by Hans Holzer
We discussed the past of the rock upon which the castle was built; originally erected in 1180, it passed into the Wurmbrand family in 1530 but it had fallen into disrepair when Degenhard’s father rebuilt it. Degenhard himself added the bathrooms and other American touches, making it probably one of the best appointed old castles in the world.
Then our conversation turned to the ghostly crows.
“I have wondered all my life what it meant,” the Count said. “I can see them even now!”
The specter of the crows—and other uncanny experiences, noises, footsteps where no one walked—troubled him through the years. But it was not until 1950 that he learned a little more about his predicament and what it meant.
“There was a German clairvoyant in California at the time,” the Count explained, “and out of curiosity I went to see her. Immediately she drew back and asked me, ‘What is this black entity I see behind you?’ She thought I was possessed.”
“Possessed?” I said. Had a ghost left the castle and travelled all the way to Hollywood? Impossible. Ghosts stay put.
The clairvoyant wondered where the Count could have “picked up” this possessing force, and he could not think of any meaningful incident—except the appearance of the ghostly crows. The clairvoyant then made an appointment for Count Wurmbrand to see a Buddhist priest specializing in exorcising the possessed.
Did it do any good?” I asked. The plot was becoming international.
“He did the ceremony three times,” the count recalled, “but after the first attempt I questioned him about the whole thing.”
The Buddhist priest, who knew nothing whatever about the Count or his background, evidently was also a medium. He described three ragged men around the Count, men who protested their expulsion since they had some unfinished business.
The Buddhist priest asked that they explain themselves, and the restless spirits informed him that two ancestors of the Count’s had done them wrong; having accused them falsely of treason, these earlier Wurmbrands had then tortured and killed the men in their castle. Even though this had happened a long time ago, the victims wanted revenge. They wanted the Count to kill, to commit a crime. That was their way of getting even for a wrong done in 1710!
Count Wurmbrand thought all this very strange, but then he recalled with terrifying suddenness how he had often felt an almost uncontrollable desire to kill, to commit murder—he, a normally gentle, peace-loving man.
Another thought struck him as he walked out of the Hollywood priest’s house. All the phenomena of an uncanny nature had taken place in the room where he had seen the three crows—and that room was in a direct line above the dungeon. His father had ordered the ancient dungeon walled up, and it is inaccessible to this day; to get into it, one would have to break down a thick wall. If anyone had been done to death at Steyersberg Castle, it was at that spot.
Count Wurmbrand examined the historical records concerning his ancestors. In 1710 the castle belonged to a different branch of the family, and, oddly enough, two men shared ownership and command, for they were also generals in the Imperial army. Thus the ghosts’ reference to two men having done them wrong made sense.
Nothing much happened to the Count in the subsequent years that would have reminded him of the ancient curse. But in 1961 he returned to Austria again and there he met a lady who had been a friend of his father’s and brother’s. She was the only person interested in psychic matters the Count knew, outside of himself, and she therefore confided in him without reservation in such areas.
It appeared that a séance had been held at the castle in his absence, at which a then-famed Vienna medium was present along with the lady and his brother. The man went into trance in one of the rooms of the castle. Suddenly, the electric lights dimmed quite by themselves for no apparent reason. Then they clearly heard heavy footfalls where nobody was seen walking. The lady had had enough and left the room, leaving the continuance of the séance to his brother.
After a while, Count Ernst also left and went to his room. But the invisible footsteps followed him right to his room. This so unnerved him that he asked the medium for further advice. The man offered to do his best, and, without having any foreknowledge of the events that had happened so many years ago in the boys’ bedroom above the dungeon, went directly to that room although he could have gone to some fifty others.
“This is where I want to sleep,” he explained, and so he did. The following morning he was none the worse for it.
The ghost had indeed communicated with him the night before. He complained of having been wrongly imprisoned for treason and tortured by the two ancestor-generals. It was exactly the same story the Buddhist had told Count Wurmbrand in Hollywood—with one notable exception: here only one man claimed to have been wronged, only one ghost.
“Was that all?” I asked. It had been quite a story.
“Not entirely,” Count Wurmbrand explained in a voice that grew slowly more tired as night fell outside. “The curse included a provision for happiness. No Wurmbrand should ever have a happy marriage within these walls, the ghost claimed. And no Wurmbrand ever has.”
I took some photographs in the haunted room, photographs that later showed remarkable superimpositions. Although my camera, double-exposure-proof due to a lock mechanism, cannot take anything but square pictures, I came up with a triple picture of oblong shape, showing areas of the room that were actually in back of me, areas the camera could not possibly have photographed under ordinary conditions—and there was no mirror or window effect to account for it in the room. These pictures are now among my psychic photographs and I treasure them highly.
Another remarkable thing about them, however, was the way Count Wurmbrand looked in one of them. Very tired and ill, as if the shadows that were to come were already being etched on his face by supernormal means!
I did not want to strain my host, but there were some loose ends I wanted to clear up before we returned to the others. Because the Count’s sister was not too keen on the subject, or so he left—wrongly, as I later discovered—he and I had gone to the haunted room alone, leaving my wife to discuss music and art with Countess Juliana Wurmbrand and Countess Kolowrat, the sister.
“Outside of yourself, your brother Ernst and of course the medium, has anyone else experienced anything out of the ordinary in this castle?” I asked.
“During the years when I was in America, the lady I mentioned before who had brought the medium here once brought here a man who was not of the best character. He was a member of the Nazi party, so intentionally she put him into the haunted room. The next morning, he complained bitterly about it. There had been terrific noises all night and people ‘trying to come in all the time.’ Some force had tried to force itself into the room, he claimed.”
Were there any records of the treason trial referred to by the ghost? We went down into the library of the castle, which was on the first floor and even nearer to the walled-up dungeon. It was an ill-lit, long room filled with manuscripts, some in a state of disorder and all covered with dust. A cursory examination yielded nothing of help.
“When was the last time you felt uneasy here?” I asked, finally.
“I wouldn’t sleep in this room, I assure you,” the Count answered. Earlier he had told me that the curse was still hanging over him and he had never really felt safe from it.
When he was at the castle, he simply avoided the areas he considered haunted and lived only in the other portions. There were the living and dining rooms, magnificent in their splendor and appointments, furnished as only a very old family can furnish their house. His own apartments were in one of the other wings, quite a walk from the big fireplace that graced the large dining room to which we now returned.
The day had been a long one, and one fraught with strange incidents. Somehow it felt like the script of a Hollywood horror movie, only we were not reading it—we were in it!
I had accepted the invitation to come to Steyersberg and been given exact instruc
tions on how to get there. Countless Kolowrat even sent me a picture postcard with the many-turreted castle on it, so I could not possibly miss it.
I hired a car in Vienna, only to discover on the very morning of our intended visit that the car had broken down and we could not go. I then telephoned Count Wurmbrand and he sent his own car and chauffeur to fetch us.
When we neared the Schlossberg, or castle hill, after about an hour’s ride through the foothills of the Austrian Alps, we found the country more and more isolated and primitive.
As we started to climb the hill to get up to the top where the castle could be seen already from some distance, the chauffeur honked his horn to advise the castle of our coming. When we rounded the final curve of the road, an incomparable sight greeted us: just inside the gray stone castle gates, as we rolled into the yard, there stood, awaiting us at attention, the butler, dressed in white jacket and dark pants, a maid in Victorian uniform, and a third servant.
By the time we had gotten out of the car with all my camera and tape equipment, Count Wurmbrand himself was walking slowly toward us from the main entrance, giving us an old-fashioned welcome.
From that moment on, we spent a delightful day in a world one regretted to leave. Unfortunately, we had already—and foolishly—committed ourselves to leave Vienna in the morning, so we could not stay over. We promised to return the following summer with Sybil Leek and finish off the ghost and the curse.
That, at least, was our intention, and we corresponded with the Wurmbrands on and off, until we could set a date for our return.
Then, suddenly, there was silence. In December of 1965, I received a black-bordered letter bearing an Austrian postmark. Instinctively I knew what it meant before I opened it.
It was the official notification that my friend had passed away on November 17, and had been buried with all honors due him in the patron’s church at nearby Kirchau, one of the villages “belonging” to the Steyersberg domain.
I was not satisfied with this formal announcement: I wanted to know more. Had not my friend been in excellent health when we last saw him?
In June of 1966 I spent some time in Hollywood, and it was then that I finally saw the California home of the Wurmbrands. Countess Juliana brought me up to date on events.
Her husband had been taken ill with a minor complaint, but one sufficiently important to be looked after in a good hospital. There was no danger, nor was he indeed suffering very deeply. Several days went by and the Count became impatient, eager to return to active life again. Juliana visited him regularly, and if anything was wrong with my friend, it was his distaste at being in the hospital at all.
Then one night he had a small blood clot. Normally, a quick treatment is possible and the outcome need not be fatal. But that night, the doctor could somehow not be found in time, and precious moments ticked off. By the time help came, it was too late. Count Wurmbrand had died of an unrelated accident, an accident that need not have happened nor been fatal to him. Had the fingers of fate, the far-reaching rays of a grim curse finally reached their last victim?
For the Count died without direct male heir bearing this illustrious name, and so it is that the Wurmbrand Castle is no longer in the hands of a Count Wurmbrand as I write this account of the strange curse that followed a man from Austria to sunny California, and back again to Austria. Who knows, if Degenhard von Wurmbrand had remained in California in 1965 he might still be alive.
I know this to be so, for I spoke to him briefly in the fall of 1964 when I passed through Hollywood. He was not sure at the time whether he could see us at his Castle in the summer of 1965 or not.
“Something tells me not to go,” he said gravely.
“Then you should not,” I advised. A man’s intuition, especially when he is psychic and has had premonitions all his life as Wurmbrand had, should be heeded.
But the Count had business in Austria and in the end he relented and went, never to return to California. Thus it was that, before I could do anything about it, the Wurmbrand curse had found its mark.
Z 134
Dick Turpin, My Love
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1973, I received a strangely elaborate and pleading letter from a young woman by the name of Cynthia von Rupprath-Snitily. The name itself was fascinating enough to warrant my further interest, but what the lady had to say concerning her strange experiences with the unknown would have attracted me even if her name had been Smith or Jones.
Cynthia had been born December 31, 1948 in Chicago, and lived in the same house until twenty-one years of age, leaving the area only to attend college at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb, Illinois. Immediately I recalled my own visit to Northern Illinois University, a huge college set in a very small town in the middle of the Illinois plains, a school which seemed forever to battle the narrow-mindedness of the surrounding town, while catering to a very large student body bent on exploring the further reaches of the human mind. Cynthia holds a Bachelor’s degree in both history and art, and is an art historian by profession. “I have dealt with both fictitious legend and concrete fact,” she stated, “and therefore I have knowledge of the fine lines that sometimes separate these two entities. I have thus carried over the cognizance to my everyday life and have incorporated it into my style of thinking. In truth, I am my own worst critic.”
In 1970 she married a man she had met at the University of Notre Dame and moved to his home town of Seattle, Washington, where he was employed at Boeing Aircraft. With the termination of the SST project, her husband enlisted in the Air Force and at the time of contacting me they were stationed at the Edwards Air Force Base in California, about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles.
Cynthia had always been a serious and sensitive person, perhaps because she was an only child of parents forty years older than herself. As a result she felt more at ease with older people, preferring their company to that of her own age. Due to her sensitivity, she was in the habit of becoming rather emotional in matters of impact to her. In order to offset this strong character trait and in view of her profession, she tried very hard to develop a logical and orderly method of approach to things, and to think matters over several times before taking any specific course of action. Thus, when she realized that she had psychic experiences from childhood onward and saw them continue in her life, she decided to analyze and investigate the phenomena in which she was a central element. She soon realized that her psychic ability had been inherited on her mother’s side of the family; her maternal grandparents had come to the United States from Croatia. Deeply embedded in the culture of many Croatian people is the belief in witchcraft, and the ability by some country folk to do unusual things or experience the uncanny. But Cynthia’s attitude towards these phenomena remained critical. “I am not overwilling to accept such phenomena without further investigation,” she explained. One case in particular impressed her, since it involved her personally.
“This case is unusual because it has occurred to three successive generations through the years. In the 1910s my grandmother was living in Chicago performing household tasks, when a neighbor dressed entirely in black came to the door. The latter woman was commonly known as a ‘strega’ and my grandmother naturally was not too happy to see her. The woman wanted to know what my grandmother was cooking in the pot on the stove. My grandmother refused and told the woman to leave, whereupon the latter reported that she would return that night, ‘to find that which she was seeking.’ That night while my grandparents, my mother, and my Uncle Bill were all sleeping in the same bed, the door suddenly blew open and my mother recalls seeing my grandmother literally struggling with some unseen force on the bed. Mother remembers quite vividly the movement of the mattress, as if something were jumping up and down on it. Certainly the sensation was stronger than a reclining figure could have inflicted. An aura of evil seemed to have invaded the room and left as quickly as did the ‘force.’ Years later, at the beginning of 1949, a similar event took place. My aunt was sitting in our Chicago home, f
eeding me a bottle, when this force again entered the scene, causing the two of us to be considerably uplifted from the couch. Again the jumping persisted and the evil presence was felt. The next performance by this “thing” occurred in the early months of 1971 in Seattle. It was around midnight and I was reading a novel, while my husband, Gary, slept. I suddenly sensed something wicked within the confines of our room. I tossed it off, but then there began that jumping motion. I became quite alarmed as I realized neither my sleeping husband nor my own reclined body could attest to such motion. I woke my husband, who is not psychic, and he, too, became aware of the jumping movement. It was now growing in intensity, but when I called out the Lord’s name, the bed suddenly ceased pitching. It wasn’t until April 1971, after moving from Seattle, that I learned of the two previous experiences.”
On her father’s side, Cynthia is descended from a noble German family, originally from Hanover. Her father had no interest or use for anything psychic. When Cynthia was only a few months old, her Aunt Doris came to live with the family as a temporary replacement for her mother, who was then quite ill and in the hospital. The aunt was sleeping on the living room couch, Cynthia’s father in the front bedroom, and Cynthia herself in a crib placed in the back bedroom. Everyone was very much concerned with her mother’s health, and her aunt, being Roman Catholic, had been praying almost around the clock. She had only been asleep for a short time, when a cold breeze awakened her and to her amazement, she saw a woman, fairly young and dressed in a nun’s habit, walking slightly above the floor through the living room and turn down the hall toward Cynthia’s room. Concerned for the little girl’s safety, the aunt quickly followed the woman into the room. There she saw the nun place her hands on Cynthia’s crib, look down at her and smile. She seemed quite unaware of the aunt and, her mission apparently accomplished, turned and walked down the hall. The aunt immediately checked the baby, and seeing that the child was alright, went after the apparition. When she arrived at the living room, the figure had vanished, yet there remained a strong scent of roses in the air which even Cynthia’s father noticed the following morning. The scent remained in the house, even though it was winter, until Cynthia’s mother came home from the hospital. There were no perfume sachets, fresh flowers, or air fresheners which could have accounted for the strange odor. The unusual scent has returned to the house from time to time and can never be satisfactorily explained; it usually coincides with an illness in the family, and has often served as a kind of telepathic warning to Cynthia’s mother, when Cynthia was ill while at college. This particular event, of course, was told to Cynthia many years later at a family gathering, but it served to underline Cynthia’s own awareness of her unusual faculty.