THE GHOST HUNTER’S DAUGHTER
As an all-female remake of Ghostbusters is announced, TEA KRULOS catches up with Alexandra Holzer, daughter of the man who helped inspire the original movie, to talk about discovering that your father was the most famous ghost hunter in America and honour
As an all-female remake of Ghostbusters is announced, TEA KRULOS catches up with Alexandra Holzer, daughter of the man who helped inspire the original movie, to talk about discovering that your father was the most famous ghost hunter in America and honouring his legacy today.
How many of you know about Hans Holzer?” Alexandra Holzer asks. She’s crowded into an elevator with about 15 people at the Chicago Ghost Conference, being held at Carl Schurz High School. The elevator is heading up to the fifth floor for a short investigation of the school’s music room, where there are claims of spirits lurking in the corner and tinkering around on the piano.
Her question is greeted with an awkward silence.
“Oh boy,” she says, disappointed, and looks at the elevator wall. Later I ask her if she thinks this was just a shy silence.
“Maybe.” She answers. “His recognition is mixed and that’s not good enough for me. It’s got to be higher.”
This lack of familiarity is disheartening because if there were ever a Mount Rushmore of “ghost hunters,” Alexandra’s father – Dr Hans Holzer – would definitely have his hawk-like features chiselled there.
Hans Holzer was born in 1920 in Vienna, Austria. He studied archæeology and history at the University of Vienna, but, with World War II on the horizon, his family determined they would move to New York City in 1938. He went on to study Japanese at Columbia University, although his real interests lay elsewhere. Thanks in part to an uncle who told him ghost stories, Holzer had a passion for the supernatural since he was a young boy, and went on to devote his life to all things ‘paranormal’. He wrote more than 120 books on ghosts, UFOs, the afterlife, ESP, witchcraft, and related topics. He also taught parapsychology at the New York Institute of Technology.
“During the Seventies and Eighties, he was the ‘ghost man’,” Alexandra explains. She says her father’s collection of artefacts related to his studies and circle of friends involved in the parapsychological field made living in the Holzer house “like growing up in a living museum”. Her mother was also out of the ordinary. An artist and descendent of Catherine the Great, Countess Catherine Buxhoeveden married Holzer shortly before his first book, Ghost Hunter, was published in 1964. The countess joined him in his travels and employed her artistic talents on illustrations for his early books. They divorced when Alexandra was 13 years old.
Alexandra became aware that her father’s interests might be termed “unusual” at a early age, and it was a while before she grew to appreciate them.
“I was about eight years old when I figured out he wasn’t normal,” she smiles, “because when I started going to school my mother would wrap up my father’s books as gifts – books on witches, warlocks, UFOs, the Amityville Horror. The teachers would open up the gifts in the classroom and all the kids’ eyes grew, the teachers’ mouths dropped, and I sank down really low in my chair like I wanted to hide. I said ‘Oh my God, that’s him? No!’”
Rebel Without a Ghost
As she grew into a young woman, Alexandra went through a rebellious phase and tried to escape her father’s eerie legacy.
“I ran off to art school to get away from my father, because I thought he was weird. I wanted to get away from the paranormal and be with creative people. I really didn’t care. I was too young. When you’re at a certain age, you don’t get what your parent does, even if it’s as weird as that. He’d say ‘Oh look – I’m on TV!’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s nice.’ I just didn’t get it.”
Alexandra might not have been getting it, but others were. Holzer became renowned as the foremost US authority on all things related to ghosts. His expertise was used on shows like the classic In Search Of… and subsequent television programmes and documentaries dedicated to the paranormal. In another contribution to pop culture, Dr Holzer helped inspire the beloved horrorcomedy Ghostbusters. Dan Aykroyd, who wrote and starred in the movie, is on record as a Holzer fan. “I became obsessed with Hans Holzer, the greatest ghost hunter ever,” Aykroyd said. “That’s when the idea of my film Ghostbusters was born.”
Holzer’s most famous case was the alleged haunting of the Lutz family on Long Island, New York, commonly known as the
He wrote more than 120 books on ghosts, ESP, witchcraft and the afterlife
Amityville Horror (see FT190:32-37).
The Lutz family moved into 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville 13 months after the home was the scene of a gruesome murder of the former tenants, the DeFeo family. On 13 November 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr, the eldest child, systemically worked his way through the house in the middle of the night, shooting his mother and father and four siblings in their beds. After the Lutz family arrived, they claimed that between December 1975 and January 1976 they were terrorised by entities, and abandoned the house just 28 days after moving in. The incident spawned a bestseller ( The Amityville Horror: A True Story by Jay Anson, 1977) followed by a string of additional books on the case, Hollywood movies (11 to date, with a 12th slated for 2015), and TV documentaries.
Dr Holzer travelled to the house in January 1977, and was joined in his investigation by medium Ethel Johnson Meyers. In addition to conducting interviews and research, Holzer often brought a medium with him on a case. “A scientific investigation must have a welltrained transmedium for communication. It is the only way,” he once stated in an interview.
In the Amityville house, Meyers claimed that she had identified the house’s angry spirit: Shinnecock Indian Chief Rolling Thunder, which helped Holzer put together a theory that the house had been built on sacred Native American burial grounds, the cause of the malicious haunting.
The Amityville Historical Society has refuted claims that the house is built on any such burial grounds, while other researchers who have investigated the case argue that it was an opportunistic hoax contrived by the Lutz family and their lawyer, embellished and exaggerated to help make money from selling a good ghost story. Dr Holzer wrote both non-fiction ( Murder in Amityville, 1979) and fiction ( The Amityville Curse, 1981, and The Secret of Amityville, 1985) about the case, as well as other popular nonfiction volumes on the topic of ghosts includes Ghosts I’ve Met (1965) Hans Holzer’s Haunted Houses: A Pictorial Register of the World’s Most Interesting Ghost Houses (1971) and Great American Ghost Stories (1990).
Second Generation
“Probably by my late 20s I started to mature a bit and when I started to see the people he’d have over, I’d think, ‘these are really interesting people, they’re very spiritual, some are a bit wacky, but there’s something to what he does.’ But I didn’t have a pinnacle moment of understanding who he was until my 30s, where I was like ‘OK, I get it.’ Then I had my own awakening and epiphany and it just kind of vibed at that point, so I’d say it took almost two decades to get to that point.”
Alexandra says that epiphany came when
her aunt passed on.
“At her service, I felt her come over and hug me. My whole body went warm and I’m sitting there crying hysterically because I didn’t like it, I didn’t understand it. I felt she was hugging me because she knew that out of everybody except my mother I was destroyed [by her death]. I knew it was her. I don’t know how to explain it, I just knew. That flipped me.”
Alexandra says the experience helped inspire her to follow both investigating and writing. She wrote a sci fi/fantasy novel, Lady Ambrosia: Secret Past Revealed (2007), and a memoir of her family, Growing Up Haunted: A Ghostly Memoir (2008).
Hans Holzer died on 26 April 2009. After his death, Alexandra stepped up her active investigations, using the family formula for ghost hunting, which she calls the “Holzer Method.” Alexandra runs her group ‘Hunt With Holzer’ with fellow investigator David Lawson. “We create events with people and give that personal contact and have groups investigate using my father’s method. We learn about other people’s methods and keep it unified; help and learn and move on and document.”
“It’s basically combining science with metaphysics,” Alexandra explains, describing the Holzer Method. “My father had his predecessors and everybody was very scientific, and then he had the mediums and intuitiveness. Although he was a sceptic, he believed if you combined the two, you’d have better results, and that’s when the method was born. It was his brainchild to say we’re going to do it this way and we’re going to do it that way and we’re going to get more data so that we can understand what happens when we die. And not everything is science, and not everything is spiritual – there’s a combination of the two.”
In addition to Hunt with Holzer, Alexandra visualises a documentary or feature film based on her father’s life. She says it’s a longtime goal of hers, one she spoke to her father about. She feels Holzer’s place in history has been forgotten and overshadowed, and hopes such a project will help her father’s legacy live on.
Back at the Carl Schurz High School investigation, her group has moved from the fifth floor music room to a smaller music room filled with rows of keyboards on the fourth floor. An electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) session is taking place. Investigators are asking questions in the dark room, hoping to illicit a response. After a minute of silence, Alexandra addresses the group, telling them that she is still in communication with her father.
“My father comes through when we’re doing things,” she says. “So if anyone wants to ask if Hans Holzer is here, it’s actually pretty normal. I mean it’s a little paradoxical, but feel free to ask him a question.”
Alexandra is seated near the teacher desk at the head of the classroom. On the desk in front of her is the REM-pod, a device that measures fluctuations in electro-magnetic fields. Triggered lights and sounds on the device is said to be an indicator of a potential ghostly presence.
Alexandra feels that Hans Holzer’s place in history has been forgotten
“Hans Holzer if you’re here, can you put that green light on?” a participant asks from the darkness.
Silence. The REM-pod light does not turn green.
“You should ask him. He’ll listen to you,” another participant suggests to Alexandra.
“He didn’t listen to me in life!” She laughs. “You think in the afterlife he’s going to listen to me? Really?” The group breaks into laughter in the dark.
“Daddy you want to play with some lights?” Alexandra asks. The REM-pod remains idle.
“Do you feel he follows you around?” someone else asks her.
“He does. He’s a pain.” A second of silence. “Did someone just hum?”
“I heard it!” a participant says. “I heard hmmm from over here.”
The group listens to an audio recorder and hears a ghostly sound they determine is an EVP they’ve captured of a girl saying “daddy.”