Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  The mother-in-law worked as a janitor and usually came home around 1 A.M. The apartment itself was on the ground floor, the last apartment on the floor, about seventy feet from the front door of the house. It was a warm night, and the newly married couple decided to sit up and await the mother’s return. The radio was playing a rebroadcast of the solemn mass given at Babe Ruth’s funeral, and the time was just 11 o’clock.

  At the moment when the music started, both Mr. and Mrs. T. heard the front door open and someone walk down the hall toward them. With Mr. T.’s extrasensitive hearing—many blind people have this—he could distinguish the fact that the person coming toward them wore no shoes. Then this person came through the door, and Mr. T. felt a hand go over his eyes. He thought it was the mother-in-law and said, “Mother?”

  Mrs. T. assured him he was mistaken; there was no one to be seen, although she, too, had heard footsteps. Now the invisible person walked past T. and turned around, facing him. All at once both T. and his wife noticed the strong smell of garlic, and each asked the other if he or she was cleaning garlic! But even stranger, T., who is totally blind, could suddenly see a woman standing before him—a short woman with long hair, wearing a loose dress and no shoes. Over the dress she wore an apron, and she had one hand in the apron pocket. There was a noise coming from the pocket as if paper were being crumpled. Her eyes were droopy almost to the point of being shut. T. stared at the apparition for what seemed like a long time to him. Finally the woman spoke: “Tell Julia to throw away those stones!”

  She repeated it twice. When the religious music on the radio had ended, she turned and walked from the room, although neither of them could hear any footsteps this time. But T. saw her walk away. All the time the visitor had been with them, they had felt very strange, as if they were paralyzed. They could not move and just sat there in a daze. The moment the figure disappeared, the spell was broken, and they discovered to their surprise that it had lasted a full hour.

  Since Mrs. T. had not seen the figure, T. told her what the woman had said. Mrs. T.’s first name is Julia, but the message made no sense to her. While they were trying to figure out what had happened to them, the mother-in-law returned, and they reported the incident to her.

  “My God,” the mother-in-law exclaimed, “what does she want?” There was another Julia whom she knew, and the message might apply to her. It seemed that this Julia had been in the apartment the night before and was due to return the next morning for another visit. Why not question her about the apparition? Next morning, the T.s met the other Julia and described their experience to her in every detail. The young woman nodded with understanding.

  “That was my mother,” she cried. “She’s been dead for two years.”

  Then she explained that her late mother had been in the habit of carrying garlic on her person, in her apron pocket to be exact. She had collected small stones wherever she went and would put them into small containers to keep. These containers with the stones her mother had collected were still cluttering up her home. Under the circumstances, the young woman decided to take the stones and scatter them over her mother’s grave. The apparition has not returned since.

  The N.s lived in a large brick house on Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, in one of the better residential districts. They shared the house with the actual owner, Mr. N.’s uncle by marriage. After Mr. N’s aunt died, strange knockings began to disturb the inhabitants of the house. There never was any rational explanation for these raps. Then, several months later, Mr. N. happened to be cleaning out a closet in what had been the aunt’s storeroom. There she had put away personal souvenirs and other belongings. In the cleanup, he came across a wrapped package in a drawer. He picked it up, and as he did so he distinctly heard a voice—a human voice—talking to him, although he knew he was quite alone in the room. It was not clear enough for him to make out the words. It was late at night; no one else was stirring in the house, and there was no radio or TV playing.

  Mr. N. took the package with him and walked down a long hall to the bedroom where his wife was reading in bed. For a distance of seventy-five feet, all along the way, the voice kept talking to him!

  As he entered the bedroom, Mrs. N. looked up from her book and said: “Who was that talking to you?”

  Mr. N. became very agitated and somehow found himself taking the strange package to the basement. As if he had been led there he then opened the furnace and threw the package into it. He had the strong feeling that his aunt did not wish to have that package opened or found. As soon as the flames had destroyed the contents of the package, Mr. N.’s mood returned to normal. There were no further psychic occurrences in the house after that. Evidently the aunt did not wish to have her private correspondence or other papers made public, and once that possibility was obviated, her need to communicate ended.

  Sometimes the “unfinished business” is monkey business. A person who dies but is unable to accept the change in status, unable to let go of earthly appetites, will be drawn back to the people he or she was close to, and sometimes this return may express itself rather physically. Wild as it sounds, it is entirely possible for a dead man to express love to a living woman, and vice versa. It is not proper, of course, not because of moral reasons but simply because it is very impractical and truly “out of its element.” But it does happen.

  Mrs. Audrey L. of Baltimore, Maryland, has been a widow for four years. As soon as her husband died, her troubles started. She would hear him “still around.” He would call her by name. He would move around in his usual manner in what used to be his house. Mrs. L. did not see this, but she heard it clearly. At night she would hear him snore. Finally she decided to sell their house and move to an apartment.

  For a while Mr. L. was not in evidence. But not for long. The nocturnal disturbances began again. This time the phenomena were also visual. Her husband’s figure appeared next to her bed, grabbed her by the wrists, and tried to pull her out of bed. She looked at him closely, despite her terror, and noticed that the familiar figure was somewhat transparent. Nevertheless, he was real, and the touch of his hands was the touch of two strong hands.

  There is no easy solution for this type of “unfinished business.” Exorcism will yield results only if the other part is willing to accept it. But if the dead husband’s moral level is not attuned to that approach, the service will not work. Only the woman herself can reject him, if she is strong enough in her determination to close this psychic door. For it is true that there may be a deep-seated desire present in the unconscious that permits the transgression to take place.

  Sometimes the business the departing person wishes to complete cannot be finished until many years later. Yet there are cases where the dead communicator somehow knows this beforehand, indicating that the threshold of death removes also the limitations of time.

  An interesting case in point concerns a prominent midwestern physician’s wife, herself an educator. A number of years ago Mrs. B. was married to a professional gentleman. They had two children. Their marriage was happy, there were no financial or professional problems, and yet the husband was given to unaccountable depressions. One evening the husband went out, never to return. Hours went by. Mrs. B. anxiously awaited his return, although she had no suspicion that anything drastic had happened. Her husband had been in excellent spirits when he left. Finally she became too tired to sit up and wait for his return. She went to bed, assuming her husband would be coming in very late.

  Her sleep was interrupted in the middle of the night by the feeling of a presence in the room. As she opened her eyes and looked, she discerned at the foot of her bed the form of her husband, and all at once she realized that he had gone across to the hereafter.

  “You are not to worry,” the husband spoke; “everything will be all right. Wally will take care of you and the children.” The apparition vanished.

  Early the next morning she was notified that he had fatally shot himself, evidently overcome by a fit of depression. In her great grief s
he tried to pass the visitation off as a dream, although she knew in her heart that she had been quite awake at the time she saw her husband standing at the foot of her bed.

  Two years passed, and the matter sank into the deepest recesses of her subconscious mind. At the time of the message, she had not been able to make much of it. Wally was a dear friend of her late husband and herself but nothing more. Out of a clear blue sky the telephone rang one day, and before she picked up the receiver Mrs. B. knew it was Wally! The friendship was resumed and ultimately led to marriage, and Wally has indeed taken care of her and the children ever since!

  Bernhard M., sixty-four, happily married, and a largely self-taught scholar, makes his home in Southern California. His literary criticism and philosophical essays have appeared largely in such scholarly publications as Books Abroad. A disability pension augments his income from writing. His mother, Frances M., was a gifted musician who has always shown an interest in psychic research. When Mr. M. Sr., who had been with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, had passed on, the family went through difficult times, and young Bernhard had to work hard to keep the family in groceries. At the age of forty-two, Mrs. M. died of a stroke at her place of work, the Conservatory of Music and Drama in Point Loma, California.

  A few days after her passing, Bernhard attended the funeral. At the time, he was told that the ashes would be placed in a niche in Greenwood Cemetery. With that reassurance, he left town. Returning to Point Loma from his business trip a month later, he had a strange dream. His late mother appeared to him in what seemed to be a small room, quite dark, and she seemed in great distress.

  “Everything went wrong,” she complained. “Even my ashes are mislaid!”

  Her son remonstrated with her in his dream, assuring her that this could not be the case. But in reply she showed him a little table on which there was a wire basket containing a small copper box.

  When he awoke the next morning, Bernhard M. rejected what he thought was an absurd dream brought on, no doubt, by his grief and recent upset over the death of his beloved brother. But it so happened he had planned on going into town to see if his mother’s name had been properly inscribed on the door to the niche at the cemetery.

  On the way he ran into a friend, May L., a singer, who informed him that she had just been to the cemetery to pay her respects to Mrs. M.—and his mother’s ashes were not there!

  On hearing this, Mr. M. asked Mrs. L. to return to the cemetery with him to make inquiry. Sure enough, his father’s ashes were there, but his mother’s were not. He questioned the caretaker, who checked the entries in his books.

  “No record of a Mrs. M.,” the caretaker informed him.

  With mounting agony and anger, Bernhard M. went to the funeral parlor.

  After some embarrassing investigations, it developed that the box of ashes had never left the building. Bernhard then took them personally out to the cemetery, to make sure everything would be as it should. By a strange quirk of fate, he traveled the identical route he had often taken with his mother when they had gone together to Point Loma.

  When Mr. M. related this experience to me, he suddenly felt his mother’s presence again, as if she were pleased at his having told me, so that others might know that the dead can return.

  Florine McC.’s solid stone house, built on one of San Francisco’s many hills in the year 1895, has withstood earthquakes and the big fire and is likely to withstand the next catastrophe, if one comes. Mrs. McC.’s brush with the uncanny started in 1929, when she was a newlywed living in Tampa, Florida. To everyone’s surprise—including her own—she suffered an unexpected heart attack. A doctor was summoned to the home and, after examining her, pronounced her dead. A towel was then placed over her face and the doctor started to console the young husband.

  “I’ll have to pass the undertaker on the way, and I’ll leave the death certificate there,” the doctor said to her husband.

  “But she’s so young,” the husband sighed, for Mrs. McC. was only nineteen at the time.

  The strange part of it was that Mrs. McC. could hear the conversation, although she could not move. Despite the fact that her eyes were covered, she could see the entire scene. Moreover, she had the strangest sensation that she was about two inches high!

  Then, it seemed to her, through her mouth came a replica of her own body, very small and without clothing. She went up to the corner of the ceiling and stayed there, looking down. She had left her body down below. The landlady had joined the mourners now, and young Mrs. McC. thought what fun it would be to wiggle her hands and frighten the woman. The thought of seeing the landlady scurry from the room in haste amused her. But then she became serious and suddenly dived down and reentered her own body through the nostrils, or so it seemed. Her physical body then became warm again, and she broke into an uncontrollable burst of laughter. Immediately the doctor proceeded to give her an injection to revive her. As soon as she was conscious she explained what had happened to her.

  The doctor shook his head. But he listened with widening eyes when Mrs. McC. repeated every word that had been said during the time she had been “legally dead.”

  She had noticed, during her temporary stay at the ceiling, that the doctor had squeezed her arms, perhaps to bring her back to life, and she wondered if she would feel sore when she returned into her body. But the arms did not feel painful. A curious thought, though, kept intruding: “He forgot something…. Whoever was in charge forgot some duty I had to do,…but I don’t understand it.”

  Perhaps that was why she was still alive. Someone forgot to pull a switch?

  Throughout the years, Florine McC. displayed extrasensory abilities. These ranged from such simple things as foreknowledge of events or places where she had not been, to the more disturbing forebodings of trouble affecting her loved ones, and her subsequent ability to come to the aid of her troubled family.

  Her father, Olaus S., born in Norway and brought to the United States at age two, was in the hotel business until his retirement many years later. He passed away in 1946 at age seventy-nine, after a full and satisfactory life.

  About a month after his death, Mrs. McC. was in bed in her room on the fourth floor of the house on Grove Street, which had been her father’s. She had not been asleep long when she was awakened by a knock at the door. She woke up, and to her amazement she saw her late father stick his head into the opened door, calling out in a cheery voice: “Hi there, Florence!”

  Mrs. McC.’s baptismal name is Florence, but she has never liked it, preferring the form “Florine” instead. However, her father liked to tease her about it, and on such occasions he would call her Florence.

  It was about 2 o’clock in the morning. Mr. S. entered the room of his daughter and stood near the bed, looking at her.

  “You can’t find it,” he said.

  Mrs. McC., fully awake now, observed her father’s apparition. She noticed that he wore a tweed overcoat, his customary shirt and tie, and his hat. He removed the hat and put his hands into his pockets. The strange thing was that she could see through him, and he was surrounded by the most beautiful blue rays, lighting up the entire room.

  “Dad, come over and sit down,” she said, and pointed to the chaise longue. There was no fear, even though she was aware that he was dead. It seemed somehow perfectly natural to her now. Although she had heard of psychic matters, she had been raised in a house where such matters were neither discussed or believed.

  The apparition walked over and sat on the chaise longue, putting his feet on a stool, as he had often done in life. This was his chair.

  “You’re looking for a paper, Florine,” her father said.

  “Yes, Dad,” she nodded, “and I can’t find it.”

  “You go down to my bedroom and take the top drawer out,” her father instructed her, “and underneath the drawer you will find it pasted on. Also, honey, you will find a letter!” The voice sounded as normal and steady as her father’s voice had always sounded.

 
; “Dad, I’m going to cover you up,” the daughter said, and she took a robe to place over his feet, as she had often done in his life.

  The moment the robe touched her father’s legs, the apparition disappeared—gone like a puff of smoke!

  “Did I dream it?” she asked herself, wondering if it had really happened. She felt awake, but she was still not sure whether she was in the midst of a dream. She decided then and there, with the curious logic of dreamers who see themselves within the dream, not to touch anything and to go straight back to bed. This she did and quickly went off to sleep.

  In the morning, she arose and inspected the room. The door, which she had closed firmly on retiring, was still ajar. Her robe was lying on the chaise longue. She looked closer and discovered that the material was still folded in a way that indicated that it had been supported by a pair of legs! She then knew she had not dreamed the visitation.

  She ran downstairs and looked for the drawer her father had indicated. There, underneath, were the papers that had been missing. These papers proved her father’s birth and nationality and were of great importance in the settling of the estate. There was also the letter he had mentioned, and it was a beautiful farewell letter from a father to his daughter. Throughout his long life, Olaus S. had never scoffed at the possibility of personal survival. The family took a dim view of Florine’s experience, but the close communion father and daughter had always enjoyed during his lifetime was the reason she had been singled out for the visit—plus the fact that there was a real need, unfinished business, that only a visit from the deceased could bring to a close.

  When the Dead Help the Living

  We have seen how the departed manifest to the living to let them know that their lives continue in another world or because they have some unfinished business in the mundane sphere that needs completing. Having thus manifested, they will not communicate again unless a crisis comes up in the lives of their loved ones or friends and their services are perhaps “required.” This is another category of communication, and it is one that also occurs frequently.