Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “Now we are going to discuss the other house,” I said pleasantly. “Do you remember some of the events that happened in the other house?” “Well, I wasn’t there when they took place. They told me about it...and actually, you will learn more from my son than from me because I don’t know anything.” “You were away all that time?” “Yes.” “Before you went, did anything unusual happen?” “Nothing.” “After you came back did anything happen?” “Well, I don’t know...I don’t remember anything.” “Before you bought the house, did you have any unusual experience involving extrasensory perception at any time?” “Never. I know nothing whatever about it.” “You were living somewhere else for a while.” “I was with my sister-in-law.” “How would you describe that period of your life? Was it an unhappy one? A confusing one? What would you say that period was?” “I have never been unhappy. I have never been confused.” “Why did you go?” “I felt I needed to for personal reasons.” “During that time did you have contact with your husband and son? Did you telephone or did you come back from time to time?” “I did not come back, but I had some letters from them and I believe that I talked some....” “Did your husband ever tell you some of the things that had happened in your absence?” “Yes. He told me.” “What did you make of it?” “I didn’t understand it. If I had seen it, I’d have gotten to the bottom of it somehow.” “The people who are mentioned in some of these notes, are you familiar with them? Were there any of them that you had a personal difficulty with or grudge against?” “None whatever. They were friends.” “Now, you are familiar with this lady, Mrs. Elliott, who has, apparently, sent some notes.” “Oh yes. She was a very good friend of mine. Of course, she is much older. She had a daughter my age and we were very good friends.” “Did you have any difficulties?” “I have no difficulties,” she replied and her eyes filled with tears. “No? You had at the time you left here.” “Not real difficulties. For several reasons, I needed a change. I didn’t intend to stay so long. She was living alone and she worked during the day. And we sort of got into a most enjoyable relationship whereby I took care of certain household chores while she was gone...” “What made you stay so long?” “I just really can’t tell you what it was.” “You still have no answer to the puzzle as to what happened?” “None. I have no idea.” “Do you remember having any treatments?” “I’m just getting old. That is the difficulty.”

  It was clear that her mind had blocked out all memory of the unpleasant occurrences in her life. As often happens with people who have undergone psychiatric treatment, there remains a void afterwards, even if electric shock therapy has not been used. Partially this is, of course, due to the treatment, but sometimes it is self-induced deliberately by the patient in order to avoid discussing the unpleasant. Mrs. Beaird had returned to her husband and son to resume life and try to make the best of it. To go back over the past would have served no purpose from her point of view. This was not a matter of refusing to discuss these things with me. She did not remember them quite consciously and no amount of probing would have helped, except perhaps in-depth hypnosis, and I was not prepared to undertake this with a former mental patient. Clearly then I could not get any additional material from the principal. I decided to re-examine the evidence and talk again with the one man who seemed, after all, the most reliable witness in the entire case, Mr. Beaird himself.

  In particular, I wanted to re-examine his own personal observations of certain phenomena, for it is one thing to make a report alone, quietly, filled with the memory of what one has experienced, and another to report on phenomena while being interrogated by a knowledgeable, experienced investigator. Quite possibly some new aspects might be unearthed in this fashion. At the very least it would solidify some of the incredible things that had happened in the Beaird household.

  On the morning of February 6, 1969, I met with Howard Beaird at my hotel and we sat down, quietly, to go over the fantastic events of the past three years. In order to arrive at some sort of conclusion, which I wanted very much to do, I had to be sure that Mr. Beaird’s powers of observation had been completely reliable. In going over some of his statements once again I wasn’t trying to be repetitive but rather to observe his reaction to my questions and to better determine in my own mind whether or not he had observed correctly. In retrospect I can only say that Howard Beaird was completely unshaken and repeated, in essence, exactly what he had reported to me earlier. I feel that he has been telling the truth all along, neither embellishing it nor diminishing it. Our conversation started on a calm emotional note which was now much more possible than at the time he first made his report to me, when he was still under the influence of recent events. Things had been quiet at the house and seemed to continue to remain quiet, so he was able to gather his thoughts more clearly and speak of the past without the emotional involvement which would have made it somewhat more difficult for me to judge his veracity.

  “Now we had better start at the beginning. I am interested in discussing whatever you yourself observed. Your wife was still in the house when the first thing happened?” “Yes.” “Were those real bugs?” “Yes.” “When you turned the light on?” “You could see thousands of bugs on the floor.” “How did you get rid of them?” “We had a vacuum cleaner.” “Did they come from the direction of the windows or the door?” “The door.” “Now, after the bugs, what was the next thing that you personally observed?” “I heard my wife’s voice. After my son and I had gone to bed we were lying there talking about these things that had happened. That was after she had left Tyler.” “Did it sound like her voice?” “No. It didn’t sound like her voice to me but it was her....” “Well, how did you know it was her?” “She told me it was and was talking about my sister having insulted her. Nobody else knew that except my wife and I.” “Where did the voice seem to come from? Was it in the room?” “Yes.” “What happened after that?” “Several nights after that, she appeared to Andy. I heard him talking in the bathroom. He talked for two or three minutes, and then I heard him say, well, goodbye.” “Didn’t it make you feel peculiar? His mother was obviously not there and he was talking to her?” “Well, I had already had my encounter with her.” “Did you call your wife in Daingerfield?” “No.” “Why not?” “Well, she wouldn’t have believed me. I had thought about writing her sister-in-law and telling her that you’ve got to keep my wife in Daingerfield. I don’t want her here. Yet, I thought, that’s a foolish thing to do, because all she’ll say is, she wasn’t here. She wasn’t in person. Her body wasn’t here.” “After the voice, what came next?” “Well, it was shortly after that we started hearing these other voices.” “Did you hear those voices?” “All of them, yes. All four.” “Did they sound alike or did they sound different?” “The men had deep rough voices, but I could tell them apart. And the ladies were all subtle voices and I couldn’t tell them apart, except when they told me.” “Did you ever hear two voices at the same time?” “I don’t believe so. However, Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Elliott were there at the same time. That is, they said they were. That was when Henry Anglin was giving us so much trouble and they had to carry him back to his grave.” “Let’s talk about anything that you have actually seen move.” “I saw these notes that were folded. Sometimes as many as ten or fifteen notes a day.” “From an enclosed room?” “Well, the doors weren’t closed between the rooms, but I’d be sitting at the table eating something, and all of a sudden I’d see one fall. I’d look up toward the ceiling and there’d be one up there.” “Most of these notes were signed ‘Mrs. Elliott’?” “Yes. Later she signed them. At first, Elie and then El. Now after my wife came back from Daingerfield she, too, would send me notes through Andy. I was working in my shop and Andy would bring me a note written with numbers, in code. 1 was A, 2 was B, and so forth. I hated to take the time to decipher those things, but I would sit down and find out what they said. In one note she asked me if I didn’t ‘lose’ some weight?” “Did your wife ever write you a note in longhand or in block letters?” �
�No.” “Was there any similarity in the writing of your wife’s note and those that later came down from the ceiling?” “I can’t say, but Mrs. Elliott had been after me to lose weight. I thought it was peculiar—that my wife came from Daingerfield and asked about my losing weight also.” “Mrs. Elliott was a contemporary of your wife?” “She died in 1963. About a year before we moved here.” “Were those two women very close in life?” “Not particularly. They were neighbors.” “What about Mrs. Snow?” “She was peculiar.” “What objects did you see move in person?” “I saw a heavy pair of shoes lift themselves off the floor and fly right over my bed and land on the opposite side of the bed.” “Did they land fast or did they land slowly?” “It was just as if I’d picked them up and thrown them. Andy’s house shoes came the same way. I’ve watched the cat being lifted up about a foot from where he was sitting and just be suspended for several seconds and it didn’t fall on the floor. I saw a can of insect spray which was sitting on the cabinet come over and suspend itself right over that opening, and spray into that little room, and I was nearly suffocated. I had to open the doors or the insect spray would have got me.” “You weren’t holding the can?” “No.” “I am particularly interested in anything where you were actually present when movement occurred, or voices were heard.” “I’ve seen my clothes fly through the air as I was coming home.” “Did these things occur whether your wife was physically in the house or not?” “Yes.” “Did anything ever happen while neither your son nor your wife was at home but you were alone?” “I believe so.” “Your wife had some personal shock in 1951, I believe. When her best friend died suddenly. Do you feel her mental state changed as a result?” “Very gradually, yes. She was very happy, though, when she found out she was going to have another child, because she thought this would make up for the loss of her friend. She was just crazy about him.” “Now, when was the first time you noticed there was something wrong with her mentally?” “In 1960 my wife took over her daughter’s room. She stopped up all the windows with newspapers scotch-taped against the wall and hung a blanket in each window of the bedroom.” “Why did she do that?” “She felt someone was spying on her. At the office, she took the telephone apart, and adding machines and typewriters, looking for microphones to see who was spying on her.” “But the phenomena themselves did not start until you moved into this house?” “That’s right.”

  I thanked Mr. Beaird for his honest testimony, for he had not claimed anything beyond or different from his original report to me. I took the voluminous handwritten notes and the letters pertaining to the case and went back to New York to study them. This would take some time since I planned to compare the handwriting by both Mrs. Beaird and Andy. I didn’t, for a moment, think that the notes had been written consciously by either one of them and simply thrown at Mr. Beaird in the ordinary way. Quite obviously Mr. Beaird was no fool, and any such clumsy attempt at fake phenomena would not have gone unnoticed, but there are other possibilities that could account for the presence of either Mr. Beaird’s or Andy’s handwriting in the notes, if indeed there was that similarity.

  There were already, clearly visible to me, certain parallels between this case and the Bell Witch case of Tennessee. Vengeance was being wrought on Howard Beaird by some entity or entities for alleged wrongs, in this case his failure to execute minor orders given him. But there were other elements differing greatly from the classic case. In the Bell Witch situation there was not present, in the household, anyone who could be classed as psychotic. In Tyler we have two individuals capable of supplying unused psychic energies. One definitely psychotic, the other on the borderline, or at least psychoneurotic.

  I then decided to examine the notes written in this peculiar style longhand, almost always in block letters but upper case letters in the middle of words where they do not belong. It became immediately clear to me that this was a crude way of disguising his handwriting and was not used for any other reason. It is of course a fact that no one can effectively disguise his handwriting to fool the expert. He may think so, but an expert graphologist can always trace the peculiarities of a person’s handwriting back to the original writer provided samples are available to compare the two handwritings letter by letter, word for word. Some of the notes were downright infantile. For instance, on December 6, 1965, a note read “My power is decreasing. I’m going back to Mack. I must hurry. I would like to come home but I don’t guess I will. I love you. Please give me a Yule gift. I can’t restore my power. I am allowed only three a year. Phone police.” What the cryptic remark, “I am allowed only three a year,” is supposed to mean is not explained.

  Sometimes Howard Beaird played right into the hands of the unknown writer. The Sunday morning after he and Andy has spent the night at a motel because of the goings on in the house, he received the notice of a package at the post office. He knew that he couldn’t get it except by noon on a weekday, so he asked aloud, “Is this notice about anything important, as I don’t want to come in from the hospital if it doesn’t amount to anything?” A few seconds later a note fluttered down from the ceiling reading only “something.” That of course was not a satisfactory answer such as an adult or reasonable person would give. It sounded more like a petulant child having a game. On December 6, 1965, a note materialized equally mysteriously, reading, “I don’t want to admit to Mack that I’m nutty.” Another note dated December 6, 1965, simply read, “Howard got jilted.” Another note read “My powers were restored by the Houston witch. Call the police and ask about her.” There doesn’t seem to be any great difference between the notes signed by Henry Anglin or by Mrs. Elliott or not signed at all by someone intimating that they were the work of Mrs. Beaird. The letters and the formation of the words are similar. A note dated December 8, 1965, read: “Dear Howard, I love you. I have been wrong. I want to come home but I don’t want stupid Mack to know I am unusual. I am really two people. If things end I won’t remember nothin’. I can be in three places at one. I love you and Junior. Please dear.”

  The note signed “Dorothy Kilgallen,” mentioned previously and received by Howard Beaird December 22, 1965, reads, “Dear Mr. Beaird: Mrs. Elliott told me about what all has happened to your family and what Henry Anglin is responsible for. It is very tragic. He is the reason I am dead because he changed my pills. Good night and good luck.” Having been personally acquainted with the late Hearst columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, I am quite certain that she would not have expressed herself in this manner, dead or alive.

  A note signed Pont Thornton dated December 23, 1965, reads, “Dear Howard P.S. an Andy: I no yu well. I no yu good. I don’t drinck much do yu haf had hardships. Anglin is a mean man. I am smarter than Henry Lee. I am distant kin of Abe Lincoln and Lewis Armstrong and Sam Davis Junior and Jon F. Kenede.” Not only was the note atrociously misspelled but it lists several quite improbable relationships. When writing as Mrs. Elliott the personality is much more concise and logical than when the writer is supposed to be Henry Anglin or Mrs. Beaird. But despite the difference in style the letters are very similar. Of course since the notes came down for almost three years it is to be expected that there are some differences in both style and appearance between them.

  On September 17, 1967, Howard Beaird observed, “About 9 or 10 P.M. Andy heard Mrs. Elliott call. She told him he could talk to her and that mother could not hear so he did and apparently mother knew nothing of it. Just as I was getting ready for bed I heard Mrs. Elliott calling me. The sound seemed to come toward the kitchen and as Andy and Johnny were watching TV in her bedroom I went to the kitchen. Mrs. Elliott called me several more times and the sound then seemed to be coming from my room. She said that Johnny couldn’t hear me so I tried to talk to her but Andy said she told him she never could hear me. Anyway before going to bed I found a very small piece of paper folded so small on the floor in the hall and also a South Side Bank deposit slip folded near it. The small note said ‘Be very generous. Say hi to me. Mrs. Snow.’ The larger note said, ‘Don’t be st
ingy Sam be a generous Joe. George Swiney.’ After I had gone to bed I heard Mrs. Elliott calling me several times but could never make her hear me answer. Just as I was about to go to sleep, Andy came in and said Mrs. Elliott told him she had left me a note on the floor. Just as I got up to look for it a note dropped in the chair next to my bed. I took it to the kitchen to get my glasses and it said, ‘Howard, I hope there won’t be any slugs. Try to be generous, you have a lot of money. There’s so much you could get you, John and Andy.’ This was followed by a list of objects, clothing primarily, which he could get for his family on her suggestion. Howard Beaird tried to talk to Mrs. Elliott to ask her where all that alleged money was but he could never get an answer to that.

  On September 29, 1967, Howard Beaird noticed that Mrs. Elliott came to visit him around 7:30 P.M. He can’t understand how she can make him hear her when she calls him by name and then make it impossible for him to hear the rest of her. Apparently the rest of the conversation has to be relayed through Andy. On the other hand, if he speaks loudly enough she can hear him. That night Mrs. Elliott informed him that a Mr. Quinn had been by earlier. A little later Mr. Quinn himself came back and Howard Beaird actually heard him call, but he could hear nothing else, and again Andy had to be the interpreter. Andy said that Mr. Quinn sounded like a robot talking, and that, of course, made sense to Mr. Beaird, since he knew that Quinn, who had lost his voice due to cancer prior to his death, used an instrument held to his throat to enable him to talk. The late Mr. Quinn apparently wanted to know how some of the people back in Grand Saline were, including a Mrs. Drake, Mr. And Mrs. Watkins, and the McMullens. This information, of course, could not have been known to Andy, who had been much too young at the time the Beairds knew these people in the town where they formerly lived.

  Mrs. Elliott also explained the reason she and the other spirits were able to be with Mr. Beaird that evening was that they had been given time off for the holidays—because of Halloween, although that was a little early for All Hallow’s Eve. Mr. Beaird thought it peculiar that spirits get furloughs from whatever place they are in.