Haunted Gary

by Ursula Bielski

  The recommendations set by the Department of Child Services included a stipulation that discussion of demons and being possessed not be part of their conversations. They were also instructed to see therapists on a regular basis. Interestingly, Latoya was also instructed to find work and other housing, “due to the paranormal activity” at the current house, which police and DCS officials continued to investigate.

  Rosa, Latoya and the three officers from the initial visit returned to the “Demon House” on May 10, 2012. They were joined by Father Maginot, two Lake County officers with a police dog (to help determine whether a body might buried in the house) and a different DCS caseworker, who had volunteered to take the original worker’s place because she didn’t want to go back to the house.

  The group went down into the basement, where the caseworker saw a peculiar substance dripping from the wall. Touching it, the group found it slippery and tacky. Father Maginot told police he wanted to investigate the dirt floor under the stairs for either a human body or a pentagram or personal objects buried there, which could indicate a curse and, consequently, a demonic presence in the house.

  Police said the dirt area looked like the concrete might have been removed specifically to bury something, and with this added information, they began to dig. They unearthed a curious variety of objects: a pair of boys’ socks from another era, devoid of nylon or other synthetics; a decorative pot with a lid; a woman’s fingernails; a heavy weight, as from a grandfather clock; and a woman’s slip, again devoid of synthetic fibers. After unearthing what Maginot describes as three layers of objects, the officer shoveled the dirt back in, and the priest sprinkled the area with blessed salt.

  Back upstairs, the caseworker and Latoya began to complain of maladies. Latoya felt an intense pain in her head, and the caseworker soon complained of pain in her finger. The skin on her digit had turned pale and felt tingly, as if constricted. She then said she was having a panic attack and needed to go outside.

  The police captain left soon after while the others stayed to continue their investigation of the home. It was at this time that they noticed the same slippery substance dripping from the blinds in a bedroom. More than a month earlier, Latoya and her mother had blessed the doors and windows with olive oil, at the suggestion of a church worker, but the oil never dried and almost seemed to increase in substance and quantity. Unable to determine the source of the substance coming from the blinds, Maginot and the police officer wiped it off and closed the door to the room to see if it would reappear on its own, suspecting Rosa or Latoya of placing it there. When they returned about a half hour later, the substance had reappeared. Father Maginot told the officers that such unknown substances were often found as a physical manifestation of demonic possession. It was this manifestation—on the heels of all he’d seen and heard—that led Father Maginot to write to Bishop Dale Meltzer and request permission to perform an exorcism.

  Maginot attests that the bishop of Gary had never sanctioned an exorcism in the diocese during his more than two decades of service in his position. True to form, the bishop denied Maginot’s plea as well, directing him to seek the guidance of other priests who had performed exorcisms. Doing so, Maginot said his advisors told him to do a minor exorcism on Latoya.

  He arranged to perform a series of powerful blessings on the house and then to perform a minor exorcism on the woman. The case manager and two police officers attended the exorcism rite, during which the caseworker claimed to feel something unseen in the room. That same caseworker told a reporter that, after that visit, problems attended her constantly everywhere she went. In a few weeks, she was burned in a motorcycle accident, broke her ribs jet skiing and broke her hand and an ankle in separate incidents.

  Working from directives that had been given to him from sanctioned exorcists in the Archdioceses of Indianapolis and Chicago, Maginot gave Latoya an important directive: to identify the names of the demons who had been attacking her family. In an exorcism, it is very important for the identity of the demon or demons to be revealed. Maginot told Latoya to think about the things that the demon or demons had done and to find their names based on the harm they had caused. Latoya claimed that while she searched on the Internet for the names, the computer kept freezing and turning itself off and that she felt nauseated and dizzy. But she persevered, eventually finding names that felt right to her, including the names of demons assigned to harm children.

  After hearing the names, Father Maginot revealed to Latoya that he had received the bishop’s permission to exorcise her with the authority of the Catholic Church.

  Three major exorcisms were required to complete the task. The first two were done in English, the third in Latin. In attendance were two of the police officers who had been involved in the case since the first home visit to offer both emotional and physical support, in case the superhuman strength common in exorcisms became an issue. During the first two exorcisms, Latoya convulsed and thrashed, falling asleep at times, which Father Maginot believed was a way for the demons to lessen the power of the ritual. She would not speak normally but only in “Satanic chants.” But the hold seemed to lesson by the end of the second attempt, after which Father Maginot went on retreat.

  By the time of the final exorcism, in June 2012, the police no longer came. Father Maginot asked his brother to assist.

  This final exorcism was in the church’s “native tongue,” and after some minor convulsions during the event, Latoya once again fell asleep. But this would be—at least for now—the end of her possession. She regained custody of her children in the fall of 2012, taking them to their new home in Indianapolis, where she’d moved with her mother during the DCS investigations.

  I talked with Father Maginot in the spring of 2015, three years after the events in the Ammons house. I found out that he was not an appointed exorcist of the Diocese of Gary when he found himself ministering to the troubled family of Latoya Ammons. This job had found him. But like most priests, he was no stranger to the paranormal. Many priests perform a surprising number of routine house blessings to quell “activity,” especially that encountered after deaths in a home or after a move or remodel. Father Maginot doesn’t typically see spirits when he finds himself ministering to those with disturbances in their homes, but this time, he says, was different:

  I did witness things, and in fact, it was things Latoya and her mother were telling me would happen in the house, and then—when I was there—they happened. I would witness them.

  I knew these things had something to do with Latoya’s ex-boyfriend. Something struck me strange about him. Whenever I would talk about him, things would happen. And I thought, what is the involvement here, who is involved here? The children? But then when I pressed a crucifix to Latoya’s forehead and she began to convulse, I knew it was about her.

  Father Maginot nods to the popular cultural perceptions about possession, as seen in The Exorcist, but says this, too, was different:

  You normally think it’s something you brought on yourself—a Ouija board, some occult thing—but when it was shown that this was something that happened to them, we were baffled. [Latoya] was never involved in the occult, never dabbled in anything, but I did think something was brought in with the boyfriend. The last time he was there, things had gone up to a level where it almost drove them out of the house.

  Latoya had been seeing the man for some time when she discovered he was married. She broke it off, but he continued to pursue her, even finding out the location of her new home on Carolina Street and showing up at the door, sometimes trying to see her children while she was at work. Latoya had found out about the man’s wife from his wife, who called her one afternoon to confront her. Latoya was dumbfounded but assured the woman she wanted nothing to do with an adulterer. But before she could hang up, Latoya heard the woman’s last words: “You will regret ever messing with my husband.”

  Few people—even Catholics themselves—are aware that the church believes in the reality of curses, not the
mere power of suggestion but that people and families can be actually and deeply affected by powerful forces deliberately affixed or sent to them to wreak havoc on their lives. According to the church, human souls don’t do the bidding of mortals, only of God. It is demons alone that are on call for the whims of the living. And if a person or family is run down, without a firm foothold in faith and prayer life, distracted by the business of living or struggling to live—or even merely physically debilitated—the results of a curse can be devastating.

  Crucial to a curse is the “cursed object”: a piece of hair, a photograph of the person, clothing, a ring, eyeglasses or any other important and intimate item inextricably connected to the target of the curse. It is this object over which the curse is made, and in the case of the Ammons family, there were many possibilities. Father Maginot remembers:

  We felt there must be some sort of curse, because there were many things that were strange. The first time [the boyfriend] moved in with her he asked for her underwear. She asked, “What for?” He told her it was to “remember this wonderful moment” or some such thing. But also at that time—and she never thought about it until much later—she was missing a pair of Air Jordans, expensive shoes she had bought, and it was a big deal. And she thought one of the kids took them or was wearing them or had messed them up…but they never could find them. Also around the same time, [Latoya] wanted to have a family picture in the living room, and she was looking through the stack of pictures she had and saw that this photo and photos of the kids and such were missing. She never found where those pictures were.

  I asked Father Maginot about what he and the police and the social worker found under the stairs when they dug under the dirt floor and what he thought it all meant. He said that he believed these objects may have been a part of necromancy—the attempt to conjure up the dead—and that he felt they were not related to the Ammons case but likely the reason for the ghosts in the house.

  I wondered if Father Maginot had experienced any residue from the exorcisms—what paranormal investigators often call “attachments,” perhaps some energy or entity that was making itself known to him at home or in his church. He said:

  After the exorcism and also toward the end of it…at our parish we had several storms come through at that time when the last exorcism had been done. One was after Mass on Saturday. And it knocked out all the lights in the church, but they were able to get the lights back on before our nine o’clock Mass on Sunday.

  The second time was the longest—around the Fourth of July. This was right around the time of the final exorcism. We were doing the exorcism in the church, and Latoya’s mouth was moving but nothing was coming out. And the lights went out. Later, she told me that she was trying to tell me that something was trying to lift her up. The demon may have tried to gather the energy to do that. They weren’t able to do it because we were in the church.

  After the Fourth of July, we had another storm come in, and it knocked out our power for more than a day. It was about ninety degrees at the church, and my rectory was horrible…trying to sleep at about eighty-five degrees at night. But then they got the power back on thirty hours later.

  Then another storm came and knocked out the power in the Church. We had Mass by candlelight, and we brought out these candelabras and lit all the candles.

  That was beneficial because the week after that, right in the middle of Mass, the power went out again, and so we brought in the candelabras and lit the candles again, without missing a beat.

  We never had a loss of power like that [before]. Never.

  The national fervor that followed the release of Jay Anson’s novel The Amityville Horror in 1977 remains matchless in American paranormal history. The closest thing to it, before this time, was the very regional frenzies that broke out in Adams, Tennessee, on the Bell family farm during the reign of terror of the so-called Bell Witch and, to a much more important extent, in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1620. These two other events paled in widespread renown, of course, in comparison to the former. By the time the Amityville troubles became national news, the nation of Salem and of John Bell had become a celebrity-studded media paradise. There have, however, been only minor appearances of the paranormal in modern American history besides Amityville.

  There was Ted Serios, the Chicago bellman who, in the early 1960s, appeared on numerous television programs, attempting to demonstrate his claimed ability to imprint Polaroid film with images from his mind. In the 1980s, a fourteen-year-old Columbus, Ohio girl named Tina Resch became briefly famous as a poltergeist agent—and went on to go to prison for the alleged murder of her toddler many years later.

  By the year 2000, the Internet allowed those interested in the paranormal to create and populate their own worlds both locally and through web forums and on social media, and “haunted” places have come to be reported either through these outlets or on paranormal-themed television programs—not in the news. Paranormal activity has, since then, mostly occurred under the radar of the mainstream news media, with one exception: the case of Gary Indiana’s Demon House.

  Not long after Marisa Kwiatkowski’s story broke, the house was purchased by Zak Bagans, the star of the immensely popular Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures. Bagans, a tight-shirted, muscular, spike-haired young man who now lives in Las Vegas, began as a film student and ended up a celebrity when his 2007 documentary about a team of three ghost hunters became an overnight sensation. Together with Nick Groff and Aaron Goodwin, Bagans has filmed eight seasons and counting of Ghost Adventures, and he now serves as executive producer and enjoys the adoration of millions of fans around the world who—despite criticisms of the show’s alleged fakery and sensationalism—continue to tune in.

  In 2014, Bagans announced that he had been living in the house and filming a documentary about the house and the case, scheduled for release in October 2015. Though this author has worked with Bagans on several occasions and is close friends with his show’s writer and historian, Bagans gave no response to requests for an interview, a tour of the house or even a comment. Only time will tell what has gone on since the Demon House became Bagans’s most sensationalized “ghost adventure.”

  Len Miller and J.C. Rositas, the former a Gary policer officer and both esteemed paranormal investigators, were the first to offer investigative services to the family, during the time before the events had escalated to their most dramatic and when police in the city were baffled about what was happening. Their offers were refused.

  After the story broke, next came Bob Jensen, founder of GhostLand Society, located in Wisconsin. Jensen and his team traveled to the house on three separate occasions, finding no evidence whatsoever of paranormal activity. When asked why they kept going back, he explained that it is the team’s standard practice when children are involved to make absolutely certain there is no danger to the family.

  David Scott and John B. Stephens, of the paranormal research group Illinois Paranormal Research Association (IPRA) Strong are videographers who film an award-winning Internet show called Believe: An Online Paranormal Experience. A few days after the appearance of Latoya’s story in the Indy Star, the pair traveled to Gary to attempt to speak to the current owners. Though no one seemed to be at home, they took some film footage and recorded for electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) using a “ghost box.” A ghost box, ghost radio or spirit radio is an AM or FM radio that has been built or “hacked” to constantly scan through the band at a speed that renders the actual sound bytes unintelligible. Many investigators believe that disembodied energies use these sound bytes to form words, essentially allowing investigators to communicate with spirits in real time. When John was recording, a voice on the box called out, “John!” and later several different voices cried out, “David!” When asked whether one of the voices speaking had possessed Latoya Ammons in the house, a male response claimed flatly, “I did.” Voices also claimed that there was a “human” buried in the house, and another voice said it did “not know Christ.”<
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  During our talk, I asked Father Maginot with a smile if he is now the “go-to” exorcist for the Diocese of Gary and whether the diocese has been slammed with requests for exorcisms since the Ammons story broke. Father Maginot is so good-natured, and he laughs readily, but he doesn’t respond that way to this question. Rather, he says very seriously:

  There is one, in Gary, right now, and it is a very sensitive situation. It involves an expectant mother. She’s about to give birth. But I think the bishop wants someone experienced. The Indianapolis Diocese has an exorcist, and the bishop talked to him, but I think also he may be shopping it around for the right person.

  It has to be the right person.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE LOST BOY OF SMALL FARMS

  Between Chase and Burr Streets, right off Highway 80/94 on the west side of Gary, is an enigmatic section of town known as Small Farms. Readers should note that this is not the housing development known as Small Farms, which is considered one of the most desirable and up-and-coming parts of Gary, but an old, undeveloped section nearby. Today, the place is, as locals call it, “a different world” and, for one Gary police officer, “like nowhere else I’ve ever been.” Not much is left in present-day Small Farms. The area is a densely forested swamp, almost always filled with standing water, loomed over by spindly dead tree trunks, dense brush and abandoned and decaying shacks and trailers and scattered with old furniture, clothing, housewares and other rubbish routinely dumped here, including the odd human body from time to time.

  The area’s name, however, comes from a different era, when Small Farms was a pretty haven of small, family-run farms, which later changed into a quiet residential quarter filled with compact frame homes typical of much of Gary. Mom and pop stores, a little church and a few of the tiny patches of agriculture still hanging on: this was the snapshot here throughout the early 1960s, when Small Farms was just another idyllic family community in the larger city of Gary. According to locals, Small Farms—like much of Gary—fell apart with the election of Mayor Hatcher.