by Hans Holzer
Nevertheless Maureen suddenly heard, in the still of the night, a swishing sound from the other side of the door, followed by footsteps and the clinking of a chain. Her heart pounded with fear as she sat there frozen, staring at the door. The key in it was turning and a voice outside the door was moaning.
For a couple of moments Maureen sat still. Then she gathered up her wits and ran up the stairs and roused her father. Quickly he came down and unlocked the door, and searched the back porch and the yard. There was nobody to be seen.
The next day the family decided that Maureen “must have heard” streetcar noises. As for the key turning in the lock, why, that was just her over-tired eyes playing tricks on her.
Maureen knew differently, for she had lived with the noises of streetcars for a long time and the moan she had heard outside the door was no streetcar. And the key moved back and forth in the lock before her yes. It did not make a clicking sound, however, as it does when it engages the lock to unlock the door. Since the rest of the family had not experienced anything out of the ordinary in the house and did not accept the possibility of the psychic, Maureen found it convenient to let the matter drop, even though she found out a few things about the house her folks had acquired back in 1957.
It had been an antique shop previously, and prior to that an old physically challenged person had lived there. His bed was near the front window giving onto the street, so that he could watch the goings-on outside in the way old people often want to—it gives them a feeling of not being shut-ins, but still part of the active world. By the time he died, the house was in deplorable condition and a real estate firm bought it and fixed it up.
For many years the old man had called this house his home, gradually becoming more and more immobile until death had taken him away from it. But had it?
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When I appeared on a special television program with Regis Philbin in Los Angeles in the fall of 1966, on which we discussed ghosts and psychic experiences and illustrated them with some of the evidential photographs I had taken of such apparitions, many people wrote or called with psychic adventures of their own or houses they wanted me to investigate.
One of the most interesting cases involved a man not particularly friendly toward the possibility of personal survival or mediumship who had been forced by his experiences to re-evaluate his views.
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Earle Burney is an ex-Marine who lives in San Diego. He was discharged from the Marine Corps in June 1945 and went to work for the Navy as a guard at a Navy Electronics Laboratory installed since World War II in an old mansion at Loma Portal, California. The work was highly classified, and security at the place was pretty strict as a consequence.
At first Burney’s job was to guard the mansion during the night, coming in at 11:15 P.M. He knew nothing about the place, and the man he relieved, for some strange reason, never talked to him about the work—seconds after Burney got there, his predecessor was out the door, as if he could not get away fast enough to suit himself.
Burney then inspected the place from top to bottom, which was part of his routine. He locked the door he had come through and put a pot of coffee on the fire in the kitchen. The house had retained much of its ancient glory, with mahogany paneling and a big, winding stairway leading up to the second story. He was puzzled, though, by a bullet hole someone had put in one of the wall ventilators.
One morning not long after he had started his job, he was sitting at his watchman’s desk drinking coffee, when he heard footsteps upstairs. It was just 2 o’clock and there was no one in the building besides himself.
Naturally, Burney jumped up immediately. The footsteps were heavy and were coming down the hallway toward the head of the stairs. Burney started up the stairs, but when he reached the top, the footsteps had stopped dead—and there was nobody within sight.
He searched every inch of the house but could not find any human being who could have caused the footsteps.
After that, he heard the steps again a few more times, but by now he was not so excited over it. He decided to ascribe it to “the house settling or cooling off,” although he could not really explain how such a noise could sound like human footsteps.
Then another phenomenon puzzled him even more. He would be sitting by his desk with only a small light burning, and the rest of the house as dark as could be. Still, he would hear music. The first time this happened, he thought that perhaps someone had left a radio on somewhere. But he found no radio anywhere. Then he discovered, as he searched the dark recesses of the old mansion, that the music was heard everywhere exactly the same way—no louder, no softer. It was faint, but then it would stop, and Burney realized he had not imagined it but really heard “something.”
Burney decided to take his little spaniel dog Amber with him. The dog was friendly and fun-loving, about as normal as a dog can be.
That night, he took her with him and made her lie down by his desk. No sooner had he done so than he noticed a strange change in the behavior of the animal. Suddenly very nervous, the dog would not go near the stairs, and just lay there near the desk, whining.
At 2 a.m. the ghostly footsteps came. The dog let out a blood-curdling scream and headed for the door. Burney let her out and she shot out into the dark, hitting an iron statue across the yard. Although not physically hurt, the dog was never the same after this incident. The slightest noise would frighten her and her fun-loving nature had given way to a pitiful existence full of neurotic fears.
Burney was very much puzzled by all this and decided to ask some questions at last.
He discovered that others had heard those nighttime footsteps too. In fact, there was a big turnover of guards at the mansion and the reason he, an ex-Marine, had been hired was primarily because of the strange events. They figured he would not be scared of a ghost. He wasn’t, but the job was hard on him, nevertheless. Especially after he found out about the bullet hole in the wall ventilator. A frightened guard had put it there. But bullets don’t stop ghosts.
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The restless dead walk on, walk on. Some of them are lucky because someone cares and brings a medium to the house or calls me to help. But for every restless one who gets help, there are a thousand who don’t. I have come to the conclusion that there are literally thousands and thousands of houses where someone died unhappily in one way or another—not necessarily violently, but not peacefully—and still walks the floors. I wish I could help them all.
Z 136
The Devil in the Flesh (Kansas)
IF YOU LIVE IN KANSAS CITY you’re bound to hear about the devil now and again if you are a Bible student or church-goer in a church that goes in for the hell-and-brimstone variety of preaching. To some people the devil is real and they will give you an argument filled with fervor and Bible quotations to prove that he exists.
Mrs. G. wasn’t one of those who were impressed by demonic outbursts, however, and could not care less whether there was a devil or not. She had grown up in a well-to-do middle-class family and spent her adult years in the world of business. At age nineteen, she met and married Mr. G. and they have had a happy life together ever since. There are no children, no problems, no difficulties whatever. She was always active in her husband’s gasoline business, and only lately had she decided to slow down a little, and perhaps do other things, leisure time things, or just plain nothing when the mood would strike her.
At age 49, that was a pretty good way to do things, she figured, and since she really did not have to work, it was just as well that she started to enjoy life a little more fully. Not that she was unhappy or frustrated in any way, but the gasoline business is not the most exciting activity in the world, and after thirty years of living by and with gas, she longed for some fresh air.
One day in the spring of 1964, a friend suggested something new and different for them to do. She had read an advertisement in the local paper that had intrigued her. A Spiritualist church was inviting the general public to its message service.
Why didn’t they have a look?
“Spiritualist church?” Mrs. G. asked with some doubt. She really did not go for that sort of thing. And yet, way back in her early years, she had had what are now called ESP experiences. When she talked to a person, she would frequently know what that person would answer before the words were actually spoken. It scared her, but she refused to think about it. Her parents’ home was a twelve-year-old house in a good section of Kansas City. It was just a pleasant house without any history whatever of either violence or unhappiness. And yet, frequently she would hear strange raps at night, raps that did not come from the pipes or other natural sources. Whenever she heard those noises she would simply turn to the wall and pretend she did not hear them, but in her heart she knew they were there.
Then one night she was awakened from a deep sleep by the feeling of a presence in her room. She sat up in bed and looked out. There, right in front of her bed, was the kneeling figure of a man with extremely dark eyes in a pale face. Around his head he wore a black and white band, and he was dressed in a toga-like garment with a sash, something from another time and place, she thought. She rubbed her eyes and looked again, but the apparition was gone.
Before long, she had accepted the phenomenon as simply a dream, but again she knew this was not so and she was merely accommodating her sense of logic. But who had the stranger been? Surely, the house was not haunted. Besides, she did not believe in ghosts.
As a young woman, she once heard a friend in real estate talk about selling a haunted house not far from them. She thought this extremely funny and kidded her friend about it often. Little did she know at the time how real this subject was yet to become in her later years!
The haunted house across the street was sold, incidentally, but nothing further was heard about it, so Mrs. G. assumed the new owners did not care or perhaps weren’t aware of whatever it was that was haunting the premises.
Her own life had no room for such matters, and when her friend suggested they attend the Spiritualist church meeting, she took it more as a lark than a serious attempt to find out anything about the hereafter.
They went that next night, and found the meeting absorbing, if not exactly startling. Perhaps they had envisioned a Spiritualist meeting more like a séance with dark windows and dim lights and a circle of hand-holding believers, but they were not disappointed in the quality of the messages. Evidently, some of those present did receive proof of survival from dear departed ones, even though the two women did not. At least not to their satisfaction. But the sincere atmosphere pleased them and they decided to come back again on another occasion.
At the meeting they managed to overhear a conversation between two members.
“He came through to me on the Ouija board,” one lady said, and the other nodded in understanding.
A Ouija board? That was a toy, of course. No serious-minded individual would take such a tool at face value. Mrs. G. had more time than ever on her hands and the idea of “playing around” with the Ouija board tickled her fancy. Consequently she bought a board the following week and decided she would try it whenever she had a moment all to herself.
That moment came a few days later, when she was all by herself in the house. She placed her fingers lightly on the indicator. Mrs. G. was positive that only her own muscle power could move the indicator but she was willing to be amused that afternoon and, so to speak, game for whatever might come through the board.
Imagine her surprise when the board began to throb the moment she had placed her hands upon it. It was a distinct, intense vibration, similar to the throbbing of an idling motor. As soon as she lifted her hands off the board, it stopped. When she replaced them, it began again after about a minute or two, as if it were building up energy again. She decided there was nothing very alarming in all this and that it was probably due to some natural cause, very likely energy drawn from her body.
After a moment, her hand began to move across the board. She assured herself that she was not pushing the indicator knowingly but there was no doubt she was being compelled to operate the indicator by some force outside herself!
Now her curiosity got the upper hand over whatever doubts she might have had at the beginning of the “experiment,” and she allowed the indicator to rush across the board at an ever-increasing speed.
As the letters spelled out words she tried to remember them, and stopped from time to time to write down what had been spelled out on the board.
“Hello,” it said, “this is John W.”
She gasped and let the pencil drop. John W. was someone she knew well. She had not thought of him for many years and if his name was still imbedded in her unconscious mind, it had been dormant for so long and so deeply, she could scarcely accuse her own unconscious of conjuring him up now.
John W. had worshipped her before she was married. Unfortunately, she had not been able to return the feeling with the same intensity. Ultimately, they lost track of each other and in thirty years never saw each other again. She learned from mutual acquaintances, however, that he had also gotten married and settled down in a nice house not far from where she and Mr. G. lived. But despite this proximity, she never met him nor did she feel any reason to.
John W. was also in the gasoline business, so they did have that in common, but there had been difficulties between them that made a marriage undesirable from her point of view. He was a good man, all right, but not her “type,” somehow, and she never regretted having turned him down, although she supposed he did not take it lightly at the time. But so many years had passed that time would have healed whatever wounds there might have been then.
When John W. died of heart failure in 1964, he was in his late fifties. Over the years he had developed a morbid personality and it had overshadowed his former gay self.
“Hello,” the Ouija board communicator had said, “this is John W.”
Could it be? She wondered. She put the board away in haste. Enough for now, she thought.
But then her curiosity made her try it again. As if by magic, the indicator flew over the board.
“I want to be with you, always,” the board spelled out now. And then an avalanche of words followed, all of them directed towards her and telling her how much he had always loved and wanted her.
Could this be something made up in her own unconscious mind? Why would she subject herself to this incursion? For an incursion it soon turned out to be. Every day, practically, she found herself drawn to the Ouija board. For hours, she would listen to the alleged John W. tell her how much he wanted to stay with her, now that he had found her again.
This was punctuated with bitter complaints that she had hurt him, that she had not understood his great devotion for her.
As the weeks went by, her own personality changed and she began to take on more and more of his characteristic moods. Whereas she had been a light-hearted, gay person, she turned moody and morbid and her husband could not fail to notice the change that had come over his wife.
But she did not feel she could tell him what had happened, partly because she did not really believe it herself yet, and partly because she felt it might harm their marriage. So she pretended to be depressed and her husband understood, blaming her middle years for it.
By the winter of 1964, her life was no longer her own. In addition to the frequent Ouija board sessions, she now began to hear the man’s voice directly.
“I am with you,” he explained, fervently, and with her he was. There was never a moment where she could be sure he was not nearby. Her privacy was gone. She kept hearing his voice, sad, but nevertheless his voice as it had been in life, talking to her from somewhere outside, and yet seemingly inside her head at the same time. She could not understand any of this and she did not know how to cope with it at first.
She threw away the accursed Ouija board that had opened the floodgates to the invasion from the beyond. But it did not help much. He was there, always present, and he could communicate with her through her own psychi
c sense. She found it difficult to fall asleep. About that time she noticed she was no longer alone in bed. At first she thought it was her imagination, spurred on by fear, that made her think the undesired one was with her. But she soon felt his physical presence close to her body.
One night she extended her hand and clearly felt something other than air above her own body! She let out a scream and turned on the light. But this merely woke her husband and she had to explain it as a bad dream, so that he would not be alarmed.
Night after night, she felt John W.’s ethereal body next to or on top of hers. There was no mistake about it. He was trying to make love to her from the shadowy world he was in, something he had been denied while in the flesh. She fought off his advances as best she could, but it did not deter him in the least.
At the beginning of their communication with the board’s help, she had still felt a kind of compassion for the poor devil who had died so sadly and rather early in his life. But whatever positive feelings she still harbored for him soon went by the board and her attitude turned into one of pure hate.
Nothing mattered in her life but to rid herself of this nightmare and return to the placid life she had been leading prior to the incident with the Ouija board.
John W. added threats and intimidation to his arsenal of evil now. Threats as to what he would do to her and her husband, if she did not accept him willingly. Ultimately, she could not bear it any longer and decided to inform her husband of what she was going through.
At first she was fearful as to what he might say. Perhaps he would have her committed to an institution, or at best, subject her to the humiliating treatments of a private psychiatrist.
But her husband listened quietly and with compassion.
“Terrible,” he finally commented, “we’ve got to get you out of this somehow.”
She sighed with relief. He evidently believed her. She herself had moments now where she questioned her own sanity. Could such things be as the sexual invasion of a woman by a dead man? Was she not merely acting out her own suppressed desires due perhaps to middle-age change of life?