The setting is unimpressive. A gravel road lined by trees and weed-choked ditches connects Newton County in the southwest corner of Missouri, with equally rural parts of Oklahoma. This is County Road E50, better know as Spook Light Road. And something that is impressive happens there often.

The Spook Light, found south of Joplin, Missouri, is a glowing orb the size of a basketball that floats down the road from Oklahoma. If you’re sitting in a car waiting for the light, it often dances on the hood of the car, winks out, and reappears behind the car like it had gone right through the cab. The locals say this happens a lot.

Roberta Williams, from nearby Carthage, Missouri, has seen the Spook Light, and she knows it’s real. “It was before midnight,” she said. “It was like a big, huge ball with a yellow glow and it went right straight through our car. I just screamed.”

According to local legend, two Quapaw Indian lovers, chased by warriors and an angry father, jumped from a cliff into the Spring River and died. The Spook Light is supposedly one of the young American Indians walking this quiet road searching for their lost love.

The light gained prominence when white settlers moved into the southwest corner of Missouri in 1886, but the local American Indians reported seeing the light in the early 1800s, said historian Virginia Hoare of Seneca, Missouri. People have seen the light ever sense.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers studied the light in 1946, but couldn’t find the source. Explanations range from gas escaping from the abundant shale in the area, to refracted automobile headlights, to UFOs, and ball lightning.

Northwest Missouri State University physics professor David Richardson planned to investigate the Spook Light with colleagues in 2011, but the EF5 tornado that struck nearby Joplin two months before the study put it on hold. “I’ve always been fascinated by ball lightning and if the Joplin Spook Lights failed the first hypothesis (headlights), then I’d have turned to (ball lightning),” Richardson said. “Having a place that regularly produces ball lightning would be awesome to study, if in fact the location produced it.” Ball lightning in nature is, as of yet, unexplained, although it has been created in the laboratory.

Regardless of what causes the light, it’s there. Locals have seen it often, including Hoare. “When I was in high school, and I graduated in 1934, I saw it,” she said. “It came right through the car. We saw it coming toward us and I looked out the back window and I saw it had passed through the car.”

Former mayor of Seneca Gary Roark has never seen the Spook Light, but knows many who have. “It’s a little bit like people with stories about UFOs,” Roark said. “There’s no doubt they’ve seen something, but what it is is anybody’s guess.”

A building sits at the turnoff to Spook Light Road. Although it’s a private residence now, it used to be the Spook Light museum. The museum was originally owned by Arthur “Spooky” Meadows who later sold it to Garland “Spooky” Middleton. Middleton sold soda to people who stopped to see the Spook Light.

Bill Caldwell, librarian for the nearby Joplin Globe, said he knows why people are interested in the light. “It’s such a community happening. It’s just part of the landscape,” he said. “It is unexplained and intangible, there’s just no way to know what it is.”

To find Spook Light Road from Joplin, take Interstate 44 to Exit 4; Missouri 43 south 4 miles to Gum Road; turn west on Gum Road to a T; turn south; then turn west onto E50. Hoare has advice on the best place to park. “You never know quite where to stop on the road,” Hoare said. “But people say ‘where do you find the most beer cans? That’s where you can stop and see the Spook Light.’”

I trusted Virginia – she’s seen the Light.

The old brick hospital sits amongst a sprawl of elegant buildings in the rolling green hills of Clay County Missouri. Constructed in 1923, it’s not the oldest structure on the properties of the Belvoir Winery, but it might be the most haunted.

Twenty-four-year-old Emily Krickle went on a guided ghost tour of the winery in November and the hospital quickly became uncomfortable.

“We were only allowed to go in the hallways,” she said. “The building was so old, that’s where the supporting beams were.”

The investigators from CREEPZ Ghost Commandos took the group to the second floor and set up motion sensors. CREEPZ conducts paranormal tours of the winery along with the team Paranormal Research Investigators.

“They talked to us about how psychics came in and said one (ghost) in the hallway was a lady who passed away in the hospital and liked to sing,” Krickle said. “In the opposite end of the hallway there is a mischievous man.”

A heavy feeling enveloped the group as it wandered one end of the dark hallway. Then a CREEPZ member brought out a white noise generator.

“They started asking questions. At first we didn’t hear anything,” Krickle said. “They said, ‘is it okay we’re here with you?’ Very clearly through the white noise we heard a ‘yes.’ They asked a couple of questions, but I don’t remember what they were because I was shocked.”

The oppressive feeling of the area became too much for one participant. “In my group there was a lady, upper 50s early 60s, she was there with her daughters,” Krickle said. “She sat down and said she was tired.”

After a few minutes on the floor, she stood, but Adam Tillery of CREEPZ knew something wasn’t right. “We hear a big thud in the background. It was her head on the wall,” Tillery said. “She was standing. Her eyes were rolling in her head.”

Tillery panned his flashlight over to the woman. As the harsh light bathed her face, Tillery and Krickle both saw the whites of the woman’s eyes. “She was sweating,” Krickle said. “She didn’t remember anything about it.”

The woman’s daughters escorted her outside, leaving five people in the second floor hallway. The now-smaller group quickly discovered it wasn’t alone.

“I asked one of the guys, ‘has that happened before?’” Krickle said. “He started to say it happened one other time, when down the hallway there was a deep growl.”

Everyone froze. “These ladies heard it. I heard it. About four feet away from us we heard a growl,” Tillery said. “At this time, it was, wow. What was that?”

After the growl, Tillery grew quiet and looked at the few members of the group. “He stopped talking and said, ‘I just want to make sure. You all heard that right?’” Krickle said.

Tillery asked if anyone wanted to walk down the hallway, and Krickle volunteered. “I actually walked down the hallway toward the mischievous man’s room,” she said. The farther she walked down the hall, the more oppressive the feeling became. “I said, ‘that’s okay, I don’t need to go any farther.”

Tillery was ready to go, too. “I wanted to stay and find out more,” he said. “But when it comes to a growl like that, it could be something powerful.”

Belvoir, French for “beautiful view,” began its life as the Reed Springs Hotel in 1887. The hotel sold to the organization the International Order of Odd Fellows in 1895. The Odd Fellows used the hotel as a place to care for orphans and the elderly until an accident in 1900.

“Something was frozen in the basement and they used blow torches and accidently burned it down,” Tillery said.

The Odd Fellows constructed a number of buildings on what was for years a 240-acre working farm, but only three of the historical buildings remain amongst a smattering of others. The administration building, the “old folks” building, and the hospital. Nearly 600 people are buried in the cemetery on the site; some of them may still be hanging around.

The night Krickle visited Belvoir it appears they were.

After the hospital, the group made their way to the administration building. “We went up to the third floor where they used to teach the orphans,” Krickle said. “The only thing we kind of found there was when we sang, ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ the meters would go off.” That was it for activity there, as well as the cemetery, however an outbuilding known as the “bunker” once used for food storage was a little more active.

“They said the orphans liked to hide there from doing chores,” Krickle said. “We were sitting in a semicircle; they got out dowsing rods.”

Krickle held the metal rods, some believe can be used to communicate with the dead, and asked questions. The rods moved on their own accord.

“If you’re here with friends, point out your friends,” Krickle said into the darkened room. “One rod went down the hallway, the other went to he corner.” She asked if the spirits wanted to play, and the rods moved again.

Krickle handed the rods to another member of the group who asked, “Do you think she’s pretty?” The rods signaled, “yes.”

“The lady who was with us said, ‘we have to leave, do you want to say goodbye?’” Krickle said. The rods signified ‘yes,’ then Krickle felt something she couldn’t explain rationally – a hug. “I was feeling a lot of pressure on my left side like someone is actually leaning into me and my arm was cold,” she said. “I thought that was pretty cool.”

Tillery said this sort of experience at the winery is normal. CREEPZ has been associated with the winery since February 2011 and has captured evidence of paranormal activity.

“Voices in the hospital. Laughing, singing. We’ve also caught strange noises throughout the old folks home,” he said. “One guy that was with us said he saw someone peeking around the corner, and he kind of freaked out.”

Visitors have also told CREEPZ they’ve seen apparitions and shadow people on the grounds. But the hospital is the paranormal centerpiece.

“There’s one of these hallways with double doors. Right in that area on one occasion it sounded like a really deep breath as we were getting ready to cross these double doors,” Tillery said. “Another time I was grabbed on my shoulders.”

The feeling, he said, is that of being watched, like something’s going to jump out at any minute.

“I had more things happen to me (at the winery) than any place in the Midwest,” Tillery said. “I’d say its one of the up coming paranormal hotspots. That’s a very spooky location.”

Hazel Ridge Cemetery sits atop a hill in Chariton County, Missouri, off a rural blacktop highway, and at the end of a tree-shrouded gravel road. Tina and her boyfriend Randy stepped out of their car at the entrance of the cemetery, and into horror. “My boyfriend and I have been checking out old cemeteries in Linn and Charlton County,” Tina said. “We have had a few experiences, but nothing like I had at Hazel Ridge.”

The couple stood outside their car at the edge of the cemetery; their normally active dog Rose cowered at Tina’s side. Tina felt someone with them, someone they couldn’t see. “I said, ‘Hello. Hello. Anyone here? We are not here to hurt you we just wanna talk to you.”

Someone, or some thing, heard her.

“I got a tapping on my chest as if a child wanted my attention,” she said. “Then my pearl necklace went straight out and turned over and landed hard on my neck.”

Rose, still pinned to Tina’s side, began to growl. Tina and Randy grabbed the dog and rushed back to their car.

“As we drove off I had a sadness come over me like I left someone there, and I can’t shake it,” she said. “Randy thinks we had a hitchhiker come home with us.”

The couple endured this hitchhiker’s small ghostly activities around their home until Randy couldn’t take it anymore.

“Randy told it to go back where it came from, we didn’t want it here,” Tina said. “He got scratched on the shoulder leaving three marks. We have not been to any cemeteries since.”

Hazel Ridge is a pre-Civil War cemetery a few miles north of the small town of Brunswick, the self-proclaimed Pecan Capital of Missouri. The cemetery’s most notable grave marker belongs to Pettis Perkinson, a farmer whose slave B.K. Bruce became the first black Treasurer of the United States. It’s also the favorite haunt of mid-Missouri ghost hunter Ryan Straub. Straub has investigated Hazel Ridge more than 100 times, and it’s never the same cemetery twice.

“The tombstones move,” Straub said. “I know it sounds weird, but, I’ve got every section mapped out and they’re not the way they were.”

Fellow paranormal investigators Mike Haurcade and Kurt Ostrom have accompanied Straub to Hazel Ridge numerous times, and are baffled by the phenomenon.

“We both drew maps, Ryan and I, and they both matched,” Haurcade said. “When we got to the cemetery at night, some of the tombstones didn’t match the ones we’d mapped. Some of the trees were in different places than other times, and some of the larger tombstones were in different spots. Something changed.”

Ostrom encountered something more disturbing than inconsistent marks on a map. “I saw a couple of gravestones shift,” he said. Ostrom leaned on a stone that suddenly wasn’t there anymore, but that didn’t keep him away. He’s accompanied Straub and Haurcade on ghost hunts at Hazel Ridge many times, working around dying cell phones, flashlights, and truck batteries. “A lot of things die up here,” he said.

Gravestones from the 1800s to recent years rise from the grass like jagged teeth, and a great wooden cross looms at the threshold of the cemetery like a gatekeeper. “A threshold is a gateway to everything,” Ryan said. “Anything where two planes meet, where the lines blur, there’s more of a chance spirits will come through.”

Ostrom and Haurcade have seen things that came through into the cemetery. “I saw a large shadow figure,” Ostrom said. “I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t pretty.” Haurcade saw something similar, a man peering at him from behind a tree. “I shined my flashlight at it and it froze,” he said. “I saw someone standing behind the tree and I could see their head and shoulder.” Haurcade turned to look for the people who came with him, and they were all behind him. “It wasn’t any of us. At that point I turned back toward the tree and couldn’t see anything at all. I’ve seen and heard some other odd things, but (the figure behind the tree) I can’t dispel.”

Hazel Ridge Cemetery isn’t just a place of moving tombstones, dead batteries, and ghostly figures; it’s also home to a voice, the voice of a long-dead child. During an investigation Straub sat an audio recorder atop a weatherworn tombstone. “The next morning we listened to it and it sounded like chipmunks,” Straub said. “I slowed it down and it was a little girl singing ‘Ring Around the Rosie.’”

Maybe if Tina and Randy had tried to collect EVPs at Hazel Ridge Cemetery, they could have heard the voice of a lonely girl, a little girl who pokes people in the chest, and follows them home. A girl who died decades ago. A girl who sings “Ring Around the Rosie.”

One of the frustrating aspects of covering the paranormal is its treatment in the mainstream media, if the media covers the paranormal topic at all. You’ll be hard pressed to find a ghost story without a mention of “Ghost Busters,” a Bigfoot report without a reference to “Harry and the Hendersons,” or a UFO story without the term “little green men” or the “X-Files” theme playing in the background.

But there was a time when major metropolitan daily newspapers took UFO reports seriously, such as this encounter near Kansas City, Missouri, that appeared in the 18 February 1967, edition of The Kansas City Star. Stella Holcomb, a mother of seven in her early thirties, looked out the north living room window of her Prairie Lee Lake, Missouri, home at 7:50 p.m. when she saw something that shouldn’t be there – a saucer in the sky.

“It was as big as a house, oval shaped, and had red, green and blue blinking lights,” she told The Star.

Holcomb’s husband Don, a member of the Kansas City Fire Department, and neighbors on their cozy cul-de-sac at the north end of the lake, Nadine Wagner and Marlene Morris, were in the living room when Holcomb saw the light in the sky.

“Sure, we saw the thing,” Morris said in the newspaper account. “We saw it coming in like a star and we all jumped in the Holcomb’s station wagon. Us three women and thirteen kids.”

Don Holcomb had to report to work, so the women and children pursued the craft.

“The thing came from the west like a big red ball,” Stella Holcomb said. “It turned south, then west right out there back of our house. I’d say about a half mile away.”

The craft then moved west and seemed to descend into the tree line near the bottom of a hill.

“We thought it landed,” Holcomb said. “That’s why we jumped into the station wagon and followed it.”

Several teenagers who had gathered for a service at the Prairie Lee Baptist Church across the road stood outside to watch the UFO. Holcomb drove her Rambler station wagon west on her paved street, then down a rural dirt road, chasing the craft.

It hovered about forty or fifty feet above a pasture about 300 feet away from the cars.

“As soon as I slammed on my breaks, the kids piled out of the car and started running across a small ravine towards the fence,” Holcomb said. “As soon as they reached the fence, the UFO started moving away.”

Although the adults couldn’t make out many details of the craft because of the bright lights it emitted, Mark Morris and Earl Holcomb, who ran to the pasture fence, said through the flashing “red, green, blue and white lights,” the craft was “round like a saucer.”

As the group stared at the house-sized saucer, smaller craft began to circle above it.

When it began to move away, the women called the children back into the car and the chase began again, going onto U.S. 50 highway before Holcomb’s station wagon began to have car problems and they returned home.

The ship followed them. When Holcomb pulled into her driveway around 8:30 p.m., the craft descended and landed behind a grove of trees about a quarter mile away from the house.

“I know it was on the ground because I could see the lights shining through the trees,” she said.

Holcomb called nearby Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base and within a half hour a military airplane circled the area above her house. Air Base Capt. James Stethens kept Holcomb on the telephone, relaying what she saw to the pilot of the airplane searching the area; but the pilot never saw the glowing saucer or the smaller lights that had again become airborne.

“It zipped over, around and under the plane,” Holcomb said. “I can’t see how he could help but see it. But he said he didn’t.”

Someone at the Air Force base did. “The Air Force did say they spotted an object on radar,” Earl said.

While Holcomb spoke to Capt. Stethens, Wagner, her husband and three children drove to the shelter house of the nearby lake and watched the craft hovering, and the Air Force plane circling over it.

A Johnson County Sheriff’s deputy arrived at the Holcomb house at 9:42 p.m. and saw the patrolling plane, but couldn’t see the UFOs.

“I am not a drinking woman and I am not silly, and I sure don’t know how to explain this sort of thing, but a lot of people saw the same thing I saw,” Holcomb said. “I’m beginning to wonder, could it be that just certain people can see these flying objects?”

Follow-up calls to the base by the nearby newspaper The Independence Examiner, failed to reach Capt. Stethens to confirm the Air Force’s response to the call. Richards-Gebaur closed in 1994.

Rebecca was six years old in 1978 when something terrifying walked into her life.

“When I was a child I saw what I now know is called the Hat Man,” Rebecca said. “The Hat Man I saw spoke to me.”

Although she now lives in Florida, Rebecca grew up in Missouri, and spent parts of 1977 and 1978 in her grandmother’s house in Independence, Missouri.

“During this time in my life my mother, sister and I lived with my grandparents off and on due to our own circumstances and the fact that my grandfather was in and out of the hospital,” she said.

Rebecca remembers other relatives staying in her grandparents’ house at that time, taking the spare bedroom she usually shared with her sister. That night, Rebecca and her sister slept in her grandmother’s room, and soon discovered they weren’t alone.

“My sister and grandmother were sleeping in the bed like normal, and I was sleeping between the two of them with my head at the foot of the bed,” Rebecca said. “I had a terrible nightmare, one where the dresser drawers were opening and closing on their own and ghosts and clothing were flying out.”

Rebecca remembers her dreamself lying in the same place as her body slept.

“Most dreams are in other places, or familiar places, but never from the perspective of where you are actually sleeping,” she said. “I woke up from the dream very afraid.”

Terrified, she gently kicked, trying to wake her grandmother, but couldn’t rouse her.

“I debated getting up and finding my mom, but I would have had to walk past the dresser from my dream and decided that was too scary,” she said. “I turned my gaze away from the dresser and up to the window behind the headboard of the bed and that is where I saw the Man.”

The Man, a dark, looming figure, seemed to stand on the headboard, but Rebecca now wonders if the Man stood behind the headboard and was extremely tall.

“The Man was wearing a long flowing coat, a top hat and carried a cane,” Rebecca said. “He had no real features, but was a solid object that blocked the light from the window behind him. I was terrified because there was someone else in the room and because I recognized it as non-human.”

Rebecca and the Hat Man stared at one another for what could have been minutes, or seconds, when the figure lifted its arm and pointed at her.

“He said, ‘This is your last chance,’” Rebecca said. “His voice did not fill the room. The best way I can describe it is that it filled my head. The voice was flat with no residual sound, as if everything surrounding the words had been removed.”

After the Hat Man spoke those five cryptic words, he put down his arm and disappeared. She told her family of the encounter the next day, but they paid little attention.

“Little kids are always filled with stories that grown ups nod and smile while hearing,” she said. “I vaguely remember being afraid of grandma’s room for a while, but not much else following the incident.”

She didn’t bring up the Hat Man encounter again until her teens; this time her family listened.

“Everyone believed in ghosts, so it was another neat ghost story from a family member for everyone except my aunt,” she said. This is because her aunt has had more than one ghostly encounter, all eerily similar to her own. “She said she had seen the same man in that same house.”

Although the fear of her grandmother’s room has long since gone, along with the terror of that long ago moment when she met the Hat Man, one question remains.

“I’ve tried to figure out what, ‘This is your last chance,’ meant,” she said. “My grandfather died somewhere around this time, but I can not be certain if the Hat Man appeared before or after his death. I do know that grandpa was not in the house at the time, but he spent quite a bit of time in the hospital toward the end of his life. Was the Hat Man telling me this was my last chance to talk with him? I don’t know.”

Life in Bolckow … never a cell phone or internet signal … landlines down constantly … electricity blinking on and off sporadically … locals are reclusive and unfriendly … stories of strange disappearances and mutilated pets … sounding like a horror movie yet?

— Tamin, Facebook post, February 3, 2011, 3:03 p.m.

A long, winding grey asphalt road splits from a rural highway thirty-some miles north of St. Joseph, Missouri, and runs between brown winter farm fields and a scattering of trees before it enters the tiny town of Bolckow, Missouri. A weathered sign welcoming visitors stands at the city limits. To some, the welcome ends there. This hilly town with its curbless streets, long dark business fronts, and many houses with grand days decades past, hides something sinister.

Tamin and Tony Morrell bought a house here in 2008; they signed the papers on Christmas Eve and moved in Christmas Day. “When we bought the house it was known as ‘the old haunted house,’” Tamin said.

The house was strange from the first day, partially because the previous owners never really moved. “They left everything,” Tony said. Furniture sat as it had for years, pictures hung from nails on the walls, dirty socks lay crumpled in the bathroom closet.

“It was spooky,” Tamin said. “The table was made. There was food in the refrigerator. Their clothes were in the drawers. They just left.”

The Morrells bought this two-story, four-bedroom house after a foreclosure. Few prospective buyers had looked at the house, Tamin would find later. “I got it really cheap,” Tamin said. “But I didn’t expect it to be like this.”

As Tony, originally from Davenport, Iowa, Tamin from nearby St. Joseph, Missouri, and her children Katheryn and Jake Hatfield, finished carrying boxes into their new home, trickles of strangeness began to fall. “The first night I slept on the couch, and I heard pots and pans rattling around,” Tamin said. “But we hadn’t unpacked. We weren’t using the kitchen.”

Tony heard something, too, but not pots and pans. It was a voice. “It sounded like a kid crying,” he said.

Last night I was awakened by my son’s voice calling “Mom” … yet he was sound asleep.
— Tamin, Facebook post, April 21, 2011, 8:42 a.m.

The first morning in the house, the smell of breakfast cooking greeted the waking family, but there was no breakfast cooking in the small kitchen. “It was weird,” Tamin said. “But there’s always weird smells.” Like death. The family began to notice the smell of rotting flesh throughout the house, but the smell never lingered. This scent of decay would appear in some parts of the house, then move to others and disappear, only to come back weeks later. The smell continues to plague them, but they have never found a cause.

During the first month the family lived in Bolckow strange occurrences in the house slowly escalated. The smells, children’s voices, doors slamming, cabinets opening, and the sound of footsteps were their constant companions. The worst thing about the house, however, was the feeling. “A lot of people say in a room upstairs they feel it,” Tony said. “A depressing feeling.”

Tamin added, “If I’m the only person here at night I feel really depressed. Almost frozen, like I can’t breathe.”

The atmosphere on the ground floor of the house is thick, heavy. But, Tony said, so is the atmosphere of the town. “I’m the biggest skeptic in the house and I’ve felt things here,” Tony said. “This house is weird anyway. The whole town is weird. The first month we lived here we only saw kids. No adults. Yeah, this town is weird.”

Driving down the road in to town, heard rain drops hit the car, stuck our arms out and felt the cold stinging raindrops hit our hands and arms, smelled the rain … yet our hands and arms were dry when we pulled them back in the windows, there were no visible rain drops on the car … weird place Bolckow is!
— Tamin, Facebook post, March 20, 2011, 8:16 p.m.

Strange things in the house continued. Thousands of flies appeared in an upstairs room, and the day after the family cleared them out, a thick mass of flies lighted on the porch. A sound like a bowling ball rolling down the upstairs hallway has woken Katheryn in the night. The dogs refuse to go into the basement. And Tamin has seen shadow figures wandering through the house. The occurrences became commonplace to the family, then the house grew violent. “I got thrown down the stairs,” Tamin said. “It was morning time. I was not scared or anything. I was standing on the landing with my dog Chewie, and the next thing I knew I was halfway down the stairs bouncing down and wondered what happened.”

They decided to move back to St. Joseph. Although Tamin said the main reason was financial, Tony said another was their now bizarre life. “We didn’t like being in this house.” The move culminated at Halloween.

The previous family who owned the house was pre-occupied with Christmas … ironically they moved in on Halloween (OUR favorite holiday) … btw … we moved in on Christmas day … coincidence?
— Tamin, Facebook post, April 10, 2010, 2:55 p.m.

Neighbors in Bolckow didn’t seem to take kindly to Halloween, and given the fact that the town’s population is 234, everyone is a neighbor. “We volunteered to donate Halloween decorations to the park,” Tony said. “People said, ‘we don’t celebrate Halloween. We celebrate the fall harvest.’”

The family decided to celebrate anyway; with a haunted open house. They didn’t realize their house was well known outside of Bolckow. “When we handed out fliers in St. Joseph,” Tamin said. “This guy said, ‘I know that house. It’s in Bolckow. It is evil.”

The event didn’t get any easier. Although many locals shunned the event, some came. “When they were drunk,” Katheryn said. “Some kids went through but their parents weren’t supposed to know about it.”

Most of the guests came from out of town to tour Bolckow’s haunted house, and the house performed, the audio system in the attic behaved of its own free will, and ornaments spun from strings in the dead still attic. The activity soon grew intense. “There was a girl in my room and the window imploded,” Tamin said.

Katheryn was there. “She stepped back and it blew on her.”

“It was a mistake, I think,” Tamin said, “to do the haunted house.”

Today I was upstairs sorting clothes in the closet and came out with scratches on my hands and arms!
— Tamin, Facebook post, April 12, 2010, 5:51 p.m.

In November, the family moved back to St. Joseph, leaving the strange house behind. They rented the house to Jim, a long-time friend of Tony’s, but the house hit the renters with everything it had.

“They changed so much,” Tamin said. “They changed when they lived here.”
Jim, his girlfriend, two teenage boys and a ten-year-old girl moved into the house and immediately felt the weight of the house upon them. “The little girl said she came to our house to talk to ghosts,” Katheryn said.

One day the renters were just gone. “They left their clothes here,” Tamin said. “They left their cell phone.”

“There was food in the fridge,” Katheryn said.

And worse. Buckets of grease and urine were scattered throughout the house. Tamin and Tony didn’t know what had happened to the people who lived in their house, but they knew the house had done something to them. “We didn’t know where they were and they never came back for their stuff,” Tamin said.

Reluctantly, Tamin and Tony moved their family back into the Bolckow house soon after.

This house has not lost its depressing, suffocating, oppressive feel. It’s like the house sucks every bit of hope and happiness out of a person when they walk through the door.
— Tamin, Facebook post, February 13, 2010, 5:01 p.m.

“Since we’ve moved back, I have not been able to sleep well, and I can always sleep,” Tony said

“We all don’t,” Tamin said.

Katheryn sat in a kitchen chair, holding her hands. “I feel like someone is shaking me.”

They moved back into the “hell house,” as Tamin calls it, because of personal finances, and crime rates in St. Joseph. “I thought, ‘let’s go back to Bolckow and everything will be fine.’”

It wasn’t. The haunting continues. Katheryn told Tamin of a dream about a little girl who lives in the house. The girl told her “the grey kitty is my favorite.” That morning Tamin found the grey cat had been inexplicably locked in the parlor all night.

“My life has been nothing but insane since I moved to Bolckow,” Tony said.

Tamin nodded. “I feel like I’m in a movie.”