Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “When did you first come to this house?” I asked quietly, while the sobbing continued.

  The faces around me showed the great emotions that seemed to have been transferred from the ghostly girl to the witnesses. Not a word was spoken.

  At this point, the tape had to be turned over. Unfortunately, it slipped out of our hands and it was several seconds before I started to record again. During those moments I tried to explore her family connections more fully.

  Who was Robert and who were his people? Who was Robert’s father?

  “In the Church,” she replied, quieter now.

  “Does he like you?” I wanted to know.

  There was a moment of quiet reflection before she answered.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Church must not marry!”

  “Is Robert a priest?”

  “Shhh!” she said quickly. “Don’t speak!”

  “I don’t quite understand...how does religion enter the picture?”

  “Changer,” she mumbled, indicating that someone had changed his faith.

  “Are you and Robert of the same religion?” I now asked.

  “Don’t ask it.”

  “Are you Catholic?”

  Utter silence was my answer.

  I pleaded with her for more information so I could help her locate Robert. In vain; she would not budge on this question. Finally, she confused me with her enemies.

  “You took him...I’m going for a walk now...follow...down the hill...just a walk...to see if he comes....”

  “If I get you to see Robert again, will you promise to do as I tell you?” I asked.

  “I promise nothing,” the frightened ghost replied. “You betray him...how do I know you’re a friend?”

  “You have to trust me if I am to help, you.”

  “I don’t trust.”

  Now I gently told her the truth about herself, the time that had come and gone since 1836 and why she could not stay on in this house.

  “Don’t speak so loud...you drive me mad...I’m going for a walk in the garden...” she said, trying to ignore the light of truth piercing her self-inflicted prison. But it did not work. The door of reality had been opened to her. In a moment she was gone.

  Sybil reopened her eyes, confused at first as to where she was. I then asked her to take some fresh air outside the house, since the rain that had come down during part of our séance had now stopped and the countryside was back to its glorious Irish freshness.

  With Sybil outside, I turned once more to the owner of the house and asked whether he had ever heard the names Woodward, Aileen, and Devine or Devaine before in connection with the house or area.

  “The only thing I know is that Canon Meissner told me that this house was once occupied by a French family named Devine. Since Canon Meissner had the house from 1935 onward, this must have been before his time.”

  “The girl speaks of a clergyman, and you saw a clergyman ghost, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” McDowell nodded, “but he wore black, not brown.”

  In the time we had lost through the tape change, the ghost had described herself as 16 years of age, wearing a red dress, and the dates 1836 and 1846 both were given. Sybil, of course, had no knowledge of McDowell’s experience with the girl in the red velvet dress.

  I asked Mr. McDowell to look in the local records for confirmation of some of the names and information that had come through the medium. Offhand, none of it was known to those present, so that confirmation would have to await further research.

  We returned to Ballymascanlon Hotel, where the eager German journalist had made an appointment with a local photographer so that he could get my films developed while we were still on location, and if there was anything on the negatives that had not been visible to the naked eye, one could make immediate use of the information. I never anticipated anything of this sort, but one can’t know these things in advance either. As it turned out, there were two pictures in the batch, taken by Catherine and me with my sealed camera, that showed the same mirror-like effects I had observed on the photographs taken in June Havoc’s haunted townhouse in New York and in the haunted trailer of Rita Atlanta, near Boston. Wherever there is present in a room a haunted area, represented by a magnetic field or a cold spot sometimes, such an area occasionally shows up on film with mirror-like effects; that is, reflections of objects in the room occur that could not have occurred under ordinary conditions, there being no mirror or other reflecting surface near.

  Peter Rober was clearly elated, showing his pleasure about as much as his North German nature permitted him to. There was still another picture that represented a puzzle to us: in the haunted room upstairs where Helen Meissner had seen the door open by its own volition, Catherine took a picture in what seemed to both of us an empty room. We clearly recall that the doors were both shut. Yet, to our amazement, on the picture the door to the left is quite plainly ajar!

  Ernest McDowell suggested we talk to the Meissners firsthand, and the following morning, Mr. and Mrs. Rober and I drove across the border to Northern Ireland, where the Meissners now live in a little town called Warrenpoint.

  Mrs. Meissner turned out to be a friendly, talkative lady who readily agreed to tell us what had happened to them during their tenancy at the rectory.

  “We lived there twenty-five years, and we left the house in 1960,” she began her recollections. “We did not notice anything unusual about the house at first, perhaps because we were so glad to get the house.

  “Part of the house was almost Queen Anne period, the rest Georgian. We had two indoor maids and we took our gardener with us, too. Everybody was happy. We did lots of entertaining and life was very pleasant. Then I noticed that local people never came to the rectory in the evening. They always made an excuse. Finally, I was informed that there was a ghost in the house. It was supposed to have been the ghost of a sea captain who lived here originally and was lost at sea. The older portion of the house was where he had lived, they said. I never was able to find out anything more than that about this sea captain, however. I was a skeptic myself and went gaily about my business. Then summer came, and I used to be outdoors as late as one could. Several evenings, something white passed me, something big, and yet I never heard a sound. I thought this very strange, of course, and wondered if it was a white owl, But there was no sound of wings. Gradually I got to rather expect this phenomenon.”

  “Any particular time of day?” I interjected.

  “At dusk. Outside. And then I saw it from the window. But it had no form, yet I knew it was white. I saw it often, and never a sound.”

  “After that, did you have any further adventures in the house?” I asked.

  “We had a visit from the sister of Ninette de Valois, and she was very interested in the house because it was an ancestor of hers who had owned it. He was a Colonel Stannus. At the same time we had another visitor, a young man from Dublin. The lady and her husband had come rather late in the evening; they were staying at Rostrevor Hotel, and they wanted to see over Carlingford Rectory, and we thought it was rather late in the evening for that, so we asked them to come the next day. At that time the young man from Dublin was here also, but he and the lady had never met.

  “When he looked at the lady, he became suddenly white as a sheet. I wondered if he was ill, but he said no, so we moved on to a room that we always regarded as a guest room. The young man from Dublin had often stayed in that room before. But when we entered the room, the lady exclaimed that she had been in that room before! Of course she hadn’t.

  “The young fellow from Dublin still looked very shaken, so I took him downstairs to one side and said, What is wrong with you?

  “Finally he told me.

  “‘It’s the most extraordinary thing,’ he said to me. ‘That lady is the ghost.’

  “‘What ghost?’ I asked.

  “‘Often when I slept in that room,’ he explained, ‘I have been awakened by the feeling of a
presence in the room. When I looked up, I saw the face of that lady!’

  “What struck me as odd was that he felt something strange immediately upon meeting her and she felt something equally strange about having been to that room before when in fact she hadn’t.

  “Later, at tea, she asked me if I believed in the transmigration of souls.”

  The young man, whose name is Ronny Musgrave, evidently was reminded by the lady’s appearance of the ghost’s, I felt, but that would still not explain her reaction to the room, unless she had clairvoyantly foreseen her trip to Carlingford and was now realizing it!

  “I’ve spent so much time in that house,” Mrs. Meissner continued, “but I never felt I was alone. My husband’s experience was different from mine. He had fallen asleep. He awoke, feeling that there was someone in the room. He thought it was an evil presence and he made the sign of the cross. Then it disappeared. I always thought the presence was female. I’ve heard footsteps, too. But I never feared this ghost. To me, it was pleasant.”

  I tried to piece together the past history of the house. Prior to 1932 when the Meissners moved in, there was a rector named Aughmuty there; before that the Reverend Bluett, before him his father-in-law, a Mr. Mailer, and that brings us back to the nineteenth century, when the Stannus family owned the place. It was just a private house then.

  Mrs. Meissner did not recognize any of the names obtained during the trance, incidentally.

  While she went to fetch her octogenarian husband to supplement some of the data for us. I had a talk with the daughter, now the widowed Mrs. Thompson, who had come over to the house to see us.

  “We had a cocker spaniel,” she began, “and the dog was with me in that upstairs room. There was a big mirror there then, and as I looked into it, I saw the door at the far end of the room open by itself, and then close again slowly. The dog got up and snarled and growled, but I saw nothing. That was the only experience that I had, but it was enough for me.”

  Canon Meissner is a lively and kind man who readily answered my questions as best he knew. None of the names rang a bell with him, as far as churchmen were concerned, and as for private origins, he did not really have the sources in his library. He recommended we take it up with Trinity College in Dublin where there are extensive records. The house had become a rectory about 1870 or 1871, he explained, and was directly purchased from the Stannus family at that time. They had built the newer part onto the already existing old portion.

  I started to examine the two heavy books the Canon had brought with him from his study.

  No Devine or Devaine showed up in the lists of rectors of Carlingford.

  In The Alumni of Trinity College, London, Williams and Norgate, 1924, on page 217, column I, I found the following entry: “Devine, Charles, admitted to Trinity, November 4, 1822, age 20 [thus born 1802]; son of John Devine, born County Louth.”

  That, of course, was the right area, for Carlingford was at that time the principal town in the county.

  I further found a listing of “Robert Woodward, graduated Trinity, November 5, 1821, aged 16, son of Henry Woodward, M.A. 1832,” on page 94 of the same work.

  It seemed extraordinary that we had located two names given in trance by Sybil Leek, and that both names were of the right period claimed and in the right location. But the search was far from finished.

  While I was trying to get some corroboration from the local librarian at Dundalk—without success—the German editors packed up and left for Hamburg. I left instructions with Ernest McDowell as to what I needed, and then the three of us, my wife and I and Sybil, went on to the western part of Ireland. There we parted company and Sybil went to her home in the south of England while we returned to New York.

  The owner Edward McDowell, a painter, examining the grounds

  On August 2, 1966, Sybil had a trance-like dream at her house at Ringwood, Hants. In this dream state she saw herself walking back and forth between the rectory and the ruined abbey. There was a young woman who had come from some other place and had been waiting a long time for a man to join her. He had been in India. The woman was terribly upset and said that she had married the man but it was not legal and she had to find a Catholic priest to marry them because the whole thing was making her ill. He did not want to be married by a priest because he was a Protestant and his family would cut him off without any money.

  He had left her because of her insistence on being married again, but she loved him and wanted to persuade him to agree to being married by a priest. She had been in England, and he told her to come to Ireland to Carlingford, where he could meet her, but he had not turned up. She had to find a priest who would keep the marriage secret, and this was not easy, as everyone said the marriage had to be written down in a book.

  The woman claimed that “everything” could be found in the Yelverton papers in Dublin. Sybil was sure there was a court case called the Yelverton case about the 1840–50 period. But then things in the dream-like state got a bit confused as she found herself drifting in and out of the house, sometimes walking to the abbey, talking to a priest, then back to the house, which at that time seemed furnished; and the gateway Sybil saw at the back of the house, not where it is now. The woman seemed to be staying with friends; she did not liye at Carlingford permanently and indeed went on from there.

  That was on August 2; on the third, Sybil again “dreamt” exactly the same sequence, which again culminated in the search for the Yelverton case papers. But the dream was more vivid this time; in the morning Sybil found that she had gotten up in the middle of the night, taken off her nightgown and put on a long evening dress, and then gone back to bed in it. She had the distinct feeling of wearing the same kind of clothes this girl wore in the 1840s. The girl said in all her moving around she could not get the right clothes to be married in and would have to buy more. The girl seemed to have an accent and spoke Italian and French in between a lot of crying and sniffling, and she seemed familiar to Sybil.

  The latter was only too logical, since Sybil had been her instrument of communication, but we had not until now discussed the details of the case or her trance with Sybil; consequently she could not have known about the religious problem, for instance.

  That was a monumental week for this case, for on the following day, and quite independently of Sybil’s impressions, Ernest McDowell had come across the needed corroboration in a rare local chronicle. In a work entitled County Families of the United Kingdom, 1800, the family named Woodhouse, of Omeath Park, near Carlingford, was listed.

  Omeath is the next village after Carlingford and quite close to it.

  John Woodhouse, born October 6, 1804, married to Mary Burleigh, June 10, 1834; nine children, the fourth of which was Adeline Elizabeth. Now the Irish would pronounce Adeline rather like Ad’lin, and what I had heard from Sybil’s entranced lips sounded indeed like A’lin, or Ad’lin!

  The Woodhouse family claimed descent from the Woodhouses of Norfolk, England; thus Sybil’s reference to the girl having been to England might fit. Perhaps she had gone to visit relatives.

  Further in the same source, there is a listing also for the family Woodward of Drumbarrow. A Robert Woodward, born June 20, 1805, is given, whose father was Henry Woodward. Robert Woodward, according to the source, married one Esther Woodward and had two sons and three daughters. This marriage took place in 1835. This is the same man also listed in the register of Trinity College.

  The similarity of the names Woodward and Woodhouse may have been confusing to the ghostly girl. One was presumably her maiden name and the other that of her husband’s family.

  Unfortunately, we don’t have the birth dates for Adeline. But if her father was married only in 1834, she could not very well have married Robert in 1836 or even 1846. If she was sixteen at the time as she claimed in trance, and if she had been born somewhere between 1835 and 1845, we get to the period of around 1850–60 as the time in which her tragic liaison with Robert might have taken place. But this is speculation.r />
  What we do know concretely is this: nobody, including Sybil Leek, ever heard of a man named Devine, a girl named Adeline Woodhouse, a man named Robert Woodward, before this investigation took place. These names were not in anyone’s unconscious mind at the time of our visit to Carlingford Rectory. Yet these people existed in the very area in which we had been and at the approximate time when the ghost had been active there in her lifetime. How can that be explained by any other reasoning than true communication with a restless departed soul?

  What were the relationships between the girl in the red velvet dress and her Robert, and how did the father fit into this and which one was the clergyman? Was Devine the clergyman who destroyed their marriage or did he help them? It seems to me that it is his ghost Ernest McDowell observed. Is there a feeling of guilt present that kept him in these surroundings perhaps?

  At any rate, the rectory has been quiet ever since our visit and Ernest McDowell is thinking of moving in soon. That is, if we don’t buy the place from him. For the peaceful setting is tempting and the chance of ever encountering the girl in the red velvet dress, slim. Not that any of us would have minded.

  * 91

  The Haunted Seminary

  I FIRST HEARD OF THE haunted room at Maynooth College from Patrick Byrne, who also assured me it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get permission to investigate it. But a Ghost Hunter never says die, so, without further attempting to set up a visit, I decided to read what there was about the seminary itself, and then set out for it.

  “Founded through the exertions of the Irish Hierarchy by an Act of the Irish Parliament in 1795, Maynooth College became within a century one of the largest ecclesiastical seminaries in the world. From its small beginnings with forty students and ten professors accommodated in a converted dwelling-house, it has grown into a fair academic city of nearly six hundred students and a teaching staff of forty, with noble buildings, spacious recreation grounds and one of the finest churches in Ireland. Between 9,000 and 10,000 priests have been trained here.

  “Eamon De Valera, President of Ireland, was formerly attached to the teaching staff.