by Hans Holzer
It appears to be equally difficult to ascertain the true nature of the girl’s problem. Had she merely brought home a suitor whom her father did not like, or had she actually gotten married? Strange as it seems, the records are not clear in this case. What appears to be certain, at least to me, is her death by falling from the upper story. Ethel Johnson Meyers would not have picked up the “passing condition” had she not genuinely felt it. Furthermore, these impressions were felt by the medium on the very spot where traditionally the girl landed. Thus, Ethel was able to confirm the continuous presence of an unfortunate young woman in what used to be her father’s house. Since the two Presidents whom the medium felt in some way attached to the house are hardly of the ghostly kind, it remains for Colonel Tayloe himself to be the man whose footsteps have been identified by a number of witnesses.
* * *
The American Institute of Architects no longer considers the Octagon the kind of museum it was before the renovation. It prefers that it be known primarily as their headquarters. Also, it is doubtful that the frequent parties and social functions that used to take place inside its walls will be as frequent as in the past, if indeed the Institute will permit them altogether.
If you are a visitor to the nation’s capital and are bent on unusual sights, by all means include the Octagon in your itinerary. Surely once the renovation is completed there can be no reason—I almost said no earthly reason—for a visitor to be denied the privilege of visiting the American Institute of Architects. And as you walk about the Octagon itself and look up at the staircase perhaps wondering whether you will be as fortunate, or unfortunate as the case may be, as to see one of the two phantoms, remember that they are only dimly aware of you if at all. You can’t command a ghost to appear. If you manage to wangle an invitation to spend the night, perhaps something uncanny might happen—but then again, it might not. What you can be sure of, however, is that I haven’t “deghosted” the Octagon by any means even though a medium, Ethel Johnson Meyers, was briefly almost on speaking terms with its two prominent ghosts.
It remains to be seen, or heard, whether further psychic phenomena take place at the Octagon in the future.
* 55 The Integration Ghost
DURING THE HOT, HUMID July days of 1964, while blacks rioted in Harlem and Brooklyn and the black-and-white struggle was being brought to fever pitch by agitators on both sides, I was fortunate enough to help free a black gentleman from his unhappy state between the two worlds.
It all started with my appearance on a program called “To Tell the Truth,” which, to tell the truth, frequently doesn’t—in the interest of good showmanship, of course.
The program, as most Americans know, consists of a panel of three so-called celebrities, who shoot questions at three guests, and try to determine, by their answers, which one is the real McCoy, and which two are imposters.
I appeared as one of three alleged ghost hunters, two of whom were frauds. One of my imposters, incidentally, was later involved in a real fraud, but my ESP wasn’t working well at the time of my meeting with him, or I would have objected to his presence.
I played it cool, appearing neither too knowing nor exactly stupid. Nevertheless, the majority of the panel knew which of us was the Ghost Hunter and I was unmasked. Panelist Phyllis Newman thought I was pale enough to be one of my own ghosts, and comedian Milton Kamen wondered about the love life of my ghosts, to which I deadpanned, “I never invade the private lives of my clients.”
Artie Shaw wanted to know if I had read a certain book, but of course I had to inform him that I usually read only Ghost Hunter, especially on network television shows.
Actually, I almost became a ghost myself on this program, for the lights so blinded me I nearly fell off the high stage used to highlight the three guests at the start of the show.
On October 10, 1963, I received a note from the receptionist of the program, who had apparently read Ghost Hunter and had something of special interest to tell me.
The Integration Ghost House—Third Avenue, New York City
Alice Hille is a young lady of considerable charm, as I later found, whose family was originally from Louisiana, and who had always had an interest in ghost stories and the like.
The experience she was about to report to me concerned a staffer at Goodson-Todman, Frank R., a television producer, and about as levelheaded a man as you’d want to find.
It was he who had had the uncanny experience, but Alice thought I ought to know about it and, if possible, meet him. Since she herself, being African-American, had an interest in an intelligent approach to integration, the particularities of the case intrigued her even more. She wrote me:
It seems that there was a colored man named John Gray. He was a personal friend of Frank’s. Mr. Gray had renounced his race and had proceeded to live in the “white world,” dressing with only the finest of taste. He died of cancer after a long illness, and his family provided him with a real old-fashioned Southern funeral. Mr. Gray would have been appalled at the way he was being laid to rest, as he had once said, should he die, he wanted to be cremated, and his ashes spread over the areas of Manhattan where he would not have been allowed to live, had he been known as a Negro.
Alice then proceeded to tell me of Frank’s uncanny experience, and gave me the address of the apartment where it happened.
It took me three or four months to get hold of Frank R. and get the story firsthand. Finally, over a drink at Manhattan’s fashionable Sheraton-East Hotel, I was able to pin him down on details.
Frank had met John Gray through his roommate, Bob Blackburn. At the time Bob and Frank lived not far from what was now the haunted apartment, and when they heard that John Gray was ill, they went to see him in the hospital. This was the year 1961. Gray, only thirty-three, knew he was dying. To the last he complained that his friends did not come to visit him often enough. He had been an employee of the Department of Welfare, with odd working hours which usually had brought him home to his apartment in the middle of the afternoon.
Three months after John Gray’s death, the two friends took over his vacated apartment. Not long after, Frank R. found himself alone in the apartment, resting in bed, with a book. It was the middle of the afternoon.
Suddenly, he clearly heard the front door open and close. This was followed by a man’s footsteps which could be heard clearly on the bare floor.
“Who is it?” Frank called out, wondering. Only his roommate Bob had a key, and he certainly was not due at that time. There was no reply. The footsteps continued slowly to the bedroom door, which lies to the right of the large living-room area of the small apartment.
He heard the characteristic noise of the bedroom door opening, then closing, and footsteps continuing on through the room towards the bed. There they abruptly stopped.
Frank was terrified, for he could not see anything in the way of a human being. It was 3 P.M., and quite light in the apartment. Sweat started to form on his forehead as he lay still, waiting.
After a moment, he could hear the unseen visitor’s footsteps turn around, slowly walk out again, and the noise of the door opening and closing was repeated in the same way as a few moments before. Yet despite the noise, the door did not actually open!
At first Frank thought he was ill, but a quick check showed that he did not suffer from a fever or other unusual state. He decided to put the whole incident out of his mind and within a day or so he had ascribed it to an overactive imagination. What, however, had brought on just this particular imaginary incident, he was never able to say.
He also thought better of telling Bob about it, lest he be branded superstitious or worse. There the matter stood until about six weeks later, when Bob Blackburn had the same experience. Alone in bed, he heard the steps, the doors open and close, but he did not panic. Somehow an incipient psychic sense within him guided him, and he knew it was his departed friend, John Gray, paying his former abode a visit.
The atmosphere had taken on a tense, unreal t
inge, electrically loaded and somehow different from what it had been only a moment before.
Without thinking twice, Bob Blackburn leaned forward in bed and said in a low, but clear voice, “May your soul rest in peace, John.”
With that, the unseen feet moved on, and the footsteps went out the way they had come in. Somehow, after this the two roommates got to discussing their psychic experiences. They compared them and found they had met John Gray’s ghost under exactly the same conditions.
They left the apartment for a number of reasons, and it was not until about three years later that the matter became of interest again to Frank R.
At a party in the same neighborhood—Thirty-fourth Street and Third Avenue, New York—one of the guests, a Chilean named Minor, talked of his friend Vern who had just moved out of a haunted apartment because he could not stand it any longer.
Frank R., listening politely, suddenly realized, by the description, that Minor was talking about John Gray’s old apartment.
“People are walking all over the place,” Vern was quoted as saying, and he had moved out, a complete nervous wreck.
The apartment remained empty for a while, even though the rent was unusually low. The building passed into the hands of the owners of a fish restaurant downstairs. Most of the tenants in the five-story walkup are quiet artists or business people. The building is well kept and the narrow staircase reveals a number of smallish, but cozy flatlets, of which Manhattan never has enough to satisfy the needs of the younger white-collar workers and artists.
John Gray must have been quite comfortable in these surroundings and the apartment on Third Avenue probably was a haven and refuge to him from the not-so-friendly world in which he had lived.
“Very interesting,” I said, thanking Frank R. for his story. I asked if he himself had had other psychic experiences.
“Well, I’m Irish,” he said, and smiled knowingly, “and I’m sort of intuitive a lot of times. When I was very young, I once warned my mother not to go to the beach on a certain day, or she would drown. I was only fourteen years old at the time. Mother went, and did have an accident. Almost drowned, but was pulled out just in time.”
“That explains it,” I said. “You must be psychic in order to experience the footsteps. Those who have uncanny experiences are mediumistic to begin with, otherwise they would not have heard or seen the uncanny.”
Frank R. nodded. He quite understood and, moreover, was willing to attend a séance I was going to try to arrange if I could talk to the present occupants of the haunted apartment. On this note we parted company, and Frank promised to make inquiries of the landlord as to whether the apartment was still vacant.
Apartment 5A was far from empty. A young and attractive couple by the name of Noren had occupied it for the past six months.
When I called and identified myself, they were puzzled about the nature of my business.
“Do you by any chance hear footsteps where no one is walking, or do you experience anything unusual in your apartment?” I asked innocently.
It was like a bombshell. There was a moment of stunned silence, then Mrs. Noren answered, “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, we do. Can you help us?”
The following day I went to visit them at the haunted apartment. Mr. Noren, a film editor for one of the networks, had not had any unusual experiences up to that time. But his wife had. Two or three months before my visit, when she was in the shower one evening, she suddenly and distinctly heard footsteps in the living room. Thinking it was her husband and that something was wrong, she rushed out only to find him still fast asleep in the bedroom. They decided it must have been he, walking in his sleep!
But a few weeks later, she heard the footsteps again. This time there was no doubt in her mind—they had a ghost.
I arranged for a séance on July 22, 1964, to make contact with the ghost.
My medium was Ethel Johnson Meyers, who was, of course, totally unaware of the story or purpose of our visit.
Among those present were three or four friends of the Norens, Frank R., Bob Blackburn, Alice Hille, an editor from Time-Life, a Mrs. Harrington, student of psychic science, the Norens, my wife, Catherine, myself—and two tiny black kittens who—in complete defiance of all tradition laid down for familiars and black cats in general—paid absolutely no attention to the ghost. Possibly they had not yet been told how to behave.
In a brief moment of clairvoyance, Ethel Meyers described two men attached to the place: one a white-haired gentleman whom Bob Blackburn later acknowledged as his late father, and a “dark-complexioned man,” not old, not terribly young.
“He is looking at you and you,” she said, not knowing the names of the two men. Frank and Bob tensed up in expectation. “He looks at you with one eye, sort of,” she added. She then complained of breathing difficulties and I remembered that John Gray had spent his last hours in an oxygen tent.
Suddenly, the ghost took over. With a shriek, Mrs. Meyers fell to the floor and, on her knees, struggled over to where Bob Blackburn and Frank sat. Picking out these two contacts from among the many present was a sure sign of accuracy, I thought. Naturally, Mrs. Meyers knew nothing of their connection with the case of the ghost.
She grabbed Bob Blackburn’s hand amid heavy sobs, and the voice emanating now from her throat was a deep masculine voice, not without a trace of a Southern accent. “It’s a dream,” he mumbled, then began to complain that Bob had not come to visit him!
Soothing words from Bob Blackburn and myself calmed the excited spirit.
When I tried to tell him that he was “dead,” however, I was given a violent argument.
“He’s mad,” the ghost said, and sought solace from his erstwhile friend.
“No, John, he’s right,” Bob said.
“You too?” the ghost replied and hesitated.
This moment was what I had hoped for. I proceeded to explain what had happened to him. Gradually, he understood, but refused to go.
“Where can I go?” he said. “This is my house.”
I told him to think of his parents, and join them in this manner.
“They’re dead,” he replied.
“So are you,” I said.
Finally I requested the assistance of Ethel’s control, Albert, who came and gently led the struggling soul of John Gray over to the “other side” of life.
“He isn’t all there in the head,” he commented, as he placed the medium back into her chair quickly. “Narcotics before passing have made him less than rational.”
Was there any unsettled personal business? I wanted to know.
“Personal wishes, yes. Not all they should have been.”
Albert explained that he had brought John’s parents to take his arm and help him across, away from the apartment which had, in earth life, been the only refuge where he could really be “off guard.”
An hour after trance had set on Mrs. Meyers, she was back in full command of her own body, remembering absolutely nothing of either the trance experience with John Gray, or her fall to the floor.
It was a steaming hot July night as we descended the four flights of stairs to Third Avenue, but I felt elated at the thought of having John Gray roam no more where he was certainly not wanted.
* 56 The Ardmore Boulevard Ghosts
ARDMORE BOULEVARD LIES in a highly respected and rather beautiful section of Los Angeles. It is a broad street, richly adorned by flowers, and substantial homes line it on both sides for a distance of several miles north and south.
The people who live here are not prone to ghost stories, and if something uncanny happens to them, they prefer that their names be kept secret.
Since that was the only condition under which I could have access to the house in question, I reluctantly agreed, although the names and addresses of all concerned in this case are known to me and to the American Society for Psychic Research, represented, in the investigation I made, in the person of its California head, Mrs. George Kern.
It all st
arted unbeknown to me when I was a panelist on a television program emanating from the Linden Theatre in Los Angeles in December of 1963.
Shortly after, I received a letter from a lady whom we shall identify as Helen L. She wrote:
I consider myself lucky that I tuned in on the show you appeared on. You see, I live in a haunted house, and I do need help desperately.
I have heard a terrible struggle and fight in the middle of the night when I have gotten up to go to the bathroom! The other night I was reading in bed and smoking a cigarette. It was about 9:30, and I was completely engrossed in my book. Suddenly, I would say about a couple of feet to my right, a champagne cork popped loud and clear and then I heard it [champagne] being poured into a glass! I saw nothing, yet heard it all, and the horror of it is that it all took place right beside me.
I telephoned Helen L. as soon as I received a second letter from her.
There was no immediate possibility of going to Los Angeles to help her, but I wanted to establish personal contact and perhaps get a better idea of her personality in the process.
Miss L. struck me as a person of good educational background; her voice was well modulated and not at all hysterical. She sounded rather embarrassed by the whole thing and begged me to keep her name and exact address confidential. I explained that unfortunately there was no foundation to pay for an expedition to Los Angeles post-haste, nor was there as yet a television series to finance such a trip as part of its legitimate research.
Consequently, I had to provide the funds myself, and an author’s funds are never enough.
I would go as soon as there was an opportunity to do so—an engagement to speak or to appear on the home screen which would take me to the coast. Meanwhile, would she write me whenever anything new was happening in the house. Also, could she give me a chronological account of the strange goings on in her house, blow by blow. On January 23, the lady obliged. Her letter seemed a bit more composed this time; evidently the promise of my coming out to see her had helped calm her nerves.