THEY'VE BEEN WAITING
by Robert C. Alsheimer in Fate magazine
I left downtown Los Angeles, heading south topward the port city of Long Beach, a place seemingly as modern as one can get. But I was about to step back more than 100 years in time. I was going to visit the haunted Civil War museum. What would an 1861 barracks look like now, restored and functioning as a museum in the midst of L.A.'s urban sprawl? I pictured a quaint wood building nestled within verdant park grounds.
I was shocked when my directions took me to a densely populated residential street. In the middle of the block lay my destination. The Drum Barracks, named after Adjutant General Richard Coutler Drum, is so tightly flanked by modest homes that the only claim to prominence this historic site possesses is a double lot, which occupies the full width of the block, allowing the front entrance to be on one street and the rear entrance on another. Modest as it is, its presence dominates the area. Any trace of the twentieth century stops at its gates. The building is a two-story, white clapboard structure. Window shutters are the only relief from the simplicity of its design. Single story wings extend from either side, forming a charming intimate courtyard, with a brilliant pink flowering tree gracing the center. A rooster cackles from a nearby backyard adding a final touch that helps the visitor shift centuries.
The barracks appears small from outside, so I was surprised by its vast interior. But this was only a perceptual illusion. Other surprises were not as easily explained. Entering the courtyard, I thought about the ghosts said to reside here. I knew that Unsolved Mysteries felt confident enough about the authenticity of the hauntings to film a TV segment here.
I wondered if I would only be reporting what other people told me, or if I would have experiences myself. Marge O'Brien, the director/curator of Drum Barracks, greeted me at the door. Her effervescent personality sparkled throughout our two hours together, and her historical knowledge was disarming. Her ability to bring dry facts and dates brilliantly alive with anecdotes about life at the museum a century ago reminded me of a favorite history teacher.
As O'Brien explained, Californians had ambivalent feelings about the Civil War. The state had just become part of the Union and had far more immediate concerns regarding Mexico, not to mention the split affinities of its populace between North and South. O'Brien drew me into a world of very understandable concerns. As I glanced up at the 14-foot-high ceiling, she told me that this last remaining structure was once an imposing fort of 19 buildings centered on 60 acres of land, built to garrison troops of mostly European enlistees arriving from the Gold Country of northern California. I could almost hear horses outside in the courtyard.
As our tour began, O'Brien explained that when she arrived in 1986, her designated position was part-time caretaker. Back then the building was dilapidated and all of the rooms were bare. Most of the south wing that we walked through had been sealed off. With a worker's help, she tore out the wall and transformed the wing's abandoned rooms into comfortable institution offices. We continued down the hall to the front of the museum.
O'Brien opened the parlor door, announcing, "This is where most of the activity happens." I scanned the dim room. Shades on all of the 10-foot-tall windows were drawn. A deck of old-fashioned playing cards was arranged upon a beautiful inlaid wood table before two chairs, as if a couple were playing. When I entered the room a chill went down my spine. This had nothing to do with psychic premonition; the room was as cold as a refrigerator. "Feel the difference in temperature?" O'Brien asked, right on cue. "It's like this in here all the time." It was a cloudless California day, and the temperature was near 80 degrees. It was midday and the southwest room had been getting full sun all morning. Even with pulled shades, it should have been one of the warmest rooms in the house. Yet the chill persisted.
"They've moved the cards again," O'Brien said. "The deck was by the other chair this morning." Okay, I thought, there was no way to prove or disprove that. But the unaccountable cold was real and impossible to ignore. I noticed a bricked-up fireplace and recalled the article I had read about Barbara Connor, the gifted psychic who had come here in 1991 and contacted many of the resident ghosts. Working with O'Brien's historical reference files, Connor and O'Brien were able to identify most of the spirits.
I hadn't met Connor yet, but during a phone interview the following day, she filled me in on her experience in the parlor. She had seen the spirit of a Union officer sitting in one of the four parlor chairs closest to the fireplace. It was one of the most amazing experiences of her psychic career, she said, first because the Colonel's image was so distinct, with no haze or mist about it and without transparency. Additionally, he spoke to her; not through thought form — the way she usually experienced spirit communication — but with his actual voice. He asked that his chair be moved closer to the hearth.
Even though the fireplace had been sealed in 1971, Connor could see it fully open. Only a weak fire was burning in her vision. The officer was trying to warm his extended left leg, which was too far away from the scant flames.
Connor's vision astonished O'Brien. The latest research had just disclosed that one of the commanding officers of Drum Barracks, Colonel James Curtis, had suffered severe frostbite during a winter Indian campaign in Washington. He would often sit here in the parlor, warming his aching leg by the fire. And it was his left leg, just as Connor had seen.
I noticed a portrait above the mantle. "I commissioned it to be painted from an old photograph of the Colonel that I found," O'Brien explained. "I wanted him to feel at home here." "Colonel Curtis didn't die at Drum Barracks," Connor later informed me as we spoke on the phone. "He returned after death because he loved this place and spent many of the happiest years of his life here."
Connor also related her encounter with the woman on the stairs, "She, too, appeared quite clearly, wearing a long hoop-skirted dress. She communicated in thought form, identifying herself as Marie, an Earthbound spirit who was free to come and go as she chose, but who was very attached to the house. 'You would have to burn it to the ground before I would leave," she informed Connor. The spirit then clutched her side and began to moan. When Connor told O'Brien this, she realized the spirit had to be Colonel Curtis's wife, Marie, who had lived at the fort and had died years later of acute appendicitis.
Although O'Brien, a self-professed skeptic, had never seen a ghost herself, she could not discount the encounters she'd had there over the past nine years. Early one morning, while she was working in one of the offices, footsteps approached from the hall and stopped behind her. Assuming it was her assistant, she said, "You're early today, Todd." When there was no response, she turned around to discover that no one was there. But she still felt a presence in the room. O'Brien had also sensed the spirit on the staircase many times. The feeling of a woman, whose name began with the letter "M," was so pervasive that she started calling the invisible spirit Mary - years before Connor identified her as Marie.
O'Brien gave me the 14-page account of spirit activities recorded by Vincent Manchester, who was the volunteer caretaker of Drum Barracks from 1967 to 1975, during the time the building remained empty and neglected. "I saw a shadow move on the upper part of the stairs,” reported Manchester. "I could see a triangle shape, like a girl in a long full skirt. She, or it, stood there long enough for me to realize there was actually something there. I turned my flashlight on the stairs... and it disappeared." O'Brien added, "I may be the director here, but she is definitely the lady of the house."
She also told me that as far back as 1927, neighbors had reported seeing strange shapes in the second floor windows. O'Brien herself had often witnessed window shades mysteriously rise before her eyes; not flapping up with a snap, but slowly rising, as if guided by an unseen hand. "They seem to enjoy basking in the sun - or at least having the rooms bright and cheery," O'Brien said.
Connor confirmed this. "I saw a number of unidentified soldiers in the parlor. A few of them were standing at the windows looking out. I didn't pick up any feelings of expectation from their behavior, just that the windows must have commanded a magnificent view back then, and that they found it very peaceful and relaxing to stand there, gazing out."
During her 1991 tour of Drum Barracks, Connor had also identified the source of some recurring ghostly thuds. Upstairs, she came upon the spirit of a young boy bouncing a leather ball in the hallway. He was shy. When Connor asked him to stop bouncing his ball, he did, and the thudding stopped. The request still works. Whenever the recurring noise becomes a distraction, O'Brien goes to the stairs and calls out to him to stop. "It always works," she said. Although O'Brien was unable to find any reference to a young boy at the fort, Connor had a strong impression that he was discovered by soldiers on maneuvers. The boy had been recently orphaned, she felt, and the soldiers brought him to the fort, where he stayed until he could be more properly placed. During that time the boy had bonded with a few of the soldiers who were like adopted fathers or big brothers to him. This boy's spirit, too, had returned because he had been very happy here while alive.
I hadn't heard any thuds that afternoon. But when O'Brien and I entered the upstairs artillery room, displaying every brand of rifle made during the Civil War as well as an authentic Gatling gun, we were surprised to discover the shades on all five windows in disarray. Most were raised at various lengths: One had been pulled well below the sill and another was missing completely from the 12-foot-high roller. "I checked in here this morning and all the shades were evenly pulled," O'Brien exclaimed. I wondered if this hadn't been pre-arranged, but I couldn't believe such a conscientious curator would actually rip down a shade just for my benefit. We searched the room. The missing shade was nowhere to be found. "Things like this have happened before," O'Brien said.
"They always turn up in a few days?" A week later I asked O'Brien about the missing shade over the phone. Not only did it show up the following day, she told me, it was reattached to the roller and functioning perfectly. She said with a jolly laugh, "We've all become used to things like this around here by now."
In another room, I was shown a model of the fort as it stood in 1861. I was surprised that of the 19 original buildings, only this one remained. O'Brien told me the story of its preservation. After the Civil War, a number of barracks were lost to fire. Then the site became Wilson College. In the early 1900s it was turned into a high school. In 1910 the area became part of Los Angeles County, and Drum Barracks was purchased successively by two different families, who kept it from demolition, a fate that befell all the other fort buildings except for a now-dilapidated powder shed.
Ironically, when the Long Beach earthquake struck in 1932 many nearby buildings were damaged, but not even a window was broken in Drum Barracks. It stood empty and neglected, with only the old caretaker looking after it through the 1960s and 1970s until O'Brien and I arrived in 1986.
When my tour was complete, we continued speaking in O'Brien's office. I asked if we could return to the parlor to see if anything had been moved. O'Brien obliged me, stating, "Don't expect anything. They're reluctant to perform for visitors." She opened the parlor door. As we stepped in, we were accosted by a sudden, overwhelming noxious odor of musty mildew. Within minutes it was completely gone. Yet the open door led only to an inside hall where every other door and window was closed. Real mildew odor doesn't evaporate - it lingers and permeates.
That night at home, while reading psychic Barbara Connor's notes, I realized that she had encountered the same odor in another room, only she had identified it more accurately as the scent of unwashed uniforms.
Mysterious odors are not uncommon at Drum Barracks. Connor had also smelled melting wax in the parlor and lilacs in the bedroom. O'Brien has often encountered an inexplicable lilac scent, which, Connor explained to her, was Marie's favorite cologne, worn often while she was alive.
I wondered why these spirits were at Drum Barracks. Connor detected that they loved the place and that they were there to prove there was existence after death. I couldn't shake the feeling that their presence resulted from a more pressing need. I considered the notably short time period of a year and a half, the time between O'Brien's arrival as part-time caretaker in 1986 and the date in 1987 when she had acquired enough period furniture through donations allowed her to enable the once abandoned building to qualify as a museum. Unrelenting dedication had resulted in gaining Drum Barracks certification as both a National Historical Site and a National Museum. Could these spirits have been waiting all this time for O'Brien's arrival?
Each of them loved the place so much they remained for a century. Wouldn't their burning desire be to have the place restored to its former beauty?
Connor agreed. "They're helping Marge in every conceivable way, literally drawing the correct things and people to her." When I mentioned this to O'Brien over the phone, she gasped. "You're so right! Not that it isn't a lot of hard, tedious work, but things do seem to arrive here miraculously. Difficult doors to government and corporations always opened with ease and with remarkable success. I'm so glad you've seen this!"
A week later, I was back in the museum office meeting Barbara Connor for the first time. Connor hadn't been to the museum since 1991, and she graciously accepted my invitation for a final tour. The results were sublime. In the parlor Connor encountered the familiar presence of Colonel Curtis sitting near the fire. "He's content now that his chair is by the fireplace." She mentioned that a small group of soldiers was also there; some at the card table, others standing contentedly by the window. She focused her attention on the sofa. "There's someone asleep on it," she said. A moment later she gasped. "One of the soldiers just said to me, 'Don't worry about him. He's dead." "We all laughed simultaneously. Living spirits commenting on the dead? Dead spirits? This opened a whole new level no one had considered before. Suddenly we all caught the scent of cinnamon. As we commented on this, it vanished.
At the end of the tour, Connor commented, "They're far more content now, especially Marie." She turned to O'Brien. "She trusts you now. She's very happy about the ongoing restoration in all of the rooms."
