Poltergeists (4 page)

For the first few weeks in January 1966 only Mrs. Elliott and Mr. Jack Gree “visited” us. She and I had lots of conversations, but she gradually got so she could barely talk to me, although Andy could still hear her. The notes were written either on some note paper Andy kept in the kitchen or on some Canton, Texas, bank deposit slips in John’s room. If I was working in the shop she would stick the notes in the grill and bang on the wall to attract my attention, and then I would stoop down under the work bench and retrieve the note. Mr. Gree, who told us we had never heard of him, had a very low, deep, gruff voice. Most of his communications to me were in the form of notes, however, but he and Andy carried on lengthy conversations nearly every day. He also used the grill “post office” for depositing his notes, then banged on the wall to let me know they were there.

At times, when Andy and I were in the car, Mrs. Elliott or Mr. Gree would be with us. They would ride along for a while and then suddenly say they were going to Canada, Russia, Minnesota, or some other far-off place, saying it took only two or three minutes for them to travel those distances, and then we might not hear anything else from them until the next day or night. Early in January of 1966 Andy came out to my shop and said Mr. Gree wanted to know if it was
OK
for him to use the telephone, and of course I told him it was. I did not know what control I would have had over the situation anyway. That first time he said it was something personal and asked Andy if he would mind leaving the room.
I could hear the phone being dialed
, and stooped down near the floor so I could look through the grilled opening, but of course I could not see anyone there and could not quite see the phone itself. After that he used the phone many times, while I was working and while Andy was studying at the kitchen table in full view of the telephone.
It was really spooky to see the receiver stand up on end by itself, and then after a while put itself back down where it belonged
, but always upside down. Some nights he would dial many times after we had gone to bed, and we could hear the sound plainly in our bedroom. The next morning I would find the receiver on the phone upside down. One night while
Andy was taking a bath Mr. Gree called somebody
and I heard him say
in a low, deep voice, “I’m weird...I’m unusual.” I thought to myself, “You can say that again.” He repeated it several times and then all I could hear would be a series of low grunts, from which I could not make out any real words. One evening while we were in the car coming home from the post office I asked Andy whom he supposed Mr. Gree called on the phone. Without a moment’s hesitation Mrs. Elliott, who we did not know was with us, spoke up and said he was calling her. We did not ask her where she was when she received the call!

Both Mr. Gree and Mrs. Elliott certainly had Andy’s welfare in mind. Practically every day for the whole month of January there was a note from one of them stuck in the screen door. It appeared to be Mrs. Elliott’s job to help get John home and to take care of Andy. She said if she could do that she would probably go back to her grave early.

After John had left home I felt sorry for Andy. He was lonely being at home alone so much of the time. He indicated a desire for a cat, and a little later for a dog. At the insistence and complete direction of Mrs. Elliott I spent quite a sum of money for such pets. Mr. Gree then took over completely the direction for our taking care of these dogs and cats.

On January 29, 1966, while I was writing a letter, there was a pounding on the kitchen wall, indicating that there was a note in our “post office.” It was from Mrs. Elliott. “I love that beagle. Sorry the dogs have been sick. I feel responsible. Andy worries. He loves them so much. If something does happen I only hope it isn’t the beagle. The beagle will be a better companion. Andy would give up one if you asked him to. Not that he wants to. But he would understand. He loves dogs. He understands. El. Reply to this note. Reply to every line I wrote.”

The other dog she referred to was a brown dachshund, which did not look very healthy when we bought it. It never did gain any weight and after we had given away the black dachshund the brown one continued to get worse. During the next few days and nights some of the most unbelievable things happened in connection with this brown dachshund. I would be working in my shop and suddenly hear a slight noise on the roof of the house. It would be utterly impossible for the dog to jump up there from the ground, and there was nothing else around for him to get on in order to jump up on the house. Yet
there he was clear up on the peak walking from one end to the other!
We would get a ladder and finally coax him down into the eave where we could get hold of him and put him on the ground. This happened time after time. We finally decided to leave him up there and go on to bed. The next night Mrs. Elliott told us she knew about the dog. We asked her how it was possible and said we would like to see how the dog got up there. She said we could not see it...that it was just a case of “now he’s down here...now he’s up there.” She said that even if we were watching him, he would just simply vanish from his spot on the ground and at the same instant be on the roof. Later that night Mrs. Elliott called Andy and me and said the dog was trying to commit suicide and for us to go to the back door and look in the flower bed on the south side of the back steps. Sure enough we looked, and the ground had been freshly dug and looked as if it had been loosely put back in place. We could see the dirt moving, and I told Andy to go and get the shovel from the garage. Mrs. Elliott said it was not in the garage, but for us to wait just a few seconds and we would find it out in the front yard under the tree, where it would be when it got back from “Heaven.” Andy did go and found the shovel just where she said it would be and brought it to me. I dug down beside where the dirt was moving and pulled the dog out by the tail. He was barely breathing and looked very pitiful, but after a few seconds was able to feebly walk a little. Mrs. Elliott told us that we had better put it out of its misery that night. I told her I did not have anything to put it to sleep with, but she finally told me to just go ahead and kill it, using a hammer, a brick or anything that would put it to death. It was a sickening experience, but I did kill the dog with a brick, as I was certain that it was in pain and would be better off dead.
We buried the dog where it had apparently dug its own grave!
I cannot say that the dog actually dug this hole, crawled into it and covered itself up with dirt, as I find it hard to see how it could possibly have dragged the dirt in on top of it...I have only Mrs. Elliott’s word for that. I am merely starting what she told us, although I did find the dog in the hole, covered with loose dirt, and barely breathing when I pulled it out.

While John was away in Daingerfield, I had bought a little plastic toilet bowl cleaner on which a disposable pad is used. The handle had come apart the first time I tried to use it. It cost only a few cents, and ordinarily I would have just bought another and forgotten about it. However, I decided to write the manufacturer, and some time later I received a letter from them, advising me that they were sending me another handle. Eventually I received a notice that there was a package at the post office. I would have had to drive about ten miles from the place were I work to the post office and back during the noon hour to pick it up, and since it was of no importance I intended to just wait until Saturday to call for the package. That evening, though, when I went to my shop to start work there was a package on my work bench. The shop had been locked all day and was still locked when I started to work. I asked Andy if he knew anything about it and he assured me that he did not even know about the package being in the post office. At that moment Mrs. Elliott spoke up and admitted she had gotten it out of the post office and brought it home to me!

Not long after John had gone to Daingerfield another mystifying thing happened. In one of the kitchen drawers where we kept some silverware in one of those little compartments made for that purpose, there was a space five or six inches behind that section clear across the drawer. In there I kept a few tools such as screwdriver, pliers, tack hammer, where they would be conveniently available when I needed them. I had not had occasion to look in there for some time, and when I finally did I noticed a pistol. It was .22 cal. and looked very real, and only when I picked it up did I discover it was just a blank pistol. I asked Andy where it came from, but he
knew nothing whatever about it. Mrs. Elliott spoke and said
she
had brought it from Daingerfield. She told us that John had ordered it from some magazine ad and had paid $12 for it. She said it was awfully hard for her to bring it to our house and that it had taken her several hours to do so. She did not say why she did it but intimated that she just wanted us to know about it. Later, when we were moving away from that house, the pistol was gone, and I have not seen it since.

For many years I had owned a .25 cal. Colt automatic pistol. I always kept it in good condition but it had not been fired in thirty years at the time we moved to Tyler. John’s mother also had had pistol exactly like mine except for the handles, as I bought a pair of white, carved bone handles for mine. When she died we brought that pistol to our house, although we never had occasion to shoot it either. We still had them both when we moved to Tyler. With so many mysterious events taking place, I decided to keep a pistol out in my shop, so I brought the one that had belonged to John’s mother and left it on top of my work bench. It stayed there for several weeks. One night it was missing. My shop was always locked and I had the only key. I had wrapped my own gun in a polyethylene bag after cleaning it thoroughly, and put it in a little compartment between the two drawers in a chest in my room. One of the drawers had to be removed completely to get the gun, and even then one had to look closely to find it. I had told no one about the hiding place. When the gun in my shop suddenly disappeared I decided to get mine that I had hidden in the chest. However, when I looked in the hiding place my pistol was not there,
but in its place was that one which had been in the shop
! I did not take it to my shop then, but some time later when I did decide to, that gun too was gone, and we have seen neither of them since that time.

Occasionally during all this time I would write to John, saying that I wished she would come home so that we might be able to get her well and be happy together again. She never replied to any of my letters, although she wrote Andy a note now and then when he would write her first. I talked to her on the phone a short while later. I do not remember whether I called her on the phone or whether she was the one who called, but she finally said she would be home on a given date in February 1967, and that Mack would bring her. When she got to Tyler she called me at work. She had taken a room in a private home for a few days before coming back to our house. Andy and I talked her into coming home that night, though, and during the remainder of 1967 things seemed to be more normal for us than they had been in many years.

During March of 1967 I moved my shop to a building downtown. I was getting too crowded in the little room I had been using at the house, and when I got things all set up at the new location I thought that it would be good for John to run the shop during the day, or at least part of each day, which she agreed to do. Things went along very well throughout the rest of the year. Our daughter Amy came for a few days’ visit at Christmas time. A little while before this, though, John had begun to throw cigarettes all over the house again, and there were burned places everywhere. John, of course, insisted that she had
not
thrown them there.

Some time in late 1967 Mrs. Elliott reappeared and began giving us more advice about how to handle John. By this time I believe Andy was about to go to pieces. One of the officials of the school Andy attended called me and asked why Andy had not been to school. Mrs. Elliott had said for him not to go to school anymore, that he could take a correspondence course and get his high school diploma that way. I tried to convince him to return to school.

I received all sorts of notes from Mrs. Elliott, telling me that Andy was becoming a nervous wreck, and that if I tried to make him go back to school she would take him with her. Andy also told me he would rather go with
her
than to return to school. Finally I asked her why she did not get away from us and never return. The last note I received from her read as follows:

Howard,

You might wish I wouldn’t come back but I did. You can do whatever you want to with John. I won’t ask Jr. if he wants to come with me, though he might kill himself. Taking John away will only make him worry more. You don’t care.
THERE IS ONE THING YOU CARE ABOUT AND THAT IS YOU
. I wish you would leave Jr. alone. He can get a course to finish school and get a diploma and leave you. If you cause any trouble I’ll take him or he’ll kill himself. I could help him go to California but that wouldn’t be good he be better off dead, which he probably will be. There’s not going to be a world in 15 years so he doesn’t care. He just wants to have some enjoyment. You are real silly. John’s going to get violent. That’s the silliest thing I ever heard. Now you are really going to hurt things when you send John away. All I asked was 1 week. You don’t want John well you just want rid of her, so you cause trouble and get her mad. John doesn’t cost you all that money you selfish fool. I can’t make John love you but I could get her to clean house and if you had any sense (which you don’t) you would leave her at Trumark. Now when you send her away and start giving Jr. trouble you are going to be sorrier than you have been or will ever be. I don’t know Jr. is good at music and would be excellent and be able to make 3 times your money. Maybe he will be better off gone. You silly old selfish idiot.

You can holler and anything else but it will be of no avail. When you see the nut doctor, tell him about me, maybe they’ll put you away.