by Hans Holzer
“This man—is he a soldier or a civilian?” I asked.
“There is so much violence about his nature that he could have been of military character. But again I get a little confusion on this.”
“Did he die here?”
“I have a feeling that he did, and that he came to a very unsavory end. Perhaps not within the walls of this place, but having been here, having stayed here for some time. I think he wanted to stay in here. After the theater was closed.”
“Is there any fighting involved?”
“Yes, I have the feeling of some violence. More people than this man.”
“Is he alone?”
“He is the victim of it.”
“What does he want?”
“I think he just is continuing in the same violent way in which he lived.”
“Why is he causing these disturbances?”
“He needs to escape. A connection with...I think this man has sometime been imprisoned. The noises are really his protestation against the periods of being restricted. He does not know this is a theater. But something vital happened in that top dressing room and the impressions there would be clearer.”
Unfortunately, the hour was so late we could not go up there that night.
“This man moves around the theater a lot,” Sybil commented. “He was moving around here under pressure.”
I thanked Sybil, and not knowing if any of the material obtained from her in this clairvoyant state had validity, I looked around for someone who could either confirm or deny it.
Again a stagehand, Albert Barden, was helpful.
“There was some fighting here,” he said in his deliberate voice. “It was during the Easter rebellion, in 1916.”
“Any soldiers here?” I asked, and a hush fell over the audience as they listened to the stagehand.
“As a matter of fact,” he continued, “there was a civilian shot—he was suspected of I.R.A. activities, but it was discovered afterwards that he had something to do with the Quartermaster stores down in Ironbridge Barracks. He was shot by mistake.”
“Where was he shot?”
“In the theater.”
“Downstairs?”
The man nodded.
“Though I was only six years old in 1916, I remember it as if it were yesterday. It was sometime between the rebellion and the Black and Tan fighting of 1921, but he surely was shot here.”
In Ireland, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two civil wars; as a matter of fact, they run one into the other, for it is true that for five long years all of Eire was a battleground for freedom.
It was very late by now and we had to leave the theater. Outside, Dublin was asleep except for a few pubs still plying their trade.
I thanked Lona Moran and her friends for having come down to help us pin down the specter of the Olympia.
Now at least they know it isn’t a fellow thespian unhappy over bad notices—but a man who gave his life in the far grimmer theater of reality.
* 90
The Haunted Rectory
THE FIRST TIME I heard of the haunted rectory of Carlingford was in August 1965, when its owner, Ernest McDowell, approached me on the advice of an American friend who knew of my work.
“I own an old rectory which is haunted. If you are interested I will show you over the house with pleasure.”
Subsequently, I ascertained that Mr. McDowell was a man of standing and intelligence, and his report was to be taken seriously. I arranged for us to go up to the Dundalk area in late July 1966. By this time, two editors from the German fashion magazine Constanze, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Rober, had decided to join us for a firsthand report on my methods, and also to act as neutral observers and arbiters should my camera yield some supernormal photographs. For this purpose, an elaborate system of safeguards was devised by Mr. Rober. It consisted of his bringing from Hamburg the very sensitive film I normally use for the purpose and personally inserting it in my Zeiss camera, which he kept in his own possession until we were ready to visit the house in question.
After he had filled the camera with film, he sealed it with string and red scaling wax, so that I could not possibly manipulate the camera or the film inside without breaking the seal. By this method he was in a firm position to attest to the fact that nobody had tampered with my camera and to further attest that if supernormal results were obtained, they had been obtained genuinely and not by fraud. I was happy to oblige the German editors, since an article in that materialistic country, dealing in a positive way with psychic phenomena, would be an important step forward.
The Robers arrived on a hot Saturday evening at Jury’s Hotel, and the following morning we set out for Dundalk in one of those huge Princess cars that can seat six comfortably. We arrived at Ballymascanlon Hotel north of Dundalk by lunch time; I had chosen this comfortable inn as our headquarters.
The former Plunkett residence, now fully modernized and really an up-to-date hostelry in every sense of the word, has beginnings going back to the ninth century, although the house itself is only a hundred years old. This area abounds in “giants’ tombs” and other pre-Christian relics, and was the center of the Scanlan family for many centuries. Later it belonged to the Cistercian monks of Mellifont, a ruin we had visited the year before when we crossed the river Boyne.
As soon as Mrs. Irene Quinn, the hotel’s spunky owner, had settled us into our rooms, we made plans. I put in a telephone call to Ernest McDowell and a pleasant, well-modulated voice answered me on the other end of the line. He was indeed ready for the expedition; within an hour he had driven over from his own home, a farm south of Dundalk called Heynestown, and we sat down in the comfortable lounge of Ballymascanlon Hotel to go over his experiences in detail.
“Let us start with the history of the house, as far as you know it at this moment,” I asked McDowell, a pleasant-looking, well-dressed young man in his fortieth year whose profession was that of a painter, although he helped his brother run their farm as required. By and large Ernest McDowell was a gentleman farmer, but more gentleman than farmer, and rather on the shy side.
“The house was built in the seventeenth century,” he began. “It was then a private house, a mansion that belonged to the Stannus family, before it was bought by the Church of Ireland for a rectory. The builder of the newer portion was the grandfather of the celebrated Sadler’s Wells ballerina Ninette de Valois. I bought it in 1960.”
“Have you moved in yet?”
“I haven’t really...the house is empty, except of course for the ghosts.”
“Ah yes,” I said, “How large a house is it?”
“Twenty-two rooms in all. Nobody has lived there since I bought it, through.”
“When was your first visit to the house, after you had acquired it?”
“I went up there every week to see if it was all right.”
“Was it?”
“Well, yes, but one summer afternoon, in 1963—it was early September, I recall—my brother and I were at the rectory. My brother was out cutting corn, and I was mowing the lawn. It was rather a hot evening and I thought I was getting a cold. I was very busy, though, and I just happened to look up, towards the door, when I noticed moving towards the door a figure of a girl in a red dress.
“The motor of the lawnmower was not in good repair and it had bothered me, and I was taken aback by what I saw. It was a red velvet dress she wore, and before I could see her face, she just vanished!”
“Did she look solid?”
“Solid.”
“Did she cast a shadow?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see her shoes?”
“There wasn’t time. I started from the ground up, and the red dress was the first thing I noticed.”
“About that face?”
“I couldn’t make it out.”
“What period would you say the dress belonged to?”
“It was Edwardian, long.”
“What did you do after she vanished?”
“I looked towards the gate—the gate that lets you into the grounds from the road—and coming in the gate was a clergyman with a very high collar, and he vanished, too!”
“Do you recall anything else about him?”
“He wore a rather out-of-date outfit, and a hat.”
“What time of day was it?”
“About 5 P.M.”
I thought about this ghostly encounter of two restless spirits for a moment, before continuing my questioning of the chief witness.
“Did they react to each other in any way?”
“I should say there was some bond between the two; there was a connection.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“No, just the two figures.”
“Did your brother see anything?”
“No. But Canon Meissner, who lived at the house for some time, saw the same girl in one of the rooms. She appeared to him on a separate occasion.”
“How long ago?”
“About twenty years ago. He described her as a young girl who appeared near his bed and then just disappeared.”
“Disconcerting for a Canon, I’d say. What else can you tell me about the haunted rectory?”
“Helen Meissner, his daughter, was in the dining room one night, with the door open, alone, when the other door, on the other end of the room, suddenly started to vibrate as if someone were trying hard to push it open. It opened by itself and the dog with her stood and stared at whatever came through the door, its hackles rising, and then it ran for its life.
“Then, too, Mrs. Meissner, the Canon’s wife, and Helen heard footsteps on the backstairs one night. The steps started on the bottom of the stairs and went right up, past them, as they were standing on both sides of the stairs; but they did not see anything. This was about fifteen years ago when Meissner was Rector and lived at the house with his family.
“My sister-in-law, who is very sensitive, went through the house only two weeks ago, and she claimed that the back part of the house gave her a very uncomfortable feeling. She owned a house in Kent, England, that was haunted and we both felt it. I suppose we are both psychic to a degree, since I’ve on occasion felt things.”
“What sort of things?” I asked. I always like to get a full picture of my witnesses to evaluate their testimony. If they have had ghostly experiences prior to the one under investigation, it would indicate mediumistic faculties in them.
“My brother and sister-in-law had bought a house in Kildare and I stayed there one night, and for no reason at all, I sat up in bed from a deep sleep, and I clearly heard both locks on the doors in the room click. But I was quite alone.”
The haunted rectory at Carlingford
“To your knowledge, is there any record of any unhappy incident in this house?” I asked, getting back to the haunted rectory.
“No, it has a very happy atmosphere. Only when I go into it sometime, I feel as if there were people in it, yet it is obviously empty. It seems alive to me. Of course, I have heard footsteps in the corridors when I was quite alone in the house. That was mainly upstairs. It’s a passage that runs up one stairway and around the house and down the other staircase. The only thing smacking of tragedy I know of was the coachman losing a child in the gatehouse that burned down, but that was not in the house itself.”
“Is there any tradition or popular rumor that might refer to the apparitions of the clergyman and the girl in the red dress?”
“None whatever.”
Thus it was that all members of our party had no foreknowledge of any event connected with the haunted house, no names, or anything more than what Ernest McDowell had just told us. Sybil, of course, was nowhere near us at this point, since she was to join us only after the preliminaries had been done with.
The Germans took it all down with their tape recorders, and it was for their benefit that I made the point of our total “innocence” as far as facts and names were concerned.
“What is the house called now?” I asked.
“Mount Trevor,” Mr. McDowell replied. “It was originally built by the Trevors, a very well-known country family. They also built the town of Rostrevor, across Carlingford Lough.”
Empty now, the rectory was once witness to great emotional events.
“Are there any chairs in the house now?” I finally asked, since Sybil had to sit down somewhere for her trance. McDowell assured me he had thought of it and brought one chair—just one—to the otherwise empty house.
When we arrived at the house after a pleasant drive of about fifteen minutes, Peter Rober gave me back my camera, fully sealed now, and I took pictures at random downstairs and upstairs, and Catherine joined me in taking some shots also, with the same camera.
We entered the grounds, where the grass stood high, and McDowell led us into the house by a side entrance, the only door now in use, although I was immediately impressed that a larger door facing the other way must at one time have existed.
The house is pleasantly situated atop a knoll gently sloping down towards the water of Carlingford Lough, with trees dotting the landscape and sheep grazing under them, giving the place a very peaceful feeling. In back of the house lay a kitchen garden, beyond which the ruined towers of ancient Carlingford Abbey could be seen in the distance. Across the road from the garden gate was the Catholic church house of Carlingford.
The hall was rather small; to the left, the staircase mentioned in the ghostly accounts immediately led to the upper story, while to the right of the door a short passage took us into the large downstairs corner room, where we decided to remain. Large windows all around gave the room sufficient illumination, and there was a fireplace in the rear wall. Next to it stood the lone chair McDowell had mentioned.
Sybil joined us now inside the house and I hurried to get her first clairvoyant impressions as they occurred.
“Something connected with the period of 1836,” she said immediately, poking about the rooms. “I have two names...as we came in the name Woodward came to me, and the other is Devine or Divine. Something like that. Peculiar name, I think.”
“Please don’t analyze it,” I warned, “just let it come. I’ll do the analyzing.”
“Woodward and Devine,” Sybil repeated. “These names have some meaning in this house. Also, a hall of imprisonment. Someone was imprisoned, I feel.”
We followed Sybil, who slowly walked from room to room, Catherine helped me carry the tape recorder and camera, Ernest McDowell following behind looking excited, and three friends of his whose presence he felt might be useful. They were two ladies sharing a house at Ardee, both of them very psychic. Mrs. Bay John and Pat MacAllister had brought a young ward named Julian with them. I secretly hoped there weren’t any poltergeists lurking about under the circumstances!
Later, Mrs. MacAllister mentioned seeing a face as if etched onto the wall in the very room upstairs where I took some psychic pictures, though of course I did not know they would turn out to be unusual at the time I took them. I never know these things beforehand.
We were still on the ground floor and Sybil was investigating the rear section, the oldest part of the house. There were some iron bars outside the window of the rather dank room, giving it a very heavy prison-like feeling. It was the original kitchen area.
“Someone was made to stay upstairs,” Sybil said now, “and I have gooseflesh on my forearms now.” We walked up the stairs and I confirmed the latter observation.
Finally we found ourselves in a room about the middle of the upper story, and Sybil came to a halt.
“I feel I want to run away from this room,” she observed. “It’s a panic-stricken feeling. Someone wants to get away from here; the name Devine comes again here. Someone is hiding here, and then there is imprisonment. Is there a prison somewhere here? Several people are held. This is away from the house, however.”
“Is there a presence here?” I asked as I always do when we are at the center of uncanny activities.
“Yes, several. T
he period is 1836. The strongest presence is someone in brown. A man. There is a connection with business. There are three people here, but of the same period. There is no overlapping of periods here. The main person hiding in this room or forcibly kept here went from here and was hanged, with other people. This was a man. Perhaps we should go downstairs now.”
We followed Sybil’s advice and repaired to the downstairs parlor.
“Father Devine...should not have left the church for business,” Sybil suddenly mumbled. “Someone says that about him. I feel him around, though.”
Now I placed Sybil in the one chair we had and the rest of us formed a circle around her as best we could. It was about the same time, 5 o’clock, as the time of the haunting and I was prepared for anything.
Presently, Sybil showed all signs of deep trance. My German friends were riveted to the floor, Mrs. Rober clutching the microphone and Mr. Rober taking dozens of pictures with his Rolleiflex camera. The tension mounted as Sybil’s lips started to move, though no word came at first through them. Gradually, I coaxed the spirit to take firmer possession of my medium’s body and to confide in us, who had come as friends.
“Who are you?” I said softly. The voice now emanating from Sybil was hesitant and weak, not at all like Sybil’s normal voice.
“Aileen,” the voice murmered.
I could hardly hear her, but my tape recorder picked up every breath.
“Aileen Woodward,” the ghost said. “Is this your house?”
“We live here...where is he? Where is he? Robert! “Whom are you seeking?”
“Devaine...Robert Devaine...speak slightly...my husband...be quiet...where is he?”
I wondered if she wanted me to keep my voice down so that I would not give her away to some pursuers.
“Where is Robert?” I asked, trying to reverse the line of questioning.
“Where is he, where is he?” she cried instead, becoming more and more upset and the tears, real tears, streaming down Sybil’s usually tranquil face.
I calmed her as best I could, promising to help her find Robert, if I could.