Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  Although I did not know it at the time, we were close to the site where colonial material had been unearthed by Boland in 1957.

  “Can you go back farther than that?” I inquired.

  There was a moment of silence as Sybil closed her eyes. Standing delicately balanced on a low bluff directly overlooking the water, she was now swaying a little and I began to worry that she might fall into the pond, especially if she should go into trance. I therefore held my arm ready to catch her, should this happen. But somehow she maintained her equilibrium throughout the entire investigation.

  “I feel a foreign invasion,” she said now, slowly, searching her way step by step into the past. “Not people who live here but people who come here to destroy something…from another place…this is not pleasant, not a happy invasion…a war…taking things….”

  “Where do they come from?”

  “From far…I can see several longboats….” Longboats! The term used for Viking boats. How would Sybil consciously know of the Viking connection at this spot?

  “Longboats…fair men…this is very long time ago…the things they do are not related to this place at all…own ideas of metal and killing….”

  * * *

  One of the significant points of Viking presences in America is their use of iron for weapons, something totally unknown to the natives of the Western Hemisphere at that time and certainly until well after Columbus.

  “The construction…is very important…about these boats…metal pieces on the boats….”

  “Can you hear any sounds?”

  “I don’t understand the language.”

  “What type language is it?”

  “It is a northern language…Germanic…Nordic… Helmut is a name that comes….”

  “Why are they here?”

  “Long time…not discover…they have long skeleton boats…one is definitely here, that was the pointed thing I saw…in the lake…it is big, it’s in the middle…and around it are the metal pieces…the boat is a frame… there are round shields…personal things…a broken boat… something peculiar about the front of the boat…strange gods….”

  * * *

  It is a fact that the Viking ships had peculiar, animal-shaped bows, and metal shields were hung on their sides in rows. We know this from Norwegian examples. Sybil “saw” this, however, in the middle of nowhere on Cape Cod. A ship had foundered and its remnants lay on the bottom of Follins Pond. Strange gods, she had just said. What gods?

  “A man had a feeling for a different god than people knew,” Sybil replied.

  * * *

  I later recalled how Leif had espoused the new Christian faith while his father, and probably many others of his people, clung to the old pagan beliefs.

  “What happened to them?” I said.

  “They were stranded here and could not get back,” Sybil replied, slowly. “I don’t think they really intended to come.”

  Blown off course on their way to Greenland, the sagas report—not intentionally trying to find Vinland!

  “They arrived, however…didn’t know where they were…it was like an accident…they were stranded… many of them ran away from the boat….”

  “Was there water here at that point?”

  “There was water. Connected with the sea. But this lake is not sea. The sea went away. The lake came later. This is a long time ago, you are not thinking how long it is!”

  “Well, how long is it?”

  “This is longer than we’ve ever been,” Sybil explained, “fifteen hundred years…or something…long time…this was nothing, not a place where anything was made…no people….”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Die here…the boat was very important…boat was broken…some went away, one boat remained…the others could not go so they stayed here…longboat in the lake and those big round metal things….”

  “Do you get any names?”

  “Helmut….”

  “Anything else?”

  “This was first sea, then land, then on top of the land it was earth…as if something is hidden….”

  “How did it all happen?”

  “A lot of boats came here at the same time. They came from the fjords…toward the cold parts…they got here by accident…they left things behind while others went away…this one boat, or perhaps more but I see one…with the things that they used…no writing…just things…something strange about the metal…an eagle, but it is not the American eagle…big bird, like a vulture…some signs on the round metal parts…the bird is very prominent….”

  * * *

  Was she trying to make out a rune? The raven was a prominent symbol among the Vikings. Also, she had correctly identified the invaders by origin: from the fjords, from the cold country. Norsemen. But what possible clues could she have had? She was standing at the shores of a nondescript little lake or pond in Cape Cod.

  I became very excited at this point, or as excited as my basically scientific nature would permit me. Obviously, Sybil Leek had hit paydirt in identifying the spot as a Viking site—something not at all certain up to that point, but only a conjecture on the part of Frederick Pohl.

  “Is there any other form or symbol you can recognize?” I inquired. Sybil was more and more in a trancelike state of immersion into another time stream.

  “Constellation…” she murmured, and when I didn’t grasp the meaning, added, “a group of stars…shield… this man came by the stars. No papers.”

  “Was this Helmut, was he the leader of the group?”

  “No…not the leader.”

  “Who was the leader?”

  “Ingrist…I can’t understand it…. Helmut and… Aabst…ssen…ssen or son…confusing….”

  “Are these earthbound spirits?” I asked.

  “Yes, this is a very drastic thing that happened. Not ghosts in the usual sense, but a feeling, a sadness…a remote, detached feeling that still remains around here. It is connected with something that is not known but has to be known. It is very important to know this. Because this place was known before it was known. But there is no writing.”

  * * *

  How clearly she had delineated the problem at hand: known before it was known—America, of course, known to the Vikings before it was known to Columbus!

  “And there is no writing?” I asked again.

  “No, only symbols,” Sybil replied, “birds, and a big sun….”

  All these are the old pagan symbols of the Norsemen. “How many men are there?”

  “Many…but one man is important…Helmut and…sson…son of someone.”

  “Son of whom?”

  “Frederickson or something…it’s two names and I can’t read it…. Frederickson is part of the name…a little name in front…k-s-o-n….”

  “What is the relationship between Helmut and Frederickson?”

  “Family relationship. Because this was the lot of one family.”

  “Which one is the leader?”

  “Well, I think, Frederickson; but Helmut is very important.”

  “Which one stays and which one goes back?”

  “Helmut stays.”

  “And Frederickson? Does he go back?”

  “I don’t know what happens to him. But he has influence with Helmut.”

  Suddenly she added, “Where would sund be?”

  At first I thought she had said “sand”; later, it dawned on me that sund, which in English is “sound,” was a Viking term of some importance in the saga, where the body of water near the first campsite is described.

  “This is a very serious place,” Sybil continued. “You must discover something and say, this is right. Someone arrived a thousand years ago without papers or maps and did not know where they were.”

  “How far back did this happen, Sybil?”

  “Eight-eight-four…eight-eight-four are the figures in the water,” she replied, cryptically. “The discovery of something in the lake is very important.”

  If 884 was t
he number of years into the past when the boat foundered here, we would arrive at the year 1083 A.D. That is exactly eighty years later than the accepted date for Leif Ericsson’s voyage. Could Sybil have misread one of the digits? Not 884 but 804? If she could call Ericsson “Frederickson”—such a near-hit was not unthinkable in so delicate and difficult an undertaking as we were attempting. On the other hand, if 884 denotes the actual date, was the calendar used a different one from the A.D. calendar?

  “Where would one look for the ship?”

  “From the other side, where I wanted to go,” Sybil said, more herself again than she had been for the past fifteen minutes.

  “This is quite a deep lake, really,” she added, “toward the middle and then come to the left. From the other side where that road is.”

  She was nearly pinpointing the same rock where Frederick Pohl had found Viking moorings!

  “What would they find?”

  “Old wood and metal stuff that nobody has seen before. Nobody knew was here. It was an accident. If you find it, it will be important to a lot of people. Some will say you tell lies.”

  I thought of the mayor of Genoa, and the Knights of Columbus. What would they be marching for on Columbus Day? His rediscovery of America? Sybil was still involved with the subject.

  “The sund…,” she mumbled.

  “Where is the sund?” I asked, beginning to understand now the meaning of the word more clearly.

  “Beyond the lake,” Sybil replied, as if it were obvious to anyone but me.

  “On which side of it?”

  “The far side…Sund…there are some things there.”

  She warmed up to this line of thought now. “There will be a line…of things to find once one is found…. When one thing is found there will be many others….” She insisted the boat and the shields with the bird on them would be found in the water; if a line were drawn from there to the shore and beyond, more would come to light. “Longboat…big…Helmut….” Again she seemed to be going under and swaying from side to side. “Longboats in the sun…shadows….”

  I decided to get Sybil out of her psychic state before she fell into the water. When she opened her eyes, which had been shut all this time, she blinked into the setting sun and yawned. Nothing she had said to me during the investigation had remained in her memory.

  “Did I say anything interesting?” she queried me.

  I nodded, but told her nothing more.

  We got into our car and drove off toward Hyannis, where the ghost hunt of the evening was about to begin.

  The next morning I pondered the information Sybil had brought me at Follins Pond. In particular, the term sund, which Sybil had pronounced closer to “sand,” puzzled me. I decided to check it out through whatever maps I might have available. I discovered several startling facts. To begin with, the area south and southwest of the coast of Greenland was known by two names: Herjolfsnes, or sand. If the sund were situated “to the far side” of the lake, as Sybil had said, could it not be that this was a reference to the area whence the boats had sailed? The sand or sund is the coast where Eric the Red’s eastern settlement stood in the eleventh century.

  If Boland was looking for the sund much closer to Cape Cod, assuming it to be the bay between Princetown and the Massachusetts coast, was he not overlooking the other body of water? We don’t know that the bay north of Cape Cod was ever named the sund, but we do know that the straits south of Greenland were thus called at the time of the Leif Ericsson adventure. Mallery’s conviction that Newfoundland was the original Vinland did not find the problem of the river flowing through or from a lake insurmountable. There are a number of small bodies of water and small rivers in Newfoundland that might fit. None of them, however, as well as the Bass River and Follins Pond in Cape Cod.

  Sybil had clearly and repeatedly identified a lesser leader named Helmut as being connected with the Follins Pond site. I discovered that one Helhild or Helhuld sailed the coast of Labrador around 1000 A.D. That this statement in the sagas is taken seriously can be seen by the fact that Helhild’s voyage and name are included in some historic maps used in higher education for many years. Moreover, Helhild started his trip at the sund, south of Greenland.

  This Helhild was the same leader who later joined Ericsson in a trip that lead to the discovery of Vinland. Helhild’s first name was Bjarni, the Bjarni mentioned on the ancient map. Evidently he was the second in command on the latter expedition. Now one might argue that Labrador is also part of North America and thus Bjarni Helhild was the original Viking discoverer of America. But we do not know of any landings on the Labrador trip, whereas we do have exact details of landings during the expedition headed by Ericsson and Helhild jointly. It may well be that the Labrador trip consisted merely of sailing down the hostile and unknown Labrador coast.

  Frederickson and Helmut are common modern names, and to a person unfamiliar with Viking names they would sound reasonably close to Ericsson and Helhild or Helhuld. Sybil, as I have already stated several times, did not know she was on a spot with Viking traditions or connotations; thus there could not be any subconscious knowledge suggesting Norse names. Whatever came through her, came because it was there.

  What are the implications of this adventure into the past? Surely, a dig in Follins Pond should be undertaken. It might very well yield Norse artifacts and perhaps even remnants of the Viking boat Sybil saw clairvoyantly. It seems to me that the question of the Vinland location misses an important point altogether: Could it not be that Vinland meant to the Vikings all of North America, the new land beyond the seas, rather than a specific settlement?

  I find it difficult to reconcile the conflicting views of respectable researchers and the archaeological evidence to boot, with any one area under discussion. The Vikings were at Newfoundland, at more than one site and over an extended period of time; but they were also in evidence in Cape Cod and again in more than one locality. Over a period of several centuries enough immigrants must have come over to allow them to spread out over the newly discovered land. Some might have gone around Florida to Minnesota and Oklahoma, while others explored the Northeast and founded settlements along the way.

  I think the end is not yet and that many more campsites of Norse origin will be discovered on our side of the Atlantic. Certainly, the Vikings discovered America long before Columbus did it all over again. It is a shame at that: He could have consulted the ancient maps even then in existence and seen that somebody had been there before. But of course Columbus wasn’t looking for America. He was trying to find a better passage to India. The Vikings, on the other hand, knew where they had landed, as time went on, even though their original landfall was accidental.

  Sybil Leek has shown that the Viking connotations of the Follins Pond area should be taken seriously. Hopefully, when this report appears in print, archaeological follow-ups of her psychic suggestions will have been initiated. Since neither Sybil nor my wife nor I had any previous knowledge of a Helmut or of the true meaning of the word sund, one cannot dismiss these revelations by our psychic as being drawn from anyone’s subconscious knowledge or mind. Thus there is really no alternate explanation for the extraordinary results of our psychic experiment. No doubt, additional experiments of this kind should prove fruitful and interesting: For the present, let it be said that the Vikings were at Follins Pond.

  Whether this was their only contact with America is a moot question. It certainly was the site of one of their landfalls in the early eleventh century. The Vikings may justly claim the distinction of having been the true discoverers of the New World!

  * * *

  Or were they?

  There is a strong tradition among the Irish that St. Brendan and a group of navigators made crossings to the American coast in boats built of timber and skins. Similar boats, about twenty-two feet long, are still in use in western Ireland. Recently, two brave Canadians tried to repeat the feat in an identical canoe. The original crossing by St. Brendan took place in the sixth c
entury—about five hundred years before the Vikings!

  Allegedly, Brendan felt himself responsible for the drowning of one of his monks, and the voyage had been a kind of pilgrimage to atone for it.

  But even St. Brendan was not first. According to my historian friend Paul Johnstone, Brendan did indeed cross all the way to the Florida coast, but the crossing by a certain Rossa O’Deshea, of the clan MacUmor, had managed it with eleven others, and gotten back safely again to Ireland, as early as the year 332 A.D.! The trip, according to Johnstone, was an accident, just as the Vikings’ initial crossing had been. On a return trip from Britain to the west of Ireland, the Gaelic navigators were blown off course and wound up in North America. Jess Stearn’s Edgar Cayce curiously also speaks of an Irish navigator named Rosa O’Deshea.

  Johnstone also mentions earlier Atlantic crossings by other Irishmen, such as a certain Dechu in 500 A.D. and a Finnian in the first half of the sixth century, a little before Brendan’s crossing in 551 A.D.

  Unfortunately, we have as yet no concrete evidence of Irish settlements in the New World, although we may some day find such material proof, of course. But these Irish traditions are interesting and far from fictional. It stands to reason that every nation of sailors would at one time or other sail westward, and the wind being what it is, might have some of her natives blown off course.

  The Romans, and before them, the Greeks and especially the Phoenicians, were great navigators. We suspect that the pre-Greek Phoenicians came to Britain from Asia in the second and first millennia before Christ. For all we know, even Rossa O’Deshea was not the first one to discover America.

  But the Vikings, comparatively Eric-come-latelies when one speaks of the Irish navigators, managed at least to leave us concrete evidence not only of having been here, but of having lived here for many years. Thus, until new evidence comes along, I’d vote for the Norsemen as being the discoverers of the New World.

  * * *

  I never discussed the case or my findings with Sybil Leek. On December 30, 1967, I received an urgent call from her. She had just had a peculiar dream and wished to communicate it to me for what it was worth. The dream took place in her Los Angeles house at 5:30 A.M., December 29, 1967. She knew it was about Cape Cod and “the lake,” as she called the pond, and that we should look for a peculiar rock in which “there are set big holes and it has a lot to do with the thing in the lake. I don’t remember any rocks but I think they are in the sea, not the lake. There is a connection. When we go to Cape Cod again I must look around that bit of coast. I saw so many things clearly in my dream. I wasn’t even thinking of the place when I dreamt this, but I talked with a large man last night, and it was he who said, ‘Look for the rock,’ and showed me the holes; they are big and deep. Also, there is more than we think in that lake and not only the lake, we have to go from the lake to the sea and look around there. What would the holes in the rock mean? I have a peculiar feeling about this and know it is important.”