A broke private eye rides south to explain away a little girl's imaginary friend, and walks out of a pine-country farmhouse convinced the old man pushing her on the swing has been dead for years.

EPISODE PAGE (includes list of sources): https://weirddarkness.com/noir-oldmanonsutterlane

TRANSCRIPT: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84f78k

THE REAL CASE BEHIND THIS STORY: In February 1989, Andy and Lisa Wyrick moved into a brick ranch house on Swint Loop in Ellerslie, Georgia, a small town in Harris County about a hundred miles south of Atlanta. The land had once been an antebellum plantation, and the previous owners had walked off and left the house abandoned long enough for it to go to auction. The following month, the Wyricks' three-year-old daughter Heidi began describing visits from an elderly man she called Mr. Gordy — silver-gray hair, dark suit, top hat, shiny black shoes — who pushed her on the backyard swing. Not long after, a wounded man she called Con appeared at the front door, a bloody bandage on his arm and blood soaking his shirt.Both were eventually tied to deceased local figures. James S. Gordy had run a real estate company in Columbus, Georgia, served for years as Sunday school superintendent at Ellison Methodist Church, and was connected to the Swint Loop property as executor and caretaker before his death. (His death year appears inconsistently across sources, with some citing 1972 and most citing 1974; either way, he died well over a decade before Heidi was born.) Lon "Con" Batchelor had lost his hand in a cotton gin accident as a teenager, returned home in bloodied clothing with his arm in bandages, and died of cancer in 1957. Heidi, who could not yet read, picked Gordy out of a blind photo lineup and walked directly to his grave among hundreds of headstones in a local cemetery. She identified Batchelor — whose name she'd heard as "Con" — from a family photograph brought to the house by Catherine Ledford, who had previously owned the adjacent property and knew the family history.Beginning in 1993, the activity escalated sharply. Heidi and other family members began seeing a black, hooded, faceless figure that moved through the house, stood in Heidi's closet, and appeared at the foot of her bed. Objects moved on their own; a kitchen chair pulled itself from the table in front of two witnesses; scratches appeared on Heidi and her father Andy across consecutive nights. The Wyricks' second daughter, Jordan, born February 3, 1994, later began reporting interactions with an unseen child. Parapsychologist Dr. William Roll — an Oxford-educated psychologist who had spent eight years researching at Oxford before building a scientific reputation studying haunting phenomena — investigated the case. He recorded an electromagnetic field spike to over forty milligauss in the parents' bedroom against a residential baseline near one-tenth of a milligauss, found elevated positive ion concentrations near Heidi's room, and tied her perceptions to environmental sensitivity and documented seismic activity in the Columbus region. He could not explain the scratches. Roll also traced a reported family history of psychic sensitivity across several generations, extending back to Lisa's mother and to land in north Georgia along the Trail of Tears route.Roll brought in medium Amy Allan — later known to television audiences through The Dead Files — who walked the property under blind conditions and identified three entities in the back rooms: two older men and a faceless dark presence. A second psychic, brought in separately by the family, named the same three entities in the same locations and identified the fireplace as a portal. Years of mounting medical bills kept the Wyricks in the house long after they wanted to leave. After Heidi was found suspended upside down above her bed by an unseen force, they sold the property when she reached her mid-teens. She reported seeing apparitions in the homes that followed.Andy Wyrick died in 2012 at age 45; no cause of death has been widely reported. Dr. William Roll died the same year, in February 2012. Heidi Wyrick married a man named Aaron, relocated to Columbus, and built a career in the medical field. She stopped seeing Mr. Gordy around age eight but still reports seeing the dark figure, and has said in interviews across many years that not a day passes when she doesn't wish the events had never happened. The case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in 1994, profiled in the Discovery Channel's 2002 documentary A Haunting in Georgia, and served as source material for the 2013 film The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia. Heidi's aunt Joyce Cathey published a firsthand account in The Veil: Heidi Wyrick's Story.
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Originally aired: June 28, 2026