by Hans Holzer
We parked the car and walked across the garden that sets the house well back from the road. There was peace and autumn in the air. We were made welcome by Corinne Russell, her husband David, and two relatives who happened to be with them that day. Entering the main door beneath a magnificent early American eagle, we admired the fine wooden staircase leading to the upstairs—the staircase on which the mysterious fire had taken place—and then entered the room to the left of it, where the family had assembled around an old New England stove.
During the three years the Russells had lived at the house, nothing uncanny had happened to Mrs. Russell, except for the incident with the fire. David Russell, a man almost typical of the shrewd New England Yankee who weighs his every word, was willing to tell me about his experiences, however.
“The first night I ever slept in what we call the Lafayette room, upstairs, there was quite a thundershower on, and my dog and I were upstairs. I always keep my dog with me, on account of the boys coming around to do damage to the property.
“Just as I lay down in bed, I heard very heavy footsteps. They sounded to me to be in the two rooms which we had just restored, on the same floor. I was quite annoyed, almost frightened, and I went into the rooms, but there nobody there or anywhere else in the house.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Was there more?”
“Now this happened only last summer. A few weeks later, when I was in that same room, I was getting undressed when I suddenly heard somebody pound on my door. I said to myself, “Oh, it’s only the house settling,” and I got into bed. A few minutes later, the door knob turned back and forth. I jumped out of bed, opened the door, and there was absolutely nobody there. The only other people in the house at the time were the invalid Mr. Roy, locked in his room, and my wife downstairs.”
What about visual experiences?
“No, but I went to the cellar not long ago with my dog, about four in the afternoon, or rather tried to—this dog never leaves me, but on this particular occasion, something kept her from going with me into the cellar. Her hair stood up and she would not budge.”
The Lafayette room, by the way, is the very room in which the pirate, Don Pedro, is supposed to have lived. The Russells did nothing to change the house structurally, only restored it as it had been and generally cleaned it up.
I now turned to Florence Harmon, an elderly neighbor of the Russells, who had some recollections about the house. Mrs. Harmon recalls the house when she herself was very young, long before the Russells came to live in it.
“Years later, I returned to the house and Mrs. Roy asked me whether I could help her locate ‘the treasure’ since I was reputed to be psychic.”
Was there really a treasure?
“If there was, I think it was found,” Mrs. Harmon said. “At the time Mrs. Roy talked to me, she also pointed out that there were two elm trees on the grounds—the only two elm trees around. They looked like some sort of markers to her. But before the Roys had the house, a Mrs. Morrow lived here. I know this from my uncle, who was a stone mason, and who built a vault for her.”
I didn’t think Mrs. Harmon had added anything material to my knowledge of the treasure, so I thanked her and turned my attention to the other large room, on the right hand side of the staircase. Nicely furnished with period pieces, it boasted a fireplace flanked by sofas, and had a rectangular piano in the corner. The high windows were curtained on the sides, and one could see the New England landscape through them.
We seated ourselves around the fireplace and hoped that Mary would honor us with a visit. Earlier I had inspected the entire house, the hearthstone under which Don Pedro allegedly lay buried, and the small bedrooms upstairs where David Russell had heard the footsteps. Each of us had stood at the window in the corridor upstairs and stared out of it, very much the way the ghost must have done when she was observed by Lorrie and her daughter.
And now it was Mary’s turn.
“This was her room,” Lorrie explained, “and I do feel her presence.” But she refused to go into trance, afraid to “let go.” Communication would have to be via clairvoyance, with Lorrie as the interpreter. This was not what I had hoped for. Nevertheless we would try to evaluate whatever material we could obtain.
“Sheet and quill,” Lorrie said now, and a piece of paper was handed her along with a pencil. Holding it on her lap, Lorrie was poised to write, if Mary wanted to use her hand, so to speak. The pencil suddenly jumped from Lorrie’s hand with considerable force.
“Proper quill,” the ghost demanded.
I explained about the shape of quills these days, and handed Lorrie my own pencil.
“Look lady,” Lorrie explained to the ghost. “I’ll show you it writes. I’ll write my name.”
And she wrote in her own, smallish, rounded hand, “Lorrie.”
There was a moment of silence. Evidently, the ghost was thinking it over. Then Lorrie’s hand, seemingly not under her own control, wrote with a great deal of flourish “Mary Wallace.” The “M” and “W” had curves and ornamentation typical of eighteenth-century calligraphy. It was not at all like Lorrie’s own handwriting.
“Tell her to write some more. The quill is working,” I commanded.
Lorrie seemed to be upset by something the ghost told her.
“No,” she said. “I can’t do that. No.”
“What does she want?” I asked.
“She wants me to sleep, but I won’t do it.”
Trance, I thought—even the ghost demands it. It would have been so interesting to have Mary speak directly to us through Lorrie’s entranced lips. You can lead a medium to the ghost, but you can’t make her go under if she’s scared.
Lorrie instead told the ghost to tell her, or to write through her. But no trance, thank you. Evidently, the ghost did not like to be told how to communicate. We waited. Then I suggested that Lorrie be very relaxed and it would be “like sleep” so the ghost could talk to us directly.
“She’s very much like me, but not so well trimmed,” the ghost said of Lorrie. Had she picked her to carry her message because of the physical resemblance, I wondered.
“She’s waiting for Young John,” Lorrie now said. Not young John. The stress was on young. Perhaps it was one name—Young-john.
“It happened in the north pasture,” Mary said through Lorrie now. “He killed Warren Langerford. The Frazier boys found the last bone.”
I asked why it concerned her. Was she involved? But there was no reply.
Then the ghost of Mary introduced someone else standing next to her.
“Mrs. Roy is with her, because she killed her daughter,” Lorrie said, hesitatingly, and added, on her own, “but I don’t believe she did.” Later we found out that the ghost was perhaps not lying, but of course nobody had any proof of such a crime—if it were indeed a crime.
“Why do you stay on in this house?” I asked.
“This house is my house, h-o-u-s-e!” “Ocean-Born” Mary reminded me.
“Do you realize you are what is commonly called dead?” I demanded. As so often with ghosts, the question brought on resistance to face reality. Mary seemed insulted and withdrew.
I addressed the ghost openly, offering to help her, and at the same time explaining her present position to her. This was her chance to speak up.
“She’s very capricious,” Lorrie said. “When you said you’d bring her peace, she started to laugh.”
But Mary was gone, for the present anyway.
We waited, and tried again a little later. This time Lorrie said she heard a voice telling her to come back tonight.
“We can’t,” I decided. “If she wants to be helped, it will have to be now.”
Philip Babb, the pirate’s real name (as I discovered later), allegedly had built a secret passage under the house. The Russells were still looking for it. There were indeed discrepancies in the thickness of some of the walls, and there were a number of secret holes that didn’t lead anywhere. But no passage. Had the pirate take
n his secrets to his grave?
I found our experience at Henniker singularly unsatisfactory since no real evidence had been forthcoming from the ghost herself. No doubt another visit would have to be made, but I didn’t mind that at all. “Ocean-Born” Mary’s place was a place one can easily visit time and again. The rural charm of the place and the timeless atmosphere of the old house made it a first-rate tourist attraction. Thousands of people came to the house every year.
We returned to New York and I thought no more about it until I received a letter from James Caron, who had heard me discuss the house on the “Contact” program in Boston. He had been to the house in quest of pirate lore and found it very much haunted.
James Caron was in the garage business at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He had a high school and trade school education, and was married, with two children. Searching for stories of buried treasure and pirates was a hobby of his, and he sometimes lectured on it. He had met Gus Roy about six years before. Roy complained that his deceased mother was trying to contact him for some reason. Her picture kept falling off the wall where it was hung, and he constantly felt “a presence.” Would Mr. Caron know of a good medium?
In August of 1959, James Caron brought a spiritualist named Paul Amsdent to the “Ocean-Born” Mary house. Present at the ensuing séance were Harold Peters, a furniture salesman; Hugh Blanchard, a lawyer; Ernest Walbourne, a fireman and brother-in-law of Caron; Gus Roy; and Mr. Caron himself. Tape recording the séance, Caron had trouble with his equipment. Strange sounds kept intruding. Unfortunately, there was among those present someone with hostility toward psychic work, and Gus Roy’s mother did not manifest. However, something else did happen.
“There appear to be people buried somewhere around or in the house,” the medium Amsdent said, “enclosed by a stone wall of some sort.”
I thought of the hearthstone and of Mrs. Harmon’s vault. Coincidence?
Mr. Caron used metal detectors all over the place to satisfy Gus Roy that there was no “pirate treasure” buried in or near the house.
A little later, James Caron visited the house again. This time he was accompanied by Mrs. Caron and Mr. and Mrs. Walbourne. Both ladies were frightened by the sound of a heavy door opening and closing with no one around and no air current in the house.
Mrs. Caron had a strong urge to go to the attic, but Mr. Caron stopped her. Ernest Walbourne, a skeptic, was alone in the so-called “death” room upstairs, looking at some pictures stacked in a corner. Suddenly, he clearly heard a female voice telling him to get out of the house. He looked around, but there was nobody upstairs. Frightened, he left the house at once and later required medication for a nervous condition!
Again, things quieted down as far as “Ocean-Born” Mary was concerned, until I saw a lengthy story—two parts, in fact—in the Boston Record-American, in which my erstwhile medium Lorrie had let her hair down to columnist Harold Banks.
It seemed that Lorrie could not forget Henniker, after all. With publicist Owen Lake, she returned to the house in November, 1964, bringing with her some oil of winter-green, which she claimed Mary Wallace asked her to bring along.
Two weeks later, the report went on, Lorrie felt Mary Wallace in her home in Weymouth near Boston. Lorrie was afraid that Mary Wallace might “get into my body and use it for whatever purpose she wants to. I might wake up some day and be Mary Wallace.”
That’s the danger of being a medium without proper safeguards. They tend to identify with a personality that has come through them. Especially when they read all there is in print about them.
I decided to take someone to the house who knew nothing about it, someone who was not likely to succumb to the wiles of amateur “ESP experts,” inquisitive columnists and such, someone who would do exactly what I required of her: Sybil Leek, famed British psychic.
It was a glorious day late in spring when we arrived at “Ocean-Born” Mary’s house in a Volkswagen station wagon driven by two alert young students from Goddard College in Vermont: Jerry Weener and Jay Lawrence. They had come to Boston to fetch us and take us all the way up to their campus, where I was to address the students and faculty. I proposed that they drive us by way of Henniker, and the two young students of parapsychology agreed enthusiastically. It was their first experience with an actual séance and they brought with them a lively dose of curiosity.
Sybil Leek brought with her something else: “Mr. Sasha,” a healthy four-foot boa constrictor someone had given her for a pet. At first I thought she was kidding when she spoke with tender care of her snake, coiled peacefully in his little basket. But practical Sybil, author of some nine books, saw still another possibility in “Life with Sasha” and for that reason kept the snake on with her. On the way to Henniker, the car had a flat tire and we took this opportunity to get acquainted with Sasha, as Sybil gave him a run around the New Hampshire countryside.
Although I have always had a deep-seated dislike for anything reptilian, snakes, serpents, and other slitherers, terrestrial or maritime, I must confess that I found this critter less repulsive than I had thought he would be. At any rate, “Mr. Sasha” was collected once more and carefully replaced in his basket and the journey continued to Henniker, where the Russells were expecting us with great anticipation.
After a delightful buffet luncheon—“Mr. Sasha” had his the week before, as snakes are slow digesters—we proceeded to the large room upstairs to the right of the entrance door, commonly called the Lafayette room, and Sybil took the chair near the fireplace. The rest of us—the Russells, a minister friend of theirs, two neighbors, my wife Catherine and I, and our two student friends—gathered around her in a circle.
It was early afternoon. The sun was bright and clear. It didn’t seem like it would be a good day for ghosts. Still, we had come to have a talk with the elusive Mary Wallace in her own domain, and if I knew Sybil, she would not disappoint us. Sybil is a very powerful medium, and something always happens.
Sybil knew nothing about the house since I had told our hosts not to discuss it with her before the trance session. I asked her if she had any clairvoyant impressions about the house.
“My main impressions were outside,” Sybil replied, “near where the irises are. I was drawn to that spot and felt very strange. There is something outside this house which means more than things inside!”
“What about inside the house? What do you feel here?”
“The most impressive room I think is the loom room,” Sybil said, and I thought, that’s where Ernest Walbourne heard the voice telling him to get out, in the area that’s also called the “death” room.
“They don’t want us here...there is a conflict between two people...somebody wants something he can’t have...”
Presently, Sybil was in trance. There was a moment of silence as I waited anxiously for the ghost of Mary Wallace to manifest itself through Sybil. The first words coming from the lips of the entranced medium were almost unintelligible.
Gradually, the voice became clearer and I had her repeat the words until I could be sure of them.
“Say-mon go to the lion’s head,” she said now. “To the lion’s head. Be careful”
“Why should I be careful?”
“In case he catches you.”
“Who are you?”
“Mary Degan.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting. Someone fetch me.”
She said “Witing” with a strong cockney accent, and suddenly I realized that the “say-mon” was probably a seaman.
“Whose house is this?” I inquired.
“Daniel Burn’s.” (Perhaps it was “Birch.”)
“What year is this?”
“1798.”
“Who built this house?”
“Burn...”
“How did you get here?”
“All the time, come and go...to hide...I have to wait. He wants the money. Burn. Daniel Burn.”
I began to wonder what had happened to Mary Wallac
e. Who was this new member of the ghostly cast? Sybil knew nothing whatever of a pirate or a pirate treasure connected by legend to this house. Yet her very first trance words concerned a seaman and money.
Did Mary Degan have someone else with her, I hinted. Maybe this was only the first act and the lady of the house was being coy in time for a second act appearance.
But the ghost insisted that she was Mary Degan and that she lived here, “with the old idiot.”
“Who was the old idiot?” I demanded.
“Mary,” the Degan girl replied.
“What is Mary’s family name?”
“Birch,” she replied without hesitation.
I looked at Mrs. Russell, who shook her head.
Nobody knew of Mary Wallace by any other name. Had she had another husband we did not know about?
Was there anyone else with her, I asked.
“Mary Birch, Daniel, and Jonathan,” she replied.
“Who is Jonathan?”
“Jonathan Harrison Flood,” the ghostly woman said.
A week or so later, I checked with my good friend Robert Nesmith, expert in pirate lore. Was there a pirate by that name? There had been, but his date is given as 1610, far too early for our man. But then Flood was a very common name. Also, this Flood might have used another name as his nom de pirate and Flood might have been his real, civilian name.
“What are they doing in this house?” I demanded.
“They come to look for their money,” Sybil in trance replied. “The old idiot took it.”
“What sort of money was it?”
“Dutch money,” came the reply. “Very long ago.”
“Who brought the money to this house?”
“Mary. Not me.”
“Whose money was it?”
“Johnny’s.”
“How did he get it?”
“Very funny...he helped himself...so we did.”
“What profession did he have?”
“Went down to the sea. Had a lot of funny business. Then he got caught, you know. So they did him in.”