More often than not, when ghost hunters look into apparent hauntings, they come back with little to show for it. But sometimes they not only find evidence of paranormal activity, but they stumble into scary, dangerous or even life-threatening situations. Here are 10 Times Paranormal Researchers Found Spooky Things.
1. Crawling Shadows
In late 2012 Greg Pollitt, the co-founder of “Paranormal Nights,” a supernatural investigation team based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and some of his associates were looking into a local haunting. The homes owner claimed he’d experienced a number of unexplained events, including doors being slammed without warning and locking on their own, as well as objects moving without being touched or even manifestations of shadow people moving about the house.
When his team arrived to investigate further, they were greeted with things moving on their own and shadows seeming to crawl across the floors and ceiling. The most chilling thing came when a photo was snapped of their client as they moved through the house. In the picture, unseen by anyone at the time it was taken, it is an apparition.
2. Back Scratches
Before paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk spent a night in the Ohio State Reformatory, he believed ghosts did exist, but that they were incapable of harming a human beyond giving their heart a jolt of fright. However, after nearly 20 years of that belief, one night in April of 2015 changed all of that as he and his team found themselves in an abandoned prison and at the mercy of a violent entity. Newkirk was standing in one of the penitentiary’s many rooms.
One without a single window, when another man who’d ironically served time in the prison began taunting the ghosts to reveal themselves. Suddenly, Newkirk felt someone brush past him, someone he could feel but not see. Then a burning sensation notified him that he’d been injured somehow. Lifting his shirt he discovered three distinct scratch marks on his back.
3. A Grave
As the host of the podcast “Realm of the Weird,” paranormal investigator John Tenney was well aware of strange happenings. He even once witnessed a small hairy creature with deep inset eyes, pointed ears and hooves dart away during an investigation that left him startled. Yet nothing could prepare him for the events that unfolded one night while he was exploring an old graveyard.
During Tenney’s investigation, he realized he wasn’t exactly alone, as a voice whispered to him, “Careful.” Startled, he spun to see what had spoken to him in such a chilling voice, only to step back and fall through the top of an old coffin. Within seconds, the paranormal researcher went from looking for the dead to literally laying in a grave, and whatever warned him was nowhere to be found.
4. Followed Home
After spending 72 hours in Hinsdale House, a building in New York known to be haunted, paranormal investigator Nick Groff returned to his New Hampshire home. Shortly after he arrived, strange things began happening. Loud knocks echoed through the walls, doors opened on their own and footsteps could be heard without a visible source. It became evident that something from the house had followed him home, and every time he went down to the basement, he could feel a presence watching him.
One night upon seeing a white apparition on a security camera feed, Groff began running his ghost hunting audio gear, only to find several voices were picked up. A psychic later told him that a number of spirits were present there, one of which was trying to protect Groff and his family from more than one malevolent force.
5. Hands at the Throat
As we’ve discussed, Greg Newkirk is no stranger to paranormal entities interacting, often aggressively, with the living. While filming a documentary on hauntings, the ghost hunter brought the film’s director to an abandoned church to look for signs of paranormal activity, which many had previously claimed there were plenty of. They’d only been in the building for around 30 minutes when a loud knocking occurred, drawing their gazes upward to the chapel’s raised pulpit.
There, a thick, dark green mist slowly formed over the course of five minutes before slowly it began to descend towards them. As the two men stared in disbelief, something took hold of the director. Newkirk watched as the man gasped for air and grabbed at his neck. As quickly as it began the attack was over, but not before two bright red handprints appeared on the director’s throat.
6. People in the Walls
In 2002 a group of high school students in Bradford County, Pennsylvania snuck into an abandoned building nicknamed The Murder House after hearing about shadowy figures being spotted in its windows. Shortly after entering, they began hearing footsteps and shuffling on the floor above them. The noises became louder until the group reached what appeared to be a mad scientists lab.
They barely set foot inside the strange room when one of them quietly alerted the rest there’s people in the walls. Pressing their ears to the drywall, they heard soft whispers and rumblings from within. The group ran out of The Murder House as fast as they could, unaware of how fitting the house’s name had almost become. Hidden inside the walls were armed men who had been cooking methamphetamine in the room.
7. The Body of Sharon Wilson
Closed in 1989, Kuhn Memorial State Hospital in Vicksburg, Mississippi was left in shambles and has been a popular place for people to conduct paranormal investigations, as well as numerous ghosts have been said to haunt the dilapidated walls. But on June 28, 2015, hunters from the Mississippi Paranormal Society got way more than they bargained for when they toured the facility and found a trail of blood leading to the body of 69-year-old Sharon Wilson.
Wilson had been the victim of a robbery and kidnapping and ultimately lost her life at the hands of 33-year-old Rafael McCloud, who would later offer no explanation for his actions or even obtain a lawyer to defend himself. Finding the dead is usually a welcome thing for paranormal researchers, but in this tragic case, it was anything but welcome.
8. Sickening Spirits
In 2014 Robert Ansley, one of the founding members of Austin Paranormal Research, discovered an abandoned lake house just outside of Austin, Texas. Formerly the Taylor House Eatery, the building was seemingly haunted by several spirits, which made themselves known through loud knocks and thumps, and demands to get out via EVP recordings.
Ansley went the house every Monday night to try to capture more evidence until one day when he suddenly came down with the flu. After a few days, he went to the hospital where he was admitted for four days due to en E. coli infection, pneumonia, an abcess in his brain and sepsis in his blood. After recovering, Ansley finally listened to his most recent EVP recordings, on which he could clearly hear voices saying they wish to kill him.
9. A Near Hanging
Shortly after moving into a house in San Pedro, California in 1988, Jackie Hernandez and her family began encountering the ghost of an old man. After being called to the house by Hernandez, a group of investigators lead by a paranormal psychologist, began searching the attic, where the family claimed most of the odd noises came from. Almost immediately one of the team members, Jeff Wheatcraft, was thrown across the room by an unseen force.
Another man managed to snap a photo of the incident only to find that in it, Wheatcraft was being hanged by the neck by a clothesline, the other end of which was around a beam overhead. Luckily both men managed to escape, and Hernandez moved from the house soon after. But, all of them remember the horrible night when an investigator nearly lost his life to a ghost.
