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.

Almost everything that family was told to do was useless. One thing would have worked, and nobody did it.

There are two questions this story never answered. How did that thing get into that house? And why did nobody come?

They did not open it.

That family signed a lease in November and moved in with what they owned. Whatever was under that basement floor was under it before they ever saw the place.

So start with what came up out of that floor, because that is the part nobody wants to look at. Somebody had poured concrete over every square inch of that basement, wall to wall, right out to the edges — and left one patch of bare dirt under the wooden stairs. Four feet down in that patch: a foil pan lying flat with a candle standing up in it. Two children's socks with the bottoms cut off below the ankle. A press-on fingernail, a comb, a heavy metal bar.

That is not rubbish under a house. That is a ritual. Somebody performed it on purpose, on that ground, and then covered it over and sealed the floor on top of it.

The Ammons family did not open that door. They signed a lease on the house it was already in.

Then there are the flies.

Before anything else. On a screened porch in December, with the ground frozen solid.

There is a name in Scripture for that. Second Kings, chapter one. A king falls, and he is sick, and he sends to enquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron. And that name is an insult. The title was Baal-zebul — Baal the Prince. Israel bent it into Baal-zebub: Lord of the Flies.

The name is in the book, and that family had a porch black with flies in an Indiana winter before a single other thing happened.

But the name is not the interesting part of that chapter. This is. The king is desperate, and he sends to the wrong god. And God does not ask him how dare you. God asks one question, and he asks it three separate times in a single chapter:

But the angel of the Lord said to Elijah the Tishbite, Arise, go up to meet the messengers of the king of Samaria, and say unto them, Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that ye go to enquire of Baal-zebub the god of Ekron? — 2 Kings 1:3

Is there no God in Israel? Is that why you went to him?

Meaning: was there nobody else? Was there nobody else you could have asked?

Now put that question over the next five months of this woman's life.

She asked for help. Church after church, chair after chair, and not one of them sent a single person 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 mark every door and every window.

There is no bleach in the Bible. But she was not wrong about the oil. Oil is real. It is all over Scripture — and it is never handed to somebody standing on their own. It comes with a person who has the authority to bring it.

She had the oil. Nobody would come and stand in that house with her.

The form of it, with the power taken out.

And then, in a wiped room, with the door shut and a cotton swab wedged in the frame that never fell, oil came running back down the inside of a window.

That is not random. That reads like mockery. She used the sign without the authority behind it, and the thing in that house handed the sign straight back to her.

And then her mother went down into that basement and built an altar. Statues standing in a row, candles, a Bible, salt poured out in lines along the walls. She built it with her own hands, out of love, with nothing left to try and nobody coming.

And it was still an idol, made inside that house, by somebody living in it.

Demons are legalists. They work on permission, and on ground, and on rights. And they will hold you to the letter of a thing you did not know you were doing. Sincerity does not touch that. Not knowing does not touch it either.

Now watch the order this thing moved in.

It started in the house. Flies, footsteps, a door that would not stay shut.

Then it was on the children.

Then it was in the family.

Every single step it took, it took on ground that somebody handed it. The first door was already there when they moved in. The second one they opened themselves, trying to shut the first.

And through the whole of it, count who was not in that building. No father. No elder. No pastor. Nobody with any authority at all who would walk through that front door and stand in it.

And it was so, when the days of their feasting were gone about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning, and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them all: for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts. Thus did Job continually. — Job 1:5

That is what the job is. A man stands between his household and whatever is coming for it.

Nobody stood over that roof, and the three children under it were open the whole way through.

And that is not that family's failure. Put that down and leave it down.

So what is it, if it is not bleach?

It is not a technique. It is not a rank. It is not a building. It is not a letter from anybody.

Them that believe. Not them that are ordained. Not them that were granted permission.

It is a name. And the name belongs to a person — and you have to be his.

That is the entire difference between the altar an elderly woman built with her own hands and the thing that finally ended it.

If something is happening in your house, do not go looking for a technique.

There is no oil, no salt, no candle, no arrangement of objects on this earth with any power in it at all.

Go and find people who know the name of Jesus Christ and will come and stand in your house and say it out loud.

And if you are one of those people, and somebody knocks on your door with a story like this one — go.

That family got out of that house, and it did not follow them. Thank God for that.

But nobody should have gone through five months of it alone. On her knees with a bottle of bleach, while every door she knocked on stayed shut.

The story did not end when the family got out. The house was bought — over the telephone, sight unseen — by a man who sealed himself inside it. Part Two — He Bought the Demon House Over the Phone.