Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  Around the end of October, he failed to show up at the study evenings, and it wasn’t until the week before Christmas that Darlene found out why. Her parish priest informed her that Rocky was very ill and in the hospital. She asked her mother for permission to visit her sick friend, but her mother refused. The following day she had the strongest feeling that Rocky needed her, so she went anyway, after school. The young man was overjoyed and confirmed that he had indeed wanted to see her very much.

  During the next two months, she went to visit him as often as she could. In February she had an accident in her gym class that forced her to remain in bed for two weeks. But she continued her interest in Rocky through telephone calls to his mother, whom she had never met. The young man had cancer and had been operated upon, and the mother gave Darlene daily reports of his progress.

  On a Friday in February she was able to return to school, and it was her intention to visit her friend Rocky at the hospital that Friday afternoon. But before she could do so, her brother showed her the morning paper: Rocky had died the night before. The shock sent Darlene back to bed.

  Very late that night she awoke from deep sleep with the feeling that she was not alone. She sat up in bed and looked round. There, at the foot of her bed, stood her friend Rocky. His features were plain, and he was surrounded by a soft glow. As soon as he noticed that she saw him, he held out his hands toward her and said: “Please help my mother; she wants and needs you.” Then he was gone.

  Darlene called the man’s mother the next morning. Before she could relay her message, the mother broke into tears, saying that she had been trying to locate Darlene, whose family name she did not know.

  Darlene was at Rocky’s mother’s side from then until after the funeral. It was only then that she finally told the man’s mother what had happened the night after Rocky’s passing. It was a great comfort to the mother, but the parish priest, whom Darlene also told of her experience, tried to convince her that it was all “a young girl’s emotional imagination.”

  Visual phenomena are not the only way by which the dead seemingly assert themselves to the living. Sometimes the phenomena are only auditory but no less evidential. It is somewhat like playing an instrument: some people gravitate toward the piano, others to the violin—but both make music. So it is with psychic communication, which, more than any ordinary communication, depends on the makeup of both individuals, the receiver as well as the sender.

  Mrs. William S. is a housewife in Pennsylvania. A friend of her husband’s by the name of Paul F., who was employed by a large mail-order house, died in his early fifties of a heart attack. A few weeks after his death Mrs. S. was in her bedroom making the bed when she suddenly heard him call out to her. There was no mistaking his voice, for she knew it well. He had called her by name, as if he wanted her attention. The voice sounded as if it came from the adjoining room, so she entered that room and responded by calling Paul’s name. There was no answer. A religious person, Mrs. S. then knelt on the floor and prayed for the man. She has not heard his voice since.

  For many years, Elizabeth S. had been friendly with a young woman named Dorothy B. This was in Pittsburgh, and they were almost next-door neighbors. Dorothy had a sister named Leona, who was a housewife also. She passed away suddenly, only twenty-eight years of age. The shock was very great for Dorothy, who could not reconcile herself to this passing. Despite attempts by Mrs. S. and others to bring her out of this state of grief, Dorothy refused to listen and even cried in her sleep at night.

  One night Dorothy was awakened by something or someone shaking her bed. She got up and looked but found no explanation for this. Everybody in her house was fast asleep. As she stood in front of her bed, puzzled about the strange occurrence, she clearly heard footsteps on the stairs. Frightened, she woke her husband, and together they searched the whole house. They found no one who could have caused the steps. The following night, the same phenomena occurred. Again there was no natural explanation.

  But during that second night, a strange thing also happened to Mrs. S., five doors away. She was in bed, reading a book, when all of a sudden the printed page seemed to disappear in front of her eyes, and different words appeared instead. Mrs. S. shook her head, assuming her eyes were tired, but it happened again. At this point she closed her eyes and lay back in bed, when she heard a voice beside her pillow calling her name, “Betty!” It was a very sharp voice, full of despair. Although Mrs. S. had never met Dorothy’s sister Leona in life, she knew it was she, calling out for recognition.

  The two women got together the next day and compared experiences. It was then that they decided Leona wanted them to know that she continued to enjoy a kind of life in another world, and to stop grieving for her. It was the push that Dorothy had needed to get out of her grief, and the two women became like sisters after this common experience. Leona never called on either of them again.

  I have often doubted the reliability of Ouija boards as a means of communication between the two worlds, but once in a while something genuine can come through them. The proof must rest with the individuals operating the board, of course, and depends upon the presence or absence of the information in their unconscious minds. But Mrs. S. had an experience that to me rings true.

  At the time, she was nineteen, as yet unmarried, and lived with her parents. She did not really believe there was anything supernatural in a Ouija board. More to amuse themselves than for any serious reason, she and a neighbor sat down to try their luck with a board. Hardly had they started to operate the indicator when it moved with great rapidity to spell out a name. That name was Parker. It surprised Elizabeth, for she had not thought of this person in a long time. Now one might argue that his name would always be present in her subconscious mind, but so would many other names of people who had gone on before.

  “Do you want anything?” Elizabeth cried out.

  The board spelled “yes,” and at the very same moment she clearly felt a kiss on her right cheek. It was not her imagination. The sensation was quite physical.

  Parker S. was a young man she had dated two years before, and the two young people had been very much in love. At the time he worked at a service station. One day, on his way to see her, he was killed in a car accident. Mrs. S. feels he had finally delivered his good-bye kiss to her, albeit a little late.

  Lastly, there are phenomena of letting the living know that death has taken a loved one. The thought going out from the dying person at the moment of separation is not strong enough or not organized sufficiently to send a full image to a loved one remaining behind. But there is enough psychic or psychokinetic energy to move an object or cause some other telltale sign so that the loved ones may look up and wonder. In German these phenomena are called gaenger, or goers, and they are quite common.

  A typical case is the experience Mrs. Maria P. of California shared with her husband a few days before Christmas 1955. The couple were in bed asleep in their Toronto home, when suddenly they were awakened by the noise of a knickknack falling off a bookshelf. The object could not possibly have fallen off accidentally or by itself. At the same moment, the woman was impressed with the idea that her father had just died. A few days later she learned that her father had indeed passed on at that identical moment in his native Germany, across the ocean.

  This was not the first time Maria had experienced anything along these lines. When she was only five years old and her mother left for the hospital, the little girl said, “You will not come back, Mother.” It was nine days later that the entire family heard a loud, snapping noise in the main bedroom. All the clocks in the house stopped at that instant. The time was 1:10 P.M. A few hours later, word came that her mother had died at that hour.

  There are other cases involving the falling of paintings, or the moving of shutters at windows, or the closing of doors in a gust of wind when no wind was blowing. All of these supernormal phenomena are, in my estimation, different ways of saying the same thing: I am going, folks, but I’m not finished.r />
  Sometimes the message needs no words: the very presence of the “deceased” is enough to bring home the facts of afterlife. Once, my friend Gail B., public relations director for many leading hotels, called me to ask my help for a friend who was extremely upset because of a visit from the beyond. Would I please go and talk to her? I would and I did.

  Carina L., a onetime professional singer who later went into business in New York City, was originally from Romania and a firm “nonbeliever” in anything she could not touch, smell, hear, or count. Thus it was with considerable apprehension that she reported two seemingly impossible experiences.

  When she was a young girl in the old country, Carina had a favorite grandmother by the name of Minta M. Grandmother M. lived to be a hale and healthy eighty-six; then she left this vale of tears as the result of a heart attack. To be sure, the old lady was no longer so spry as she had been in her youth. One could see her around the neighborhood in her faded brown coat and her little bonnet and special shoes made for her swollen feet, as she suffered from foot trouble.

  She had a shuffling walk, not too fast, not too slow; her gait was well known in her neighborhood in Bucharest. When Grandmother M. had called it a day on earth, her daughters inherited her various belongings. The famed brown coat went to Carina’s Aunt Rosa, who promptly cut it apart in order to remodel it for herself.

  Grandmother was gone, and the three daughters—Carina’s mother and her two aunts, Rosa and Ita—lived together at the house. Two months after Grandmother’s death, Ita and her little son went to the grocer’s for some shopping. On their way they had to pass a neighbor’s house and stopped for a chat. As they were standing there with the neighbor, who should come around the corner but Grandmother, the way she had done so often in life. Ita saw her first and stared, mouth wide open. Then the little boy noticed Grandmother and said so.

  Meanwhile the figure came closer, shuffling on her bad feet as she had always done. But she didn’t pay any attention to the little group staring at her. As she came within an arm’s length, she merely kept going, looking straight ahead. She wore the same faded brown coat that had been her favorite in life. Ita was dumbfounded. By the time she came to her senses, the figure had simply disappeared.

  “Did you see Mrs. M.?” the neighbor asked in awe. Ita could only nod. What was there to say? It was something she never forgot. On getting home she rushed to her sister’s room. There, cut apart as it had been for several weeks, lay the brown coat!

  Many things changed over the years, and finally Carina found herself living in New York City. Her Aunt Ita, now living in Toronto, decided to pay her a visit and stayed with Carina at her apartment. About two weeks after the aunt’s arrival, she accompanied her niece on a routine shopping errand in the neighborhood. It was a breezy March afternoon as the two ladies went along Broadway, looking at the windows. Between West Eighty-first and Eighty-second Streets, they suddenly saw a familiar figure. There, coming toward them, was Grandmother M. again, dressed exactly as she had been twenty-five years before, with her faded brown coat, the little bonnet, and the peculiar shoes.

  The two ladies were flabbergasted. What does one do under such conditions? They decided to wait and see. And see they did, for they stopped and let Grandmother M. pass them by. When she was only inches away from them, they could clearly see her face. She was as solid as anyone in the street, but she did not look at them. Instead, she kept staring ahead as if she were not aware of them or anyone else around. As she passed them, they could clearly hear the sound of her shuffling feet. There was no mistaking it: this was Grandmother M. dead twenty-five years but looking as good as new.

  When the figure reached the next corner and disappeared around it, Carina sprang to life again. Within a few seconds she was at the corner. Before her, the side street was almost empty. No Grandmother. Again she had disappeared into thin air. What had the old lady wanted? Why did she appear to them? I could only guess that it was her way of saying, “Don’t you forget your Granny. I’m still going strong!”

  Unfinished Business

  The second category of “spirit returns,” as the spiritualists like to call it, is unfinished business. While the first thought of a newly dead person might be to let the grieving family know there is no reason to cry and that life does continue, the second thought might well be how to attend to whatever was left unfinished on earth and should be taken care of.

  The evidence pointing to a continuance of personality after dissolution of the body shows that mundane worries and desires go right along with the newly liberated soul. Just because one is now in another, finer dimension does not mean one can entirely neglect one’s obligations in the physical world. This will vary according to the individual and his or her attitudes toward responsibilities in general while in the body. A coward does not become a hero after death, and a slob does not turn into a paragon of orderliness. There is, it appears, really nothing ennobling in dying per se. It would seem that there is an opportunity to grasp the overall scheme of the universe a lot better from over there, but this comprehension is by no means compulsory, nor is the newly arrived soul brainwashed in any way. Freedom to advance or stand still exists on both sides of the veil.

  However, if a person dies suddenly and manages to move on without staying in the earth’s atmosphere and becoming a so-called ghost, then that person may also take along all unresolved problems. These problems may range from such major matters as insurance and sustenance for the family, guidance for the young, lack of a legal will, unfinished works of one kind or another, incomplete manuscripts or compositions, disorderly states of affairs leaving the heirs in a quandary as to where “everything” is, to such minor matters as leaving the desk in disorder, not having answered a couple of letters, or having spoken rashly to a loved one. To various individuals such frustrations may mean either a little or a lot, depending again on the makeup of the person’s personality. There are no objective standards as to what constitutes a major problem and what is minor. What appears to one person a major problem may seem quite unimportant when viewed through another individual’s eyes.

  Generally speaking, the need to communicate with living people arises from a compulsion to set matters right. Once the contact has been made and the problem understood by the living, the deceased’s need to reappear is no longer present, unless the living fail to act on the deceased communicator’s request. Then that person will return again and again until he gets his way.

  All communications are by no means as crystal clear as a Western Union message. Some come in symbolic language or can only be understood if one knows the communicator’s habit patterns. But the grasping of the request is generally enough to relieve the very real anxieties of the deceased. There are cases where the request cannot possibly be granted, because conditions have changed or much time has gone on. Some of these communications stem from very old grievances.

  A communicator appearing in what was once her home in the 1880s insisted that the papers confirming her ownership of the house be found and the property be turned back to her from the current owners. To her the ancient wrong was a current problem, of course, but we could not very well oblige her eighty-five years later and throw out an owner who had bought the property in good faith many years after her passing. We finally persuaded the restless personality that we would try to do what she wanted, at the same time assuring her that things had changed. It calmed her anxiety, and because we had at least listened to her with a sympathetic ear, she did not insist on actual performance of the promise.

  An extreme case of this kind concerns a Mrs. Sally V. of Chicago. This lady was married to a plasterer who gave her ten children, but in 1943 she nevertheless divorced her active spouse. She then married a distant relative of her husband’s, also called V. But divorce did not stop the plasterer from molesting her. He allegedly threatened her over the years until she could stand it no longer. It was then that the woman, in her despair, decided to get rid of her ex-husband in a most dramatic and,
she thought, final way by murdering him.

  The opportunity came when a nineteen-year-old cousin of hers stopped in on leave from his outfit, which was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  “Would you kill my ex-husband for me? I’d give a month’s pay for it.”

  “You’ve got yourself a deal,” the cousin is quoted as saying obligingly, according to the United Press, and when she offered him $90 for the job, he thought $50 was quite enough. To a soldier conditioned to war, human life is sometimes cheap.

  Soon afterward Mr. Charles V. was found dead in his basement apartment, his head bashed in by a hammer.

  The story might have remained a secret between the willing widow and her obliging cousin had it not been for the unwilling spirit of the late Mr. V.

  The murder took place on a Tuesday night, right after she made the deal. On Wednesday morning, August 5, 1953, Mrs. V. was startled to see her late husband standing before her in a menacing attitude. She was terrified and called the police. The detectives took a dim view of her ghost story, but in the questioning her own guilt was brought out and the soldier was arrested. One certainly cannot blame the late Mr. V. for wanting the unfinished business of his murder cleared up.

  The psychic experience of Clarence T. of California is particularly interesting, because Mr. T. has been blind all his life. In 1946 he was married in San Francisco to a lady who is still his wife. They went to New York shortly afterward, and he did not know any of his wife’s friends or family at the time.

  Mr. T. remembers the day of his arrival in New York: it was the day famed baseball player Babe Ruth was to be buried. Mr. T. and his wife were to stay with his new mother-in-law on the lower East Side.