Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  Sybil, of course, had no way of knowing about the mooring holes in the rock in the middle of Follins Pond. She knew nothing about my sources, and I had not talked about it in front of her at any time. But it was clear to me from this experience of hers that she had made a real contact while we were in the area and that those whom she had contacted wished us to find the physical evidence of their presence in the waters of the pond.

  Sybil had sent me a note giving all these bits of information she had obtained in her dream. At the end of her note, she drew a kind of seal, a large letter E in a circle—and said, this is important, is it a name?

  I looked at the medieval form of the initial E and could almost feel Leif Ericsson’s heavy hand.

  * 123

  The Haunted Organ at Yale

  YALE UNIVERSITY IN New Haven, Connecticut, is an austere and respectable institution, which does not take such matters as ghostly manifestations very lightly. I must, therefore, keep the identity of my informant a secret, but anyone who wishes to visit Yale and admire its magnificent, historical organ is, of course, at liberty to do so, provided he or she gets clearance from the proper authorities. I would suggest, however, that the matter of ghostly goings-on not be mentioned at such a time. If you happen to experience something out of the ordinary while visiting the organ, well and good, but let it not be given as the reason to the university authorities for your intended visit.

  I first heard about this unusual organ in 1969 when a gentleman who was then employed as an assistant organist at Yale had been asked to look after the condition and possible repairs of the huge organ, a very large instrument located in Woolsey Hall. This is the fifth largest organ in the world and has a most interesting history.

  Woolsey Hall was built as part of a complex of three buildings for Yale’s 200th anniversary in 1901 by the celebrated architects, Carere and Hastings. Shortly after its completion the then university organist, Mr. Harry B. Jepson, succeeded in getting the Newberry family, of the famous department store clan, to contribute a large sum of money for a truly noble organ to be built for the hall.

  Even in 1903 it was considered to be an outstanding instrument because of its size and range. By 1915, certain advances in the technology of pipe organs made the 1903 instrument somewhat old-fashioned. Again Jepson contacted the Newberry family about the possibility of updating their gift so that the organ could be rebuilt and the hall enlarged. This new instrument was then dedicated in 1916 or thereabouts.

  By 1926 musical tastes had again shifted toward romantic music, and it became necessary to make certain additions to the stops as well as the basic building blocks of the classical ensemble. Once again the Newberry family contributed toward the updating of the instrument. The alterations were undertaken by the Skinner Organ Company of Boston, in conjunction with an English expert by the name of G. Donald Harrison. Skinner and Harrison did not get on well together and much tension was present when they restored and brought the venerable old organ up-to-date.

  Professor Harry Jepson was forced to retire in the 1940s, against his wishes, and though he lived down the street only two blocks from Woolsey Hall, he never again set foot into it to play the famous organ that he had caused to be built. He died a bitter and disappointed man sometime in 1952.

  One of the university organists, Frank Bozyan, retired in the 1970s, with great misgivings. He confided to someone employed by the hall that he felt he was making a mistake; within six months after his retirement he was dead. As time went on, Woolsey Hall, once a temple of beauty for the fine arts, was being used for rock-and-roll groups and mechanically amplified music. Undoubtedly, those connected with the building of the hall and the organ would have been horrified at the goings-on had they been able to witness them.

  The haunted organ at Yale

  The gentleman who brought all of this to my attention, and who shall remain nameless, had occasion to be in the hall and involved with the organ itself frequently. He became aware of a menacing and melancholic sensation in the entire building, particularly in the basement and the organ chambers. While working there at odd hours late at night, he became acutely aware of some sort of unpleasant sensation just lurking around the next corner or even standing behind him! On many occasions he found it necessary to look behind him in order to make sure he was alone. The feeling of a presence became so strong he refused to be there by himself, especially in the evenings. Allegedly, the wife of one of the curators advised him to bring a crucifix whenever he had occasion to go down to the organ chambers. She also claimed to have felt someone standing at the entrance door to the basement, as if to keep strangers out.

  I visited Yale and the organ one fine summer evening in the company of my informant, who has since found employment elsewhere. I, too, felt the oppressive air in the organ chambers, the sense of a presence whenever I moved about. Whether we are dealing here with the ghost of the unhappy man who was forced to retire and who never set foot again into his beloved organ chamber, or whether we are dealing with an earlier influence, is hard to say. Not for a minute do I suggest that Yale University is haunted or that there are any evil influences concerning the university itself. But it is just possible that sensitive individuals visiting the magnificent organ at Woolsey Hall might pick up some remnant of an unresolved past.

  * 124

  The Ghost On Television

  UNTIL 1965 I HAD HEARD OF two kinds of ghosts connected with television: those impersonated by actors and those caused by the interference of tall buildings. Now I was to learn of still another kind of ghost on television, this one being the real McCoy. It all started with a lecture I gave at the British College of Psychic Studies in London in 1965. After my lecture on ghosts, which was illustrated by slides of apparitions, I was approached by a tall, intellectual-looking lady who wanted to tell me about a very strange haunted house in East Anglia. This was my first meeting with Ruth Plant, who explained that she was a writer and researcher, with a background in social science. Her beliefs lay in the Spiritualist philosophy, and she had had any number of psychic experiences herself. I asked her to drop me a note about the house in East Anglia. I expected it to be just another haunted house, probably containing the usual complement of footsteps, doors opening or closing by themselves, or possibly even an apparition of a deceased relative. By my standards, that constitutes a classic, conventional haunting.

  The following January, Miss Plant lived up to her promise. She explained that the house in East Anglia was called Morley Old Hall, and though it was principally of the Stuart period, it stood on much earlier foundations, going back to pre-Saxon times. It was situated near Norwich in the northeast of England and apparently belonged to a friend of hers who had bought it with a view to restoring it. It had been in lamentable condition and not suitable to be lived in. Her friend, by the name of Ricky Cotterill, was essentially a pig farmer; nevertheless, he and his young wife and their baby managed to live in the sprawling mansion, or rather in that part of it which he had been able to restore on his own funds, and the excitement of living with so much history more than adequately made up for the deprivations he was subjecting himself to. Miss Plant explained that the house was way off the beaten track and was, in fact, hard to find unless one knew the countryside. There were two moats around it, and archeological digs had been undertaken all over that part of the country for many years, since that part of East Anglia is one of the oldest and most historic sections of England.

  At the time of her first communication with me, in January, 1966, Miss Plant had not as yet undertaken any research into the background of the house or its surroundings. She thought the house worthy of my attention because of what had happened to her and a friend during a visit.

  “I went to stay there with a Norwegian friend, Anne Wilhelmsen, whose father was a cultural attaché of Norway in London, and who was herself a university graduate,” Ruth Plant explained. “This was two years ago at Easter. We had intended to stay at the local hotel, but Mr. Cotterill, the owner of
the mansion, found that the hotel was entirely full.”

  Under the circumstances, the owner moved out of the room he had been occupying and let the two ladies use it for the night. As he knew of Miss Plant’s interest in ghosts, he assured her that to the best of his knowledge there were no ghosts there, since he had lived there for three years and had seen nothing. As a matter of fact, the two ladies slept well, and in the morning Miss Plant got up and walked across the big room connecting the two wings with the kitchen, all of it being on the first floor.

  “When I came back, I felt impressed to pause at the large window which looked down the front drive, in spite of the fact that it had no glass in it and the day was bitterly cold. I felt very peaceful and contemplative and I suddenly heard a Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary, and was sure that the ‘presence’ I felt was that of the lady of the house. After I had noted this, I went back into our bedroom and was surprised to find Anne sitting up in bed looking very worried. She said she had just heard the rustle of bedclothes and heavy breathing while she lay there. She had sat up in bed to listen more closely, and immediately the sound ceased, only to come back again when she lay down. We told our host about this over breakfast, but he could not enlighten us further. So I went into the village and in talking to people found out that several people who had lived in the house had experienced very much the same thing. One man had actually seen the lady quite clearly at the window, and others had heard her, like Anne.”

  The “Lady at the Window” fascinated Ruth Plant, especially as she didn’t know her identity. As was her custom then, and is now, she decided to have a sitting with a reputable medium to see whether the medium might pick up something spiritual around her and possibly shed some light on the identity of the lady ghost of Morley Old Hall. This time she had a sitting with a certain Mr. Bogoran, one of the regulars sitting at the College of Psychic Studies, Queensbury Place. “I didn’t mention anything about the ghost, but said I had a friend who was trying to restore a beautiful old Stuart house and I wondered if anyone on the other side could offer any helpful advice.”

  Instead of advice on how to restore the house, medium Bogoran described the house itself in minute detail and then added that he saw a ghostly lady standing at one of the windows. This of course came as a surprise to Miss Plant, but even more of a shock was in store for her: Mr. Bogoran volunteered two additional statements of interest. One, that the owner of the house, her friend, would be on television within a few weeks, and two, that there was another ghost in the house, a monk who was attached to the house, not because he had been happy there like the ghostly lady, but because he had been involved in a killing.

  Since Mr. Cotterill, the owner of the house, had absolutely no connection with television, the first statement evoked nothing but doubt in Ruth Plant’s mind. Picture her surprise when several days after her sitting with Mr. Bogoran, Ricky Cotterill telephoned to tell her that he had been approached by a local television station to have an all-night session at the house which would be filmed for television. The reason for his call was to invite her to Norwich to appear as part of the program. In the excitement of this development, Ruth Plant forgot all about the ghostly monk.

  When she arrived at the Hall, she met Tony Cornell, a psychic researcher from Cambridge. Ruth and Mr. Cornell did not see things the same ways: she sensed him to be skeptical and negative and suspected his presence in the house was more to debunk the ghosts than to find them. It turned out later that Mr. Cornell was, as the program producer put it, “Our handiest accredited psychic investigator,” called into the case not necessarily because of his commitment to the reality of ghosts, but because his offices were not too far away, and time was of the essence. Ruth brought along a sound tape of her sitting with Mr. Bogoran, but it was not used in the film. She gave the required interviews and thought no more about it. A few weeks later, the filmed report of Morley Old Hall went on the air. Ruth Plant saw it at a local hotel, where it was rather badly focused, and she could hardly recognize herself or anyone else. Nevertheless, something odd happened during that screening.

  “During the performance, there was a loud bang on the set,” Ruth Plant stated, “which seemed to have no normal cause. My basset hound, who had been fast asleep with her back to the screen, jumped up in great apprehension and stood gazing at the screen as though she saw someone we could not see.”

  A few days later Ruth Plant telephoned Mr. Cotterill, and it was only then that she heard the amazing results of the television of the film. It appeared that no fewer than twenty-three people from the general public had written into the broadcasting station and asked who the bearded monk was, standing behind Mr. Cornell while he was speaking!

  Now no one had mentioned anything about a ghostly monk, but everyone connected with the venture knew that a ghostly lady had been observed by a number of witnesses. Consequently, she would have been on the minds of those participating in the experiment, if a mind picture could indeed find its way onto a television film.

  The idea of a ghost appearing on television naturally excited me. Immediately I got in touch with Michael Rob-son, producer of the documentary and one of the executives of Anglia Television. Michael Robson, who had been to Morley Old Hall many times before the documentary was made, offered to let me see the actual film when I came to England. “Our film unit had an all-night vigil in the Hall,” he explained in a statement dated September 2, 1966, “with the chairman of the Cambridge Psychical Research and Spontaneous Cases Committee, Mr. Tony Cornell. Various things of interest occurred during the night, in particular a moving tumbler, but what caused all the excitement was this: Mr. Cornell and I were discussing the Hall on film by a mullioned window as dawn was breaking. No sooner had the film been transmitted than a great many people wrote in asking who the figure was that appeared between Mr. Cornell and myself. All their descriptions were the same: the face and trunk of a monkish-type figure looking between us. Mr. Cornell and I examined the film closely afterwards ourselves and saw nothing: but in view of the large number of people who claimed to have seen the figure, Mr. Cornell thought it an interesting example of collective hallucination, and took away the letters for closer study.”

  It turned out that Mr. Cornell was not a parapsychologist with an academic connection, but merely an interested ghost-fancier. With the help of Miss Plant, and considerable patience, I managed to obtain the letters which Mr. Cornell had taken with him and examined them myself. His explanation of the phenomenon as a “mass hallucination” is, of course, an easy way out of coming to grips with the problem itself—a genuine psychic phenomenon. But the twenty-three witnesses are far more eloquent in their description of what they experienced than any would-be scientist could possibly be in trying to explain away the phenomenon.

  Mrs. Joan Buchan of Great Yarmouth wrote: “My husband and I saw a figure of a monk with a cowl over his head and with his hands clasped as though in prayer. It could be seen quite clearly, standing quietly in the window. It didn’t appear to be looking at the men conversing, but behind them.”

  “I saw the figure of a man which appeared to me to be that of a monk; he had on a round hat, a long cloak, and his hands were together as in prayer,” observed Miss A. Hewitt of Southrepps.

  “I saw the figure quite distinctly, considering I only have a twelve-inch screen and the sunlight was pouring into my room. The figure appeared behind the profile of the man who was talking, as if looking through the window,” stated L. M. Gowing. “I thought perhaps it was due to the light, but the man talking moved and seemed to partly cover it. When he went back to his former position, it was there clearer than before.”

  “Both my daughter and myself certainly saw the outline of a priest to the right of the speaker and to the left of the interviewer,” wrote Mrs. G. D. Hayden of Bromham. Not only did Mr. and Mrs. Carter of Lincolnshire say, “It was very clear,” but Mrs. Carter sent in a drawing of the monk she had seen on the television. From Norwich, where the broadcast originated, came a state
ment from a viewer named Elviera Panetta who also drew the bearded monk, showing him to have a long, haggard face. “Both my mother and I saw the monk looking through the window; he is cowled, bearded, and his hands are slightly raised.” One viewer, Miss M. C. Grix, wrote to the station inquiring whether “it was a real person standing in the window just behind the man who was talking, dressed in black and looking as if he had his hands together in prayer,” to which Nora Kononenko of Suffolk added, “It first looked to me like a skull with a hood, and then, as the gentlemen went on talking, it seemed to come forward and peer in. At that moment it distinctly changed into a gaunt-looking face, with a horrible leer upon it.” The station decided to run the film again, as testimonies kept pouring in. After the second run, even more people saw the ghostly monk on the screen.

  “Your repeat of the alleged haunted house shook me considerably,” wrote Mrs. A. C. Mason, “not because of what I had seen in the original broadcast, but because your Mr. MacGregor gaily quipped, ‘Well, did you see anything?’ I was astonished that anyone else couldn’t see what was so clear to me. I did see the monk both times.” Some viewers sent in simple statements, unsolicited and to the point. “I saw the monk in the window just as plain as could be. It was there at the time and I can assure you I did not imagine it,” wrote Mrs. Joan Collis of Suffolk.