by Hans Holzer
Mrs. K. is a practical woman, somewhat impatient at times, and not easily frightened by anything. She has had a good education and has a moderate interest in ESP matters, ESP, ecially after the events I am about to relate had entered her life.
The very first night after moving into the house on 96th Street, Los Angeles, Mrs. K. was awakened from sleep by the sound of deep groans in her bedroom in which she was alone. This continued night after night. Soon, the groaning was accompanied by the touch of unseen fingers riffling through her hair, and light prodding to her ribs by someone she could not see. It was evident to her that someone wanted to get her attention. Finally, three weeks after moving in, a neighbor took pity on her and filled her in on the background of her house.
It had originally belonged to a man named Winsten, a Scandinavian carpenter, who at age 54 had married for the second time, a woman 28 years old. Under the influence of a sudden jealous streak, he had shot his wife to death, and when the police were closing in on him, committed suicide three days after. Although the two crimes had not occurred directly in the house, he had spent many years there and it was then his home.
This knowledge in no way helped calm Mrs. K.’s nerves. For one thing, the disturbances did not stop just because she now knew who it was that was causing them. It got to be so bad, she finally asked a friend to stay with her one night so that she too could hear the goings-on. That was in 1948. As soon as the two women had gone to bed, they clearly heard measured footsteps walking from the bedroom door across the living room floor and to the front door. However, they did hear the front door open and close. The friend was convinced now Mrs. K. was not “hearing things.”
Shortly after, Mrs. K. was awakened one night by the sound of a long, deep sigh followed by heartbreaking weeping.
It was a woman’s voice and Mrs. K. felt her kneeling on the floor next to her bed! She decided to ignore it and turned to the wall. But she had not slept very long when she felt something like a man’s fist wrapped in bedclothes push very hard into the back of her neck. She did not move and waited. Eventually, the power ran out and the disturbances ceased. For that night, anyway.
“More than once I have felt an evil presence standing at the head of the bed,” Mrs. K. explained, “and the most terrifying thing is that it tries to pin me down in bed, while I’m fully awake, something like throwing a plastic covering over me.”
I had heard this description of possession or attempted possession several times before. On one occasion, a seemingly heavy object fell off the ceiling and hit the bed, in which Mrs. K. was already lying, with such force that it made it sag about a foot. Yet nothing visible had fallen! At first, she thought it was merely a local earthquake. But in the morning, when she put her hand behind the pillow, she plainly felt “something like a tissue paper ruffling away.” It had been there all night, evidently.
In 1958, the ghost pushed her so violently that she woke up. As she gathered her senses, she clearly heard a whispered voice near her say the word, “Bottle!” a moment later, it repeated the demand for a bottle. Completely awake by now, she sat up in bed and challenged the ghostly intruder.
“Why are you talking about a bottle?” but she received no reply.
Soon after she saw an apparition of “her” ghost. He passed quickly from one corner of the bedroom to the other, dressed in black with a black hat with turned-down brim. However, she could not make out his features. Since then she noticed his face close to hers on several occasions, although she was never able to make it out clearly. By Christmas 1959 it had gotten so bad that she felt him holding onto her shoulder and had to struggle to rid herself of the intruder.
A rational and logical woman, Mrs. K. wanted additional proof of her observations. In 1954 she had a house guest who shared her quarters for three months, sleeping in her bedroom, while Mrs. K. took the living room to sleep in.
Her guest soon complained about lack of sleep. Someone kept watching her, she explained, someone she could not see but sensed right there in the room with her.
Another friend, strongly psychic, came to the house and instantly diagnosed the “ailment” of the place. There was great sadness in the house, she said, and went on to describe the tragedy that had created the ghostly phenomena.
From time to time Mrs. K. would hear a woman’s voice, apparently talking to someone in the room, but she could not make out the words. The phenomenon occurred only in the bedroom area, and there were periods of quiet in between periods of disturbances.
I kept in touch with Mrs. K. after her initial contact with me in February 1960. At that time I could not rush to Los Angeles myself, so I suggested that a local man with some knowledge of exorcising techniques contact her for immediate relief. Unfortunately this man never followed up on my request and Mrs. K. became more and more worried about the whole matter. It was true that it was quiet in the house for most of 1960, she said, but sooner or later the dead carpenter would show up again, she was sure. Thus her own fears began to complicate the ghostly visitations.
She called on two local mediums to try to drive the carpenter and his wife away. The mediums failed. By now the ghostly carpenter had tried to get into her bed, she claimed. I did not laugh off such a claim, outlandish as it may sound on the surface—especially to someone unacquainted with the extent to which psychic disturbances can go. Mrs. K. had not impressed me as hysterical.
Whenever things got too bad, she moved out and stayed at a neighbor’s house now, leaving the ghosts to roam the house at will.
In 1963 I was in Los Angeles and talked to her as soon as I landed. She was quite ill at that time, partly from a severe cold and partly from the nervous tension the ghosts had caused her.
I wish I could report a happy ending to this case, but I have been unable on subsequent visits to make contact with Mrs. K. Has she, like a ghost ship, vanished into the Los Angeles smog, or has the carpenter finally given up on his demand for the bottle?
Whatever the reasons, it is an object lesson to prospective house hunters not to buy suicide-owned homes. You never know what comes with the deal.
Sometimes the restless dead insist they are not dead at all. They want to participate in the activities of the living as of yore.
Mrs. Smith—this is her real name—lives in Los Angeles. Shortly after she got married for the first time in 1936, her mother joined her and her husband to live with them, but the household lacked harmony. Within a year, however, matters came to a head, when the mother became ill and was moved to the hospital, where her illness was diagnosed as terminal cancer.
At the same time, Mrs. Smith was expecting her second baby, so she, too, had to go to the hospital. Nobody knew how long her mother might live, but she was to stay at the hospital indefinitely.
After Mrs. Smith had given birth and was about to go home, she was moved one night to another ward not far from where her mother’s bed was.
That night, her last night at the hospital, she could not sleep somehow. Her eyes fastened themselves on the wall and the six windows in it. She was fully awake. Suddenly she “saw” three figures come in through those windows. What to her seemed a Christ-like figure in a white robe was flanked by her father, who had died when she was only two, and her minister who had passed on three years before.
The trio passed Mrs. Smith’s bed on their way to her mother’s bed and as they did so, the dead minister told her they had come for her mother.
Mrs. Smith sat up in bed and reached out to touch them, but the three figures disappeared. Five minutes later a nurse came to tell her that her mother had just died.
Mrs. Smith returned home, but her grief for her mother was of short duration. A week later she was busy around the house discarding her late mother’s belongings when she found that an unseen force pulled every object she was about to throw out from her hands! She could not manage to do it and had her husband take care of it.
But that was not all. Every night, when she and her husband were in bed, there would be a knock
at the door and her late mother’s voice would call out for her by name! Both Mrs. Smith and her husband saw the cupboard doors open and close by themselves, comparing notes, so to speak, on all the unearthly phenomena to make sure they were not imagining things. They were not.
They had been searching for her mother’s door key for some time, not wishing to have it fall into strange hands, as, after all, it was the key to their home. They could not locate it anywhere no matter how carefully they looked. One night the ghost of Mrs. Smith’s mother rapped at their bedroom door and told her daughter, clairaudiently, to look in a certain pocket in a coat that had not yet been given away. Then and there, Mrs. Smith jumped out of bed and looked. Sure enough, there was the key!
Mrs. Smith now realized that she had psychic powers and could hear the dead talking. Naturally, she tried to talk back to them, also via telepathy. Her mother, however, would not listen. She never answered her, never reacted to anything her daughter would say. Like all true ghosts, Mrs. Smith’s mother was disturbed and could not recognize her true status.
They rented the mother’s room to a woman. The board complained she could not sleep in the room. Someone was forever knocking at her door. Nobody had said a word to her about mother’s ghost, of course. The board moved out and Mrs. Smith and husband moved in, letting the woman have their own room in exchange.
For a few days, all seemed peaceful. Then one night the boarder was alone in the house, taking a bath. Suddenly she heard the front door open and close and someone walking up the stairs to the second floor. But when she checked she found no one there. It was enough for her and she moved out for good.
At this point, mother’s attention increased. Mrs. Smith thought things over carefully. They, too, moved out. Now her mother has the place all to herself.
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Ruth Hayden is a retired school teacher who lived at Ojai, California, a quiet, retired life, when she made contact with me in 1963.
Her idleness had left her groping for something positive to contribute, and the new truths of psychic research had attracted her strongly. Thus she had come forward to contribute her own experiences in this field as part of the ever-increasing evidence of the survival of human personality after bodily death.
I asked Miss Hayden to explain herself to me first, so that I might understand better her interest in the psychic.
“As an orphan, in a school for the blind, I had twelve years of reverent Bible training, among all sorts and conditions of men, and grew up broadly tolerant, with a lovable respect for the higher Powers. My philosophy was to treat my friends the way I wanted God to treat me, and the rest of the world as I wanted the world in general to treat me. After teaching for 36 years in two large state hospitals (again among all sorts and conditions), I came to California to escape winter.”
Her psychic experiences were many over the years. One particularly evidential case reminded me of an experience Eileen Garrett had a few years ago, when news of a friend’s passing reached her by psychic means before anyone in New York had been notified of the event.
“I had come out of a shoe-repair shop and was headed down the narrow side street toward the city square, when up in the air between the buildings, over the heads of the traffic, about fifteen feet to my left, a familiar voice said: ‘Sancho Pancho is with me now.’
“The voice was that of a friend who had died five months before. I had heard and recognized the voice and the words, but others nearby apparently did not hear anything unusual!
“‘Sancho Pancho’ was a pupil of mine who that week had undergone an operation for cancer of the throat. His real name was Tom Joyce, but my friend had nicknamed him Sancho Pancho because he was so helpful to me about the schoolroom—and nobody but my dead friend and I knew of this association.
“Without thinking about the incident I waited for my bus, rode five miles, and walked a little over half a mile up to the school. As I passed the switchboard I was told to ‘phone the Pondville Hospital.’ There I was informed that my pupil Tom—the Sancho Pancho of the spirit-voice—had just passed away, and they wanted to know if I could give them his home address. The address they had was that of the institution in which he was living and where I was a teacher.”
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I first heard of Adriana de Sola down on Charles Street, New York, when we investigated the strange occurrences at the home of Barrie Gaunt. Miss de Sola had been Barrie’s house guest and one of the people who had encountered the melancholy ghost of “Miss Boyd” investigated in my book Ghosts I’ve Met, with the help of Sybil Leek.
I had always wanted to meet the spunky lady in person and when I passed through Los Angeles in late January of 1965, I decided to call on her.
Originally from Mexico, Adriana de Sola had been a long-time resident of Los Angeles, her main occupation being that of a writer, although she took on odd jobs from time to time to make ends meet—a necessity not uncommon among American writers.
Her first uncanny experience was many years ago, when she was engaged to be married but had had a fight with her intended and he had left for Acapulco. Several weeks went by. Then one night as she was brushing her hair, she heard him stand next to her and tell her that he had drowned in Acapulco at nine that very morning!
Imagine her shock when she picked up the morning paper the next day and found the tragedy reported just as he had told her.
“I smelled his special perfume but I did not see him,” she commented, “and I heard his voice as if he were whispering behind my left ear.”
“Was that the end of it? Did he just come to say goodbye?”
“Not quite...you know how Latins are sometimes...I married another man a year later, and the ghost of my fiancé so bothered us that I had to divorce him. One of our servants was mediumistic and he managed to have her do his bidding while in trance, even dropping objects on my new husband. Like a plate of soup.”
So she decided it was better to divorce the man than have him haunted out of her life!
Today, Miss de Sola is a vivacious, dark-haired woman in her middle or late forties, very self-reliant and philosophical. Her voice is firm and she exudes authority at every turn. Ghosts evidently would have a tough time getting the better of her, I concluded, as we faced each other in the comfortable confines of the Hollywood Roosevelt, where there are no specters to speak of.
When Adriana de Sola moved to a tiny village in Lower California, which is a desert-like province of Mexico, she bought a house which was such a bargain that she smelled a rat—or rather, a ghost. She was not wrong, for one night she awoke with the strong impression she should dig into a certain wall, 45 inches thick, and she followed her hunch only to discover a hidden earthenware pot, which, however, was empty. After that, all was quiet and she could enjoy the little house in peace. Evidently the former owner wanted her to find the pot.
After a brief stay in New York, where she encountered the sighing ghost of Miss Boyd on Charles Street, she came to Los Angeles and went to work at a house in Belair as a housekeeper. She had been sent there by a domestic employment agency and had no knowledge of the house or its history.
The house now belonged to a motion picture producer of some renown and she was engaged to supervise the staff, a task at which she proved very good. To her it was a means of saving some money and after a while cut loose again and do some writing on her own. The house was beautiful and seemed quiet at first glance, and Adriana felt she had made a good choice.
Shortly after her arrival she found herself awakened in the middle of the night. Someone was shaking her by the shoulder. When she was fully awake, she sat up in bed. There was nothing to be seen, but her psychic sense told her there was someone standing next to her bed, a tall, slim woman with blonde hair down her shoulders. With her inner eye she “saw” this very clearly. The specter was terribly grieved and bathed in blood!
Although Adriana was impressed by her plea, she could not get herself to accept the reality of the phenomenon and ascribed it to an u
pset stomach. She prayed for the restless one and then went back to sleep.
About six or seven days later, it happened again. This time Adriana was particularly impressed with the beauty of the ghost. The next morning she decided, finally, to make some inquiries about the matter.
Her employer’s wife listened quietly to the description of the ghostly visitor, then nodded. ESP, ecially when Adriana mentioned her as appearing to her wearing a light suit, covered with blood.
The house had been Carole Lombard’s house, where she had been very happy with Clark Gable! Carole Lombard had died tragically in an airplane accident when her plane, en route to the east where she was to join her husband, hit a mountain in a storm. She was wearing a light-colored suit at the time.
Miss de Sola decided she had had enough of the uncanny and left the house two days later. Thus it may well be that Carole Lombard’s restless spirit is still clinging to her home, unless, of course, she has since found her husband Clark Gable on her side of the Veil.
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Maureen B. is a San Francisco housewife now, but in 1959, when her first brush with the uncanny took place, she was attending college summer school and living by herself in the old house her parents, Mrs. and Mrs. John F., had bought recently on Toravel Street.
Records showed the house to date back to 1907, which is pretty old for the area. The parents had gone away on vacation and Maureen should have had the place to herself—but she didn’t.
Sometimes she would stay awake all night because she had the feeling of not being alone in the house. There was something or someone staring at her—someone she could not see!
The tension made her ill, but nothing further happened until the summer of 1960 when she found herself studying late one night in the breakfast room downstairs.
Although physically tired, she was mentally quite alert. The door leading to the back porch, where the pantry was situated, was locked from the inside, and the key was in the lock. The door leading from this back porch into the yard outside was double-locked and the key was hidden away. None of the windows in the old house would open.