Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book)

Cover

Title Page

FOREWORD

THY KINGDOM COME

NEAR DEATH

THE REIGN OF SCIENCE

RETURN TO THE KINGDOM

GOD’S KINGDOM

MEDICAL SUPERSTITIONS

EXILED

THE RETURN OF EVIL

CONTACT

About the Author

Copyright

Dear Mr. King:

I am writing to you because I know from reading your books that you are a true believer in the world of spirits, that you had a near-death experience similar to mine, and because you are a fellow Mainer.

My name is Eleanor Sarah Druse, Sally to my friends. I am seventy-five years of age, born 2 November 1928, All Souls’ Day, at the old Kingdom Hospital in the town of Lewis ton, Maine, where I have lived most of my life. Although I am a trained experimental psychologist and professor emeritus of noetic sciences and esoteric psychology at Lewiston’s Faust College, I cannot at this early date write with the authority and detachment of a scientist working in a controlled environment. My research into the baffling and disturbing events I have witnessed at Kingdom Hospital is so far unfunded and has of necessity been conducted in the field, where I have done my best to describe breaking events in uncontrolled, even chaotic circumstances.

I do not have the necessary staff and equipment to conduct more rigorous, definitive studies, but I believe that I have collected tangible evidence of what we psychologists call a “sensed presence” at Lewiston’s Kingdom Hospital. I believe this to be the distressed spirit of a child who has repeatedly made herself known to me (throughout my life) and who, for reasons still unknown, is unable to pass beyond what the great Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg called the First State after death. I intend to find out who this poor child was in life, what happened to her, and if I can, how to help her find eternal rest, but I am opposed in my endeavors by powerful adversaries with vested interests to protect.

Although I lack the funding to conduct the necessary scientific research, I have tried to write this account with the objectivity and accuracy of a careful and ethical journalist. When appropriate, I have also described my own subjective impressions, because as you will see, on many occasions the child makes herself present only to me. I don’t know if the child has chosen me as a medium and vessel for her distress, or if her grief is aimless and I sense her voice only because of my own clairaudient aptitudes.

I apologize for sending handwritten notebooks, but I have no secretary or assistant, and I write in haste during the press of events leading up to my investigation of the sensed presence at Kingdom Hospital. If these pages speak to you, Mr. King, and if you have a secretary or typist at your disposal who could take on the work of typing these notes, I would be so grateful. My hope is that a typed manuscript could be submitted to the National Association for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and other organizations devoted to rigorously examining claims of extrasensory perception, parapsychology, precognition, and psychokinesis.

Please read these pages as an introduction only to what I believe will one day be a complete scientific study and assessment of the remarkable occurrences witnessed by myself and others at Kingdom Hospital beginning in December of the year 2002 and continuing to the present time.

Mr. King, I am seventy-five years old—still vigorous and alert—but I have also had disquieting premonitions that my struggle to learn the secrets of this girl’s distressed spiritual exile may lead to my own death. If I must shed this heavy flesh and cross the barrier to the beyond, then let my written words live on after me and speak for me when I am gone from this world. I have also included a detailed summary of my medical condition, because my nemesis is a physician whose weapon of choice is diagnosis.

If anything happens to me, and if subsequent research proves that the girl’s spirit is still abandoned, confused, and suffering, then please find someone to help her. As you will see in the papers I have enclosed, she can indeed be reached, and in time I believe that she will be able to tell us why she cannot rest.

God be with us all,

Most sincerely, and with great admiration for your work,

Eleanor Druse

ON DECEMBER THIRTEENTH OF
the year 2002, I was awakened in the wee-hour stillness of a winter’s night by my ringing telephone. At that hour, especially at my age, phone calls often amount to progress reports from the angel of death, whose duties include making unscheduled house calls in the dead of night and filling the obituaries with the names of my elderly friends. I expected that this was just such a call and was surprised to hear my son’s voice instead.

Bobby works the night shift as an orderly at Kingdom Hospital here in Lewiston, Maine. He was calling from work, and I thought it might be about one of the hospice patients I visit from time to time. I do some volunteer work on Kingdom Hospital’s sunshine ward. I go in once a week or, so; I sit with the dying and make their final days less lonely, hold their hands, pray with them, read Swedenborg or William Blake to them—anything to help them make ready for their grand journeys. If they are adventurers or spiritualists, then I’m happy to be of service with my crystals, cards, or runes, or even with a séance if they are anxious to reach a friend or family member.

Once in a great while I have had a call from the sunshine ward at night, especially if the patient was a close friend or if I had grown fond of the family during their visits. But I sensed that this was something else again.

“Mum,” said Bobby, “sorry to wake you, but we got something strange going on here.”

Bobby is not often roused to action, and making a phone call at this hour was, for him, tantamount to a dramatic exploit, maybe even aerobic exercise. In the Middle Ages, when the genius doctors all thought our temperaments were ruled by the four cardinal humors—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—Bobby would have been diagnosed as phlegmatic. These days I think they call it sensory integration disorder or amotivational syndrome. He’s a good boy, but a perversely willful underachiever. He isn’t quite forty years old yet, so I’m still looking out for signs of progress. Be assured that Bobby calling at 2:57
A.M.
on a winter’s night meant that something far beyond strange was afoot.

“What is it, Bobby? Are you at the hospital? What’s wrong?”

“Mum, there’s an attempted suicide here. A Mrs. Madeline Kruger. I think we know the family. She’s fairly gaga, Mum. Failing all of her cranial checks: doesn’t quite know what she’s doing, how old she is, where she lives. When the nurses asked her who’s the president, she said Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When they asked her what year is it, she said 1939.”

“Madeline Kruger?” I repeated the name and felt a cold mass congeal in my solar plexus and spread to my arms and legs on a cresting wave of gooseflesh. I shivered and caught my breath. I assumed that my visceral reactions were all caused by the nature of the call. Attempted suicide? I’d known Madeline Kruger (maiden name Jensen) since childhood—we were the same age—but I hadn’t seen or heard from her in twenty…hold on, could be thirty years, at least. Lloyd Kruger had run off and left her with nothing but his last name and three kids a long time ago—roughly the same decade my ex-husband left me.

“What’s happened to her? Did she tell you to call me?”

“It’s weirder than that, Mum. She keeps using your name. Sally this and Sally that. And when the nurses asked her, ‘Who’s Sally?’ she said, ‘Why, little Sally Druse, of course.’ ”

I felt the same cold mass expand inside me again and tried to think why in heaven Madeline Kruger would suddenly be invoking my name after I exchanged pleasantries with her in the produce section nearly thirty years ago, and why just after she attempted to take her own life? I sat up and tried to clear my head, because I seemed to be on the verge of remembering something she’d told me, some terrible confession she’d sworn me to secrecy over when we were still children. Maybe I’d forgotten it on purpose, so I couldn’t tell anybody.

“She’s still woozy, Mum, from gas and pills. They don’t seem to be able to find any family or next of kin.”

“She needs me, then, doesn’t she, Bobby?”

“The other thing is,” he said, “she left a note. A long one.”

I felt cold all over again and shivered.

“It has your name in it, Mum.”

“Well, what does it say?”

“They won’t show it to me, Mum. They just said she mentions you in her note. They asked me to call you, because she’s still talking about you. Something about tell Sally Druse the little girl is still here or the little girl is coming back. Are you sure you didn’t work with Mrs. Kruger on the sunshine ward? Or read her fortune somewhere? You didn’t cast any spells on her or anything, did you?”

“Bobby, I don’t cast spells, and I haven’t spoken to Madeline Kruger in thirty years. But I want to see her now.”

“Well, look out the window, Mum. We’ve had two feet of snow since yesterday. Stay home. Don’t go out. Turn on the TV and the weather alert will tell you the same.”

Bobby said that the side streets were snowpack and the main thoroughfares black ice, and that under no circumstances should I try to come to the hospital. Too dangerous. Mrs. Kruger’s stomach had been pumped (pills, too!), so she probably wouldn’t recover enough to receive visitors until morning, at which time Bobby promised he would come home and drive me in his truck to see her.

I told Bobby that he was absolutely right, that I dared not go out, and that I would wait for him to pick me up in the morning. Then I hung up the phone, went out to the garage, started my old Volvo, and drove to Kingdom Hospital so I could be with poor Madeline on the darkest night of her life. Bobby is something of a lummox in these matters, especially if he thought I could roll over and go back to sleep after learning that a childhood friend of mine was alone in the world, locked up in a psych ward, and still tormented by whatever demons had pursued her to the brink of self-slaughter.

There was a full moon that dread night in December, and the roads looked like bobsled runs, with snow heaped on either side to form a half tunnel out of which I could not see. I drove ten miles an hour the whole way, feeling guilty for all of the good I hadn’t done Madeline for the last third of a century, and remembering as much as I could about her.

We had been close friends when we were little girls, and I do remember our being in the hospital together when we were ten or eleven years old. The doctors said it was whooping cough, but my mother blamed the Androscoggin River, which in those days was used as a sewer for untreated paper-mill effluents, and the fumes were rumored to peel the paint off houses and burn the lungs of children. “That’s the smell of money,” the locals used to say. Whatever the diagnosis, Madeline and I missed a week or so of school, bedridden in that old bandage hotel, which burned to the ground not long after they let us out of there.

After that, we grew apart: Madeline went to St. Dominic’s; I went to Lewiston High. Then I went to the University of Maine at Orono and completely lost track of her, but I heard later that she had been an academic star at Vassar—a philosophy or theology major, if I recall. I studied parapsychology and psi phenomena abroad in Europe for five years before I moved back to Lewiston and took an appointment in the psychology department here at Faust College. Madeline also moved back, but she apparently didn’t want to teach or go to graduate school. She stayed home and cared for Lloyd’s children. I heard she was working on a novel and had had a short story or two published in literary magazines.