Original subtitles

My house did have a reputation of being haunted,

and a lot of the kids would not stay in it.

It's this amount of death that can leave

a physical charge and can cause

paranormal activity to happen.

It knows details about my life

that only my mother and my father would know.

At first glance, you wouldn't connect a series

of text messages to something paranormal,

but developments are going to make us look at this case in

an entirely more sinister light.

Off the charts. I never experienced anything

so frightening in my entire life.

That's when he found the crucial piece of evidence

in this case-- the smoking gun.

Something was trying to seek revenge on us.

Get away from my family!

I can't move, laying there frozen, staring at this thing.

How could this happen to us both?

Whatever it wanted from me, it was definitely evil.

Moreno Valley is a very interesting place.

The M Mountain has a giant M on it.

It stands for Moreno Valley.

A lot of people that are not from the area, they're like,

"Oh, that's the place with the M mountain."

It's like, "Yeah, that's Moreno Valley."

There is some good hiking areas

as well out here in Moreno Valley.

There's also Sycamore Canyon.

Beautiful. It looks over the city.

It's a quiet place to live.

But just like that, all that changed one night.

All the problems started for us that one night.

I was working late, so I was going to pick up pizza for

my wife and the kids.

The pizza place is about 10 minutes away from the house.

And while I was in line,

I heard a ding go off on my phone.

- Any mushrooms on it? - Two slices.

There's advertisement all over the window, so you can't really

see in or out.

So I kind of glanced outside and looked around,

and I don't see anybody on their phone

or anything that would show there's someone texting me.

And I thought, you know, that's really creepy.

Like, who would send something like that?

And I get another ding, and it's another message.

And it was accurate.

What it just texted me was accurate.

The scenery, there was the three females

and the one male.

The cashier looks at me, and he noticed something's off.

He could see it on my face, and he's like, "What's going on?"

I'm like, "I got a weird message,

but don't even worry about it."

And he's like, "All right." So he gives me my pizza,

and then I start heading home.

I'm already weirded out at this point.

I'm trying to just get home and just enjoy this pizza with

my family, because I don't know who this is or what they want.

So I'm just trying to get it out my mind.

So then I arrive at my house, and I get that ding,

and I see that it's another message coming in.

Now I'm freaked out. Now I'm looking around again.

It's got me scanning the area. I don't see anybody.

There's no signs of anything.

The name was Luke Wilkes.

I went and clicked on who this is to see if it's anything that

would give me an idea who's writing me.

There was no profile picture. There was no cover photo.

It said that the account was activated since 2013.

Had no friends. It had nothing.

It was a blank account.

In reviewing Malcolm's case,

in my 25 years of experience as a paranormal investigator,

electronic communications from a ghost are rare.

They're extremely rare.

Malcolm's getting very disturbing texts that show

someone is tracking his movements from

the restaurant to his home.

We're dealing with tangible communications that come from

a very specific source.

And he's right to be worried about this.

Statistics show that one in five cases of stalking will

escalate to physical violence.

You know, so I'm getting home with the pizza,

and I don't know if I want to tell my wife.

- Do I enjoy dinner first? - Is this vegetarian?

So, you know, I decided, you know what, I'm gonna go

ahead and show her the messages just to get it out of the way.

I'm trying to ease my mind and see what she thinks

about this. - Let me see.

And I looked at the message

and it says, "Give the phone back to Malcolm."

The pizza parlor was one thing.

Now it's breaching the security of my home.

Now it's in my home where my family lives.

I immediately thought that there's someone in the house.

We even went as far as my wife and my son, they went inside

the restroom and they stayed in there and they closed the door.

And I went and scanned the whole house,

but I couldn't find anyone.

Whoever this is, whatever this is, where the hell is it?

I'm pissed off.

So, I come over to the door and I look outside.

I don't see anything. I look over here.

I'm looking out in the field. I look out in the street.

I don't see anything.

So, I just yell out. I'm like,

"Leave me the [bleep] alone.

"Just leave me the [bleep] alone already

and get away from my family."

I thought maybe someone hacked in and can see what's going on

the inside of my home.

There are tools that cyber criminals can use to hack

Malcolm's cell phone, gain access to his camera,

track his locations.

This could be an attempt to intimidate him.

But who's doing it and to what end?

I was extremely paranoid continuing my everyday life.

I'm always looking in my rearview mirror.

I'm always looking out the windows and just nervous,

and scared, and worried of what's gonna come next.

I started thinking, like, you know,

"Did I wrong anyone?

Did I, you know, make anyone angry?"

And I couldn't come up with anything.

As an investigator, I'm asking the same questions.

I'm looking at flesh and blood individuals that Malcolm may

have wronged to the point they're unstable enough that

they are trying to get into his life from outside

and break it apart.

At first glance, you wouldn't connect a series

of text messages to something paranormal,

but developments are going to make us look at this case in

an entirely more sinister light.

What?

The messages are still coming in.

And I wrote it back, "This conversation's over.

"I don't want anything to do with you.

Please leave me alone, leave my family alone."

It said that I had escaped death twice.

And it was terrifying because that was true.

When I was born, I was premature.

I had trouble breathing. I almost didn't make it.

Very few people know about that.

And the second time I almost died was from a drunk driver.

It knows details about my life that, I mean, it's almost like

only my mother, my father would know.

This could be something not of this world.

It said that I'm gonna get murdered or killed by gunfire.

And that there scared me more than anything.

It chilled me to my bones.

We had a family trip planned for Texas.

My wife went with her family, I stayed.

I felt like I was the main target.

It hasn't really said much about my family,

just about me personally.

And it's basically telling me that I escaped death twice,

I won't a third time. So I didn't take the risk.

That's when things got really crazy.

I woke up and there was dishes.

They were all like pulled to the edge of the counter,

like almost like, you know, toying, like someone

could bump it and it'll fall but they were everywhere.

You know, they're all pulled to the edge of the cabinets,

they're pulled to the edge of the countertops.

Now I'm feeling odd, like, OK, this isn't a person.

Obviously, there's no one in my house.

This has to be some sort of entity.

They started mocking the Bible, mocking scriptures.

So it's kind of like, you know, almost like

a grim reaper.

Because if he's death himself, that's what a grim reaper is.

He's death.

I was sitting alone and I started to think like,

"You know, I'm getting hungry, I'm gonna go heat up a piece of pizza."

Now it also knows what I'm thinking.

I'm extremely terrified.

This is the moment when it becomes clear to me that we are

not dealing with a flesh-and-blood stalker.

Malcolm's harasser comes from that other world.

I started trying to connect the dots and thought maybe it

could have started back when I was 12 years old.

There was this one night in my bedroom,

and I had woke up because I heard the door creak.

And when I was looking at it,

I watched the door creak open a little bit.

And I'm watching, waiting for someone to come in, and I watch

it creak open just a little bit more.

And now I'm terrified, but no one ever enters the room.

Two weeks goes by, and I hear something at the door.

And I watch the door handle just go down one

and goes up again,

and then it kind of rattles.

And now I'm freaked out, so I throw the covers over my head,

and I'm kind of just peeking out, watching, waiting for

someone to either come in or if the door

was going to keep going,

but the door just did it by its own.

There was no one there.

And I connected that because that's all I have.

I have nothing else. I'm going crazy.

I'm like, OK, maybe that was something paranormal

because now I'm older and I understand what paranormal is.

It could be that. It could be the same thing.

I don't know.

There have been cases in which an entity attaches itself to

a person and then reappears at different points throughout

that person's life.

In Malcolm's case, he's dealing with an entity that seems bent

on destabilizing him and perhaps rendering

him vulnerable. For what, we don't yet know.

I started waking up with scratches.

It was almost like an animal had attacked me.

There was no pain associated with these scratches.

That is until I started waking up with scratches on my face.

And those scratches burned.

And it was on my forehead,

it was on both sides of my cheeks,

and they were just so fine.

Not human fingernails, I mean, just so fine.

What began as a psychological campaign

has now progressed to physical abuse.

It has escalated an entire order of magnitude.

It said that I'm gonna roll a dice and each number had

a consequence of what would happen.

And then there was one on there that it-- it gets me emotional,

because of how real it was.

But it said on number six that it was going to visit my mom

and it was gonna help her take her life.

And I just stared at my phone.

Hello?

Malcolm, you have to come over quick!

Something's wrong with Mom.

My little sister said, "Can you hurry over here?

Something's wrong with Mom."

When I arrive at my Mom's house,

she's got the door locked. She's barricaded in the room.

Mom?

Leave me alone. I'm talking to God.

Mom?

Get the hell out.

And my mom's never talked to me like that my whole life.

I'm hopeful that we will be able to meet one day soon.

You just have to tell me what I need to do.

Yes, I need to see you.

She's like, "My whole life I've wanted to talk to God,

"and now I'm talking to him

and you're gonna interrupt that conversation."

Go away.

I was like, "And what is God telling you to do?"

She's like, "He told me where I could go

to go kill myself."

She's like, "So that I can meet him."

And I told her, I said, "Mom, God would never tell

"you to go take your life.

That's not God."

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

And eventually, my mom snaps out of it.

Now, not only are we seeing physical abuse directly aimed

at Malcolm, but this entity is tormenting those that

he cares about.

It's attacking him indirectly as well,

by means of his family.

I'm driving home, and I'm just a wreck.

I started thinking,

what could have been something earlier in my life,

since it knows about me, that could have happened,

that it could possibly be this same entity?

So I was actually right here when it got hit

on this crossroad, this intersection.

I was on a bicycle, and I was coming across the street.

There was a drunk driver that blew the light here.

I hit the hood, and I went in the air, and I grabbed,

you know, my shoulders.

And I remember saying out loud, "Don't die, don't die,

don't die, don't die." Like, I just kept repeating it.

And then just, boom, it went black.

And then I wake up down the street.

This is where, when I got back to my consciousness,

this is where I actually was.

As I'm laying there, there's a silhouette,

like a lady that walks up.

Cars are zooming by.

As soon as she approaches me, it goes silent,

and all I hear is her.

Everything is going to be OK.

The cops come and they're like,

"Are you OK? Is everything fine?"

I said, "Can you tell that lady to come

back here real quick?" He goes, "What lady?"

He said, "I've been parked right there."

He said, "There's no lady."

I was like, "There was a lady. She was just talking to me."

OK, and I was like, "I'm alive, right?"

He's like, "Yeah, you're alive."

And he laughs-- he goes, "We're having this conversation.

You're here. You're OK, man."

But he said there was no lady there,

and I vividly remember her. - Don't worry.

If there are dark, negative spirits,

as many believe, it stands to reason

they must have a counterpart.

If the bad actors are wandering around targeting people like

Malcolm, is there an equivalent of a spiritual police officer,

someone that will, or something, that will respond and protect?

Is this the female spirit that came and aided Malcolm

after his hit-and-run?

I started to realize doing extensive research that when

you have a near-death experience, that veil is

thinned out and you're so close to death and that it's like,

almost like, you were one foot in and one foot out.

You were kind of alive, kind of dead.

And now that veil, I feel,

is forever thinned out spiritually.

That day, yes, I was talking to a guardian angel and something

of good nature.

But I feel that that also allowed possibly something else

to enter my life.

That could have been the entity

that is trying to come after me.

Because he brings up that time I supposedly skipped death.

So it could have entered through that thinned-out veil

the same way the guardian angel did.

I have a friend that mentioned to me, he's like,

"Malcolm, you're the only one that can solve this.

"If you want it bad enough, you aren't fearful of it

and you stand up to it, you can solve this."

In my mind, I was like, "You know, he's right."

What if I try my hardest to eliminate that fear,

regardless of everything it's done,

be stronger than it and not fear it

and show it no type of fear emotion?

Nice job, bud.

After that conversation, it's like he gave me armor.

I was ready to battle whatever this was.

And I said, "I'm not scared of you.

"My kids aren't scared of you. My wife isn't scared of you.

"My mom isn't scared of you.

Nobody has any fear of you anymore."

And it just did this evil laugh

all the way from the living room,

and I laughed back at it.

It's like, "I don't fear you."

At the end of the day, it was the fear that we fed it,

that it was just consuming it.

Once we eliminated that,

that's when it started diminishing

to the point where it wasn't even happening anymore.

There he is!

Sometimes the best way to defuse a dangerous situation

is not to escalate it.

Malcolm's approach becomes, I'm not being afraid anymore.

I will not be harassed.

And as he takes this approach, the activity begins to

dissipate until finally it stops altogether.

It's been six years now

and we haven't received any texts,

and it's going great. Life is great.

This experience actually changed my view on

the paranormal world, and the reason for that is

I went into all this as a skeptic,

and it opened up my mind vastly to what's out there.

I was born and raised

in the small town of Napier, Ontario.

When I was growing up,

the population would have been around 25.

I was constantly outside, hunting, fishing,

canoeing, kayaking.

It was all pretty idyllic.

Then, one day...

everything changed.

It was the beginning of a living nightmare.

I remember the day, because that's when my parents

came back from a trip.

Wait till you see what I got you.

What do you think? Pretty sweet, eh?

My parents went on vacation to Virginia.

They're big into history.

My dad's into Civil War reenacting,

and stuff like that.

There's so much history in Virginia.

Wow! Cool, Mom.

And look at this. She's so old.

They were excited, had a great time, telling me what they did,

all the historical sites that they'd seen.

My house reflects history, and the love for old things.

Those things mean a lot to me because then that's a way of

making that person still stay alive somehow.

My friends would come from school,

and some of them were scared to even stay here at night.

There's a lot of things in the house

that are over 200 years old.

Erin Goodpipe, take one. Marker.

My first impression hearing about this story is that

I think when people are historians, you're bringing in

multiple objects and objects have histories

and they have energetic histories.

They have spiritual histories and that makes objects

spiritually charged, or at least it has

the potential to.

I'm wondering about the objects in that space and potentially

the havoc that they could be causing for the people that are

in relationship with those objects.

My house did have a reputation of being haunted.

In this case, it all began in the basement in Lee's bedroom.

At the time, I'm like,

"I'm gonna put my room in the basement."

Parents said, "OK, if you're moving

everything, you can do it."

So when I was a teenager, this is where my bedroom was.

My bed was right here.

My stereo was beside it.

And this is the spot right here where I started having

horrible, vivid dreams.

This shadow figure was following me.

It's always like it's three steps behind you,

ready to grab you.

And then you'd wake up from it.

It was scary. It felt real.

I kept having the same dream.

It seemed like it picked up from the same spot.

The whole dream was just running away constantly...

over and over again.

Finally, I explained it to my parents...

and they didn't know what to make of it either, really.

There's nothing particularly abnormal about having

scary dreams, and you can't actually say that

that's technically paranormal in nature.

We have dreams all the time, and dreams are a way for us

to process things, and sometimes the content of

those dreams can be very fearful.

As an investigator, I start to pay attention when dreams begin

to manifest into reality, and you begin to see what's

happening in your dreams happening in real life.

This one night, I go to bed.

It's pitch-black.

I can't see anything down there.

I hear footsteps coming down the stairs.

It sounded like a person walking down the stairs.

I heard all the CDs fall to the floor.

There's absolutely no one in the room with me.

Dad?

Dad?

I just was awake, listening.

So this...

really put a deep fear in me. I mean, it was terrifying.

It kept me up all night.

If an intruder came into the house, then it would have

been the dog barking because our dogs bark.

Like, I don't know what happened,

but it wasn't me down there.

In the morning, I come upstairs and I see my dad in

the kitchen and I'm like,

"What were you doing in my room last night?"

And my dad's like, "What are you talking about?"

I thought he was playing a joke on me or something like that.

And he's like, "I'm telling you, it wasn't me.

I didn't-- I was not down there last night."

Your dad was asleep in bed last night.

But I couldn't help but think something is off.

Our house felt...

different somehow.

Well, someone's going through my CDs.

Knocked them on the floor, all of them.

I started wondering to myself, is it possible that this

could be ghosts and paranormal stuff?

When I begin to think about the paranormal aspect

of this house, of this area,

I think about the town's history,

and there is a layered history here,

a really sad layered history.

Back in the 1880s, there was an epidemic that swept through

the town and killed 90% of its children.

It's this amount of death that can leave a physical charge

and can cause paranormal activity to happen.

There's a lot of children buried in the cemetery.

One family that has two children, or three children

actually, that had died from diphtheria in the course of

a few months.

I think the way that they died might have left them in limbo,

so they need direction in finding where they're going to

cross to the other side.

I tend to believe that spirits act

just as we do as human beings.

So if there are children that are buried nearby, we have to

think that they lived in the town and potentially

they had friends or relatives who lived in the house,

so they could be paying a visit.

You start to ask yourself, after this happens a few times,

is it possible that this could be one of the ghosts

from one of the children that died in this town?

But this didn't seem like a child-- it was different.

I'm led to believe that there is something else

that's going on here.

My grandfather had passed away,

so we moved a bunch of boxes.

We're bringing 'em back here.

His grandfather died suddenly.

He died on Halloween night, actually.

I always want to ask somebody who is experiencing a haunting

if there has been a traumatic event that's happened

or if there's been death in the family,

because from my belief,

you can have spirits, relatives, come and pay a visit to you.

So I'm looking through my grandfather's wallet.

It was just sitting there,

and I wanted to see what was in it.

So, I just opened it up and was looking for any pictures

or just to see what he had in his wallet.

And I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

I didn't know what it was.

That's when I saw this thing.

I was frozen.

I'm just standing there like, "What is this thing?"

I'm freaked out. I don't even know what to do.

I run screaming down the hall.

All of a sudden, I heard this horrific scream.

I was so freaked out.

Nothing like that has ever happened before.

He came running, and he was white.

I tried to describe it to her. She was confused.

And I'm like, "What are you talking about, Lee?

There's nothing here."

And she thought it was insane.

After somebody dies, from my belief, spirits can pay visits.

They especially want closure sometimes before they make

their spirit journey because they're gonna go on.

But I would say that Lee would know somewhere deep down

that that was his grandfather.

They're still the person that they are intrinsically.

Based off of what Lee is experiencing and the fear

around these occurrences happening in the home,

it doesn't feel that this spirit is personal to him.

It doesn't feel like this is his grandfather.

Off the charts.

I never experienced anything

so frightening in my entire life.

I went from maybe being on the fence to a true believer

because I saw something I definitely couldn't explain.

The basement kind of freaked me out a bit, so I moved my room

back upstairs to my old bedroom.

So, I'm in bed one night...

and floating above me was this black mass.

I can't move. I can't speak.

I can't do anything, laying there frozen,

staring at this thing.

And whatever it wanted from me, it was definitely evil.

Somehow, I was able to yell. And as soon as I made a noise...

it disappeared.

I was completely terrified, scared out of my wits.

It was the same dark, faceless figure that was

chasing me in my dreams.

So the next morning, I come out to the table to have breakfast.

My mom's looking at me, and she's like,

"What's the matter with you?"

She could tell something was wrong.

So I was a bit apprehensive,

but I told her what was going on,

about what happened in the room the night before.

In the morning, Lee came to me and said he had this dream.

And I'm like, "Oh my god,

that's the same thing that happened to me."

It was horrible that we had the same dream.

It floated over me

and wanted me to go with it.

"No," I was screaming, "I'm not going with you,

I'm not going with you." But I couldn't move.

It was like it held me there.

Finally, I did scream loud enough.

How could this happen to us both?

What on earth is going on in this house?

There's too many things to write it off as a coincidence,

and each new thing seems to progressively get worse from

the last one.

I think if I would have went with it, I felt like

maybe I was gonna die. I'm not sure.

It scared me.

It's frightening at this point.

When two people, Nancy and Lee, both wake up

from a nightmare and are having the experience of a shadowy,

dark entity that is hovering above them.

And they wake up at the same time,

and they share that together.

To me, this legitimizes

a paranormal activity that's happening here.

This spirit is provoking the Bernier family.

And when a spirit is provoking like that, it leads me to

believe that there is an important message that

they're trying to get across, or there's something that

the spirit wants this family to do.

What caused all this?

The only thing I could pinpoint was all of this stuff started

happening in the house after my parents' vacation to Virginia.

I started going back through the photo album that they had.

I was just trying to find some kind of clue or something

because it felt like someone or something was trying to seek

revenge on us.

That's when he found the crucial piece of evidence

in this case-- the smoking gun.

On their trip, Lee's parents visited a cemetery

in Richmond, Virginia,

where 18,000 Confederate soldiers were buried.

It's called Hollywood Cemetery.

And on all these mausoleums, they have ivy

growing everywhere. It's gorgeous.

I'm a florist.

I had never seen anything like that.

So I just plucked a little piece of ivy and brought it

back with me.

Nancy didn't realize when she picked that ivy,

she was picking it from the gravesite

of General George Pickett,

who had actually done some pretty terrible

and gruesome things.

General Pickett was a Civil War general,

led a famous charge.

He lost 7,500 men. It was a bloodbath.

After that battle, he executed 22 soldiers that

refused to pick up arms and fight with him,

one of them being a kid that was only 15 years old.

Pickett was a guy that had a lot of blood on his hands.

The ivy came from his grave.

To bring that ivy into this home, maybe some of that anger

and aggression followed with it.

One meaning behind ivy is that when you place it next to

somebody's grave site, you're hoping that the ivy will

contribute to this person living forever

in the afterlife. It's a symbol of immortality.

That was my aha moment.

All the stuff that's been going on, that's because you guys

took this ivy.

I had no idea what ivy meant on a grave.

The ivy was the problem in the house.

And so there is the potential that this spirit,

if it is George Pickett, that he is trying to send

a message here of his authority, that he was wrong,

that he felt disrespected.

I'm like, "This has to go."

I didn't just bring back ivy.

I brought back a dark entity,

and I do not want that in my home anymore.

And so, when Nancy decided to burn the ivy, I think that

would have symbolized to General George Pickett

that, "I didn't mean to do that, and I'm dissipating this now."

I haven't had that terrible, reoccurring dream ever since.

We didn't have anything after that.

I think the lesson to be learned here is,

don't remove anything from a cemetery.

The last thing you want is something dark gunning for you.