by Hans Holzer
Soon she had seated herself in the living room across from Helen L., myself, Mrs. George Kern of the American Society for Psychic Research, and an associate of hers, Mr. G., who was psychic to a certain extent.
The house impressed him strongly. “I felt chilly on entering this house,” he said. “There are two people here—I mean ghosts—one is a man in his middle years, and a young female who died by suffocation.”
I immediately thought of Helen L.’s report of how she was almost suffocated a number of times by unseen hands!
“These two seek each other,” Mr. G., an engineer by profession, continued. “The young person is about ten or twelve years old, feminine or a male with feminine characteristics. This child is lost and asking for help. There is wildness, she wants to do ‘things,’ she says, ‘I want....”’ Mr. G. was now breathing heavily, as if he were assuming the personality of the young ghost.
“This child may be a little older,” he finally said, “maybe as much as fifteen years. She is very nervous... crying because of unexpressed emotions...this child lived in this house but had sad times here, too much discipline. I think both people died about the same time. I’d say at least fifteen to twenty years ago.”
I thanked the engineer and turned to Mrs. Bell, who had quietly watched the “reading” of the house.
“I never interfere with another medium’s impressions,” she finally said, “but if he’s finished, I’d like to add mine.”
I nodded for her to go ahead.
“A Philip Stengel died here in 1934,” she began. I looked at Helen L. The name did not register. But then her mother did not recall all of their tenants. There were quite a few.
“Ten years ago a person was murdered here,” Mrs. Bell continued. “No—in 1948. There were violent arguments. Two men, one of them named Howard. Arguments in the driveway outside. The neighbors heard it, too. Two parties came here, there was that violent argument, and one was killed. Wounded in the abdomen. The body was lifted into a vehicle. One of them is staying here in this house, but there is also another person in the house. I feel sudden violence and money involved. A lady fled. Lots of money was at stake. Two people were here, the woman, however, had the house. The quarrel was due to a misunderstanding about money.”
I was amazed. Unless Mrs. Bell had read Helen L.’s letters to me or spoken to her before coming here, she could not have known many of these details. The description of the quarrel and the attitude of the neighbors were exactly as described to me by Helen L.
I looked at the owner of the house who sat somewhat stunned by what she had heard.
“Well,” she finally said to me, “there are two different kinds of footsteps—the ones in the back of the house sound like those of a man, while the ones in front are certainly more like a child’s steps, very fast. The steps we hear around three or four in the morning are also woman’s, I think. I’m sure the whistler we’ve heard is a man.”
What were the facts around that quarrel?
Helen L. had looked into the matter further since my arrival.
“There was a fight,” she said quietly. “An oilman lived here, he was married to a much younger woman, and they had a baby. He went away and a friend came to the house. There was a wild fight here.”
“What about those rather quaint words you heard?” I questioned Miss L.
“You mean, ‘Woe, woe, woe, you’ve got to go, go, go!’—why, they were spoken with a definite British accent.”
“Or a theatrical phony British accent?”
“Perhaps.”
We moved on to the bedroom where so much commotion had been observed. Mrs. Bell stood opposite the bed and the rest of us formed a circle around her. I asked the entity to leave, in a ritual known as a rescue circle, a verbal exorcism, which usually works. There are exceptions, of course.
I then took some photographs with my Super Ikonta B camera, a camera which is double-exposure proof because of a special arrangement of the transport and shutter systems. I used Agfa Record film and no artificial light. There was enough light coming in from the French windows. To my amazement, two of the pictures showed figures that were not visible to the naked eye, at least not to mine. One of the two clearly shows a female figure, rather young and slender, standing near the window in what looks like a diaphanous gown. Evidently the ghost wanted us to know she was watching us. I have since enlarged this picture and shown it on television.
There is no doubt about the figure, and I didn’t put it there, either.
We returned to the living room and took our leave. I felt sure the evil entity had been dislodged or at least shaken up. Sometimes an additional visit is necessary to conclude the deed, but I could not stay any longer.
I had hardly touched New York soil, when a letter from Helen L. arrived:
I haven’t written you sooner because I wanted to be sure that “it” has left, and I feel that “it” hasn’t left entirely. I am suffering from a dreadful fatigue of mind and body and soul—and I’d like to cry and cry and never stop! On the Saturday night you were here, I woke up about 11:30 P.M. and walked into the kitchen, when I heard heavy footsteps walking in the dining room to the swinging kitchen door. Needless to say, I got out of there fast.
On May 17, Helen L. finally wrote to me some of the corroboration I asked her for. I wanted to know if any more of the material obtained by Maxine Bell could be checked out, and if so, with what results:
When Miss Bell was here, she said there was kindly gray-haired man standing before her who had died suddenly in my bedroom, years ago, of a heart attack. He hadn’t expected to die, and had so much unfinished business. In talking to my mother later she feels that it was a man she had as a tenant here who was married for the second time, to a much younger woman. She said he had been ill with a heart condition and he was an extremely busy man with more than one business, including a railroad he owned. He had a baby daughter by his second wife and was quite cheerful and happy—and confident that he was over the heart attack he had previously suffered.
Nevertheless he did die suddenly and my mother always felt that he did die in this house, although his wife denied it. Even so, my mother released her from the lease. He was a gray-haired, very distinguished-looking man.
Now about the murder that Miss Bell mentioned and the terrible fight that took place that our neighbors reported to my mother.
Miss Bell was right when she said that the fight started toward the back of the house on the driveway. In fact, our neighbor came out and asked what was going on and the man he asked, whom he didn’t know (probably a guest of our tenant’s at that time) said, “Oh, nothing,” and gave him his card which had an address on this street. Nevertheless the fight started again, and it was terrible—furniture being broken, etc. The neighbors didn’t call the police because they didn’t wish to become involved. My mother said that this particular tenant was a big brutish-looking man, married also to a young woman, and they too had a baby daughter.
The wife and baby were not here, according to our neighbors. They were away visiting relatives over the weekend.
My mother also told me that after they moved she did find blood spots on our floors.
For a while, I heard nothing further from the haunted address on Ardmore. Then a letter arrived, dated July 4. It was no fireworks message, but it contained the melancholy news that Helen L. was being plagued again by footsteps, thuds, movements, and other poltergeist manifestations.
I explained that I thought her own mediumistic powers made the manifestations possible and her fear of them might very well bring back what had been driven out. Such is the nature of anxiety that it can open the door to the uncanny where the strong in heart can keep it closed forever.
I also hinted that her own emotional state was extremely conducive to paranormal occurrences. Frustrations, even if unconscious, can create the conditions under which such manifestations flourish.
But Helen L. could not accept this.
“They’ll always com
e back, no matter who lives here,” she said, and looked forward to the day when she would sell the house.
What was needed was such a little thing—the firm conviction that “they” could be driven out, never to return. Instead, through apprehension as to whether the uncanny had really left, Helen L. had turned the closed door into a revolving door for herself.
* 57 The Ghost Who Refused to Leave
ONE OF THE MOST spectacular cases I reported in Ghosts I’ve Met concerned the hauntings at a house on Ardmore Boulevard, Los Angeles.
The house itself, barely thirty years old, was being plagued by the noises of a wild party going on at night, during which apparently someone was killed, by footsteps where nobody was seen walking and by other uncanny noises, including voices resounding in the dark, telling the current owners to get out of their house!
I had been to this house several times and brought Maxine Bell, a local psychic, on one occasion. That visit proved memorable not only because of material obtained by Miss Bell, in semi-trance, which proved accurate to a large degree, but because of my own photographic work.
Left alone in the most haunted part of the house, I took at random a number of black and white pictures of a particular bedroom which of course was empty, at least to my eyes.
On one of the pictures, taken under existing daylight conditions and from a firm surface, the figure of a young girl dressed in a kind of negligee appears standing near the window. As my camera is double exposure proof and both film and developing beyond reproach, there is no other rational explanation for this picture. Since that time, I have succeeded in taking other psychic photographs, but the “girl at the window” will always rank as one of my most astounding ones.
The whistling noises, the popping of a champagne bottle in the dark of night followed by laughter, the doors opening by themselves, and all the other psychic phenomena that had been endured by the owner of the house, Helen L., for a long time would not yield to my usual approach: trance session and order to the ghost to go away. There were complications in that Miss L. herself had mediumistic talents, although unsought and undeveloped, and there was present in the household a retarded sister, often the source of energies with which poltergeist phenomena are made possible.
Nevertheless, when we left the house on Ardmore Boulevard I had high hopes for a more peaceful atmosphere in the future. For one thing, I explained matters to Miss L., and for another, I suggested that the garden be searched for the body of that murder victim. We had already established that a fight had actually occurred some years ago in the house, observed by neighbors. It was entirely possible that the body of one of the victims was still on the grounds.
In July 1964 the noises resumed, and thuds of falling bodies, footfalls and other noises started up again in the unfortunate house. Quite rightly Helen L. asked me to continue the case. But it was not until the spring of 1965 that I could devote my energies toward this matter again.
All I had accomplished in the interim was a certain lessening of the phenomena, but not their elimination.
On March 14, 1965, Helen L. communicated with me in a matter of great urgency. For the first time, the ghost had been seen! At 3 A.M. on March 13, her mother had been awakened by strange noises, and looking up from the bed, she saw the figure of a man beside the bed. The noise sounded to her as if someone were tearing up bed-sheets. Frightened, the old lady pulled the covers over her head and went back to sleep. Helen L. also heard heavy footsteps all over the house that same night. Needless to say, they had no visitors from the flesh-and-blood world.
“Are you going to be here in April? Help!!” Helen L. wrote. I answered I would indeed come and bring Sybil Leek with me to have another and, hopefully, final go at this ghost. But it would have to be in June, not April. During the first week of May, Helen awoke on Sunday morning to hear a man’s voice shushing her inches away from her pillow. She could hardly wait for our arrival after that. Finally, on June 28, I arrived at the little house with Sybil to see what she might pick up.
“I know there is a presence here,” Sybil said immediately as we seated ourselves in the little office that is situated in back of the bedroom where most of the disturbances had occurred. I turned the light out to give Sybil a better chance to concentrate, or rather, to relax, and immediately she felt the intruder.
“It is mostly in the bedroom,” she continued. “There are two people; the man dominates in the bedroom area, and there is also a woman, a young girl.”
I decided Sybil should attempt trance at this point, and invited the ghost to make himself known. After a few moments, Sybil slipped into a state bordering on trance, but continued to be fully conscious.
“Morton,” she mumbled now, “there is something terribly intense...have a desire to break something ... Morton is the last name.”
I repeated my invitation for him to come forward and tell his story.
“The girl goes away,” Sybil intoned, “and he says he comes back to find her. And she isn’t here. He was going to celebrate. He must find her. Wedding party, celebration...for the girl. She wasn’t happy here; she had to go away. This man is a foreigner.”
“You’re right.” The booming voice of Helen L. spoke up in the dark across the room. Evidently Sybil had described someone she recognized.
“Jane Morton,” Sybil said now, flatly, “something to do with building, perhaps he had something to do with building this house...he’s an older man. Jane...is young...I’m trying to find out where Jane is...that’s what he wants to know...I will tell him it didn’t matter about the party...she would have gone anyway...she hated the old man...this man fell...head’s bad...fell against the stable...”
“Did he die here?” I pressed.
“1837,” Sybil said, somewhat incongruously, “1837. Came back...went out again, came back with people, was drunk, hurt his head, left hand side....”
Despite my urging, the entity refused to speak through Sybil in trance. I continued to question her nevertheless.
The ghost’s name was Howell Morton, Sybil reported, although I was not sure of the spelling of the first name, which might have been Hawall rather than Howell.
“He came here to do some building, someone was accidentally killed and buried in the garden...”
“Who buried this person?”
“Boyd Johnson...Raymond McClure...Dell...Persilla...” The voice was faltering now and the names not too clear.
“Is the girl dead too?”
“Girl’s alive....”
“Is there anyone dead in this house outside of Morton?”
“Morton died here.”
“Who was the figure I photographed here?”
“Jane...he wants to draw her back here...but I think she’s alive...yet there are things of hers buried...”
Sybil seemed confused at this point.
“Meri...Meredith....” she said, or she could have said. “Married her.” It just was not clear enough to be sure. Morton and some of his friends were doing the disturbing in the house, Sybil explained. He died at the party.
“There was violence outside,” Sybil added and Helen L. nodded emphatically. There was indeed.
“Drunk...4 o’clock...he died accidentally...”
Where is he buried in the garden, Helen L. wanted to know, anxiously.
“Straight down by the next building,” Sybil replied. “It wasn’t built completely when he died.”
Later we all went into the garden and identified the building as the garage in back of the house.
But Helen was not yet ready to start digging. What would the neighbors think if we found a body? Or, for that matter, what would they think if we didn’t? There we left it, for her to think over whether to dig or not to dig—that was the question.
I returned to New York in the hope that I would not hear anything further from Helen L. But I was mistaken. On July 5 I heard again from the lady on Ardmore Boulevard.
Her other sister, Alma, who lives in Hollywood but has stayed
at the house on Ardmore on occasion, called the morning after our visit. It was then that she volunteered information she had been holding back from Helen L. for two years for fear of further upsetting her, in view of events at the house. But she had had a dream-like impression at the house in which she “saw” a man in his middle years, who had lived in a lean-to shack attached to the garage.
She knew this man was dead and got the impression that he was a most stubborn person, difficult to dislodge or reason with. What made this dream impression of interest to us, Miss L. thought, was the fact that her sister could not have known of Sybil Leek’s insistence that a man lay buried at that very spot next to the garage! No shack ever stood there to the best of Helen L.’s knowledge, but of course it may have stood there before the present house was built.
Also, Helen reminded me that on those occasions when her mother and sister slept in the garage, when they had company in the main house, both had heard heavy footsteps coming up to the garage and stopping dead upon reaching the wall. Helen L.’s mother had for years insisted that there was “a body buried there in the garden” but nobody had ever tried to find it.
Nothing more happened until May 8, 1966, when Sybil Leek and I again went to the house because Helen L. had implored us to finish the case for her. The disturbances had been continuing on and off.
With us this time was Eugene Lundholm, librarian and psychic researcher. Trance came quickly. Perhaps Sybil was in a more relaxed state than during our last visit, but whatever the reason, things seemed to be more congenial this time around.
“I’m falling,” her voice whispered, barely audible, “I’m hungry...”
Was someone reliving moments of anguish?
“Who are you?” I demanded. “Can’t breathe....”
“What is your name?”
“Ha...Harold...”
He had great difficulties with his breathing and I suggested he relax.
“Kill her...” he now panted, “kill her, kill the woman...”
“Did you kill her?”
“NO!”