Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  She was asleep one night when someone shook her hard and said, “Hey, you!” Frightened, she did not open her eyes, yet with her inner eyes, she “saw” a man of about fifty years of age. She was much too frightened to actually look, so instead she dove underneath the covers and lay here with her eyes shut. There was nothing further that light.

  In the fall of the same year, Toni decided to have a pajama party and spent the night with a group of friends. Her mother had gone to bed because of a cold. Toni and her friends returned to the house from bowling at around 11:30. They were downstairs, talking about various things, when all of a sudden one of Toni’s girlfriends said, “Your another is calling you.”

  Toni went out into the hallway, turning on the lights as she approached the stairs. Footsteps were coming down the stairs, audible not only to her but to her two girlfriends who had followed her into the house. And then they heard a voice out of nowhere calling out, “Toni, it is time to go to bed.” It was a voice Toni had never heard before.

  She went up the stairs and into her mother’s room, but her mother was fast asleep, and had not been out of bed. The voice had been a woman’s, but it had sounded strangely empty, as if someone were speaking to her from far away.

  The following years, Toni was married and left the house. Under the circumstances, Mrs. K. decided to sub-lease part of the house to a tenant. This turned out to be a pleasant woman by the name of Alice H. and her husband. The lady had been injured and was unable to go far up the mountain where she and her husband were building a summer home at the time. Although Mrs. K. and her new tenants were not associated in any way except that they were sharing the same house, she and Alice H. became friendly after a while. One afternoon, Alice H. came to Mrs. K.’s apartment in order to invite her to have supper with her and her husband that night. She knew that Mrs. K. was in her apartment at the time because she heard her light foot-seps inside the apartment. When there was no reply from inside the apartment Alice was puzzled, so she descended to the ground floor, thinking that perhaps Mrs. K. was downstairs.

  Sure enough, as she arrived downstairs, she saw a shadow of what she assumed to be Mrs. K.’s figure walking long the hallway. She followed this shadowy woman all the way from the ground floor guest room, through the bath into Mrs. K.’s bedroom, and then through another hallway and back to the bedroom. All the time she saw the shadowy figure, she also heard light footsteps. But when she came to the bedroom again, it suddenly got very cold and she felt all the blood rush to her head. She ran back to her husband in their own apartment, and informed him that there was a stranger in Mrs. K.’s rooms.

  But there was no one in the house at the time except themselves, for Mrs. K. had gone off to Asheville for the day. The experience shook Alice H. to the point where she could no longer stand the house, and shortly afterward she and her husband left for another cottage.

  In August of the same year, Toni S. returned to her mother’s house. But now she was a married lady, and she was coming for a visit only. Her husband was a car dealer, in business with his father. At the time of the incident, he was not in the house. It was raining outside, and Toni was cleaning the woodwork in the house.

  Suddenly her Pekinese dog came running down the stairs, nearly out of her mind with terror, and barking at the top of her lungs. Toni thought the dog had been frightened by a mouse, so she picked her up and proceeded up the stairs. But the dog broke away from her and ran behind the door. All of a sudden, Toni felt very cold. She kept walking down the hall and into the room, where there was a desk standing near the window. Someone was going through papers on her desk as if looking for a certain piece of paper, putting papers aside and continuing to move them! But there was no one there. No one, that is, who could be seen. Yet the papers were moving as if someone were actually shuffling them. It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and the light was fairly good.

  Suddenly, one letter was pulled out of the piles of papers on the desk, as if to catch her attention. Toni picked it up and read it. It was a letter her father had sent her in February, at the time she got married, warning her that the marriage would not work out after all, and to make sure to call him if anything went wrong. Things had gone wrong since, and Toni understood the significance of what she had just witnessed.

  At that very moment, the room got warm again, and everything returned to normal. But who was it standing at her desk, pulling out her father’s letter? The one person who had been close to her while he was in the flesh was her grandfather.

  During Toni’s visit at the house, her husband, now her ex-husband, also had some uncanny experiences. Somebody would wake him in the middle of the night by calling out, “Wake up!” or “Hey you!” This went on night after night, until both Toni and her husband awoke around two in the morning because of the sound of loud laughing, as if a big party were going on downstairs.

  Toni thought that the neighbors were having a party, and decided to go down and tell them to shut up. She looked out the window and realized that the neighbors were also fast asleep. So she picked up her dog and went downstairs, and as she arrived at the bottom of the stairs, she saw a strange light, and the laughing kept going on and on. There were voices, as if many people were talking all at once, having a social. In anger, Toni called out to them to shut up, she wanted to sleep, and all of a sudden the house was quiet, quiet as the grave. Evidently, Southern ghosts have good manners!

  After her daughter left, Mrs. K. decided to sublease part of the house to a group of young men from a national fraternity who were students at a nearby university. One of the students, Mitchell, was sleeping in a double bed, and he was all alone in the house. Because the heat wasn’t turned up, it being rather costly, he decided to sleep in a sleeping bag, keeping warm in this manner. He went to sleep with his pillow at the head of the bed, which meant due east, and his feet going due west. When he awoke, he found himself facing in the opposite direction, with his head where his feet should have been, and vice versa. It didn’t surprise the young man though, because from the very first day his fraternity brothers had moved into the house, they had heard the sounds of an unseen person walking up and down the stairs.

  One of their teachers, a pilot who had been a colonel in the Korean War, also had an experience at the house. One day while he was staying there, he was walking up the stairs, and when he reached about the halfway mark, someone picked him up by the scruff of his neck and pushed him up the rest of the way to the landing.

  But the night to remember was Halloween Eve. Mrs. K. was in the house, and the night was living up to its reputation: it sounded as if someone wearing manacles were moving about. Mrs. K. was downstairs, sleeping in one of the bunk beds, and a noise came from an upstairs hall. This went on for about two hours straight. It sounded as if someone with a limp were pulling himself along, dragging a heavy chain. Mrs. K. was puzzled about this, since the noise did not sound anything like her father. She looked into the background of the area, and discovered that in the pre-colonial period, there had been some Spanish settlers in the area, most of whom kept slaves.

  Toni S. takes her involvement with hauntings in stride. She has had psychic experiences ever since she can remember; nothing frightening, you understand, only such things as events before they actually happen—if someone is going to be sick in the family, for instance, or who might be calling. Entering old houses is always a risky business for her: she picks up vibrations from the past, and sometimes she simply can’t stand what she feels and must leave at once.

  But she thought she had left the more uncanny aspects of the hauntings behind when she came to New York to work. Somehow the wound up residing in a house that is one hundred ten years old.

  After a while, she became aware of an old man who liked sitting down on her bed. She couldn’t actually see him, but he appeared to her more like a shadow. So she asked some questions, but nobody ever died in the apartment and it was difficult for Toni to accept the reality of the phenomena under the circumstances. As a traine
d psychologist, she had to approach all this on a skeptical level, and yet there did not seem to be any logical answers.

  Soon afterward, she became aware of footsteps where no one was walking, and of doors closing by by themselves, which were accompanied by the definite feeling of another personality present in the rooms.

  On checking with former neighbors upstairs, who had lived in the house for seventeen years, Toni discovered that they too had heard the steps and doors closing by themselves. However, they had put no faith in ghosts, and dismissed the matter as simply an old structure settling. Toni tried her innate psychic powers, and hoped that the resident ghost would communicate with her. She began to sense that it was a woman with a very strong personality. By a process of elimination, Toni came to the conclusion that the last of the original owners of the house, a Mrs. A., who had been a student of the occult, was the only person who could be the presence she was feeling in the rooms.

  Toni doesn’t mind sharing her rooms with a ghost, except for the fact that appliances in the house have a way of breaking down without reason. Then, too, she has a problem with some of her friends; they complain of feelings extremely uncomfortable and cold, and of being watched by someone they cannot see. What was she to do? But then Toni recalled how she had lived through the frightening experiences at East La Porte, North Carolina, and somehow come to terms with the haunts there. No ordinary Long Island ghost was going to dispossess her!

  With that resolve, Toni decided to ignore the presence as much as she could, and go about her business—the business of the living.

  * 74

  Reba’s Ghosts

  REBA B. IS A SENSITIVE, fragile-looking lady with two grown children. She was born in Kentucky, and hails from an old family in which the name Reba has occurred several times before. She works as a medical secretary and doctor’s assistant, and nowadays shares her home with three cats, her children having moved away. Mrs. B., who is divorced, wondered whether perhaps she had a particular affinity for ghosts, seeing that she has encountered denizens of the other world so many times, in so many houses. It wasn’t that it bothered her to any extent, but she had gotten used to living by herself except for her cats, and the idea of having to share her home with individuals who could pop in and out at will, and who might hang around her at times when she could not see them, did not contribute to her comfort.

  Her psychic ability goes back to age three, when she was living with her grandparents in Kentucky. Even then she had a vivid feeling of presences all around her, not that she actually say them with her eyes. It was more a sensitivity to unseen forces surrounding her—and awareness that she was never quite alone. As soon as she would go to bed as a child, she would see the figure of a man bending over her, a man she did not know. After a long period of this she wondered if she was dreaming, but in her heart she knew she was not. However, she was much too young to worry about such things, and as she grew up, her ability became part of her character, and she began to accept it as “normal.”

  This incident begins when she happened to be living in Cincinnati, already divorces. Her mother shared an old house with her, a house that was built around 1900; it had all the earmarks of the post-Victorian era: brass door knobs, little doorbells that were to be turned by hand, and the various trimmings of that age. The house consisted of three floors; the ground floor contained an apartment, and the two ladies took the second and third floor of the house. Reba had her bedroom on the third floor; it was the only bedroom up there situated in the middle of the floor.

  One day she was coming up those stairs, and was approaching the window when she saw a man standing by it. He vanished as she came closer, and she gave this no more thought until a few days later. At that time she happened to be lying in bed, propped up and reading a book.

  She happened to look up and saw a man who had apparently come up the stairs. She noticed his features fully: his eyes were brown, and he also had brown hair. Immediately she could sense that he was very unhappy, even angry. It wasn’t that she heard his voice, but somehow his thoughts communicated themselves to her, mind to mind.

  From her bed she could see him approach, walking out to a small landing and standing in front of her door. Next to her room was a storage room. He looked straight at Reba, and at that moment she received the impression that he was very angry because she and her mother were in that house, because they had moved into his house.

  Although Reba B. was fully conscious and aware of what was going on, she rejected the notion that she was hearing the thoughts of a ghost. But it did her no good; over and over she heard him say or think, “Out, out, I want you out, I don’t want you here.” At that moment he raised his arm and pointed outward, as if to emphasize his point. The next moment he was gone. Reba thought for a moment whether she should tell her mother whose bedroom was downstairs. She decided against it, since her mother had a heart condition and because she herself wasn’t too sure the incident had been quite real. Also, she was a little frightened and did not want to recall the incident any more than she had to. After a while, she went off to sleep.

  Not too long after that her daughter, who was then fourteen, and eleven-year-old son were home with her from school. It was a weekend, and she wanted the children to enjoy it. Consequently, she did not tell them anything about her ghostly experience. She had gone into the front storage room, when she thought she saw someone sitting on the boxed stacked in the storage area.

  At first she refused to acknowledge it, and tried to look away, but when her gaze retured to the area, the man was still sitting there, quietly staring at her. Again she turned her head, and when she looked back, he was gone. The following weekend, her children were with her again. They had hardly arrived when her daughter returned from the same storage room asked, “Mother, is there someone sitting in there?” and all Reba could do was nod, and acknowledge that there was. Her daughter then described the stranger and the description matched what her mother had seen. Under the circumstances, Reba B. freely discussed the matter with her children. But nothing further was done concerning the matter, and no inquiries were made as to the background of the hourse.

  Summer came, and another spring and another summer, and they got into the habit of using the entrance at the side of the house. There were some shrubs in that area, and in order to enter the apartment in which they lived, they had to come up the stairs where they would have a choice of either walking into the living room on the second floor, or continuing on to the third floor where Reba’s bedroom was. The tenant who had the ground floor apartment also had his own entrance.

  One warm summer evening, she suddenly felt the stranger come into the downstairs door and walk up the stairs. When she went to check, she saw nothing. Still, she knew he was in the house. A few days passed, and again she sensed the ghost nearby. She looked, and as her eyes peered down into the hall, she saw him walking down the hall towards her. While she was thinking, “I am imagining this, there is no such thing as a ghost,” she slowly walked toward him. As he kept approaching her, she walked right through him! It was an eerie sensation: for a moment she could not see, and then he was gone. The encounter did not help Reba to keep her composure, but there was little she could do about it.

  Many times she sensed his presence in the house without seeing him, but early one evening, on a Sunday, just as it got dark, she found herself in the living room on the second floor of the house. She had turned on the television set, which was facing her, and she kept the volume down so as not to disturb her mother, whose room was on the same floor. She had altered the furniture in the room somewhat, in order to be closer to the television set, and there were two lounge chairs, one of which she used, and the other one close by, near the television set, so that another person could sit in it and also view the screen. She was just watching television, when she sensed the stranger come up the stairs again and walk into the living room. Next he sat down in the empty chair close to Reba, but this time the atmosphere was different from that first
encounter near the door of her room. He seemed more relaxed and comfortable, and Reba was almost glad that he was there keeping her company. Somehow she felt that he was glad to be in the room with her, and that he was less lonely because of her. He was no longer angry; he just wanted to visit.

  Reba looked at the stranger’s face and noticed his rather high-bridged nose. She also had a chance to study his clothes; he was wearing a brown suit, rather modern in style. Even though the house was quite old, this man was not from the early years, but his clothes seemed to indicate a comparatively recent period. As she sat there, quietly studying the ghost, she got the feeling that he had owned the house at one time, and that their living room had been the sitting room where the ghost and his wife had received people.

  Reba somehow knew that his wife had been very pretty—a fair-complexioned blonde, and she was shown a fireplace in the living room with a small love seat of the French Provincial type next to it, drawn up quite close to the fireplace. She saw this in her mind’s eye, as if the man were showing her something from his past. At the same time, Reba knew that some tragedy had occurred between the ghost and his wife.

  Suddenly, panic rose in Reba, as she realized she was sharing the evening with a ghost. Somehow her fears communicated themselves to her phantom visitor, for as she looked close, he had vanished.

  As much as she had tried to keep these things from her mother, she could not. Her mother owned an antique covered casserole made of silver, which she kept at the head of her bed. The bed was a bookcase bed, and she used to lift the cover and put in receipts, tickets, and papers whenever she wanted.

  One day, Reba and her mother found themselves at the far end of her bedroom on the second floor. Her bed was up against the wall, without any space between it and the wall. As the two ladies were looking in the direction of the bed, they suddenly saw the silver casserole being picked up, put down on the bed, turned upside down and everything spilled out of it. It didn’t fly through the air, but moved rather slowly, as if some unseen force were holding it. Although her mother had seen it, she did not say anything because she felt it would be unwise to alarm her daughter; but later on she admitted having seen the whole thing. It was ironic how the two women were trying to spare each other’s feelings—yet both knew that what they had witnessed was real.