Haunted Gary

by Ursula Bielski

  Despite the long and emphatic history of these stories in Griffith, actual encounters with this mysterious woman are very few and even further between. Rare is the kind of firsthand story shared by “Rob,” who was driving home from a reunion one night in 1983 at about 1:00 a.m., when he swerved to miss hitting a woman who appeared from the side of the road near a wooded area in Griffith. The woman was about twenty years old, with dark hair that was pulled back and wearing a long, shiny dress. “Rob” remembers that she almost seemed to slam into the hood of the car to stop it, and that she was

  very upset, hysterical. She was just like that expression “a deer in the headlights,” you know, like people say. I only saw her for about four seconds, but she was so upset, and I just froze with my foot on the brake. She came around the side of the car like she was going to get in, but then she was just gone. I have never told anyone this before. I felt like I should get out and look for her, and I had this feeling that there was someone after her, but I was so scared for some reason. I felt this overpowering feeling of dread. I did not feel that this was someone who had been in an accident. She was definitely getting away from someone. I’m ashamed to say that I had drunk a lot at the reunion I was at, and I was in no position to help anyone, and I reasoned that there was a decent amount of late traffic on the road and someone else would be there for her, see her and help if she needed it. And she was just gone anyway. A big part of me thought I didn’t even see her until I heard the story about this girl later on. I have never forgot that happening, and once in a while I’ll hear someone mention Reeder Road in the paper or somewhere, and I get that feeling again—just terror.

  Exhaustive searches have yielded no records of an Elizabeth Wilson or any other young woman killed in this area in this time period. It’s possible that the legendary “ghost of Cline Avenue” story has been transplanted to this much spookier locale, as Cline runs through the town of Griffith, and Reeder Road is not far from the banks of the Calumet River, where the storied “Woman in White” has most often been seen.

  Ross Cemetery in Griffith is the rumored burial site of Elizabeth Wilson, though no burial records or even legal records have been found to prove her existence. Photo by John B. Stephens.

  Sadly, however, a second ghost story surrounding someone with the name Wilson sprung up here after the violent death of a young ghost hunter on the road. For two generations, local kids have told the tale of ghost cars seen along Reeder Road, including a white 1970s station wagon, which travelers have reported as driving right through the locked entrance to the road. Some believe this ghost car is part of the paranormal residue left from a tragic accident that befell a group of ghost hunters in the 1970s, when eighteen-year-old Bruce Wilson was killed by a train while trying to rock the family station wagon off the tracks. His brother and friends were pushing from behind after the vehicle became stuck on the rails during a jaunt in the “borrowed” family car through the notorious woods. According to accounts, the others tried to coax Bruce out of the car, but he kept insisting that he could get it free. The train struck the car with the young man still inside, as his brother watched in horror. Bruce Wilson is buried in nearby Ross Cemetery, the burial ground forever tied by ghost lore to the Region’s most legendary road.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE HOUSE OF 200 DEMONS

  The 2011 film The Rite, starring Anthony Hopkins, introduced a whole new generation to the reality of possession and exorcism, as seen through the eyes of a young seminarian who regains his wavering faith by studying under a Vatican exorcist. The Rite, based on a true story, loosely follows the life story of Father Gary Thomas, a Saratoga, California priest who is one of about two dozen “official” exorcists in the United States; that is, they have been sanctioned by their bishops to perform exorcisms.

  In his seminal work on possession and exorcism, Hostage to the Devil, the late Malachi Martin, himself a former Jesuit priest who sat in on numerous exorcisms in contemporary North America, based his entire book on the thesis that an exorcism is the final rendezvous among the demon, the victim and the exorcist—all of whom have been inextricably linked from before birth. Sometimes that exorcist is not a sanctioned one. Sometimes the exorcist is called to his ministry when it is the last thing expected. Father Michael Maginot, a Catholic priest assigned as pastor of the St. Stephen Martyr parish in Merillville, Indiana, has (as of this writing) just finished filming a documentary of his own experience: the 2012 Gary, Indiana exorcism of a woman named Latoya Ammons.

  In the fall of 2011, Ammons; her mother, Rose Campbell; and Latoya’s three children moved into a small rental house on Carolina Street. The street is sleepy (at least for Gary), and the family was close-knit and seemingly well adjusted, despite Latoya’s status as a single mother trying, like so many, to make ends meet. By May, however, Latoya would have her children taken from her by Indiana’s Department of Child Services, citing “severe spiritual stress” resulting from what Latoya—and numerous others—believed was demonic possession.

  Latoya would go on to give her story to the Indy Star, specifically to a reporter named Marisa Kwiatkowski. The resulting article would become the most read in the Star’s history, and the family’s story was one of the most notable appearances of the paranormal in American media history, even leading the nation’s most popular ghost hunter to purchase the family’s former home—what became known as the “Demon House,” or the “House of 200 Demons.”

  Latoya and her family had been in the house scarcely a month before strange events began, starting with the appearance of swarms of flies. Evocative of a horror movie, huge black horseflies suddenly infested their screened-in porch before Christmas, seemingly oblivious to the freezing temperatures. Latoya and her mother put down flypaper, swatted and swept up the insects day after day, but the infestation persisted.

  The Carolina Street house, otherwise known as the “House of 200 Demons,” pictured here after the Indy Star story broke. Photo by John B. Stephens.

  Soon, one by one, other events unfolded. On one occasion, a few minutes after midnight, Rosa and Latoya both said they heard the steady clump of footsteps climbing the basement stairs and the creak of the door opening between the basement and kitchen. Fearing an intruder, the two waited with bated breath at their bedroom doors for many, many minutes, fearing even a move to call the police. After much time had passed, Latoya flicked on the lights and went to inspect the kitchen and basement. No one was there. Even after a thorough inspection and putting a lock on the door, the noise continued night after night, worsening with the sound of pounding on the door and, sometimes, the growling of what sounded like an animal.

  Rosa said she then awoke one night and saw a shadowy figure of a man pacing back and forth in her living room. Fearing an intruder, she lay paralyzed in bed until morning and then went to investigate. Though the doors and windows were still locked from the inside and nothing seemed to be missing, the family found large, wet footprints on the living room floor.

  On March 10, 2012, the family was up late. There had been a death in the family, and friends were over, chatting and reminiscing into the evening hours. During the evening, Latoya’s daughter complained of being pulled off the couch by an unseen force. Shortly after, one of the boys was thrown into a freezer adjacent to the living room. Later, sometime after the children had gone to bed, suddenly conversation was interrupted by a piercing cry from the girl’s room, where she was sleeping with a cousin. When Rosa got to the room and switched on the light, she saw the body of her daughter drop to the bed. According to the cousin, the girl had been levitating, still asleep, several feet off the bed.

  The visitors never came back to the house on Carolina Street, and there were others who refused to enter the house but for a different reason. The local churches, which Latoya and Rosa begged for help, turned a deaf ear to their pleas, believing the women were imagining—or fabricating—their tales. Eventually, after an especially tearful visit to one small community church, a minister visi
ted the house and declared that it was troubled by spirits. The recommended remedy was a thorough cleaning with bleach and ammonia, followed by the inscribing of crosses on all of the doors and windows. Also prescribed was the anointing of the family members with oil.

  The first mention of “demons” in connection with the house seems to have been when Latoya and her mother contacted two clairvoyants, who sat the women down with the news that the house was infested with more than two hundred demonic spirits, that the forces were emanating from the basement and that they must remove the children from the house at once. But with nowhere else to go, Latoya was forced to resort to plan B. At the advice of one of the clairvoyants, she built a makeshift altar in the basement, covering a table with a sheet and placing on it a pure white candle and a statue of the Holy Family. Latoya dressed in white and, using a stick of sage from a local occult shop, went through the house with the burning stick, reading from Psalm 91, invoking God’s protection. After blessing and “smudging” every room of the house with the aromatic herb, she returned to the basement and placed the Bible on the rude altar, open to the psalm.

  What followed was three days of peace. And then the real trouble began. Latoya went on record with the Indy Star, claiming that demons then possessed not only her but also her three children, twelve, nine and seven years old. The “possession” would come and go without warning, but there was no mistaking when it was happening: their eyes bulged and flared accompanied by loveless smiling and gruff intonations of cryptic words and phrases. They felt lightheaded and besieged by an almost crippling fatigue. Headaches were a daily problem for nearly everyone in the house.

  Latoya described seeing her children first engaged with and then tormented by whatever was in the house. Each child was targeted differently. The youngest began speaking of an imaginary friend, who would coax him into the closet to “play” for hours on end and who talked about knowing what it was like to be killed. Her nine-year-old once began speaking about what it feels like to be murdered. Her daughter, twelve, heard a disembodied voice tell her she would not live another twenty minutes and that her family was going to be taken away.

  Latoya claimed her family also continued to be physically attacked in the house, her daughter assaulted by a heavy headboard, battered so hard that she needed stitches, and her younger boy flying out of the bathroom as if by some tremendous force. The attacks became so bad that some nights, for relief, the family stayed in a hotel. With their spiritual remedies seemingly exhausted, Latoya and Rosa appealed to their family physician for help. The doctor told a reporter later that even he was “scared” when he first heard of the events in the Ammons home. But from the notes he wrote in the family’s file—”delusional,” “hallucinations”—he apparently was more afraid for their mental health than of any supernatural manifestations in their lives.

  That would change abruptly, however, with the physical visit to the doctor’s office. According to the testimony of medical staff that appears in the DCS files, the two young boys began cursing the doctor in low, growling voices, the younger boy then being lifted and thrown against the office wall. Both boys then fainted. Someone called 911. A flurry of police officers arrived, no one quite sure what was going on. The boys were taken to a local hospital, where staff literally laughed off Latoya’s accounts of their troubles. When the boys woke up, the nine-year-old seemed himself, but the younger child had to be held down by five men. Someone—whether from the hospital or the doctor’s office—called the Department of Child Services to report the situation.

  Soon after, a caseworker arrived at the hospital to interview the family. An exam had found the children healthy and free of bruises or other marks. Latoya had been examined by a hospital psychiatrist and found to be stable. But while the caseworker interviewed the children, the seven-year-old began growling and baring his teeth. His eyes bulged and rolled back in his head. He then attempted to strangle his older brother and had to have his hands pried off his brother’s throat by the adults in the room.

  Suspecting that the children were for some reason performing at their mother’s urging, the caseworker later brought them into an isolated exam room, joined by a nurse and their grandmother. According to the caseworker’s report—which was backed up by the nurse—the younger boy immediately began to growl again before telling his brother, “It’s time to die.” At the same time, the older boy began thrusting his head into his grandmother’s stomach, at which point Rosa grabbed his hand and began to pray.

  It is what happened next that made the world take notice. With a weird grin, the older boy walked backward several steps and up the wall to the ceiling, glided across the ceiling over his grandmother and landed on his feet, never letting go of his grandmother’s hand.

  The caseworker told the Star reporter that she and the nurse ran out of the room and then called security. The caseworker also said she believed an “evil influence” might be at work in the lives of the Ammons family.

  Though the youngest boy spent the night in the hospital with Latoya, the next day was his eighth birthday, and the family returned with cake and small gifts. After the makeshift party, DCS informed Latoya that her children were being taken away from her, without a court order. The caseworker had written in the report that all of Latoya’s children were under “spiritual and emotional distress.”

  Latoya was devastated. After all the family had fought through, the idea of her being suspected of abuse or neglect was too much to bear. The children, too, were hysterical over the idea of being separated. But nothing could be done. Incredibly, however, the family had been at the hospital long enough to catch the attention of the hospital chaplain, and on the morning of April 20, 2012, he put in a call to Father Michael Maginot at St. Stephen, Martyr parish in nearby Merrillville, requesting something extraordinary: an exorcism for a young Gary boy. Though skeptical of the claims, Maginot agreed to visit the family after Mass that weekend. And on April 22, he arrived as promised at the house.

  Maginot was a believer in demons but also sensible and forthright. He told Latoya and Rosa that the first thing they needed to do was rule out any natural causes for what was happening. For the next two hours, he listened as the two women laid out the history of the case in grim detail. During the interview, the bathroom light took to flickering on occasion, stopping each time the priest walked over to investigate. Blinds on the kitchen window, too, swung back and forth as they talked, and wet footprints appeared in the living room. At one point, Latoya complained of a headache, prompting Father Maginot to place a crucifix against her forehead. Her body began to convulse uncontrollably.

  After a meticulous four-hour interview, Maginot said he was convinced the family was being tormented by demons but also that he believed there were ghosts—human, deceased entities—in the house. He went from room to room, blessing each with holy water and reading passages from the Bible as he walked. As he stood to leave, he strongly encouraged Latoya and Rosa to leave the home.

  But less than a week later, the two women were back at the house to let the case manager check the condition of the home. The caseworker arrived with a police officer she’d asked to accompany her and two other officers, who’d asked to come out of curiosity.

  The group went from room to room, inspecting first the main floor and its three bedrooms, living room and bath. The kitchen door, where the first sounds had started, led to the unfinished basement with concrete floors. Directly under the stairs, however, was a dirt floor. The concrete around it was jagged, as though it had been broken. Latoya told police that the demons seemed to originate from that patch of dirt.

  One of the officers present was a Gary police captain, who went on record saying that he came to believe in demons after visiting the “Demon House.” During the visit, an officer’s audio recorder malfunctioned. The power light flashed to indicate the batteries were dying, even though the officer had placed fresh batteries in the recorder earlier that day. Another officer recorded audio and, when he played it b
ack later, heard an unknown voice whisper, “Hey.”

  The officers also took photos of the house. In one photo of the basement stairs, there was a cloudy white image in the upper right-hand corner. When an officer enlarged the photo, that cloud appeared to resemble a face. The enlargement also revealed a second, green image that police say looked like a woman.

  The Gary police captain said photos he snapped with his cellphone also seemed to have strange silhouettes in them. The radio in his police-issued Ford malfunctioned on the way home. Later that night, the garage at his Gary home refused to open, even though the power was on everywhere else. On the way home, the driver’s seat in his car also started moving backward and forward on its own. When he took it into the dealership, the mechanic told him the motor on the driver’s seat was broken, which could have caused an accident.

  In April 2012, DCS petitioned Lake Juvenile Court for temporary wardship of the three children. The request was granted. An investigation had found that Latoya had neglected her children’s education by not having them in school regularly. The finding was not just a symptom of the events on Carolina Street. Records showed that the same situation had been recorded in 2009, two years before the family had moved into the “Demon House.” The older children were sent to St. Joseph’s Carmelite Home in neighboring East Chicago, while the younger child was sent to another live-in facility for psychiatric evaluation. There, a clinical psychologist found him stable and coherent, except when he talked about demons. It was only then that his talk became “illogical.” He tended to change the subject, and his stories varied each time he was asked about the events in the house. Wright believed the now-eight-year-old did not suffer from a true psychotic disorder. She wrote in her report that the case was one of “delusion” instilled in the boy by his mother. The psychologist at St. Joseph’s had the same diagnosis: Latoya had presumably influenced the older children into believing the family was possessed.