by Hans Holzer
Mrs. F. smiled wryly, for she remembered that the ghostly sailor always liked that door open. She too, had closed it to have privacy, only to find it opened by unseen hands. Finally, she understood that it wasn’t curiosity or evil thoughts on his part, but simple loneliness, the desire not to be shut out from the world, and she left it open, the way he wanted it.
How long would it take the lieutenant to understand the lad? She mused and wondered if perhaps he could leave the house of his own free will, now that he had told her at least part of his story. Shortly after, the F.s moved to Florida. They wondered if the power for the manifestations had come from their young daughters, who were at the time of “poltergeist” age. If so, the police lieutenant will have the same problem: he has six children of his own.
* 63
The Bayberry Perfume Ghost (Philadelphia)
IF THERE IS ANYTHING more staid than a North Philadelphia banker I wouldn’t know it. But even bankers are human and sometimes psychic. In William Davy’s case there had been little or no occasion to consider such a matter except for one long-forgotten incident when he was eight years of age. At that time he lived with his parents in Manchester, England. On one particular morning, little William insisted that he saw a white shadow in the shape of a man passing in front of the clock. The clock, it so happened, was just striking the hour of 8:30 A.M. His mother, reminded by the sound of the clock, hurriedly sent the boy off to school, telling him to stop his foolishness about white shadows.
By the time the boy returned home, word had reached the house that his favorite grandfather, who lived halfway across England in Devon, had passed away. The time of his death was 8:30 A.M. Eventually, Mr. Davy moved to Philadelphia where he is an officer in a local bank, much respected in the community and not the least bit interested in psychic matters. His aged father, William Sr., came to live with him and his family in the home they bought in 1955. The house is a splendid example of Victorian architecture, built on three levels on a plot surrounded by tall trees in what is now part of North Philadelphia, but what was at the time the house was built a separate community, and originally just farmland.
The ground floor has a large kitchen to one side, a large living room, with fireplace, separated from a dining room by a sliding double door. Upstairs are bedrooms on two floors, with the third floor the one-time servant quarters, as was customary in Victorian houses. The Davy family did some remodelling downstairs, but essentially the house is as it was when it was first built, sometime in the late 1880s, according to a local lawyer named Huston, who is an expert on such things. At any rate, in 1890 it already stood on the spot where it is today.
William Sr. was a true English gentleman given to historical research, and a lover of ghost stories, with which he liked to regale his family on many occasions. But what started as a purely literary exercise soon turned into grim reality. Shortly after his arrival, William Sr. complained of hearing unusual noises in the house. He had a room on the third floor and was constantly hearing strange noises and floor boards creaking as if someone were walking on them.
His son laughed at this and ascribed it to his father’s vivid imagination, especially after his many fictional ghost stories had set the mood for the sort of thing. But the older Davy insisted to his last day that he was being troubled by an unseen entity. After he passed away in February 1963, Mr. and Mrs. Davy thought no more of the matter. The house was a peaceful home to them and they enjoyed life.
* * *
Several months later, Mr. Davy was sitting by himself in the living room, reading. He was tired, and the time was 10 P.M. He decided to call it a day, and got up to go to bed. As he walked toward the hallway between the living room and the staircase, he literally stepped into a cloud of very pungent perfume which he instantly identified as a very strong bayberry smell. For a moment he stood in utter amazement, then slowly continued into the hall and up the stairs. The perfume still surrounded him, as if someone invisible, wearing this heavy perfume, were walking alongside him!
Upon reaching the first landing he went into the bedroom. At that point, the perfume suddenly left him, just as suddenly as it had come.
“Mary,” he asked his wife, “did you by any chance spill some perfume?” She shook her head emphatically. She did not even own any such scent, and there had been no one else in the house that day or evening.
Puzzled but not particularly upset, Mr. Davy let the matter drop and he would have forgotten it entirely had not another event taken him by surprise.
Several months later he was again sitting in the living room, the time being around 10 P.M. He put down his book, and went toward the hallway. Again, he walked into a heavy cloud of the same perfume! Again it followed him up the stairs. As he climbed he felt something—or someone——brush against his right leg. It made a swishing sound but he could not see anything that could have caused it. When he got to the landing, he stopped and asked Mary to come out to him.
His wife had suffered a fractured skull when she was young and as a consequence had lost about 70% of her sense of smell.
When Mary joined him at the landing, he asked her if she smelled anything peculiar. “Oh my word,” she said, immediately, “what a heavy perfume!” They were standing there looking at each other in a puzzled state. “What on earth is it?” Mary finally asked. He could only shrug his shoulders.
At that precise moment, they clearly heard footsteps going up the stairs from where they were standing, to the third floor!
Since neither of them saw any person causing the footsteps, they were completely unnerved, and refused to investigate. They did not follow the footsteps up to the third floor. They knew only too well that there wasn’t any living soul up there at the moment.
One evening Mary was reading in bed, on the second floor, when she found herself surrounded by the same bay-berry perfume. It stayed for several seconds, then died away. Since she was quite alone in the house and had been all evening, this was not very reassuring. But the Davys are not the kind of people that panic easily, if at all, so she shrugged it off as something she simply could not explain. On another occasion, Mr. Davy saw a patch of dull, white light move through the living room. From the size of the small cloud it resembled in height either a large child or a small adult, more likely a woman than a man. This was at 3 A.M. when he had come downstairs because he could not sleep that night.
In April 1966 the Davys had gone to Williamsburg, Virginia for a visit. On their return, Mr. Davy decided to take the luggage directly upstairs to their bedroom. That instant he ran smack into the cloud of bayberry perfume. It was if some unseen presence wanted to welcome them back!
One of Mary’s favorite rings, which she had left in her room, disappeared only to be discovered later in the garden. How it got there was as much of a mystery then as it is now, but no one of flesh and blood moved that ring. Naturally, the Davys did not discuss their unseen visitor with anyone. When you’re a Philadelphia banker you don’t talk about ghosts.
In September of the same year, they had a visit from their niece and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Nowak. Mr. Nowak is a U.S. government employee, by profession a chemical engineer. Their own house was being readied and while they were waiting to move in, they spent two weeks with their uncle and aunt. The niece was staying on the second floor, while Mr. Nowak had been assigned the room on the third floor that had been the center of the ghostly activities in the past. After they had retired, Mr. Nowak started to read a book. When he got tired of this, he put the book down, put the lights out and got ready to doze off.
At that precise moment, he clearly heard footsteps coming up and he was so sure it was Mary coming up to say goodnight that he sat up and waited. But nobody came into his room and the footsteps continued!
Since he is a man of practical outlook, this puzzled him and he got out of bed and looked around. The corridor was quite empty, yet the footsteps continued right in front of him. Moreover, they seemed to enter the room itself and the sound of st
eps filled the atmosphere of the room as if someone were indeed walking in it. Unable to resolve the problem, he went to sleep.
The next night, the same thing happened. For two weeks, Mr. Nowak went to sleep with the footsteps resounding promptly at 10 P.M. But he had decided to ignore the whole thing and went to sleep, steps or no steps.
“It seemed, when I was in bed,” he explained to his aunt, somewhat sheepishly, “the footsteps were coming up the stairs, and when I was lying there it seemed as if they were actually in the room, but I could not distinguish the actual location. When I first heard them I thought they were Mary’s, so I guess they must have been the footsteps of a woman.”
Mr. Nowak is not given to any interest in psychic phenomena, but on several occasions his wife, also named Mary, as is her aunt, did have a rapport bordering on telepathic communication with him. These were minor things, true, but they were far beyond the possibilities of mere chance. Thus it is very likely that the chemist’s natural tendency towards ESP played a role in his ability to hear the steps, as it certainly did in the case of the banker, Mr. Davy, whose own childhood had shown at least one marked incident of this sort.
But if the ghostly presence favored anyone with her manifestations, it would seem that she preferred men. Mary Nowak slept soundly through the two weeks, with nary a disturbance or incident.
Clifford Richardson, another nephew of the Davys, came from Oklahoma to visit the Nowaks one time, and in the course of the visit he decided to stay a night at the Davys. Mr. Richardson is the owner of an insurance agency and not the least bit interested in the occult. On his return to the Nowaks the following day, he seemed unusually pensive and withdrawn. Finally, over coffee, he opened up.
“Look, Mary,” he said, “your husband Bucky has stayed over at Uncle Ned’s house for a while. Did he sleep well?”
“What do you mean?” Mary asked, pretending not to know.
“Did he ever hear any sounds?”
Mary knew what he meant and admitted that her husband had indeed “heard sounds.”
“Thank God,” the insurance man sighed. “I thought I was going out of my mind when I heard those footsteps.”
He, too, had slept in the third floor bedroom. What was the terrible secret the little bedroom held for all these years?
The room itself is now plainly but adequately furnished as a guest room. It is small and narrow and undoubtedly was originally a maid’s room. There is a small window leading to the tree-studded street below. It must have been a somewhat remote room originally where a person might not be heard, should he/she cry for help for any reason.
The Davys began to look into the background of their house. The surrounding area had been known as Wright’s Farm, and a certain Mrs. Wright had built houses on the property towards the late 1880s. The house was owned by four sets of occupants prior to their buying it and despite attempts to contact some of those who were still alive, they failed to do so. They did not discuss their “problem” with anyone, not even Mary’s aged mother who was now staying with them. No sense frightening the frail old lady. Then again the Davys weren’t really frightened, just curious. Mary, in addition to being a housewife, was also a student of group dynamics and education at nearby Temple University, and the phenomena interested her mildly from a researcher’s point of view. As for William Davy, it was all more of a lark than something to be taken seriously, and certainly not the sort of thing one worries about.
* * *
When their inquiries about the history of the house failed to turn up startling or sensational details, they accepted the presence as something left over from the Victorian age and the mystique of it all added an extra dimension, as it were, to their fine old home.
Then one day, in carefully looking over the little room on the third floor, Mr. Davy made an interesting discovery. At waist height, the door to the room showed heavy dents, as if someone had tried to batter it down! No doubt about it, the damage showed clear evidence of attempted forcing of the door.
Had someone violated a servant up there against her wishes? Was the door to the bedroom battered down by one of the people in the house, the son, perhaps, who in that age was sacrosanct from ordinary prosecution for such a “minor” misdeed as having an affair with the maid?
The strong smell of bayberry seemed to indicate a member of the servant class, for even then, as now, an overabundance of strong perfume is not a sign of good breeding.
* * *
There have been no incidents lately but this does not mean the ghost is gone. For a Victorian servant girl to be able to roam the downstairs at will is indeed a pleasure not easily abandoned—not even for the promised freedom of the other side!
* 64
The Headless Grandfather (Georgia)
GROVER C. WAS ONE OF those colorful old-timers you hardly see anymore these days, not even in the deep South. It wasn’t that Grover had any particular background in anything special, far from it; he was an untutored man who owed his success solely to his own willpower and an insatiable curiosity that led him places his education—or lack of it—would have prevented him from ever reaching.
* * *
He saw the light of day just before the turn of the century in rural North Carolina. At the age of nineteen he married for the first time, but his wife Fannie and the child she bore him both died from what was then called “childbed fever,” or lack of proper medical treatment. He had not yet chosen any particular career for himself, but was just “looking around” and did odd jobs here and there. A year later he was married again, to a lady from Georgia who is still living. After their first girl was born, they moved to Columbus, Georgia, and Mr. C. worked in a local mill for a while. This didn’t satisfy his drive, however, and shortly afterward he and his brother Robert opened a grocery store. The store did right well until “the Hoover panic,” as they called it, and then they managed to sell out and buy a farm in Harris County.
Life was pretty placid, but after an accident in which he lost his daughter, Mr. C. moved back to Columbus and tried his hand at the grocery business once more. About this time, the restless gentleman met a lady from Alabama, as a result of which he became the father of an “extracurricular” little girl, in addition to his own family, which eventually consisted of a wife and nine children, two of whom are dead, the others still living.
When his second-born child died of an infectious disease, Mr. C. had his long-delayed breakdown, and for several years, he was unable to cope with his life. During those rough years of slow, gradual recuperation, his daughter Agnes ran the store for him and supported the family.
As his health improved and he began to return to a happier and more constructive outlook on life, he developed an interest in real estate. With what money he could spare, he bought and sold property, and before long, he did so well he could dispense with the grocery store.
Soon he added a construction business to his real estate dealings and was considered a fairly well-to-do citizen in his hometown. This status of course attracted a variety of unattached women and even some who were attached, or semi-detached, as the case may have been, and Mr. C. had himself a good time. Knowledge of his interest in other ladies could not fail to get to his wife and eventually he was given a choice by his wife: it was either her or them.
He picked them, or, more specifically, a lady next door, and for thirteen years he was reasonably faithful to her. Eventually she disliked living with a man she was no married to, especially when he happened to be married to someone else, even though he had bought her a cute little house of her own in Columbus. Mr. C. was not particularly happy about this state of affairs either, for he developed a penchant for drinking during those years. After they separated, the lady next door left town and got married.
Far from returning to the bosom of his family, now that the “other woman” had given him the gate, Grover looked elsewhere and what he found apparently pleased him. By now he was in his late sixties, but his vigorous personality wasn’t about t
o be slowed down by so silly a reason as advancing age!
* * *
About 1962 he met a practical nurse by the name of Madeline, who turned out to be the opposite of what the doctor had ordered. After a particularly heavy argument, she kicked him in the nose. When it did not stop bleeding, she became alarmed and took him to the hospital. The family went to see him there even though his wife had not exactly forgiven him. But at this point it mattered little. Mr. C. also complained of pain in his side and the children firmly believed that the practical nurse had also kicked him in that area. Since he died shortly afterward, it was a moot question whether or not she had done so because Mrs. C’s abilities no longer corresponded to her amorous expectations. The old gent certainly did not discuss it with his family. He was seventy when he died and Madeline was a mere sixty. Death was somewhat unexpected despite the fact Mr. C. had suffered from various ailments. During the days he had been alone in his room at the hospital. At first, he shared the room with another older man, but several days later a young man was sent in to be with him. The young man’s complaint was that he had a lollipop stick stuck in his throat. There probably aren’t too many young men with such a predicament in medical annals, and even fewer in Columbus, Georgia. The family found this mighty peculiar, even more so since the young man was a close relative of Madeline, the very practical nurse.
They complained to the hospital authorities and the young man was moved. It is not known whether the lollipop stick was ever removed from his throat, but chances are it was or we would have heard more of it. Young men with lollipop sticks in their throats either die from them or become sideshow attractions in the circus; the records show neither so it must be assumed that the lollipop stick got unstuck somehow somewhere along the line. At any rate, Mr. C. was now guarded by one of his children each night, the children taking turns.