by Hans Holzer
Maurice did not pursue his line of thought, how she had gotten in in the first place, but asked her what she wanted. Somehow, he felt a little frightened. He had noticed that her face was more like a skeleton covered with skin than the face of a flesh-and-blood person. The lady seemed unusually white. There was no reply; she simply stood there, looking around the place. Maurice repeated his question.
“Well,” she said finally, in a faraway tone of voice, “I just came here to look at the place. I used to live in this building.” Then she went to the window and pointed to the street. “I used to play over there—these houses are all new brick houses. My father and mother had a corn farm where the Federal Building is now, downtown.”
“Was there anything peculiar about her tone of voice?” I asked.
“No, it sounded pretty clear to me, real American,” O. replied. “She said, ‘You know, all these new buildings weren’t here during Revolutionary times.’ Then she added, rather apologetically, ‘I just came around to look.”‘
Maurice was standing in back of the counter that separates his office from the short stretch of corridor leading from the entrance door. The lady was standing on the other side of the counter, so Maurice could get a good look at her; but he was too frightened to look her in the face. When he backed up, she started to talk rapidly. “I just wanted to visit the neighborhood. I used to live here.” Then, pointing her hand toward the window, she said, “The headquarters of the British Army used to be across the street.”
The statement made no impression on Mr. O. Besides, he was much too upset by all this to wonder how a woman standing before him in the year 1971 could remember the location of the headquarters of the British Army, which had left New York almost two hundred years before.
“What did she look like?” I asked.
“She was dressed very nicely, and she looked just like any other person except for her face. I didn’t see her hands, but she had on brand new gloves, her dress looked new, and the hat was real nice.”
“Did you see her walking?”
“Yes, she was walking.”
“What happened next?”
“Well,” Maurice explained, swallowing hard at the memory of his experience. “I finally got up enough courage to ask her, ‘Where are you going now?”‘
The question had seemed to make the lady sad, even upset. “I’m leaving to visit relatives on Long Island,” she said finally. “In the cemetery. My relatives, my friends, my father and mother.”
Maurice became more and more uneasy at all this. He pretended that he had some business in the rear of the shop and started to back up from the counter.
“I’m going to visit you again,” the lady said and smiled.
For about a minute, Mr. O. busied himself in the back of his workshop, then returned to the office. The woman was gone.
“Was the door still closed?”
“The door was closed. No one could have left without slamming this door, and I would have heard it. I quickly opened the door to convince myself that I had really spoken to a person. I looked around; there was nobody outside. Nobody.”
Maurice checked both his door and the door downstairs. Neither door had been opened, so he went back up to continue working. He was still very much upset but decided to stay till about 5 o’clock. When he was ready to go home and had put the keys into the door, he suddenly began to smell the same perfume again—the perfume the lady had brought with her. She’s back again, he thought, and he looked everywhere. But there was no one about. Quickly he locked the door and ran downstairs.
A year to the day after the apparition, Maurice decided to work late—more out of curiosity than out of any conviction that she would return. But the lady never did.
Mr. O.’s nephew, who is a teacher and a researcher, commented, “With reference to the British headquarters’ being across the street, I have checked this fact out and have found that during the Revolution the British headquarters were across the street from this same building my uncle now occupies. This is a fact I know my uncle couldn’t possibly have known.”
“Ingrid,” I said, after I had asked her to join me and Mr. O. in the front of the workshop, “what do you feel about this place?”
“There is a lot of excitement here,” she replied. “I think there is a man here who is kind of dangerous, very treacherous, and I think someone might have been injured here. This happened about twenty-five years ago.”
“Do you think there is an earlier presence in this house?”
“I feel that this was a prosperous place, an active, busy spot. A lot of people were coming here. It was part home, part business. Before that I think this building was something else. I think a family lived here. They may have been foreigners, and I think the man was killed. I feel that this man came to this country and invested his savings here. He wanted to build up a family business. I also think there is a woman connected with it. She wears a longish dress, going below the knees.”
“What is her connection with this place?”
“She may have spent her childhood here—what happened here might have happened to her father. Perhaps she came here as a young child and spent many years in this building. She has some connection with this man, I feel.”
“Does she have any reason to hang onto this place?”
“Maybe she doesn’t understand why all this has happened, and she can’t accept it yet. Perhaps she has lost a loved one.”
Every year, around Thanksgiving, Maurice O. will wait for the lady to come back and talk to him again. Now that he knows that she is “just a ghost,” he isn’t even afraid of her any longer. As far as the lady is concerned, she need not worry either: when the British Army headquarters stood across the street, the area was a lot safer than it is now, especially at night; but she really needn’t worry about muggings either, things being as they are.
* 89
The Ghost of the Olympia Theatre
THERE ARE THREE THEATERS of renown in Dublin: the Gate, the Abbey, and the Olympia. The Gate was closed for repairs, and the Olympia was running a musical revue when we visited Dublin for the first time, in the late summer of 1965.
Lona Moran, the stage designer, had first told me of the hauntings at the Olympia, and my appetite was further whetted by Michael MacLiammoir, although he thought the Gate’s ghosts were more impressive!
We booked seats for the night of August 19. The revue starred popular Irish comedian Jack Cruise in something called “Holiday Hayride.” To tell the truth, it was pleasant without being great, and we laughed frequently at what to sophisticated Americans must have appeared old-hat comedy. Overtones of Palace vaudeville made the show even more relaxing and the absence of boisterous rock-and-roll groups—inevitable in England these days—made it even nicer for us. In a comedy sketch taking off on Dublin police—called here the Garda—one of the cops played by Chris Curran made reference to our TV appearance that morning, proving again how small a town Dublin really is. Or how topical the revue was. At any rate, Lona Moran, who had often worked here before becoming the designer for Telefis Eireann, had arranged to meet us after the show and discuss the haunting with us.
Dick Condon, the house manager, joined us in the bar around eleven, and Miss Moran was not long in coming either. Sybil’s purple evening sari drew a lot of attention, but then Sybil is used to that by now.
We decided to repair to the stage itself, since the house had meanwhile gone dark. The stagehands agreed to stay a little late for us that night, and I started my inquiry.
“I’ve beard some very curious tappings and bangings,” Lona Moran began, “and doors being shaken when they were very heavily chained. I have heard windows rattle, outside the room where I was sitting, and when I came out I realized there was no window!”
“How long ago was that?”
“That was about this time last year,” Lona Moran replied. “It was in the backstage area, in the dressing room upstairs, number 9. Outside there is a completely blank wall. Actually
, Mr. O’Reilly was with me and he heard it too. It was early morning when I went into that room, about half past five. We had been working all night. We went up to the dressing room to make notes and also to make tea, and this awful banging started. It sounded like a window being rattled very, very persistently. I went stiff with fright. I was very tired at the time. At intervals, the noise covered a period of about an hour, I’d say, because we left the room around 6:30 and only then we realized there was no window.”
“Did you hear this noise at any other time?”
“Yes, when I worked on stage during the night. I heard a window rattle, and once got as far as the first floor to see if I could see it and then I lost my nerve and came down again.”
“There was no possibility of a window making the noise?”
“Well, I suppose a window could have done it—but what window?”
“Do you know if any structural changes have taken place here?”
“No, I don’t; but the theater is over two hundred years old.”
“Do you know if any tragedy or other unusual event took place in this area?”
“I don’t know of any, but the theater is supposed to be haunted. By what, I really don’t know.”
“Did you experience anything unusual before last year?”
“Yes, before then there were lots of bangings. The door of the bar would shake and rattle very badly, on very calm evenings, as if someone were rattling it. The sound of things dropping also. I thought Jeremy, my assistant, was dropping things and accused him rather sharply, but he wasn’t.”
“Ever hear footsteps?”
“I think I’ve imagined I heard footsteps—I don’t know really whether they were or weren’t—always during the night when we were working—two of us would be working on the stage together, and no one else in the theater.”
“And what happened on those occasions?”
“Rattling noises and creaking...and something that might be footsteps.”
“Have you ever felt another presence?”
“I had the feeling last September that there was something there, when I walked through that door and saw no window.”
I asked if she had ever had psychic experiences before she set foot into the theater.
“I simply did not believe, but I do now,” Lona Moran replied. She had never experienced anything unusual before coming to the Olympia. She had worked as stage designer for the Olympia Theatre for fourteen months prior to going into television.
I turned to Lona Moran’s associate, who had come along to tell of his own experiences here.
“My name is Alfo O’Reilly,” the tall young man said, “and I’m theater designer and television designer here in Dublin. I myself have designed only two or three productions here, and last year, for the theater festival, I designed an American production. On the particular evening in question Lona and I worked very late into the night, and I had not heard any stories at all about this theater being haunted. We went up to the dressing room, and we were sitting there quietly exhausted when we heard these incredible noises.”
“Those are the noises Miss Moran spoke of,” I commented, and Alfo O’Reilly nodded and added:
“I have found that when I’m terribly exhausted, I seem to have a more heightened awareness. We knew there was only one other person in the theater, the night watchman who was roaming elsewhere, and we were alone upstairs. There was certainly nothing in the corridor that could create this kind of noise. I’ve heard many things, footsteps, at the Gate Theatre, which is certainly haunted, but not here.”
I thanked Mr. O’Reilly and turned to a slim young man who had meanwhile arrived onstage.
“My name is Jeremy Swan and I work with Telefis Eireann,” he said by way of introduction, “and I used to work here as resident stage manager. About this dressing room upstairs—I remember one season here, during a pantomime, the dressing room was wrecked, allegedly by a poltergeist.”
“Would you explain just how?”
“All the clothes were strewn about,” Swan explained, “makeup was thrown all around the place—we questioned all the chorus girls who were in the room at the time—that was number 9 dressing room.”
The haunted dressing room, I thought.
“Apparently there had been knocking at the door every night and nobody there,” the stage manager continued, “at half past nine. One night when I was working here as assistant to Miss Moran I went upstairs to the washroom there, and when I came out I felt and I was almost sure saw a light—just a glow—yellow; it seemed to be in the corner of the corridor. I followed the light round the corner—it moved, you see—and it went into the corridor where number 9 was, where there was another door. The door was open, and now it closed in my face!”
“Incredible,” I was forced to say. “What happened then?”
“There was nobody in the theater at all. It was after midnight. Now all the doors in the corridor started to rattle. That was four years ago.”
“Have you had any experiences since then?”
“I haven’t worked here very much since.”
“Did you feel any unusual chill at the time?”
“Yes, I did before I went upstairs to the corridor. It was very cold onstage. Suddenly, I heard whispering from back in the theater.”
“What sort of whispering?”
“Sh-sh-sh-sh,” Jeremy Swan went on. “It sounded like a voice that didn’t quite make it.”
“Anything else?”
“Then I heard this banging again. Beside me almost. On stage. I did not want to say anything to Miss Moran, and then I went up to the washroom where this funny light business started.”
“At what height did the light appear?”
“Sort of knee level.”
I thanked the young man and looked around. The stagehands had come forward the better to hear the questioning. Somehow they did not mind the overtime; the subject was fascinating to them.
All this time, of course, Sybil Leek was absent, safely out of earshot of anything that might be said about the haunting onstage. I was about to ask that she be brought in to join us, when a middle-aged stagehand stepped forward, scratched his head and allowed as to some psychic experiences that might perhaps interest me.
“What is your name, sir?” I asked the man.
“Tom Connor. I’m an electrician. I’ve been here fifteen years.”
“Anything unusual happen to you here at the Olympia?”
“About eight years ago when I was on night duty here, I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. So I thought it was one of the bosses coming and I went to check and there was nobody, so I went to the top of the house and still didn’t see anybody. I came back again and I heard footsteps coming down the gallery, so I went to the switchboard, put on the houselights and searched—but there was nobody there.”
“Did you hear this just once?”
“During the same fortnight when that show was on,” Tom Connor replied quietly, “I had the same experience again. Footsteps coming down from the dressing rooms. I went and checked. Still, nobody. Couple of nights afterwards, I was having a cup of tea, and I was reading a book, sitting on the rostrum, and the rostrum lifted itself a few inches off the ground! I felt myself coming up and I thought it was one of the bosses, and I said, well, I’m awake! It’s all right, I’m awake. But to my surprise, there was nobody there.”
“You felt the rostrum physically lifted up?”
“Yes, as if someone of heavy weight had stood on the end of it.”
“So what did you do then?”
“When I realized that there was no one there, I got a shock and felt a cold shiver, and put on more lights and had a look around. There was nobody in the theater.”
“Did you ever experience anything unusual in the area of the dressing rooms upstairs?” I asked.
“No, except that I heard the footsteps coming down, very clearly.”
“Man or woman?”
“Heavy footsteps, like a man
’s.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, at night, half-past twelve, 1 o’clock, I get this cold, clammy feeling—my hair standing on end—I am always very glad to get out of the place.”
Meanwhile, Dick Conlon, the house manager, had come onstage, having finished counting his money for the night.
I interrupted my interesting talk with Tom Connor, stagehand, to question Conlon about his experiences, if any, at the Olympia.
“I’ve been here thirteen months,” he said, “but so far I haven’t noticed anything unusual.”
By now Sybil Leek had joined us.
“Sybil,” I said, “when we got to this theater earlier this evening, you did not really know where we were going. But when we got to our seats in stage box I, you said to me, ‘Something is here, I feel very cold.’ What was your impression on getting here?”
“There is undoubtedly a presence here and I think it moves around quite a lot. The box has some association with it. I am mainly concerned though with the dressing room that had the number changed. I have not been up to this room, but it is upstairs. Second door, almost faces the stage. The corridor continues and there is a left hand turn. Then there are two doors. Not a particularly healthy presence, I feel. I don’t feel it is connected with the theater.”
“Then how would it be here?”
“I have an impression that this is something in the year 1916, and something very unruly, something destructive. It is a man. He doesn’t belong here. He wishes to get away.”
“What is he doing here?” I asked. The story was taking a most unusual turn.
Sybil thought for a moment as if tuning in on her psychic world.
“He stayed here and could not get out, and the name is Dunnevan. That is the nearest I can get it. I can’t see him too well; the clearest place where I see him is upstairs, along the corridor that faces the stage on both landings. Near the dressing room that had the number changed.”
