"I was at my sorority with my dog Rambo." "It was about midnight." "My dog suddenly started shaking." "I noticed a change in the air." "It's like I could feel eyes on me." "I see a man at the end of the hall." "Who is this person?" "Why are they in the house?" "Should I scream?" "Should I run away?" "And whatever it was, it didn't feel human." "Our sorority found this house and really liked it." "I was so excited to live there." "Whatever this was, it was there to hurt me." "Living in that house, it's almost like being under attack." "It's almost as though the house was physically pulling us apart." "Even though I've always wanted to go to university of Michigan," "I didn't really think that I was gonna get in." "And I was actually very shocked when I got my acceptance letter." "Because the campus is so large," "I wanted something where I had close friends." "And that's when I found out about the sorority." "The morning that we initiated Caroline, we have noisemakers, and we bang on the door, and we have balloons." "I was really excited to be a part of the sorority." "After I met the girls," "I felt safe." "I felt cared for." "I knew that no matter what happened, this group of girls would have my back." "Kristen?" "I'm Nicole." "Did you find it okay?" "Yes, absolutely." "It's amazing." "I was so excited." "Here's this big, beautiful house." "The house originally was a fraternity house on campus." "Our sorority was looking for a house at the time." "We wanted to find something where we could grow into a house, and we found this house and really liked it." "I walk into the door, and it was very, very dirty." " Hey." " Hey." "I was so excited to live there." "The first few weeks were really just midnight pajama parties, talking about boys, talking about school, and getting my bearings of the place." "There's a room in the basement that people don't often go into." "It was supposed to be off-limits, but being the explorer that I am," "I found my way in there." "It's a room that the fraternity that had previously resided in the house left things in." "They had some of the old cups, some of the things used in the rituals for the fraternity." "The whole room was like a time capsule." "Kristen!" "Yeah?" "I need your help with something." "Coming." "Awesome." "All of us were pitching in to help clean up the house." "I can unclog a toilet, so I was assigned to the house manager position." "But no matter what I did," "I always felt like I was cleaning and cleaning and I never got anything clean." "Ew." "There were maggots all over the bottom of this garbage can and on the floor." "There were hundreds of them." "It seemed like the maggots came really quick." "I've left food out before and never got maggots." "Are you okay?" "Kristen!" "Kristen!" "You have to come upstairs!" "One of the girls came up to me and goes," ""kristen, kristen, you have to come see this." "You have to come see this."" "What is it?" "It was down that hallway in front of Caroline's room." "And I see this little black spot in the top of the hallway towards the ceiling." "It's a bat." "It didn't make sense that the bat was there." "There were too many doors it had to get through." "There were too many spaces to get through." "A lot of the things that happened in this house did not make sense." "One night, I'm doing my laundry in the basement." "It was very dark." "It was very cool." "It was very quiet." "No one else was there." "So I'm walking up the stairs in my slippers." "I hear a thump." "It couldn't be real." "But I could hear them hit certain steps." "Like, the third step I know has this little creak." "All of a sudden, we just hear this blood-curdling scream." "There's kristen looking terrified." "I could just see it in her face that something had happened." "What's wrong?" "I didn't want to talk about it." "I didn't believe it, so I tried to pretend it didn't happen." "I didn't know what had happened, but I immediately knew that something was wrong." "One night, I was walking home from class, and I knew that all the other girls were still on campus." "I went upstairs to go to my room, and when I got to the second floor..." "I could feel the change in the atmosphere." "It was electrical." "It was a sensation I had never felt before." "And suddenly, I just felt like there was someone there." "All of a sudden, this person appeared standing in front of my friend's door." "I thought, "why would a guy be here?"" "We don't have any males living with us." "Almost as quick as it came, it disappeared." "I walked slowly towards my room, went inside, and locked the door." "I started to question myself." "I started to question my sanity." "So I just..." "I didn't say anything." "Good morning." "I started noticing throughout the rest of the house and with other girls that everybody started becoming more agitated, not coming to events." "Things just slowly started to change." "That's it?" "That's it?" "That year, I had been through a break-up and became incredibly depressed during that time." "When I'm really upset, my room is a place where I can really find refuge." "But when I was at the sorority house," "I never felt comfort." "I never felt refuge." "It was not a place to feel safe, but rather it took everything that was bad in my life and made it worse because I could never feel like I was at home in the room that I was living in." "I felt like if I stayed in the room for too long, it was just gonna get worse and worse and worse, and I couldn't explain why." "My mom came over to visit one day." "I was really, really excited." "When I first walked into the home," "I felt uncomfortable, and I felt confined." "She was a little bit more quiet than usual." "And when we walked down into the basement..." "We opened the door to go down the stairs, and they were a little creepy." "Come on." "Come on." "I had a growing uneasiness." "And..." "I couldn't place what would be causing that." "The second I walked into the room, the energy completely shifted." "There was a thickness in the air." "I had this really oppressive feeling that something did not want me down there." "I stopped dead in my tracks." "Come on." "And I said, "Mom, come this way."" "And she just couldn't move." "Mom, come on." "My mom came over to visit one day." "I was really, really excited." "She was a little bit more quiet than usual." "When I first walked into the home," "I felt uncomfortable, and I felt confined." "The second I walked into the room, the energy completely shifted." "I had this really oppressive feeling that something did not want me down there." "All of a sudden, I stopped dead in my tracks." "Come on." "And she just couldn't move." "There was a face right in front of me." "There were these horrible dark circles under the eyes." "And the face, it was so pale." "It was almost like looking at a corpse." "And I turned to my mom, and I knew that she saw it too." "I could see such anger in his eyes." "I felt as though I had been knocked backwards in the chest." "Go, go, go, go!" "When we got to the top of the steps..." "We both let out a sigh of relief." "I still needed to justify to myself what I saw and what I was feeling." "Are you guys okay?" "Caroline shared with me that she had been having experiences of a similar nature in the home." "Aren't you coming?" "She was worried for me, but I had to live there." "It was required for sisters to live in for a year, and I didn't want to let go of that." "A parent's always concerned about their child, but Caroline is an independent young woman, and she loved and cared about the ladies of the sorority house." " Have you seen my wallet?" " Your wallet?" "Things were really bad in the house." "Everybody started becoming more isolated." "We started having more incidences of fighting between girls." "We had a lot of arguments that..." "Had never been a problem before." "And it just felt like the house was contributing to us having these problems." "Kristen?" "I remember one of the girls knocked on my door, and she goes, "how long have you had this dog here?"" "And I can't..." "all I hear is his barking." "Can you, like..." "I've been here all day." "He hasn't barked at all." "And she goes, "well, he has to go."" "I'm not the only person that feels this way." "Clearly there's other girls..." "What do you mean, he has to go?" "He's been here for a really long time." "Are you kidding me?" "Get rid of him!" " Shut up!" " No, I'm not gonna..." "And it was just this really mean... like, it was a jab at me." "Like, "hey, I'm gonna take something you care about and get rid of it just so you don't have it there anymore."" "So I had to send my dog to my parents' house." "Are you sure?" "Yeah." "We had a feeling that we needed to find a way to cement the bonds that we had formed as a sisterhood." "So we decided to do a haunted house for the neighborhood kids." "It was an opportunity for us to come together." "Don't do that." "Everybody was excited about it, and we finally felt like sisters again." "People were back to their old fun-loving selves." "It was very ironic, the fact that we were having a haunted house in a haunted house." "Excuse me." "I was forced to go back down into the basement, obviously, for the haunted house." "And I was a little apprehensive about it." "I didn't want to say anything to the other girls still about what had happened." "But at the same time," "I was really worried that something awful was about to happen." "I was just super nervous." "There were so many things running through my head." "Working in that haunted house, it felt good." "We're gonna give them a good scare." "Look how creepy this is." "In the first room, they would experience spiders." "Then as they moved through, they went to the execution room." "Electric chair was in there, and the lights were flashing." "And then they got to the room where I was actually working..." "Which was the exorcism room." "Someone jumped out of a coffin." "There were some special effects we had going, so someone would be behind a certain wall, and they'd be pounding on it when they walked by." "It was the best haunted house I've ever been in." "After the haunted house," "I was really, really happy that nothing had happened." "I went up the back staircase." "All of a sudden..." "I saw flames everywhere." "In the... in the middle of the room, there was a girl trapped, screaming." "I came up the back staircase, and I noticed that Nicole's bedroom was open." "I saw flames everywhere." "And there was this girl trapped in the middle of the room." "There were just flames all around her." "And she was just screaming." "There was no heat from the flames." "There was no smell of smoke in the air." "But I still saw it." "I saw the fire." "She was about to be burned alive." "It felt so real." "But then..." "It was gone." "It was so real, what I saw, that I was behaving as if there was actually a fire in this room." "Okay, if there was a fire in this bedroom, where would it be?" "There's no candles." "Is there anybody on the fire escape?" "I wasn't sure what was going on in the house." "I wasn't sure what I was seeing." "I wasn't sure if I was seeing anything or if I was just crazy." "After the haunted house fund-raiser was over," "I had really hoped that we could come together, put on the event, and really regain the bonds that had been slowly torn apart." "It didn't happen." "It was like a sickness that got into a person..." "If they stayed there too long." "There was a lot of anger." "People got into fights." "People just started going crazy." "Girls became people that I didn't recognize." "It's almost as though the house was physically pulling us apart." "There had been a girl living in the house." "Over time, she completely lost it." "She had gotten in a fight with another girl, and the police got called out, and they had to physically restrain her." "It was..." "It was scary." "I felt at times, living in that house, it's almost like being under attack." "This cross calms me down." "If I'm in a nervous situation or if I feel anxious, it's safety knowing that it's right here." "But when my grandma gave me this crucifix," "I never thought that I would actually need it." "When everything started happening in the house," "Caroline in particular took a really hard hit." "She stopped caring about the things" "I think she cared about before." "And she just became very reclusive." "One night, I was lying in bed, just watching TV." "Suddenly I felt like something was there." "I looked over and..." "Through the wall walks in the same man that I had seen in the basement." "This time, I could see him much clearer." "There was definition." "I could see his face." "I could see what he looked like." "He had this white shirt on that went up to his neck and this really old jacket." "And the last time that I had been around the spirit of this man, it was very angry, very forceful." "So I was worried." "I was scared." "Is he here to attack me?" "Is he here to hurt me?" "Then I saw the look on his face." "He had a very serene look, and he was just very calm." "So I just introduced myself." "I'm Caroline." "Somehow I got the feeling that he reciprocated that greeting." "Like he went so long having people not even acknowledge him or know he was there." "By this point," "I was just so confused." "Maybe the house wasn't as bad as I thought it was." "But then something absolutely terrifying happened." "One night, I went to bed just like any normal night." "It must have been 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning." "I was shoved out of my bed as hard as I had ever been shoved before and flew across the room onto the floor." "I looked back at my bed and saw a man hovering above the bed where I had just been laying." "One night, I went to bed just like any normal night." "It must have been 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning." "I was shoved out of my bed as hard as I had ever been shoved before and flew across the room onto the floor." "I looked over back at my bed and saw..." "A man hovering above the top of my bed where I had just been laying." "He was someone that I had never seen before." "He had an old formal-looking jacket on, buttons all the way up to the top, a really rounded collar." "I looked right at him, and I felt that he was really trying to tell me something." "Something terribly wrong was about to happen, and I knew I needed to go do something." "I walked into a dark hallway." "I couldn't figure out what was wrong." "I walked around to the kitchen." "I could smell the overwhelming aroma of gas in the air." "The stove, which is an industrial stove and has large flames, had a burner left on." "And one of the other burners was on but didn't have a flame, so the gas was coming out of the top of the stove." "I was shaking." "I went into a cold sweat." "If that gas had met with that flame, our house, which was built many, many years ago and is made of all wood, would have erupted into flames." "And my room, which was right above it, would have been the first one to go." "I was really reluctant to mention anything, to not only my sisters but to my friends or family." "Having grown up in a household where I wasn't encouraged to believe in things like ghosts," "I felt like if I started to talk about an experience with a ghost that they would think that there was something wrong with me, that I needed to go talk to someone." "But when I had my experience," "I knew that there was something in the house, obviously, that something was Truly wrong." "It was strange how the house itself was just so negative and there was all these negative emotions and negative energy attached to the house." "But yet this spirit of this man, all I could feel from him was peace and calm." "It was the complete opposite." "It really made me question, well, where did all of these negative emotions come from?" "Where did all this stress come from?" "Where did all of this tension and anxiety come from that I felt whenever I was in the house?" "Was it... was it just me?" "One evening, I was getting ready for bed, and I went into the bedroom." "Something was in the hallway." "It was a sphere of this staticky energy." "Whatever this was had a lot of power." "And somehow I knew it was there to hurt me." "I didn't know what it was capable of doing." "I didn't know what it wanted to do with me." "I just wanted it gone." "I grabbed a Bible." "I just tried to read out loud." "I tried to read anything, something." "But the words on the pages were blurry and they were getting jumbled." "It was scary that whatever this was had the power to manipulate my mind, and I felt powerless." "Help!" "One evening, I was getting ready for bed." "There was a sphere of this staticky energy." "And somehow I knew it was there to hurt me." "I couldn't believe what I was seeing." "I was..." "I was almost in disbelief." "But then I thought about the man that I had seen in the house." "He was a calm, peaceful spirit, but yet whatever this thing was was extremely negative." "And I realized that he is different from the house." "The house and this spirit were two separate entities." "I really was questioning my sanity." "What was going on in my head?" "I didn't know what else to do." "Help!" "Help!" "And that's when in through the wall walks the man I had seen before." "And it walked in between me and whatever this thing was, almost like a shield." "I don't know how he did it, but whatever he did..." "Made it leave." "They were both gone." "The next morning, when I woke up, things were different about the house." "There wasn't that oppressiveness." "It didn't feel like the same house." "It felt so much better." "When I asked him for his help," "I don't know if that led to empowerment on his part, but whatever he did worked, and it was clear the next morning that it was gone." "At that point, it was a very different feeling in the house." "The air in the room had changed." "I felt calm." "What's up?" "Finally, I was really, really ready to just talk about it." "I saw this light." "Well, more than anything, I felt it, you know." "It was so angry, and it was like it was coming right at me." "Caroline brought up that her experience included that she saw a man." "And she started describing him." "I asked him for help, and he came to save me." "I, um..." "And Nicole goes, "oh." "Well, that's... that's the same guy that I saw."" "For the last month, two months." "And then kristen jumped in and said that the person that I was describing sounded like someone that she had seen also." "I thought I was going insane." "It was... it was uncanny." "And from there, it just spiraled into all of the incidents that we individually had and how much they correlated with each other." "It was just crazy." "Knowing that I was not alone in my experience was an overwhelming sense of relief." "Come... come with me." "Come on." "What?" "After that moment, I think that we really needed to find out what it was that was happening, who the person was that we had seen, and why were they in the house?" "And so we decided to do a little research into the history of our house." "Was he, you know, somebody that had just lived in the house before us or during... when it used to be a fraternity or..." "I had absolutely no idea who this person was." "I discovered that what had happened in the house wasn't the result of a fraternity." "The house, which stands on the eastern side of Ann arbor only a few blocks from the university campus, was the former residence of Joseph Jacob walser and his family." "Hi, dad." "Joseph Jacob walser was an industrialist who was a graduate of the university of Michigan in Ann arbor in 1899." " Oh, my God." " Oh, my God." "When I saw the picture," "I caught my breath in my throat, and I started shaking." "It was complete shock." "I was speechless." "It... it was insane." "It was the exact..." "Same face." "What's up?" "Caroline brought up that her experience included that she saw a man." "And she started describing him." "I asked him for help, and he came to save me." "Come... come with me." "Come on." "What?" "After that moment, I think that we really needed to find out what it was that was happening, who the person was that we had seen." "Joseph Jacob walser was an industrialist who was a graduate of the university of Michigan in Ann arbor in 1899." "Hi, dad." "I was speechless." "It... it was insane." "It was the exact..." "Same face." "How do you spell it?" "It's w-a-l-s-e-r." "Mr. walser built his dream home over on the fashionable east side of town." "Look, look, there he is." "And there he lived in this house with his wife and four daughters." "Crazy." "A year after building his house," "Mr. walser contracted a disease that was later identified as tuberculosis." "His form of TB was not susceptible to treatment." "They only gave him about a year to live." "He was gaunt, emaciated, dark circles under his eyes, what you might call a walking skeleton." "Mr. walser thought perhaps he should try to seek a more pleasant climate..." "And moved with his wife down to lake worth, Florida." "He left his four daughters behind at the big home in Ann arbor." "Unfortunately, he would never see them again." "Mr. walser died at the young age of 42 in lake worth, Florida, on new year's day of 1921." "Wait." "It gets better." "Did you see this?" "This is what we found downstairs." "At the time of his death, walser's four daughters were practically the age of the sorority girls who live in the house today." "It was as though every question I had had about my experience started to come together." "Knowing that you have an illness that people don't recover from and knowing that you're never going to see your daughters or your wife again would be a feeling of loss that is unsurmountable." "All the puzzle pieces started to fall into place." "He wasn't the thing that I was afraid of." "Looking back at all the different girls that got sick in the house..." "Oh, God." "His energy was there to protect us..." "And to save us from whatever it was that had made him sick." "It was very uplifting..." "To know that, you know..." "Here's this person who was a dad, and..." "Looked at us like his daughters and still wanted to protect us, like a father." "I will always remember him for the positive, loving protector that he was." "Was there something in the house when he built it that made him sick?" "Did his sickness manifest its own energy?" "Whatever the negative force was, it was tied to the house and not the spirit that was in the house." "With the darkness that was surrounding the house, it gave him a sense of peace, the fact that by living in that house, he wanted to restore a good feeling." "He was there to make me feel like I would always be protected and I would always be safe." "I believe that I have a guardian angel." "If I have a guardian angel, there must be demons." "There must be things out there actively working to cause people pain and anger." "That's the scariest thing."