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Authors: Hans Holzer

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Mrs. Elliott also explained the reason she and the other spirits were able to be with Mr. Beaird that evening was that they had been given time off for the holidays—because of Halloween, although that was a little early for All Hallow’s Eve. Mr. Beaird thought it peculiar that spirits get furloughs from whatever place they are in.

On September 30, 1967, Beaird had heard nothing at all from Mrs. Elliott during the day. Andy had been out pretty late that night and Mr. Beaird was asleep when he came in. Sometime after, Andy woke him and said that Mrs. Elliott had left him a note. They found it on his bed. It read, “Howard, think about what I said. Are you going to do it Monday. Elliott.” Just below it was a note reading, “John wants a vacuum cleaner and a purse. Junior wants a coat for school and some banjo strings. Hiram.” Now the remarkable thing about this note is that the first part was definitely in the handwriting of Mrs. Beaird, while the second part was a crude note put together with a lot of capital letters where they did not belong and generally disorganized. Hiram Quinn, the alleged writer, was of course a very sick man for some time prior to his passing. When Howard Beaird confronted the alleged Mrs. Elliott with the fact that her note was written in the handwriting of his wife, she shrugged it of by explaining that she could write like anybody she wished.

On October 2, 1967, Mr. Beaird noted, “About 7:30
P
.
M
. Mrs. Snow called my name. I was in the kitchen and the voice seemed to come from the back part of the house where Andy and John were. The voice sounded exactly like Mrs. Elliott’s and although I could hear it plainly enough and answered aloud immediately I could hear nothing else and Andy had to tell me what she had said. She just wanted to tell me about my stamp business and how John had been. She barely could hear me and told Andy to turn off the attic fan and for me to go into my room and close the door so she could hear. She couldn’t explain how I could hear her call my name and then hear nothing more and said it was some kind of ‘law.’”

The notes signed by Mrs. Elliott from that period onward frequently looked as if they had been written by Mrs. Beaird. The handwriting is unquestionably hers. That is to say it looks like hers. Howard Beaird does not doubt that the notes were genuinely materialized in a psychic sense. On October 23 he had dozed off to sleep several times and on one occasion was awakened by the rustling of papers on the floor beside his bed. He was alone in the room at the time. He turned the light on and found a sort of pornographic magazine folded up on the floor. Andy came in at this point and explained that Mrs. Elliott had told him she had found this magazine in Mrs. Beaird’s room. She said that Mrs. Beaird had gotten it at the beauty shop and the piece of paper was torn from it. On the note was printed “Somebody loves you,” signed underneath, El.

On November 12, 1967, a Sunday, Howard Beaird heard Mrs. Elliott talk to him. She advised him that he should go to Mrs. Beaird’s room and look for some nudist pictures and also some hand-drawn pictures of naked men and women. Mr. Beaird found all these things but his wife denied any knowledge of them. The following night, November 13, 1967, was particularly remarkable in the kind of phenomena experienced by Howard Beaird. “Mrs. Elliott came by before I left for the shop and told me to look for some more lewd pictures. I found some and destroyed them. Mrs. Elliott told me to be sure and tear them up in front of John and maybe she would quit drawing them, and also quit buying the nudist magazine pictures. Later that night, about 9:15, Mrs. Elliott called me on the telephone.
That’s the first time I ever talked to a ghost on the telephone
. I could understand what she said on the phone, yet I could never hear anything except her calling my name when I was at home. Of course all she said on the phone was to come home. I then talked to Andy and he said she wanted me to come home right then and
get some more drawings and nudist magazines from John’s hiding places. I did go home and got the pictures and went back to the shop after I had destroyed them.”

Some of the notes showed the underlying conflict, imagined or real, between the young boy and his father which was of much concern to “guardian angel” Mrs. Elliott. On January 11, 1968, a note read, “Howard, I need to write you notes. Junior has had to worry so much. Why do you mind him coming with me? He would be happy. It would be right for him not to worry. I agree he must get an education but at seventeen he could get a course and then to college. In the meantime I will help John and him. He could play music and he would be great at seventeen. He would also like to take care of the house. John would get so much better. You would be better financially and Junior could get better. This is the only thing I will allow or I will take him with me if he wants to...He said he would tell me to go and wouldn’t go but that wouldn’t change him from wanting to. You had better pay attention cause he wants to come. I have all the divine right to take him. El.” This threat by the spirit of Mrs. Elliott to take the young boy with her into the spirit world did not sit lightly with his father, of course. Analyzed on its face value, it has the ring of a petulant threat a mentally handicapped youngster would make against his parents if he didn’t get his way. If Mrs. Elliott was the spirit of a mature and rational person then this kind of threat didn’t seem, to me, to be in character with the personality of the alleged Mrs. Elliott.

The following night, January 12, 1968, the communicator wrote, “Howard, I have the divine right. I will prove it by taking Junior and I take him tonight. You don’t love him at all. You don’t care about anyone.” Mrs. Elliott had not taken Andy by January 15, but she let Howard know that she might do so anyway any time now. In fact, her notes sounded more and more like a spokesman for Andy if he wanted to complain about life at home but didn’t have the courage to say so consciously and openly. On January 18, Mrs. Elliott decided she wasn’t going to take the boy after all. She had promised several times before that she would not come back any longer and that her appearance was the last one. But she always broke this pledge.

By now any orthodox psychologist or even parapsychologist would assume that the young man was materially involved not only in the composition of the notes but in actually writing them. I don’t like to jump to conclusions needlessly, especially not when a prejudice concerning the method of communication would clearly be involved in assuming that the young man did the actual writing. But I decided to continue examining each and every word and to see whether the letters or the words themselves gave me any clue as to what human hand had actually written them, if any. It appeared clear to me by now that some if not all of the notes purporting to be the work of Mrs. Elliott were in the hand of Mrs. Beaird. But it was not a very good copy of her handwriting. Rather did it seem to me that someone had attempted to write in Mrs. Beaird’s hand who wasn’t actually Mrs. Beaird. As for the other notes, those signed by Henry Anglin, Hiram Quinn and those unsigned but seemingly the work of Mrs. Beaird herself, they had certain common denominators amongst them. I had asked Mr. Beaird to supply me with adequate examples of the handwriting of both Andy and Mrs. Beaird. That is to say, handwritten notes not connected in any way with the psychic phenomena at the house. I then studied these examples and compared them with the notes which allegedly came from nowhere or which materialized by falling from the ceiling in front of a very astonished Mr. Beaird.

I singled out the following letters as being characteristic of the writer, whoever he or she may be. The capital letter T, the lower case e, lower case p, g, y, r, and capital B, C, L, and the figure 9. All of these appeared in a number of notes. They also appear in the sample of Andy’s handwriting, in this case a list of song titles which he liked and which he was apparently going to learn on his guitar. There is no doubt in my mind that the letters in the psychic note and the letters on Andy’s song list are identical.
That is to say that they were written by the same hand
. By that I do not mean to say, necessarily, that Andy wrote the notes. I do say, however, that the hand used to create the psychic notes is the same hand used consciously by Andy Beaird when writing notes of his own. I am less sure, but suspect, that even the notes seemingly in the handwriting of his mother are also done in the same fashion and also traceable to Andy Beaird.

On December 7, 1965, one of the few drawings in the stack of notes appeared. It showed a man in a barber chair and read, among other annotations, “Aren’t the barbers sweet, ha ha.” It should be remembered that Andy’s great ambition in life was to be a barber. In fact, when I met and interviewed him he was going to barber school.

What then is the meaning of all this? Let us not jump to conclusions and say Andy Beaird wrote the notes somehow unobserved, smuggled them into Mr. Beaird’s room somehow unnoticed, and made them fall from the ceiling seemingly by their own volition, somehow without Mr. Beaird noticing this. In a number of reported instances this is a possibility, but in the majority of cases it simply couldn’t have happened in this manner, not unless Howard Beaird was not a rational individual and was, in fact, telling me lies. I have no doubt that Mr. Beaird is telling me the truth and that he is a keen and rational observer. Consequently the burden of truth for the validity of the phenomena does not rest on his gift of observation, but on the possibility of producing such paranormal occurrences despite their seeming improbability yet reconciling this with the ominous fact that they show strong indications of being Andy Beaird’s handwriting.

We must recognize the tension existing for many
years in the Beaird household, the unhappy condition in which young Andy found himself as he grew up, and the fact that for a number of years he was an introspected and suppressed human being unable to relate properly to the outside world and forced to find stimulation where he could. Under such conditions certain forces within a young person can be exteriorized and become almost independent of the person himself. Since these forces are part of the unconscious in the person and therefore not subject to the logical controls of the conscious mind, they are, in fact, childish and frequently irrational. They are easily angered and easily appeased and, in general, behave in an infantile fashion. By the same token these split-off parts of personality are capable of performing physical feats, moving objects, materializing things out of nowhere and, in general, contravening the ordinary laws of science. This we know already because cases of poltergeists have occurred with reasonable frequency in many parts of the world. In the case of the Beaird family, however, we have two other circumstances which must be taken into account. The first is the presence in the house of not one but two emotionally unstable individuals. Mrs. Beaird’s increasing divorce from reality, leading to a state of schizophrenia, must have freed some powerful forces within her. Her seemingly unconscious preoccupation with some aspects of sex indicates a degree of frustration on her part yet an inability to do anything about it at the conscious level. We have recognized that the power supply used to perform psychic phenomena is the same power inherent in the life force or the sexual drive in humans, and when this force is not used in the ordinary way it can be diverted to the supernormal expression, which in this case took the form of poltergeist phenomena. We have, therefore, in the Beaird case, a tremendous reservoir of untapped psychic energy subject to very little conscious control on the part of the two individuals in whose bodies these energies were stored and developed.

Were the entities purporting to use these facilities to express themselves beyond the grave actually the people who had once lived and died in the community? Were they, in fact, who they claimed to be, or were they simply being re-enacted unconsciously perhaps by the split-off part of the personalities of both Andy and Mrs. Beaird? Since Howard Beaird has examined the signature of one of those entities, at least, and found it to be closely similar, if not identical, with the signature of the person while alive, and since, in that particular case, access to the signature was not possible to either Andy or Mrs. Beaird, I’m inclined to believe that actual non-physical entities were, in fact, using the untapped energies of these two unfortunate individuals to express themselves in the physical world. Additional evidence, I think, would be the fact that in several cases the names and certain details concerning the personalities of several individuals whom Howard Beaird knew in their former residence in Grand Saline were not known or accessible to either his wife or the young man. I am not fully satisfied that there could not have been some form of collusion between Andy and these so-called spirit entities in creating the phenomena, but if there was such collusion it was on the unconscious level. It is my view that Andy’s unexpressed frustrations and desires were picked up by some of these discarnate entities and mingled with their own desire to continue involving themselves in earth conditions and thus became the driving force in making the manifestations possible.

What about the fact that Andy Beaird’s handwriting appears in the majority of the notes? If Andy did not write these notes physically himself, could they have been produced in some other manner? There is no doubt in my mind that in at least a large percentage of the notes Andy could not have written them physically and dropped them in front of his father without Mr. Beaird noticing it. Yet, these very same notes also bear unmistakable signs that they are the work of Andy Beaird’s hand. Therefore the only plausible solution is to assume that a spiritual part of Andy’s body was used to create the notes in the same way in which seemingly solid objects have, at times, been materialized and dematerialized. This is known as a “physical” phenomenon and it is not entirely restricted to poltergeist cases but has, on occasion, been observed with solid objects which were moved from one place to another, or which appeared at a place seemingly out of nowhere, or disappeared from a place without leaving any trace. The phenomenon is not unique nor particularly new. What is unique, or nearly so in the case of the Beaird family of Tyler, Texas, is the fact that here the obvious is not the most likely explanation. I do not think Andy Beaird wrote those notes consciously. I do believe that his writing ability was used by the entities expressing themselves through him. I believe that Andy was telling the truth when he said he was surprised by the appearance of the notes and at no time did he have knowledge of their contents except when one of the other spirit entities informed him about them. The same applies, of course, to Mrs. Beaird. In the phenomenon known as a automatic writing, the hand of a living person, normally a fully rational and conscious individual, is used to express the views, memories and frequently the style of writing of a dead individual. The notes which fluttered down from the ceiling at the Beaird home are not of the same kind. Here the paper had first to be taken from one place and impressed with pencil writing in the hand of another person before the note itself could be materialized in plain view of witnesses. This is far more complex than merely impressing the muscular apparatus of a human being to write certain words in a certain way.

BOOK: Poltergeists
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