"Paranormal Witness: Curse of the Lonergan Farm" EP Recap

The following events occurred between 1989 and 1991 at Lonergan farm in Nebraska.

Winter of 1989, Dan Dale comes home from work one day to find out his brother Tim, his wife Sydney and his children would be moving into the farm. Tim Dale wasn’t fond of moving back into the farm but after losing his job, he didn’t want his family out in the streets. “I was very young when my parents moved in and it was a bit tight, lots of people living there!” Laura (Tim’s daughter) Dale remembers. Tim’s mother was suffering from lung cancer. Steve Dale was in high school at the time and had a more upbeat attitude. Regardless of the family situation, they stuck together. Vaunette, Dan’s girlfriend at the time, spent a lot of time at the house as well. The family would reminisce about old times and their family tree. “I was becoming more of a family member, so they were telling me more of these stories!” she recalls. They mentioned their Uncle Will and needless to say, Vaunette realized that he wasn’t very liked among the family.

Lonergan farm 

One night, Dan tucked in his mother good night and made sure everything was taken care of. But when he left the room, he felt that something didn’t feel right…but Dale shook the feeling off. The next day, the three brothers took a walk out in the woods, jumping over logs and going through the trees. Once they got in the back of the woods, they came across an old house…Uncle Will’s old house. “The place scared me since I was a kid,” Tim remembers. “There was something there.” Steve recalls all too well the ghost stories connected with the house. For old times’ sake, the brothers walked to the house and went inside. Tim then heard twigs breaking and felt something was there. The house was dark and dusty. One thing that was commonly heard were bells clinging but there were never any bells around. They were almost like spurs on someone’s boots. The brothers then come across the water well that was used for the water. It was about 70-80ft. deep. It took Dan back to the day he went down the well…

Years ago, Dan’s mom told him and his brothers to check the well because an animal was down there. Steve and Tim hooked up a rope to a tier and helped hook Dan up. Dan took a fishnet with him to pick up the animal and a flashlight to help him see. The boys carefully lowered Dan. Dan was especially scared because of how deep and dark the well was. He eventually reached the bottom and saw there was a dead raccoon. He scooped it up and then began to hear voices in his ear…a man’s voice. Dan thought the brothers were joking with him. “As I’m reaching down the net, I heard someone talk in my ear again and it sounded like it was right behind me,” Dan recalls; “I felt I wasn’t alone. I always felt someone was right behind me.” Dan yelled at the boys to pull him up repeatedly. The boys, realizing something felt off, pulled him up immediately.

 

Their mothers’ cancer worsened and Dan was in the room. The mother was in and out of consciousness the entire time. Something woke the mother up and she was pointing at the doorway, as if she had seen something. “She’s looking fully at someone and there was no one there. I was the only one at the room at the time. It was a very eerie moment,” Dan said. The mother had passed away. Vaunette recalls the tremendous grief the family felt. “My mom was an awesome person….I sure miss her sometimes,” Tim said. The brothers continued living on the farm.

Sticking into unseen territory 

One night in October, Dan took Vaunette out into the woods for a walk. He wanted to “initiate” her into the family by taking her on a spooky trip to Uncle Will’s farm. Vaunette laughed at her boyfriend’s attempt to scare her. “The more you walked in, the more light seemed to be sucked out of it. You didn’t hear anything,” Vaunette explained about walking in the woods. “There was all kinds of debris and you really had to be careful.” The couple finally arrived at the house. Vaunette admitted at being a bit scared by the house’s presence. But she decided to go down the basement with Dan, much to Dan’s teasing. Dan led her down the basement. Vaunette saw holes in the basement wall and asked Dan about it. Dan said that that’s where Uncle Will kept his treasures and anyone who put their hands in the holes will lose their hands. Vaunette picked up a stick and poked them into different holes. There was a hole that was a little bit higher. “For some reason, I can’t explain it….I knew I had to put my hand in that one,” she recalls. So she did. But then she felt a “seering hot pain” in her hand and it was spread up to her elbow. She yanked out her arm and discovered human bites on her arm. The couple ran out of the house.

A farm full of menace and evil 

One day, the boys and Vaunette were out hunting and walked through the woods. Tim remembers hearing footsteps and heard the “bells clinging” again. “It was like something was stalking us….” Dan then saw a figure behind a tree. Dan ran to that tree and nothing was there. The figure kept popping up behind the trees and no matter how fast Dan ran, he couldn’t catch up to it. “You had the feeling like someone was watching you but there wasn’t anybody there!” The boys and Vaunette continued back towards the house and were passing the haunted house. Vaunette, growing tired of the walk, stopped to take a drink as the boys walked ahead. She looked up as she took her drink and saw a man hanging by a noose. Vaunette did a double check. She just saw an apparition of a man being hung. “I told myself that I was just hallucinating,” she said.

Then the nightmares began….

A deadly apparition

“It was always in the barn and there was people,” Tim remembers.  They were just laughing at me. Like ‘you’re in trouble boy’. The old guy was deranged looking and I couldn’t get away from him. All the sudden, my mom showed up. She’s pulling at me and yelling at me to get the hell out of there. I woke up outside Uncle Will’s house in underwear, t-shirt, right outside of Uncle Will’s house in 6-8 inches of snow.”

“It felt clearly evil. There was something that wanted to get me. I’m completely terrified. But my mom is there, yelling ‘get out of here, now!’” Dan recalls.

The nightmares weren’t stopping. Tim continued to sleepwalk to the barn. He didn’t sleepwalk since he was a kid. Tim tells Dan about it and they both realize they are having the same dream. They realize that their deceased mother is trying to protect them. It recalled another memory of Dan’s...

Back in their high school days, Dan and Tim took their friends to Uncle Will’s to give them a good scare so they could understand where they lived at. “We saw the ‘no trespassing’ sign,” the brothers’ friend, Aaron recalled. “We can’t trespass if we’re with family, right? It reminded me almost like something you’d see in the Western film. I really wasn’t interested in finding out about spirits and ghosts.”  But the friends proceeded to go to the house. But then, terror began to set in. “We see something on one side of the porch start moving and you can start hearing the boards creaking, and we froze like deer,” Aaron recalls. The deranged old man appears. “A tall man, coming up the path, moving fast!” Tim recalls. “I was moving faster than I ever ran in my life…looked like a human locomotive!” Aaron remembers. “We’ve been chased away by a man that’s been dead for 35-40 years,” Dan said. The brothers are wondering why to this day, they are still being haunted.

Dan and Tim decided to visit their Aunt Mary, who was like a second mother to them. The boys open up about “the man in the moustache” that everyone keeps seeing. Aunt Mary pulled out a photo album to show them pictures of the family. There was a picture of the boys’ great-grandfather and his relatives. They recognize the picture of Uncle Will immediately. Aunt Mary told the men then about the terrible incident that happened on the farm;

A dark family history

Uncle Will was terribly racist and during the early 1900s, a black man working for Uncle Will was caught having a relationship with a white woman and it angered Uncle Will so badly, that him and his men got their hands on the worker and lynched him. No one was arrested or charged for the incident. Dan and the brothers were absolutely disgusted that such a rotten human being was a part of their family name. 

“Growing up at the farm was scary in the dark but for the most part, it was a good place,” Laura recalls. When she was seven-years-old, she shared a room with her sister. But Laura also began having bad dreams. Laura confided in Vaunette about her secrets and her fears and how Laura couldn’t tell if her dreams were really dreams. Vaunette advised Laura to pinch herself and if it was a dream, the pinching would wake her up.

One night, when little Laura was sleeping in her bed, the door creaked open very slowly and she saw someone coming into the room. She couldn’t tell who it was but she knew it wasn’t her parents. Is this a dream? But Laura felt too frozen in fear to pinch herself to see if it was a dream or not. “I had a feeling they were going to take her…I forced myself to pinch myself and I screamed,” she recalls of that horrible night.

“I didn’t know where my baby daughter was, I didn’t even know if she was kidnapped,” Tim recalled.

The police were called and arrived on the scene. The police immediately went to work and called for a search party on the baby. “There were people everyone calling, hollering out for the baby (Melissa) and it started to echo in the trees,” Vaunette recalls. Herman, Tim’s brother-in-law, joins in on the search party once he hears about his niece going missing. The search party closes in on Uncle Will’s area. But they find nothing so they continue on. But Vaunette was haunted by the sounds of bells she heard nearby. “I knew Melissa was out there with the ghost of Uncle Will.” Even more unusual, Herman felt a need to go on a certain trail and reach an area. At that point, Herman sees something….it was the baby. Herman yelled that he found her. The baby is alive. The police were thrilled and while the family were as well, they were still scared because they knew deep down, Uncle Will and his unseen forces were behind this.

In 1999, in an interesting turn of events, arsonists burned down Uncle Will’s house. Not surprisingly, the family wasn’t exactly grieving over the loss of the house, since it was filled with evil, menacing energy. All that was left was the basement. A couple years later, the family put the farm up for sale and to this day, they don’t know why they were being targeted by Uncle Will…

This was NOT how I predicted the show to turn. I assumed it was the ghost of an old man still sitting on his rocking chair outside the barn, equipped with a Remington and going "Get off my lawn, you pesky kids!" but obviously, it was more than that. What REALLY boggled my mind was the incident with the baby. I've heard many ghosts and poltergeist stories but a ghost possible kidnapping a child and leaving it out to the snow is just....why? Granted, with the first episode of Season 3, a demon was targeting two young girls. It is also a theory that "ghost children" are actually demons in disguise. So demon activity involving children isn't a foreign concept. But still. I'm trying to wrap my mind around it.

Because they didn't say the exact location, I had a pretty hard time doing some digging. However, this particular incident just nags at me and here is my own personal conclusion; 

Tim Dale mentioned that he began sleepwalking again. Both Vaunette and Herman mention in their own experiences about being "guided" by some unseen force. The family (from what I assume) didn't tell the police about the paranormal circumstances, obviously for fear or ridicule and being labeled as crazy. But could it be that Tim, possibly possessed by paranormal forces, sleepwalked his way to Laura's room, took the baby and placed her out there in the woods? And could he possibly have left her there and sleepwalk back to bed? But of course, you're not going to tell the cops you took your baby out in the snowy woods while sleepwalking because it won't get looked on to fondly. But was Tim in bed when Laura was screaming when the incident happened? She did mention briefly that when the mystery person came to her room, it wasn't her parents but if this theory were to be true, Tim wouldn't be himself in his awakened state. People do some crazy sh*t during a sleepwalking state. 

What do you guys think? 

Picture Credit: Syfy 

Follow me @janespringfield 

Paranormal Witness EP 205 Recap: “Lady On The Stairs”

The ghost of a Victorian-era mother may be haunting the home of newlyweds.

Mark, a recently widowed man after 25 years of marriage, met Mari-Lynn and they moved pretty quickly as he married her a year later. The happy newlywed couple moved into the home Mark shared with Robin, his deceased wife. “It was a whole new life for me” Mark said. “I never had kids and have always wanted a little boy. Now I have this beautiful woman who also has a little boy.” Mari herself was in wedded bliss; “I felt privileged…I had nothing and all the sudden, had a husband who can provide for me and my son,” she said. She further explains her love for her new home: “When I went into the house, I was amazed. I have never seen so much beautiful furniture in one place. I was worried Jessie was going to damage something that was irreplaceable”. On the other hand, she still felt something off about the house with the blinds being shut and there being no light. “It felt dead,” she said. “I always felt uncomfortable, maybe I shouldn’t be there…like eyes were just on me”. Mark also noted that he knew she felt uneasy about the home from the first day.

Beautiful but haunted house

The house was originally decorated by Robin. Robin had a rather large collection of angels, which “freaked out” Mari. “Let’s just say me and Robin have different taste,” she said. Mark didn’t change anything in the house and still maintained Robin’s room upstairs as it was when she passed. Mark warned Mari and Jessi to not enter the room at all. Mari convinced Mark to hold a garage sale to sale Robin’s belongings. “I couldn’t wait to get rid of the angels!” Mari said. “It was a very successful garage sale. We sold about 75 angels”. While Mari was cleaning up after the garage sale, she noticed her son Jesse was playing in the yard nearby when something caught his interest. He was staring at a tree. Mari walked to Jesse and asked him what he was looking at. “Mama, there’s a lady in the tree!” Jesse said. Mari didn’t see anything and assured Jesse there was nothing. However, he saw Jesse seemed scared so she yelled “You go away mean lady, leave my son Jesse alone!” A few minutes later, Mari asked Jessie if the “mean lady” went way. He then said she was in a grove across the street. Mari still couldn’t see anything. One day, Mari was downstairs in the kitchen and heard a cry. She thought maybe she was hearing things and tried to brush it off. She then heard what sounded like Jesse scream and cry. Then Mari realizes Jesse wasn’t home. Mari went into every room and no one was in there. Mari began hearing a lot of noise. They were coming from Robin’s room. She had a horrible feeling but insisted on going into Robin’s room. She saw in her room that the bedroom window was open, the curtains were blowing and things were scattered on the floor. Mark came home and was outraged when he realized Mari went into Robin’s room. Mari concluded that it must’ve been her.

Guardian Angels?

One night, Mark and Mari were in bed. Mari woke up to the sounds of children laughing and playing. She tried to wake up Mark but Mark was sleeping. Mari got up to investigate. They had a swing set outside the window so Mari thought maybe kids were outside playing there. When Mari went out, she couldn’t find anything about these things she was hearing. There was nothing at the swing set. Mari didn’t know what she was going to find exactly and was still confused as to what was happening to her. On another night, Mark and Mari were sitting in the living room watching TV. Jesse began screaming, like he had been hurt. Mark wondered what he was screaming about and assumed it was for attention. Jesse kept screaming that there was a lady in the closet. Mari looked in the closet and nothing was there. Mari went onto comfort Mari. Jesse wouldn’t stop crying. Mari didn’t know what to do. Mari couldn’t see what he was seeing but decided to lie down with Jesse to comfort him, seething at the fact that Mark didn’t seem to care. “It’s really hard as a mom to watch your child be terrified and be terrified about something you don’t know what it is,” Mari said.

One Sunday morning, Mark was working at his antique store and Mari was doing housework. Mari heard something “big” crash and she went in the kitchen to see what happened. She saw both water faucets on full blast. “Jesse couldn’t do that, he wasn’t tall enough!”. Then Mari heard banging in the garage door in the laundry room. Mari mustered up courage to open the door really fast. No one was there and nothing was happening in the garage. But a few seconds later, the garage door was being beaten on and the lights were all flashing on and off. Mari went to a frightened Jesse and made a desperate call to Mark. Mari cried and begged Mark to come home. However, Mark still wasn’t convinced and thought she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Mari began questioning her sanity. She then contacted her sister Lora. Lora came over and with her background and education in phsychology, both women looked up disorders like schizophrenia. Lora concluded Mari didn’t have the classic symptoms of schizophrenia. Mari and Lori then looked around the house. “It was a very lovely house…my eyes were just wandering everywhere, room by room” Lora said. As Lora was approaching the door, she noticed she felt different; her heart raced and she felt anxious. Lora went into Robin’s room. Lora rushed downstairs and explained to Mari she felt so anxious. 

From the outside, wondering what's inside...

Mari concluded it must be Robin. 

Mari tried to tell Mark and again, Mark just brushed her claims off. “Robin would never do anything that,” he said. Later on, Mari worked with Mark in the antique store. “Anytime I wasn’t in the house, I felt great,” Mari said. “Jesse was safe at school and I was safe”. The antique store was a 2-story old building that was constructed in the 1800s. One of the antique store’s devoted customers was a young man named Peter who began befriending Mari. Mari wanted to hire him but the business couldn’t afford to hire him; however, that didn’t stop Peter for wanting to work there as a store assistant. One day at the shop, Peter noticed a picture frame leaning against the counter. All the sudden, it “lifted up” and fell over. Mari also saw what Peter saw and said that “the pic flew up across the room and landed face down”. Mari and Peter looked at each other and were dumbfounded at what they saw. But more strange phenomena happened at the shop. Peter and Mari were closing the store and just as they were leaving, they heard footsteps on the second level. They thought maybe it was a customer upstairs that they forgot to check up on. Peter swore there wasn’t anyone upstairs. They checked the surveillance cameras and no one was up there. But there were still footsteps being heard. Peter decided to go upstairs but the more steps he took, the more anxious he got. He then heard a “pounding noise” and jumped, rushed downstairs and ran out. Mari was frightened. “It wasn’t going away, it was getting worse!” she exclaimed. Mark went in the shop, but saw no one there. He got scared…but not because of the strange thought but because he questioned where Mari was slowly going insane. Mari begged him to move out. However, Mark didn’t have the resources to just pack up and move. “I should’ve left…I should’ve gone out of there….” Mari recalls. 

Visitors of the past stopping by

One night, Mark woke up and looked down; he saw he had 3 scratches on his hand. Then when Mari woke up, she saw 3 marks on her side. They were frightened and what scared them even more was they didn’t feel themselves getting scratched.  On another night in the living room, Mari and Mark are watching TV in the room. Mari kept telling herself to watch TV and to just focus on the TV show. All the sudden, Mari felt someone was watching her. She turned around and saw “people” looking at her. She immediately panicked. Mark turned around and saw nothing, but Mari saw them with her two eyes. She called for Jesse. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She saw a woman in a black “mourning dress” from the Victorian-era and with her was a small boy in a black suit. Mari ran to Jesse to protect him. 

Paranormal Scars

On a separate occasion at dinnertime, Jesse, Mark and Mari were all out in the kitchen, fixing their plates. Jess reached up and just as he touched plate of food, he started screaming and shaking like he was being electrocuted. He kept crying “my side, my side!”. They lifted up his shirt and saw he had a red mark. It kept growing as they were looking at it. There was nothing hot around him. “I wish I had taken him to the doctor but how can you explain that?” Mari said. “I couldn’t lie about it.” Startled at what happened to Jesse and also with Mari and Jesse locking themselves in the bedroom, Mark was slowly “waking up” and seeing how the strange phenomena was affecting his family. “I knew there was something evil in this house,” Mari explained. ”They were watching me.” Mark didn’t know what to do at this point and soon enough, he began experiencing phenomenon. On one occasion, Mark was in the kitchen when he looked over and saw a woman go down in the basement. He walked over there. The door was shut. Mark was trying to really sink in what he just witnessed. I saw a woman in a dress walk through the door. Meanwhile, Mari would witness the familiar “ghost woman” carrying an infant.  Mark began seeing the things now and began believing Mari and that she wasn’t crazy. Mari made a few phone calls and came in contact with Kat and Bev, two local historians. When Bev and Kat met up with Mari to hear her story, the two ladies noticed that she looked “haunted” and assumed that she could possibly be a troubled woman.  The women then began actively investigating the history of the house; they spent hours upon hours looking at land records, birth certificates, death certificates and more. Their research revealed that the antique store Mark worked at used to be called “Porter & Wright” hardware store and it was right in the center of town. The hardware store was also (literally) the center for gossip. “They didn’t have Facebook back then!” Bev joked. “So all the gossip was at the store.”

Secret letters

Meanwhile, the property where Mark and Mari lived used to be a farm in the early 1870s. A young woman named Theresa Stisen lived with her Uncle Phillip and her aunt. The uncle and aunt also took in an orphaned boy named Nate. Months later, Theresa became pregnant. The historians noted that during the  Victorian era, it was unthinkable that a single woman was pregnant so her uncle sent her far away to a local sanitarium. Theresa’s pregnancy was tough but her birth was much more difficult, as her newborn son had died. Because Theresa was so far away from home, no one in town knew…except Porter & Wright. During her stay at the sanitarium, Porter &Wright was a liason between communication with Theresa and Phillip, where both would send each other anonymous letters. Theresa became very ill after childbirth and on her death-bed, she confessed that her Uncle Phillip was the father of the boy. Theresa then died at the young age of 19. Phillip was sent to trial and Nate, the orphaned boy, testified about the relationship between Phillip and Theresa. While Phillip was charged guilty, the findings were thrown out because the judge of the case stated that the case was based on hearsay. Upon this discovery, Mari believed that Teresa died with people thinking she was having an affair with her uncle, when in fact, Theresa was molested.  “I was seeing her and her baby,” she recalls, speaking softly about Theresa; “I am most honored she chose me to told her story too. She’s a huge part of my life now.” Mark also confessed that he could’ve been more supportive during the paranormal nightmare Mari had endured. “All these connections were unebelievable!” Mark said.

An exorcism took place at the house in March of 2009. There has been no reported paranormal phenomena at the house since then….

Vampire Slaying kit from the Main St. Antique Store

Janes Notes: This story has me boggled because of Mari-Lynn's position in all of this. I will admit, the fact she was so hellbent on getting Robin's angels out of the house and selling her things left a sour taste in my mouth and I can admit when I said, I was a slight judgemental jackass towards her. But then my opinion on her softened up when she showed compassion for Theresa once she realized the dark, disturbing hitsory behind the two locations that Mari associated with at home AND work. It's one thing to experience paranormal phenomena in one location (work, home, etc) but BOTH? I tried to do some google searches and eventually found some results googling the Main Street Antique Store in Holly, MI. It also seems that Mari-Lynn hasn't been a stranger the paranormal activity aside from the spirit of Theresa and child. This article here talks more about her experiences that have gone on in the antique store. I also saw the Facebook page for the store it seems Mari has had the courage to speak out more about her experiences and even embrace the world of the Paranormal. Their most recent post shows they are holding a Fall Antique show and will also be featuring people doing Tarot, Dragon, and Angel card readings, which are interesting, whether you believe in Tarot or not. If you look on their Facebook page here, it's a pretty active page and it's interesting to see all the stuff they have collected! With the amount of things that must come to them (let's hope no Dybbuk boxes!), it can be that certain energies have attached to the items and manifest themselves into ghosts. Pretty cool photo albums they have on there! But one more question. What is UP with the men on these shows?? Has anyone noticed that in most of these shows (save the cops on the Capitol Theatre recap), the men are in total denial and just brush it off? Note to self: marry a gentleman that believes in the paranormal so in case  I get scared and need a lap to jump on, he won't consider sending me to an asylum.

Picture Credit; SyFy, Main Street Antique Store's Facebook Page 

Follow me on Twitter @janedoemessage or visit my personal blog at Message In A Bottle.