Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  In March of 1964 her maternal grandmother passed away. She had been close to her but for some reason was unable to see her in her last moments. Thus the death hit her hard and she felt great remorse at not having seen her grandmother prior to her passing. On the day of the funeral she was compelled to look up, and there before her appeared her late grandmother. Smiling at her, she nodded and then vanished. But in the brief moment when she had become visible to Sharon the girl understood what her grandmother wanted her to know. The message was brief. Her grandmother understood why she had not been able to see her in her last hours and wanted to forgive her.

  In April 1964 when she was just sixteen years old she married her present husband. They went to Memphis, Tennessee, for four days. All during their honeymoon Sharon insisted on returning home. She felt something was wrong at home, even though she couldn’t pinpoint it. Though it wasn’t a hot period of the year she felt extremely warm and very uncomfortable. Eventually her husband gave in to her urgings and returned home with her. Assuming that her psychic feelings concerned an accident they might have on the road, she insisted that they drive very carefully and slowly. There was no accident. However, when they entered the driveway of her home she found out what it was she felt all that distance away. A large fertilizer truck had hit a gasoline truck in front of her mother’s house. A tremendous fire had ensued, almost setting her mother’s house on fire. The blaze could be seen clearly in towns over five miles away. Both trucks burned up completely. It was the heat from the fire she had felt all the way to Memphis, Tennessee.

  The house outside of Hollygrove, however, kept on calling her and somehow she didn’t forget. Whenever she had a chance to drive by it she took it, looking at the house and wondering what its secret was. On one such occasion it seemed to her that she heard someone play a piano inside the vacant house. But that couldn’t very well be; she knew that there was no one living inside. Perhaps there were mice jumping up and down the keyboard, if indeed there was a piano inside the house. She shook her head, dismissing the matter. Perhaps she had only imagined it. But somehow the sound of songs being played on an old piano kept on reverberating in her mind. She decided to do some research on the house.

  Tom Kameron runs an antique shop in Hollygrove, and since the old house was likely to be filled with antiques he would be the man to question about it. That at least was Sharon’s opinion. She entered the shop pretending to browse around for antiques. A lady clerk came over and pointed at an old lamp. “I want to show you something that you’ll be interested in,” she said. “This came from the old Mulls house here.” Sharon was thunderstruck. The Mulls house was the house she was interested in. She began to question the clerk about the antiques in the Mulls house. Apparently a lot of them had been stolen or had disappeared during the last few years. Since then a caretaker had been appointed who guarded the house. At this point the owner of the shop, Tom Kameron, joined the conversation. From him Sharon learned that the house had belonged to Tom Mulls, who had passed away, but Mrs. Mulls, although very aged, was still alive and living in a sanitarium in Little Rock. Kameron himself had been a friend of the late owners for many years.

  The house had been built by a Captain Mulls who had passed away around 1935. It was originally built in St. Augustine, Florida, and was later moved to Hollygrove.

  The captain wasn’t married, yet there was a woman with him in the house when it stood in Hollygrove. This was a Native American woman he had befriended and who lived with him until her death. The man who later inherited the house, Tom Mulls, was an adopted son. Apparently Captain Mulls was very much in love with his Native American lady. After her death he had her body embalmed and placed in a glass casket, which he kept in a room in the house. It stayed there until he died, and when Tom took over the house he buried the casket in the cemetery not far away. Her grave still exists in that cemetery. There were many Indian relics and papers dealing with Indian folklore in the house during her lifetime, but they have all disappeared since. The woman played the piano very well indeed, and it was for her that the captain had bought a very fine piano. Many time he would sit listening to her as she played song after song for his entertainment.

  The house has been vacant for many years but people can’t help visiting it even though it is locked. They go up to the front steps and peer in the windows. Sharon was relieved to hear that she was not the only one strangely attracted to the old house. Others have also been “called” by the house as if someone inside were beckoning to them. Over the years strangers who have passed by the house have come to Mr. Kameron with strange tales of music emanating from the empty house. What people have heard wasn’t the rustling of mice scurrying over a ruined piano keyboard but definite tunes, song after song played by skilled hands. Eventually the house will pass into the hands of the state since Mrs. Mulls has no heirs. But Sharon doubts that the ghost will move out just because the house changes hands again. She feels her presence, very much alive and wholly content to live on in the old house. True, she now plays to a different kind of audience than she did when Captain Mulls was still alive, but then is it just possible that the captain has decided to stay behind also if only to listen to the songs she continues to play for his entertainment.

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  Georgia Stay-Behinds

  THE STATE OF GEORGIA, especially the area around Atlanta, is full of people interested in psychic research. Whether this has something to do with the fact that many cases exist in the area, or whether this is simply because Georgia has some fine universities and metropolitan centers where the interest in ESP has been high for many years, is hard to tell. But the fact is that I get far more cases of interest from the area of Atlanta and of Georgia in general than, for instance, Mississippi or Louisiana. The caliber of the people who have most of the experiences or are possessed of ESP talents is also quite high. A. W. C., a science teacher from rural Georgia, says he does not believe in ghosts such as such; however, he is quick to admit that the experiences he has had will admit of no explanation other than a psychic one. When he was a teenager he was very close to his grandmother even though she lived 150 miles away. One night, while he was in bed, he awoke and saw his grandmother standing in the corner of his room. At first he thought he was imagining things. He closed his eyes and looked once again but she was still there. Now he covered his head and after a while looked back; grandmother was still standing there. At that point he heard footsteps in the kitchen and got up to see if anybody had entered the kitchen, but to his surprise he found no one there. When he returned to his bedroom he decided, in his logical mind, that what he had seen had been a dress or some other piece of material hanging on the wall and not his grandmother. In the morning he would make sure that that was so. Came the morning and he checked and there was nothing in the corner of that room. However, a few days later the family received a telegram advising them that grandmother had had a stroke and was at the point of death. Evidently the young man had seen a projected image of his dear relative at a time when partial dissolution had taken place. Shortly thereafter the grandmother died.

  But Mr. C. not only has been the recipient of psychic impressions, he has also been able to send them, although not at will. During World War II he was with the Army in France. His family frequently discussed his fate abroad. One evening his wife, sister, and an aunt who had reared him and who was particularly close to the young man were sitting in front of a wooden stove in their home. Suddenly the aunt started to scream. Terror-stricken, the woman explained that she just seen Mr. C.’s face appear to her in the flames of the stove. At that very moment Mr. C. was wounded in France.

  * * *

  Robert Mullinax of Atlanta, Georgia, is in his early twenties. When he was seventeen years old, in 1967, he had an experience he will never forget. His mother had often had premonitions of things to come and perhaps some of this talent had come down to him also. On that particular day in April, Mrs. Mullinax had been very restless all day long as if something were about to hap
pen. She had the feeling she should telephone her sister-in-law, but somehow she never not around to it. They were not particularly close; in fact, they had visited each other only about three times in twenty-five years. That evening she knew why she had had the strange feeling of urgency to call he sister-in-law. The woman had committed suicide by shooting herself.

  It was two days after her death when young Robert found himself standing in his home in front of a large mirror. This was in their living room and he was about to comb his hair when he saw his aunt in the mirror behind him. He turned around and, sure enough, there she was standing about six feet away. As he got a closer look at her she vanished. In this fleeting moment young Robert had the impression that his aunt wanted to tell him something—perhaps express regret at what she had done and to send a message to her youngest son whom she loved very much, but she was gone before Robert could really make out the message. What is interesting about this case is the fact that the ghost was solid enough to be seen in a mirror, not merely a hallucination or a subjective vision.

  * * *

  Mrs. W. is a housewife living in Athens, Georgia. She is also a certified nursery school teacher, the mother of six children, and she has had ESP experiences for many years past. She is living proof that ESP messages can be very precise at times in giving the recipient an indication of what the message is all about and to prepare the recipient for any shock that might come his or her way. In 1946 Mrs. W. was living in another city in Georgia. At that time she had one son age two-and-a-half years and another six months old. She was also pregnant with another child. During that period she had many vivid dreams of a psychic nature. But after the third child was born she was particularly disturbed one night by a dream which became so powerful that it awoke her. She found herself crying uncontrollably, so much so that her husband was genuinely concerned. When she became calmer she told her husband she had dreamed she saw her brothers and sisters and her mother looking at her through the glass of their front door, saying, “Call an ambulance.” The dream had no meaning for her, so after a while she went back to sleep and didn’t think about it again. Three months later the dream became a reality. Her brother appeared at her front door and standing outside the glass said, “Call an ambulance.” He then explained that their father, who lived on the next street and who had no telephone, had suffered a heart attack while preparing for bed. The father died three days later. It was only after her grief ceased that Mrs. W. realized that in her dream she had seen all members of her family except one—her father was not in it. Had she understood this properly perhaps she would have been more prepared for the shock that was to come her way shortly.

  The relationship with her father had been a close one, so she was not surprised that after his passing there were times when she felt him standing near her. She did not see him, yet she knew of his presence. She hesitated to discuss this with her husband out of fear of being ridiculed or worse. During that time she awakened her husband five or six separate times and asked him to get up and shut the door since Daddy had come in. Her husband didn’t like it, but when she insisted, he did get up in order to please his wife. They never discussed it until many years later when her husband admitted that each time she had asked him to close the door it was indeed open and there had been no reason for it to be open.

  Mrs. W.’s husband is the editor of a county newspaper and a very logical man. He learned to accept his wife’s special talent as the years rolled by, but there were times when he wished that she weren’t as psychic as she was. One night she dreamed that a plane crash had taken place somewhere in back of their house and she saw some Army men drive up in a jeep and take away the bodies of those killed. In the morning she told her husband of this dream. He didn’t say anything. Two weeks later, however, he told his wife to quit having “those crazy dreams.” It appeared that Mr. W. had been traveling away from home in the direction one might properly call “back of the house” when he saw that an Army plane had crashed and Army personnel in a jeep had driven up to the site and removed some bodies, just as his wife had told him. Mrs. W. realized that she had a very special talent and perhaps had been chosen by some superior intelligence as a communicator.

  A month after her daughter Karen was born in 1952 she happened to be lying down for an afternoon nap. She was facing the wall when she felt compelled to turn over in the opposite direction. There she saw the figure of a man in a white robe standing by her bed. Her first thought was that she still had in her system some of the drug that had been given her during the birth and that she was indeed hallucinating. She thought it best to turn back to the wall. Immediately, however, she felt a strong compulsion to turn back, and this time she saw the man pointing his finger at her with a stern look on his face. She got the impression she was to get up immediately and follow him. She did just that and walked straight into the next room. As if acting in a daze she saw herself dial her husband at his office. As soon as her husband came to the phone she told him not to ask questions but if he ever intended to do something that she had asked him for, this was the time to do it. She told him to go at once to a place called Curry’s Creek to see if their son Joe was there. Her husband objected. He knew, he said, that the five-year-old was not there. Nevertheless Mrs. W. insisted. Her plea was so urgent she impressed her husband sufficiently that he did indeed go down to the creek. Ten minutes later he telephoned her asking her how she knew that the boy was indeed at the creek. It appeared that he found the little boy at the edge of the water looking down into it. The creek furnished the town’s water supply and is next to a busy highway a mile outside of town. The child had never been there before. Had Mr. W. not arrived in time the child might very well have drowned. Mrs. W. then realized that the man in the white robe had come to save their child.

  * * *

  The warning of impending disaster is a recurrent theme in ghost lore. It appears that on occasion the departed are given the task of warning the living of impending difficulties or disaster but are not permitted to be specific. Evidently that would interfere with the exercise of free will under test conditions. A similar case involves a lady from Decatur by the name of Mrs. L. E., who when a child, was staying with her Aunt Mary in her house. Twenty years before that visit Mary’s Great-Aunt Rev had passed on. With her cousins Mrs. E. then proceeded to one of the bedrooms in the house to fetch some of the tricycles they had stored in it to go outside and play. When they got to the door of the room they saw Great-Aunt Rev standing in the middle of the room right where the tricycles were. She was looking at the children rather sternly. She wore her long white nightgown and her nightcap, the clothing she was wearing when she died. The children stood there transfixed by shock. They spoke her name more in fear than in reverence. Then they ran out. When they described the apparition to the owner of the house, Mrs. E.’s Aunt Mary was very solemn. “She came back,” she said and began to move all the furniture from the house, taking it out into the yard away from the house. This seemed like strange behavior, but the children were young and did not understand many things. Then Aunt Mary took the children and walked with them up the road to a neighbor’s house. There she left them. Several hours later when they returned they found the house had burned down to ashes. No one had seen the ghost of Aunt Rev since.

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  A Tucker Ghost

  TUCKER, GEORGIA, IS ABOUT an hour’s ride due north of Atlanta, a pleasant, almost suburban community populated by pleasant, average people. The Stevens house, a landmark as early as 1854, was built of huge hand-hewn chestnut pine logs originally. The older part was added to by a Baptist minister around 1910. Finally another addition was made to the house in the late 1940s. When the Stevenses bought the house they were told that it was originally built by Indian settlers in the area around 1800, or even before. This is Cherokee Territory and according to the local tradition the Indians brought their sick to this house. They would stay with them overnight on their way to Decatur. Decatur was the town where the famed Dr. Chapman Powe
ll lived. The Powell cabin has been restored and is now located in Stone Mountain Park, but originally it was in Decatur and was moved to the park to better preserve it as a landmark. The Stevens house stands about a mile off the High Tower Trail, which is the old Cherokee Indian trail, and four miles from Stone Mountain Park. Since Mrs. Stevens is herself about one thirty-second Cherokee, she has a vivid sympathy for all Indian lore and has always been interested in the Indian background of the house. Whey they first bought the house in May 1960 the Stevenses lived in it for only a year. Then, for business reasons, they moved down to Florida and sold their house to their in-laws. However, two years later they returned from Florida and bought the house back. During that first year in the house they do not recall anything strange except for a recurrent dream Mrs. Stevens had right from the start when they took up residence at the house. In that dream she saw herself looking up through an opening in the ceiling into the darkness of a loft. She could clearly make out the rafters, wooden beams, and the chimneys. Somehow this dream seemed all very familiar. As soon as she had moved to the house she realized that her dream visions concerned the attic of their house. It looked exactly like the visions she had seen so many years prior to coming to the house. Evidently it was predestined that the Stevenses should take up residence in Tucker. On recollection Mrs. Stevens remembers that her in-laws had no special experiences in the house out of the ordinary during the two years in which they resided there. But then neither of her in-laws professed any particular interest in the occult or was possessed of psychic sensitivities.