by Hans Holzer
If you visit West Point, try to find the building that contains room 4714. Company G-4 is quartered there, and perhaps someone will help you find the way.
* 105 The Stenton House, Cincinnati
IN ONE OF THE QUIETEST and most elegant sections of old Cincinnati, where ghosts and hauntings are rarely whispered about, stands a lovely Victorian mansion built around 1850 in what was then a wealthy suburb of the city.
The house was brought to my attention some years ago by John S. of Clifton, a descendant of one of the early Dutch families who settled Cincinnati, and himself a student of the paranormal. The owners at that time were the Stenton family, or rather, of one of the apartments in the mansion, for it had long been subdivided into a number of apartments lived in by various people.
Soon after they had taken up residence in the old house, the Stentons were startled by noises, as if someone were walking in the hall, and when they checked, there was never anyone about who could have caused the walking. Then, two weeks after they had moved in, and always at exactly the same time, 2:10 A.M., they would hear the noise of a heavy object hitting the marble floor—of course there was nothing that could have caused it.
The haunted Stenton House—Cincinnati, Ohio
The study where footsteps were being heard
Shortly thereafter, while Mrs. Stenton and her father were doing some research work in the flat, someone softly called out her name, Marilyn. Both heard it. What really upset them was the sound of arguing voices coming from the area of the ceiling in their bedroom: Mrs. Stenton had the impression that there was a group of young girls up there!
But the most dramatic event was to transpire a couple of weeks later. Someone had entered the bedroom, and as she knew she was alone, her family being in other parts of the house, she was frightened, especially when she saw what appeared to be a misty figure—as soon as she had made eye contact with it, the figure shot out of the room, through the French doors leading to a studio, and whilst doing so, the misty shape managed to knock the Venetian blinds on the doors, causing them to sway back and forth!
Shortly before I visited Cincinnati to deal with this case, Mrs. Stenton had another eerie experience. It was winter and had been snowing the night before. When Mrs. Stenton stepped out onto their porch, she immediately noticed a fresh set of footprints on the porch, heading away from the house!
The house was built in 1850, originally as a large private home; later it became a girls’ school and much later became an apartment house of sorts. The Stenton’s apartment is the largest in the house, encompassing seven rooms.
When I looked into the case I discovered some additional details. In 1880, a young man of the Henry family had committed suicide in the house by shooting himself, and after the family moved, the house could not be sold for a long time. It became known as being haunted and was boarded up. Finally, a girls’ school, the Ealy School, bought it in 1900.
Other tenants had also encountered unusual phenomena, ranging from “presences,” to noises of objects hitting floors, and footsteps following one around when no one was, in fact, doing so. Even the dog owned by one of the tenants would under no condition enter the area of the disturbances and would put up a fearsome howl.
But the item most likely to have an answer to the goings-on came to me by talking to some of the oldsters in the area: one of the young girls in the school was said to have hanged herself upstairs, above the Stenton’s apartment. Was it her ghost or that of young Henry who could not leave well enough alone?
* 106 The Ghost at El Centro
WHEN MR. AND MRS. C. moved from France to Los Angeles in the 1960s, they did not figure on moving into a haunted house, but that is exactly what they did. With their daughters, they took an old one-story house built in the Spanish style, on El Centro Avenue, a quiet section of the city.
One of the daughters, Lilliane had married shortly before their arrival, and the second daughter, Nicole, decided to have her own place, so it was Mr. and Mrs. C. and their third daughter, Martine, who actually lived in the house. The dining room had been turned into a bedroom for Martine, leaving the master bedroom to the parents.
On her first night in the house, Mrs. C., who is very psychic, had the distinct impression there was someone observing her, someone she could not see. Martine, too, felt very uncomfortable but the business of settling in took precedence over their concern for the next few days.
However, strong impressions of a presence continued night after night. They were never “alone.” There was a noise in the kitchen, and Mrs. C. thought her husband had gotten up in the middle of the night to get something—but there he was, fast asleep in bed. Instead, a strange man was standing between their two beds, and worse yet, she could see right through him! She gave out a startling cry and the apparition vanished instantly.
She discussed the matter with her daughters who had lived in the apartment before their arrival: it then became clear that the girls, too, had been bothered by ghostly manifestations. They had tried to deal with it by lighting a candle every night. But apparently it did not help at all.
During the following days, the hauntings continued.
The ghost house on El Centro, Los Angeles
The girls, too, had seen a male ghost between the beds. But now the mother saw a woman’s apparition, and it was decided to seek the help of a competent medium. This turned out to be Brenda Crenshaw, who made contact with the entities. She reported that the “problem” consisted of the fact a young couple who had formerly occupied the apartment, had committed suicide in it.
When the family checked this out with the appropriate records, it turned out to be correct. But now what? The idea of continuing to share the place with the ghost couple was not at all appealing to them. Mrs. C. decided to pray for the release of the ghosts and did so relentlessly for several weeks. One night, there was the young man again, as if to acknowledge her efforts. Then he vanished, and the apartment has been quiet ever since.
* 107 The Ghostly Stagecoach Inn
NOT FAR FROM VENTURA, at Thousand Oaks, a few yards back from the main road, stands an old stagecoach inn, now run as a museum; between 1952 and 1965, while in the process of being restored to its original appearance, it also served as a gift shop under the direction of a Mr. and Mrs. M. who had sensed the presence of a female ghost in the structure.
The house has nineteen rooms and an imposing frontage with columns running from the floor to the roof.
There is a balcony in the central portion, and all windows have shutters, in the manner of the middle nineteenth century. Surrounded by trees until a few years ago, it has been moved recently to a new position to make room for the main road running through here. Nevertheless, its grandeur has not been affected by the move.
During the stagecoach days, bandits were active in this area. The inn had been erected because of the Butterfield Mail route, which was to have gone through the Conejo Valley on the way to St. Louis. The Civil War halted this plan, and the routing was changed to go through the Santa Clara Valley.
I investigated the stagecoach inn with Mrs. Gwen Hinzie and Sybil Leek. Up the stairs to the left of the staircase Sybil noticed one of the particularly haunted rooms.
Ghostly Stagecoach Inn—Thousand Oaks, California
She felt that a man named Pierre Devon was somehow connected with the building. Since the structure was still in a state of disrepair, with building activities going on all around us, the task of walking up the stairs was not only a difficult one but also somewhat dangerous, for we could not be sure that the wooden structure would not collapse from our weight. We stepped very gingerly. Sybil seemed to know just where to turn as if she had been there before. Eventually, we ended up in a little room to the left of the stairwell. It must have been one of the smaller rooms, a “single” in today’s terms.
Sybil complained of being cold all over. The man, Pierre Devon, had been killed in that room, she insisted, sometime between 1882 and 1889.
She did
not connect with the female ghost. However, several people living in the area have reported the presence of a tall stranger who could only be seen out of the corner of an eye, never for long. Pungent odors, perfume of a particularly heavy kind, also seem to waft in and out of the structure.
Like inns in general, this one may have more undiscovered ghosts hanging on to the spot. Life in nineteenth-century wayside inns did not compare favorably with life in today’s Hilton. Some people going to these stagecoach inns for a night’s rest never woke up to see another day.
* 108 Mrs. Dickey’s Ghostly Companions
THERE ARE TWO VIENNAS I’ve been to: One, the better-known city, is in Austria, and I was born there; the other is in Virginia, right outside Washington, D.C., and it consists mainly of old homes, lovely gardens, shady streets, and a kind of atmosphere that makes one wonder if there really is a bustling world capital nearby. Especially in the spring, Vienna, Virginia, is a jewel of a place. You ride down broad, shady roads, look at houses—even mansions—that have been in the same hands perhaps for generations, see children playing in the streets as if there weren’t any cars buzzing by.
I heard about Mrs. Dickey from a mutual friend in Washington. Nicole d’Amercourt, who is now Mrs. Bruce Jackson, had met her and heard about her disturbing experiences with ghosts. Nicole thought that perhaps I could help Mrs. Dickey either get rid of her ghosts, or at least come to terms with them, I readily agreed, and on May 11, 1968, we drove out to Vienna.
When we arrived at the Dickey house, I was immediately impressed by the comparative grandeur of its appearance. Although not a very large house, it nevertheless gave the impression of a country manor—the way it was set back from the road amid the trees, with a view towards a somewhat wild garden in the rear. A few steps led up to the front entrance. After Nicole had parked the car, we entered the house and were immediately greeted by a lively, petite young woman with sparkling eyes and the aura of determination around her.
We entered a large living room that led to a passage into a dining room and thence into the kitchen. In the center of the ground floor is a staircase to another floor, and from the second floor, on which most of the bedrooms are located, there is a narrow staircase to a garret that contains another bedroom.
The house was beautifully furnished in late colonial style, and antiques had been set out in the proper places with a display of taste not always met these days.
After I had inspected the house superficially from top to bottom, I asked Mrs. Dickey to sit down with me so we could go over the situation that had caused her to ask for my help.
We sat in comfortable chairs in the downstairs living room, and I began to question her about the house.
* * *
“Mrs. Dickey, how long have you lived here?”
“About two-and-a-half years. Myself and five children live here now. And we have two young foreign students living in with us now; they’ve been here about a month.”
“How many rooms are there in the house?”
“There are about twenty.”
“About twenty? You’re not sure?”
“Well, twenty. Real estate-wise we don’t count the bathrooms, but I do.”
“Yes, and the closets. Don’t forget the large closets.”
“I don’t count closets.”
“Did you know much about the house at the time you moved in?”
“Not much. Although we were told, before we purchased it, that it was haunted.”
“By whom? I mean told by whom, not haunted by whom.”
“By several people. The real-estate woman mentioned it, but laughed about it, and I was intrigued. She said the house has quite a history, and there are many tales about what went on here. After we moved in, more people told us. I suspect they were trying to worry us a bit.”
“What sort of tales did you hear before you moved in?”
“Just that the house was haunted.”
“No details?”
“No.”
“What was the first thing that made you think that there was something to these tales?”
“I was about the last member of the family to be aware that something was going on, but I had heard repeated stories from the children. I was sleeping in one of the children’s rooms upstairs one night, and was awakened by heavy footsteps—not in the room but in the next room. I wondered who was up, and I heard them walking back and forth and back and forth. I finally went back to sleep, but I was kind of excited. The next morning I asked who was up during the night, and no one had been up.”
“Who was in the rooms in which the footsteps were heard?”
“A six-year-old child was in one room, and my daughter, then eighteen, was in the other.”
“In the room in which you thought the footsteps occurred, was there only the six-year-old child?”
“Yes, but the wall was where the old staircase went up. It’s now closed off, but the staircase is still there, and I had the feeling it was either in the stairwell, or in the next room. But it felt as if it were right beside me.”
“Have there been many structural changes in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Did the steps sound like a man’s or a woman’s?”
“A man’s.”
“How long did it go on?”
“At least for ten minutes.”
“Didn’t it worry you that some burglar or a prowler might be in there?”
“No. We have dogs, and I thought it was probably a spirit.”
“Do you mean you just accepted it like that without worrying about it?”
“I was a little frightened because I don’t want to be touched, and I don’t want to look up and see someone looking at me, but I don’t care if they walk around!”
“This was the first thing you heard. What was the next thing?”
“I was sleeping in my son Douglas’ room again, and I was having a very frightening dream. I don’t remember what the dream was, but I was terrified. Suddenly I awoke and looked at the wall. Before I had gone off to sleep, I had noticed that the room had been sort of flooded with panels of light, and there were two shafts of light side by side, right directly at the wall. I sat right up in bed and I looked up and there was a shadow of a head. I don’t know whether it was a man’s or a woman’s, because there were no features, but there was a neck, there was hair, it was the size of a head, and it was high up on the wall. It could have been a woman with short, bushy hair. It was so real that I thought it was Joyce, my daughter, who was about eighteen then. I said, ‘Joyce,’ and I started speaking to it. Then I realized it was waving a little bit. I became frightened. After about ten minutes of saying, ‘Joyce, Joyce, who is it? Who is there?’ it moved directly sideways, into the darkness and into the next panel of light, and by then I was crying out, ‘Joyce, Joyce, where are you?’ I wanted someone to see it with me.”
“You still couldn’t see any features?”
“No features at all.”
“No body?”
“No body.”
“Just a head?”
“Well, that’s where the shaft of light ended. It was about that long, and it included the head and the neck, and nothing else showed because that was the end of the light on the wall. Then Joyce came in and I said, ‘Joyce, look quickly,’ and it was still there. But as I stared at this thing, it went out. It moved directly sideways and went.”
“Did she see it too?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her when she gets here. She was quite excited. The next night we tried to get the panels of light to get back on the wall again. But we couldn’t ever get the two panels of light there, and we don’t know what they were.”
“Do you think these panels of light had anything to do with it? Were they from the moonlight or were they part of this apparition?”
“That’s what I don’t know, but I would suspect that it had to have something to do with the thing that was there because we could never get the light back again.”
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“Was there any change in the atmosphere? Any chills?”
“I was extremely aware that there was something there.”
“Did you feel cold?”
“Yes.”
“What was the next event that happened after that?”
“In 1967 we decided to get a Ouija board. We had some friends who knew this house well, and said, ‘You ought to work a board and find out what was there.’ They owned this house for about ten or fifteen years; their names are Dean and Jean Vanderhoff.”
“Have they had any experiences here?”
“Oh yes, definitely.”
“When did they tell you about them”
“After we noticed things.”
“They are not here today, so you can briefly sum up what their experiences were.”
“Well, on several occasions they heard a woman talking in the kitchen when there was no other woman in the house. They heard the voice, and they also heard the heavy garage doors bang up and down at night, with great noise.”
“What did the woman say to them?”
“Nothing to them. They were upstairs in bed, but they heard a woman talking. Also, very often they heard everything in the kitchen being banged, and thought all the china in the kitchen was being broken. A great clattering and banging,”
“Now, you decided to tell the Vanderhoffs about your experiences?”
“Yes. We worked the Ouija board the night after I had seen this ‘thing’ on the wall. We immediately got the names of people. There was a Martha and a Morgan, who communicated with us.”
“What do they tell you?”
“Martha said that it was she who was appearing on the wall, because one child in the next room had fallen out of bed, and Martha loves children, and tried to help. And Martha said dear things about me—that I have a big job, and it’s hard for me to handle the children, and she’s here to help.”