by Hans Holzer
She then retired to the downstairs portion of the house and called in a neighbor. Together the two women kept watch, waiting for the early afternoon hours when the ghost child usually became active upstairs.
As the minutes ticked off, Carole began to wonder how she would look if nothing happened. The neighbor probably would consider her neurotic, and accuse her of making up the whole story as an attention-getter in this rather quiet community.
But she did not have to worry long. Sure enough, there were the footsteps again upstairs. The two women waited a few moments to give the ghost a chance to leave an impression, then they rushed upstairs.
They saw no child, but the white flour had indeed been touched. There were footmarks in the flour, little feet that seemed unusually small and slender. Next to the prints there was the picture of a flower, as if the child had bent down and finger-painted the flower as a sign of continuing presence. From the footprints, they took the child to be between three and four years of age. The water and pan in the crib had not been touched, and as they stood next to the footprints, there was utter silence around them.
Mrs. Trausch now addressed the unseen child gently and softly, promising the child they would not hurt it. Then she placed some boys’ toys, which she had obtained for this occasion, around the children’s room and withdrew.
There was no immediate reaction to all this, but two days later the eight-year-old daughter came running down the stairs to report that she had seen the shadow of a little boy in front of the linen closet in the hall. He wore striped shirt and pants, and was shorter than she.
When I heard of the footprints by telephone, I set the week of June 2 aside for a visit to the house. Meanwhile I instructed the Trausches to continue observing whatever they could.
But the Trausches had already resolved to leave the house, even if I should be able to resolve their “problem.” No matter what, they could never be quite sure. And living with a ghost—or perhaps two ghosts—was not what they wanted to do, what with three living children to keep them on their toes.
Across from the Trausch apartment, and separated from it by a narrow lane, is another house just like it and built about the same time, on what was before only open farmland—as far as everyone there knows. A few years before, the area was flooded and was condemned, but it dried out later. There is and always has been plenty of water in the area, a lowland studded with ponds and fishing holes.
The neighbor’s name was Bonnie Swanson and she too was plagued by footsteps that had no human causing them. The curious thing is that these phenomena were heard only in the upstairs portion of her house, where the bedrooms are, just as in the Trausch house.
Twice the Swansons called in police, only to be told that there was no one about causing the footsteps. In April, the Swansons had gone away for a weekend, taking their child with them. When they returned, the husband opened the door and was first to step into the house. At this moment he distinctly heard footsteps running very fast from front to rear of the rooms, as if someone had been surprised by their return. Mrs. Swanson, who had also heard this, joined her husband in looking the house over, but there was no stranger about and no one could have it left.
Suddenly they became aware of the fact that a light upstairs was burning. They knew they had turned it off when they left. Moreover, in the kitchen they almost fell over a child’s tricycle. Last time they saw this tricycle, it had stood in the corner of their living room. It could not have gotten to the kitchen by itself, and there was no sign of anyone breaking and entering in their absence. Nothing was missing.
It seemed as if my approaching visit was somehow getting through to the ghost or ghosts, for as the month of June came closer, the phenomena seemed to mount in intensity and frequency.
On the morning of May 10, 9:30, Mrs. Trausch was at her front bedroom window, opening it to let in the air. From her window she could see directly into the Swanson house, since both houses were on the same level with the windows parallel to each other. As she reached her window and casually looked out across to the Swanson’s rooms, which she knew to be empty at this time of day (Mr. Swanson was work, and Mrs. Swanson and a houseguest were out for the morning) she saw to her horror the arm of a woman pushing back the curtain of Mrs. Swanson’s window.
There was a curiously stiff quality about this arm and the way it moved the curtain back. Then she saw clearly a woman with a deathlike white mask of a face staring at her. The woman’s eyes were particularly odd. Despite her excitement, Mrs. Trausch noticed that the woman had wet hair and was dressed in something filmy, like a white nylon negligee with pink flowers on it.
For the moment, Mrs. Trausch assumed that the houseguest must somehow have stayed behind, and so she smiled at the woman across from her. Then the curtain dropped and the woman disappeared. Carole Trausch could barely wait to question her neighbor about the incident, and found that there hadn’t been anyone at the house when she saw the woman with the wet hair.
Now Mrs. Trausch was sure that there were two unseen visitors, a child and a woman, which would account for the different quality of the footsteps they had been hearing.
She decided to try and find out more about the land on which the house stood.
A neighbor living a few blocks away on Chestnut Street, who had been in her house for over twenty years, managed to supply some additional information. Long before the development had been built, there had been a farm there.
In the exact place where the Trausches now lived there had been a barn. When the house was built, a large trench was dug and the barn was pushed into it and burned. The people who lived there at the time were a Mexican family named Felix. They had a house nearby but sold the area of the farm to the builders.
But because of the flooded condition of the area, the houses stood vacant for a few years. Only after extensive drainage had taken place did the houses become inhabitable. At this time the Trausches were able to move into theirs.
The area was predominantly Mexican and the development was a kind of Anglo-Saxon island in their midst.
All this information was brought out only after our visit, incidentally, and neither Sybil Leek, who acted as my medium, nor I had any knowledge of it at the time.
Mrs. Trausch was not the only adult member of the family to witness the phenomena. Her husband finally confessed that on several occasions he had been puzzled by footsteps upstairs when he came home late at night. That was around 1 A.M., and when he checked to see if any of the children had gotten out of bed, he found them fast asleep. Mr. Trausch is a very realistic man. His business is manufacturing industrial tools, and he does not believe in ghosts. But he heard the footsteps too.
The Trausches also realized that the shuffling footsteps of what appeared to be a small child always started up as soon as the two older girls had left for school. It was as if the invisible boy wanted to play with their toys when they weren’t watching.
Also, the ghost evidently liked the bathroom and water, for the steps resounded most often in that area. On one occasion Mrs. Trausch was actually using the bathroom when the steps resounded next to her. Needless to say, she left the bathroom in a hurry.
Finally the big day had arrived. Mr. Trausch drove his Volkswagen all the way to Hollywood to pick up Mrs. Leek and myself, and while he did not believe in ghosts, he didn’t scoff at them either.
After a pleasant ride of about two hours, we arrived at Westminster. It was a hot day in June, and the Santa Ana area is known for its warm climate. Mr. Trausch parked the car, and we went into the house where the rest of the family was already awaiting our visit.
I asked Sybil to scout around for any clairvoyant impressions she might get of the situation, and as she did so, I followed her around the house with my faithful tape recorder so that not a word might be lost.
As soon as Sybil had set foot in the house, she pointed to the staircase and intoned ominously, “It’s upstairs.”
Then, with me trailing, she walked up the stairs
as gingerly as trapeze artist while I puffed after her.
“Gooseflesh,” she announced and held out her arm. Now whenever were are in haunted area Sybil does get gooseflesh—not because she is scared but because it is a natural, instant reaction to whatever presence might be there.
We were in the parents’ room now, and Sybil looked around with the expectant smile of a well-trained bird dog casing the moors.
“Two conflicting types,” she then announced. “There’s anger and resentfulness toward someone. There’s something here. Has to do with the land. Two people.”
She felt it centered in the children’s room, and that there was a vicious element surrounding it, an element of destruction. We walked into the children’s room and immediately she made for the big closet in the rear. Behind that wall there was another apartment, but the Trausches did not know anything about it except that the people in it had just recently moved in.
“It’s that side,” Sybil announced and waved toward the backyard of the house where numerous children of various ages were playing with the customary racket.
“Vincent,” Sybil added, out of the blue. “Maybe I don’t have the accent right, but it is Vincent. But it is connected with all this. Incidentally, it is the land that’s causing the trouble, not the house itself.”
The area Sybil had pointed out just a moment before as being the center of the activities was the exact spot where the old barn had once stood.
“It’s nothing against this house,” Sybil said to Mrs. Trausch, “but something out the past. I’d say 1925. The name Vincent is important. There’s fire involved. I don’t feel a person here but an influence...a thing. This is different from our usual work. It’s the upper part of the building where the evil was.”
I then eased Sybil into a chair in the children’s room and we grouped ourselves silently around her, waiting for some form of manifestation to take place.
Mrs. Trausch was nervously biting her lips, but otherwise bearing up under what must have been the culmination of a long and great strain for her. Sybil was relaxing now, but she was still awake.
“There’s some connection with a child,” she said now, “a lost child...1925...the child was found here, dead.”
“Whose child is it?” I pressed.
“Connected with Vincent...dark child...nine years old...a boy...the children here have to be careful...”
“Does this child have any connection with the house?”
“He is lost.”
“Can you seem him; can he see you?”
“I see him. Corner...the barn. He broke his neck. Two men...hit the child, they didn’t like children, you see...they left him...until he was found...woman... Fairley...name...Pete Fairley...”
By now Sybil had glided into a semi-trance and I kept up the barrage of questions to reconstruct the drama in the barn.
“Do they live here?” I inquired.
“Nobody lives here. Woman walked from the water to find the boy. He’s dead. She has connection with the two men who killed him. Maniacs, against children.”
“What is her connection with the boy?”
“She had him, then she lost him. She looked after him.”
“Who were the boy’s parents then?”
“Fairley. Peter Fairley. 1925.”
Sybil sounded almost like a robot now, giving the requested information.
“What happened to the woman?” I wanted to know.
“Mad...she found the boy dead, went to the men... there was a fight...she fell in the water...men are here... there’s a fire...”
“Who were these men?”
“Vincent...brothers...nobody is very healthy in this farm...don’t like women...”
“Where did the child come from?”
“Lost...from the riverside...”
“Can you see the woman?”
“A little...the boy I can see clearly.”
It occurred to me how remarkable it was for Sybil to speak of a woman who had fallen into the water when the apparition Mrs. Trausch had seen had had wet hair. No one had discussed anything about the house in front of Sybil, of course. So she had no way of knowing that the area had once been a farm, or that a barn had stood there where she felt the disturbances centered. No one had told her that it was a child the people in the house kept hearing upstairs.
“The woman is out of tempo,” Sybil explained. “That makes it difficult to see her. The boy is frightened.”
Sybil turned her attention to the little one now and, with my prodding, started to send him away from there.
“Peter go out and play with the children...outside,” she pleaded.
“And his parents...they are looking for him,” I added.
“He wants the children here to go with him,” Sybil came back. Mrs. Trausch started to swallow nervously.
“Tell him he is to go first,” I instructed.
“He wants to have the fair woman come with him,” Sybil explained and I suggest that the two of them go.
“She understands,” Sybil explained, “and is willing, but he is difficult. He wants the children.”
I kept pleading with the ghost boy. Nothing is harder than dealing with a lost one so young.
“Join the other children. They are already outside,” I said.
There was a moment of silence, interrupted only by the muffled sounds of living children playing outside.
“Are they still here?” I cautiously inquired a little later.
“Can’t see them now, but I can see the building. Two floors. Nobody there now.”
I decided it was the time to break the trance which had gradually deepened and at this point was full trance. A moment later Sybil Leek “was back.”
Now we discussed the matter freely and I researched the information just obtained.
As I understood it, there had been this boy, age nine, Peter Fairley by name, who had somehow gotten away from his nanny, a fair woman. He had run into a farm and gone up to the upper story of a barn where two brothers named Vincent had killed him. When the woman found him, she went mad. Then she looked for the men whom she knew, and there was a fight during which she was drowned. The two of them are ghosts because they are lost; the boy lost in a strange place and the woman lost in guilt for having lost the boy.
Mrs. Kunze and Mrs. Trausch volunteered to go through the local register to check out he names and to see if anything bearing on this tragedy could be found in print.
Unfortunately the death records for the year 1925 were incomplete, as Mrs. Trausch discovered at the Santa Ana Register; and this was true even at the local Hall of Records in the court house. The County Sheriff’s Office was of no help either. But they found an interesting item in the Register of January 1, 1925:
Deputies probe tale of “burial” in orange grove. Several Deputy Sheriffs, in a hurried call to Stanton late last night, failed to find any trace of several men who were reported to be “burying something” in a isolated orange grove near that town, as reported to them at the Sheriff’s office here.
Officers rushing to the scene were working under the impression that a murder had been committed and that the body was being interred, but a thorough search in that vicinity failed to reveal anything unusual, according to a report made by Chief Criminal Deputy Ed McClellan, on their return. Deputy Sheriffs Joe Scott and Joe Ryan accompanied McClellan.
Mrs. Kunze, a long-time resident of the area and quite familiar with its peculiarities, commented that such a burial in an isolated orange grove could easily have been covered up by men familiar with the irrigating system, who could have flooded that section, thus erasing all evidence of a newly made grave.
I wondered about the name Peter Fairley. Of course I did not expect to find the boy listed somewhere, but was there a Fairley family in these parts in 1925?
There was.
In the Santa Ana County Directories, S.W. Section, for the year 1925, there is a listing for a Frank Fairley, carpenter, at 930 W. Bishop, Santa Ana. The l
isting continues at the same address the following year also. It was not in the 1924 edition of the directory, however, so perhaps the Fairleys were new to the area then.
At the outset of the visit Mrs. Leek had mentioned a Felix connected with the area. Again consulting the County Directories for 1925, we found several members of the Felix family listed. Andres Felix, rancher, at Golden West Avenue and Bolsa Chica Road, post office Westminster, Adolph and Miguel Felix, laborers, at the same address—perhaps brothers—and Florentino Felix, also a rancher, at a short distance from the farm of Andres Felix. The listing also appears in 1926.
No Vincent or Vincente, however. But of course not all members of the family need to have been listed. The directories generally list only principals, i.e., those gainfully employed or owners of business or property. Then again, there may have been two hired hands by that name, if Vincente was a given name rather than a Christian name.
The 1911 History of Orange County, by Samuel Armor, described the areas as consisting of a store, church, school, and a few residences only. It was then called Bolsa, and the main area was used as ranch and stock land. The area abounds in fish hatcheries also, which started around 1921 by a Japanese named Akiyama. Thus was explained the existence of water holes in the area along with fish tanks, as well as natural lakes.
With the help of Mrs. Kunze, I came across still another interesting record.
According to the Los Angeles Times of January 22, 1956, “an ancient residence at 14611 Golden West Street, Westminster, built 85 years ago, was razed for subdivision.”
This was undoubtedly the farm residence and land on which the development we had been investigating was later built.
And there we have the evidence. Three names were given by our psychic friend: Felix, Vincent, and Peter Fairley. Two of them are found in the printed record, with some difficulty, and with the help of local researchers familiar with the source material, which neither Mrs. Leek nor I was prior to the visit to the haunted house. The body of the woman could easily have been disposed of without leaving a trace by dumping it into one of the fish tanks or other water holes in the area, or perhaps in the nearby Santa Ana River.