Original subtitles

I was hoping we could find peace and quiet here,

but I found out real fast there was nothing quiet or peaceful

about this house.

You could feel that tension in the air

that something's going on.

It just didn't seem natural.

Something strange is happening in this house.

It felt like I was being attacked.

He was trying to force me out by taking the things

that I love.

Is the man hiding something?

Does he know more than he's saying?

I was hearing something from another dimension.

I was really starting to feel really isolated.

We have unfinished business.

And so it shoots through me.

It was an act of aggression.

There is a powerful spirit here.

My blood turned cold.

The spirit is resentful.

What is going on in this house?

This place is haunted.

It's a strange feeling to know you wanna stay in this space,

but yet everything you love is being driven away.

Benson, North Carolina, is a really small town.

It's kind of a tight-knit, closed-minded,

agriculturally driven community.

It's definitely not a metropolis.

The reason I moved to North Carolina was a job being

a photography professor.

I chose Benson because it was the only place

I could find a cool old house.

When I saw the pictures of it, I could tell that there was

something special about this house.

It was my dream home.

But that did not last too long.

I was a late bloomer when I came out.

I was 30 years old when I finally, kind of,

figured it all out and came out.

Being gay in a small community can be rough.

I didn't have any friends.

I would go to the local gym. I would work out.

I would hear conversations, and it would pretty much

solidify my thoughts on what people thought

about gay people.

Come here.

I anticipated there would be some resentment.

So, I bought some chickens.

Yes.

I bought chickens because I love animals

and these were gonna keep me company.

I brought the chickens inside.

They were just the little baby chicks at the time,

and I put them in the bathroom

to let them stay warm that night.

I start hearing a knocking on the wall.

I'm like, "Oh, the chicks must have got out

and somehow they're pecking on the wall."

But yet it did not sound like pecking.

It was a knock.

The chicks were all in their little box, just as happy

as could be.

So that was the first inkling of something strange is

happening in this house.

Erin Goodpipe, take one.

The case of Shane Booth is really fascinating to me

because in my experience in paranormal investigations,

oftentimes what happens is that it begins spirits by really try

to get the attention of somebody through rapping on doors

or making sounds somewhere.

And it's often just the beginning.

The next day,

I went outside to have coffee on the porch.

I found this pile of chicken bones sitting

on the front step.

At first, I thought, you know, maybe a cat did it

or a dog did it or some strange animal had, you know,

killed an animal and eaten it on my porch.

But the bones were old, and they were placed

too perfectly in the center of the step

and in a really neat pile,

and it just didn't seem natural.

It looks as though these bones are being placed

ritualistically because of how organized they are.

Which means there's a very clear intent that somebody placed

these here for a reason,

whether they're human or non-human.

Who would place those there and why would they do that?

Could these bones be a warning?

Finding the bones on my porch really made me think,

"Somebody is messing with me."

Maybe they had seen some of my photography online

and didn't, you know, want me in the town.

The house is 140 years old, so you can break

into it quite easily.

So I went to my neighbors that lived behind me

and I asked them,

you know, "Hey, is there any kind of vandalism

going on in this town"?

And they just looked at me and the younger lady

wouldn't really answer my question.

It did really crossed my mind that somebody was trying

to scare me and say, you know, "You're not welcome.

"You're not from this small town.

You're an outsider."

I go to bed that night.

And all of a sudden, I shut up and I heard

the cat just running.

So I decided I would deal with whatever was out there

in the morning.

And so in the morning when I woke up,

expecting to find like a raccoon or something in the house,

I looked over

and a picture of my great grandmother had now been placed

about five feet away from where it was hanging.

Why was it so odd that it was there?

Why would that be odd?

Oh, because a picture that falls off doesn't just fall

and move all the way over here.

Something had attacked this picture with such ferocity

that there's bite marks out of it,

there's puncture wounds in it,

and it was just shredded.

How does something knock that picture from four feet up

on the wall onto the ground, tear it up, put the glass back

on top of it?

I never knew my great grandmother.

She was a very religious, strict woman and probably would

not condone my lifestyle.

I'm led to believe that this is paranormal in nature

and not coming from a human being.

The occurrence of this photo of Shane's great grandmother

being meticulously moved is a really good piece

of evidence here.

It points to the fact that this could be perhaps

his very stern German great grandmother.

People think that, for some reason, that spirits are...

They just like release everything that they believed

or knew or their histories and their actions, behaviors.

The truth is, they take that all with them into death.

Is she trying to contact him to warn him about something?

So the next night I was folding laundry in my bedroom

and my littler dog, who is not little,

she's 60 pounds,

gets off the bed, and walks into the other room.

And all of a sudden...

...I just hear this crashing.

And when I got out here, this window was broken

with such force that the glass had been thrown all the way

across the porch.

There were shards of glass shattered 12 feet away.

For a dog to run and jump out

this window-- sure, it's possible,

but Matilda's never done anything like that.

And she's such a large dog that that's not gonna happen.

That dog didn't have a scratch on her.

I cleaned up the glass. I got her back inside.

And I went into my bedroom.

And when I came back, I couldn't believe what I saw.

All the laundry that I had just folded was thrown

all over the room.

My blood turned cold when I saw that, because now all

of a sudden, I'm like, "This is not natural.

This is not normal. What is going on in this house?"

Something paranormal just happened.

We now have an array of spiritual activity that is

occurring in this house.

We have items that are being meticulously rearranged.

The animals in the house are acting really strangely.

And we have Shane's laundry thrown around the room.

Because of all these occurrences, Shane is now

considering the otherworldly, the paranormal world,

as causing these incidences.

My main suspect at this point is the great grandmother.

But why would she be reaching out to him?

What is her message or her motive for Shane?

It seemed to have calmed down.

I had met a man, and so I had a boyfriend at the time.

It was snowing outside, which is quite rare

in North Carolina.

So the light was starting to go down,

and it was just kind of an eerie vibe in the house.

And all of a sudden, I just feel

like someone's looking at me.

In the name of the Lord.

As I turn and look at him, he just disappears.

It was almost like a light switch went on and off.

Josh!

I called out to my boyfriend, Josh.

"Are you here"?

Like, "Were you just standing in the doorway"?

And he's like, "Shane, I'm in the bedroom watching TV.

What do you want"? And I'm like, "There's a man,

"there's a man. I just saw a man

in the doorway."

The look on his face was just like, "What the heck are

you doing in my space"?

And so that really made me think, what connection

to this house does he have and why is he so disapproving?

This is not Shane's great grandmother.

This spirit is appearing as a man who is giving off a real

menacing feeling, a feeling as though "I'm watching you."

I have to wonder, why is this spirit acting so aggressively?

Who is he and what does he want?

I was in bed with my boyfriend and we were just starting,

you know, make out, and all of a sudden out of nowhere...

Did you hear that?

Yeah.

It happened at a time where we were being intimate.

It was almost mocking.

My boyfriend is military, and so he got up

and went searching through the house.

Because, of course, you know, it had to be somebody

in the house or somebody looking through the windows.

And he didn't see anything.

- There has to be something. - Yeah, there's nothing there.

- You're sure? - I'm sure.

My bad.

This was great. Thank you.

Uh.

My boyfriend, Josh, left in the middle of the night.

He didn't come back.

People I were dating would come to my house and they would not

feel welcome at all.

And in the middle of the night, they would literally get up

and go home because they're like, "Shane, we can't sleep.

We don't feel comfortable here. Something is just not right."

It did seem like this entity was trying to force

me out by taking the things that I love.

And I was really starting to feel really isolated.

These collective incidents really show that the spirit is

resentful, hostile towards Shane, and the spirit is really

targeting Shane during these really intimate times

where he's with his partners.

So what is going on here? And could this be a clue

as to who is haunting Shane?

I woke up to this electric shock shooting through my body.

I can feel it entering my feet, going through me,

and coming out my head.

And so it shoots through me...

...and then all of a sudden it stops.

It was just a feeling, this intense feeling

of electricity shooting through my body.

It felt like an energy just going through me.

And that really scared me.

And all of a sudden, this energy just goes

through me again.

It stops again, and it was over.

In the paranormal realm, it is common for people to experience

a sense of electric shock, like an energy that's washing

through you.

There is a powerful spirit here.

There is a charged space.

The belief is that spirit is made out of energy of specific

energy frequencies,

specifically electromagnetic frequency.

And so spirits can kind of use that energy

and steal energy from people.

That really, really, really terrified me because now

it's physical and it's affecting me.

And this did not seem like something that was friendly.

If something is messing with me in that capacity,

what else could it do?

I was already on edge because of the two previous nights.

I'm trying to stay awake 'cause, you know, I really

don't wanna go to bed 'cause I don't know

what's gonna happen.

Finally, I fall asleep.

The end of the bed is levitating.

I'm physically feeling the shaking.

It comes crashing down to the ground and just goes,

and I'm just laying here like, "What the heck just happened?"

That night was really the most terrifying night

of my entire life.

So I was really getting frustrated.

I was really getting lonely, very lonely, and I have to

decide how do I deal with this?

I was looking for any answer that I could find

to maybe help me with the stuff that was going on.

The new preacher down the block says to me, "Do you know

your house is the old Baptist church"?

And then all the puzzle pieces came together.

He gave me a photo of an old man that was responsible for

getting the church built.

Oh, my God.

This is the man that was in my doorway.

We must wipe out.

It really made sense to me why this man

would not want me in his church,

because he still saw it as a church.

This preacher man doesn't like my lifestyle and is doing

things to try and get me out.

It's really saddening to think that people can take

their beliefs into the afterlife and still wreak

havoc in people's lives.

This preacher who is driven by his beliefs,

which are homophobic in nature, is enacting this revenge

against Shane, who is a very proud gay man

and is very upset about this.

I have a connection to this house

that I can't explain.

It's a strange feeling to know you wanna stay in this space,

but yet everything you love is being driven away.

Being desperate, I was willing to try anything.

One in particular student gave me a potion and said,

"Sprinkle this around your house and it should cleanse

your house of any entity."

And I don't know if it was some kind of Santería,

that was my guess that it was some kind of Santería,

but I'm not quite sure

what it was, but I was willing to try anything.

So I'm walking around squirting this potion,

and then out of the top of the ceiling

comes this black... entity.

And it just kind of leaps from the ceiling

and goes down like it's hiding under the table.

This black thing was negativity,

just oozing out of it.

It seems evil.

I gather all the strength that I have and I look

under the table

and nothing's there.

There's nothing underneath that table.

So I'm getting goosebumps just talking about it.

After the event of the entity, the black shadow person coming

out of the wall and hiding under the table,

things seemed to slow down a little bit.

Took six years for me to really feel comfortable because I had

met another gay couple that had opened a store in town

and open-minded individuals who hang out at this shop.

Um, and have transformed the town really, and now there's

a large group of people that I do not feel are as close-minded.

The spirit that had been haunting me,

it doesn't interact with me in the ways,

the strong ways, that it has in the past,

but it's definitely still there...

...but I think that we have come to an understanding

that if you really mess with me anymore,

I will take steps to get rid of you.

And it seems to have calmed down.

When we moved to Hanover, I was retired

from law enforcement at that time.

We chose Hanover because we loved the history

of Gettysburg.

And I was getting ready to prepare for a business plan

to open up a shop. Souvenirs, that type of thing.

Gettysburg is a hub for a lot of tourism,

so we knew that her shops would probably take off.

We started looking a home for knowing we were gonna

go to Gettysburg.

We always scouted them first, though.

When we got there, we were like,

"Wow, this is a nice home."

Talking to the landlord, he is kind of one of those guys

that, you know, really nice,

but kind of that weird tone about him.

The landlord seemed like he didn't wanna spend

a lot of time in the house, that it made him uncomfortable.

I could detect that.

He told us about his father

and how the house was custom built

for him and that his dad had passed away before he had

the chance to take that house as his residence.

We settled on this house because the price was right.

I was hoping we could find peace and quiet here,

but I found out real fast there was nothing quiet or peaceful

about this house.

Something isn't right

with the house.

In the case of Jerry and Aretta Burkhead,

life was in a state of transition.

There was a new job, a new home in a new town,

and, little be known to them, new hauntings.

Tawney Lewis, take one.

When I researched the Jerry and Aretta case, as soon

as I saw the words "Gettysburg," I was intrigued.

You know, everyone is aware of the history

of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,

and I could only imagine the kind of activity

they would have experienced.

There's a rich history here,

not just of the Civil War battle itself,

but the hauntings which have

followed it for more than 150 years.

One day we were coming into the house.

And the front door handle fell onto the floor inside.

- Aretta. - Hey.

She called me and said, "Hey, the door handle just flew off."

- It fell. - What?

So I came into the house.

My thought was, "Was somebody tampering with the lock,

thinking no one was home?"

...and then closed it, it just fell on the floor,

and, um...

That's when I was like, "OK, let me call the landlord

because this house is new."

And this shouldn't happen.

The creepy guy. We had to call him.

- Hey, Sam. - Hi.

He comes over, and he comes through the front door,

and he, like, looks around. And I'm thinking,

"OK, you all right"? Like this.

And he's like, "Yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine," like this.

So we pick up the doorknob, and he puts it back on.

And I said, "What do you think happened to it?"

And he goes, "You better watch it."

- I've gotta go. - And he left.

What?

As a police officer by training,

Jerry is a great student of people.

And he notices something strange about the landlord.

He seems very uncomfortable whenever he visits Jerry

and Aretta's home.

It's as if he really does not want to be there.

And Jerry can't help but wonder why.

Is the man hiding something?

Does he know more than he's saying?

It wasn't...

jiving with me.

I said, "This frigging place is haunted."

After a couple weeks of living in the house,

I noticed very distinctively

that I had large lesions that were forming

on my face.

Everywhere-- my neck, hands,

just, I was breaking out in lesions.

Jerry!

I never broke out in anything like that before I lived there.

- Hey, look at this. - Ew, gross.

What do you think this is?

Jerry came to me.

He had just come out from the shower, and he noticed that

his feet were heavily peeling.

They had cracks in them that were very abnormal.

Oh, my God, Jerry, what happened?

And he had some blood that was coming out

from parts of his feet.

Does it hurt?

They would actually split and start bleeding.

And it was scary.

Ow.

- Ew, gross. - It hurts.

When I went in to see the doctor, um...

I told him what was going on.

And he said, "He has no clue what it is."

My blood work came back clean. So it blew everybody's mind.

Like, they thought something was gonna be in my blood.

With all these things happening, I started asking myself,

was there something to do with the location

of the house?

Something that could be causing the skin conditions.

Why is Jerry and Aretta having this sort of a reaction?

It makes me think that it is connected

to paranormal activity.

We don't have to look too far for an explanation as to why

Jerry and Aretta's new house might be haunted.

They've moved to Gettysburg, which pretty much

any paranormal investigator will agree is the most haunted

town in America.

Gettysburg is notoriously known for being haunted.

Gettysburg, the site of the Civil War,

57,000 people died.

Could some part of that deadly battle be haunting their house?

We were at a loss. We were stumped.

What's going on here in this neighborhood or this house?

And, you know, from the background I have,

I was like, "Maybe I should investigate this

a little bit further."

Sam.

So I'm outside the next day and the landlord's

doing his grasp.

Sam, can I talk to you for a second?

I gotta talk to you about the house.

I tried to ask the landlord about the house.

Sam.

I tried to convince* you about the house.

He didn't say much.

Sam.

Sam, wait.

You can feel that tension in the air

that something's going on.

We were laying in bed one night.

It just was swirling up against the wall, though,

as it moved across the wall. - It just threw me into a panic.

And that's when I was like, that real mean, nasty voice.

And I said, "What the F-- was that?"

And it sounded to me like a very agitated older man.

Like he could see what we were doing,

and that was the worst part of it.

That was so scary.

It's all right. It's OK, honey.

Aretta looked right at me and said,

"Do you believe me now?

This place is haunted." And I said, "Yes, I do.

I believe you." It hit me that, you know,

things are going on here. It's affecting us.

And it's not human. It's paranormal.

So clues are really starting to line up here.

I have a hunch that it has something to do

with the landlord.

There's a reason that he doesn't wanna come inside.

There's a reason why there's a hesitance.

And I have to figure out what that block is.

Why is there such an issue when it comes to the landlord?

One day I was in the kitchen and an apple,

a red delicious apple, that was in a basket on the counter...

Ow!

Hit me right in the chest.

It felt like I was being attacked.

It was an act of aggression.

It's rare for spirit to gather that much energy to where

they can throw objects at someone,

especially that forceful.

So why is this entity so powerful?

Why are they able to manifest themselves so strongly to where

they can throw objects?

Aretta needs to pay attention now because this thing is

making it very clear that they are there

and they want her out.

Few days later, we were just laying in bed.

Ah!

Ah!

I felt like I had a knife through my side.

Ah!

She said, "I gotta go to the hospital."

They found a very large kidney stone.

Even the doctor said, "That's huge.

You should have felt that a long time ago."

We had to sense, after we came home from the hospital,

that this entity is definitely targeting us

and it doesn't want us there.

A door being taken apart, apples flying across the room,

and now a host of medical symptoms.

What on earth is going on in the Burkhead house?

Since they've moved into the home.

All the clues are piling up.

However, the one thing about this haunting,

everything around it is physical.

There's a lot of physical elements.

So where did that come from? What is going on?

After living in the house for a while,

I was feeling drained,

exhausted, constant fatigue, and...

it just got worse.

It was afternoon.

I had laid down to take a nap

and could not move my body.

I could hear a phone call.

911, what's your emergency?

And an operator picked up the phone.

911, please state your emergency.

Please, he's on the floor. He's not breathing.

It was clear to me that the phone call I was hearing

was of paranormal nature.

It wasn't coming from a neighboring house or somebody

on their cell phone.

Ma'am?

Hello? Are you there?

I was hearing something from another dimension.

911, what is your emergency?

Oh, my God.

Can you give me your location?

The 911 conversation that I heard was, at first,

the dispatcher saying, "911, what's your emergency?"

And then I heard the female on the other end.

She was frantic

that someone had fallen and they needed help.

When Jerry arrived, he just wanted to snap me out

of that feeling of, "Am I having a stroke still?"

Aretta, wake up! She was, like, white as a ghost. Her eyes were wide open.

Are you OK?

The whole experience, it still was resounding through me.

It's just horrible.

I was like, "This place is not normal.

"It's haunted, like my wife says,

and we gotta get out of here."

We had to call the landlord.

We had to ask the landlord about the house, its history.

He told me that his father passed away in the house.

Not only had his father lived there,

but he had died inside the house.

And as a paranormal investigator,

that's a huge red flag to me.

The question is, if the landlord's father is

haunting the property, why is he so angry?

Why is he so vengeful?

What is his vendetta against Jerry and Aretta?

He actually brought it up about, you know, what his dad

passed away from. He had diabetes.

Said, "his feet were, um, falling apart,"

which was like...

He had respiratory issues, he had kidney issues.

Aretta kinda looked at me, and I said,

"You don't have to say it."

I said, "all these ailments that he had,

we have."

It was like every disease that the landlord's father had

had been mirrored onto us or transferred onto us.

He was doing it.

I think that the 911 call that I heard was someone related

to him, calling in

that they found him, and possibly soon after that,

he had passed away.

The landlord also told me that his father was nasty,

selfish, mean.

When someone usually dies inside of a residence,

you know, more than likely, they will cross over.

However, there are some that do not wanna go.

They feel like they have unfinished business,

or they may have had trauma, and they will linger.

And it sounds like when it comes to the landlord's father,

he had a pretty traumatic passing.

So I'm not shocked that he stayed around.

The target of his revenge is not the Burkhead's themselves,

but rather their landlord for his broken promise

that he would not rent out the house

after his father's death.

And now that he's done so, and has broken his word,

I believe the spirit of the old man is specifically seeking

revenge on his son.

I believe that he was depriving his son of any type

of income that might be coming from the house.

Kind of like one of those things like he's on

the other side of that realm

or that grave laughing at his son

saying, "No one's staying in this house

because you're not gonna make a dime off of this house."

Because anybody lives here that's getting attacked

like this is gonna move out.

This gentleman who died in this house

is a very vengeful spirit.

Once we moved out, things started to improve.

My skin, Jerry's feet--

everything started to just fall back,

and we were very happy.

I don't have any regrets leaving that house.

The only regret I have is not leaving it sooner.