Hans Holzer - Ghost Hunter: The Groundbreaking Classic of Paranormal Investigation

A s a professional ghost hunter, I am forever on the lookout for likely prospects. There is no dearth of haunted houses in Manhattan. There is, however, a king-sized amount of shyness among witnesses to ghostly phenomena which keeps me from getting what I am after. Occasionally, this shyness prevents me from investigating a promising case.

There was a man, on Long Island, who was appalled at the idea of my bringing a medium to his house. Even though he did not question my integrity as a psychic investigator, he decided to discuss the matter with his bishop. Mediums and such are the work of the Devil, the cleric sternly advised the owner of the haunted house, and permission for my visit was withdrawn.

Although the poltergeist case of Seaford, Long Island, had been in all the papers, and even on national television, the idea of a volunteer medium trying to help solve the mystery proved too much for the prejudiced owner of the house.

Then, there was the minister who carefully assured me that there couldnt be anything to the rumors Id heard about footsteps and noises when there wasnt anyone there. What he meant, of course, was that he preferred it that way. Still, that was one more potential case I lost before even getting to first base. Dont get me wrongthese people understand who I am; they have respect for my scientific credentials; and they know their anonymity will be carefully guarded. They know Im not a crackpot or an amateuramusing himself with something he does not understand. In fact, theyre very much interested to hear all about these things, provided it happened in someone elses house.

I am a professional investigator of ghosts, haunted houses, and other spontaneous phenomena, to use the scientific termthat is, anything of a supernormal nature, not fully explained by orthodox happenings, and thus falling into the realm of parapsychology or psychic research.

I wasnt born a ghost hunter. I grew up to be one, from very early beginnings, though. At the age of three, in my native Vienna, my Kindergarten teacher threatened me with expulsion from the class for telling ghost stories to my wide-eyed classmates. These, however, were the non-evidential kind of stories I had made out of whole cloth. Still, it showed I was hot on the subject, even then!

Even in Freudian Vienna, ghost-story telling is not considered a gainful profession, so my schooling prepared me for the more orthodox profession of being a writer. I managed to major in history and archeology, knowledge I found extremely helpful in my later research work, for it taught me the methods of painstaking corroboration and gave me a kind of bloodhound approach in the search for facts. The fact that I was born under the truth-seeking sign of Aquarius made all this into a way of life for me.

I am the Austrian-born son of a returnee from New York; thus I grew up with an early expectation of returning to New York as soon as I was old enough to do so. Meanwhile, I lived like any other child of good family background, alternately sheltered and encouraged to express myself.

I had barely escaped from Kindergarten when my thoughtful parents enrolled me in a public school one year ahead of my time. It took hundreds of dollars and a special ukase by the Minister of Education to get me in at that early age of five, but it was well worth it to my suffering parents.

I had hardly warmed the benches of my first-grade class when I started to build radio sets, which in those days were crystal powered. For the moment, at least, ghosts were not in evidence. But the gentle security into which I had lulled my elders was of brief duration. I had hardly turned nine when I started to write poems, dramas (all of four pages)and, youre rightghost stories. Only now they had more terror in them, since I had absorbed a certain amount of mayhem, thanks to the educational motion pictures we were treated to in those days and certain literary sources known as Zane Grey and Karl May.

My quaint writings earned me the reputation of being special, without giving me any compensation of fame or fortune.

Gradually, girls began to enter my world. This fact did not shatter my imaginative faculties. It simply helped populate my ghost stories with more alluring female ghosts.

I was now about thirteen or fourteen, and frequently visited my late Uncle Henry in his native city of Bruenn. My Uncle Henry was as special as was I, except that his career as a businessman had restricted his unusual interests to occasional long talks and experiments. In his antique-filled room in my grandparents house, we held weird rites which we called the raising of the spirits, and which, for all we knew, might have raised a spirit or two. We never waited around long enough to find out, but turned the lights back on when it got too murky. Needless to say, we also indulged in candle rites and readings from my uncles substantial collection of occult books.

I didnt think my uncle ever believed in the occult, but many years later, just before his passing, he did confess to me that he had no doubts about the reality of the other world and spirit communication. If I am to believe several professional and nonprofessional mediums who have since brought me messages from him, he is now in a position of proving this reality to himself, and to me.

In 1935 I was fifteen and I had become a collector of antiques and coins and was an ardent bibliophile. One day, while digging through the stacks at a booksellers, I came across an early, but then rather up-to-date account of the scientific approach to the occult, called Occultism in This Modern Age. It was the work of Dr. T. K. Oesterreich, a professor at the University of Tbingen in Germany. This 1928 book started me off on a serious approach to ghosts.

At first, it was idle curiosity mixed with a show-me kind of skepticism. I read other books, journals, and learned bulletins. But I didnt attend any seances or have any actual contact with the subject while a teen-ager. My training at this point veered toward the newspaper-writing profession.