by Hans Holzer
In a high state of excitement, Madison ran into a real estate office operated nearby by a Mr. Vandervoort whom he knew well. Quickly relating what had happened to him, Madison was assured that Knight and indeed been dead for five years and that he, Madison, was seeing things.
But Ralph Madison knows in his heart he shook hands with a dead man on a street corner in Palo Alto, in plain daylight.
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A strange case came to my attention recently, strange among strange experiences in that it involves a kind of possession against which orthodox medicine seems to be powerless.
Mrs. B. of Burlingame went to at least six doctors for help, took countless nerve tonics and calming agents—but to no avail. When she heard of my work in ESP, she contacted me with a cry for help. This was in March of 1966 and I finally talked to her in October of the same year. Her voice was firm and there was no sign of panic in it. Still, what had happened to her would cause a lot of stronger people to throw in the towel in a struggle against insanity.
A widow now, Mrs. B. originally came from the Midwest where her father had been a physician, as were his father and grandfather before him. Her mother before her marriage was a high school teacher and she herself was the daughter of a senator.
Mrs. B. taught school also and later took up nursing as a profession. She was married from 1949 to 1960 and considers her marriage a most happy one. No emotional turmoils followed her widowhood, since Mrs. B. was an avid reader and musician and had surrounded herself with congenial friends. One could safely say that her life was serene and well ordered.
But it took her three letters before she could commit to paper the shocking experiences that had suddenly entered her life. I always insist on written statements from those reporting seemingly paranormal cases, and Mrs. B. reluctantly complied. It was her feeling of shame that prompted me to omit her full name from this account.
It started with a presence in the room with her, when she knew that she was quite alone. Before long, she felt the intimacies of another person on her body—a person she could not see!
She thought she had cancer and consulted every conceivable specialist, but got a clean bill of health. Yet, the attacks continued. Was she imagining the unspeakable? She began to question her own sanity. The physicians she consulted knew no answer except to reassure her that she had no physical ailment to account for the strange sensations.
Now I have heard similar stories about “attacks” by sex-minded ghosts before and sometimes they are the imagination of a frustrated middle-aged woman. No doubt about it, a change of life can produce some pretty wild symptoms in a woman, or for that matter in a man. Thus it was with extreme caution that I accepted the testimony of this lady. I wanted to be sure the case was psychic, not psychiatric.
I questioned her along ESP lines. Had she never had psychic experiences—other than the very graphically described invasions of her privacy—in the house she lived in, or elsewhere?
Apparently, the answer was affirmative. Some months before contacting me, she was doing housework on a Sunday, when she heard a voice speak to her, apparently out of thin air, a voice she did not recognize but which sounded rather low and was speaking in a whisper.
“The G.s are coming today.” Now the G.s were friends of Mrs. B.’s living at some distance. She had not seen or heard from them for months, thus was not expecting their visit in any way. Consequently, Mrs. B. refused to believe the strange “voice.” But the voice insisted, repeating the sentence once more!
Mrs. B. continued with her work, when around 1 P.M. she decided to take a rest. At 2 o’clock, the doorbell rang. Since she was not expecting any visitors, she was slow in answering it. It was the G.s, just as the voice had said!
Since then, the ghostly voice has been heard by Mrs. B. many times, always announcing someone’s coming. The voice has never erred. The name, day and exact hour are given and each time it comes to pass.
The presence of an unseen person continued to trouble Mrs. B., but in addition she heard a voice speak two words, “my wife,” several times, and on another occasion, “her husband,” as if someone were trying to tell her something she should know.
Mrs. B., of course, rejected the idea that it might be her own late husband who was haunting her, for he never believed in anything psychic while in the flesh. Shortly after this line of thought, she clearly heard the voice say, “She just does not understand.”
When I was ready to see Mrs. B. in Burlingame, which is near San Francisco, she had already moved to another house in Santa Monica. It was there that I finally talked to her.
The situation was much the same, it appeared, ruling out any possibility that the ghost or invader was somehow tied up with the house in Burlingame.
The voice, which she still did not recognize, was very insistent now.
“Her husband...she just does not understand” was followed on another occasion by a statement, “I would do anything in the world...I wonder what she would do if she knew.”
Then the words “sweetheart” and “my wife” were added and repeated on many occasions. All this happened to Mrs. B. in a house in which she was quite alone at the time.
Still, Mrs. B. refused to face the possibility that her husband, skeptic though he might have been in the physical state, had learned the truth about psychic communications and was now trying to reach her—in the way a husband might!
Sometimes the tragedies that make people of flesh-and-blood into non-physical ghosts are less horrifying than the ghosts that continue a kind of forlorn existence in the world in between—or rather I should say the ghosts are not the comparatively benign apparitions of people as we knew them, but something far more terrible, far more sinister.
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Wayne Barber is a young ambulance driver who used to run the service out of Baker, California, one of the worst stretches of road because of the many automobile accidents that have happened on it. Now it is my personal opinion that half the people driving cars should not, and, furthermore, that licenses should be renewed only after annual examinations of those who qualify for them. What happened to Mr. Barber is only one case in point.
Aged twenty-nine years, six feet tall and married, Wayne Barber is a rough-and-tough man who, as he put it, “can eat a ham sandwich in complete comfort with dead bodies all over the highway.” It’s part of his business and he isn’t the least bit sentimental about it.
Until February 1966 he had absolutely no belief in anything resembling the human soul, anything beyond death. But then something pretty terrible happened.
On Washington’s Birthday there was a wreck about five miles east of Baker, California, in which seven people died. A group of three drunks was heading down the freeway in the wrong direction and had a head-on collision with a carload of people going to Las Vegas. In this car a mother and father were taking their daughter and her fiancé to be married!
The car headed in the wrong direction burned before the bodies could be removed. The others, mother and father, were pinned in their car and the two children that were to be married were thrown clear. All seven were dead.
“Any wreck involving the living is worse than handling the dead,” Barber explained, “and this was not the worst wreck my attendant and I had ever handled. I am mentioning this so you don’t think we had a case of nerves.”
After making certain there were no survivors, they cleared the bodies off the highway and started to check them for identification. Removing the bodies is part of an ambulance crew’s work, and Barber and his aide did just that—or what was left of the bodies—in order to clear the road for traffic.
A day later a sandstorm came up, and five women travellers in the area could not proceed because of poor visibility on the road. They appealed to Barber to put them up overnight at the ambulance station, and he readily agreed. He then went to the rear of the building to put together five cots for them from his supplies of standby equipment.
It was around 10:30 P.M. and the yard lights f
ailed to work. He could see only about five feet, but he carried a small flashlight. As he busied himself on the standby rig near the corner of the building, he suddenly felt himself watched. Who would be standing there watching him in the driving storm?
He spun around and faced something he had never faced before.
There at arm’s length was what he later described as “a thing,” a terribly mutilated figure of a human being, a male, with legs hanging crookedly, just as they had been compounded in the accident, the body twisted at the waist and the head hanging at a weird angle, indicating a broken neck. But the eyes were watching him, looking straight into his—living, human eyes!
Barber was frozen to the spot long enough to observe every detail of the horrible apparition.
“There was a sad longing in the eyes, and a gratitude,” Barber said afterwards. “In those eyes there was no intention to harm me.”
Suddenly, his reactions returned and he tore into the ghost with his flashlight as if it were a knife. But he was thrashing thin air, and nothing but sand hit his face!
At this point his German Shepherd, a very rugged animal, came out of the darkness howling, out of his senses with fear. Barber continued on back to the house with the stretchers for the cots. It was then that he saw what he calls “the other thing.” This one was female. He did not see as many details of this ghost as he had observed of the male apparition, but he saw her outline clearly. It was enough for him to take a day off immediately.
But the dog was not the same for weeks, becoming a complete nervous wreck until he had to be given away to a sympathetic lady. Soon after he was run over and killed.
Barber married after this experience and he had no intention of ever talking about it to his new bride. But the dog he had acquired to take the place of the shepherd soon behaved in the most extraordinary fashion also, precisely the same as the shepherd. What was the dog seeing around the place? Barber then told his wife about the two ghosts.
The second dog had to be given away, too, when he became unmanageable in the place. Now Barber has a pug dog and he seems to be able to tolerate the influences that still pervade the spot a little better than his two predecessors.
“Something here is protecting me,” Wayne Barber explains, and he and his wife refer to the ghosts somewhat bravely as “the little people.”
Had the spirits of those two who never lived out their normal lives attached themselves to their rescuer?
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Mrs. Daphne R. lives in Malibu, California, with her husband and children. Her second husband is a Navy man and they have moved frequently. Originally English, Mrs. R. has had a number of psychic experiences and is unquestionably mediumistic. But the incident I found most fascinating had to do with a ghost her little daughter encountered. It interested me because not all the restless dead are hopeless, pathetic human beings in trouble, unable to help themselves. This ghost even helped another person. It happened in 1952.
“I was working in Heidelberg as a secretary, and I had a little three-year-old daughter from a broken marriage, who lived with my parents in England. I got awfully lonely, and increasingly sure that I ought to bring her over to Germany to live with me. So one day I flew over to England, and rode the train down to Folkestone, collected the child and her belongings and took her back to London. I had to wait a few days for her papers, so I stayed at the private home of a rather well-known photographer.
“He was most kind, and offered to put my daughter and me up for the time we had to spend in London. He was a widower. I hardly saw him, as he was out all the time on assignments. He had a small boy of around four or five, and an English nanny. They lived in a rather posh narrow house.
“One night I wanted to go to the theater, and asked the nanny if she would baby-sit for me and keep an eye on my little girl. I should add here that the child was in a terrible emotional state about leaving my parents (I was almost like a stranger to her), and she wept all the time, and seemed calmer with the nanny than with me.
“Anyway, I went out, and left the little girl in the double bed we were sharing, and the nanny promised to pop in and out of the bedroom to watch her, as the little boy had also gone to bed nearby. I wore a black suit—which is an item of importance. When I got back around 11:00 P.M., the nanny was in the kitchen, and she said Kitty had cried quite a bit (not for me, but for my parents, whom she missed), and that suddenly she had been quiet, so the nanny had run up to take a peek at her, and she was fast asleep and smiling in her sleep. The next morning I awakened, and the child was in a very happy mood, so much so that I said to her that I was so happy to see her smiling for the first time in about two days, and that perhaps she was a bit happier about going to live with Mummy in Germany. She replied that yes, she was very happy. Then she said, ‘I was unhappy last night, and I cried, because I wanted my Nana (she referred to my mother), but then the LADY came over to my bed and stroked my head and told me you were out and would be back soon, and that she would stay with me until you got back.’ I merely thought she was referring to the nanny in the house, and said ‘Yes, nanny is a nice lady,’ and my daughter said, ‘Oh no, it wasn’t the nanny, it was a pretty lady with long red hair, and she was beautiful.’ Then she went on to prattle about how the ‘Lady’ had told her how much Mummy loved her, and how unhappy it made Mummy to see the child cry, and that really it was much better for her to be with her mother than with her grandparents, and the child ended up saying ‘I realized she is right, Mummy.’
“Later that day, I asked the nanny if she had had a guest, and when she said no, I told her about the above incident, and she was quite aghast, and related to me that her master’s late wife had long red hair, and was a beautiful woman, but had been very unhappy, and I suppose nowadays we would think she was mentally unbalanced; apparently she threw herself from the balcony of the room in which my daughter and I had been sleeping. She was so interested in this—the nanny, I mean—that she asked my daughter what the ‘lovely lady’ had been wearing, and Kitty, my daughter, said, ‘A lovely long blue satin nightie,’ and later the nanny said that the late lady of the house had committed suicide in a blue satin evening house-gown.”
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Some people with ghosts in their houses get to me in person. Some write. Others manage to get me on the phone although I am not listed any more. Still others tape record their plea to me.
One such instance occurred while I was doing television in Hollywood in November of 1966.
David Burkman, of Yorba Linda, is a married man with four children; he is thirty years old. He used to be a skeptic as far as ESP and psychic phenomena are concerned. But then it happened.
It was in Fullerton, California, in April 1962, when the Burkmans were occupying a house consisting of a large living room, bedroom, den, two bedrooms for their children, and a kitchen. At the time Mrs. Burkman was already the mother of two children and expecting her next, which, however, she later lost.
At the time of the incident that made Mr. Burkman wonder about ghosts, he and his wife were asleep in their bedroom at the southeast corner of the house. It was in the early hours of the morning when Mrs. Burkman woke up from the noise of “someone trying to open the door” which is situated on the other end of the house. She woke her husband and called his attention to the noise. The door in question was the gate to the yard. It was fully locked at the time and secured with a chain.
Mr. Burkman got his revolver, loaded it, and both he and his wife now clearly heard the door open and shut. There was no mistaking the characteristic noise with which they were quite familiar. He stepped out of the bedroom into the corridor now and heard footsteps coming toward him. Someone was walking through their kitchen, then had stopped at a point where the short hallway separated the kitchen and the boy’s bedroom from the corridor leading toward the couple’s own bedroom.
Mr. Burkman put his hand on the light switch, ready to bathe the intruder—for they were sure it was one—in the light of the ceiling fixtures. Now
the footfalls continued toward the hallway, so Burkman turned the lights on and leveled his gun, ready to shoot—but to his dismay, there was no intruder to be seen!
However, the footsteps of an unseen person continued, despite the lights, down the hallway. Petrified, Mr. Burkman just stood there as the footsteps passed by and turned into the bedroom, where they stopped abruptly when they reached the spot where Mrs. Burkman was standing.
Nothing else happened to the Burkmans in this house, nor did they ever discover any cause for the strange occurrence on that April day in 1962.
However, David Burkman has had other psychic experiences.
Usually through dreams, he has had premonitions of deaths that later occurred as seen in his dreams.
What interested me in this case was the apparent disregard of the ghost of the lights being turned on and of the challenge by flesh-and-blood people.
In the case of the Integration Ghost reported by me in Ghosts I’ve Met, similar footsteps also went through the motions of a “movement remembered.” It appears therefore that someone was so intent on repeating an urgent business, a walk to a certain spot in the house, that he did not even realize the presence of others, or of lights.
David Burkman of course was wondering if he was losing his sanity—but that, at least, I could prevent, by showing him that he was not an isolated case.
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Mrs. Fanny K. lives not far from the International Airport in Los Angeles, in a small house of considerable age. Her house is built of wood and is situated three feet from a paved alley, at the rear of a 135-foot lot. She purchased it in 1947 from the two women who then owned it. They were the first wife and the daughter of a carpenter, she discovered, but nobody told her at the time that the house was haunted or that anything unusual came with the purchase.