by Zak Bagans
Then I had an idea. While everyone else was trying to get to the family, the priest, the ER staff, and the reporter who broke the story in the Indiana press, I decided to go a different route and get into the house itself. A house in which a demonic possession takes place is sacred in our profession, so I figured if I bought the house, then I could investigate it whenever I wanted and figure out what was happening on my own terms. I’m fortunate to have made a decent living from my TV shows, so maybe I could pull out a trump card that no one else could and make the house mine. That would be a huge victory.
But there was a problem: In order to buy the house, I needed to find the owner, Charles Reed. I remembered seeing him in one of the videos about the incident, but how could I find him? The house had been rented to a new family, and I couldn’t go through them—they didn’t like all the attention and were angry about the media trying to get close.
After several unsuccessful attempts to get a hold of Reed, my buddy Dave Schrader came through again with Reed’s cell phone number, so I called and left a message. (All this was happening just before my call time to film Ghost Adventures, mind you.) Minutes later, my phone rang, and it was him.
YES!
But now I had to tell this guy that I wanted to buy his house on the spot, even though it wasn’t for sale. So I explained who I was, and I thought to myself, Just get to the point. I blurted it out: “Hey, man, I saw your house on the news this morning, and I want to buy it.” I held my breath for a split second. Would he be offended? Would he want a kajillion dollars for it? Would he hang up?
“Sure,” he said. “How much?”
That was the best feeling in the world. I didn’t spit out a number because I had no idea what the Indiana real estate market was like. Instead, I left it to him to start the bidding.
“Thirty-five thousand,” he said.
“Deal!” I sent him a PayPal deposit minutes later and went to film my episode, the sweet smell of victory radiating off of me.
But the next day I began to worry. I thought the media blitz might make Reed think that he could get more money from someone else, and our verbal contract wasn’t going to hold up. I wasn’t trying to steal the house from him. He told me the asking price and I agreed, so it should be all good, right? I called him back and asked him to send me an email stating that I had bought the house and he had received the deposit, which he did. That made me feel better.
So I had my foot in the door—literally. The house was mine. At this point, it wasn’t so much about making a film as it was about getting into the house and investigating it for myself. I had to see the forces at work in Indiana that had caused such an uproar. But it’s never that easy, is it?
Somehow word spread that I’d bought the house, even though the transaction between Reed and me was private. Marisa Kwiatkowski, the reporter who broke the story for the Indianapolis Star, called me, asked for details, and asked if she could publish them. I was shocked at how quickly she’d learned about the purchase, but I said yes. I wasn’t trying to hide anything, so why not? Her article came out the next morning, and I was flooded with media requests like never before. Seriously, I’ve never had so much media attention in my life, from Germany to Australia to every news source in the U.S. The home page of the USA Today website reported that I had bought the “Demon House” and planned on doing an investigation and possibly a documentary or feature film, and with that article came a lot of interview requests.
I was asked to be on Inside Edition twice, and I did those interviews back at home in Las Vegas. During the interviews, I explained why I had bought the house and what it meant to me. Because of the number of credible witnesses who had seen supernatural things, including three police officers (from three separate jurisdictions) who had witnessed events that had made them believers, I couldn’t resist being a part of it.
A demonic possession is a fight between good and evil over a human soul. When an exorcism is conducted, a priest fights with the devil for the human being who’s infected. We can learn a lot from these exorcisms.
Religion is taught through sacred texts like the Bible. But for atheists and nonbelievers, the Bible is still a book, and it’s the story of Jesus Christ, a man. He’s not here to sit down and tell us that everything ever written about Him is true. Having faith means believing in his teachings, which have been passed down through many generations. And people believe in different gods. Christianity, Judaism, Islam—these are all belief systems, and they are different for everyone. But an exorcism that involves supernatural events that defy the laws of physics and scientific explanation…I believe something godlike is connected to this event. At the very least, there’s a force at work that we don’t understand, but should strive to. To me, this is the crux of being a paranormal investigator. A lot of people don’t believe in anything they can’t see or feel, so a possession is a way we can see God and the devil and justify our religious beliefs. Many find it scary and want to get away from it or deny it. But I want to be there to document it and learn from it, like a storm-chaser rushing to the next killer tornado. I want to find proof that there’s something more than a living physical body that can also exist on the other side. It would give us answers to so many things we don’t understand yet about life, the afterlife, God, you name it.
There’s a big risk that goes along with all this: We don’t understand what we’re messing with. The highest members of the clergy can’t tell us exactly who God is or how He came to exist. There are theories and scriptures, but to actually witness God defeating the devil in an exorcism…I think that’s the most powerful material event in the living world that lets us witness the power of God. It’s more powerful than prayer. In prayer, you wait for a response. There’s no beam of light while you’re praying (that I know of) that shoots down and enables you to talk face-to-face with God. People who want to feel God go to church and raise their hands to get a closer connection to Him. Sometimes they think they feel him (and some people might), but there are more mysteries surrounding God than anything. But in an exorcism, you can actually do that: feel the power of God.
It’s what I think combat must be like when an enemy soldier gets shot. When the bullets hit the enemy, you see the effect it has on him. In an exorcism, when a priest says the words of God, it’s like bullets hitting the demon and terminating it. It’s proof to me that the power of God is real. Seeing exorcisms work has made me more religious. And I’m intrigued by holy water burning the skin and a cross debilitating a demon. It goes much deeper than ghost hunting for me. We’re getting at the source of spirits and the afterlife.
So I owned the house and was doing a bunch of interviews. In a way it was good to have my name in the media, because the family, the priest, the police officers, and everyone else who had witnessed these events saw that I was serious about getting to the bottom of what had happened. It kind of put them in shock, too, because the press associated them with me in a lot of articles. That should have made it easy for me to get a hold of them and learn their stories, right?
Nope. I did everything I could think of to contact them and got nowhere. Only Father Michael, the priest who had performed the exorcism, would talk to me. He even thought it was great that I had bought the house. So I sent him an exclusive agreement to make a documentary film, which he signed. Owning the rights to his story was a huge coup, so I decided not to wait and to make the film immediately.
I hired Matt Mourgides to be my production manager, some camera crewmen from LA, and Jay Wasley and Billy Tolley for electronics. While we were in pre-production, my main focus was to interview everyone who had been involved as quickly as possible, before any sharks could lock them up and steal them away from me.
Right away I had an issue. (The obstacles to this project never stop popping up.) I was contacted by a producer who said that he had worked on a paranormal movie. Our conversation was very vague at first. I didn’t want to play my hand, so I left things open until I could figure out his angle. He said that
he loved my story about buying the house and wanted to talk again later, so I hung up thinking nothing more about it. But it wouldn’t be the last time I would hear from him.
I went back to making my film and quickly learned that everyone’s ego had swollen since the story broke. So much attention was being paid to the people involved that they started shopping their stories around to the highest bidder. This is America, and I get it, but it was frustrating nonetheless. Everyone was hard to talk to. The Indianapolis Star wouldn’t let me use Marisa’s articles in the film, and I wasn’t allowed to interview her. She offered to meet me at the house to have the Star write about my making the documentary, but it doesn’t work that way. This is a two-way street: You help me and I help you. They gave me all this attention for buying the house but then wouldn’t allow me the courtesy of an interview or give me permission to use her article in the film, so I flushed that plan.
Next up was Captain Charles Austin of the Gary Police Department, who was one of the first officers to respond to the family. He had investigated along with Child Protective Services because the kids were going to school with bloody noses and not acting right. CPS took the kids away and went to the home with Captain Austin to interview the family. This is when they told them that they were possessed by demons, and Captain Austin didn’t believe them for a second. He thought they were making it up, and can you blame him? But then he had his own experience. After walking back to his police car to drive away, his AM/FM radio came to life with very high static, and a deep, demonic voice came through saying, “YOU IN THERE!” He was on the phone with another police officer back at the Demon House when it happened, and the other officer heard the voice, too. That officer also saw an apparition in the house, so suddenly the police believed the family’s claims of demonic possession because they saw it themselves! Later, Captain Austin would label the house “a portal to hell.”
I talked with Captain Austin, and, man, is he a character. He’s funny, laughs a lot, and is a pleasure to be around. One day, he told me that another producer had contacted him. It turned out to be a guy I know, which shows you how competitive the entertainment industry is. Everyone was going after these people—including me, to be honest, but there was a difference in our objectives. Hollywood sees the money in the story, and I just want to tell the story. My production isn’t designed for maximum profit; it’s bare bones so I can capture what happened. After talking with Charles Austin many times, I got the impression that he would give me an on-camera interview, as would the landlord. At that point I had a filming schedule, a crew, a lot of equipment, three of the participants, and the house. Ultimately the family was the priority, but no one had heard from them, probably because everyone wanted the life rights to their story. I couldn’t compete with the offers that I knew were being tossed at them anyway.
Inside Edition wanted to do another interview with me in the house, but I wasn’t sure because I hadn’t done a proper investigation yet. We were in our third or fourth day of filming background shots and superficial pieces, and at one point something dark happened. I think I saw a demon attack someone I let into the house. It shocked me and the crew. I had no idea what was waiting for us in that house, so there was no way I was going to let reporters in. Besides, it would have been irresponsible of me to give them access when I knew that there was a risk of bodily harm. I might as well have invited them to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
So I kept Inside Edition on the porch and did an interview with them there, and right away I wasn’t feeling well. Not myself at all. I didn’t know if I was sick, tired, or what, but I was foggy and unable to concentrate. It felt like everyone was speaking in slow motion. I didn’t want to be there, but I kept telling myself to be professional and fight through it. You can Google that interview and see how out of it I was. Later, the crew told me that I was different every time we went to that place. Even if we were just putting in a smoke detector or walking around, I seemed to get meaner and more short-tempered. I’ve been around a lot of bad energy and I’ve fought with a few nasty demons, but this place was different—so much that it actually made me stop filming for a while.
One day we were troubleshooting a camera system. No filming was going on except for the surveillance cameras, when I suddenly went off on a crew member for no reason. I was shouting at him, and things got physical. This man weighs 200 pounds, and I picked him up and pinned him against a wall, something I’m not sure I could do on my own. Later he said that I seemed to have superhuman strength and didn’t look like myself when it happened.
So many things have happened to people in that house—workers removing mold, plumbers, the building inspector, everyone has some type of experience while they’re there or after they leave. Strange things even happened to people I interviewed for the documentary after they left the house.
To be honest, I feared for my life a few times there. Something kept telling me that I had to do this, but I don’t want to sustain permanent damage. There’s something about the house that I’ve connected with, for better or worse. After I pinned that guy up against the wall, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to leave. I remember being at the front door looking back inside and seeing a tall, dark figure standing at the threshold of the kitchen leading down to the basement—the same type of figure the police officers saw. This is beyond anything I’d ever witnessed before. This is beyond the power of human spirits. This house may not be a portal to hell, but it’s a portal to something that is powerful and evil.
At that point, I don’t think I realized what I had gotten myself into. For most investigations, I can show up, do my job, come into contact with human spirits, go home, have a lockdown hangover for a day or two, and I’m fine. This place is different. It’s indescribable. Something in this house is aware of me and uses me. An incident that occurred a few weeks later confirmed this belief.
A woman who claims to have lived in the house in the 1980s saw me on the news and reached out to my producers. After we validated that she had in fact lived there as a teen, we agreed to meet her at the house. She wanted to go inside, but I was hesitant. It was an open investigation where bad things had happened to children, and this woman had her family with her. It was dangerous, but she was insistent. She had lived there for many years, so finally I caved, and we all went in together. At first it seemed harmless. She showed me which room was hers, and we spent some time talking about what it had been like to live there. She even revealed that she’d had nightmares as a kid, and when she had a specific nightmare, someone she knew would die the next day. I honestly wasn’t surprised given how evil this place is.
Then we headed downstairs to the basement, but as we moved through it, something happened to the woman’s leg, like something hit her or a dog bit it. She said, “Ow!” and turned to her son to yell at him, but he was ten feet away and had nothing to do with it. She was angry. “Why the hell did you do that?” she spat. It was a strange moment, and she immediately went upstairs and left the house. The visit pretty much ended right there.
Days later, she called to say that her daughter was possessed and hadn’t been the same since being in the house. Apparently her daughter tried to kill herself and her mom just a few days after I met them, an act that was totally unlike her. Even worse was that she called me from the ER in Indianapolis, where her daughter was still being treated for a suicide attempt.
This was it for me—a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, and a kick in the crotch all at once. I was in deep. Really deep. I’d bought a portal to hell that had some sort of guard dog demon prowling around it, and it shook my self-confidence. It’s like deciding to hang out with a bad crowd and seeing them do bad things and knowing you don’t belong there. Your first instinct is to look for a way out.
But then I remembered that I was stronger than that. I had to be there. I had to do this. I had to see what was going on in this house and document it. I felt responsible for allowing these innocent people into the house, and I’ll never be
able to take that back, but I could make it right, too. I could fight the darkness that had set up this awful situation. It was the demon’s will. It persuaded me to let a new family into the house so that it could do damage to them, and I wasn’t strong enough to stop it. Well, that won’t happen again. I bought this portal to hell, and it’s too late to get my money back, so I’m all in. There are no refunds when it comes to fighting evil.
But the challenges are constant. Around this time I discovered that Father Mike had signed a contract with another producer (just four days after signing one with me), and it hit the media immediately. So I called him and reminded him that he had signed an exclusive agreement with me, and that exclusivity was implicitly outlined. He said that he wanted to do a documentary with me and a Hollywood feature film with the other guy, and he didn’t see a problem with doing both. I explained that he couldn’t. There’s more legal information that I can’t write about, but the point is that he signed a contract to be a part of my movie and also wanted to be part of a separate movie, which was a violation of my contract.
Father Mike and I had a good talk, but suddenly I got a call from that other producer while I was at the house. He immediately said that I’d better watch it because I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, which I took as a threat. He belittled me over and over again on the phone and tried to bully me to get me out of the picture. He kept throwing out the amount of money that his movie had made to make me feel small, but it had the opposite effect. I hung up the phone and dug my heels in for a fight. Money changes people, and I can say that with the benefit of experience on my side. This guy threw his money around like it was morals and he was a better person than me because he had more. That logic doesn’t work. That’s like saying the sun revolves around the Earth. I suddenly felt like I was in a different movie, where I was the protagonist trying to tell the story while a big-money antagonist tried to stop me. I wasn’t flinching.