by Hans Holzer
But no matter who actually lived there. It seemed the real owner was still Mrs. Collar.
* 94
The Ghost of Gay Street
FRANK PARIS AND T. E. Lewis were puppeteers. Children came to admire the little theater the two puppeteers had set up in the high-ceilinged basement of their old house in Greenwich Village, that old section of New York going back to the 1700s. The house at Number 12 Gay Street was a typical old townhouse, smallish, the kind New Yorkers built around 1800 when “the village” meant far uptown.
In 1924, a second section was added to the house, covering the garden that used to grace the back of the house. This architectural graft created a kind of duplex, one apartment on top of another, with small rooms at the sides in the rear.
The ownership of the house in the early days is hazy. At one time a sculptor owned Number 12, possibly before the 1930s. Evidently he was fond of bootleg liquor, for he built a trapdoor in the ground floor of the newer section of the house, probably over his hidden liquor cabinet. Before that, Mayor Jimmy Walker owned the house, and used it well, although not wisely. One of his many loves is said to have been the tenant there. By a strange set of circumstances, the records of the house vanished like a ghost from the files of the Hall of Records around that time.
Later, real-estate broker Mary Ellen Strunsky lived in the house. In 1956, she sold it to the puppeteer team of Paris and Lewis, who had been there ever since, living in the upstairs apartment and using the lower portion as a workroom and studio for their little theater.
None of this, incidentally, was known to me until after the visit I paid the house in the company of my medium for the evening, Berry Ritter.
It all started when a reporter from the New York World-Telegram, Cindy Hughes, came to interview me, and casually dropped a hint that she knew of a haunted house. Faster than you can say Journal-American, I had her promise to lead me to this house. On a particularly warm night in May 1963, I followed Miss Hughes down to Gay Street. Berry Ritter knew nothing at all about the case; she didn’t even know the address where we were going.
We were greeted warmly by Frank Paris, who led us up the stairs into the upper apartment. The sight of the elaborately furnished, huge living room was surprising. Oriental figurines, heavy drapes, paintings, statuary, and antiques filled the room.
In two comfortable chairs we found awaiting us two friends of the owners: an intense looking man in his thirties, Richard X., who, I later discovered, was an editor by profession, and Alice May Hall, a charming lady of undetermined age.
I managed to get Berry out of earshot, so I could question these people without her getting impressions from our conversation.
“What is this about the house being haunted?” I asked Frank Paris.
He nodded gravely.
“I was working downstairs with some lacquer. It was late, around 3 A.M. Suddenly, I began to smell a strong odor of violets. My black spaniel here also smelled it, for he started to sniff rather strangely. And yet, Ted, my partner, in the same room with me, did not get the strange scent at all. But there is more. People waltz up and down the stairs at night, time and again.”
“What do you mean, waltz?”
“I mean they go up and down, up and down, as if they had business here,” Frank explained, and I thought, perhaps they had, perhaps they had.
“A weekend visitor also had a most peculiar experience here,” Frank Paris continued. “He knew nothing about our haunted reputation, of course. We were away on a short trip, and when we got back, he greeted us with—‘Say, who are all these people going up and down the stairs?’ He had thought that the house next door was somehow connected to ours, and that what he heard were people from next door. But of course, there is no connection whatever.”
“And did you ever investigate these mysterious footsteps?” I asked.
“Many times,” Frank and Ted nodded simultaneously, “but there was never anyone there—anyone of flesh-and-blood, that is.”
I thanked them, and wondered aloud if they weren’t psychic, since they had experienced what can only be called psychic phenomena.
Frank Paris hesitated, then admitted that he thought both of them were to some extent.
“We had a little dog which we had to have put away one day. We loved the dog very much, but it was one of those things that had to be done. For over a year after the dog’s death, both of us felt him poking us in the leg—a habit he had in life. This happened on many occasions to both of us.”
I walked over to where Miss Hall, the gray-haired little lady, sat.
“Oh, there is a ghost here all right,” she volunteered. “It was in February 1963, and I happened to be in the house, since the boys and I are good friends. I was sitting here in this very spot, relaxing and casually looking toward the entrance door through which you just came—the one that leads to the hallway and the stairs. There was a man there, wearing evening clothes, and an Inverness Cape—I saw him quite plainly. He had dark hair. It was dusk, and there was still some light outside.”
“What did you do?”
“I turned my head to tell Frank Paris about the stranger, and that instant he was gone like a puff of smoke.”
Paris broke in.
“I questioned her about this, since I didn’t really believe it. But a week later, at dawn this time, I saw the ghost myself, exactly as Alice had described him—wearing evening clothes, a cape, hat, and his face somewhat obscured by the shadows of the hallway. Both Alice and I are sure he was a youngish man, and had sparkling eyes. What’s more, our dog also saw the intruder. He went up to the ghost, friendly-like, as if to greet him.”
Those were the facts of the case. A ghost in evening clothes, an old house where heaven knows what might have happened at one time or another, and a handful of psychic people.
The ghost on Gay Street making an appearance before the owner and late puppeteer, Frank Paris
I returned to Betty Ritter, and asked her to gather psychic impressions while walking about the house.
“A crime was committed here,” the medium said, and described a terrible argument upstairs between two people. She described a gambling den, opium smokers, and a language she could not understand. The man’s name was Ming, she said. Ming is a very common Chinese word meaning, I believe, Sun.
Betty also told Frank Paris that someone close to him by the name of John had passed on and that he had something wrong with his right eye, which Paris acknowledged was correct. She told Ted Lewis that a Bernard L. was around him, not knowing, of course, that Lewis’ father was named Bernham Lewis. She told Richard X. that he worked with books, and it was not until after the séance that I learned he was an editor by profession. I don’t know about the Chinese and the opium den, but they are possibilities in an area so far removed from the bright lights of the city as the Village once was.
We went downstairs and, in the almost total darkness, formed a circle. Betty fell into trance, her neck suddenly falling back as if she were being possessed by a woman whose neck had been hurt.
“Emil,” she mumbled, and added the woman had been decapitated, and her bones were still about. She then came out of trance and we walked back up the stairs to the oldest part of the house. Still “seeing” clairvoyantly, Betty Ritter again mumbled “Emil,” and said she saw documents with government seals on them. She also felt someone named Mary Ellen had lived here and earlier some “well-known government official named Wilkins or Wilkinson.”
The late medium Betty Ritter trying to contact the restless one
Betty, of course, knew nothing about real-estate broker Mary Ellen Strunsky or Jimmy Walker, the former New York Mayor, who had been in this house for so long.
It now remained for us to find those bones Betty had talked about. We returned to the downstairs portion of the house, but Betty refused to go farther. Her impression of tragedy was so strong she urged us to desist.
The Ghost of Gay Street
Thus it was that the Ghost of Gay Stree
t, whoever he may be, would have to wait just a little longer until the bones could be properly sorted out. It wasn’t half bad, considering that Frank Paris and Ted Lewis put on a pretty nice puppet show every so often, down there in the murky basement theater at Number 12 Gay Street.
* 95
The Ship Chandler’s Ghost
IT IS A WELL-KNOWN FACT among ghost hunting experts that structural changes in a house can have dire effects. Take out a wall, and you’ve got a poltergeist mad as a wet hen. I proved that in the case of the Leighton Buzzard ghost in Ghosts I’ve Met. Take down the building, like the studio building at New York’s 51 West Tenth Street, and put up a modern apartment house, and you’ve got no ghost at all. Just a lot of curious tenants. If the ghost is inside the house before the changes are realized, he may bump into walls and doors that weren’t there before—not the way he remembered things at all.
But move a whole house several yards away from the shore where it belongs, and you’re asking for trouble. Big trouble. And big trouble is what the historical society in Cohasset, Massachusetts, got when they moved the old Ship’s Chandlery in Cohasset. With my good friend Bob Kennedy of WBZ, Boston, I set out for the quaint old town south of Boston on a chilly evening in the fall of 1964.
When we arrived at the wooden structure on a corner of the Post Road—it had a nautical look, its two stories squarely set down as if to withstand any gale—we found several people already assembled. Among them were Mrs. E. Stoddard Marsh, the lively curator of the museum, which was what the Ship’s Chandlery became, and her associate lean, quiet Robert Fraser. The others were friends and neighbors who had heard of the coming of a parapsychologist, and didn’t want to miss anything. We entered the building and walked around the downstairs portion of it, admiring its displays of nautical supplies, ranging from fishing tackle and scrimshaw made from walrus teeth to heavy anchors, hoists, and rudders—all the instruments and wares of a ship chandler’s business.
Built in the late eighteenth century by Samuel Bates, the building was owned by the Bates family; notably by one John Bates, second of the family to have the place, who had died seventy-eight years before our visit. Something of a local character, John Bates had cut a swath around the area as a dashing gentleman. He could well afford the role, for he owned a fishing fleet of twenty-four vessels, and business was good in those far-off days when the New England coast was dotted with major ports for fishing and shipping. A handwritten record of his daily catch can be seen next to a mysterious closet full of ladies’ clothes. Mr. Bates led a full life.
After the arrival of Dorothy Damon, a reporter from the Boston Traveler, we started to question the curator about uncanny happenings in the building.
“The building used to be right on the waterfront, at Cohasset Cove, and it had its own pier,” Mrs. Marsh began, “and in 1957 we moved it to its present site.”
“Was there any report of uncanny happenings before that date?”
“Nothing I know of, but the building was in a bad state of disrepair.”
“After the building was brought to its present site, then,” I said, “what was the first unusual thing you heard?”
“Two years ago we were having a lecture here. There were about forty people listening to Francis Hagerty talk about old sailing boats. I was sitting over here to the left—on this ground floor—with Robert Fraser, when all of a sudden we heard heavy footsteps upstairs and things being moved and dragged—so I said to Mr. Fraser, ‘Someone is up there; will you please tell him to be quiet?’ I thought it was kids.”
“Did you know whether there was in fact anyone upstairs at the time?”
“We did not know. Mr. Fraser went upstairs and after a moment he came down looking most peculiar and said, ‘There is no one there.”’
“Now, there is no other way to get down from upstairs, only this one stairway. Nobody had come down it. We were interrupted three times on that evening.”
I asked Robert Fraser what he had seen upstairs.
“There was enough light from the little office that is upstairs, and I could see pretty well upstairs, and I looked all over, but there was nobody upstairs.”
“And the other times?”
“Same thing. Windows all closed, too. Nobody could have come down or gotten out. But I’m sure those were footsteps.”
I returned to Mrs. Marsh and questioned her further about anything that might have occurred after that eventful evening of footsteps.
“We were kept so busy fixing up the museum that we paid scant attention to anything like that, but this summer something happened that brought it all back to us.”
“What happened” I asked, and the lady reporter perked up her ears.
“It was on one of the few rainy Sundays we had last July,” Mrs. Marsh began, “You see, this place is not open on Sundays. I was bringing over some things from the other two buildings, and had my arms full. I opened the front door, when I heard those heavy footsteps upstairs.”
“What did you do—drop everything?”
“I thought it was one of our committee or one of the other curators, so I called out, ‘Hello—who’s up there?’ But I got no answer, and I thought, well, someone sure is pretty stuffy, not answering me back, so I was a little peeved and I called again.”
“Did you get a reply?”
“No, but the steps hesitated when I called. But then they continued again, and I yelled, ‘For Heaven’s sake, why don’t you answer?’ and I went up the stairs, but just as I got to the top of the stairs, they stopped.”
There was a man who had helped them with the work at the museum who had lately stayed away for reasons unknown. Could he have heard the footsteps too and decided that caution was the better part of valor?
“The other day, just recently, four of us went into the room this gentleman occupies when he is here, and the door closed on us, by itself. It has never done that before.”
I soon established that Fraser did not hear the steps when he was alone in the building, but that Mrs. Marsh did. I asked her about anything psychic in her background.
“My family has been interested in psychic matters since I was ten years old,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I could have become a medium, but I didn’t care to. I saw an apparition of my mother immediately after she passed away. My brother also appeared to me six months after his death, to let me know he was all right, I guess.”
“Since last July has there been any other manifestation?”
“I haven’t been here much,” Mrs. Marsh replied. “I had a lot of work with our costume collection in the main building. So I really don’t know.”
We decided to go upstairs now and see if Mr. Bates—or whoever the ghost might be—felt like walking for us. We quietly waited in the semi-darkness upstairs, near the area where the footsteps had been heard, but nothing happened.
“The steps went back and forth,” Mrs. Marsh reiterated. “Heavy, masculine steps, the kind a big man would make.”
She showed us how it sounded, allowing of course for the fact she was wearing high heels. It sounded hollow enough for ten ghosts.
I pointed at a small office in the middle of the upstairs floor.
“This was John Bates’ office,” Mrs. Marsh explained, “and here is an Indian doll that falls down from a secure shelf now and then as if someone were throwing it.”
I examined the doll. It was one of those early nineteenth-century dolls that Indians in New England used to make and sell.
“The people at the lecture also heard the noises,” Mrs. Marsh said, “but they just laughed and nobody bothered thinking about it.”
I turned to one of the local ladies, a Mrs. Hudley, who had come up with us. Did she feel anything peculiar up here, since she had the reputation of being psychic?
“I feel disturbed. Sort of a strange sensation,” she began, haltingly, “as though there was a ‘presence’ who was in a disturbed frame of mind. It’s a man.”
Another lady, by the name of M
cCarthy, also had a strange feeling as we stood around waiting for the ghost to make himself known. Of course, suggestion and atmosphere made me discount most of what those who were around us that night might say, but I still wanted to hear it.
“I felt I had to get to a window and get some air,” Mrs. McCarthy said. “The atmosphere seemed disturbed somehow.”
I asked them all to be quiet for a moment and addressed myself to the unseen ghost.
“John Bates,” I began, “if this is you, may I, as a stranger come to this house in order to help you find peace, ask that you manifest in some form so I know you can hear me?”
Only the sound of a distant car horn answered me.
I repeated my invitation to the ghost to come forward and be counted. Either I addressed myself to the wrong ghost or perhaps John Bates disliked the intrusion of so many people—only silence greeted us.
“Mr. Bates,” I said in my most dulcet tones, “please forgive these people for moving your beautiful house inland. They did not do so out of irreverence for your person or work. They did this so that many more people could come and admire your house and come away with a sense of respect and admiration for the great man that you were.
It was so quiet when I spoke, you could have heard a mouse breathe.
Quietly, we tiptoed down the haunted stairs, and out into the cool evening air. Cowboy star Rex Trailer and his wife, who had come with us from Boston, wondered about the future—would the footsteps ever come back? Or was John Bates reconciled with the fact that the sea breezes no longer caressed his ghostly brow as they did when his house was down by the shore?
Then, too, what was the reason he was still around to begin with? Had someone given him his quietus in that little office upstairs? There are rumors of violence in the famous bachelor’s life, and the number of women whose affections he had trifled with was legion. Someone might very well have met him one night and ended the highly successful career of the ship chandlery’s owner.