incidents and impressions––
Quite soon after they moved into 333, Christopher talked to Paula Strasberg (on the phone, I think). In the course of their conversation, she said, “It’s a very lonely house.” At the time, her choice of adjective seemed merely odd to him––how could 333 be described as lonely, when the next-door house on one side nearly touched it and when there was a continuous line of houses facing it from across the road? However, by the time he next talked to Mrs. Strasberg, eight months later, he thought he understood what she had meant.
He said to her: “When you told me that this house is lonely, were you trying to warn me that it’s haunted?” Mrs. Strasberg denied this emphatically, she laughed aloud at the very idea. But Christopher wasn’t impressed. He told himself that this old Jewess would naturally 184
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refuse to admit to a ghost, since it was one of those disadvantages which lower property values. Then why had she let drop that word
“lonely”? It must have been a slip––perhaps she had been badly scared at 333, and the impression had remained so strong that she had referred to it in spite of herself. Christopher never found out the truth about this. And now Mrs. Strasberg is dead.
Chris Wood, always a highly credible witness, told how he
decided to drop in on Christopher and Caskey, one morning,
unannounced. When you crossed the bridge over the creek, the
house was on your right. Downstairs were the living room and the kitchen, upstairs were a bathroom and two bedrooms. One of these bedrooms opened onto a glassed-in porch which Christopher used as a workroom. Chris Wood crossed the bridge and approached
the house. As he did so, he saw a figure upstairs moving behind the windows of this porch. Taking it for granted that this was Christopher, Chris went to the front door and knocked. No answer.
Chris then opened the front door and entered. No one in the kitchen or living room. Remembering the figure he had seen upstairs, Chris wondered if it could be a burglar. But he nevertheless bravely climbed the staircase and looked in all the rooms. They were empty.
And there was no other exit from the upper floor.
One evening, Caskey, Carlos McClendon and a few others tried
using a Ouija board in the living room of 333.1 At first the board spelled out words like fuck, cunt, shit––probably with a good deal of encouragement from Caskey. Then they began to question it––
“Who are you?” It gave a woman’s name. “Are you dead?” “Yes.”
“How did you die?” “Murdered.” “Who murdered you?” “Myself.”
“Where did you die?” “Here.”
On January 1, 1950, Bill Harris came to stay with Christopher (Caskey was away in the East). Bill slept in the bedroom adjoining the glassed-in porch; Christopher slept in the other bedroom, beyond it.
One night, Bill woke and saw someone he took for Christopher, in the nearly total darkness, come out of Christopher’s bedroom, cross the bedroom Bill was sleeping in and start going down the
staircase––which led directly out of that bedroom to the ground floor.
Lying in bed, you could watch a person go downstairs until his head 1 No, says Carlos McClendon (December 8, 1972), he wasn’t at the Ouija board party, though he does remember Caskey telling him about it. However, Carlos describes an experience he had which was very like Chris Wood’s.
Approaching the house, one day, he looked up at the glassed-in porch and saw a woman. Bill Harris was downstairs––this must have been in January 1950––and Carlos asked him who the woman was. Bill was alone in the house.
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sank below floor level. Just as this was about to happen, the someone who seemed to be Christopher turned and looked at Bill and said, with intense hatred, “You son of a bitch!” Then he disappeared. At first, Bill was merely astonished. “Chris must be terribly mad about something,” he said to himself. Then he reflected that he had never seen Christopher get mad like this before. Then he began to wonder,
“Was that Christopher?” Then he got out of bed, went across to Christopher’s bedroom and looked in, to find Christopher in bed, snoring peacefully. Then Bill was scared. Nevertheless, with a considerateness which was typical of him, he didn’t wake Christopher.
In themselves, these happenings made no great impression on
Christopher. He didn’t have to be convinced by any more evidence that “hauntings” (whatever they essentially are) do occur. What did impress him was the intensity of the unpleasant psychic atmosphere at 333. Ever since his boyhood at Marple Hall, Christopher had taken it for granted that one’s awareness of such an atmosphere is just as valid as one’s awareness of a strong unpleasant smell. He believed that he himself was particularly sensitive to it,1 and he was rather proud of 1 For example, on May 19, 1948, while Christopher and Caskey were up at Wyberslegh, staying with Kathleen and Richard, they visited Lyme Hall and went round the house on a conducted tour. They managed to keep ahead of the main body of sightseers and thus got an independent first impression of each room before they were caught up with by the others. When Christopher and Caskey went into one of the rooms, Christopher exclaimed at once that it had a horrible atmosphere and must surely be haunted. A few moments later, the guide arrived with the rest of the party and announced that this was The Haunted Room. (Of course it’s quite possible that Christopher had been told about this room when he came to Lyme as a boy.)
But this reminds me of a far stranger experience which, for some reason I failed to record in the 1939–1944 journal. It must have happened sometime in 1939 or 1940, during one of the trips that Christopher and Vernon Old took up into northern California––I am sure Vernon was with Christopher at the time, though he wasn’t involved in the experience.
They were in their car, driving through the Sequoia forest. It was late afternoon, always a time which Christopher found rather sinister in the big woods––the feeling that night is about to fall seemed to him far more menacing than night itself. Suddenly, the road led them around the edge of a large clearing––a cup-shaped hollow which was grassy and swampy. In the middle of this clearing stood a shack. It was a store, and it looked like the stores of pioneer days; maybe it had survived from the period before Sequoia became a national park and private dwellings were forbidden. Anyhow, there it was––and Christopher was happy as well as surprised to see it. He wanted to buy some cigarettes and had despaired of being able to until they were out of this area.
Vernon stopped the car and sat at the wheel waiting while Christopher ran down into the hollow and entered the store. He found the store empty. It 186
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this. However, his experience at 333 was different from any of his others, not only in intensity but in kind.
This atmosphere made itself more strongly felt on the upper floor and particularly in the front bedroom around the top of the staircase, but Christopher was aware of it everywhere. The smallness of the house seemed to compress it and thus add to its power. 333 was dark in the daytime, because of the neighboring hillside and the over-hanging sycamore trees; at night, a guest who saw it brightly lit and full of people would often describe it as snug. But it never seemed snug to Christopher. It seemed secret, unhomely, unheimlich.[*]
Often, when he was working in the glassed-in porch (where there was at least plenty of daylight) he would feel, almost catch a glimpse of, someone at his elbow and turn quickly, but never quickly enough to confront the shadowy presence. At night, when Caskey was out and he was alone in the house, he would sometimes wake thrilling with fear. For a few moments after waking, he would be afraid but not panic stricken. His very belief in the objective existence of the phenomenon reassured him––for him, it wasn’t The Unknown. It