I am Haunted: Living Life Through the Dead (4 page)

Something drew me to this story, and not just a little, but a lot. I was completely engrossed. As I was getting ready to hit my call time to film an episode of
Ghost Adventures,
I couldn’t get the story out of my mind. I wanted to investigate, but I knew right away that there would be a conflict. The story had already gone public, and being a TV show host, I knew that the entertainment industry would be all over it. Stories like this, especially when they’re true or backed by real events, are like crack cocaine for Hollywood. The story practically writes itself, and it has a built-in audience in the people who have been following along. The competition would be stiff.

My first thought was to make a documentary film about what had happened in the house and to the family, because documentary filmmaking is my passion. (My 2006 documentary film
Ghost Adventures
is how I got into this business in the first place.) But there was something more here. This story is bigger than just me and a documentary film. It could help provide answers to some of the oldest mysteries of the paranormal world, so I wanted to be a part of it. It’s like an astrophysicist finding out that a huge meteor has just hit Indiana, and there are fragments of it all over the state. It’s what the astrophysicist has been looking for his whole life, and suddenly it’s in Indiana. So to me, getting involved was not a want, but a
need.
It was one of the most credible and witnessed demonic possessions I’ve ever heard about in the media, and I had to get involved.

I hadn’t made a documentary film since 2006, and this project had a lot of great facets to it: a great story, public interest, and an unexplained paranormal phenomenon. It wasn’t about the money or about exploiting anyone. I wanted to be part of a historic paranormal event, and there was no way I was going to be stopped.

The first thing I did was call my golden connection, Dave Schrader. Dave and I have worked together on many projects, including
Paranormal Challenge,
Darkness Radio, and Coast to Coast Radio. He’s a great person to network with, and he quickly got me in touch with the priest in this case, Father Michael Maginot. His name was in the headlines, so he’s the first guy I called. We talked for half an hour. I told him who I was and that I was interested in doing a film about the true events that had taken place there. He assured me that he was interested in doing a film with me, but nothing was in writing, which made me nervous because I knew that 500 people were going to be calling him. It was a headline on every major news outlet around the world, so I knew I was fighting everyone for the story: paranormal people, TV people, film producers, you name it. All the sharks would be circling. The family to whom all this had happened put up a big wall, too. After the story broke, they weren’t taking calls.

Then I had an idea. While everyone else was trying to get to the family, the priest, the ER staff, and the reporter who broke the story in the Indiana press, I decided to go a different route and get into the house itself. A house in which a demonic possession takes place is sacred in our profession, so I figured if I bought the house, then I could investigate it whenever I wanted and figure out what was happening on my own terms. I’m fortunate to have made a decent living from my TV shows, so maybe I could pull out a trump card that no one else could and make the house mine. That would be a huge victory.

But there was a problem: In order to buy the house, I needed to find the owner, Charles Reed. I remembered seeing him in one of the videos about the incident, but how could I find him? The house had been rented to a new family, and I couldn’t go through them—they didn’t like all the attention and were angry about the media trying to get close.

After several unsuccessful attempts to get a hold of Reed, my buddy Dave Schrader came through again with Reed’s cell phone number, so I called and left a message. (All this was happening just before my call time to film
Ghost Adventures,
mind you.) Minutes later, my phone rang, and it was him.

YES!

But now I had to tell this guy that I wanted to buy his house on the spot, even though it wasn’t for sale. So I explained who I was, and I thought to myself,
Just get to the point.
I blurted it out: “Hey, man, I saw your house on the news this morning, and I want to buy it.” I held my breath for a split second. Would he be offended? Would he want a kajillion dollars for it? Would he hang up?

“Sure,” he said. “How much?”

That was the best feeling in the world. I didn’t spit out a number because I had no idea what the Indiana real estate market was like. Instead, I left it to him to start the bidding.

“Thirty-five thousand,” he said.

“Deal!” I sent him a PayPal deposit minutes later and went to film my episode, the sweet smell of victory radiating off of me.

But the next day I began to worry. I thought the media blitz might make Reed think that he could get more money from someone else, and our verbal contract wasn’t going to hold up. I wasn’t trying to steal the house from him. He told me the asking price and I agreed, so it should be all good, right? I called him back and asked him to send me an email stating that I had bought the house and he had received the deposit, which he did. That made me feel better.

So I had my foot in the door—literally. The house was mine. At this point, it wasn’t so much about making a film as it was about getting into the house and investigating it for myself. I had to see the forces at work in Indiana that had caused such an uproar. But it’s never that easy, is it?

Somehow word spread that I’d bought the house, even though the transaction between Reed and me was private. Marisa Kwiatkowski, the reporter who broke the story for the
Indianapolis Star,
called me, asked for details, and asked if she could publish them. I was shocked at how quickly she’d learned about the purchase, but I said yes. I wasn’t trying to hide anything, so why not? Her article came out the next morning, and I was flooded with media requests like never before. Seriously, I’ve never had so much media attention in my life, from Germany to Australia to every news source in the U.S. The home page of the
USA Today
website reported that I had bought the “Demon House” and planned on doing an investigation and possibly a documentary or feature film, and with that article came a lot of interview requests.

I was asked to be on
Inside Edition
twice, and I did those interviews back at home in Las Vegas. During the interviews, I explained why I had bought the house and what it meant to me. Because of the number of credible witnesses who had seen supernatural things, including three police officers (from three separate jurisdictions) who had witnessed events that had made them believers, I couldn’t resist being a part of it.

A demonic possession is a fight between good and evil over a human soul. When an exorcism is conducted, a priest fights with the devil for the human being who’s infected. We can learn a lot from these exorcisms.

Religion is taught through sacred texts like the Bible. But for atheists and nonbelievers, the Bible is still a book, and it’s the story of Jesus Christ, a man. He’s not here to sit down and tell us that everything ever written about Him is true. Having faith means believing in his teachings, which have been passed down through many generations. And people believe in different gods. Christianity, Judaism, Islam—these are all belief systems, and they are different for everyone. But an exorcism that involves supernatural events that defy the laws of physics and scientific explanation…I believe something godlike is connected to this event. At the very least, there’s a force at work that we don’t understand, but should strive to. To me, this is the crux of being a paranormal investigator. A lot of people don’t believe in anything they can’t see or feel, so a possession is a way we can see God and the devil and justify our religious beliefs. Many find it scary and want to get away from it or deny it. But I want to be there to document it and learn from it, like a storm-chaser rushing to the next killer tornado. I want to find proof that there’s something more than a living physical body that can also exist on the other side. It would give us answers to so many things we don’t understand yet about life, the afterlife, God, you name it.

There’s a big risk that goes along with all this: We don’t understand what we’re messing with. The highest members of the clergy can’t tell us exactly who God is or how He came to exist. There are theories and scriptures, but to actually witness God defeating the devil in an exorcism…I think that’s the most powerful material event in the living world that lets us witness the power of God. It’s more powerful than prayer. In prayer, you wait for a response. There’s no beam of light while you’re praying (that I know of) that shoots down and enables you to talk face-to-face with God. People who want to feel God go to church and raise their hands to get a closer connection to Him. Sometimes they think they feel him (and some people might), but there are more mysteries surrounding God than anything. But in an exorcism, you can actually do that: feel the power of God.

It’s what I think combat must be like when an enemy soldier gets shot. When the bullets hit the enemy, you see the effect it has on him. In an exorcism, when a priest says the words of God, it’s like bullets hitting the demon and terminating it. It’s proof to me that the power of God is real. Seeing exorcisms work has made me more religious. And I’m intrigued by holy water burning the skin and a cross debilitating a demon. It goes much deeper than ghost hunting for me. We’re getting at the source of spirits and the afterlife.

So I owned the house and was doing a bunch of interviews. In a way it was good to have my name in the media, because the family, the priest, the police officers, and everyone else who had witnessed these events saw that I was serious about getting to the bottom of what had happened. It kind of put them in shock, too, because the press associated them with me in a lot of articles. That should have made it easy for me to get a hold of them and learn their stories, right?

Nope. I did everything I could think of to contact them and got nowhere. Only Father Michael, the priest who had performed the exorcism, would talk to me. He even thought it was great that I had bought the house. So I sent him an exclusive agreement to make a documentary film, which he signed. Owning the rights to his story was a huge coup, so I decided not to wait and to make the film immediately.

I hired Matt Mourgides to be my production manager, some camera crewmen from LA, and Jay Wasley and Billy Tolley for electronics. While we were in pre-production, my main focus was to interview everyone who had been involved as quickly as possible, before any sharks could lock them up and steal them away from me.

Right away I had an issue. (The obstacles to this project never stop popping up.) I was contacted by a producer who said that he had worked on a paranormal movie. Our conversation was very vague at first. I didn’t want to play my hand, so I left things open until I could figure out his angle. He said that he loved my story about buying the house and wanted to talk again later, so I hung up thinking nothing more about it. But it wouldn’t be the last time I would hear from him.

I went back to making my film and quickly learned that everyone’s ego had swollen since the story broke. So much attention was being paid to the people involved that they started shopping their stories around to the highest bidder. This is America, and I get it, but it was frustrating nonetheless. Everyone was hard to talk to. The
Indianapolis Star
wouldn’t let me use Marisa’s articles in the film, and I wasn’t allowed to interview her. She offered to meet me at the house to have the
Star
write about my making the documentary, but it doesn’t work that way. This is a two-way street: You help me and I help you. They gave me all this attention for buying the house but then wouldn’t allow me the courtesy of an interview or give me permission to use her article in the film, so I flushed that plan.

Next up was Captain Charles Austin of the Gary Police Department, who was one of the first officers to respond to the family. He had investigated along with Child Protective Services because the kids were going to school with bloody noses and not acting right. CPS took the kids away and went to the home with Captain Austin to interview the family. This is when they told them that they were possessed by demons, and Captain Austin didn’t believe them for a second. He thought they were making it up, and can you blame him? But then he had his own experience. After walking back to his police car to drive away, his AM/FM radio came to life with very high static, and a deep, demonic voice came through saying, “YOU IN THERE!” He was on the phone with another police officer back at the Demon House when it happened, and the other officer heard the voice, too. That officer also saw an apparition in the house, so suddenly the police believed the family’s claims of demonic possession because they saw it themselves! Later, Captain Austin would label the house “a portal to hell.”

I talked with Captain Austin, and, man, is he a character. He’s funny, laughs a lot, and is a pleasure to be around. One day, he told me that another producer had contacted him. It turned out to be a guy I know, which shows you how competitive the entertainment industry is. Everyone was going after these people—including me, to be honest, but there was a difference in our objectives. Hollywood sees the money in the story, and I just want to tell the story. My production isn’t designed for maximum profit; it’s bare bones so I can capture what happened. After talking with Charles Austin many times, I got the impression that he would give me an on-camera interview, as would the landlord. At that point I had a filming schedule, a crew, a lot of equipment, three of the participants, and the house. Ultimately the family was the priority, but no one had heard from them, probably because everyone wanted the life rights to their story. I couldn’t compete with the offers that I knew were being tossed at them anyway.

Inside Edition
wanted to do another interview with me in the house, but I wasn’t sure because I hadn’t done a proper investigation yet. We were in our third or fourth day of filming background shots and superficial pieces, and at one point something dark happened. I think I saw a demon attack someone I let into the house. It shocked me and the crew. I had no idea what was waiting for us in that house, so there was no way I was going to let reporters in. Besides, it would have been irresponsible of me to give them access when I knew that there was a risk of bodily harm. I might as well have invited them to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.