Case 2: Private Home and Farm in Volendam

For privacy reasons, we obviously will not be disclosing who owns this property, as they are acquainted with Marie’s parents and Jared’s parents. We would not want random people showing up to hunt ghosts at their private property, after all. As such, I will be referring to them as Family A, consisting of Father A, Mother A, Son A1, Son A2, Daughter A, Uncle A, Grandfather A. and Grandmother A.

As for the backstory behind this particular case, this home and its attached farm were built in 1817, and the property was owned by a family for over 150 years before it was sold to the family that currently owns it. The property is located in the most remote area of the town of Volendam, referred to as Amesbury. Aside from some farms, three churches, an abandoned schoolhouse, and one of the smallest fire departments in the area, there’s not much in the way of things within this area of town, although it has been settled for almost two and a half centuries. As with any property that has been around as long as this one has, multiple people of this first family have died on the grounds, seven to be exact. Five of them were normal and relatively peaceful deaths from natural causes. However, there were two that were of particular note that were not.

In 1838, it is recorded that one of the older sons of the family at the time was killed when he was kicked and stomped on by a horse. Then, in 1910, the father of the family at the time was killed when he fell from the top of the barn while working on it. While these deaths are certainly fairly violent compared to the other five, perhaps the cause of most activity does not involve the first family to own the property after all, but rather the road the house sits on.

The house sits on a bend in the road that was infamous for being the site of several fatal car accidents. The worst took place in 1987, which both of the grandparents and the father of the family remembered. A drunk driver took the turn too fast and hit a family in their own car, killing two young children and their mother while an older child and their father survived. The drunk driver also survived and spent 10 years in prison for the accident, only being released in 1998. His whereabouts were unknown after that until it was reported he died in 2010. In total, there have been at least six fatal accidents on that bend in the road in 1947, 1957, 1980, 1987, 2003, and 2014, killing eleven people. The most recent was a motorcyclist who was killed when he crashed his bike on the bend while the family was out on a vacation in Florida.

In regards to Family A, activity picked up around the time their youngest child, Son A2, was born in 2012. While there had been the occasional bump in the night or the rare voice no one recognized in the house, for some reason, after Son A2 was born, the spirits became restless. Grandfather A and Father A both recalled to Marie when she visited the farm that several times when they were outside working early in the morning, they could hear what sounded like screaming from the bend in the road, in particular after the fatal motorcycle accident in 2014. Sometimes, the screams were male, and other times, they were female. Male screams became more common after the motorcycle accident, which makes sense as the victim was a man in his late 20s. Regardless, every time they stopped what they were doing to see what was going on, they found nothing.

Within the house itself, Grandmother A recounted that a few weeks after Son A2 was born, he began to point out something invisible in whatever room he was in in the house. Curious, she had taken a photograph of Son A2, and found that it had a white mist shape in the direction of where Son A2 was staring. When I talked to her, she also gave me a photograph she and Grandfather A had taken long ago, around 1985, of one of the windows of the house. Standing in the window between the curtains was a semi-transparent apparition staring back at the camera. She also showed us another photo, this time of the driveway near the bend in the road, taken late at night. This photo, taken by Grandfather A after he began to feel uneasy while walking a dog, showed an indiscernible white shape in the distance standing on the side of the road.

Within the barn, Mother A and Daughter A both recalled hearing footsteps above them one day while clearing out equipment from it despite everyone else either being inside the house or working elsewhere on the farm. Another time, Son A1 was inside it with a friend of the family who was working for them part-time when they heard what sounded like a yell followed by a loud thump from just outside the barn. They both ran out, but found nothing. Yet another time, and in a story that Daughter A, the oldest child of the family and now a 20-year-old college student, had never told anyone until then, she was with her then-boyfriend in the barn doing, well, certain activities, late at night as a teenager when they both heard a side door slam open. Fearing her parents had caught them, Daughter A and her then-boyfriend ran out, but found nothing. What made it creepier was when Daughter A remembered that her parents had in fact just left the house, her grandparents were staying over at her uncle’s for the weekend, and both of her brothers were inside the house watching a movie.

With this amount of activity, we would definitely have our hands full. Thankfully, we would have a whole weekend to investigate the farm, as Family A would be going away on a vacation for a few days. We also decided that this would be our first true lockdown-style investigation, with Father A turning things over to us on Friday evening and us pulling an all-nighter until Saturday morning.

…

At 5 PM, Ashley, Jared, and I were talking to Father A in the driveway as we were doing the handover and his family was preparing to leave for the airport. Ashley remarked to Father A, “I got a good feeling we’ll get some interesting evidence here.”

“You sure as Hell will,” he replied in a confident tone. “I bet you’ll-“

We were all interrupted when we heard a scream from within the house, which we instantly recognized as Marie. We all looked at each other and immediately ran inside, Father A included. “Marie,” I called out as I ran in. “What’s going on?! What happened?!”

Marie and Yukiko both immediately came running down the stairs, the former visibly shaken as she came to a stop. “Guys, guys, there’s something up there and it does NOT like us!”

Father A asked her, “Marie, what’s up there?”

Ashley asked my sister, “Did you see or capture anything?”

“No,” she shook her head. “I was in another room taking pictures when I heard Marie scream. She did have a DVR with her, though.”

Marie then immediately handed it to me with a visibly shaking hand, telling me, “Play it back. You’ll see what I mean.” She then turned to Father A and told him, “[Father A], I saw someone missing an arm staring right at me. He was bleeding everywhere too.”

“Ah, Christ,” he replied to her. “That’s probably a crash victim.” The fact he had zero doubts about what Marie claimed was yet another sign that this was something very serious.

I then began to play back the DVR, and it was about a minute in when Marie began making notes about the house for a pre-investigation review. “Okay, so this is the master bedroom. We have an attached bathroom right next to it, and a-“ Marie then cut herself off, staying silent for some reason. It was at this moment that we all heard what sounded like heavy breathing and moaning in the room, none of which came from Marie. Then, Marie screamed, and the recording stopped.

“That voice was the man I saw,” Marie said to us, still shaken by what had happened. “He was moaning like he was in pain.”

Father A, concerned for Marie, asked her, “If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to.”

“I agree,” I told her. “If you want to stand back a bit, go ahead. Me, Ashley, Yukiko, and Jared can do it.”

“No, no, no,” she insisted. “It’s fine. I can do it. I just… I wasn’t expecting this level of activity so soon.”

…

After another chat with Father A, he turned the keys over to us, and Family A left the property. From that moment on, the five of us would be on the entire farm by ourselves. Me, Jared, and Marie went off to the barn first, while Yukiko and Ashley stayed in the house. For this investigation, we now had two camcorders in addition to our cellphones, two digital cameras instead of a Polaroid camera, and three DVRs.

In the barn, as we opened the door, Marie stepped in and immediately told us, “There’s definitely somebody here.”

I asked her, “You can sense it?”

“It feels like something is watching us from upstairs,” Marie said as she pointed up to the partial second floor of the barn where some equipment was stored, after which she took three photos with a digital camera.

Jared asked me as he pointed the camcorder up to the second floor, “Do you guys wanna go up there first?”

“I’ll go up there,” I volunteered. “You guys can stay down here.” I pulled out my cellphone and began recording as I walked over to the stairs and climbed up them, the old wooden steps loudly creaking with each move I made. When I reached the top of the stairs, I began to look around to see if anything was visible before then setting my phone on an old wooden table, using some kind of book on the table to prop it upright before pulling out my DVR.

Downstairs, Jared and Marie began to take photos of the barn’s interior. As they did, Marie remarked to Jared, “I am not getting good vibes from this place at all. Not the house, not here, not anywhere on the property.”

Then, both of them heard footsteps from outside and turned around, but found nobody outside of the barn. Jared shouted up to me, “Hey, Takeo, was that you, man?”

“No,” I shouted back down. “I didn’t go back down! Is there someone outside?!”

“I can’t see anyone,” he called back to me.

“I’m gonna do an EVP session up here,” I then shouted to the two of them. “Try to be quiet if you can!” I then turned on the recorder and began to ask questions. “My name is Takeo. Can you state your name if you’re here? Did you live or work here?”

I ended up getting no responses during this session. It seemed as though all activity in the band had ceased. After another minute of waiting for more responses,

Marie shouted up to me, “I think they’re gone! I don’t feel anything unusual anymore!”

As I came down the stairs, I asked her, “Wanna review the photos you took?”

“Sure.”

Me, Jared, and Marie then began to look over the three photos the best we could in the dark. In the very last photo, which was taken of the staircase I had just came down from, Jared noticed something odd. “Hey, woah, woah, woah, what the Hell is that?”

“Hmmm,” Marie said as she zoomed in. “That looks like… That kinda looks like a face.”

“Oh yeah,” I added as I looked at the shape Jared had pointed out. Near the stairs seemed to be a disembodied face floating nearby. I could clearly see a pair of blank eyes, a bit of a nose, and the outline of a mouth. The direction the face seemed to be pointing in indicated it was heading out of the barn. Perhaps the footsteps we all heard minutes before was this spirit leaving.

After this, there was next to no activity in the barn for a while. Jared got a phone call from his mother, so he stepped away for a bit to take it while I took the camcorder. While he talked outside the barn, me and Marie were discussing my family’s planned trip to Japan in August. “Are you sure it’s okay if we come along? I don’t want to intrude on you guys since it’s your family.”

“No, it’s fine,” I assured her. “Ashley’s coming with us anyway, so I figured having you and Jared come won’t be a hassle. Besides, the weekend we’re gonna arrive in Tokyo is Summer Comiket.”

“Wait, hold on,” Marie replied rather suddenly. “Did you just say Comiket? As in that Comiket?”

“I sure did. I’ve been looking up how to go there as a foreigner. I figured if you go, we all could go there.”

“Dude, I’d love to go there! Would we do only one day or…?”

“We’ll be in Tokyo from Thursday until Sunday evening, after which we’ll travel to my dad’s hometown, Harukawa, and stay there until the next Sunday. We’ll be able to go the whole day on Saturday and most of Sunday if you wanna go to it.”

“Now I’m for sure going with you guys.” Marie must have realized it may have sounded selfish, so she almost immediately added, “N- Not like I’m only interested in Comiket and Tokyo, Takeo. Don’t worry.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine.”

Jared then walked back into the barn, putting his cellphone away as he did so. “Guys, I heard something outside just as I ended the phone call. I got it on the DVR.”

I asked him, “You had it going during the phone call?”

“Yeah.”

Jared then played us what he found on the DVR. We both definitely heard something, but at the time, we could not make out what it was. After analysis following the investigation, we determined it was a male voice saying very quietly, ‘In the barn.’

“I definitely heard something speak,” Marie commented. “But I can’t tell what they said.”

“Me too,” I replied. “Let’s head back to the house for a bit and see what’s up there.”

…

In the house, Ashley and Yukiko started off the investigation by sitting at the kitchen table and beginning an EVP session. Yukiko had left a camera on a tripod to record them while holding a digital camera to take photos while Ashley held a DVR. There were no lights on in the house besides the screens and lights of their equipment and electronics. “Hello,” Ashley began. “We’re here to talk to you. We’re not here to hurt you. We just want to talk. Does anyone want to talk to us?” Pause. “Is there anyone in the house right now?” Pause.

Yukiko began snapping photos of the kitchen and the living room right next to it. She commented, “It feels a little colder in here.”

“Yeah,” Ashley replied. “I think the temperature dropped a bit.” She then asked the spirits around the two of them, “Did you live here? Did you die on the road in front of the house?” Pause. “What happened to you here?”

For the next half-hour, nothing happened in the house. When me, Marie, and Jared made it to the house, they were going over the brief EVP session they had done earlier, listening in on one particular recording. I asked them as I walked into the kitchen, “Did you guys get something?”

“Yeah,” Ashley said to me. “Listen to this.”

I listened intently and heard a voice in the recording. The voice, that of a woman, seemed to call out something indiscernible. I asked her, “Neither you nor Yukiko heard anything, right?”

“No,” she shook her head. “We didn’t.”

“Hey guys,” Marie then said as she looked over at the road. “I feel really uneasy.”

Jared asked her, “How so?”

“I feel… I feel some kind of pain,” Marie explained the best she could. “Not physical pain, no… More emotional, like sadness.” Marie then pulled out a chair and sat down at the table as she took a deep breath. “Yeah, it’s really hitting hard now. Holy shit, dude.”

I could tell from her facial expression and her increasingly pale skin that whatever it was, it was having a really nasty effect on her. “Marie, do you need to step out for a bit?”

“No, no,” she insisted. “I’ll be fine. It’s just…” She then seemed to wipe away tears from her eyes. “Damn… It feels really sad here.”

I turned to Yukiko and told her, “Start recording on the DVR now.”

“Got it,” she replied as she pulled one out and pressed record.

Just as I was about to ask a question, Jared let out a confused, “Wait, what the fuck?”

Ashley asked him, “Jared, what’s up?”

“My camera just died,” he replied as he turned on the light in the kitchen and showed us a blank screen. “It was at like three bars and then it just shut off.”

“Oh no,” I muttered, realizing what was probably happening. “Don’t tell me a ghost drained it.”

“I’m still recording on my camera,” Yukiko told us, assuring that someone was still capturing video. “I got four bars.”

At that moment, it got a lot colder in that kitchen, and out of nowhere, the light switch was suddenly flicked off by an unseen force, causing all of us to turn to it, except for Jared, who jumped when it happened since he was the closest to it. “Agh, what the Hell?!”

Marie asked him, “Did you touch that?”

“No, I didn’t!”

“Holy shit,” I whispered to myself.

Ashley then began to ask questions of the spirit of spirits around us. “Who’s here with us? Did you get into an accident out on the road? Did you die here?” In response to one of those questions, all three of us heard some kind of female voice, this one very similar to the voice I had heard on the DVR earlier, from upstairs. “Holy shit.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said to the others. “Did you guys hear that?”

“Yeah,” Jared replied. “Dude, that came from upstairs.”

“I’ll go up,” I offered as I pulled out my cellphone. “You guys don’t need to go up with me.”

“Don’t do that,” Marie then warned me as she took a deep breath and once again wiped away tears from her eyes. “Please, don’t go up there by yourself. There’s… There’s…” She then got up from the table and said to us, “Hang on. I gotta… I gotta step outside and take a breather. Holy shit…”

As Yukiko went with Marie to comfort her, I began recording video on my camera phone and said to the others, “This is getting crazy.”

“I’ll go up with you,” Ashley volunteered. “If Marie says you shouldn’t go up by yourself, you really shouldn’t.”

“You don’t have to,” I assured her. “If you wanna stay down here and look after Marie, go ahead.”

“No, no, no,” she insisted. “It’s fine. Besides, I’m your girlfriend. We’re ride and die together, right?”

I chuckled. “Yeah, you’re right.” Relenting, I turned to go upstairs and said to her, “Come on.”

“I’ll go outside with Marie,” Jared then told us. “I’ll leave a DVR here on the table and keep it running.”

…

Outside the house, Yukiko set the camera down and sat next to Marie, who had buried her face in her hands as she sat on a ledge bordering the driveway and the front lawn. “Hey, Marie, are you okay?”

“God damn it,” she said between quiet sobs. “I can’t… I can’t begin to describe it. It feels like… It feels like I’ve lost so much…”

Yukiko patted her on the shoulder and told her, “You’re fine, Marie. We’re right here.”

Jared then walked over, asking the two of them, “You guys doing alright?”

“Marie’s getting pretty emotional,” Yukiko explained. “I think whatever’s here is getting in her head.”

“It feels…” Marie then began to collect herself emotionally, wiping away the tears as she found the words to explain what was going on with her. “It feels like this is someone who died here, but didn’t live here.”

Jared asked her, “Like a crash victim?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “It’s like I felt all their sadness at once. It was overwhelming. It felt like someone who died on this road was standing in that kitchen with us, and was trying to use me to communicate their sadness and pain.”

…

Back in the house, me and Ashely ran up the stairs together, and as soon as we both reached the top of the stairs, we felt the air get colder, as well as an unusual smell emanate from a room down the hall. I turned my cell phone camera towards the direction of that room and remarked, “Hey, Ash, do you smell that?”

“Yeah,” she remarked with a hint of disgust. “It smells… Ugh, it smells like burnt barbecue.”

“Burnt barbecue…” I sniffed the air again, and I could feel chills run up and down my spine as I realized what we were actually smelling. “Ash, that isn’t burnt barbecue… That’s burnt flesh.”

Ashley turned as pale as a sheet, remembering something we had read up on about the history of the property and the road it was on. “Oh my God, Takeo… You know what date it is, right?”

“February 24. Why?”

“One of the accidents was today,” she explained. “February 24, 2003. Twenty years ago.”

I shuddered as I remembered the details of this specific accident. Late at night, on February 24, 2003, a 21-year-old woman and her 68-year-old grandmother were both killed when their car flipped over in a rainstorm and caught fire after falling into a ditch. Although the drunk driver accident in 1987 had been the worst in terms of number of fatalities, this accident had perhaps been the most gruesome, as both women had actually survived the crash, only to burn to death. It happened only about forty feet from the driveway of the house.

“Holy shit,” I remarked to her. “That’s…”

“Maybe that’s what Marie’s feeling,” Ashley theorized. “And that would explain the sme-“

Suddenly, we both heard footsteps from within that same room as the burning flesh smell. We both went silent and looked at each other as the footsteps got closer to the door out into the hallway and then stopped. Ashley took this time to snap three photos with her camera, and began to review them. I said to her in a whisper, “There’s someone here.”

As she came across the second photo and compared it to the third, she whispered to me, “Takeo, look at this.” I walked over and looked at both photos while putting the phone down on the floor aimed upwards so it could record at least the ceiling. The second and third photos seemed to show some kind of shadow figure moving out of the room and into the hallway. Neither of us saw this figure with our own eyes, and my own cellphone camera did not capture it. Neither of us could really confirm if it was paranormal or debunk it as a camera malfunction of some kind, although none of the other photos taken with Ashley’s camera had a similar anomaly.

I said to her as I looked at the photos, “That’s creepy… There’s definitely someone else with us.”

Ashley then asked me, “Do you wanna go in the room?”

“We might as well,” I replied, taking a deep breath to prepare myself before picking up my cellphone, walking over to the room, and slowly opening the door. I could feel my heart pounding with both anticipation and fear as I entered the room, only to find nothing out of the ordinary visible. It was just a normal bedroom for a teenage girl, the daughter of the family. “There’s nothing here,” I whispered to Ashley.

“Maybe they went downstairs,” she whispered back. She then began to snap a few photos of the room, none of which yielded any results.

…

After another twenty or so minutes, we all met up outside to start going over evidence we had captured so far. It had been an active night, although things were starting to slow down by this point. After reviewing the photos, videos, and audio recordings from earlier again to verify what was captured, we began to review the DVR left in the kitchen and found something disturbing.

What should have been about twenty-five minutes of mostly silence occasionally interrupted by me and/or Ashley talking upstairs instead contained a female voice around the fourteen-minute mark. What we interpreted it as saying shook all of us, but especially Marie. ‘I burned here.’

As we played back this part to hear it again, Marie immediately gasped. “Holy shit,” she said to us. “That’s… That sounds like the person I felt in that kitchen.” She was visibly shaken, and stepped away to collect herself. “Fuck… I just realized this is the 20th anniversary of that one crash where the two women burned…”

Deeply concerned, I asked Marie, “Hey, are you alright?”

“I felt her,” she told me. “I felt her presence. I could feel her trying to communicate through me. I… I think it was the younger woman who was driving.” She began to cry again, now realizing who had been trying to channel her. “She… She feels guilty.”

Ashley put a hand on her shoulder and asked her, “Marie, do you need to step away for a bit?”

“Yeah…”

At this point, I did not want to subject Marie to any more of this. I suggested to her, “How about you take the rest of the night off? We can do the rest of the investigation tonight.”

“Okay, okay,” Marie nodded as she wiped her eyes.

Me and Ashley took her to the van she had driven over in, with Ashley staying with her to comfort her. At this point, me, Yukiko, and Jared decided to continue the investigation by going back out to the barn.

Inside the barn, we had been conducting an EVP session while taking photographs for about an hour, but had zero luck finding anything. It was as if all the spirits had gone away for some reason. However, after I had turned the DVR off, all of us heard footsteps in the barn, this time from the roof. As we ran out to see what was up there, if anything, Jared pointed the camera to the roof and told us, “It sounded like something heavy was walking on it.”

“I don’t see anything,” Yukiko remarked as she shined a flashlight on the roof of the barn. “You see anything, Takeo?”

“Nope,” I replied as I walked around and did a 360 view of the old structure. “Whatever caused it is gone now!”

“I definitely heard something.”

“We all did,” Jared pointed out to her.

…

That first night started out very active, but after the footsteps in the barn, nothing else of note occurred. It was as if the spirits on the property had put on some kind of show for us when we began, or perhaps the fact it was the twentieth anniversary of one of the fatal crashes on the road in front of the house had caused activity to stir up more than usual.

The second night would prove to be the exact opposite: Starting out quiet, and then ending with a proverbial bang. After seeing how deeply affected Marie was, we all decided that she would sit out the following night. Because of this, our game plan changed. Me and Yukiko would stay in the house all night, while Jared and Ashley stayed in the barn all night.

…

In the house, me and Yukiko had been talking about what had happened the day before in the family living room. It had been about three hours into the investigation, and nothing had occurred. “She’s doing better,” Yukiko said to me in Japanese. “She told me, though, that when she was in this room, she could see and feel that younger woman who was driving that car.”

I asked her, “Did you ask her if she could sense any burning odor?”

“She said the woman was definitely burnt. She also said she was visibly crying, but not making a sound while she did. It was that that drove Marie-senpai to tears.”

I took a deep breath and sighed. “Holy shit… Man, I feel bad for bringing her along.”

“She insists she’s fine. She says that these people are close to her family, and that she’s doing her best to help them.”

“I know, but still… She’s been through a lot these past few years. I don’t want her to get hurt.”

“We all have to be fai-“ We both were interrupted by a door being opened and then slammed shut in the back of the house. Switching to English, she said in confusion, “Wait, what the Hell?”

“Oh shit,” I said as we both got up and Yukiko grabbed a camera. “There’s something here.” I started up the DVR and began asking questions around me. “Who’s here with us? Did someone just walk out of this house? Or did they walk in here?”

I then stopped the DVR and immediately began to play it back to see if I had gotten anything. What I captured was a sign of what would soon happen to Jared and Ashley out front. A male voice was heard saying, ‘They walked out.’

Yukiko told me as we walked to the rear family room and pointed her camera at the door that we believed had been opened and shut by a spirit, “It just got a lot colder in here.”

“Yeah,” I commented. “Someone on the DVR said someone else walked out.” I started up the DVR and began asking questions again. “Who walked out? Where are they going?” This time, the response I got was audible within the room, although we could not tell what it said until we played back the recording. The same male voice explained to us, ‘Farmer… (unintelligible) walking to the barn. (Unintelligible).’

Yukiko commented to me in Japanese, “This is getting freaky, oniichan. I could hear that ghost.”

“Me too,” I replied in kind. “I couldn’t make out what it said, but I could definitely hear it talk. Holy shit…” Little did we know what would soon befall Jared and Ashley in the barn.

…

Similar to us, neither Jared nor Ashley had been able to catch anything for three hours. They had been talking among themselves about a variety of topics, including some rather personal things about Marie and things that had happened in the last few years. “Between the divorce, Naomi’s death, dealing with that creep who stalked her cosplay group last year, and all that bullshit going on with the lockdowns, Marie’s had it rough for a few years, probably the roughest of all of us.”

“And that’s saying something,” Jared replied to her.

“You’re telling me. I’m admitting that, and I lost my girlfriend to a drunk driver.” Ashley then sighed. “I’ve wanted to get more into cosplay and cons, but hearing some of the shit she tells us about idiots who stalk them kinda makes me wonder if it’s worth it.”

“I mean, it’s not like it happens to her every time. Most of her stories are second-hand.”

“Yeah, true. Even she says it doesn’t deter her.” Both of them then heard someone running towards the barn and assumed that it was me and my sister. “Is that them?” As Ashley got up, Jared pointed the camera at her while she left the barn. After a few seconds outside, she came back in and said, “It’s not them. I can’t find them outside.” Jared got up to join her, leaving the camera on the bench and aiming towards the entrance of the barn as the two of them went to go look for whoever was walking around the barn. It was while they were both gone that something incredible happened.

A semi-transparent full body apparition suddenly came into view from the outside and was seen walking into the barn before disappearing out of view of the camera. As the apparition walked, audible footsteps could be heard, followed by what sounded like someone walking up the stairs to the second floor of the barn. A few seconds after it was spotted, Ashley and Jared walked back in, neither of them aware of what the latter’s camera had captured. Jared said to Ashley, “This night might be a bust.”

“The ghosts definitely aren’t as active as they were last night,” agreed Ashley. Almost on cue, as soon as she said this, a slamming sound was heard upstairs, startling both of them. “Holy shit!”

“You just had to say something,” Jared replied as he ran over and picked up his camera. Ashley also pulled out her digital camera and began to snap photos of the barn, hoping to capture something. As Ashley ran up the stairs, a confused Jared yelled, “Where the Hell are you going?!”

“Upstairs,” she replied. “Come on! We gotta go up there!”

“Alright, fine,” he relented, apparently still not feeling totally comfortable with going upstairs. As the two of them made it to the top of the stairs, they looked around, but saw nothing. However, as Ashley snapped a few more photos, they definitely heard something.

A male voice was heard whispering something indiscernible from the other end of the second floor, causing both of them to turn towards the source of the sound. In shock, Ashley asked, “Dude, did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” Jared replied. “We should go back downsta-“

“No, hang on,” she insisted as she then pulled out a DVR and pressed record. “Who’s up here? Did someone walk up here? Can you come out and talk to us? Hello?” Ashley then stopped the recording and began to play it back to see if she and Jared could hear anything. In response to the third question and the fourth question, a male voice was heard, and this time, words could be made out: ‘Are you…’ and ‘Out.’

Jared asked Ashley, “Are you gonna review the photos next?”

“Yeah,” she nodded before putting the DVR away and then began to look over the photos taken with her digital camera. Two photos taken while she was upstairs stood out, and both had been taken of the general area where the whispers had been heard earlier. When the two of them looked over both photos, their blood ran cold.

A distorted and angry face was looking back at them in both photos, with the face not being attached to a full body and only a head. In the second photo, it seemed like the face actually got angrier, as if Ashley and Jared’s presence was making this spirit enraged. In response to these photos, Jared told Ashley, “We need to get the Hell outta here.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. As the two of them began to walk to the stairs and just as Ashley specifically had stepped onto them, they heard a wooden chair upstairs slide across the room towards them, with Jared quickly turning around and capturing the chair moving for just a second on his camera. As soon as it did, both of them yelled in fright and ran down the stairs as fast as they could, fearing that the spirit was chasing them. As this happened, a wooden board was ripped off the wall on the first floor and thrown in their direction by an unseen force, a clear sign of an attack by a spirit.

Just before the two of them escaped from the barn, Jared yelled, “We need to get the fuck outta here!” In response, they heard a loud male scream from inside the barn, causing both of them to run faster towards the house as they let out their own loud screams that echoed throughout the area. “RUN! RUN!”

As they reached the house, me and Yukiko opened the rear door, having heard the screams from them. I yelled out to them, “Guys, what the Hell is going on?!”

Ashley screamed at me, “We need to go! We need to go now!”

Panicking at this point, I yelled back, “Ashley, what the Hell is happening?!”

“We got chased by something,” Jared yelled at me. “It’s following us!”

Yukiko, concerned, began to take photos of the fields behind Jared and Ashley as they reached the house. As soon as they ran in, she slammed the door shut and locked it. She then asked the duo, “What did you guys see out there?”

“We… We…” Ashley had a hard time explaining what had happened due to how emotional she was getting. She and Jared were clearly traumatized by what had happened in the barn. “Oh my God… We got chased by a ghost… It… It was angry at us. It wanted us out… I think it threw a piece of wood at us.”

“Holy shit,” I replied. “Ashley, are you okay?”

Ashley could not reply in time before she began to cry. As I comforted her in the rear family room, Jared and Yukiko walked to another room to give the two of us privacy. The two of them began to talk about what had happened, with Yukiko, seemingly on a hunch, pulling out a DVR and pressing record. “That was crazy,” Jared said to my sister. “A chair moved on its own upstairs, and then someone ripped something off the wall and threw it at us.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he replied as he rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Just… Oh my God, man. That shit freaked me out.”

“And to think,” Yukiko pointed out. “This night started off with nothing.”

“You’re telling me.” At this moment, a voice was captured on the DVR that neither Jared nor Yukiko heard at the time, although Yukiko would later recall hearing a faint whisper that she brushed off as the wind outside. This voice whispered to them a rather chilling remark: ‘Did he scare you?’

…

After this, the rest of us decided to pack things up and relax for the night, with Yukiko running out to the barn and leaving her camera inside to see if anything could be captured, while Jared did the same with his camera inside the kitchen. Around two-thirty in the morning, the camera in the barn captured a shadow figure move from one side of the barn to another, after which a door was heard to open and then shut behind the camera. Around three in the morning, the camera in the house kitchen captured a faint whisper that we were unable to debunk as coming from any of us sleeping in another room nearby, although we were unable to make out what it said. Aside from these two occurrences, activity died down. It was as if whoever had chased Ashley and Jared had decided they had enough fun with us for the night.

This investigation was even more intense than the one at the church and cemetery, and would prove to be a rather high benchmark for us in terms of the level of activity we would encounter in a single investigation. We talked to the family who owned the property, and after presenting them our evidence, Father A and Mother A agreed to get the house exorcised, especially after seeing what had happened to Marie.

Thankfully, our next investigation, while still fruitful, would be nowhere near as intense or as frightening as this, nor would the backstories of its spirits be as tragic.