Poltergeists (13 page)

We were now seated in a small room off the second-floor corridor. The light was moody and the air dank. There was a quietness around the house so heavy I almost
wished
I could hear a door slam. Molly had more to reveal.

“Once, a little girl named Andree, age eleven, came to visit us and within seconds exclaimed—‘Mamma, there is a ghost in this house!’”

Our hostess admitted to being somewhat psychic, with sometimes comical results. Years ago, when a boyfriend had failed to keep their date, she saw him clearly in a dream-vision with a certain blonde girl. He later explained his absence in a casual way, but she nailed him with a description of his blonde—and he confessed the truth.

Two years after she moved into the house, Molly developed a case of asthma, the kind very old people sometimes suffer from. Strangely, it bothered her only in certain rooms and not at all in others. It started like a kind of allergy, and gradually worsened until it became a fully grown asthmatic condition. Although two rooms were side by side, sleeping in one would aggravate the condition, but sleeping in the other made her completely free of it!

“Did you hear any other noises—I mean, outside of the door slamming?” I asked.

“Yes. Not so long ago we had a dinner party here, and among the guests was a John Gardner, a vice president of the Bankers Trust Company.”

Suddenly she had heard someone rap at the window of the big room downstairs. They tried to ignore the noise, but Gardner heard it too.

“Is someone rapping at your window?” he inquired.

He was assured it was nothing. Later he took Molly aside and remonstrated with her. “I distinctly heard the raps,” he said. Molly just smiled.

Finally the Smythes called on the American Society for Psychic Research to find an explanation for all these goings-on. But the Society was in no hurry to do anything about the case. They suggested Molly write them a letter, which she did, but they still took no action.

I thoroughly inspected the premises—walked up the narrow staircase into Molly Guion’s studio where some of the best portrait oils hung. Her paintings of famous Britons
had just toured as an exhibition and the house was full of those she owned (the greater part of her work was commissioned and scattered in collections, museums, and private homes).

There was a tiny bedroom next to the landing in back of the studio, evidently a servant’s room, since the entire floor had originally been servants’ quarters. The house had sixteen rooms in all.

By now Mr. Smythe had joined us and I explained my mission. Had he ever noticed anything unusual about the house?

“Oh yes,” he volunteered, speaking slowly and deliberately. “There are all sorts of noises in this house and they’re not ordinary noises—I mean, the kind you can
explain
.”

“For instance?”

“I was sleeping up here one night in the little bedroom here,” he said, pointing to the servant’s room in back of the landing, “when I heard footsteps. They were the steps of an older person.”

But there was no one about, he asserted.

Jared Peck, who built the house in 1860, died in 1895, and the house passed into the hands of his estate to be rented to various tenants. In 1910, Stuyvesant Wainwright bought the property. In the following year, his ex-wife, now Mrs. Catlin, bought it from him and lived in it until her death in the 1920s.

The former Mrs. Wainwright turned out to be a colorful person. Born wealthy, she had a very short temper and the servants never stayed long in her house.

“She certainly liked to slam doors,” Mr. Smythe observed. “I mean she was the kind of person who would do that sort of thing.”

“One day she became very ill and everybody thought she would die,” Molly related. “There she was stretched out on this very couch and the doctor felt free to talk about her condition. ‘She won’t last much longer,’ he said, and shrugged. Mrs. Wainwright sat up with a angry jolt and barked, ‘I intend to!’ And she did, for many more years of hot-tempered shenanigans.”

In her later years Mrs. Wainwright moved to the former servants’ quarters on the second floor—whether out of economy or for reasons of privacy no one knows for sure. The
slamming door
was right in the heart of her rooms and no doubt she traveled up those narrow stairs to the floor above many times.

The plumber, painter, and carpenter who worked for Mrs. Wainwright were still living in Rye and they all remembered her as a willful and headstrong woman who liked to have her own way. Her granddaughter, Mrs. Condit, recalled her vividly. The Smythes were pretty sure that Mrs. Wainwright slept up there on the second floor—they found a screen marked “My bedroom window” that fit no other window in any of the rooms.

The Smythes acquired the handsome house from the next owner, one Arthur Flemming, who used Mrs. Wainwright’s old room. But he didn’t experience anything unusual, or at any rate said nothing about it.

There was a big theft once in the house and Mrs. Wainwright may have been worried about it. Strongly attached to worldly possessions, she kept valuables in various trunks on the third floor, and ran up to look at them from time to time to make sure everything was still there.

Could the slamming of the door be a re-enactment of these frequent nervous expeditions up the stairs? Could the opening and closing of the entrance door be a fearful examination of the door to see if the lock was secure, or if there was anyone strange lurking about outside?

The very day after our visit to this haunted house, a young painter friend of Molly’s named Helen Charleton, of Bronxville, New York, was alone in the studio that Molly let her use occasionally to do some painting of her own. She was quite alone in the big house when she clearly heard the front door open. Calling out, she received no answer. Thinking that the gardener might have a key, and that she might be in danger, she took hold of what heavy objects she could put her hands on and waited anxiously for the steps that were sure to resound any moment. No steps came. An hour later, the doorbell rang and she finally dashed down to the entrance door.
The door was tightly shut
, and no one was about. Yet she
had
heard the characteristic noise of the opening of the old-fashioned door!

The mailman’s truck was just pulling away, so she assumed it was he who had rung the bell. Just then Molly returned.

“I’ve heard the door slam many times,” Helen Charleton said to me, “and it always sounds so far away. I think it’s on the first floor, but I can’t be sure.”

Was Mrs. Wainwright still walking the Victorian corridors of “The Cedars,” guarding her treasures upstairs?

When Catherine and I returned from Europe in the fall of 1964, Molly Guion had news for us. All was far from quiet in Rye. In the upstairs room where Molly’s physically challenged mother was bedridden, a knob had flown off a table while Mrs. Guion stood next to it. In the presence of a nurse, the bathroom lights had gone on and off by themselves. More sinister, a heavy ashtray had taken off on its own to sail clear across the room. A door had opened by itself, and footsteps had been heard again.

A new nurse had come, and the number of witnesses who had heard or seen uncanny goings-on was now eight.

I decided it was time for a séance, and on January 6, 1965, medium Ethel Meyers, Mary Melikian, Catherine and I took a New Haven train for Rye, where John Smythe picked us up in his station wagon.

While Ethel Meyers waited in the large sitting room downstairs, I checked on the house and got the latest word on the hauntings. Molly Guion took me to the kitchen to show me the spot where one of the most frightening incidents had taken place.

“Last Christmas, my mother, my husband, and I were here in the kitchen having lunch, and right near us on a small table next to the wall was a great big bread knife. Suddenly, to our amazement,
the knife took off into the air
, performed an arc in the air and landed about a yard away from the table. This was about noon, in good light.”

“Was that the only time something like this happened?”

“The other day the same thing happened. We were down in the kitchen again at nighttime. My husband and I heard a terrific crash upstairs. It was in the area of the servants’ quarters on the second floor, which is in the area where that door keeps slamming. I went up to investigate and found a heavy ashtray lying on the floor about a yard away from the table in my husband’s den.”

“And there was no one upstairs—flesh-and-blood, that is?”

“No. The object could not have just slipped off the table. It landed some distance away.”

“Amazing,” I conceded. “Was there more?”

“Last week I was standing in the upstairs sitting room with one of the nurses, when a piece of a chair that was lying in the center of a table took off and landed in the middle of the floor.”

“Before your eyes?”

“Before our eyes.”

“What would you say is the most frequent phenomenon here?” I asked.

“The opening of the front door downstairs. We and others have heard this characteristic noise any number of times, and there is never anyone there.”

I turned to Mrs. Witty, the nurse currently on duty with Molly Guion’s mother.

“How long have you been in this house?”

“Since October, 1964.”

“Have you noticed anything unusual in these four months?”

“Well, Mrs. Smythe and I were in the patient’s bedroom upstairs, when we heard the front door downstairs open. I remarked to Mrs. Smythe that she had a visitor, and went down to the front door, and looked.
The heavy chain was swinging loose, and the front door was slightly ajar
!”

“Did you see any visitor?”

“No. I opened the door, looked all around, but there was no one there.”

“Anything else?”

“A couple of weeks later, the same thing happened. I was alone in the house with the patient, and the door was locked securely. An hour after I had myself locked it, I heard the door shut tightly, but the chain was again swinging by itself.”

I next turned to Mr. Smythe to check up on his own experiences since we had last talked. Mr. Smythe was a naval architect and very cautious in his appraisal of the uncanny. He was still hearing the “measured steps” in the attic room where he sometimes slept, even when he was all alone in the house.

I returned to Ethel Meyers, the medium, who had seated herself in a large chair in the front sitting room downstairs.

“Anything happening?” I asked, for I noticed a peculiar expression on Ethel’s face, as if she were observing something or someone.

“I picture a woman clairvoyantly,” Ethel said. “She looks at me with a great deal of defiance.”

“Why are you pointing across the room at that sofa?” I asked my wife.

“I saw a light from the corner of my eye and I thought it was a car, but no car has passed by,” Catherine said.

If a car
had
passed by, no reflection could have been seen at that spot, since no window faced in that direction.

While Ethel prepared for the trance sitting, I went outside the room to talk to Georgia Anne Warren, a young dancer who had modeled for some of Molly Guion’s paintings. Her full-length nude study graced the studio upstairs, and there amid the Churchill portraits and faces of the famous or near-famous, it was like a shining beacon of beauty. But Miss Warren wasn’t only posing for a painter, we discovered—she was also modeling for a ghost.

“I heard a thumping noise, as if someone were going upstairs. I was in the kitchen. The steps sounded as if they were coming from the dining room. There was no one coming in. The only people in the house at the time were Molly Guion and myself. No doubt about it.”

I thanked the redheaded model and followed Ethel Meyers up the stairs, to which she seemed propelled by a sudden impulse. There, on the winding Victorian steps, Ethel made her first contact with the ghost.

“Make the body very cold. Don’t put it in the ground when it’s warm. Let it get very cold!” she mumbled, as if not quite herself.

“Let her speak through you,” I suggested.

“She is,” Ethel replied, and continued in a somewhat strange voice. “Ring around the rosies, a pocketful of posies....”

I turned toward the stairwell and asked the ghost to communicate with us, tell her tale, and find help through us. There was no further answer.

I led Mrs. Meyers back to her chair, and asked Molly Guion to dim the lights a little so we could all relax. Meanwhile, other witnesses had arrived. They included
New York Times
reporter N. Berkowitz, Benton & Bowles vice-president Gordon Webber, publicist Bill Ryan, and book critic John K. Hutchins. We formed a long oval around Ethel Meyers and waited for the ghost to make her appearance.

We did not have to wait long. With a sudden shriek, Ethel, deep in trance, leapt to her feet, and in the awkward
posture of an old crone, walked toward the front door. Nothing I could do would hold her back. I followed her quickly, as the medium, now possessed by the ghost, made her way through the long room to the door.

As if a strong wind had swept into the sitting room, the rest of the guests were thrown back by the sheer drive of Ethel’s advance. She flung herself against the heavy wooden door and started to alternately gnaw at it and pound against it in an unmistakable desire to open it and go through. Then she seized the brass chain—the one Mrs. Witty had twice seen swinging by itself—and pulled it with astonishing force. I had all I could do to keep the medium from falling as she threw her body against the door.

In one hand I held a microphone, which I pressed close to her lips to catch as much of the dialogue as possible. I kept the other hand ready to prevent Ethel’s fall to the floor.

“Rotten,” the entranced medium now mumbled, still clutching the chain.

I tried to coax her back to the chair, but the ghost evidently would have none of it.

“It stinks...Where is it?”

“Is this your house?” I asked.

Heavy breathing.

“Yes. Get out!”

“I’ve come to help you. What is your name?”

“Get out!” the microphone picked up.

“What is it that you want?” I asked.