Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  There was, of course, no record of any servants named Jeremiah or Lucy. Servants’ names rarely get recorded unless they do something that is most unusual.

  I asked Mrs. Tholl about ladies who might have fitted the description of the haughty lady who had spoken to us through Ethel Meyers in trance.

  “I associate this with the Hewitt occupancy of the house,” she explained, “because of the reference to a passage connecting two parts of the house, something that could not apply to an early structure on the spot. Amelia Hewitt, whose bedroom we had come through, was described in literature of the period as ‘all placidity and kindliness.’ Sarah Hewitt, however, was quite a cut-up in her day, and fitted the character of ‘the lady’ more accurately.”

  But we cannot be sure of the identity of the ghost-lady. She elected to keep her name a secret and we can only bow to her decision and let it remain so.

  What lends the accounts an air of reality and evidence is, of course, the amazing fact that Ethel Meyers spoke of “Jackson Whites” in this house, an appellation completely new to her and me. I am also sure that the medium had no knowledge of Indians living in the area. Then, too, her selecting a room above the spot where the ghostly steps had been heard was interesting, for the house was sprawling and had many rooms and passages.

  * 97

  The Phantom Admiral

  I HAD NEVER HEARD OF Goddard College until I received a letter from Jay Lawrence, a second-semester student at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. Mr. Lawrence was serious about his interest in psychic phenomena and he had some evidence to offer. He did more than ask me to speak at the college on extrasensory perception; he invited me to come and have a look at a ghost he had discovered in Whitefield, New Hampshire, about two hours’ drive from Goddard.

  The haunted house in Whitefield belonged to the Jacobsen family who used it as a summer home only. The younger Jacobsen, whose first name was Erlend—they’re of Norwegian descent—invited us to come stay at the house, or at least have a look at it. The Goddard College boys offered to pick us up in Boston and drive us up through the scenic White Mountains to Whitefield.

  We arrived at dusk, when the country tends to be peaceful and the air is almost still. The house was at the end of a narrow, winding driveway lined by tall trees, hidden away from the road. There was a wooden porch around three sides of the wooden structure, which rose up three stories.

  We were welcomed by Erlend Jacobsen, his wife, Martha, and their little boy Erlend Eric, a bright youngster who had met the ghost, too, as we were to find out.

  Inside the house with its spacious downstairs dining room and kitchen, decorated in a flamboyant style by the Jacobsens, we found Mr. and Mrs. Nelson, two friends of the owners, and Jeff Broadbent, a young fellow student of Jay Lawrence.

  Sybil puttered around the house, indulging her interest in antiques. I mounted my tape recorder to hear the testimony of those who had experienced anything unusual in the house. We went upstairs, where Sybil Leek could not very well hear us, and entered a small bedroom on the second floor, which, I was told, was the main center of ghostly activities, although not the only one.

  The house was called “Mis ‘n Top” by its original owner and builder. I lost no time in questioning Erlend Jacobsen, a tall young man of thirty on the Goddard College faculty as an instructor, about his experiences in the old house.

  “When my parents decided to turn the attic into a club room where I could play with my friends,” Erlend Jacobsen began, “they cut windows into the wall and threw out all the possessions of the former owner of the house they had found there. I was about seven at the time.

  “Soon after, footsteps and other noises began to be heard in the attic and along the corridors and stairs leading toward it. But it was not until the summer of 1956, when I was a senior in college and had just married, that I experienced the first really important disturbance.

  “1955, Erlend,” the wife interrupted. Wives have a way of remembering such dates. Mr. Jacobsen blushed and corrected himself.

  “1955, you’re right,” he said. “That summer we slept here for the first time in this room, one flight up, and almost nightly we were either awakened by noises or could not sleep, waiting for them to begin. At first we thought they were animal noises, but they were too much like footsteps and heavy objects being moved across the floor overhead, and down the hall. We were so scared we refused to move in our beds or turn on the lights.”

  But you did know of the tradition that the house was haunted, did you not?” I asked.

  “Yes, I grew up with it. All I knew is what I had heard from my parents. The original owner and builder of the house, an admiral named Hawley, and his wife, were both most difficult people. The admiral died in 1933. In 1935, the house was sold by his daughter, who was then living in Washington, to my parents. Anyone who happened to be trespassing on his territory would be chased off it, and I imagine he would not have liked our throwing out his sea chest and other personal possessions.”

  “Any other experience outside the footsteps?”

  “About four years ago,” Erlend Jacobsen replied, “my wife and I, and a neighbor, Shepard Vogelgesang, were sitting in the living room downstairs discussing interpretations of the Bible. I needed a dictionary at one point in the discussion and got up to fetch it from upstairs.

  “I ran up to the bend here, in front of this room, and there were no lights on at the time. I opened the door to the club room and started to go up the stairs, when suddenly I walked into what I can only describe as a warm, wet blanket, something that touched me physically as if it had been hung from wires in the corridor. I was very upset, backed out, and went downstairs. My wife took one look at me and said, ‘You’re white.’ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I think I just walked into the admiral.’”

  “I suppose he didn’t enjoy your bumping into him in this fashion either,” I commented. “Anything else?”

  “I was alone in the house, in the club room, which is designed like a four-leaf clover—you can see into the section opposite you, but you can’t see into the other two. I was lying there, looking out the window at sunset, when I heard someone breathing—rhythmically breathing in, out, in, out.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I held my own breath, because at first I thought I might be doing it. But I was not. The breathing continued right next to me! I became terrified, being then only fifteen years of age, and ran out of the house until my parents returned.”

  I asked him again about the time he touched the ghost.

  How did it feel? Did it have the touch of a human body?

  The home of the ghostly Admiral in New Hampshire

  “Nothing like it. It was totally dark, but it was definitely warm, and it resisted my passage.”

  “Has anything happened to you here recently?”

  “About two-and-a-half weeks ago, I walked into the house at dusk and I heard very faint crying for about fifteen or twenty seconds. I thought it might be a cat, but there was no cat in the house, and just as suddenly as it had started, the crying stopped. It sounded almost as if it were outside this window, here on the second floor.”

  “Is there any record of a tragedy attached to this house?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “Who else has seen or heard anything uncanny here?”

  “My parents used to have a Negro maid who was psychic. She had her share of experiences here all right. Her name is Sarah Wheeler and she is about seventy-five now. The admiral had a reputation for disliking colored people, and she claimed that when she was in bed here, frequently the bedposts would move as if someone were trying to throw her out of bed. The posts would move off the floor and rock the bed violently, held by unseen hands, until she got out of bed, and then they would stop. She was a Catholic and went to the church the next day to fetch some Holy Water. That quieted things down. But the first night of each season she would come without her Holy Water and that was when things were worst for her.”
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  “Poor Sarah,” I said.

  “She was psychic, and she had an Indian guide,” Erlend Jacobsen continued. “I did not put much stock in some of the things she told us, such as there being treasure underneath the house, put there by the old admiral. But eight or nine years ago, I had occasion to recall this. The house has no cellar but rests on stone pillars. We used to throw junk under the house, where wooden steps led down below. I was cleaning up there with a flashlight, when I saw something shiny. It was a cement block with a silver handle sticking out of it. I chipped the cement off, and found a silver bowl, with ‘A.H.’ engraved on it.”

  I turned my attention to Mrs. Jacobsen. She had three children, but still gave the impression of being a college sophomore. As a matter of fact, she was taking courses at Goddard.

  It was ten years to the day—our visit was on June 11—that the Jacobsens had come to this house as newlyweds.

  “We spent one night here, then went on our honeymoon, and then came back and spent the rest of the summer here,” Martha Jacobsen said. “The first night I was very, very frightened—hearing this walking up and down the halls, and we the only ones in the house! There was a general feeling of eerieness and a feeling that there was someone else in the house. There were footsteps in the hall outside our bedroom door. At one point before dawn, the steps went up the stairs and walked around overhead. But Erlend and I were the only ones in the house. We checked.”

  Imagine one’s wedding night interrupted by unseen visitors—this could give a person a trauma!

  “Two weeks later we returned and stayed here alone,” Mrs. Jacobsen continued,” and I heard these footsteps several times. Up and down. We’ve been coming here for the last ten years and I heard it again a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Must be unnerving,” I observed.

  “It is. I heard the steps overhead in the club room, and also, while I was downstairs two weeks ago, the door to the kitchen opened itself and closed itself, without anyone being visible. Then the front door did the same thing—opened and shut itself.

  “Along with the footsteps I heard things being dragged upstairs, heavy objects, it seemed. But nothing was disarranged afterwards. We checked.”

  “Any other events of an uncanny nature?” I asked as a matter of record. Nothing would surprise me in this house.

  “About ten years ago, when we first moved in, I also heard the heavy breathing when only my husband and I were in the house. Then there was a house guest we had, a Mrs. Anne Merriam. She had this room and her husband was sleeping down the hall in one of the single rooms. Suddenly, she saw a figure standing at the foot of her bed.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She called out, ‘Carol, is that you?’ twice, but got no answer. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the figure dissolved into thin air.

  “She queried her husband about coming into her room, but he told her that he had never left his bed that night. When this happened on another night, she attempted to follow the figure, and found her husband entering through another door!”

  “Has anyone else had an encounter with a ghost here?” I asked.

  “Well, another house guest went up into the attic and came running down reporting that the door knob had turned in front of his very eyes before he could reach for it to open the door. The dog was with him, and steadfastly refused to cross the threshold. That was Frank Kingston and it all happened before our marriage. Then another house guest arrived very late at night, about five years ago. We had already gone to bed, and he knew he had to sleep in the attic since every other room was already taken. Instead, I found him sleeping in the living room, on the floor, in the morning. He knew nothing about the ghost. ‘I’m not going back up there any more,’ he vowed, and would not say anything further. I guess he must have run into the admiral.”

  What a surprise that must have been, I thought, especially if the admiral was all wet.

  “Three years ago, my brother came here,” Mrs. Jacobsen continued her report. “His name is Robert Gillman. In the morning he complained of having been awake all night. A former skeptic, he knew now that the tales of ghostly footsteps were true, for he, too, had heard them—all night long in fact.”

  Jeffrey Broadbent was a serious young man who accompanied Jay Lawrence to the house one fine night, to see if what they were saying about the admiral’s ghost was true.

  They had sleeping bags and stayed up in the attic. It was a chilly November night in 1964, and everything seemed just right for ghosts. Would they be lucky in their quest? They did not have to wait long to find out.

  “As soon as we entered the room, we heard strange noises on the roof. They were indistinct and could have been animals, I thought at first. We went off to sleep until Jay woke me up hurriedly around six in the morning. I distinctly heard human footsteps on the roof. They slid down the side to a lower level and then to the ground where they could be heard walking in leaves and into the night. Nothing could be seen from the window and there was nobody up on the roof. We were the only ones in the house that night, so it surely must have been the ghost.”

  Jay Lawrence added one more thing to this narrative.

  “When we first turned out the flashlight up in the attic, I distinctly heard a high-pitched voice—a kind of scream or whine—followed by footsteps. They were of a human foot wearing shoes, but much lighter than the normal weight of a human body would require.

  Jerry Weener also had spent time at the haunted house.

  “In early March 1965, Jay and I came over and had dinner at the fireplace downstairs. We decided to sleep downstairs and both of us, almost simultaneously, had a dream that night in which we met the admiral’s ghost, but unfortunately on awakening, we did not recall anything specific or what he might have said to us in our dreams. A second time when I slept in the house, nothing happened. The third time I came over with friends, I slept in the attic, and I heard footsteps. We searched the house from top to bottom, but there was no one else who could have accounted for those steps.”

  Erlend Eric, age eight going on nine, was perhaps the youngest witness to psychic phenomena scientifically recorded, but his testimony should not be dismissed because of his age. He had heard footsteps going up and down and back up the stairs. One night he was sleeping in the room across the hall when he heard someone trying to talk to him.

  “What sort of voice was it?” I asked. Children are frequently more psychic than adults.

  “It was a man’s,” the serious youngster replied. “He called my name, but I forgot what else he said. That was three years ago.”

  Miriam Nelson was a petite young woman, the wife of one of Erlend Jacobsen’s friends, who had come to witness our investigation that evening. She seemed nervous and frightened and asked me to take her to another room so I could hear her story in private. We went across the hall into the room where the figure had stood at the head of the bed and I began my questioning.

  “My first experience was when Erlend and I brought a Welsh Corgi up here; Erlend’s parents were here, too. I was downstairs in the library; the dog was in my lap. Suddenly I felt another presence in the room, and I could not breathe anymore. The dog started to bark and insist that I follow him out of the room. I distinctly felt someone there.

  “Then on a cold fall day about four years ago, I was sitting by the stove, trying to get warm, when one of the burners lifted itself up about an inch and fell down again. I looked and it moved again. It could not have moved by itself. I was terrified. I was alone in the house.”

  I had heard all those who had had an encounter with the ghost and it was time to get back downstairs where the Jacobsens had laid out a fine dinner—just the right thing after a hard day’s drive. A little later we all went up the stairs to the top floor, where Sybil stretched out on a couch near the window. We grouped ourselves around her in the haunted attic and waited.

  “I had a feeling of a middle room upstairs,” Sybil said, “but I don’t feel anything too strongly yet.�
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  Soon Sybil was in deep trance as we awaited the coming of the admiral—or whoever the ghost would be—with bated breath. The only light in the attic room was a garish fluorescent lamp, which we shut off, and replaced with a smaller conventional lamp. It was quiet, as quiet as only a country house can be. But instead of the ghost speaking to us directly and presumably giving us hell for trespassing, it was Sybil herself, in deep trance “on the other side,” reporting what she saw—things and people the ordinary eye could not perceive.

  “I’m walking around,” Sybil said. “There is a man lying dead in the middle room. Big nose, not too much hair in front, little beard cut short now. There is a plant near him.”

  “Try to get his name, Sybil,” I ordered.

  “I’ll have to go into the room,” she said.

  We waited.

  “He is not in here all the time,” she reported back. “He came here to die.”

  “Is this his house?”

  “Yes, but there is another house also. A long way off. This man had another house. Hawsley...Hawsley.”

  Almost the exact name of the admiral, I thought. Sybil could not have known that name.

  “He went from one house to another, in a different country. Something Indian.”

  “Is he still here and what does he want?”

  “To find a place to rest because...he does not know in which house it’s in!”

  “What is he looking for?”

  “Little basket. Not from this country. Like a handle...it’s shiny...silver...a present. It went to the wrong house. He gave it to the wrong house. He is very particular not to get things confused. It belongs to Mrs. Gerard at the other house. He usually stays in the little room, one flight up. With the fern. By the bed.”

  “But what about Mrs. Gerard? How can we send the package to her unless we get her address?” I said.

  “It’s very important. It’s in the wrong perspective, he says,” Sybil explained.