The Ghost and Betty Hill

    The late Betty Hill will always be remembered for her part, along with her husband, Barney, in the first publicised alien abduction case in 1961. It has overshadowed her lifetime of social work, but without it, no-one would have recorded her other unusual experiences, which really deserve to be remembered.
   For a start, she had a tendency to have precognitive dreams, or scenes which would flash in front of her eyes as she was going to sleep. Once, as she was ready to fall asleep, a shadow came out in front of her, and she hit it. "Oh, my God," she thought, "a kid on a bicycle!", and for the next few days she was constantly watching for children on bicycles while she was driving. Instead, she hit a deer.
   As a teenager, she dreamt she saw her best friend, Louise killed. There was broken glass and teeth all over the road. She warned Louise to be careful. Shortly afterwards, Louise's parents decided to get her out of the house while they arranged a surprise 16th birthday party. They send her to buy a quart of milk at the local store. On the way, she was hit by a truck and killed.
    Then, as a senior, Betty was dating a boy named Freddy from another high school, and they were planning to attend each other's graduation exercises. But when she had a vivid dream of his being killed at a certain spot, she told him to stay away from it. "OK," he scoffed, "if I get killed, you go to my graduation with Rusty." Would you believe it? He was on the exact spot when a driver ran a red light, side-swiped Freddy's car, and killed him. She did go to the graduation with Rusty.
    Apparently, the power ran in the family, for her maternal grandmother was said to be able to tell the future. Betty's father was an atheist, and didn't believe in any of that rubbish, but he did take her mother to a spiritualist meeting on their second date - presumably as a lark. Her mother only went out with him because she had nothing better to do, and was most annoyed when they were told at the meeting that they would marry and have five children. But they did marry - for over fifty years - and had five children.
   You will remember from an earlier post, that the official explanation for such experiences is a combination of coincidence and selective memory. So you may wish to ask a statistician how far coincidence can be stretched before it breaks.
    Betty also frequently got involved with an entity which shared her sister's home for at least thirty years. It was never seen, but because it was not attached to any one person, but even changed houses, responded to requests, and wept, I judge it was not a poltergeist. It appears to have been that rarest of psychic entities: an independent and intelligent ghost. Most other ghosts tend to get caught up in monotonous, repetitive behaviour. The story is so detailed, perhaps it is best to quote the actual words.
  

    A good twenty years before Betty's UFO contact she recalls that her sister Janet repeatedly corrected her three children, then aged 2, 5, and 7, for mischief they denied doing. When they were older, they said that they had been punished for things they didn't do. But, at the time they could not figure out how these things were always happening. Silly things such as: who spilled the contents of the wastebasket all over the kitchen floor?
    Finally Glenn, the middle child, whom Hannah the child ghost was particularly fond of, went away  to service, and Hannah moved into his room. But, when Glenn came home, Hannah would have a fit. Night after night she would awaken him and throw his clothes across the room. If his clothes were hanging in the closet, they'd all fall off the hangers and be left in the middle of the closet with a bang, or they would tumble down just as if someone took them and swept them off the rod. Also, things would fall off the edge of the dresser. Betty saw some of these things happen herself.
    "Sometimes you could hear Hannah sobbing. She would call, 'Mommy, Mommy.' One day my sister Janet answered the door and it was the assistant scoutmaster dropping by to see her husband Donald. (Janet's brother-in-law was always active with the Scouts.) Donald wasn't home, but while the scoutmaster was talking to Janet, Hannah started sobbing and crying, 'Mommy.' The man stopped and asked, 'Is that your grandson?' Janet said, 'No' and the he said, 'You're taking care of some neighbour's child?' Janet still said, 'No'. Then he said, 'Well, where is the child crying?' And Janet said, 'Oh I never told you, but that's our spirit Hannah.' And he took off!
    "We realized something was going on, but we didn't know what. My sister went to a psychic, who said we had the ghost of a small child living in the house. He told us the story of Hannah - how she had lived with her parents somewhere in the vicinity about a hundred years ago and how there had been a fire in which both her parents burned to death. Hannah was rescued, and neighbours took her in and adopted her. The psychic said that Janet was living in Hannah's adopted parents' home. Janet said, 'No, that couldn't be,' because she and her husband built the house themselves and there was no former house there. The psychic insisted that there had been a house there, but Janet disagreed because the land had been in their family since 1840. The psychic still insisted and said that the people adopted Hannah, and that one day while she was riding horseback, when she was about 5 or 6 years old, Hannah fell off, was injured and died.
    "A few years later when Janet was digging a trench on the side of the house she found old cellar walls. That got her interested again and she checked through old records, deeds, and such, and found out that what the psychic said was true. She even discovered where Hannah was buried."
    Betty continued: "One day Hannah got so obnoxious that Janet said, 'Look, Hannah, I've had it with you. You go over to Sheila's.' Sheila, who didn't know of this, of course, was working at the kitchen sink at the time. All of a sudden the knobs on the front of the stove came off and fell on the floor, right in front of her eyes. Sheila got on the phone, dialled Janet, and said, 'Will you come over and get Hannah, or shall I bring her back?' Sheila is married to our nephew.
    "In my mother's house Hannah is always knocking on the door. To the best of my knowledge, Hannah is never in two places at the same time. For example, when she was cutting up with me, there was no monkey business at my sisters'. Once when Janet and I went to Ohio to visit my niece, we wondered what Hannah was going to do. About two days after we got to Ohio Janet was sitting on the bed, when all of a sudden, she felt Hannah grab her hand and she said, 'Hannah is here!' We'd say, 'Come on, Hannah,' and when we were leaving my niece said, 'I hate to see you leave, but be sure to take Hannah with you.'
    "My niece's [now ex-husband] was getting a Ph.D., in psychology at the University of Cincinnati. Of course, anyone getting a Ph.D. in psychology knows there are no such things as ghosts. When they came to New Hampshire one summer for a couple of weeks, Tom (the husband) slept in Glenn's room, which Hannah objected to. At five in the morning Hannah would wake him up. We found Tom sitting in the front yard, and he wouldn't go back to the house. He said that Hannah kept him awake all night by rattling things in the closet and that he also heard a child crying. It suddenly dawned on him that it wasn't the grandson Danny, but, 'Oh, my God, it's Hannah. I'm not sleeping in any house with any ghosts.'
    "Once, when Barney was alive, I gave Janet a rest by offering to take Hannah back to Portsmouth with me for two days. It was eerie. Hannah would walk in the room, cough, and you'd see the rocking chair rock but nobody was in it. This episode happened after the sighting.
    "The rocking chair business also happened at Janet's, mother's, and Sheila's house. Once, the first day of school, when the children left the house, and when Hannah was presumably with Janet, the mothers of the neighbourhood got together at Janet's for coffee. They were sitting around the table when all of a sudden the storm door opened out, the house door opened in, the cat walked in, and the doors shut. Everyone just sat and looked without saying a word.  Nobody mentioned it to Janet until two weeks later. They couldn't figure it out. Finally, somebody said, 'that was the strangest thing.' Janet said, 'Relax it happens all the time.'"
    "The latest happening was on the 28th wedding anniversary of Janet and her husband. Since they were separating, Janet had to go out and get a job. Janet had been on the new job two days when all of a sudden the file racks were moving by themselves. Everybody (in the office) was saying, 'What's going on? Look at those racks, they never moved before.' When Janet got home that night, she said to Hannah: 'Let me tell you, you stay home, or you can go to Grandmother's, or Sheila's, but you're not going to where I work.' But since some things have happened when Janet has been working, she has to keep reminding Hannah. In the meantime, Janet's husband moved out. I guess Hannah was too much for him. He refused to admit Hannah's existence for a long time, and would say, 'Don't talk about your imaginations and all.' One night Hannah really did a job on Janet's husband Donald. His big feather pillow somehow got all torn apart, and when Donald went upstairs, he found the whole room strewn with feathers. Donald yelled, 'I'm going to get an exorcist! I'll get rid of you, you dirty (rascal).' Then the venetian blinds started shaking.
    "Plants tip over, doors rattle, they open and shut."
    Recently (letter of March 28, 1976) Betty wrote, "My sister was with a psychic development teacher who taped the session ... It is a most unusual tale, which includes a child's voice calling 'Mommy,' several times. This happened when they were talking about Hannah. Also during the taping the batteries (new ones) failed to function and difficulties still developed when it was plugged into the electrical outlet. The tape might be defective although a new one, but this would not explain the batteries. My sister told me that she always has trouble with batteries if she was upset or tense."

    It must have been really interesting living in that household. I wonder if Hannah is still there and, if so, whether the current occupants are so tolerant.

Reference: 'Talks with Betty Hill: 2 - The Things That Happened Around Her' by Berthold Eric Schwarz M. D. : Flying Saucer Review 23 (3) [Oct. 1977], pp 11 - 14, 31 (Note that back issues can be obtained from their website, with separate windows for UK and non-UK residents.)