ghost snorted.

  “Hm...men.”

  “Who brought you here?”

  “Came...people sent us away...soldiers...follow them...sent me away....”

  “What army? Which regiment?”

  “Napier.”

  The haunted area of Miss Havoc’s living room

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Hawthorne...not very far away from here.”

  I was not sure whether she said “Hawthorne” or “Hawgton,” or some similar name.

  “What is you father’s name?”

  Silence.

  “Your mother’s name?”

  Silence.

  “Were you baptized?”

  “Baptized?”

  She didn’t remember that either.

  I explained that she had passed on. It did not matter.

  “Stay here...until I get some food...meat...meat and corn...”

  “Have you tried to communicate with anyone in this house?”

  “Nobody listens.”

  “How are you trying to make them listen?”

  “I make noise because I want food.”

  “Why do you stay in one area? Why don’t you move around freely?”

  “Can’t. Can’t go away. Too many people. Soldiers.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Dead.”

  “What is your mother’s name?”

  “Mae.”

  “Her maiden name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Your father’s first name?”

  “Terry.”

  “Were any of your family in the army?”

  Ironical laughter punctuated her next words.

  “Only...me.”

  “Tell me the names of some of the officers in the army you knew.”

  “Alfred...Wait.”

  “Any rank?”

  “No rank.”

  “What regiment did you follow?”

  “Just this...Alfred.”

  “And he left you?”

  “Yes. I went with some other man, then I was hungry and I came here.”

  “Why here?”

  “I was sent here.”

  “By whom?”

  “They made me come. Picked me up. Man brought me here. Put me down on the ground.”

  “Did you die in this spot?”

  “Die, die? I’m not dead. I’m hungry.”

  I then asked her to join her parents, those who loved her, and to leave this spot. She refused. She wanted to walk by the river, she said. I suggested that she was not receiving food and could leave freely. After a while, the ghost seemed to slip away peacefully and Sybil Leek returned to her own body, temporarily vacated so that Lucy could speak through it. As usual, Sybil remembered absolutely nothing of what went on when she was in deep trance. She was crying, but thought her mascara was the cause of it.

  Suddenly, the ghost wa
s back. The floorboards were reverberating with the staccato sound of an angry tap, loud, strong, and demanding.

  “What do you want?” I asked again, although I knew now what she wanted.

  Sybil also extended a helping hand. But the sound stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

  A while later, we sat down again. Sybil reported feeling two presences.

  “One is a girl, the other is a man. A man with a stick. Or a gun. The girl is stronger. She wants something.”

  Suddenly, Sybil pointed to the kitchen area.

  “What happened in the corner?”

  Nobody had told Sybil of the area in which the disturbances had always taken place.

  “I feel her behind me now. A youngish girl, not very well dressed, Georgian period. I don’t get the man too well.”

  At this point, we brought into the room a small Victorian wooden table, a gift from Gail Benedict.

  Within seconds after Sybil, June Havoc, and I had lightly placed our hands upon it, it started to move, seemingly of its own volition!

  Rapidly, it began to tap out a word, using a kind of Morse code. While Earl Wilson was taking notes, we allowed the table to jump hither and yon, tapping out a message.

  Heavy knocking in the floorboards were heard here every night at 3 A.M.

  The late medium Sybil Leek making contact. Notice the psychic energy covering the floor and making it mirror-like.

  None of us touched the table top except lightly. There was no question of manipulating the table. The light was very bright, and our hands almost touched, so that any pressure by one of us would have been instantly noticed by the other two. This type of communication is slow, since the table runs through the entire alphabet until it reaches the desired letter, then the next letter, until an entire word has been spelled out.

  “L-e-a-v-e,” the communicator said, not exactly in a friendly mood.

  Evidently she wanted the place to herself and thought we were the intruders.

  I tried to get some more information about her. But instead of tapping out another word in an orderly fashion, the table became very excited—if that is the word for emotional tables—and practically leapt from beneath our hands. We were required to follow it to keep up the contact, as it careened wildly through the room. When I was speaking, it moved toward me and practically crept onto my lap. When I wasn’t speaking, it ran to someone else in the room. Eventually, it became so wild, at times entirely off the floor, that it slipped from our light touch and, as the power was broken, instantly rolled into a corner—just another table with no life of its own.

  We repaired to the garden, a few steps down an iron staircase, in the rear of the house.

  “Sybil, what do you feel down here?” I asked.

  “I had a tremendous urge to come out here. I didn’t know there was a garden. Underneath my feet almost is the cause of the disturbance.”

  We were standing at a spot adjacent to the basement wall and close to the center of the tapping disturbance we had heard.

  “Someone may be buried here,” Sybil remarked, pointing to a mound of earth underneath our feet. “It’s a girl.”

  “Do you see the wire covering the area behind you?” June Havoc said. “I tried to plant seeds there, and the wire was to protect them—but somehow nothing, nothing will grow there.”

  “Plant something on this mound,” Sybil suggested. “It may well pacify her.”

  We returned to the upstairs apartment, and soon after broke up the “ghost hunting party,” as columnist Sheila Graham called it later.

  The next morning, I called June Havoc to see how things were. I knew from experience that the ghost would either be totally gone, or totally mad, but not the same as before.

  Lucy, I was told, was rather mad. Twice as noisy, she still demanded her pound of flesh. I promised June Havoc that we’d return until the ghost was completely gone.

  A few days passed. Things became a little quieter, as if Lucy were hesitating. Then something odd happened the next night. Instead of tapping from her accustomed corner area, Lucy moved away from it and tapped away from above June’s bed. She had never been heard from that spot before.

  The dark shape on the right was not visible to the eye.

  The living room in normal condition

  I decided it was time to have a chat with Lucy again. Meanwhile, corroboration of the information we had obtained ahd come to us quickly. The morning after our first séance, Bob Winter-Berger called. He had been to the New York Public Library and checked on Napier, the officer named by the medium as the man in charge of the soldier’s regiment.

  The Dictionary of National Biography contained the answer. Colonel George Napier, a British officer, had served on the staff of Governor Sir Henry Clinton. How exciting, I thought. The Clinton mansion once occupied the very ground we were having the séance on. In fact, I had reported on a ghost in Clinton Court, two short blocks to the north, in Ghost Hunter and again in Ghosts I’ve Met. As far as I knew, the place was still not entirely free of the uncanny, for reports continued to reach me of strange steps and doors opening by themselves.

  Although the mansion itself no longer stands, the carriage house in the rear was now part of Clinton Court, a reconstructed apartment hourse on West Forty-sixth Street. How could Sybil Leek, only recently arrived from England, have known of these things?

  Napier was indeed the man who had charge of a regiment on this very spot, and the years 1781–82 are given as the time when Napier’s family contracted the dreaded yellow fever and died. Sir Henry Clinton forbade his aide to be in touch with them, and the Colonel was shipped off to England, half-dead himself, while his wife and family passed away on the spot that later became Potter’s Field.

  Many Irish immigrants came to the New World in those years. Perhaps the Ryan girl was one of them, or her parents were. Unfortunately, history does not keen much of a record of camp followers.

  On January 15, 1965, precisely at midnight, I placed Sybil Leek into deep trance in my apartment on Riverside Drive. In the past we had succeeded in contacting former ghosts once they had been pried loose in an initial séance in the haunted house itself. I had high hopes that Lucy would communicate I wasn’t disappointed.

  “Tick, tock, tickety-tock, June’s clock stops, June’s clock stops,” the entranced medium murmured, barely audibly.

  “Tickety-tock, June’s clock stops, tickety-tock...”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Lucy.”

  “Lucy, what does this mean?”

  “June’s clock stops, June’s clock stops, frightened June, frightened June,” she repeated like a child reciting a poem.

  “Why do you want to frighten June?”

  “Go away.”

  “Why do you want her to go away?”

  “People there... too much house... too much June... too many clocks... she sings, dances, she makes a lot of noise... I’m hungry, I’m always hungry. You don’t do a thing about it....”

  Sybil Leek in a trance as June Havoc and Hans Holzer watch

  “Will you go away if I get you some food? Can we come to an agreement?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to help you, help June.”

  “Ah, same old story.”

  “You’re not happy. Would you like to see Alfred again?”

  “Yes...he’s gone.”

  “Not very far.

  I’ll get you together with Alfred if you will leave the house.”

  “Where would I go?”

  “Alfred has a house of his own for you.”

  “Where?”

  “Not very far.”

  “Frightened to go...don’t know where to go... nobody likes me. She makes noises, I make noises. I don’t like that clock.”

  “Where were you born, Lucy?”

  “Larches by the Sea...Larchmont...by the Sea... people disturb me.”

  Again I asked her to go to join her Alfred, to find happiness again. I suggested she call for
him by name, which she did, hesitatingly at first, more desperately later.

  “No...I can’t go from here. He said he would come. He said wait. Wait...here. Wait. Alfred, why don’t you come? Too many clocks. Time, time, time...noisy creature. Time, time...3 o’clock.”

  “What happened at 3 o’clock?” I demanded.

  “He said he’d come,” the ghost replied. “I waited for him.”

  “Why at 3 o’clock in the middle of the night?”

  “Why do you think? Couldn’t get out. Locked in. Not allowed out at night. I’ll wait. He’ll come.”

  “Did you meet any of his friends?”

  “Not many...what would I say?”

  “What was Alfred’s name?”

  “Bailey...Alfred said, ‘Wait, wait...I’ll go away,’ he said. ‘They’ll never find me.’”

  “Go to him with my love,” I said, calmly repeating over and over the formula used in rescue circle operations to send the earthbound ghost across the threshold.

  As I spoke, Lucy slipped away from us, not violently as she had come, but more or less resignedly.

  I telephoned June Havoc to see what had happened that night between midnight and 12:30. She had heard Lucy’s tapping precisely then, but nothing more as the night passed—a quiet night for a change.

  Was Lucy on her way to her Alfred?

  We would know soon enough.

  In the weeks that followed, I made periodic inquiries of June Havoc. Was the ghost still in evidence? Miss Havoc did not stay at her townhouse all the time, preferring the quiet charm of her Connecticut estate. But on the nights when she did sleep in the house on Forty-fourth Street, she was able to observe that Lucy Ryan had changed considerably in personality—the ghost had been freed, yes, but had not yet been driven from the house. In fate, the terrible noise was now all over the house, although less frequent and less vehement—as if she were thinking things over.

  I decided we had to finish the job as well as we could and another séance was arranged for late March, 1965. Present were—in addition to our hostess and chief sufferer—my wife Catherine and myself; Emory Lewis, editor of Cue magazine; Barry Farber, WOR commentator; and two friends of June Havoc. We grouped ourselves around a table in the front room this time. This soon proved to be a mistake. No Lucy Ryan. No ghost. We repaired to the other room where the original manifestations had taken place, with more luck this time.