Hans Holzer - Houses of Horror

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H ave you ever come home and wondered what might be lurking up the stairs, in the dark of the corridor where the lights dont reach and the soft footfalls of the visitor disappear into the thick carpet?

If your house were devoid of all unseen presences, then you would not think along those lines. But thousands of people who live in old houses and even some who live in comparatively modern homes have come face to face with something that wasnt in their lease or purchasing contract.

The presence lets you know it is its house and not yet yours, and the disturbances to attract your attention to make sure you realize that youre never really alonethose are the earmarks of the haunted house, and if youre only a little bit psychic, sooner or later you will have to come to grips with the problem.

Across the nation and all over the world, sane respectable people report experiences with ghosts, or what for want of a better and less frightening term is called spectral. These people dont go about telling the newspapers, for they do not wish to be made the butt of cheap jokes, nor do they tell their ministers and doctors, for the men of religion and science instinctively fear the reality of ghostly phenomena as representing a threat to their preconceived notion of what the universe is all about.

Finally, these people turn to people like me, who are experts in such matters, and ask for advice and comfort: the comfort of knowing they are not alone in their predicament and their experiences with the world of the uncanny.

I cannot always come and lay the ghost, nor is it necessarily desirable to do so. Often the matter is complex and involves both the living and the dead in a mutually entwining relationship that cannot exist one without the other, and to sever arbitrarily that which nature has evidently ordained somehow, would be as wrong as not heeding the cry for help from those who desperately want help and release.

Mans inhumanity to man has created countless remnants of tragic events that persist in the areas of their demise and even the walls seem to be able to talk at times and tell posterity what has happened in them.

Wherever stark human emotions are involved there is no boundary of time or expiration, for these emotions cling to the surroundings forever. It does not really matter if you step into such whirlpools of feelings today or a hundred years hence, they will still be there and you will relive the moments as if the time in between had never passed.

The events reported here are but a fraction of those in my files awaiting disposition or perhaps only a word of understanding. People keep having parallel experiences and they are the ones for whom I write especially, so that they may know theirs is not a unique world but one fashioned by an unsentimental nature in a rather routine way that has occurred elsewhere and will recur to the end of time. If this is not exactly comforting to those caught up in the turmoil of the experience, on both sides of the veil, it is at least a finger pointing to a better understanding of what hauntings are all about. Many of these cases remind one of the Gothic novels of the nineteenth century, for even though the surroundings are modern, the problems are like the sufferings of the Gothic tragedies, equally beyond real help. I am telling the stories from the point of view of the victims, for they are the ones who create the Gothic character of these true accounts.

The very fact that these are not cases easily resolved in the way many other ghost cases are resolved through trance investigations, points at the tragic character of the stories: for neither victim nor ghost escapes the consequences of their being put in each others way. The victims may move on and find new surroundings, without, however, ever forgetting the imprint of what they have experienced previously. The ghost will keep re-enacting his final compulsion until the house is pulled down around him, or even beyond.

I have not intruded myself into these accounts other than to verify them as best I could. For one reason or another, dispatching the restless ghosts herein reported was neither possible nor desirable, and the introduction of a medium was neither required nor desired by those most concerned.

What we present then are ghost stories that have the touch of the tragic, but above all, are true!

S omerset was one of those small towns that abound in rural Pennsylvania and that boast nothing more exciting than a few thousand homes, a few churches, a club or two and a lot of hardworking people whose lives pass under pretty ordinary and often drab circumstances. Those who leave may go on to bigger and better things in the big cities, and those who stay have the comparative security of being among their own and living out their lives peacefully. But then there are those who leave not because they want to but because they are driven, driven by forces greater than themselves that they cannot resist.

The Manners were middle-aged people with two children, a fourteen-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter. The husband ran a television sales and repair shop which gave them an average income, neither below middle-class standards for a small town, nor much above it. Although Catholic, they did not consider themselves particularly religious. Mrs. Manners people originally came from Austria, so there was enough European background in the family to give their lives a slight continental tinge, but other than that, they were a typical Pennsylvania people without the slightest interest in, or knowledge of, such sophisticated matters as psychic research. But, the occult was never unknown to Mrs. Manner. She was born with a veil over her eyes, which to many means the Second Sight. Her ability to see things before they happened was not precognition to her, but merely a special talent she took in her stride. One night she had a vivid dream about her brother, then miles away in the army. She vividly saw him walking down a hall in a bathrobe, with blood running down his leg. Shortly after she awakened the next day, she was notified that her brother had been attacked by a rattlesnake and, when found, was near death. One night she awoke to see an image of her sister standing beside her bed. There was nothing fearful about the apparition, but she was dressed all in black.

The next day that sister died.

But these instances did not frighten Mrs. Manner; they were glimpses into eternity and nothing more.