When the boyfriend’s wife found out about the affair between her husband and LaToya, says the priest, she called LaToya and made a rather ominous remark to the effect that “you will regret ever messing with my husband.”

This is asked because of things that occurred even before moving into the house. When LaToya was with him bed sheets had mysteriously slipped off her feet, objects suddenly went missing (including a pair of her Air Jordan sneakers), as did certain family photographs, and he had requested LaToya’s underwear as sort of a souvenir of their relationship (excuse the explicit detail, but it may play into the picture). Soon after LaToya (now knowing he was a married man) fled, renting the home on Carolina Street and not wanting him to enter.

House: horseflies, shadow of man, foot prints of boots, creaking door

Father Maginot, things in the house (which had included shadows and unexplained wet boot prints in the living room) “revved up.” The children were pulled off the couch, and the daughter, 12 at the time, levitated off her bed in full view of a friend who was sleeping over

A strange case, for the house itself also had its suspicious aspects.

As Father Maginot — who was granted permission from his bishop to exorcise LaToya — detailed to me, there were things about the basement of this home that lends one to believe it had its own occultic baggage — that it was what the priest calls a “portal.”

For in the basement, which was poured concrete, was a portion about four by three feet under the stairs (particularly the third and fourth steps) where the concrete had been broken. When police dug there, they found a white pair of panties, a political shirt pin, a plastic shoe horn that looked as if it had been purposefully broken in half, a lid for a small cooking pan, socks with the bottoms cut off below the ankles, and a heavy metal objects that looked like a weight for a drapery cord, as the Indianapolis Star so ably put it.

Anyway, the manifestations were intense. This we read about. Father Maginot witnessed it for himself on his first visit, when the lights in the bathroom mysteriously flickered every time he spoke about the haunting and the window blinds swayed though there was no breeze. There was the shadowy figure who would leave muddy footprints. He saw this himself. Father Maginot said he sprinkled blessed salt under the stairs, which seemed to be a focal point. A black “monster-like” form was seen by the children.

At one point, the three children lapsed into states whereby one would utter satantic-like chants and then pass out, followed by the next child continuing the same chant and passing out, followed by the third, in perfect sequence. The chants were in a strange deep voice and seemed to involve numbers. During a visit to the doctor’s office, the seven-year-old  — according to an official report from the Department of Child Services — was lifted by unseen forces and thrown against a wall. He was rushed to Methodist Hospital in Gary. When the caseworker, Valerie Washington, spoke to the family at the hospital, the boy’s eyes rolled back and he bared his teeth, growling.

It was at the hospital, in front of Washington and nurse Willie Lee Walker, that the other son, nine years old, who was holding his grandmother’s hand, suddenly had a strange grin and “walked up the wall, flipped over her, and stood there. There’s no way he could’ve have done that.” He had “glided” backwards up the wall. It wasn’t a running, acrobatic jump.

Police reported eerie exudations of oil in the home and trouble with electronic gear after visiting the home. One veteran homicide reporter refused to stay in the home in the dark. Another government caseworker who entered the house later suffered a series of accidents, including burns from a motorcycle, three broken ribs while Jet Skiing, a fractured hand, and finally a broken ankle while running in sandals.

Father Maginot himself seemed well-protected, though he too encountered strange events in his life. His computer had problems when he did a search having to do with demonology. Then there was “the bicycle ride, one of the strangest things in my life.”

On the way home, people he passed by were no longer friendly. Now, everyone was staring at him, with looks of puzzlement, about ten people, including a family. “It was freaky,” says the priest. “They were just standing there staring at me, all with the same kind of look.”

Between the second and third exorcisms, the lights went out in the rectory during a storm. Then there was a second outage right after July Fourth. It turned out to be a thirty-hour blackout. It was the first time in the fourteen years there that there was a sustained outage. And it occurred a third time just before Mass, which was then celebrated by candlelight. The Ammons had much electrical phenomena at the house —  static on the phone, strange disruptions in the television.