Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,39

investigate, only to find himself quite alone.

He would wake up in the middle of the night thinking his wife and gotten up, and was immediately reassured that she was sleeping peacefully next to him. Yet there was someone out there in the empty house!

Since everything was securely locked, and countless attempts to trap the ghost had failed, the Meyerses shrugged and learned to live with their peculiar boarder. Gradually the steps became part of the atmosphere of the old house, and the terror began to fade into the darkness of night.

In May of the following year, they decided to work in the garden and, as they did so, they met their next-door neighbors for the first time. Since they lived in identical houses, they had something in common, and conversation between them and the neighbors—a young man of twenty-five and his grandmother—sprang up.

Eventually, the discussion got around to the footsteps. They, too, kept hearing them, it seemed. After they had compared notes on their experiences, the Meyerses asked more questions. They were told that before the house was divided, it belonged to a single owner who had committed suicide in the house. No wonder he liked to walk in both halves of what was once his home!

* * *

You’d never think of Kokomo, Indiana as particularly haunted ground, but one of the most touching cases I know of occurred there some time ago. A young woman by the name of Mary Elizabeth Hamilton was in the habit of spending many of her summer vacations in her grandmother’s house. The house dates back to 1834 and is a handsome place, meticulously kept up.

Miss Hamilton had never had the slightest interest in the supernatural, and the events that transpired that summer, when she spent four weeks at the house, came as a complete surprise to her. One evening she was walking down the front staircase when she was met by a lovely young lady coming up the stairs. Miss Hamilton noticed that she wore a particularly beautiful evening gown. There was nothing the least bit ghostly about the woman, and she passed Miss Hamilton closely, in fact so closely that she could have touched her had she wanted to.

But she did notice that the gown was of a filmy pink material, and her hair and eyes were dark brown, and the latter, full of tears. When the two women met, the girl in the evening gown smiled at Miss Hamilton and passed by.

Since she knew that there was no other visitor in the house, and that no one was expected at this time, Miss Hamilton was puzzled. She turned her head to follow her up the stairs. The lady in pink reached the top of the stairs and vanished—into thin air.

As soon as she could, she reported the matter to her grandmother, who shook her head and would not believe her account. She would not even discuss it, so Miss Hamilton let the matter drop out of deference to her grandmother. But the dress design had been so unusual, she decided to check it out in a library. She found, to her amazement, that the lady in pink had worn a dress that was from the late 1840s.

In September of the next year, her grandmother decided to redecorate the house. In this endeavor she used many old pieces of furniture, some of which had come from the attic of the house. When Miss Hamilton arrived and saw the changes, she was suddenly stopped by a portrait hung in the hall.

It was a portrait of her lady of the stairs. She was not wearing the pink gown in this picture but, other than that, she was the same person.

Miss Hamilton’s curiosity about the whole matter was again aroused and, since she could not get any cooperation from her grandmother, she turned to her great aunt for help. This was particularly fortunate since the aunt was a specialist in family genealogy.

Finally the lady of the stairs was identified. She turned out to be a distant cousin of Miss Hamilton’s, and had once lived in that very house.

She had fallen in love with a ne’er-do-well, and after he died in a brawl, she threw herself down the stairs to her death.

Why had the family ghost picked her to appear before, Miss Hamilton wondered.

Then she realized that she bore a strong facial resemblance to the ghost. Moreover, their names were almost identical—Mary Elizabeth was Miss Hamilton’s, and Elizabeth Mary, the pink lady’s. Both women even had