Original subtitles

I saw something that I would never be able to shake.

There was something in the house with me.

I was trapped.

Even though you can see the black figure,

but you can't actually physically touch it...

...it was more frightening than me dying.

Could this be a former staff member who spent his entire

life abusing children

and is continuing to do this in the afterlife?

I don't know if I died.

Stay with me, Alex.

But I could see myself on the table.

You are kind of Earth-side, but you're also

in the spiritual realm, so it really makes you susceptible

and vulnerable to the spirit realm that is around you.

I thought he was gonna end my life.

I thought he was gonna kill me.

A huge amount of rage is being directed at Alex Matsuo.

And we need to figure out why, if this is to be stopped.

It watches from afar.

So it could attack again.

Ahh!

I grew up in New York

in a county called Rockland County.

It's 30 miles outside of Manhattan in New York City.

We were New Yorkers, but we had grass and we had a front yard.

And I lived a middle-class, suburbia lifestyle.

That was a typical little suburban kid riding around

on my BMX bike, skateboarding, hanging out

with my friends, having a good time.

Everything's normal. You know, I'm enjoying myself.

These are the good times in my life.

But I had no idea it would get worse.

Tawney Lewis, take one.

Mark.

The case of Dedrick Hilton is one of the most intriguing

cases that I have ever researched.

It has spanned many decades.

And it started when he was just seven years old.

Growing up, it was my mom, my dad, and my sister,

and I have an older sister.

In my bedroom, I shared a bedroom as a child growing up

with my sister, and we had a black-and-white TV,

because that was our first TV, and a dresser, and I remember

a window where I could look outside and see the apple tree.

It was just a typical Saturday.

At the foot of the bed is where I saw something

that I would never be able to shake.

Something woke me up.

I woke up to see like some type of strange smoke occurring,

like right here.

It was strangely, like, moving around.

I was a curious seven-year-old.

I also didn't know what ghosts were

or what it meant to be haunted.

I leaned closer into the smoke, and I put my finger through it.

I realized that this cloud of smoke was beginning

to form a shape.

And when I touched it, it fully took form.

And that's when I realized, this is not smoke.

I could see the eyes, I could see the shoulder, I could see

the arms, but I could not see his mouth or his nose

or anything else.

I decided to touch it again.

It just faded away. It disappeared.

As a paranormal researcher, whenever there is a case that

involves children, you know, I really listen to them because

after you talk to them, you're like, "You know what,

"imaginary friend, or actually, no, this is

getting kind of creepy."

Sometimes darker spirits will

come in as a dark mass or a dark, heavy mist or fog.

So that is what Dedrick encountered, which immediately

let me know that this was something darker.

Being a seven-year-old child and seeing something like this,

I was confused about how to approach my mom and dad

about it, or even my older sister.

I decided to just keep it to myself because I didn't wanna

look like I was telling them a fib or anything.

Nice.

All right, I'm going to go make dinner, OK?

My mother was on the phone, like, always, every Saturday,

and I was playing with my toys...

down here.

And this Saturday, I felt that same feeling again that I felt

a year ago, like something was coming.

These hands, like, gripped me tight around my ankle.

Mom!

It pulled me out of eyesight from my mother.

And I kicked and kicked, and I broke free.

And that's when I tore out of my mother's room.

So I ran to my mom for help.

My mother dropped the phone,

and that's when she came to my aid.

Later that night, she told my father about it.

He believed my story. He didn't brush it off.

I guess I was more alarmed because of his reaction,

his reaction of...

concern and belief.

I could see it written all over his face.

My dad definitely knew something about this entity.

In the minds of children, you know, they feared closets

or under the bed because that's where the monsters live.

And so for someone like Dedrick to have that trauma just

instilled in his brain of this spirit

dragging him under the bed,

it's all about the control aspect of the spirit,

just trying to show that he can absolutely manipulate Dedrick.

It was an attack.

What it wanted at seven, I didn't know yet.

I just knew it came back aggressive and more violent.

Because I was only seven at the time, I had no idea

that we were living in one of the most haunted places

on Earth, the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York.

In Rockland County, there was a mental institution called

Letchworth Village that was actually opened in 1911.

And there was so much abuse, terrible conditions,

people dying.

And then knowing that there was so many children

that had perished there.

And so I wonder, with all the years, the history of that

location, could this be a former staff member who spent

his entire life abusing children and is continuing

to do this in the afterlife?

I took the incident and placed it deep down inside,

and I didn't think about it anymore.

I went on with my day-to-day life, and everything seemed

like it was going back to normal.

So, about a year passed by,

and that's when this thing came back again.

This entity...

has a certain energy to it.

It feels like someone's staring at you in the crowd.

Hello there.

What do we have here?

Fee...

Fi...

Fo...

I've been looking forward to [indistinct].

It was far more angrier and violent.

I've been looking.

It was pushing on me aggressively, trying to pin me

down, and I was paralyzed. I couldn't move.

I could feel it, like it was trying to push me

through my mattress.

This entity was so dark, like, its body shape.

This time, I can't see through it.

You're just looking deep into dark black mass.

Even though you can see the black figure,

but you can't actually physically touch it,

was more frightening than me dying.

I said, "Get the F up off me."

I could feel it lightening up, and just like that,

it was gone.

When a person is fighting back a spirit,

it depends on what their mindset is.

So if you have control over the situation, if you have

control over what's happening, the spirit will feel that

and they will back off.

Anger and fear are potential energy sources

for paranormal activity.

Between the ages 7 and 18, I encountered this entity

on several different occasions.

And each time it came back stronger, more aggressive.

I felt like it was tracking me at times.

There's way too many personal attacks towards Dedrick

to think that it has anything to do

with the mental institution.

I can't imagine a spirit from Letchworth Village wanting

to focus that much on Dedrick, so it has to be something else.

I felt like this entity was trying to weaken me, like it

didn't want me going forward somewhere, and it wanted me

to be weakened where I become submissive to it.

That's when I remember something I heard in my house

over and over again.

Growing up, I heard from my uncles and aunts a whole lot

about our culture, which is called Gullah Geechee culture.

Gullah Geechee is a group of people.

It's the oldest group of Blacks in America.

We have our own language, our own folklore,

our own way of praying,

and our own way of seeing the spiritual realm.

Gullah Geechee is actually in my lineage,

on my mother's side.

The Gullah Geechee people are descendants from West Africa,

and they were brought over

to be enslaved, and they are very spiritual people.

Well, in the Gullah culture, they talk about ghosts often,

even in the churches.

And we have this...

entity we call "the hag."

It...

comes into people's homes,

and they say it could slide underneath doors.

It could get in through cracks, window cracks.

Entity gets on top of you.

It has you pinned down, and the elders call it "riding."

Similar to a vampire, but instead of the hag wanting

your blood, they actually want your breath,

because it builds the energy.

It allows them to manifest themselves

to become bigger and powerful.

So now I'm wondering,

you know, is Dedrick onto something?

Is this a manifestation of the hag?

I really felt like it was draining me.

My dad starts explaining to me more and more about the hag.

I asked my father, have you even seen it before?

And he said he's seen it one time in our home.

And that's why I thought, "All right, well, maybe when

I go off to college, this thing will leave me alone."

And when I turned 19, that's what I did.

As soon as I left my home, that's when all the stuff

with the hag had stopped.

I went upstate in the Catskill Mountains.

That's roughly about two and a half hours away from my home.

I was a typical college student.

I'm enjoying my life now.

You know, I'm meeting new people.

Times is great.

Things are very good for me in college at this time.

But it came back again, far more aggressive,

far more dark,

far more vengeful than it ever did before.

I'm laying in my bed and there's a window

at the foot of my bed with a forest.

This time, I saw it coming from the woods.

I could feel this energy, like a force coming.

And I'm looking at the forest,

and I'm looking at it, and I'm like, "What is that?"

It never left me.

It was waiting for the perfect opportunity to attack

and try to break me down.

I saw the dark spirit in the woods.

It came through the grass, through the walls,

into my dorm room.

I got you.

I hit the floor. It's on me.

It wanted me bad this time around.

Matter of fact, it didn't come back stronger.

It came back angry.

I'm in a whole different place.

And it's here.

It followed me.

It's more aggressive.

Its nails are longer as it's digging to me.

It's wrestling with me. It's pulling me.

I say, "Get out my effing room, now!

Now!"

I jump up.

I take off running through our townhouse.

I tripped over the first two steps to get me up

the staircase to where my roommates was at.

They could see that I'm upset.

They're walking through my room, they're checking,

they're checking the bed, they're checking the window.

They didn't see anything.

The whole thing scared me so bad,

the next day I couldn't even function.

For the next couple of nights, all I could think of...

"Please don't come bother me again."

Because there's no way I'll survive round two.

Not the way it threw me on the floor.

No way.

Dedrick's attempt to fight back, he's actually

feeding this spirit.

This spirit loves the fear.

That spirit loves it when he has control over Dedrick,

and he feels like he's gonna take control of him

from now through the rest of his life.

When it comes to the hag theory, I do not think

that this is what's after Dedrick.

The hag is a part of the Geechee culture,

which I know is a part of his life.

However, this is seen as more of a female type of spirit,

whereas what Dedrick is seeing, the way it's being described,

is a male.

What I was dealing with was something spiritual.

That was evident.

And it's following me from city to city, town to town,

home to home. And I'm tired of it.

Why is this thing following me?

What does it want from me?

And why is it coming back stronger and stronger?

There are spirits out there that will track people

their entire lives.

And I'm actually shocked with this particular case because

I don't think I've seen it yet

with an African American person.

It's very rare.

So to me, there's something different.

There's something deeper here, to where I'm like, "I really

"want to uncover who the spirit is and why does it feel

so attached to Dedrick."

I was so desperate, I began to dig deep into my family past.

That's when I found out, back in the 1800s,

that my great grandfather, Sam Hendrick, was running

a successful turpentine business.

He was from the Caribbean Isle of Haiti, so he came over here

as a free Black, because Haiti was the first

free Black country.

So people were not used to seeing someone of his stature

during this era

maneuvering around freely,

confident, because he wasn't a slave.

He bought 200 acres of land just about,

which we still own to this day.

And everyone didn't agree with

him having this property and this land.

Dr. Hagen resent the fact

that this Black family owned all this land

and they were working for themselves.

And his reputation was not the greatest.

He was not just mean towards Black people,

but even other races in the community,

white people that had a problem with him, too.

Dr. Hagen eventually passed.

The legend goes that when they buried him,

they buried him in the front yard of his home,

and some town people came up and dug up his body

and scattered his bones all across the front yard.

It was hard for him to track down who threw these bones

across the yard because many of the town people hated him.

Not just the Black American population, but many

of the white folks in town hated him, too.

Things started to get a little weird back there

on this property.

People claimed they started seeing images of him

walking around.

They could hear his voice deep in the woods at night.

I started putting it together, and I believe these attacks was

occurring due to Dr. Hagen

being resentful and angry at my family

and my family lineage.

And now I'm at college and I was the next in line.

I am absolutely sure that this entity is Dr. Hagen.

In life, Dr. Hagen was a racist man.

You know, he did not want to see

African Americans prospering.

This was a family that actually had their own house,

their own property.

It basically was a personal attack.

This spirit was trying get revenge on not just Dedrick,

but his whole family.

After the experience I had in college,

I start digging deeper

into other forms of spirituality.

And as I got stronger in my spiritual walking path,

this entity seems to keep his distance.

I feel it present today.

It never leaves.

It watches from afar

for the opportunity to attack again.

But I learned how to handle him,

or whatever it is that he's sending.

I learned how to counter it.

He has 100% control, which would explain

why the spirit has completely backed off.

With Dedrick's story, I feel like it encapsulates

so much about history,

the U.S. history, and racism,

slavery, the Gullah Geechee.

There are not a lot of paranormal researchers

that look like me.

So to be able to actually talk about this with someone

like Dedrick, you know, it's fascinating.

I stand tall and I curse at it in the dark.

And so far, that's worked just fine.

I grew up in San Diego.

It was the land of perfect weather and great beaches.

I was living the dream life. I was in college.

I lived next to the beach. I was doing a show.

I was a working actor.

That all came to an end on New Year's Eve, 2005.

On the rare occasion, it was raining in San Diego

on New Year's Eve,

and I was on my way to a party.

In the rain, the road became extremely slick.

I was on the freeway ramp when I lost control of my car.

I hit the guardrail, and my car was damaged.

I got out of the car.

I see this car coming towards me.

The car hits me.

I roll off the hood, and I fell 25 feet off the freeway ramp.

Code blue, room 305.

I do remember them unloading me out of the ambulance

and rolling me into the trauma center.

I started to fade in and out.

At that point, something changed.

The paranormal world, there's a dark side to it,

and it can be terrifying.

I felt excruciating pain.

Excruciating pain.

I had extensive damage in my internal organs.

I had vertically sheared my pelvis.

I shattered my tailbone,

and I broke three vertebrae in my back.

Erin Goodpipe. Take one.

Mark.

The case of Alex Matsuo is really one that was triggered

by extreme trauma.

The paranormal literature tells us that

there is a correlation between sustaining serious head trauma

and a psychic awakening, if you will,

in that mysterious realm between life and death.

Alex Matsuo found herself in the crosshairs of something

from the other side.

I remember them rolling me into the room where they were

going to start working on me.

Alex, stay with me, Alex.

There is somebody on the bed next to me covered in blood,

and I hear him screaming.

And I'm like, "I'm in the same room as this man."

Probably means something bad is going to happen to me, too.

In my mind, I was thinking, "This is it.

I think I'm going to die."

All of a sudden, things just stopped.

And I don't know, like, it was an out-of-body experience

from the trauma, or it was a hallucination, or my body was

so tired of the pain it checked out.

Everything just went quiet.

I don't know if I died,

but I could see myself on the table.

I truly believe that this was passing on.

This was me experiencing death.

Alex, stay with me, Alex.

And it was almost like this checklist was going off

in my head.

I was looking for that feeling of love that they say

that happens to you right before you pass

or you start seeing a light.

Like, I'm literally looking around,

wondering, "OK, where's the light?

Where's that feeling of being content to pass on?"

Stay with me.

I didn't experience any of that.

I felt confusion and fear.

Near-death experiences can be very varied, but one element

of them that seems to be really similar across the board

is that people experience an out-of-body experience.

You are in a liminal space spiritually.

You are kind of Earth-side, but you're also

in a spiritual realm.

So it really makes you susceptible and vulnerable

to the spirit realm that is around you.

I wondered if I was finally dead.

I saw this black shadow pass by.

As the resuscitation team's going about their business,

fighting to save Alex's life, she's watching all this happen,

and she's also sensing a presence

that is in the room with them.

Not somebody that works at the hospital.

Something that feels dark and ill-intentioned.

This might offer a clue as to what's about to happen to Alex.

But then it felt like my body calling back to me

or something was saying, "Hey, it's not your time yet.

You need to go back."

Alex.

So after they had done the CAT scan, the MRI,

they took me up to my room.

Can you hear me, Alex?

Two California highway patrolmen came in

to question me about the accident.

Can you just tell us what happened at the overpass?

I started seeing a shadow walking

behind the police officers.

It was dark in my hospital room that night

so I was thinking maybe it could have

been just another person in there.

It was evident, though, that the officers in the room

did not acknowledge this person.

I thought maybe it was just, "OK, you're starting

"to get morphine. It's dark.

"You're tired. You're in pain.

Maybe this is all explainable."

But that wasn't quite the case.

Alex, are you sure?

Police officers are generally very alert

to their surroundings, and it appears that in this case,

the detectives are not aware of the figure walking

back-and-forth behind them.

Is this a clue that we're dealing

with something paranormal?

Hospitals have a great potential to be a hotbed

for spiritual activity, and this is because

there's a lot of life and death that occurs there.

On New Year's Eve in San Diego,

more than ten people may die

in any given hospital on that one night alone.

Could one of these lost souls be the shadow Alex is seeing?

When I was at the hospital, my mom came to visit me.

And one of the things that she wanted to do was she wanted

to brush my hair.

The hairbrush was on my tray, and as she was putting her hand

down to grab it, the hairbrush did

this little hop.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

She went down to grab the hairbrush again,

and the brush flew off the tray.

There was also a water glass on the tray, too,

and a moment later,

that water glass also went down

and flew off the tray.

And there was water everywhere.

There was no one else around.

There was no explanation as to how this could have happened.

I had started to think that maybe there was something

more paranormal happening, and that was terrifying.

Finally, it was time to go home.

I wasn't able to completely take care of myself, so my mom

became my primary caregiver while I was going

through the rest of my recovery.

I was also looking forward to leaving behind all of the weird

things that had been happening at the hospital.

I felt like I was walking into a new sense of freedom.

At first, everything was peaceful,

but that didn't last too long.

My mom, she had to go back to work because she had missed

so much taking care of me or visiting me in the hospital.

So I was home alone.

I wasn't able to drive. I still wasn't walking.

My mom and I would start having little arguments.

It felt like I was back in high school bickering

with my mother.

It really felt like something was egging me on

or trying to get in my head.

It felt like something was purposely picking on me.

When I got home, I started having

these terrible nightmares.

I didn't want to go to sleep.

I would see this shadow, this man, and he would always

get in my face. He would yell at me.

As the nightmares continued,

I would start seeing more details.

He would get closer.

I was able to see his face, and it was bloody.

I could see parts of his skull and his brain exposed,

and the blood vessels pulsating.

It was horrifying to see. Like, I was terrified.

I didn't know what to think.

Alex.

Alex is starting to experience stuff

in the subconscious level

where she's having dreams and very terrible feelings.

To me, it speaks to the fact that a spirit might have

a personal vendetta against her.

And these nightmares were recurring, so it seemed like

something was happening. And it was terrifying.

It was terrifying.

And I didn't know, like, when I went to sleep that night,

"Am I gonna have another nightmare?"

I was home alone.

I started hearing footsteps, like somebody was going

up and down the stairs.

I feel like I can't breathe.

I feel like I'm in trouble.

There was something in the house with me.

I was trapped.

I was still in a wheelchair at that point, so it's not like

I could get up and run.

I started being in this constant state of panic,

looking over my shoulder.

"Where are you?

Where are you?"

I was with my mother at home.

We were watching TV one evening, just hanging out.

All of a sudden, the house was shaking.

It felt like it could have been an earthquake.

Even though I walk...

My mom actually grabbed her Bible and started

reading Bible verses. - ...shadow of death.

- Mom! - I will fear no evil.

Mom, stop!

I actually was begging my mom, like, "Stop reading out

of the Bible. You're making it worse."

You know, it takes a lot of energy for a spirit to be able

to physically move things, much less shake a house up.

So this says to me that this spirit is a very powerful one

and must have a very specific motive that it's trying

to get across.

I did see it as a continuation of, like, everything that had

happened in the hospital, to now, it was almost like

everything was just building and building and almost like

a balloon filling up with air, and this was the pop.

Later that night,

I finally went to bed.

Why you and not me?

Why you and not me?

He was able to reach me and touch me

and push me down into the bed.

I thought he was going to end my life.

I thought he was gonna kill me.

He was saying, "Why you, not me?

Why you, not me?"

He would also be getting in my face

and he would start lunging at me,

almost like he was trying to choke me.

And the nightmares would escalate so bad that he would

literally have his hands around my neck and he would be

pushing me down into the bed.

Why you and not me?

Ah!

That's when I realized I had seen him before.

I knew who he was.

That was when I realized this was the guy I saw

in the trauma room.

His eyes.

I could see his eyes.

And his eyes just had so much rage and so much anger.

And I could just tell he was robbed of something

and it was my fault.

Like, his death was my fault.

That's what I kept feeling.

And I'm thinking, "Oh, my God, stop it.

Please, please stop it."

My mother had reached out to a friend who was involved

in paranormal stuff.

The friend offered to have someone from her church to come

and check out the situation

and see if there was anything that they could do to help.

When we opened the door, we saw this Greek woman,

she said something in Greek and said, "We're going to do

a little ceremonial ritual to see if this is something

that is attached to you."

She got some olive oil.

She made the sign of the cross on my forehead.

She said, "There was a spirit attached to me who was jealous

of me and angry with me and wanted what I had."

That's when I realized this man was angry at me because

I survived that night

and he did not.

I lived... he died.

And so she ended up

going around the house and blessing it.

Blessing it, saying prayers all over the house.

Amen, amen, amen.

The ritual did work.

It worked.

It worked.

I'm glad he's gone.

In cases like this, spiritual practitioners

are often working blind.

It's a lot like giving a medicine.

You're hoping for a beneficial effect,

but there are no guarantees,

and it's impossible to tell beforehand

what the effect's gonna be.

This woman did a kindness to the spirit by helping him along

on his journey and accepting that he needed to take the next

step on his spiritual journey and keep going and let go

of a vendetta or resentment around his death.

I never saw the man again.

From this whole experience, I learned that there is

something else beyond our physical bodies,

that there is some sort of existence after death.

Then, any grudges or negative feelings you may have,

you could very well take it with you to the grave.