One thing I was certain of, that what I did was good therapy. That was more important to me than to be too scientific. I know I was taking considerable risks. I could not be sure that I was right and that the poltergeist phenomena would stop, but I knew that my publicly expressed confidence in him would pay dividends.
It did. I became an angel of the Lord for Ted Pauls. He was walking on air, beaming with happiness and basking in the sudden change of parental and grandparental attitude. Suddenly they were proud of him and respected him. He was no longer an irresponsible boy of seventeen. He was a man with a great future ahead. He became the pride of his family.
No room could be left for the poltergeist with such an uplifting of the ego. His psychic energies could no longer explode downwards. He was out to reach the heights. However, I had failed to take into consideration that Ted Pauls might not willingly consent to my departure at such a short notice, that he may well stage a tantrum through Poltergeist activity against the severance of the important emotional tie formed with me.
The result was that the poltergeist activity did not immediately cease, rather it reached a crescendo of rage and frustration. Psychoanalytically, this was part of the working-through process. While it appeared to go against my therapeutic approach, actually it did not do so. The protest from Ted Pauls’ unconscious level was not maintained too long. It gradually died.
The case is important because accidentally I tumbled on a novel cure of the poltergeist psychosis. (So described by me in my book, Haunted People.) It is as simple as the egg of Columbus. Find the frustrated creative gift, lift up a crushed ego, give love and confidence and the poltergeist will cease to be. After that you can still proceed with psychoanalysis, release the unconscious conflicts, but whether you do it or not, a creative self-expression will result in a miraculous transformation.
SUSY SMITH earned an enviable reputation during her long life as an investigator of parapsychology and the supernatural in America, travelling across the length and breadth of the continent to prove that as many inexplicable events occur in the States as in Europe. Among her most popular books were ESP: The Uncanny World of Extrasensory Perception (1962), Reincarnation (1967) and Prominent American Ghosts (1968) for which she visited many old houses and, she says, “met a few of the ghosts – but I’m not sure.” There does not seem to be much doubt about her visit to a school, though, as she recalled in this report written in 1967.
THE BURNLEY SCHOOL SPOOK
Location and date:
Seattle, Washington, USA, 1965
In doing research for my work I have made it a practice never to visit ghost houses with mediums. If a psychic person has happened to be along, I have noted his impressions; but it has not been my purpose to attempt to communicate with the alleged entities who haunt the houses I have visited.
Once, though, I found myself in a haunted school in the company of four mediums, and it was an experience I’ll never forget. This is what happened.
The Burnley School of Professional Art, at 905 East Pine Street in Seattle, Washington, had loud creaky footsteps on the stairs and locked doors that opened in the night for about six years, until they abated somewhat in the spring of 1965. I made an appointment on 4 October 1965 with Jess Cauthorn, the owner-director of the school and one of the Pacific Northwest’s best-known watercolorists, to visit his school and interview several of the students who had heard unexplained activity in the building. Since I was in Seattle also to study the manifestations of the medium Keith Milton Rhinehart, we decided to ask him to join us later and see what psychic impressions he received there.
The Burnley School is on the corner of Broadway and Pine Street, across from a very old public school now known as Edison Tech. The Franklin Savings & Loan Association occupies the street-level offices of the building, and the art school takes up the two top floors. The structure was originally designed to be a cultural and art center; and it had studios for ballet and piano and a large auditorium on the second floor to be used for special events. Its first official function was a reception for President William Howard Taft when he visited Seattle to open the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909. For some years a dancing club known as “Entre Nous” used to rent Christiansen’s Dance Studio in the auditorium, for student affairs which were the big social events of Broadway High School each season.
There was a period when the auditorium was used as a temporary school gymnasium for the overflow from across the street; but the ceilings were so low that basketball players had to invent trick shots – such as banking the ball off the ceiling. When the dancing teacher complained that the noise was disturbing his classes, wrestling mats were brought and placed against the gym walls to muffle the noise.
In 1946, Edwin Burnley, a well-known Seattle artist, opened art classes there and taught many budding painters, including Jess Cauthorn, who now owns the school. The big gym has been turned into a classroom full of adjustable wooden desks at which students work during the day, and which the ghost apparently resents exceedingly. He makes noises at night as if he were moving the desks around – great scraping and scrunching sounds as if he were trying to drag them out of there. He is better in the audio department than the material or physical, for nothing is ever actually disturbed in the morning – except the people who had to listen to the noises the night before.
Jess Cauthorn told me that he, himself, has heard these manifestations. He had never believed in ghosts until that time. He isn’t really sure that he does now, and yet . . .
“I’m a realistic person,” Cauthorn said, “but there are some things you just can’t ignore – like the sound of desks being moved in an empty room behind locked doors.”
Jess thought that perhaps the ghost had been more active in recent years because, “We’ve had to enlarge the school to accommodate more students. This meant going into strange nooks and crannies, opening up heretofore unused rooms and employing the long-locked-up back stairway in order to get to new classrooms. That’s probably what disturbed the ghost, who, apparently had not been too active up until then.”
John R. Nelson, a tall young student, illustrated for me the sound the ghost made on the stairs. He went down and clomped up the wide flight leading from the first floor to the third. The steps are very creaky, and each footstep squeaked in its own specific way. There was no possible doubt that the sound was just that – a footstep on a stair. John said that, when he had been working on a big art project and didn’t want to stop, he had sometimes painted most of the night. When he was all alone in the building, and knew he was all alone, he would hear, at any moment between eleven o’clock at night and three o’clock in the morning, footsteps mounting those stairs. He would naturally go to see who was arriving, but nobody was there. At least, no physical presence was there.
“I was scared to death at first,” said John.
“Can you ever get used to a thing like that?” I asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “You just learn not to work here alone at night.”
“You wouldn’t get me here alone, even without a ghost,” I said, being somewhat of a sissy about big, empty places.
“New students don’t believe it, of course,” John went on. “But after they’ve been here some of them work late at night and then they hear it. Jennie Miller . . .” and John nodded toward a girl who had just come into the room, “didn’t believe it at first. And she even stayed in the building several nights and didn’t hear anything . . .”
“But when I finally did,” Jennie interrupted him, “I went bellowing down the hall. I was all alone here and I wanted to run out, but I was scared to go down the stairs.”
The students got together and devised tests to catch the haunt. With masking tape they fastened thread across doorways about three feet off the floor. The next day, when they were sure that they had been the last ones out at night and the first ones in in the morning, they found some of the threads broken. On another occasion they stretched the thread across the s
tairway. Then they turned out the lights and waited upstairs. Some time later, they heard the steps come up both flights; but on examination the thread, which a living being would either have broken or knocked down, was intact.
Lest it be suspected that the noises heard on the stairs were just the normal creakings of old buildings, the students ask how that accounts for the fact that when they hear someone climbing, the creaks are sequential in order from bottom to top.
Cauthorn did not want his students alone there at night if there was any possible danger that a robber could be getting into the place in such a clever way that no one could catch him at it. So he had an insurance investigator check over the building carefully. When the place was pronounced perfectly safe, with all the locks and doors and windows secure against intruders, Jennie again worked late in her studio.
“While I was concentrating hard on my sketches,” she told me, “I heard a bang, and then a creak, and then the sound of somebody walking. Naturally I had all the lights on, and I hurried out into the hall to see who it was. Nobody was there.” Later that night she heard a key go into the lock of the front door and the squeaking sound of the door opening. “I rushed out and looked down the stairs,” she said, “but the door was not open and not a soul had come in.”
Jennie’s friend, Ellen Pearce, had a studio on the third floor, and they worked there sometimes at night. The main light switch for that floor is on the inside of a room, and you have to grope your way across in the dark to find it. One night the girls heard a moan behind the door of that room, like a human being in great agony. Wondering who could possibly have gotten in there, and what could be happening, they fumbled their way across to the light switch, almost petrified with fright.
“But can you imagine our state when we got the light on and looked behind the door and no one was there?” asked Ellen.
I could. But I said I’d rather not.
Another student, Robert B. Theriault of Seattle, found a certain small room, used by the students for resting and coffee breaks, to be the most sinister of all. Once, when the lights were on in there, he was standing outside the door, but he knew someone was inside because he heard sounds as if magazine pages were being turned, and other movements. However, when he started to enter the room, the rustling stopped, and there was no one in there.
Henry Bennett is a commercial artist who had an apartment on the third floor while he was a student at the Burnley School around 1959–60. Cauthorn told me, “Hank was responsible for the security of the building at night. But often in the morning I would find the front door, or the fire door, wide open, or at least they would be unlocked when I arrived. Sometimes I really chewed Hank out, but he always insisted he had locked the doors and checked the place over the night before. I didn’t know what to think.”
Bennett confirmed to me that he always carefully locked the building each night. But the doors were often unlocked the next morning, and sometimes even open. “Many curious things happened while I was living there,” he said. “You would swear someone was walking up the stairs or moving furniture in some room, or some unseen person was doing construction work on the building. But when I’d turn on the lights, nobody was ever there.” Henry Bennett said that the ghost had not scared him; but he was talking from a distance of five years from the time of the events in which he had been involved.
I was to get close to events within a very short time – for the mediums were gathering. Clyde Beck, a member of the American Society for Psychical Research and an individual who believes in attempting to work with all the equipment of a modern technician, had arrived first, loaded down with movie cameras and tape recorders – none of which were usable when things got interesting. By then we were all in the dark, and he had been unable to secure infrared lights and film. After Clyde, came several of the younger mediums of Rhinehart’s church – the Aquarian Foundation. Then came the feature attraction of the evening – Dr Keith Milton Rhinehart, himself.
Actually an intelligent young man of twenty-nine, Keith was at that time affecting a mustache and goatee and a loud sports jacket – and he looked more like a beatnik guitar player than the pastor of a church. He brought a few more people with him; so it turned out to be altogether a much larger group than we had anticipated.
Since many people know little about mediums except the reputation some of them have for being fraudulent, I think perhaps I should take a moment here to discuss the subject. Extrasensory perception (or ESP) is not uncommon. Those who have a great amount of it are known as mediums, or “sensitives,” or “psychics.” They may be born with the natural talent in large degree, or they may have some slight ability and decide to improve it, by sitting for development in classes at which a trained medium presides.
I have sat in a number of development groups myself, and have begun to exhibit an interesting amount of telepathy – I can sometimes see a picture clearly in my mind of something another person is at that moment thinking. I have on one or two occasions gone into a trancelike state. I was not then completely unconscious, but my mind was “withdrawn” to the extent that I was not consciously instigating the words that were spoken through my mouth, words that purported to come from a deceased entity. Whether or not what I said came from my subconscious, I cannot state. I am only sure that certain information was given through me which I did not consciously know, and had not acquired normally.
Because of my own personal experience with this, I am aware that the material mediums produce may be genuine. I also know the effort, the countless hours sitting in classes, which many sensitives spend in order that their psychic talents may be developed as fully as possible. For this reason I must say definitely and firmly that all mediums are not fraudulent.
Yet I know that, just as there are quack doctors and shyster lawyers, there are phoney mediums. I have seen some who put on such sham acts that it was disgusting; and I have been furious, not only with them but with the gullible public who allowed themselves to be taken in by such trickery.
Keith Rhinehart is a natural-born medium who also spent years improving his native capabilities, beginning when he was in junior high school. When he is in good form, his powers are excellent. I have seen much evidence that, when he is entranced, genuine information has been given through him that he could have no possible normal way of knowing. This is usually referred to as “mental” mediumship. Although extremely adequate as a mental medium, Keith prefers to be known as a “physical” medium – one in whose presence curious physical phenomena occur.
One of his special abilities, it is claimed, is the production of “apports” – objects that are said to have been dematerialized from somewhere else on earth and then rematerialized inside the seance room. If the room has been thoroughly searched beforehand, the possibility of trap doors and secret compartments and false arms and bottoms to chairs, etc., eliminated, and the medium has been stripped and examined by a doctor, and then apports appear during the seance – it is hard not to consider their appearance as a supernormal manifestation. In the history of psychical research there is evidence for the appearance of apports, under conditions that have been so controlled as to give no opportunity for fraud.
I have seen apports appear in a lighted room under what I considered to be controlled conditions; but still I am reluctant to declare firmly once and for all that the phenomena were genuine. Many investigators much more highly trained than I have also hesitated to commit themselves. This is because there are some mediums who are so adept at prestidigitation that it is difficult for anyone ever to guarantee absolutely that he might not have in some way been hoodwinked.
I am going into this in such detail because of the events which followed at the Burnley School. I want it understood that I do not point an accusation of fraud at anybody for what occurred on the evening I am about to describe. And yet there is no possible way for me to be certain that there was not at least some lighthearted trickery involved. Then again, maybe there wasn’t. After all, we were in a bu
ilding with a reputation for being haunted.
The members of Keith’s organization who came with him to the Burnley School that night had trained themselves very carefully, sitting hour after hour in dark rooms letting their natural mediumistic talents develop. I felt, and still feel, that they are sincere workers at their trade. In this group were Judith Crane, a very pretty, well-educated young woman who has gained considerable prominence as a medium, and her fiancé, Donald Ballard, whom she has since married. Don is not a medium and is only a follower of psychic interests insofar as they affect Judy. I can’t help but believe that Don would have been furious if he had observed in Judy or her associates anything he thought was in any way dishonest – yet he was with the Aquarian Foundation members all the time that evening. The two other Aquarians present were Kenneth Bower and Helen Lester. The rest of the crowd that began to tour the haunted school included Jess Cauthorn, his students John Nelson and Jennie Miller, Clyde Beck, and me.
As we moved through the building I took notes on the impressions each sensitive expressed. Some were interesting in the light of the history of the school: It was sensed that there had been dancing and basketball in the big auditorium and that there had been exercise mats there at one time. But all this had been published in various newspaper accounts of the haunting which had appeared over the years, one as recent as June 1965, so the mediums could be given no special credit for their successes even if they were genuine “hits.” There is always the chance that they may have read the articles.
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 25
