William Raymond Manchester, one of America’s most popular and successful historians, authored several bestsellers, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a President (1967); American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur (1978); the acclaimed memoir Goodbye Darkness (1980); and his landmark two-volume Churchill biography, The Last Lion (1983-’88). He passed away on June 1, 2004.
Back in November, the residents of a home in Middletown, Connecticut reported odd goings-on, such as items disappearing and the feeling that they being watched. We investigated the residence one weekend, and discovered a number of displaced spirits there. In the last room we checked, we came upon a ghost who liked to be called “Alfred Hitchcock.” He told Crystal that he wanted to find a small metal box, which he believed was buried in the backyard.
We asked him our usual list of base questions while recording the EVP session. Of course, his priority was finding his box. As we progressed through our list, we received some routine-sounding answers that we believed could be subject to easy verification.
The identity of this spirit turned out to be anything but routine.
That evening, I started to research just who this spirit could be, based on the answers that Crystal channeled during the EVP session. The first clue I researched was from this Q&A
What did you do for a living? Professor – College – Ivy League
My initial search came up with the name William Manchester, who had been a local professor at Wesleyan University right there in Middletown. But I quickly dismissed this possibility – I just didn’t think it was him, and it seemed too easy. I kept looking for someone named Alfred. But William Manchester’s name kept coming up.
After about two hours of scouring the Internet for clues without much luck, I decided to take a closer look at William Manchester. I noticed that he was also a history professor, and was actually a rather famous writer. But some of the facts about him still didn’t correlate enough with the answers that Crystal had received from “Alfred.” To begin with, Manchester had died in 2004, but “Alfred” indicated that he believed the current year was 1993. It’s not unusual for a spirit to be off on the current year by a number of years, and this spirit couldn’t answer what year he died – this is why we also ask if they know what year it is. But the gap between the spirit’s likely date of death (1993) and William Manchester’s confirmed date of death (2004) seemed too wide for “Alfred” to be him.
I was still intrigued, though, and having no other success, I kept on looking at William. I was able to learn the name of the Middletown street where he had lived, but I did not have a house number. Using Google Maps, I looked for a house that might likely have been his. Since Manchester was a famous and successful man, I looked for the house in town with the biggest yard and longest driveway. I was shocked by what I found.
This house that fit this description was less than a half mile away from the client’s home, where all the disturbance’s had been reported and where we had encountered “Alfred.”
There were no houses between this house and our client’s home. Had I found Manchester’s (Alfred’s) home? The first thing that went through my head was this:
“No shit!”
I sent this information to Crystal, who had also been doing some research on William Manchester. She had come across another more interesting detail: he had lived for decades without knowing that he had a bullet lodged next to his heart (as the result of a combat injury sustained during World War II). We began to wonder if there could be a correlation between Manchester’s unusual medical history and the following answers that we had received from Alfred:
How did you pass? In surgery
What was the surgery for? Heart
The following Monday, I arrived at my normal day job, and asked a coworker about William Manchester. He had just finished reading one of his books, and found our discovery to be fascinating. My colleague decided to do a little checking of his own, and found the following:
- The nearby house that I had found with the big driveway was in fact the residence of William Manchester…the addresses matched.
- Manchester had open heart surgery in 1995. That was when doctors discovered the bullet
- He had been suffereing from Alzheimer’s for several years when he passed.
This had all of us thinking – was “Alfred” really the famous author William Manchester?
As Manchester had open heart surgery around the time that Alfred thought he had died, Crystal and I started thinking. Could the Alzheimer’s be responsible for a cloudy post-death memory, and could this issue be leading “Alfred” to be mistaken about his date of passing? We already believed that ghosts pretty much remain in the same mental and emotional state they were in when they died. So, was it a reach to say that “Alfred” may have thought he died in 1992, when in fact he had died in 2004?
One other close correlation that we discovered – the spirit told us he was born in 1921.
William Manchester was born in 1922.
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Unfortunately, we have been unable to return to the residence where Alfred” is located.
What do you think? Did we find the spirit of William Manchester?
According to Wikipedia, his WIFE died in 1998.