Events in an unassuming house in Seaford, Long Island redefine the notion of poltergeist, and become the only time on record that a police detective is detailed full-time to the case of a suspected haunting. The full story told for the first time with unprecedented access.
FEBRUARY 3, 1958. SEAFORD, LONG ISLAND.
Jimmy Herrmann, 12, almost dropped an armful of books upon reaching his bedroom after school. An honors student at Seaford Junior High who played chess and collected stamps, he was known for being able to recite facts about airplanes and railroads. As he’d recall later, the first thing to catch his eye was a model gondola that his father had brought back from a business trip to Venice. It was shattered.
A ceramic toy was also broken, its legs cracked off. Both were prized possessions to Jimmy.
“Mom!” he called out.
Lucille Herrmann, 38, with short black hair and cat eye glasses, caught up with her son. She had been head nurse at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan for years. Handling urgent matters was second nature to her.
“Who was in the house?” Jimmy asked. “Who was in my room?”
As puzzled as her son, she studied the damaged objects in his room. Their white and green ranch-style home of three bedrooms was on a picket fence street in Seaford, one of Long Island’s oldest towns, where residents minded their business. Nothing unusual–no fluke tremors or vibrations or construction–had occurred that day. Lucille had been the only one home while her husband James was 35 miles away at work. Lucy, 13, had walked into the house with her brother. The teenager could give the impression of being flighty and carefree, but she rose to the occasion in serious situations like this.
Lucille checked the house for anything else unusual. The Herrmanns, like many Catholics, displayed bottles of holy water to bless the house. On the dresser in
the master bedroom, Lucille spotted one knocked over onto its side–odder still, the cap, which had been twisted tight, was off. Things grew far stranger. The rest of that day and in the tension-filled days to come, the family reported unexplained damage throughout the house, with objects exploding, spilling and shattering while the house’s inhabitants watched in shock.
A small legion of investigators would get involved in the events at 1648 Redwood Path in Seaford, including pioneer university researchers in parapsychology. With access to previously unreleased psychiatric tests, archival footage, case records, court transcripts, investigator notes, police accounts and other rare material, The Curse offers the definitive account of events that redefined the public’s understanding of purported poltergeists. In parapsychology, poltergeists were expected to be brief and arbitrary, a kind of passing anomaly. In contrast, the phenomena believed to be identified inside the Herrmann home crossed physical and temporal boundaries–with the events connecting back to chilling, unresolved violence from centuries earlier.
Like his wife, James Herrmann, 42, was a problem solver both by constitution and training. Tall with an athletic frame, he was a decorated combat Marine who now worked at the office of Air France in Manhattan while also serving in the auxiliary police force of Seaford. Nothing strange had ever happened in their home other than their television sometimes picking up a strange voice, which they presumed was a neighbor, four doors down, who had a ham radio.
The Herrmann House
At first, James was sure he could comfort his family as their once-quiet home seemed to turn against them amid creaking, crashing and shattering. “I happen to be known as a very hard headed man,” he would later say. “I always want to know a cause and effect and everything has to be physical as far as I’m concerned.” But he, too, found no source and no explanation for the disruptions. He was astounded. “Just about everything that wasn’t nailed down decided that it wanted to fly all around.”
Other witnesses were also at a loss. When James’s boss visited the house, he had to duck when a crockery bowl nearly hit him in the head. When family friends came over on a Sunday afternoon, one of the guests watched as an untouched glass bowl fell from a telephone bench to the floor. James’s second cousin started as a skeptic but added fuel to the fire after her visit. She described a porcelain figurine sail across the room in an unnatural motion. “I saw the female figurine wiggle (like that of a worm cut in pieces) as it went in the air it looked like a small white feather--then crashed to the rug, unbroken.”
As word spread about unexplained events on Redwood Path, some assumed they were the product of childhood pranks. The brainy and somewhat shy Jimmy was a readymade scapegoat, especially since he had noticed the first evidence of the phenomena. James had no reason to believe Jimmy or anyone else in the household was responsible. Still, he was a disciplinarian with no patience for nonsense, and he wanted to gather all the information available. He flipped open his black notepad given to him as an auxiliary police officer, ready to document details.
At one point when questioning each member of his family, he waited in the doorway of the bathroom for Jimmy to finish brushing his teeth. In subsequent signed testimony, James described in detail two bottles on top of a clean, dry vanity table move and spin, then crash down. There was no reasonable explanation for how the objects moved.
The family never missed Catholic Mass, but they were so unsettled they did
not attend on Sunday. The mysteries accumulated. Another closed bottle of holy water ended up again inexplicably with its cap “unscrewed and the contents spilled.” In the kitchen, a sealed container of starch burst open and was spread across the kitchen floor while, in the cellar, a can of paint thinner also opened and spilled. Another time, Lucy, an avid fan of rock and roll in its early years, described watching the kids’ beloved record player as it “flew across the room” in the basement rumpus room, breaking against the open shelving on one side of the stairs.
The Herrmanns, overwhelmed, called the police. Both had been part of first responder communities, and they did not take this step lightly. Dispatchers at Nassau County’s 7th Precinct, no strangers to outlandish calls, sent Patrolman James Hughes to do a check as a formality. The patrolman did a sweep of the house then convened the whole family in the living room. They all heard noises coming from the bathroom. Hughes went to check and found the bottles spilled again.
The officer couldn’t explain it. No appliances were running in the house. The family had been with him in the other room. He had seen the bottles moments ago, standing upright and closed. When later questioned on the last points, the officer’s response was, “I can swear to that!”
Whatever was happening at the Seaford home, it warranted attention. Stuyvesant Pinnell, Nassau County’s battleworn Chief of Detectives, took “a personal interest in the Herrmann case,” even while juggling several high-profile murder cases. The case escalated from what was categorized as a miscellaneous investigation to a so-called “D.D.”—a priority case assigned to the Detective Division.
With a no-nonsense glare beneath black hair and thick eyebrows, Detective Joe Tozzi, 32, stared down the house on Redwood Path as though it were one of the many criminal suspects that he had questioned the last half-decade. He had joined the force in 1949 after serving in the Navy during World War II. He was promoted to detective in 1953 and worked on some of Long Island’s most high-profile crimes, including an infamous kidnapping that had a tragic end.
Joe’s arrival at the Herrmann house marked a turning point and an unprecedented opportunity in the annals of parapsychology: the only time in history that a police detective was assigned full- time to the case of a suspected poltergeist.
Some cops on the force needled the detective that he was working in a “haunted house.” He kept his head down and was surprised. At one point, Joe saw
a sugar bowl launch through the kitchen yet land so gently that it did not break, as though it was slowing down along the way. Nobody inside the house was near enough to have been responsible.
At another point, a small metal horse fell to the floor at the detective’s feet.
Joe became personally attached to the Herrmanns as the case file ballooned with detailed reports, eyewitness accounts and officers’ observations (many of the quoted details of the events in this article come from those original police documents). He lived five blocks away and showed up whenever the family needed him, joking that he was there so much he would have to pay the family rent. He would sit down for coffee with a frayed Lucille. He particularly bonded with young Jimmy, finding him an inquisitive and affable boy. Just like James, all evidence led Joe to reject unfounded rumors that Jimmy had to be playing tricks. In fact, a distraught Jimmy seemed sensitive and insightful about all that
was happening, as though he might even, somehow, hold the key to stopping it.
At one point, with everybody’s locations in the house accounted for, a Virgin Mary statue launched from a dresser to the other side of the room, in the process smashing a lamp and breaking its bulb while also shattering the glass in a picture frame and denting the wooden frame of a mirror.
Joe tried chasing down any reasonable possibility. One theory posited that imperceptible “vibrations from earth erosion by an underground stream” might have caused some of the incidents. Farfetched as it seemed, the police called in the Long Island Lighting Company, which used an oscillograph to measure potential vibrations of the cellar
floor, without any luck. The company returned a few weeks later to check wiring throughout the home for possible anomalies or disruptions. An independent electrician followed up with an inspection.
The fire department inspected a well in front of the home but found a steady water level. The local building department examined the home’s foundation and the home itself “top to bottom” and reported “only normal settling cracks in the basement floor.” The department head summarized their examination: “We looked at all the beams in the cellar, the concrete in the foundation and the rafters in the attic to see if we could find any defect that might give us a clue. The house is very well built and is in perfect condition—and we have no theories as to what could be causing these things.” Professors from every department at Adelphi College, an engineering professor from Cooper Union, and several engineers from the Nassau County Society of Professional Engineers came up empty.
In fact, some of the experts were present for disturbances and still could not find any explanations. Police sent several objects for testing at a Mineola police lab, which found “no foreign matter” or evidence of trickery. “It’s the damnedest case I’ve ever worked on,” Joe admitted. Lucille didn’t believe in “supernatural powers,” but she couldn’t help but ask the question on many people’s minds: “Is there a devil in the house?”
Even mainstream Catholicism acknowledged that the devil could make its presence known. To religious believers, the fact that holy water and religious objects seemed a repeated target of the phenomena felt ominous, and many would have simply fled. But the house was the Herrmanns’ piece of the American dream. They were determined to stand their ground.
Joe Tozzi, also Catholic, discussed with the Herrmanns the possibility of consulting a priest. James and Lucille approached Father William J. McCloud of St. William of the Abbot Church. Father McCloud, who knew the family well, moved from room to room in the house, spreading holy water while repeating a prayer of blessing: “O heavenly Father, Almighty God, we humbly beseech Thee to bless and sanctify this house and all who dwell therein and everything else in it.” McCloud paused in the rooms that were reportedly the most active and intoned, “may the angels of Thy light, dwelling within the walk of this house, protect it and those who dwell therein. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
But disturbances continued. As an experiment, Lucille filled a holy water bottle with tap water instead and nothing happened; later, when James refilled the bottle with holy water, it was discovered overturned and emptied again. Church officials now joined the police in admitting to being stumped. A formal request to approve an exorcism was quietly made by the family’s parish to Bishop Walter Kellenberg, then Bishop of Rockville Centre, Long Island. Since no family member exhibited signs of possession,
the request to perform an exorcism was denied. They were becoming increasingly hopeless.
FEBRUARY 15, 1958. DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA.
As the Herrmann home became the subject of national and international media attention, word reached investigators affiliated with Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory. They were based in the heart of campus one floor up in “a grand Neoclassical structure of white pressed brick” known as the West Duke Building. Psychologist Joseph Gaither Pratt, 47, who went by Gaither, had dark, slicked-back hair and usually wore a suit that matched the formal sincerity of his mannerisms, which had led one to describe him as “so respectable as to seem staid.” He received his doctorate from Duke and taught there for decades before joining the psychology department at the University of Virginia. William Roll, 31, wore black- rimmed glasses and retained his native Danish accent even after years getting degrees at Cal-Berkeley and Oxford, where he cultivated a deep interest in the paranormal. Truly*Horror has been given access to Gaither Pratt and William Roll’s extensive, unpublished notes and personal papers on the Herrmann case, offering the most comprehensive, accurate account to date.
The field of parapsychology examines unexplained incidents associated with paranormal spheres, and Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory was in the vanguard of the movement. For his part, Gaither believed potential parapsychological scenarios were best studied in real-life situations rather than in laboratories. Gaither leaned on scientific methods but strived to be open-minded. “Research effort should be increased when we are confronted with an ‘either/ or’ situation, and we should actually favor the more novel explanation.... If, as a consequence, the novel explanation should eventually prove to be the correct one, science would have benefitted through our venturesomeness.”
“Poltergeist” in German means simply “noisy ghost,” not a particularly descriptive characterization, although helpful in suggesting a combination of a paranormal or psychokinetic force with a dull reality, in this case noise. Poltergeists, because they were believed to manifest in contained spaces subject to observation and documentation, represented a rich subject for these academics to study.
Gaither and William packed their bags and flew into La Guardia to head to Long Island.
To the Herrmanns, respected investigators from a top research university seemed a vast improvement to the self-proclaimed mediums, psychics and healers ringing their doorbell. “The house was filled with people from morning to night,” Lucille noted. “The phone rang constantly.” Once, when answering in the middle of the night, the voice on the other end yelled, “Repent!” James hated the attention: “Normally my family is a very quiet, shy, retired family, and here all of a sudden we’re put right into the limelight.”
But these latest visitors could actually help turn things around. The Herrmanns welcomed them to Seaford, as did Joe Tozzi. Another regular observer who greeted the newcomers was Dave Kahn, 28, an ambitious local reporter (later a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). Despite his initial skepticism, Dave was unable to ignore what he witnessed in the home. What began as a novelty assignment for Dave quickly became an obsession, one shared by the parapsychologists.
Incidents escalated. A heavy dresser, an entire bookcase and a coffee table all fell over at different points. The bookcase, which included a complete set of the Universal Encyclopedia, weighed nearly 80 pounds. “From the point of view of the physical exertion and skill represented by an occurrence,” wrote Roll of the bookcase, “this is perhaps the most remarkable of the entire case.” Witnesses were shocked by the sounds associated with disturbances. “It sounded like the walls were caving in,” Lucy said of one crashing sound. “I thought it came from the living room, the dining room, everywhere.” Dave expected a thud when a figurine slammed into wood, but he instead heard a sound like an explosion. The falling dresser was accompanied by a “rumble [that] lasted an abnormally long time.” The sounds reportedly didn’t seem to arise from a particular location but instead seemed to consume the house.
At one point when an object was witnessed flying across the room toward the television, the television picture “started to flicker,” as though through some unknown interference. Days later, when another object seemed to propel itself, Joe Tozzi observed and documented that the television became “completely scrambled and out of focus” at the same moment. Yet another peculiarity was observed: after some incidents, when touching one of the objects that had inexplicably moved, it suddenly felt like
it had an unnatural heat around it. The spilled holy water was also hot. Jimmy was hiding in bed when disturbances increased, often with “covers up to his chin.” At two different points, the boy suddenly shrieked, feeling “like someone had stuck [him] through the back with a pin.”
Dave Kahn was “considerably shaken,” recalling, “my palms went damp and I shivered.” He continued to be unnerved when phoning in his report: “I could only speak weakly when I telephoned the news to the office.”
Dave Kahn
Patterns emerged, with several of the objects involved in the disturbances suggesting symbolic meanings, particularly in relation to Americana, the United States and its history. A cardboard globe bounced and rolled through the living room. A colonial figurine slammed against the wooden secretary in the room with such force that it left dents and scrapes in the wood, and a ceramic Davy Crockett figurine was knocked over. A painting of the West smashed to the floor. The phenomena also seemed to be activated by representational art and objects that gestured toward safety and stability– which included the religious symbols and the holy water bottles. Water itself often seemed provocative, whether the holy water or other liquids, as well as depictions of water, including Jimmy’s model Venice gondola.
Lucille would pace back and forth in the kitchen. She attempted to hold back her sobs. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “I’ll do anything to stop this.” Lucille asked Gaither and William point blank: “How can we stop this?”
“No one truly understands these things,” one of the investigators said, but buried in the statement was the Duke researchers’ determination to use the Herrmanns’ case to change that.
The family finally caved to concerns and stayed with relatives and friends, though each time they would return to the house, refusing to give up. They were in store for another twist. The investigators interviewed the Herrmanns’ near neighbor who owned a ham radio and determined that the radio had not been in use for three years. That meant the voices that the family had heard come through the television no longer had an explanation.
The investigative team raced the clock. The disturbances seemed to have evolved from mischievous to potentially deadly. Meanwhile, Gaither and William had to keep reporting back to the director of their department in Durham, Dr. J. B. Rhine,
who disliked devoting resources to field work and could recall the investigators any moment.
For the researchers to unfurl the meaning of the events at the Herrmann house, they had to go further back in time than the last month. They had to go back hundreds of years.
ORIGINS: 1643.
Not far from Seaford, southeast of the future Herrmann home, dawn opened at the treetops on a March morning in 1643, with a harsh wind cutting through the Long Island forest. David Pieterszoon de Vries, 50, was following tribal representatives into the woods. De Vries, a Dutch navigator, had become something of an impromptu diplomat, negotiating between the Lenape tribes and the merciless William Kieft, the director of New Netherlands for the past five years.
The area’s topography made it known as “the great water land” to the tribes. This wasn’t only due to water that could be seen but also water rising and falling from beneath the ground. George Washington noted this when he passed through years later: “We came in view of the Sea... as near it as the road could run, for the small bays, marshes and guts into which the tide flows at all times render[ed] it impassible.”
De Vries had volunteered to carry out the negotiation when no others from their community dared. Tensions had boiled over after Kieft ordered what would come to be known as the Pavonia Massacre, when over 100 Lenape, including children, were killed in brutal and public fashion. Horrified, de Vries couldn’t blame the Lenape when they retaliated against the Dutch.
“We gave you beans and wheat,” one of the chiefs said to De Vries. “We showed you how to find oysters and fish. And as our reward, you killed our people.”
De Vries pleaded. “I know all of these things that you speak. But this violence will end.”
A peace treaty was established but would not last. Skirmishes erupted and Kieft turned
to a journeyman soldier named John Underhill, whom one historian said “was a combination of bravery, piety and fiendish cruelty hard to equal.” Captain Underhill was known to “justify putting the weak and defenseless to death” based on jaded interpretation of Scripture.
Underhill led a band of Dutch soldiers who stormed Lenape villages. The attackers seemingly relished in the violence that followed. Villagers were “drowned while being towed by a rope tied around their necks.” Others were dragged into the street where they were hacked and flayed while still alive.
The terror culminated in what became known as the Battle of Fort Neck in present-day Oyster Bay, Long Island. According to a 17th-century source, after long suffering at the hands of the Dutch colonists, Massapequa Indians stood up to them, destroying colonists’ crops, driving away cattle and horses, and storming the garrison. Colonists, in turn, rode their horses to the Massapequa fort and decimated the tribe. Captain Underhill and his men collected dead and dying Indians, and threw them in “a heap on the brow of the hill” while ten soldiers sat down next to the bodies and ate breakfast.
The vista from that infamous hill that witnessed so much death—the last sight of the dying Massapequa warriors— included Seaford, where the Herrmann house would be built 300 years later. Some of the tribes would never recover their numbers, disappearing. Those that did survive preserved stories of the atrocity and passed down their cultures and beliefs that the attackers had attempted to wipe out.
In Lenape lore taught to this day, the mythological figure of Mahtantu was a kind of tribal underworld spirit. Mahtantu roamed the swampy wilderness, attempting in almost imperceptible ways to torment and terrorize transgressors who were otherwise too powerful to stop. If there were flowers, Mahtantu created thorns; if rain watered crops, Mahtantu released mosquitoes; if there was bountiful food, Mahtantu added poison. Anything marked by beauty and orderliness would be undermined and cursed by Mahtantu, increasingly viewed as a tribal version of the devil.
In the 1930s, the land was ripped up by a developer, exposing skeletal remains left there in the massacre and continually displaced by the constant flow of water. From that point forward, Indian remains were stolen by fortune seekers. “More than 20 skeletons,” the New York Times reported, “buried in the fetal position and facing east, disappeared.” As time passed, all that remained were scattered bones and decimated artifacts. Putting a stop to the plundering, the town of Oyster Bay finally managed to purchase the land from private owners in 1953, the year the Hermann home was built. The city made the land a public park in 1958, the year the Herrmann home was swarmed by police, media, priests and parapsychologists.
MAY 1958. SEAFORD, LONG ISLAND.
Time was running out when it came to the patience of both the leadership of
the Seaford police and the laboratory directors back at Duke. As fears of grave injury increased, the team of investigators led by Joe Tozzi from the police side, and Gaither Pratt and William Roll from the parapsychology side, had tough decisions to make. Studies of historic and contemporary poltergeists always returned to the notion that the phenomena attached itself to certain children, particularly adolescents. Dave Kahn defied his own skeptical perspective in arriving at his conclusion on that front: “This is that some kind of psychical force perhaps operating through Jimmy called, if you will, a poltergeist—is somehow causing these things to happen.”
From all they could gather, they needed to find a way to break this potential linkage in order to try to end the poltergeist activity. For starters, they needed to finish gathering every bit of intelligence they could that might help address the situation. Gaither and William arranged psychiatric tests on the Herrmann children that were completed in May 1958. Although never released to the public, these tests have been reviewed by Truly*Horror. The exhaustive evaluations included word association, Rorschach and thematic application tests. These tests showed that Jimmy feared the consequences of the rumors that he was to blame and that he felt general anxiety about his father’s feelings toward him.
In addition to parapsychology, another institution could help unlock the keys to understanding of poltergeists: the government. Shortly after the end of World War II, the military had taken an interest in the secret warning of an informant from the German military that Axis powers had identified paranormal weaponry that could be invisibly unleashed against the United States. From that point on, the government quietly tracked reports of unexplained phenomena as a matter of national security.
Psychology reports obtained by Truly*Horror
Gaither and William engaged a private security expert and government insider named Frank A. Seckler, 60, whose participation in the Herrmann case has been entirely obscured by history. There were few ex-government operatives as knowledgeable as Seckler, described by a contemporary as a “more fatherly J. Edgar Hoover.” After serving as a soldier in World War I starting when he was 17, he then transitioned to military intelligence. This led to a long career as an undercover agent for the Secret Service, during which time he was also loaned out to other government agencies and privy to classified activities at the highest levels.
Seckler dropped everything to begin planning discussions with the Herrmann family. James Herrmann’s military service would stick out as interesting. James had been in the First Division of the Marines, with which he was part of the pivotal Battle of Guadalcanal. What James would always remember was the feeling of being “left” or abandoned on the Japanese island for more than a week, days that blurred into each other while the Marines set up a groundbreaking and powerful radar detection system, SCR-270. As early as the 1870s, physicists had studied the relationship between electromagnetic radiation and reported paranormal incidents. Investigators in Seaford had looked for similar clues, which included ruling out the neighbor’s ham radio. RCA Communications, which was involved with burgeoning technology used in outer space satellites and rockets, loaned their technicians and a “truckful” of equipment to the Seaford investigators to search for radio waves. The notion gave literal meaning to the “noise” in the “noisy ghost” etymology of the word poltergeist, and James Herrmann’s prolonged presence and exposure to SCR-270’s electromagnetic waves could not be ignored.
Back on Redwood Path, the team had to try something to jostle the apparent bond between Jimmy and the phenomena. According to the literature and analyses of poltergeists, a child such as Jimmy would become the focal point of the phenomena due to a set of characteristics common in adolescence–introversion, timidity, vulnerability. Armed with the psychiatric tests’ confirmation that Jimmy feared blame and feared punishment from his father, they saw a chance. Using Joe Tozzi’s playbook as an interrogator, Gaither took turns with Joe Tozzi and James Herrmann pressuring Jimmy.
They would lean on him hard: You did this. We know you did this! We have proof!
Jimmy would vow he hadn’t done anything wrong over and over again, becoming more insistent each time. “I had nothing to do with any of it. I swear. I didn’t do it!”
As guilty as they felt harshly interrogating the boy–especially James, heartbroken to voice the accusations against his son–the approach seemed to work. Jimmy gradually became more assertive and confident.
With progress in sight, James Herrmann also met with ex-government operative Seckler in New York City in a private conversation of which no record was left behind. As he was preparing for comprehensive meetings with the whole family, Seckler, an athlete with no reported health conditions, died “unexpectedly” the next week. No obituary appeared to be published, an oddity for a well-known figure often interviewed by the media and described by one criminology text as “probably the most famous and successful undercover man in the history of the U.S. government.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Rhine, the director of Duke’s parapsychology program, abruptly shut down the laboratory’s Herrmann investigation. All investigators were recalled to Durham. Other members of the team hearing about this on campus vocally disagreed with Rhine’s unilateral decision, insisting that there was more to learn from Seaford. Rhine’s reluctance may have only reflected his general hesitance about field work, or may have been resulted from outside influences. The military followed the Duke parapsychology department’s investigations closely, and the lab performed some secretive studies at the direct behest of the government, a context that made Duke’s deep investment in the Herrmann case, and its sudden departure, even more notable.
Despite a feeling of unfinished business, the disturbances at 1648 Redwood Path came to a halt. For those who believed a malicious force or curse had been attached to the family or specifically to Jimmy Herrmann, it seemed, finally, to be dislodged. While able to herald the peace in the Herrmann house, investigators had revealed a possibility with disturbing consequences. They had demonstrated that poltergeists could be freed from what had been believed to be a contained area or holding zone, released from its confines to possibly go elsewhere.
THE FALLOUT
After the phenomena subsided, the Herrmanns did not want more strangers showing up despite the fact that many researchers insisted there was more to learn. “Everything has been very peaceful,” Lucille Herrmann told a reporter at one point. “We’re just beginning to get back to a quiet, normal life.” Still, when a New Jersey woman reported unexplained phenomena in her own house, Lucille privately reached out to commiserate.
The Duke-based team used the Herrmann case to codify and publish complex
new theories of “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” or RSPK, which remains the dominant paradigm in the field for analyzing unexplained phenomena, particularly in domestic settings. William Roll, looking back at Seaford, later viewed 1958 as the “dividing line between old and new poltergeists.”
In the late 1970s, Hollywood’s fastest rising star Steven Spielberg paired with filmmaker Tobe Hooper to make the landmark suburban ghost story, Poltergeist, inspired in part after Hooper read a short description of the Herrmann case. A pattern of misfortunes behind the scenes of the film franchise were considered by some to be a “curse.” Interestingly, Poltergeist viewers routinely remember, incorrectly, that the
neighborhood in the movie was built on Indian burial grounds. In fact, there is a line in the film that explicitly states this was not the case, though in Spielberg and Hooper’s original treatment excavators were supposed to discover a large grave site, a “massive massacre of white settlers, perhaps 150 years ago.” This idea inverted the real life massacre site of American Indians near the Seaford house that was opened up to developers.
A few years after the Herrmann case ended, the United States government and military officially, though covertly, began to fund and initiate studies and research into purported paranormal phenomena, including alleged poltergeists, and whether they could be controlled. In 1982, Poltergeist was one of the movies Ronald Reagan chose to watch while in the White House. Government programs have included MK-Ultra, already underway in the 1950s, and Project Stargate, which started in the 1970s and lasted into the mid-1990s.
The chain reaction evoked Joe Tozzi’s comment at one point during the Seaford case: “I’m beginning to think it’s going to go on forever.” Tozzi went on to a 50-year career in law enforcement, culminating in an 8-year stint as Chief of Police in Colleyville, Texas, but his time spent with the Herrmanns never faded from his mind. At one point, Joe insisted, “The file is still open.”
The house on Redwood Path still stands, no longer owned by the Herrmann family. Lucy Herrmann married and became Lucy Patricia, settling in Sherrill, New York. Her son, the grandson of James and Lucille Herrmann, is Matt Patricia, who became a coach in the National Football League after studying to be an aeronautical engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
While James Herrmann for the mostpart stayed tight-lipped about what happened at their house, Truly*Horror obtained rarely seen footage in which he shared his thoughts. He said that in the early 1900s, people thought airplanes were “black magic” until they began to understand aerodynamics. He hoped the same understanding would come together in 40 or 50 years about what happened in their household. Taking out a map of the United States, he pointed to their home in Seaford, and then to Florida, “where the army has been doing quite a bit of their practice work with their rocket.
My theory has been these rockets have been going off course for various reasons and the army has tried to claim it’s been signals from [high frequency radios] in the vicinity. Actually, I think that possibly some of these unidentified submarines would have been laying off this coast, might have been sending a signal... might have been triangulated along here.” He pointed to a route along the map. “The Navy has taken a very serious deal with it because they in turn have sent out a task force to try to chase some of these submarines away. So it’s a matter of triangulation of signals, and that’s exactly what has been in my mind.” Later in his life, he refused to elaborate or give more interviews.
Jimmy Herrmann, later preferring to go by James like his father, became the president of an engineering corporation in Massachusetts. Interestingly, the company specialized in the harnessing of microwave energy as applied to military use, its literature describing itself as “one of the original developers of broadband, high power devices, which gained worldwide preeminence in modern electronic warfare and electronic countermeasure systems.”
To believers and to skeptics, the real horror contained in the Seaford case may lie in the invasion of supposedly safe spaces, including the tribal lands in Long Island. These stories force us to face the paradox of feeling secure on our own land, in our houses, in our bodies, while at the same time fearing the loss of that safety–a fear that is made only more intense if this loss cannot be explained. It is worth considering whether it is more terrifying to believe that dangers and disruptions in daily life arise from systematically connected events controlled by some unseen malice, or from sheer chance.