Original subtitles

My dad bought a fixer-upper.

We lived in his grandmother's home.

In the bottom of the floorboards

was skeletal remains.

That someone wished something bad upon me.

- Jacob. - Jacob.

She was headless.

If someone hears phantom crying, it could,

in fact, be a message from the spirit world.

I tried to talk myself out of, I didn't see what I saw.

But it scared me because I thought I saw Death.

What is the reason that her mother-in-law had them?

I just know that I was terrified.

I got very angry at that point, and I just put my hand out

and I started charging it. - I heard my mom scream,

"Somebody pushed me. Somebody pushed me."

It scared me because he saw it.

He started to say, "In the name of Jesus,

"I cast out the spirit that's

in this house. I cast you into the desert."

When I started thinking about things

and trying to figure out what was going on,

why is this happening?

Jake.

Living in Philly, you actually knew your neighbors.

You know, you would walk outside, your neighbor would be

literally standing at your doorway.

You went into your house, they literally would walk

right by your window.

This neighborhood that I lived in in Philadelphia

was predominantly a Hispanic neighborhood.

It had predominantly Puerto Ricans that lived there.

It was a, how can I say, it was a wonderful experience

growing up as a kid.

But when I was 13, my family moved from Philadelphia

to the quiet suburb of Bridgeton, New Jersey.

So moving into New Jersey, Bridgeton, New Jersey,

roughly, was tough.

It was no longer a Puerto Rican community.

It was more suburb,

so you barely, didn't see as many people around.

As a kid, moving into New Jersey, I thought

we were going backwards.

My dad bought a fixer-upper that he wanted to transform

into a beautiful house for a family.

None of us were too keen on the move, but we bought into

Dad's dream.

When my father started working on his house,

he literally gutted the entire home.

This was basically a tear-down rebuild.

A month after we moved into the house, I was helping

my father on a Saturday, and it was just me and my dad.

In the bottom of the floorboards was

skeletal remains.

These skeletal remains were animal in origin.

I remember my father saying,

"Don't tell your mother anything,"

because my mother would have immediately

started screaming, thinking this was some kind of Santeria,

Bruja, Brujo type of witchcraft, sorcery going behind this.

My mother did all kinds of voodoo

and had all kinds of beliefs in the black arts, the magic arts,

however you want to call it-- witchcraft.

Erin Goodpipe, take one, mark.

There's a lot of factors in Jake Estrada's case.

Jake's family has just moved into a new house.

They end up finding...

ritualistic items that they think are related

to the spiritual practice of Santeria,

which is an Afro-Cuban spiritual practice.

It's very easy to vilify a culture like that,

one that has material culture where they use

specific items to basically interact with the spiritual,

whether that's for protection, whether that's for good things,

but also for bad things at times.

He knew if my mom knew about what was discovered underneath

what would become her kitchen, she would totally wig out.

She would just tell my dad, "Nope, I'm not moving in.

We're gone."

I was freaked out.

I was like, "Who buries this underneath the floorboards

in their house?"

After my father did the extensive build

of the house, we started living in the home now.

Things were going nicely.

I began to get this strange sensation

that I was being watched.

Jacob.

The voice I was hearing was definitely female.

And my name was specifically called.

At first, I thought it was my sister playing a joke on me.

And I ran out of the room, and I ran

into my sister's room.

And then I saw my sister sleeping in bed, laying in bed.

I'm walking out into the main living room area...

- Mom? - ...and I'm calling out to my mom.

- Mom? - And I didn't hear her call me back.

And so I went into the room,

and I realized no one was home.

And I was like...

"I thought they were home," you know?

And where are they, you know? And I was like--

it made me really perplexed and confused.

As a teenager, Jake is in a very vulnerable state.

And so this is a time of life where, essentially, you can be

susceptible to experiencing spirits

and being manipulated by them.

Deep down, I believe that I wasn't losing my mind,

but I was made out to feel like I was losing my mind.

Art was always a great escape for me.

And as a kid, it was the cornerstone of my world.

A great escape from reality.

Jacob.

And you start looking around and getting weird goosebumps

on your arm, the back--

the hairs on your neck standing up.

You're just getting this peculiar feeling

that you're being watched.

Jacob.

Jacob. Jacob.

Jacob, Jacob, Jacob,

Jacob, Jacob.

Was I just imagining hearing them call my name?

And... they just weren't there.

Jake.

And at the time, I had a Walkman.

And I was like, "Well, I'm gonna use this Walkman

"to try to record to see if I can talk to this entity

"and figure out why she was here, why this lady was

in my room visiting me."

And me being me, I started to

ask her a question. "Why are you here?"

And I remember hitting the Walkman, recording it.

I think Jake is absolutely doing the right thing here,

trying to record the sound of a voice.

I started to try to talk to her, but the batteries started

to die, and I would change it repeatedly, and I had

no results. It wouldn't work.

I remember testing the batteries out

on different items in the house.

I had a boom box and also a remote control,

and it worked perfectly well.

So, when I put it into the walkman and trying to

use it, the batteries would immediately die.

In my work in the spiritual and in the paranormal,

I've seen many instances where a spirit will drain the energy

or the electricity out of certain instruments.

Jacob.

Jacob.

Jacob.

She was headless. She was like,

there was this torso, and you could tell it was

female, but there was no head.

Jake.

I didn't really know what she wanted.

I just know that I was terrified.

My initial thoughts when I hear of a spirit

that is headless is

the manifestation of perhaps lacking their consciousness.

Perhaps there was an injury that was sustained

that led to death.

It was important for me to show my parents what I was

dealing with happening in my bedroom.

I started to draw what I was seeing, and I was trying to use

this moment to also process what was happening

for myself, too.

Whenever I'm doing a paranormal investigation,

it's really important to get to the bottom of the identity

of the spirit.

I looked into the county archives to see if there was

any information on the previous inhabitants of the home,

but I didn't come across any information.

I did, however, find...

a very interesting piece of information.

In 1922, Eleanor Mills was found in a field next to

her married lover with her throat slit, which appeared

as if she was potentially being decapitated.

I was the first to start witnessing this woman appear

in the house, but also my father.

I told him everything.

I told him about what I was seeing.

I showed him the drawings.

My dad, out the corner of his eye, saw something.

And he was like, "This is not happening.

"Whatever you've been saying, the stories you told me

"about it, you're infecting me, son, stop it.

"Don't tell me no more.

Don't tell your mom."

Jake's family has a great fear of the dark arts,

and it's creating this cone of silence within the family.

And it's very important to note that...

while you can deny something is happening, it doesn't mean that

something isn't happening.

So it makes me wonder if the spiritual activity

is connected to the house,

or is it connected to the family?

I sat down and I started to make sketches of

this woman that was in the house,

quite consistent during this period.

I started to develop a tremor in my hand,

and before long, my whole body was going through

fits of tremors.

I felt like I did completely break apart here.

Lost it. I was cracking up.

This is a really terrifying experience where, at this

stage, you're experiencing physical ailments,

and Jake is also very much obsessing over this spirit,

and so this becomes a feedback loop where you're basically

creating a self-fulfilling prophecy because he believes

and buys into this so much.

So, this is gonna have a huge impact, amplifying an already

terrible situation mentally and emotionally for him.

My parents started taking me to doctors.

Trying to discover what was wrong with me.

The doctors were perplexed.

They didn't really have a clear answer what was going on

with my body at all.

I couldn't walk. I was bed-bound.

Jacob.

Jacob.

Jacob.

I remember her literally standing over me,

but I couldn't do nothing.

I couldn't get up and run out of the room.

I couldn't get up and scream. Here I was, just paralyzed.

I was completely terrified. I was...

scared.

I was thinking I was really losing my mind,

but at the same time, I knew I wasn't.

Jake's case has now escalated from not only physical

ailments, but into a mental obsession and now it's turning

to his family.

My mother had just come into the house.

Hey, sweetie, how you feeling?

Want me to grab you a glass of water?

Mom.

I heard my mom scream, "Somebody pushed me.

Somebody pushed me." My mom had just been pushed.

She had a broken ankle, and there was no one there

that could have pushed her unless it was a ghost.

There could be a link between Eleanor Mills and this house,

but it seems very unlikely.

And I say this because while spirits can come and roam

the area and attach themselves to somebody,

this feels really personal.

It was like a perfect storm when it came to all our health.

Here I was sick, and then my mom had just been pushed.

She had a broken ankle.

My father then was diagnosed with cancer.

My mom, shortly after that, was diagnosed

with breast cancer.

So we were all being attacked differently,

but at the same time.

My mom started to be a bit more proactive.

She started thinking that it was spiritual herself

at this point. She started thinking it was

some kind of evil entity in the house.

So, she started to make phone calls to,

first the church, and other people

in that realm of the spirituality.

When you have serious situations like this,

it requires serious attention and sometimes unorthodox ways

of healing or approaching a situation.

My mom was told through a friend of hers

to call this Hispanic pastor.

And so she eventually calls this pastor, and the pastor

would eventually come to our house.

He came prepared with the Bible and his complete belief,

and he felt like there was some sort of

spiritual warfare going on there that,

you know, he needed to do a cleansing

in the house.

And he started to pray on me.

He started to say, "In the name of Jesus, I cast out the spirit

"that's in this house. I cast you into the desert.

"You don't belong in this house.

"You don't belong attacking this young man.

This is a person of Jesus."

And he kept on repeating those words, and he just kept on praying.

I started to hear the woman's voice.

Jacob.

I felt a lot of anger coming from her, a lot of misery,

a lot of hurtfulness, a lot of hatred.

Jake!

- Amen! - Jake!

Jake!

I did feel like the weight of the world was lifted off

my shoulders, and I felt like that, you know, I was better.

After several weeks,

I started to be able to do things on my own again.

I always thought that...

this woman, you know, she was sucking the life out of me,

obviously, and she was attacking all the different

family members in the home.

My mom beat the breast cancer, but my father never got well.

My father succumbed to cancer.

And my father wasn't a smoker or a heavy drinker,

but he did do commercial roofing.

And they believe that some of it was attributed to

the asphalt or the asbestos that he was, you know,

in direct exposure to.

But I always thought that it had a lot to do with him

living at the house there in Bridgeton.

I thought it was a generational thing because my mom had

visited botanica, so she believed in witchcraft

and the black arts.

So this was something that

my mother was used to dabbling in and out of.

She told me about her family being haunted when they lived

in their home in Philadelphia.

I believe she had brought the spirit, and the spirit was

following our family.

I believe that some spirits do follow family lines.

I think some families and some people are more open

to the spiritual world.

I believe some people are conduits to this type of thing.

It seems that long ago Jake's mother had a spirit

attach itself to the family and has been following them

ever since, wrecking havoc in their lives.

There were some assumptions that were made by the family

and a quick admission to throw out the Santeria items

that were found in the home.

However, we don't know if those items were placed there,

you know, for blessings, for protections.

My dad, you know, he told me a lot of things

when he was really sick, and he told me--

one of the promises that he made me

make with him was that...

me, my sister, and my mother would move out of the house,

because he didn't want no one else to die in that house.

A few months later, we all packed up and left.

There's no question to me that this paranormal world

is very real.

Bakersfield is a small community,

close-knit community. It's an old town.

I work in the oil and gas industry.

I've been doing that for about 10 years.

I am Mexican American.

My mom's from Mexico, so my heritage is important to me.

I was born and raised Catholic all my life, and that with

being in the Mexican culture is very spiritual.

As much as we believed in, you know, angels and saints,

and you pray to your saints, and did your rosary,

you also believed in spirits and good and bad,

knowing, growing up, that there was angels and demons.

Erin Goodpipe, take one, mark.

As an investigator, Adeline Salas's case is

very rich and complex and therefore

makes it so interesting.

Tawney, story eight, mark.

In the case of Adeline Salas,

all these events started to happen around Adeline

when she was young, when she had her first marriage.

That was the beginning of this paranormal activity.

My first husband and I were married very young.

I was 18, he was 20.

We were high-school sweethearts.

We had a really good marriage, you know, throughout the years.

We kind of grew up together.

We lived in his grandmother's home.

We moved in there in 1982, '83.

And so I just thought life was good.

Then one night, I was feeling really sick.

In the middle of the night,

I woke up

because I thought I heard something outside

our front door.

When I looked on the ground...

was a black bird...

dead. Some kind of bones.

If I had a guess, it'd be like chicken bones or like a--

it almost looked like a, like the little--

like your thigh bone of a chicken,

and it had a circle of, looked like salt.

The next morning, got up and it was gone.

There's such a thing as an intention that can be

placed on you, and that can be for good or for bad.

Some might call a blessing as a positive intention that is

placed on you, and a curse can be a negative intention that is

placed on you, meant to wreck havoc in your life.

My husband and I had our first child.

He was about seven months old.

One night, I couldn't sleep, and I had my husband

and the baby, we're all in the same room.

I got up, and I took the baby monitor with me.

Looked at the baby, and the baby was asleep.

My husband comes,

here's the baby crying.

Run over there, the baby's not crying.

At that point, my husband unplugged the baby monitor

and that baby monitor's still crying.

That crying, what is that?

I don't know, maybe you're crazy, maybe...

You hear that baby monitor still going off like

the baby's crying. It freaked us out so bad.

Phantom crying is a phenomena where new parents hear a sound

that sounds like their baby is crying.

It's an internal instinct to prime parents to be able to

respond to the needs of their children.

If someone hears phantom crying, it could in fact

be a message from the spirit world.

Unfortunately, in haunted situations,

the spirit is not a baby.

I would absolutely consider phantom cries a warning

of trouble that is coming to her home.

My first marriage didn't work out,

and I thought it would be a good marriage,

but it just broke.

I love to be married. I believe in marriage.

I got remarried soon after my first marriage ended

and moved into this new house.

Little did I know that something followed me

from the old house to this one.

I got sick.

I was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer.

One night, I had just had a round of chemo.

And during the night, I was not feeling well.

And so I got up knowing that I was gonna be physically ill.

I didn't have any lights on or anything like that.

It was very dark.

So I was coming through here,

and I stood right here, and then I started

getting sick...

While in a fight for her life, battling stage three cancer,

Adeline has a horrifying vision.

I stood right here, and then I started getting sick,

and I was here.

And as I was getting sick and I was getting-- I was done,

I saw something right here, so I looked up,

and as I looked up...

And it was just gone, the blink of an eye.

I remember looking and trying to touch it,

and I felt nothing, but I could still see the darkness.

And my hand was like,

it was like in a black hole or something.

I just remember just feeling like, coldness, like I just was

cold, and I'm like, "OK, that's the chemo,"

and trying to talk myself out of, I didn't see what I saw.

But it scared me because I thought I saw Death.

In a case like this, you have to look and see

what exactly is the chemotherapy doing to Adeline?

You know, is she having cognitive changes?

Is she hallucinating? Is she seeing things

that aren't there? Is she focused?

As an investigator, you have to really look into all of that.

But more than likely, with Adeline,

she is experiencing something very paranormal.

I didn't tell anybody because I didn't want people

to think I was crazy.

They were like, "Oh, she's on chemo.

"She's thinking of death.

She's probably dreaming." You just don't talk about it.

When I started thinking about things and trying to figure out

what was going on, why is this happening?

Why am I now seeing this?

I really didn't start seeing anything until I moved

into this house. It was owned by my in-laws.

When they passed away, we did have to

go through their stuff.

It was, unfortunately, placed upon my responsibility

to clean out the house, and somebody had to do it,

so I did it.

They had 55 years of stuff that they had acquired.

I started noticing locks of hair everywhere.

I found them in bookshelves.

I found them in her pantry drawers.

I found them in her bathroom, all over the house.

And I don't know what they were from or why.

Across cultures, there is a lot of significance around

hair, especially the spiritual quality of it.

I know for myself that we believe that hair has

or houses the spirit.

Keeping locks of hair around one's house could have

a lot of different meanings. You know, for example,

there might be families that

keep locks of hair of their child,

of their relatives, just as a memory.

But there are some people that might use it as a ritual.

If you were keeping the hair of a loved one that made you feel

safe, pieces of it can indeed offer you protection.

What is the reason that her mother-in-law had them?

What would she need protection from?

Adeline did the right thing by getting rid of the hair.

For a while, things returned to normal.

But unfortunately, it didn't last.

After being in remission, I thought I was good to go.

I thought, you know,

I beat death. I saw death.

I'm getting a second chance at life.

This is good. I'm good to go.

I thought everything was behind me.

I had gotten up one night, as I'm walking down the hall...

And as I looked...

Is that what I'm seeing?

I got very angry at that point, and I just put my hand out

and I started charging it and just said, like...

Get out of my house.

...and when I stopped, right here,

it was, it was gone.

It's back again.

It was the exact same thing that I saw when I was

in the bathroom.

And again, the coldness like if I was in a freezer.

Am I going crazy? I know what the hell I saw.

Then I thought, like, "Am I being punished for going

through my in-laws' things?"

It is very well-known in the paranormal community that

spirits can absolutely attach themselves to objects.

There are so many people that are antique collectors.

And myself as an investigator, I run from antiques

only because I know that there is a potential of energy

being connected to it.

Think about something that you absolutely love,

something you adore, whether it be a necklace,

a bracelet-- whatever it is.

And going into the next life, you don't have that

favorite object.

There are some people that say, "No, that's mine."

That is my hairbrush. That is my mirror.

That is my whatever that may be.

And their energy is attached to it.

Could this be responsible for what is happening to Adeline?

I remembered that my mother-in-law had a hope chest.

I had a Nazi uniform at my home.

Oh my god.

I went back and I opened it up again because I wanted to see,

like, what I was seeing.

And I looked at-- there was dried blood and everything.

It felt just not good.

Like, "What did I open?" I obviously opened something

that was secretive.

Could this item have a malicious attachment to it,

given its dark history?

It started to attack, not only me,

but the people I loved, like Austin.

Austin is my son-in-law. He is married to my third son.

I got to meet Austin...

five years ago.

Austin's a really good, he's a really good man.

If you talk to my son, Seth, he'll tell you that

I love Austin more than him.

I learned that Hispanic culture is very well endowed

in spirituality, myths, legends,

and traditions, something that I've been that I'm not

very accustomed to, so it was

a little bit of a learning curve,

being welcomed into the family.

Definitely, there is a negative side to spirituality as well.

If you believe in angels, you've got to believe in demons,

and I didn't learn that until I physically

saw that in this home.

I was staying the night at Seth's house.

So it was about 10:30 at night, and I was walking out of

Seth's room to use the bathroom.

And it was dark in the hallway.

I can see in between the two vanity mirrors the black mass

just standing there.

I have an engineering degree.

Everything, I try to get an explanation, because there

typically always is one.

And here, I just could not figure what is going on.

- OK. - Hey.

- I need to tell you something. - Is everything OK?

Eventually, I just said, "I need to tell you something."

And she said, "Oh, you've seen it."

I immediately felt an intense burn go up my hand.

I looked down, and I could see redness starting from the base

right here of my fingers, and it just traveled up

to the base of my palm.

And it looked like you could see scratch marks right here

and then just palm on the top of my hand right here.

And it was bright red.

I believe that what was happening to his hand was this

entity, and it was letting us know that almost like,

"I'm here. I'm showing you I'm here."

Everything's gonna be OK.

It scared me because he saw it.

And I almost felt like, "What did I do?"

Like, did I, like...

I should have done something about it.

Like, this is now happening to him.

When her son-in-law Austin has his own frightening encounters,

Adeline knows her home contains an attachment

and that she might be the reason why.

When I started thinking about things and trying to figure out

what was going on, why is this happening?

One day, it hit me.

It had to do with my culture and my first husband.

We lived in his grandmother's home.

That house...

was not a good place for me to live.

A curse was put on me.

And it didn't leave me.

She told me that back in the '80s, Seth's dad's

grandmother put a curse on her because she did not

want her to marry his dad.

And that was something that she kept quiet for 30 years.

But I know what she said to me.

I know the things she's done to me.

I believe she was evil.

And I know,

everything in my gut and my heart, that I believe

she did that bird thing to me.

When it comes to the grandmother, you know,

it feels that maybe she manipulated spirits to come

and target Adeline.

The entity's focus is on Adeline

as the bearer of this original curse.

What started off as a curse to...

scare Addie away, to not get married, has now turned into

a full-blown attack of revenge on Addie.

I feel it more now that Seth and Austin are gone,

I do feel it more. I never feel I'm home alone.

I've been told the closer you get to the Lord,

the more you'll feel it.

Maybe that's what's going on.

But I'm not gonna give them me.

I won't.