"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 

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