by Hans Holzer
“It went up—which way?”
“I could hear the noise, and I saw something go up on top of that shed and then take off. That sort of scared me. I sat up and worked the rest of the night.”
“Any other unusual happenings?” I asked.
“A lot of times the switch to the furnace at the head of the stairs is turned off, and the house starts to get cold. Also, often, when I step out of the car and start to walk in here, I’ve heard something walking behind me. Four or five different people have had that experience.”
“Who were these other people who heard this person walking behind them?”
“My son for one. Then Bob, a friend of our nephew’s. Bob would go out and work on his car when he got home, and he was late for dinner every evening. One night he came home mad and said, ‘Why don’t you stop coming out and walking up and down without coming in where I’m working?’ We looked at him and assured him, we hadn’t been doing that.”
“Did he see anyone?”
“No, he never saw anyone, but he could hear them walk on the gravel, halfway between the barn and the garage where he was working.”
“All right, thank you very much,” I said, and turned to the Rays’ daughter, who had been listening attentively.
“Mrs. Bonnie Williams, what were your experiences in this house?”
* * *
“When I was seventeen, three years ago, I was asleep one night on this same couch. It was about 1 o’clock in the morning, and I had just turned out the light, after reading for a while. My parents were asleep upstairs. I was lying there, and I wasn’t asleep, when I noticed a light right in this corner. I didn’t pay any attention to it, but rolled over. As I rolled over, I looked out the two windows which are right above the couch, and there was no light outside. It was a very dark night. So I became curious, and I rolled back over and I looked at the light, and it was still there. I sat up, turned on the light and there was nothing. So I turned out the light and pulled the covers over my head. About five minutes later, I thought, I’d look again. This light was still here. It was a strange light, not a flashlight beam but sort of translucent, shimmering, and pulsating.”
“What color was it?”
“It was a bright white.”
“Did it have any shape?”
“It seemed to; as it was pulsating, it would grow in size. But when it started doing that, I got scared and I turned on the light, and there was nothing.”
“Anything else?”
“This was at the time when Tommy Young, my cousin, and Bob Brichard were here. Everybody was at the dinner table, and my girlfriend, Kathy Murray, and I were leaving the house as we were eating dinner over at her house. We went out the back door, and we got about halfway down the walk when we heard moaning. It seemed to be coming from the bushes near the fence. I said, ‘Come on,’ and we started walking along but after we had taken about four steps, it started again. Well, when she heard it the second time she took off running for the house, and I decided I wasn’t going to stand there by myself, so I went running into the house too.”
“Did it sound like a woman or a man?”
“A man.”
“Any other visual experiences?”
“No, but I’ve heard something upstairs many times when I’m the only one home, sitting downstairs. There was something walking around upstairs.”
“Well was there in fact someone there?”
“I went upstairs. There was nothing.”
“Did you ever feel any ‘presences’?” I asked.
“One night,” Bonnie replied, “at 1 o’clock in the morning, we wanted to have a séance. Since you get the feeling more often upstairs, we went up into my brother’s room. We were sitting on the edge of the bed, my brother was nearest to the closet, Jackie Bergin, my aunt, was next to me, and I was on the other side. We were really concentrating for ‘it’ to appear. Then my brother spoke up and said, ‘Do you see what I see?’ And there was a shimmering light in the closet. It was very faint.”
I thanked Bonnie and questioned her mother, Mrs. Virginia Ray, about her own experiences here.
* * *
“First of all,” she said seriously, “I believe that there is a relationship between the barn and the house. The first things I heard were the noises of tools or whatever being knocked around in the barn. I heard it from inside the house. Then I had a very peculiar experience one Sunday afternoon. An acquaintance, Mrs. Ramsier, and I were standing on the front porch talking when all of a sudden it sounded as if the whole barn were collapsing. We both ran out the door and got as far as the maple tree in the side yard, but the barn was still standing. The noise took off about at the level of the eaves, where the gable comes down, and then travelled in a straight line over into the woods, and got quieter as it went away into the woods.”
“I understand your mother also had an experience here?”
“My mother, Mrs. Bonnie Young, was here last July for my daughter Martha’s wedding. She didn’t believe anything we had said previously about this. I got up and left my room. I saw her light on and stuck my head in the door. I had intended to say absolutely nothing to her about what I had just experienced, but she said, ‘Did you hear the ghost?’ I asked her what she’d heard, and she said in the bedroom immediately adjoining hers she heard all the furniture moving around. She thought, what in the world is Martha doing, moving all the furniture around in the middle of the night! Then the noise left that room and moved to the side of the house, to this chimney, and then it disappeared.”
“What was it, the thing that you yourself had heard at the same time your mother experienced this?”
“I was asleep in Bonnie’s room, which does seem to be a center of activities too—the barn and Bonnie’s room are the centers. I became aware of a very loud noise—loud and gathering in the distance. It was coming closer together and getting louder and just moving towards the house. By the time it got to the house it seemed to be in two forms.”
“What did it sound like?”
“Not like a boom; it was just a loud, gathering noise.”
“Was it high-pitched or low-pitched?”
“I would say nearer low than high.”
“Did you see any figure or any face of any kind?”
“Well, I didn’t see it, but I was conscious of this noise coming into a configuration as it got to the window. All of a sudden these two noises came right through the window and up to my bed, and just went wrrp, rrr; hard-sounding noises. They seemed to be two separate noises. At this point I tried to get up enough courage to talk to it, but I couldn’t. I was frightened by that time. I thought, I’ll just go to sleep, but I couldn’t. Finally, I got up, when I felt it had diminished, and left the room. Then I found out about Mother’s experience.”
“Have you had any unusual dreams in the house?”
“Yes, but not in this house. I went down to visit my mother once before she came up here. I woke up in the middle of the night, with this very loud, distinct voice that said, there is something wrong, pack up and move away! I didn’t know whether it was there or here.”
“Was it a man or a woman?”
“I would say it was a man. I got up, walked the floor, and decided to pay attention. I had not planned to leave that day, but I told Bonnie about it and we went home that day.”
“But it could have applied to this house.”
“Yes, even though Mother’s place is eleven hundred miles away, in Florida. The first night after we moved into this house, I went to bed. I had the feeling that a mouse started at the tip of the bed and ran straight to the floor. But my thought was—well, it wasn’t a mouse because it didn’t go anywhere else. I refused to worry about it. Then, a week or ten days ago, in April [1968], my husband’s brother, Gilbert Ray, was here. He came out of the bathroom with the light off. He called to me, ‘Ginny, do you mind coming here for a minute? Do you see anything over there?’ I said, ‘Yes I do.’ And written on the metal cabinet above our washing machi
ne in fluorescent light was the word L-A-R-U, in one line. And below that was sort of a smeared G, and an O. On the side of the cabinet there was one small slash. And then, between the cabinet and the window sill, in a narrow area about eight inches, there was an abstract face—eyebrows, nose, and mouth, and the face was sort of cocked on the wall. It was definitely there. We washed it off. It seemed like fluorescent paint. Two or three days afterward, in the bathroom, I did find on the cap of a deodorant a tiny bit of fluorescent paint. We have tended to say that it was somebody who did it, some physical person. But we have no idea who did it.”
“Well, did anybody in the family do it?”
“They say no.”
“Were there any kids in the house?”
“No.”
“There is no logical reason for it?”
“We have no logical reason for it.”
“You saw the fluorescent light?”
“Three people saw it.”
* * *
So there had been something more than just noises. I tried to put some meaning into the letters L-A-R-U-G-O, assuming they were of supernormal origin for the moment. It was a pity that the fluorescent paint was no longer available for inspection or analysis. It might have been ordinary, natural fluorescent paint, of course. But then again, the ectoplastic substance often found in connection with materialization does have similar fluorescent qualities and upon exposure to light eventually dissolves. What the Rays had described was by no means new or unique. In photographs taken under test conditions in an experiment in San Francisco and published by me in Psychic Photography—Threshold of a New Science, I also have shown similar writings appearing upon polaroid film. In one particular instance, the word WAR, in capital letters, appears next to the portrait of the late John F. Kennedy.
The substance seems to be greenish-white, soap-like, soft material, and there is a glow to it, although it is not as strong a glow as that of commercial fluorescent material.
I questioned all members of the household again. There was no doubt that no one had been playing tricks on any of them by painting fluorescent letters or that anyone from the outside could have gotten into the house to do so without the Rays’ knowledge. Of that I became sure and quite satisfied. Under the circumstances, the supernormal origin of the writing was indeed the more probable explanation.
Who, however, was Larugo, or did it mean Laru and the word Go? I realized that I had to return to the house with a competent medium, preferably of the trance variety, to delve further into the personality causing the various phenomena. That there was a disturbed entity in and around the Ray house I was, of course, convinced. It would appear also that there was some connection with the barn, which, in turn, indicated that the disturbed entity was not an owner but perhaps someone who just worked there. Finally, the tombstone-like stone in the ground found by the Rays indicated that perhaps someone had been buried on the grounds of the house.
We walked over to the barn, which turned out to be rather large and dark. Quite obviously it was not of recent origin, and it was filled with the usual implements, tools, and other paraphernalia found in country house barns. There was a certain clammy chill in the atmosphere inside the barn that I could not completely account for in view of the warm weather outside. Even if the barn had been closed off for several days during the day and night, the wet chill of the atmosphere inside—especially the lower portion—was far beyond that which would have been produced under such conditions.
* * *
Unfortunately, I could not return immediately with a medium to investigate the matter further. Towards fall of 1968, word came to me through the mutual friends of the Rays and ourselves that they would eventually move from the house. Without knowing any of the details, I felt it was imperative that I get in touch with Mrs. Ray.
I called her on October 31, apologizing for the seeming connection between Halloween and their ghostly phenomena, and inquired how matters stood in house and barn. I also was able to tell Mrs. Ray that I would be at the house on November 7 at noon with a medium, Mrs. Ethel Johnson Meyers. This was good news to her indeed for the phenomena had continued and had not been any less since my first visit.
To begin with, Mrs. Virginia Ray was forced to sleep with the hall light on and had done so for about five months because of an increasing uneasiness at night. One afternoon during the summer two small boys living in the neighbourhood came to her door inquiring about the noises that were going on in the barn. Mrs. Ray had been taking a nap and had heard nothing, but the boys insisted that something was going on in the barn. Together they investigated, only to find everything in place and quiet. “We have bats, swallows, and we were developing a colony of pigeons in the barn,” Mrs. Ray explained, “the last of which we do not want. My son, who is now twenty-one, was home on vacation when he decided to use a rifle to get rid of the pigeons. When he did so, an unusual spot of light came on the walls of the barn. He took one look at it and declined to spend any time in the barn after that.”
One of the most impressive experiences perhaps occurred to the Rays’ new son-in-law, who had come to spend the summer in June 1968. He had heard all the stories of the phenomena and didn’t believe any of them. One night, he was awakened at about quarter to four in the morning by the noise of loud knocking outside the screen. Then the noise came on into the room, and he observed that it was a high hum mixed in with what sounded like the tinkling of a wind chime. The same night Mrs. Ray herself was awakened by a sound that she at first thought was high above her outside of the house, and which she sleepily took to he the noise of an airplane. Then she realized that the noise was not moving. Independent of the son-in-law and Mrs. Ray, Mr. Ray had also heard a similar noise at the same time.
Mrs. Ray’s mother came for a visit during the summer. During her stay, the hall lights were being turned off—or went off by themselves—not less than four times in one night. There was no faulty equipment to be blamed; no other explanation to be found. Lights would go on and off more frequently now, without hands touching them, and the furnace again went off. Somebody or something had turned the emergency switch.
I was all set to pay the Rays a visit on November 7, 1968. At the last moment I received a hurried telephone call from Mrs. Ray. She informed me unhappily that the new owners objected to the visit and that therefore she could not offer the hospitality of the house again. They would move from the house on December 2 and the new owner had already started to take over.
“That’s nothing,” I said. “Perhaps I can get permission from them to pay a short visit.”
Mrs. Ray seemed even more nervous than at first. “I don’t think so, but you could try,” she said, and supplied me with the name and address of the new owner. And she added, cryptically, “But he is a military man and I don’t think he likes what you are doing.”
I wrote a polite letter requesting only that we complete what we had started earlier, both in the interests of parapsychology and the house itself. I included my credentials as a scientist and teacher, and promised not to permit any undue publicity to arise from the case. This is standard procedure with me, since it is not my intention to cause the owners of haunted houses any embarrassment or difficulty in the community. I assumed, quite rightly, that whatever it was that caused the Rays to leave would not go out with them but would remain tied to the house. There is an overwhelming body of evidence to support this view. Only once in a while, and in special cases, is a haunting attached to one particular person in a house. Clearly this is not the case in the Oakton haunt, and I had to assume that the matter was not resolved.
I made some inquiries about the new owner, and discovered that Colonel S. is a retired army officer, who had served in nearby Washington for many years while his wife was a teacher. Since there was very little time left before my impending visit, I hoped that permission would come through prior to November 7. The day before I received a certified letter with return receipt request from Colonel S. The letter was truly the letter of
a military man: curt, insulting, and full of non sequiturs. The colonel tried hard to convince me that my work wasn’t worthwhile or that it made no sense whatsoever. I realized that the man was more to be pitied than scorned, so I took his letter, wrote on it that I did not accept discourteous letters because they would contaminate my files, and returned it to him. I have heard nothing further from the colonel or his wife, and if there is any phenomenon going on at his Oakton, Virginia, house, he is handling it all by himself. He is most welcome to it. Quite possibly, he is not even aware of it, for he may be gifted with a lack of sensitivity that some people have. On the other hand, one cannot be sure. It is quite possible that the noises have since continued and will continue, or that other, more stringent phenomena will follow them. I don’t think that a disturbed spirit has any respect for the opinion of a military man who wishes that spirits wouldn’t exist.
* * *
On November 7 we did drive by the house and Mrs. Meyers stepped out briefly and went as close to the grounds as we could without entering the house proper or without violating the colonel’s newly acquired property rights. Happily, the public thoroughfares in Virginia may be walked upon by parapsychologists and mediums with no need to ask permission to do so. As Ethel faced the enclosure of the house, she received the distinct impression of a troubled entity. Without having been told anything at all about the nature of the phenomenon or the location of it, she pointed at the barn further back as the seat of all the troubles. “It’s down there, whatever it is,” Ethel said, and looked at me. “But I would have to be closer to do anything about it. All I can tell you is that someone is awfully mad down there.” Under the circumstances, I asked her to come back with me and let the matter rest.