Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  Another group was upstairs when their attention was directed simultaneously to the chandelier which began to swing around as if someone were holding the bottom and twisting the sides. One boy was tapped on the leg several times by some unseen force while seated there.

  Meanwhile, downstairs in the parlor, an old-fashioned lamp with prisms hanging on the edges began to act strangely. As we watched, several prisms began to swing by themselves. These would stop and others would start, but they never swung simultaneously. There was no breeze in the room.

  At this time we all met in the courtroom. Carolyn then suggested that we try to lift the large table in the room.

  We sat around the table and placed our fingertips on it. A short while later it began to creak and then slid across the floor approximately eight inches, and finally lifted completely off the floor on the corner where I was seated.

  Later on we brought a small table from the music room into the courtroom and tried to get it to tip, which it did. With just our fingertips on it, it tilted until it was approximately one inch from the floor, then fell. We righted the table and put our fingertips back on it, and almost immediately it began to rock. Since we knew the code for yes, no and doubtful, we began to converse with the table. Incidentally, while this was going on, a chain across the doorway in the courtroom was almost continually swinging back and forth and then up and down.

  Through the system of knocking, we discovered that the ghost was that of a little girl, seven years old. She did not tell us her name, but she did tell us that she had red hair, freckles, and hazel eyes. She also related that there were four other ghosts in the house besides herself, including that of a baby boy. We conversed with her spirit for nearly an hour.

  At one time the table stopped rocking and started moving across the floor of the courtroom, into the dining room, through the pantry, and into the kitchen. This led us to believe that the kitchen was her usual abode. The table then stopped and several antique kitchen utensils on the wall began to swing violently. Incidentally, the kitchen utensils swung for the rest of the evening at different intervals.

  The table then retraced its path back to the courtroom and answered more questions.

  At 5:00 a.m. we decided to call it a night—a most interesting night. When we arrived our group of 15 had had in it a couple of real believers, several who half believed, and quite a few who didn’t believe at all. After the phenomena we had experienced, there was not one among us who was even very doubtful in the belief of some form of existence after life.

  It was Friday evening, and time to meet the ghosts. Sybil Leek knew nothing whatever about the house, and when Regis Philbin picked us up the conversation remained polite and non-ghostly.

  When we arrived at the house, word of mouth had preceded us despite the fact that our plans had not been announced publicly; certainly it had not been advertised that we would attempt a séance that evening. Nevertheless, a sizable crowd had assembled at the house and only Regis’ polite insistence that their presence might harm whatever results we could obtain made them move on.

  It was quite dark now, and I followed Sybil into the house, allowing her to get her clairvoyant bearings first, prior to the trance session we were to do with the cameras rolling. My wife Catherine trailed right behind me carrying the tape equipment. Mrs. Reading received us cordially. The witnesses had assembled but were temporarily out of reach, so that Sybil could not gather any sensory impressions from them. They patiently waited through our clairvoyant tour. All in all, about a dozen people awaited us. The house was lit throughout and the excitement in the atmosphere was bound to stir up any ghost present!

  And so it was that on June 25, 1965, the Ghost Hunter came to close quarters with the specters at Whaley House, San Diego. While Sybil meandered about the house by herself, I quickly went over to the court house part of the house and went over their experiences with the witnesses. Although I already had their statements, I wanted to make sure no detail had escaped me.

  From June Reading I learned, for instance, that the court house section of the building, erected around 1855, had originally served as a granary, later becoming a town hall and court house in turn. It was the only two-story brick house in the entire area at the time.

  Not only did Mrs. Reading hear what sounded to her like human voices, but on one occasion, when she was tape recording some music in this room, the tape also contained some human voices—sounds she had not herself heard while playing the music!

  “When was the last time you yourself heard anything unusual?” I asked Mrs. Reading.

  “As recently as a week ago,” the pert curator replied, “during the day I heard the definite sound of someone opening the front door. Because we have had many visitors here recently, we are very much alerted to this. I happened to be in the court room with one of the people from the Historical Society engaged in research in the Whaley papers, and we both heard it. I went to check to see who had come in, and there was no one there, nor was there any sound of footsteps on the porch outside. The woman who works here also heard it and was just as puzzled about it as I was.”

  I discovered that the Mrs. Allen in the curator’s report to me of uncanny experiences at the house was Lillian Allen, her own mother, a lively lady who remembered her brush with the uncanny only too vividly.

  “I’ve heard the noises overhead,” she recalled. “Someone in heavy boots seemed to be walking across, turning to come down the stairway—and when I first came out here they would tell me these things and I would not believe them—but I was sitting at the desk one night, downstairs, waiting for my daughter to lock up in the back. I heard this noise overhead and I was rushing to see if we were locking someone in the house, and as I got to almost the top, a big rush of wind blew over my head and made my hair stand up. I thought the windows had blown open but I looked all around and everything was secured.”

  “Just how did this wind feel?” I asked. Tales of cold winds are standard with traditional hauntings, but here we had a precise witness to testify.

  “It was cold and I was chilly all over. And another thing, when I lock the shutters upstairs at night, I feel like someone is breathing down the back of my neck, like they’re going to touch me—at the shoulder—that happened often. Why, only a month ago.”

  A Mrs. Frederick Bear now stepped forward. I could not find her name in Mrs. Reading’s brief report. Evidently she was an additional witness to the uncanny goings-on at this house.

  “One evening I came here—it was after 5 o’clock; another lady was here also—and June Reading was coming down the stairs, and we were talking. I distinctly heard something move upstairs, as if someone were moving a table. There was no one there—we checked. That only happened a month ago.”

  Grace Bourquin, another volunteer worker at the house, had been touched upon in Mrs. Reading’s report. She emphasized that the sounds were those of a heavy man wearing boots—no mistake about it. When I questioned her about the apparition of a man she had seen, about six weeks ago, wearing a frock coat, she insisted that he had looked like a real person to her, standing at the top of the stairs one moment, and completely gone the next.

  “He did not move. I saw him clearly, then turned my head for a second to call out to Mrs. Reading, and when I looked again, he had disappeared.”

  I had been fascinated by Mrs. Suzanne Pere’s account of her experiences, which seemed to indicate a large degree of mediumship in her makeup. I questioned her about anything she had not yet told us. “On one occasion June Reading and I were in the back study and working with the table. We had our hands on the table to see if we could get any reaction.”

  “You mean you were trying to do some table-tipping.”

  “Yes. At this point I had only had some feelings in the house, and smelled some cologne. This was about a year ago, and we were working with some papers concerning the Indian uprising in San Diego, and all of a sudden the table started to rock violently! All of the pulses in my body became throbbing,
and in my mind’s eye the room was filled with men, all of them extremely excited, and though I could not hear any sound, I knew they were talking, and one gentleman was striding up and down the center of the room, puffing on his cigar, and from my description of him June Reading later identified him as Sheriff McCoy, who was here in the 1850s. When it was finished I could not talk for a few minutes. I was completely disturbed for a moment.”

  McCoy, I found, was the leader of one of the factions during the “battle” between Old Town and New Town San Diego for the county seat.

  Evidently, Mrs. Bourquin had psychically relived that emotion-laden event which did indeed transpire in the very room she saw it in!

  “Was the court house ever used to execute anyone?” I interjected.

  Mrs. Reading was not sure; the records were all there but the Historical Society had not gone over them as yet for lack of staff. The court functioned in this house for two years, however, and sentences certainly were meted out in it. The prison itself was a bit farther up the street.

  A lady in a red coat caught my attention. She identified herself as Bernice Kennedy.

  “I’m a guide here Sundays,” the lady began, “and one Sunday recently, I was alone in the house and sitting in the dining room reading, and I heard the front door open and close. There was no one there. I went back to continue my reading. Then I heard it the second time. Again I checked, and there was absolutely no one there. I heard it a third time and this time I took my book and sat outside at the desk. From then onward, people started to come in and I had no further unusual experience. But one other Sunday, there was a young woman upstairs who came down suddenly very pale, and she said the little rocking chair upstairs was rocking. I followed the visitor up and I could not see the chair move, but there was a clicking sound, very rhythmic, and I haven’t heard it before or since.”

  The chair, it came out, once belonged to a family related to the Whaleys.

  “I’m Charles Keller, father of Milton Keller,” a booming voice said behind me, and an imposing gentleman in his middle years stepped forward.

  “I once conducted a tour through the Whaley House. I noticed a lady who had never been here act as if she were being pushed out of one of the bedrooms!”

  “Did you see it?” I said, somewhat taken aback.

  “Yes,” Mr. Keller nodded, “I saw her move, as if someone were pushing her out of the room.”

  “Did you interrogate her about it?”

  “Yes, I did. It was only in the first bedroom, where we started the tour, that it happened. Not in any of the other rooms. We went back to that room and again I saw her being pushed out of it!”

  Mrs. Keller then spoke to me about the ice-cold draft she felt, and just before that, three knocks at the back door! Her son, whose testimony Mrs. Reading had already obtained for me, then went to the back door and found no one there who could have knocked. This had happened only six months before our visit.

  I then turned to James Reading, the head of the Association, responsible for the upkeep of the museum and house, and asked for his own encounters with the ghosts. Mr. Reading, in a cautious tone, explained that he did not really cotton to ghosts, but—

  “The house was opened to the public in April 1960. In the fall of that year, October or November, the police called me at 2 o’clock in the morning, and asked me to please go down and shut off the burglar alarm, because they were being flooded with complaints, it was waking up everybody in the neighborhood. I came down and found two officers waiting for me. I shut off the alarm. They had meantime checked the house and every door and shutter was tight.”

  “How could the alarm have gone off by itself then?”

  “I don’t know. I unlocked the door, and we searched the entire house. When we finally got upstairs, we found one of the upstairs front bedroom windows open. We closed and bolted the window, and came down and tested the alarm. It was in order again. No one could have gotten in or out. The shutters outside that window were closed and hooked on the inside. The opening of the window had set off the alarm, but it would have been impossible for anyone to open that window and get either into or out of the house. Impossible. This happened four times. The second time, about four months later, again at two in the morning, again that same window was standing open. The other two times it was always that same window.”

  “What did you finally do about it?”

  “After the fourth incident we added a second bolt at right angles to the first one, and that seemed to help. There were no further calls.”

  Was the ghost getting tired of pushing two bolts out of the way?

  I had been so fascinated with all this additional testimony that I had let my attention wander away from my favorite medium, Sybil Leek. But now I started to look for her and found to my amazement that she had seated herself in one of the old chairs in what used to be the kitchen, downstairs in back of the living room. When I entered the room she seemed deep in thought, although not in trance by any means, and yet it took me a while to make her realize where we were.

  Had anything unusual transpired while I was in the court room interviewing?

  “I was standing in the entrance hall, looking at the postcards,” Sybil recollected, “when I felt I just had to go to the kitchen, but I didn’t go there at first, but went halfway up the stairs, and a child came down the stairs and into the kitchen and I followed her.”

  “A child?” I asked. I was quite sure there were no children among our party.

  “I thought it was Regis’ little girl and the next thing I recall I was in the rocking chair and you were saying something to me.”

  Needless to say, Regis Philbins’ daughter had not been on the stairs. I asked for a detailed description of the child.

  “It was a long-haired girl,” Sybil said. “She was very quick, you know, in a longish dress. She went to the table in this room and I went to the chair. That’s all I remember.”

  I decided to continue to question Sybil about any psychic impressions she might now gather in the house.

  “There is a great deal of confusion in this house,” she began. “Some of it is associated with another room upstairs, which has been structurally altered. There are two centers of activity.”

  Sybil, of course, could not have known that the house consisted of two separate units.

  “Any ghosts in the house?”

  “Several,” Sybil assured me. “At least four!”

  Had not William Richardson’s group made contact with a little girl ghost who had claimed that she knew of four other ghosts in the house? The report of that séance did not reach me until September, several months after our visit, so Sybil could not possibly have “read our minds” about it, since our minds had no such knowledge at that time.

  “This room where you found me sitting,” Sybil continued, “I found myself drawn to it; the impressions are very strong here. Especially that child—she died young.”

  We went about the house now, seeking further contacts.

  “I have a date now,” Sybil suddenly said, “1872.”

  The Readings exchanged significant glances. It was just after the greatest bitterness of the struggle between Old Town and New Town, when the removal of the court records from Whaley House by force occurred.

  “There are two sides to the house,” Sybil continued. “One side I like, but not the other.”

  Rather than have Sybil use up her energies in clairvoyance, I felt it best to try for a trance in the court room itself. This was arranged for quickly, with candles taking the place of electric lights except for what light was necessary for the motion picture cameras in the rear of the large room.

  Regis Philbin and I sat at Sybil’s sides as she slumped forward in a chair that may well have held a merciless judge in bygone years.

  But the first communicator was neither the little girl nor the man in the frock coat. A feeble, plaintive voice was suddenly heard from Sybil’s lips, quite unlike her own, a voice evidently parched with thirst
.

  “Bad...fever everybody had the fever...”

  “What year is this?”

  “Forty-six.”

  I suggested that the fever had passed, and generally calmed the personality who did not respond to my request for identification.

  “Send me...some water....” Sybil was still in trance, but herself now. Immediately she complained about there being a lot of confusion.

  “This isn’t the room where we’re needed...the child...she is the one....”

  What is her name?”

  “Anna...Bell...she died very suddenly with something, when she was thirteen...chest....”

  “Are her parents here too?”

  “They come...the lady comes.”

  “What is this house used for?”

  “Trade...selling things, buying and selling.”

  “Is there anyone other than the child in this house?”

  “Child is the main one, because she doesn’t understand anything at all. But there is something more vicious. Child would not hurt anyone. There’s someone else. A man. He knows something about this house...about thirty-two, unusual name, C...Calstrop...five feet ten, wearing a green coat, darkish, mustache and side whiskers, he goes up to the bedroom on the left. He has business here. His business is with things that come from the sea. But it is the papers that worry him.”

  “What papers?” I demanded.

  “The papers...1872. About the house. Dividing the house was wrong. Two owners, he says.”

  “What is the house being used for, now, in 1872?”

  “To live in. Two places...I get confused for I go one place and then I have to go to another.”

  “Did this man you see die here?”

  “He died here. Unhappy because of the place...about the other place. Two buildings. Some people quarrelled about the spot. He is laughing. He wants all this house for himself.”