The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  Much of the evidence for Brando’s interest in the spirit world came to light after his death when the home on Mulholland Drive, where he had lived the life of a recluse for many years until his death aged 80 on 2 July 2004, was cleared to settle his affairs. In the bedroom were found books on the occult and New Age philosophy as well as a recessed shelf crowded with little figures and fertility statues that a member of the staff taking away the items for auction described as “looking like a shrine”. Of course, mystery, like notoriety, had surrounded Brando for many years – he had helped to earn the street where he lived the epitaph “Bad Boy’s Drive” with the eager compliance of hell-raiser Jack Nicholson who lived next door and Warren Beatty just up the road – but his fascination with the supernatural and psychic experiences were not generally known because of his obsessive desire for privacy.

  During Brando’s career, which had been launched with his “Method Acting” on the stage in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and iconic screen performances in 1954 in The Wild One, he had pursued an interest in the uncanny and apparently met a number of psychic investigators. Never a man to be duped or easily convinced, on one occasion he challenged the famous Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos to prove his ability. Brando showed him two locked wooden boxes and asked the Dutchman to tell him what was inside. Hurkos held the first box for several moments and said, “I see fire or an explosion on the sea. You have here a golden spike, a nail from a ship.” Picking up the second box, Hurkos repeated the process and then added, “I see a letter and I’m sorry to tell you, sir, that the spelling is lousy!”

  Brando opened the boxes and agreed that the Dutchman had been correct on both counts. The first box contained a golden spike that had come from the ship HMS Bounty, which had featured in his classic movie, Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), while the second contained a letter written by Brando in which a number of words were misspelt.

  The story of the haunting of Marlon Brando began in May 1990 when his notorious and troubled life hit a new low. Christian Brando, his oldest son by his first wife, Anna Kashfi, shot and killed Dag Drollet, the Tahitian lover of his half-sister, Cheyenne. The subsequent trial made international headlines, and after a dramatic testimony in the courtroom by Brando in which he admitted the failings of himself and his wife as parents and told the Drollet family that he “would trade places with Dag if I could”, Christian Brando was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Five years after the trial, Cheyenne, who was said to have never recovered from her lover’s death, committed suicide by hanging herself in Tahiti, aged just twenty-five.

  As time passed and he remained closeted behind the walls of the house in Mulholland Drive, friends of Marlon Brando came to believe he was constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Anna Kashfi later claimed that the situation was even more traumatic for her former husband:

  “After Dag’s death, Marlon said he was being haunted. He talked about sheets that were suddenly flung off his bed. He said he heard ghostly lips that whispered to him while he was out in his car, ‘I should not have died.’ Marlon became convinced it was the ghost of Dag Drollet. He admitted, ‘It’s terrifying. I know it Dag’s angry spirit.’ ”

  A further rather more curious supernatural story emerged during the final decade of Brando’s life. He apparently became intrigued by the legend of the Angel of Mons and at the turn of the new century was involved in a project to make a film utilizing the theme. A cache of personal papers and what was said to be actual footage of a mysterious apparition taken in Mons had come to light and he was involved in their purchase with a long-time associate, Hollywood director Tony Kaye. The collection had been started in 1914 by William Dodge, a West Countryman who had enlisted in the British Army and been posted to Belgium that same year.

  The documents and footage had lain forgotten for years in a military trunk discovered at the Bonita Junk Shop in Monmouth. They revealed Dodge’s love for a Belgian woman, identified only as Marie, and how, when he had lost her during the confusion of war, he embarked on a mystical, forty-year quest in the pursuit of an angel. According to Dodge’s notes, he had seen a vision and managed to film it:

  “The whole thing took on the shape of what I can only describe as an angel. I could see what looked like long white robes. It had no feet and there were shapes like wings behind its shoulders. I found out that the spook we’d seen had been floating over the place where some men had died.”

  Talking to the Sunday Times in March 2001, Tony Kaye said he hoped that Brando would play the veteran soldier in the movie version of events. William Dodge’s footage of the apparition, which he hoped to include in the film, would be “a spine-tingling moment” he said, adding: “It is the closest we have on film to proof of an angel. I’ve spent much of my life looking at special visual effects, and this is an effect for which I have no explanation.”

  The death of Marlon Brando three years later, however, brought an end to this plan. His ashes were appropriately divided: half being scattered in Tahiti and the remainder in Death Valley.

  Charlie Chaplin, one of Hollywood’s first superstars in the early years of the twentieth century, was also fascinated by the macabre and the occult and credited himself with extrasensory perception. He also loved telling ghost stories to his sons and Charlie Chaplin Jr remembered him acting out “chilling” scenes from Charles Dickens’ famous supernatural tales. Writing in My Father, Charlie Chaplin (1968), of his childhood, he says:

  “We were at an age to enter wholeheartedly into the macabre world introduced to us through our father’s ghost stories and we couldn’t get enough of blood and violence and ghoulish horrors of all descriptions.”

  The Chaplin boys especially remembered their father telling them about a real haunted house close to the family’s holiday home at Pebble Beach. It had been vacant for a number of years and nobody seemed willing to rent it for summer vacations. Chaplin Jr explained:

  “Dad told us about this house and the weird things that went on in it. He said that someone had been murdered there and a severed head had been found in the centre of the marble floor. We decided to go and see it in daylight and knock the ghosts out. Self-appointed exorcizers, we picked up rocks and began hurling them at the big plate-glass windows. It was fun and we did a thorough job. We broke practically every window in the house before we hurried off to catch our train. Only on the way back did we begin to wonder if the place had been haunted – or if we’d been taken in by one of Dad’s ghost stories!”

  A curious story of the impact of Charlie Chaplin’s success, which had psychic implications, occurred in the winter of 1916 when the star was “simultaneously paged in hundreds of hotels across the United States.” This phenomenon, which was reported right across the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts and from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, came to the attention of the Boston Society for Psychical Research who assigned one of their most experienced members, Professor Bamfylde More, to investigate. In February 1917 he produced a report on the extraordinary event and concluded:

  “We find beyond peradventure that on the date mentioned, 12 November, there existed for some inexplicable reason a Chaplin “impulse” which extended through the length and breadth of the continent. In more than 800 of the principal hotels Mr Chaplin was being paged at the same hour. In hundreds of smaller towns people were waiting at stations to see him disembark from trains upon which he was supposed to arrive.

  “There is no reason to doubt the correctness of scientific proof that constant reiteration of a certain fact or idea will or may precipitate precisely such a phenomenon as that which has resulted from the wide display of Chaplin absurdities in motion picture theatres – a sudden mental impulse manifesting itself simultaneously practically throughout the length and breadth of the land. It is therefore important, though the incident in itself appears trivial, to establish the exact extent of the Chaplin wave and, so far as it may be traced, local causerie.”

  In the opinion of Professor More, the
“Chaplin impulse wave” deserved scientific study of the same kind that the Boston SPR had been devoting to the paranormal and the supernatural. The subject himself was apparently both intrigued and amused by the phenomenon.

  Another actor with a similarly legendary status in Hollywood’s Golden Era was James Cagney. The man who would become famous for his gangster roles after starring in the groundbreaking Prohibition story, The Public Enemy (1931), began his career in revue as a female impersonator. Later, he proved his versatility in such diverse roles as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) and his song and dance routines in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) for which he won an Oscar. Unlike Chaplin, though, Cagney had no interest or belief in the supernatural, which makes his account of what happened to him and his wife in 1964 all the more extraordinary. The fact that it took place in a car gives it an uncanny resonance with the story of Marlon Brando.

  “My wife and I were driving to San Francisco. We had to be there at a certain time. It was late at night and I was doing between 80 and 85 miles per hour, speeding along with nothing on our minds but getting there and having a good dinner. Then I heard a voice in my ear say, ‘Take it easy, kid!’ I took my foot off the accelerator, thinking at first that Billie, my wife, was imitating me. But as I turned to face her, she asked, ‘Did you hear it too?’ ”

  Cagney said that he was initially sceptical about having heard anything untoward and intended to take no notice of the command. He put his foot down on the accelerator again:

  “I had no sooner touched 85 than I heard the voice again, this time shouting loudly, ‘Take it easy, kid!’ I was stunned. I said to Billie, ‘That’s my father’s voice!’ And she thought it was his voice, too. Some hundred yards ahead of us was a broken-down trailer lying across the road. It had evidently come loose from a car a few moments before. I saw it in time and detoured. If we had been going 85 we would have taken the last mile into eternity.”

  For a man who had never believed in ghosts it was a traumatic moment – for his father, an Irish bartender, had been dead for years. To Cagney it seemed that the voice had crossed the life-death boundary to save him and his wife from death.

  Another American actor who had a ghostly experience in a car was Telly Savalas, the Greek-born star who was nominated for an Oscar for his role in The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and became an iconic figure in the TV detective series, Kojak. He was driving home on Long Island at 3 a.m. on a summer morning in 1954 when he ran out of petrol and decided to walk to a freeway where he knew there would be a petrol station still open. He recalled:

  “I decided to walk through a wooded park as a short cut when a guy called out, ‘I’ll give you a lift.’ I was shaken because I hadn’t heard this big black Cadillac pull up, but the man who was all dressed in white looked okay and he took me to the service station. There, to my embarrassment, I found I didn’t have enough money for the petrol – but the stranger just handed over some notes and said it was OK, I could pay him back later. While we were driving back to the car, the guy, out of the blue, mentioned that he knew Harry Agannis. I asked who he was and the man explained he was a baseball player with the Boston Red Sox. I had never heard of him. That was the extent of our conversation and he dropped me back at my car.”

  The following day Telly Savalas was in for a big surprise when he opened a newspaper and found that the baseball player Agannis had died suddenly at the age of twenty-four. It seemed he had died at just about the time his name had been mentioned by the stranger in the car. Savalas picks up his strange story again:

  “I felt it was just a horrible coincidence until I tried to phone the guy to give him his money back. A woman answered and I explained why I was ringing. She sounded a little strange and asked what car the guy had been driving and what he had been wearing. When I told her, she began crying hysterically saying that I’d described her husband who’d died three years earlier. I’ve thought of all kinds of explanations, but it was a phenomenon I’ll just have to accept. All I do know is that it seems I took a ride in a car with a dead man.”

  The British classical actor Sir Alec Guinness has told his story of an encounter with the supernatural, which also took place before he became a household name in films such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Star Wars (1977).

  In 1941, the Second World War interrupted Guinness’s burgeoning career as a Shakespearean actor on the London stage when he was recruited into the Royal Navy. A year later, he was commissioned and put in charge of a 200-ton landing craft based at Barletta on the Adriatic coast of Italy that was employed primarily for transporting troops or civilians from danger areas. On 31 December he was ordered to the island of Vis, off the coast of Yugoslavia. Taking advantage of what looked like being a smooth journey to the island and taking on board 400 woman and children in anticipation of a German invasion, Guinness went to his cabin for a rest. What happened next he described in an essay published in 1945:

  “I slept for nearly two hours. When I woke it was with the strangest notion I have ever had in my life. I suppose I believe in ghosts. Certainly in good and evil spirits. It is difficult to describe what happened to me at six o’clock that evening. I woke up with a start, the sweat pouring off me. I trembled. The cabin was filled with an evil presence and it was concentrated twelve to eighteen inches from my left ear. Fully awake, I heard with my ear, or so it seemed to me, the word, TO-MORROW. It was spoken clearly and quite loudly. Then the evil thing withdrew. Never have I felt so relieved at the departure of an unwanted guest as I was by that one.”

  Alec Guinness believed that a mountain of evil intent had been condensed into that one word. It seemed to be telling him that soon he was going to die an unpleasant death. He did not have to wait long. Within half an hour the ship was struck by a hurricane with winds up to 120 miles per hour and an electrical storm bathed the vessel in the awful St Elmo’s Fire. For the next few hours – well into 1 January 1943 – no matter what the crew did, the ship was battered by enormous waves and finally wrecked on the Italian shore. As it broke up on the rocks, Guinness and all his crew managed to scramble desperately to safety. Although the fateful warning did not come true – Sir Alec lived a triumphant career until 2000 – the implications about the day were never far from his thoughts:

  “Since then New Year’s Eve has been an unlucky one for me. Disasters and near-disasters, large and small, have often struck on that night. Family misfortunes, pipes bursting throughout the house and parties spoiled by bad weather have dogged us. It could have been my own fears making themselves manifest – but it was a very real and very sinister experience.”

  Anthony Quinn, the American actor who co-starred with Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia, was similarly unnerved by a mystery voice that spoke to him while he was making that film. A man of mixed Irish-Mexican parentage, Quinn had several brushes with the supernatural during his life and, after his biggest success in Zorba the Greek (1964), often favoured accepting roles in which he could appear as a mystic life force such as The Magus (1968) and Mohammed Messenger of God (1976). He recounted his brush with the unearthly to Sally Francis of Photoplay in March 1970:

  “When I was filming Lawrence of Arabia in the desert, I decided one day to take a walk. I was still wearing my robes and just wandered off on my own. Suddenly I found myself to be in an open vast expanse of nothing. I felt another presence was watching me. A horrifying fear overcame me. I sank to my knees. I was aware that a voice was trying to say something to me. I put my hands over my ears to prevent myself hearing for I was sure that if I heard the voice I would die. I suppose I have regretted ever since not letting the voice speak to me. I’ve always wanted to know what it would have said to me. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.”

  A supernatural experience actually changed the career of Vincent Price, the actor who spent years of his screen career giving audiences some of the best frights of their lives. Price, who is probably best remembered for his roles in horror movi
es like House of Wax (1953), and the series of films by Roger Corman based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, had a privileged upbringing and obtained a degree in art history and English when, literally overnight, he opted for a creative rather than academic life. He explained:

  “I was at Yale studying for my degree. I was having a problem with what I wanted to do and was discussing this with a roommate. My friend advised me not to go into the arts, as it was such a precarious existence. Suddenly, as we were talking, he turned into an absolute flaming bush. To me he seemed to be on fire to the point where I had to back out of the room. I went out and walked for about an hour preceded by this sort of flame. It was an extraordinary and wonderful experience. Like most manifestations it was symbolic. I knew that if I did as my friend suggested it would burn me up. After that I knew I had to go into something which would give me an artistic outlet.”

  Opting for a career on the stage, Price crossed the Atlantic to London and managed to get a small part in Chicago starring John Gielgud. He followed this with bigger parts in West End productions until he broke into films as Sir Walter Raleigh in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in 1938. After the war ended, he rapidly established himself as a master of the screen thriller. Then in November 1958 he had another chilling moment that he never forgot.