THE GHOSTS OF '46
The first of the "ghosts" made its appearance in February of 1946. It
was seen just after nightfall near the bank of a little stream known as
Otter Creek, a few miles from Rutland, Vermont. There are willows along
the creek-bank at this point. Heavy snow was on the ground. A farmer's
wife saw the ghost standing beside the trunk of a tree. The evening was
rather dark. Clouds obscured the stars and the moon. A shaft of yellow
light from the farmhouse windows came out over the snow; but the ghost
was in a patch of deep shadow. It seemed to be the figure of a man
standing with folded arms, a shoulder against the tree-trunk. It was
white and shimmering; it glowed; its outlines were wavy and blurred.
The farmer's wife screamed and rushed back into the house.
Up to this point the incident was not unusual. It would have merited no
more than the briefest and most local newspaper attention; reported
perhaps to some organization interested in psychical research to be
filed with countless others of its kind. But when the farmer's wife
got back to the house and told her husband what she had seen, the
farmer went out and saw it also; and with him, his two grown sons and
his daughter. There was no doubt about it; they all saw the apparition
still standing motionless exactly where the woman had said.
There was a telephone in the farmhouse. They telephoned their nearest
neighbors. The telephone girl got the news. Soon it had spread to the
village of Procter; and then to Rutland itself. The ghost did not
move. By ten o'clock that evening the road before the farmer's house
was crowded with cars; a hundred or more people were trampling the snow
of his corn-field cautiously, from a safe distance regarding that white
motionless figure.
It chanced that I was also an eyewitness to this, the first of the
ghosts of '46. My name is Robert Manse. I was twenty-six years old that
winter--correspondent in the New York office of a Latin-American export
house. With Wilton Grant and his sister Beatrice--whom I counted the
closest of my few real friends--I was in Rutland that Saturday evening.
Will was a chemist; some business which he had not detailed to me had
called him to Vermont from his home near New York. In spite of the
snowy roads he had wanted to drive up, and had invited me to go along.
We were dining in the Rutland Hotel when people began talking of this
ghost out toward Procter.
It was about ten-thirty when we arrived at the farm. Cars were lined
along the road in both directions. People trampling the road, the
fields, clustering about the farmhouse; talking, shouting to one
another.
The field itself was jammed, but down by the willows along the creek
there was a segment of snow as yet untrampled, for the crowd had dared
approach so far but no farther. Even at this distance we could see the
vague white blot of the apparition. Will said, "Come on, let's get down
nearer. You want to go, Bee?"
"Yes," she said.
We began elbowing and shoving our way through the crowd. It was snowing
again now. Dark; but some of the people had flashlights which darted
about; and occasionally a smoker's match would flare. The crowd was
good-natured; with courage bolstered by its numbers, the awe of the
supernatural was gone. But they all kept at a safe distance.
Somebody said, "Why don't they shoot at it? It won't move--can't they
make it move?"
"It does move--I saw it move, it turned its head. They're going up to
it pretty soon--see what it is."
I asked a man, "Has it made any sound?"
"No," he said. "They claim it moaned, but it didn't. The police are
there now, I think--and they're going to shoot at it. I don't see what
they're afraid of. If they wanted me to I'd walk right up to it." He
began elbowing his way back toward the road.
* * * * *
We found ourselves presently at the front rank, where the people were
struggling to keep themselves from being shoved forward by those behind
them. Thirty feet across the empty snow was the ghost. It seemed, as
they had said, the figure of a man, blurred and quivering as though
moulded of a heavy white mist at every instant about to dissipate.
I stared, intent upon remembering what I was seeing. Yet it was
difficult. With a quick look the imagination seemed to picture the tall
lean figure of a man with folded arms, meditatively leaning against the
tree-trunk. But like a faint star which vanishes when one stares at
it, I could not see a single detail. The clothes, the face, the very
outlines of the body itself seemed to quiver and elude my sight when I
concentrated my attention upon them.
Yet the figure, motionless, was there. Half a thousand people were now
watching it. Bee said, "See its shoulder, Rob! It isn't touching the
tree--it's inside the tree! It's leaning against something else, inside
the tree!"
The dark outline of the tree-trunk was steady reality; it did seem as
though that shadowy shoulder were within the tree.
A farmer's boy beside us had a handful of horseshoes. He began throwing
them. One of them visibly went through the ghost. Then a man with a
star on the lapel of his overcoat fired a shot. It spat yellow flame.
Where the bullet went no one could have told, save that it hit the
water of the creek. The specter was unchanged.
The crowd was murmuring. A man near us said, "I'll walk up to it. Who
wants to go along?"
"I'll go," said Will unexpectedly; but Bee held him back.
The volunteer demanded, "Officer, may I go?"
"I ain't stoppin' you," said the man with the star. He retreated a few
steps, waving his weapon.
"Well then put that gun away. It might go off while I'm down there."
Somebody handed the man a broken chunk of plank. He started slowly off.
Others cautiously followed behind him. One was waving a broom. A woman
shouted shrilly, "That's right--sweep it away--we don't want it here."
A laugh went up, but it was a high-pitched, nervous laugh.
The man with the plank continued to advance. He called belligerently,
"Get out of there, you! We see you--get away from there!" Then abruptly
he leaped forward. His waving plank swept through the ghost; as he
lunged, his own body went within its glow. A panic seemed to descend
upon him. He whirled, flailing his arms, kicking, striking at the empty
air as one tries to fight off the attack of a vicious wasp. Panting, he
stumbled backward over his plank, gathered himself and retreated.
The white apparition was unchanged. "It was just like a glow of white
light," the attacker told us later. "I could see it--but couldn't feel
it. Not a thing--there wasn't anything there!"
The ghost had not moved, though some said that it turned its head
a trifle. Then from the crowd came a man with a powerful light. He
flooded it on the specter. Its outlines dimmed, but we could still see
it. A shout went up. "Turn that light off! It's moving! It's moving
away!"
It was moving. Floating or walking? I could not have told. Bee said
that distinctly she saw its legs moving as it walked. It seemed to
turn; and slowly, hastelessly it retreated. Moving back from us. As
though the willows, the creek-bank, the creek itself were not there, it
moved backward. The crowd, emboldened, closed in. At the water's edge
we stood. The figure apparently was now within or behind the water. It
seemed to stalk down some invisible slope. Occasionally it turned aside
as though to avoid some obstruction. It grew smaller, dimmer by its
greater distance from us until it might have been the mere reflection
of a star down there in the water of the creek; then it blinked, and
vanished.
There were thousands who watched for that ghost the following night,
but it did not appear. The affair naturally was the subject of
widespread newspaper comment; but when after a few days no one else had
seen the ghost, the newspapers began turning from the serious to the
jocular angle.
* * * * *
Then, early in March, the second ghost was reported. In the Eastern
Hemisphere this time. It was discovered in midair, near the Boro Badur,
in Java. Thousands of people watched it for over an hour that evening.
It was the figure of a man, seated on something invisible in the air
nearly a hundred feet above the ground. It sat motionless as though
contemplating the crowd of watchers beneath it. And then it was joined
by other figures! Another man, and a woman. The reports naturally
were confused, contradictory. But they agreed in general that the
other figures came from the dimness of distance; came walking up some
invisible slope until they met the seated figure. Like a soundless
motion picture projected into the air, the crowd on the ground saw the
three figures in movement; saw them--the reports said--conversing;
saw them at last move slowly backward and downward within the solid
outlines of the great temple, until finally in the distance they
disappeared.
Another apparition was seen in Nome; another in Cape Town. From
everywhere they were now reported. Some by daylight, but most at
night. By May the newspapers featured nothing else. Psychical research
societies sprang into unprecedented prominence and volubility. Learned
men of spiritualistic tendencies wrote reams of ponderous essays which
the newspapers eagerly printed.
Amid the reports now, the true from the false became increasingly
difficult to distinguish. Notoriety seekers, cranks, and quacks of every
sort burst into print with weird tales of ghostly manifestations.
Hysterical young girls, morbidly seeking publicity, told strange tales
which in more sober days no newspaper would have dared to print. And
in every country charlatans were doing a thriving business with the
trappings of spiritualism.
In late July the thing took another turn. A new era began--a sinister
era which showed the necessity for something more than all this aimless
talk. Four men were walking one night along a quiet country road near
a small English village. They were men of maturity, reputable, sober,
middle-aged citizens. Upon the road level they observed the specters
of four or five male figures, which instead of remaining motionless
rushed forward to the attack. These ghosts were ponderable! The men
distinctly felt them; a vague feeling, indescribable, perhaps as though
something soft had brushed them. The fight, if such it could be called,
amounted to nothing. The men flailed their arms in sudden fear; and
the apparitions sped away. Greenish, more solid-looking than those
heretofore seen.
This was more than mere visibility--an actual encounter. These four men
were of the type who could be believed. The report was reliable. And
the next night, in a Kansas farmhouse, the farmer and his wife were
awakened by the scream of their adolescent daughter. They rushed into
her bedroom. She was in bed, and bending over her was the apparition of
a man. Its fingers were holding a lock of the girl's long black hair.
At the farmer's shout, the ghost turned; its hand was raised--and the
farmer and his wife both saw that the shadowy fingers had lifted the
girl's tresses which they were clutching. Then it dropped them and
moved away, not through the walls of the room, but out through the open
window.
The girl was dead. She had suffered from heart trouble; was dead of
fright, undoubtedly. It was the beginning of the era of menace. And
that next afternoon Wilton Grant telephoned me. His voice had a strange
tenseness to it, though it was grave and melodious as always.
"Come out and see us this evening, will you, Rob?"
"Why, yes," I said. I had not seen them for over a month--an
estrangement which I had not understood and which hurt me had fallen
between us. "Of course I will," I added. "How's Bee?"
"She's been quite ill.... No, not dangerous, she's better now. Don't
fail us, Rob. About eight o'clock.... That's fine. We--I need you.
You've been a mighty good friend, letting us treat you the way we
have--"
He hung up. With an ominous sense of danger hanging over me, I went out
to see them at the hour he had named.