Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “I’ve come to help you. I’m your friend.”

  “Kill her before she goes away....”

  “Why?”

  “No good here...where’s he taken her? Where is she?”

  The voice became more intelligible now. “What is her name?”

  “Where is she...I’ll kill her.”

  “Who’s with her?”

  “Porter.”

  “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “NO!”

  “Who are you?”

  “Harold Howard.”

  “Is this your house?”

  “My house.”

  “Did you build it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you buy it?”

  Evidently my questioning got on his nerves, for he shouted, “Who are you?” I explained, but it didn’t help.

  “Too many people here...I throw them out...take those people out of here!”

  Strangely enough, the voice did not sound like Sybil’s at all; it had lost all trace of a British flavor and was full of anger. Evidently the ghost was speaking of the revellers he had found at his house and wanted them out.

  “His friends...take them away...she brought them...”

  “While you were away?” He was somewhat calmer now.

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “Where were you?”

  “Working.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Miner.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Purdy Town.” He may have said Purgory Town, or something like it.

  “What happened when you came home?”

  Again he became upset about the people in his house and I asked that he name some of them.

  “Margaret...” he said, more excited now. “Mine... twenty-five...I came home...they were here...too many people...party here....”

  “Did you hurt anyone?”

  “I’m going to kill her,” he insisted. Evidently he had not done so.

  “Why?”

  “Because of him.” Jealousy, the great ghost-maker. “Who is he?”

  “Porter.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He took my place. Eric Porter.”

  “What year is this?”

  It was high time we got a “fix” on the period we were in.

  “Forty-eight.”

  “What happened to you...afterwards?”

  “People went away...Porter...outside...I want to go away now...”

  It became clear to me that the girl must have been killed but that a shock condition at the time of the crime had prevented this man from realizing what he had done, thus forcing him to continue his quest for the girl. I told him as much and found him amazed at the idea of his deed.

  “Why did he follow me...he followed me...then I hit him in the guts...”

  “What did you do with him then?”

  “Put him away.”

  He became cagey after that, evidently thinking I was some sort of policeman interrogating him.

  “I watch him,” he finally said. “I look after him...in the garden. I won’t let him in the house.”

  I asked him further about himself, but he seemed confused.

  “Where am I?”

  He asked me to leave the other man in the garden, in the ground. He would never go away because he had to watch this other man.

  “Margaret comes back,” he said now. Was there a foursome or were we dealing with more than one level of consciousness?

  “Keep him away from her,” the ghost admonished me.

  “I will,” I promised and meant it.

  I then told him about his death and that of the others, hoping I could finally rid the house of them all.

  “She’ll come back,” his one-track mind made him say. “I’ll wait till she is in bed and then I’ll kill her.”

  I explained again that killing the other man wouldn’t do any good since he was already dead.

  “My head’s bad,” the ghost complained. “You cannot stay at this house,” I insisted firmly now.

  “Not leaving,” he shot back just as firmly. “My house!”

  I continued my efforts, explaining also about the passage of time.

  “Forty-eight...” he insisted, “I fight...I fight...”

  “You’ve been forgiven,” I said and began the words that amount to a kind of exorcism. “You are no longer guilty. You may go.”

  “Carry him,” he mumbled and his voice weakened somewhat. “Where is she? Who’ll clean up?”

  Then he slipped away.

  I awakened Sybil. She felt fine and recalled nothing. But I recalled plenty.

  For one thing, it occurred to me that the ghost had spoken of the year ’48, but not indicated whether it was 1948 or 1848, and there was something in the general tone of the voice that made me wonder if perhaps we were not in the wrong century. Certainly no miner worked in Los Angeles in 1948, but plenty did in 1848. Eugene Lundholm checked the records for me.

  In the forties mines sprang up all over the territory, In 1842 Francisco Lopez had discovered gold near the San Fernando Mission, and in 1848 a much larger gold deposit was found near Sacramento.

  In 1848 also was the famous gold strike at Sutter’s Mill. But already in the 1840s mining existed in Southern California, although not much came of it.

  After we went back to New York, Helen L. reached me again the last week of July 1966.

  Her mother refused to leave the house, regardless of the disturbances. Thus a sale at this time as out of the question, Miss L. explained.

  Something or someone was throwing rocks against the outside of the house and on the roof of their patio—but no living person was seen doing it. This, of course, is par for the poltergeist course. Just another attention-getter. Loud crashes on the patio roof and nobody there to cause them. Even the neighbors now heard the noises. Things were getting worse. I wrote back, offering to have another look at the haunted house provided she was willing to dig. No sense leaving the corpus delicti there.

  But on September 18 Miss L. had some more to tell me. Rocks falling on the driveway behind the house brought out the neighbors in force, with flashlights, looking for the “culprits.” Who could not be found. Nor could the rocks, for that matter. They were invisible rocks, it would seem.

  This took place on numerous occasions between 6:15 and 7:30 P.M. and only at that time. To top it off, a half ripe lemon flew off their lemon tree at Miss L. with such force that it cracked wide open when it landed on the grass beside her. It could not have fallen by itself and there was no one in the tree to throw it.

  I promised to get rid of the lemon-throwing ghost if I could, when we came to Los Angeles again in October. But when I did, Miss L.’s mother was ill and the visit had to be called off.

  I have not heard anything further about this stubborn ghost. But the area was populated in 1848 and it could be that another house or camp stood on this site before the present house was erected. There is a brook not far away. So far, neither Mr. Morton nor Mr. Howard has been located and Jane and Margaret are only ghostly facts. A lot of people passed through the house when Miss L.’s family did not own it, and of course we know nothing whatever about the house that preceded it.

  One more note came to me which helped dispel any notion that Helen L. was the only one bothered by the unseen in the house on Ardmore.

  It was signed by Margaret H. Jones and addressed To Whom It May Concern. It concerned the ghost.

  “Some years ago, when I was a guest in Miss L.’s home at _____ Ardmore Boulevard, in Los Angeles, I heard what seemed to be very heavy footsteps in a room which I knew to be empty. Miss L. was with me at the time and I told her that I heard this sound. The footsteps seemed to advance and to recede, and this kept up for several minutes, and though we investigated we saw no one. They ceased with the same abruptness with which they began.”

  I fondly hoped the manifestations would behave in a similar manner. Go away quietly.

  But on October 6, 1967, Helen L.
telephoned me in New York. She had spent a sleepless night—part of a night, that is.

  Up to 4 A.M. she had been sleeping peacefully. At that hour she was awakened by her cat. Putting the animal down, she noticed a strange light on her patio, which is located outside her bedroom windows. She hurriedly threw on a robe and went outside.

  In the flower bed on her left, toward the rear of the garden, she noticed something white. Despite her dislike of the phenomena which had for so long disturbed her home, Helen L. advanced toward the flower bed.

  Now she could clearly make out the figure of a woman, all in white. The figure was not very tall and could have been that of a young girl. It seemed to watch her intently, and looked somewhat like the conventional white bedsheet type of fictional ghost.

  At this point Miss L.’s courage left her and she ran back to her room.

  The next morning, her eyes red with exhaustion, she discussed her experience with her aged mother. Until now she had been reluctant to draw her mother into these matters, but the impression had been so overpowering that she just had to tell someone.

  To her surprise, her mother was not very upset. Instead, she added her own account of the “White Lady” to the record. The night before, the same figure had apparently appeared to the mother in a dream, telling her to pack, for she would soon be taking her away!

  When Helen L. had concluded her report, I calmed her as best I could and reminded her that some dreams are merely expressions of unconscious fears. I promised to pay the house still another visit, although I am frankly weary of the prospect: I know full well that you can’t persuade a ghost to go away when there may be a body, once the property of said ghost, buried in a flower bed in the garden.

  After all, a ghost’s got rights, too!

  * 58 The Haunted Motorcycle Workshop

  LEIGHTON BUZZARD SOUNDED like a species of objectionable bird to us, when we first heard it pronounced. But it turned out to be a rather pleasant-looking English country town of no particular significance or size, except that it was the site of a poltergeist that had been reported in the local press only a short time before our arrival in England.

  The Leighton Buzzard Observer carried a report on the strange goings on at Sid Mularney’s workshop.

  When Leighton motorcycle dealer, Mr. Sid Mularney, decided to extend his workshop by removing a partition, he was taking on more than he anticipated. For he is now certain that he has offended a poltergeist.

  Neighbors are blaming “Mularney’s Ghost” for weird noises that keep them awake at night, and Mr. Mularney, who claims actually to have witnessed the poltergeist’s pranks, is certain that the building in Lake-street, Leighton, is haunted.

  It was about a fortnight ago when he decided to take down the partition in the workshop which houses racing motorcycles used by the world-champion rider, Mike Hailwood.

  The following morning, said Mr. Mularney, he went to the door, opened it, and found three bikes on the floor. The machines, which are used by local rider Dave Williams, had their fairings smashed.

  A few days later Mr. Mularney was working on a racing gear box, and when he realized he couldn’t finish it unless he worked late, he decided to stay on. And it wasn’t until three o’clock that he finished.

  As he was wiping his hands, weird things started to happen.

  “I felt something rush by me. I looked round and spanners flew off hooks on the wall and a tarpaulin, covering a bike, soared into the air,” he declared.

  “You would have to see it to believe it. I was scared stiff. I grabbed a hammer, got out of the room as fast as I could and made straight for home. My wife was asleep and I woke her up to tell her about it.”

  Since then other peculiar things have been taking place, and neighbors have been complaining of weird noises in the night.

  Mrs. Cynthia Ellis, proprietress of the Coach and Horses Restaurant, next door in Lake-street, said she had been woken during the night several times “by strange bangings and clatterings.”

  “I looked out of the window, but there was never anything there.”

  She said her young son, Stephen, was the first to wake up and hear noises.

  “We thought it was just a child’s imagination, but we soon changed our minds,” she said.

  “The atmosphere round here has become very tense during the past fortnight. It’s all very odd,” said Mrs. Ellis.

  Since his strange experience Mr. Mularney has discovered odd happenings in the workshop. One morning he found a huge box of nuts and bolts “too heavy for me to lift,” scattered all over the floor. Since then he has discovered petrol tanks which have been moved about and even large bolts missing, which, he claims, he could never mislay.

  I contacted the editor of the Observer, Mr. McReath, who confirmed all this information and gave me his private estimation of Mr. Mularney’s character and truthfulness, which were A-1. I then arranged with Mr. Mularney to be at his place at noon the next day to look into the matter personally.

  Located on a busy main street, the motorcycle workshop occupies the front half of a large yard. Much of it is rebuilt, using some very old timbers and bricks. Mr. Mularney, a large, jovial man with a bit of an Irish brogue, greeted us warmly and showed us around the rather crowded workshop. There were three rooms, leading from one into the other like a railroad flat, and all of this space was chockfull of motorcycles and tools.

  “What exactly happened, Mr. Mularney?” I opened the conversation.

  “When we finish off in the evening, my partner and I clean our hands and put all the tools back onto the bench. Just then, for some unknown reasons, the spanners (wrenches) jumped off the hooks on the bench and landed on the bench in front of me.”

  “You mean, the wrenches flew off the hooks by themselves?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw this with your own eyes?”

  “Oh, yes, definitely.”

  “There was enough light in the shop?”

  “Yes, the shop was lit.”

  “What did you think it was?”

  “Well, at the moment I didn’t take much notice of it but, later, there was a noise in the rear of the workshop, something came across the floor, and caught my foot, and my toe, and my eyes, and so I began to look around; on the other side of the shop we had some metal sprockets which were standing there. They started to spin around on a pivot bolt. Later, a huge piece of rubber foam came off the wall and flew into the middle of the room.”

  “By its own volition?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you think it was something unusual?”

  “I did then, yes. Then we had a racing motorcycle covered by a waterproof sheet, and this rose completely up—”

  “You mean, in the air?”

  “Yes, it stayed up. By that time I was ready to leave the shop.”

  “Did you think something supernatural was taking place then?”

  “I did. I sat in the van for a moment to think about it, then went home and woke my wife up. I explained to her what I had seen, and she thought I’d been drinking.”

  “Did anything else happen after that?”

  “Yes, we had the Swedish motorcycle champion leave his motorcycle here for repairs. He left some pieces on the bench and went to have tea. When he went back, they had completely disappeared and could never be found again. There was no one in the shop at the time who could have taken them, and we had locked up tight.

  “I had the same experience myself,” Sid Mularney added. “We were taking a cycle apart, two of us working here. One compartment, big enough to see, just disappeared.”

  The haunted motorcycle workshop

  “You have, of course, looked into the possibility of pranksters?”

  “Oh, yes, we have. But there’s only two of us who use the shop. About five weeks ago, the two of us took another motorcycle to pieces. We put some of the nuts and bolts into a waterproof pan to wash them. We locked up for the night, but when we returned in the morning, the whole lot was sca
ttered all over the room.”

  A number of amateur “ghost chasers” had offered Mr. Mularney their services, but he turned them all down since the shop housed some pretty valuable motorcycles and they did not want to have things disappear by natural means on top of their supernatural troubles.

  I realized by now that a mischievous spirit, a poltergeist, was at work, to disrupt the goings on and call attention to his presence, which is the classical pattern for such disturbances.

  “Tell me, what was on this spot before the repair shop was built?”

  “Years ago it used to be an old-fashioned basket works, and there used to be about fourteen men working here. After that, the shed stood empty completely for five or six years. When we came here to open the shop, it was full of old baskets and things. We rebuilt it and made it into this workshop.”

  “I understand the phenomena started only after you knocked down a wall?”

  “Yes, we knocked down that wall on a Saturday evening. We came back Sunday morning and three motorcycles were in the corner, as if somebody had thrown them there. As if in anger.”

  “Did something dramatic ever take place here before you took it over, Mr. Mularney?” I asked.

  “Somebody hanged himself here years ago when it was the basket works. That’s all we know.”

  I went back into the third of the three rooms and examined the spot where the wall had been removed. The wooden beams still left showed signs of great age, certainly far beyond the current century.

  Quite possibly, in removing the partition wall, Sid Mularney had interfered with the memory picture of a ghost who did not wish to leave the spot. The three of us stood quiet for a moment, then I addressed myself to the poltergeist, asking that he discontinue annoying the present owners of the place. I left my card with Mr. Mularney and instructed him to telephone me the moment there was any further disturbance.

  All was quiet in the weeks that have followed, so I can only assume that the poltergeist has accepted the redesigning of the place. Then, too, he might have become offended by the kind of clientele that rides motorcycles nowadays. Basket weaving is a gentle art, and “mods” and “rockers” are best avoided by gentle folk. Even ghosts.

  59 Encountering the Ghostly Monks