Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  The ghost did not put in any further appearances after the dramatic encounter in the living room. About a year later, the two ladies moved away into another old house far from this one. But shortly before they did, Reba’s mother was accosted on the street by a strange middle-aged lady, who asked her whether she was living in the house just up the street. When Reba’s mother acknowledged it, the lady informed her the house had once belonged to her parents. Were they happy in it, Reba’s mother wanted to know. “Very happy,” the stranger assured her, “Especially my father.” It occurred to Reba that it might have been he who she had encountered in the house; someone so attached to his home that he did not want to share it with anyone else, especially flesh-and-blood people like her mother and herself.

  The new home the ladies moved into proved “alive” with unseen vibrations also, but by now they didn’t care. Reba realized that she had a special gift. If ghosts wanted her company, there was little she could do about it.

  She had a friend who worked as a motorcycle patrolman, by the name of John H. He was a young man and well-liked on the force. One day he chased a speeder—and was killed in the process. At the time, Reba was still married, but she had known John for quite a few years before. They were friends, although not really close ones, and she had been out of touch with him for some time. One morning, she suddenly sensed his presence in the room with her; it made no sense, yet she was positive it was John H. After a while, the presence left her. She remarked on this to her mother and got a blank stare in return. The young man had been killed on the previous night, but Reba could not have known this. The news had come on the radio just that morning, but apparently Reba had had advance news of a more direct kind.

  Reba B. shared her interest in the occult with an acquaintance, newscaster Bill G. In his position as a journalist, he had to be particularly careful in expressing an opinion on so touchy a subject as ESP. They had met a local restaurant one evening, and somehow the conversation had gotten around to ghosts.

  When Mr. G. noticed her apprehension at being one of the “selected” ones who could see ghosts, he told her about another friend, a young medium who had an apartment not far away. One evening she walked out onto her patio, and saw a man in old-fashioned clothes approach her. The man tried to talk to her, but she could not hear anything. Suddenly he disappeared before her eyes. The young lady thought she was having a nervous breakdown, and consulted a psychiatrist; she even went into a hospital to have herself examined, but there was nothing wrong with her. When she returned to her home and went out onto the patio again, she saw the same ghostly apparition once more. This time she did not panic, but instead studied him closely. When he disappeared she went back into her apartment, and decided to make some inquiries about the place. It was then that she discovered that a long time ago, a man of that description had been hanged from a tree in her garden.

  “These things do happen,” Bill G. assured Reba, and asked her not to be ashamed or afraid of them. After all, ghosts are people too. Since then, Reba had come to terms with her ghostly encounters. She has even had an experience with a ghost cat—but that is another story.

  * 75

  Henny from Brooklyn

  Clinton Street, Brooklyn is one of the oldest sections of that borough, pleasantly middle-class at one time, still amongst Brooklyn’s best neighborhoods, as neighborhoods go. The house in question is in the 300 block, and consists of four stories. There was a basement floor, then a parlor floor a few steps up, as is the usual custom with brown-stone houses, with a third and fourth floor above it. If one preferred, one could call the third floor the fourth floor, in which case the basement becomes the first floor; but no matter how one called it, there were four levels in this brownstone, all capable of serving as apartments for those who wished to live there. The house was more than one hundred years old at the time of the events herein described, and the records are somewhat dim beyond a certain point.

  In the 1960s, the house was owned by some off-beat people, about whom little was known. Even the Hall of Records isn’t of much help, as the owners didn’t always live in the house, and the people who lived in it were not necessarily the owners, not to mention tenants, although sharing a part of the house with people legitimately entitled to live there. However, for the purpose of my story, we need only concern ourselves with the two top floors; the third floor contained two bedrooms and a bath, while the fourth or top floor consisted of a living room, dining room, kitchen, and second bath.

  At the time my account begins, the first two floors were rented to an architect and his wife, and only the two top floors were available for new tenants.

  It was in the summer when two young ladies in their early 20s, who had been living at the Brooklyn YWCA, decided to find a place of their own. Somehow they heard of the two vacant floors in the house on Clinton Street and immediately fell in love with it, renting the two top floors without much hesitation. Both Barbara and Sharon were 23 years old at the time, still going to college, and trying to make ends meet on what money they could manage between them. Two years later, Barbara was living in San Francisco with a business of her own, independently merchandising clothing. Brooklyn was only a hazy memory by then, but on August 1 of the year she and Sharon moved in, it was very much her world.

  Immediately after moving in, they decided to clean up the house, which needed it, indeed. The stairway to the top floor was carpeted all the way up, and it was quite a job to vacuum it clean because there were a lot of outlets along the way, and one had to look out for extension cords. Sharon got to the top floor and was cleaning it when she removed the extension cord to plug it in further up. Instead, she just used the regular cord of the vacuum cleaner, which was about 12 feet long, using perhaps three feet of it, which left nine feet of cord lying on the floor.

  All of a sudden, the plug just pulled out of the wall. Sharon couldn’t believe her eyes; the plug actually pulled itself out of the socket, and flew out onto the floor. She shook her head and put it back in, and turned the vacuum cleaner on again. Only then did she realize that she had turned the switch on the cleaner back on, when she had never actually turned it off in the first place! She couldn’t figure out how that was possible. But she had a lot more work to do, so she continued with it. Later she came downstairs and described the incident to her roommate who thought she was out of her mind. “Wait till something happens to you,” Sharon said, “there is something strange about this house.”

  During the next five months, the girls heard strange noises all over the house, but they attributed it to an old houses settling, or the people living downstairs in the building. Five months of “peace” were rudely shattered when Sharon’s younger brother came to visit from New Jersey.

  He was still in high school, and liked to listen to music at night, especially when it was played as loud as possible. The young people were sitting in the living room, listening to music and talking. It was a nice, relaxed evening. All of a sudden the stereo went off. The music had been rather loud rock and roll, and at first they thought the volume had perhaps damaged the set. Then the hallway light went out, followed by the kitchen light. So they thought a fuse had blown. Barbara ran down four flights of stairs into the basement to check. No fuse had blown. To be on the safe side, she checked them anyway, and switched them around to make sure everything was fine. Then she went back upstairs and asked the others how the electricity was behaving.

  But everything was still off. At this point, Sharon’s brother decided to go into the kitchen and try the lights there. Possibly there was something wrong with the switches. He went into the hallway where there was an old Tiffany-type lamp hanging at the top of the stairway. It had gone off, too, and he tried to turn it on and nothing happened. He pulled again, and suddenly it went on. In other words, he turned it off first, then turned it on, so it has been on in the first place.

  This rather bothered the young man, and he announced he was going into the kitchen to get something to eat. He proceede
d into the kitchen, and when he came back to join in the others he was as white as the wall. He reported that the kitchen was as cold as an icebox, but as soon as one left the kitchen, the temperature was normal in the rest of the house. The others then got up to see for themselves, and sure enough, it was icy cold in the kitchen. This was despite the fact that there were four or five radiators going, and all the windows were closed.

  That night they knew that they had a ghost, and for want of a better name they called her Hendrix—it happened to have been the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, and they had been playing some of his records.

  Shortly afterward, Toby joined the other two girls in the house. Toby moved in on April 1. It had been relatively quiet between the incident in the kitchen and that day, but somehow Toby’s arrival was also the beginning of a new aspect of the haunting.

  About a week after Toby moved in, the girls were in living room talking. It was about 11 o’clock at night, and they had dimmers on in the living room. Toby was sitting on the couch, and Barbara and some friends were sitting on the other side of the room, when all of a sudden she felt a chilly breeze pass by her. It didn’t touch her, but she felt it nonetheless, and just then the lights started to dim back and forth, back and forth, and when she looked up, she actually saw the dial on the dimmer moving by itself. As yet, Toby knew nothing about the haunting, so she decided to say nothing to the others, having just moved in, and not wishing to have her new roommates think her weird.

  But things kept happening night after night, usually after 11 o’clock when two girls and their friends sat around talking. After a couple of weeks, she could not stand it any longer, and finally asked the others whether they could feel anything strange in the room. Barbara looked at Sharon, and a strange look passed between them; finally they decided to tell Toby about the haunting, and brought her up to date from the beginning of their tenancy in the house.

  Almost every day there was something new to report: cooking equipment would be missing, clothing would disappear, windows were opened by themselves, garbage cans would be turned over by unseen hands. Throughout that period, there was the continued walking of an unseen person in the living room located directly over the third-floor bedroom. And the girls heard it at any hour of the night, and once in a while even during the day. Someone was walking back and forth, back and forth. They were loud, stomping footsteps, more like a woman’s but they sounded as if someone were very angry. Each time one of them went upstairs to check they found absolutely nothing.

  The girls held a conference, and decided that they had a ghost, make no mistake about it. Toby offered to look into the matter, and perhaps find out what might have occurred at the house at an earlier age. Barbara kept hearing an obscure whistling, not a real tune or song that could be recognized, but a human whistle nevertheless. Meanwhile, Toby heard of a course on witchcraft and the occult being given at New York University, and started to take an interest in books on the subject. But whenever there were people over to visit them and they stayed in the living room upstairs past 11 o’clock at night, the ghost would simply run them out of the room with all the tricks in her ghostly trade.

  “She” would turn the stereo on and off, or make the lights go on and off. By now they were convinced it was a woman. There were heavy shutters from the floor to the ceiling, and frequently it appeared as if a wind were coming through them and they would clap together, as if the breeze were agitating them. Immediately after that, they heard footsteps walking away from them, and there was an uncomfortable feeling in the room, making it imperative to leave and go somewhere else, usually downstairs into one of the bedrooms.

  As yet, no one had actually seen her. That June, Bruce, Toby’s boyfriend, moved into the house with her. They had the master bedroom, and off the bedroom was a bathroom. Since Barbara would frequently walk through in the middle of the night, they left the light on in the bathroom all night so that she would not trip over anything. That particular night in June, Toby and her boyfriend were in bed and she was looking up, not at the ceiling, but at the wall, when suddenly she saw a girl looking at her.

  It was just like an outline, like a shadow on the wall, but Toby could tell that she had long hair arranged in braids. Somehow she had the impression that she was an Indian, perhaps because of the braids. Toby looked up at her and called the apparition to her boyfriend’s attention, but by the time he had focused on it she had disappeared.

  He simply did not believe her. Instead, he asked Toby to go upstairs to the kitchen and make him a sandwich. She wasn’t up there for more than five or ten minutes when she returned to the bedroom and found her boyfriend hidden under the covers of the bed. When she asked him what was wrong, he would shake his head, and so she looked around the room, but could find nothing unusual. The only thing she noticed was that the bathroom was now wide open. She assumed that her boyfriend had gone to the bathroom, but he shook his head and told her that he had not.

  He had just been lying there smoking a cigarette, when all of a sudden he saw the handle on the door turn by itself, and the door open.

  When he saw that, he simply dove under the covers until Toby returned. From that moment on, he no longer laughed at her stories about a house ghost. The following night, her boyfriend was asleep when Toby woke up at 2 o’clock in the morning. The television set had been left on and she went to shut it off, and when she got back into bed, she happened to glance at the same place on the wall where she had seen the apparition the night before. For a moment or two she saw the same outline of a girl, only this time she had the impression that the girl was smiling at her.

  Two weeks after that, Toby and her boyfriend broke up, and this rather shook her. She had come back home one day and didn’t know that he had left, then she found a note in which he explained his reasons for leaving, and that he would get in touch with her later. This very much upset her, so much so that her two roommates had to calm her down. Finally, the two girls went upstairs and Toby was lying on the bed trying to compose herself.

  In the quiet of the room, she suddenly heard someone sob a little and then a voice said, “Toby.” Toby got up from bed and went to the bottom of the stairs and called up, demanding to know what Barbara wanted. But no one had called her. She went back to the room and lay down on the bed again. Just then she heard a voice saying “Toby” again and again. On checking, she found that no one had called out to her—no one of flesh and blood, that is.

  Toby then realized who had been calling her, and she decided to talk to “Henny,” her nickname for Hendrix, which was the name given by the others to the ghost since that night when they were playing Jimi Hendrix records. In a quiet voice, Toby said, “Henny, did you call me?” and then she heard the voice answer, “Calm down, don’t take it so hard, it will be all right.” It was a girl’s voice, and yet there was no one to be seen. The time was about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and since it was in June, the room was still fairly light.

  Toby had hardly recovered from this experience when still another event took place. Sharon had moved out and another girl by the name of Madeline had moved in. One day her brother came to visit them from Chicago, and he bought a friend along who had had some experience of a spiritual nature. His name was Joey, and both boys were about twenty to twenty-one years old.

  Madeline and her brother were much interested in the occult, and they brought a Ouija board to the house. On Saturday, December 19, while it was snowing outside and the atmosphere was just right for a séance, they decided to make contact with the unhappy ghost in the house. They went upstairs into the living room, and sat down with the board. At first it was going to be a game, and they were asking silly questions of it such as who was going to marry whom, and other romantic fluff. But halfway through the session, they decided to try to contact the ghost in earnest. The three girls and Madeline’s brother sat down on the floor with their knees touching, and put the board on top. Then they invited Henny to appear and talk to them if she was so inclined. They w
ere prepared to pick up the indicator and place their hands on it so it could move to various letters on the board.

  But before their hands ever touched it, the indicator took off by itself! It shot over to the word yes on the board, as if to reassure them that communication was indeed desired. The four of them looked at each other dumbfounded, for they had seen only too clearly what had just transpired. By now they were all somewhat scared. However, Toby decided that since she was going to be interested in psychic research, she might as well ask the questions. She began asking why the ghostly girl was still attached to the house. Haltingly, word for word, Henny replied and told her sad story.

  It was a slow process, since every word had to be spelled out letter by letter, but the young people didn’t mind the passage of time—they wanted to know why Henny was with them. It appears that the house once belonged to her father, a medical doctor. Her name was Cesa Rist and she had lived in the house with her family. Unfortunately she had fallen in love with a young man and had become pregnant by him. She wanted to marry him and have the baby, but her father would not allow it and forced her to have an abortion. He did it in the house himself, and she died during the abortion.

  Her body was taken to Denver, Colorado and buried in the family plot. She realized that her boyfriend was dead also, because this all happened a long time ago. Her reasons for staying on in the house were to find help; she wanted her remains to be buried near her lover’s in New York.

  “Do you like the people who live in the house?”