Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “Needless to say,” Mr. K. explained in complete frankness, “I was not the average run-of-the-mill boy, and I turned out to be very effeminate and was teased constantly by my schoolmates.” Rejected by the other boys, he began to turn within himself and did not bother to explain his ideas to others. Although he had never traveled outside the four southern states surrounding his native village, he began to feel very emotional about France, particularly Paris. “I somehow seemed to have fond memories of a life of many human pleasures, a life of a woman who was very aware and felt a need to express herself totally,” John K. explained, adding that he knew by that time that Jacqueline, whoever she might have been, had led the life of a prostitute. He thus had a sense of heavy religious condemnation, of being a wicked sinner with the threat of hell hanging over him.

  When the family finally moved to Arizona, he thought that perhaps some of his agonies would subside. But the conflict between his present surroundings and the world of Jacqueline increased almost daily. At the age of fourteen he felt that since he could not belong to this world he might as well kill himself and return to where he really belonged. He wrote a farewell note to his mother, the only one to whom he could relate at the time, his sister having married and his grandmother having grown old and feeble. In the note he told his mother that he was going to return to where he belonged, that he felt he had come from another planet and it was time for him to go back. He then ran a rope over one of the rafters in his room, put a chair under it, and placed the noose around his neck, ready to jump. Then fate intervened in the person of one of his mother’s friends who had stopped by unexpectedly. Since his mother was asleep, John had to answer the door. The visit lasted a long time, and by the time the lady had left he was no longer in the mood to take his own life.

  From then on he did rather well in school, although most people thought him too shy and introverted. He never dated girls, since he felt himself female. But he did make friends with one particular boy and remained close friends with him for ten years. Later, the boy moved to Los Angeles. When John K. dropped out of school in his junior year of college, he came to Los Angeles and moved in with his friend. At the time he was twenty years old. He still felt like a female and was still continually aware of Jacqueline.

  It was then that John became involved in the homosexual world and had the first sexual experience of his life. Whenever he had sexual relations, he felt strongly that he was fulfilling the part of the woman.

  About six months after he came to Los Angeles, he started to have terrible dreams. One night when he was totally awake he suddenly saw a woman standing at the foot of his bed. She was wearing a long nightgown and had long hair and was smiling at him. She seemed to float just above the floor. At first John thought that it was his imagination and passed it off as a silly dream. The next night the same thing happened. He realized the apparition wanted to tell him something. Strangely enough, he wasn’t particularly frightened. The third night the apparition returned, and her smile had turned into a frown of deep sorrow. She returned the following night, and this time her face showed utter terror. Deep veins stood out on her face, her eyes were bloodshot, and her mouth grinned hideously.

  She returned once again the following night, and this time her entire head had been turn off, and blood was spilled all over her beautiful flowing gown. John was fully aware of the utter torment of her soul. That same night something grabbed hold of his arm and forcibly yanked him out of bed and onto the floor. He screamed for help from his roommate, who was in the next room, but the young man had no compassion for his condition and yelled out for John to shut up or he would have him committed. After this incident John thought he was going mad and wondered to whom he could turn for advice.

  A few months passed. He was still living in Hollywood with the same roommate but by this time was a prostitute himself. He had gone to college and found himself a good job, but he had had a strong urge to become a prostitute, and so followed it. Whenever he engaged in these activities he felt a very deep satisfaction. Also at this time he resumed wearing female clothes, and since his roommate was a make-up artist by profession, he would do the make-up for him. John would never go into the streets in this array; he would wear these clothes only at home. His friends began to call him Jackie, for Jacqueline.

  Whenever he put on the clothes, John became another person. The first time he saw himself in complete make-up and female clothing he felt that Jacqueline had won at last. He now felt that she had taken total possession of him and that he was cursed for life.

  “It was not a simple case of transvestitism or going in female drag,” John explained, “It was a complete soul satisfaction on my part, and when Jacqueline came out she controlled me completely. She was very strong and I was very weak.”

  It finally reached the point that when John came home at night he would dress up in female clothing and spend the entire evening in this manner. He even slept in evening gowns. He removed all the hair from his body and delighted in taking baths and dousing himself with perfumes. This went on for two years, until John felt that something had to be done about it. He realized something was wrong with him.

  About that time another friend introduced him to Buddhism. For three years he practiced the Buddhist religion, and through it was able to find many answers for himself that had eluded him before. Because of his devotion to Buddhism, Jacqueline finally left, never to return again. A new male image began to emerge slowly but surely as a result of his Buddhist practices, and once again he was able to relate to the environment around him and find a reason for living.

  Through a friend, John received my address. He contacted me in the hope I might hypnotize him and regress him to an earlier life in which he might encounter Jacqueline. John was firmly convinced that his predicament had been due to an unfulfilled reincarnation problem, and that perhaps through hypnosis I might put him further on the road to recovery.

  “I never felt fulfillment during my pre-Buddhist sexual contacts while portraying Jacqueline,” he told me, “but it did satisfy my Jacqueline personality completely. But she is totally gone now and a new John is emerging—one who is not afraid of the dark anymore and who can live alone and stand on his own two feet, and who will someday marry a girl and have a family. I am very optimistic about the future.”

  Although neither John nor his immediate family had had any interest in or knowledge of occult practices, this was not entirely true of others in his background. An Aunt Mary had been a practicing witch, had owned many books dealing with witchcraft of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and had been a sore subject in the family. Nobody dared talk about her. But she had died before John was born, and all knowledge John had of his Aunt Mary was necessarily secondhand. Nevertheless, there had been ESP talents in the family on his father’s side, mainly messages from dead relatives, though John was never able to obtain any details. In his family the occult was something not suitable for family conversation.

  After Jacqueline had left John, he kept having ESP experiences unrelated to his ordeal. They were not world-shaking experiences, but they did convince him that his ESP faculty had remained unimpaired by the hold Jacqueline had exercised upon him for so many years. A short time before our meeting there had been a steamship strike and he was laid off. He was wondering if he should get another job outside the steamship industry when he had a strange dream. In the dream he saw his boss at the steamship company coming out of his office and saying to someone, “Call John K. back to work.” At the same time he saw the number 7 flash through the dream. Upon awakening he remembered every detail. On September 7 his boss came out of his office and told an aide, “Call John K. back to work,” and, as foreseen in the dream, he returned to his former position.

  I was rather interested in his continuing ESP experiences since I had begun to wonder whether Jacqueline was indeed a reincarnation memory or perhaps something else. We proceeded to begin hypnotic regression. I first took John K. down to age twenty, when he remembered e
very detail of his life. He even remembered the names of his best friends and what was on his desk at the time. I then took him back to age twelve and his life in Missouri. In each case he even knew his exact height at the time. He knew the names of the nearest neighbors, how many children they had and even the name of their dog. Satisfied that he was deeply in the third stage of hypnotic regression, I then took him back beyond the threshold of birth into an alleged earlier life. I worked very hard and very gradually to see whether we could locate some other personality that had been John K. in a previous lifetime, but he saw nothing. I then asked him to look specifically for Jacqueline.

  “Do you know who she is?” I asked.

  “She is someone who doesn’t like me.”

  “Is she a real person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever lived in France?”

  “No.”

  I then took him as far back as the Middle Ages, fifty years at a time, in case there were other incarnations. When we got to the year 1350, he said he felt very strange and put his hands upon his chest in a gesture I interpreted as religious. But there was no recognition of another person. I then took him, step by step, back into the present, finally awakening him, and then inquiring how he felt. Since John was a good hypnotic subject, he remembered absolutely nothing of what he had said during hypnosis.

  “Do you feel different from the way you felt fifteen minutes ago?” I inquired.

  “Well, I had a headache before I came; I don’t have a headache now.”

  He felt well-rested and satisfied with himself. Jacqueline had not put in an appearance, as she would have if she had been part of John K. I then explained to the young man that his ordeal had not been caused by reincarnation memories or an unfulfilled earlier lifetime. To the contrary, he had been victimized by an independent entity, not related to him in any way, who had somehow sought him out to serve as her medium of expression in the physical world. Jacqueline, the French prostitute, whose choice of clothes indicated that she had lived in the nineteenth century, wanted to live in this century through another body. For reasons of her own she had chosen a male body for her experiment.

  If there was any reincarnation connection between the two, it remained obscure. There is, of course, the possibility that John K. had been in another life someone close to Jacqueline, in her time, and had since reincarnated while Jacqueline had not, and that the woman attached herself to John K. just as soon as she could after his birth into the present life. I myself tend to favor this theory. It is unfortunate that this earlier John K. could not be rediscovered either consciously or in hypnosis. But if this earlier incarnation had led a fully satisfactory life, the need to retain traces of memory would not be there.

  In the case of Jacqueline, her inner conflict between what she was doing and the religious pressure exerted upon her must have been the compelling factor in keeping her in a time slot, or, rather, suspended in time, preventing her from reincarnating herself. In her predicament and frustration she needed to express herself through someone in the present, since she could not herself go on and be someone else. Deprived of her medium, Jacqueline perhaps will have found an avenue of escape into the next stage of existence and hopefully will not be heard from again.

  Z 133

  The Wurmbrand Curse

  ONE OF THE STRANGEST cases I have ever investigated took me from sunny California to the dank, dark recesses of an Austrian castle, a case so strange that I am still hard put to find a parallel in the annals of psychic research. And yet all this happened only yesterday, in the practical 1960s, barely two hours from a spanking new jetport.

  It all began in Vienna in 1964, when my good friend Turhan Bey told me of a haunted castle belonging to a friend of his who resided in Hollywood. The friend’s name was von Wurmbrand, and Turhan promised to introduce us. But somehow the matter slipped our minds at the time.

  Fate, however, had meant for me to meet this man, apparently, for in November of the same year I received a letter from Count Wurmbrand, telling me he had read Ghost Hunter, and thought possibly I could help him solve his psychic problem. What had called me to his attention was not only my book but a silly newspaper article in the Vienna Volksblatt, a newspaper of very minor importance that had seen fit to ridicule my work. The article had dealt with the ghost at Forchtenstein reported by me in Ghosts I’ve Met.

  Subsequently, I met the Count at the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood. Over lunch, we talked of his predicament and I promised to come to Steyersberg, his ancestral castle, that very summer. The Count, over six feet tall, was an imposing figure of a man, very much old world, but with a dash of the practical American intermingled with his historical background.

  This was not surprising, since he had resided in California since 1927 and was an American citizen, married—a second marriage for him—to an American woman considerably his junior, with whom he lived at an impeccably decorated house in the Hollywood hills.

  The house, which I only got to know after the Count’s untimely death, is a far cry from the enormous expanse of the Steyersberg castle, but in its own way it was a perfect home, perfect for the two people who lived there happily for many years. For whatever the sinister aspects of the story, they had no powers under the warming rays of the California sun.

  Degenhard von Wurmbrand was dressed conservatively—for California, anyway—in a gray business suit, but being Austrian, he was anything but stuffy. His conversation sparkled with wit and charm; his English of course was excellent, and we spent a pleasant hour together. Unfortunately I was under great pressure at the time from television work, so I could not come to his home on Bluebird Avenue.

  He was seventy-two years old and, as a former Imperial officer, carried himself so erectly as to belie his years. Nothing about him gave a hint of illness or weakness, a point I find rather important in the light of later events.

  It was his custom to visit his castle in the mountains of Austria every summer, to join his sister, the widowed Countess Kolowrat, in a few weeks of vacationing at a place that had been in their family for centuries past. The Wurmbrand family goes back to the Middle Ages, and its members held high honors in the Austrian Empire.

  After 1939, Degenhard did not return to his castle in the summer because of the war, and only his American ownership of the estate prevented the Russians from sacking it toward the end of the Second World War. His younger brother actually administered it until his death in 1960, while Degenhard continued a carefree existence in Hollywood. But there was always a shadow, an ever present threat that even the warmth of California could not dispel.

  Degenhard von Wurmbrand had grown up in the enormous castle, a gray building of some sixty rooms perched atop a tree-covered mountain some 49 miles south of Vienna, not terribly far from the busy Schwechat airport and yet remote in many ways—as we were to learn later that year. But as the Imperial Count—his full title was His Excellency, the Imperial Count of Wurmbrand-Stuppach—grew up in the castle, he was soon to learn that it harbored a terrible secret. He shared a room with his younger brother in the oldest wing of the castle, a wing going back well into the early seventeenth century and beyond. Although Steyersberg has been completely modernized and has a bathroom for each bedroom, no structural changes whatever have changed its original appearance.

  The room the two boys occupied, back at the turn of the century, was a tower room looking out onto the moat below and the rolling hills of Styria in the distance. It is in what is now the top floor of that wing, looming considerably above the surrounding landscape. I have looked out of that window at the corner of the room where you can see both eastward and southward, and the isolation, the feeling of remoteness, is intense. The room the boys shared was connected to another tower room by a dark corridor. Their sister Huberta occupied that other room. Underneath, the castle extended well into the rock.

  Degenhard was now six years old and on his own, so to speak; his younger brother still had a nurse who shared the accommodations with
the two children. The younger boy was two.

  It was dark early that evening and nothing but blackness could be seen outside the windows. The nearest village is miles away and no lights break the enveloping shadows. The nurse was reading a book—it was only about 7 p.m.—and the only light in the large room came from a small kerosene lamp on her night table. The younger boy was already asleep but Degenhard could not close his eyes. Somehow this night seemed different to him. Perhaps the budding sixth sense had already manifested itself at this early age, for Count Wurmbrand later became very psychic and was so to his end.

  At any rate, the six-year-old was in bed, but fully awake, when his eyes happened to glance toward the corridor connecting the two rooms. Suddenly, he saw three black crows emerge from the corridor—flying into their room!

  As the startled boy watched the strange birds which had seemingly come out of thin air, one of the crows alighted on the headboard of his brother’s bed, while two perched on his bed. This was enough for him—instantly he pulled the blanket over his head. When he came up for air a moment later, there was no trace of the birds, and the nurse was reading quietly. She had not seen anything. Evidently the birds had meaning only for members of the Wurmbrand family!

  When I visited Steyersberg Castle with my wife Catherine on September 6, 1965, Count Wurmbrand took me to that very room. Except for the soft carpeting now covering the floor wall to wall and the up-to-date bathroom fixtures, it had not changed very much. The view from the windows was still breathtaking.

  Again, it was dark outside, as the air was heavy with rain which had come down continuously all day. It was now four in the afternoon but the atmosphere was forbidding and depressing. The instant I set foot into that part of the castle, I felt myself pulled down and somehow found myself speaking in hushed tones. The Count suddenly looked very, very tired and old—quite different from the athletic Lord of the Manor who had greeted us at his gates earlier that day. Was the atmosphere of the room transforming him too?