Try the Spirits
Weighing the unseen — every spirit tested against the Word.
“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”
1 John 4:1 · KJV
“For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers…”
Colossians 1:16 · KJV
We answer real questions about the unseen — hauntings, the occult, UFOs and the high strange, near-death experiences — with the best reporting on the beat, and then we weigh what it means in the light of Scripture.
The reporting and the weighing are kept visibly apart, so you can check the facts and leave the rest. We think you will come back for the facts. We are not hiding what we believe, and we are not going to pretend the question underneath is anything other than a religious one.
Police Watched It Rain Inside a House. Then the Chief Ordered Them to Keep Quiet.
Sworn police officers went on the record. They watched water rise up out of a dry floor and fly sideways through a living room. In February of 1983, in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, it rained inside a house. Not a leak. Rain, falling in a living room, out of the air, for two days. The family who lived there saw it. Their landlord saw it. The woman who ran the restaurant across the street saw it. Police officers walked in the front door and were soaked two steps inside it. **And when the chief of police stood in that living room and was pelted with it himself, he called it a plumbing problem.** Then he ordered his men to file no report and never speak of it again. ## The man it was falling on Don Decker was in his early twenties. A quiet kid who fell in with the wrong people, doing a few months in the county jail for receiving stolen property. Then his grandfather died, and the jail granted him a weekend out for the funeral. He did not want to go, and nobody in that family knew why. From the time Don was seven years old, his grandfather beat him, hurt him. It went on for years, and Don never told a soul. So he stood at that funeral and listened to the family talk about what a wonderful man they had buried. What he felt was relief. The evil was gone. He thought everything would change now. He was glad his grandfather was dead, and he had to hide it. His mother would not take him. Friends did. Bob and Jeannie Kieffer told him to stay as long as he liked. ## The face in the window Saturday evening, Don went upstairs to wash his hands for supper. And the room changed. The air went out of it like a vacuum, and it turned very, very cold. Something was on him. He could not see it, and he could not get it off. Then he looked at the window. There was a face in it. An old man, wearing a crown. Don looked down at his arm. Three scratches ran down it, side by side, blood beading at the ends. He came down the stairs white as a sheet. Bob saw the blood and asked what he had done to himself. > I didn't do it, Bob. There's something up there, I swear to God. There's a face in the window staring at me. ## It starts raining indoors Then the living room went cold. The same cold. Water started running down the walls. Then drops began falling out of the middle of the air. A few, then more, then it was raining in the house. And there were no water lines in that end of the house. The plumbing was all in the back. It did not fall the way water falls. It came down from the ceiling, sideways out of the wall, and up out of the floor. Catch a drop and rub it between your fingers and it was not like water. It was sticky, tacky. Some left an oily smudge where they struck. Bob called his landlord and would not say why. Ron Van Why and his wife Romayne watched water come up out of that floor and rise. No leak. No condensation. It had not rained outside in days. ## The police walk in A Stroudsburg police officer named John Baujan picked up when Bob called the station. > Bob, this is the police station, not the water department. > I just need you to trust me. Baujan walked into that living room and had it in about a second. Droplets lifting off the floor, going up, defying gravity. He and Bob were standing a few feet apart, face to face, and a single big drop formed in the air between them. It did not fall. It flew, flat and level, across the living room, through the dining room, out into the dark of the kitchen. Baujan's partner would not come in. He had to be talked through the front door. Two steps inside and he was pelted, soaked through. And the strangest thing of all: it was only that one room. Step into the dining room and it was bone dry. And the second the officers were out of the house, the rain in the house stopped. The landlord and his wife were still standing in it. The officers left, and it left. ## The crucifix that burned him Pam Scrofano owned the restaurant across the street. That night it started raining inside it, over the tables, into the food. She had been watching Don all day. Glassy. Looking at you without seeing you. She kept a crucifix by the cash register. She picked it up and touched it to his skin. **It burned him.** The skin blackened where it touched. That crucifix had been lying on a counter. It was not hot. And she said it out loud, in front of everybody. > This boy is possessed. You need a priest. ## The chief That night, the officers brought their chief. The water came at him the same as it came at everyone else, and it soaked him the same. And he called it a plumbing problem. He ordered his men out. He ordered them to file no report. He ordered them never to speak of it again. ## Three officers break the order Three veteran officers drove back to that house the next day, against their chief's direct order. Men with decades on the job who could not leave it alone. They were standing in the kitchen when the pots started rattling on the stove. And Don came off the floor. Lifted, and thrown across the room. One of them said it was like watching a man get hit by a bus. Don felt it over his whole body at once. > I'm a big guy. It made me feel like a newborn. Three fresh claw marks stood up on his neck, welling blood. And scratched into his arm, where the first three had been, was the shape of a crown. He did not know whose it was. He did not know why. One of the men who watched it had been a cop for forty years. > There's always an explanation when something happens. You investigate, you come up with something. This is why it happened. This case here, there is no explanation. Romayne had already said to his face what nobody else would. *You're doing this. You made it rain here. You made it rain at Pam's. Make it stop.* They had tried everything on him by then. At one point, a bag over his head, in case he was somehow spitting it. The water kept coming. And that was the worst of it. Don had started to believe her. > They lived in that house for years and nothing ever happened. That's when I started realizing it was me. ## Every church in town said no Every Catholic priest and every Protestant minister in Stroudsburg was called, and every one of them said no. One person said yes. An evangelical preacher. A woman. The next night, she knelt on that living room floor, prayed over him, and read out loud from the Bible. The rain stopped falling at random and concentrated on her. Pelting her. Harder the longer she read. She kept reading, and Don, curled on the floor, convulsing, went quiet. The feeling of the whole house changed. By the time she finished praying, the water was gone. Everybody in that house believed it was over. Don knew it was not. > I knew whatever it was, it was still inside of me. ## Cell block, maximum security A county jail took Don Decker back when his funeral furlough ended, and within days there was water in his cell. Moving horizontally. Moving vertically. Climbing the walls. His cellmate screamed for the guards to get him out. Not out of the water. Away from Don. So they moved him to a maximum security cell on his own. Concrete floor, concrete walls, locked door. And sitting in there alone, Don had a thought. Not a prayer. Just a thought. *I wish it would rain in here.* And water came up out of the concrete floor. All weekend this thing had hunted him, cut him, frozen him, thrown him across a room in front of police officers. **Now it was offering itself to him.** > At that point, I thought I could do stuff. Then two guards came down to his cell and dared him to prove it. They had heard what he was saying he could do, and they did not believe it. If you can really control it, make it rain in the office on the other side of the jail. Through door after locked door. Don said, I'll try. That office was in a totally different area of the jail, behind numerous locked doors. Nothing Don could see from where he sat, and nothing he could get anywhere near. About eight that evening, Dave Keenhold was sitting alone in the administration area, writing reports. Nobody else in the room. An officer walked in and pointed at his chest. In the middle of his sternum, on a brand new shirt, a patch about four inches by two was soaked through with water. He never felt it happen. He was on the far side of a jail from Don Decker, behind locked doors. > It's just humanly impossible. The officer who dared him was badly frightened now. So was Keenhold. And Keenhold made the call: get the chaplain. ## The chaplain was told not to pray The jail chaplain, Reverend William Blackburn, found a meek, mild-mannered young man, and opened with a chaplain's weariness. > Son, don't you think it would be simpler if you stopped all this nonsense? You're making this up, aren't you? And Don's face changed. His whole manner changed. And a smell came into the room. Blackburn had met it before, in the room of a person dying of cancer. This was that, multiplied five times over. Evil. Foreboding. Don told him what the crosses had done. They put a cross around my neck and it burned. They put a rosary in my hand and it burned. Then he raised his hand, rubbed his fingers together, and said: > I have powers you don't. I can make it rain. And it started to rain. A fine, drenching mist filling a closed room in the middle of a county jail, soaking both men standing in it. > It was like the devil's rain. I was in the presence of evil. Blackburn said, I'm going to pray for you. Don said, I don't want you to pray for me. Blackburn said, I don't care whether you want me to or not. Prayer is my prerogative. The chaplain opened his Bible and read aloud, into rain that was falling indoors. The rain came harder. It drove at Don. It drove at Blackburn. It was falling on everything in that little room. **Everything except the Bible.** It was open in his hands in the middle of all of it, and the pages never got wet. > So help me. It was a frightening thing. The stench got thicker. Don's own words for it: *I smelled death.* Blackburn kept reading and kept praying. As much for himself, he admitted later, as for the man in front of him. ## One sentence The chaplain said one sentence. > I bind you in the name of Jesus Christ. The rain stopped. It did not taper off. It stopped. And something came into that room that both men could feel, and neither had another word for but peace. Don's eyes filled, and he said, thank you. And a chaplain and a prisoner stood in that little room and held onto each other and prayed. It never happened again. Not that night. Not that year. Not ever. ## Who is on the record The chief of police never moved off his account. Called to the house twice. Saw nothing unusual. *Sometimes what people believe happens and what actually happens are two different things.* The jail's warden waved the whole thing off. *Hearsay. Everything I've heard is hearsay.* The men at the top said nothing happened. The men who stood in the room said it did. **Ten of them put their names to it in public, and not one ever took it back.** And John Baujan, the young officer soaked two steps inside that front door, who drove back the next day against his chief's order, went on to run that police department. Ten years as chief. Don Decker never moved off his own answer for what came into that house. He said it was his grandfather. > He abused me when I was young. He got a chance to abuse me again. The witnesses tell this themselves, on camera, in [the Unsolved Mysteries case file on Don Decker](https://unsolved.com/gallery/don-decker/) and in *Paranormal Witness*, Season 1. Every claim in this film comes from what those people said happened to them.
He Bought the Demon House Over the Phone
A man walks out of a house in Gary, Indiana, and his eyes never work properly again. It is permanent. Double vision, for the rest of his life. Nothing hit him. Nothing splashed him. He is not ill. There is just pressure behind both eyes, and an ache that will not go. Prism glasses on his face every single day — the kind of lens that bends the world back into one picture so a man can cross a room without putting a hand on the wall. Years later he is still wearing them. Surgeons have offered to operate. He has refused, and he has said why: corrective surgery on both eyes runs the risk of total blindness. And not one doctor has ever been able to tell him why a man's eyes come apart in the weeks after he spends time in one particular house. **He bought that house. Over the telephone. He had never once stood inside it.** He did not walk the rooms. He did not open a cupboard or put a foot on a stair or look at the basement. He owned it before he had seen it. People buy property sight unseen every day of the week. To flip it, to rent it out, to knock it down and sell the lot. Nobody does it with the one house in the country that a family has just run out of. ## The man who buys buildings nobody wants This is his trade, and he is good at it. He goes into the buildings the rest of us cross the road to get away from. Shut wards. Emptied asylums. Plywood screwed over the windows by somebody who meant it to stay screwed on. Places where, at some point, a person decided nobody should be inside any more, and locked the door, and left. He takes a crew in with him. Lights, cameras, sound, batteries, the whole apparatus. They stay the night, they film every hour of it, he cuts it together, and he sells it as a series. Men who do that work get used to the dark. That is the entire point of them. It is a job, with a routine, and gear that needs charging, and a way of talking to each other at three in the morning that keeps everyone steady. He has walked into hundreds of these buildings. He had never bought one. He had never wanted one. Then the story out of Gary broke. A small rented clapboard house on a corner. A family gone out of it. A priest called to the house, and three exorcisms after it. Police in the basement with a shovel, digging under the one patch of bare dirt in a floor that was concrete everywhere else, and lifting something out of the hole. That is the story told in full in [Part One — what the police actually saw](/watch/gary-indiana-demon-house). **And there is a thing he says happened before any of that, which he has never stopped saying.** A week before the story broke, he had a dream. He was a spirit among other spirits, showing them a trick — moving an object on a table without touching it, the thing he spends his working life asking spirits to do. Then he was in front of a door and could not control his body. The door opened. A twelve foot goat was standing on the other side of it, and black smoke came out of its mouth, and he was made to breathe it in. He woke up and his lungs hurt. And he knew it meant something. A week later the story out of Gary was on the news in every country there is. And he picked up a telephone, and he bought the house. He has been asked why, and the answer he gives is about himself, not about the house. He says part of him is drawn to the edge of that kind of chaos and danger. ## Everybody before this was sent. Nobody after it was. Now hold on to one thing, because it is the whole difference between everybody in this story so far and everybody in it from here. Everybody you met before this was sent. The caseworker was assigned the case. The officers were dispatched to the address. The priest was asked to come. The family signed a lease on a house they knew nothing whatsoever about. > **Not one person from here on was sent. Every one of them chose it, on purpose, knowing exactly what had happened in there.** ## The man brought in to explain it The first thing the new owner does is sensible. He brings in a man whose whole working life is one job — stand in the room, look at the thing, and say what it actually is. That is a draught. That is a joist. That is a pipe. That noise has a cause and here is the cause. An older man. Careful. Unexcitable. A lifetime of habits pointed at that one job and nothing else. He is the ballast. He is worth more than every camera in the van, because when a man like that says he cannot account for something, it means something. They get him inside the house. And within a short time the colour goes out of his face. He says he is dizzy. He says he thinks he is going to pass out. He is not frightened out of the building. **His body quits in it.** He cannot keep himself upright, and other men have to take hold of him and walk him out of that house. The one person brought there to explain the place cannot stay standing in it. Nothing gets explained. There is no draught to point at and no pipe to blame, because the man who was going to do the pointing is out on the street being held up by other men. He goes home. And a short time after he gets there his organs start shutting down. His prostate. His kidneys. His liver. His bladder. Not one at a time. Not a little here. Boom, like a cascade. He was in that house a few hours. He says that if he had stayed the night, he would be dead by now. He was in good health when he walked in. The doctors cannot tell him why any of it is happening. **And then, still inside, with the meters running, something comes over the man who brought him there.** He lunges at him. And then he catches himself, turns his body away, and makes himself walk out of the room, because he can feel what he is about to do to an older man he invited into that house. Behind him, on his own camera, the meter jumps again. That is the first time. He puts it down to tempers and a long shoot. He does not think much of it yet. He will. ## Four words nobody asked for They are already inside when it happens. Down the stairs, in the basement, with a camera running and a family standing around them in the dark. And it is the man who bought the house who says it. Standing in that basement, in front of a family who are still living with this, he tells them these things can get inside of you. That they do not just haunt a place. That they make you sick. And then four words nobody asked for. > **It's happened to me.** One of the family asks him the obvious thing back. Who helped you get that stuff out of you? The answer is one word. **A priest.** *And that's when you started wanting to do ghost hunting?* *Well, yeah. More or less. Investigating. That's what brought me here.* So understand what he has just told a room full of people. He is not guessing at any of this. He has had one of these things in him. It took a priest to get it out. And that is the thing that made him want to do this for a living. ## What was on the wall There is one more piece of footage out of that house, and nobody watches it for weeks. When they finally go through the tapes, they find something on the wall behind him. A black mass comes out of it. Not a shadow crossing the wall. **Out of the wall.** And then Doctor Taff turns and walks back down that hallway, and puts his hand flat on the wall. On the exact spot it came out of. And it takes him again where he stands. He does what a careful man does. He checks the boring answer first. Is that just the cameraman's hand. Then he says the sentence that should have ended the shoot. *We don't see it retract back into the wall.* And then, still just doing his job, he asks a question. *I don't know if that cameraman had any problems after this shoot.* ## Eight days behind a door The man who walks into abandoned asylums for a living cannot get off a bed. It starts as pain driving through both temples. It does not lift, and it does not lift, and he cannot stand up. **He stays in that room for eight days.** Eight days is not a headache. Crew on the clock. Gear hired by the week. Grown men sitting in a corridor, waiting on one man to open one door. And for eight days he does not open it. He is not sending word out. He is not on a phone. He is a man alone in a room with pain going through his head, for a week and a day. When he finally does, the people who have worked beside him for years say the man who came out is not the man who went in. Emotional first. Weeping, at nothing, at the wrong moments, in front of people he has never wept in front of. Then past that. Aggressive. He goes at one of his own crew. Somebody he hired. Somebody he has slept in bad buildings beside. **And he has no memory of it. Not a flash of it. Nothing.** They keep cameras running in the hallways, because they always do. So it is on the surveillance, and he sits and watches himself do a thing he cannot remember doing. Not a story told about him. Him. In a hallway. Going at a man who works for him. The crew fill in the rest afterwards, because he has to be told. *You attacked him. You were shouting at him — get out, get out. And then you rushed him.* He does it twice. He remembers neither time. The word he reaches for afterwards is not a supernatural one. He calls it a **contagion**. The house was a disease, and everybody who went near it got exposed. And then, with the cameraman they found on that basement floor already sent home — the men around him saying he is not himself any more — he does the thing that is hardest to explain. He has the last sheet of plywood screwed onto the front door with himself sealed inside the house, alone, overnight, to let whatever is in there take its best shot at him. Before they screw it on, he says it out loud. *I know this sounds stupid. But the investigator inside of me wants to experience it.* ## The ones who never chose any of it He is not the only one it did this to. And the rest of them never chose any of it. Three people went into that house before he had ever heard of it. A police captain with more than three decades on, sent there to prove the family were lying. A child services investigator whose whole career was children who had been burned and beaten. And a priest who had never performed an exorcism in his life, and was asked to perform three. Here is what it cost them. The captain gave his account sitting inside that building, in a chair, in daylight. And in all the time he was tied to that address he would not stay in it after dark. Not once. He never gave anybody a reason. Two days after he sat in that chair and told it, he came out of a restaurant onto ice. Men go down on ice constantly — backwards, arms out, onto a hip. He somersaulted. Came down on his head. Out cold for about a minute, and awake in a hospital, bleeding. More than thirty years of police work. They sent him to prove a lie. Four words. **I am a believer.** The investigator would not go back into that house. Somebody else had to walk in for her. The priest was thrown off his bicycle the day before he was due back for the second rite. When somebody looked at the bicycle after, the seat was turned forty five degrees. A bicycle seat does not move. It is a bolt through a clamp. It takes a tool and it takes force. He got back on it, and he went and did the rite. And the men who work those streets every shift — Gary police officers, saying out loud that they would not walk through the door of that address. One of them put it plainly. *I believe in that stuff, and that stuff might follow me home.* ## Two days Not one of those four picked that house. Which brings this to somebody who never had to go near it at all, and went anyway. She had lived in that house before the family who ran out of it ever saw the place. She was a child when she lived there. She was grown by the time any of this happened, and she agreed to walk back into it with him. She goes in. She stands in the rooms she was small in. The stairs, the front room, the doorways she last saw from a child's height. Then she goes home. For two days, nothing happens. Two completely ordinary days. And then she is in a hospital, badly hurt. While the staff are working on her, somebody sees her back. There is a number cut into the skin of it. **A six.** Not scratched. Cut. And it is on her back — which is the one part of a person that they cannot see, cannot easily reach, and cannot do neatly. She does not remember the six. Nobody can tell her how it got there. Two days before this, she was standing on a staircase looking at the house she grew up in. Two days. The night she was hurt, one of the crew walks off the production. Not notice. Not a conversation about it at the end of the week. That night. And he does not come back. ## Two thousand miles away Two thousand miles away, in Reno, Nevada, there is a woman who never once goes near that house. She and her husband are not crew. They are a couple from Reno who became the show's go-to specialists over four seasons and nine appearances — brought in, put in the building, and asked to do the one thing they were known for. Which was standing in empty rooms with a recorder, reaching for what she believed were the voices of the dead. She hears what happened to the young woman with the number cut into her back. And she decides to reach for the thing in that basement in Gary from exactly where she is standing. No car. No address. No trip to Indiana. Two thousand miles, and she reaches for it anyway. She makes the attempt. Months later, her husband killed her, and then himself. That is a domestic homicide. It has a man who did it, and [a documented history of domestic abuse behind it](https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2015/09/23/paranormal-investigators-killed-had-domestic-abuse-history/72717600/). They had a daughter. She is alive. ## Three years, and then the machine The film about the house takes him three years. Understand what that means. He owns the building outright. He holds the deed and he holds the key. There is no permission to chase, no owner to talk round, no window of access to book. He can let himself in on a Tuesday afternoon any week he likes. Three years. He says the case messed him up. He says the film is cursed. Near the end of his own film he stops and counts it out. He calls it the toll the house has taken on nearly everyone who ever went in. The caseworker who moved away and went into therapy. A second case manager, burned and broken up off a motorcycle not long after being in the house. A home inspector with a cancer diagnosis. The priest off his bicycle. The captain on the ice. The young woman. His own cameraman. A police chief saying something came back with him, and he does not want it back. And then [his eyes](https://dailydead.com/interview-zak-bagans-on-his-experiences-in-the-demon-house/). Then he does the thing that nobody in that business expects. He does not keep it. He does not sell it on. He does not board it up and sit on it. **In twenty sixteen he has it torn to the ground.** The screened porch, where the flies came back every winter on frozen ground. The staircase with the door at the top of it, that the footsteps came up. The front room where a grandmother sat at three in the morning and watched the shape of a man cross it, and cross it, and cross it again. The basement. The concrete. The dirt underneath the concrete, and the hole they dug in it. There is no negotiation in a demolition. It is one machine, and one afternoon, and then it is a lot with nothing on it. He could have gone on making money out of that house for as long as he owned it. Another season shot in it. Nights sold to people who would have paid anything to be locked inside it. Tours at the door, in the dark, every weekend of the year, forever. He says he wanted it destroyed so that nobody else could be in there any more. He walked away from all of that money, and he put the house on the ground. There is no house at that address now. No porch. No staircase. No front room. No basement, and no floor laid over the dirt. And the family who were in that house before any of these people arrived — the mother is alive, she is well clear of all of it, she has asked to be left alone, and she is. He kept pieces of it. Boards. Fittings. Part of the stairs. Part of a doorway. Nobody has stood inside those walls since. What is left of them is behind glass in his own museum in Las Vegas, in a case with a light on it.
The Gary Indiana Demon House: What Police Actually Saw
Five people stood in a small examination room in a hospital in Gary, Indiana, and watched something happen that took about four seconds. One of them was Valerie Washington. She had spent her whole career walking into the worst houses in Indiana — burns, bruises, cupboards with locks on the outside — and none of it had ever made her quit. She was in that room to write down what she saw. Four seconds in that room, and she walked out and never took another case. She left the job. She left the state. She did what you are supposed to do. She sat down in front of a psychiatrist and told him what she had seen with her own eyes. And he told her that she was the one who needed help. This is what she saw, and this is what was living in the house that family had rented. **It started with flies.** Late in 2011, a woman moved into a rented house on a small street in Gary with her mother and her three children. Nobody fell in love with this house. It was not a dream and it was not a bargain. There is no part of this story where somebody says it felt wrong. It was a house they could get, and they took it because that is what you do when you need somewhere to live. It had a basement. Concrete floor, poured flat, wall to wall, right out to the edges. Nobody in that family had any reason to look at that floor. In December the grandmother walked out onto the screened porch and the porch was black. Not a few flies. Not a cluster on the window in the sun. A covering — on the boards, on the screens, on the sill, thick enough that the grain of the wood was gone underneath them. It was December in northern Indiana. The ground outside was frozen solid. There was nothing out there for a fly to eat and nothing for a fly to hatch from. So they killed them. Rolled-up paper, a swatter, then a broom, sweeping them into a pan, and the pan filled, and they emptied it and filled it again. The next day the porch was black again. Every day, the same porch. Always that porch — never the kitchen, never the bedrooms. One room in that house, and the flies came back to it like it belonged to them. Here is what a family actually does, and it is the reason nobody outside a house like this ever understands it. They talk themselves out of it. It's an old house. Something has died inside a wall. There's a nest in the eaves and it'll be gone by spring. Nobody ever found a nest. Nobody ever found anything dead in a wall. And the flies went on all winter. Then, in the middle of the night with everybody in bed, somebody came up the basement stairs. Heavy. Wooden treads, one at a time, the way a grown man in boots comes up a staircase. You could count them. And then the last one, and then the sound of the basement door. They got up. Everybody was where they were supposed to be. There was nobody on the stairs and nobody in the basement. So they started locking the basement door. And the basement door kept opening. Then one night the grandmother woke up in the front room, and there was a man in the house. He was a shape in the dark, and he was pacing — across the living room, turn, back across the living room. Not searching for anything. Not going anywhere. Walking the way a man walks in a room he already knows. She did not scream and she did not run. She lay there with her eyes open and she watched him do it, because at three in the morning with children asleep down the hall, that is what your body decides for you. In the morning there were wet boot prints on the floor. Big ones. From something that had been outside. After that the whole household was in bed by eight o'clock at night. All of them, the grandmother too. Not because they were tired — because they had worked out the pattern. If everybody was asleep, the house stayed quiet. If anybody was still up at eleven, it started. Things going across rooms with nobody near them. A room with the heat running, cold enough that you could see your own breath in it. And the children in the dark, saying that something had touched them. A haunting does not make a family scream. It makes a family negotiate. You do not run — you make a rule. Everybody in bed by eight, and if we all do it right we get to keep the house and the school and the beds and the address, and nothing happens tonight. Terror turns into a schedule, and a schedule feels like control. It held for about six weeks. Then somebody the family loved died, and for one night the rule went out of the window. Two in the morning, a house full of people sitting up together the way people do. Nobody asleep. And the mother was in her own mother's bedroom when she started screaming. What the mother and the grandmother both say is this. One of the children was up off the bed. In the air, above it. Unconscious. Not thrashing, not making a sound. Out cold, and off the mattress, with nothing underneath. So the adults in that house did the only thing they could think of. They crowded around that bed, all of them, and they prayed. The grandmother's own word for what she felt in that room is *terrified*. Eventually the child came back down onto the bed. Nobody can tell you what ended it. Only that it ended. The child woke with no memory of any of it — did not know it had happened. And every single person who was visiting that house that night refused to ever come back to it. So the mother went and asked for help. Think about what that actually costs. It means sitting down in a chair, in daylight, across a desk from a man in a collar you have never met, and saying out loud with your own mouth that something walks around your living room at eleven at night and touches your children. And then it means watching his face while you say it. It changes. Not to laughter. Something worse than laughter. It goes polite. Then she got up and found another church and sat down in another chair and did it again. And then again. Not one church sent anybody to that house. Eventually one of them answered her, and what it handed her was not a person. It was instructions. Clean the house with bleach and ammonia, then take oil and draw a cross on every door and every window. So she did it. All of it. Exactly. On her knees with a bucket, room by room, into the corners, until the whole house stank of it and her eyes were streaming. Then she went back through with the oil. Every door frame, every window sill. The front door, the back door, the basement door, the closets, the porch. She did not skip one opening in that house. Then she went and got her children — their hands, palms turned over, their feet, her thumb in the oil and a mark on each forehead, one at a time. She did not believe anything about bleach. She was not a woman with a system. She was doing exactly what she had been told, to the letter, by the only people in months who would tell her anything at all. And her children stood still and let her do it. It did not hold. By spring it was not the building any more. It was the children. What came out of their mouths — words a child that age does not have and has never heard. A look held a beat and a half too long across a kitchen at their own mother. So she stopped trying to protect the house and started trying to protect the kids, and she was not quiet about it. She said it in waiting rooms. She said it at the school. She said it to anybody who would sit still long enough to hear it. And somebody outside that family picked up a telephone and called the state. Not to report a haunting — to report that this mother was mentally ill and had coached three children into performing it. Then every rational door in the world opened at once, and every one of them opened away from her. All three children were examined by doctors. All three were healthy — no marks, no injuries, nothing on any of them. The mother was evaluated properly by people qualified to do it and was found completely sound of mind. Specialists sat and listened to her account and wrote down what they made of it. And somebody, officially, in writing, recommended that the house be checked for carbon monoxide. There is no villain anywhere in that building. Nobody is lazy and nobody is cruel. Every one of those people is competent, doing the job they were trained to do, correctly — and every single one of them arrives somewhere else. The way she said it herself was this. *I couldn't talk to them, so I talked to God.* And then, in a hospital, in front of staff, the youngest boy came up off the floor and into a wall with nobody within reach of him, and both boys started cursing at the doctor in voices that were not theirs. Now slow down, because this is the room. It is small. A chair. A sink. A door that opens inward. The kind of room you have sat in yourself, waiting, reading the poster on the wall about washing your hands. Five people in it. The grandmother. Two of the boys. And two people whose job that afternoon was to stand there and write down what they saw. The younger boy started to growl. Not a noise a child makes playing at monsters — low and continuous, with breath behind it, coming out of a child's chest and going on longer than a child's lungs should let it go on. His lips pulled back off his teeth and his eyes rolled up until there was nothing in them but white. The grandmother reached across and took the older boy's hand. Just reflex. The way you grab a child in a car park. And then a voice came out of the older boy. It was not a child's voice. It was deep, and it was underneath his own, and everybody in that room heard it. *It's time to die. I will kill you.* And then he grinned at them. Too wide. The wrong muscles pulling in the wrong places, further than a face is built to go. And he held it. And he held it. And he did not blink. Then he went backwards. He did not turn around. He went backwards, across the floor, with the grandmother's hand still locked in his — and his heel found the wall. And he kept going. Up it. Flat-footed, soles against the plaster, his body coming out over the room, and her arm rising up over her own head because neither of them would let go. Onto the ceiling. Over the top of her, and down the other side, and onto his feet. Then he walked over to the chair and sat down in it. Every adult in that room who was being paid to be in it got out of it. And minutes later the boy lifted his head and looked around him like somebody waking up in a room he does not remember lying down in. Here is the part that makes this thing impossible to kill. They went and found the doctor and they told him. And the doctor did not believe them. Of course he did not believe them. And then he asked the one question that could actually settle it. *Can he do it again?* So three grown professionals walked back into a hospital room and asked a small boy to walk up a wall. And he had no idea what they meant. Five minutes after doing it, he could not remember doing it. He tried, because adults were asking him to. He put his foot up on the wall and he pushed. His foot slid down. He tried again and it slid again. He could not do it. Somebody asked afterwards whether he had run at it — taken it at speed, the way a kid gets two steps up a wall on a dare, the way you would have to do it if it were a trick. No. He glided. That same afternoon the state took all three children. There is a form for that. It has printed reasons down the side and you check the one that applies. Somebody checked a box, and then underneath, in the space where you write what was actually going on, there is one sentence. *All the children were experiencing spiritual and emotional distress.* Read that back to yourself. That is the state of Indiana, in its own paperwork, on the afternoon it took three children out of their mother's house. And land on her for a second. She went to the churches and the churches went polite. She went to the hospital and the hospital wrote a word beside her name. Then the state came. And now she is standing in that house at eight o'clock at night with no children in it. Then a telephone rang in a rectory in Merrillville, Indiana, and a priest picked it up. It was the hospital. *We need an exorcism.* People had just run out of a room because they watched a boy walk backwards up a wall. The man who took that call was not an exorcist. He had never done one. It was not what he did. He went anyway. He sat with that family for hours. He telephoned two men who do this work for a living and asked them what he was looking at. And he went hunting for the ordinary explanation, the way you are supposed to. Illness. Drafts. A family with a story to sell. A house with something wrong with the plumbing. He did not find it. And then he took out a crucifix and laid it on the mother, and she began to convulse. Right there in front of him, her body seizing and going and she could not stop it, and it was not a faint and it was not a fit, and nobody standing in that room could put a name to it. He told her straight out that she was possessed. She did not argue with him. She did not ask him what he meant. She said two words. *I know.* Sit in that for a second. Five months. Flies on the porch since December. Boots on the stairs. Wet prints on her living room floor. Everybody in bed by eight. Bleach on her knees. Oil on her own children's foreheads. A word written beside her name by people with degrees on the wall. Three children taken out of her house in a single afternoon. And in five months not one single person had agreed with her. Then a stranger walks into the room, puts a piece of metal against her, and says out loud the thing she has been trying to get somebody — anybody — to say since winter. *I know.* He performed the small rite he was permitted to perform on his own. Afterwards the nightmares got worse, not better. So he typed it up. Six pages. Everything he had seen and everything he had checked and ruled out. He put his name at the bottom of it and sent it to his bishop. And the bishop said no. Meanwhile a police captain with more than three decades on the job — homicides, been shot at — had a theory, and it was a good theory. This family had made all of this up for money, and he was going to go over there and end it. Then his recorder died. Fresh batteries in it. Went in working, came out dead. Then another officer played back his own audio from inside that house, and there is a word on it. A whisper. *Hey.* Nobody said it. Then his police radio quit on him on the drive home. Then his garage door would not open, and the power was on the whole way up and down his street. Then the driver's seat of his own car slid backwards and forwards with him sitting in it. He took the car to a mechanic and the mechanic told him the seat motor was broken. He went and got the boring answer himself — and then he stood there and told people about the whole thing anyway. Back at the house, oil was running out along the slats of the blinds in an upstairs room and pooling on the sill underneath them. So they photographed it. Then they took cloths and wiped every slat, both sides, top to bottom, until the whole thing was dry. Then they put every person out of that room and shut the door. And then somebody did something clever: they wedged a cotton swab into the door frame, so that the door could not be opened by anybody without that swab dropping on the floor. Forty minutes later they came back. The swab was exactly where they had left it, and the blinds were running again. They took flashlights outside and went up the outside of that wall looking for a pipe, a vent, a seam, a leak — anything above that window that could put oil on the inside of it. There was nothing. Then they went down into the basement. In the big room down there, standing on the concrete, was a small altar somebody had built by hand. Religious statues stood up in a row, candles, a Bible, and salt poured out in lines along the inside walls, running the whole length of that basement. The grandmother told them plainly whose it was. Theirs. They had built it themselves, to keep the demons off. Which is the bleach and the oil, one floor down. It is the same woman doing the same arithmetic. No church would send a man to that house. The hospital wrote a word next to her daughter's name. The state took the children. So an elderly woman went down into her own basement with what she could get her hands on — statues, wax, a Bible and a box of salt — and built the only thing she could think to build. That is the second time this family had to invent a defence on their own, in the dark, with nobody coming. And then somebody looked at the floor. Concrete, poured flat, wall to wall, right out to the edges of that basement — except in one place. Underneath the wooden stairs there was a patch of bare dirt. And the question, once you have heard it, does not leave you alone. Why would somebody concrete an entire basement and leave the dirt under the stairs? So they dug it out. Four feet by three, and down. Men with shovels handing things up out of a hole, one at a time, and getting quieter as they go. A press-on fingernail, pink. A woman's underwear. A comb. Two children's socks with the bottoms cut off below the ankle. A heavy metal bar. And a red tin. The captain would say afterwards that four feet down there was a foil pan, sitting flat, with a candle standing up in it. More than three decades. Homicides. Shot at. And this is the man who has to stand there and put words to what came up out of that floor. His words: *We only assume, because we had no expertise, that this was a portal to hell.* Nine days after those six pages went to the bishop, a telephone rang at half past three in the afternoon. Permission — and it had not been typed. It was written by hand, in ink, at the foot of the last page of his own request. What happened in those nine days, nobody has ever said. Three rites, in his own church. The day before the second one he was thrown off his bicycle. He picked himself up off the road and looked at it, and the seat had turned forty-five degrees. His words: *What else can it do? I was baffled by it, and I wasn't going to let it stop me.* He got back on the bicycle and he went and did the second one. The children came home. Not to that house — a different house, in a different city, hours away. Their mother never spent another night on that street. Months later the same agency that took those children closed the file on them. The last thing written in it is one sentence. *They have not experienced any issues with demonic presences or spirits in the home.* They went home, and it did not follow them. She lives quietly now. She does not talk about it, and she does not want to be found. And the people who have sat with her since all say the same thing about her. That she is at peace. The family got out.
He Was Sedated for 5 Days. So How Did He See Me Praying?
This one is mine. Everything else on this site is an account we went out and found, weighed, and handed back to you. This is my own testimony. It happened to my father and it happened to me, in the summer of 2025, and I am telling it the way I lived it. For five days a machine did my father's breathing. The number on the monitor was his own respiratory effort, and it read zero. It would blip up to five, maybe ten, and then fall back to nothing and stay there. You could watch that screen for five straight minutes and never see him take a breath of his own. He was a big man — six foot five, over three hundred pounds — and he had been fighting for eight years. Eight years of experimental treatment, of taking whatever they put in front of him, of going into hospitals and coming back out again every single time. So when he called me and told me his skin was on fire, that he could not stand to be inside his own body, I did what I had always done. I assumed he would come back out again. I was travelling for work, sitting in an airport, and I flew home the next day. The room was quiet when I got there. He was in a standard room, not intensive care, and nobody was worried. We talked about nothing in particular for ten minutes. Then my father went into seizures. Every alarm in that room went off at once, the room filled with people, and a doctor turned around in the middle of it and asked me a question: do we have your permission to protect his airway. That is how they ask. What they are asking is whether they can put a machine in your father's throat and let it breathe for him. I said yes. They took him to intensive care, and the number never moved. Not on the first day, not on the second, not on the third. And the longer a man stays on that machine, the less likely it becomes that he ever comes off it. Here is the part I did not expect: nobody would tell me the truth. I do not say that bitterly — the doctors were careful, they were polite, they were correct, and they were not straight with me. They dropped hints and left the room. It was our neighbour, who had been through the same thing with her own mother, who told me what it meant that there was no pulse in his lower extremities. And every night that week I went home and typed the words the doctors had left in the room into an AI and asked it what they meant. It told me what none of them would. My father was dying. Not eventually. Now. Which brought me to the piece of paper. He had a directive and it was a clear one: nothing artificial, no machines keeping him here. He had written it down, he had meant it, and I was the one holding it. And I agreed with it — if it were me on that machine, I would not want to be kept here either. But agreeing with him did not make the decision any easier to be the one to make. Being faithful to my father meant ending my father's life. I would give the word, they would take the machine away, and I would carry that for the rest of my life. I knew what the call was. I just did not want to be the one to make it, and I knew that if I made it I would never be all right with it. That Sunday night I went up to my office and I got on the floor. I am not going to give you the words. That prayer was between me and God and it is going to stay that way. But I will tell you what I asked for, because that is the whole story. I did not ask for a miracle. I did not ask for healing. I did not ask God to undo any of it or to give me my father back. I asked God for His will — and then I asked Him one thing on top of it. If it can be done, take this out of my hands. Do not make me the one who chooses. That was the prayer. Then I went to bed, and nothing about that night felt like anything had happened. Every morning that week I had called the nurses' station before I did anything else, and every morning the answer was a version of the same answer. Monday morning I called again. And the nurse said: he's up. He's off the machine. We're about to get him some food. Five days at zero, and overnight he simply came back. By that night he was out of intensive care and in a normal room, sitting up, annoyed that nobody would let him go home yet. I want to be careful about how I tell you the next part, because of how I found out. I did not ask him. It would never have occurred to me to ask him — as far as I knew, he had been asleep. He brought it up himself. He told me he had been in a blackness where he could see nothing at all. That was his phrase: he could see nothing. And in that dark, he said, he was shown two things. Life, and death. And he was asked to choose. And then he was shown one more thing. He was shown his son. On his knees. Praying. My father was not a poet. He was not a mystical man and he was not a dramatic one. He gave me that account in a handful of flat sentences, and in all the time he had left he never added a single detail to it, never embellished it, never built it into anything. He just said it, the same way, every time he said it. And he said it to a lot of people — to our family, to his friends, and to his closest friend of many years, the man who would stand up two weeks later and give the eulogy at his funeral. I am not the only person who heard my father say that he was asked to choose, and that he was shown his son praying. He chose to live. And on Monday morning, he came back. What he got was two weeks. He was not healed — he came back to the same failing body he left. God gave my father a choice; He did not give him a new body. I want to be honest about that, because the gift was not what I would have designed. It was better. That Father's Day it was just the two of us in that hospital room. I brought a basket. He wanted to go home. It was not a remarkable day and I would not trade it for anything I own. Then they let him go home, and he had two weeks in his own house. At the end of those two weeks he fell at home, and they barely got him to the hospital in time. He went straight into intensive care, and this time he did not come out. He used those two weeks. That Thursday he thanked my wife — for every birthday and every holiday she had quietly carried since my mother died eight years before him. That was his goodbye to her, and he knew it was, and she did not. Friday he and I had ours. I am keeping that one. But we had it, and I have never once had to wonder what my father would have said to me, because he said it. Saturday it was me and the head nurse. He had been sedated long enough that he should have been awake, and he wasn't, quite; she had to shake him. She leaned down and said his name, and then she said — do you know who this is. And she was pointing at me. My father looked right at me and shook his head. No. And he held it. He let it sit there. He let me stand in it. He had been a kidder his whole life, and that head nurse had known him just long enough to see straight through him. So she asked him again. You know who this is. And he laughed, and he nodded yes. Then she asked him what she had woken him up to ask. Are you ready to go. He said yes. And then she asked him one more question, because she wanted to be certain he understood what he was saying. She asked him where he was going. And my father lifted his hand, and he pointed up. Those were the last words I had with my father. Two hours later he was gone.
It Came Within Ten Feet of Their Helicopter
A senior U.S. intelligence officer took a helicopter up to investigate loud thuds heard in the mountains of a weapons test range. What followed, in his own words, was "a series of close UAP encounters lasting over an hour." An object rose off the ground, closed to within **ten feet** of the aircraft, dropped below them and accelerated away. They gave chase and broke off almost immediately — "unable to match its speed." Later, hovering at 700 feet, he and both pilots watched two large orange orbs flare up beside the rotor disk. Then a third below them. Then a fourth. Four or five in a "T" formation, which dimmed in reverse order and vanished. When fighter jets arrived overhead, the same orbs appeared directly above them, flaring one at a time, matching their speed and course. "We were virtually speechless." He took no photographs, and he says why: "I was focused on assessing what it was and whether it posed a threat." That account is ODNI-UAP-D001, and almost nobody has read it. It sits inside PURSUE — the 375 records the Department of War has published across five releases since 8 May 2026. We watched every video in all five: 134 files. Most of it is distant infrared — a grey rectangle, a bright shape miles out, a crosshair. The best clip in the archive is DOW-UAP-PR054, a spherical object filed as showing "erratic movement," and it was not inside any of the download bundles. Nothing in five releases comes close to "GIMBAL" and "GO FAST", the two U.S. Navy recordings from 2015, declassified in 2020, which are not part of these releases at all. A second document matters as much. DOW-UAP-D077, an anomaly-office memorandum dated 5 June 2026, covers October 2023 in the western United States: six federal law enforcement special agents, in three teams of two, reporting a "luminous orange mother orb" that releases clusters of smaller red orbs, repeatedly, over several hours. The office works through every ordinary explanation and attributes roughly 60% to military flares — while noting its own best explanation is "unsubstantiated by technical data or physical evidence." The remaining 40% lack a plausible explanation and remain unresolved.
Pentagon UFO Files, Drop #1: What's Actually in the PURSUE Releases
Since May 2026 the Department of War has been publishing United States government UFO files in batches, under a program called PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. As of the fifth release, cleared on 7 August 2026, the archive holds 375 files: documents, images, audio and video, drawn from agencies including the CIA, the FBI, NASA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the State Department, the Department of Energy and the Pentagon itself. What is unusual is not that files are being released. It is which files. By the Department's own description these are unresolved cases — "the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena" — and the directive adds, in the same paragraph, that the Department "welcomes the application of private-sector analysis, information and expertise." The headline cases so far: five Army service members at Fort Carson, Colorado watching something over Cheyenne Mountain in February 2022; six video files captured contemporaneously over the Gulf of Oman in 2021; a Department of Energy incident report from Pantex, Texas, where the United States assembles its nuclear weapons, which put the plant into lockdown; and a senior intelligence officer who filed a report on his own daylight sighting in late 2025. Alongside them, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office publishes the cases it did resolve, with its reasoning and its confidence levels attached. New tranches are posted every few weeks. This entry covers the cases we judged most substantial — not all 375 files.
The Weekly
One letter a week, and nothing else.
What came across the beat, and what we made of it. No tracking, no selling, no noise — and you can leave whenever you like.
We ask for an address, never a card. Everything here is free, and the things that help a frightened person always will be.