Several years back, we carried a “special report” on a violently “haunted” — demonized — home in Hammond, Indiana, after interviewing a priest who was involved in quelling what was clearly a very sinister phenomenon. The family fled the home (children had become very sick, and were thrown about, along with objects, one of them even levitating in front of hospital personnel), as others also had abandoned it.
The story, first reported by the Indianapolis Star, made headlines nationally.
So did a subsequent purchase of the home by celebrity “ghost hunter” Zak Bagans [above], who decided to move in with a film crew and create a documentary on how it was to live there. We warned at the time of the extreme foolishness of meddling with such things.
But Zak went ahead, and now, this week, upon imminent release of the documentary, “Demon House,” the ghost hunter is in the media again, this time fretting over it.
“Bagans claimed he became so ill that he couldn’t leave his room for eight days,” reports the Indiana newspaper in a follow-up. “He said witnesses and experts were hospitalized. Crew members quit or were fired. ‘This film is cursed,’ he said during it.”
The documentary opens with a warning: “View at your own risk” — causing us to wonder, if it’s a danger, why it is being released.
So severe were the alleged phenomena — as the priest also described them to us — that Bagans has had the house torn down. The ghost hunters became the prey.
According to an recent interview, one of the crew members even became possessed — and violent toward the others. “The documentary is filled with moments of this kind of intensity, and it was that very fact that led Bagans to ultimately decide to tear down the house, but he’s quick to point out that simply doing so is not enough to have ended the demonic activity,” says the report.
“I decided to destroy the house to prevent anyone else from ever living there again,” said Bagans. “It’s like when someone has to have an exorcism, and it takes multiple times for it to truly be successful. I believe this is part of the action needed to destroy the things that live in that house, but do I believe they are gone, now? Absolutely not.”
That spirits can and do cause us physiological issues has long been recognized, not only in the Old Testament and by Jesus Himself but also subsequent Church founders such as Tertullian — who in a letter to Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antonius and the Roman Senate about spirits wrote (circa 200 AD) that “the ruin of mankind is their whole employment; these malicious spirits were bent on mischief from the beginning, and fatally auspicious in their first attempt, in undoing man as soon as he was made; and in like manner they practice the same destructive methods upon all his posterity, by inflicting diseases on their bodies [our italics], and throwing them into sad disasters, and stirring up sudden tempests and preternatural (abnormal) emotions in the soul.”
No ghost tour is a good ghost tour. Lent is prime time to purge of such spirits. For from time to time they “haunt” all of us, usually without our knowing.
Illness and physical harm?
There are similar places, such as the Myrtles Plantation, also in the news of late, “a house located in Louisiana which is dubbed as one of the most haunted houses in the United States. The house is reportedly built on the top of an Indian burial ground. According to the stories, there have been more than ten murders in the house. Legends have it that different types of ghosts appear including the ghost of a former slave.” The original owner’s two daughters died there of yellow fever.
So proliferate are such accounts that some realtors even assure buyers that there is no spookiness [below in Oregon].
Yes, pray for the souls. And keep in mind what Saint John Paul II, when asked about potential future disasters (as foreseen at Fatima), said (holding out his rosary beads):
“Here is the remedy.”
True as much with “ghosts” as with anything.
[Below from a tabloid called the London Express (too lurid for a link).]
As Tertullian wrote, “Philosopher is a name the devils value not; they stand in no awe of a philosopher’s beard, nor will the hem of his pallium cure any diseases. But Christians did not only outlive them in virtue but outdid them in power.” 
[resources: spiritual warfare books]