by Hans Holzer
A year went by, and I heard nothing further from the curator. Evidently, all was quiet at John Bates’ old house. Maybe old John finally joined up with one of the crews that sail the ghost ships on the other side of the curtain of life.
* 96
The Ghost-Servant Problem at Ringwood Manor
RINGWOOD, IN THE SOUTH of England, has an American counterpart in New Jersey. I had never heard of Ringwood Manor in New Jersey until Mrs. Edward Tholl, a resident of nearby Saddle River, brought it to my attention. An avid history buff and a talented geographer and map maker, Mrs. Tholl had been to the Manor House and on several occasions felt “a presence.” The mountain people who still inhabited the Ramapo Mountains of the region wouldn’t go near the Manor House at night.
“Robert Erskine, geographer to Washington’s army, is buried on the grounds,” Mrs. Tholl told me.
The Manor House land was purchased by the Ogden family of Newark in 1740, and an iron-smelting furnace was built on it two years later. The area abounds in mine deposits and was at one time a center of iron mining and smelting. In 1762, when a second furnace was built, a small house was also built. This house still stands and now forms part of the haphazard arrangement that constitutes the Manor House today. One Peter Hasenclever bought the house and iron works in 1764. He ran the enterprise with such ostentation that he was known as “The Baron.” But Hasenclever did not produce enough iron to suit his backers, and was soon replaced by Robert Erskine. When the War of Independence broke out, the iron works were forced to close. Erskine himself died “of exposure” in 1780.
By 1807, the iron business was going full blast again, this time under the aegis of Martin Ryerson, who tore down the ramshackle old house and rebuilt it completely. After the iron business failed in the 1830s, the property passed into the hands of famed Peter Cooper in 1853. His son-in-law Abram S. Hewitt, one-time Mayor of New York, lived in the Manor House.
Mrs. Hewitt, Cooper’s daughter, turned the drab house into an impressive mansion of fifty-one rooms, very much as it appears today. Various older buildings already on the grounds were uprooted and added to the house, giving it a checkered character without a real center. The Hewitt family continued to live at Ringwood until Erskine Hewitt deeded the estate to the State of New Jersey in 1936, and the mansion became a museum through which visitors were shown daily for a small fee.
During troubled times, tragedies may well have occurred in and around the house. There was a holdup in 1778, and in the graveyard nearby many French soldiers were buried who died there during an epidemic. There is also on record an incident, in later years, when a cook was threatened by a butler with a knife, and there were disasters that took many lives in the nearby iron mines.
One of the Hewitt girls, Sally, had been particularly given to mischief. If anyone were to haunt the place, she’d be a prime candidate for the job. I thanked Claire Tholl for her help, and called on Ethel Johnson Meyers to accompany me to New Jersey. Of course, I didn’t give her any details. We arranged to get to the house around dusk, after all the tourists had gone.
My wife Catherine and I, with Ethel Meyers as passenger, drove out to the house on a humid afternoon in May 1965. Jim Byrne joined us at the house with Saturday Review writer Haskell Frankel in tow.
We were about an hour late, but it was still light, and the peaceful setting of the park with the Manor House in its center reminded one indeed of similar houses gracing the English countryside.
We stood around battling New Jersey mosquitoes for a while, then I asked Catherine to take Ethel away from the house for a moment, so I could talk to Mrs. Tholl and others who had witnessed ghostly goings-on in the house.
“I’ve had a feeling in certain parts of the house that I was not alone,” Mrs. Tholl said, “but other than that I cannot honestly say I have had uncanny experiences here.”
Alexander Waldron had been the superintendent of Ringwood Manor for many years, until a year before, in fact. He consented to join us for the occasion. A jovial, gray-haired man, he seemed rather deliberate in his report, giving me only what to him were actual facts.
“I was superintendent here for eighteen years,” Mr. Waldron began. “I was sitting at my desk one day, in the late afternoon, like today, and the door to the next room was closed. My office is on the ground floor. I heard two people come walking toward me at a fast pace. That did not seem unusual, for we do have workmen here frequently. When the steps reached my door, nothing happened. Without thinking too much, I opened the door for them. But there was no one there. I called out, but there was no answer. Shortly after, two workmen did come in from outside, and together we searched the whole building, but found no one who could have made the sound.”
“Could anyone have walked away without being seen by you?”
“Impossible. There was good light.”
“Did anything else happen after that?”
“Over the years we’ve had a few things we could not explain. For instance, doors we had shut at night, we found open the next morning. Some years ago, when I had my boys living here with me, they decided to build a so-called monster down in the basement. One boy was of high-school age, the other in grammar school—sixteen and thirteen. One of them came in by himself one night, when he heard footsteps overhead, on the ground floor. He thought it was his brother who had come over from the house.
“He thought his brother was just trying to scare him, so he continued to work downstairs. But the footsteps continued and finally he got fed up with it and came upstairs. All was dark, and nobody was around. He ran back to the house, where he found his brother, who had never been to the manor at all.”
Bradley Waldron probably never worked on his “monster” again after that.
There are stories among the local hill folk of Robert Erskine’s ghost walking with a lantern, or sitting on his grave half a mile down the road from the Manor House, or racing up the staircase in the house itself.
Wayne Daniels, who had accompanied Mrs. Tholl to the House, spoke up now. Mr. Daniels had lived in the region all his life, and was a professional restorer of early American structures.
“I have felt strange in one corner of the old dining room, and in two rooms upstairs,” he volunteered. “I feel hostility in those areas, somehow.”
It was time to begin our search in the house itself.
I asked Ethel Meyers to join us, and we entered the Manor House, making our way slowly along the now-deserted corridors and passages of the ground floor, following Ethel as she began to get her psychic bearings.
Suddenly, Ethel remarked that she felt a man outside the windows, but could not pin down her impression.
“Someone died under a curse around here,” she mumbled, then added as if it were an afterthought, “Jackson White...what does that mean?”
I had never heard the name before, but Claire Tholl explained that “Jackson White” was a peculiar local name for people of mixed blood, who live in the Ramapo hills. Ethel added that someone had been in slavery at one time.
Ethel was taken aback by the explanation of “Jackson White.” She had taken it for granted that it was an individual name. Jackson Whites, I gathered, are partly American Indian and partly black, but not white.
We now entered a large bedroom elegantly furnished in the manner of the early nineteenth century, with a large bed against one wall and a table against the other. Ethel looked around the room uncertainly, as if looking for something she did not yet see.
“Someone with a bad conscience died in this room,” she said. “A man and a woman lived here, who were miles apart somehow.”
It was Mrs. Erskine’s bedroom we were in. We went through a small door into another room that lay directly behind the rather large bedroom; it must have been a servant’s room at one time. Nevertheless, it was elegant, with a marble fireplace and a heavy oak table, around which a number of chairs had been placed. We sat down but before I had time to adjust my tape recorder and camera, Ethel Meyers fell into deep tr
ance. From her lips came the well-modulated voice of Albert, her control. He explained that several layers of consciousness covered the room, that there were blacks brought here by one Jackson, who came in the eighteenth century. One of them seemed present in the room, he felt.
“One met death at the entrance...a woman named Lucy Bell, she says. She was a servant here.”
Suddenly, Albert was gone. In his stead, there was a shrill, desperate female voice, crying out to all who would listen.
“No...I didn’t...before my God I didn’t...I show you where...I didn’t touch it...never...”
She seemed to be speaking to an unseen tormentor now, for Ethel, possessed by the ghost, pulled back from the table and cried:
“No...don’t...don’t!” Was she being beaten or tortured?
“He didn’t either!” the ghost added.
I tried to calm her.
“I didn’t touch...I didn’t touch...” she kept repeating. I asked for her name.
“Lucy,” she said in a tormented, high-pitched voice completely different from Ethel Meyers’ normal tones.
“I believe you,” I said, and told the ghost who we were and why we had come. The uncontrollable crying subsided for the moment.
“He’s innocent too,” she finally said. “I can’t walk,” she added. Ethel pointed to her side. Had she been hurt?
“I didn’t take it,” she reiterated. “It’s right there.”
What didn’t she take? I coaxed her gently to tell me all about it.
“I’ve come as a friend,” I said, and the word finally hit home. She got very excited and wanted to know where I was a since she could not see me.
“A friend, Jeremiah, do you hear?” she intoned.
“Who is Jeremiah?”
“He didn’t do it either,” she replied. Jeremiah, I gathered, lived here, too, but she did not know any family name—just Jeremiah. Then Ethel Meyers grabbed my hand, mumbling “friend,” and almost crushed my fingers. I managed to pull it away. Ethel ordinarily has a very feminine, soft grip—a great contrast to the desperately fierce clasp of the ghost possessing the medium!
“Don’t go!”
I promised to stay if she would talk.
“I have never stolen,” she said. “It’s dark...I can’t see now...where do I go to see always?”
“I will show you the way,” I promised.
“Marie...Marie...where are you?” she intoned pleadingly.
“What is Jeremiah doing?”
“He is begging for his honor.”
“Where is he now?”
“Here with me.”
“Who is the person you worked for?” I asked.
“Old lady...I don’t want her....”
“If she did you wrong, should we punish her? What is her name?”
“I never wished evil on anyone...I would forgive her...if she forgives me. She is here...I saw her, and she hates me....”
The voice became shrill and emotional again. I srarted to send her away, and in a few moments, she slipped out. Suddenly, there was an entirely different person occupying Ethel’s body. Proudly sitting up, she seemed to eye us, with closed eyes, of course, as if we were riff-raff invading her precincts.
“What is your name?” I demanded.
“I am in no court of justice,” was the stiff reply in a proper upper-middle-class accent. “I cannot speak to you. I have no desire. It is futile for you to give me any advice.”
“What about this servant girl?” I asked.
“You may take yourself away,” the lady replied, haughtily. “Depart!”
“What did the girl take?” I asked, ignoring her outburst of cold fury.
“I am not divulging anything to you.”
“Is she innocent then?”
This gave her some thought, and the next words were a little more communicative.
“How come you are in my house?” she demanded.
“Is it your house?”
“I will call the servants and have you taken our by the scruff of your neck,” she threatened.
“Will the servants know who you are?” I countered.
“I am lady in my own.”
“What is your name?”
“I refuse to reveal myself or talk to you!”
I explained about the passage of time. It made no impression.
“I will call her...Old Jeremiah is under his own disgrace. You are friend to him?”
I explained about Ethel Meyers and how she, the ghost, was able to communicate with us.
Ringwood Manor, New Jersey—the late owner never left.
She hit the table hard with Ethel’s fist.
“The man is mad,” the ghost said. “Take him away!”
I didn’t intend to be taken away by ghostly men-in-white. I continued to plead with “the lady” to come to her senses and listen. She kept calling for her servants, but evidently nobody answered her calls.
“Jeremiah, if you want to preserve yourself in my estimation and not stand by this girl, take this...”
Somehow the medium’s eyes opened for a moment, and the ghost could “see.” Then they closed again. It came as a shock, for “the lady” suddenly stopped her angry denunciation and instead “looked” at me in panic.
“What is this? Doctor...where is he...Laura! Laura! I am ill. Very ill. I can’t see. I can’t see. I hear something talking to me, but I can’t see it. Laura, call a doctor. I’m going to die!”
“As a matter of fact,” I said calmly, “you have died already.”
“It was my mother’s.” The ghost sobbed hysterically. “Don’t let her keep it. Don’t let it go to the scum! I must have it. Don’t let me die like this. Oh, oh...”
I called on Albert, the control, to take the unhappy ghost away and lead her to the other side of the veil, if possible. The sobbing slowly subsided as the ghost’s essence drifted away out of our reach in that chilly Georgian room at Ringwood.
It wasn’t Albert’s crisp, precise voice that answered me. Another stranger, obviously male, now made his coughing entry and spoke in a lower-class accent.
“What’s the matter?”
“Who is this?” I asked.
The voice sounded strangely muffled, as if coming from far away.
“Jeremiah...What’s the matter with everybody?” The voice had distinct black overtones.
“I’m so sleepy,” the voice said.
“Who owns this house?”
“Ho, ho, I do,” the ghost said. “I have a funny dream, what’s the matter with everybody?” Then the voice cleared up a little, as he became more aware of the strange surroundings into which he had entered.
“Are you one of these white trashes?” he demanded.
“What is the old lady’s name?” I asked.
“She’s a Bob,” he replied, enigmatically, and added, “real bumby, with many knots in it, many knots in the brain.”
“Who else is here?”
“I don’t like you. I don’t know you and I don’t like who I don’t know,” the servant’s ghost said.
“You’re white trash,” he continued. “I seed you!” The stress was on white.
“How long have you been living here?”
“My father...Luke.”
Again, I explained about death and consequences, but the reception was even less friendly than I had received from “the lady.”
Jeremiah wanted no truck with death.
“What will the old squaw say? What will she say?” he wondered, “She needs me.”
“Not really,” I replied. “After all, she’s dead, too.” He could hardly believe the news. Evidently, the formidable “squaw” was immune to such events as death in his mind.
“What do you have against my mother?” he demanded now. Things were getting confusing. Was the “old lady” his mother?
“Lucy white trash too,” he commented.
“Was she your wife?”
“Call it that.”
“Can you see her?”
“Then you know you have died and must go from this house?” I asked.
“’dominable treek, man, ’dominable treek,” he said, furiously.
“This house is no longer yours.”
“It never was,” he shot back. “The squaw is here. We’re not dead, Great White Spirit—laugh at you.”
“What do you want in this house?”
“Squaw very good,” he said. “I tell you, my mother, squaw very good. Lucy Bell, white trash, but good. Like Great White Spirit. Work my fingers down to the bone. I am told! I am thief, too. Just yesterday. Look at my back! Look at my squaw! Red Fox, look at her. Look at my back, look at it!”
He seemed to have spent his anger. The voice became softer now.
“I am so sleepy,” he said. “So sleepy...my Lucy will never walk again...angel spirit...my people suffer...her skin should be like mine...help me, help my Lucy....”
I promised to help and to send him to his father, Luke, who was awaiting him.
“I should have listened to my father,” the ghost mumbled.
Then he recognized his father, evidently come to guide him out of the house, and wondered what he was doing here.
I explained what I thought was the reason for his father’s presence. There was some crying, and then they all went away.
“Albert,” I said. “Please take over the instrument.”
In a moment, the control’s cool voice was heard, and Ethel was brought out of trance rather quickly.
“My hip,” she complained. “I don’t think I can move.”
“Passing conditions” or symptoms the ghost brings are sometimes present for a few moments after a medium comes out of trance. It is nothing to be alarmed about.
I closed Ethel’s eyes again, and sent her back into trance, then brought her out again, and this time all was “clear.” However, she still recalled a scream in a passage between the two rooms.
I wondered about the Indian nature of the ghost. Were there any Indians in this area?
“Certainly,” Mr. Waldron replied. “They are of mixed blood, often Negro blood, and are called Jackson Whites. Many of them worked here as servants.”
The footsteps the superintendent had heard on the floor below were of two persons, and they could very well have come from this area, since the room we were in was almost directly above his offices.