by Hans Holzer
Then it was time to leave again, and Edna’s husband, good-naturedly, reminded her that he had neither seen nor heard nay ghosts all that time. On that very day, their little son took sick, and they had to stay longer because of his condition.
They set up a cot for him in the living room, where they were then sleeping. If the boy were in need of help, they would be close by. During the night, they suddenly heard the cot collapse. They rushed over and quickly fixed it. The boy had not even awakened, luckily. As they were bent over the cot, working on it, they heard someone coming down the stairs.
Edna paid no particular attention to it, but her husband seemed strangely affected.
“Did you hear someone just come down the stairs?” he finally asked.
“Of course I did,” Edna replied, “that was probably Miss Robinson.”
Miss Robinson was a boarder living up on the third floor.
“No, it wasn’t,” her husband said, and shook his head, “I watched those stairs closely. I saw those steps bend when someone walked over them—but there was no Miss Robinson, or for that matter, anyone else.”
“You mean...?” Edna said and for the first time her husband looked less confident. They made a complete search of the house from top to bottom. No one else was home at the time but the two of them and the sick child.
Edna, who is now a divorcee, realized that her family home held a secret, perhaps a dark secret, that somehow defied a rational explanation. Her logical mind could not accept any other and yet she could not find any answers to the eerie phenomena that had evidently never ceased.
If there was a ghostly presence, could she help it get free? What was she to do? But she knew nothing about those things. Perhaps her thoughts permeated to the ether areas where ghostly presences have a shadowy existence, or perhaps the unhappy wraith simply drew more and more power from the living in the house to manifest.
Sometime later, Joanne, Edna’s close friend, came to her for help in the matter of a costume for a barn dance she had been asked to attend. Perhaps Edna had some suitable things for her? Edna had indeed.
“Go down to the basement,” she directed her friend. “There are some trunks down there filled with materials. Take what you can use.” Joanne, a teacher, nodded and went down into the cellar.
Without difficulty, she located the musty trunks. It was not quite so easy to open them, for they had evidently not been used for many years. Were those remnants left behind by earlier tenants of the house? After all, the present tenants had taken over a partially furnished house and so little was known about the people before them. The house was at least sixty years old, if not older.
As Joanne was pulling torn dresses, some of them clearly from an earlier era, she was completely taken up with the task at hand, that of locating a suitable costume for the dance. But she could not help noticing that something very strange was happening to her hair. It was a strange sensation, as if her hair suddenly stood on end! She passed her hand lightly over her forehead and felt that her hair was indeed stiff and raised up! At the same time she had a tingling sensation all over her body.
She dropped the dress she had been holding and waited, for she was sure someone was standing and staring at her. Any moment now, that person would speak. But as the seconds ticked away and no one spoke, she began to wonder. Finally, she could no longer contain herself and turned slowly around.
Back a few yards was a whirlpool of smoke, whirling and moving at rapid pace. It had roughly the shape of a human figure, and as she looked at this “thing” with mounting terror, she clearly saw that where the face should be there was a gray mass of smoke, punctuated only by two large holes—where the eyes would normally be!
As she stared in utter disbelief, the figure came toward her. She felt the air being drawn from her lungs at its approach and knew that if she did not move immediately she would never get out of the cellar.
Somehow she managed to inch her way toward the stairs and literally crawled on all fours up to the ground floor. When she reached the fresh air, she managed to gather her wits sufficiently to tell Edna what she had seen.
But so terrible was the thought of what she had witnessed she preferred not to accept it, as time went by. To her, to this day, it was merely the shadow of someone passing by outside the cellar windows....
Meanwhile the footsteps on the stairs continued but somehow the fury was spent. Gradually, the disturbances receded or perhaps the people in the house became used to them and paid them no further heed.
After Edna finally left the house and moved into a modern, clean flat, the house was left to its own world of ghosts until the wreckers would come to give it the coup de grace.
But Edna had not forgotten her years of terror, so when she heard of a famed psychic able to communicate with such creatures as she imagined her house was filled with, she tried to make contact and invite the lady to the house. She herself would not come, but the door was open.
It was a muggy day in July 1967 that the psychic lady and a friend and co-worker paid the house a fleeting visit. Perhaps an hour at the most, then they would have to go on to other, more urgent things and places. In that hour, though, they were willing to help the unseen ones out of their plight, if they cared to be helped.
The psychic had not been inside the musty living room for more than ten seconds when she saw the woman on the stairs.
“There is a little boy, also, and the woman has fallen to her death on the stairs,” she said, quietly, and slowly walked back and forth, her footsteps echoing strangely in the empty, yet tense old house.
“Go home,” she pleaded with the woman. “You’ve passed over and you mustn’t stay on here where you’ve suffered so much.”
“Do you get any names?” asked her companion, ever the researcher. The psychic nodded and gave a name, which the gentleman quickly wrote down.
“All she wants is a little sympathy, to be one of the living,” the psychic explained, then turned again to the staircase which still gleamed in the semi-darkness of the vestibule. “Go home, woman,” she intoned once more and there seemed a quiet rustling of skirts as she said it.
Time was up and the last visitors to the house on Fifth Street finally left.
The next day, the gentleman matched the name his psychic friend had given him with the name of a former owner of the house.
But as their taxi drew away in a cloud of gasoline fumes, they were glad they did not have to look back at the grimy old house.
For had they done so, they would have noticed that one of the downstairs curtains, which had been down for a long time, was now drawn back a little—just enough to let someone peek out from behind it.
* 67
Morgan Hall (Long Island)
ALICE IS A TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD blonde, way above average in looks and intelligence. She lives in Manhattan, has a decent, law-abiding seaman for a father and an Irish heritage going back, way back, but mixed in with some French and various other strains that have blended well in Alice’s face, which is one of continual curiosity and alertness. Alice’s work is routine, as are most of her friends. She takes this in her stride now, for she has another world waiting for her where nothing is ever ordinary.
* * *
When she was born, her parents moved into an old house in Brooklyn that had the reputation of being queer. Alice was only a few months old when they left again, but during those months she would not go into her mother’s bedroom without a fierce struggle, without breaking into tears immediately—a behavior so markedly different from her otherwise “good” behavior as a baby that it could not help but be noticed by her parents. While her father had no interest in such matters, her mother soon connected the child’s strange behavior with the other strange things in the house: the doors that would open by themselves, the footsteps, the strange drafts, especially in the bedroom little Alice hated so much.
When Alice was about twelve years old, and the family had moved from the old neighborhood into another house, sh
e found herself thinking of her grandmother all of a sudden one day. Her grandparents lived a distance away upstate and there had been no recent contact with them.
“Grandmother is dead,” Alice said to her mother, matter-of-factly. Her mother stared at her in disbelief. Hours later the telephone rang. Grandmother, who had been in excellent health, had suddenly passed away.
Her mother gave the girl a queer look but she had known of such gifts and realized her daughter, an only child, was something special. Within six months, the telephone rang twice more. Each time, Alice looked up and said:
“Grandfather’s dead.”
“Uncle’s dead.”
And they were.
While her father shook his head over all this “foolishness,” her mother did not scoff at her daughter’s powers. Especially after Alice had received a dream warning from her dead grandmother, advising her of an impending car accident. She was shown the exact location where it would happen, and told that if her mother were to sit in front, she would be badly hurt but it Alice were to change places with her, Alice would not be as badly hurt.
After the dream, without telling her mother her reasons, she insisted on changing places with her on the trip. Sure enough, the car was hit by another automobile. Had her mother been where Alice sat, she might not have reacted quickly enough and been badly hurt. But Alice was prepared and ducked—and received only a whiplash.
Afterward, she discussed all this with her mother. Her mother did not scoff, but asked her what grandmother, who had given them the warning, had looked like in the vision.
“She had on a house dress and bedroom slippers,” Alice replied. Her mother nodded. Although the grandmother had lost both legs due to diabetes, she had been buried with her favorite bedroom slippers in the coffin. Alice had never seen nor known this.
When she was seventeen years of age, Alice had a strong urge to become a nun. She felt the world outside had little to offer her and began to consider entering a convent. Perhaps this inclination was planted in her mind when she was a camp counselor for a Catholic school on Long Island. She liked the serenity of the place and the apparently quiet, contemplative life of the sisters.
* * *
On her very first visit to the convent, however, she felt uneasy. Morgan Hall is a magnificently appointed mansion in Glen Cove, Long Island, that had only been converted to religious purposes some years ago. Prior to that it was the Morgan estate with all that the name of that wealthy family implies. Nothing about it was either ugly or frightening in the least, and yet Alice felt immediately terrified when entering its high-ceilinged corridors.
As a prospective postulant, it was necessary for her to visit the place several times prior to being accepted, and on each occasion her uneasiness mounted.
But she ascribed these feelings to her lack of familiarity with the new place. One night, her uncle and grandfather appeared to her in a dream and told her not to worry, that everything would be all right with her. She took this as an encouragement to pursue her religious plans and shortly after formally entered the convent.
She moved in just a few days before her eighteenth birthday, looking forward to a life totally different from that of her friends and schoolmates. The room she was assigned to adjoined one of the cloisters, but at first she was alone in it as her future roommate was to arrive a week late. Thus she spent her very first days at Morgan Hall alone in the room. The very first night, after she had retired, she heard someone walking up and down outside the door. She thought this strange at that hour of the night, knowing full well that convents like their people to retire early. Finally her curiosity overcame her natural shyness of being in a new place, and she peaked out of her door into the corridor. The footsteps were still audible. But there was no one walking about outside. Quickly, she closed the door and went to bed.
The next morning, she discussed the matter with six other postulants in rooms nearby. They, too, had heard the footsteps that night. In fact, they had heard them on many other nights as well when there was positively no one walking about outside.
As she got used to convent routine, Alice realized how impossible it would be for one of them—or even one of the novices, who had been there a little longer than they—to walk around the place at the hour of the night when she heard the steps. Rigid convent rules included a bell, which rang at 10 P.M. Everybody had to be in their rooms and in bed at that time, except for dire emergencies. One just didn’t walk about the corridors at midnight or later for the sheer fun of it at Morgan Hall, if she did not wish to be expelled. All lights go out at ten also and nothing moves.
At first, Alice thought the novices were playing tricks on the new arrivals by walking around downstairs to create the footsteps, perhaps to frighten the postulants in the way college freshmen are often hazed by their elder colleagues. But she soon realized that this was not so, that the novices were no more allowed out after ten than they were.
Her psychic past did not allow Alice to let matters rest there and her curiosity forced her to make further inquiries as best she could under the circumstances. After all, you don’t run to the Mother Superior and ask, Who walks the corridors at night, Ma’am?
It was then she learned that the house had been J. P. Morgan’s mansion originally and later had been used by the Russian Embassy for their staff people. She recalled the battles the Russians had fought with the Glen Cove township over taxes and how they finally vacated the premises in less than perfect condition. As a sort of anticlimax, the Catholic nuns had moved in and turned the Hall into a convent and school.
A conversation with the convent librarian wasn’t particularly fruitful, either. Yes, Mr. Morgan built the house in 1910. No, he didn’t die here, he died in Spain. Why did she want to know?
Alice wondered about Mr. Morgan’s daughter.
Alice Morgan had lived in this house and died here of typhoid fever in the early years of her life.
But try as she might, she never got the librarian to tell her anything helpful. Naturally, Alice did not wish to bring up the real reason for her curiosity. But it seemed as if the librarian sensed something about it, for she curtly turned her head sideways when speaking of the Morgans as if she did not wish to answer.
Frustrated in her inquiry, Alice left and went back to her chores. One night in October 1965, Alice was walking in the hall of the postulancy, that part of the building reserved for the new girls who were serving their apprenticeship prior to being admitted to the convent and to taking their final vows.
It was a cool night, and Alice had walked fairly briskly to the extreme end of the hall and then stopped for a moment to rest. As she turned around and faced toward the opposite end of the hall, whence she had just come, she noticed a girl standing there who had not been there before. She wore a long, black dress similar to the dresses the postulants wore and Alice took her to be her girl friend.
She noticed the figure enter the room at the end of the hall. This room was not a bedroom but used by the postulants for study purposes.
“It’s Vera,” Alice thought, and decided to join her and see what she was up to in that room.
Quickly, she walked towards the room and entered it. The lights were off and Alice thought this peculiar. Was her friend perhaps playing games with her? The room at this hour was quite dark.
So she turned on the lights, and looked around. There was no one in the room now, and there was no way anyone could have left the room without her noticing it, Alice reasoned. She examined the windows and found them tightly closed. Not that she expected her friend to exit the room by that way, but she wanted to be sure the person—whoever she might have been—could not have left that way. This was on the third floor and anyone trying to leave by the windows would have had to jump, or have a ladder outside.
Suddenly it hit Alice that she had not heard anything at all. All the time she had seen the figure walk into the room, there had been no footsteps, no noise of a door opening, nothing at all. Morgan Hall’s doors open
with a considerable amount of squeaking and none of that was audible when she had seen the figure before.
Alice quickly left and hurried to her own room to figure this out quietly.
On recollection, she visualized the figure again and it occurred to her at once that there was something very odd about the girl. For one thing, the long gown the postulants wear moves when they walk. But the figure she had seen was stiff and seemed to glide along the floor rather than actually walk on it. The corridor was properly lit and she had seen the figure quite clearly. What she had not seen were her ankles and socks, something she would have observed had it been one of her friends.
Although the door was not closed, the room was actually a corner room that could be entered in only one way, from the front door. Alice was sure she had not seen the figure emerge from it again. There was no place to hide in the room, had this been her girlfriend playing a joke on her. Alice had quickly examined the closet, desk, and beds—and no one was hiding anywhere in that room.
Eventually, she gathered up enough courage to seek out her friend Vera and discuss the matter with her. She found that there was a “joke” going around the convent that Alice Morgan’s ghost was roaming the corridors, but that the whole matter was to be treated strictly as a gag. Yet she also discovered that there was one part of the hall that was off limits to anyone alone. In what the girls called the catacombs, at ground level, was the laundry room. The third section, way back, was never to be entered by any of them at night, and in the daytime only if in pairs. Yet, the area was well lit. Alice could not get any information for the reasons for this strange and forbidding order. In a convent, speaking to anyone but one’s own group is extremely difficult without “proper permission” and this was not a fitting subject to discuss.
The novices, whom she approached next, suddenly became serious and told her to forget it: there were things going on in the building that could not be explained. She was not to pay attention, and pray hard instead.