BILL BEATTY’S HAUNTED MANSION

Is a man who died before completing his dream house now haunting the residence?

Some say that Bill’s ghost haunts the castle

The haunted mansion

CASE DETAILS

Bill Beatty

In 1923, a wealthy executive named Bill Beaty, and his wife, started building a seventeenth century style Norman castle on 150 acres of woodland in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.  In 1930, before construction was complete, the Beatys moved into the castle with their four children. But Bill would never see the completion of his dream. Just one year later, he died of the flu at the age of 45. His castle wasn’t finished for another five years. 

Sarah Beaty never remarried. She raised all four children in the castle, and lived there until 1941. After that, the castle served as a boy’s school for several decades. In 1972, Don Burlingame and his wife, Carol, bought the estate and began to re-model:

“Carol was really the first one to feel some sort of presence, and she had a friend that was sort of amateur parapsychologist, and she said, ‘There definitely is a presence here.’ And Carol said, ‘Well, maybe we should try to get rid of him.  Shouldn’t we have a séance?’ And she said, ‘No, you better leave things exactly the way they are.  He’s friendly, he’s happy, let it go at that.’”

Residents claimed they heard strange noises

After Don and Carol moved in, hammering noises echoed through the hallways and footsteps were heard going up and down the stairs. Don and Carol started to accept that they shared their home with the ghost of Bill Beaty. On one occasion, Bill demonstrated just how much he really cared about the castle. According Carol, she and Don planned to go out for a drive:

“Don said, ‘You better close all the windows, it’s supposed to rain.”  I said, ‘No, it’s not gonna rain, don’t worry about it, I’m leaving them all open.’ So I left them open. We went out, and it rained. We came home, and all of the casement windows, which opened from the inside, and opened to the inside, were all closed and latched. There wasn’t a drop of rain in the house.”

Bill Beaty’s ghost also seemed to have a sense of humor. Carol said he liked to play around with the TV signal:

“You’d just get into a movie, just the really interesting part, and all of a sudden the station would change. It would go from two, to three, to four to five, and it happened more than one time. I knew that there was a presence here. What I couldn’t figure out was, when was he going to leave?  If in fact, was he ever going to leave?  It was something I couldn’t figure out.”

The Burlingames began to look into the history of the castle. That’s how they found Eugene Melville, who used to work there: 

“I had told them what I’d seen there, and they said they’ve sensed something themselves.  But they never saw him. I have only seen him that once. I can truthfully say that was the only time I have ever laid eyes on him, was that once.” 

In 1934, three years after Bill Beaty’s death, Eugene was helping Sarah search for a bracelet she had lost when the figure of a man briefly materialized on the balcony. Sarah cried out that it was Bill:

“It was a figure of a man standing there. It didn’t stay long for me to examine it very good. It was gone just like that. It was scary. It frightened the daylights out of  me. I just never wanted to go on that balcony again. I passed by it, but to get me in there, to stand there, oh, forget it. I wouldn’t go in there.” 

According to Carol, Bill had something of a throwing arm:

“I was alone in the kitchen. The bread was on the counter and there was no way that it could have fallen off by itself. And when it did fall off, or fly off, it went a considerable distance.  So I know that someone had to have moved it. There was no one else there with me at all.  No animals, Don wasn’t around, there was no way the bread could have fallen off the counter, because it was set square. And that led me to believe that Bill had to be there, saying, ‘Hi, I’m here.’ There was just no way that that bread could have fallen off the counter by itself.”

Don and Carol invited Dr. Michaeleen Maher, a noted parapsychologist, to visit the castle. Mayer and her assistant conducted a series of tests for paranormal activity:

“Our physical instruments were not able to detect anything unusual, but in this particular case, the sheer volume of the reports adds to the credibility of the case. One of our witnesses in this case, a particularly credible witness, in fact, a professional person of some stature, reported seeing in the driveway, in front of the castle, a person who dissipated right in front of his eyes. I think the big news here is that humans can act as sensors and we find that we cannot dismiss this evidence as caused by coincidence.” 

Carol has concluded that the key to living with ghosts is acceptance:

“If you can accept it, you can enjoy it, and when things happen you just write them off as ‘Oh, it must be the ghost,’ or ‘It must be Bill,’ if you happen to know who it is.”

Eugene Melville doesn’t think Bill Beaty’s going anywhere anytime soon:

“I firmly believe he will never leave the castle. The love of the thing maybe got the better of his soul. And I think that’s the thing that has such power, it’s the soul. It’s eternal.”

Bermuda Triangle... the shape of mystry

I have read about Bermuda Triangle since my childhood, and every time I am thrilled by the facts and myths.

Fifty years after five navy bombers mysteriously vanish in the Bermuda Triangle, a researcher finds a sunken aircraft he believes is one of the missing planes.





The Bermuda Triangle






CASE DETAILS



The submarine’s mechanical arm

Five navy Avenger torpedo bombers take off on a routine training mission known as Flight 19. There are fourteen men on board. Five hours later, the entire squadron has vanished without a trace, and a modern legend of the supernatural is born.

It has been called “The Triangle of Death,” “The Hoodoo Sea” or “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.” But to most of us, the area where the five planes disappeared is known as “The Bermuda Triangle.” The area extends from the south of Florida, northeast to Bermuda, and southeast to Puerto Rico. Some researchers claim that since the early 1900s, over 100 ships and planes have disappeared in this region. But the Triangle’s most famous victims were the five Avengers of Flight 19.

Some say that Flight 19 was swallowed up by supernatural forces. But after years of research, a former helicopter pilot named Jon Myhre has a more scientific theory. Jon carefully studied the squadron’s flight plan, radio transmissions, and the weather on the day of the disappearance:

“When I read this story, and I read the transcripts of the radio conversations, it triggered a response in me, and I said, ‘If this is true, and this is true, then I think I can find one of the airplanes.”



A crane lifted the coral-encrusted fuselage

The story of The Lost Squadron began at the Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was the afternoon of December 5th, 1945. Lt. Charles Taylor was assigned to command Flight 19. He was known as a cool, capable pilot, with over twenty-five hundred hours as a naval aviator.

The crew of Flight 19 was briefed on the routine training exercise. Just before takeoff, Lt. Taylor made a strange request: he wanted to be removed from the flight. He said he wasn’t feeling up to it. But Taylor was the only instructor on base that afternoon, so he had to fly. The five planes lifted off and headed out over the Atlantic.

Their plan was to fly 123 nautical miles southeast, practice a bomb run, push 73 miles northwest, and head 120 miles back to Fort Lauderdale. Dianne Lawes is a Flight 19 researcher:

“Flight 19 consisted of four student pilots who were qualified naval aviators. They each had more hours in the air than the FAA requires now for commercial license. They had gone through all of their training, except for this one flight.”

Jon Myhre points out that Lt. Taylor was not leading the squadron:

“The flight was not following Charles Taylor. He was the instructor pilot who was trailing behind the rest of the flight. He was grading their performance. He wasn’t doing the navigating. The other pilots in the flight were doing their own navigation.”



Was this Avenger from Flight 19?

The men successfully completed the practice bomb run. But on the second leg of the flight, Taylor’s compass began to malfunction. He asked another airman what his compass reading was. The airman reported 330 degrees. Myhre believes the crewman’s compass reading was correct. But Lt. Taylor remained convinced they were lost. When he looked down and saw a string of small islands, Taylor assumed they must be over the Florida Keys. But Taylor had made a critical mistake. Flight 19 was not in the Gulf of Mexico. Myhre believes that the squadron was actually flying over the Abaco Islands in the West Atlantic, 300 miles northeast of where Taylor thought he was. From the air, the two island chains look very similar.

Taylor ordered the planes to fly northeast, then due east. If they had been over the Keys, this route would have taken them safely home. Instead, it took them further out to sea.
By 5:00 PM, the sun was setting and the weather was getting worse. Flight 19 was headed east, away from their base, when they began losing radio contact. The base heard one of the last pilot-to-pilot communications: “If we just headed west, we’d get home. Dammit, if we’d just head west, we’d get home.”

Fuel was low and time was running out. According to Myhre, Taylor finally listened to his crewmen and headed west towards the Florida coast:

“So he flew due west for 49 minutes, until the first airplane crashed.”

Myhre thinks the remaining four pilots then made another fatal mistake. They were only seven minutes away from the Florida coast, but they still had not spotted land. They began to think they perhaps they were flying over the Gulf of Mexico. So they once again reversed their course and headed east. This took them back out to sea, where they disappeared. The fate of Flight 19 was sealed.

For the next five days, the Navy conducted a massive search. No trace of the planes or the fourteen missing men, was ever found. However, Myhre believes that some of the men of Flight 19 were alive, drifting at sea:

“Two ships sighted flares within five hours of each other. And everybody in the investigation said ‘Nah, those flares that were spotted were search aircraft.’ Well, I went back to the investigation and found out when the search aircraft took off and where they went. And the search aircraft weren’t where those flares were sighted by those steamers. I think those were people from Flight 19.”

Myhre believes the first plane crashed just thirty miles off the Florida coast, near Cape Canaveral. But finding a single Avenger in the ocean was an overwhelming task, until a national tragedy struck.

In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded after liftoff from Cape Kennedy. Some of the debris fell in the exact location where Myhre believes the first plane crashed. The Challenger salvage team reported a wrecked plane submerged in 400 feet of water. Jon Myhre believed the discovery supported his theory. Several years later, he was able to see for himself. Myhre went down in a submarine to inspect the wreckage:

“We knew we had a wreck, but we didn’t know what type of airplane it was. And to say I was on the edge of my seat, along with my colleagues, would be an understatement.”

As they came near the wreck, they could see nothing in the murky water. Then, the wing of a plane became visible. But was it the right plane? One distinctive feature of the Avenger is its bomb bay, located under the fuselage. The submerged plane was upside down, and the bomb bay cavity was clearly visible.

Another recognizable feature of the Avenger is its wheel well, on the underside of the wing. And the Avenger’s most unusual feature is the ball turret, which protected the gunner behind the pilot. Both these features were visible to Meyer. It was clear that Myhre had found an Avenger. But was it one from the lost Flight 19?

Using the submarine’s mechanical arm, Myhre removed the engine cowling. He was hoping to find a serial number that would confirm that this Avenger belonged to Flight 19. But after examining the cowling, Myhre was unable to find any serial numbers:

“The only way to prove whether this is indeed a Flight 19 aircraft is going to be to raise that sucker out of the water. I and my partners believe that we’re correct, but it’ll remain a mystery until we can raise the airplane.”

Lifting a plane from the floor of the ocean is no easy task. But Jon Myhre’s solid research had attracted supporters. With new partners Larry Schwartz and Dianna Lawes, Myhre began a massive recovery operation known as Project 19.

Previous dives had revealed that the engine and propeller had separated from the main body. They made plans to bring the plane up in two sections: first, the engine and propeller assembly, then the main body. Jon believed the engine alone would confirm his find:

“There was a Navy bureau number on the engine, and there was also a manufacturer’s stamp number in the engine block. So if we raise that engine, we should be able to get a positive ID from that. Now, as to how much corrosion has occurred, that’s difficult to say.”

As the recovery project began, the submarine’s robotic arm wrapped nylon straps around the propeller and engine housing. Four hundred feet above, a 50-ton crane began raising the wreckage. Slowly, the propeller and engine assembly was lifted on board. But the condition of the wreckage made the immediate identification of the plane impossible.

The next step was the recovery of the wing and fuselage. The submarine’s crew attached a cable to a harness that held the sunken plane. The crane began to slowly lift the plane 400 feet to the surface. But the coral-encrusted Avenger weighed about three times more than expected. The harness and cable strained under the weight. As night fell, the crane’s steel cable suddenly went slack. It had snapped in two, sending the Avenger back to the bottom.

At dawn, the crew was ready to try again. The submersible was launched to relocate the wreckage. Tim Askew was Project 19’s operation’s director:

“It’s still sitting in the same position that it was before, which is upside down. All the rigging is still on it, so all we have to do is get down there and hook onto it and it’s gonna come up.”

But this time, as the plane came up, there was another problem. The wings were buckling. Divers immediately went down to reinforce the wings. If they failed, according to Project 19 Administrator Larry Schwartz, the wings would tear off and the plane would sink again to the ocean floor:

“The heave of the boat was causing the wings to flap up and down about two feet. We don’t want to stress it. So we put straps around the outer portions of those wings, brought them up tight to give them a little extra support.”

The Avenger torpedo bomber resumed its ascent. Finally, the plane broke the surface.
For Jon Myhre, the successful recovery of the Avenger marked the end of a nine-year quest for the truth:

“You know, it’s strange. You think you’d be elated, and everybody’s screaming and jumping up and down. For me, it’s there, but it’s subdued. It’s tempered by knowing some good people died a long time ago, and we’re not gonna forget them.”

The wreckage of the Avenger was taken to Marine Land, near St. Augustine, Florida. There, members of Project 19 recorded the numbers from parts of the recovered aircraft.
Several of these numbers partially matched those of one of the lost Avengers from Flight 19. But, unfortunately, Myhre and his team were unable to positively identify the recovered aircraft. Perhaps someday, the other planes that were lost that fateful day will be found and the mystery of Flight 19 will finally be solved....

SC Bose: A master of disguise...

It's amazing how Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose continues to be in news 60 years after his disputed death. In a way, this has been in defiance of successive Indian governments who would rather want the people to sideline him as they have. A recent BBC online poll named Bose the third most popular leader in South Asia after Jinnha and Gandhi. Strikingly, as per the same poll, the stalwarts like Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and the inimitable Atal Bihari Vajpayee don't even blip on the radar anymore.

The PMO tells Chandrachur that "this Office has no records pertaining to the receipt of ashes of Netaji in India by the then Prime Minister and Minister of External Affairs. Such records may be available with Ministry of Home Affairs, which is the nodal Ministry in respect of the subject under consideration". The MHA responded that "as the entire incident took place in the Ministry of External Affairs, you may take up the matter with that Ministry". The MHA responded that "as the entire incident took place in the Ministry of External Affairs, you may take up the matter with that Ministry".

Psst ...Top Secret! Let this impression be trashed at the outset that the Netaji mystery belongs to a different era. No doubt it started in 1945; but it has been simmering till date. The controversy is a bombshell and that's what the official records hint at. Netaji is supposed to have died at the end of Second World War, and yet the Indian Government continues to sit on files about him. And they are wary of approaching the British and Russian Governments to release the papers they are keeping to themselves.

But why so much of precaution over some details about man who ceased to be a problem to his adversaries in and outside India decades back? This is for you Gen-X dudes: Some of the classified Netaji files maintained by the Government of India are of mid-1990s vintage! That is, post-Rajiv Gandhi period. Perish the idea ... "Oh, such an old story, what is the fuss now!" The Government of India wouldn't agree. They think there is something about Netaji that can spell big time trouble even now. That's why they refused to hand over several Top Secret files to the Mukherjee Commission and later to Mission Netaji. Why would they be doing so? Well, in the case of two Narasimha Rao period files, they reasoned that the "disclosure of the nature and contents of these documents would ... hurt the sentiments of the people at large and may evoke wide-spread reactions .... Diplomatic relations with friendly countries may also be adversely affected if the said documents are disclosed."

To Mission Netaji, the Ministry of Home Affairs said that the documents are so sensitive, their public disclosure may lead to a serious law and order problem in the country.

Should not we demand to know what these documents have to say? How on earth some bits about a dead man affect India's relations with other countries, or sparking unrest within the country? Should not we ask our Government to state facts? Don't we have a right to know what happened to the man who liberated us?

Pre-conceived notions It's cynicism exemplified when people say, "How long we can go on inquiring?" If Americans, for instance, were to be besotted with same defeatist thinking, they would not have become the great power they are. Indeed they don't give up. How can one leave out in cold those who fight for one's country? Last year only the US Government asked the Indian Government to help them trace out their missing WWII airmen. Netaji went missing while waging war for freedom for us and we don't want to know what happened to him. What is it if not brazen ungratefulness?

Those who dismissively say that "there have been commissions after commissions" have no idea whatsoever what sort of frauds were played on the nation by the previous "commissions". In 1956, Shah Nawaz Khan, a Congress MP and a secretary to then Railway Minister, headed a committee - a puppet on a string, actually. There are reasons to believe that he did what he was told by Nehru government. After his "command performance" Shah Nawaz was made a minister. GD Khosla, who headed a commission in early 1970s, was a friend of Nehru's to start with. He wrote the biography of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi even as he inquired into Netaji's disappearance. Can you imagine such things happening now? Both these panels declared that Netaji had died in a plane crash in Taiwan. Never mind that they did not bother to know what the Taiwan Government thought much as people wanted them to.

"But the issue is dead!" Ok, for argument's sake, if that was the case a few years ago, it is ALIVE NOW. A Commission of Inquiry headed by a former judge of the Supreme Court of India handed over his report to the Government of India, stating clearly that Netaji did not die in the so-called plane crash. The Government rejected it in one sentence, and killed the debate in the Parliament to prevent its ramifications.

Perplexing past
Funny how people jump to conclusions. "My grandfather was in the INA and he said Netaji died and therefore I believe so." This is how some give their verdict on the issue the nation is debating for 6 decades. If only it were that easy. There were over 50,000 people aligned with the Provisional Government of Free India and only a handful knew what happened to Netaji in his last known days. The rest were in as much dark as the Indians back home. They all heard stories ... Netaji died or Netaji escaped. The truth, or inkling of it, came out after interrogations and inquiries, whose reports are not in public domain.

On August 25, 1945 the Indian newspapers broke the news that Netaji had died in a freak plane crash in Taipei (then Taihoku) on August 18th. He had been flying to Tokyo to work out the INA's surrender when this happened. The British would believe none of it. Viceroy Wavell noted in his diary on 23 August that "I wonder if the Japanese announcement of Subhas Chandra Bose's death in a air-crash is true. I suspect it very much, it is just what should be given out if he meant to go underground..." They dispatched their crack intelligence teams to South East Asia. The findings were bewildering. Netaji was not heading to Tokyo. Months before the world war staggered to a halt, he had begun planning a new chapter of his war on colonialism. He saw the Cold War coming and reached out to the USSR. The British intelligence got clear information that Subhas was going to Russia at the time of his death. The Japanese had given out a false story about his destination. The survivors of the crash were rounded up and records were captured. The pictured that emerged was of deceit. Eyewitnesses were found to be lying and records appeared as if they had been planted.

Americans chipped in with help. In fact it were they who had the best knowledge. They reached Taiwan in September 1945 and guess what they found. " ... there is no direct evidence that Subhas Chandra Bose was killed in a airplane crash … despite the public statements of the Japanese to that effect." This, stated the State Department, ten months after Netaji's "death". What really happened? "The D.I.B. during his recent visit to London mentioned the receipt ... of information to the effect that Subhas Bose was alive in Russia." This is from a May 1946 report and D.I.B. means, the Director of Intelligence Bureau Sir Norman Smith.

The Government of free India knew about the Soviet connection to the Netaji mystery. But all they did was to dilly-dally and state that no inquiry was required. It took ten years of pressure before Prime Minister Nehru agreed to inquire into the matter. This must be hammered: the Government never wanted to probe Netaji's fate. From Shah Nawaz to Manoj Mukherjee, each time they were forced to. Isn't it revolting?

Present perfect
Thank God for Mukherjee Commission! Or shall we thank Mikhail Gorbahev? The fall of the USSR brought the Netaji issue out. In mid-1990s the Russians themselves began saying that Subhas was with them after his death. The matter reached India and the press did rake it up. But Narasimha Rao, with Pranab Mukherjee in tow, would not say a thing. A patriotic fellow moved to Calcutta High Court and the court found the matter to be wide open for inquiry. The Government was chided and told to form a commission of inquiry to find out where and how Netaji had died. Mercifully, at the time the verdict came, the NDA was in power.

The inquiry of the Mukherjee Commission has been pathbreaking. The commission found out, among others, that the Government of India, at the PMO level, indulged in systematic, unlawful destruction of evidence concerning the Netaji death case. The Government did not want any inquiry in Taiwan, which is precisely what Justice Mukherjee did. The result: the Republic of China Government ruled out the very occurrence of the crash that we had been told over decades had killed Netaji.

Indian Government also did not want any inquiry in Russia; but after much pulls and pressures, the Mukherjee Commission visited Russia. However, that wasn't a good enough development. The Government's didn't do anything to help the Commission access security and intelligence related classified papers in Russia, said to be containing definite information about Netaji's "post-death" life. Time has come for us, the people of India, to demand from our Government something that they should have done decades back: For God's sake, request the Head of the Russian Government to state facts. The people of India must know what happened to their liberator.