by Hans Holzer
The police seem not particularly interested in pursuing the matter. They think it was Valerie herself who called them the first time, and that she just decided to end it all in a drunken stupor. That at least is the impression they gave Sheila.
The following day, Saturday, the window was still open. The rose Valerie had left behind was still on the sill, despite the windy weather of April.
That night when Sheila was putting on her jacket, she felt somebody helping her into it. She was alone, or so she thought.
It occurred to her then that Valerie’s spirit was not at rest and that I might be able to help. The very least I could do was talk to her now, since fate had prevented me from getting to her in time.
I arranged with Betty Ritter to be ready for me the following weekend, without telling her where we would be going, of course. The date was May 6, the time 3 P.M., and Sheila was to meet us at the apartment that once belonged to Valerie, but now was cleaned out and ready for the next occupant. The superintendent agreed to let us in, perhaps sensing why we had come or not caring. At any rate he opened the tenth floor apartment and left us alone inside.
As we reached the elevator of the East Sixty-third Street building, Betty Ritter suddenly remarked that she felt death around her. I nodded and we went upstairs.
As soon as we had stepped through the door into Valerie’s place, Betty became a psychic bloodhound. Making straight for the window—now closed—she touched it and withdrew in horror, then turned around and looked at me.
“There is a man here jumping around like mad,” she said, but there is also someone else here—I am impressed with the initial E.” She then took off her coat and started to walk toward the bathroom. There she stopped and looked back at me.
“I hear a woman screaming...I saw blood...now I see the initial M...she was harmed...it is like suicide... as if she couldn’t take it any more.”
Betty had difficulty holding back her emotions and was breathing heavily.
“She left two behind,” she said. “I see the initials L. and S.”
Betty Ritter, not a trance medium but essentially a clairvoyant, is very strong on initials, names, letters, and other forms of identification and she would naturally work that way even in this case.
“I heard her say, ‘Mama, Mama’—she is very agitated.”
“I also get a man’s spirit here...initial J.”
“How did this girl die?” I interjected at this point.
“She couldn’t take it any more. She shows the initial R. This is a living person. She gulped something, I think.”
I thought that Betty was picking up past impressions now and wanted to get her away from that area into the current layer of imprints.
“How exactly did she die?” I queried the medium. Betty had no idea where she was or why I had brought her here.
“I think she tried...pills...blood...one way or the other...in the past. She was a little afraid but she did plan this. She is very disturbed now and she does not know how to get out of this apartment. I get the initial G. with her.”
I asked Betty to convey our sympathies to her and ask her if there was something she wished us to do.
While Betty talked to the spirit woman in a low voice, I reflected on her evidence so far. The initials given—E. was the first initial of Valerie’s sister’s name, Ethel, M. was Mary, her mother, and G. the manager of the company with whom she had had a relationship—it all seemed to make sense. Betty Ritter had also correctly “gotten” the attempted suicide by pills and pointed out the window as a “hot” area.
What was to follow now?
“She is crying,” Betty reported. “She wants her loved ones to know that she didn’t mean it. She shows me the head of an Indian and it is a symbol of a car—a brand name I think—it’s red—the initial H. comes with this and then she shows me writing, something she has left unfinished. She asks her mother to forgive her because she could not help herself.”
I decided to ask Valerie some important questions through the medium. Was she alone at the time of her death?
“Not alone. Initial A. A man, I feel him walking out of the door. Agitating her, agitating her.”
“Was he with her when she died or did he leave before?”
“She says, ‘I slammed the door on him.’ And then she says, ‘And then I did it.’”
“Why?”
“I had gone completely out of my mind...could not think straight...he drove me to it....”
“This man is a living person?”
“Yes.”
“Is he aware of what happened to her?”
“Yes.”
“Did she know him well?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“What was his connection with her?”
Betty was herself pretty agitated now; in psychic parlance, she was really hot.
“I see a bag of money,” she reported, “and the letters M. or W.”
I handed her some personal belongings of Valerie’s, brought to the scene in a shopping bag by Sheila and now placed on the stove for Betty to touch. She first took up a pendant—costume jewelry—and immediately felt the owner’s vibrations.
“How I loved this,” she mumbled. “I see D. R., Doctor...this was given to her and there is much love here in connection with this...this goes way back....”
Somehow the personalities of Betty Ritter and Valerie K. melted into one now and Betty, not quite herself, seemed not to listen any more to my queries, but instead kept talking as if she were Valerie, yet with Betty’s own voice and intonation.
“There’s so much I wanted to say and I couldn’t at the time....”
Now returning to herself again, she spoke of a man in spirit, who was very agitated and who had possessed the woman, not a ghost but someone who had died...an older man who had a link with her in the past. J.W. Dark-skinned, but not Negro—India or that part of the world.”
It struck me suddenly that she might be talking of Valerie’s late husband, the man she had married long ago in Hong Kong; he was much older than she at the time.
“I have a feeling of falling,” Betty suddenly said, “I don’t know why. May have something to do with her.”
I decided to let her walk around the entire apartment and to try to pick up “hot” areas. She immediately went for the lefthand window.
“Something terrible happened here...this is the room...right here...stronger here....”
“Is there another woman involved in this story?” I asked.
“I see the initial M.” Betty replied, “and she is with a man who is living, and there is also some jealousy regarding a woman’s boyfriend...she could not take it.”
I decided to start the exorcism immediately.
“It’s such a short time ago that she went,” Betty remarked. “She wants to greet Mary...or Marie...and an L. To tell L. she is relieved now. Just carry on as usual.”
L. was the initial of Lynn, the girl at the office who had encountered the strange happenings with the earrings.
I decided to test this connection.
“Did she communicate with L. in any way?” I asked.
“Yes,” Betty nodded, “I see her by L.’s bed...perhaps she frightened her...but now she knows...didn’t mean to frighten her...she is leaving now, never wants to get back again....”
We were quiet for a moment.
“She’s throwing us kisses now,” Betty added.
“She would do that,” Sheila confirmed, “that was the way she would do it.”
And that was that.
Betty lit a cigarette and relaxed, still visibly shaken by the communications for which she had been the carrier.
We put Valerie’s pitiful belongings back into the paper bag and left the apartment, which now looked shiny and new, having been given a hasty coat of paint to make it ready for the next occupant.
No further snatching of jewelry from anyone’s ears occurred after that, and even Sheila, my friend, no longer tried to reopen the cas
e despite her belief that there was more to it than met the eyes of the police.
We decided to allow Valerie a peaceful transition and not to stir up old wounds that would occur with a reopening of the case.
But somehow I can’t quite bring myself to forget a scene, a scene I only “saw” through the eyes of a laconic police detective making a routine report: the tall, lovely Asian woman, intoxicated and nude, slamming the door on the police...and two liquor glasses on her table.
Who was that other glass for...and who smoked the second cigarette, the brand Valerie never smoked?
Who, then, was the man who left her to die?
Z 131
The Warning Ghost
NOT ALL GHOSTS have selfish motives, so to speak, in reasserting their previous ownership of a home: some even help later occupants, although the limits of a ghost’s rationality are very narrow. For one thing, if a ghost personality is aware of later inhabitants of a house and wants to communicate with them—not in order to get them out but to warn them—such a ghost is still unable to realize that the warning may be entirely unnecessary because time has passed, and the present reality no longer corresponds to the reality he or she knew when his or her own tragedy occurred.
Still, there is the strange case of Rose S., now a resident of New York State, but at one time living in Fort Worth, Texas. Miss S. is a secretary by profession, and during the mid-1960s worked for a well-known social leader. That summer, Miss S. moved into an old house in Fort Worth, renting a room at one end of the house. At the time, she wanted to be near her fiancé, an army pilot who was stationed not far away.
The old house she chanced upon was located on Bryce Avenue, in one of the older sections of Fort Worth. The owner was renting out a furnished room because the house had become too large for her. Her husband, an attorney, had passed away, and their children were all grown and living away from home.
The house seemed pleasant enough, and the room large and suitable, so Miss S. was indeed happy to have found it. Moreover, her landlady did not restrict her to the rented room, but allowed her to use the kitchen and in fact have the freedom of the house, especially as there were no other tenants. The landlady seemed a pleasant enough woman in her middle or late sixties at the time, and except for an occasional habit of talking to herself, there was nothing particularly unusual about her. Miss S. looked forward to a pleasant, if uneventful stay at the house on Bryce Avenue.
Not long after moving in, it happened that the landlady went off to visit a daughter in Houston, leaving the house entirely to Miss S. That night, Rose S. decided to read and then retire early. As soon as she switched off the lights to go to sleep, she began to hear footsteps walking around the house. At the same time, the light in the bathroom, which she had intended to leave on all night, started to grow dimmer and brighter alternately, which puzzled her. Frightened because she thought she had to face an intruder, Miss S. got up to investigate, but found not a living soul anywhere in the house. She then decided that the whole thing was simply her imagination acting up because she had been left alone in the house for the first time, and went to bed. The days passed and the incident was forgotten. A few weeks later, the landlady was again off for Houston, but this time Miss S.’s fiancé was visiting her. It was evening, and the couple was spending the time after dinner relaxing.
Miss S.’s fiancé, the pilot, had fallen asleep. Suddenly, in the quiet of the night, Miss S. heard someone whistle loudly and clearly from the next room. It was a marching song, which vaguely reminded her of the well-known melody, the Colonel Bogey March. Neither TV nor radio were playing at the time, and there was no one about. When she realized that the source of the whistling was uncanny, she decided not to tell her fiancé, not wishing to upset him.
Time went on, and another periodical trip by her landlady left Miss S. alone again in the house. This time she was in the TV den, trying to read and write. It was a warm night, and the air conditioner was on.
As she was sitting there, Miss S. gradually got the feeling that she was not alone. She had the distinct impression that someone was watching her, and then there came the faint whining voice of a woman above the sound of the air conditioner. The voice kept talking, and though Miss S. tried to ignore it, she had to listen. Whether by voice or telepathy, she received the impression that she was not to stay in the house, and that the voice was warning her to move out immediately. After another restless night with very little sleep, Miss S. decided she could take the phenomena no longer.
As soon as the landlady returned, she informed her that she was leaving, and moved in with friends tempor-arily. Eventually, her experiences at the house on Bryce Avenue aroused her curiosity and she made some quiet inquiries. It was then that she discovered the reasons for the haunting. On the very corner where the house stood, a woman and a girl had been murdered by a man while waiting for a bus. As if that were not enough to upset her, something happened to her fiancé from that moment on. Following the incident with the whistling ghost, of which her fiancé knew nothing, his behavior towards her changed drastically. It was as if he was not quite himself anymore, but under the influence of another personality. Shortly afterwards, Miss S. and her pilot broke off their engagement.
Z 132
Jacqueline
JOHN K. IS TWENTY-SIX years old, lives in Hollywood and works as a freight cashier at a steamship company. “I don’t quite know where to begin,” he said when he contacted me in May 1971. He explained that he felt he was being harassed by reincarnation memories or by someone he thought was in some mysterious way connected with his personality. Since I am always on the lookout for “evidential” reincarnation cases, I was naturally interested. In October of the same year we met at the Continental Hotel in Hollywood. Mr. K. turned out to be a slight, quiet-spoken young man far from hysterical and not particularly involved with the occult. Gradually I pieced his amazing story together and discovered what lay at the base of his strange and terrifying experiences.
John K. was born in a small town in the Ozarks with a population of only forty-two people. The house he was born and raised in was quite old, built before the Civil War. His family lived there until he reached the age of twelve, when they moved to another small town in southwestern Arizona. There his father was employed by the government on a nearby Army base. At the age of twenty, Mr. K. dropped out of college after his junior year and headed straight for Los Angeles, where he has lived ever since.
His first twelve years in the Ozarks were spent on a farm with five brothers and two sisters. The family lived a very primitive life. There was no indoor plumbing; heat was provided by a coal stove, and each Saturday night the entire family would take turns bathing in the same tub of water. At first there was no electricity in the house. For the first three grades, Mr. K. went to a one-room schoolhouse. “Our teacher was very young and had not yet finished her college education but was permitted to teach us anyway.”
Mr. K. explained, “The reason I am relating all of my earlier surroundings to you is to point out the fact that the first twelve years of my life I lived a very isolated existence.” Until he reached the age of ten, Mr. K. had not seen a television set; entertainment in his family consisted mainly of playing cards and talking. He attended the local Southern Baptist Church, into which he was duly baptized; however, after the family left the farm they dropped out of organized religion.
From an early age John K. received the impression of a presence which no one else could see. None of his immediate family had ever been out of the country, yet he was aware of the presence of a French lady whose name, he came to know, as Jacqueline. When he mentioned the presence of this woman to his family he was laughed at and told that he had a fantastic imagination, so he stopped talking about it. At an early age he also developed the ability to dream of events that later happened exactly as seen in his dreams. These prophetic dreams did not forecast great events but concerned themselves with everyday matters. Nevertheless, they were upsetting to the boy. He never r
emembered his dreams, but when the event became objective reality he started to shiver and realized he had seen it all before. This, of course, is called déjà vu and is a fairly common ESP phenomenon. He could not discuss his dreams with his family, since psychic experiences were not the kind of thing one could talk about in the Ozarks in the early fifties. But he hated to stay in the house alone; he had a terrible fear of darkness and of the house itself.
One afternoon when he was ten years old, he happened to be in the house alone, upstairs in the back bedroom. All of a sudden he knew there was a presence there, and the most horrifying fear swept through him, as if he were being choked to death. The walls seemed to vibrate, and he heard a loud sound for which there did not seem to be any natural explanation. Eventually he was able to break out of his terror and flee down the stairs.
There was something else that seemed strange about John K. from an early age on. He could never relate to men and felt completely at ease only with women—his grandmother, his mother, and his older sister. When he was very young, he began playing with his older sister, six years his senior, and enjoyed playing girls’ games tremendously. He would never join his brothers in boys’ games. He loved wearing long flowing dresses, fashions of an earlier time that he had found in the attic. Whenever he wore these dresses, he felt completely at ease and seemed to have a rather sophisticated air about him. The strange thing was that he insisted on wearing only those dresses of an earlier period of history; the shorter dresses of the current era interested him not at all. At those times he felt as though he were another person.
It was during those early childhood days that he first became aware of Jacqueline. Especially when he played with his sister, he felt that he was sexually just like her. He continued to wear dresses around the house until the time he started to school. Often when he came home from school he would go upstairs and put on his dresses. Finally, his father became aware of the boy’s tendency and threatened to send him to school wearing a dress if he didn’t stop, so John stopped. However, the impression of a female life inside him and the desire to wear long dresses persisted.