Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  Finally, there is a kind of semi-voluntary astral projection, where a person wills himself or herself to visit a distant place, without, however, knowing anything about the place itself or its appearance. When such a visit yields verified details, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant, we can judge the verity of the experiment so much more accurately.

  Some researchers refer to this particular phase also as “traveling clairvoyance.” Others maintain that really only a part of the personality doing the projecting is visiting distant places and that the essential portion of oneself does not move. To me, this is harder to believe than the more natural explanation of duality—the physical body stays behind and the etheric body travels. Not a part of the etheric body, but all of it.

  What about thought projections, then? There are known cases where an apparition of a living person has suddenly and momentarily appeared to others in the flesh great distances away. Usually, there are emotional situations involved in this type of phenomenon. Either the apparition of the living is to warn of impending disaster or danger, or the sender himself is in trouble and seeks help. But the projection is sudden and momentary in all cases and does not compare to the lingering qualities of a true ghost or an apparition of a person who is deceased.

  I am inclined to think that these thought projections in which a living person appears to another living person are extremely fast astral projections, so fast, in fact, that the etheric body is back home again before the traveler realizes it, and that, therefore, there is no need to be in a prone position in bed—a sudden sense of absence, of being not all there, at the most.

  * 161

  The Monks of Winchester Cathedral

  MY WIFE AND I were on a journey to Southampton to appear there on television and then go on to Beaulieu, where I wanted to investigate hauntings at the ancient abbey. Winchester Cathedral is in direct line with this destination, and so I decided to stop over briefly at the famed cathedral. I had heard that a number of witnesses had observed ghostly monks walking in the aisles of this church, where no monks have actually walked since the 1500s. During the dissolution of the monasteries upon orders of Henry VIII, monks and abbots were abused and occasionally executed or murdered, especially when they resisted the orders driving them from their customary places. Here at Winchester, so close to the capital, the order was strictly enforced and the ghostly monks seen by a number of witnesses may indeed have had some unfinished “business”! On researching the matter, I discovered that I was not the first man to obtain psychic photographs in this place. According to a dispatch of the Newark Evening News of September 9, 1958, an amateur photographer by the name of T. L. Taylor was visiting the ancient cathedral with his family. Taylor, who was then forty-two years old, an electrical engineer by profession, was on a sightseeing trip as a tourist without the slightest interest in or knowledge of the supernormal. He took a number of pictures in the choir area—the same area where my ghostly monks appeared—in late 1957. With him at the time was Mrs. Taylor and his then sixteen-year-old daughter Valerie. Incidentally, none of them observed any ghostly goings-on whatever.

  The Monks of Winchester: still walking?

  The haunted pews

  Close-up of the monks who were driven out by Henry VIII

  The first exposure turned out to be a normal view of the choir chairs, but on the following picture—perhaps taken from a slightly different angle—there appeared in these same empty chairs thirteen human figures dressed in what appeared to be medieval costumes. When the film and prints came back from the lab, Taylor was aghast. As a technician he knew that his camera could not take double exposures accidentally—just as mine can’t—because of a locking mechanism, and the manufacturer of the film confirmed to him upon inquiry that the film was in no way faulty and the “ghosts” could not be explained through some form of error in manufacture of film or developing. Satisfied that he had somehow obtained some supernormal material, Taylor turned the results over to the Lewisham Psychic Research Society, where they presumably still are.

  The monks in the aisle

  As soon as we had dashed from the car through the heavy rainfall into the cathedral, Catherine and I walked up to the choir chair area and I began to take black-and-white photographs, exposing two seconds for each picture. The high content of moisture in the atmosphere may have had some bearing on the supernormal results. On other occasions I have found that moist air is a better psychic conductor than dry air. After I had exposed the entire roll of eleven pictures in various directions, but from the same area, we returned to our car, still of course totally ignorant as to whether anything unusual would show on the negatives. Since all of my psychic photography is unexpected and purely accidental, no thoughts of what might turn up filled my mind at the time. I was merely taking photographs of the cathedral because people had observed ghosts in it. Only later did I discover that someone else had also obtained photographs of ghosts there.

  Upon developing and printing it became immediately clear that I had caught the cowled, hooded figures of three monks walking in the aisle. On close inspection it is clear that we are dealing here not with one identical picture of a monk exposed somehow three times as he moved about but with three slightly different figures, one of which looks sideways, while the other two are caught from the rear. I was puzzled by the apparent lack of height on the part of these figures and wondered if sixteenth-century men were that much smaller than we are. But on examination of the records I discovered that the stone floor of the cathedral was raised a hundred years after the last monks had been driven out from Winchester. Thus the figures caught here are walking on what to them must be the original floor!

  * 162

  The Secret of Ballinguile

  “YOU MAY LIKE TO follow up the enclosed,” wrote Patrick Byrne of the Dublin Herald, who had been running pieces about our impending return to Ireland in search of haunted houses. The enclosure turned out to be a letter written in longhand, dated April 2, 1966, from a Mrs. O’Ferrall, who had a sister living near Dartry, a suburb of Dublin, said sister having but recently removed there from a haunted house on Eglington Road, Donnybrook.

  After a consultation about the matter—talking about ghosts is not taken lightly by the Irish—Mrs. O’Ferrall got her sister’s approval, and, more important, address. Thus it was that I addressed myself to Mrs. Mary Healy of Temple Road, so that I might learn of her adventures in the house firsthand.

  The house in question, it turned out, was still standing, but had lately been falling into disrepair, since the new owners were bent on eventual demolition. Mrs. Healy had sold it in 1963. Part of the sprawling gray stone house is eighteenth century and part is nineteenth, but the site has been inhabited continuously since at least the fifteenth century. A high wall that surrounds the property gives it the appearance of a country house rather than a city residence, which it is, for Donnybrook is really a part of Dublin. The word Donnybrook, incidentally, is derived from St. Broc, a local patron, and there is on the grounds of this house, called Ballinguile, a natural well of great antiquity, dedicated to St. Broc.

  Thus it is that the house may have given the whole district its name. The well, situated towards the rear wall of the garden, is greatly overgrown with lush vegetation, for everything grows well in moist Ireland. The house itself is set back a bit from the road—a busy road it is—thus affording a degree of privacy. In back of the main house are a now totally rundown flower and vegetable garden, and the extensive stables, long fallen into disuse or partially used as garages. There is farther back a small, compact gatehouse, still occupied by a tenant who also vaguely looks after the empty house itself.

  There are large sitting rooms downstairs fore and aft, attesting to the somewhat haphazard fashion in which the house was altered and added to over the years. The house consists of three portions, with the middle portion the highest; there is a second story, and above it an attic to which one gains access only by a metal ladder. Set down in front of the sidewall o
f Ballinguile is a greenhouse which a previous owner had made into a kind of verandah. Now it lay in shambles, just as most of the ground-floor windows had long been shattered by neighborhood youngsters in a peculiar spirit of defiance common to all young people wherever unbroken—and unattended—windows stare!

  “The principal unusual happenings,” Mrs. Healy explained, “were the sound of footsteps, mostly on the stairs. They were so natural that one did not at once realize that all the household were present. They occurred during the daytime and most frequently during July and August. In fact, August was the time the two strangest things happened. The year I moved there, my youngest son was living with me and he was still a student and a bit lively. When he had friends in I usually retired and went to bed.

  “One night he had just one friend downstairs, and about 9 P.M. came to me and said they were going out for a while, and so they went. Shortly after I woke from a doze to hear a lot of people downstairs; they were laughing and joking, and talking, and I could hear them moving about. They seemed very happy and really enjoying themselves. I was very angry and thought to get up and tell them that was no time to be having an unprepared party, but I didn’t.

  “After quite a while there was silence, and shortly after, the hall door opened and my son came in. He had gone to see his friend home and stayed with him a while. There had been no party!

  “Two years later, also in August, my daughter, who lived with her husband and little girl in half the house, and I were standing in my dining room, an old converted kitchen. Suddenly we saw the little girl of three and a half talking to someone in the enclosed yard. She would say something and wait for the answer. There was no one that we could see anywhere, but we distinctly heard her say, ‘but you are my friend!’ We asked her who she was speaking to and she said casually, ‘the tall dark man,’ and gave us the impression she knew him well.

  “Just before we left, one evening after we had all retired to bed about 11 P.M., we were aroused by the doorbell. My son-in-law went down to find two policemen inquiring if all was well. Passing, they had heard a lot of violent noise in the house, and seeing all dark, came to investigate.

  The Secret of Ballinguile—an old argument that won’t go away

  “We had heard nothing!

  “To me the strangest thing was that one did not feel frightened, everything seemed so completely natural. It was only afterwards one realized it was strange. At no time was there any ‘creepy’ feeling.

  “The only person who was frightened at night was the little girl, who would not stay in bed at night saying something frightened her. But children often do that. We did not tell her anything about our own experiences, for children are quick to elaborate.”

  So much for Mrs. Healy’s experiences. I reported none of this to Sybil, of course, and as we were on the lookout for a house to buy in Ireland, it was simply still another house to inspect for that reason.

  On arrival in Dublin I arranged a date to meet Mrs. Healy at her new home, after we had been to the former Healy home in Donnybrook. To get permission and keys, I telephoned the present owner, Arthur Lurie, who was most cooperative although I never told him about any potential ghost. But then I doubt it would have impressed him. Mr. Lurie sounded to me like a man who was all business. The price he asked for the house was unfortunately too high for us, but we did like the house and might have bought it otherwise.

  Keys in pocket, we set out for Ballinguile on a very warm July afternoon. The driver obligingly opened the rusty gates for us and the car drove into the grounds. At that moment, a little lady practically flew past us in pursuit of two small dogs, explaining on the run—“They used to play in here, you know. Mind if I give them a run?”

  Before we could answer she was past us and inside. Five minutes later I had her out again, dogs and all.

  Now we started our exploration, carefully avoiding the many broken windows that had let in a veritable avalanche of birds, to whom some rooms had become home, judging from their evidences.

  We were still standing outside, while the driver was napping in the sun. I was busy putting my tape recording equipment and cameras into operating condition, while Catherine explored the wider reaches of the lush garden. Sybil and I found ourselves directly outside the rear sitting room.

  Suddenly, I heard muffled voices coming from the room and my first thought was, oh, there are some other people here also; how inconsiderate of the landlord to send them at the same time! Sybil turned her head to me and there was one big question mark written all over her face. She, too had heard the voices. It was over in a matter of perhaps two or three seconds, and the voices, one of which was male and deep, sounded as if coming from under water, but they certainly were human voices in conversation…such as at a party! We entered the room immediately, but of course there wasn’t a soul in it.

  I decided it was time to enter the house and see what Sybil’s psychic sense would “get” us.

  “Funny thing,” Sybil remarked as we started up the path towards the house, “I feel as if I’d been here before. I’ve ‘seen’ this house many times over the years. This house had a lot of unwarranted hatred directed towards it. When we got out of the car, I thought I saw a man…in one of the upper rooms…I thought I heard a voice… something beginning with S, like Sure, or Sean…the central portion, upper window, there seemed to be a man reading a paper….”

  Since Sybil did not get any strong impressions in the downstairs part of the house, we ascended the stairs and soon found ourselves on the second floor, in the very room in which most of the psychic occurrences had taken place.

  “There is plotting here…in this particular room I have the feeling of somebody very sick, worried, very excitable, a man—not too far back, the grounds seem to have an older influence but not this room. About 300 years on the grounds, but in the house, perhaps fifty years. There is a foreign influence here. Another language.”

  “Can you get any names?” I asked as Sybil leaned against the wall of the empty room. There was no chair to sit down in, so we had to do our trance work in this awkward fashion.

  “Wyman,” Sybil mumbled now, and gradually she became more and more entranced, although at no time was she in full trance.

  “French influence…Wyban, Vyvern…don’t know what it means,” she added, “he is here now. Not too long ago. He’s the one who brought us here.”

  “What does he want us to do?”

  I too had felt that this case was more than routine, that we were drawn to this house in some mysterious way. What was the secret of Ballinguile?

  “It seems ridiculous, but the man looks like Abraham Lincoln,” Sybil finally stated, “thin, gaunt, stooping shoulders…it’s his house, fifty years ago…Whibern…he has papers…something to be careful about…the land…the deed, there is trouble…the house and the land are not completely together.”

  I discovered later that the house was built on ground that belonged to different owners and that there were great legal problems involved in this. Sybil had no knowledge of this fact.

  “Another man knows this,” Sybil continued. “There is some trouble about the land. That’s the conflict of two families. He wants us to settle the land. Samly, Seamly… that was the name that was spelled when I came into the house. It’s a family name.”

  “Did he die here?”

  There was a moment of silence as Sybil queried the ghost.

  “Reading the papers carefully,” she finally mumbled instead, “check the papers, Miss Seamly…check the papers carefully…the money was wrong…Simmely (Seamly) made a mistake about the ground…sort it out…”

  Sybil was almost in trance now and her voice became weak and irregular. “Twenty-four,” she whispered under the influence of the ghost, “1924…year….”

  “Is there any other problem?” I inquired matter-offactly. Might as well clean out the lot.

  “The woman,” Sybil said, “where did she go? He says the woman left!”

  I assured him ther
e was nobody here now but us ghost hunters. Did he want us to buy the house perhaps? Not that it would help with the landlord.

  “Good people,” he mumbled, “people from overseas live here…now…not for the Irish…traitors…stolen the land…the land to the Institute…Institute for sick people….”

  “Did you leave the land to the Institute?” I asked.

  “Took it…the Institute….”

  “And who should have gotten it instead?”

  “Wyman…Wynan.” The name still was not quite clear, but I promised we would try and look into the matter of the land if we could.

  “He knows…” Sybil murmured, and a moment or two later she came out of the state bordering on trance. We were still upstairs.

  Sybil remembered absolutely nothing, but “her eyes did not feel right” for a moment.

  We went downstairs and closed the house, got into the car and drove to the nearby house where Mrs. Healy and her married daughter now reside.

  Suddenly it struck me that Sybil had talked about a man named White ever since we had met again in Dublin. Did I know any Mr. White? I did not. Would we be meeting such a person in one of our investigations? No, I said, we would not as far as I could tell.

  But then Mary Healy cleared up the mystery for us.

  A Mr. Bantry White used to live in the house we had just left. Since this name was unknown to me prior to that moment, Sybil of course could not have gotten it from my unconscious mind prior to visiting the Donnybrook house. Were Wynan and White the same person, I wondered.

  Another thing that struck me as peculiar was Sybil’s insistence on going to a house with an iron gate. No such house was on my list but Sybil kept asking for it. When we arrived at Ballinguile, however, there was no iron gate within view; still, Sybil demanded to see it, sure it was part of this house.