Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “Jan. J-a-n.”

  Upon my prodding, Sybil elicited also the information that this Jan Wasserman was a native of San Francisco, that his father’s name was Johan or John, and he lived at 324 Emil Street.

  I proceeded then to exorcise the ghost in my usual manner, speaking gently of the “other side” and what awaited him there.

  Sybil conveyed my wishes to the restless one and reported that he understood his situation now.

  “He’s no trouble,” Sybil murmured. She’s very sympathetic to ghosts.

  With that we left the basement and went back up the stairs into the haunted bedroom, where I took some photographs; then I moved into the living room area upstairs and took some more—all in all about a dozen black-and-white photographs, including some of the garage and stairs.

  Imagine my pleased reaction when I discovered a week later, when the film came back from the laboratory, that two of the photographs had psychic material on them. One, taken of the stairs leading from the bedroom floor to the top floor, shows a whitish substance like a dense fog filling the front right half of my picture. The other remarkable photograph taken of Mrs. Grasso leaning against the wall in the adjoining room shows a similar substance with mirror effect, covering the front third of the area of the picture.

  There is a reflection of a head and shoulders of a figure which at first glance I took to be Mrs. Grasso’s. On close inspection, however, it is quite dissimilar and shows rather a heavy head of hair whereas Mrs. Grasso’s hairdo is close to the head. Mrs. Grasso wears a dark housecoat over a light dress but the image shows a woman or girl wearing a dark dress or sweater over a white blouse.

  I asked Jean Grasso to report to me any changes in the house after our visit.

  On November 21, 1966, I heard from her again. The footsteps were gone all right, but there was still something strange going on in the house. Could there have been two ghosts?

  Loud crashing noises, the slamming of doors, noises similar to the thumping of ash cans when no sensible reason exists for the noises have been observed not only by Jean Grasso and her mother since we were there, but also by her brother and his fiancée and even the non-believing father. No part of the house seems to be immune from the disturbance.

  To test things, Jean Grasso slept at her mother’s house soon after we left. At 11 P.M., the thumping started. About the same time Mrs. Grasso was awakened by three knocks under her pillow. These were followed almost immediately by the sound of thumping downstairs and movements of a heavy metallic can.

  Before I could answer Jean, I had another report from her. Things were far from quiet at the house in Millbrae. Her brother’s fiancée, Ellen, was washing clothes in the washing machine. She had closed and secured the door so that the noise would not disturb her intended, who was asleep in the bedroom situated next to the laundry room.

  Suddenly she distinctly heard someone trying to get into the room by force, and then she felt a “presence” with her which caused her to run upstairs in panic.

  About the same time, Jean and her mother had heard a strange noise from the bathroom below the floor they were then on. Jean went downstairs and found a brush on the tile floor of the bathroom. Nobody had been downstairs at the time. The brush had fallen by itself...into the middle of the floor.

  When a picture in brother Allen’s room lost its customary place on the wall, the thumb tack holding it up disappeared, and the picture itself somehow got to the other side of his bookcase. The frame is pretty heavy, and had the picture just fallen off it would have landed on the floor behind the bookcase; instead it was neatly leaning against the wall on top of it. This unnerved the young man somewhat, as he had not really accepted the possibility of the uncanny up to this point, even though he had witnessed some pretty unusual things himself.

  Meanwhile, Jean Grasso managed to plow through the microfilm files at the San Mateo county library in Belmont. There was nothing of interest in the newspapers for 1884, but the files were far from complete.

  However, in another newspaper of the area, the Redwood City Gazette, there was an entry that Jean Grasso thought worth passing on for my opinion. A captain Watterman is mentioned in a brief piece, and the fact the townspeople are glad that his bill had died and they could be well rid of it.

  The possibility that Sybil heard Wasserman when the name was actually Watterman was not to be dismissed—at least not until a Jan Wasserman could be identified from the records somewhere.

  Since the year 1884 had been mentioned by the ghost, I looked up that year in H.H. Bancroft’s History of California, an imposing record of that state’s history published in 1890 in San Francisco.

  In Volume VII, on pages 434 and 435, I learned that there had been great irregularities during the election of 1884 and political conditions bordered on anarchy. The man who had been first Lieutenant Governor and later Governor of the state was named R.W. Waterman!

  This, of course, may only be conjecture and not correct. Perhaps she really did mean Wasserman with two “S’s.” But my search in the San Francisco Directory (Lang-ley’s) for 1882 and 1884 did not yield any Jan Wasserman. The 1881 Langley did, however, list an Ernst Wassermann, a partner in Wassermann brothers. He was located at 24th Street and Potrero Avenue.

  Sybil reported that Wasserman had been killed by a certain Pottrene and a certain Povey. Pottrene as a name does not appear anywhere. Could she have meant Potrero? The name Povey, equally unusual, does, however, appear in the 1902 Langley on page 1416.

  A Francis J. Povey was a foreman at Kast & Company and lived at 1 Beideman Street. It seems rather amazing that Sybil Leek would come up with such an unusual name as Povey, even if this is not the right Povey in our case. Wasserman claimed to have lived on Emil Street. There was no such street in San Francisco. There was, however, an Emma Street, listed by Langley in 1884 (page 118).

  The city directories available to me are in shambles and plowing through them is a costly and difficult task. There are other works that might yield clues to the identity of our man. It is perhaps unfortunate that my setup does not allow for capable research assistants to help with so monumental a task, and that the occasional exact corroboration of ghostly statements is due more to good luck than to complete coverage of all cases brought to me.

  Fortunately, the liberated ghosts do not really care. They know the truth already.

  But I was destined to hear further from the Grasso residence.

  On January 24, 1967, all was well. Except for one thing, and that really happened back on Christmas Eve.

  Jean’s sister-in-law was sleeping on the couch upstairs in the living room. It was around two in the morning, and she could not drop off to sleep, because she had taken too much coffee. While she was lying there, wide awake, she suddenly noticed the tall, muscular figure of a man, somewhat shadowy, coming over from the top of the stairs to the Christmas tree as if to inspect the gifts placed near it. At first she thought it was Jean’s brother, but as she focused on the figure, she began to realize it was nobody of flesh-and-blood. She noticed his face now, and that it was bearded. When it dawned on her what she was seeing, and she began to react, the stranger just vanished from the spot where he had been standing a moment before. Had he come to say good-bye and had the Christmas tree evoked a long-ago Christmas holiday of his own?

  Before the sister-in-law, Ellen, could tell Jean Grasso about her uncanny experience, Jean herself asked if she had heard the footsteps that kept her awake overhead that night. They compared the time, and it appeared that the footsteps and the apparition occurred in about the same time period.

  For a few days all was quiet, as if the ghost were thinking it over. But then the pacing resumed, more furiously now, perhaps because something within him had been aroused and he was beginning to understand his position.

  At this point everybody in the family heard the attention-getting noises. Mrs. Grasso decided to address the intruder and to tell him that I would correct the record of his death—that I would tell
the world that he was not, after all, a bad fellow, but a case of mistaken identity.

  It must have pleased the unseen visitor, for things began to quiet down again, and as of February 6, at least, the house had settled down to an ordinary suburban existence on the outskirts of bustling San Francisco.

  But until this book is in print, the Grassos won’t breathe with complete ease. There is always that chance that the ghost decides I am not telling the world fast enough. But that would seem patently unreasonable. After all, he had to wait an awfully long time before we took notice of him. And I’ve jumped several ghosts to get him into print as an emergency case. So be it: Mr. Wasserman of Millbrae is not the Mr. Wasserman they were looking for, whoever they were. They just had themselves a wild ghost chase for nothing.

  * 157

  The Ghosts of Barbery Lane

  “I KNOW A HOUSE IN RYE, New York, with a ghost,” painter Mary Melikian said to me, and there was pleasure in her voice at being the harbinger of good news. Mary knew how eager I was to find a haunted house, preferably one that was still haunted.

  “A ghost,” Mary repeated and added, tantalizingly, “a ghost that likes to slam doors.”

  I pumped Mary for details. One of her friends was the celebrated portrait painter Molly Guion, known in Rye as Mrs. John Smythe. Molly and her husband, an architect, lived in a sprawling mid-nineteenth-century house atop a bluff overlooking the old New Haven Railroad bed, surrounded by houses built in later years. The Smythes house was the first one on the tract, the original Manor House, built there around 1860 by one Jared B. Peck.

  I arranged with Mrs. Smythe to visit the house the following week, in August 1963. My wife Catherine and I were met at the train by Mrs. Smythe, whose husband also came along to welcome us. The drive to the house (originally called “The Cedars” but now only known as a number on Barbery Lane) took less than five minutes, yet you might well have entered another world—so serene and rural was the atmosphere that greeted us that moonlit evening, when the station wagon pulled up to the gleaming-white 100-year-old house the Smythes had called home since the summer of 1957.

  Rising to four floors, the structure reminded me of the stylized paintings of Victorian houses associated with another world. A wide porch went around it at the ground level, and shady trees protected it from view and intrusion.

  The huge living room was tastefully furnished with fine antiques and all over the house we encountered the marvelously alive portraits painted by Molly Guion, which blended naturally into the decor of the house. This was a stately mansion, only an hour from New York but as quiet and removed from the city of subways as if it stood in the Deep South or Down East. We seated ourselves comfortably. Then I came right to the point.

  “This ghost,” I began. “What exactly does it do and when did you first notice anything unusual in the house?”

  This is my standard opener. Molly Guion was more than happy to tell us everything. Her husband left for a while to tend to some chores.

  “We arrived in this house on a hot summer day in 1957—in July,” she recalled. “About a week later—I remember it was a particularly hot night—we heard a door slam. Both my husband and I heard it.”

  “Well?”

  “But there was absolutely nobody in the house at the time except us,” Molly said, significantly. “We heard it many times after that. Maybe six or seven separate instances. Once around 10 o’clock at night I heard the front door open and close again with a characteristic squeak. Mother was living with us then and I was not feeling well, so that a nurse was staying with me. I called out ‘Mother,’ thinking she had come home a bit early, but there was no reply. Since then I’ve heard the front door open many times, but there is never anyone there.”

  “Is it the front door then?”

  “No, not always. Sometimes it is the front door and sometimes it is this door on the second floor. Come, I’ll show you.”

  Molly led us up the winding stairs to a second floor containing many small rooms, all exquisitely furnished with the solid furniture of the Victorian period. There was a tiny room on one side of the corridor leading to the rear of the house, and across from it, the door that was heard to slam. It was a heavy wooden door, leading to a narrow winding staircase which in turn led up another flight of stairs to the third floor. Here Molly Guion had built herself a magnificent studio, taking up most of the floor space.

  “One day in January of 1962,” she volunteered, “I was downstairs in the kitchen talking to an exterminator, when I heard a door slam hard—it seemed to me. Yet, there was no one in the house at the time, only we two downstairs.”

  “Outside of yourself and your husband, has anyone else heard these uncanny noises?”

  Molly nodded quickly.

  “There was this man that worked for me. He said, ‘Mrs. Smythe, ever time I’m alone in the house, I hear a door slam!”‘

  “Anyone else?”

  “A Scottish cleaning woman, name of Roberta Gillan. She lives in Harrison, New York. She once came to me and said, ‘Did you just slam a door?’ Of course, I hadn’t.”

  We were now seated in a small room off the second-floor corridor. The light was moody and the air dank. There was a quietness around the house so heavy I almost wished I could hear a door slam. Molly had more to reveal.

  “Once, a little girl named Andree, age eleven, came to visit us and within seconds exclaimed—‘Mamma, there is a ghost in this house!’”

  Our hostess admitted to being somewhat psychic, with sometimes comical results. Years ago, when a boyfriend had failed to keep their date, she saw him clearly in a dream-vision with a certain blonde girl. He later explained his absence in a casual way, but she nailed him with a description of his blonde—and he confessed the truth.

  Two years after she moved into the house, Molly developed a case of asthma, the kind very old people sometimes suffer from. Strangely, it bothered her only in certain rooms and not at all in others. It started like a kind of allergy, and gradually worsened until it became a fully grown asthmatic condition. Although two rooms were side by side, sleeping in one would aggravate the condition, but sleeping in the other made her completely free of it!

  “Did you hear any other noises—I mean, outside of the door slamming?” I asked.

  “Yes. Not so long ago we had a dinner party here, and among the guests was a John Gardner, a vice president of the Bankers Trust Company.”

  Suddenly she had heard someone rap at the window of the big room downstairs. They tried to ignore the noise, but Gardner heard it too.

  “Is someone rapping at your window?” he inquired.

  He was assured it was nothing. Later he took Molly aside and remonstrated with her. “I distinctly heard the raps,” he said. Molly just smiled.

  Finally the Smythes called on the American Society for Psychic Research to find an explanation for all these goings-on. But the Society was in no hurry to do anything about the case. They suggested Molly write them a letter, which she did, but they still took no action.

  I thoroughly inspected the premises—walked up the narrow staircase into Molly Guion’s studio where some of the best portrait oils hung. Her paintings of famous Britons had just toured as an exhibition and the house was full of those she owned (the greater part of her work was commissioned and scattered in collections, museums, and private homes).

  There was a tiny bedroom next to the landing in back of the studio, evidently a servant’s room, since the entire floor had originally been servants’ quarters. The house had sixteen rooms in all.

  By now Mr. Smythe had joined us and I explained my mission. Had he ever noticed anything unusual about the house?

  “Oh yes,” he volunteered, speaking slowly and deliberately. “There are all sorts of noises in this house and they’re not ordinary noises—I mean, the kind you can explain.”

  “For instance?”

  “I was sleeping up here one night in the little bedroom here,” he said, pointing to the servant’s room i
n back of the landing, “when I heard footsteps. They were the steps of an older person.”

  But there was no one about, he asserted.

  Jared Peck, who built the house in 1860, died in 1895, and the house passed into the hands of his estate to be rented to various tenants. In 1910, Stuyvesant Wainwright bought the property. In the following year, his ex-wife, now Mrs. Catlin, bought it from him and lived in it until her death in the 1920s.

  The former Mrs. Wainwright turned out to be a colorful person. Born wealthy, she had a very short temper and the servants never stayed long in her house.

  “She certainly liked to slam doors,” Mr. Smythe observed. “I mean she was the kind of person who would do that sort of thing.”

  “One day she became very ill and everybody thought she would die,” Molly related. “There she was stretched out on this very couch and the doctor felt free to talk about her condition. ‘She won’t last much longer,’ he said, and shrugged. Mrs. Wainwright sat up with a angry jolt and barked, ‘I intend to!’ And she did, for many more years of hot-tempered shenanigans.”

  In her later years Mrs. Wainwright moved to the former servants’ quarters on the second floor—whether out of economy or for reasons of privacy no one knows for sure. The slamming door was right in the heart of her rooms and no doubt she traveled up those narrow stairs to the floor above many times.

  The plumber, painter, and carpenter who worked for Mrs. Wainwright were still living in Rye and they all remembered her as a willful and headstrong woman who liked to have her own way. Her granddaughter, Mrs. Condit, recalled her vividly. The Smythes were pretty sure that Mrs. Wainwright slept up there on the second floor—they found a screen marked “My bedroom window” that fit no other window in any of the rooms.

  The Smythes acquired the handsome house from the next owner, one Arthur Flemming, who used Mrs. Wainwright’s old room. But he didn’t experience anything unusual, or at any rate said nothing about it.

  There was a big theft once in the house and Mrs. Wainwright may have been worried about it. Strongly attached to worldly possessions, she kept valuables in various trunks on the third floor, and ran up to look at them from time to time to make sure everything was still there.