Original subtitles

In this world, there is real evil.

In the darkest shadows and in the most ordinary places.

These are the true stories of the innocent and the unimaginable.

In the mountains of Taiwan, the bishops are strangers in a foreign land.

Their new home is a place of nightmares filled with deadly creatures and

terrifying visions of another dimension.

A Taoist priest uses ancient rituals to protect them from the angry dead and

calm a power beyond human understanding.

Between the world we see and the things we fear, there are

doors.

When they are opened, nightmares become reality.

In the Far East, many people believe that there are no boundaries between the

physical world and the spiritual realm.

Ghosts are a part of everyday life.

On the island of Taiwan, in the foothills of the Yangming Mountains,

there is a sacred valley where some say the dead have more power.

than the living.

In 1984, the Bishop family visits northern Taiwan.

Dennis Bishop has recently accepted an executive-level position at an American

company in Taipei.

It was a major promotion for me.

When you're offered jobs like this, you have the right to refuse, but if you do,

it's a long time till the next offer can come.

So there's some pressure to take a proposal of that sort.

Dennis' wife, Candace, is nervous about moving her two younger daughters, 16

-year-old Stacy and 12-year-old Marissa.

It was known in the expatriate community as a lawless country.

I was extremely concerned that I was not going to be able to keep my family safe.

The representative of Dennis' new employer brings the family to tour a

company house a few miles outside of Taipei.

Stacey is impressed.

Drove up the long driveway and we looked at it, and it was beautiful.

There was very little of it to not like.

For Marissa, the house is almost magical.

The house was stunning.

I mean, we had come from a pretty small house living in Tokyo, which is a very

crowded city, going to this mansion in the middle of farms, graveyards, and

rice paddies. It was actually kind of surreal.

This is the biggest house I've ever seen.

Dad says there's a pool around back. Really? Let's go.

They're excited about that pool.

From the beginning, Candace has a bad feeling about the house.

It was like a really powerful fist.

slammed into my back so hard that it pushed me forward. I lost my balance.

What?

Well, it felt like something or someone punched me in the back.

I looked around and there was no one there.

I didn't know what to think, but I was afraid.

I don't like this place.

You haven't even seen it yet. Come on.

Yes, let me show you.

To the left here.

This

is

the living room. It's quite lovely with the fireplace.

You're really going to enjoy this place.

Have you had some problems with flooding?

We'll take care of that right away. It shouldn't be a problem at all.

Because it's been the heavy rains that we've been having here lately, and the

house has been empty for a little while.

Dennis, I don't like this house.

It'll be fine once we fix it up.

I don't like it.

You want us to look at some other places before we make a decision?

Yes, please. I think she reacted very strongly and didn't want to live there.

It was decided that I would look with the realtor for other houses.

Well, thanks for showing us the place.

We looked at literally dozens of other places over a period of two weeks, and

none of the dozens of houses we looked at were as acceptable as the one we had.

Reluctantly, Candace agrees to move into the company house.

I felt like I had no option.

This was the best for my husband, therefore it was the best for my family,

and it was my position as...

You know, a rational woman was to find a way to make it work.

On move-in day, the bishops meet Achong.

Dennis's company has hired him as a driver for the family.

Yep.

Okay. We don't have too much more left to do.

I think we're pretty much done.

Don't you?

Did you hear that? Sounded like it was coming from the cabinet.

What was that?

I heard screaming, ran, and saw Achung running at full speed up the stairs with

a shovel.

Yes. Mr. and Mrs. Bishop.

Did you get it?

Yes, but these spiders, they travel in pairs.

Dennis. You know, he says, sir, these spiders, they mate for life.

And if you've killed one, there's another one in there. I'll throw this

out. All right, thanks.

It was a jungle.

And I just kept... saying, deal with it.

I would learn how to deal with it.

Come on, Stacy, Marissa.

A few weeks later, Stacy and Marissa begin school and Dennis starts his new

job. Here's your lunch.

All right, have an awesome day. Okay.

All right, I want to hear all about it when you get home.

Okay. Bye, Mom.

Bye. All right. You too.

Thank you.

I started seeing out of the corner of my eyes lights, like these orbs of light.

They kept darting away from me, so I could never look right at it.

Candice's first impulse is to call Dennis.

It's so out of your box of reality, you don't know what to do. You know, do I

pretend it doesn't exist?

Oh, it's my imagination.

I tried to find a rational reason for it.

I never mentioned it to anyone because I didn't want anyone to think I was crazy.

What's wrong?

Is Alchung still here?

No. He left a few hours ago.

Are you sure?

Yeah. Why?

I thought I saw somebody out there.

There's nobody out there, Marissa.

You can come upstairs and do your homework with me if you want.

There was always a sense of seeing something out of the corner of your eye

and hearing something that didn't seem right.

I personally tried to dismiss everything that felt a little out of normal.

Every night before Stacy goes to bed, she checks her room for tarantulas.

i heard someone walk into my room i could hear it clearly

Stacy doesn't tell anyone about the voice she heard in a bedroom.

The family has more immediate problems.

Taiwan's rainy season begins, and the house starts to leak.

There was always water coming through the walls.

All the water that was coming down through the mountain just came into our

house.

When you girls do your homework in the dark, you know you're gonna hurt your

minds. It's better than getting electrocuted.

And the walls were filled with water. Just the humidity and the dampness and

the light switches were not grounded.

You couldn't turn the light switch on without getting electrocuted.

Are you okay?

Yeah, I'm fine.

You know, this is ridiculous.

Candace, I just got the mail in.

An $1,100 power bill? How can we be using so much power?

The family's electricity bills are impossibly high, heightening the tension

between Dennis and Candace.

Dennis and I were fighting all the time now.

It was very, very tense in the house.

All right, I will, but up until then, what are we going to do?

I'm not sure I knew exactly why the tension was building, but you could feel

it. There was a lot of discomfort, and I think we were taking that out on each

other.

Dennis calls an electrician to the house.

He finds evidence of an underground power leak.

The house apparently had been built illegally.

had probably not been ever attached to the electricity grid in a proper way. I

had no access to any of the background.

The landlord spoke no English at all. My predecessor was long gone, and so I

didn't pursue any of that.

The utility company will have to dig up existing underground cables to solve the

problem.

One night soon after, Stacy is home alone.

Mom?

Dad?

Is that you?

It was impossible to find some logic to understand what was happening. I just

knew that I couldn't put it away. I still wasn't talking about it. I hadn't

told anybody. I just realized that I might be in some trouble.

Stacy gets out of the house as often as possible,

spending time with her boyfriend.

What made me the most afraid is for some reason it clearly wanted to get my

attention, making it obvious that it could open and close doors, that it knew

my name, that it could walk directly up to me within a couple of inches and call

out my name so clearly that I could not misunderstand.

Until then, what are we gonna do?

Stacy escapes to her boyfriend's house whenever possible.

I know it sounds crazy.

And I know that I just can't explain it to you.

Stacy, you don't have anything to worry about.

You know you're safe here, and if you need to call me, you can.

You know you can count on me.

I didn't know what it was. I couldn't even really identify it. All I knew is

that it was impacting my life tremendously on a day-to-day level.

I felt extremely powerless.

Hey, Stacy, don't worry about anything. It'll be fine.

I can't understand you.

Stacy's boyfriend calls.

What? And tells her what he saw.

What?

Go check on her. Just go see if she's all right. Just go. Go. Hold on.

Stacy, what's wrong?

Why didn't you answer me?

You didn't hear me calling you?

No, I didn't.

Promise? Is she all right?

She's fine.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye. Bye.

Stacy,

what's the matter? Talk to me.

I'm so sick of this house.

I'm sick of everything in it. I can't even go in my room without hearing

footsteps or someone call my name.

Stacy started to talk about her experiences, started telling me about

the sounds that she had heard and the voices.

I know. I've been hearing things, too.

She was having someone call her name. Yes, I have.

I was having someone call my name.

The more we compared stories, the more we talked about the stories, the more we

realized that this could possibly be real.

Dennis, we need to talk.

You know, we have got to leave this house. We've got to leave Taiwan.

Dennis didn't believe any of it, but what he did know was that something was

really upsetting the family.

Ted, you don't believe anything we've been telling you, do you?

I don't think he thought we were lying, but he never knew what to say. That's

not true.

But I can't give up everything that I've worked for.

It was made very clear that my dad's job was important to all of us, and we

needed to find a way to, you know, to deal with it the best we could.

What am I supposed to tell my boss? That I have to move because my house is

haunted?

I just said, I need to get the children away from the house. I need to get them

out of Taiwan.

During their school break, Candace takes the girls to a summer house in

California.

She begins to research the paranormal.

One book theorizes that ghosts draw their power from the living.

Candace concludes that if she and her daughters can ignore their fears, the

disturbances will stop.

I had two choices of either collapsing and giving up and leaving, or standing

my ground and claiming my home for my children and my family.

I remember dreading walking back in.

It was just kind of this feeling of...

pressure that would come over me marissa dad and i are just going to be down the

street at the shaw's house so call us if you need anything and stacy should be

home from thomas's real soon all right i love you me too call us i

think that my parents were taking the proper measures to

protect us they were trying to reassure us that everything was fine

Is that you?

Did you forget something?

Stacy? Is that you?

Stacy? Mom?

Dad?

Stacy, is that you?

If it is, it isn't funny.

I remember someone coming in the room itself, opening the door, and actually

pushing me over, actually coming into me.

I felt victimized, and I thought that I and my family might lose this battle.

Marissa, honey, how are you feeling?

I feel okay.

Are you sure?

Yeah, I'm fine, Mom.

Did you want to talk about what happened last night?

It's fine. Just don't worry about it. It's okay.

We had no idea what was happening.

I think we didn't want to even think about the possibilities.

Did your sister say anything to you?

No. Because none of them were really good.

So we kind of just said, we don't know. We just don't know.

I was very concerned I could no longer protect my children.

Candace calls her friend Bob Patton, a journalist with strong ties to the

Taoist religious community in Taiwan.

He had done articles about various people that lived in the country, and

one of the people that he had interviewed once was a very well

-respected Taoist priest.

This is it. We're here.

I felt like, well, maybe I could find the strength to handle this as long as I

knew that this man knew what to do.

I remember him looking around and being surprised at what was in the house.

The priest explains that many Chinese believe physical shapes and forms can

influence the spiritual energy of a place.

He had talked about how the moisture and how it was built into the mountain made

a tremendous amount of negative energy be around the house.

He says that no Chinese architect would design a house like this unless

they wanted to curse the inhabitant.

Whoever built the home designed the home to kill us.

The priest senses the presence of what the Chinese call hungry ghosts.

The reason that ghosts come back is because they don't have what they need

in the afterlife.

Let it be food, let it be money, things like that.

They become hungry ghosts.

They're looking for energy to survive and to live.

What he saw was two bodies that

were buried on our property.

Chinese peasants believe that when a person suffers a violent death, they

must perform a ritual to put these spirits at rest.

The priest knows that Marissa has been attacked.

And he proceeded to tell me that the spirits that were in the house were

actually using me as an energy source.

He was concerned about her safety.

He was very afraid for us and did not know if there was anything he

could do to help the situation.

He needed to gather his strength.

and he said he would be back in a few days.

Have a seat.

Candace speaks to her family's driver, Oh Chung, about the history of her

house. Oh Chung, how long have you lived in Tian Mo?

All my life.

Do you know anything about the property before our house was built on it?

For many years, there was a farm and an old house.

Before this home was on the property, there was a pig farm.

that had burned down and the husband and wife were caught in the fire.

Candice believes these could be the two spirits the Dallas priest envisioned.

A lot of people don't even want to talk.

Candace tries to convince her husband that the family must move.

Look, I can't cancel this trip right now. It's a very hectic time for me.

Everything's going to be fine.

The hardest part was trying to decide what was real and what was imaginary.

And I don't know that I ever reconciled that very well. Look what happened to

Marissa. I know she's scared, but she's fine now. I have to go.

Candace considers leaving Taiwan immediately.

It was a very difficult decision.

It would have meant the disintegration of our family.

Because he couldn't go.

She decides to stay and keep her daughters close.

As long as Dennis was gone, the girls had to sleep with me in the bedroom so

that we were all together.

I slept with a butcher knife and a baseball bat underneath the bed.

Quick, there's somebody outside.

What, Darlene?

There's somebody outside the door.

Okay, you stay here and be quiet, okay?

I'll never forget having horrible nightmares that she would hurt one of us

or hurt herself or hurt my father with that knife.

When Dennis returns, he agrees to let the Taoist priest perform an exorcism on

the house.

We got a problem here, and I was willing to try anything to solve it.

I knew I couldn't fix it, and maybe he could.

A few nights later, the Taoist priest says he must perform the exorcism

immediately.

He said to me, if he ever was going to have the power, it was now.

The priest asks them to send Marissa to a neighbor's house.

He was concerned that if Marissa were in the home when he was calling these

spirits, that they might actually attack her.

I was pretty panicked. I was pretty frightened.

I genuinely didn't know what was going to happen.

Dennis was willing to go along with it. How can we be using so much power?

You know, Dennis, I don't know.

What he explained was he was going to attempt to do an exorcism on the house

and see if he could appease the spirits.

The priest tells them to open every door in the house to give the spirits free

reign.

he has brought food and money as offerings for the hungry spirits

he

lights incense in preparation for a ritual which he hopes will appease the

angry dead

The Taoist priest explains that earlier tonight he performed a funeral for a

powerful dignitary.

He will use the positive energies from that funeral in an exorcism of their

house.

We report to and summon all the agents of the symbols for the destruction of

hell and the rescue of these benighted souls.

I'd be the first to admit some really fairly unexplainable things happen.

It's making our clothes move, our hair move, things moving through us in ways

that made it hard to breathe.

We don't know what's happening.

But it's very, very real.

It was very physical.

As much as I wanted to rationalize it and deny it and say it was all in my

mind, it was difficult to deny.

The priest asks Stacy to take offerings to the burial site in the backyard.

You must be courageous.

I looked at him horrified because this was the scariest experience I'd ever

had.

And he looked at me and said, no, you need to do this.

Okay.

Thank you.

The priest blesses every room in the house.

He said a prayer in each room in four corners of the room.

In each room, when he would

go in, the lights, they would dim and lighten.

That was when I knew he clearly was in some control of these energies.

I really believe that he knew what he was doing.

The priest tells the family that he has done all that he can.

I expected that it would all just go away and be okay.

What he told us at the end of that was just exactly the opposite.

He suggested that what he had done during the exorcism might put us in good

stead for two or three months, but after that we should get out of there.

He strongly recommended we leave that house.

Before he leaves, the priest places an I Ching symbol on the front door.

He hopes that it will help maintain a sense of harmony in the house.

I knew that Stacy was graduating in June and she would be leaving.

And so what I said was I was leaving too.

It was one of the most eye-opening times of my life.

I learned that there was a world that I lived in that I didn't know had existed

before then.

At the same time, probably one of the most scary times of my life.

I know that there are such things as very powerful negative

energies or spirits or whatever one wants to call them that can

affect my environment, that can affect my family.

It was a turning point for me.

Because my world, my safe world that I had created where nothing bad existed,

was shattered.