Specter in the Rectory

The Rev. William R. Harris of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Greenwich, New York has been very happy with his church and its lovely 150-year old rectory ever since he moved there with his family in 1968.

But the house has more than age and history behind it. Apparently, it has a ghost. An no one knows this better than the rector himself.

"I don’t like to use the word ‘ghost’," Father Harris told a local newspaper reporter a short time ago, but went on to declare there was something non-human inhabiting the old place on Main Street in Greenwich, he was sure. He had even told his congregation as much in one of his sermons.

Father Harris should know. It was one warm night in the summer of 72 that he first saw the specter for himself. His family had been besieged by inexplicable manifestations for some time. And he believed them all. His wife had once had a silver tray she was carrying start to pull right up out of her hands. She resisted and after a minute the strange force abated and she had full hold on the tray once more.

Another time, their daughter, Jan complained of feeling a draught overhead as though someone were fanning with a large piece of cardboard. Two younger daughters, Julia and Page, looked up in the rectory hallway once to catch sight of "something white…like an old man dressed in clothes from Jesus’ time!"

On another occasion, the oldest daughter, Jody, who was visiting with her newborn baby, walked into the bedroom just in time to see a shrouded grey-white form staring down at her infant son. He raised deep-set unhappy eyes towards her, then vanished.

But Father Harris’ own meeting with the specter that summer night of ’72 was a convincing and shaking experience that he will never forget.

He was lying in bed, half awake, when he suddenly felt the foot of the bed depress slightly as though someone had settled down at the foot. Soon, the weight shifted back and forth in a kind of kneading action.

The rector lay very still with his eyes wide open and his senses alert. He had left this phenomenon slightly before. It would come and go. Tonight he was going to observe carefully in case more should take place.

He was not to be disappointed.

Soon the pressure increased. More "like tonnage than poundage," he described it later and all the while an intense chill crept over him. In another minute he felt the pressure not only increase measurably but move upwards, engulfing his, whole body slowly but unrelentingly. The terrible force proceeded up the legs to the knees, then to the torso and finally to the chest, arms, neck, and ultimately, in a fearful heaviness, pressed down weightily on his face.

Father Harris felt alarm well up in him! He could hardly get his breath! But worse was to come.

In front of his wide-staring eyes-no farther than a foot away-rose a specter the likes of which he had never seen before and hopes never to lay eyes on again. It was the grey-white shape of a pointed shroud, framing a tortured glowing-eyed face of indescribable horror.

The features were lean-a sharp bone-ridged nose, high cheek bones, a thin mouth and a chin covered with wisps of grey beard that fell from his face and chin "like Spanish moss." But it was the eyes that struck terror. They burned into the darkness unlike any human eyes. They were hot piercing orbs that shot their light into the pinioned priest below like brilliant laser beams.

"Suddenly shocked by the aggressive malevolence of the specter, I realized intuitively," reported the rector afterwards, the possibility of demonic possession!" With that frightening thought, Father Harris impulsively thrust his right arm outward, cutting sharply through the specter. As he did so, he boomed out in loud, sonorous tones:

"Go In the name of Jesus Christ, go!"

The apparition disappeared.

The Harris family members are not the sole witnesses of the gruesome specter nor the only objects of his terrorizing. Ask Mr. Paul Fung, noted cartoonist for the King Features Syndicate who lives in Greenwich also.

Mr. Fung saw the shrouded form three times during a fourth of July visit with the Harris family a few years ago. It was about six-thirty, Mr. Fung told local reporters later, when he started downstairs for dinner. As he stepped along the second floor hallway, he felt a sudden draught of icy air. In the next instant, just as he was about to descend the stairway, he saw a figure appear on the landing. The specter, just as Father Harris had described him, made a slow movement towards the stair railing and leaned on it, staring into Paul Fung’s face with dark, wild eyes.

"The look was hostile," said Fung later, "and then again, it was not hostile. I was not particularly frightened because I don’t tend to believe in such things."

The cartoonist cooly started down the steps. With each stair, the coldness intensified. In another second he was near enough to figure to touch it. He didn’t but just looked calmly back into the expressionless features. The man’s form had no colors, either in his skin or his clothing. He consisted of varying shades of grey. Below the shrouded covering, Fung noticed an extraordinary thing. The apparition had no feet. Beneath its quite firm materialization of form, there was only air.

Once down the stairway and back into the normal warmth of summer, Paul Fung let the experience race through his head over and over. He made a quick decision. Would the incident reoccur if he were to ascend the stairs. He turned around and walked back up. With each successive step upwards the cold draught returned and got colder and colder as he approached the landing. It was as he expected. The hooded grey-white form was there again, staring directly into the artist’s face.

Paul Fung has never forgotten that eerie and inexplicable experience. A short time afterward, he drew up a portrait sketch of the macabre apparition. It was a perfect illustration what the Harris family had been describing.

This haunting sketch and whole story of the rectory’s ghostly visitant appeared in the local newspaper, The Greenwich Journal and Salem Press of October 5, 1972, written up by Marty Hughes. The article amazed the whole upper New York State community and the wonder of it all has been spreading slowly far beyond. It should. Few ghosts today have been more classically spectral or more clinically appraised.