Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “The accountant John Dillon’s son was working in the kitchen one evening around ten. Now some of these heavy pots were hanging there on pegs from the ceiling. Young Dillon told his father two of them lifted themselves up from the ceiling, unhooked themselves from the pegs, and came down on the floor.”

  Did any guests staying at the inn during Svensson’s ownership complain of any unusual happenings?

  “There was this young couple staying at what Svensson called the honeymoon suite,” Furman replied. “At 6:30 in the morning, the couple heard three knocks at the door, three loud, distinct knocks, and when they opened the door, there was no one there. This sort of thing had happened before.”

  Another case involved a lone diner who complained to Svensson that “someone” was pushing him from his chair at the table in the dining room onto another chair, but since he did not see another person, how could this be? Svensson hastily explained that the floor was a bit rickety and that was probably the cause.

  Was the restless spirit of the captain satisfied with our coming? Did he and his son meet up in the great beyond? Whatever came of our visit, nothing further has been heard of any disturbances at Cap’n Grey’s Inn in Barnstable.

  * 112

  The Confused Ghost of the Trailer Park

  I MET RITA ATLANTA when she worked in a Frankfurt, Germany nightclub. That is when I first heard about her unsought ability to communicate with spirits.

  Later that year, after my return to New York, I received what appeared to be an urgent communication from her.

  Rita’s initial letter merely requested that I help her get rid of her ghost. Such requests are not unusual, but this one was—and I am not referring to the lady’s occupation: exotic dancing in sundry nightclubs around the more or less civilized world.

  What made her case unusual was the fact that “her” ghost appeared in a 30-year-old trailer near Boston.

  The haunted trailer and owner—Rita Atlanta

  “When I told my husband that we had a ghost,” she wrote, “he laughed and said, ‘Why should a respectable ghost move into a trailer? We have hardly room in it ourselves with three kids.”’

  It seemed the whole business had started during the summer when the specter made its first sudden appearance. Although her husband could not see what she saw, Miss Atlanta’s pet skunk evidently didn’t like it and moved into another room. Three months later, her husband passed away and Miss Atlanta was kept hopping the Atlantic (hence her stage name) in quest of nightclub work.

  Ever since her first encounter with the figure of a man in her Massachusetts trailer, the dancer had kept the lights burning all night long. As someone once put it, “I don’t believe in ghosts, I’m scared of them.”

  Despite the lights, Miss Atlanta always felt a presence at the same time that her initial experience had taken place—between 3 and 3:30 in the morning. It would awaken her with such regularity that at last she decided to seek help.

  In September of the previous year, she and her family had moved into a brand-new trailer in Peabody, Massachusetts. After her encounter with the ghost Rita made some inquiries about the nice grassy spot where she had chosen to park the trailer. Nothing had ever stood on the spot before. No ghost stories. Nothing. Just one little thing.

  One of the neighbors in the trailer camp, which is at the outskirts of greater Boston, came to see her one evening. By this time Rita’s heart was already filled with fear, fear of the unknown that had suddenly come into her life here. She freely confided in her neighbor, a woman by the name of Birdie Gleason.

  Psychic manifestations inside the trailer

  To her amazement, the neighbor nodded with understanding. She, too, had felt “something,” an unseen presence in her house trailer next to Rita Atlanta’s.

  “Sometimes I feel someone is touching me,” she added.

  When I interviewed Rita, I asked her to describe exactly what she saw.

  “I saw a big man, almost seven feet tall, about 350 pounds, and he wore a long coat and a big hat,” she reported.

  But the ghost didn’t just stand there glaring at her. Sometime she made himself comfortable on her kitchen counter, with his ghostly legs dangling down from it. He was as solid as a man of flesh and blood, except that she could not see his face clearly since it was in the darkness of early morning.

  Later, when I visited the house trailer with my highly sensitive camera, I took some pictures in the areas indicated by Miss Atlanta: the bedroom, the door to it, and the kitchen counter. In all three areas, strange phenomena manifested on my film. Some mirrorlike transparencies developed in normally opaque areas, which could not and cannot be explained.

  When it happened the first time, she raced for the light and turned the switch, her heart beating wildly. The yellowish light of the electric lamp bathed the bedroom in a nightmarish twilight. But the spook had vanished. There was no possible way a real intruder could have come and gone so fast. No way out, no way in. Because this was during the time Boston was being terrorized by the infamous Boston Strangler, Rita had taken special care to doublelock the doors and secure all the windows. Nobody could have entered the trailer without making a great deal of noise. I have examined the locks and the windows—not even Houdini could have done it.

  psychic energy in trailer

  The ghost, having once established himself in Rita’s bedroom, returned for additional visits—always in the early morning hours. Sometimes he appeared three times a week, sometimes even more often.

  “He was staring in my direction all the time,” Rita said with a slight Viennese accent, and one could see that the terror had never really left her eyes. Even three thousand miles away, the spectral stranger had a hold on the woman.

  Was he perhaps looking for something? No, he didn’t seem to be. In the kitchen, he either stood by the table or sat down on the counter. Ghosts don’t need food—so why the kitchen?

  “Did he ever take his hat off?” I wondered.

  “No, never,” she said and smiled. Imagine a ghost doffing his hat to the lady of the trailer!

  What was particularly horrifying was the noiselessness of the apparition. She never heard any footfalls or rustling of his clothes as he silently passed by. There was no clearing of the throat as if he wanted to speak. Nothing. Just silent stares. When the visitations grew more frequent, Rita decided to leave the lights on all night. After that, she did not see him any more. But he was still there, at the usual hour, standing behind the bed, staring at her. She knew he was. She could almost feel the sting of his gaze.

  Rita in working costume

  One night she decided she had been paying huge light bills long enough. She hopped out of bed, turned the light switch to the off position and, as the room was plunged back into semidarkness, she lay down in bed again. Within a few minutes her eyes had gotten accustomed to the dark. Her senses were on the alert, for she was not at all sure what she might see. Finally, she forced herself to turn her head in the direction of the door. Was her mind playing tricks on her? There, in the doorway, stood the ghost. As big and brooding as ever.

  With a scream, she dove under the covers. When she came up, eternities later, the shadow was gone from the door.

  The next evening, the lights were burning again in the trailer, and every night thereafter, until it was time for her to fly to Germany for her season’s nightclub work. Then she closed up the trailer, sent her children to stay with friends, and left with the faint hope that on her return in the winter, the trailer might be free of its ghost. But she wasn’t at all certain.

  It was obvious to me that this exotic dancer was a medium, as only the psychic can “see” apparitions.

  * 113

  The Ghost Who Would Not Leave

  HARDLY HAD I FINISHED investigating the rather colorful haunting in the New York State home of Newsday columnist Jack Altschul, which resulted in my name appearing in his column as a man who goes around chasing ghosts, than I heard from a gentleman, now deceased, who was t
he public relations director of the Sperry Company and a man not ordinarily connected with specters.

  Ken Brigham wanted me to know that he had a resident ghost at his summer home in Maine, and what was I to do about it. He assured me that while the lady ghost he was reporting was not at all frightening to him and his family, he would, nevertheless, prefer she went elsewhere. This is a sentiment I have found pervasive with most owners of haunted property, and while it shows a certain lack of sentimentality, it is a sound point of view even from the ghost’s perspective because being an earthbound spirit really has no future, so to speak.

  All this happened in January 1967. I was keenly interested. At the time, I was working closely with the late Ethel Johnson Meyers, one of the finest trance mediums ever, and it occurred to me immediately that, if the case warranted it, I would get her involved in it.

  I asked Mr. Brigham, as is my custom, to put his report in writing, so I could get a better idea as to the nature of the haunting. He did this with the precision expected from a public relations man representing a major instrument manufacturer. Here then is his initial report:

  As a member of the public relations/advertising profession, I’ve always been considered a cynical, phlegmatic individual and so considered myself. I’m not superstitious, walk under ladders, have never thought about the “spirit world,” am not a deeply religious person, etc., but....

  Eight years ago, my wife and I purchased, for a summer home, a nonworking farm in South Waterford, Maine. The ten-room farmhouse had been unoccupied for two years prior to our acquisition. Its former owners were in elderly couple who left no direct heirs and who had been virtually recluses in their later years. The house apparently was built in two stages, the front part about 1840, and the ell sometime around 1800. The ell contains the original kitchen and family bedroom; a loft overhead was used during the nineteenth century for farm help and children. The former owners for many years occupied only a sitting room, the kitchen, and a dining room; all other rooms being closed and shuttered. The so-called sitting room was the daily and nightly abode. We never met the Bells, both of whom died of old age in nursing homes in the area, several years before we purchased the farm. They left it to relatives; all the furniture was auctioned off.

  The first summer my wife and I set about restoring the farmhouse. The old kitchen became our living room; the Bells’ sitting room became another bedroom; the old dining room, our kitchen. One bright noontime, I was painting in the new living room. All the doors were open in the house. Aware that someone was looking at me, I turned toward the bedroom door and there, standing in bright sunlight, was an elderly woman; she was staring at me. Dressed in a matronly housedress, her arms were folded in the stance common to many housewives. I was startled, thinking she must have entered the house via the open front door and had walked through the front sitting room to the now-bedroom. Behind her eyeglasses, she maintained a passive, inquisitive expression. For a moment or two, we stared at each other. I thought, What do you say to a native who has walked through your house, without sounding unneighborly? and was about to say something like What can I do for you? when she disappeared. She was there and then she wasn’t. I hurried through the bedrooms and, of course, there was no one.

  Once or twice that summer I was awakened by a sudden, chill draft passing through the second-floor room we used as a master bedroom. One early evening, while I was taking a shower, my wife called me from the living room with near-panic in her voice. I hurried downstairs as quickly as possible only to have her ask if I intended to remain downstairs.

  Before closing the house up for the winter, I casually described the apparition to local friends without disclosing my reasons, excusing the inquiry from a standpoint I was interested in the previous owner. Apparently my description was accurate, for our friends wanted to know where I’d seen Mrs. Bell; I had difficulty passing it off.

  My wife wasn’t put off, however, and later that evening we compared notes for the first time. The night she called me, she explained, she had felt a cold draft pass behind her and had looked up toward the door of the former sitting room (which was well-lighted). There, in the door, was the clear and full shadow of a small woman. My wife then cried out to me. The chill breeze went through the room and the shadow disappeared. My wife reported, however, that surprisingly enough she felt a sense of calm. No feeling of vindictiveness.

  Over the years, we’ve both awakened spontaneously to the chill draft and on more than one occasion have watched a pinpoint light dance across the room. The house is isolated and on a private road, discounting any possible headlights, etc. After a moment or so, the chill vanishes.

  A couple of times, guests have queried us on hearing the house creak or on hearing footsteps, but we pass these off.

  The summer before last, however, our guests’ reaction was different.

  A couple with two small children stayed with us. The couple occupied the former sitting room, which now is furnished as a Victorian-style bedroom with a tremendous brass bed. Their daughter occupied another first-floor bedroom, and their son shared our son’s bedroom on the second floor. A night light was left on in the latter bedroom and in the bathroom, thereby illuminating the upper hallway, and, dimly, the lower hallway. My wife and I occupied another bedroom on the second floor that is our custom.

  During the early hours of the morning, we were awakened by footsteps coming down the upper hallway.

  They passed our door, went into the master bedroom, paused, continued into our room and after a few minutes, passed on and down the staircase. My wife called out, thinking it was one of the boys, possibly ill. No answer. The chill breeze was present, and my wife again saw the woman’s shadow against the bedroom wall. The children were sound asleep.

  In the morning, our adult guests were quiet during breakfast, and it wasn’t until later that the woman asked if we’d been up during the night and had come downstairs. She’d been awakened by the footsteps and by someone touching her arm and her hair. Thinking it was her husband, she found him soundly sleeping. In the moonlight, she glanced toward a rocking chair in the bedroom and said she was certain someone had moved it and the clothes left on it. She tried to return to sleep, but again was awakened, certain someone was in the room, and felt someone move the blanket and touch her arm.

  My wife and I finally acknowledged our “ghost,” but our woman guest assured us that she felt no fright, to her own surprise, and ordinarily wouldn’t have believed such “nonsense,” except that I, her host, was too “worldly” to be a spiritualist.

  At least one other guest volunteered a similar experience.

  Finally I admitted my story to our local friends, asking them not to divulge the story in case people thought we were “kooks.” But I asked them if they would locate a photograph of the Bell family. Needless to say, the photograph they located was identical with my apparition. An enlargement now is given a prominent place in our living room.

  Although this experience hasn’t frightened us from the house, it has left us puzzled. My wife and I both share the feeling that whatever [it is] is more curious than unpleasant; more interested than destructive.

  I was impressed and replied we would indeed venture Down East. It so happened that Catherine, whom I was married to at the time, and I were doing some traveling in upper New Hampshire that August, and Ethel Johnson Meyers was vacationing at Lake Sebago. All that needed to be done was coordinate our travel plans and set the date.

  Mr. Brigham, who then lived in Great Neck, New York, was delighted and gave us explicit instructions on how to traverse New Hampshire from Pike, New Hampshire, where I was lecturing at the Lake Tarleton Club, to our intended rendezvous with Ethel in Bridgton, Maine, at the Cumberland Hotel. The date we picked was August 14, 1967. Ken and Doris Brigham then suggested we could stay over at the haunted house, if necessary, and I assured them that I doubted the need for it, being a bit cocksure of getting through to, and rid of, the ghost all in the same day.

  * *
*

  Crossing the almost untouched forests from New Hampshire to Maine on a road called the Kancamagus Highway was quite an experience for us: we rode for a very, very long time without ever seeing a human habitation, or, for that matter, a gas station. But then the Indians whose land this was never worried about such amenities.

  Before we left, we had received a brief note from Ken Brigham about the existence of this road cutting through the White Mountains. He also informed me that some of the witnesses to the phenomena at the house would be there for our visit, and I would have a chance to meet them, including Mrs. Mildred Haynes Noyes, a neighbor who was able to identify the ghostly apparition for the Brighams. Most of the phenomena had occurred in the living room, downstairs in the house, as well as in the long central hall, and in one upper-story front bedroom as well, Mr. Brigham added.

  At the time I had thought of bringing a television documentary crew along to record the investigations, but it never worked out that way, and in the end I did some filming myself and sound recorded the interviews, and, of course, Ethel Meyers’s trance.

  When we finally arrived at the house in question in Waterford, Maine, Ethel had no idea where she was exactly or why. She never asked questions when I called on her skills. Directly on arrival she began pacing up and down in the grounds adjacent to the house as if to gather up her bearings. She often did that, and I followed her around with my tape recorder like a dog follows its master.

  “I see a woman at the window, crying,” she suddenly said and pointed to an upstairs window. “She wears a yellow hat and dress. There is a dog with her. Not from this period. Looking out, staring at something.”

  We then proceeded to enter the house and found ourselves in a very well appointed living room downstairs; a fire in the fireplace gave it warmth, even though this was the middle of August. The house and all its furnishings were kept as much as possible in the Federal-period style, and one had the feeling of having suddenly stepped back into a living past.