Original subtitles

An Arkansas couple thinks their dream house is the deal of a lifetime.

But there's a reason it's such a bargain.

Tell us who you are.

That was the worst thing we could have expected it to say.

And what they don't know will hurt them.

Then I knew there is such thing as ghosts and demons. We had to have help

or we might not survive.

In America, there is real evil.

It lurks in the darkest shadows in our most ordinary towns.

Between the worlds we see and the things we fear, there are doors.

When they are opened, nightmares.

become reality.

What do you think, sweetie?

In the summer of 2001, Terry and Blake VanLandingham find the perfect house for

their large family in their hometown of Wynn, Arkansas.

I can't believe we did this.

Terry is relieved to find such a nice home in their price range and in a good

neighborhood. It was just so big, and it was old, and it was right in the heart

of Wynn.

Well, we jumped on it.

It was a great buy.

My husband worked really, really hard.

He drove a truck, which kept him away from home a lot.

Gonna have to take more routes.

Be gone more.

I worked in a law office. I also taught dance part-time.

Eight-year-old Ethan is Terry and Blake's youngest child.

Ethan looks up to his more outgoing sisters.

Heather shares a room with her older sister, Brianna.

Heather and Brianna had the most awesome room of the house.

It was like an apartment over the garage, and they loved it.

I fell in love with the house because we just had so much room.

We could do anything we wanted to and not get in anybody's way.

Isn't it wonderful?

But Brianna's excitement...

quickly turns to apprehension.

I don't know.

It doesn't feel right.

Brianna felt like something was watching her.

There was just something about the house that she was uneasy about.

Sorry. I told her, it'll be all right. It's just a new house. You know, you got

to get used to it.

Two weeks after moving in, Terry is doing housework.

When she discovers that photos of the children have somehow been turned

around.

And I thought, who would do that? That is crazy.

Terry thinks one of the children moved the photos as a prank.

They would be all flat down.

And the ones on the wall would be turned backwards.

And I questioned everyone in the house.

Are you turning the pictures around? And the girls then said, our pictures are

turned backwards upstairs too.

There were no explanations for that.

That was just the beginning.

A month later, Heather and Brianna have another experience that defies

explanation.

Hey, Heather, have you seen my hairbrush?

No, you can use mine. I think it's on the dresser.

Ethan?

Whenever Ethan can't sleep, Ethan?

he comes upstairs to stay with his sisters.

Ethan!

We heard this falling down the stairs.

We were afraid that it was Ethan.

We ran out the door expecting to see Ethan down there.

And there was absolutely nothing there.

We told my mom and dad about it the next morning.

Mom, we heard some noises last night. Like someone falling down the stairs.

You've heard noises?

Yeah, but then when we went to go check, there was no one there.

Blake, could you please check the steps for the girls?

I'll take a look at it when I get home. I gotta go.

Okay. I don't think they really believed us.

Seriously? Terry thinks the noises are just the house settling.

And I would just reassure them that there was always going to be noises and

the house is going to creak because it's old.

For the next month, nothing unusual happens in the house.

Then, one afternoon, the girls return from school to

find their bedroom in a shocking state of disarray.

anybody do this?

Mom, who was in our room today?

Oh, girls, clean this mess up.

Mom, we did not do this.

Someone was in our room today.

Nobody was in your room today. Now please have it cleaned up before dinner.

But we didn't do this.

Heather and Brianna both know there is no logical explanation for the wind in

the room or the floating trash.

The only thing that I could think of was ghosts.

Mom! Mom!

Mom, you won't believe it. What?

I think we have a...

Ghost. Brianna, it's an old house. You're going to hear noises.

These weren't just noises.

A piece of trash floated in the air. I saw it too.

Brianna is dramatic.

She is my little drama queen.

I always felt like maybe she was stretching the truth just a little bit.

Brianna, don't you have play rehearsal?

Over the next several months, Heather and Brianna continue to have strange

experiences in the house.

They have no idea.

This is just the beginning of a series of events that will tear their family

apart.

Ethan! Teenage sisters, Heather and Brianna Van Landingham, believe a ghost.

is responsible for strange sounds, objects moving and even levitating in

their home.

But nothing has prepared them for what happens next.

I had gone upstairs to get dressed for church, and I saw Brianna standing

in the bathroom brushing her hair.

Hey, Bri, what do you think? The blue one or the green one?

And I carried on probably about a 20-minute conversation with her while I

was picking out my clothes and getting dressed.

Well, I'm going to go put this on.

I'll meet you downstairs.

Bye, Heather.

I love you.

That was really weird to me because why would she tell me she loved me if she

was just going to see me in a minute?

Bye. Love you, too.

How'd you get down here before me?

What do you mean?

I was freaked out.

You were just up in the bathroom.

How'd you pass me on the steps?

I never use that bathroom.

I've been down here the whole time.

My mom assured me that there was no possible way that I had talked to

Brianna upstairs in the bathroom because She had been doing, bringing his hair

the whole time I was upstairs.

You couldn't have seen her.

When I thought about it, I never saw her face.

I was truly terrified at that point because I just had

a conversation with my sister, and it turns out that there was no way that

that was my sister.

I had no idea what it was or who it was.

My biggest issue was trying to get someone to believe me.

It wasn't my imagination.

I know what happened.

A few nights later, the entire family will become convinced that they are not

alone.

And we all just stopped and just looked.

Like, oh my gosh.

But their strange evening is far from over.

Sounded like a body being thrown down the staircase.

I told you there was something in this house.

Yeah, that was strange.

We all knew that there was something that was not right in the house.

I was calling Blake every day, saying there is something in our house.

Hello? Thank goodness you're here. There's strange things happening at the

house. We're hearing all kinds of stuff. Slow down, Terry.

Are you sure you heard it? Yes, I...

There must be a reasonable explanation for everything.

We'll talk about it when I get home.

I love you.

When you're out on the road and your wife's calling you up and she's telling

you that these crazy things are happening at home, you get this

gigantic, helpless feeling.

Your man needs to be there, and he wasn't.

The following week, on her way home from shopping, Terry spots a friend of

Brianna's walking out of the garage.

What's Mia doing?

That's strange.

And we thought that was odd.

There's nothing in the garage other than the vehicles, and I couldn't understand

why she did that.

We go in, everyone's in the den, they're watching TV.

What are you doing outside?

I never went outside.

But I just saw you come out of the garage.

No one's been outside.

We never saw her face, you know.

But if it wasn't her... Terry now believes Heather's

account of seeing Brianna in the upstairs bathroom while Brianna was

actually downstairs.

But Heather...

never saw her sister's face.

Here is another time that someone else has presented itself, and it's not the

person that we thought it was.

She fears an entity is taking the form of friends and family. For what purpose?

Terry has no idea.

That is very scary, because then you're like, okay, are you going to go up and

start touching people to make sure that that's them?

Three days later, Brianna is getting ready for a dance recital.

There are a few minutes before Brianna has to leave so she watches television

to settle her nerves Unaware she's being watched

Scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the worst, I'd put her right up there at a 10.

She was white.

I just never seen her like that.

Something attacks me.

Oh, honey, are you okay?

Brianna could never have done this to herself.

But whatever was had such force that it left marks on her body.

There was no way Brianna could have made those marks herself.

My dad's own hand couldn't even leave fingerprint marks that far apart.

Start seeing your child marked up. As a dad, you have this feeling

of helplessness.

What can I do to defend my children against something like this? I think

this was the...

The stone that finally made me realize that, you know, yes, there is something

going on here.

And it is beyond me.

Blake and Terry move Brianna downstairs.

Heather insists on staying in the room.

Are you sure you want to stay up here by yourself?

Don't worry about it.

I personally felt like... Brianna was the attention.

It was drawn to her.

It fed off of her.

So I wouldn't have any issues staying in that room.

Three days after Brianna is attacked, Heather is in the upstairs bedroom

alone.

Heather, turn the music down, honey.

Just keep the music down a little bit, okay?

Sure, Mom.

Several days after an entity attacks her sister Brianna in their bedroom, Heather

Van Landingham is alone in the room.

She believes the paranormal activity in the home is focused on Brianna, not her.

She was just looking at me.

It was weird because I never felt uncomfortable or threatened by her.

feel like she was trying to let someone know that she had either fallen

or been pushed down the stairs.

Terry calls her sister, who has lived in Wynn a long time, and asks her if she

ever heard about anything unusual happening in the house.

Maybe somebody falling down the stairs or a fire.

Did someone die?

falling down the stairs in this house.

When did you say this was?

Terry learns that in the 1950s, the upstairs bedroom had been rented out as

a sort of boarding house.

Do you know anything other than that?

There was, however, no record of anyone dying there.

Everything calmed down for a week, but things still went missing.

Pictures are still knocked over.

Ethan avoids the brunt of the paranormal activity until one afternoon after

school. He goes to the upstairs bedroom looking for Heather.

Mom,

Mom! He came...

barreling down the stairs.

And he said, mom, I just had a bat thrown at me upstairs.

Terry believes Heather should not stay in the upstairs bedroom alone.

I never wanted to move out of my room.

No matter what, I still loved the space of that room.

Anytime I was up there alone, nothing had attacked me or physically

touched me.

The entire family is frightened of the entity in their home.

But moving is not an option.

It was a hardship to even consider moving financially.

We didn't have anything saved, didn't know how we could just up and just

leave.

We are going to pray because I think that's the only way that we're going to

get rid of it.

Let's hold hands.

I gathered my family together just before I left going out on the road. And

I prayed for God to deliver these things from our home.

Asked for protection on my family while I was gone.

Lord, we know that you are the one in charge.

But we need your help.

Because whatever's going on here is totally out of our control.

Please bless this family, Lord.

The family prays daily for help.

But the paranormal activity continues.

We were getting weary.

It was really a test of our faith

because we had been praying every day

for so long for something good, and it never happened.

Several weeks later, the family's nightmare takes a much darker turn.

Brianna goes up to the bedroom to retrieve some of her belongings.

You try to do anything that you can to get to your child

when they're screaming like that.

And yet I could not get inside that room.

I tried to find anything I can that's going

to open up the door.

And when I get back up to the door, it was silent.

There's nothing coming from the room.

Terry has no idea what she'll find behind the bedroom door.

Open the door, honey. Open the door. Terry VanLandingham struggles to free

her daughter from the grip of a violent entity.

I can't even describe her horror.

Honey, what happened?

It was a shadow.

And it smothered me.

She said he was just a black mass.

And he was as tall as the ceiling.

It had no face.

All right, come on.

Let's get out of here.

I made the decision for her. She was not staying there anymore.

Terry and Blake send Brianna to live with family in town.

Come on. It's not like I won't see you again.

I would get her in the mornings, bring her home.

She would change her clothes and go to school.

But she didn't spend the night at our house anymore.

Then I knew.

that there is such thing as ghosts and demons, and we had to have help,

or we might not survive.

Started researching anything I could get my hands on that had to do with the

supernatural.

An internet search leads Terri to the Central Arkansas Society for Paranormal

Research, or CASPER.

She speaks to the director, Karen Schillings.

As a ghost hunter, my quest is to provide people with irrefutable evidence

that ghosts do exist.

Karen finds the VanLandingham family credible.

She decides to bring her entire team in the following week and conduct a full

investigation.

The paranormal experts will attempt to document the entity's presence using

cameras and electromagnetic field detectors.

A psychic is also on the team.

When we put a compass in the front room, it spun in circles.

Well, what do you think?

Look. The psychic that was with me said that most likely that indicated that we

were standing within a portal to another dimension.

One of the reasons the Van Landingham home could have been haunted is simply

because of the location.

Some areas are natural portals, and spirits can come and go easily through

these portals.

Paranormal experts believe naturally occurring electromagnetic fields can

create doorways or portals where spirits can enter the physical world, even

spirits who, in life, had no connection to the location.

When we heard about a portal, we were horrified.

But at the same time, it gave us security knowing that there really are

that many spirits in our home and that we weren't just going crazy.

I thought, how are we going to survive this?

If it's full of entities, what are we going to do?

In the upstairs bedroom, Karen and the investigators conduct an electronic

voice phenomena EVP session.

They hope to capture the voice of at least one entity on tape.

Why are you here?

What do you want with these people?

Leave us alone.

Leave us alone.

Leave us alone.

I am not leaving.

We were all too stunned to say anything.

We didn't know exactly what it was. And then it became apparent that it wasn't

her voice.

I am not breathing.

After a few seconds, I realized that she was actually channeling a spirit.

It was very startling.

It just as quickly as it happened, it was over.

What happened?

Are you okay?

The message was that no matter what, this thing was not leaving.

Karen ends the investigation.

It will take at least a week to process the audio and video recordings.

The next night, Blake feels the need to conduct his own investigation.

There's things that hasn't been answered for me, and I still got to have some

answers.

Blake sets up a camera in the upstairs bedroom.

He plans to spend the night in Brianna's old bed and capture any strange activity

in the room on video.

The drawer slammed.

Slammed very hard. I got up and went over and checked my camera.

Still had plenty of time running on the camera, so I returned to bed.

The next morning, Blake reviews the tape with his family.

It's it?

A face.

All of a sudden, there's a partial face with a cat eye. You can see part of the

bridge, the nose.

A little bit of hair hanging down on the forehead.

It looks demonic.

There's something else.

I couldn't hear it at the time. You have to crack the sound up.

Release my child from this evil, evil, evil.

Release my child from this evil, evil, evil.

And she keeps repeating evil like a broken record.

Blake Van Landingham.

finds the proof he is looking for.

I just thought, oh my goodness, you know, what I'm thinking, I'm dealing

with is real.

After his family is terrorized by something he cannot see or understand,

Blake Van Landingham conducts his own paranormal investigation.

There's no doubt.

I've got something in my house.

I've never seen anything like it and hope to never meet anything like it

personally.

A few days later, paranormal investigator Karen Shillings returns

with her findings.

I've got something I really need you guys to hear.

Her team has amplified the recordings they made in the upstairs bedroom.

Using filters, they are able to isolate what sounds like voices.

We picked up a lot of interesting EVPs here.

Leave this house.

You can hear someone say, we hate you.

We want you out of here. Get out of our house.

Tell us who you are.

That was just the worst thing that we could have expected it to say.

Even though it felt like we had been in hell in that house, we

never expected that.

What are we supposed to do?

I'm just an investigator. I collect the evidence.

Karen tells Terry she has no power to make the entity or entities leave.

I advise Terry and her family to call their clergyman to have the house

blessed.

Three nights later, their pastor arrives to bless the home.

It's hard to go to your pastor and tell him you've got evil things in your

house.

But we...

thought that if he came and prayed, that that would help remove this bad spirit

from our house.

Lord God Almighty, we come before you to rid this home of the evil forces

occupying it.

We know only you have the power to bring light to this darkness and to restore

peace to this family.

There was a rush of cold wind.

It was like a breeze around us.

I felt it was the evil entities just encircling us, just taunting us.

I was trembling.

You could feel just evil in that room.

I just kept my head down and my eyes closed because I was afraid that I was

going to see something, and I didn't want to see it.

Amen.

that this prayer was not working.

We were saddened by that because we really had hoped that that was going to

drive it away.

Later that night, the family hopes and prays for restful sleep.

I heard Something come into my room.

Ethan would come into my room on many occasions and sleep with me

because he just never felt comfortable in his own room.

I felt something crawl over my feet and just ease under the covers like Ethan

always did.

And I rolled over.

You could see where the covers were raised, and there was an indention in

the bed, but there was nothing laying there.

I was beyond scared.

I couldn't move.

I couldn't yell. I was afraid it was going to hurt me.

Lord Jesus, please make it go away.

I just kept praying that it would go away, and I never slept in that room

again.

The other children were so petrified that Heather did not sleep upstairs.

She slept in the den.

Ethan no longer slept in his room at all.

We should have left, but you put a lot of money into your home, and

you think that you're going to be there forever, and that's your dream house,

and you're still hoping, you're just still really hoping that...

You're going to get to enjoy that house like it used to be.

A few days later, Karen Shillings, the paranormal expert, returns alone to

investigate.

Karen believes the entity is not attached to a particular person, but

resides in the house.

To test that theory, she asks Terry if she may spend the night alone in the

upstairs bedroom.

I did this despite the danger that I might face because I really wanted to

capture something undeniable on tape.

I could feel it before I saw it.

And then I realized that I was nose to nose with this thing. It was horrifying.

Paranormal investigator Karen Schillings comes face to face with a dark entity

taunting the Van Landingham family.

I realized that where I was staring,

Should have been a face, but it was just a black hole with a swirling mist in it.

It felt horrible.

I felt like I was smothering in it, and it was prickling me.

Karen cannot move.

Whatever it was emitting, I was caught up in it, and I commanded it to leave

over and over again.

Command it to leave.

And it didn't seem to have any effect on it.

And finally, I felt the thing lift off of me.

Karen believes the Van Landingham family has seen this entity several times.

There were multiple occasions where the girls and family members saw this thing.

It would be dressed like their friend. It would be dressed like their relative.

And it would have the same type of hair.

But they never saw its face. It was something that had no face.

I think that it's a demon maybe manifesting itself into someone else. I

just don't think it wants to show itself.

That's the whole purpose of not being able to see a face, is it just doesn't

want to show itself.

The next morning, Karen tells Terry about her experience.

This thing is very, very evil.

And it's really strong.

And it wants to stay here.

I've come to the conclusion that there's not much that you can do, or anything

really, to make the entities leave.

And the camcorder shut off.

I got nothing on tape.

What am I supposed to do?

I suggest you leave.

And pray to God this thing stays behind.

She was more than convinced that we needed to leave.

It brought such sorrow for us to think that we may not have any other

alternative but to leave.

For the family, there is no doubt they must move away.

But finding a new home will take time.

Terry no longer allows the girls to go up to the bedroom alone.

But a few weeks later, Heather goes upstairs by herself to get clothes for

school.

I had gotten more comfortable just going up to the room to grab things by myself

without needing my mom or dad.

I just felt this cold.

Gust of air come from my bathroom, and I was terrified to look

Fearing

for their lives the van landinghams finally give up their dream house

This was a house that everybody felt love in.

We entertained a lot.

And all of our children's friends were welcome.

They loved being there, and it came to nothing.

Nobody wanted to come anymore.

Not even us.

They pack up everything in just three days and move out.

The stress, the fatigue, the trying to keep the family together,

it all takes a toll on you.

We rented a home from a family member that had several rental properties. Even

though the house was very, very small, at that point we didn't care.

Two days after leaving the house...

Terry and Heather returned to look for a phone charger left behind.

Is it in there?

Oh, for goodness sakes, Heather, where in the world did you find it?

And Heather

and I looked at each other and we ran out of that house as fast as we could.

And with that, the entity.

reclaims the house as its own.

It robbed all of us of the little childhood that we had left.

The house is currently being lived in.

The family who lives there now has the upstairs and the staircase blocked

off. It is not used.

You can go by the house, and the bathroom light will be on upstairs.

I know there's still something in that house.