Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  Sometime after, she sat facing the same stairs in the company of her bother and sister-in-law, when she heard the footsteps again and the stranger appeared. Only this time she got a good look at him and was able to describe his thin, very pale face, his black hair, and the black suit and fedora hat he wore.

  Nobody believed the girl, of course, and even the landlady accused her of imagining all this. But after a year, her father became alarmed at his daughter’s nervousness and decided to move. Finally, the landlady asked for details of the apparition, and listened as the girl described the ghost she had seen.

  “My God,” the landlady, a Mrs. Grimshaw, finally said. “I knew that man—he hanged himself on the top floor!”

  * * *

  Sometimes the dead will only stay on until things have been straightened out to their taste. Anna Arrington was a lady with the gift of mediumship who lived in New York State. In 1944, her mother-in-law, a woman of some wealth, passed on in Wilmington, North Carolina, and was buried there. There was some question about her will. Three days after her death, Mrs. Arrington was awakened from heavy sleep at 3 A.M. by a hand touching hers.

  Her first thought was that one of her two children wanted something. On awakening, however, she saw her mother-in-law in a flowing white gown standing at the foot of her bed. While her husband continued to snore, the ghost put a finger to Mrs. Arrington’s lips and asked her not to awaken her son, but to remember that the missing will was in the dining room of her house on top of the dish closet under a sugar bowl. Mrs. Arrington was roundly laughed at by her husband the next morning, but several days later his sister returned from Wilmington (the Arringtons lived in New York City at the time) and confirmed that the will had indeed been found where the ghost had indicated.

  * * *

  Back in the 1960s, I was approached by a gentleman named Paul Herring, who was born in Germany, and who lived in a small apartment on Manhattan’s East Side as well as in a country house in Westchester County, New York. He was in the restaurant business and not given to dreaming or speculation. He struck me as a simple, solid citizen. His aged mother, also German-born, lived with him, and a large German shepherd dog completed the household.

  Mr. Herring was not married, and his mother was a widow. What caused them to reach me was the peculiar way in which steps were heard around the Westchester house when nobody was walking. On three separate occasions, Mrs. Herring saw an apparition in her living room.

  “It was sort of blackish,” she said, “but I recognized it instantly. It was my late husband.”

  The “black outline” of a man also appeared near light fixtures, and there were noises in the house that had no natural origins.

  “The doors are forever opening and closing by themselves,” the son added. “We’re going crazy trying to keep up with that spook.”

  Their bedspreads were being pulled off at night. They were touched on the face by an unseen hand, especially after dark.

  The September before, Mrs. Herring was approaching the swinging doors of the living room, when the door moved out by itself and met her! A table in the kitchen moved by its own volition in plain daylight.

  Her other son, Max, who lived in Norfolk, Virginia, always left the house in a hurry because “he can’t breathe” in it. Her dog, Noxy, was forever disturbed when they were out in the Westchester house.

  “How long has this been going on, Mrs. Herring?” I asked.

  “About four years at least,” the spunky lady replied, “but my husband died ten years ago.”

  It then developed that he had divorced her and married another woman, and there were no surviving children from that union. Still, the “other woman” had kept all of Mr. Herring Sr.’s money—no valid will was ever found. Was the ghost protesting this injustice to his companion of so many years? Was he regretting his hasty step divorcing her and marrying another?

  The Herrings weren’t the only ones to hear the footsteps. A prospective tenant who came to rent the country house fled after hearing some walk through a closed door.

  * * *

  Mrs. E. F. Newbold seems to have been followed by ghosts since childhood—as if she were carrying a lamp aloft to let the denizens of the nether world know she had the sixth sense.

  “I’m haunted,” she said. “I’ve been followed by a ‘what’s it’ since I was quite young. It simply pulls the back of my skirt. No more than that..., but when you’re alone in the middle of a room, this can be awfully disconcerting.”

  I thought of Grandma Thurston’s ghost, and how she had pulled my elbow a couple of years before while I was investigating an empty room in a pre-colonial house in Connecticut, and I couldn’t agree more. Mrs. Newbold’s family had psychic experiences also. Her little girl had felt a hand on her shoulder. It ran in the family.

  “My husband’s aunt died in Florida, while I was in New Jersey. We had been very close, and I said good-bye to her body here at the funeral at 10 A.M. At 9 P.M. I went into my kitchen and though I could not see her, I knew she was sitting at the table, staring at my back, and pleading with me.”

  “What about this skirt pulling?”

  “It has followed me through a house, an apartment, a succession of rented rooms, two new houses, and two old houses. I’ve had a feeling of not being alone, and of sadness. I’ve also felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard pacing footsteps, always overhead.

  “The next house we lived in was about 35 years old, had had only one owner, still alive, and no one had died there. It looked like a haunted house, but it was only from neglect. We modernized it, and then it started! Pulling at my skirt went on fairly often. One night when I was alone, that is, my husband was out of town and our three children were sound asleep—I checked them just before and just after—I was watching TV in the living room, when I heard the outside cellar door open. I looked out the window to see if someone was breaking in, since I had locked the door shortly before. While I was watching, I heard it close firmly. The door didn’t move, however. This door had a distinctive sound so I couldn’t have mistaken it.

  “I went back to my seat and picked up my scissors, wishing for a gun. I was sure I heard a prowler. Now I heard slow footsteps come up from the cellar, through the laundry room, kitchen, into the living room, right past me, and up the stairs to the second floor. They stopped at the top of the stairs, and I never heard it again. Nor do I want to. Those steps went past me, no more than five feet away, and the room was empty. Unfortunately, I have no corroboration, but I was wide awake and perfectly sober!”

  So much for the lady from Harrington Park, New Jersey.

  * * *

  Miss Margaret C. and her family lived in what surely was a haunted house, so that I won’t give her full name. But here is her report.

  In December of 1955, just two days before Christmas, I traveled to Pennsylvania to spend the holidays with my sister and her husband. They lived on the second floor (the apartment I am now renting) of a spacious mid-Victorian-style home built around a hundred years ago.

  Due to the death of my sister’s mother-in-law, who had resided on the first floor of the house, the occasion was not an entirely joyous one, but we came for the sake of my brother-in-law.

  Having come all the was from Schenectady, New York, we retired between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock. The room I slept in was closest to the passage leading to the downstairs, and the two were separated only by a door.

  Once in bed, I found it rather difficult to sleep. As I lay there, I heard a piano playing. It sounded like a very old piano and it played church music. I thought it quite strange that my brother-in-law’s father would be listening to his radio at that hour, but felt more annoyed than curious.

  The next morning, as we were having coffee, I mentioned this to my sister. She assured me that her father-in-law would not be listening to the radio at that hour and I assured her that I had heard piano music. It was then she mentioned the old piano her husband’s mother had owned for many years and which sat in the down
stairs front room.

  We decided to go and have a look at it. The dust that had settled on the keyboard was quite thick, and as definite as they could possibly be were the imprints of someone’s fingers. Not normal fingers, but apparently quite thin and bony fingers. My sister’s mother-in-law had been terribly thin and she loved to play her piano, especially church music. There was positively no one else in the house who even knew how to play the piano, except my mother, who lived with my sister and her husband.

  * * *

  Another New Jersey lady named Louise B., whose full name and address I have in my files, told me of an experience she will never forget.

  I cannot explain why I am sending this on to you, merely that I feel compelled to do so, and after many years of following my compulsions, as I call them, must do so.

  My mother had a bachelor cousin who died and was buried around Valentine’s Day, 1932. He had lived with two maiden aunts in Ridgewood, New Jersey, for most of his lifetime. He was a well-known architect in this area. He designed local monuments, one of which is standing in the Park in Ridgewood today. He was short of statute, with piercing eyes and a bushy gray full beard, and he smoked too many cigars. I was not quite 14 years old when he passed away.

  My parents decided to spare me the burial detail, and they left me at home on the way to the cemetery with instructions to stay at home until they returned. They planned on attending the burial, going back to the house with my great-aunts and then coming home before dinner, which in our house was 6 P.M.

  I have no recollection of what I did with my time in the afternoon, but remember that just before dusk I had gone indoors and at the time I was in our dining room, probably setting the table for dinner, as this was one of my chores.

  We had three rooms downstairs: the living room faced north and ran the full length of the house, while the kitchen and dining room faced southeast and southwest respectively, and a T-shaped partition divided the rooms. There was a large archway separating the dining and living rooms.

  I don’t recall when I became aware of a “presence.” I didn’t see anything with my eyes, rather I felt what I “saw,” or somehow sensed it and my sense “saw.” This is not a good explanation, but about the closest I can come to what I felt.

  This presence was not in any one spot in the room, but something that was gradually surrounding me, like the air that I was breathing, and it was frightening and menacing and very evil and stronger, and somehow he word denser seemed to apply and I knew that it was “Uncle” Oscar. I could feel him coming at me from every direction (like music that gets louder and louder), and my senses “saw” him as he had been dressed in the casket, with a red ribbon draped across his chest, only he was alive and I was aware of some terrible determination on his part and suddenly I knew that somehow he was trying to “get inside me” and I began to back away. I don’t recall speaking, nor his speaking to me. I just knew what his intention was and who he was. I last remember screaming helplessly and uselessly at him to go away. I do not know how long this lasted. I only know that suddenly he was gone, and my parents came into the room. I was hysterical, they tell me, and it took some doing to quiet me.

  Many years later Mrs. B. discovered that “Uncle” Oscar had died a raving maniac to the last.

  * * *

  Grace Rivers was a secretary by profession, a lady of good background, and not given to hallucinations or emotional outbursts. I had spoken with her several times and always found her most reluctant to discuss what to her seemed incredible.

  It seemed that on weekends, Miss Rivers and another secretary, by the name of Juliet, were the house guests of their employer, John Bergner, in Westbrook, Connecticut. Miss Rivers was also a good friend of this furniture manufacturer, a man in his middle fifties. She had joined the Bergner firm in 1948, six years after John Bergner had become the owner of a country house built in 1865.

  Bergner liked to spend his weekends among his favorite employees, and sometimes asked some of the office boys as well as his two secretaries to come up to Connecticut with him. All was most idyllic until the early 1950s, when John Bergner met an advertising man by the name of Philip Mervin. This business relationship soon broadened into a social friendship, and before long Mr. Mervin was a steady and often self-invited house guest in Westbrook.

  At first, this did not disturb anyone very much, but when Mervin noticed the deep and growing friendship between Bergner and his right-hand assistant, something akin to jealousy prompted him to interfere with this relationship at every turn. What made this triangle even more difficult for Mervin to bear was the apparent innocence with which Bergner treated Mervin’s approaches. Naturally, a feeling of dislike grew into hatred between Miss Rivers and the intruder, but before it came to any open argument, the advertising man suddenly died of a heart attack at age 51.

  But that did not seem to be the end of it by a long shot.

  Soon after his demise, the Connecticut weekends were again interrupted, this time by strange noises no natural cause could account for. Most of the uncanny experiences were witnessed by both women as well as by some of the office men, who seemed frightened by it all. With the detachment of a good executive secretary, Miss Rivers lists the phenomena:

  Objects moving in space.

  Stones hurled at us inside and outside the house.

  Clanging of tools in the garage at night (when nobody was there).

  Washing machine starting up at 1 A.M., by itself.

  Heavy footsteps, banging of doors, in the middle of the night.

  Television sets turning themselves on and off at will.

  A spoon constantly leaping out of a cutlery tray.

  The feeling of a cold wind being swept over one.

  And there was more, much more.

  When a priest was brought to the house to exorcise the ghost, things only got worse. Evidently the deceased had little regard for holy men.

  Juliet, the other secretary, brought her husband along. One night in 1962, when Juliet’s husband slept in what was once the advertising man’s favorite guest room, he heard clearly a series of knocks, as if someone were hitting the top of the bureau. Needless to say, her husband had been alone in the room, and he did not do the knocking.

  It became so bad that Grace Rivers no longer looked forward to those weekend invitations at her employer’s country home. She feared them. It was then that she remembered, with terrifying suddenness, a remark the late Mr. Mervin had made to her fellow-workers.

  “If anything ever happens to me and I die, I’m going to walk after those two girls the rest of their lives!” he had said.

  Miss Rivers realized that he was keeping his word.

  Her only hope was that the ghost of Mr. Mervin would someday be distracted by an earlier specter that was sharing the house with him. On several occasions, an old woman in black had been seen emerging from a side door of the house. A local man, sitting in front of the house during the weekdays when it was unoccupied—Bergner came up only on weekends—was wondering aloud to Miss Rivers about the “old lady who claimed she occupied the back part of the house.” He had encountered her on many occasions, always seeing her disappear into the house by that same, seldom-used, side door. One of the office workers invited by John Bergner also saw her around 1:30 A.M. on a Sunday morning, when he stood outside the house, unable to get to sleep. When she saw him she said hello, and mentioned something about money, then disappeared into a field.

  Grace Rivers looked into the background of the house and discovered that it had previously belonged to a very aged man who lived there with his mother. When she died, he found money buried in the house, but he claimed his mother had hidden more money that he had never been able to locate. Evidently the ghost of his mother felt the same way about it, and was still searching. For that’s how it is with ghosts sometimes—they become forgetful about material things.

  * * *

  The Peter Hofmann family consisted of husband, wife Pennie, and baby—then about three or
four years old. The parents were articulate, well-educated people making their home in Harvard. Not Harvard University, but Harvard near Ayer, Massachusetts, about an hour’s ride from the university.

  An automobile accident in 1956 had left Mrs. Hofmann partially paralyzed, but her keen gift of observation was not impaired. She had always had a peculiar liking for graveyards, and her first psychic experience, in 1951, consisted of a vision of a horse-drawn hearse that had passed near a cemetery. One could argue that lots of such hearses used to pull into cemeteries, but the fact remains that Mrs. Hofmann’s was not a real one.

  Their house stands next to a house built by Mrs. Hofmann’s father, a well-known physician, and it seemed that both houses were haunted. The larger house, owned by Mrs. Hofmann’s father, was built in 1721 “on the bounty received from an Indian scalp.”

  From the first moment she saw it, Pennie Hofmann had odd sensations about it. In 1960 or 1961, she and her husband were spending the night there, when at about two in the morning they both woke up for no apparent reason.

  “I spoke to what I thought was Pete,” she said, “as I could see someone by the front window, but it turned out that Pete was behind me. Needless to say, we left right away.”

  Peter Hofmann nodded and added: “I myself have been in the house at night a few times alone, and I’ve always had the feeling I was being watched.”

  Then in late October 1963, Pennie Hofmann phoned me in New York. Could I please come to Boston and tell her if she was seeing things?

  What sort of things, I asked.

  “Well,” she replied, somewhat upset, “we’d been staying over in my father’s house again a week ago. I saw a soldier in the bedroom. He was dark and had a noose around the neck; the rope was cut and his face seemed almost luminous. I swear I saw him.”