Clasping hands, they listened to the child’s voice…

By John Macklin

“You were very unhappy when you first came to this house. There were even times when you thought about killing yourself but things got better after you got another job. You never told anyone about this but I know it…”

The voice echoed around the dimly-lit room, unreal and strangely shrill. Dr Alan Arcron leaned forward in his chair, his face taut with shock and disbelief. Was he listening to the voice of a dead child? Or was he the victim of some skilled and heartless hoax?

It was the summer of 1969 and Dr Arcron, an associate professor of English literature at a New York university, was attending a séance conducted by a leading medium, Mrs Mary Sorenson, in an attempt to discover whether he had a ghost in his house.
For the past year, Dr Arcron had been forced to the conclusion that some inhuman being shared his 80-year-old house in New York’s Manhattan Heights. Now, it seemed, his worst fears had been confirmed.

It was claimed that at the séance the voice of a long-dead child revealed details of Dr Arcron’s life which were known only to him. As he said later: “There is no way that anyone researching my past life could have unearthed some of the things I was told. It was absolutely uncanny.”

It was soon after he moved into the house in 1964 that he realised “that I was not alone. Only days later, I was woken by the sound of a child crying although there was nothing to be seen.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own Summer Special