Dane (39:51)
I just started running and didn't stop until I reached the car. I sat in my car for about an hour just trying to process what I had just found and waited on B to figure out that I had already left. She finally made it back to the car with all the valuables she had found in hand. When she finally got in the passenger seat, I was as white as a ghost and was in shock. She asked me what was wrong and I told her exactly what I found. Her jaw hit the floor and she too turned as white as I was. I wasn't sure what to do to be honest, so I simply drove to the closest door and called the non emergency 911 line and explained what I had just found and how I stumbled onto it. Needless to say, the investigator thought me and B were basically full of crap. But he got in his car and followed us to the end of the neighborhood and explained that he would have to hike a good mile to find the abandoned house and the well where the body was. No more than 20 minutes later we see police cars and the coroner van pull up at the end of the neighborhood. Eventually they started to tape off the entire wooded area. As I'm just sitting in my car asking one of the many officers there if Bea and I could leave. I look past the officer to see two people carrying out a black completely zipped up body bag and placing it into the back of the coroner's van. I shuddered at the thought of who that person was or what could have happened to them. A few months later I get a phone call from one of the detectives working on the body in the well case. She wanted to inform me that they were able to identify who the person in the well was. She was a 24 year old female who had been reported missing out of a small town called Between Georgia seven to eight months ago. Between Georgia was only an hour and a half drive without traffic from where her body was found. The craziest part is the multiple detectives on this case live and grew up in the area where the body was found their entire lives, most of them being in their mid to late 50s. And not one of them have ever known about or heard about the Abandoned house in the Middle of the Woods When I was five years old, my stepdad took a job in a town an hour away from the home we were living in. After a few months of a long drive to and from work, my parents decided to start looking for a home closer to his new place of work. Unfortunately, this didn't pan out too well for them. The market at the time made it difficult to find anything, including rentals at a price they could afford. Around the same time, my stepdad's parents decided to sell their home. This was the house my stepdad grew up in, and in addition to being a well kept, decent sized home, there was a lot of sentimental value from my stepdad. When my parents expressed interest in working out a deal with my grandparents to purchase the home, my grandparents simply gave it to them at a price they could afford. And so began the creepiest chapter of my life. I had visited the home many times before, and while I never felt uneasy, there was certainly an energy to the home that I had not felt anywhere else in my short five years. Almost immediately after we moved in, whatever energy was in the house began forming its attachment. Most of the energy in the home seemed to emanate from one room. One of the upstairs bedrooms had a small door in the wall of the closet leading to an attic, and even as a small child, I was terrified of that room and that attic in particular. My first bedroom was across the hall from that room. It was one of the few peaceful places in the house that seemed as if no kind of negativity could touch it. Nearly every other space in the house carried with it a feeling of heaviness. The closer we were to the attic or basement, the heavier the air felt and the more our anxiety grew. Around two years after moving into the home, my younger sister was born and once she was old enough to have her own room, she moved into the room I once shared with my brother. I took the downstairs bedroom. I was around six or seven years old and excited to have my own space. I got to choose my own decorations and make it very homey prior to moving into the room. It was a dream come true for my childhood self, but the first night I stayed there alone, the heaviness that plagued the majority of the house was more present than I had ever felt it. I have struggled with anxiety since a very young age, so I simply dismissed it as anxiety, as I would for many of the events that would take place later on. Thankfully, nothing truly scary ever happened in this room, aside from the feeling of heaviness and strange dreams. Eventually, my siblings took over the room with the attic in the closet. At first they were scared, and being the older sister, I offered to have a sleepover for the first few nights to help make them feel more comfortable. I had become accustomed to the strange energy in the house, and although it was certainly stronger in the room with the attic, I continued to chalk it up to my anxiety disorder. That was the first night that I saw the Shadow Man. The shadow man would stand just outside the doorway. He was only visible from this room and did not appear every night. Still, I continued to believe it was anxiety. A few years later, my siblings and I were older and braver and decided the attic would make a great clubhouse. We brought toys and decorations in and set up a cool space near the entrance. But even then, we were terrified of the rear of the attic where the light didn't reach and deemed the space off limits. None of us wanted to admit we were afraid, and each of us claimed it was just too dark to see. But in reality, each of us had seen the shadow man lurking. Not just standing still anymore, but moving, always watching darker than the surrounding darkness, seemingly trying to find a way to get closer to us. Over the years, every single one of us would hear our names called from different parts of the house, including my stepdad, who had never had any paranormal experiences in this home growing up and was an absolute skeptic when it came to anything paranormal. When we would come to where we thought our names were being called from, we would either be greeted with an empty room or those present were totally confused as to why we thought we were being called. Looking back, one of the creepiest places things that sticks with me is the last couple of years in the home, during which my sister and I decided to explore the basement. We had what is called a Michigan basement, which in our case was more or less a pit that had been dug beneath the house, with walls of dirt surrounding the space and a three foot crawl space on top of each wall. Since early childhood, we always had a notion that something interesting was buried within those walls. As kids, we always thought of secret treasure, but as we got older, the running joke became that maybe there was a body buried within the walls. Shortly before moving out, my sister and I decided to explore a bit and crawled around on top of the walls. We found nothing but a few antiques left behind, perhaps by my grandparents or previous owners. The scariest part of the whole story comes years later. My family grew again and we moved to a newer home on the opposite side of town. We had been there for over two years when the creepy old house came up in conversation. We were watching a show about ghost stories when they started talking about the Hat Man. I started laughing and said, man, if we were still in that old house, I would be terrified. I always used to think I saw something like that in the hallway upstairs. I laughed, but my demeanor quickly changed when I saw my mother's and siblings expressions. We started talking about weird things we experienced in that old house. And as it turns out, every single one of us saw the exact same figure in the hallway, down to every detail. Even worse, it could only be seen from the room that was attached to the attic. While we all routinely heard our names being called in that house and thought nothing of it, not a single one of us has ever experienced that since moving out. My mom even confessed that when she and my stepdad shared the attic room, she awoke very early one morning to a sailor sitting on the edge of the bed who quickly disappeared after her initial fright. She never told anyone about the experience until that day. Later that night, we started digging into the history of the house and discovered that a neighbor whose backyard met with ours was doing some landscaping and discovered the grave of a sailor just steps away from their back door. Needless to say, we were pretty freaked out and didn't talk about it again for some time. Fast forward a few more years. I had gotten married, was expecting my first child, and my husband and I began looking for a home to buy. I hadn't thought much about the old house or its haunts in years. We toured a few homes. We hadn't yet found anything that really fit our needs. This was shortly before the housing market exploded, so there was no sense of urgency or desperation. We were only interested in finding the right space to grow a family. A few months in, I began having a repetitive dream about my old home. In my dream, we purchased the home and a voice kept telling me to tear out the bathtub. We obliged and found an old doll hidden in a box in the wall. This doll talked to us and told us there was something buried in the land. This dream happened multiple times a week until I began to become obsessed with owning the house. Anytime I was in the area, I would drive by. The more I drove by the house the more obsessed I became. The home wasn't even for sale yet. I was thinking of ways I could entice the current owners to sell it to us. I needed that house. It freaked me out because I am the opposite of materialistic. And while I had many good memories at that house, I hadn't even thought about it for years. Why was I so obsessed with it? Why was I constantly dreaming about it? I immediately began to remind myself of how terrified I was there as a child and forbade myself from going near it. I stopped thinking about it for a while. My daughter is now four years old. She recently found out that my parents cried. Current home is not the house I spent most of my life in. A few weeks ago, she asked if she could see where I grew up. I hadn't thought about the house for some time, so I agreed. We drove by and it looked more beautiful and appealing than I remembered, despite there being no significant changes to the home. Now every time we visit my parents, she asks to see it, almost as if it's calling to her too. I have started having the dreams again. And to this day, if that home went up for sale, I can't promise I wouldn't buy.
