HANS HOLZER:HANS HOLZER, who has died aged 89, was a psychic researcher with decided views and a determined manner.
He produced more than 120 books on the theme of ghosts and the afterlife including Murder in Amityville (1979), which became the basis of the film Amityville II - The Possession. For a while he hosted his own show on US television, entitled Ghost Hunter, and was a consultant on the series In Search of . . . in the late 1970s.
Holzer was born in Vienna and studied at the university there before moving to New York, just before the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. He studied archaeology and history at Columbia University, New York, and stated that he held a "PhD from London College of Applied Science", though this does not seem to be London, England.
For a time he worked in show business writing comedy sketches and produced a musical, Hotel Excelsior, before resuming studies in comparative religion and parapsychology. He became convinced of an afterlife, having visited mediums and having spent time in allegedly haunted houses, and claimed to have coined the phrase "the other side". Holzer came to the conclusion that ghosts occur "wherever a great tragedy has left an unfortunate person hung up between the spirit worlds and this world, unable to proceed due to the inability to free themselves from emotional turmoil".
Holzer always disliked the word "belief", which he regarded as the uncritical acceptance of something that cannot be proved, and the word "disbelief", which he felt was dismissive. He viewed organised religions as corporations that took people's hard-earned money and attempted to frighten them. After proving, to his own satisfaction, that Jesus Christ was born in October in the year 7BC, he never celebrated Christmas or attended church again.
He was famously involved in the aftermath of the murders of the DeFeo family in the large colonial house in the New York borough of Amityville. The mass murderer was 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, who methodically shot dead his parents, two brothers and two sisters, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The subsequent residents of the house, George and Kathleen Lutz, claimed it was haunted and, with the writer Jay Anson, produced a book, The Amityville Horror, that was followed by a successful film of the same name. Holzer subsequently investigated the site and wrote Murder in Amityville, a fictionalised treatment of the affair that became the basis of the movie's 1982 sequel. Holzer's "findings", via a medium, that the house stood on the site of a Shinnecock Indian burial ground were shown to be erroneous - there is no historical record of any burial ground thereabouts. In fact Montaukett Indians had originally inhabited Amityville.
A believer in reincarnation, Holzer claimed he could recall being present at the massacre at Glencoe, Scotland, and dedicated one of his books to the victims of Culloden, Glencoe and Flodden. He was also a lifelong vegetarian and friend of "king of the witches" Alex Sanders and other practitioners of Wiccan rituals. He sought the ghost of Lillie Langtry at a house in St John's Wood, north London, met a ghost in the Grenadier pub near London's Hyde Park, and explored haunted Edinburgh.
Holzer married Catherine Buxhoeveden, a sixth-generation descendent of Catherine the Great of Russia, and the couple had two daughters. But the marriage was eventually dissolved.
For some years Holzer led tours of Britain and these resulted in his book The Great British Ghost Hunt (1976). Three times he received grants from Eileen Garrett's Parapsychology Foundation to carry on his work. He once said: "There are thousands of houses, if not hundreds of thousands, all over the world where stay-behinds, and ghosts, and memories that won't fade, keep sharing the apartments with flesh-and-blood occupants . . ."
A keen photographer, in 1964 he obtained an image of what appeared to be ghostly monks inside Winchester Cathedral. He and his wife were alone in the church at the time, he said.
He talked of an occasion when he saw "an apparition in good light" that proved to be his dead mother. Almost as soon as he realised what he was seeing, she had disappeared, but he was sure it was not a dream. "Dreams can't cast shadows," he said. "And my mother did just that."
His daughters and grandchildren survive him.
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Hans Holzer: born January 26th 1920; died April 26th, 2009