Original subtitles

ANNOUNCER: This program is about unsolved mysteries.

Whenever possible, the actual family members

and police officials have participated

in recreating the events.

What you are about to see is not a news broadcast.

ROBERT STACK: May 9, 1986, Arizona State Prison,

Patrick Michael Mitchell and two cohorts

stage a daring escape in broad daylight.

Since then, Mitchell is suspected of robbing five banks

of nearly $1 million and has earned a spot on the FBI'S 10

Most Wanted List.

60 years ago in Ohio, an eight-year-old farm boy

was disciplined by his stepparents

and left to fend for himself during the Depression.

Today Victor Scheiman is still looking for his real family

and needs your help.

From Nevada, an eerie tale of two families and one

haunted house.

One of the family claims they took this picture

of a benevolent ghost.

The other family claims that their spirits tormented them.

Also, the FBI is asking for your help to track down a master con

man who is suspected of brutally murdering

his wife and two stepdaughters.

Join me.

Perhaps you can help solve a mystery.

December 14, 1987, 8:30 am.

[crash]

Nobody move!

Just put your hands up, and no one will get hurt.

ROBERT STACK: Two men, wearing Ronald Reagan masks held up

a bank in Gainesville, Florida.

Keep your hand up.

ROBERT STACK: The bank had not yet opened for business.

Employees were marking in the weekend deposits.

In less than five minutes, the two robbers

made off with nearly $500,000.

Working with similar MOs, the FBI

targeted Richard Joseph Landry, alias Michael Garrison,

alias Roger Lanthorn.

They all turned out to be the same man, Patrick Michael

Mitchell, one of the most skilled bank

robbers in the country.

During the last 15 years, his heists have

netted close to $3 million.

Patrick Michael Mitchell is an escape

artist, a master of disguise.

He changes identities like most men change shirts.

Each time he Robinson bank he wears a different comic mask,

Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, even Bozo the Clown.

The FBI believes the masks are Mitchell's way of thumbing

his nose at authority.

Today, after 14 bank robberies in the United States

and Canada and two prison escapes,

Mitchell is the newest addition to the FBI'S

10 Most Wanted List.

I guess you could best describe

him as being confident.

He's even vain, to a certain extent, in that we believe him

to have taken the prescription drug

of Retina A, which supposedly helps

keep your youthful appearance.

He's been described as having an athletic build.

He likes the ladies.

He fancies himself as a gourmet cook.

Matter of fact, we've even recovered

some cookbooks from the trunk of one of his cars.

So far, we've developed at least 25 different aliases

he's used in the past 11 years.

ROBERT STACK: In 1983, Patrick Mitchell

was given a 20 year sentence at Arizona

State Prison for bank robbery.

On May 9, 1986, he and two other prisoners

assigned to janitorial duties staged a bold escape.

It had been meticulously planned and precisely timed by Mitchell

himself.

None of the guards noticed that the three men were missing.

No alarms had been set off.

Wearing street clothes, they had hidden in a utility room,

the three convicts simply walked outside.

A girlfriend of one of the prisoners was waiting for them.

She had been duped into believing that the men

were on a weekend furlough.

The escape went off without a hitch.

One of the men would eventually be

arrested in Atlanta, Georgia.

Patrick Michael Mitchell, with the third escapee,

Johnny Salazar Stewart, headed for Gainesville, Florida.

They come into a town, a month or two in advance.

They come in on several occasions,

stay at local hotels and motels, we believe either

by staking out department stores or armored car services,

they then determine when and where they will make their hit.

The way I see it, armored car gets

there between 8:15 and 8:20.

We'll watch them go, and we go in--

ROBERT STACK: In the fall of 1987,

Patrick Mitchell and Johnnie Stewart

began planning a robbery in Gainesville.

Mitchell rented a self-storage unit

with a good view of both the bank they intended to rob

and the armored car company that served the bank.

Mitchell pretended to load and unload boxes from the storage

unit, while he observed the routine operating movements

of the armored car company.

Patrick Mitchell never went inside the bank himself.

Instead, he sent Johnny Stewart to scout the interior.

Actually it's a pretty good idea, this individual

after they open an account, has a legitimate reason

for being in the bank.

So there will be no questions for an individual who

has an account there, walking around, looking

around, and conversing with different customers

and employees.

He can also be there when deliveries are made

by the armored car services possibly,

where he can see actually what they're doing

and how they're doing it after deliveries are made.

ROBERT STACK: 7:30 AM, the day of the robbery.

Mitchell and Stewart meet at the self-storage facility.

7:50 AM, bank employees begin filing in

to prepare for business hours.

The bank will open in one hour and 10 minutes.

The armored car leaves to pick up deposits

from several nearby stores.

VOICE ON PHONE: I've got a bomb planted.

ROBERT STACK: 8:10, the Gainesville police operator

receives a bomb threat.

Can you tell me what time it's going to go off?

ROBERT STACK: His target, a junior high school

in the Northeast Gainesville--

It's going to go off in 10 minutes?

ROBERT STACK: --the same police district as the bank.

Hello?

ROBERT STACK: 8:22, the armored car guards arrive at the bank,

swelling its total deposits on hand to $300,000.

Simultaneously, patrol cars are dispatched

to the site of the bomb threat, 32 blocks from the bank.

Police now believe that Patrick Mitchell

phoned in the false alarm as a diversionary tactic.

8: 25 AM, Mitchell and Stewart make their move.

[crash]

[scream]

Don't anybody move.

Put your hands up, and no one will get hurt.

Where are the money bags that the armored car just

dropped off?

I was thinking, he's either going to shoot somebody,

or he's going to take someone hostage.

I was very frightened.

I remembered laying on the floor in the back,

and I kept thinking, I'll never see my husband or my children

again.

I started to cry.

I remember thinking that he was going to shoot me in the back.

Keep your hands up, and no one will get hurt.

This is a bomb.

Nobody move, and it won't go off.

ROBERT STACK: As the two men flee,

Mitchell drops a bag containing $28,000.

Nevertheless, their take for the day is nearly $500,000.

The bomb is a phony, but it buys valuable escape time.

8:40 AM, a woman who works at the storage facility

sees Mitchell drive away, a rack full of clothes

hung across the back seat.

It is the last sighting of Patrick Michael

Mitchell in Gainesville.

Two months after the Gainesville robbery,

Johnny Salazar Stewart was apprehended.

Despite his innocent plea, he was tried and convicted

for his role in the robbery and is today

serving a 40 year sentence.

A year after the robbery, Patrick Mitchell's Cadillac

was found abandoned at a storage facility in Tallahassee,

150 miles from Gainesville.

The car was clean of evidence, but Mitchell did leave nine

cookbooks in the back seat.

During the last two years, Mitchell has been sighted

in Texas, Georgia, and Alabama.

However, he is Canadian and authorities believe he

could have returned to Canada.

His last known alias with Johnny Grant.

I think is imperative that we find Patrick Michael Mitchell,

because I don't believe that he'll be stopping

with the Gainesville robbery.

Based on his previous activities in the past 11

years and his hit frequency, I believe

that it's not if he's going to hit but when he's going to hit.

ROBERT STACK: Next, the poignant saga

of a little boy torn from his family during the Depression.

Perhaps you can help reunite him with his brothers and sisters.

Dillonvale, Ohio, 1929, the darkest days

of the Great Depression.

For an 8-year-old farm boy named Frank,

the hard times, common to all Americans,

were especially cruel.

Here's your bucket, Pa.

I had the chickens to feed and the grass to cut

and the chores to do, and of course, I was busy.

I didn't mind that so much, but I'd like to have

been fed afterwards though.

ROBERT STACK: For as far back as he can remember,

Frank's hardships went beyond his thankless chores.

Frank, have you fed the chickens yet?

What have you been doing, you're such a lazy boy.

This whole barn has to be cleaned.

This new hay--

I was beaten.

I went so hungry, the smell of the food made me sick.

No supper for you.

I wasn't allowed in the house.

I'd sleep in the barn most of the time or with the dog.

I was bitter, angry, and a very upset young man,

to say the least.

ROBERT STACK: By age nine, Frank's life

had completely disintegrated.

His parents informed him that he wasn't even their son

and ordered him off the farm and out of their lives.

Frank was told that his real parents didn't want him either.

They had turned him over to the state welfare department

just days after he was born.

Frank was left to fend for himself.

He had no family and no idea who he really was.

The search for a missing family and one's true identity

can be a difficult ordeal.

Many times years of research end with disappointment

in the dust-covered files of some county record department.

For those who do succeed, the solution

can sometimes be more painful than the quest, when

a child discovers he was abandoned by parents

who simply didn't care.

This was a fear that haunted nine-year-old Frank,

whose search for the truth would last more than half a century.

After being put out of his home, Frank

was shuffled from state institutions

to foster families and back again.

I was a ward of the state of Ohio.

I ate at the soup kitchens.

I stole food off the front of stores, just to eat now.

I was not a thief.

I didn't know anything about my parents.

I was told all types of stories, like the family deserted me.

I just was lost.

Frank, Frank.

ROBERT STACK: As a teenager, Frank's troubles continued.

Did you hear my question?

Did you read your homework last night?

ROBERT STACK: The belief that his birth parents

had willfully abandoned him, left

Frank dispirited and aimless.

Frank, this is the third time in two weeks.

You're going to stay after school

and write the entire chapter on pronouns until you finish.

ROBERT STACK: But at 16, his life took an unexpected turn.

A concerned social worker confirmed that Frank

was not his real name.

He had been born Victor Scheiman.

The counselor also made a promise.

If Frank applied himself and stayed in school,

his real parents would be in the audience

when he received his diploma.

They told me my name was Victor Scheiman.

I had a family, that he would see that my parents would

be there on my graduation day.

And I buckled down and went to work.

ROBERT STACK: That day Frank had worked

so hard for finally came.

He was going to meet his real family.

Frank asked that he officially be graduated Victor Scheiman.

It was the first time he used his real name.

Victor Scheiman.

I thought if my parents were in the audience,

they would hear the name and they would respond.

Lisa Goldblatt.

Nobody showed up.

Andy

Robinson.

And it turned out to be one of the sorriest days of my life.

I wrote to the Bureau of Charities, the Welfare

Departments State of Ohio.

And the answer that I received that nothing could be found.

They knew very little.

And that my family had just disappeared without a trace.

So I gave up.

ROBERT STACK: At a complete dead end,

Victor had no choice but to move ahead with his life.

In the 1950s, he married Eleanor Kell

and started a family of his own.

For 34 years, Victor all but abandoned

the hope of finding his family.

But in 1984, Victor learned of an organization

in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, called Reunite,

a support group for people searching for lost loved ones.

An old school chum told me about this group

and I thought, well, what have I got to lose?

A little bit of time, I can spare that.

So I went and I was very amazed.

My name is Victor Scheiman.

I was born September the 5th, 1921 in Alliance, Ohio.

ROBERT STACK: Victor told the group

the story of his childhood.

That evening he met amateur genealogist, Rose Murphy.

I've been searching for them all these years.

This man has spent his entire life, 60 plus years,

without any knowledge of his history.

And I couldn't believe that that could be true.

And it just went crossgrains to everything

I believe in, because I think everyone

has the right to their history.

ROBERT STACK: Rose Murphy was determined

to find Victor's family and solve the puzzle which had

eluded Victor his entire life.

She began sifting through a labyrinth

of state adoption records, county welfare

files, and old newspapers.

Incredibly, less than a week later,

she discovered the obituary of a Hungarian immigrant

named Lena Shimon.

Lena had died in 1921, just hours

after giving birth to her 11th child.

The baby's name, Victor.

And I contacted a Hungarian language professor.

He said that he would venture to guess,

and would probably be right, that the family name was

actually Simon, a common Hungarian family

name, but pronounced by a Hungarian spoken person

and heard by an English ear, would be spelled as Scheiman

or Shiman, or any other forms of spelling depending

upon the person hearing it.

Within 20 minutes, I had located Victor's

original birth certificate, that had sat here for 64 years.

They hadn't caught it, because they're

searching for it as the Scheiman family,

rather than the Simon family.

ROBERT STACK: Information found in the obituary and birth

certificate enabled Rose to reconstruct the events

surrounding Victor's birth.

Victor's father, Dan Simon, had worked for the railroad

in Alliance, Ohio, just 100 miles

from where Victor had grown up.

Just before Victor's birth, a tragic series of events

was set into motion that would separate him from his family.

Ah!

Hey, hey!

Throw the switch!

Throw the switch!

ROBERT STACK: The bones in Dan Simon's ankle were shattered.

He was rushed to the hospital.

That afternoon, Dan's wife, Lena, went into labor.

Push, that's it.

You've got to help me.

Good.

I can imagine a tremendous struggle going on physically as

well as emotionally in that room as Lena gave life to Victor

and lost her own in the process.

I will fear no evil for thou art with me.

They rod and thy staff--

According to her obituary, Mr. Simon

was take from the hospital to the funeral.

With this broken ankle, the father being totally

unable to care for the child, Welfare

placed the child for foster care, and in fact

indicated in their records that the father

agreed to that foster care only with great regret.

Here he is, a strong and healthy boy.

His name is Victor.

We've decided to call him Frank.

Frank.

I feel very strongly that his father returned to Welfare

after he recuperated and was out of the hospital, and said,

you know, you have my son, Victor Simon.

I want my son back.

He could very possibly have been told,

we don't have anybody by that name, which they didn't have.

They had a Victor Emanuel Scheiman.

They didn't have a Victor Simon in their records.

ROBERT STACK: Victor Scheiman can take comfort

in knowing that he was not truly an unwanted child,

but rather a victim of an unlikely conspiracy of events.

However, several pieces to the puzzle of his life

are still missing.

I hope that I meet some member of my family

to know that I belong.

I want to know what happened.

I want my children to have their side

of the family, like uncles, brothers, sisters, and so on.

I just want to see somebody and talk

to somebody that I belong to.

ROBERT STACK: When we return, a brutal attack leaves a mother

and her two daughters dead.

A woman's husband is wanted for murder.

Las Vegas, city of big dreams and high rollers.

This desert town has attracted every kind

of crooked and con man.

However during, the last decade, the dry climate

and limitless entertainment have also begun to attract

a large retirement community.

Frank Allen, a Los Angeles businessman,

bought his dream retirement home in 1986.

It was located in an elegant gated community

10 miles from downtown Las Vegas.

As a temporary measure, he rented the house

to another family, maintaining a room

for himself as well for his frequent business trips

to Nevada.

But Frank Allen had no idea that Joe

Smith, the man who was renting his house,

had an unsavory past.

Joe Weldon Smith, who called himself a real estate investor,

had a long history as a con man and had once been convicted

of attempted grand theft.

He lived in the Nevada house with his wife, Judith,

and her two daughters from a previous marriage, 12-year-old

Christy and 20-year-old Wendy.

On October 6, 1990, Frank Allen expected

to have the house to himself.

Joe Smith had said that he and his family

would be out of town for a few days.

Instead of a restful weekend, Allen

had stepped into a nightmare.

I locked the door behind me and went

up to the top of the steps and unlock the bedroom and went in.

I started undressing, took off my jacket,

shirt, tie, and suddenly stopped in my track, and said,

something is wrong.

I said, I don't know what it is, but something is wrong.

Joe, what the hell are you doing?

I grabbed him at the wrist on that arm, his right arm,

and that's when I shook him.

And I said, Joe, what in the hell are you trying to do?

And then it was clear to me that he was trying to murder me.

Coming down the steps, I said, now, I've locked myself

in with these double dead bolts, and I don't

have time to reach for a key.

So I ran across the foyer into the living room dining room.

And sure enough, he went the opposite direction

to head me off in the kitchen.

And I doubled back for the front door.

I still didn't think I had time to fumble for a key,

so I went straight through the door.

[tires screech]

He stood in the door and glared at me

and then walked back in the direction of the bar.

And I drove my car up to the guard gate,

and said to the guard, call the police.

There's a man in my house.

Joe!

Joe, it's the police.

If you're in there, come on out.

ROBERT STACK: 10 minutes later, local police

arrive at the house, expecting to find Joe Smith still inside.

They quickly made their way from the living room

to a downstairs bedroom.

Joe!

Come on out, Joe.

ROBERT STACK: They thought they had cornered Joe

Smith hiding under a blanket.

Instead they were confronted with a tragic scene

of 12-year-old Christie Cox, Smith's stepdaughter.

She had been strangled and bludgeoned to death.

It was obvious that she had been dead for quite some time.

She had several wounds to the face and to her head.

In the next bedroom, they forcefully entered that also,

and that's when Wendy Cox was found, laying beside the bed.

She had approximately 32 wounds to her heads and hands,

defensive wounds to her hands.

And she had also been strangled.

Officers went upstairs, searched the open rooms, the game room

and so forth, and then went to the master bedroom,

entered that. The doors were closed.

They entered that bedroom, and that's when they found

Judith Smith, lying in the bed.

ROBERT STACK: Judith Smith, Joe's wife

and mother of the two girls, had also been bludgeoned to death.

Police later determined that the three victims had been dead

for approximately 18 hours.

[phone rings]

Hello?

ROBERT STACK: Two hours after the bodies were discovered,

Smith telephoned his wife's daughter-in-law.

It's Joe.

ROBERT STACK: He denied all involvement in the murders.

Joe?

What's going on?

It's after 4:00 in the morning.

Are you sitting down?

Yes.

Approximately 4:30 in the morning, on October 6th,

he called her on the phone told her that her mother and sisters

had been murdered and he had killed

one of the people that did the killing

and knew who the other ones were.

Where are you?

It doesn't matter where I am right now.

You just have to believe I had nothing to do with it.

If I don't kill myself, I'm going

to find the guys who did it.

I know who they are.

And I'm going to kill them.

In my opinion it was a ruse by Mr. Smith

to get support from Judith Smith's family members

and make them believe that he was

not involved in the killings.

ROBERT STACK: Joe Smith fled in a gold Lincoln Continental

with vanity Nevada license plates reading Smitty 2.

He is wanted on three counts of murder

and one count of attempted murder with a deadly weapon.

Smith is 50 years old, six feet tall and weighs 160 pounds.

He has brown hair and brown eyes.

He may be working in real estate.

Police are still puzzled by what appears to have

been on motiveless crime.

By all accounts, the Smiths' marriage was a happy one.

Though Joe Smith was in dire financial straits,

he was not named in his wife's will,

nor did he have life insurance policies

for her or her daughters.

Authorities believe Smith may now

be somewhere in the Southwestern United States or Mexico.

Just minutes after we profiled Smith's case,

an anonymous viewer called our telecenter

to report that the fugitive was living

near Los Angeles, California.

Smith was hiding out at this motel,

but managed to escape before he could be apprehended.

Once we establish that Joe Weldon Smith was in the Los

Angeles area, we focused our attention

to his brother, who we know that he had close contact with.

After five days of surveilling this brother,

we established where the suspect was residing.

20 minutes later, Joe Weldon Smith

was arrested at another local motel, where he was registered

under an assumed name.

Inside Smith's room, detectives recovered several credit

and identification cards.

Smith told police that he was in the process

of creating a new identity.

At the time of his arrest, Joe Smith

indicated to me that he had seen the last airing

of the "Unsolved Mysteries" program.

He also told me that it was very tough being a fugitive,

and he always knew someone would be knocking at the door

one day.

He's kind of glad it's all over at this point.

ROBERT STACK: Next, former residents

claim that this house is haunted,

but are the spirits friendly, evil,

or just a figment of overactive imaginations?

In the tiny hamlet of Fish Springs,

Nevada stands a 100-year-old Kansas style farm house.

It was originally built next to a graveyard in Virginia City

and has been moved three times.

Some people find it very odd that the house

has managed to survive for more than a century.

Others believe the explanation is simple.

They say this house is haunted.

I'd like to see it destroyed.

I think it is a center point for spirits.

The house has something keeping it alive.

I'd like see it burned to the ground.

I've always loved older homes.

And I'm fascinated by them, by their building, and the fact

that they have so much history that they've

withstood all that time.

I just feel like they have a memory of their own,

just like people.

They can remember the past and things

that have happened there.

ROBERT STACK: There's something about haunted houses

that even the most skeptical among us

finds difficult to resist.

Perhaps it's because they bring back childhood memories

of things that go bump in the night,

or perhaps they just like a good ghost story.

This is a tale of two families, the Kelseys and the Robinsons.

Both families believe they had supernatural encounters

while they lived in the Nevada house,

but the end result would be very different for each.

Is this a story of a congenial and well-meaning spirit?

Is it the tale of a fearsome poltergeist?

Or is it simply a tale?

You will no doubt have an opinion of your own.

The Kelsey family bought the house on May 2, 1978, 100 years

to the day after the man who built it had died.

From the beginning, there was something eerie

about the house.

I felt like we had gotten more than we bargained for.

And I wouldn't walk through the house in the dark at all

for fear that I was going to run into something, something that

wasn't supposed to be there.

Just as you're getting to sleep, you would hear footsteps

walking up and down stairs.

What's wrong?

My husband would tell me that he heard

a swishing noise like the rustle of the old chiffon skirts

was how he described it.

Sounds like swishing to me.

We got really scared, or I did anyway,

thinking that either there really was something happening

in the house or we had just seen too many scary movies,

and my imagination was running wild

because it was an old house.

The Kelsey's daughter, Jennifer, who was then four years old

had an even more bizarre experience.

I had just woken up for some reason.

I don't know why.

And I remember, I rolled over and I looked at my bedroom door

and I saw this little boy.

And he looked like he was sad.

And, the man, he just looked like he was really concerned.

And it was only there for a few seconds

but then it just like disappeared.

It was weird.

They didn't looked familiar to me at all,

but the way they were looking at me

just seemed like they knew me.

It was just really weird.

For some reason I keep thinking that the levitation was

the same night that I saw him.

For some reason I just combined the two together in memory.

But I just remember laying there in my bed.

It Seemed like the whole bed was just like floating.

After Jennifer told me what had happened,

I was very scared that things were

starting to happen that aren't supposed to happen normally.

And I told my husband about it, and he asked me

if she was actually levitated.

And I said, from what she was saying, that what it sounded

like.

ROBERT STACK: Jim and Susan Kelsey

often heard strange footsteps approaching

their daughter's bedroom.

They were concerned for her safety.

In desperation, the Kelseys decided

to call a local man, Daniel Martin, who

had a reputation as a psychic.

When I first talked to Mrs. Kelsey,

she was more concerned, confused, because she didn't

understand what was happening.

ROBERT STACK: After visiting the house,

Martin returned to his room and put himself into a deep trance.

Incredibly, Martin says that while he was in the trance,

he met Kelsey's ghost.

I contacted an entity, appeared

to me as a sailing man.

That's what came to my mind.

He had the mustache.

And at that time I asked him, who are you?

And he told me his name was Samuel.

And he told me at the time that his purpose there

was to protect the child and he was there not to harm anyone.

Then I explained to him that he was frightening the family,

and Samuel promised not to do these things in the future,

not to frighten them by doing frightening things to them.

Jennifer asked me, she said, does that mean he's going away?

And I said, I don't know.

And then a couple of weeks later, things had quieted down,

and she asked me if he had moved away,

and I said, I didn't know.

And she said, well, I don't think he did.

She says, I think he's up to the attic.

ROBERT STACK: The Kelseys became convinced

that their ghost, Samuel, was a spirit who meant them no harm.

Three years later, in 1981, they moved to a more modern house

nearby.

The old home was leased to a potential buyer.

By now, the Kelseys had three children,

including an infant son.

When my son was seven weeks old,

I had taken some pictures of him and I had run out of flash,

and I had the rest of the roll of film to use up.

And so I decided to try to get the pictures

taken of him anyway.

And I propped him up on the love seat

next to a lamp, with some stuffed animals around him,

and proceeded to take the rest of the roll of film,

figuring there should be enough light.

When I went to pick the pictures up, I opened them up

and I pulled them out, and there was a man on the first picture.

And I thought, these aren't my pictures.

So I went through them.

And after that initial picture, everything in there,

the roll was of my son.

And I checked my negative and the man was on it.

The only way I can explain the photograph

is that it is of our ghost, Samuel,

because my daughter had told me about

three weeks earlier that she felt that he had moved with us.

And I didn't believe her.

And I just saw the picture of him,

and it was his way of telling us that he

had in fact moved with us.

That was the only explanation there was.

ROBERT STACK: The mysterious photograph became front page

news in Fish Springs.

Interestingly, nobody in town recognized the man

in the picture.

"Unsolved Mysteries" brought in photographic expert Vernon

Miller to analyze the snapshot.

I can't say precisely how this image was formed.

There's not enough evidence.

The image is three dimensional and has reflected qualities

where the skin is tight against the skull, it's brighter

and there's highlights there.

A manifestation of a ghost is usually

thought of as transparent or self-illuminant,

and this is definitely reflected light.

I detected lines, horizontal lines, across the image.

In conclusion, I would say that Samuel's ghost

was made of of a large television screen.

The picture of Samuel is not a fake.

There is a lot of things that can't be explained.

And I just think this is one of them.

I know I can't explain how somebody

came out in my picture that wasn't there when I snapped it.

ROBERT STACK: The Kelseys insist they have never photographed

their television screen.

Could the picture be a simple accident, even a hoax?

Or could it really be a ghost?

For 15 months the new tenants of the Fish Springs house

reported nothing out of the ordinary.

But then in October of 1989, the house

was rented to another family.

Steve and Mona Robinson knew nothing

about the house's ghostly past.

Soon, however, the Robinson family

was caught up in the middle of it's very own ghost story.

I felt that there was ghosts in the house,

but then I kept telling myself no.

And things started happening more and more,

the footsteps, the bangs.

I'd bring it up to Steve once in a while,

and he would say, no, there's got to be some reason why

all this is happening.

It's an old house.

We even thought about pipes.

We thought of all kinds of things.

ROBERT STACK: The Robinsons became extremely concerned

when their 11-year-old son, Garrett, began to have

frightening experiences.

I started hearing noises upstairs like it was walking,

bangings, and stuff.

After I heard the laughing, I went up to the top

of the stairs by myself.

I was scared though because I heard all these footsteps

[inaudible].

And there was a whole bunch of walking around [inaudible]

while I was upstairs.

Then I started hearing humming, three different like voices,

a higher one, [inaudible].

I then ran out the door.

When I got out, when I was inside my driveway,

there was all this banging of the screen door.

And then for some reason, I looked over to the window

and I saw this old guy and he had this grin on his face,

a smirky grin, not like a real mean one,

like he was trying to be mean.

ROBERT STACK: Six-year-old Miles was the next child to fall

under the spell of the house.

I remember one night I was getting lifted out of bed.

Got lifted up pretty high.

And I didn't know what was happening.

I just got lifted up.

Well I had told my husband then that I

didn't want to live there.

And he said, well, he goes, they're not going to hurt us.

He wasn't afraid.

ROBERT STACK: Finally, Mona Robinson

reached the end of her rope.

My husband and I were getting ready to go to bed

and I couldn't sleep.

And I could hear bangs in the hallway,

like coming down the stairs.

Then all of a sudden I heard, right behind my bed,

in a man's voice called me a bitch.

It was a bad voice, mad, angry.

I thought, you know, that she was going nuts.

But at the same time, I believed her.

She refused to go to bed.

She was always afraid that once we got in the bed,

the noises would start.

So she'd stay up all night long.

I felt like they were trying to drive me crazy.

I would never believe anybody that told me what has happened

to me, I wouldn't believe them.

I do believe now, because we had it happen to us.

You never believe anything like that until it happens to you.

ROBERT STACK: January 31, 1990, the Robinsons moved

out of the house, less than four months after they had moved in.

The Kelseys, who still owned the house once

again called in Daniel Martin.

Once again, he put himself into a trance.

Once again he claimed he met ghosts,

this time different ones.

That time I encountered three entities,

two men and one woman.

My first impressions when I approached these entities

were that they were of the Virginia City era

back in the old days.

These entities were not destructive,

they were just cantankerous, kind

of a rowdy little gang of troublemakers,

had been and still was.

ROBERT STACK: Martin says he asked

the spirits to leave the house.

But it was too late to do the Robinson any good.

They were already settled in a new home,

far away from hauntings and poltergeists.

To most of us, this saga sounds incredible.

But the Kelseys and the Robinsons

take it very seriously.

It is interesting to note that last year,

the Kelseys sold the house to a couple

with two children, who bought with full knowledge

of the stories of spirits and haunting.

The new owners have been in the home for eight months

and have reported no unusual phenomena.

Perhaps ghosts, like many other things

exist only in the eyes of the beholder, perhaps.

On our next 'Unsolved Mysteries," for a lonely widow,

Eric Kessler is like a dream come true, charming, elegant,

and cosmopolitan, he has the perfect qualities

for a potential husband and a master con man.

His elaborate schemes have allegedly

netted more than $150,000 from at least four vulnerable women.

Authorities are convinced that his list of victims

is much longer and still growing.

Join me for our next edition of "Unsolved Mysteries."

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