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.

So what opened the door. In this story there are two answers, and they are not the same.

That family opened nothing. No board, no session, no invitation — they rented a house that already had it. And it came slowly. Weeks before anything touched a child. And when the state examined all three of those children: healthy. Nothing that lasted.

The men who came after went looking. Not for answers. For a thrill, and for what it would sell. One of them bought the house over the telephone without ever standing in it. The rest brought equipment and questions.

That is the widest door there is. And they held it open with other people standing in the room. A young woman who used to live there. Their own crew. Themselves.

And there was no ramp at all. Eyes damaged inside a few weeks. A cameraman on the basement floor. Eight days behind a door with no memory of it. And a young woman who was invited in — a number cut into her back two days later, and she has never been able to say how.

Same house. Two doors. One of them was held open on purpose.

That is not the door you are standing at

Now — most of you are reading this the way I used to watch this. Curious, on a couch, late. That is not the door.

There is a name on this channel and it is a command. Try the spirits, whether they are of God. Hold a thing up against His word and find out what it is.

What it never meant is talking to them. Coming into agreement with them. Working with them.

A recorder switched on and a question asked into an empty room. A ghost box. Trying to talk to the dead, or to ascended masters, or whatever it is calling itself this year. That is not trying the spirits. That is joining them.

Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God. — Leviticus 19:31

A pendulum. A board with letters. A sorcerer reading an animal's organs. We use a recorder and a ghost box. Different centuries. Same practice.

And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? — Isaiah 8:19

Hear what is being asked there. Not how dare you. Why would a people go to them, when their own God is right there.

Nobody in this film had one ounce of authority

Because that is what it comes down to. Nobody in this film had one ounce of authority over that house. They had equipment. And there is none in a recorder, or a meter, or in bleach, or salt, or an altar built by hand by a frightened grandmother with nobody left to ask.

So if this is your house — see a doctor, rule out every ordinary thing, and leave the equipment alone.

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. — James 4:7

Submit first. Then resist. You do not have to be strong enough. You have to be His.

And that is exactly what that mother did. She had no equipment and no technique. She went church to church asking for help and she would not stop asking. She turned to God — and that family got out, and it did not follow them.

The captain who went in to disprove it did not go looking for anything. Neither did the doctor they brought in, or the caseworker, or the priest. They walked into somebody else's emergency.

But the men who bought that house and filmed inside it did not stop when it started. They kept going. The mother reached for God. They kept reaching for the house.

I am not throwing rocks at anybody. Every one of those men is still alive, and still able to turn around. That is all repentance is. Turning around.

There is a name

There is a name. Jesus Christ. The authority is His, He is greater than anything that was ever in that basement, and you have to be His. Not interested in Him. Not respectful of Him. His.

And if you have already opened that door — a board at a sleepover, a session, a recorder in an empty room — that is forgiven. Not excused. Forgiven.

He is not asking what you were doing in there. He is asking you to come home.