Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “The place we just left,” Sybil said as we drove off, “has a feeling of sickness to it—like a place for sick people, but not a hospital.”

  Finally we arrived at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Lomar Drive in Coronado, where Gloria Jones had seen the car with Kathleen in it. All through the trip, on the ferry, and down again into Coronado Island, we avoided the subject at hand.

  But now we had arrived and it was time to find out if Sybil felt anything still hanging on in this spot.

  “I feel a sense of death,” she said slowly, uncertainly. “Despite the sunshine, this is a place of death.” It wasn’t that there was a presence here, she explained, but rather that someone had come here to wait for another person. The noise around us—it was Sunday—did not help her concentration.

  “It’s a foreign face I see,” Sybil continued. “Someone—a man, with very little hair—who is alien to this place. I see an iris next to his face.”

  Was the man using the symbol to convey the word Irish perhaps? Was he an ancestor of Kathleen’s from over there?

  I turned to Mrs. Jones.

  “I think what you witnessed here was the superimposition on a pair of motorists of the spirit image of your late friend. These things are called transfigurations. I am sure if the car had stopped, you would have found a stranger in it. Kathleen used her so that you could see her familiar face, I think.”

  Perhaps Kathleen Duffy wanted to take one more ride, a joy ride in freedom, and, proud of her accomplishment, had wanted her best friend to see her taking it.

  There have been no further disturbances or prankish happenings at the Jones house since.

  * 129

  The San Francisco Ghost Bride

  NOT FAR FROM the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, San Francisco, where the popular television series Hotel was taped, is a spot considered haunted by many. Here on California Street, in front of an average apartment house going back some years, the ghost of Flora Sommerton walks. Many have seen the girl, dressed in her bridal gown, walking right through living people and totally oblivious of them, and they, of her. Some years ago Mrs. Gwen H., a lady I worked with on a number of cases, was riding up the hill with a friend, in a cable car. Both ladies saw the strange girl in her bridal gown walking fast as if trying to get away from something—or someone.

  Where the ghostly bride of Nob Hill was spotted

  Which is exactly what she tried to do. Flora Sommerton, a San Francisco debutante, was eighteen when she disappeared from her family’s Nob Hill mansion one night in 1876. It was a major society scandal at the time: Flora simply had refused to marry the young man her parents had picked for her to marry.

  Flora never came back nor was she ever found, despite a vast search and huge reward offered for her return or information leading to her. The years went by and eventually the matter was forgotten. Flora’s parents also died and it was not until 1926 when the truth finally came out. That year Flora died in a flophouse in Butte, Montana, still dressed in her bridal gown. Ever since, she has been seen walking up Nob Hill desperately trying to escape an unwanted marriage.

  If you will slowly walk up California Street, late at night when there is little traffic, perhaps you too might run into the wide-eyed lass from 1876 and if you do, be sure to tell her it is time to let go, and that she is finally free.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Haunted People

  TRUE CASES INVOLVING a ghost that attaches itself to a specific person are not nearly as common as haunted houses, but they do exist. These are not in any sense free spirits, because the attachment represents an emotional problem that has not been fully resolved.

  But the ghost or earthbound spirit who attaches itself to a person in the physical world does have wider opportunities to manifest, or “get through,” than the traditional haunted house ghost. Such phenomena may therefore occur in several places.

  These ghosts, who are not nearly as rational as free spirits—can also make contact through deep trance mediums when communications between spirits and living people can be quite innocuous and friendly. When the spirit has unresolved problems, however, or makes demands, it can be upsetting and requires consultation with an expert.

  Some cases I have investigated include the following.

  Z 130

  The Strange Death of Valerie K.

  SOMETIMES BEING A PSYCHIC investigator puts a heavy moral burden on one, especially where there may be a possibility of preventing someone’s death. Of course, you’re never sure that you can. Take the case of Valerie K., for instance. I am not using her full name because the case is far from closed. The police won’t talk about it, but her friends are only too sure there is something mysterious about her death, and they will talk about it. They speak mainly to me, for that’s about all they can do about it—now.

  To start at the beginning, one April I got a phone call from Sheila M.—an English woman whom I had met through a mutual friend—inviting my wife and me to a cocktail party at her house on New York’s East Side. Now if it’s one thing my wife and I hate it’s cocktail parties, even on the East Side, but Sheila is a nice person and we thought she was likely to have only nice friends, so I said we’d come. The party was on April 20, and when we arrived everybody was already there, drinking and chatting, while the butler passed between the guests, ever so quietly seeing after their needs.

  Since I don’t drink, I let my wife talk to Sheila and sauntered over to the hors d’oeuvres, hopefully searching for some cheese bits, for I am a vegetarian and don’t touch meat or fish. Next to the buffet table I found not only an empty chair, unusual at a cocktail party, but also a lovely young woman in a shiny silver Oriental-style dress. In fact, the young lady was herself Chinese, a very impressive-looking woman perhaps in her middle twenties, with brown hair, dark eyes, and a very quiet, soigné air about her. It turned out that the girl’s name was Valerie K., and I had been briefly introduced to her once before on the telephone when Sheila had told her of my interest in psychic research, and she had wanted to tell me some of her experiences.

  We got to talking about our mutual interest in ESP. She sounded far away, as if something was troubling her, but I had the impression she was determined to be gay and not allow it to interfere with her enjoyment of the party. I knew she was Sheila’s good friend and would not want to spoil anything for her. But I probed deeper, somehow sensing she needed help. I was right, and she asked me if she could talk to me sometime privately.

  There were several eager young men at the party whose eyes were on her, so I thought it best not to preempt her time, since I knew she was not married. I gave her my telephone number and asked her to call me whenever she wanted to.

  About an hour later we left the party, and when we got home I suppressed a desire to telephone this woman and see if she was all right. I dismissed my feeling as undue sentimentality, for the woman had seemed radiant, and surely the reason for her wanting to see me would have to be psychic rather than personal in the usual sense.

  All through the weekend I could not get her out of my mind, but I was busy with other work and decided to call her first thing the following week.

  Monday night, as I read the Daily News, my eye fell on a brief article tucked away inside the newspaper, an article telling of the death of two women a few hours before. The paper’s date was Tuesday morning. The deaths had occurred early Monday morning. One of the two women was Valerie K.

  With a shudder I put down the paper and closed my eyes.

  Could I have prevented her death? I will let you be the judge. But first let me show you what happened in the final hours of this girl’s life on earth. Every word is the truth....

  Valerie K. came from a well-to-do Chinese family residing in Hawaii. She was as American as anyone else in her speech, and yet there was that undefinable quality in the way she put her words together that hinted at Eastern thought. After an unhappy and brief marriage to a Hong Kong businessman, she came to New York City to try living on her own. Never partic
ularly close to her parents, she was now entirely self-supporting and needed a job. She found a job vaguely described as a public relations assistant, but in fact was the secretary to the man who did publicity for the company. Somehow she was not quite right for the job or the job for her, and it came to a parting of the ways.

  The new person hired to take her place was Sheila. Despite the fact that the English woman replaced her, they struck up a friendship that developed into a true attachment to each other, so much so that Valerie would confide in Sheila to a greater extent than she would in anyone else.

  When Valerie left the office, there was no job waiting for her; fortunately, however, she had met the manager of a firm owned by the same company, and the manager, whose initial was G., took her on for somewhat selfish reasons. He had a sharp eye for beauty and Valerie was something special. Thus she found herself earning considerably more than she would have been paid in a similar job elsewhere. Soon the manager let her know that he liked her and she got to like him, too. Between August and October of the year before her death, they became close friends.

  But in October of that year she called her friend Sheila to complain bitterly of the humiliation she had been put through. G. had found another woman to take her place. Innocently, the new woman, Lynn, became the pawn in the deadly game between the manager and the Chinese beauty.

  G. found fault with her very appearance and everything she did, criticizing her and causing her to lose face—an important matter not easily forgotten.

  Still, she cared for the man and hoped that he would resume his former attentions. He didn’t, and after a miserable Christmas which she partially shared with Sheila, the axe fell. He fired her and gave her two weeks’ pay, wishing her the best.

  When Sheila heard about this she suggested that Valerie register at the unemployment office. Instead, the proud girl took sleeping pills. But she either did not take enough or changed her mind in time, for she was able to telephone Sheila and tell her what she had done. A doctor was called and she was saved. She had a session with a psychiatrist after that and seemed much more cheerful.

  But the humiliation and rejection kept boiling within her. Nothing can be as daring as a person whose affections have been rejected, and one day Valerie wrote a personal letter to the owner of the companies she had once worked for, denouncing the manager and his work.

  As if nourished by her hatred, her psychic abilities increased and she found she was able to influence people through telepathy, to read others’ thoughts and to put herself into a state of excitement through a form of mediation.

  All this of course was for the purpose of getting even, not only with the manager but with the world that had so often hurt her.

  Nobody knew for sure if she ever got a reply to her letter. But she was a regular at a Chinese restaurant near her apartment and became friendly with the owners. There she talked about her plans and how she would show the world what sort of woman she was.

  Meanwhile the manager found himself short of help and asked her back. Despite her deep hatred for the man, she went back, all the time scheming and hoping her fortunes would take a turn for the better. But she did confide in Sheila that she had taken a big gamble, and if it worked she’d be all right in more ways than one. The owner of the restaurant saw her on Friday, April 21—a day after the party at which I had met her for the first time—and she seemed unusually happy.

  She would marry a prominent European, she told him; she had been asked and would say yes. She was almost obsessed at this point with the desire to tell the whole world she would marry him; her parents in Hawaii received a letter requesting them to have formal Chinese wedding attire made up for her in Paris because she would marry soon. Had the idea of getting even with G. robbed her of her senses? It is difficult to assess this, as the principals involved quite naturally would not talk, and even I prefer that they remain anonymous here.

  That weekend—April 22 and 23—the pitch of her “wedding fever” rose higher and higher. A neighbor who had dropped in on her at her apartment found her clad only in a bikini and drinking heavily. She observed her running back and forth from her telephone, trying to reach the man overseas she said she would marry. But she couldn’t get through to him. In the meantime, she started giving possessions away, saying she would not need them any longer now that she would marry so rich a man.

  She also drew up a list of all those whom she would help once she had become the wife of the millionaire. The neighbor left rather perturbed by all this, and Valerie stayed alone in her apartment—or did she?

  It was 4 A.M. when the police received a call from her telephone. It was a complaint about excessive noise. When an officer—initialed McG.—arrived on the scene at 4:20 A.M., Valerie herself opened the door in the nude.

  “Go away,” she said, and asked to be left alone. The officer quickly surveyed the scene. She became rude and explained she was expecting a phone call and did not wish to be disturbed. The officer reported that she had been alone and was drinking, and there the matter stood.

  The minutes ticked away. It was early Monday morning, April 24.

  At precisely 5 A.M., the building superintendent looked out his window and saw something heavy fall on his terrace.

  Rushing to the scene, he discovered Valerie’s broken body. She had been killed instantly. The woman had taken two roses with her—but one somehow remained behind on the window sill of the open window from which she had plunged to her death. The other sadly fluttered to earth even as she did.

  The police officers found themselves back at the apartment sooner than they had expected, only this time there was a cause for action. After a routine inspection of the girl’s tenth floor apartment, her death was put down to accidental death or suicide by falling or jumping from her window. Since she had been drinking heavily, they were not sure which was the actual cause of death.

  Monday night Sheila called me frantically, wondering what she should do. There was no one to claim the girl’s body. Neither her sister Ethel nor her parents in Hawaii could be reached. I told her to calm down and keep trying, meanwhile berating myself for not having called Valerie in time to prevent her death.

  Eventually the parents were found and a proper funeral arranged.

  But the puzzle remained. Had she committed suicide or not?

  Did that call from Europe finally come and was it so humiliating that Valerie could no longer face the world? Was there not going to be a wedding after all—then at least there must be a funeral?

  Valerie had been particularly fond of two things in life—flowers and jewelry. To her, losing a favorite piece of jewelry was bad luck.

  Lynn, the woman who now worked at Valerie’s office, is a rather matter-of-fact person not given to emotional scenes or superstitions.

  Valerie owned a pair of jade earrings that G. had had made for her in the days when they were close. About a month before her death, Valerie gave those earrings to Lynn as a gift. There was a special stipulation, however. She must not wear them around the office, since people had seen Valerie wear them and presumably knew their history.

  Lynn agreed not to wear them around the office, but when she wore them outside a most unusual phenomenon took place. Suddenly the earrings would not stay put. One and then the other would drop off her ears as if pulled by some unseen force. That was on April 13, and Valerie was still alive though she had seemed very distraught.

  Word of Lynn’s concern with the falling earrings got back to the former owner, and finally Valerie called to assure her the falling was a “good omen.” Then a week later, on Saturday, April 22, she suddenly called Lynn shortly before midnight and asked her to wear “her” earrings at the office. Lynn promised she would wear them to work Monday.

  That was the day Valerie died. The following day, Lynn was still wearing the earrings, which now seemed to cling properly to her ears. She found herself in the ladies’ room, when she felt her right earring forced off and thrown into the toilet. It felt as if it had be
en snatched from her ear by an unseen hand.

  Returning to her desk, she noticed that an unusual chill pervaded the area where Valerie’s desk had stood. It disappeared at 4:30, which was the time Valerie usually left for home.

  All this proved too much for Lynn and she went on a week’s vacation.

  Sheila was still very upset when a male friend dropped in to help her in this sorry matter. The gentleman, a lawyer by profession, had taken off his jacket when he suddenly felt a cufflink leave his shirt. It was a particularly intricate piece of jewelry, and no matter how they searched it was never found.

  Was the dead girl trying to show her hand? Too fantastic, and yet....

  There was no rational explanation for the sudden disappearance, in plain light and in the presence of two people, of so definite an object as a cufflink.

  On Friday of that week, after the girl had been buried, her sister, Ethel, who had finally arrived in town, went to the apartment to find out what she could about her sister’s effects.

  As soon as she entered the apartment, she realized that a terrific fight had taken place in it. Nothing had been touched from the moment of death until her arrival, as the apartment had been sealed. Three knives were lying on the floor and the place was a shambles. On the table she noticed two glasses, one partially filled with Scotch and one almost empty. When she called the police to report the strange appearance of the place, she was given the cold shoulder.

  Who was the person Valerie had entertained during her last hours on earth?

  The superintendent reported to the sister that Valerie had received two letters since her death, but when they looked in the mailbox, it was empty.

  A friend, the owner of the restaurant Valerie had frequented, notified the telephone company to cut off service and forward the final bill to her. She was told the bill could not be found.

  And so it went. Was someone covering up his traces? Sheila heard these things and went to work. To her, something was terribly wrong about her friend’s death and she was going to find out what. Questioning both the restaurant owner and the girl’s sister again, she came upon another strange fact. The ash trays Ethel had found in the apartment had two different types of cigarettes in them—L&M and Winston. Valerie always smoked L&M, but who smoked Winston?