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.
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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.
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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.
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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….
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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;
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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
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