Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “There, there,” he said, soothingly, taking her head in his hands. “You’ve been having nightmares.”

  “He doesn’t believe a word I’ve said,” she thought, between sobs, but she preferred being consoled by a non-believer than not being consoled at all.

  The next few weeks passed somehow. They had requested a transfer to another location. When it came, she was a new person. The prospect of moving into another house where nothing would disturb her sleep was just too wonderful.

  Her husband had rented a big, old mansion in Wichita, where they were transferred by the company, and it was filled with antiques and fine furniture of a bygone era.

  When Marlene first saw the house, she thought, “Oh my God, if any house ought to be haunted, this looks like one!”

  But it wasn’t and the house in Wichita proved as peaceful and serene as a house can be, if it isn’t inhabited by a restless ghost.

  The house was full of memories of its past fifty years but none of them intruded upon her and she lived a happy, relaxed life now. The experiences in Kansas receded into her memory and she was sure now that it had all been the fault of the house and not something connected with her—least of all, her imagination, for she knew, no matter what her husband had said, that she had seen and heard that ghost car drive up to the house.

  She sometimes wonders who the new owners of that house in Kansas are and whether they can hear the heavy breathing the way she did. But then she realizes that it was her own innate psychic ability that allowed the phenomena to manifest themselves when they did. Another person not so endowed might conceivably not feel anything at all.

  What was the horrible accident that was being reenacted—from the sound of the water being poured down, to the rushing up of the ghost car? And whose heavy breathing was disturbing her nights?

  Many times her curiosity almost made her inquire but then she decided to let sleeping dogs lie. But in later years while living in California, her psychic ability developed further until she was able to hear and see the dead as clearly and casually as she could commune with the living. It frightened her and she thought at first she was having waking nightmares. All through the night she would be aware of a room full of people while at the same time being able to sleep on. Her observation was on several levels at the same time, as if she had been turned into a radio receiver with several bands.

  Clearly, she did not want any of this, least of all the heavy breathing she started to hear again after they had moved to California.

  But then it could be the breathing of another restless soul, she decided, and not necessarily something or someone she had brought with her from Kansas. She read as much as she could now on the subject of ESP, and tried her hand at automatic writing. To her surprise, her late father and her grandparents wrote to her through her own hand.

  She noticed that the various messages were in different hands and quite clearly differed from her own. Yet her logical mind told her this might all come from her own subconscious mind and she began to reject it. As she closed herself off from the messages, they dwindled away until she no longer received them.

  This she regretted, for the presence of her father around her to continue the link of a lifetime and perhaps protect her from the incursions of unwanted entities of both worlds, was welcome and reassuring.

  By now she knew of her psychic powers and had learned to live with them, but also to close the psychic door when necessary.

  * * *

  Meanwhile the house in Kansas still stands and very few tenants stay for long.

  * 121

  The Ghostly Monks of Aetna Springs

  “IF YOU LIKE GOLF, you’ll enjoy our nine-hole golf course,” says the brochure put out by the Aetna Springs, California, resort people. They have a really fine self-contained vacationland going there. People live in comfortable cabins, children have their own playground, adults can play whatever games they please, there are tennis, swimming, fishing, riding, dancing, horseshoe pitching, hunting, shuffleboarding, mineral bathing—the springs—and last, but certainly not least, there is that lovely golf course stretching for several miles on the other side of the only road leading up to the place. With all the facilities on one side of the road, the golf course looks like a million miles from nowhere. I don’t know if it pleases the guests, but it is fine with the ghosts. For I did not come up eighty-five miles north of San Francisco to admire the scenery, of which there is plenty to admire.

  As the road from Napa gradually enters the hills, you get the feeling of being in a world that really knows little of what goes on outside. The fertile Napa Valley and its colorful vineyards soon give way to a winding road and before you know it you’re deep in the woods. Winding higher and higher, the road leads past scattered human habitation into the Pope Valley. Here I found out that there was a mineral spring with health properties at the far end of the golf course.

  In the old days, such a well would naturally be the center of any settlement, but today the water is no longer commercially bottled. You can get as much as you want for free at the resort, though.

  Incidentally there are practically no other houses or people within miles of Aetna Springs. The nearest village is a good twenty minutes’ ride away over rough roads. This is the real back country, and it is a good thing California knows no snow, for I wouldn’t want to tackle those roads when they are slushy.

  As I said before, we had not come up all that way for the mineral water. Bill Wynn, a young engineer from San Francisco, was driving us in my friend Lori Clerf’s car. Lori is a social worker and by “us” I mean, of course, my wife Catherine and Sybil Leek. Sybil did not have the faintest idea why we were here. She honestly thought it was an excursion for the sheer joy of it, but then she knows me well and suspected an ulterior motive, which indeed was not long in coming.

  My interest in this far-off spot started in 1965 when I met Dr. Andrew von Salza for the first time. He is a famous rejuvenation specialist and about as down-to-earth a man as you can find. Being a physician of course made him even more skeptical about anything smacking of the occult. It was therefore with considerable disbelief, even disdain, that he discovered a talent he had not bargained for: he was a photographic medium with rare abilities.

  It began in 1963, when a friend, the widow of another doctor by the name of Benjamin Sweetland, asked him to photograph her. She knew von Salza was a camera bug and she wanted to have a portrait. Imagine their surprise when the face of the late Dr. Sweetland appeared on a lampshade in the room! There was no double exposure or accidental second picture. Dr. von Salza had used ordinary black and white film in his Leica.

  The doctor’s curiosity was aroused and his naturally inquiring mind was now stimulated by something he did not understand and, furthermore, did not really believe. But he came back with a color camera, also a Leica, and took some pictures of Mrs. Sweetland. One out of twenty produced an image of her late husband against the sky.

  The experience with Mrs. Sweetland was soon followed by another event.

  A patient and friend of the doctor’s, Mrs. Pierson, had been discussing her daughter with Andrew in her San Francisco apartment. The girl had recently committed suicide.

  Suddenly Andrew felt impelled to reach for his camera. There was little light in the room but he felt he wanted to finish the roll of film he had. For no logical reason, he photographed the bare wall of the room. On it, when the film was developed, there appeared the likeness of the dead girl von Salza had never met!

  While he was still debating with himself what this strange talent of his might be, he started to take an interest in spiritualism. This was more out of curiosity than for any partisan reasons.

  He met some of the professional mediums in the Bay area, and some who were not making their living from this pursuit but who were nevertheless of a standard the doctor could accept as respectable.

  Among them was Evelyn Nielsen, with whom von Salza later shared a number of séance experiences and who apparently be
came a “battery” for his psychic picture taking, for a lot of so-called “extras,” pictures of people known to be dead, have appeared on von Salza’s pictures, especially when Miss Nielsen was with him.

  I have examined these photographs and am satisfied that fraud is out of the question for a number of reasons, chiefly technical, since most of them were taken with Polaroid cameras and developed on the spot before competent witnesses, including myself.

  One day in New York City, Mrs. Pierson, who had been intrigued by the psychic world for a number of years, took Andrew with her when she visited the famed clairvoyant Carolyn Chapman.

  Andrew had never heard of the lady, since he had never been interested in mediums. Mrs. Pierson had with her a Polaroid color camera. Andrew offered to take some snapshots of Mrs. Chapman, the medium, as souvenirs.

  Imagine everybody’s surprise when Mrs. Chapman’s grandfather appeared on one of the pictures. Needless to say, Dr. von Salza had no knowledge of what the old man looked like nor had he access to any of his photographs, since he did not know where he was going that afternoon in New York.

  A friend of Andrew’s by the name of Dr. Logan accompanied him, Mrs. Pierson, and Evelyn Nielsen to Mount Rushmore, where the group photographed the famous monument of America’s greatest Presidents. To their utter amazement, there was another face in the picture—Kennedy’s!

  Dr. Logan remained skeptical, so it was arranged that he should come to Andrew’s house in San Francisco for an experiment in which he was to bring his own film.

  First, he took some pictures with von Salza’s camera and nothing special happened. Then von Salza tried Logan’s camera and still there were no results. But when Dr. Logan took a picture of a corner in von Salza’s apartment, using Andrew’s camera, the result was different: on the Polaroid photograph there appeared in front of an “empty” wall a woman with a hand stretched out toward him. As Andrew von Salza reports it, the other doctor turned white—that woman had died only that very morning on his operating table!

  But the reason for our somewhat strenuous trip to Aetna Springs had its origin in another visit paid the place in 1963 by Andrew van Salza. At that time, he took two pictures with the stereo camera owned by a Mr. Heibel, manager of the resort.

  As soon as the pictures were developed, they were in for a big surprise. His friend’s exposures showed the magnificent golf course and nothing more. But Andrew’s pictures, taken at the same time, clearly had two rows of monks on them. There were perhaps eight or ten monks wearing white robes, with shaven heads, carrying lighted candles in their outstretched hands. Around them, especially around their heads, were flame-like emanations.

  There was no doubt about it, for I have the pictures before me—these are the photographs, in color, of monks who died in flames—unless the fiery areas represent life energy. They were brightest around the upper parts of the bodies. On one of the pictures, the monks walk to the right, on the other, to the left, but in both exposures one can clearly distinguish their ascetic hollow-eyed faces—as if they had suffered terribly.

  The pictures were not only fascinating, they were upsetting, even to me, and I have often been successful in psychic photography. Here we had a scientific document of the first order.

  I wanted to know more about these monks, and the only way to find out was to go up to Napa County. That is why we were winding our way through the Pope Valley that warm October afternoon.

  We were still many miles away from Aetna Springs when Sybil took my hand and said: “The place you’re taking me is a place where a small group of people must have gone for sanctuary, for survival, and there is some religious element present.”

  “What happened there?”

  “They were completely wiped out.”

  “What sort of people were they, and who wiped them out?”

  “I don’t know why, but the word ‘Anti-Popery’ comes to me. Also a name, Hi….”

  A little later, she felt the influence more strongly.

  “I have a feeling of people crossing water, not native to California. A Huguenot influence?”

  We were passing a sign on the road reading “Red Silver Mines” and Sybil remarked she had been impressed with treasures of precious metals and the troubles that come with them.

  We had now arrived at the resort. For fifteen minutes we walked around it until finally we encountered a surly caretaker, who directed us to the golf course. We drove as far onto it as we could, then we left the car behind and walked out onto the lawn. It was a wide open area, yet Sybil instantly took on a harrowed look as if she felt closed in.

  “Torture…crucifixion and fire…” she mumbled, somewhat shaken. “Why do we have to go through it?”

  I insisted. There was no other way to find out if there was anything ghostly there.

  “There is a French Protestant Huguenot influence here…” she added, “but it does not seem to make sense. Religion and anti-religion. The bench over there by the trees is the center of activity…some wiping out took place there, I should think…crosses…square crosses, red, blood crosses….”

  “What nationality are they, these people?”

  “Conquistadores…”

  “Who were the victims?”

  “I’m trying to get just one word fixed… H-I… I can’t get the rest…it has meaning to this spot… many presences here….”

  “How many?”

  “Nine.”

  “How are they dressed?”

  The ghostly monks of Aetna Springs, California

  “Like a woman’s dress on a man…skirted dress.”

  “Color?”

  “Brown.”

  “Do they have anything in their hands or doing anything, any action?”

  “They have a thing around their head…like the Ku Klux Klan…can’t see their faces…light…fire light…fire is very important….”

  When I asked her to look closer, she broke into tears.

  “No, no,” she begged off, her fists clenched, tears streaming down her cheeks. I had never seen her emotionally involved that much in a haunting.

  “What do you feel?” I asked softly. She was almost in trance now.

  “Hate…” she answered with a shaky voice choked with tears, “to be found here, secretly, no escape…from the Popish people…no faces….”

  “Did they perish in this spot?” I asked.

  Almost inaudibly Sybil’s voice replied: “Yes….”

  “Are the people, these nine, still here?”

  “Have to be…Justice for their lives….”

  “Who has hurt them?”

  “Hieronymus.” There was the “Hi” she had tried to bring out before.

  “Who’s Hieronymus?”

  “The leader of the Popish people.”

  “What did he do to them?”

  “He burned them…useless.”

  “Who were they?”

  “They took the silver….”

  “I intoned some words of compassion and asked the nine ghosts to join their brothers since the ancient wrong done them no longer mattered.

  “Pray for us,” Sybil muttered. “Passed through the fire, crosses in hand…their prayers….”

  Sybil spoke the words of a prayer in which I joined. Her breath came heavily as if she were deeply moved. A moment later the spell broke and she came out of it. She seemed bewildered and at first had no recollection where she was.

  “Must go…” she said and headed for the car without looking back.

  It was some time before we could get her to talk again, a long way from the lonely golf course gradually sinking into the October night.

  Sybil was herself again and she remembered nothing of the previous hour. But for us, who had stood by her when the ghostly monks told their story, as far as they were able to, not a word was forgotten. If recollection should ever dim, I had only to look at the photographs again that had captured the agony in which these monks had been frozen on the spot of their fiery deaths.

  I
took a motion picture film of the area but it showed nothing unusual, and my camera, which sometimes does yield ghost pictures, was unfortunately empty when I took some exposures. I thought I had film in it but later discovered I had forgotten to load it…or had the hand of fate stayed my efforts?

  Nobody at Aetna Springs had ever heard of ghosts or monks on the spot. So the search for corroboration had to be started back home.

  At the Hispanic Society in New York, books about California are available only for the period during which that land was Spanish, although they do have some general histories as well.

  In one of these, Irving Richman’s California under Spain and Mexico, I was referred to a passage about the relationship between Native American populations and their Spanish conquerors that seemed to hold a clue to our puzzle.

  The specific passage referred to conditions in Santo Domingo, but it was part of the overall struggle then going on between two factions among the Spanish-American clergy. The conquistadores, as we all know, treated the native population only slightly less cruelly than Hitler’s Nazis treated subjugated people during World War II.

  Their methods of torture had not yet reached such infernal effectiveness in the sixteenth century, but their intentions were just as evil. We read of Indians being put to death at the whim of the colonists, of children thrown to the dogs, of rigid suppression of all opposition, both political and spiritual, to the ruling powers.

  Northern California, especially the area above San Francisco, must have been the most remote part of the Spanish world imaginable, and yet outposts existed beyond the well-known missions and their sub-posts.

  One of these might have occupied the site of that golf course near the springs. Thus, whatever transpired in the colonial empire of Spain would eventually have found its way, albeit belatedly, to the backwoods also, perhaps finding conditions there that could not be tolerated from the point of view of the government.

  The main bone of contention at that time, the first half of the sixteenth century, was the treatment and status of the Native Americans. Although without political voice or even the slightest power, the Indians had some friends at court. Strangely enough, the protectors of the hapless natives turned out to be the Dominican friars—the very same Dominicans who were most efficient and active in the Spanish Inquisition at home!