Celebrity Ghosts and Notorious Hauntings

NOTORIOUS GHOSTS, POLTERGEISTS, AND PARANORMAL HOT SPOTS

Some ghost stories and haunted locations truly stand out for their intensity and the terror they cause, whether to a family living on a farm or the hundreds of drivers who dare travel down a lonely road. Some become so notorious, they end up being made into movies or best-selling novels. In fact, most people don’t know these situations even happened until they see it on the big screen or read about it.

Here are a few to ponder.…

FAMOUS GHOSTS
AMITYVILLE HORROR HOUSE

In 1977, Prentice Hall published a book by author Jay Anson called The Amityville Horror: A True Story. Up until then, most people were totally unaware of the horrors occurring in the small town of Amityville on the south shore of Long Island, particularly in a five-bedroom Dutch Colonial home. The story began on the night of November 13, 1974, when a twenty-three-year-old man named Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot his parents and four siblings to death with a .35 caliber Marlin 336C rifle at 3:00 A.M. while they slept peacefully in their beds. Two of the victims may have been awake during the time of the murder. All six were pronounced dead when they were found by Suffolk County police.

The family had lived there since 1965, and they were all buried together in the nearby Saint Charles Cemetery. DeFeo, the eldest son of the family, was taken into custody. He told police he thought the killings were the result of a mob hit. The next day, when his alibi proved false, he confessed to the murders and went to trial on October 14, 1975. He then claimed he killed his family because they were plotting against him. He was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and was given six back-to-back, twenty-five-year-to-life sentences.

Thirteen months after the murders, the Lutz family took advantage of the home’s reduced price and purchased it. They moved in but stayed only twenty-eight days before leaving. What happened to George and Kathy Lutz and their three children during that time has become the stuff of legends, spawning a blockbuster movie in 1979 starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder as George and Kathy Lutz and Oscar winner Rod Steiger as the priest that comes in to help and bless the house. Sequels and remakes soon followed.

But as truth is often stranger than fiction, the Lutz family experienced less than a month of pure terror before they left one night in a hurry. The level of paranormal activity that occurred in the house was through the roof, including:

•George woke up every night at 3:15 A.M., the exact same time as the DeFeo murders.

•Swarms of flies plagued the house, even in the cold winter.

•Apparitions appeared everywhere, and the family members reported cold spots, strange odors, and the sensations of being touched or, in Kathy’s case, embraced by unseen arms.

•The image of a demon was burned into the back of the fireplace. The demon had half its head blown off.

•George found a small, hidden room in the basement with red walls, which the family dog refused to go near.

•Kathy had recurring nightmares of the murders and “saw” the order in which the DeFeo family was killed.

•The five-year-old daughter, Missy, claimed to have an imaginary friend named Jodie, a pig with red, glowing eyes, which was witnessed by George on Christmas Day.

•George, who closely resembled DeFeo, began going to the same local bar DeFeo often patronized.

•Kathy developed strange, red welts on her chest while in bed.

•Constant doors and windows opening and closing, strange bite marks, disembodied voices, and even green, oozing slime dripping from the walls.

The Lutzes tried their own home blessing in January 1976, but the paranormal phenomena continued. They eventually left the house with a few possessions to go to stay with Kathy’s mother in Deer Park, but the phenomena followed them. With the help of their local priest, who came out to attempt to bless the house and cleanse it but heard a voice tell them to “Get out!”, they apparently freed the house of demons, according to some reports, and left permanently on January 14. The priest also claimed he suffered blistering and was slapped by unseen hands in the house before he left.

Interestingly, the mover who came in to load up the rest of their things reported nothing at all wrong with the house.

The address of the Amityville horror house (shown here in 2012) had to be changed by the owners in an attempt to confuse and reduce the number of unwanted gawkers and tourists.

On the night of March 6, 1976, famed demonologist couple Ed and Lorraine Warren, who founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952, visited the home with a news crew and claimed to have captured a “demonic boy” on camera, which was made public in 1979, when the first film was about to be released. Publicity stunt or just good timing? Noted parapsychologist and author Hans Holzer also visited the house and claimed, along with the Warrens, that the house was indeed filled with evil spirits. Holzer went on to write several books about the Amityville events.

Over the years, there has been a lot of controversy about the Amityville case and how much of the story was true and how much was fabricated. Add to that the differences made to the story for the sake of Hollywood’s need to sell movie tickets (there were, at last count, sixteen Amityville Horror movies and sequels), and no one will really know exactly what happened in that house except the families who lived there and experienced what happened behind closed doors. The Lutzes took a lie-detector test and were found to be truthful, but the family’s former lawyer, William Weber, who had a falling-out over financial issues with the couple, claimed they made the whole thing up to make money. Weber, interestingly, was DeFeo’s defense attorney.

The son, Daniel, claims the house indeed ruined his life and continues to have nightmares to this day. He was featured in a documentary called My Amityville Horror, which was released in March 2013. Daniel confirmed the original story as told by his mother and stepfather in the documentary. He also makes additional claims that both he and George were possessed, that George demonstrated telekinetic abilities, and strongly suggests that George’s interest in the occult, which was not portrayed in the original movie, might have initiated the demonic events.

The Lutzes stood by their story up until their deaths (George died in 2006 of heart disease and Kathy died in 2004 of emphysema). And they never got rich off of books and movies, struggling financially afterward. Contrary to many rumors, the Amityville house was not built upon ancient Indian burial ground, as confirmed by the Amityville Historical Society. Whatever happened in that house within the two years between the DeFeo murders and the Lutzes’ terrifying encounters, only they know for sure.

The house was home to a number of families afterward, and its street address has been changed as a way to keep tourists and looky-loos away, although the style of the house is hard to miss.

MARION PARKER’S GHOST

In 1927, a violent psychopath named Edward Hickman kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl named Marion Parker from her childhood home in Los Angeles, California, with the intention of getting a nice ransom from her wealthy father, banker Perry Parker. Hickman caught Marion writing a letter to her parents about her kidnapping, and Hickman went crazy, choking the girl, then cutting off her arms and legs with a razor blade. He still wanted the ransom and told Parker she was still alive. He then powdered up her dead face, fixed up her hair, and sewed her eyelids open before putting her torso in the back of his car covered with a blanket. He drove to the site where the ransom would be waiting and delivered the girl bundled in the blanket to her father. By the time her father discovered she was dead, Hickman was gone. He was eventually caught, convicted of murder, and hanged in 1928. Marion’s ghost is said to haunt her childhood home to this day.

THE SULTAN PRINCE

New Orleans is a city haunted by ghosts, demons, voodoo, and all sorts of paranormal activity. The large home at 716 Dauphine Street was one such place. It was known as “The Palace” in the 1860s, when the owner hosted loud parties almost every night. His name was Prince Suleyman, a Turkish sultan of a nonspecific Middle Eastern country, or so he told people, and he loved to have lavish parties, orgies, and harems of women and young boys at his whim. He had many wives and a large number of slaves, servants, and family members living at the palace.

Legend has it that a neighbor noticed the palace was unusually quiet one morning and called the police, who arrived to discover a horrifying scene. Bloodied bodies were strewn about the house, soaking the floors and ceilings with blood. The slaughtered victims included men, women, and children, yet the sultan was not among them. He was discovered buried alive in the yard, his hand reaching above the ground.

Police initially blamed pirates, who were active in the area at that time, but some people believed it was a revenge killing because the sultan had stolen his brother’s money and fled to America to avoid execution. Whatever the reason, today people report seeing the ghost of the sultan himself and hearing the loud, raucous sounds of phantom partiers inside the palace.

THE CONNECTICUT HAUNTING

In 1986, the Snedeker family decided to rent an old house in Southington, Connecticut. The family consisted of Allen and Carmen Snedeker and their four kids: three sons and one daughter. In the basement, Carmen discovered a stash of old mortician tools, and they learned the house had once been a funeral parlor.

It wasn’t long before the oldest son was experiencing terrifying visions and seeing ghosts, and soon, the rest of the family was as well. Allen and Carmen both reported they were sexually assaulted by demonic entities, and one day, while Carmen mopped the kitchen floor, the water turned to blood.

Ed and Lorraine Warren, the same demonologist couple who once investigated the Amityville house (above), were called in, and they claimed the house was infested with demonic spirits. The Snedekers even went on television to tell their horrific story, appearing on national talk shows. The story, of course, became a movie, The Haunting in Connecticut (2009), which was based on a book horror novelist Ray Garton wrote in 1992. Garton was hired by the Warrens to write the Snedeker family’s story and later admitted he found holes in the story the couple told him.

Paranormal researcher Lorraine Warren is shown here at a 2013 speech she gave at Wondercon. She and her husband, Ed, investigated the doings at Amityville and at the Perron house in Rhode Island.

The Snedekers stood by their story, but the family’s maid, who was there at the time of the alleged hauntings, reported to Skeptical Inquirer she never heard or saw anything unusual in the two years the family lived there. Rumors swirled that the family, seeing how much publicity the Lutz family got, made up the haunting to financially benefit from the book deal. This theory still plagues the Amityville story to this day. Was it real, or was it made up? Again, only the families involved know for sure.

THE CONJURING—THE PERRON FAMILY STORY

Another blockbuster movie, The Conjuring (2013), starred Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine Warren. The film told the story of Roger and Carolyn Perron, who moved into a haunted, eighteenth-century Burrillville, Rhode Island, farmhouse with their five daughters. The family soon realized they weren’t alone and experienced a host of frightening paranormal activity, even possession by demonic spirits. Lorraine Warren was a consultant on the film and insisted the movie depicted what she and her husband found when they began investigating the house and the family’s claims.

The Perron family lived in the fourteen-room farmhouse for nine years, from January 1971 to 1980, during which time they experienced both harmless and malevolent spirits, including one they called Bathsheba, who acted as though she were the matriarch of the house and resented the mother, Carolyn. According to family members, including Andrea Perron, one of the five daughters, spirits would arrive around 5:00 A.M. and lift the beds up. They stunk of rotting flesh, but the family continued to stay. They never would enter the basement, though, believing it to be a center of activity. Sometimes, Roger would have to go down to fix broken heating equipment and reportedly felt the presence of something cold and awful.

The Warrens visited the farmhouse repeatedly in 1974, but they did not attempt an exorcism, which was the domain of a Catholic priest. Andrea Perron recalled seeing her mother being possessed during a séance and speak in a strange language as her chair was lifted and thrown across the room.

Perron has published a series of books documenting the events from the eyes of someone who experienced them.

ROLAND DOE, OR THE BOY WITH MANY NAMES

Exorcisms of possessed humans are not common, but they have happened over the course of history and continue to do so. One such case served as the foundation for one of the most successful horror movies ever to be released, The Exorcist. Released in 1979, the movie was based on the 1971 novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty, which was inspired by the Doe case. Many people who flocked to the theater to see the movie had no idea there was some truth to the horrific story of possession.

Roland Doe, who was also known as Ronnie Doe, Ronald Hunkeler, and Robbie Mannheim, was born in 1935 in Cottage City, Maryland. His mother was Lutheran, and his father was Catholic. His Aunt Tillie (Aunt Harriet) was a spiritualist who introduced him to the wonders of the Ouija board when he was fourteen years old, and after his aunt died, she supposedly possessed him via the Ouija board. The family began noticing the sounds of angry voices and furniture moving across the rooms at night. Roland’s body would break out in strange, inexplicable claw marks, and he would feel sharp pains in his stomach, so the family decided to leave for St. Louis, Missouri, to escape the creepy activity, especially when the boy’s behavior began turning dark.

Author William Peter Blatty wrote The Exorcist, which is about the Roland Doe case and was made into a successful horror film in 1979.

While in St. Louis, the family met with Father Raymond Bishop and Father William Bowdern from the Xavier College Church. The two priests entered Roland’s room and were immediately assaulted by invisible demons that threw holy water across the room and moved bookcases around in front of their eyes. The men got permission a few days later to perform an exorcism and returned, working over the next few days to free the boy of a host of evil demons. Because the family was so stressed, they carried out the rest of the exorcism rites on Roland at the psychiatric ward of the Alexian Brothers Hospital in South St. Louis, Missouri. The exorcism was considered complete and successful on Monday, April 18, when the final evil demon was banished from the boy.

From that point on, the Doe boy never experienced another event and lived a peaceful life.

Though Blatty admitted his novel changed a few elements from the original story of Roland Doe, including the child’s gender and the location of the home, much of it was indeed based on the Doe story. As with all of these notorious hauntings, skeptics claimed the boy was not possessed at all but perhaps mentally ill or just deeply disturbed. The theory of poltergeist phenomena was also raised, which could have resulted in the moving objects and items flying across the room. Others believed it was just plain trickery and fraud and that all of the alleged behaviors could have easily been faked by the boy (except for the stuff they claimed was poltergeist activity!).

POLTERGEISTS

The problem with ghosts, poltergeists, and demonic activity is that it often looks the same on the surface or occurs in tandem. Poltergeist activity is a whole specific field of paranormal phenomena that involves a specific person—called the human host or human agent—and not a location such as a house or cemetery. The human agent is often young, female, and going through hormonal and behavioral changes that may cause brain activity associated with psychokinesis, the ability to move objects without touching them.

The word poltergeist means “noisy ghost” or “noisy spirit” and comes from the German poltern or “to make sound, to rumble,” and geist, or “ghost, spirit.” The characteristics of a true poltergeist involve physical disturbances and loud noises such as objects flying across the room, doors banging closed, knocks on walls, and even large pieces of furniture moving about but also include biting, kicking, slapping, pinching, and hitting. The spirits are described as mischievous and a bit malevolent, if not downright violent, but often don’t appear unless prompted or provoked by the proximity of the human agent, who seems to serve as a type of channel. Poltergeist phenomena occur in almost every country of the world but under different names, and accounts date back as far as the first century C.E.

So, are these ghosts or demons? Or are they some kind of physical manifestation of teenage angst? Are they trickster spirits, or are they natural phenomena, such as the presence of water beneath a house that causes all kinds of creaks and groans, or nearby seismic activity?

While spiritualists believe these are the lowest of the low spirits on the hierarchy of spirits (that’s not very nice!), scientists claim they are nothing but ball lightning, although one is hard-pressed to explain how ball lightning can move a couch across the room on its own.

If the cause is indeed psychokinesis and the human agents are usually adolescent girls, or even boys, who somehow are unconsciously manipulating energy to move objects, it would make sense to do more research into the potential of the human brain and the parts of the brain that are active during a poltergeist event. In fact, Dr. Barry Taff, a noted parapsychologist with a Ph.D. in psychophysiology, has studied poltergeist phenomena at length for years, including over four thousand cases, many sharing common characteristics.

His studies began with one of the most notorious cases ever, which served as the basis for a 1982 horror movie called The Entity, starring Barbara Hershey as a single mother who claimed she was being raped by spirits. In 1974, Doris Bither and her four children experienced pure terror at the hands of unseen forces in their small Culver City, California, home. Dr. Taff and his colleague Kerry Gaynor visited with Doris and listened to her talk of ghostly activity at the home, then she told them about the rapes. She claimed three spirits were involved, two of which held her down while the third raped her. She was referred to a clinical psychologist at UCLA, but when Taff and Gaynor went back to the house two weeks later, they witnessed a number of things that made them believe Doris wasn’t making it all up.

The overpowering smell of rotting flesh, cold spots, and a frying pan that flew out of a cabinet and across the room were enough for the two. Weeks of investigating followed using all types of equipment, ending with the appearance of a full-body apparition that was witnessed by over two dozen people at the house. Even before then, the children reported seeing shadow figures moving across the living room, and soon, even neighbors could see the humanoid shapes that appeared like dark fog moving around or standing in corners of the house watching.

Doris left the house with her family, but the activity followed her wherever she went. However, each time she moved her family, the entities seemed to get weaker and weaker. Eventually, Dr. Taff lost contact with her. But it was from that research Dr. Taff came up with three strong points he felt were responsible for poltergeist manifestation:

1.The location of the activity contains EMF anomalies.

2.The human agent is prone to seizures or is an epileptic.

3.The human agent is neurologically “wired” to not cope well with stress, which enables a hyperactive nervous system response.

These three things may work in concert to produce just the right internal and external environment for a poltergeist event to occur. Taff added that the poltergeist behavior acts like a virus and can follow the human agent from location to location until it just stops on its own. The psychokinesis that accompanies the presence of a poltergeist might be the result of energy fields from the brain acting on the external environment coupled with the anger and angst of the host or human agent. The same parts of the brain that are activated during an epileptic grand mal seizure are the same parts of the brain that seem to be active in a human agent during poltergeist activity. Studies by parapsychologists into temporal lobe epilepsy and its association with raised levels of psi abilities and how bursts of electrical activity in the brain responsible for seizures might also be responsible for PK are ongoing.

No matter whether poltergeists are purely natural, the stuff of demons, trickster spirits, human agents with PK abilities, or maybe some combination of causes, they are terrifying.

THE DAGG HAUNTING

A quiet farm in Clarendon, Quebec, Canada, was turned upside down in 1899 when a poltergeist attacked the family living there. Mrs. Dagg awoke on a fine, spring day to do her chores, but when she entered the farmhouse living room, she was accosted by a strange smell and the sight of animal feces smeared across the floor. The young farmhand, Dean, was accused of the foul deed since he worked outside with the hogs and often entered the house with his filthy shoes on. He had been warned before about doing so and was told he would be fired. He denied ever even being in the house that morning, but he was fired anyway.

As the days went by, more bizarre activity occurred, including loud banging sounds and large rocks crashing through windows. Plates were tossed across the room by invisible hands, and the father, George Dagg, got a group of employees together to search Dean’s property, thinking he might be taking revenge on the farm for being fired. But they found nothing to accuse Dean of the strange events, which continued to the point where Mrs. Dagg suggested a demonic entity was responsible. She was an adherent of Spiritualism, and eventually, she got word to a psychic named Percy Woodstock, who came to the farm and set up a full-on investigation. His conclusion was the family was indeed under demonic attack and suggested the adopted eleven-year-old daughter, Dinah, was the channel for the sinister activity. Dinah confirmed she was in contact with a mischievous spirit that lived out in the old shed. When Woodstock went to the shed to investigate, he was greeted by a deep, guttural laugh that told Woodstock he was the Devil and would break his neck if he didn’t leave the house.

Obviously, Woodstock packed up his gear and split. But months later, fires broke out around the house, awful banging could be heard all night, jugs of water were thrown into the faces of the family and guests, and an entity revealed itself as an old man who died on the property. The family children reported the entity appeared sometimes as a devil with a cow’s head and hooved feet and other times as a black dog with glowing, red eyes. Another entity appeared in the form of a tall man with flowing, white hair and a brilliant crown of stars upon his head. It was that entity that told the children he was leaving and they would suffer no longer. True to his word, they watched as he floated up into the sky and vanished. The farm and the family experienced nothing but the peace and quiet of normal life afterward.

MARIA JOSE FERREIRA

Imagine being eleven years old and becoming the target of a terrifying poltergeist. That is what happened to Maria Jose Ferreira in Jaboticabal, Brazil, in 1965. Maria was assaulted by an invisible assailant, and stones and bricks would appear out of nowhere and be thrown through the house. Often, Maria would manifest scratches, claw marks, bites, and slap marks on her body, which was constantly bruised. An exorcist from the local church came to the house but to no avail. If anything, it angered the poltergeist even more because now, poor little Maria would be set on fire while out in public.

Maria’s family took her to a local medium, who claimed the girl had been an evil witch in a past life and was now being attacked by the spirits of those she tormented. The medium attempted to get the spirts to leave Maria alone, but it failed to work. Maria ended up swallowing pesticides and took her own life. The poltergeist activity ended upon her death, never to return.

A BOY NAMED DANNY

A 1998 story appeared in the Savannah Morning News about a haunted antique bed owned by a man named Al Cobb of Savannah, Georgia. The reporter, Jane Fishman, wrote that the bed was vintage 1800s and had been purchased at an auction as a Christmas gift for Al’s fourteen-year-old son, Jason. Three nights after the bed was delivered, Jason began to complain of strange sensations of a presence. He said he felt like someone was resting their elbows on his pillow and breathing down his neck. He began to feel sick. The next night, a photo of his grandparents on his nightstand flipped over. Jason stood it back up, and it flipped over again.

In the morning, he found two Beanie Babies in the center of his bed next to a conch shell, a dinosaur made of shells, and a papier-mâché toucan bird. None of these were his, so he got his parents. Al came into the room and asked, “Do we have a Casper here?” He asked the ghost, or whatever was in the room, to tell him its name and age. Al left some lined paper and crayons on the bed, and they left the room.

Fifteen minutes later, when they went back in, someone had written in large, childlike letters “Danny, 7.” Al continued trying to communicate with Danny but only when the family was safely away. The ghost child told Al that his mother had died in the antique bed in 1899, he wanted to be with the bed, and no one else was permitted to sleep in it. One of the notes read “No one sleep in bed.” Jason had already moved into a different room but one day took a nap on the antique bed. Al was upset, went to check on Jason, and had to dodge a flying terra-cotta pot hanging on the wall that was thrown at him by unseen hands, no doubt belonging to an angry Danny. However, a host of other activity began such as furniture moving on its own, kitchen drawers opening and closing, some invisible hands setting the dining table, chairs being flipped over, and the presence of other spirits the family came to know as Jill, Uncle Sam, and a young girl named Gracie, whose statue sits in the Bonaventure Cemetery. Jason seemed to be the center of the activity, but some paranormal investigators suggested it may have been the bed or the house itself. In other words, nobody knows.

ENFIELD POLTERGEIST

The most notorious poltergeist case is the Enfield case, which occurred on a small home in Brimsdown, Enfield, England, from 1977 to 1979. Two sisters, Janet Hodgson, age eleven, and Margaret Hodgson, age fourteen, were at the heart of the controversial story. In August 1977, single mom Peggy Hodgson summoned police to the family home in Enfield after her four children claimed furniture moved on its own and there were strange knocks coming from inside the walls. The female constable sent to the home even witnessed a chair slide across the room. Other activity included disembodied voices, toys and rocks flying through the air, strange noises, overturned chairs, and the children levitating in midair. This went on for over a year and a half and was witnessed by over thirty neighbors, reporters, and psychic researchers. The case received a great deal of media, and Peggy was even accused of creating a hoax as a way to make money.

The activity appeared to end around 1979. The psychic and paranormal investigators on the scene claimed the activity appeared to center around Janet, the younger daughter, and many people claimed she and her older sister faked the activity, allegedly caught on a video camera in the next room. But the faked activity couldn’t explain large pieces of furniture moving on their own. The girls admitted their pranks to reporters, although some felt they were forced into the confession. Lead researchers Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair from the Society for Psychical Research were humiliated for the admission as well as their peers, deciding that the girls were faking everything and that Janet was an expert at ventriloquism. They apparently did it for media attention.

For the following few years, believers and skeptics tossed their own pet theories of what happened back and forth, some making good sense but others bordering on the absolutely ridiculous. Like a political debate, the two sides battled back and forth with skeptics refusing to open their minds to the possibility the girls were genuinely telling the truth and the believers refusing to consider the girls might have been faking it from the start. Hollywood jumped on the case and released a movie in 2016 about it, The Conjuring 2, and there have been a number of documentaries on the case.

THE COLUMBUS POLTERGEIST CASE

In 1984, the teenage adopted daughter of Joan and John Resch appeared to be the human agent behind a series of poltergeist attacks that garnered widespread media attention. Tina Resch was only fourteen when she saw the movie Poltergeist, and soon after, the family reported objects flying about the house and doors opening and closing. The local newspaper, the Columbia Dispatch, sent a reporter, Mike Harden, and a photographer, Fred Shannon, to check out the activity. They interviewed Tina and later published the story along with some photos of a telephone flying through the air.

A noted parapsychologist named William Roll asked to stay with the Resch family and document the activity, which resulted in his book Unleashed: Of Poltergeists and Murder: The Curious Story of Tina Resch. Roll claimed there was ample spontaneous psychokinesis but never witnessed it with his own eyes. It often seemed to occur when he had his back to Tina or the room in question or was distracted elsewhere. A television crew that visited later caught Tina on tape kicking over a table lamp and screaming. When they confronted her, she claimed she did it so the reporters would finally leave.

Tina married and divorced twice after those events and changed her name to Christina Boyer. She had a daughter, Amber, who was found dead at the age of three, allegedly beaten to death. Boyer and her boyfriend, David Herrin, were arrested for the child’s murder. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. Both Boyer and Herrin blamed the other for the death, and eventually, Boyer was charged with aggravated battery. She agreed to a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty and continued to maintain her innocence. She got a life sentence with no possibility of parole. Herrin received twenty years.

Boyer, aka Resch, continued to maintain her innocence long after the media frenzy faded.

Roll later admitted that while Tina could have staged some of the more minor events, she could not have staged all of them and that there were many witnesses who saw the phenomena and agreed. The house became so uninhabitable from items flying around and breaking, glass shattering everywhere, and appliances starting up and causing potential danger that the case still is open to debate.

THE GREAT AMHERST MYSTERY

A tiny cottage in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada, was home to a family who experienced strange and frightening poltergeist activity from 1878 to 1879. The activity was first noted by nineteen-year-old Esther Cox, who lived in the cottage with her family. When Esther was eighteen, she was traumatized by a sexual assault by a male friend. The strange phenomena started shortly afterward.

One night, she and her sister Olive, who also lived there with her husband, two young children, and three other members of the family, felt something move under the covers of the bed they shared in one room. There was nothing there. Phantom knocking and banging with no discernible origin plagued the house. Esther began having seizures, and objects would then fly about the rooms on their own. Doctors gave Esther sedatives, but the disturbances increased, and when a psychic attempted to contact spirits in the house, there were strange knocking responses.

This house in Amherst, Nova Scotia, is where the teenager Esther Cox became the center of a poltergeist attack on the family, and Esther suffered seizures as well.

The activity continued for months, and in December, Esther contracted diphtheria and was bedridden for two weeks. During that time, the poltergeist activity ceased, even when she was sent to recuperate with a family member. But when she returned to the Amherst home, it began all over again. This time, fires broke out all over the house and Esther reported seeing a ghost, who warned it would burn the house down unless she left. Esther went away to stay with a local family, but the activity followed her and was witnessed by several others. Esther began experiencing abuse by the ghosts, including being slapped, pinched, and scratched.

The events were becoming more known outside the local community and Esther went to Saint John in New Brunswick to get away, but the phenomena followed. She was investigated by more researchers, who communicated with spirits via knocking and rapping. The spirits now had identities. Bob Nickle was the ghost of a shoemaker; Peter Cox was a distant relative; and there was a female spirit named Maggie Fisher.

Esther moved again, and this time, an actor who was an amateur parapsychologist, Walter Hubbell, was brought on board to help investigate. He spent weeks with Esther and her family at their summer cottage in Teeds and talked with the spirits, including two new ones—Jane Nickle and Eliza McNeal, although it was never revealed why the spirits were tormenting Esther or if she was indeed the catalyst. He even helped Esther deal with the entities, and she soon went on a speaking tour to talk about the phenomena to mixed audiences. Some welcomed her experiences; others were incredibly hostile and accused her of faking everything. She soon returned to the original Amherst home and worked for a man whose barn burned down mysteriously. He blamed her, and Esther spent a month in prison. At that time, the poltergeist phenomena stopped and never returned.

Esther married twice, had two sons, and moved to Massachusetts, where she died on November 8, 1912, at the age of fifty-two.

A HAUNTING IN SAN PEDRO

Parapsychologist Dr. Barry Taff was involved in another poltergeist case, this time in 1989, when he was asked to visit a home in San Pedro, California. The owner was a young woman named Jackie Hernandez, and she claimed the house was haunted with strange smells, sounds, and apparitions, including a weird, glowing cloud that tried suffocating her in front of witnesses. Even when Jackie tried to leave the house, the activity followed her, and she was terrified.

Taff worked with her and believed she had emotional issues, including a strong romantic attachment to Barry Conrad, the cameraman and photographer he brought with him to document the activity. In fact, anyone the “spirit” deemed a threat to her and Barry was viciously attacked by the unseen entities. However, there were also other entities reported by witnesses in the house, and after Jackie left, the house continued to be haunted, causing any new tenants to bolt within six months of moving in!

BORLEY RECTORY

Over in England, another shocking case occurred and was investigated by paranormal researcher Harry Price. The Borley Rectory was an old, crumbling manor house in Essex County, England. Price read a newspaper report in 1929 about the paranormal activity at the Rectory and went to investigate. The report claimed there were phantom footsteps, ghostly whispers, a headless apparition, a young girl ghost dressed in white, strange lights, and several other identifiable spirits roaming around. It sounded like a classic case of ghosts.

There was also a local legend about the Rectory being built upon the former site of a monastery, where a thirteenth-century monk and a young novice had been killed trying to elope. The monk was hanged to death, and the novice was buried alive in the walls of a convent. In October 1930, Reverend Lionel Foyster and his wife, Marianne, moved into the peaceful building. Suddenly, the place became a hotbed of paranormal activity, and people were locked out of rooms, windows shattered, objects vanished, and furniture moved on its own.

Marianne was thrown from her bed, slapped by phantom hands, had large objects thrown at her day and night, and she was almost killed by a mattress suffocating her. Scrawled messages began appearing on the walls, but they were pleading with Marianne as if needing her help: “Marianne, please help get:” and “Marianne, light mass prayers.”

Harry Price determined that Marianne was the human agent behind the activity, but he also suggested the ghosts might also be real. Perhaps it was Marianne’s kindness and sympathetic nature that caused the ghosts to get her attention. However, no one knows.

The Borley Rectory, shown here in 1892, was the site of a vicious poltergeist attack in 1930 in which a reverend and his wife were the victims.

BLACK MONK

Another terrifying English poltergeist case occurred at the forbiddingly named Black Monk House on a quiet street in Pontefract, Yorkshire, England. The small, brick house would be home to Jean and Joe Pritchard, who bought the house to live in with their two teenagers, Philip and Diane, and Jean’s mother, Sarah. The activity began in small ways at first, including chalk falling from the ceiling or water pooling on the floor despite no leaks or other sources. Sarah would try to clean up the water, but more would appear after she dried the spot.

Joe and Jean witnessed the ghost of a spirit in black monk robes hovering over their bed one night. The same ghost monk appeared a number of times in the house and on the property. Lights began flickering on and off, heavy plants would fall down the stairs, and family pictures were being slashed by unseen hands. The house began to smell like death at times, and if the family left, they often would return home to find furniture overturned.

After about two years of this type of activity, things began to escalate, and Diane was grabbed by the monk ghost, who had never attempted any such thing before. She said he grabbed her by the neck and dragged her up the stairs. This prompted the family to call in the help of exorcists, who only seemed to make the monk ghost more violent and angry.

Naturally, the media had a field day, and some researchers confirmed that the house was built on land that had been where King Richard II was killed. The land was also the site of former wars, and after the activity ceased, paranormal investigator Tom Cuniff researched the case for years and discovered that a priory had existed near the Black Monk House from 1090 to 1599 and the town gallows had been located across the street. One of the monks hanged there was accused of raping and murdering a young girl, who had been the very same age as Diane Pritchard.

MACOMB POLTERGEIST

In 1948, a disturbed teenager named Wanet McNeil moved in with her father after her parents divorced in 1948. They moved to a farm west of Macomb, Illinois, and Wanet was very unhappy living there. Her emotions were all over the map because of the bitter divorce, and she began to manifest strange poltergeist activity in the form of small fires she set with her mind all over the farm.

The first fire happened on August 7 on the farm of a man named Charles Willey. It began with small, brown spots on the wallpaper inside the home that would then spontaneously burst into flames. Neighbors had to be called upon to come by the house and put out daily fires, and soon, the fire chief was called in to launch an investigation. He had the Willeys strip the wallpaper from their house, and the same brown spots then appeared on the bare plaster beneath, erupting into flames before dozens of witnesses.

The front porch began to ignite along with curtains in each room and one bed. Not even the National Fire Underwriters Laboratory, who were called in to investigate, knew why or how the fires were starting. It got to the point in which over two hundred fires broke out, averaging twenty-nine per day, and eventually, an entire house was destroyed. Willey created a tarp home for his family, but the next day, their barn burned down. Days later, the second barn burned down, along with other structures, and the family fled.

The U.S. Air Force even got involved as more fires broke out, and soon, the farm was filled with over a thousand people coming to see what was happening.

Eventually, Wanet was accused of starting the fires with simple kitchen matches. She confessed to the deputy fire marshal and said it was because she was unhappy and didn’t like living on the farm. She missed her mother and had caused the fires to rebel. But that never explained the strange, brown spots and how they turned into fires or the fires that happened on the ceilings of buildings, even when Wanet was nowhere around. But the confession made everyone happy and they closed the case, except for hundreds of reporters and paranormal researchers who believed Wanet was the human agent for poltergeist phenomena.

The fires eventually stopped, and Wanet went to live with her grandmother. Everyone accepted she was guilty of arson. Well, not everyone.…

SAUCHIE POLTERGEIST

For one year, from 1960 to 1961, the town of Sauchie, Clackmannanshire, Scotland, was terrorized by a poltergeist that focused on the home of the Campbell family. Husband, Thomas; wife, Isabella; daughter, Margaret; and son, Derek, resided with Thomas’s sister, Annie, and her daughter, Virginia, who appeared to be the human cause. When Annie and Virginia moved in with the family in the autumn of 1960, that’s when the activity began, with objects vanishing and reappearing elsewhere in the house, furniture levitating in the air and moving on its own, pillows and bedding rippling from unseen forces, doors opening and closing, and family members being pinched and poked. The same activity occurred at Virginia’s school and at a temporary home she lived in in the town of Dollar. There were many witnesses, including the town’s doctor, minister, and a teacher, and no trickery was ever found. Psychic investigator George Owen documented the case and considers it an example of psychokinesis associated with the human agent, Virginia.

SAN DIEGO POLTERGEIST?

This author experienced her own poltergeist phenomena over three decades ago at a large home in San Diego, California. To protect the identity of the family, we will call them the Wilkes family. The activity consisted of objects flying around the house, including clothespins that would hurtle down an upstairs hallway. Pictures were said to move around or topple off their nails. Strange noises and knockings were experienced by the family, all of which seemed to center on a teenage daughter, who was having emotional issues dealing with school and dating.

Though the activity was never hostile, it was dangerous to get hit by a flying clothespin. The family thought the activity came from an antique clock that would ring at odd times, but when the activity ceased after the daughter in question moved out, the clock was let off the hook. At one point, the author of this book stayed overnight and experienced a strange, cold wind moving through her the next morning, at which time the younger daughter said, “Did you feel it?” It felt as though a breeze literally moved through every cell, yet there were no open doors or windows at the time.

The late paranormal investigator William Roll was a psychology professor at the University of West Georgia. He believed poltergeists were the result of what he called “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis.”

The Wilkes family talked to their local church about assisting with stopping the strange phenomena, but because they were Lutheran, exorcisms were not performed. The family ended up moving away after a while, long after the daughter, who appeared to be the human agent, had gone off to college, and the new owners of the home had it razed and rebuilt from the foundation up. No one ever found out why.

AN INDIANAPOLIS POLTERGEIST

A suburban street in Indianapolis, Indiana, was the home of Renate Beck, her widowed mother, Lina Gemmecke, and her daughter, Linda, who was thirteen at the time the activity began. Objects moved about the house, glassware and pots and pans were thrown by unseen forces, and pillows and photographs were torn by unseen hands. Lina experienced what looked like bite marks. There was a lot of hostility between Renate and her mother, which created tensions that might have led to the activity, but in this case, the daughter was not around when most of it occurred. The case was investigated by William Roll, who was known for his investigation and subsequent book documenting the Tina Resch case. Along with him was Dr. David Blumenthal, a clinical psychologist who visited the home and witnessed the family over several days. The activity was confined mainly to the two weeks between March 10 and March 24, 1962. The mother, Lina, was reported to have caused quite a bit of trouble and was even seen throwing an ashtray and turning over furniture. She was arrested and later returned to her home in Germany after doing some jail time. When she left, all poltergeist activity ceased.

Another case investigated by William Roll involved a nineteen-year-old Cuban refugee named Julio Vasquez. His family life was stressful, and he attempted suicide shortly after he was hired to work at the Warehouse of Tropication Arts, a wholesaler of novelty items, in Miami, Florida. From 1966 to 1967, when Julio worked there, objects began moving and breaking, ashtrays and glasses were thrown across the rooms, and boxes would be overturned or moved by unseen hands. Julio apparently did not get along well with his boss, and the phenomena only occurred when he was working on-site, but witnesses claim he was nowhere near the items that were thrown or boxes that were overturned. His mere presence at work seemed to be enough. Naturally, when he left the company, the activity ceased but allegedly continued at other places Julio worked afterward.

In many poltergeist cases, the activity starts out small, then escalates to the point where it poses a danger to all involved. Yet, it often ceases after a while on its own and not necessarily when the human agent in question leaves or moves away. Perhaps it ceases when the agent’s hormones and emotions level off enough to end the kinetic activity and there is not enough energy left for the phenomena to feed off of and manifest from.

PARANORMAL HOT SPOTS

Imagine a place where just about every possible paranormal anomaly occurs all within a fixed boundary. Known as hot spots, these can be massive desert landscapes, mountain ranges, top-secret military bases, specific bodies of water, or intersections of highways that defy the known laws of reality. In these regions, beasts roam that are rarely seen on the outside, and anomalies occur that challenge gravity and laws of physics. Sometimes, human activities add to the creepy atmosphere such as cults and satanic rituals.

Often, Native American tribes know the lands are cursed and why. It is only natural that the land that once belonged to Native American tribes be filled with legends, lore, and spirits from their vast pantheon of traditions and beliefs. The fact that some of these legends might have a great deal of truth to them chills the bones of the most enthusiastic legend tripper, paranormal enthusiast, and even horror-movie aficionado. The following hot spots are filled with a variety of phenomena, as if these specific areas are marked by otherworldly forces as unique and special. Are they vortices leading to other realities, where life in those realities travels the highways and byways that lead here? Though not all hot spots have a Native influence, they all seem to attract every possible type of anomalous phenomena known to exist.

BLACK STAR CANYON

Southern California’s Orange County is known for its gorgeous beaches and suburban neighborhoods, but to the east are the Santa Ana Mountains, filled with trails locals say are haunted by a bloody past. The canyon itself is an archaeological site filled with artifacts of the Shoshone American Indian tribe, and it also serves as a reminder of the violence and bloodshed in the 1800s, when the Shoshone fought white settlers who were encroaching on their land. Trappers who wanted to ingratiate themselves to the Spanish would sneak down into the area called Hidden Ranch and plan their attack, which involved lying in wait and then assaulting the Shoshone with guns, while the Shoshone had mainly arrows to defend themselves. The Shoshone suffered terrible losses, although few of the white men died.

Black Star Canyon in Orange County, California, was once the domain of the Shoshone Indians as well as deadly battles between them and European encroachers. The spirits of the dead are said to still inhabit the canyon trails.

Along with the deaths from the ongoing battles were murders committed on Hidden Ranch during the Wild West’s final days, including an actual shoot-out between two horse-ranching families who were feuding that resulted in the death of James M. Gregg and, of course, deaths from the elements and harsh conditions.

The canyon has been haunted ever since by the spirits of those who perished there, and many ghost-hunting groups and psychics have braved the terrain to try to contact the dead. Witnesses in the canyon say they’ve seen ghosts of men lost in battle, mainly Shoshone warriors, and the spirit of James M. Gregg walks about the land near Hidden Ranch. A dark energy permeates the area, and paranormal groups claim to capture tons of EVP of the dead. But the creepiest thing about Black Star Canyon is the famous—or maybe infamous—winds. The area is eerily quiet and still, but sudden gusts of wind will start up, howling loudly through the canyon. While there are desert winds called Santa Anas that blow fast and hard in the area during the fall months, or fire season, as the locals call it, there are those who believe the howls are coming from the spirits of the dead Shoshone.

TERRORS OF TURNBULL CANYON

Puente Hills, California, is a sunny chain of hills covered in chaparral with ample hiking trails, parks, and open spaces for biking and off-roading. Located just south of the San Gabriel Valley in an unincorporated part of east Los Angeles County, the western hills are often called the Whittier Hills. The terrain mixes desert landscaping with woodsy spots as well as the Puente Hills Landfill, the country’s largest landfill, which closed in 2013. The mostly rural and uninhabited hills are filled with a plethora of flora and fauna indigenous to the region and also an incredible number of terrifying stories of paranormal high jinks and just plain creepy human behavior.

One particular spot seems the most “haunted.” Turnbull Canyon was the home to an insane asylum in the 1930s and was open for ten years before it burned to the ground in a mysterious fire in the early 1940s. The ruins remain and are said to be haunted by the dark spirits of those who were abused and mistreated while patients, many of whom died. According to “Turnbull Canyon Deaths: Ghosts of the Old Asylum” on the Haunted Los Angeles website, in the early 1960s, a group of teenagers were hiking in the canyon and found an old electric shock device among the ruins. One of the young men, who may have been intoxicated, strapped the device to his head, bragging about how he was going to burn—and he did. Even though there was no electricity to be found, the device fired up and sent thousands of volts into his body. His hair, clothes, then eyes and skin burned, and within seconds, while his friends watched in horror, he was dead.

Over the decades, the area has been full of ghostly encounters, including the spirits of children swinging from trees who open their eyes if you stare at them. They may have been victims of satanic cults said to be operating in the remote ruins. The ghosts of Native Americans and patients from the asylum wander the ruins and hills, and huge pentagrams have been found carved into the earth. The Orange County Police Department reported that Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker serial killer, belonged to a cult that met in the canyon.

Locals claim the area is cursed by Native Americans and others claim by witches. UFOs are sighted repeatedly as if the Turnbull Canyon area is some kind of paranormal vortex. Psychics who visit the place hoping to contact spirits of the dead sense strong feelings of panic and dread. Rumors of murders run rampant, and hundreds of years ago, the canyon was given the name Hutukgna, or “the dark place,” which refers to the ghosts that reside on this forbidden ground. In fact, when later Spanish settlers arrived, they chose to ignore the warnings of the cursed land and built their San Gabriel Mission nearby. The settlers drove the poor off the land and made the natives convert to Christianity or be slaughtered. Many natives simply chose to die, refusing to give the settlers what they wanted and knowing that in death, their spirits would remain a part of the land, even if their living bodies could not.

Another southern California hot spot is Turnbull Canyon in the Puente Hills, where everything from ghosts to UFOs have been reported.

In more modern years, the canyon locals reported seeing men, women, and children performing strange rituals late at night while dressed in black robes and hoods. A young boy was strapped to a cross as the cultists danced and chanted around him. The cross was lifted, turned upside down, and the boy tried to scream through a rag stuffed in his mouth. The boy was beaten to a pulp, then taken down and whisked away in a wagon. Months later, a rash of missing persons broke out and a posse was formed to confront the cultists, but they were already long gone.

Those who hike and walk the trails will no doubt meet up with some spectral entity of the past, but at least for now, they won’t have to worry about being kidnapped by a cult. Turnbull Canyon represents a Bermuda Triangle-like region where people go missing, UFOs are seen in the sky, ghosts and spirits abound, and an eerie sense of doom pervades. There are others just like it, though.

THE ALASKA TRIANGLE

More people have vanished in the area known as the Alaska Triangle than anywhere else in the country. The remote and heavily forested triangle borders Anchorage and Juneau in the south to Barrow on the state’s northern coast and is some of the harshest wilderness in the world, covered in Boreal forest, alpine lakes, craggy peaks, and bleak and desolate tundras. Oh, and it gets incredibly cold up there, too. So, it’s not surprising many people go missing. What is surprising is just how many are never seen or heard from again, and no bodies are ever found. In fact, nobody knows if they are alive or dead. According to “More People Disappear in the Alaska Triangle Than Anywhere in the U.S.” for themanual.com, that number is close to sixteen thousand people since 1988, more than twice the national average.

The triangle came on the map of locals and paranormal researchers in 1972 when a small, private plane with U.S. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs on board vanished in the area. Because of his official status, the government launched a massive search and rescue effort with over fifty planes and forty military craft, as well as hundreds of people, focusing on a thirty-two-thousand-square-mile stretch of land where it was believed the plane went down. After thirty-nine days of searching, nothing was ever found. In 1950, a military craft with forty-four passengers vanished without a trace. In 1990, a Cessna 540 with five people on board disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Though the sheer uninhabitable nature of the land and the geography of the area are no doubt to blame in part for the record numbers of vanishings, resulting in hundreds of search and rescue missions every year, rarely do state troopers find any bodies, dead or alive. There are avalanches in the mountains and the terrain is absolutely no place for tourists and hikers, even those with a great deal of experience. There are caverns, caves, and other hidden chambers within the icy glaciers that someone could take shelter in, but the cold, lack of food and water, and isolation would not allow for anyone to survive for long, and surely, bodies would be found, even if only bones left behind.

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The Alaska Triangle is a mysterious region between Barrow in the north and Anchorage and Juneau in the south.

Which is why local legends hint at a Bigfoot creature that roams the snowy landscape, and indigenous myths speak of shape-shifting entities that kidnap lost humans. According to the Tlingit and Tsimshian tribes that are native to the area, these creatures are called Kushtaka and can take on human form to appear to fellow travelers, often as a relative or a child in need of help, and lead their victims to the river, where they are torn to shreds to be morphed into another Kushtaka. Unfortunately, the only way to prove what is happening out in the Alaska Triangle is to go there and possibly become victim to whatever forces, natural or supernatural, may be at play, and one has to wonder if it’s worth the risk.

THE BRIDGEWATER TRIANGLE

Some urban legends are combined with ghost sightings, UFO sightings, cryptid encounters, and just about every other type of paranormal phenomenon one could imagine. These places are called paranormal vortexes, and the Bermuda Triangle and Devil’s Triangle off the coast of Japan are two well-known examples where ships and planes vanish and no traces of the wreckage or crew is ever found. This particular paranormal vortex exists on land and makes up a 200-mile (322-kilometer), triangular swath of land in Massachusetts, with the three towns of Abington, Freetown, and Rehoboth as its three points. Dead center is the town of Bridgewater as well as nearby towns of Raynham, Taunton, Brockton, Mansfield, Norton, and Easton.

Within this region, mystery abounds. The reports of bizarre activity began as far back as 1760 when a sphere of fire was reported hovering over the area, emitting a bright light that was seen over a large area. Ever since, the area has been rampant with UFO sightings and a host of other ghostly and strange activity, prompting locals and paranormal researchers alike to wonder if this was indeed some strange vortex or a wormhole that linked our world with others, including whatever lives in those other worlds.

Local newspapers and news channels have documented much of the recent activity and there is no shortage of books written on the Bridgewater Triangle, but to this day, no one is really sure why this area in particular is a hotbed for Bigfoot sightings, UFO landings (even some involving local law-enforcement personnel), balls of light that float through the woods, a ghostly, redheaded hitchhiker that haunts Route 44 in Rehoboth, animal mutilations in the towns of Freetown and Fall River that were attributed to a local cult performing ritual sacrifices, a phantom in the Hockomock Swamp near Route 138, a ghostly man who sits upon Profile Rock by the Freetown Fall River, and even a ghostly trucker who speeds on the Copicut Road and honks his horn at passing cars.

The actual name Bridgewater Triangle came from renowned cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, who gave the place its name back in the 1970s. Much of the area is forested, rural, remote, and the perfect spot for cult activity, murders, and numerous suicides, all of which add to the spooky reputation of the triangle, which also includes unusual geological features such as Dighton Rock, which contains unidentifiable etchings thought to be from Vikings or ancient Phoenicians, depending on who you ask. Taunton is home to the Taunton State Hospital, once used by satanic cults in the 1960s and a place to see strange orbs and spectral figures that reach out and touch you with phantom fingers.

Those who have visited and investigated the abundantly haunted locations within the triangle say it is a legend tripper’s dream—two hundred miles’ worth of haunted ground where every possible supernatural spookiness occurs, thus increasing visitors’ chances of getting to experience at least a ghost, a UFO, or a run-in with Bigfoot, if not all three.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

Over four million people visit Yosemite National Park every year. The U.S. national park, which was designated back in 1864, is filled with some of the most stunning, eye-popping natural scenery in the world. With towering waterfalls, deep valleys, gorgeous meadows, icy glaciers, rugged mountains, peaceful lakes, ancient giant sequoias, and the tranquility provided by the remoteness of the High Sierras, this 1,200-square-mile (3,100-square-kilometer) park that spans three central California counties is bound to have a dark side. The word Yosemite means “killer” in Miwok and refers to a renegade tribe of Native Americans that were once driven out of the region and slaughtered by the Mariposa Battalion. Prior to that, the natives called it Ahwahnee, which means big mouth.

Most people just consider Yosemite National Park in northern California to be a spectacular, bucolic vacation spot, but it is also home to ancient spirits; bizarre, cryptic beasts; and UFOs.

Located at the center of the vast landscape is Grouse Lake, a verifiable hot spot for paranormal phenomena. The otherwise peaceful-looking lake belies the high strangeness that occurs there, including sightings of a dead boy who drowned in the lake. Visitors claim to hear his yelping and crying as he tries, according to native legend, to make others come to his aid so he can trap them on the bottom of the lake and keep him company. Then there is a malevolent ancient spirit, the Po-Ho-No, who draws people to the edge of a large waterfall so it can push them to their deaths. Three people have reportedly lost their lives plunging to the bottom.

Nightcrawlers, a strange, cryptid entity that looks like a walking pair of pants with a tiny head, have been spotted around the lake. Native legends claim they’ve walked the area for decades. Visitors might also get a sight of Bigfoot roaming near the lake as well as the Wendigo, a hostile cryptid from Native American lore that may be responsible for the park’s many missing-persons reports. The Wendigo began as human beings but, because of their sins while in human form, were cursed and forced to take on the appearance of beasts that cannibalize anyone they come in contact with. Unlike the shy Bigfoot, who seems to just want to be left alone, the Wendigo are not afraid and can be rather aggressive.

Between 11 P.M. and 3 A.M. on certain nights, hikers and campers might see the ghost of a camper who hanged himself in the woods or perhaps one of many UFOs that hover in the skies, especially around the notorious top-secret base Area 51, which is said to house crashed UFOs, and above the allegedly cursed Tenaya Canyon area. After the natives were forced out of their homes, Chief Tenaya of the Ahwahnechee Tribe put an angry curse on the area, and since then, hikers and campers go missing on a regular basis, never to be seen again but for a few found alive in some kind of trancelike shock, missing their shoes.

Yosemite is a huge area, and 95 percent of that is wilderness, much of it difficult, if not impossible, to reach by foot or otherwise. It is filled with rumors, legends, lore, and plenty of reportedly real encounters with things that like to hide in the remote, isolated natural setting until some unsuspecting human comes along.

SUPERSTITION MOUNTAINS

Superstition Mountains may sound familiar from the famous Phoenix Lights UFO wave that happened just to the north for several months in 1997. But the largest of the mountain ranges surrounding the city of Phoenix is home to quite a bit of paranormal activity other than UFO sightings. The range, made of volcanic peaks and boulder-filled, saguaro-covered canyons, rises above the desert to a height of 5,024 feet (1,531 meters), much of which falls within the Tonto National Forest. It is part of the larger Superstition Wilderness Area and, as its name implies, it is a hotbed of high strangeness mixed with native legend and lore and, next to the Grand Canyon, it is the most photographed area in the state.

Superstition Mountain is the focal point of the range and a popular recreation spot for locals and tourists alike, with hiking and biking trails, camping, fishing, and legend tripping for those who hope to encounter something out of the ordinary around the area of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. Legend claims the mine is somewhere beneath the vast range of mountains and contains a huge stash of gold. Some lore claims the stash is located below a tall rock known as Weaver’s Needle, but nothing has yet been found. The mine got its name from a German immigrant named Jacob Waltz, who found the mine in the nineteenth century and kept its location hidden. Since German men were referred to as “Dutchmen,” the name stuck and, along with California’s lost Pegleg Mine, has become the most notorious lost mine in the country.

The name Superstition Mountains comes from local farmers in the 1860s, who heard stories from the Pima Indians about strange noises and phantom lights, vanishing people, mysterious deaths, and spirits of the dead. Add to that the legend of a lost gold mine, and you have the perfect mixture of curiosity and greed. Those who set out to find the booty never do, and some perish in the harsh landscape or vanish altogether.

Apache tribes nearby called it the home of the Thunder God and claim there are the faces of spirits seen in the rocks along the Apache Trail. UFOs were often reported during the 1950s and 1960s near the Flat Iron and Bluff Springs Mountains. Spirits of the dead are said to haunt certain canyons and around caves once thought to house lost gold or diamonds. Haunted Canyon is one of those where old native legend and lore mixes with nuggets (pun intended) of truth. Whether any of it is true or not doesn’t stop thousands of people from coming to the mountain to search out lost gold or spot a spirit or alien ship in the sky.

THE BORDERLANDS

The Colorado–New Mexico border sits along the paranormal hot spot known as the 37^th Parallel. Known also as the Borderlands, it’s not uncommon to experience everything from a Bigfoot sighting, cattle mutilations and black helicopters, UFOs buzzing the skies, and strange, interdimensional vortexes. Navajo and Ute Native American and Spanish Colonial legends add to the fantastical flavor, as does the amazing landscape, which is a vast, harsh desert edged by the rush of the Rio Grande River and the overlooking snowy, 14,000-foot (4,250-meter) mountain peaks. The region includes the Sangre de Christo Mountain Range, running from southern Colorado to northern New Mexico, that gives off a spooky, red glow at sunset.

One of the most notorious haunted locales in the region is the San Luis Valley, where seeing and hearing all kinds of bizarre entities and activities is normal, everyday happening. This 8,000-square-mile (20,720-square-kilometer) area is home to the world’s largest alpine valley, the floor of which is 60 miles (97 kilometers) across at its widest point. There have been upward of twelve Native American tribes that either once inhabited the region or do so now, and they lived off the valley’s game and the lake’s freshwater fish supplies. But something about this valley prompted theories of electromagnetic fluctuations and anomalies that were responsible for the sightings of atmospheric phenomena, phantom lights, stories of witches and Satan worshippers using the sites for dark ceremonies, black choppers that often showed up after UFO sightings, cryptid sightings, and even a mysterious presence of military vehicles nearby.

This is part of a 1950 memo filed by FBI Special Agent Guy Hottel about the UFO sightings in Aztec, New Mexico. He describes three UFOs about fifty feet in diameter that had been recovered, each containing three alien crewmembers.

Some of the military presence might be related to the Aztec, New Mexico, UFO crash site, which lies about a hundred miles west of the Great Sand Dunes Monument. In March 1948, eight months after the more famous Roswell UFO crash, which was also in New Mexico, a policeman followed a strange, erratic craft for hours. A New Mexico highway patrolman was also watching the bizarre craft, as was a rancher nearby who thought he heard a sonic boom. Instead, the craft dropped out of control just beyond his property and crashed to the ground along Hart Canyon Road, where a brush fire broke out. Like the Roswell crash of infamy, there were reports of small bodies inside and, in this case, slumped over the control panel. Soon, military vehicles arrived to interrogate the many witnesses who saw the craft along the way.

Aside from the crash site, there are reports of Bigfoot roaming the terrain, elusive as always, and visits by Star People from Zuni mythology. These Star People are depicted in petroglyphs and rock art found throughout the area and are mirrored in Lakota tales of beings that come down from the skies and take children. Sound familiar? One theory suggests that the UFOs and Bigfoot enter our world via a number of portals hidden in the vast Borderlands and that they go back to their worlds the same way. So much activity occurs here, gaia.com dubbed it “North America’s Paranormal Disneyland.”

POINT PLEASANT, HOME OF MOTHMAN

The story of Mothman is the stuff of legends. Urban legends. But with quite a core of truth. In 1966, the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, was put on the historical map for all eternity when residents began reporting a huge, flying, humanoid entity that would be dubbed “Mothman.” The first sighting occurred in Clendenin, West Virginia, on November 12, when five cemetery workers watched as a large, dark-winged creature flew out of the trees into the sky. They described it as far more humanoid than birdlike. The sightings spread throughout the area, with the majority occurring near the old West Virginia Ordnance Works, an abandoned munitions plant north of Point Pleasant known to the locals as the TNT Area.

On November 15 of the same year, two young couples encountered the Mothman creature while driving through the area at midnight. They saw two glowing, red eyes coming from inside the old North Power Plant, and soon, a seven-foot-tall, winged creature emerged. The car stalled in the road long enough for the four to get a good look at the creature, but imagine their terror when Mothman began chasing after their car as it sped down Highway 62 at over 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour trying trying to get to the city. When they arrived, the creature was nowhere to be seen.

The two couples were stunned and uncertain of what they had seen, so they headed back to the TNT Area and, lo and behold, were accosted again by the creature on Route 62. That encounter triggered a host of sheriff investigations out to the TNT Area, and for the next thirteen months, various locals spotted Mothman. Some claim there were up to one hundred additional sightings. The eeriest was a string of reports claiming Mothman warned them of a pending disaster, which turned out to be the horrific Silver Bridge collapse on December 15, 1967, which killed forty-six people during rush-hour traffic. There are other similar cryptids all over the world that are known to warn of pending disasters. Mothman-like creatures have been sighted around a Freiburg, Germany, mine that collapsed shortly afterward and just before the infamous Chernobyl power plant meltdown in Ukraine. They are always bipedal, winged humanoids with glowing, red eyes and are dark brown, black, or gray in color. They have a wingspan of up to 15 feet (4.6 meters), have been clocked flying at over 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour, and can lift straight up off the ground like a helicopter.

Witnesses also reported visitations by Men in Black, usually in the form of two men dressed in black suits and hats who appear robotic in their movement and speech and warn people not to talk about anything they’ve seen or experienced. MIBs are common in UFO reports and have a hypnotic effect on those they question and threaten. Yes, there were UFO sightings in the region during the Mothman activity, which have continued to this day (unlike the Mothman sightings, which tapered off shortly after the initial wave of sightings). Electrical disturbances have also been reported such as GPS devices not working, landlines giving a fast busy signal, cell phones going dead, batteries draining quickly, and computers not working properly.

There have been people in the area, or traveling through the area, who have reported blacking out and waking up hours later with no known rationale for what happened. There are also numerous reports of cattle mutilations that cannot be attributed to predators or vandals, something often reported in areas of high UFO activity. Could they have been food for a hungry Mothman instead?

Paranormal researchers, cryptozoologists, and ufologists alike believe that where there is a plethora of one type of sighting, there is often a plethora of others. For example, locations known to be haunted by many ghosts, such as a haunted canyon or ranch, might also experience UFO sightings, and UFO hot spots are often associated with corresponding reports of cryptids or interdimensional creatures. Maybe the vortices and portals like the Bermuda Triangle, Bridgewater Triangle, Alaska Triangle, and others are the roadways traveled by these beings and craft and explain these paranormal clusters of bizarre and varied activity, unlike a haunted house or graveyard that is home only to ghostly apparitions. The idea has been discussed by this author as to the need to widen the umbrella of paranormal phenomena to include far more than just ghosts and spirits. After all, it’s all paranormal.

Point Pleasant today is far quieter when it comes to paranormal activity than it was in the 1960s with no recent reports of the giant entity, but the Mothman presence is felt everywhere: in museums, yearly events, a Mothman festival, paranormal conferences, and the stories witnesses tell their children and grandchildren. Mothman, along with Nessie and Bigfoot, is one of the most famous cryptids ever witnessed and has become the subject of novels, movies, and spooky television shows galore as well as nonfiction books devoted to trying to solve the mystery of who, or what, Mothman truly was and where he came from. Because of the entity’s strange interdimensional, yet also physical, nature, it has become one of the most studied cryptids on record.

But while the town of Point Pleasant, and soon the nation, were caught up in the Mothman sightings and other bizarre activity, there were reports of something even stranger coming in—an entity named Indrid Cold, also known as the Grinning Man.

It began the same month and year as the Mothman sightings: November 1966. A sewing machine salesman named Woodrow Derenberger was driving home to Mineral Wells on Interstate 77 near Parkersburg on the cold, rainy night of November 2. A sewing machine somehow fell out of the back of the vehicle, and Derenberger stopped to fetch it. He got back in the car and drove on. Soon, a set of headlights moved past him at high speed and slowed, pulling itself sideways in front of Derenberger’s car. Derenberger had to stop; he had no choice. He stopped in the middle of the road, thinking it was a police car.

An artist’s concept of Mothman, a cryptid being that seems to be based in West Virginia and is associated with UFO activity.

The door to the other vehicle opened, and a man stepped out. He had dark hair, swept off his face, and a deep tan. He had a strikingly wide grin and wore a dark overcoat, beneath which was a strange, metallic, green uniform. As he approached Derenberger, the man’s vehicle rose forty feet into the air and floated there. When he spoke, the man claimed his name was Indrid Cold and that he was from a place “less powerful than the United States.” He claimed he was human and nothing out of the ordinary and asked about the lights of the city and the people who lived in Parkersburg. The creepy man also encouraged Derenberger to report their encounter to the police and that more confirmations would follow. Cold told Derenberger they would meet again. The strangest element of this whole encounter was the fact that the whole conversation took place as telepathy between the two.

The two did visit a few more times. Often, Indrid was accompanied by others, who he claimed were from the planet Lanulos. He even took Derenberger on a trip to the planet. Derenberger went on to tell his story to noted UFO researcher John Keel. During that investigation, Keel himself began receiving creepy phone calls from Indrid Cold or a third party who knew of Indrid. Often, these calls took on a prophetic tone, speaking of events to come.

The same night Derenberger had his encounter, two men reported an object landing in front of their car. They stopped and a man got out, dressed just as Indrid Cold was. He asked them a series of questions that the man said seemed relatively pointless, then got back on the craft and left. Weeks later, two boys, James Yanchitis and Martin Munov, would also encounter the mysterious Grinning Man standing along the fence line across from the Turnpike, a local landmark. The boys claimed the man was staring at them, grinning.

There are those who believe that seeing or encountering Indrid Cold precedes a disaster or bad luck and that he may be one of the Men in Black who confronted witnesses of the Mothman entity that same month. However, a Point Pleasant reporter named Mary Hyre reported being visited in her office one night in January 1967 by one of those MIBs, and she described him as short and stocky with dark, long, bowl-shaped hair and a speech impediment like a stutter. Nothing like Indrid Cold. Maybe there were different types of MIBs operating after the Mothman sightings. Maybe Indrid Cold was a whole separate phenomenon. Or maybe it was all a part of the cluster of strange activity that engulfed the town of Point Pleasant and nearby locales and is connected in ways we still don’t begin to understand.

The Grinning Man has become a part of American urban legend and folklore with reports of a similar entity coming in from all over the country. Either Indrid Cold gets around, or he is but one of many Grinning People that speed past drivers, cut them off, and engage in telepathic Q&A sessions only to smile that spooky, wide smile, turn around, and leave. They have not caused any harm, but would you want to see one?

SKINWALKER RANCH

The most notorious haunted hot spot in the country is a 480-acre (194-hectare) cattle ranch in the middle of Utah near the town of Ballard called Skinwalker Ranch (also called Sherman Ranch). It may even be the most terrifying place in the world. But before we find out why, we first need to know what a Skinwalker is. In Navajo Indian culture, there exists a type of shape-shifting witch, and not the Glenda the Good kind that can take on the appearance of, and possess, an animal or even a human being. It does so, according to legend, by removing the victim’s skin so it can wear it, taking on their persona—thus the name Skinwalker. The Skinwalker story is nowadays the stuff of modern Hollywood movies, as the Navajo are not open to discussing the lore of the mythological and archetypal Skinwalkers. Outsiders are not permitted to know all the details, which are protected by the tribe, but what we do know is that these are not healing witches or helpful medicine men or women—not by a long shot.

The Skinwalkers are considered evil in Navajo lore and take part in rituals and ceremonies that manipulate dark magic for sinister purposes. They often take on the image of a coyote or other creature that is associated with death. They can, and do, possess animals and humans and literally walk in their skins by locking eyes with them. Usually, Skinwalkers are male, but they have been reported in female form as well. Perhaps we can say that Skinwalkers are medicine men, and women, who have gone to join the dark side.

People driving through Utah heading into Arizona have reported seeing Skinwalker creatures along the desolate roadsides, described as a hairy human or a hairy animal wearing human clothing with yellow, glowing eyes. They have a monstrous appearance and are aggressive with no fear of attacking humans. Just ask the residents and visitors who have been to Skinwalker Ranch. The Ute Indians will not go anywhere near the ranch, which borders their reservation, believing it to be Skinwalker territory. Members are forbidden to trespass on the ranch property that sits in the Uintah Basin in Uintah County, Utah, believing the ranch is on ground cursed by the Navajo Indians. Though most people wouldn’t think of Utah being such a vortex of high strangeness, this ranch would prove them otherwise.

In the 1950s, UFOs were sighted regularly over the ranch, and cattle, cat, and dog mutilations have been reported by former ranch owners throughout the last fifty years. The Skinwalker Ranch got its reputation as a notorious haunted location mainly when the Sherman family, often referred to as the Gorman family, took ownership in 1994 only to be driven off the farm two years later by a host of terrifying paranormal activity. Strange, hybrid-like animals often appeared, including a giant wolf the size of a car that could not be killed by bullets fired right into it, birds that glowed in the dark, and a hunched, red-haired, hyena-like creature with a bushy tail that attacked the horses of the original ranch owners one night. These entities were impervious to bullets and, as with the horse-attacking hyena beast, appear and disappear right before witnesses’ eyes. There are a host of bizarre lights in the area that people claim have an intelligence, as they have been known to attack people and livestock by zapping them, almost like an electrical shock. Shafts of light emanate from the ground up. The fields sometimes light up as if surrounded by lights on a football field.

People staying on the ranch see apparitions in the fields on and around the ranch and claim they’ve heard the sound of people speaking alien gibberish or saying the names of those staying at the ranch, yet the origin of the voices remains unexplained except that the voices seemed to be coming from about twenty feet above their heads. Families who once lived on the ranch have reported poltergeist phenomena, voices calling out their names when no one else was around, aliens seven feet tall standing amid the fields’ lit-up bright lights, UFOs the size of two football fields, and, of course, the horrifying Skinwalkers. One UFO report claims a craft the size of a refrigerator, with one light on the front and a red light on the back, had hovered over the ranch in the spring of 1995. There were repeated sightings of strange, unmoving clouds that hovered over the property with colorful, blinking lights and the sounds of small explosions coming from inside!

In 1996, blue spheres were being sighted almost every day as well as orbs the size of baseballs with bubbling liquid inside. They appeared to be controlled by some intelligence and would dart off when a flashlight beam fell upon them. When Sherman family members saw the orbs, they reported feeling intense fear or panic. One of these blue orbs appeared in May 1996 and led the family dogs out across the field and into thick burrs where the dogs could be heard yelping before falling silent. The next morning, where the dogs were last heard were three round spots of dried vegetation. Inside each round spot was a lump of dark, greasy substance that may have been the incinerated remains of a dog. It was this event that convinced the Shermans they’d finally had enough of the horrifying events surrounding the property.

The Shermans were interviewed by a Salt Lake City news reporter, and the story aired on the local media. The Shermans sold the property in 1996, when it was then purchased by billionaire Robert Bigelow, who owns the Budget Suites hotel chain. He had seen their story on the wire service and purchased the ranch for $200,000. He immediately installed surveillance equipment, turning it into the headquarters for a paranormal research group called the National Institute for the Discovery of Science, which operated there until 2004 and was later replaced by the Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. The Shermans stayed on during this time as caretakers but were so plagued by nightmares and identical dreams, they began suffering psychological consequences. They were still seeing apparitions in the house, dark entities peering into the windows at night, and experiencing poltergeist phenomena the whole time the ranch was being investigated for paranormal research.

In 2007, Bigelow received a nice chunk of the $22 million budget of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which had undertaken the quest of investigating UFO activity. In 2016, Bigelow sold the ranch to a private corporation, and in 2017, the name “Skinwalker Ranch” was officially trademarked. It is a hugely popular subject in paranormal, UFO, and cryptid research circles as well as movies, television shows, and books.

The ranch is private property and not open to the public at all, although a few researchers have been allowed onto the grounds to investigate and study the ongoing phenomena that continues to make this place the stuff of legends and horror movies. Though Skinwalkers were and still are reported at other locations, the concentration of sightings makes Skinwalker Ranch a true vortex of paranormal phenomena of every type.