A New York socialite and muse to Ernest Hemingway believes she is being controlled by a centuries-old spirit. A renowned female medium determines she must open herself up to being possessed in order to stop the evil.
*Reader note: This story discusses suicidal feelings
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The summer evening began with an air of lightness when Jane and Arnold Gingrich first met with Eileen Garrett and Martin Ebon for dinner at a French bistro in Manhattan.
Jane and Eileen chatted about their love of Provence in Southeastern France while Martin and Arnold Gingrich discussed business. Dr. Robert Laidlaw, who had introduced them, sat back and enjoyed the meal. When they were done eating, the group piled into Arnold’s vintage Ferrari to drive to the Gingriches’ historic townhouse. A photo of them at that moment could have made the perfect ad in Esquire magazine, which Arnold edited. But the mood of their evening on the town changed when they arrived at their elegant West Village address. The ominous house, which kept secrets in its dark corners and behind closed doors, melted the false pretense of a simple evening outing. Eileen and Martin’s jobs as psychic investigators came to the forefront. Crossing the threshold, Jane, the elegant socialite, broke down like a frightened child. “She is here,” Jane whispered. Her body began to shake.
It had all started in the mid 1960s with a parlor game, a Ouija board. Jane was playing for fun when she began receiving haunting messages. She was curious and pursued the conversation.
As a creative woman who had always dabbled with writing, Jane picked up a pen and began “opening herself up” to these so-called supernatural influences for inspiration. The pen seemed to just flow. Stories of characters filled hundreds of pages. But this form of “automatic writing,” a psychic phenomenon believed to occur when a person unconsciously works as a scribe for an unknown cosmic source, was not the same as when she had tried her hand at being a journalist, playwright, or novelist when she was younger. This was something different--something she felt she did not control.
As time passed, the writing became increasingly dark and began to terrorize Jane, but her instinct told her not to believe that supernatural forces were taking hold of her. She came to a different understanding, one that was even more terrifying: Jane was losing her mind.
Just as she had been told before. Jane’s personal demons first made an appearance after a scary car accident in Cuba.
Jane was considered mesmerizing as a ruddy blonde with wild hair and a lanky frame. She was having an affair with Ernest Hemingway, but in proper socialite form, the relationship between Jane and her then-spouse and Hemingway and his spouse was friendly. One weekend, the Hemingways brought their family to Jane’s estate. Jane was driving the Hemingway’s two sons, Patrick and Bumby, along with her own son, Tony, home from an outing when, inexplicably, she drove her Chevrolet off a cliff.
Whatever mechanical problem or horrific compulsion on Jane’s part led to the accident was never discussed. Fortunately, the boys walked away unscathed--they didn’t even cancel the dinner plans they had with the American ambassador.
But Jane wasn’t so lucky, and the crash marked the start of a dark chapter in her life. She injured her spine in the accident, causing her to be bedridden with home care nurses. As a result, Jane butted heads with her nurses and the household staff. Four people quit. Once again, she found herself overwhelmed with a frightening impulse. Jane ended up dragging herself out of bed, then jumped from a window.
The jump “was not high enough to cause death or serious injury,” her family noted, but it still revealed internal struggles, a haunting inside. To some observers in their inner circle, the incident exposed Jane’s self-destructive nature. There seemed to be something inside that was against her, compelling her reckless behavior.
If Jane had been inclined to begin to realize that something was very, very wrong, her then-husband’s condescendingly glib attitude must have made her question herself. In a letter to a friend, he chalked it all up to one of Jane’s “changeable fits of elation and depression,” and her audacious attention-seeking behavior.
In an era where so many emotional and mental struggles in women were simply labeled “hysteria,” as John F. Kennedy’s sister, Rosemary, was lobotomized for teenage rebellion, Jane’s husband’s response was less than surprising. He shipped her off to Doctors Hospital in New York like a parent sending a child to boarding school.
In the hospital in New York, Jane began psychotherapy or what she referred to as “psycho-paralyzing.” Dr. Lawrence Kubie, her analyst, said she was the only patient that he ever had that he could not treat. Dr. Kubie wanted to blame her affair with Hemingway as the source of her malignant spirit. Kubie even called out Hemingway’s characterization of “real men” as being “lusty, hard-living fellows, who must exhibit their prowess incessantly lest they forget they have it, and who drink noisily to hide from fear and depression” in a piece submitted to and then pulled from The Saturday Review of Literature.
In reality, Jane felt herself suffering from a desire to live a more adventurous life and wanted the freedom to write, travel, hunt and drink like characters in a Hemingway novel. She was not ready to be a wife and mother as a barely twenty-something when her life seemed to have only just begun. She wrote in a letter to a friend after returning from safari life in Africa that she was “a too-loving spirit, tied down to a predatory feminine carcass” in reference to her domestic life in Cuba.
But she was torn, wrestling with the social sensibilities of her upbringing, and the powerful men who never seemed to permit her any greater role than that of mistress, wife or mother.
Ultimately, she quietly returned to a more “respectable” life.
Now, ensconced in a loving marriage with Arnold, founder and editor-in-chief of Esquire magazine, they were picture-perfect husband and the picture-perfect wife in a picture-perfect West Village brownstone, representing the crème de la crème of New York Society. So playing the Ouija board meant to be fun, but instead it seemed to open an awful portal to a broken but long repressed psyche or something else.
After playing, strange incidents accumulated. On one occasion, Jane felt herself drowning in the bathtub. Paralyzed, unable to raise her face the mere inches to break the surface of the water, it felt as if something were pinning her down. At the last moment, her lungs screaming for the air that seemed impossibly far away, she burst out of the tub, gasping, only to have her wet, naked body hurled across the bathroom crashing into the tiles on the wall.
Sitting, bruised and shivering on the cold floor in the abrupt silence, it is difficult to imagine Jane having ever been as terrified in her entire life. Making matters even worse, she didn’t know who to turn to, or who wouldn’t simply declare her delusional. Once more, her outwardly perfect upscale life had become a nightmare. Perhaps Hemingway would have the imagination to believe her, but the last people to have seen him were a couple who observed him on his Key West veranda. They exchanged a friendly wave. Only when they recounted their celebrity encounter to the locals did they learn Hemingway had ended his own life days before their sighting, leaving them to conclude they had seen a ghost.
Jane paid a visit to Dr. Robert Laidlaw, the chief of psychiatry at Roosevelt Hospital. But as with her previous therapist, Dr. Laidlaw quickly discovered that he could not help her. Unlike her previous therapist, however, Dr. Laidlaw did not give up.
For the first time, Jane would not be under the guidance of some smug, superior male but rather would be helped by a woman. Dr. Laidlaw called Eileen Garrett: an eccentric colleague in her 70s with much more experience dealing with what he believed Jane was enduring.
Possession.
Gathering in Jane and Arnold’s house after their introductory dinner at the French Bistro, Arnold led the conversation at first, at times speaking on his wife’s behalf, while Dr. Laidlaw and Eileen’s assistant, Martin Ebon, spoke little. All eyes went to Eileen Garrett. Irish-born Eileen had deep eyes, wore a short sensible haircut, and projected an effortless authority that inspired a blend of fascination and envy.
“When her writing went into its first phase,” Arnold explained, “she was just like a ship’s operator getting messages.” Arnold was bald with a prominent mustache and serious eyes.
The psychic experience known as automatic writing was unknown to Jane. She was merely taking dictation. “I didn’t know what it meant,” she admitted of the concept. “This wasn’t a hobby with me.”
Jane filled thousands of pages. It would have once been a dream come true to be able to write so prolifically. But the stories were harrowing tales of lost souls fighting to cross through--turning the process into a very real nightmare.
Jane’s husband claimed that the words came from something, or someone “who purported to have existed on Earth in different times and places.”
In spite of her fear, Jane admitted that she found the mysterious author “quite interesting or literate” and would prod it with inquiries. “Are you always with us?” she asked during these writing sessions, as if inviting it to come out and play.
“We walk among you unhindered and unhindering. Midnight is a fool’s myth” came the reply. For her, the voice was “pretty coherent.”
However startling all of this might sound in polite conversation, it was harder to unsettle Eileen Garrett. Her connection to death and the spirit world started young. Eileen’s parents had committed suicide shortly after she was born, and she was raised by her aunt and uncle. As a child she played with imaginary friends that she called “the children.” These magical figures, as well as animals and plants, would appear to her out of nowhere. At a young age she had a dark vision of her other aunt and the aunt’s baby only to find out the next day that they had both died during childbirth.
After years as a professional trance medium, Eileen had established in Manhattan the Parapsychology Foundation, which was an institute that facilitated research and conferences on psychic phenomenon.
“I have a gift, a capacity–a delusion, if you will– which is called ‘psychic,’” Eileen wrote later. “I do not care what it may be called, for living with and utilizing this psychic capacity long ago inured me to a variety of epithets–ranging from expressions almost of reverence, through doubt and pity, to open vituperation. In short, I have been called many things, from a charlatan to a miracle woman. I am, at least, neither of these.” In parapsychology, as in other fields, some men refused to accept a woman’s authority.
To Jane, Eileen’s unorthodox life represented a liberating example: no standards, no expectations and no stifling rules imposed on her.
For Eileen to be able to help, Jane knew she had to stop letting Arnold speak for her. She needed to take control of her own voice from those both known and unknown.
Jane told more about her experiences to be able to give Elieen the critical clues she needed. Jane had first heard strange noises and felt a presence in their country house, but it was in her Manhattan home at 273 W. 12th Street that the spirit began to embody the space, possessing Jane and throwing her across the room.
When concerned friends would ask about the bruises, Jane made jokes about wild horse rides. She kept horses at her country house in Pennsylvania, so the excuses were credible. Still, Jane was not herself. She had grown thin, too thin, even for a fashionable socialite. And there was the drinking. This once beautiful and vivacious woman was vanishing before their eyes.
“Ever since we moved into this house I have been sick,” Jane explained to the paranormal investigators. “Right from the beginning I’ve been ill the whole time I’ve been in this house, one thing after another.”
Living with what seemed to be a ghost was not easy. It brought its own suffering and despair into her home, with a voice sometimes begging for prayers, and once crying out: “Oh it’s so cold in this merciless wind.”
This ghost revealed herself to be named Ruth.
By far the worst of it all, claimed Jane, was what she referred to as persecution from Ruth, which she said “made me sickest of all with these violent attacks. You have no idea how violent they were … I mean she’d throw you across the room ... There was always the strain of not knowing what would happen next. You’d be perfectly alright; you’d start across the room and then–wham– down you’d go.”
Having finally heard the entirety of Jane’s experiences, Eileen identified the most important question of all.
Who was Ruth?
According to Jane, the ghost had been one of the many accused of witchcraft amid the infamous Salem witch trials. In fact, Ruth Ayer is one of the most obscure victims of the trials, and at the time of Jane’s hauntings, even the best scholars of the era had likely not heard of her.
As an unwed 19-year-old woman in Puritan Salem, Ruth would have been a prime target during the witchcraft craze--most likely causing her arrest on August 20, 1692. There would have been no more terrifying time to be accused; the day before had been one of the bloodiest days of the entire affair with six accused witches being executed.
However, there is no record of further action. Throughout the history of the trials, only three of the accused were pardoned: two because they were pregnant and one because she confessed. Having not been pregnant herself, this leaves only the option that Ruth herself confessed, or she somehow managed to flee Salem. In fact, two years later, she appeared in Haverhill, Massachusetts, married with a young family.
Not long after that, in the dark and forbidding wilderness, Ruth and her young daughter were reportedly killed by a contingent of French soldiers and American Indians warriors from the Algonquin and Abenaki tribes, who were desperately trying to stop the encroachment on their lands that were stripping them of their resources and way of life.
Many of the women accused of witchcraft by the Puritans were just ahead of their time, flaunting the rules of their oppressive society. From the perspective of the psychic investigators, Ruth may have found in Jane a woman who was also ahead of her time, that she was hoping could help calm her tortured soul.
But the unique lack of records concerning Ruth Ayer also raised the possibility to true believers that she may have been the outlier. Perhaps through her had come the years in which evil ran free in Salem. Perhaps those soldiers who encountered Ruth believed they had found such an evil spirit and in recognizing it, destroyed it once and for all. And now, nearly three centuries later, she had found a way back.
Whatever her motives, she was torturing Jane and had to be stopped.
A few moments later, Jane mustered the courage to tell Eileen that she did not think Ruth was the only spirit haunting her. That there was another. A constant knocking at the walls that seemed different somehow, though she could not explain why. And when she sat beside the fireplace, she felt a sense of foreboding that seemed somehow connected. She was certain that it was another presence. A man.
“We have to get rid of all this,” Eileen said simply.
Eileen had never shied away from confronting darkness. After she had her childhood vision, proven correct, her curiosity about the spiritual realm became endless. Eileen did her own research to get answers. In a painful experiment, she drowned her aunt’s prized ducklings, an act that served her studies into the afterlife.
“The little dead bodies were quiet, but a strange movement was occurring all about them,” Eileen would recount the event. “A gray, smoke-like substance rose up from each small form. This nebulous, fluid stuff wove and curled as it rose in winding spiral curves, and I saw it take new shape as it moved out and away from the quiet forms.” Eileen, in the service of the spiritual realm, could be ruthless.
Now Eileen wanted to exorcise the ghosts from 273 West 12th Street--and from Jane’s mind. Eileen’s assistant Martin Ebon worked in tandem by asking probing questions about Jane to test her sincerity. Had she simply become overly preoccupied with the occult and imagined all this? Jane admitted to having read a “ridiculous story by Oscar Wilde about a haunted house that I thought was so funny,” but “no I’ve never been interested in the occult.”
Feeling like Martin was pressing, yet another man doubting her, Jane defensively shouted that she had never asked for any of it. Never sought it out. “I truly don’t want it!” she insisted, pushing off any suggestion that she may have created this as part of a personal drama to get attention.
The formidable Eileen, meanwhile, spent an hour moving slowly through the house to take its psychic temperature. She was “smelling the place out” looking for traumas and memories trapped in the home’s aura and looking for a vessel through which to escape.
She entered every room one at a time on each floor of the home. Martin followed along with a tape recorder to document her thoughts. In Eileen’s experience, spirits existed on a complicated landscape. When she first formally studied the occult, she fell asleep during a trance and awoke in a room full of dead people that were looking to her to communicate with their living relatives. The spirits’ fates seemed intertwined and sometimes mixed together. This is where she first encountered Uvani, a spirit that would visit Eileen frequently throughout her career.
Jane and her husband had heard that someone had been murdered in their West Village home several generations in the past. Though the hip neighborhood was the center of downtown theater in the 1960s, darkness also lurked among its streets. Poet Dylan Thomas died just blocks away from Jane’s abode at Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center not long before they moved in. Down the street at 14 W 10th Street, an address kept by Mark Twain in 1900, ghost sightings were reported. Residents and guests of the so-called House of Death reported seeing Twain, as well as a lady in white with a gray cat lurking in the home.
Eileen did not discount the possibility that Ruth wasn’t really a Salem witch but actually a restless ghost born as a murder victim in the home. She could be using the Ruth story as a way to lure Jane. Perhaps Ruth’s spirit was being used as a vessel, a cover to approach Jane. This set of spirits could be like nesting dolls, one hiding another. One thing was for sure, Eileen insisted she could tell the entity terrorizing Jane was malevolent, like those she had studied in ancient texts from China and Babylon.
As she moved slowly through the house, Eileen would pause in the corners and stairwells to feel the presence in the home. She mumbled quietly to herself, communicating with another realm.
At times she ran ahead on her own only to be found standing still and listening in an eerie silence.
She stared at a wall.
She mentioned that the house was once connected to another building through a window or door, which was built over now, but whose memory remained, a kind of phantom limb, a portal to another realm.
As she worked through every corner of the house, Eileen seemed to be struggling to find a method of helping Jane. For as many times as she had performed this sort of thing before, something seemed different. Typically, an exorcism is little more than a person commanding a spirit to depart the possessed. But it became clear to Eileen that the adversary in this case was too powerful. Like with Jane’s previous therapists, it seemed there might be no solution.
But then, Eileen came upon an idea. She would not attempt to exorcise Ruth. She would summon someone who could. Jane’s upscale Manhattan townhouse was about to become a battleground. This is the first time in known records of parapsychology that a medium would attempt to fight a ghost with a ghost.
Having spent most of her life as a medium, Eileen could easily slip into a trance. She knew how to handle these spirits and used them as her guides to go deeper into the spirit realm to address the business at hand. In the ultimate triumph over sexist and misogynistic doubters in her field, Eileen would show how she could command even powerful male spirits to follow her will. She would seek out Uvani.
Uvani was a Persian spirit whom Eileen believed helped transport her into deeper realms. A kind of guardian of realms, he called himself the “Keeper of the Gate.” At the start of the séance, Uvani entered Eileen, dramatically altering both the pitch of her voice and her vocabulary
Once the gates were opened, Uvani settled on the spirit he would bring forth, and as she writhed in her chair, inhuman noises filling the room, Eileen’s body welcomed in a spirit identifying himself as Abdul Latif.
A 12th-Century Arabic physician in the Court of Saladin, Latif was a prominent philosopher of his time who traveled widely, wrote many books and was one of the first known scholars of Egyptology. But he also had a darker side. His curiosity was endless, and took him throughout Arabia, to Cairo and beyond. He was said to have once sought out the wisest man in Egypt after having formed an obsession with alchemy--the product of which saw him author two books described as grotesque. What occurred specifically between Latif and the wise man is lost to history, but what is known is that Latif left Cairo shaken, spending much of the rest of his life pleading with others to never pursue alchemy.
Also while in Egypt, he faced a great deal of criticism for using numerous bodies, dead from famine, to further his understanding of human anatomy.
If anyone had seen both good and evil, and the mysteries of the world, it was Latif. Through Eileen’s process, she reported identifying Latif as a spirit powerful enough to push out Jane’s tormentor, with Elieen as a potent-enough medium to push him to do so.
The five people who had only dined hours earlier at a fashionable Manhattan restaurant were now seated around the living room waiting for an exorcism to begin.
Eileen removed her jewelry, closed her eyes and leaned her head back while Jane sat in a stiff chair across from her. The others sat quietly so as not to disturb the events to follow.
“What do you wish of me?” asked Latif in his deep voice through Eileen’s vessel.
Eileen explained the problem. “It is well that you have come here,” Latif responded, feeling the presence of the malicious spirit.
Latif insistently summoned Ruth, forcing her to make her presence known.
Now it was Jane, until this time a quiet observer, whose body convulsed as she was taken over by the dark entity. Her voice deepened and croaked, “I want… I want… I want… peace!”
Ruth arrived inside of Jane as if soaring into her at unimaginable speeds. Her body stumbled toward the couch and then collapsed on the floor.
“We are here to heal you, to help you, to bring you peace,” Latif-through-Eileen said with authority to hold control over the dark spirit, and again demanded that Ruth make her presence known.
Jane, as if fighting Ruth’s spirit as she had so long fought off her other suppressed demons, trembled as she placed her head on Eileen’s knees, tears pouring from her eyes as she took comfort in the medium. The men watched in horrified silence as Jane and Ruth appeared to become one. Both broken, both seeking salvation.
Latif calmly reassured Ruth that she did not belong on this plane and told her she must leave Jane’s body in order to move forward. “You have not been abandoned, although you may be seared in your soul,” Latif said. “There are others here among us who can help you find your proper life, your proper existence. But you must let go of this body for your own sake.”
Latif offered a blessing to the possessed woman. Touching Jane’s head, he said to Ruth: “And now you, Ruth, must go and let this child reside in her own world. She must be restored to herself and to herself alone.”
But if Ruth had been placated, it did not last long. Whether it had simply been a ruse, or she had for a moment considered giving in, an energy now surged through the room as the two spirits seemed to shift abruptly from conversation to a brutal fight. The dark spirit fought to maintain Ruth’s presence inside of Jane.
It all brought to mind the earliest accounts of the Salem witch trials, when two young girls, a daughter and niece of the town’s pastor, Reverend Samuel Parris, were abruptly overcome and began shrieking, writhing, and barking like dogs.
This struggle too was grotesquely visible as Ruth made what the investigators described as a final effort to take Jane over completely. In so much of her life, Jane had come to believe the judgement of others that she had surrendered to personal flaws and fears, given in, run away. There had been little in her life to suggest that she had the will to fight any more.
But Latif’s presence, powered by Eileen’s strength and determination, surged, and in an instant, lights were reported by the witnesses to pop and flash across the living room, and the dark spirit was exorcised from the woman’s body. Jane quivered and fell to the ground.
The battle was over and Latif was victorious. Uvani returned to Eileen, sealing off the door to the spiritual realm.
Eileen began to groan in her own voice. She breathed deeply and her eyes flickered, then opened as she returned to the room. As usual, through a combination of pain and will, she had done it.
Jane slowly began to rise, kneeling quietly.
Jane’s husband looked at Martin for the signal that he could go to his wife. After getting the nod, he helped lift her back to her chair.
“What’s happened?” Jane muttered, awaking from the trance.
Eileen explained what had taken place in the living room. Blinking, Jane breathed in silence for a moment before a slight smile came to her face.
“I guess we all need a stiff drink,” she said.
Arnold broke out the bottles from the bar and poured everyone a libation.
“I’ve suffered terribly with this, but I have never been afraid,” Jane offered. “Now that is the peculiar part. I don’t understand it. You ride a horse that’s thrown you and you may say to yourself, ‘I’m not afraid of this horse,’ but deep down in your soul, you are afraid. But I was not afraid of this… when Ruth takes hold of me, and she did before, I’m still not really afraid of her, though I know she can hurt me.”
“It’s been amazing to me too that with all these very real wounds, bloody and scratched, and all that, she still kept an amazing morale,” Arnold agreed. “I’d be ready to shoot myself at half a dozen points; but seriously, she took it all–well, I don’t want to say nonchalantly–but with a very positive attitude.”
Jane was touched. Having felt men in her life declare her weak or a disappointment, she now recognized that she did not need their approval, while at the same time witnessing that Arnold had seen so much strength in her for so long.
“You know there hasn’t been a murder here,” Eileen announced casually. “The knocking you have experienced, I think, comes from someone who is friendly.”
“Oh?” Jane inquired, suddenly acting as though her ghost was a cocktail party curiosity.
“Yes, he likes the house, he likes you, but I’ve asked him to go away; to please go away in the name of God and leave everybody at peace until they are strong. I see him as brash, cheerful, nonchalant, good-natured but rough.”
“Not too good-natured,” Jane objected mysteriously.
The séance had also cleared the room of the tapping sounds, which Jane admitted to having liked. “I guess you have to get rid of the good with the bad spirits,” Martin said.
You bet you do. You have to get them all out,” Eileen said.
As the guests left the home that night, that advice lingered, to let go of the good spirits as well as the bad. It was not hard to imagine Jane defiantly choosing to hold on to whatever she needed to, perhaps even waving at it and smiling as it waved back from afar.
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Dianna Dilworth is the author of the forthcoming book Mellodra ma, the Mellotron Story: How Harry Chamberlin’s Magic Box Set Loose the Beatles, Prog Rock, Post-Punk, and “Free Bird” from Bazillion Points.