by Hans Holzer
“Does he know he is dead?” I asked the question that often brings forth much resistance to my quest for facts from those who cannot conceive of their status as “ghosts.”
Sybil listened for a moment.
“He does as he wants in this house because he is going to live here,” she finally said. “It’s his house.”
“Why is he laughing?”
A laughing ghost, indeed! “He laughs because of people coming here thinking it’s their house! When he knows the truth.”
“What is his name?” I asked again.
“Cal...Calstrop...very difficult as he does not speak very clearly...he writes and writes...he makes a noise...he says he will make even more noise unless you go away.”
“Let him,” I said, cheerfully hoping I could tape-record the ghost’s outbursts.
“Tell him he has passed over and the matter is no longer important,” I told Sybil.
“He is upstairs.”
I asked that he walk upstairs so we could all hear him. There was nobody upstairs at this moment—everybody was watching the proceedings in the court room downstairs.
We kept our breath, waiting for the manifestations, but our ghost wouldn’t play the game. I continued with my questions.
“What does he want?”
“He is just walking around, he can do as he likes,” Sybil said. “He does not like new things...he does not like any noise...except when he makes it....”
“Who plays the organ in this house?”
“He says his mother plays.”
“What is her name?”
“Ann Lassay...that’s wrong, it’s Lann—he speaks so badly...Lannay...his throat is bad or something....”
I later was able to check on this unusual name. Anna Lannay was Thomas Whaley’s wife!
At the moment, however, I was not aware of this fact and pressed on with my interrogation. How did the ghost die? How long ago?
“‘89...he does not want to speak; he only wants to roam around....”
Actually, Whaley died in 1890. Had the long interval confused his sense of time? So many ghosts cannot recall exact dates but will remember circumstances and emotional experiences well.
“He worries about the house...he wants the whole house...for himself...he says he will leave them... papers...hide the papers...he wants the other papers about the house...they’re four miles from here...several people have these papers and you’ll have to get them back or he’ll never settle...never...and if he doesn’t get the whole house back, he will be much worse...and then, the police will come...he will make the lights come and the noise...and the bell...make the police come and see him, the master...of the house, he hears bells upstairs...he doesn’t know what it is...he goes upstairs and opens the windows, wooden windows...and looks out...and then he pulls the...no, it’s not a bell...he’ll do it again...when he wants someone to know that he really is the master of the house...people today come and say he is not, but he is!”
I was surprised. Sybil had no knowledge of the disturbances, the alarm bell, the footsteps, the open window...and yet it was all perfectly true. Surely, her communicator was our man!
“When did he do this the last time?” I inquired.
“This year...not long....”
“Has he done anything else in this house?”
“He said he moved the lights. In the parlor.”
Later I thought of the Richardson séance and the lights they had observed, but of course I had no idea of this when we were at the house ourselves.
“What about the front door?”
“If people come, he goes into the garden...walks around because...he meets mother there.”
“What is in the kitchen?”
“Child goes to the kitchen. I have to leave him, and he doesn’t want to be left...it was an injustice, anyway, don’t like it...the child is twelve...chest trouble...something from the kitchen...bad affair....”
“Anyone’s fault?”
“Yes. Not chest...from the cupboard, took something...it was an acid like salt, and she ate it...she did not know...there is something strange about this child, someone had control of her, you see, she was in the way...family...one girl...those boys were not too good...the other boys who came down...she is like two people...someone controlled her...made her do strange things and then...could she do that.”
“Was she the daughter of the man?”
“Strange man, he doesn’t care so much about the girl as he does about the house. He is disturbed.”
“Is there a woman in this house?”
“Of course. There is a woman in the garden.”
“Who is she?”
“Mother. Grandmother of the girl.”
“Is he aware of the fact he has no physical body?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t he see all the people who come here?”
“They have to be fought off, sent away.”
“Tell him it is now seventy years later.”
“He says seventy years when the house was built.”
“Another seventy years have gone by,” I insisted. “Only part of you is in the house.”
“No, part of the house...you’re making the mistake,” he replied.
I tried hard to convince him of the real circumstances. Finally, I assured him that the entire house was, in effect, his.
Would this help?
“He is vicious,” Sybil explains. “He will have his revenge on the house.”
I explained that his enemies were all dead.
“He says it was an injustice, and the court was wrong and you have to tell everyone this is his house and land and home.”
I promised to do so and intoned the usual formula for the release of earthbound people who have passed over and don’t realize it. Then I recalled Sybil to her own self, and within a few moments she was indeed in full control.
I then turned to the director of the museum, Mrs. Reading, and asked for her comments on the truth of the material just heard.
“There was a litigation,” she said. “The injustice could perhaps refer to the County’s occupancy of this portion of the house from 1869 to 1871. Whaley’s contract, which we have, shows that this portion of the house was leased to the County, and he was to supply the furniture and set it up as a court room. He also put in the two windows to provide light. It was a valid agreement. They adhered to the contract as long as the court continued to function here, but when Alonzo Horton came and developed New Town, a hot contest began between the two communities for the possession of the county seat. When the records were forcefully removed from here, Whaley felt it was quite an injustice, and we have letters he addressed to the Board of Supervisors, referring to the fact that his lease had been broken. The Clerk notified him that they were no longer responsible for the use of this house—after all the work he had put in to remodel it for their use. He would bring the matter up periodically with the Board of Supervisors, but it was tabled by them each time it came up.”
“In other words, this is the injustice referred to by the ghost?”
“In 1872 he was bitterly engaged in asking redress from the County over this matter, which troubled him some since he did not believe a government official would act in this manner. It was never settled, however, and Whaley was left holding the bag.”
“Was there a child in the room upstairs?”
“In the nursery? There were several children there. One child died here. But this was a boy.”
Again, later, I saw that the Richardson séance spoke of a boy ghost in the house.
At the very beginning of trance, before I began taping the utterances from Sybil’s lips, I took some handwritten notes. The personality, I now saw, who had died of a bad fever had given the faintly pronounced name of Fedor and spoke of a mill where he worked. Was there any sense to this?
“Yes,” Mrs. Reading confirmed, “this room we are in now served as a granary at one time. About 1855 to 1867.”
“Were there ever an
y Russians in this area?”
“There was a considerable otter trade here prior to the American occupation of the area. We have found evidence that the Russians established wells in this area. They came into these waters then to trade otters.”
“Amazing,” I conceded. How could Sybil, even if she wanted to, have known of such an obscure fact?
“This would have been in the 1800s,” Mrs. Reading continued. “Before then there were Spaniards here, of course.”
“Anything else you wish to comment upon in the trance session you have just witnessed?” I asked.
Mrs. Reading expressed what we all felt.
“The references to the windows opening upstairs, and the ringing of these bells....”
How could Sybil have known all that? Nobody told her and she had not had a chance to acquaint herself with the details of the disturbances.
What remained were the puzzling statements about “the other house.” They, too were soon to be explained. We were walking through the garden now and inspected the rear portion of the Whaley House. In back of it, we discovered to our surprise still another wooden house standing in the garden. I questioned Mrs. Reading about this second house.
“The Pendington House, in order to save it, had to be moved out of the path of the freeway...it never belonged to the Whaleys although Thomas Whaley once tried to rent it. But it was always rented to someone else.”
No wonder the ghost was angry about “the other house.” It had been moved and put on his land...without his consent!
The name Cal...trop still did not fall into place. It was too far removed from Whaley and yet everything else that had come through Sybil clearly fitted Thomas Whaley. Then the light began to dawn, thanks to Mrs. Reading’s detailed knowledge of the house.
“It was interesting to hear Mrs. Leek say there was a store here once...” she explained. “This is correct, there was a store here at one time, but it was not Mr. Whaley’s.”
“Whose was it?”
“It belonged to a man named Wallack...Hal Wallack...that was in the seventies.”
Close enough to Sybil’s tentative pronunciation of a name she caught connected with the house.
“He rented it to Wallack for six months, then Wallack sold out,” Mrs. Reading explained.
I also discovered, in discussing the case with Mrs. Reading, that the disturbances really began after the second house had been placed on the grounds. Was that the straw that broke the ghost’s patience?
Later, we followed Sybil to a wall adjoining the garden, a wall, I should add, where there was no visible door. But Sybil insisted there had been a French window there, and indeed there was at one time. In a straight line from this spot, we wound up at a huge tree. It was here, Sybil explained, that Whaley and his mother often met—or are meeting, as the case may be.
I was not sure that Mr. Whaley had taken my advice to heart and moved out of what was, after all, his house. Why should he? The County had not seen fit to undo an old wrong.
We left the next morning, hoping that at the very least we had let the restless one know someone cared.
A week later Regis Philbin checked with the folks at Whaley House. Everything was lively—chandelier swinging, rocker rocking; and June Reading herself brought me up to date on July 27th, 1965, with a brief report on activities—other than flesh-and-blood—at the house.
Evidently the child ghost was also still around, for utensils in the kitchen had moved that week, especially a cleaver which swings back and forth on its own. Surely that must be the playful little girl, for what would so important a man as Thomas Whaley have to do in the kitchen? Surely he was much to preoccupied with the larger aspects of his realm, the ancient wrong done him, and the many intrusions from the world of reality. For the Whaley House is a busy place, ghosts or not.
On replaying my tapes, I noticed a curious confusion between the initial appearance of a ghost who called himself Fedor in my notes, and a man who said he had a bad fever. It was just that the man with the fever did not have a foreign accent, but I distinctly recalled “fedor” as sounding odd.
Were they perhaps two separate entities?
My suspicions were confirmed when a letter written May 23, 1966—almost a year later—reached me. A Mrs. Carol DeJuhasz wanted me to know about a ghost at Whaley House...no, not Thomas Whaley or a twelve-year-old girl with long hair. Mrs. DeJuhasz was concerned with an historical play written by a friend of hers, dealing with the unjust execution of a man who tried to steal a harbor boat in the 1800s and was caught. Make no mistake about it, nobody had observed this ghost at Whaley House. Mrs. DeJuhasz merely thought he ought to be there, having been hanged in the backyard of the house.
Many people tell me of tragic spots where men have died unhappily but rarely do I discover ghosts on such spots just because of it. I was therefore not too interested in Mrs. DeJuhasz’ account of a possible ghost. But she thought that there ought to be present at Whaley House the ghost of this man, called Yankee Jim Robinson. When captured, he fought a sabre duel and received a critical wound in the head. Although alive, he became delirious and was tried without representation, sick of the fever. Sentenced to death, he was subsequently hanged in the yard behind the Court House.
Was his the ghostly voice that spoke through Sybil, complaining of the fever and then quickly fading away? Again it was William Richardson who was able to provide a further clue or set of clues to this puzzle. In December of 1966 he contacted me again to report some further experiences at the Whaley House.
“This series of events began in March of this year. Our group was helping to restore an historic old house which had been moved onto the Whaley property to save it from destruction. During our lunch break one Saturday, several of us were in Whaley House. I was downstairs when Jim Stein, one of the group, rushed down the stairs to tell me that the cradle in the nursery was rocking by itself. I hurried upstairs but it wasn’t rocking. I was just about to chide Jim for having an overactive imagination when it began again and rocked a little longer before it stopped. The cradle is at least ten feet from the doorway, and a metal barricade is across it to prevent tourists from entering the room. No amount of walking or jumping had any effect on the cradle. While it rocked, I remembered that it had made no sound. Going into the room, I rocked the cradle. I was surprised that it made quite a bit of noise. The old floorboards were somewhat uneven and this in combination with the wooden rockers on the cradle made a very audible sound.
“As a matter of fact, when the Whaleys were furnishing carpeting for the house, the entire upstairs portion was carpeted. This might explain the absence of the noise.
“In June, Whaley House became the setting for an historical play. The play concerned the trial and hanging of a local bad man named Yankee Jim Robinson. It was presented in the court room and on the grounds of the mansion. The actual trial and execution had taken place in August of 1852. This was five years before Whaley House was built, but the execution took place on the grounds.
“Yankee Jim was hanged from a scaffold which stood approximately between the present music room and front parlor.
“Soon after the play went into rehearsal, things began to happen. I was involved with the production as an actor and therefore had the opportunity to spend many hours in the house between June and August. The usual footsteps kept up and they were heard by most of the members of the cast at one time or another. There was a group of us within the cast who were especially interested in the phenomenon: myself, Barry Bunker, George Carroll, and his fiancée, Toni Manista. As we were all dressed in period costumes most of the time, the ghosts should have felt right at home. Toni was playing the part of Anna, Thomas Whaley’s wife. She said she often felt as if she were being followed around the house (as did we all).
“I was sitting in the kitchen with my back to the wall one night, When I felt a hand run through my hair. I quickly turned around but there was nothing to be seen. I have always felt that it was Anna Whaley who touched me. It
was my first such experience and I felt honored that she had chosen me to touch. There is a chair in the kitchen which is made of rawhide and wood. The seat is made of thin strips of rawhide crisscrossed on the wooden frame. When someone sits on it, it sounds like the leather in a saddle. On the same night I was touched, the chair made sounds as if someone were sitting in it, not once but several times. There always seems to be a change in the temperature of a room when a presence enters. The kitchen is no exception. It really got cold in there!
“Later in the run of the show, the apparitions began to appear. The cast had purchased a chair which had belonged to Thomas Whaley and placed it in the front parlor. Soon after, a mist was occasionally seen in the chair or near it. In other parts of the house, especially upstairs, inexplicable shadows and mists began to appear. George Carroll swears that he saw a man standing at the top of the stairs. He walked up the stairs and through the man. The man was still there when George turned around but faded and disappeared almost immediately.
“During the summer, we often smelled cigar smoke when we opened the house in the morning or at times when no one was around. Whaley was very fond of cigars and was seldom without them.
“The footsteps became varied. The heavy steps of the man continued as usual, but the click-click of high heels was heard on occasion. Once, the sound of a small child running in the upstairs hall was heard. Another time, I was alone with the woman who took ticket reservations for Yankee Jim. We had locked the doors and decided to check the upstairs before we left. We had no sooner gotten up the stairs than we both heard footfalls in the hall below. We listened for a moment and then went back down the stairs and looked. No one. We searched the entire house, not really expecting to find anyone. We didn’t. Not a living soul.
“Well, this just about brings you up to date. I’ve been back a number of times since September but there’s nothing to report except the usual footfalls, creaks, etc.
“I think that the play had much to do with the summer’s phenomena. Costumes, characters, and situations which were known to the Whaleys were reenacted nightly. Yankee Jim Robinson certainly has reason enough to haunt. Many people, myself included, think that he got a bad deal. He was wounded during his capture and was unconscious during most of the trial. To top it off, the judge was a drunk and the jury and townspeople wanted blood. Jim was just unlucky enough to bear their combined wrath.