Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  They talked it over. Both agreed that the voice they had heard had been the mother’s voice and that it had sounded the same as it used to. Evidently this was Mother’s way of saying she was still visiting them. Nothing more was heard from her for a long time. Perhaps she had other things to do or found her new world more intriguing.

  But on January 9, 1967, Mrs. B.’s older sister woke up to hear her mother calling her urgently. She immediately got out of bed to answer her mother, completely forgetting for the moment that her mother had been dead for all those years. Three times the voice called, and the tone was one of great distress. Was she trying to tell her something, and if so, what? The following night, Mrs. B.’s sister found out. Her husband died quite suddenly. Perhaps her mother had tried to soften the blow by forewarning her.

  Not every communication from the dead is welcomed by the living. A certain percentage of superstitious people might even consider such contacts evil or devil-inspired or dangerous. Otherwise rational people refuse the proffered hand from beyond the grave. They don’t doubt that their loved ones continue to exist in another world. They just don’t want those loved ones around in theirs.

  A Mrs. Marge C. in New Jersey has had trouble with her grandfather for years. It all started when he was dying in the local hospital and asked to see her. Although she had not been really close to him, it was his dying wish; yet her mother did not grant it. Soon after, she felt a strange chill. Later she realized that it had occurred at the very moment of his passing, but she did not know it at the time.

  Still a little girl, Marge was present when her uncle and aunt brought their new baby home with them. She happened to look up, and there at the back door stood her grandfather, watching. As he noticed her look, he reached out to her. But instead of compassion for the old man, she only felt terror at the thought.

  A little later, one evening as she was getting ready for bed she heard someone calling her. This was peculiar because she was home alone. But she went downstairs to the kitchen. There was her grandfather, gazing at her. She yelled in fright, and he vanished.

  The next time the unwelcome visitor made an appearance she was sixteen. This time she was at a girlfriend’s house and happened to glance out the window at a quiet moment. There was grandfather again, looking at her from outside. She still did not want any part of the manifestations.

  Just before she met her husband in 1965 she saw her grandfather again. He reached for her and tried to speak, but she yelled and fainted. Perhaps the grandfather got the message that appearing in all his celestial glory was frightening to his granddaughter; at any rate he did not come back again. But the problem was by no means solved. Frequently Marge could sense him around and hear him call out to her. Even her husband heard the voice and of course could understand it. Finally, Marge took her problem to her mother to find out why her grandfather was so insistent. Her mother had been his favorite child, it seems, and Marge, ever since she was born, had grown into the image of her mother. Was that the reason her grandfather wanted to communicate with her?

  I explained the possible reasons to Mrs. C. and asked her to be understanding toward her grandfather. I never heard anything further from her, so perhaps grandfather has given up.

  Dr. Lucia B., a medical doctor specializing in cancer research and a graduate of a leading European university, has had a distinguished medical career as a chest specialist. A vivacious lady, she speaks several languages. Her parents moved from her native Vienna to Prague, where her father was editor and published a group of magazines. Later her father lived in Berlin, where he ran a successful publishing house.

  Dr. B. is married to a retired Italian army general and lives in an apartment on New York’s West Side. She has lived in the United States on and off since 1932. Prior to that, she was a physician with the Health Department of Puerto Rico. Her major contribution to medicine, she feels, was the discovery of the enzyme that inhibits the cancer cells of the respiratory system. Unfortunately the New York climate did not agree with her, and when I met her she was ready to pull up stakes again and return to Italy.

  Dr. B. came to my study in New York to talk about some unusual psychic experiences she wanted explained. As a medical doctor, she had a certain reluctance to accept these events at face value, and yet, as an observant and brilliantly logical individual, she knew that what had happened to her was perfectly real and not the result of an overactive hallucinatory imagination.

  In 1940, when the first of these astounding events took place, Lucia B. lived at the famous Villa Horace in Tivoli, Italy. World War II was on, and her husband was on active duty as a major in the Italian army. They had just been transferred to Tivoli and lived at the villa, which was then the property of an Englishwoman whom the Fascists did not touch because she had lived among the Italians for a very long time. Dr. B. was and is a U.S. citizen, and there was some concern felt for her status. But for the moment no overt move had been made against her, and as the wife of an Italian officer she seemed safe for the time being, especially since the United States had not yet entered the war.

  In May of that year, the Englishwoman left for two days to visit friends. Major B. had gone off to Civitavecchia to get some briefings at the military academy, leaving Dr. B. all alone for a day. She decided to make good use of her “freedom” to go to nearby Rome the next morning for a full day’s visit. It was a beautiful, warm evening, and there was one of those marvelous early summer sunsets Italy is famous for. Dr. B. stood by her windows and looked out into the landscape, unusually happy despite the heavy clouds of war all around her.

  They had a pet turkey, which she went to visit in the downstairs portion of the villa. The house, built upon the original Roman foundations and incorporating much of the ancient house, is one of the great historical attractions of the area and is listed in most guidebooks. After a brief visit with the bird, she returned to her quarters and went to bed in a serene frame of mind.

  She had left word to be awakened at 7 A.M. This was to be the duty of Gino, her husband’s young aide-de-camp. But she was aroused from deep sleep at 6 A.M. not by Gino but by Oscar, Gino’s orderly.

  “Wake up—it’s 6 o’clock,” he said, and shook her.

  Dr. Barrett was upset at this unusual treatment. “But it’s supposed to be at seven,” she countered, “and not you, but Gino’s supposed to wake me. What are you doing in here? Get out!”

  With that, the orderly fled, and Dr. B. tried to go back to sleep. But she could not. She got up and opened the shutters that let in the light of the already bright day. Then she opened the door that led to a long, spacious room called the mensa that was used as a mess hall. There was a chapel within the walls of the villa, and a row of benches formerly in the chapel had been placed along the walls of this long room so that people might sit there and pray, or just rest. Dr. B. stepped into the mess hall. On one of the first bench seats she saw a man sitting. It was her father, and then she realized why the orderly had awakened her out of turn: to let her know that her father had arrived.

  “So you’re not dead after all,” she said, and went over to greet him.

  Her father had left New York in October 1938 and gone back to Prague. In February of the following year she received a telegram from her father’s mistress advising her briefly that her father had died and had been buried. There were some suspicious circumstances surrounding his death, Dr. B. learned later when she went to Prague to investigate. It was not a natural death, and there were witnesses who said he was afraid that he was being poisoned. But there was nothing she could do. Prague was already German-occupied, and it was difficult to open old wounds. She could not locate the ashes, but she did find the man who had signed her late father’s death certificate. He freely admitted that he had not examined the body, but the death had occurred on the day the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia, so he took it for granted that it was suicide as he had “been told.” Dr. B. has always suspected her father was “done in” through a plot involving a mistress, but
she cannot prove it. She left Prague again, sure only that her father was indeed no longer alive.

  But there he was, exactly as he used to look in the happy days when they went hiking into the mountains together. He was dressed in a brown tweed suit, a suit her mother had loathed because it was so old. His head was bent down, and at first she did not see his face. He wore a wide-brimmed hat.

  “You’re here,” Dr. B. exclaimed. “I knew you weren’t dead!”

  For the moment she had forgotten all about her trip to Prague and the certainty of his demise. But she was otherwise awake and alert, and the day was already very bright.

  She knelt down to look into his face and noticed how worn his suit was. He was as solid a man as ever, nothing transparent or vague about him. She started to talk to him in a voice filled with joy. He lifted his head somewhat, and the hat moved back up on his head a little. Now she could see his forehead and face more clearly, and she noticed that his skin was greenish.

  “You must have been ill,” she said, puzzled by this strange color. “Or have you been a prisoner?”

  He answered her in a voice that came from his lips with great difficulty. “Yes,” he said, “they let me sit in the sun so you would not get so scared.”

  (A materialization in full daylight requires a great deal of power and preparation, I thought, and is not at all common. But evidently the people arranging this strange encounter had seen a way to bring it off successfully.)

  Dr. B. did not grasp the meaning of his remark. “You’ve been sick,” she repeated. “Who brought you?”

  Her father pointed to the rear of the huge room. Dr. B. looked in that direction. There were six other benches behind the one her father sat on, and then there was a buffet where the soldiers quartered in the house would eat, and beyond that, next to a wide open door, she saw standing Dr. K., a friend of both her father and herself. At the time she saw this man, he was living in New York, but as it dawned upon her that her father was a visitor from the other side, she asked him whether Dr. K. was also dead.

  His reply came in a faltering voice. “No. They brought me.”

  Dr. B. looked again and saw behind the erect figure of Dr. K. five yellow-skinned people of small stature, apparently East Indians. They stood at a short distance from the doctor in a respectful position and were dressed in dark clothes.

  “Who are these men?” she asked.

  “They are from Java,” her father replied. “They brought me here.”

  This did not make any sense whatever. She took her father’s hand into her own now. It felt like ice. Now she realized that her intuitive feeling a moment before had been right.

  “You are——?”

  He nodded.

  “Why did you come? There must be a reason for it.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “Am I in danger?”

  “Yes,” he replied, “you are. You must join the mountaineers.”

  “I must what?”

  “Go over the mountains,” her father admonished. “You must get guides.”

  This made very little sense, but before she could question her dead father further, he added: “When you’re on the ship, these Javanese will look after you.”

  “But I don’t need to be looked after.”

  “They’ll watch you during the sea voyage,” he repeated in a tired, faraway tone of voice.

  At this moment, Gino the aide-de-camp who was supposed to wake her at 7 A.M., burst through the door. Seeing her already up and about, he became agitated.

  “Who are all these people?” he demanded. Evidently he too could see them! “Who opened the gates for them?”

  As Gino thundered into the mess hall, Dr. B.’s attention was momentarily distracted by him. When she looked back to her father, he had vanished! She glanced toward the other end of the room and found the Javanese and Dr. K. had also disappeared.

  She explained that Oscar had awakened her an hour earlier. Gino swore he would punish the orderly for doing this and left immediately. Fifteen minutes later Gino returned rather sheepishly. It seemed that Oscar was supposed to get up at 5 A.M. but did not. No matter how the soldiers tried to rouse him, he would not wake up but seemed to be in a strange stupor. He was still asleep when Gino saw him, and there was no question that he had never set foot into the mensa room that morning!

  Evidently Oscar was a physical medium, and it was his “substance” those in charge of “arrangements” had borrowed to make the materialization of Dr. B.’s father possible.

  An additional proof that it was not the real Oscar but only a projection or simulation of the orderly that had awakened her at 6 A.M. could be seen in the fact that the keys to the outer gates were still in Gino’s possession. No one else had a set of keys, and yet the doors were open when Gino arrived! They could not be opened from the inside; only with a key put into the lock from outside the gates could they be opened.

  A long succession of soldiers testified that Oscar had never left his bed. At 7:10 A.M. he was still unconscious, and awoke only much later in the day.

  When questioned by his superiors and Dr. B., Oscar was as mystified as they were. He recalled absolutely nothing and had never had a similar experience before.

  “I should have known something was odd when he touched me and shook me violently to awaken me,” Dr. B. said as an afterthought. “In Italy that sort of thing just isn’t done—you don’t touch the Signora.”

  The real Oscar, of course, would never have dared to, but apparently the astrally-projected Oscar, perhaps under the control of another will, had to awaken her in order for her to receive the message her father had brought. It seemed to me like a wonderfully well-organized psychic plot.

  With all the commotion, Dr. B. had completely forgotten she had to catch the 8 o’clock train to Rome. Getting hold of her emotions, she made the train just in time. When her husband returned two days later, she did not tell him about the incident. It wasn’t the sort of thing an Italian officer would accept, she felt, and she thought it best to put it aside. Time would tell if there was something to all this.

  Two months later her husband left for the war in earnest. This left her alone at the villa, and as the Germans took over more and more in Italy she was advised by the U.S. consul to leave the country. But just as she was ready to leave for Switzerland, the Italian government confiscated her passport. Marriages between Italian officers and foreigners were dissolved, leaving her in even greater difficulties.

  All this time her husband was fighting somewhere in Greece, and she had very little news of him. There was a hint she might wind up in a detention camp. She decided to leave while she could.

  “Go over the mountains,” a friend suggested, and suddenly it hit her what her father had meant.

  Twice she was unsuccessful. The third time she succeeded and wound up in a French prison for two months. As she was a good skier, she had crossed the Little St. Bernard pass on skis. However, in order not to get caught and sent back again she had taken a guide. Just as her dead father had predicted she would!

  Her mother in New York arranged for her to come back and got her to Lisbon, where she was to take a boat. Through a highly placed acquaintance in Washington her mother arranged for passage aboard a tiny vessel never meant for the Atlantic passage. The boat belonged to a Portuguese industrialist, and there were just twelve cabins aboard.

  The yacht was named the Cavalho Arrujo, or Red Horse, and it took twenty-one days to cross the ocean. When the ship reached the Azores, a Dutch radioman and five Javanese crewmen from a torpedoed Dutch ship were taken aboard. Evidently they had been torpedoed by the Germans and taken blindfolded to the Azores, then neutral. In a rare gesture of humanitarianism the Germans left them there to be rescued and sent home.

  From the very first, the five Javanese attached themselves to Dr. B., watching over her just as her father had told her they would. They looked exactly as they had appeared to her in the glimpse into the future her father had given at the villa in
Tivoli!

  After she landed in New York and joined her mother, she never saw the Javanese crewmen again. They vanished as quickly and quietly as they had entered her life.

  Just as soon as she could, she looked up Dr. K. She was sure he would not believe her, but she was determined to tell him what she had seen.

  To her amazement Dr. K., a celebrated biochemist, did not scoff. They compared the time differential to determine where he had been at the time she had seen him in Tivoli. He had been at work in his New York lab and had felt nothing special at the time.

  Since there was no close connection between Dr. B. and Dr. K., she was puzzled as to why her father had “shown” him to her at the time of his visit. But Dr. K. represented New York to her father, and perhaps this was his way of saying: “You’ll get to New York.”

  Since Dr. K. did not project his image to Italy, I can only assume that what Dr. B. saw was a simulation—that is, a materialization created by the same powers that arranged for her father’s temporary return. Ectoplasm can be molded in many ways, and as Dr. B. did not actually speak to the Javanese and to the Dr. K. she saw in Tivoli., they might also have been merely projections or visions. Whatever the technique of their amazing appearances, the purpose was clear: to give her a glimpse into the future.

  Her father never contacted her again after her safe return to the United States.

  Dr. B.’s encounters with the supernormal have been rare and far between, but whatever experiences she has had were unusually vivid. Shortly after her marriage she was spending some time alone in a summer resort not far from Venice, where she and her husband were living at the time. Two days before she was to rejoin her husband in the city, she was dressing for dinner. It was the last Sunday, and she was putting on her fanciest evening gown for the occasion. It was a warm June evening. She was sitting in front of the dresser, and as she bent forward to put on her lipstick, she suddenly saw in the mirror that two candles were burning behind her. She turned around, but there were no candles in back of her. She looked back into the mirror, and there were the two candles again! Back and forth her head went, and the candles were still there—but only in the mirror.