Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  One afternoon, while she was praying for him, she felt a clutching sensation on her arm. Later on, in bed, she clearly heard his voice, saying—“It is me, Don!” From that day on, he stayed with her constantly. On one particular amorous occasion, her mother clearly discerned a man’s outline in the empty bed. She quickly grabbed a fly swatter and chased the earthbound spirit out of her daughter’s bed!

  Once, when she was about to put on her coat to go out, the coat, apparently of its own volition, came toward her—as if someone were holding it for her to slip on!

  Whenever she was with other men, he kissed her, and she would hear his angry voice.

  But this time the séance cracked his selfish shell. “I haven’t been able to finish what I started,” he sobbed, referring to his important medical experiments. He then asked forgiveness, and that he be allowed to come back to be with Edith now and then.

  After we left—Dr. Fodor had come along, too—we all expressed hope that the Bergers would live in peace. But a few weeks later, Edith telephoned me in great excitement. The doctor had returned once more.

  I then explained to her that she had to sacrifice—rid herself of her own desire to have this man around, unconscious though it may be—and in closing the door on this chapter of her life, make it impossible for the earthbound one to take control of her psychic energies. I have heard nothing further.

  Z 139

  The Vineland Ghost

  NANCY, AN ATTRACTIVE blonde and her handsome husband Tom moved into the old farm house near Vineland, New Jersey in the summer of 1975. Tom had been a captain in the Air Force when he and Nancy met and fell in love in her native Little Rock, Arkansas. After three years, Tom decided he wanted to leave his career as a pilot and settle down on a farm. They returned to Tom’s hometown of Vineland, where Tom got a job as the supervisor of a large food processing company.

  The house had been built in 1906 by a family named Hauser who had owned it for many generations until Tom’s father acquired it from the last Hauser nineteen years before. Sitting back a few hundred yards from the road, the house has three stories and a delicate turn-of-the-century charm. There is a porch running the width of the front, and ample rooms for a growing family. Originally there were 32 acres to the surrounding farm but Tom and Nancy decided they needed only four acres to do their limited farming. Even though the house was very rundown and would need a lot of repair work, Tom and Nancy liked the quiet seclusion and decided to buy it from Tom’s father and restore it to its former glory.

  “The first time I walked into this house I felt something horrible had happened in it,” Nancy explained to me.

  By the time the family had moved in Nancy had forgotten her initial apprehension about the house. But about four weeks later the first mysterious incident occurred.

  As Nancy explained it, “I was alone in the house with the children whom I had just put to bed. Suddenly I heard the sound of children laughing outside. I ran outside to look but didn’t see anyone. I ran quickly back upstairs but my kinds were safely in their beds, sound asleep, exactly where I’d left them.”

  That summer Nancy heard the sound of children laughing several times, always when her own were fast asleep. Then one day Nancy discovered her daughter Leslie Ann, then aged three-and-a-half, engaged in lively conversation with an unseen friend. When asked what the friend looked like, the child seemed amazed her mother couldn’t see her playmate herself.

  The house of the Vineland ghost

  Convinced they had ghostly manifestations in the house, they decided to hold a séance with the help of a friend. After the séance the phenomenon of the unseen children ceased but something else happened—the gravestone incident.

  “We found the gravestone when we cleared the land,” Tom said. “We had to move it periodically to get it out of the way. We finally left it in the field about a hundred yards away from the house. Suddenly the day after our séance it just decided to relocate itself right outside our back door. It seemed impossible—it would have taken four strong men to move that stone.”

  For some time Nancy had the uncanny feeling that Ella Hauser, the woman who had built the house was “checking” on the new occupants. Tom had looked on the ghostly goings-on in a rather detached, clinical way, but when his tools started disappearing it was too much for even him.

  The house is peaceful despite the fact that the deceased Emma still lives there.

  Ghostly manifestations on the staircase

  Tom and Nancy were not the only ones who encountered the unknown. In August 1977, a babysitter, Nancy F., was putting the children to bed, when she heard someone going through the drawers downstairs. “She thought it was a prowler looking for something,” Nancy explained, “But when she finally went downstairs nothing had been touched.”

  Emma’s tombstone—she isn’t there.

  A psychic photo of Emma?

  The night after the babysitter incident Nancy went downstairs to get a drink of water and found a five-foot ten inch tall man standing in her living room—3 o’clock in the morning.

  “He was wearing one of those khaki farmer’s shirts and a pair of brown work pants. Everything was too big for the guy. I could tell he was an old man. I took one look and ran upstairs.”

  When I received their telephone call I immediately asked for additional details. It became clear to me that this was a classical case of haunting where structural changes, new owners, and new routines have upset someone who lived in the house and somehow remained in the atmosphere. As is my custom, I assembled the residents and a psychic I had brought with me into an informal circle in the kitchen. Together we asked Ella and whoever else might be “around” to please go away in peace and with our compassion—to enter those realms where they would be on their own. The atmosphere in the kitchen, which had felt rather heavy until now, seemed to lift.

  When I talked to Nancy several weeks after my visit, all was well at the house.

  The house is privately owned and I doubt that the Joneses are receiving visitors. But you can drive by it, and most people in Vineland, New Jersey know which one it is.

  Z 140

  Amityville, America’s Best Known Haunted House

  THE NIGHT OF FRIDAY, November 13, 1974, six members of the DeFeo family of Amityville, Long Island, were brutally murdered in their beds—one of the most horrifying and bizarre mass murders of recent memory.

  The lone survivor of the crime, Ronald DeFeo Jr., who had initially notified police, was soon after arrested and formally charged with the slayings. But there are aspects of the case that have never been satisfactorily resolved.

  When Ronald DeFeo Jr. got up in the middle of the night, took this gun, and murdered his entire family, that wasn’t him who did it, he says, but something...someone...who got inside his body and took over. I just couldn’t stop, says DeFeo.

  Was DeFeo a suitable vehicle for spirit possession? The facts of my investigation strongly suggest it. DeFeo himself doesn’t believe in anything supernatural. He doesn’t understand what got into him. Did he massacre his family in cold blood, or under the influence of a power from beyond this dimension?

  From the outset there were strange aspects to the case: nobody seems to have heard the shots which killed six people...how was it that none of the victims resisted or ran out of the murderer’s way? Did they in fact not hear the shots either?

  At DeFeo’s trial, two eminent psychiatrists differed sharply about the state of the murderer’s sanity: Dr. Schwartz considers DeFeo psychotic at the time of the murder, while Dr. Zolan holds him fully responsible for what he did. Rumors to the effect that DeFeo had first durgged his family’s food (which would have explained their seeming apathy) proved groundless. The mystery remained even though DeFeo’s sentence was clear: twenty-five years to life on each of the six counts of murder in the second degree, served consecutively—as if that mattered.

  Amityville—THAT house at 114 Ocean Avenue

  Side view of the house

  Et
hel Meyers, the famous trance medium, getting her bearings

  Psychic manifestations in one of the rooms

  Over and over DeFeo repeated the same story: yes, he had killed his family, and felt no remorse over it...but no, he didn’t know why. Something...someone had gotten inside his person and forced him to shoot...going from bedroom to bedroom at 3 A.M. and exterminating the same parents, brothers and sisters he had lovingly embraced at a birthday party in the house a scant two months before the crime... whatever had gotten into DeFeo surely knew no mercy.

  On January 15, 1977 I brought reputable trance medium Ethel Johnson Meyers to the house on Ocean Avenue, along with a psychic photographer to investigate what was shaping up as a case of suspected possession. Although Mrs. Meyers hadn’t the slightest notion where she was or why I had brought her there, she immediately stated: “Whoever lives here is going to be the victim of all the anger...the blind fierceness...this is Indian burial ground, sacred to them.” As she was gradually slipping into trance, I asked why the Indian spirits were so angry.

  Ethel in deep trance. The Indian chief has made contact.

  “A white person got to digging around and dug up a skeleton....” She described a long-jawed Indian whose influence she felt in the house.

  “People get to fighting with each other and they don’t know why...they’re driven to it because they are taken over by him.” According to Mrs. Meyers, the long-ago misdeed of a white settler is still being avenged, every white man on the spot is an enemy, and when a catalyst moves there, he becomes a perfect vehicle for possession... like Ronald DeFeo.

  “I see a dark young man wandering around at night ...like in a trance...goes berserk...a whole family is involved....,” the medium said and a shiver went up my spine. She had tuned right in to the terrible past of the house.

  When the pictures taken by the psychic photographer were developed on the spot, some of them showed strange haloes exactly where the bullets had struck...my camera jammed even though it had been working perfectly just before and was fine again the minute we left the house on Ocean Avenue...a house totally empty of life as we know it and yet filled with the shades of those who have passed on yet linger for they know not where to go....

  All sorts of charlatans had been to the house attracted by cheap publicity...until the new owners had enough. They knew all about the phenomena first-hand and eventually a best-selling book was based upon their experiences ...embellished, enlarged and elaborated upon...but that is another kind of story. The real story was clear: 112 Ocean Avenue had been a psychically active location for perhaps two centuries...the phenomena ranging from footsteps and doors opening by themselves to the apparitions of figures that dissolve into thin air are well-attested poltergeist manifestations, phenomena observed in literally thousands of similar cases all over the world...grist for the mills of the parapsychologist who knows there is no such thing as the supernatural, only facets of human personality transcending the old boundaries of conventional psychology.... DeFeo had painted a little room in the basement red, because the color pleased him. The room he used as a kind of toolshed. An eighteenth century owner of the spot allegedly practiced witchcraft: add it all up, and enter the devil.... DeFeo Sr. was a devoutly religious man who believed the devil was in the house, but his son left the house the minute the priest his father had called moved in.

  The house today

  When all the Satanic fallout had settled, I decided to investigate with the result that the real Amityville story began to emerge. What happened at Amityville could have happened anywhere in the world where passions are spent and human lives terminated by violence. The residue of the great crime lingers on even as the vehicle of possession gropes for an explanation of his true status. Young DeFeo is not a believer in things that go bump in the night, nor does he fear either God or the devil. But as he awaits still another interminable day in his cell at Dannemora prison, Ronald DeFeo cannot help wondering about the stranger within, the force that made him commit what he considers impossible crimes. He could have killed his father in an argument, perhaps, he concedes, but not his mother, not the children.

  DeFeo may never get an answer he can live with, but he is young and may yet see the day when some future owner of that house has his innings with the unknown. For that day will surely come. I’ve tried to exorcise the angry entity in the house, and though I have frequently succeeded in such cases, so much accumulated hatred is too powerful a reservoir to simply fade away. But in the end, we all get justice, one way or another.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Stay-Behinds

  STAY-BEHINDS IS A TERM I have invented. It refers to earthbound spirits or ghosts who owe their continued residency in what may have been their long-term home to the fact that they don’t want to leave familiar surroundings. This is not simply a willful decision (“I ain’t goin’”), though that can on occasion be the case; the majority are people who have never been told where to go and are expecting the kind of fanciful heaven their faith has for so long pictured for them. Naturally, when they pass out of the physical body they are disappointed, or at least surprised, not to see a reception committee of angels and cherubs showing them the way to Heaven, God, and possibly Jesus as well.

  Instead, they find their loved ones who have preceded them to the “other side”; they have come to make the transition easier. If the death is due to severe illness or prolonged hospitalization (including heavy doses of drugs) the person will often be confused and need to be placed into healing facilities “over there” for a while.

  But the majority of people are not prepared for what comes next: some will prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know as yet—meaning, of course, not a literal devil (a figment of the imagination) but a figure of speech. The unknown frightens them. They cling to what they know.

  The Pennsylvania lady who passed on at 90 years of age—she had spent most of them in her house—was not at all prepared for her funeral and points beyond. So when the grieving relatives returned from the cemetery, guess who was already there, in the lady’s old chair, waiting to welcome them back—the lady in question, feeling no pain, naturally, having lost or gotten rid of her physical shell.

  It is a bit tricky at times to differentiate between a true stay-behind (a person) and an impression from the past. Only when the apparition moves or speaks can you really judge.

  Stay-behinds are different from resident ghosts in another important aspect. True ghosts will resent new tenants, or even visitors, and will consider them intruders in “their” house. But the stay-behind could not care less: it is his or her place all right, but the stay-behind’s attitude is the same as it was before death. Just you leave me be and I won’t bother you!

  * 141 When The Dead Stay On

  NOTHING IS SO EXASPERATING as a dead person in a living household. I mean a ghost has a way of disturbing things far beyond the powers held by the wraith while still among the quick. Very few people realize that a ghost is not someone out to pester you for the sake of being an annoyance, or to attract attention for the sake of being difficult. Far from it. We know by now that ghosts are unhappy beings caught between two states and unable to adjust to either one.

  Most people “pass over” without difficulty and are rarely heard from again, except when a spiritualist insists on raising them, or when an emergency occurs among the family that makes intervention by the departed a desired, or even necessary, matter.

  They do their bit, and then go again, looking back at their handiwork with justified pride. The dead are always among us, make no mistake about that. They obey their own set of laws that forbids them to approach us or let us know their presence except when conditions require it. But they can do other things to let us feel them near, and these little things can mean a great deal when they are recognized as sure signs of a loved one’s nearness.

  Tragedies create ghosts through shock conditions, and nothing can send them out of the place where they found a sad end except the re
alization of their own emotional entanglement. This can be accomplished by allowing them to communicate through trance. But there are also cases in which the tragedy is not sudden, but gradual, and the unnatural attachment to physical life creates the ghost syndrome. The person who refuses to accept peacefully the transition called death, and holds on to material surroundings, becomes a ghost when these feelings of resistance and attachment become psychotic.

  Such persons will then regard the houses they lived and died in as still theirs, and will look on latter owners or tenants as merely unwanted intruders who must be forced out of the place by any means available. The natural way to accomplish this is to show themselves to the living as often as possible, to assert their continued ownership. If that won’t do it, move objects, throw things, make noises— let them know whose house this is!

  The reports of such happenings are many. Every week brings new cases from reliable and verified witnesses, and the pattern begins to emerge pretty clearly.

  A lady from Ridgewood, New York, wrote to me about a certain house on Division Avenue in Brooklyn, where she had lived as a child. A young grandmother, Mrs. Petre had a good education and an equally good memory. She remembered the name of her landlord while she was still a youngster, and even the names of all her teachers at Public School 19. The house her family had rented consisted of a basement, parlor floor, and a top floor where the bedrooms were located.

  On a certain warm October day, she found herself in the basement, while her mother was upstairs. She knew there was no one else in the house. When she glanced at the glass door shutting off the stairs, with the glass pane acting almost like a mirror, she saw to her amazement a man peeking around the doorway. Moments before she had heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs, and wondered if someone had gotten into the house while she and her mother had been out shopping. She screamed and ran out of the house, but did not tell her family about the stranger.