Poltergeists (5 page)

During the last part of March and early February the most ghastly things yet began to happen at the house. Henry Anglin came back. I could not hear him, but Andy said he talked very little and what few words he did speak were barely understandable. Andy could hear his evil laughter. He began by putting an egg under the mattress about where my head would be. We would not have known at the time, of course, but he would tell Andy to have me look in certain places. There was an egg, broken, in one of my house shoes, one in a pocket of my robe, one in the shade of the ceiling light, one broken in the corner of the room where it was running
down the wall, and one broken against the chest of drawers. There was even one inside my pillow case. Andy said that Anglin would just give a sort of insane-sounding laugh each time we would find another egg. We cleaned up the mess, and that was the end of the egg episode.

A few days later when I got home from work, Andy called me into our room and there
in the middle of the bed was our dresser
. It was not very heavy, and I was able to lift it down by myself. The next day the chest of drawers was on the bed. This was very heavy, and it took both Andy and me to set it on the floor again. The following day, when I got home, Andy was not there. I noticed that the door to the room he and I shared was closed. That was not unusual, though, as we often kept it closed during the day. However, when I started to open it,
it simply came off the hinges in my hands
. I could see that the pins had been removed from the hinges, so I just leaned the door against the wall. The next day I found the closet door wrenched from the opening, bringing most of the door facing with it. These were hollow doors and both of them had holes knocked in them about the size of a fist. The next night, about nine o’clock, while I was working at the shop, Andy telephoned me and said
the refrigerator was in our room
. He had heard a noise while he and John were watching television, and got up to see what it was. To reach the bedroom the refrigerator had had to go through the length of the breakfast room, the den, and a hallway before reaching our room. I knew we could not move it back that night so I told Andy to just leave it alone and we would decide what to do the next day. However, a little later he called and said the washing machine, which was located in the kitchen, had been pulled away from the wall and the faucets behind it were leaking and water was running all over the floor.

I told him to cut off the hydrants, which he did. I then called the police and asked them to meet me at the house. When we got there the holes in the two doors in the bedroom had
increased to about fifteen or twenty
and some of them were through both sides of the doors and big enough to put one’s head through.

Pretty soon, the house was swarming with policemen and detectives. That is when I decided to tell them as briefly as I could what we had been going through. Some of them, I am certain, thought the whole thing was a hoax, and came right out and said they thought I was being hoodwinked by John, who had enlisted Andy’s help. That was absolutely ridiculous though,
as practically all of the strange happenings occurred when Andy and I were together, and while John was staying with Mack about a hundred miles away
. One of the chief detectives talked a long time with John, and later told me that she talked sensibly, but that he was amazed
at her lack of concern about the strange things
that had happened. I too had noticed that she was wholly indifferent to the entire “show.”

About the middle of February 1968 things got so bad that I made John give me her key to the shop, and told her that I was going to have to do one of three things. I was going to try and have her committed to a state hospital as I was not financially able to have her take psychiatric treatments, or she could take them and pay for them herself, or I was going to get a divorce. A divorce at my age I thought was ridiculous, but I felt as if I could not stand to go on as things were. Andy was going to move with me as soon as I found a suitable place. John did not seem perturbed one way or the other, and probably did not believe I would really do any of those things. However, on February 24, I did move out of the house, and had my attorney begin divorce proceedings, since he again stated that he did not think I would have a chance in trying to have her committed. I think that when the papers were served on John it was the first time she actually realized what was happening. I got an apartment only a few blocks from my shop. I told Andy to call me every night to let me know how things were at home. I met him at a nearby shopping center each Saturday and gave him enough money to buy food for himself and John during the following week.

For several weeks we went on this way. One night Andy called me and said
that the dining table was up in the attic
. The only opening to the attic was a rectangular hole in the garage ceiling about 16 by 24 inches, through which
it was absolutely impossible for the table to go
. The next night the table was back in the house again. This happened several times. Other things also “went” to the attic, such as a small table, an ottoman, and another kidney-shaped end table. Finally, the dining table came down and Andy found it in the garage, and after considerable work was able to get it inside the house, where it belonged.

Eventually, John was beginning to believe that the strange things we had been talking about were really happening. Previously she had just made fun of us whenever we would mention them. Several weeks after I had left, Andy was sitting in the den, playing his guitar, when the lights went out. At first he thought that a bulb had burned out, but when he looked at the switch he could see that it had
been turned off
. This happened several times. Once when John was going through the den the light went out and she too saw that the switch had been turned; Andy was not anywhere near it, and there was nobody else who could have done it.

It was well into the second month after I left home. I had just finished work in the shop. The telephone rang. It was John and she sounded hysterical. She said she was very sick and begged me to come home. I got there a few minutes later, and she could hardly talk. She continued to beg me to come home, but I told her I could never spend another night in that house. Finally I got her calmed down enough to talk seriously. I finally told her that I would come back, but that first we would have to find another place to live. I demanded that she never smoke again. Finally, on April 15, 1968, we moved out of the house of horrors, and I have nor been there since.

John has not smoked since that time. It has now been over three months since we left the house, and John does the normal things about the house except cook. She is again at my rubber stamp shop and seems to enjoy it.

* * *

In retrospect, as I read over these words, I realized how difficult it must have been for Mr. Beaird to report on his experiences, especially to a stranger. What had appeared completely impossible to him would, of course, have been even more unbelievable to someone who was not present when it happened, and he doubted his own sanity at times, which was not surprising.

Having met Howard Beaird I am sure that he is completely sane, in fact, so sane he could not even be called neurotic. Had I not heard of parallel cases before, perhaps I too would have wondered about it. None of the phenomena reported by Mr. Beaird are, however, impossible in the light of parapsychological research. We are dealing here with forces that seem to be in contradiction of ordinary or orthodox physical laws, but the more we learn of the nature of matter and the structure of the atom, the more it seems likely that poltergeist activities connect with physics in such a way as to make seeming de-materialization and re-materialization of solid objects possible practically without time loss. But the case was a question of studying not so much the techniques involved in the phenomena as the reasons behind them and those causing them.

I informed Mr. Beaird that I was eager to enter the case, especially as I wanted to make sure that the poltergeist activities had really ceased once and for all and would never recur at his new location. In cases of this kind there is always the possibility that the phenomena are attached to one or the other person in the household rather than to a location. Moving to another house seems to have stopped the activities, but as there had been pauses before that culminated in renewed and even stronger physical activities, I wanted to be sure that this would not be the case in this new location. I explained that I would have to interview all those concerned, even the police detectives who had come to the house on that fateful night. Mr. Beaird assured me that he would make all the necessary arrangements, and, after discussing my plans with his wife and son, they too agreed to talk to me. Mack, her sister-in-law, who had been hostess to Mrs. Beaird while most of the phenomena took place at the house, was unable to meet me in Tyler, but I was assured that Mrs. Beaird had never left her care during all that time. For a while Howard Beaird had thought that his wife had returned without his knowledge and done some of the things about the house that had startled him. This, of course, turned out to be a false impression. At no time did Mrs. Beaird leave her sister-in-law’s house in Daingerfield, 75 miles away. Whether or not her astral self visited the home is another matter and would be subject to my investigation and verification as far as possible.

Mr. Beaird also went back to his former home to talk to the present owners. Somewhat suspicious of him, for no apparent reason, they were willing to see me if I came to Tyler. Mr. M. works for a local bakery and returns home at 5:30
P.M
., and since his wife would not entertain strange visitors in the absence of her husband, my visit would have to be at such an hour as was convenient to the M.s. Perhaps the somewhat battered condition of the house when the M.s had bought it from Mr. Beaird might be the reason for their reluctance to discuss my visit. At any rate it was agreed that I could call briefly on them and talk to them about the matter at hand. Howard Beaird’s daughter, who is now Mrs. Howard Wilson, lives in Austin, Texas. She has had some interest in the occult and mind development and had suggested that someone from the Silva Mind Center in Laredo should come up to Tyler to investigate the case. That was prior to my entering the situation, however, and now Mrs. Wilson wanted very much to come up to Tyler herself and be present during my investigation. Unfortunately it turned out later that she was unable to keep the date due to prior commitments. Thorough man that he is, Howard Beaird also talked to Detective Weaver at the police station to make sure I could see him and question him about his own investigation of the house. I was assured of the welcome mat at the police station, so I decided to set the time when I could go down to Tyler and look for myself into what appeared to be one of the most unusual cases of psychic phenomena.

On February 5, 1969, I arrived at the Tyler airport. It was 5:42 in the afternoon and Howard Beaird was there to welcome me. We had made exact plans beforehand so he whisked me away to the Blackstone Hotel, allowed me to check in quickly, then went with me to see Detective Weaver at the police situation.

As we passed through town I had the opportunity to observe what Tyler, Texas, was all about. Clean shops, quiet streets, a few tree-lined avenues, small houses, many of them very old—well, old anyway in terms of the United States—and people quietly going about their business seem to be characteristic of this small town. We passed by Howard Beaird’s shop, a neat, tidy shop, the company name Trumark plainly written on the window pane. As in many small towns, the telephone wires were all above ground, strung in a lazy haphazard fashion from street to street. The police station turned out to be a modern concrete building set back a little from the street. Detective Weaver readily agreed to talk to me. Howard Beaird left us for the moment in a fine sense of propriety just in case the detective wanted to say something not destined for his ears. As it turned out, there wasn’t anything he could not have said in front of him. Was there anything in the detective’s opinion indicating participation by either the boy or Mrs. Beaird in the strange phenomena? The detective shrugged. There was nothing he could pinpoint along those lines. He then went to the files and extricated a manila envelope inscribed “pictures and letter, reference mysterious call at——Elizabeth, February 19, 1968, 11:00
P.M
., case number 67273. Officer B. Rosenstein and officer M. Garrett.” Inside the envelope there were two pictures, photographs
taken at the time by a police photographer named George Bain. One picture was of the door, clearly showing the extreme violence with which a hole had been punched into it. The entire rim of the hole was splintered as if extremely strong methods had been employed to punch this hole through the door.

The other picture showed a heavy chest of drawers of dark wood sitting squarely upon a bed. Quite clearly the description given to me by Howard Beaird had been correct. What exactly did the two police officers find when they arrived at the house on Elizabeth Street? The house was in disorder, the detective explained, and furniture in places where it wasn’t supposed to be. On the whole he bore out the description of events given by Howard Beaird.

Somehow he made me understand that the police did not accept the supernatural origin of the phenomena even though they could not come up with anything better in the way of a solution. Almost reluctantly, the officer wondered whether perhaps Andy wasn’t in some way responsible for the phenomena although he did not say so in direct words. I decided to discuss the practical theories concerning poltergeists with him and found him amazingly interested. “Would you like to have the photographs?” the detective asked and handed me the folder. Surprised by his generosity, I took the folder and I still have it in my files. It isn’t very often that a researcher such as I is given the original folder from the files of a police department. But then the mystery on Elizabeth Street is no longer on active situation—or is it?