Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  She had not actually kept house since we made the move and had not cooked a single meal for Andy or me. About this time she started walking to a drugstore in a nearby shopping center for breakfast, and then in the late afternoon just before I would get home she would walk to a restaurant a few blocks away for the evening meal, usually by herself. A little later she began calling a taxi nearly every morning to go to a different place for breakfast: once to a downtown hotel; once way out on the other side of town to a roadside restaurant on the Mineola Highway, and to many other places within the course of a few weeks. Always in the evenings though she would go to the restaurant near our home. She would come home usually just after I arrived, and would change clothes and stay in her room from then on. She would get up very early in the morning, about 5 o’clock, something she had never done during our entire married life. For the past few years she insisted that people were spying on her, and finally, when I did not agree with her, she accused me of being at the head of this group set out to torment her, and even said that I had television cameras set up in the house to spy on her.

  John smoked almost incessantly, every kind of cigarette made, but later began to smoke little cigars the size of a cigarette, and still later started on the big regular ones that men smoke. Once she bought a small can of snuff. She had never used snuff before. This was a little while after she had begun to lay cigarettes down just anywhere, although there were plenty of ashtrays throughout the house. She also began putting lighted cigarettes on table tops, the arms of a divan, or even on the bed, and if Andy or I had not been there to put them out, no doubt the house would have eventually been burned down. She did burn holes in several sheets and in the mattress on her bed. When that happened I told her that she simply could not smoke any more. She did not protest. Andy and I searched the house and found cigarettes and matches everywhere. John had hidden them everywhere, inside a little table radio by removing the back, inside a flashlight where the batteries are supposed to be, in those little shoe pockets she had hanging in her closet, in a little opening at the end of the bathtub where a trap door in the closet exposes the pipes for repairs, under the mattress, inside pillow covers, and even in the dog house outdoors. We gathered up cigarettes, matches, and cigarette lighters every day when I got home and there is no telling how many we finally found and destroyed. Of course she would get more every day at the shopping center, and once we even found one of those little automatic rollers that a person can use to make his own cigarettes.

  Exactly what part John played in the frightening events that took place at our house I cannot say. I am convinced though, as is Amy, that there was some connection. The three years from late 1962 to the summer of 1965 preceded the most awesome, fantastic chain of events that the human mind can imagine. In fact, as these unbelievable episodes began to unfold before us I was beginning to doubt my own sanity. Andy, who was 13 at the time this began, shared with me every one of the horrible experiences, which started in midsummer 1965 and lasted without interruption until near the end of 1966, when we were “told” that they were over with, only to find that during the next fifteen months we were in for even worse things. If Andy had not been with me to substantiate these awful experiences I would have indeed considered myself hopelessly insane.

  The frightening events began to take place near the middle of 1965, about the time John quit going places with Andy and me. When at home she would stay in her bedroom and close the door and leave it closed after she went to bed. Andy and I slept in the same bed in another room.

  During our first year at this house we were not bothered by the usual summertime insects, so I did not bother to repair the screens needing fixing at that time. However, during July of 1965, Andy and I would go to bed, and as soon as we turned out the light we were plagued by hordes of June bugs of all sizes, which would hit us on our heads and faces, some glancing off on the floor, others landing on the bed, and some missing us entirely and smashing themselves against the metal window blinds. Night after night we fought these bugs in the dark, grabbing those that landed on the bed and throwing them against the blinds as hard as we could.

  Then we discovered that at least half of the bugs that hit us were already dead, in fact had been dead so long that they were crisp and would crumble between our fingers when we picked them up! I would get up and turn on the lights, and the raids would cease immediately; we could see no sign of them in the air … only those hundreds that littered the floor and bed. The instant I turned off the light, though, the air would be filled with bugs again, just as if someone were standing there ready to throw handfuls at us as soon as it was dark. One night I got up and swept and vacuumed the entire room, moved every piece of furniture away from the walls, dusted the backs of the dresser, chest and tables, and vacuumed the floor again. When I was through I could swear that there was not a living creature in that room other than Andy and me. I got some rags and stuffed them in the cracks beneath the closet door and the one leading from the room into the hall. The windows were closed. The room was absolutely clean. Andy was in bed, awake. I turned off the light. At that exact instant hundreds of bugs hit us!

  About this time John began to act more strangely than ever, doing things she would not dream of doing under ordinary circumstances. For example, I might look in my closet to get a shirt or a pair of trousers, and there would not be any there. I do not know what prompted me to do it, but I would go to John’s closet, and there would be my clothes hanging alongside some of hers.

  At this time I had a rubber stamp shop in a room behind the garage, which was a part of the house, and I worked out there every night. There was no direct connection from the house. One had to go out the kitchen door into the garage and then through another door into the shop. On many occasions I would hear the kitchen door being opened, and would rush to the shop door to see who it was. No matter how hard I tried, though, I could never get there fast enough to see anybody …only my clothes, suits, shirts, etc., on hangers just as they landed in the middle of the garage floor.

  It was during the hottest part of summer while we had the air-conditioners running that other strange things took place for which we assumed John was responsible. Andy or I would suddenly find the bathroom wall heater lighted and the flames running out the top, with the door closed. The room would be hot enough to burst into flames. John insisted that she had not lit the heater … that one of us had. After this had happened several times, I removed the handle that turns on the gas. A short time later, while I was out in the shop, Andy came running out and called me in. There was a bunch of paper towels stuffed into the heater where the burners are and they were on fire, some of them on the floor, burning. I then decided to turn off all the pilot lights in the house. This was on the weekend before Labor Day, and I did not know how I could possibly go to work on Tuesday following the holiday and leave John at home alone, since Andy would be in school. I had talked with Dr.——until I could determine what I would eventually be able to do with her, but the psychiatric wards were already running over, and he did not want to admit her as a patient. I decided to tell John that if she did “any of those things” again I would have to put her in jail. Monday night she started waving a pistol around, so I called the police station and told them the predicament I was in. They said they would keep her until things could be settled and told me to bring her on down. She went without protest. When my lawyer returned he made appointments for her to be examined by two psychiatrists, after which I thought there would be no further question about the need for commitment, and she stayed at home that week. However, on the Monday following Labor Day she called her sister-in-law Mack in Daingerfield, Texas, about a hundred miles from Tyler, and asked if she could visit her at once. I was at work and knew nothing of this until Mack got to Tyler and asked it if would be all right for John to go with her. I objected, but my lawyer advised me that I should let her go, as she could be brought back for the commitment hearing, so they left that day for Daingerfield.

 
A few days later John’s lawyer had her examined by a psychiatrist again, and he finally said that she might benefit somewhat from getting a job, although she would have to undergo psychiatric treatment at various times in the future. It would be almost impossible to have her committed voluntarily, so we decided to just let things stand as they were. For the record, John’s attorney insisted that I be examined by the same doctors who had examined her. The reports on me were favorable.

  Shortly after John had gone off to stay with Mack, Andy and I were lying in bed with the lights off, talking about the terrible things we had gone through. Suddenly I heard a voice calling my name … a high-pitched, falsetto voice that seemed to be coming from out in space. The voice said it was John, and although it sounded nothing at all like her, I am convinced it was, since she talked about several things that only she and I knew of.... One was about some disagreeable words she had had with one of my sisters at the time of my father’s death in 1950. She said that although my other sister had insulted her, she was good, and that she had forgiven her. Andy did not hear any part of this conversation. Apparently John, or the voice, could talk to either of us without the other listening to the voice. I even suspected that Andy was doing the talking, and I held my fingers to his lips while listening to the voice. I knew then it could not have been coming from his lips.

  One night while I was lying in bed and Andy was in the bathroom I heard his voice say “good-bye,” though, just before he came to bed, and he told me he had been talking with his mother. During the following weeks we heard six other voices from right out of nowhere, all from people who had been dead for some time. I knew all but one of them while they were living. Two of them had always been friendly toward me, and both were old enough to be my mother. Andy also knew these who women and one of the men named George Swinney. This latter person was killed in an accident some time after he visited us “by voice.” The other two women were mothers of friends of mine and both had died some time before we moved to Tyler. One was Mrs. Snow and the other was Mrs. Elliott, and theirs were the next two voices we heard after John had left, and they came to us about the time the visits by Henry Anglin started. He was the only one of the lot who gave us trouble to start with; in fact I am convinced that he is the one responsible for the bug raids and other awful things that happened to us.

  One of the work benches in my shop was against the wall dividing the shop and the kitchen, and at the bottom of the wall was an opening with a grill over it to handle the return air from the central heating system. For some reason the grill on the shop side had been removed, and by stooping down near the floor under the bench I could see much of what was going on in the kitchen. I worked in the shop every night, and when these “ghosts” first began visiting us they would call my name, the voices seeming to come from the opening into the kitchen. I would stoop down and answer. At that time I would carry on lengthy conversations with all of them. Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Elliott were very friendly and seemed to want to give me all kinds of good advice. Henry Anglin was just the opposite. He was extremely mean and demanded that I do all sorts of things I would not do. When I refused, he would be very nasty. Once he got a can of insect spray we kept on the kitchen cabinet top and held it down at the opening to my shop. He would start spraying through the hole. He used a whole can of spray and in that little room I nearly suffocated. One cannot imagine what a feeling it is to see a can of insect spray suspended in midair with apparently nothing holding it and to have it sprayed right in one’s face! When I went inside I could see the dents made by the edge of the can where he had banged it against the wall.

  About the middle of September 1965 the nightly bug raids began to taper off. We thought that we were going to get a few nights’ sleep without fear. However, when we went to bed we would feel something moving on an arm or in our hair—after we had turned off the lights. We jumped up and found one or several slugs somewhere on us or on the bed. They are the ugliest, slimiest wormlike creatures that can be imagined, big at the head and tapering to a point toward their rear end. They have whiskers on each side of the head, and although they have eyes, they are not supposed to see very well, according to Andy, who, strangely enough, was studying them at school at that time. The large ones are as big as a Vienna sausage, about three inches long, and leave a silvery looking trail wherever they crawl. When the first few of these creatures appeared Andy thought they had clung to his shoes while he was playing in the yard and had gotten into the house that way. However, night after night the number of slugs increased, and we went through the same torture as with the bugs, only much worse. One cannot imagine how awful it is to wake up in the middle of the night and find oneself surrounded by a horde of slimy, ugly worms! Andy said that salt would dissolve the slugs. So we sprinkled salt all around the baseboard, around the bed legs, but still the slugs came as soon as the lights were out. A few nights later we were again bombarded with bugs ... not June bugs this time, but the wood louse, the little bug about the size of a blackeyed pea. They have lots of tiny legs, will roll up into a round ball when touched, and are generally called pill bugs. I knew they could not fly, yet there they came, hitting us just as if they were shot out of a gun, at the exact moment we turned out the lights! Mixed in with these were some bugs I had never seen anywhere before, like a doodle bug but brown in color. I knew doodle bugs couldn’t fly, and these things no more had wings than I did. Yet there they came, shooting through the air, and, just as the June bugs had done, they started out one or two at a time, until finally dozens began hitting us at once the moment the lights were out. I also found little pieces of clear material which looked like pieces of broken glass. I finally discovered that these pieces were making the loud noise against the blinds... some of them landed on the bed along with the peculiar bugs. I then washed off a piece about the size of a pea and tasted it; it was pure rock salt! I had not the slightest idea where it came from, as we certainly had had no use for any here. As baffling as the idea of bugs flying without wings was, it was no more so than rock salt sailing through the air with apparently nothing to propel it. There was absolutely no human being in the house except Andy and me.

  A day or two after John had left, I cleaned up her room thoroughly, moved every piece of furniture, swept, vacuumed, dusted, and made up the bed, putting on a spread that came nearly to the floor. A few days after the second series of bug raids, Andy called me into John’s room. He raised up the spread, and there under the bed was a conglomeration of objects, among which was a ten-pound sack of rock salt, most of which had been poured in a pile on the carpet under the bed. There was an old hair net mixed with it, some burned matches, an unwrapped cake of “hotel” soap, and on top of the pile was a note, printed the way a six-year-old child would do it, “Evil spirit go away.”

  In the next few days we began looking through things in John’s room and found lots of notes written in longhand, most of which were like those of a child just learning to write, although a few words were unmistakably John’s handwriting. They were mainly of people’s names, a date which might be the birthdate, and then another date some time in the future...some up past 1977. There were many names contained in the notes. One name was of a man I am sure John could not have known. He was Henry Anglin, a pitifully ignorant old man who used to farm just west of Grand Saline, and, like all farmers in the adjoining territory back in 1918, would come to town each Saturday to buy groceries and other supplies for the following week. When I was about fourteen years old I worked in a department store that also handled groceries. My job was to keep track of the farmers’ stacks of groceries so that when they were ready to leave in the evening I could show them where their purchases were and help load their wagons. Henry Anglin was among the people I regularly waited on. He seemed old to me then and that was about fifty years ago. I have no doubt that he has long since died. I cannot imagine how his name entered John’s mind. There were also some typewritten sheets in John’s room which contained the same items as the notes we had found.
One mentioned a certain “Tink” Byford. There was a date that was probably his birthdate, then a date in 1964. We had moved to Tyler in July 1964, and it was several months after that when I read in the paper that “Tink” Byford had been killed in an auto accident while returning to Grand Saline from Dallas. Another name was “Bill” Robertson, a friend of both of us. There was an early date, then “Hosp. 1965, death 1967.” There were many other names, some now dead, but most still living, always with two dates! One day when I got home from work Andy and I found in the living room between the divan and table a new bar of soap which had been crumbled up and scattered over a two-or three-foot area. Andy found a potato masher in John’s room with soap on it, so we assumed it was used in the living room where the soap was scattered. We did not clean it up right away. That night, after we went to bed, several pieces of soap about the size of a quarter hit our blinds like bullets, although the door to the living room was closed and the den and hallway are between the living room and our bedroom.