Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  December 24, 3 p.m. My cousin Ernest Gautschi and I are talking in the stables, when suddenly the light goes on—in the middle of the afternoon. 5:30 P.M. I enter the barn to give the cows their hay, when I notice the lights go on by themselves in the old barn. I go back immediately and find the dog howling pitifully at the light switch! I went on to the house to see if anyone was outside, but nobody left even for a moment. My son, Paul, returns with me to the barn. It was he who had left the dog tied up outside half an hour earlier. Now he is tied up inside the barn, and the barn door is locked tight. How did the dog get inside?

  Evidently, the poltergeist had now begun to turn his attentions towards the dog.

  December 25, 7:30 a.m. The dog is found locked into the stables. Yet, half an hour ago Elfi left him roaming freely outside after giving him his food.

  February 2, 5 a.m. I went to the stables and the dog, which slept in the barn, followed me into the stables. He became noisy and one of the calves seemed to get frightened, so I said to the dog, “Go outside at once!” As I am turning around to open the door back into the barn for him to let him out, I see him already outside the barn. Who opened the door for him? I didn’t.

  The children also got their attention from the obnoxious spirit. That same day, February 2, Leuthold reported in his diary:

  February 2, 6:15 p.m. The three sleds, which normally are stacked in the corner of the barn, are found across the manure trough.

  The Leutholds took their unseen “visitor” in stride, always hoping it would go away as it had come. Their spiritualist neighbor insisted that “Leo the Ghost,” as they had dubbed it, was somehow connected with Elfi, a notion the Leutholds rejected instantly, since they were in an excellent position to vouch for the maid’s honesty and non-involvement. The phenomena continued unabated.

  March 14, 6 a.m. The window in the dining room is taken from its hinges and found in a flower pot in front of the house. 7:30 A.M. My slipper disappears from the barn and reappears in another part of the stables beneath a shoe shelf.

  March 29, 7:30 a.m. The dog lies in the yard. A few minutes later he is locked into the old stables. Everybody in the house is questioned and accounted for. Nobody could have done it. 7 P.M. Elfi and I empty the skimmed milk into four pails which we then place next to the door to the pigsty. At 9 P.M. we find the four pails directly in front of the door.

  Elfi got married in April and presumably her “uncommitted” vital energies were no longer free to be used in poltergeist activities. But the Maschwanden ghost did not obey the standard rules laid down by psychic researchers. The disturbances went on, Elfi or no Elfi.

  August 9, morning. As I clean my boots, I find below the inner sole a small tie pin which I had missed for three months.

  August 10, 5:30 p.m. A pitchfork is left stuck in a bag of mineral salt. It took two men to pull it out. Half an hour before the same fork was still in the barn.

  August 19, 4:45 a.m. Angelo, the Italian working for us, misses one of his boots. He finds it 3 yards distant inside the barn and a heavy pitchfork on top of it.

  Similar events took place for another few weeks, then it gradually became quiet again around the Leuthold farm.

  I looked around the house, the stables, the barn. I talked to all members of the family, except the Italian, who had only shared their lives briefly, and Elfi, who had left long ago for wedded bliss.

  I asked, “Did anyone die violently in the house?”

  Paul Leuthold Sr., thought for a moment. “About ten years ago we had an Italian working for us. His pride was a motorcycle, but he could not afford insurance. One day he decided to return to Italy with some friends for a vacation. To get an early start, they would leave around three in the morning. The night before my mother warned him, ‘Be careful, and don’t get home with your head under your arm.’ He replied, shrugging, ‘If I am dead, it doesn’t matter either.’

  “He started an hour late the next morning. When he got to the St. Gotthard, his motorcycle started to kick up. The other fellows went on ahead and promised to wait for him at the height of the mountain. He went to a garage and had his machine fixed, determined not to miss his colleagues. He would have been better off had he stayed behind, for a short time later a piece of rock fell down onto the road and killed him instantly.”

  “And you think it may be his ghost that is causing all this?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Leuthold assured me. “I’m only wondering who is doing it.”

  I gathered that Leuthold had some suspicions about his neighbors. Could an active spiritualist “cause” such phenomena to happen? Not a spiritualist, I assured him, but maybe a black magician.

  Nobody had died violently in the house or farm. But then, an older house of which we know nothing may have stood on the spot. The Leuthold children are now beyond the age of puberty where their untapped energies might have contributed the power to make the phenomena occur.

  My guess is that both Elfi and the children supplied that energy. When Elfi left, and only the children were available, the phenomena gradually faded away. They have not returned since. They are not likely to, unless, of course, another unwitting supplier of such energy moves into the house. The discarnate personality behind the disturbances may still be lurking about, untamed, waiting for another chance. If this happens, Mr. Leuthold can bet that the Ghost Hunter will be on hand, too!

  * 156

  The Millbrae Poltergeist Case

  One wouldn’t think a spanking, modern home perched on a hill at Millbrae, a sunny little town outside San Francisco, could harbor a poltergeist case, one of those sinister disturbances, usually Germanic, involving a teenager or otherwise emotionally unabsorbed person in the household of the living. The youngster is not playing any pranks; the youngster is being used to play them with, by a disturbed person no longer in possession of a physical body.

  I heard of the Millbrae case from a young girl who used to live in that house before she decided she was old enough to have a place of her own and consequently moved out to a nearby town called Burlingame. Now twenty, Jean Grasso has a high school education and a big curiosity about things she cannot explain. Such as ESP.

  In 1964, she had an experience that particularly upset her because it did not fit in with the usual experiences of life she had been taught in school.

  She was in bed at the time, just before falling asleep, or, as she puts it so poetically, “just before the void of sleep engulfs you.” Miss Grasso is not at a loss for words. Her world is very real to her and has little or no room for fantasies.

  Still, there it was. Something prevented her from giving in to sleep. Before she knew what she was doing, she saw her own bare feet moving across the floor of her bedroom; she grabbed the telephone receiver and blurted into it—“Jeannie, what’s wrong? Did you get hurt?” The telephone had not rung. Yet her best friend, who was almost like a sister to her, was on the line. She had been in an automobile accident in which she had been run off the road and collided with a steel pole, but except for being shook up, she was all right.

  What made Jean Grasso jump out of a warm bed to answer a phone that had not yet rung, to speak by name to someone who had not yet said “hello,” and to inquire about an accident that no one had told her about as yet?

  The dark-haired woman is of Italian and Greek background and works as the local representative of a milk company. She is neither brooding nor particularly emotional, it seemed to me, and far from hysterical. The uncanny things that happened in her life intrigued her more in an intellectual way than in an emotional, fearful way.

  When she was sixteen, she and five other girls were playing the popular parlor game of the Ouija board in one of the bedrooms. Jean and Michele di Giovanni, one of the girls, were working the board when it started to move as if pushed by some force stronger than themselves.

  Still very skeptical about Ouija boards, Jean demanded some sign or proof of a spiritual presence. She got a quick reply: four loud knocks on the wall. There
was nobody in back of the walls who could have caused them. Suddenly, the room got very cold, and they panicked and called the “séance” off then and there.

  Ever since, she has heard uncanny noises in her parents’ house. These have ranged from footsteps to crashing sounds as if someone or something were thrown against a wall or onto the floor. There never was a rational explanation for these sounds.

  After Jean moved out to her own place in Burlingame, she returned home for occasional weekends to be with her mother. Her mother sleeps in the living-dining room area upstairs, to save her the trouble of walking up and down the stairs to the bedroom level, since she has a heart condition.

  On the occasions when Jean spent a weekend at home, she would sleep in her mother’s former bedroom, situated directly underneath the one fixed for her on the upper level.

  One night, as Jean lay awake in bed, she heard footsteps overhead. They walked across the ceiling, “as if they had no place to go.”

  Thinking that her mother had breathing difficulties, she raced upstairs, but found her mother fast asleep in bed. Moreover, when questioned about the footsteps the next morning, she assured her daughter she had heard nothing. “Were they a man’s footsteps or a woman’s?” I asked Jean Grasso when we discussed this after the investigation was over.

  The Millbrae Poltergeist Case—The owner’s daughter surrounded by psychic mist

  “A man’s,” she replied without hesitation.

  Once in a while when she is in the dining area upstairs, she will see something out of the corner of an eye—a flash—something or somebody moving about—and as soon as she concentrates on it, it is not there. She has chalked all that up to her imagination, of course.

  “When I’m coming down the steps, in the hall, I get a chill up my spine,” the girl said, “as if I didn’t want to continue on. My mother gets the same feelings there, too, I recently discovered.”

  That was the spot where my psychic photograph was taken, I later realized. Did these two psychic people, mother and daughter, act like living cameras?

  “Do you ever have a feeling of a presence with you when you are all alone?”

  “Yes, in my mother’s bedroom, I feel someone is watching me and I turn but there’s no one there.”

  I questioned her about the garden and the area around the basement. Jean confessed she did not go there often since the garden gave her an uneasy feeling. She avoided it whenever she could for no reason she could logically explain.

  One night when she spent the weekend at her parents’ house and was just falling asleep a little after midnight, she was awakened by the sound of distant voices. The murmur of the voices was clear enough but when she sat up to listen further, they went away. She went back to sleep, blaming her imagination for the incident. But a week later, to the day, her incipient sleep was again interrupted by the sound of a human voice. This time it was a little girl’s or a woman’s voice crying out, “Help...help me!”

  She jumped up so fast she could hear her heartbeat in her ears. Surely, her mother had called her. Then she remembered that her mother had gone to Santa Cruz. There was nobody in the house who could have called for help. She looked outside. It was way after midnight and the surrounding houses were all dark. But the voice she had just heard had not come from the outside. It was there, right in the haunted room with her!

  I decided to interview Jean’s mother, Mrs. Adriana Grasso, a calm pleasant woman whose skepticism in psychic matters has always been pretty strong.

  “We’ve had this house since 1957,” she explained, “but it was already five years old when we bought it. The previous owners were named Stovell and they were about to lose it when we bought it. I know nothing about them beyond that.”

  The very first night she went to bed in the house, something tried to prevent her from doing so. Something kept pushing her back up. On the first landing of the stairs leading down to the bedroom level, something kept her from continuing on down. She decided to fight it out. Every time after that first experience she had the same impression—that she really shouldn’t be coming downstairs!

  “I hear footsteps upstairs when I’m upstairs, and I hear footsteps downstairs when I’m upstairs, and there never is anyone there causing them,” she complained.

  On several occasions, she awoke screaming, which brought her daughter running in anxiously. To calm her, she assured her she had had a nightmare. But it was not true. On several different occasions, she felt something grabbing her and trying to crush her bones. Something held her arms pinned down. Finally, she had to sleep with the lights on, and it seemed to help.

  A big crash also made the family wonder what was wrong with their house. Mrs. Grasso heard it upstairs and her son Allen, upstairs at the same time, thought it was downstairs—only to discover that it was neither here nor there!

  “Many times the doorbell would ring and there was no one outside,” Mrs. Grasso added, “but I always assumed it was the children of the neighborhood, playing tricks on us.”

  Loud noises as if a heavy object had fallen brought her into the garage to investigate, but nothing had fallen, nothing was out of place. The garage was locked and so was the front door. Nobody had gotten in. And yet the noises continued; only three days before our arrival, Mrs. Grasso awoke around one in the morning to the sound of “someone opening a can in the bathroom,” a metal container. In addition, there was thumping. She thought, why is my son working on his movies at this hour of the night? She assumed the can-opening noises referred to motion picture film cans, of which her son has many. But he had done nothing of the sort.

  Soon even Allen and Mr. Grasso heard the loud crashes, although they were unwilling to concede that it represented anything uncanny. But the family that hears ghosts together, also finds solutions together—and the Grassos were not particularly panicky about the whole thing. Just curious.

  It was at this point that I decided to investigate the case and I so advised Jean Grasso, who greeted us at the door of her parents’ house on a very warm day in October 1966. In addition to Sybil and my wife Catherine, two friends, Lori Clerf and Bill Wynn, were with us. We had Lori’s car and Bill was doing the driving.

  We entered the house and immediately I asked Sybil for her psychic impressions. She had not had a chance to orient herself nor did I allow her to meet the Grassos officially. Whatever she might “get” now would therefore not be colored by any rational impressions of the people she met or the house she was in.

  “There is something peculiar about the lower portion of the house.” Sybil began, referring to the bedroom floor. The house was built in a most peculiar manner. Because the lot was sloping toward a ravine, the top floor reached to street level on the front side of the house only. It was here that the house had its living room and entrance hall. On the floor below were the bedrooms, and finally, a garage and adjoining work room. Underneath was a basement, which, however, led to ground level in the rear, where it touched the bottom of the ravine.

  At this point, however, Sybil and I did not even know if there was a lower portion to the house, but Jean Grasso assured us there was. We immediately descended the stairs into the section Sybil had felt invaded by psychic influences.

  We stopped at the northeast corner of the bedroom floor where a rear entrance to the house was also situated, leading to a closed-in porch whence one could descend to the ground level outside by wooden stairs.

  “What do you feel here, Sybil?” I asked, for I noticed she was getting on to something.

  “Whatever I feel is below this spot,” she commented. “It must have come from the old foundations, from the land.”

  Never let it be said that a ghost hunter shies away from dusty basements. Down we went, with Catherine carrying the tape recorder and one of the cameras. In the basement we could not stand entirely upright—at least I couldn’t.

  “That goes underneath the corridor, doesn’t it?” Sybil said as if she knew.

  “That’s right,” Jean Grasso
confirmed.

  The staircase and psychic mist

  “Somebody was chased here,” Sybil commented now, “two men...an accident that should never have happened...someone died here...a case of mistaken identity.”

  “Can you get more?” I urged her.

  “There is a lingering feeling of a man,” Sybil intoned. “He is the victim. He was not the person concerned. He was running from the water’s edge to a higher part of land. He was a fugitive.”

  Anyone coming from the San Francisco waterfront would be coming up here to higher ground.

  “Whom was he running from?”

  “The Law...I feel uniforms. There is an element of supposed justice in it, but....”

  “How long ago was he killed?”

  “1884.”

  “His name?”

  “Wasserman...that’s how I get it. I feel the influence of his last moments here, but not his body. He wants us to know he was Wasserman but not the Wasserman wanted by the man.”

  “What does he look like to you?”

  “Ruddy face, peculiarly deep eyes...he’s here but not particularly cooperative.”

  “Does he know he is dead?” I asked.

  “I don’t think he knows that. But he notices me.”

  I asked Sybil to convey the message that we knew he was innocent.

  “Two names I have to get,” Sybil insisted and started to spell, “Pottrene...P-o-t-t-r-e-n-e...Wasserman tells me these names...P-o-v-e-y...Povey...he says to find them ...these people are the men who killed him.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “They had to kill him. They thought that he was someone else.”

  “What was the other one wanted for?”

  “He doesn’t know. He was unfortunate to have been here.”

  “What is his first name?”