Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “Does she give you any evidence of her existence as a person?”

  “I think she and Morgan are brother and sister and they’re both children of Sarah. And Sarah was the first wife of Homer Leroy Salisbury who built this house in 1865.”

  Did you know at the time you worked the board that this was a fact, that they had children by these names?”

  “No, but we had been told that Sarah is buried here in the yard somewhere with two children. I’ve searched the records and I can’t find the names of these children. I don’t know for sure whether Martha and Morgan are these two.”

  “But yet you do now know that there were such people connected with this house.”

  “There were two children and there was Sarah. But we don’t know the names of the children.”

  “But you do know there was a Sarah.”

  “There definitely was a Sarah.”

  “Now, when did you find that out? That there was a Sarah?”

  “Someone must have told me, and then I did find a record about it.”

  “Was it before or after the first Ouija board session?”

  “No, we got Sarah, the name, on the board; we didn’t know.”

  “You didn’t know what it meant. It was afterwards, then, that you discovered there was a Sarah connected with this house. And she’s buried on the grounds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still is?”

  “Some people say they know where, but we don’t.”

  “You haven’t found it?”

  “No. I’ve looked.”

  “What about the house now?”

  “Homer Leroy Salisbury built it in 1865, and structural changes were made in 1939, and there were some since then. Last summer I decided that I would enlarge the terrace because a lot of stones were here. We used all the stones that were here and did it ourselves.

  “It was the night after we started tearing it all out and putting new footing down and all. It was the night after, two of my children, Lelia and Doug, had an experience that we thought was because we were making this big change. We worked the board every time we had something happen. But Martha and Morgan came and said they were not unhappy with the terrace.”

  “What was the next visual or auditory experience, apart from the Ouija board?”

  “I have had no other, except a month ago I felt, but did not see, the apparition. That night, we had a big party here. A twenty-two-year-old girl named Nancy Camp offered to work the board. We had never met before. She and I sat at the board and started working it.”

  “And what happened?”

  “The interesting thing was that immediately a new spirit came. His name was Adam, and he gave his last name—it began with a B, something like Bullock. He said he’d been slaughtered in the 1800s by Beatrice. Beatrice had killed both him and his daughter. He needed help. We asked, ‘Would you appear?’ He agreed to appear to the two of us only. So we went to the back room, closed the door, and sat there.”

  “Did you actually see him?”

  “I didn’t, but Nancy did. I watched her as she saw him. She knocked me over backwards and the chair went in the air, then she knocked her chair down, threw the board in the air, and became absolutely terrified, and finally ran out the door.”

  “Who was this Adam?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he connected with this house?”

  “I don’t know. But he appeared again, and she watched him for at least five minutes, and she described him.”

  “Since then, have you had any further disturbances?”

  “Yes, I have. Since then it has been very difficult for me to sleep in my room at night. I’m very much aware that there’s something there, in my bedroom. I definitely feel a presence.”

  “Is it a man or a woman?”

  “Well, we worked the board and we were told it was Adam. I’d been compelled to look at the chaise lounge in the corner, and I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to be frightened. So I made myself not look at it, but I was terribly drawn to it, and when we worked the board the next day Sarah came and said, ‘Adam was in your room, and I was in the chaise lounge, and I was there to protect you.”‘

  “You said earlier a lot of history happened here. You mean, on the grounds? The house is only a hundred years old, but prior to that there was something here. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Many people have said there was a house, the Town Hall, standing here that was occupied during the Civil War. But it was riddled with bullets, and it was burned down during the Civil War. This was a camping ground for both the Union and the Confederate armies. Slaves are buried in the yard—ten or twelve people have told me that.”

  “What about prior to the Civil War period?”

  “I was told that there were tunnels here. This was a dairy farm and there’s a tunnel from the barn, a walking tunnel. There were said to be tunnels from the basement, but we have found nothing.”

  “Does this sum up your own firsthand experiences?”

  “There is one more thing. This has happened to me many times in my bedroom, while I was in bed. Early in the morning I hear heavy footsteps, at least twelve of them, walking, overhead. But there is no room to walk over my bedroom!”

  “You mean, on the roof?”

  “No, in the attic.”

  “Is it a male or female footstep?”

  “I would think a man.”

  “Are these similar to the footsteps you heard when you were in your room and didn’t get up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you had experiences that I would call ESP experiences before you moved to this house?”

  “No, but I’ve got one more thing to tell you. On a very hot Summer night in June of 1967 I couldn’t sleep. I woke up and went to my daughter’s empty room, which is the little eleven-by-eleven top cupola. I had gone up there because I thought it would be breezy, and I tried to sleep. I was soon awakened by crying, whimpering, and moaning. I got up and walked around a couple of times, and it stopped. Then I went back to bed. About five times I had to get up because I heard moaning and crying. Finally I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ve got two puppy dogs, it must be a dog.’ I walked all the way down and went into the kitchen, but the dogs were sound asleep. I went back to bed in my own room. I had no sooner gotten into bed, when the phone rang. My daughter, then eighteen, had been in a very serious automobile accident. My husband then slept with ear plugs, and he would never have noticed the phone. I thought, I wouldn’t have even been down here, had I not been awakened by the moaning and crying!”

  “Was it your daughter’s voice you heard?”

  “Yes—she said she had been left with the most severely injured girl alone on the road, while the others went for help, and that the girl was crying and they were moaning; they were all crying and whimpering.”

  “Who else has had experiences in this house?”

  “A friend, Pat Hughes, saw a woman here one night. Pat was here with a man named Jackson McBride, and they were talking, and at 3 o’clock I left and went to bed. At about 4 o’clock in the morning, Pat heard noises the kitchen and thought that I had gotten up. She heard someone walking back and forth. Pat was over there, and said, ‘Come on in, Lucy, stop being silly. Come in and talk to us.’ And this apparition walked in, and then Pat said, ‘It’s not Lucy’—she realized that the ghost looked similar to me. It was tall and slim, had long dark hair, and had a red robe on and something like a shawl collar, and her hand was holding the collar. Pat was exited and said, ‘My God, it’s not Lucy! Who is it?’ She said to this man, ‘Come and look,’ but he was afraid. Then Pat turned to go back and try to communicate, but it had vanished! Later, they heard a great rattle of things in the kitchen.”

  “How long ago did that happen?”

  “About six months.”

  “Has anyone else seen or heard anything here?”

  “One night, Joe Camp, Nancy Camp’s brother, saw a shadowy woman in white. On two different
occasion.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A year ago when we came home around 11 P.M. we found two of the children still up and frightened. I’ve never seen Douglas and Lelia so terrified.”

  “And what did they tell you?”

  “I’d like Lelia to tell it to you herself.”

  I turned to Lelia, who was ten at the time, and encouraged her to speak.

  “I was sleeping in bed,” she began, “when I saw something go past the window. I said, ‘Oh it’s nothing, it’s probably just the trees.’ Then my brother saw it pass his window. He came out and we just started running around the house until mother came home.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Sort of blurry—”

  “Did you see a face?”

  “No. Grayish. Sort of fuzzy. And a crinkling noise.”

  “And how long did it last?”

  “About three or five minutes.”

  “We found a ring with three rubies in it, the night after this woman in red appeared,” Mrs. Dickey interjected at this point. “She found it in her room. A lovely gold ring.”

  “Was it there before?”

  “We never saw it before. Do you believe in animal ghosts?” Mrs. Dickey asked thoughtfully. “We had eleven people here once, in the living room and we were working the Ouija board one afternoon. Suddenly, and for no reason at all, we heard a big horse run across the front porch! We stared out the windows, but saw absolutely nothing. Still, we heard it; every one of us heard it!”

  But Lelia had something more to tell. “A year-and-a-half ago we had a farewell party for my sister’s fiancé—my other sister, Joyce—and on the side of the porch there was a coiled head.”

  “A head?”

  “A head. Face. Coiled—like coiled—in a lot of wires. It had features too.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Man.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “And how did it go away?”

  “It just went—twee. Another time, my sister Joyce and I went down into the basement because we thought our father was there. We saw a coat hanging on the door, and all of a sudden this coat just moved. But our father wasn’t down there.”

  “Is there any particular area of the house that is most involved in these activities? Or is it all over the house?” I asked Mrs. Dickey now.

  “Under the staircase!” Lelia volunteered.

  “If you were to draw a straight line from the basement to those upstairs rooms, what would you hit?”

  “The basement, the stairwell, and the room upstairs, definitely; if you had to draw.”

  “To your knowledge, what was the upstairs’ use? Who lived there in the old days? Were there small rooms up there?”

  “There were small rooms, yes.”

  “Servants’ quarters?”

  “I doubt it. I know there were servants’ houses around here—this was more or less the manor house. There were other slave quarters.”

  “So these were just small rooms on the top floor.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the little room under the cupola?”

  “That’s where I had another experience,” Mrs. Dickey exclaimed. “I was awakened at night, about 3 o’clock in the morning. Patty was out on a date, but I had told her to get in early. I heard heavy footsteps going up those old, tiny, narrow stairs to Patty’s room. I called out, ‘Patty, are you just getting in?’ She didn’t answer, and I got annoyed. I thought, why isn’t she answering me and why is she making so much noise. So I went racing up the stairs and pulled down the covers, and she’d been sound asleep for hours. Another girl was with her, and they were both asleep, and I had frightened them. But the noise was so loud and so apparent, you could hear the leaning on the banister, every foot on the stair—”

  “Was it like the other footsteps, the male footsteps that you heard?”

  “Yes. Slow, methodical, steady, heavy footsteps.”

  “Did it sound as if somebody had trouble walking up?”

  “No. Just walking up.”

  “As it is, we have two personalities to deal with, a woman and a man. Is there anything known about the house involving tragedy?”

  “Not that I know of; I haven’t been able to find it out. I had a maid about two months ago and she said, ‘I haven’t been in this place in years, but my uncle had been riding on a horse, and the horse reared and threw him up and hanged him in a tree.’ And she pointed the tree out to me.”

  “Because the horse got frightened?”

  “Threw him up in the air and he was hanged to death in the tree.”

  “What about that door in the wall? What is the history of that door?”

  “A seventy-year-old woman has come here repeatedly to visit. She says she was born in this house; her name is Susan Richmond. She told me that when guests came, and the people in the house were in their aprons and wanted to get upstairs quickly and change, they would scoot up through the little door.”

  “This staircase was here from the beginning? Where does it lead to?”

  “It’s boarded over now, but it connected where the stairs are upstairs.”

  * * *

  I finally questioned Joyce Dickey about her experiences in the house. Joyce, twenty, had been in the house with her mother from the beginning, two-and-a-half years ago.

  “You’ve had some experiences with your sister?”

  “Yes. It was in the basement.”

  “Have you had any spontaneous experiences?”

  “I would sit in the dining room, and all of a sudden it would get really cold. I could feel a presence. One night we were listening to the record player when there was a sound like a huge waterfall—right by the back entrance. First, it sounded like water dripping down, and then it became like a big waterfall.”

  “You mean it sounded like it.”

  “Yes, sounded like it.”

  “Was there anything there?”

  “No.”

  “Your sister said something about a coat in the basement.”

  “When we had first moved in here, I had to go down to the basement. My father’s coat was hanging on the door, and it was kind of swinging. I just thought my father had gone down into the basement. I opened the door and started to go down. There was this figure, supposedly my father, in front of me; I could just barely see a man’s figure, walking down in front of me. I got down and turned on the light and looked around. My father wasn’t there.”

  “But you saw a man?”

  “Well—very faint.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  “No—it was just the back, going down in front of me.”

  “Anything else that I ought to know?”

  “I thought the last séance we had stirred things up.”

  “In which way?”

  “The dogs were in the basement, and they started to get upset, so I took them outside. One of them I couldn’t get—she ran away, and I couldn’t get her into the kennel. But I got the other two in, and came back into the house. There was a noise in the kitchen, like somebody clinking against the pots and pans, and banging around. In the basement there was the sound of a man walking. Then the sounds stopped, and then they started up again, and it was dragging something along the basement floor—sounded like a big sick of potatoes. And then the dogs started barking really furiously. This was last winter.”

  “Did you hear the horse, out front here?”

  “Yes, I did. We were working with the Ouija board, when a huge horse just went clomping across the porch.”

  “On the wood, you mean?”

  “On the wood! He just went clomping—! Like he was trotting. On the porch.”

  “And did you look to see if there was a horse?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t one of our horses.”

  “Where are your horses kept?”

  “In the back.”

  “There wasn’t any chance of one of them having got
ten loose?”

  “No. It was a big horse, and our little pony couldn’t have made that much noise.”

  I thought of the man who had been “hanged” by his horse, then turned my attention to Patty Dickey. Patty was almost eighteen.

  “I haven’t really had any experiences,” she explained and smiled somewhat embarrassed. “Only one time, when my mother saw a figure in my little brother’s room. That same night I woke up from a sound sleep and I felt something was in my room.”

  * * *

  Despite their employing Oujia boards to make contact with the spirits or alleged spirits in the house, I felt that the Dickey family had indeed undergone some genuine psychic experiences. I was more convinced of this as I realized that the apparition and the auditory phenomena preceded any attempt to make contact with what was in the house by means of a Ouija board. I have never held boards of this kind in high esteem, and have on occasion warned against their use by children or by those likely to be mediums and not aware of it. Then, too, the information gleaned from the use of these boards is not very reliable on the whole. If anything tangible comes from their usage, it generally can also be obtained by other means, such as meditation, genuine mediumship, or automatic writing. But at the time when I had arrived at the Dickey homestead, the use of the Ouija board was already a matter of record, and there was nothing I could have done about it.

  “It is quite clear you have a ghost, or possibly two ghosts, in this house,” I said to Mrs. Dickey as I prepared to leave. “I will arrange to come back with a competent medium sometime in the future, and we’ll have a go at it.”

  Mrs. Dickey nodded enthusiastically. A small woman, she belies the fact that she has five children, looking more as if she were in her early twenties. Her enthusiasm was such that I tried to come back immediately, but failed due to the fact that summer had come and I was off to Europe, as I do every year.

  * * *

  It was therefore not until April 10, 1969 that I was able to arrange for a return visit to Mrs. Dickey’s house. The house, by the way, is called Windover, and stands on Walnut Lane, appropriately called that because of the tall old walnut trees on both sides of the street. We agreed that I would come down in the company of Mrs. Ethel Johnson Meyers, and on May 11, 1969, we arrived fully prepared to encounter whatever ghosts in the house wished to be talked to.