by Hans Holzer
Just as I had asked her, she started at the beginning:
My mother bought our home around thirty-eight years ago. It had just been completed when we moved in. My mother had been widowed a few years previously and she brought my two sisters and myself from the Middle West to California because we were always sickly due to the fierce winters that we left behind.
About a couple of years after we moved in, we unfortunately lost almost everything. My mother then rented our house furnished and we lived elsewhere. She rented the house on a lease basis to five different tenants over an eight or nine year period.
There was an oil man who had a young wife and baby. My mother can only describe him as a great brute of a man with a surly disposition.
Our next-door neighbors called my mother while these people were living here and said that there had been a terrible fight at our house the night before and four other men were involved. They said that they could hear furniture being broken, and that they had almost called the police.
As to furniture being broken—it was all too true—as my mother discovered when they moved out.
In the back of the house are two bedrooms and a small room that we use as a den. These three rooms all have French doors and then screened doors that open onto a good-sized patio.
Things didn’t start to happen right away after we moved back. It was quiet for a while, but then it started.
The first thing I remember was when I was about nineteen or twenty years old. Everyone had gone to bed, my sister had gone out, and I was writing a letter in my bedroom. Suddenly my locked French doors started to rattle and shake as if someone were desperately trying to get in. It just so happened that we had had our outside patio floor painted that very afternoon. I couldn’t wait until I got out there the next morning to look for footprints in the paint. There weren’t any. There wasn’t even a dent.
I touched my finger to the freshly painted patio floor and a little of it adhered to my fingers.
We would also keep hearing a light switch being pushed every now and then, and no one in the room!
Sometimes my mother would ask me in the morning why I had been rapping on her bedroom door at night. I have never rapped on her door and she knows it now because that’s another thing that goes on every now and then. Three raps on your bedroom door, usually late at night. I was married during World War II, and after the war my husband and I lived here for three years. I had a most unhappy married life and eventually we separated and I secured a divorce.
One night, while I was still married, my mother and sister were visiting relatives in the Middle West.
I was all alone, as my husband had gone out for a while. I had locked all the doors that lead to the back of the house as I always did when I was alone. It was only around 9 P.M. Suddenly I heard someone slowly turning the knob of the door that leads from the laundry to the den. Then it would stop and a few minutes later “it” would try again, turning and turning that knob!
My husband came home less than an hour later and we both went through the house together. Every window was bolted, every door was locked.
Then later, there was the man I kept steady company with for a long time. We met about eleven years ago and I remember so well after we had been out and he’d walk me up to my front door at night we would both hear these footsteps inside the house making a great deal of noise running to the front door as if to meet us!
Then, sometimes for weeks at a time, every night tapping on my furniture would start while I’d be in bed reading. “It” would go around and tap on all of my furniture, usually two or three taps at a time. I used to get so fed up with it all I’d yell out “Get out and leave me alone!” That didn’t do any good because “it” would always come back.
When I used to sleep with my lights out up to five years ago, three times I was nearly smothered to death.
I always sleep on my left side—but for some strange reason I would slowly wake up lying flat on my stomach trying desperately to breathe.
Something seemed to have me in a vise wherein I absolutely could not move any part of my body, and would keep pressing my face into the pillow! I would try desperately to scream and fight it off, but I was absolutely powerless. Just when I knew I couldn’t stand it any longer and was suffocating to death—I would be released, slowly!
But each time this happened—“it” would suffocate me a little longer. I felt that I would never live through it again, and hence have slept with my lights on ever since.
The same thing happened to my mother once when she had that room prior to my having it. She never told me about her own experience, however, until I told her of mine.
The champagne cork popping and the liquid being poured (it even bubbled) right beside me, without being seen, happened three times last year at approximately six-week intervals.
That too was in my bedroom; it happened once in my mother’s bedroom also.
The loud shrill whistling in my right ear occurred last March or April when I came home one evening around 10 P.M. It was so loud it was more like a blast. It started as a whistle into my right ear just as soon as I opened the front door and stepped into the darkness of the house. I screamed and ran to the kitchen and when I turned the light on it stopped. The whistling sounded like the beginning of a military march, but there were just a few notes.
Occasionally we hear a whistling outside our house at night—but it is a different tune and sounds more as if it is calling to us.
My mother has heard articles on her dressing table being moved around while she was in bed at night. This happened twice last year.
Noises in our kitchen wake me up at night. They sound as if something were moving around, kettles being handled, and cupboards being opened.
One night about three years ago, I got up around midnight to go to the bathroom. While I was in the bathroom, I heard loudly and clearly a terrible fight going on in the living room. It was a wordless and desperate struggle!
How I got the courage to open the door to the living room I’ll never know, but I did. It was completely dark—I saw nothing and the fighting stopped the instant I opened the door!
Some months later, my mother, sister, and I were awakened at night by a terrible fight going on right outside of our bedroom’s French doors. It sounded as if every stick of our patio furniture were being broken by people who were fighting desperately but wordlessly. It lasted all of several minutes.
We didn’t go outside, but the next morning we did. None of our furniture on the patio had been touched, everything was in its place and looked as pretty as it always had. Yet we had all been awakened by the terrible noise—and what sounded like the complete destruction of everything on our patio.
This blasted ghost even walks around outside in the back yard and on our driveway and sidewalks.
Several times when we have had relatives staying with us for a few days, my mother and my sister slept in our double garage on some of our patio chaise longues. They have always been awakened at night by heavy footsteps walking up to the garage door and then they hear nothing else. There are never any footsteps heard that indicate “it” is walking away! Let me also mention it would be almost impossible for a human intruder to get into our back yard. Everything is enclosed by high fences and a steel gate across the driveway.
Several years ago when I had fallen asleep on the couch in the den while looking at television, I awakened around 11 P.M. and turned the television off. Then I stretched and was just walking to my bedroom when I heard a voice enunciating most distinctly, and saying loudly and clearly, but slowly—“Oh woe—woe—woe—you’ve got to go—go—go!”
Last month I heard footsteps every night in the den, even after I had left that room only five minutes before.
I decided to seek verification of the experience with the footsteps from inside an empty house. The young man Helen had mentioned, William H., is a chemist and rather on the practical side.
“On quite a few instances upon returning to
Helen’s home and entering the house I heard what sounded to me noises of footsteps approaching to greet us as we entered the living room. I investigated to assure myself as well as Helen that there was no one there. I cannot explain it, but I definitely heard the noises.”
I had encouraged Helen L. to report to me any further happenings of an uncanny nature, and I did not have to wait long. On February 3, 1964, she wrote me an urgent note:
On January 28th I woke up about 11:30 P.M. to go to the bathroom for a glass of water. As I turned on the light I pushed the bathroom door open, and I heard a loud, screeching, rusty sound. It sounded like some heavy oaken door that one might hear in a horror movie! I examined the bolts at the top and the bottom of the door and there was nothing wrong; the door was as light to the touch and easy to open as it always had been.
Incidentally, while the door was making those terrible noises, it woke my mother up. She had heard it, too.
On Friday night, January 31, I was in the small room that we call the den, in the back of the house.
I suddenly heard footsteps outside, walking very distinctly on the sidewalks right by the den windows and then suddenly they just ceased as they always do—outside!
They are definitely a man’s footsteps, and I would say the footsteps of a man that knows exactly where he’s going! It’s always the same measured pace, and then they suddenly stop!
I asked Miss L. whether anyone had ever died in the house, whether by violence, or through ordinary ways. “As far as we know, nobody ever died,” she replied.
I promised to make arrangements soon to visit the house with a medium. Miss L. meanwhile wanted me to know all about her mother and sister:
My sister here at home is retarded due to an injury at birth. Also, my mother is 80 years of age, an arthritic with crippled hands and feet and suffers from the added complication of heart disease.
Last night, February 2, I was reading in bed. It was around 10:30 P.M. Suddenly it sounded as if a body were thrown against my bedroom door.
Since this was the first I had heard of the sister’s retarded condition, I naturally questioned her role in creating the strange phenomena. Knowing full well that a retarded person is often exactly like a youngster prior to puberty as far as the poltergeist phenomena are concerned, it occurred to me that the woman might be supplying the force required to perform some of the uncanny actions in the haunted house.
I tactfully suggested this possibility to Helen L., but she rejected any such possibility:
Her power of concentration is impaired and her nervous system more or less disorganized. You must also bear in mind that every door in this house that leads to another room is locked. There is only one door that we don’t lock and that is the door that leads from the kitchen to the laundry.
She couldn’t possibly produce the phenomena that even other friends of mine have witnessed when my sister has been over 3,000 miles away visiting relatives in Minnesota.
One thing I haven’t told you is that I seem to have inherited a tendency of my mother’s. We both dream dreams that come true—and have all of our lives. Many of them don’t concern me at all or even people that are close to me, but they always come true.
One night I dreamt I saw this ghost who has been haunting our house. I was in bed and he was sitting on my cedar chest just looking at me. He seemed to be dressed in some early Grecian style—had rather curly hair—a frightfully mischievous expression and the most peculiar eyes. They were slanted up at the corners but he was not Oriental. His eyes were rather dark and very bright but his face looked bloated—an unhealthy looking pasty white skin—and it was too fat. He was a pretty big young man. He looked anything but intelligent, in fact the expression on his face was quite idiotic! Now—can you make anything out of this?
The psychic photo of the girl who died at a wild party in the house on Ardmore Boulevard, Los Angeles
The picture began to get clearer. For one thing, Helen L. had not understood my references to her retarded sister. I never suggested conscious fraud, of course. The possibility that her energies were used by the ghost began to fade, however, when Helen told me that the manifestations continued unabated in her absence from Los Angeles. Poltergeists don’t work long distance.
Then, too, the incidents of earlier clairvoyance and premonitory dreams in Helen’s life made it clear to me at this point that she herself must be the medium, or at least one of the mediums, supplying the force needed for the manifestations.
Her strange dream, in which she saw the alleged ghost, had me puzzled. Could he be an actor?
As I began to make preparations for my impending visit to California, I was wondering about other witnesses who might have heard the uncanny footsteps and other noises. Helen L. had told me that a number of her friends had experienced these things, but were reluctant to talk:
There was only one time in my life that I was glad that this wretched ghost around here made himself known. I had a close lady friend for a number of years with whom I used to work. After I had known her a few years I took her into my confidence and told her that our house was haunted. She laughed and said of course there was no such thing as a ghost, and that I must be the victim of my own imagination. I didn’t argue the point because I knew it was useless.
About one month later she called me on the phone on a Sunday afternoon and asked me if she could stop by and visit. She came by around 4 P.M., and I fixed a cup of coffee which I brought to my bedroom. She was sitting in my bedroom chair jabbering away—and I was sitting on my bed drinking my coffee. It was still daylight. Suddenly, this ghost started walking and thumping from the living room right up to my bedroom door and stopped. Margaret looked up at me brightly and said, “Why, Helen, I thought you said you were all alone—who on earth could that be?” I said, “Margaret, I am all alone here—no living person is in this house except you and me, and what you hear is what you call my imagination!”
She couldn’t get out of this house fast enough, wouldn’t even go out through the living room, but rushed out of my French doors that lead to the patio and that’s the last I saw of her.
On February 23, Helen L. wrote again. There had been additional disturbances in the house, and she was able to observe them a little more calmly, perhaps because I had assured her that soon I would try to get rid of the nuisance once and for all.
Since I last wrote to you two or three weeks ago—for almost one solid week I would hear someone moving around in the den which adjoins my bedroom; sometimes within only 5 or 10 minutes after I would leave the den, lock the door, climb into bed and read—I would keep hearing these furtive movements. This time the walking would be soft—and “it” would keep bumping into the furniture; of late I am awakened quite frequently by someone that has thrown himself forcibly against the den door leading to my bedroom. This has happened several times at exactly 11:30 P.M., but has also happened as early as 8:30 P.M. The only way I can describe it is that someone is pretty damned mad at me for closing and locking that door and is registering a violent reaction in protest.
It actually sounds as if the door is about to be broken down. Then “it” has begun to rap loudly on the bedroom walls, two loud raps.
A week before I was due to arrive in Los Angeles, I had another note from Helen. On April 9, she wrote:
Last Saturday night I got home around midnight and went to bed with my book as usual. I was just about ready to doze off when a “bull-whip” cracked right over my head! The next night someone hit the bedboard of my bed real hard while I was sitting there in bed trying to read.
I’ve told you about the heavy man’s footsteps outside, what I neglected to tell you is that my mother and sister are both awakened every once in a while between 3 and 4 A.M. by a woman’s fast clicking shoes hurrying up our driveway and stopping at the gate that crosses the driveway towards the rear of the house! The last time was less than two weeks ago.
I wonder what the neighbors think when they hear her!
I arrived i
n Los Angeles on April 16 and immediately called Helen L. on the phone. We arranged for a quick initial visit the following day. Meanwhile I would make inquiries for a good medium. Once I had found the right person, I would return with her and the exorcism could begin.
The quick visit after my lecture, delivered to the Los Angeles branch of the American Society for Psychic Research, was of value inasmuch as I got to know Helen L. a little better and could check on some of her reports once again. The house on Ardmore Boulevard was as comfortable and pleasant-looking as its owner had described it, and I would never have guessed that it had a sinister history.
That’s the way it is sometimes with haunted houses; they just don’t look the part!
Dick Simonton, an executive deeply interested in extra-sensory perception studies, accompanied me to the house. He, too, was impressed by Miss L.’s apparent level-headedness under trying conditions.
Fortunately, I did not have to look far for a suitable medium or, at least, clairvoyant. Several months before my California trip, I had received a letter from a Mrs. Maxine Bell, who had seen me on a local television show:
I am a sincere medium willing to offer my talents for your research and experiments. For the past 20 years I have been doing much work for individuals with definite problems. Not once have I run into a poltergeist type, for my work is more spiritually oriented. Deep trance is not even necessary for me to work as I am extremely sensitive.
I am a woman in her late 40’s who has had the gift of perception since 1938 and I have worked on the most serious cases of possession and some haunted-house cases as well. I would be most happy to serve you in any way.
I called Mrs. Bell and asked her to meet us the following day in front of the house. The time was 3 P.M. and it was one of those lovely California afternoons that are hard to reconcile with a ghost.
Obviously, Mrs. Bell had no chance to dig into the past of the house or even get to know the present owner. I told her to meet us at the corner but volunteered neither name nor details.