Something eerie happened in 2011 at the small house on 3860 Carolina Street in Gary, Indiana which made the national news and still sends chills down spines.
This house, dubbed the “Portal to Hell” by the media, had it all, shadow men, swarms of buzzing black flies buzzing, heavy footsteps in the night, disembodied voices, and physical assaults by something unseen.
In November 2011, Latoya Ammons, her three children, ages, 7, 9, and 12, and her mother Rosa Campbell had moved into the two-bedroom rental house. They soon learned that they weren’t alone.
It all started the way a demonic infestation often does, with eerie footsteps in the night. After midnight, the family heard footsteps on the basement stairs as if someone was walking up and down the stairs. Then they would hear the creak of the basement door, which opened into the small kitchen.
In December, black flies swarmed the screened-in porch. They killed the flies, but the pesky insects returned repeatedly.
The situation quickly escalated beyond creaking doors and phantom footsteps when Latoya was choked by invisible hands.
One night she awoke, and from her bedroom, she saw a shadowy, male figure pacing the living room. She got up to investigate. There was no one in the room, but she found “large, wet boot prints” on the floor.
On March 10, 2012, Latoya was holding a memorial for a lost loved-one with a group of family and friends in the front room. Her 12-year-old daughter was sleeping in Latoya’s bedroom. Around 2 AM, her daughter’s screams rent the air.
“Mama! Mama!” the girl cried.
Latoya and her friends dashed into the bedroom and saw that the girl was now unconscious and levitating above the bed as if carried by invisible hands. Everyone gathered around the child and prayed. Soon she floated back to the bed.
Later, the girl had no memory of the incident.
Rosa told her daughter that they needed to get help, that something was very wrong in the house, and so they called numerous local churches, but most didn’t believe the story.
A local catholic church warned her that the home was haunted. She was urged to thoroughly clean the house from top to bottom with bleach and ammonia and to smudge oil in the shape of a cross over the doorways and on the children’s foreheads.
She took their advice to heart and sat out religious statues and bibles, even set up a candlelit Christian altar in the basement with a bible and crucifix, but the supernatural activity continued unabated.
Desperate, she reached out to two clairvoyants who both claimed the house was infested with “200 demons.” They advised her to move, but she couldn’t afford to. Instead, she smudged the house with sage and sulfur, and the supernatural activity quieted down for three days…
And then it got worse as if a portal had opened in hell.
The kids, with evil smiles and bulging eyes, were seemingly possessed, or, at the very least demonically oppressed. Something invisible would throw the older son against walls while the youngest boy often sat in a closet talking to an imaginary friend whom no one else could see. A headboard once became animated like something in a cartoon and smacked into Ammons’ daughter, causing a wound that required stitches.
Latoya was a victim of violence as well. She often had headaches, felt feint and weak, her body shaking as if the entity had touched her spirit. Only her mother Rosa was spared from the attacks.
Some nights the family were forced to escape to a hotel.
In April 2012, not knowing what to do, Latoya sought help from their family physician, Geoffrey Onyeukwu, claiming that demons were throwing her kids against the walls. The skeptical Onyeukwu visited the home. Seeing no evident paranormal activity, he believed the family’s behavior was delusional. In his notes, he wrote: “delusions of ghosts in home” and “hallucinations.”
During a visit at the doctor’s office, Latoya’s sons went into a rage and cursed the doctor in a deep, demonic voice. Medical staff said the youngest boy was “lifted and thrown into the wall with nobody touching him.”
The boys abruptly passed out and wouldn’t come to. Latoya and Rosa cradled the boys in their arms while someone from the doctor’s office called 911. Soon seven or eight police cars and multiple ambulances arrived, sirens blazing.
The police found the younger boy screaming and thrashing. It took five men to hold him down. They decided to take the children to the nearby Methodist Hospital. In the emergency room, the boys were violent with one of them saying in a crazy voice, “I’ve been here long enough. I came to kill, and I want to kill now!”
All of the kids reported that the demon was talking in their heads, saying crazy things. The girl begged her grandmother Rosa to “make them stop,” saying she could no longer bear it.
Police Captain Charles Austin, a 36-year veteran of the Gary Police Department, said he initially thought Latoya and her family concocted an elaborate tale as a money-making scheme. But after several visits to the home and interviews with witnesses, he would come to believe that the paranormal was at work.
Many on the force, however, were skeptical and suspicious that Latoya could be harming her children so the investigation was turned over to the Department of Child Services.
DCS family case manager Valerie Washington handled the initial investigation and interviewed the boy in the hospital. As she spoke to him, the youngest boy growled and gnawed his teeth. Her eyes widened when he suddenly grasped his brother’s throat and tried to strangle him. The staff had to intervene.
Later that evening, Washington, and Willie Lee Walker, a registered nurse, brought the boys into a small exam room for an interview with a psychologist. Rosa joined them.
When questioned, the youngest boy stared into his brother’s eyes and began to growl again.
Then he described what it felt like to be killed. His face wild, his eyes rolled to the back of his head as he said, in a deep, blood chilling voice, “It’s time to die,” and “I will kill you.”
All the while the oldest boy head-butted Rosa in the stomach. She simply prayed and firmly held his hand.
And then, to everyone’s shock, the oldest, with a wicked grin, walked up the wall backwards. He then flipped over Rosa, landing on his feet.
In terror, Washington, Walker, and the psychologist fled the room.
Afterward, the boy couldn’t remember any of it. Police later asked Washington if the boy had merely been performing an acrobatic technique.
“No,” Washington said. “The boy glided backward on the floor, wall, and ceiling.”
She later added that she thought evil spirits were affecting the family.
Latoya’s daughter told mental health professionals that she saw shadowy figures in the Carolina Street home. She also said she twice went into trances. She added that she sometimes felt as if she were being choked and held down so she couldn’t speak or move. One time, a voice told her she’d never see her family again and wouldn’t live another 20 minutes.
The oldest boy said, “doors would slam and stuff started moving around.”
The children and Ammons were otherwise found to be healthy and were free of bruises or other injuries. A hospital psychiatrist determined that Ammons was “of sound mind.”
DCS, nevertheless, enacted the emergency step of taking custody of the children. After all they’d gone through together, this news was devastating, nothing short of heartbreaking, to the family.
Around this time the case had started making headlines. The Indianapolis Star published a photo of a “shadowy figure” which was reportedly taken at the house when no one was home.
Reverend Michael Maginot, the priest at St. Stephen, Martyr Parish, in Merrillville for more than 10 years, was leading a bible study in his living room on the morning of April 20, 2012, when he received a call from a hospital chaplain.
The chaplain asked him to perform an exorcism on Latoya’s 9-year-old son.
Maginot would first need to investigate.
On April 22, 2012, he began his investigation at the house where he conducted a four hour interview with Latoya and Rosa. During the interview the bathroom light started flickering. Each time Maginot investigated, the flickering stopped. The interview was interrupted again when Rosa pointed out how the Venetian blinds in the kitchen were swinging even though no air current was affecting them.
Maginot also saw wet footprints throughout the living room as if something invisible walked among them.
Latoya rubbed her temples, complaining about a headache so Maginot pulled out a crucifix and held it to her head. She began convulsing, revealing an aversion to holy objects, and this convinced him that the family was being tormented by evil forces. He also believed there were ghosts in the house.
Maginot blessed the house–praying, reading from the Bible, and sprinkling holy water in each room. For now, that’s all he could do. An exorcism would require permission from a Bishop.
He told Latoya and Rosa to leave because it wasn’t safe to live in the house, and they temporarily took up residence with a relative. Circumstances, however, brought them back to the house.
A week later, they were required to let Washington and DCS inspect the home. Three officers and Maginot accompanied the social workers. Latoya stayed outside while her mother, whom the entity never attacked, conducted the tour.
The group tromped through the main floor, which had three bedrooms, a living room, one bathroom, and a small kitchen. A door in the kitchen led to a basement. The group descended the creaky stairs and entered the cavernous area, which was painted blue.
They discovered the makeshift altar, which LaToya had created, along with rings of salt she’d poured around the perimeter of the floor to “dissuade the demons.”
Rosa told officers that demons seemed to emanate from beneath the stairs, and Austin noticed that there was a foil pan there with a candle, which could represent the possibility that a ritual had once been performed in the basement.
Perhaps someone had conjured something.
Oddly, though the basement had concrete floors, the area under the stairs was a dirt floor. The concrete around it was jagged, as if it had been broken.
During an interview with Rosa, one of the officer’s audio recorders malfunctioned. The batteries were drained, even though the officer had placed fresh batteries in the recorder earlier that day.
Another officer recorded audio, and when he played it back later, an unknown whispery voice said, “Hey,” giving him chills.
The officer also took photos of the house. In a photo of the basement stairs, he caught a cloudy, white image in the upper right-hand corner. When the photo was enlarged the cloud appeared to resemble a grim face—also described as a “Devil’s Face.” The enlargement also revealed what might have been a second apparition, a greenish, feminine figure.
Several of the photos Austin snapped with his iPhone also seemed to have strange silhouettes of human-like figures in them.
The evil apparently followed him home that night. He stopped at a gas station about a mile and half away from the house in his police-issued Ford when the radio station went awry. Crackling static spewed from the speakers, and an eerie voice said something along the lines of, “Who’s in there?”
When he arrived at his Gary home, the garage door refused to open, even though the power was on.
Another time, the driver’s seat in his 2005 Infiniti started moving backward and forward on its own. He had the car checked at a dealership, and the mechanic told him the motor on the driver’s seat was broken, which could have caused a distraction leading to an accident.
Such things convinced Austin of Latoya’s claims of paranormal activity. The mental health professionals evaluating her and her children, however, remained unconvinced.
In April 2012, DCS petitioned Lake Juvenile Court for temporary wardship of the three children. To the family’s despair, the request was granted.
The family begged Father Maginot to exorcise the house, but his hands were still tied.
DCS gave Ammons a long list of requirements before she could regain custody of her children, including getting a job and finding a home which would be safe for the family to live in. She worked hard on meeting those objectives, while the police and DCS officials continued to investigate the inexplicable happenings in the house.
On May 10, 2012, Rose, Latoya, Captain Austin, and the two other police officers from the initial visit returned to the house for an after-work-hours investigation.
They were joined by Maginot, two Lake County officers with a police dog and DCS family case manager Samantha Ilic. Ilic had volunteered to go in Washington’s place, because Washington never wanted to return to the house.
A county officer took his police dog around the home, but the dog showed no interest in any particular area. Everyone else marched down the creaky stairs to the basement.
Ilic fingered some strange liquid dripping on a basement wall, and said it felt, “slippery yet sticky” between her fingers.
Maginot insisted on checking the dirt under the stairs for a pentagram or personal objects that might have been cursed as a pentagram could indicate a demonic presence. He also thought that if someone had died in the house and was buried under the stairs, it could explain the paranormal activity.
One of the officers dug a 4-foot by 3-foot hole beneath the stairs, unearthing nothing but what appeared to be trash–a pink press-on fingernail, a white pair of women’s panties, a political shirt pin, a lid for a small cooking pan, socks with the bottoms cut off below the ankles, candy wrappers, and a heavy metal object that looked like a weight for a drapery cord.
Finding nothing significant, the officer replaced the dirt and raked over it.
After blessing some salt, a barrier to evil, Maginot sprinkled it under the stairs and throughout the basement.
Ilic said she was later in the living room with the rest of the group when pain gripped her. Her hand turned white as if the blood had been drained from it, and her left pinky finger, tingling, felt like it was broken.
A moment later, she had a panic attack. As she struggled to breathe, she dashed outside to wait for the group.
When the priest started questioning Latoya, she complained of a headache and shoulder pain and so she joined Ilic outside.
Austin said he left the house at nightfall as he had no intention of staying in the house past dark.
The other officers continued to examine the home. On the main floor, they noticed a shiny, oil-like substance, similar to what they’d seen in the basement. Only now, it was oozing from venetian blinds in the back bedroom. No one could figure out what it was or where it was coming from—it just seemed to materialize out of nowhere.
To make sure no one had poured oil on the blinds, two of the officers used paper towels to clean it off, then they closed the room up for 25 minutes and stood nearby so no one could enter and tamper with the evidence. When they went back in, the oil had spontaneously reappeared.
Maginot told the police the liquid was a manifestation of a demonic presence.
After this evidence, Maginot wrote a detailed report, detailing his investigation and asked Bishop Dale Melczek’s permission to perform an exorcism on Latoya. Even doing so, he knew it was unlikely to be approved as Melczek hadn’t authorized an exorcism in 21 years.
As expected, Melczek initially denied Maginot’s request to do a church-sanctioned exorcism. The bishop bade Maginot to contact other priests who have performed exorcisms for assistance.
When Maginot approached other priests with the story, he learned that a minor exorcism, doesn’t require church approval. Thus, he did an “intense blessing” on the house to expel the demons.
That same day, Maginot performed a minor exorcism on Latoya. The ritual consisted of prayers to cast out demons.
Two police officers and Ilic attended the ritual.
Ilic said she left believing that something was “going on,” although she wouldn’t go as far as saying it was demonic. Even so, she “got chills” during the nearly two-hour exorcism.
“We felt like someone was in the room with you, someone breathing down your neck.”
After visiting the home, Ilic had a string of medical problems. A week after she’d visited the house for the last time, she suffered third-degree burns from a motorcycle. Within 30 days, she’d broken three ribs while jet skiing, broke a hand when she hit a table, and broke an ankle while running in flip-flops.
“I had friends,” Ilic said, “who wouldn’t talk to me, because they believed that something had attached itself to me.”
After the minor rite, Maginot said Bishop Melczek gave him permission to exorcise Latoya.
In June 2012, Maginot performed three major exorcisms on Latoya—two in English, and the last in Latin—at his Merrillville church, in which he praised God and condemned the devil.
Latoya said she felt the negative spirit lift from her.
By this time, Latoya and Rosa had moved to Indianapolis, but they drove back for the exorcisms and court hearings, as her children were still in DCS care.
After the family moved out of the house, they had no paranormal issues. Rosa often read the bible to combat the demonic in their new home to protect the family.
Landlord Charles Reed believed the claims were a hoax. He claimed he’d never experienced any supernatural events at the house and that his prior tenants and the tenant who moved in after Latoya had never had any paranormal or odd experiences there either.
Latoya regained custody of her three children in November 2012, but DCS continued to check in on the family until February 2014 when the case was closed.
The day the family was together again was the “happiest day” of her life. The kids had screamed with joy when she picked them up from the DCS office in Gary.
In 2014, Zak Bagans, paranormal investigator and producer of Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel, purchased the house for $35,000 with an eye toward investigating the haunting. He supposedly toyed with the idea of opening a “haunted house” attraction. After evicting a handful of squatters, he began filming a documentary on the property, Demon House, which was released on March 16, 2018.
Before setting out on this journey, he told his close psychic friend, Debbie Constantino, about his nightmares involving an “ominous goat man exhaling black smoke in his mouth.” After a psychic connection in which she saw a powerful demon, Debbie warned him to stay away from the house.
Zak, nevertheless, continued his on-site investigation and even had the crew board himself inside the house for an overnight stay. During the investigation something wicked messed with him in a way he soon wanted to forget, making him ill for more than a week and even permanently damaging his eyes. Now, he has diplopia and is forced to wear prism prescription glasses.
Zach wasn’t the only one who was affected. In the documentary, he says crew members quit on the spot and “witnesses and experts ended up in the hospital.”
The house negatively affected everyone who entered it from illness, accidents, attempted suicide, and more, causing much suffering. Even his psychic friend Debbie and her husband Mark ended up dead in a murder suicide.
After Zach completed the investigation in 2016, he had the house bulldozed. The basement stairs and other items from the house were moved to The Haunted Museum, a paranormal museum in Las Vegas, a real creep fest with haunted artifacts.
But was that the end of haunting? Many who live in Gary have reported online that the empty lot is still haunted, a heavy, “weird ass” feeling there. Chill-inducing EVP voices can supposedly be captured in broad daylight, and cameras won’t focus there. Others have said that the lot attracts Satanic rituals, and if that’s true, more trouble is on the way.
© Bobette Bryan, 1998-2024
Commentary from Psychic Marie St. Claire
I won’t connect to any case that could involve the demonic as that could have consequences. Even so, I can feel the negative energy as the documentary dishes out some super creepy vibes. Just the photo of the house has an aura that gives me chills.
The Ammon family and many others who entered the house were terrorized by a high-ranking demon, possibly a devil, and I believe there’s more than one. Are there 200 demons in the house? That’s unlikely, but demonic infestations usually involve more than one entity.
Where did it come from? Someone opened a door—most likely by doing Satanic rites in the basement. According to the documentary there were also five violent deaths in the house, and that negative energy would have created a welcoming place for the demonic.
I can understand why someone would want to tear the horrid place, which had caused such suffering, down.
That being said, tearing down the house was a huge mistake as whatever was there remains attached to the property. In short, the land is cursed. I know Father Maginot blessed and exorcised the house, but I believe something remained. A final cleansing should have been done before the house was bulldozed. Items from the house, including the objects found in the dirt floor area, should have been blessed and burned. I don’t doubt the stories about a lingering “heaviness” there as demons surely still occupy the lot, which nothing short of an exorcism will cure.
