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I thought, Okay, he's sleepwalking.

Wake up, you're sleepwalking, And then he just started laughing.

It was the creepiest, scariest laugh.

Welcome to the Knife.

I'm Patia Eton, I'm Hannah Smith, and today we've got something a little different.

In the spirit of Halloween, we're bringing you something spooky.

When Jamie and her family moved into a two hundred year old home in Lamar, Arkansas, it felt like a dream come true.

That is, until strange and eerie things started to occur.

Jamie and her family endured years of unexplainable sounds and sights, unexplainable unless, of course, you believe in ghosts.

Let's get into the interview.

Hi, Jamie, thank you for joining us today.

Hello, I'm happy to be here.

We're so excited to talk with you.

Yeah, I'm so excited to talk to you guys too.

So take us to your life prior to two thousand and two, when you end up moving into this house.

What was life looking like for you.

I was actually working as a legal assistant.

My mom was an attorney.

She's retired now, but I worked for her law office.

And then my husband Ben was a nurse, but he was also going to school full time, so it was hectic.

We had a new baby, Jackson was less than a year old, I think around eight months old or so.

We were living in a rental, just an apartment, and we were looking for a house and the kids could run and play, and we wanted to keep it in this small town with you know, small schools and plenty of space.

So we were on the hunt for a house.

And I grew up in Lamar, That's where I graduated high school, and so we thought that was the perfect place to start.

Can you tell us like a little bit about Lamar and what it's like there.

I think most people may not know.

Yeah, it's tiny, no stoplights, there's one gas station.

There is a post office.

So we basically have a school, a fire station, a little small police station.

Back in the day, there was a little diner called the Lamar Drive in, but that's even closed now.

Originally it was called Cabin Creek instead of Lamar, and it was going to be the state capitol.

They considered it for the state capitol at one time because the river's right there and they had a strong railroad system.

It used to be this bustling town, but now it's just a tiny, little small town where most people play sports because that's the only thing they have to offer.

There's no nightlife or anything like that.

So that I'm me hearing is there's a lot of history and.

A lot of history, a lot of history.

Yes, what drew you to this house?

In particular, my.

Aunt uncle owned the house.

They were debating on whether to rent it out or to sell it, and so they said, we know you're looking if you want to check it out.

They hadn't had it for long.

I don't believe they had had any renters in there or anything.

It was kind of just sitting empty for a while.

So they said, you know, it might be a fixer upper, but take a look and if you want it, we'll give you first DIBs on it.

We really didn't look much because as soon as we pulled up, I was like, this is the one.

So did they have live in that house while they owned it?

They never lived in it.

Now that seems like a really exciting time.

What was it like when you first moved in?

Well, first, it was perfect.

The trees were massive, and it was you know, these beautiful, like gnarly old old trees.

Big it was.

It had five acres, so I could picture my kids running back in those days.

The houses were built with two front doors, and so it had this big front porch, kind of Antebellum style.

It just looked like a dream home.

I mean, it definitely needed some work.

There was some tip paint, and you know, we could we knew that we were going to have to eventually do some renovations inside and out.

But there were so many little character things that drew us to it.

That had these massive fireplaces that kind of bookended the house, and so the chimneys went up both sides, and and that was what I always picked.

I always wanted an older house, and I just couldn't believe that this was in our price range, and so we were really excited about that.

How old was the house, Well.

From what I can tell, was built in the eighteen hundreds.

On one of the chimneys at the very top in the stone you can see is atch eighteen eleven, maybe eighteen forty one, but definitely one of those two.

You can see it etched in the stone.

So I it is from what I know that it was built sometime in that time, but also on a stone inside the house, on one of the fireplaces, it said seventeen eighty something, so I don't know, but sometime in the late seventeen hundreds or eighteen hundreds.

But I was told that that was odd because there were only like a handful of French tres in the area, so it was one of the original houses in that area.

Oh.

I wanted to mention that when we did the first walk through of the house down one hallway, the very last room we looked at when we were first looking at the house, and I mentioned this several times when I tell the story, but one of the fireplaces was boarded up and it looked like someone had broken in.

There was some like candles and some paraphernalia laying around, beer cans, you know that kind of stuff.

And then painted on the board was a pentagram and it had the name of a boy painted next to it, so it looked like some kids had been messing around.

We didn't really think that much about it, because I mean, it had been sitting empty.

Because Lamar is a very small town.

Jamie soon learned that the name painted on the pentagram was a local boy who had died.

It seemed like some teenagers had seen that no one was living in the house, broken in and hung out, but Jamie and her family wouldn't let this deter them from buying their first home, their dream home.

Around September of two thousand and two, Jamie, her husband, Ben, and their three kids moved into the house.

The kids were excited because they each got their own room, and at first all was well, but then about a month in strange things started to happen.

I feel like we had just unpacked our last box, is the way I remember it in my head.

We had, you know, the TV setup.

We were just exhausted.

I remember I was in my recliner and Ben was on the couch and we were just relaxing, and I thought I had heard one of the kids get up because we heard walking, like footsteps coming down the stairs, and I remember going, hey, you know, it's late, go back to bed, and nothing.

We just kept hearing like a little bit of stomping.

It sounded like small feet, not big, you know, boots or anything, So I really thought it was one of the kids.

Bridger liked to get up a lot and come down after he was already sent to bed, and so I went to check and the kids were all in bed, and so that was the first thing that I remember happening.

So I would say about a month after when we kind of felt totally settled in is when we first started hearing noises that we couldn't explain.

How are you like interpreting those noises?

At that time, old house things settling in.

I even thought, well, maybe, you know, when the kids got up and then heard me coming up the stairs and was pretending like they're sleeping.

Ben and I talked about it, and we're like, we're probably going to hear a lot of you know, things in this house because it's old, and old houses do weird things.

I guess when they're settling.

So then how do things progress where you start to notice, you know, what else happens over the course of a couple weeks or a month.

It seemed like in the beginning, once we started hearing footsteps, we'd also hear something that sounded like a ball bouncing down the stairs.

It was almost like someone took a rubber ball and started at the top of the stairs.

It would just be, you know, kind of like it was rolling down the stairs.

We heard that also, when we would get settled into sleep, we would hear a pounding.

It sounded almost like it was right above our heads when we were trying to sleep, so it sounded like it was something pounding on the wall, very loud.

Would you and your husband like, turn to each other, did you hear that?

What would the conversation be?

That was pretty much it.

Did you hear that?

And he's like, oh, yeah, I heard that, So you know again, I did a tree limb fall outside.

It was so loud.

It was almost like it was in the wall.

I don't know how to explain, but it was just very loud and right above our heads.

My middle son, Bridger Gosh, I want to say.

We moved in, who had to be around five, and he would come down and say that he couldn't sleep because people were talking in his room.

He kept here and talking, and I thought, okay, you know, we're watching TVs here in the sounds from the TV through the walls or through the ceiling.

But then he'd say, no, it sounds like a lot of people talking over each other and I can't understand what they're saying, and I can't sleep.

And again, I mean, this was pretty much a few months after we moved in, and so I just again thought it's the TV or it's his imagination, you know.

We didn't jump straight to, oh, gosh, there's a sea of ghosts in his room.

Jamie and Ben would eventually start to wonder if there was something more going on in that old house, something paranormal, but in those first months, they just continued to think, this is an old house.

Old houses make weird noises.

So it was mostly just sounds throughout the house at first.

But then a month or so would go by, and that's when my son started reporting hearing people talking in his room.

He started reporting that his toys would start making noises and kind of turn on by themselves.

So this was kind of over the first few months.

I would say, from fall to winter, these things started happening.

It wasn't every day.

Sometimes there would be a few days in between.

Some of those redew a week or so in between, so it wasn't like we were constantly, you know, hearing these things.

But it started to happen a little more frequently as the months went by.

My daughter actually thought my son was awake and playing with his toys in his room, and she would come down and kind of like taddle on him.

You know, Bridger's awake, he's playing with his toys in his room.

Or she would go and look and he'd be sound asleep.

And so she couldn't explain why she was hearing toys moving around or you know, sirens going off on the fire truck.

Jamie and Ben continued to hear noises that didn't make sense, voices of people they didn't know, toys turning on in the middle of the night, someone walking around upstairs, a ball bouncing.

Still, they explained it away as the sounds of an old house.

Jamie was really clear that she didn't bring up the idea of ghosts to her kids.

Instead, she would tell them, you're probably just hearing the TV through the wall, or maybe it's the wind.

Slowly, but surely, more odd things started to happen.

After a while.

When I was sleeping, it felt like someone was going and just like flicking my hair, and Ben actually saw my hair flick.

Really, yeah, that's terrifying.

It was so scary.

So that happened, and I was like, okay, you know now it's beyond just noises.

Ben was sleeping, he worked, he was a factory nurse at Tyson, so he worked overnight, but then he would sleep for just a few hours and then go to class.

And so we had one of my friends, I worked at the law office, and so she would come and kind of help with Jackson because the other two were in school while Ben could get some sleep, and then she would stay with him until I got off work.

And Ben was trying to sleep and he heard Jackson crying because we had the baby monitor in our room, and he heard Jackson crying and he was like, you know, Gessa, you know I are you going to get the baby?

And he thought that she was just ignoring the baby.

So he finally got up, and he was real grumpy about it because you know, he was trying to sleep, and so he kind of stombed upstairs and Jackson was not there, Dessa was not there.

They were gone.

But he heard this loud crying and the monitor and there was no baby.

It was a sound only monitor.

I'm assuming no video.

No video.

Yeah, but he never mentioned that to me at first.

He didn't want to freak me out.

I mean, we had already started going.

I don't know, maybe we have something else going on, but I mean we just we were busy people and we really just wanted it to be nothing, and so we would try to explain it away.

Even as it progressed.

We would try to, you know, is it our imagination, is it just the old house?

What is it?

It's hard because your imagination can do crazy things, you know, and so we you know everything, we just kind of we're suspicious, but nothing was like one hundred percent this house is haunted.

Yet I went to Walmart, and again it's a small town.

There was a greet or she was young.

I didn't know her, but she said, hey, is your name Jamie?

And I said yes, and she said do you live in that house on Cabin Creek?

And I said yeah.

And she said, well some of my family used to live there and it's haunted.

And I said oh really, And I said, well, I'd love to hear more.

She wrote down her number.

This was like cell phones weren't really a thing.

Then I was like okay, but I was in a rush, and I said, would love to talk to you more.

She wrote down her name and number, and then I just kind of put it aside and thought, well, you know, I'd like to hear more.

At some point but it wasn't like we had experienced enough to where I felt like I was desperate for information at that time.

Yeah, and prior to this experience in your life, I guess, prior to this chapter, were you, you know, a believer in ghosts the paranormal.

Yes, but it wasn't.

I've never felt really scared.

When I was a teenager, we had a lot of things happen in one of the houses I lived in.

My mom has experienced somethings, so I've always believed in ghosts, but none of them have ever felt like a threat or anything like that.

It was just something I've always believed was there but couldn't explain.

So things are progressing, you know, slowly, but surely you're hearing more and more than you run into this person at Walmart who knows a little bit about other people who have experience.

Maybe the house is haunted.

When is the moment of okay, this is paranormal.

Well, as soon as Ben told me about the baby monitor, for me, that was enough.

With everything else that's happened, that kind of sealed the deal for me.

I'm like, something's not right.

But at the same time, what do you do?

You just bought a house.

We put every penny we have into it.

What are we going to do?

I mean, if our house is haunted, I mean seems like they're harmless.

If there are ghosts here, nobody's being hurt, So what do you do?

But then the thing that kind of changed my mind to maybe it's not just a harmless ghost.

My friend that was helping me with the baby.

We also had some creative projects.

We were doing a writing project and it was late at night.

Ben was working overnight and we were both sitting at this computer monitor and just kind of talking and the kids were already in bed.

It was probably ten or eleven at night and working away, and then we saw what looked like just like kind of a shadow past, you know, just a reflection on the monitor, and we both jumped and she was like, did you see that?

And I said, yep, I sure did.

So we were freaked out.

But again, was it a passing car, was it some kind of reflection through the window.

You just don't know.

And we were already kind of jumpy because of things that had happened in the house.

So we kept working.

But then I heard one of the kids coming down the stairs.

When he round to the corner, walked straight up to us, just blank face, walked right up next to me.

You know, I'm like, I'm sitting here.

He was just standing right next to me and looking straight ahead, and it looked like he was in a trance.

And so, you know, I was like, Bridger, are you okay, what's going on?

And nothing, just a blank stare.

So I thought, okay, he's sleepwalking.

And so I kind of, you know, like shook his little shoulders and you know, like, wake up, Bridger, you know you're sleepwalking.

And then he just started laughing like it was the creepiest, scariest laugh just aha, just like right in my face.

And I could not snap him out of it at all.

It was the scariest thing I've ever seen.

I mean, it's not a laugh I've ever heard him make before, so laughing laughing.

I finally was like, Bridger, you know, just we're like frantically trying to wake him up.

At this point, he finally snapped out of it.

He was so confused, he had no idea what was going on.

He just seemed completely unaware of how he made it down the stairs.

He didn't remember laughing, didn't remember anything, we did have a dog, and at that point, the dog just took off like a bolt up the stairs, just bolted up the stairs and we could hear the dog just barking, bark and barking like ferociously, and so Destin I ran up the stairs after the dog, and the dog was on Bridger's bed, jumped up on Bridger's bed, went to the corner.

It looked like it had something pinned in the corner and was just barking, barking, barking, and it was terrifying.

So Desain and I were so scared and we ran back down the stairs, and as we were coming down the stairs, we noticed that the dog's leash was at the bottom of the stairs.

It was not there when we just ran up the stairs thirty seconds before that.

So it was almost like whatever it was was saying, get this dog out of here.

So Deessa saw all of this happen with Dodgers.

Yeah, what was her reaction in that moment?

No, she was freaked out.

Yeah, yeah, she was very freaked out.

Had he ever sleptwalk before?

No, how old was he at this time, five or six?

I can't remember how long it had been at this point, but we definitely have been there for a while, so at least a year.

Yeah.

And then did he ever sleepwalk again after that?

No?

Nope, This was like one isolated incident.

Yes, And I mean that's got to be scary in and of itself.

I've been around people who sleepwalk, and it sort of feels like this creepy experience no matter what, because you're like, your eyes are open, you're walking around, you're not aware, you're like a weird zombie person.

Yeah, but the laughing and then also in combination of as soon as he sort of comes out of it, the dog right, would freak me out so much because, like you said, humans whatever, I think, once we have it in our heads, maybe that something's haunted.

There's all these ways that we could interpret something right to be like, well, yes, was that paranormal, but like a dog doesn't know that.

Nope, And dogs are very perceptive.

We love dogs on this podcast.

Yes, had the dog ever done anything like that?

No?

No, Wow, that's so strange.

That was by far the scariest thing that happened.

I don't know.

I don't want to say he was possessed, because everything was fine after that, you know, he was perfectly normal, but something I don't know what it was.

He was like a scary trance of some sort that he was in.

Yeah, and I'm just like, as a mom, like, how do you put him back down to bed or what did you do?

He slept with us?

Yeah, yeah, he slept with us.

Jackson later on slept with us as well.

We had a very crowded bed.

Tory, my oldest was the only one really that slept in her room.

Sounds like a good dog.

I know.

She was the best.

Her name was Calli and she was very protective.

Yeah.

So what did you tell Ben?

Oh?

I mean, I just I told him what had happened, and he was really freaked out.

I mean he was kind of skeptical and always try to explain it away up to the baby monitor thing, which then that started his wheels turning that maybe we had a ghost.

But then other things had happened, like him seeing my hair being flipped, and there were things that were happening that he couldn't explain anymore.

And so by the time this happened with Bridger, he was scared.

Yeah.

So then what do you do, because, as you said, you've bought this house, you know, that's a huge sort of purchase and accomplishment to like be like, we bought a house and we put all our money in it.

It's not an easy thing to just undo.

But now you're seeing and hearing things.

But at this point, now it sort of crossed over to your son seems to have been affected in this scary way, right, So what do you do next?

Like what are you thinking at that point?

Well, I had started talking to my family, my mom, and you know, just like what do I do?

And we can't just move.

We have all of our money tied up in this I mean, Ben was going to school.

It was a very, very financially stressful time already.

On top of all the things that have happened in this house, it also had a lot of old house problems, trouble with the you know, central heating, air and the appliances were constantly breaking, and we'd have electrical problems and it was just always something in the stress of it was just a lot, but we were kind of stuck there.

It was pretty impossible for us to move.

The thing that was our saving grace, I think was that this was not constant.

So we would have several months where they would happen, you know, and we'd hear these noises, and that happened with Bridger, and then we would have several months where nothing, nothing, completely quiet, and we're like, okay, you know, maybe everything's okay, and so we start to settle in again and get comfortable in the house, and then something else would happen.

This was a pattern, and this went on for two or three years of very active and then really quiet.

When you say more active, can you give some examples of like things that were happening when things became active again.

Yeah, it would be all over the place.

Really.

We heard the noises, like the ball bouncing often, that was something that happened more than once.

Stomping, the knocking on the walls would happen a lot.

Weird things would happen, like we'd wake up and there would be dimes in our shoes and it's like slippers, you know, took your slippers off, get into bed, wake up the next day, put your feet in your shoes and there's dimes in there or a cheeto.

You know, it's just like what is going on?

I heard someone call my name from the laundry room.

I was in the kitchen and it sounded like one of the kids going mom, you know mom.

So I went in there.

No one was in there.

My brother came to stay at the house, and he saw what looked like a stream of smoke, like maybe someone had set like a cigarette or a cigar or a pipe or something down and there was just this stream of smoke coming up from the counter.

I saw that as well at a different time.

There were just so many different things going on in the house.

Jamie tried to look into the history of the house.

She knew the house was really old, and she wondered if maybe there was a clue in the history that might shed light on what was going on in the h She reached out to the historical society.

She asked around the neighborhood.

She ended up being told that the written history of the house had been lost to a fire.

But there were many local rumors about this house.

It was rumored to be the original stage coach stop.

It was rumored that it was a speakeasy at one time.

It was rumored that it was even used temporarily as the county jail.

So we were hearing all these things, and we heard that a boy had fallen from the upstairs window.

I also heard that someone got hit by a stage coach.

I heard all these stories.

I can't verify any of them.

It was all just this was rumors, but we started talking about it in what it could be.

There was also a cemetery, a Confederate cemetery, about two hundred yards from the house.

It was on the property.

It was five acres, so that was part of the five acres, but it was ded it off, so the city, the town took care of the cemetery itself, but it was on the property.

So there were so many things that we just thought there's been a lot of history here.

Maybe it's just you know, spirits that there's been so many people in and out, so much happened here, hundreds of years worth of activity, and so that's kind of what we wrote it off as.

It's just it's a very active house because it has a rich history.

Did you think back to that person at Walmart?

Yeah, I actually wanted to talk to her again.

A lot of time had gone by.

I can't keep track of anything, so I lost her name or number.

I had no idea.

All I knew was what she looked like and that she was from Lamar that her family had lived there.

That's what she told me.

It was a very brief conversation, the first time go into any detail.

She just said, oh, my family used to live in that house and it's haunted.

So I did go back and just kind of look for her.

I just said, you know, hey, you know there was a greeter here.

This is what she looks like.

I don't remember her name.

And they're like, oh, yeah, that's so and so, and she doesn't work there anymore.

So I didn't know how to get back in touch with her.

Yeah, and houses the biggest purchase most of us ever make.

You can't just up and leave.

Did you take any sort of action to try to rid the house of the ghosts?

Yes.

After the thing with Bridger, I had talked to my mom and I was like, what do we do?

And she's like, well, maybe you can get the house cleansed or have some investigators come and see, you know what they can find.

And I've never done anything like that.

My mom had seen I think an article in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and it was talking about CASPER, which is Central Arkansas Society for Normal Research.

I love that academics.

It's great.

Classic.

Yeah, So I found their email.

I emailed them.

I said, look, this is what's going on.

Do you want to come and do an investigation?

Is there anything you can do to help us?

Jamie planned to have this paranormal society come check out their home to do an investigation and hopefully a cleansing, but before they could even schedule that, something terrible happened.

I had gone to pick up the kids from school.

I had the two boys.

They were in there.

Bridge was about five, so he was still in a booster seat.

Jackson was still in a car seat, and Tory was sitting with me up front.

And it wasn't a long drive, maybe three or four miles from the school to the house, and we were driving home.

It had been raining for the last few days, so the road was a little wet.

They were doing construction and one of the construc ruption barrels looked like someone had tapped it and it had rolled out into the middle of the road, and I went to go around it, and I overcorrected and we ended up, you know, sliding, and the road was wet, and we ended up flipping several times.

The van ended up rolling and landing upside down.

It was terrifying.

I did not know where Tory was.

She was not in her seat.

I got out after figuring out what was going on and that we had just wrecked and the boys were upside down.

They were still in their seats, completely fine.

I could tell that they were fine.

So I went and tried to find Tory.

I didn't know she had like phone out and she was in the ditch or what.

And someone came running that had witnessed the accident.

It was running full speed towards me and said, there's someone under the van and I I didn't know what I was going to find, but I knew it was Tory.

And I crawled on my hands and knees under the van.

There was a little bit of a space enough for my body to get under the van, and she was there.

She was pinned under the van.

She wasn't moving.

It was very hard.

I touched her hand and she did kind of come to, and I remember her saying, what's happened?

And I told her, you know, we were in an accident.

And I was so glad that she was okay.

But she could barely I mean, she was the weight of the van was on top of her.

So she had no breast.

She could barely get any words out, and she's like, I can't you know, I can't breathe.

And I just said to just keep talking to me as long as you're talking breathing, you know.

And so I stayed there.

Someone had called nine one one, and it was very fast.

It seemed like almost instant that the Saint Troopers arrived on the scene.

She was just like, am I going to die?

And it was the worst, worst moment of my life.

We were able to get the van.

They came with special tow truck and was able to lift the van straight off of her.

They said the only reason why she survived is because it had rained for days and the ground was super soft, so she was able to sink into the mud.

So the weight of the van was taken off of her because she was able to sink into the ground.

How old was she when this happened.

She was ten.

She was ten years old.

Yeah, it was the worst day of my life.

Yeah, the worst day of my life by far.

But she was rushed to children's hospital and she broke several ribs.

She broke her back.

She had compression fractures on her back in several places knocked, some of her teeth out, was covered in glass.

It was awful.

The boys didn't even have a scratch on them, but cautionary tale.

She had her seatbelt the strap tucked behind her back, and just with all the rolling and her being so small, it didn't hold her in.

She was in the hospital for a couple of weeks and then came home.

She was in an immobilizing back brace, and so I took off work.

She was out of school and I stayed with her full time.

I mean, we were already in financial trouble and then this happens, and you know, I have a healing child, and so it kind of felt like we were just stuck there in the house until at least so she healed, you know.

Jamie said this was an incredibly stressful period of her life.

They were struggling financially.

The house seemed to need constant repairs.

She was sleep deprived, incredibly sleep deprived, and two of her kids were also sleeping in their bed because of the scary voices they were hearing in their rooms.

Jamie and Ben really wanted to leave this house, but they just couldn't do it financially, not yet.

But Jamie wants to be really clear that she doesn't believe anything paranormal caused this car wreck.

She said she previously told her story and it was interpreted that perhaps a ghost might have grabbed the wheel, but that is not how Jamie sees it.

No, And you know, the story has been told by a major network, and I was really upset when I saw their rendition of it because I do not believe that it was a paranormal thing that caused the wreck.

I feel like, I mean, it just was one of those things and it could have happened if I was, you know, fully rested too.

I just remember feeling so exhausted that day and I don't know if my you know, reflexes were not where they should have been or what.

But I think if I'm going to blame the house at all, it would just be that we were exhausted.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it was a very stressful time and it was you know, sleep deprivation with little kids is so real.

Yeah, even in the best of circumstances, and then you're dealing with like this older home that has issues and strange activity and the financial stress.

It's a lot at once.

Yeah, it was.

And so then you obviously have no choice but to go back home.

And now your child is in this I think you called it in immobilizing back brace.

Yes, And you had said earlier like the house was just full of actual just problems, right, that must have been so difficult to care for her in that space.

It was.

I mean she was in excruciating pain all the time.

I mean sometimes she would just howl with pain.

He couldn't go to school, you know, so we were I was homeschooling her and then still trying to keep up with working from home.

And it was a lot.

And she's doing great now.

So I always told her she was meant for great things, you know.

Yeah, it seems like a miracle that she survived that accident.

Sounds like a miracle.

Yeah.

Once Jamie's daughter Tory was recovered, Jamie reached back out to the paranormal Investigation organization.

She thought, well, we can't leave the house right now, but maybe this organization can help stop the paranormal activity and make our lives easier.

They had a skeptic come with them.

They always brought someone that was I believe he was an electrician.

I could have this wrong, but he at least knew something about, you know, the electrical problems.

It could check out the house.

Because we had one hallway, the one that was leading to Bridgers room.

We could never keep the lights on in that hallway, and so that made it extra creepy because he was reporting all this stuff from his room and so we had Alan, one of the skeptics with Casper, check out the electricity and he couldn't see anything that was wrong.

And what was the issue with the light?

Yeah.

We we would put even like led bulbs you know, in there.

They were supposed to last for years, and within hours the light would go out.

It just wouldn't work.

It was just like it used all the power from the bulb within a few hours.

We even got touch lamps specifically for when the investigators were coming, you know the kind that you can just stick to the wall, then you touch them and then come on so their battery operated.

Got several of those and just lined them down the hallway with new batteries and backup batteries, and within a few minutes they would burn out.

It wouldn't work.

A touch slamp in a haunted house was like, okay, you're inviting some weird stuff.

Yeah, I know, I know.

But that's not even connected to the old house electric system and they're still going out.

That's that's creepy.

That's freaky.

It was very freaky, very freaky, and it was just in that one hallway that was leading to Bridgers room.

And what to people who do the work that Casper does, what do they do to cleanse a house?

Well, when they first came in, they just kind of kind of took over the house.

They had a psychic with them and they would just kind of go and sit in different spaces in the house.

So Bridger's room was one of the major places that they would sit because that's where we had the most activity reported.

So they would just sit and kind of just tell us if they picked up on anything.

I had my friend that watch, Jackson, was with us.

One of my cousins was there, so I had several people with me, and then they had Casper had several members with them, and so we kind of just waited for something to happen for a while.

One of the psychics, I believe her name was Violet, said that when she was in Bridger's room, she just heard like a sea of voices which is kind of what Bridgert was describing.

She said there were so many that she couldn't tell what they were saying.

None of the words they were saying were clear.

It was just like everyone was talking over each other, and that's what bridger had described.

And they did have video cameras set up in several places.

I know one was set up kind of from bridges room, pointing down the hallway where the lights we couldn't get to stay on.

One of the investigators said that's where they felt the biggest oppressive feeling, almost like that was a negative energy in the house.

And also the psychic said that she felt that there was both good and bad spirits in the house, that she felt that some more benign and that seemed a little more malignant.

You know, we were hearing all this, and so ultimately they decided that they wanted to try to communicate with some of these spirits, and this is when they brought out a Ouigi board.

You know, looking back, I never would have agreed to this if I had known more about what was going to happen.

What was your feeling about Ouiji boards before that?

I didn't have a good feeling, But also I didn't know what to believe.

You know, I didn't know if it was just there's all these scary stories attached to it, but I didn't know if it's something I should be really afraid of.

But again I thought, they're the professional investigators, so let's, I guess, let them do their thing.

They had several people, I want to say four people that had their hands on the blanchet.

They started asking questions, is their spirit in the house that wants to speak to us?

That kind of thing.

It would say yes, there was, so the blanchet would go to yes, and then it would say, you know, have we seen you?

What is your name was one of the questions.

What is your name?

And it spelled out SETH, so S E T H went to each of the letters.

And then they asked when this spirit was alive, and it said never.

And so everyone freaked out when that happened because they said, if it's never, that means it's a demon that they're communicating with.

Oh wow, okay, yeah.

And so the question was is this something that's been in the house or is this something that they conjured up?

Because they started using the Ouiji board and so that's something I've never known, because up to that point, I never felt like we had a demon.

I just felt like we had very active ghosts.

I didn't feel like our lives were in danger.

But once that happened, it felt like the energy and in the house changed.

Really, So you noticed a difference after.

Yeah, yeah, you do get kind of swept away in the moment.

I mean, if you're you're sitting there and you're hearing this, and of course you're terrified.

Yeah, I don't want anyone telling me that a demon named Seth lives in my house.

Yeah, because if you like believe in this stuff or are at least like open to it, then people who then die and maybe exist in some sort of like ghost state.

You know.

I think most people are inherently good or have good in them, but a demon rights like that's really staffying.

It was very terrifying.

And then they asked the spirit if anyone had seen him tonight that night, and it said yes, And so they asked you know who, and it looked like the Blanchets, sort of moving in a figure eight almost.

It's almost like an infinity sign, you know, kind of, And then it went off the board and went and pointed at one of the cameras.

Yeah, almost like, yes, someone saw me.

It's on this camera right here.

And then was there some sort of footage that they aired.

I wish I could get my hands on this footage.

Supposedly there was a figure in the hallway.

It was from the camera that was pointing from Bridger's room down the hallway, and it looked like a shadow figure that was kind of forming almost to a human shape, starting at the ceiling, kind of coming down and making a human form, but then would fade away.

Did they ever show it to you?

I could see it, but it was very it was hard, you know, it's very dark, you know how video footage is.

To me, it looked like something forming, but I, you know, I don't know.

Yeah, obviously who knows what was really going on, and maybe maybe they were picking up on something.

But so my brother works in film and he worked for one of these ghosts investigation shows for a while.

Obviously not this one, but a different one, and you know, they're all different, but this one sounded very almost like predatory on people, like coming into their home telling them that there's all these things there.

He at one point sort of was in the background and like flushed a toilet or something, and he was like, oh, sorry, that was me, Like, you know, he should stop filming, and they were like, no, just be quiet, we'll get that.

In the background, there was a lot of fabricating of stuff, ok, for the TV, because it has to look big and it has to look you know, you have a crew, you're paying, you have a show, so you have to make sure that there's some payoffs.

Not to say that every place does that, but there's part of my brain that's like, oh, they came into your house and told you that it was demon possessed and then then pointed to the camera like the camera has the footage, not to say that it's not real.

But regardless if it was real or even if they made it up, it's like kind of rude to you because and now you think that there is a demon in your home.

Yes, it was terrifying.

It was terrifying.

So up to that point, I mean, we just thought, let's cleanse the house, let's have these people.

You know, we're stuck here, you know, financially, there's nothing we can do.

We have an injured child, We're not going anywhere.

Maybe these people can come in and give us some peace of mind, give us some answers or anything.

And then when they brought out the WISI board, I changed my perspective.

I was terrified after that.

Jamie and Ben had come to believe that their house was haunted, and the haunting had been affecting the entire family.

They were on edge, stressed, scared.

So the whole reason Jamie invited this paranormal investigation group into her home was to cleanse it.

What she wanted was peace and for her family to feel less afraid in the house.

Instead, what happened was this group came in and introduced an even scared your idea that a demon named Seth was living there.

Jamie said she had never felt more terrified in her own home than at that moment.

So it makes you wonder if this group was potentially making things worse, giving them more reasons to feel unsettled.

Jamie did say that after they announced the presence of the demon, they then performed some cleansing rituals.

They went through with sage.

They had brought sage and you know, all this stuff, and so they went through and they were saying, you know, cleanse this house.

They were doing some chanting and please by all means, you know, do this.

At this point, I was all for them doing this.

I was terrified.

But then they did like a circle of salt around the house and some of these other rituals.

And I don't know if it was just the power suggestion or what, but it did feel almost instantly like it had helped, like things had calmed down.

But you know, I don't know, I don't know if what they did really worked or if it was just the power of suggestion, like this is going to help, you know, made me feel a little more relaxed, but it was kind of like, okay, you know, they did the cleansing and then they left, so it was just Okay, you have a demon in your house, We're going to do this cleansing and now we're out, you know, good luck kind of thing.

But it didn't stop the activity.

Within a couple of days, we started hearing the noises and cabinet doors opening, and it hadn't really changed much.

Sometime after this, Jamie and Ben both got jobs working on a TV show in Joplin, Missouri.

They put the house on the market.

It didn't sell, so they ended up renting it out through a realty company, they packed up their lives and they moved to Joplin.

It helped great.

I felt great for so many reasons.

I mean, I didn't feel like the spirits followed us or anything.

I feel like I slept so well in a new space.

And also we didn't have the responsibilities of maintenance.

We had a landlord, and it just seemed like such a relief compared to what we've been going through for the last four years.

We were there, I think about a year close to a year.

And while we were in job On actually is when the Discovery Channel contacted us and they wanted to do a story on our house.

Jamie and Benn decided to participate in the Discovery Channel story about their haunted house, and then eventually they actually moved back to Lamar, back into the haunted house.

They were finally able to do some renovations, and they sold the house in two thousand and seven.

How do you think the experience of living in a house that felt haunted has impacted you.

I mean, at the time, it was exhausting.

I think even I made the joke, I guess it would be a joke, but when people ask me about the house, I still have people contacting me, like you guys after the Discovery Channel did the episode of a Haunting.

For years, people would reach out to me.

They would find me on Facebook or social media or you know, find my email and reach out.

And so I made the joke that now that's the only thing haunting me.

Yeah, it's that story.

All these Instagram messages.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, But no, I mean I remember it as one of the most stressful times of my life.

It was such a relief when I finally left, not just because of the haunting, but just because it was such an old house.

It just didn't have the vibe that we thought it was going to have.

It was scary and it was also always breaking, and just between the two, it was just an exhausting experience.

Yeah, an old house is like really charming as an idea, but the reality is like, oh this is really old and yeah, a lot of maintenance.

Yeah yeah, I love the craftsmanship, paint the ghosts exactly.

It was such a.

Yeah, love the craftsmanship.

You don't have any yet, Patia, Happy Halloween, Happy Halloween.

Do you plan to dress up?

You know, gosh, I haven't dressed up for Halloween in a long time.

I think I did like a very lazy sort of cat costs back in twenty twenty two.

Yeah, drew on someone scars like a little headband.

But no, I mean, I don't have any night of Halloween plants, and I certainly don't have any party plans.

But I assume the chapter I'm in right now will involve a lot of trips to the pumpkin patch, a lot of painting the pumpkins, a lot of petting zoos.

Will turn our dress up?

She will, she will.

I think she has an Elsa costume locked and loaded that she's pretty excited about.

Rosen has really taken young children by storm for many, many years.

I never thought I would be that parent that knows every word to every Disney movie and she doesn't even watch that much, but they are just so catchy and good that like, I learned them all.

It's a pretty good movie.

I recently watched it with Ben, mainly because it's always in crossword clues and we're like, I don't really know what this movie is about, so we watched it so that we could understand the crossword clues and I enjoyed it.

Okay, good movie, Yeah, it's good, right, even since like my day, they've come so far.

Like I remember thinking Toy Story was like amazing, amazing, wow, and it is and it was then, but yeah, they've gotten even better.

Yeah.

Well, I usually go to a Halloween party, but I panic and try to decide my costume about two hours before I leave, even though I have three hundred and sixty five days since the last Halloween.

And you strike me as someone who would plan that literally never have.

Wow.

No, there's been many years that I've dressed up as Christmas.

Oh okayeen okay, because it was like I had like a tree green, just like Christmas, not like any specific object, like a green dress, and then I would just wrap my body in garlands and lights and fine, and then I'd be like I'm Christmas.

And it's sort of an easy go to.

You know.

I've thought about maybe doing that again this year, or trying a different holiday, but there's that like I don't know, I don't want to be Thanksgiving or like Fourth of July, like no one wants to dress up like that.

Really, it could be Easter.

I guess I could be Easter.

Yeah, I've got nothing to offer is inspiration for Halloween costumes I think it's commendable anybody that was effed in to dress up.

And I love the Christmas idea.

Okay, maybe I'll do that.

I do love Halloween, and we had a fun Halloween episode today.

You know, it got me thinking about how many people believe in ghosts.

Jamie said that she believes in ghosts and a lot of people in her life also believe in ghosts, And so I looked this up and according to a Gallup poll from twenty twenty five, nearly half of US adults, forty eight percent believe in psychic or spiritual healing.

Slightly fewer, thirty nine percent express a belief in ghosts, while between twenty four and twenty nine percent say they believe in other supernatural phenomena such as telepathy, communicating with the dead, astrology.

I guess astrology is included in that reincarnation in witches.

That's a long list, but like that means thirty nine percent of people believe in ghosts.

There was another poll that had it much higher, but I guess like that surprised me, I didn't.

I guess I didn't realize so many people believed in ghosts.

Yeah, I think it's maybe when we think about like psychics or what's the motivation for that?

Right, A lot of times it's like sadness.

It's someone wanting to communicate with someone that has passed that they can't communicate with anymore, or even a pet or something.

Right, Yeah, and that is easier for me to understand.

But I mean I feel like, I don't know, do you believe in ghosts?

I don't think I do.

I know a lot of people that do, and I think I knew a lot more people that believed in ghost when I lived in Oklahoma than in LA.

And it's also maybe like a regional thing.

I mean, I think people believe everywhere.

So I never grew up believing in ghosts, but I grew up really religiously, and so it was like we didn't believe in ghosts, but there was a belief in the supernatural.

But if I had been in that house and experiencing those things as a child, I would have thought those were like demons.

So in my growing up, it was like there's either angels who are like they work for God, or there's demons they work for the devil.

So it's like very like black and white, good and evil.

Yeah, but no, there was like scary stories of people waking up and talking about how there was like a demon on the end of their bed and I'm terrifying.

Oh, oh my gosh, that is that is so terrifying.

Did you ever as a kid feel like you were in the midst of a demon?

No, I never saw anything like that, but I was scared about it.

You know, it was scary to me.

And then I think later in my life, I was like, I don't believe any of this.

This is all like, you know, I don't believe in demons and angels anything definitely not ghosts.

And then I think now I'm sort of like more at a place where I'm just more okay to know that I don't know everything.

Yeah, I love that.

I think for me, I grew up in a household that had zero religion, which is you know, fine by me.

It was like, I feel like I've had a really good upbringing, and I grew up around people who were members of different faiths and that was also fine.

But yeah, I didn't have any sort of belief in anything supernatural ever, or paranormal or however you want to explain it.

But you know, I think like everybody else.

When you experience the death of someone close to you, like the finality of that makes you wonder.

You're like, could it be, Like could it be that I'm never going to see that person again, talk to that person again, And that becomes just almost impossible to reconcile.

And so you know, I think I'm probably closer to where you are.

I don't know what, I don't know, and there's answers that we're just not going to get and I'm okay with that.

Yeah, you know, it is a nice idea to think that you would be haunted by someone that you love who's passed away.

Yeah, that's a better haunting.

Yeah, that's a good haunting.

Oh yeah, Like if my light flickers, I'll just be like, oh, that's Bunker.

Yeah, that's bunker.

Ip Bunker a great dog, I know.

And like I do like the idea of that.

And there's a lot of like strange occurrences in the world and a lot of things that you're like, how could it be that this little thing that happened has resulted in all of this or whatever?

And I think that leaves my mind like open to all ideas about it.

But I've never experienced what I felt like was a ghost, but I don't think I would rule it out.

Yeah, I've definitely been in old, old houses that have a creepy vibe.

Yeah, but I don't think I I mean, I've for sure never experienced anything like a ghost.

There's part of me that thinks the moment you start believing in these things is the moment you start seeing them totally.

You know, I don't know, the brain works in mysterious ways.

Yeah, it's like you see people how you want to see them.

You see ghosts if you want.

To see them.

Yeah, And so I'm like, I don't believe in them, and I think that and they won't bother me.

Yeah.

I mean, also, just like the work that we do, and maybe just the content I would consume anyway, I have bigger problems, like serial killers.

To worry about scarier things.

But you know, this haunted house story, I still felt like was so compelling because you know, this was someone's true experience, and as we get into the story and learn about it, like you really see their reaction was the result of feeling like, Okay, we tried to write this off, but we can't write it off as just an old house making weird sounds anymore.

And yeah, I could totally get behind that.

Yeah, I thought I was interesting.

And then the sort of psychological terror that comes from that that Jamie talked about of experiencing these events.

The house is haunted and this is scaring her, scaring her children, and then that affects her everyday life, like they're sleeping in her bed.

There's sleep disruption.

It's stressful.

This idea of being trapped in a house that scares you that you can't get out of is a real life nightmare.

Totally.

Yeah, and I had one.

I wouldn't consider this like a ghost encounter, but how a strange thing happen When I was in I would have been in seventh grade, my grandmother passed away.

And I remember it was pie day because we were all supposed to bring these pies to school at fourteenth.

Yeah, yes, my fourteenth and I had a horse show that coming weekend and my grandmother was going to come up and go to this show.

She passed in her sleep peacefully, So of course we drive down to where she lived, which was like five hours from where we lived, and so we get to the house and she passed peacefully.

She was older.

There was nothing, you know, strange about it, even though it was sad.

So we ended up actually staying at the house that night and we were all going to start packing up her stuff the next day.

It was a pretty small house.

It wasn't like a big endeavor.

And I had this dream and my grandma is not super physically affectionate.

She was like a loving, wonderful grandma, but she wasn't like a big on hugs.

And in my dream, we were standing in her kitchen in her house that we were at, and she just gave me a hug.

And I don't remember if any like, if we spoke at all, but it was like a very nice moment.

It was like morning light in the kitchen and there were boxes in the kitchen and they were stacked in this really specific way.

And so I woke up and I kind of, you know that groggy dream state where you're like, oh, that was nice.

I guess, like who knows what that is, but that was nice.

Yeah.

Well, so I go into the kitchen later that day in the boxes are now in the kitchen, stacked in the exact way that they were in my dream.

And they hadn't been the day before, no.

Because we had just started packing that morning when everyone woke up.

Wow.

Yeah, that's wild.

It was really wild.

And I've never had anything like that before or since.

But yeah, whether it was just like my brain making me feel better or something else, like.

I was glad it.

Yeah, that's really nice.

Yeah.

I do feel like when we have loved ones pass away, there's more sort of unexplainable stuff that happens around that time.

Like when I've had people that I love pass away, I think that I see them a lot, like, oh, I'll see them in a crowd and stuff, or like have dreams about them, and I don't know, it's interesting that that happens at that time.

Yeah, it's like either you're just seeing things in a new way because you're kind of looking or maybe it's the universe being like it's okay, yeah, okay, Yeah, that's sweet.

Yeah.

So we have a little bit of history of Lamar that you found.

We tried to look into the history of Jamie's house.

You know.

In the interview, she talked about how it's an old house.

It was built potentially in the early eighteen hundreds, maybe even in the late seventeen hundreds, and there were all these rumors about there had been maybe a jail there, a stage coach stop.

Yeah, it was a stage coach stop.

It was like where you you would you know, if you were traveling through town, you would stop there.

Yeah, but we weren't able to find anything.

Yeah, nothing on her specific home.

But Lamar, Arkansas, like much of our country, especially the South, has a lot of history that is quite sad.

So before Lamar Arkansas became Lamar Arkansas, it was inhabited by indigenous people, and those indigenous people were part of what is now a federally recognized tribe, the Caddo Nation.

There were populations of Caddo people all along the Southeastern states, including Arkansas, Oklahoma, I think some up into Tennessee maybe.

So in the early eighteen hundreds, white settlers reached what is now Lamar and pushed a lot of these Catto people, almost all of them actually to reservations in Texas, which you know, is an awful thing that occurred in our nation's history.

So Lamar is actually named after a Confederate officer.

All so, I did learn through this process that Arkansas actually supplied more troops to the Union Army than any other state except Tennessee, and no Confederate battles took place in Lamar, but it was named after this Confederate officer, and there are many cemeteries around Johnson County and Lamar that people say there's lots of Confederate soldiers buried there.

So as far as Jamie's actual house, I did find something that was really close in location to where she lived, which is that in eighteen forty four, Thomas Stevenson Drew was elected governor of Arkansas and his plantation in Johnson County was first called Stream of Cabins because of the many homes he built for his slaves, and later it was called Cabin Creek, which of course is the name of the street that Jamie's house was on.

So this is obviously a really dark part of their history, and I don't don't know that it has any correlation to Jamie's story, but for whatever it's worth to anyone who's thinking, like, well, what was.

The history of the area, that's what we could find.

Yeah, well thanks for looking into that.

Yeah.

So if you love stories about stuff that's scary or maybe hard to explain, you can check out Jamie's podcast, The Unexplained Archives, where she and her co host Jennifer discuss everything from the paranormal to aliens.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back next week.

If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it.

Our email is The Knife at exactlyrightmedia dot com, or you can follow us on Instagram at the Knife Podcast or a Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced by me Hannah Smith and me paytia Ety.

Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Samarosi.

This episode was mixed by Tom Bryfogel.

Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport

Artwork five vansa Lilac executive produced by Karen Kilgaret, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.