Ghost Hunter: The Groundbreaking Classic of Paranormal Investigation

TARCHER SUPERNATURAL LIBRARY

Isis in America by Henry Steel Olcott

The Romance of Sorcery by Sax Rohmer

Ghost Hunter by Hans Holzer

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

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Ghost Hunter was originally published in 1963.

First Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin edition 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holzer, Hans, 1920–2009.

Ghost hunter: the groundbreaking classic of paranormal investigation/Hans Holzer.

p. cm.—(Tarcher supernatural library; 1)

ISBN 978-0-698-15426-1

1. Ghosts—New York (State)—New York. 2. Parapsychology. 3. Holzer, Hans, 1920–2009. I. Title.

BF1472.U6H63733 2014 2014012316

133.109747—dc23

Version_1

CONTENTS

Also in the Tarcher Supernatural Library

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction: Ghosts, Anyone?

THE BANK STREET GHOST

THE WHISTLING GHOST

THE METUCHEN GHOST

THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR

A GREENWICH VILLAGE GHOST

THE HAUNTINGS AT SEVEN OAKS

THE CENTRAL PARK WEST GHOST

THE GHOSTS AT ST. MARK’S

A VISIT WITH ALEXANDER HAMILTON’S GHOST

THE CONFERENCE HOUSE GHOST

THE CLINTON COURT GHOSTS

THE HOUSE GHOST OF BERGENVILLE

THE FIFTH AVENUE GHOST

GOOD MEDIUMS ARE RARE

THE GHOSTLY LOVER

THE CASE OF THE MURDERED FINANCIER

THE ROCKLAND COUNTY GHOST

THE HAUNTED NIGHTCLUB

THE RIVERSIDE GHOST

THE HAUNTED CHAIR

THE GHOST AT THE WINDOW

A RENDEZVOUS WITH HOUDINI

About the Author

INTRODUCTION: GHOSTS, ANYONE?

As 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are the work of the Devil, the cleric sternly advised the owner of the haunted house, and permission for my visit was withdrawn.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 couldn’t be anything to the rumors I’d heard about footsteps and noises when there wasn’t 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. Don’t get me wrong—these people understand who I am; they have respect for my scientific credentials; and they know their anonymity will be carefully guarded. They know I’m not a crackpot or an amateur—amusing himself with something he does not understand. In fact, they’re very much interested to hear all about these things, provided it happened in someone else’s house.

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

I wasn’t 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, you’re right—ghost 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 uncle’s substantial collection of occult books.

I didn’t 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 bookseller’s, 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 Tübingen 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 didn’t 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.

I took a course in practical journalism, and started to sell articles to local papers. The reportorial training added the interview in depth approach to my later investigations. All this time, we had dreamed of coming back to New York, of which my father had fond memories. But it wasn’t until 1938, when I had just turned eighteen, that I set foot on American soil. My first job had nothing to do with occultism, and it paid only fifteen dollars weekly in a day when that was just enough to live on uncomfortably.

Falling back (or forward, if you wish) on my knowledge of antiquities and coins, I became an expert cataloguer and writer for one of the big importers of such things.

In 1945 I quit my position—I was then associate editor of a scientific magazine dealing with coins and antiquities—and I became a free-lance writer. My old interest in the occult revived; the flame had never died but had been dormant, and now it burst forth again. More books, more lectures, more seeking out the unorthodox, the tantalizingly unsolved.

In 1949 I went to Europe as an accredited foreign correspondent, with the intent to write articles on cultural activities, the theater, and human-interest stories. I had begun to write plays and compose music myself, a skill which I have since used professionally in the New York theater. On this trip, which led me from the heel of the boot of Italy to the northern part of Sweden, I realized that much psychic research activity was going on in the countries I visited. However, the brevity of my stay in each place precluded any close contact with these bodies.

The following year I returned to Europe, again as a foreign correspondent. In this capacity, I covered the theater in London and other major cities of Europe. One evening, I was invited backstage at the Hippodrome Theatre in London, where comedian Michael Bentine was then appearing as one of the stars. Mr. Bentine offered me a home-grown tomato instead of a drink: he immediately ingratiated himself to me since I am a vegetarian. It also developed that Michael and I had birthdays on the same day, though a few years apart. A friendship grew quickly between us, especially when we discovered our common interest in the occult.

I remember we had a luncheon date in one of London’s Spanish restaurants. Luncheon was served at twelve noon, conversation started at one, and at five o’clock the owner gently tiptoed over to us and whispered, Dinner is being prepared!

When I returned home that night, I started to work on a television series based on actual hauntings. Through mutual friends, I was led to a study group composed of earnest young people from various walks of life, who meet regularly in the rooms belonging to the Edgar Cayce Foundation in New York. Their purpose was simply the quest for truth in the vast realm of extrasensory perception. From then on, I devoted more and more time and energies to this field.

One of the greatest of all living mediums and, at the same time, psychic researchers is Eileen Garrett, who is today president of the Parapsychology Foundation of New York, a world-wide organization that encourages and supports truly scientific investigations and studies in the realm of extrasensory perception. The Foundation also publishes magazines, and has helped the publication of important books on psychic subjects.

I had met Mrs. Garrett briefly in 1946 without realizing that she was the same person whose psychic reputation had long awed me. The contact with her became stronger after my return from Europe in 1951, when I discussed my work and ideas on psychic research with her from time to time.

Eileen Garrett had no patience with guesswork or make-believe. She taught me to be cautious and painstaking, so that the results of my research would not be open to question. My friendship with Eileen Garrett helped a great deal. Since she was both a great medium and researcher, I adopted her severe approach. I neither believed nor disbelieved; I looked only for facts, no matter what the implications.

At the Edgar Cayce Foundation on 16th Street and elsewhere, I also met the handful of nonprofessional mediums who helped me so much in my investigations. My method frequently calls for the presence of a sensitive person to pick up clairvoyantly, or through trance, tangible material about a haunted house, that could then later be examined for veracity. I don’t hold with the ghost hunter who spends a night alone in a haunted house, and then has nothing more to show for his bravery than a stiff back.

To me, the purpose of investigation is twofold; one, to establish the observed facts of the phenomena, and two, to make contact with the alleged ghost. The chances of seeing an apparition, if you’re not sensitive yourself, are nil, and I don’t like to waste time.

Ghosts are people, or part of people, anyway, and thus governed by emotional stimuli; they do not perform like trained circus animals, just to please a group of skeptics or sensation seekers. Then too, one should remember that an apparition is really a re-enactment of an earlier emotional experience, and rather a personal matter. A sympathetic visitor would encourage it; a hostile onlooker inhibit it.

Sometimes an ordinary person does manage to see or hear a ghost in an allegedly haunted location, be it a building or open space. Such a person is of course sensitive or mediumistic, without knowing it, and this is less unusual than one might think.

Even though I am an artistic, and therefore sensitive, person, I do not profess to mediumship, and certainly would not be satisfied with the meager impressions I might gather myself, psychically. A more advanced psychic talent is very necessary to get results. So, I take my sensitive with me. If I also see or hear some unearthly things, well and good. That’s a bonus. But I don’t like unfinished cases. And rarely indeed have I come home empty-handed when I set out in the company of a good medium.

Are good mediums hard to find? They are! That is why I spend a considerable portion of my efforts in this field in search for good new mediums. These are people with the extrasensory gift, whose interest is scientific, not financial. Natural talents in this field, just as in any other, can be trained. There are strict methods and conditions, and when you work in a field that is still on the fringes of recognized science, the more stringent your conditions are, the better.

Today, my methods are well thought out. When I hear of a likely case or prospect, I call the owners or tenants of the building, or if an open area, the nearest neighbor or potential witness, and introduce myself. I get as much information as I can on witnesses and type of phenomena observed, then call the witnesses and interview them. Only after this preliminary work has been done do I call in one of my sensitive-collaborators. I tell them only that a case has come up, and when I will need them.

I discuss everything but the case with them on our way to the location, and when we get there, the hosts have been informed not to volunteer any information, either.

A good medium like Mrs.