Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

She went down into the basement to cheek but found everything normal. As she returned to the baby’s room she suddenly had the distinct impression that the phenomenon somehow connected with the presence of a young girl.

  She tried to reason this away, since no young girl was present in the household, nor was there any indication that tied in in any way with the tragic disappearance of Mrs. Duprey’s girl, of which she, of course, knew. Try as she might, she could not shake this feeling that a young girl was the focal point of the disturbances at the house.

  One night her sister had joined her in the living room downstairs. Suddenly there was a loud crash overhead in what they knew was an empty bedroom. Mrs. Viner left her worried sister downstairs and went up alone. A table in the bedroom had been knocked over. No natural force short of a heavy quake could have caused this. The windows were closed and there was no other way in which the table could topple over by itself. She was so sure that this could not have been caused by anything but human intruders, she called the state police.

  The police came and searched the house from top to bottom but found no trace of any intruder.

  Mrs. Viner then began to wonder about the goings-on. If these unseen forces had the power to overturn heavy tables, surely they might also harm people. The thought frightened her, and where she had until then considered living with a ghost or ghosts rather on the chic side, it now took on distinctly threatening overtones. She discussed it with her husband but they had put so much work and money into the house that the thought of leaving again just did not appeal to them.

  It was inevitable that she should be alone in the house, except for the children, at various times. Her husband was away on business and the farm help out where they belonged. Often Mrs. Viner found herself walking through the rooms hoping against rational reasoning that she would come face-to-face with the intruder. Then she could address her or him—she was not sure how many there were—and say, “look, this is my house now, we’ve bought it and rebuilt it, and we don’t intend to leave it. Go away and don’t hang around, it’s no use.” She often rehearsed her little speech for just such a confrontation. But the ghost never appeared when she was ready.

  Meanwhile the footsteps followed by the heavy thumps kept recurring regularly, often as many as four times in a single week. It was usually around the same time of the evening, which led her to believe that it represented some sort of tragedy that was being re-enacted upstairs by the ghostly visitors. Or was she merely tuning in on a past tragedy and what she and the others were hearing was in fact only an echo of the distant past? She could not believe this, especially as she still remembered vividly the ice cold hand that grabbed her shoulder in the bedroom upstairs on that hot September day. And a memory would not cause a heavy door to swing open by itself with such violence that it burst the lock.

  No, these were not memory impressions they were hearing. These were actual entities with minds of their own, somehow trapped between two states of being and condemned by their own violence to live forever in the place where their tragedy had first occurred. What a horrible fate, Mrs. Viner thought, and for a moment she felt great compassion for the unfortunate ones.

  But then her own involvement reminded her that it was, after all, her house and her life that was being disrupted. She had a better right to be here than they had, even if they had been here before.

  Defiantly, she continued to polish and refine the appointments in the house until it looked almost as if it had never been a dilapidated, almost hopelessly derelict house. She decided to repaper one of the bedrooms upstairs, so that her guests would sleep in somewhat more cheerful surroundings. The paper in this particular room was faded and very old and deserved to be replaced. As she removed the dirty wallpaper, the boards underneath became visible again. They were wide and smooth and obviously part of the original boards of the house.

  After she had pulled down all the paper from the wall facing away from the window, she glanced up at it. The wall, exposed to light after goodness knows how many years, was spattered with some sort of paint.

  “This won’t do at all,” she decided, and went downstairs to fetch some rags and water. Returning to the room, she started to remove what she took for some very old paint. When she put water on the stains, the spots turned a bright red!

  Try as she might, she could not remove the red stains. Finally she applied some bleach, but it only turned the spots a dark brown. It finally dawned on her that this wasn’t paint but blood. On closer investigation, her suspicion was confirmed. She had stumbled upon a blood-spattered wall—but what had taken place up here that had caused this horrible reminder?

  Somehow she felt that she had gotten a lead in her quest for the solution to the phenomena plaguing the house. Surely, someone had been killed up there, but who and why?

  She went into the village and started to talk to the local people. At first, she did not get much help, for New Englanders are notoriously shy about family matters. But eventually Mrs. Viner managed to get some information from some of the older local people who had known about the house on Brickyard Road for a long time.

  When the house was still a public tavern, that is somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century or the very end of the eighteenth, there had been two men at the tavern who stayed overnight as guests. Their names are shrouded in mystery and perhaps they were very unimportant, as history goes.

  But there was also a young girl at the tavern, the kind innkeepers used to hire as servant girls in those days. If the girl wanted to be just that, well and good; if she wanted to get involved with some of the men that passed through on their way to the cities, that was her own business. Tavern keepers in those days were not moral keepers and the hotel detective had not yet been conceived by a puritan age. So the servant girls often went in and out of the guests’ rooms, and nobody cared much.

  It appears that one such young girl was particularly attractive to two men at the same time. There were arguments and jealousy. Finally the two men retired to a room upstairs and a fight to the finish followed. As it was upstairs, most likely it was in the girl’s own room, with one suitor discovering the other obtaining favors he had sought in vain, perhaps. At any rate, as the horrified girl looked on, the two men killed each other with their rapiers, and their blood, intermingled in death, spattered upon the wall of the room.

  As she walked back from the village with this newly-gained knowledge, Mrs. Viner understood clearly for the first time, why her house was indeed haunted. The restless footsteps in the room upstairs were the hurried steps of the unhappy suitor. The scuffling noises that followed and the sudden heavy thumps would be the fight and the two falling bodies—perhaps locked in death. The total silence that always ensued after the two heavy falls, clearly indicated to her that the stillness of death following the struggle was being re-enacted along with the tragedy itself.

  And how right she had been about a girl being the central force in all this!

  But why the hostility towards her? Why the icy hand at the shoulder? Did the girl resent her, another woman, in this house? Was she still hoping her suitor would come for her, and did she perhaps take Mrs. Viner for “competition?” A demented mind, especially when it has been out of the body for one hundred fifty years, can conjure up some strange ideas.

  But her fighting energies were somehow spent, and when an opportunity arose to sell the house, Mrs. Viner agreed readily to do so. Those house then passed into the hands of Samuel Beno, after the Viners had lived in it from 1951 to 1961. For five years, Mr. Beno owned the house but never lived in it. It remained unoccupied, standing quietly on the road.

  Only once was there a flurry of excitement. In 1966, someone made off with $5,000 worth of plumbing and copper piping. The owner naturally entrusted the matter to the state police hoping the thieves would eventually return for more. The authorities even placed tape recorders on the ready into the house in case some thieves did return.

  Since then not much has been heard about the house
and one can only presume that the tragic story of the servant girl and her two suitors has had its final run. But one can’t be entirely sure until the next tenant moves into the old Lyons Tavern. After all, blood does not come off easily, either from walls or from men’s memories.

  * 71

  A California Ghost Story

  LITTLE DID I KNOW when I had successfully investigated the haunted apartment of Mrs. Verna Kunze in San Bernardino, that Mrs. Kunze would lead me to another case equally as interesting as her own, which I reported on in my book, Ghosts of the Golden West.

  Mrs. Kunze is a very well-organized person, and a former employee in the passport division of the State Department. She is used to sifting facts from fancy. Her interest in psycho-cybernetics had led to her to a group of like-minded individuals meeting regularly in Orange County. There she met a gentleman formerly with the FBI by the name of Walter Tipton.

  One day, Mr. Tipton asked her help in contacting me concerning a most unusual case that had been brought to his attention. Having checked out some of the more obvious details, he had found the people involved truthful and worthy of my time.

  So it was that I first heard of Mrs. Carole Trausch of Santa Ana.

  What happened to the Trausch family and their neighbors is not just a ghost story. Far more than that, they found themselves in the middle of an old tragedy that had not yet been played out fully when they moved into their spanking new home.

  Carole Trausch was born in Los Angeles of Scottish parentage and went to school in Los Angeles. Her father is a retired policeman and her mother was born in Scotland. Carole married quite young and moved with her husband, a businessman, to live first in Huntington Beach and later in Westminster, near Santa Ana.

  Now in her early twenties, she is a glamorous-looking blonde who belies the fact that she has three children aged eight, six, and two, all girls.

  Early the previous year, they moved into one of two hundred two-story bungalows in a new development in Westminster. They were just an ordinary family, without any particular interest in the occult. About their only link the world of the psychic were some peculiar dreams Carole had had.

  The first time was when she was still a little girl. She dreamed there were some pennies hidden in the rose bed in the garden. On awakening, she laughed at herself, but out of curiosity she did go to the rose bed and looked. Sure enough, there were some pennies in the soil below the roses. Many times since then she has dreamed of future events that later came true.

  One night she dreamed that her husband’s father was being rolled on a stretcher, down a hospital corridor by a nurse, on his way to an operation. The next morning there was a phone call informing them that such an emergency had indeed taken place about the time she dreamed it. On several occasions she sensed impending accidents or other unpleasant things, but she is not always sure what kind. One day she felt sure she or her husband would be in a car accident. Instead it was one of her little girls, who was hit by passing car.

  When they moved into their present house, Mrs. Trausch took an immediate disliking to it. This upset her practical-minded husband. They had hardly been installed when she begged him to move again. He refused.

  The house is a white-painted two-story bungalow, which was built about five years before their arrival. Downstairs is a large, oblong living room, a kitchen, and a dining area. On the right, the staircase leads to the upper story. The landing is covered with linoleum, and there are two square bedrooms on each side of the landing, with wall-to-wall carpeting and windows looking onto the yard in the rear bedroom and onto the street in the front room.

  There is a large closet along the south wall of the rear bedroom. Nothing about the house is unusual, and there was neither legend nor story nor rumor attached to the house when they rented it from the local bank that owned it.

  And yet there was something queer about the house. Mrs. Trausch’s nerves were on edge right from the very first when they moved in. But she accepted her husband’s decision to stay put and swept her own fears under the carpet of everyday reason as the first weeks in their new home rolled by.

  At first the children would come to her with strange tales. The six-year-old girl complained of being touched by someone she could not see whenever she dropped off for her afternoon nap in the bedroom upstairs. Sometimes this presence would shake the bed, and then there was a shrill noise, somewhat like a beep, coming from the clothes closet. The oldest girl, eight years old, confirmed the story and reported similar experiences in the room.

  Carole dismissed these reports as typical imaginary tales of the kind children will tell.

  But one day she was resting on the same bed upstairs and found herself being tapped on the leg by some unseen person.

  This was not her imagination; she was fully awake, and it made her wonder if perhaps her intuition about this house had not been right all along.

  She kept experiencing the sensation of touch in the upstairs bedrooms only, and it got to be a habit with her to make the beds as quickly as possible and then rush downstairs where she felt nothing unusual. Then she also began to hear the shrill, beep like sounds from the closet. She took out all the children’s clothes and found nothing that could have caused the noise. Finally she told her husband about it, and he promptly checked the pipes and other structural details of the house, only to shake his head. Nothing could have made such noises.

  For several months she had kept her secret, but now that her husband also knew, she had Diane, the oldest, tell her father about it as well.

  It was about this time that she became increasingly aware of a continuing presence upstairs. Several times she would hear footsteps walking upstairs, and on investigation found the children fast asleep. Soon the shuffling steps became regular features of the house. It would always start near the closet in the rear bedroom, then go toward the stair landing.

  Carole began to wonder if her nerves weren’t getting the better of her. She was much relieved one day when her sister, Kathleen Bachelor, who had come to visit her, remarked about the strange footsteps upstairs. Both women knew the children were out. Only the baby was upstairs, and on rushing up the stairs, they found her safely asleep in her crib. It had sounded to them like a small person wearing slippers.

  Soon she discovered, however, that there were two kinds of footsteps: the furtive pitter-patter of a child, and the heavy, deliberate footfalls of a grownup.

  Had they fallen heir to two ghosts? The thought seemed farfetched even to ESP-prone Carole, but it could not be dismissed entirely. What was going on, she wondered. Evidently she was not losing her mind, for others had also heard these things.

  Once she had gone out for the evening and when she returned around 10 P.M., she dismissed the babysitter. After the girl had left, she was alone with the baby. Suddenly she heard the water running in the bathroom upstairs. She raced up the stairs and found the bathroom door shut tight. Opening it, she noticed that the water was on and there was some water in the sink.

  On January 27 of the next year, Carole had guests over for lunch, two neighbors name Pauline J. and Joyce S., both young women about the same age as Carole. The children were all sleeping in the same upstairs front bedroom, the two older girls sharing the bed while the baby girl occupied the crib. The baby had her nap between 11 and 2 P.M. At noon, however, the baby woke up crying, and, being barely able to talk at age two, kept saying “Baby scared, Mommy!”

  The three ladies had earlier been upstairs together, preparing the baby for her crib. At that time, they had also put the entire room carefully in order, paying particular attention to making the covers and spread on the large bed very smooth, and setting up the dolls and toys on the chest in the corner.

  When the baby cried at noon, all there women went upstairs and found the bed had wrinkles and an imprint as though someone had been sitting on it. The baby, of course, was still in her crib.

  They picked up the child and went downstairs with her. Just as they got to the stairway, all t
hree heard an invisible child falling down the stairs about three steps ahead of where they were standing.

  It was after this experience that Mrs. Trausch wondered why the ghost child never touched any of the dolls. You see, the footsteps they kept hearing upstairs always went from the closet to the toy chest where the dolls are kept. But none of the dolls was ever disturbed. It occurred to her that the invisible child was a boy, and there were no boys’ toys around.

  The sounds of a child running around in the room upstairs became more and more frequent; she knew it was not one of her children, having accounted for her own in other ways. The whole situation began to press on her nerves, and even her husband—who had until now tended to shrug off what he could not understand—became concerned. Feelers were put out to have me come to the house as soon as possible, but I could not make it right away and they would have to cope with their unseen visitors for the time being, or until I arrived on the scene.

  All during February the phenomena continued, so much so that Mrs. Trausch began to take them as part of her routine. But she kept as much to the downstairs portion of the house as she could. For some unknown reason, the phenomena never intruded on that part of the house.

  She called in the lady who managed the development for the owners and cautiously told her of their problem. But the manager knew nothing whatever about the place, except that it was new and to her knowledge no great tragedies had occurred there in her time.

  When the pitter-patter of the little feet continued, Carole Trausch decided she just had to know. On March 16, she decided to place some white flour on the linoleum-covered portion of the upstairs floor to trap the unseen child. This was the spot where the footsteps were most often heard, and for that past two days the ghost child had indeed “come out” there to run and play.

  In addition, she took a glass or water with some measuring spoons of graduated sizes in it, and set it all down in a small pan and put it into her baby’s crib with a cracker in the pan beside the glass. This was the sort of thing a little child might want—that is, a living child.