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Mystery in L.I. House Deepens

"Mystery in L.I. House Deepens; Family, Experts, Police Stumped," By Milton Bracker, Special to The New York Times. Seaford L. I., March 3 - The Case of the Herrmann House is a month old today. Last night, after four days of quiescence, it kicked up again. The case remains a Whodunit without a crime, a criminal or a solution. But it has a very tangible scene, a quantity of evidence - smashed or damaged household ware - and a frustrated detective. It also has had many specialized private investigators. They have brought equipment ranging from an electronic vibration-detector to a willow dowsing stick. They have gone away without firm conclusions, although the water-diviner thinks he is on the right track. A remarkable thing about the phenomenon is that, no matter how unusual it may seem in 1958, it is closely in line with poltergeist literature going back 1,600 years. A poltergeist is a noisy spirit associated with the misbehavior of objects. The Herrmann house is a carefully kept, white-trimmed green ranch model at 1648 Redwood Path here. Outside and in, it would appear to be a symbol of orderly suburban family life. There is a father, nearing 43; a mother who is a registered nurse; a daughter, 13, and a son, 12. There are a television set, a playroom and a dinette made cheerful by the bright lilies on the wallpaper. Seek Haven With Friends Yet between 3 P.M. on Feb. 3 and 10:10 P.M. last night, things in the house behaved so strangely that at one point the family sought haven with friends for forty-eight hours. Nothing happened while they were away. But a great deal happened after they returned. The police have been called, a Roman Catholic priest came on request to bless the house - and the chimney was capped with a revolving device to keep out mischievous drafts. A woman in Revere, Mass., had suggested this. James M. Herrmann, his wife, Lucille, and the children, Lucille and Jimmy, apparently a close-knit, affectionate family, became the center of a disruptive mystery. As Mr. Herrmann recalls Monday, Feb. 3, at 5:05 P.M.: "I'm down in my office." (He is an interline representative for Air France at 683 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. For twenty years prior to 1955, he was employed at the General Post Office, Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street). "My wife calls, and she says 'Kimmy, what's going on here?'" "I say, 'How do I know, I'm thirty-five miles away.' She says 'All the bottles in the house are blowing their tops.'" What seemed like a good-natured pun turned out to be a good description of what had happened. Between 3 and 5 P.M., six screw-top bottles, one for holy water, had opened, fallen over and spilled in four rooms. The other substances were nail polish remover, peroxide, rubbing alcohol, liquid starch and bleach. Both children were home with their mother. But on the next two days, nothing happened. Then, on Feb. 6 and 7, the incidents recurred. On Sunday, the 9th, Mr. Herrmann said, two bottles slid off a bathroom ledge in paths at right angles to each other, landing at the feet of Jimmy, who was brushing his teeth. "The poor kid freezes and you can't blame him," said Mr. Herrmann. The same day, a shampoo bottle on Mrs. Herrmann's vanity table did its "usual act" - according to her husband - of popping its top. Mr. Herrmann called the Nassau County police and Detective Joseph Tozzi of the Seventh Squad was assigned. Yesterday - at his own home near by several hours before last night's new developments at the Herrmanns - Detective Tozzi said he was stumped. He has a briefcase full of data. He has consulted "every kind of engineer." He has spent hours with the family and interviewed its members separately; and he has worked closely with a parapsychologist from Duke University. Moreover, he has taken a good deal of ribbing from his colleagues. But he brushes this off. For Detective Tozzi is perplexed but not sicouraged. He was back at the Herrmann house last night. His record shows that the more spectacular incidents occurred between Feb. 20 and 25. Incident of the Sugar Bowl On the evening of the 20th the detective was in the Herrmann living room, completing some notes. Earlier, he had deliberately placed a full sugar bowl near a corner of a table in the adjoining dinette, Jimmy Herrmann, a bright, brown-eyed honor student at Seaford Junior-Senior High School, was doing homework at the end of the table farthest from the bowl. All at once it "exploded" - as Mrs. Herrmann put it - and landed in the hall and showered grains all over. Detective Tozzi phoned his chief. He said there was no doubt the incident had occurred and that in his opinion, in view of the time and distance factors involved, no hand had touched the bowl. Asked about it, Jimmy simply said: "I heard the noise." But the weirdest was to come. On the night of the 24th Dave Kahm, a reporter for Newsday, was alone in the living room. At 9 P.M. he was reading on a chair chosen specifically so that his eyes would be on a direct line with Jimmy's darkened room. Suddenly a ten-inch geographic globe, ordinarily on top of a metal-rod bookcase at the far side of Jimmy's room, hurtled across the hall. It landed in the living room, across from where Mr. Kahn sat. Boy Heard 'Noise' The reporter rushed across the hall and flipped on the light in the boy's room. He was sitting up in bed, his legs blanketed. H said he had heard "the noise." Mr. Kahn wrote that it was "possible but improbable" that the boy had thrown the globe. The next day, a statuette of the Virgin Mary "flew" from a dresser top in the Herrmann's bedroom to the dressing table. And later that evening, with Jimmy alone in the downstairs playroom, doing homework at the far side, a portable phonograph at the other side supposedly left its stand, flew across the room and dented the wood of the open-work stairway guard. Jimmy said later, "I heard the noise." Obviously, the fact that Jimmy has been alone in the room on several occasions, and nearest to the displaced article on others, has focused attention on him. Detective Tozzi agrees that it would have been possible for the boy to have caused some of the incidents. But he emphasized that it would have been improbable in many instances and impossible in others. The detective particularly cites the overturning of the bookcase shortly before the episode of the sailing globe. A set of the Universal Standard Encyclopedia is tacked beneath the shelf on which the globe rested. The detective estimated the overall weight of at seventy-five pounds. He said that a boy Jimmy's size might have flipped the case over. But he says even a man would have had trouble turning it upside down and wedging it as tightly as it was found between a radiator and the bed corner. Moreover, in at least two instances, the boy has been reported out of the room. Once, when a chest of drawers fell, the family said he was on the stairway to the playroom. And last night, Mrs. Herrmann noted that no one was in the dinette when a heavy glass dish fell and that "my son was out of the house" with his father when a picture crashed. From the 25th - that is "after the phonograph," for the Herrmanns no longer refer to dates but to incidents - things were calm until 4 P.M. yesterday. The whole family and six guests were in the house when a dish fell in the dinette. The last incident, at 10:10, involved a falling night table. Detective Tozzi came back. To an outsider, Jimmy - whose best subjects are mathematics and English - is bright, pleasant and full of facts on airplanes and railroads. He reads science fiction, saves stamps and draws rockets. Mrs. Herrmann, born Lucille Mucci, said she had never heard of a poltergeist. Mr. Herrmann said he had, back in his days at Fordham, where he got a law school qualifying certificate. Both he and his wife were natives of the Bronx, attended parochial and high schools there and lived there until they moved Nassau County five years ago. Mr. Herrmann served in the Marine Corps. Mrs. Herrmann was head nurse at St. Luke's Hospital, Manhattan, in 1943. Down the years, poltergeist manifestations have been associated with the teen-age member of the family, more often with a girl than a boy. Some cases have dissolved when ingenious trickery has been exposed. In others, the agent or suspected person has been constantly watched or even tied down - yet the incidents continued. Many Theories Devised Many theories have been devised to explain the influence of the agent. One is that sexual energies, building up in a pubescent individual, are transferred into a kind of vibration that leaves the body like a radio impulse and plays hob where it hits. Another theory, cited in "Haunted People: Story of the Poltergeist Down the Centuries," by Hereward Carrington and Nandor Fodor (underlined in pen), was advanced in 1944 by Dr. John Layard. He continued: "All true poltergeist phenomena are purposeful and probably occasioned by conditions of unresolved tensions in the psyche of those involuntarily producing them." Eschewing the poltergeist approach, the various scientists and technicians who have visited the house seek to interpret what has happened along the lines of their own specialties. The man with the willow dowsing stick was Robert E. Zider, a technical specialist in high-energy particle acceleration at the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton. With his Y-shaped dowser, Mr. Zider charted "fields" that he felt were caused by water under the house. He related this to the presence near Jerusalem Avenue about a mile away of a recharge basin, or sump, recently heavily coated with ice. Mr. Zider felt that powerful vibrations, caused perhaps by a passing jet plane, might have so jolted the ice that the shock wave was transmitted by the underground water faults in such fashion as to "back up" or strike hard directly under the Herrmann house.

The Seaford Poltergeist Case is a famous case of poltergeist activity which drew a lot of attention from the media at the time, as investigators tried to solve the mystery and offered various theories. The article notes how poltergeist cases are often centered around teenage children, typically girls. However, the Seaford Case is different, as the poltergeist activity in the Herrmann household is suspected by some to center around the son. One theory for poltergeist activity is that sexual energies of a pubescent individual are externalized through vibrations. Both this and the association between poltergeists and teenage children, particularly girls, were informed by sex and gender norms and beliefs at the time. Another theory suggests that poltergeists are an external manifestation of internal struggles, and another attributes the activity at the Herrmann house to the physical force of vibrations from something such as a jet plane being transmitted through water underneath the house.

“Mystery in L.I. House Deepens; Family, Experts, Police Stumped,” Milton Bracker, Special to The New York Times. March 3, 1958, Folder “Seaford Poltergeist,” Box D, Eileen J. Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Collection, Collection 331, Special Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Baltimore, MD).

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