August 6, 2025 • 44 mins
In today's story, we hear from Richard who housed a foster child, strange drawings, and a haunting that defied belief. This is the extraordinary true story of a battle with something far darker than a ghost.
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You can find Edwin on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram as @edwincov
Editing and sound design by Sarah Vorhees Wendel from VW Sound
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You can get these ad-free through ScaryPlus.com free for 14 days, then 4.99 per month. Cancel anytime.
You can find Edwin on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram as @edwincov
Editing and sound design by Sarah Vorhees Wendel from VW Sound
Get in touch to share your story through TrueScaryStory.com
Join our community:
Facebook.com/scarypod
Instagram.com/scarypod
tiktok.com/@truescarypod
youtube.com/scarystorypodcast
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is impossible. This isn't a knock on the door.
This isn't a voice in my ear, This isn't a
light turning on and off. This is a physical piece
of paper. How can that possibly manifest in a different
place than she lived? A year after she was removed from.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Her home, A foster child, strange drawings, and a haunting
that defied distance, belief, and time itself.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Now, this is the extraordinary true.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Story of a battle with something far darker than a ghost.
My name is Edwin, and here is richer.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
It's true scary story.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
My name is Richard, and I'm in Los Angeles, California,
and I'm going to share a true story about a
demonic haunting that my family experienced for five years. This
began after we temporarily fostered a thirteen year old girl
who claimed to be possessed by an entity that she
called Melabelle. This was a temporary foster placement. This was
(01:05):
not an adoption placement. I want to make that clear.
She had displayed increasingly disturbing behavior. She would watch demonic
summoning videos on YouTube. Just before Thanksgiving of twenty seventeen,
she had attacked my ex wife and I in our home.
This was after she had done things like animal torture,
(01:28):
animal abuse and made some very frightening comments to us.
She had what I believed at the time to be
a mental breakdown. She was in her room, throwing things around,
(01:49):
punching walls. She was making a sound that sounded like
a mix of a growl and a scream. She was
just thrashing her body around, and I'd come in there,
so I'd taken my camera and I put it in
my jacket pocket to act a sort of a body
cam in case something were to happen. I'm six foot tall,
(02:10):
I'm about two hundred and thirty pounds, and this was
a thirteen year old girl who was eighty pounds soaking wet.
She shoved me hard enough that I flew out of
her room and down part of the hallway and collided
with a big, heavy glass vase, almost knocking it over.
And it wasn't as if she was super strong. It
was as if I had weighed nothing. It felt like
(02:31):
I was floating down that hallway. If you can imagine
what that was like. Right before Thanksgiving, DCFS social worker.
Nobody's working on Thanksgiving, nobody's working the day after nobody's
working that weekend, so we had her in her home
after this attack. She wouldn't talk, she would stare at walls.
(02:57):
And they'd sent out what's called a PMRT, it's like
a psychiatric emergency team. That following Monday, and they had
interviewed her and she had told the story of how
she became possessed by this entity. She claimed that when
she was six years old, she thought that her father
(03:17):
had passed away, and he hadn't. They just didn't know
how to contact her. So every night, she said, as
a little girl, she would contact what she referred to
as the spirit roman asked was anybody here? Was anybody here?
She said that one day a voice replied back to
her and said that I'm here. It only spoke to
(03:38):
her one time, and it gave her the name Melabelle
me E labl E, and it said that it would
never let anything hurt her. It would always protect her.
She had claimed that from that day forward, whenever she
would look into the mirror for too long, she would
(03:58):
see like a demand woman. If she kept staring, that
this entity would take over her body and make her
do things. She began telling this PMRT team how she
was planning on murdering her family before she was removed
from their care. She said that whenever she would dream,
(04:20):
she would dream about this malabell entity ripping on her
mother's throat and what the arterial spray from her neck
would look like, how the blood would spurred out. One time,
her brother hit her with a pillow, and so she
was going to murder everybody in her family, but she
wanted to grow up and get a good job, and
murdering her family would, I guess, get in the way.
(04:42):
So instead, she broke every belonging in their home, every
single belonging. And she was discussing with this PMRT team
and just this sort of flat, matter of fact voice.
It's like how we would describe picking up groceries. She
was describing how she was going to murder them, and
she described how she was going to murder me and
murder my ex wife. This went on for about forty
(05:05):
five minutes and just became more and more disturbing, and
so they said, okay, well we need to leave your
house and we need to talk amongst ourselves for a
few minutes and we'll be right back. We had instructed
the girl to just go to her room and we
were going to be out in the living room, and
you know, we had waited five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes.
(05:26):
After forty minutes of them not coming back, I opened
the door and these four people were right on our
doorstep and they looked at me with terror in their eyes.
And I was like, Okay, well, what's going on. You
guys are going to get her some help. You're going
to take her. They said, no, we're not. It's not
safe for us to ride in a car with her.
It's not safe for us to even be in the
house with her. I was I, oh, so wait, if
(05:48):
it's not safe for you guys, it's not safe for me.
They had said, Well, we've called an ambulance and they're
going to have to strap her to a gurney and
take her to a psychiatric hospital because she's a danger
to everybody around her. The ambulance arrived. We lived in
a complex with a big courtyard, and you know, she
had a couple of little friends in there. I wanted
(06:12):
her to have a little bit of dignity, so I
asked if we could just all walk through the courtyard
and then once we reached the ambulance then they could
strap her down, and yeah, they reluctantly agreed to it.
And the last time I saw her, they had a
mask on her like Hannibal Lecter, and they had strapped
her to a gurney. She was taken away and we
(06:34):
never saw her again. Her bedroom was the first room
once you walked into our loft. I said, okay, I'm
going to make this storage room. I was a photographer
at the time, so you know, I had taken all
of the beds out and her belongings went with her.
(06:55):
So I was going to turn that into a storage
room for my photography equipment. But I couldn't turn on
any of the lights. It was in the afternoon, but
it was almost pitch black in that room, and so
I was like, okay, you know what, probably flip the breaker.
Let's just get on with our day. Let's just deal
with it in the morning. So when I came downstairs
the following morning, all of the lights were on. She
(07:18):
had a mix of overhead lights that were controlled by
light switch, and then she had smart lights that were
like in the strips. I noticed that the colors had
changed on them, and I said, okay, well that's weird,
but you know, if maybe the power went out in
that room for a little bit, or you know, the
internet went out or something like that, it can happen.
So I didn't really think too much of it. I
(07:40):
started bringing in these big external closets I used to
hold light stands, and at the time we'd had two
small kittens, and every time I would open the door
to put a light stand in, one of the kittens
would jump in, and I didn't want the cat to
get hurt, so I kicked the cats out. I had
closed the doors on them so that nothing could happen,
(08:02):
and you know, it's just going through all of my equipment,
and about forty seconds later I turned around and the
doors were standing wide open. Now these were two different closets.
One opened up like cabinets, and then one slid open
and shut, and they were fairly noisy. Knowing that I
closed them, and remembering how it felt to close them
so that the cats couldn't get in, it scared me.
(08:30):
Our bedroom was on the upper level. It was a
lofted bedroom, and so there was a set of stairs
going down. At the bottom of the stairs was a
little storage cabinet, and so at night we heard that
door opening and closing and just kind of rattling on
its hinges, and we could hear running up and down
(08:51):
the stairs, and there was no neighbor on the other
side of that wall. The other side of that wall
led to her bedroom, which led to the outside. There
was no neighbor, there was no people, the cats weren't
in there, but we could hear this banging. The very
(09:12):
next morning, we went out and bought sage. Now, at
the time, I didn't believe in sage. I didn't really
believe much of anything. I was a nonpracticing Christian person,
so you know, I always look for a scientific explanation
and everything. But this scared me enough because I had
never seen anything quite like this before that. You know,
somebody said go ahead, buy sage and smudget, so you know,
(09:32):
we just kind of walked around burning the sage. If anything,
it made it a lot worse. About three weeks after that,
the unit next to hours became vacant. The place was
just giving us the hebgbis just something didn't feel normal.
(09:52):
So we'd moved in there and then for about three
weeks everything was absolutely fine. So we're like, okay, well
that was weird, but you know it's over. And then
one night we we were watching the movie a quiet place.
My home theater set up was I had a projection screen,
I had a projector, and then I had a separate
set of of old like computers Logitech Z fifty five
(10:14):
under it, but they required a separate power button. We
had gone to bed, the movie was over, turned everything off,
and maybe about twenty thirty minutes after we had fallen
asleep asleep, I heard like the loudest music ever. So
I had heard the music at full blast, so I
(10:35):
went running up the stairs. It scared me so bad
that I turned on the camera on my phone because
I thought that I was going to find an intruder
in there. It turns out that the projector was still off.
The firestick is powered by the projector, but the speakers
had turned themselves on. It was playing the end credits
music at full volume. These are like thousand watts speakers,
(10:57):
so it was enough to wake up the entire neighborhood.
In the new place, the home theater was on the
upper level and our bedroom was on the lower level,
and so I kept hearing this weird kind of a
buzzing grinding sound coming from upstairs. When you go up
the stairs and look to the left, there's the bathroom
(11:19):
and you can see the mirror. Immediately, as soon as
I would walk up the stairs and look to the left,
the sound would stop. I did it once, I did
it twice. Every time I went downstairs, I would hear
the noise again. It would three times, four times, five times.
Finally on the sixth time. I was so freaked out
at this point because I knew that something weird was
(11:39):
going on that I live streamed it on Facebook and
I was recording it so that video is uploaded to
my YouTube page. So I started going up the stairs
and I hear the buzzing sound. I'm like, okay, great,
ill go all the way up to the stairs. It's
getting louder. As soon as I look into the mirror,
it stopped. At the time, we had thirteen security cameras
(12:03):
in our home. If you're a foster parent, it's very
important to be able to document things that are going on. Also,
as a photographer, and I worked with female models, so
you always want to have some sort of a documentation
in case there's an incident or an allegation. There was
always just this weird feeling in the house. I would
always feel like things were moving out of the corner
(12:25):
of my eye, but I never stopped to really check
the footage, because if you don't believe in paranormal activity,
you have no reason to check footage. If there's nobody
else in the house. How about and knights had passed.
I remember I was sitting on the couch upstairs in
a home theater room. I got this weird giddy feeling
(12:46):
where everything was funny and silly, and I felt a
little bit light. It's almost like feeling like I'm high.
There was no gas leak in the place. Everything was
all electric, so there was no gas or anything like that.
And my ex had come up this stairs. She was like,
do you smell that. I started cracking up because I'm like,
you know, it's your upper lip or whatever. And she
(13:08):
had said, no, it smells like eggs or something. It
smells like something disgusting, like a skunk. And I was like,
I don't smell anything. She's like, no, come over to
where I'm at. So then I went over to her
at the top of the stairs, and sure enough I
smelled would smell like a rotten meat smell. We're just sniffing.
It was maybe about the size of a person. Like
(13:29):
you know, if we went one foot to the right,
we wouldn't smell it, two feet to left, we wouldn't
smell it. But right there we could smell it really bad.
Then suddenly we didn't smell it. I was like, Okay, well,
I don't know what that was, but it's gone. And
so I started to walk back over to the couch
and I smell it again. I was like, wait, I
smelled it again, and then the same thing happened again
(13:50):
and it moved. I didn't know what was going on.
So I had done like a Google search. I was like,
you know, rotten meat smell was coming up with leak, etc.
Just from a lart. Just because we had experienced some
other weird stuff. I had added in that the search
term ghost. It said that dark entity like a demon
(14:14):
can create this rotten meat smell. I had looked up
how to annoint oil. At the time, I had essential
oils frankincense, and you know I used olive oil for
my skin and hair, so you know, I had these
oils and I looked up how to bless the oils,
and at the time, I barely believed in anything, but
(14:36):
I was willing to give anything a try. At this point,
I did it, and I went upstairs and I splashed
the oil where I smelled it because it had moved again.
As soon as I splashed oil instead of prayer, it
would move somewhere else. There's a video. There's maybe a
five minute long clip of my ex and I running
around this room sniffing where this smell had gone off to.
(15:00):
It went on for I don't know, maybe another half hour,
another hour or something like that. Then it was gone
and it never came back. By this point we believed
that something was going on. At night, we would hear
the banging. Again. We live in California, so you think tremors.
The building was only like twelve years old, so we
(15:22):
were thinking that maybe the building was settling. But we
had been hearing these knocks. It was like a knock
on the door. It would be like in series of three,
or it'd be like one really big loud bang, like
somebody was dropping a piano, and it was usually coming
from upstairs. At the time, I'd made a new friend.
She had come over. I was making them ramen, and
(15:45):
there's a video clip of the bulls of ramen and
a bottle of saracha. I'm cooking, so I'm not looking
at this happening. In the video, you can see the
bottle of saracha slide across his table by itself. I
had heard her say, why is this bottle of saracha
moving by itself? And I turned my head and I
(16:06):
saw it just moved that last inch, and I was like,
there's no way somebody else witnessed this. So we tried
to recreate it. I was like, well, you know, maybe
it's hydro planet. Maybe there was water on the table
and it kind of trapped air pocket, and you know,
it slid across. So we were trying to recreate it,
and we couldn't recreate it, and she was like, you
(16:28):
should download that footage. It was the first piece of
footage I downloaded from the security cameras. I started being
hyper aware of anything unusual that was going on, and
we started to detect a lot. So my friend had
around the time that my ex wife had moved out,
(16:49):
she had moved in shortly thereafter, and we started just
recording all of these bizarre occurrences in our home. So
it'd be like that the typical lights turning on and off.
So we had a mix of smart lights and we
also had them manuel push rocker switches and we would
see the lights turn on and off. I was a
(17:11):
photographer at the time, so I had like the big
paper backdrops. There's one time where it just started blowing
like there was a wind, but there was no wind
in there, but you could see this backdrop, this huge
nine foot backdrop just kind of whipping back and forth.
The very last day that my ex was removing her
(17:34):
belongings from the bedroom, she walks out of the bedroom
and we both heard a voice say watch it. It
was like, that's unmistakable. I said, did you say something?
And she said no, I didn't. So I downloaded the
footage and you can hear it in a woman's voice
(17:55):
say watch it, like a really loud whisper. And I
was a good five feet away from my ex at
the time, but I heard it very, very clearly. There
was another time a couple of days later that I
was sitting on the toilet and I had heard of
woman's voice say hello. I didn't say anything back because
(18:18):
I didn't know who it was, and so, you know,
I just kind of went about my business and I figured, okay,
well let's see who just came in, and there was nobody.
So I pulled the footage to see if anybody had
entered the loft. Nobody had entered the loft, but in
the video recording it's kind of garbled because of the
audio compression, but you can hear a voice say hello.
(18:42):
The occurrences started happening even more. We had a big
seventy five inch TV that was on like a rolling
cart with locking wheels. There was one time I can
remember I had locked the wheel. I had always had
the wheels locked, but it started moving by itself. It
started spinning in this circle. Another time when Maria and
I Maria's my second wife. She was the friend that
(19:04):
I had met around that time. We were meal prepping.
We were making burrito bulls, and so there's a can
of corn that started spinning on it the same table
that the Siracu mottel moved on. It started spinning and
then it slid across. At this point, we had accepted
that this has to be some sort of paranormal activity,
(19:27):
and it's very weird when you experience true paranormal activity.
Because we live in a universe that's based on rules.
You have laws of thermodynamics, you have physics, you have
conservation of energy. Paranormal activity doesn't make any sense from
the perspective of any of the laws of physics. So
(19:47):
it creates this sort of feeling of cognitive dissonance, this
uncomfortable feeling where you believe in gravity, you believe in physics,
you believe in a law of thermodynamics, but you just
heard a voice whisper in your ear, or you just
heard banging on the walls, or the lights just turned
on and off, or you watched an object move by itself,
(20:07):
and it would even happen in front of witnesses. There
was one time I was saying karaoke in a garbage
cam lid started spinning and just flew across the room,
and I'm like, this is crazy because I believed in science,
but I was experiencing things that science couldn't explain. So
(20:28):
we had contacted a number of priests and we finally
got one in Culver City to agree to come out.
So we had sent him a number of videos and
we had you know, maybe like five six of us there,
and we were explaining everything that we had experienced. He
had said, you know, I'm a Catholic priest. I have
(20:51):
to believe in demons, but I'll be honest and say
that I've never seen anything like this before in my life.
He said, I believe you guys, because there's a number
of you who have experienced things, and I've seen the videos.
It looks very compelling. He did what he referred to
as a house blessing in a minor exorcism, and he said,
(21:11):
I want to prepare you guys, because your guys are
going to hear some language that you don't typically hear
in the Catholic church. And you had a little book
with him. He had holy water and he had blessed
some sult so he would take this holy water and
he would splash it on every doorway around the house.
He first blessed us and he started talking in Latin
(21:33):
in a very very loud voice, and he had said,
if this doesn't work and this comes back, please let
me know and I can get permission from the I
think he said the bishop to send some additional help out.
At that point it stopped like a light switch for
(21:55):
about a month. My new wife Maria had heard recorded
laughter from an old TV show, that fake laugh track
(22:17):
that you hear in old comedy shows. From that point,
the paranormal activity came back. This time it came back
a lot worse, and I would get things like scratch
marks on my back, the doors would slam. Something was
happening with our sun at the time. He was my
(22:39):
step son. He was around two years old at the time,
and he kept seeing things and hearing things, but he
didn't have the language to articulate what he was hearing
and seeing. He was just terrified by now. It was
around June of twenty twenty. We needed a smaller place
(22:59):
because the pandemic had kind of killed most of our business,
so we had moved to a place in the arts district. Again.
Things were okay for maybe a couple of weeks, but
then we started experiencing paranormal activity on the level that
we had never seen before. The closet door in my
(23:21):
son's room would suddenly fly open, and we have video
footage of that happening. After the birth of my second son,
my wife was changing his diaper and there was a
stuffed animal that was right next to him that moved
on its own as like a dinosaur. Stuffed animal. The
lights would turn on and off. There was one time
(23:42):
where we had guests over and suddenly all of the cabinet,
not one, all of the cabinets in the kitchen slammed
all at once, and it made such a loud sound.
And you know, by this point we had experienced so
much that we would try to find excuses, so, you know,
we'd try to blame it on the cat or you know,
blame it on the wind, or like a mini earthquake
(24:03):
or something like that. It started happening every single day.
There was another time that I was playing religious music
and switched to a podcast about the Amityville Horde. There
was another time that I was walking towards the sink
and there was a drinking glass and the sink, and
I walked towards it, and that drinking glass exploded like
(24:26):
somebody put a grenade inside. It was the loudest shards
of glass everywhere, and we caught that on camera as well.
Another time, we'd heard noise in the bathroom that like,
there's an unmistakable sound that comes to when somebody slams
the toilet ridge shut. Nothing else sounds like that. We
(24:46):
had heard that sound and my son says to me, Daddy,
what was that. I was like, Oh, it's your aunt.
She's in the bathroom and she called out from another room.
She's like, I'm not in the bathroom. We walk over
to the bathroom, my son and I. His electric toothbrush
turns on by itself and we're like, oh my god.
(25:08):
About a year after we had moved from the first
loft into the second loft, I had walked into my office.
So it was a wide open loft and had had
an office area with sliding glass doors. It's why I
liked it. It looks so commercial, so I could do
my work there and I could have clients over and
it didn't look like an apartment. On the floor of
my office was a folded up piece of paper lined
(25:33):
like a child have in their book. I had opened
it up and it had said I love and then
the girl's name. This was a year after we had
moved from the first loft to the second loft. Nothing.
There was absolutely no chance that I had taken it
from the first loft into the second loft. I was thinking, Okay, well,
(25:57):
a name is one thing, and she had not an
unusual name, but a name that you probably only hear
maybe once or twice a year or two. So it
was an uncommon name. We'll put it like that. And
so I had looked at the picture that she had
sent me. She had drawn a picture of this entity
that she had seen, and she had also kept a
(26:20):
journal that she would write in, so when she was
in class she would write notes to a friend. I
noticed that she had three forms of handwriting. One was
super cutesy, like super girly. One looked like chicken scratch,
just completely nonsense, and the other one looked just different.
(26:42):
I mean, yeah, I can't really say that it looks
feminine or masculine or whatever. It just looked different. And
I noticed that her handwriting would change depending on what
mood she was in. I had looked at there was
a certain way that she drew her ease. I had
taken a picture of the drawing of Malibell. I'd thrown
away the original because I just didn't want it in
my house. So I had taken a picture because it
(27:04):
was so scary. It was like a pitch black, demonic
looking woman with sharp teeth holding a knife. She had
like scraggly black hair. So I had looked at the
way that she had drawn her e for Malibell versus
I love, and then her name. So I'd compare the
ease and they were identical. It looked like it was
written with the exact same pencil. And the other thing
(27:26):
was that that note was written in pencils, and I
had no pencils in my home. It's kind of a
small detail, but if you think about it as a
grown man, I don't need to have pencils for anything.
I had pens, and so that struck me. And I'm
not a handwriting expert at all, but the handwriting was
so distinct that I could tell that it was hers,
(27:47):
and I had no idea. So the very first thing
that I had done when I'd seen the letter was
I crumpled it up. And then i'd opened it up.
I was like, this is impossible. This isn't a knock
on the door, This isn't a voice in my ear,
this isn't a light on and off. This is a
physical piece of paper. How can that possibly manifest in
a different place than she lived? A year after she
(28:08):
was removed from her home, And so I had stretched
it back out, I had taken the picture. I still
have that picture to this day, comparing the lettering of
various writing samples. So we had called the Catholic Church again.
The first priest that came out, strangely never returned our call.
(28:29):
So we started calling other churches and explaining what had happened,
explaining that we had already had a priest out and
it was super effective. But then it came back after
we started retelling the story too many times, so they
sent out another priest. I remember he came with a
younger guy, So I think the younger guy was like
an altered roy or something like that. You know, he
(28:52):
kind of wasn't taking it serious. He had said, well,
what this is you know, it's playful. It's just trying
to get your attention. And you know, at this point
I believe that there was paranormal activity going on, but
at the same time that explanation sounded a little bit silly.
It upset me a little bit because it felt like
he wasn't taking it very serious. And so he had
(29:12):
done a smaller house blessing, but there was just something
that was just off about the visit. There was something
that was off about him, and the very next day,
the paranormal activity dialed up to about eleven. We were
(29:33):
laying in bed and I felt our bed get kicked
and kicked hard. It was enough to wake me up
from a deep sleep, and I'm like, what the f
was that? I'm looking around. I pulled the footage and
you can hear the kick clear as day. From that
day forward, whenever we would go to sleep, our bed
(29:53):
would sort of vibrate and shake. It would feel like
it was jumping up and down without actually making the noise,
so you could feel it. So I would wake my
wife up and say did you feel that. She's like,
oh my god, it's an earthquake. It's not an earthquake.
I was like, just sit still, feel this. Take it in.
(30:13):
This is happening every night. She's a deeper sleeper than I,
so she wouldn't wake up most nights. When I would
wake up in the morning once more, I would have
scratch marks on my back, and I took a lot
of pictures of these scratch marks and had her take
some as well, on my back, on my arms, on
my legs, and I started getting bite marks. When you
(30:34):
have a bruise from a bite, it's a very very
particular shape. Nothing else looks like it because it looks
like a ring of purple with normal colored skin inside.
You could even make out individual tea. So I would
wake up and I would get these bite marks, and
maybe just like two, three, four at a time, but
they were very consistent. My son once woke me up
(30:57):
and said that you could feel something getting in the
bed with him, And I said, what do you mean
something he had gotten in the bed with you. He's like,
it felt like a person got in the bed with me.
So I had him describe more, and he had explained,
like how he could feel that the sheet being pulled
and like that depression in the bed that wait right
next to him. So then he did not want to
(31:19):
sleep in his bedroom after that. So we would have
him either sleep in bed with us, or we would
set up like a little makeshift bed for him right
next to us in our room. And like you know,
we moved onto to air mattresses, but he was terrified.
(31:39):
Towards the end, one of our election units started calling
nine to one one by itself, so it called like
maybe about three times. There would be a lot of
nights that we would wake up and we would hear
knocks somewhere in the house. It would be like wraps
of three again, like bang bang bang, or like really
loud bang to the point where we could feel it.
(32:01):
At the time, I was a mix of a photographer,
but I also hosted productions in my home, so it
would be things like TV shows, movies, music videos, etc.
So even there's three celebrities who have experienced paranormal activity.
The first one had felt something grab her arm, and
(32:21):
I remember I was talking to her about parenting because
at this time my wife was pregnant and we thought
that she was going to lose a baby. Like as
this woman was recording her music video, and I was like,
you know, how do you do it? Have you ever
experienced that? And then she started telling me a story
of when she thought that she was going to lose
her son. And then suddenly she stopped and she turned around.
(32:42):
She's like, was that you She had said to somebody.
I was like, what do you mean. She's like, something
grab my arm. I'm like, nobody grabbed your arm, and
it's like I immediately knew what it was. So it's
like I just you'd rather than say, yeah, well, we're
having paranormal activity in our house. I just kind of
changed the subject. There was another time where they were
filming a like time movie in our lock and lock.
(33:06):
Most of it was open, but there were two bedrooms
and I would usually hang out in one of the
bedrooms and read comic books or something like that while
everybody worked, so I wouldn't be tripping over them or
getting in their way or whatever. They would feel like
they would have a little bit more freedom. It hurt
a knock on my door and so I'd opened the door.
I was like, hey, what's up, do you guys need anything?
And there was nobody there. So I went around to
(33:28):
where they were filming. It sounded like they had a cut.
They weren't actively recording, so I said, hey, just only
knock on the door. They're like no, and they sounded
really mad about it, and they were like, have you
been banging on the walls. It's like we can't get
a clean take for sound because we keep hearing these
banging sounds. And I was like no way. I was like,
this is a film crew of about thirty five people
(33:50):
and they're witnessing the knocking sound. So I'd said, hey,
can you play that back for me? He was like yeah,
he played it back, and I heard the banks. I
just kind of said, Okay, here's what's going on, guys,
there is paranormal activity here. And you know, of course
that immediately diffused the situation because they experienced something themselves.
But yeah, we'd hear a lot of people. God, there
(34:10):
were even people that would hear voices. I'd had it.
My nerves were afraid because I'm thinking, why is this
happening to us? This is going on close to five years,
just daily occurrences. And so one night I was sitting
on my bed and my son runs over to me, terrified,
(34:34):
said Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I heard a voice. I heard
a voice, Like wow, what did the voice say? And
he said it went and so I'm thinking, like it's
the fan or something. So I was like, okay, let
me pull the footage. So then the footage shows that
he's racing a car al on the floor and then
suddenly you hear voice go. Later, he told me that
(34:59):
he could also feel the breath on the back of
his neck, but he just didn't have the language yet
to really express what he had felt in addition to
what he had heard. At this point, I was so
fed up that we ran out of the apartment. Before
we did, I started playing Christian music. In the past,
whenever I would play Christian music in the house, the
(35:22):
paranormal activity it wouldn't stop completely, but it would be
maybe a fraction of what it was before. For some reason,
the Christian music would greatly reduce the amount of paranormal activity.
So I played the music and we ran out of
the house and I called my wife. I said, listen,
whatever you're doing, drop it, come home. We need to
find a church that's open. I want to get some
(35:44):
holy water. I want to bless this place. I'm so
tired of this. I'm not going to live there anymore
if we don't do this. And so we had found
the church that was open, we got the holy water.
We came back and I didn't really know what I
was doing, so I started reciting prayers and splashing the
holy water, and suddenly the music changed from Christian music
(36:07):
to a song called Monster by a band called Seether.
It's a song about demonic possession. I remember it freaked
me out so bad. And I had uploaded a video
of me splashing the holy water and then the music
changing and I just started just shouting, get out of
my home. Get out, Get out. In the name of God,
(36:28):
get out of my home. We called another Catholic turs.
We called the closest one to us. They said, okay,
well I need to give you a call back. And
we've gotten a call back and they said, okay, we're
going to come out and we're going to do a
house blessing and we're going to see what we can do.
(36:49):
And I'm thinking another house blessing, like this did not work,
This made it worse the last time. But you know,
I'm not going to turn down any help. The man
comes in and he identified himself as a priest who
specializes in exorcisms. It was at that moment I was like,
(37:11):
this isn't honest to God exorcist And I said what
church are you with? He said, I was sent directly
by the archdiocese. I was thinking, oh my god, this
is an actual exorcist in our home. And I was like, well,
how did they notice send you? They said, they know
about your case because you've been calling all these churches.
You've had two priests come out already, so they had
(37:32):
a record of the last two times that they had
come out. I was like, okay, well, I have all
of these videos to show you, said, I don't need
to see them. I got mad at the time because
we had been dealing with this for almost five years.
We'd been scratched bit and our bed would jump up
and down at night, we couldn't sleep, doors would slam,
(37:54):
the lights would turn on and off. Object heavy objects
like big boxes full of seven five pounds worth of
weights would suddenly slide off of flat services. We had
been through a lot. I was just so sick and
tired of feeling like we were being condescended to. I
was like, well, this can't be normal, Like, you know,
(38:14):
why aren't you taking this more serious? He said, I
tell you what. What you have is like a person.
He said, it's conscious. It's not material, but it's aware
that you're here. It's demonic in nature. I said, there's
no way that you've seen this before. He said I have.
He said, In fact, after I leave here, I have
another appointment just like this. I said, well why and
(38:37):
he said, well, as people stopped believing in God and
they stopped going to church, this has become more commonplace.
And he said the word commonplace. It's like, this can't
be that common he just kind of looked at me,
and so he said, Okay, we're going to go ahead
and begin. And so he had given me the blessed
salt again, you know, to put around the windows. I
had started with the blessing of us and he had
(38:59):
done basically the same thing that the first priests had done,
but it stopped the paranormal activity like a light switch,
and it never came back in the same way. When
(39:25):
he left, it was like I felt thirty pounds lighter,
because when you deal with paranormal activity, when you see
things that can't possibly be real, it makes you feel crazy.
It's that cognitive dissonance where you believe that the universe
has rules, but you're watching those rules get broken right
in front of you, and so it makes you feel
(39:46):
crazy and you question yourself. And the human mind has
this uncanny ability to reconcile almost anything that's going on.
So if you can imagine waking up with bite marks
on your legs and you sleptear because your bed was
jumping up and down, and you know, you heard voices,
the TV turned on by itself, but you still got
(40:08):
to pay the rent, so you still got to wake up,
get dressed, go to work and you can't let it
rule your life. It makes you feel crazy inside because
life is so mundane and then you see these incredible,
impossible things happen. It felt like after he had left
that all of that weight, all of that just feeling
(40:29):
of just weirdness left me. And I've only had one
paranormal experience since then. This was again caught on camera,
so we had moved again. That place actually had black molds,
(40:50):
so we had to leave there very quickly, so we
moved into a house northern Los Angeles County. I was
still working in in production. I was still hosting productions
and they were filming a TV show that is ironically
about paranormal activity in my home. Right before he left.
The producer was like, okay, I need to get my practicals.
(41:12):
Those are light bulbs, so I used smart led bulbs,
but they don't video very well, so they bring their
own Tongusten practicals so that they can get in even light.
So I was collecting them all from the Wisconsin's on
the wall, the lamps, etc. Was holding them and then
he had said, wow, Richard, that lit up in your hand.
You have the power or something, and he was kind
(41:33):
of laughing about it, and then my wife was like,
oh my god, the light bulb lit up in your hand.
This is a disconnected lits. This is just a standard
tungsten bulb, but it had lit up in my hand.
I saw it kind of for a half second out
of the corner of my eye, and the producer was like,
you know, now that I've had a chance to really like,
let that sink in, I see how absolutely weird that is.
(41:57):
My wife was like, yes, as soon as it lit
up in your hand, all of the other lights flickered.
The Wisconsin's that were connected to mains flickered. So I
told them, yeah, we used to have paranormal activity, but
we haven't had anything in like a year. This was
the very first time and that was the last paranormal
activity that we experienced. Your listeners, I don't want them
(42:27):
to say, wow, that's a weird story and then just
kind of keep moving on. No, this is real. So
there's a very big part of me that gets mad
just just recalling this, and it's like this is nonsense.
Bite somebody's leg, Like what is that accomplishing? Like I
don't understand. It stuck with me and I feel like
(42:48):
we were blessed enough to have all of these security
cameras and our various homes that have recorded so much
of the footage. I need to tell this story. I
feel compelled to tell it because we live in such
a mundane world where nobody really believes in anything, and
(43:09):
I have almost one hundred videos of paranormal activity and
probably close to one hundred witnesses that have experienced objects,
moving doors, slamming knocks, getting their arm grabbed, and so
I just feel compelled to share it to let people
know that this actually is real. The whole situation freaked
(43:32):
me out so bad that I became an ordained minister.
I became a practicing Christian and an ordained minister. It
was a life changing experience. I mean, it was mostly negative,
but it's let me know that there's more to the
world than just what we see.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Thank you Richard for sharing your story with our community.
You can tell me about your story over on true
scarystory dot com for us to have it featured here
on the podcast. To support our program and the rest
of the shows on scary FM, you can try out
Scary Plus. You'll get all of the episodes without ads.
You can play them right here where you're listening, and
get them early when we have them available. It's free
(44:24):
for fourteen days and then four a month. You can
cancel anytime. This episode of True Scary Story was edited
and sound designed by Sarah vorhis Wendel. A VW sound
scheduling was done by Bianca Chavez. An additional production by
me Edwin Kobarubias and the Scary fmteam. If you're following
the show, I'll be back next week with another story.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone,
See you soon.
This is impossible. This isn't a knock on the door.
This isn't a voice in my ear, This isn't a
light turning on and off. This is a physical piece
of paper. How can that possibly manifest in a different
place than she lived? A year after she was removed from.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Her home, A foster child, strange drawings, and a haunting
that defied distance, belief, and time itself.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Now, this is the extraordinary true.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Story of a battle with something far darker than a ghost.
My name is Edwin, and here is richer.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
It's true scary story.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
My name is Richard, and I'm in Los Angeles, California,
and I'm going to share a true story about a
demonic haunting that my family experienced for five years. This
began after we temporarily fostered a thirteen year old girl
who claimed to be possessed by an entity that she
called Melabelle. This was a temporary foster placement. This was
(01:05):
not an adoption placement. I want to make that clear.
She had displayed increasingly disturbing behavior. She would watch demonic
summoning videos on YouTube. Just before Thanksgiving of twenty seventeen,
she had attacked my ex wife and I in our home.
This was after she had done things like animal torture,
(01:28):
animal abuse and made some very frightening comments to us.
She had what I believed at the time to be
a mental breakdown. She was in her room, throwing things around,
(01:49):
punching walls. She was making a sound that sounded like
a mix of a growl and a scream. She was
just thrashing her body around, and I'd come in there,
so I'd taken my camera and I put it in
my jacket pocket to act a sort of a body
cam in case something were to happen. I'm six foot tall,
(02:10):
I'm about two hundred and thirty pounds, and this was
a thirteen year old girl who was eighty pounds soaking wet.
She shoved me hard enough that I flew out of
her room and down part of the hallway and collided
with a big, heavy glass vase, almost knocking it over.
And it wasn't as if she was super strong. It
was as if I had weighed nothing. It felt like
(02:31):
I was floating down that hallway. If you can imagine
what that was like. Right before Thanksgiving, DCFS social worker.
Nobody's working on Thanksgiving, nobody's working the day after nobody's
working that weekend, so we had her in her home
after this attack. She wouldn't talk, she would stare at walls.
(02:57):
And they'd sent out what's called a PMRT, it's like
a psychiatric emergency team. That following Monday, and they had
interviewed her and she had told the story of how
she became possessed by this entity. She claimed that when
she was six years old, she thought that her father
(03:17):
had passed away, and he hadn't. They just didn't know
how to contact her. So every night, she said, as
a little girl, she would contact what she referred to
as the spirit roman asked was anybody here? Was anybody here?
She said that one day a voice replied back to
her and said that I'm here. It only spoke to
(03:38):
her one time, and it gave her the name Melabelle
me E labl E, and it said that it would
never let anything hurt her. It would always protect her.
She had claimed that from that day forward, whenever she
would look into the mirror for too long, she would
(03:58):
see like a demand woman. If she kept staring, that
this entity would take over her body and make her
do things. She began telling this PMRT team how she
was planning on murdering her family before she was removed
from their care. She said that whenever she would dream,
(04:20):
she would dream about this malabell entity ripping on her
mother's throat and what the arterial spray from her neck
would look like, how the blood would spurred out. One time,
her brother hit her with a pillow, and so she
was going to murder everybody in her family, but she
wanted to grow up and get a good job, and
murdering her family would, I guess, get in the way.
(04:42):
So instead, she broke every belonging in their home, every
single belonging. And she was discussing with this PMRT team
and just this sort of flat, matter of fact voice.
It's like how we would describe picking up groceries. She
was describing how she was going to murder them, and
she described how she was going to murder me and
murder my ex wife. This went on for about forty
(05:05):
five minutes and just became more and more disturbing, and
so they said, okay, well we need to leave your
house and we need to talk amongst ourselves for a
few minutes and we'll be right back. We had instructed
the girl to just go to her room and we
were going to be out in the living room, and
you know, we had waited five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes.
(05:26):
After forty minutes of them not coming back, I opened
the door and these four people were right on our
doorstep and they looked at me with terror in their eyes.
And I was like, Okay, well, what's going on. You
guys are going to get her some help. You're going
to take her. They said, no, we're not. It's not
safe for us to ride in a car with her.
It's not safe for us to even be in the
house with her. I was I, oh, so wait, if
(05:48):
it's not safe for you guys, it's not safe for me.
They had said, Well, we've called an ambulance and they're
going to have to strap her to a gurney and
take her to a psychiatric hospital because she's a danger
to everybody around her. The ambulance arrived. We lived in
a complex with a big courtyard, and you know, she
had a couple of little friends in there. I wanted
(06:12):
her to have a little bit of dignity, so I
asked if we could just all walk through the courtyard
and then once we reached the ambulance then they could
strap her down, and yeah, they reluctantly agreed to it.
And the last time I saw her, they had a
mask on her like Hannibal Lecter, and they had strapped
her to a gurney. She was taken away and we
(06:34):
never saw her again. Her bedroom was the first room
once you walked into our loft. I said, okay, I'm
going to make this storage room. I was a photographer
at the time, so you know, I had taken all
of the beds out and her belongings went with her.
(06:55):
So I was going to turn that into a storage
room for my photography equipment. But I couldn't turn on
any of the lights. It was in the afternoon, but
it was almost pitch black in that room, and so
I was like, okay, you know what, probably flip the breaker.
Let's just get on with our day. Let's just deal
with it in the morning. So when I came downstairs
the following morning, all of the lights were on. She
(07:18):
had a mix of overhead lights that were controlled by
light switch, and then she had smart lights that were
like in the strips. I noticed that the colors had
changed on them, and I said, okay, well that's weird,
but you know, if maybe the power went out in
that room for a little bit, or you know, the
internet went out or something like that, it can happen.
So I didn't really think too much of it. I
(07:40):
started bringing in these big external closets I used to
hold light stands, and at the time we'd had two
small kittens, and every time I would open the door
to put a light stand in, one of the kittens
would jump in, and I didn't want the cat to
get hurt, so I kicked the cats out. I had
closed the doors on them so that nothing could happen,
(08:02):
and you know, it's just going through all of my equipment,
and about forty seconds later I turned around and the
doors were standing wide open. Now these were two different closets.
One opened up like cabinets, and then one slid open
and shut, and they were fairly noisy. Knowing that I
closed them, and remembering how it felt to close them
so that the cats couldn't get in, it scared me.
(08:30):
Our bedroom was on the upper level. It was a
lofted bedroom, and so there was a set of stairs
going down. At the bottom of the stairs was a
little storage cabinet, and so at night we heard that
door opening and closing and just kind of rattling on
its hinges, and we could hear running up and down
(08:51):
the stairs, and there was no neighbor on the other
side of that wall. The other side of that wall
led to her bedroom, which led to the outside. There
was no neighbor, there was no people, the cats weren't
in there, but we could hear this banging. The very
(09:12):
next morning, we went out and bought sage. Now, at
the time, I didn't believe in sage. I didn't really
believe much of anything. I was a nonpracticing Christian person,
so you know, I always look for a scientific explanation
and everything. But this scared me enough because I had
never seen anything quite like this before that. You know,
somebody said go ahead, buy sage and smudget, so you know,
(09:32):
we just kind of walked around burning the sage. If anything,
it made it a lot worse. About three weeks after that,
the unit next to hours became vacant. The place was
just giving us the hebgbis just something didn't feel normal.
(09:52):
So we'd moved in there and then for about three
weeks everything was absolutely fine. So we're like, okay, well
that was weird, but you know it's over. And then
one night we we were watching the movie a quiet place.
My home theater set up was I had a projection screen,
I had a projector, and then I had a separate
set of of old like computers Logitech Z fifty five
(10:14):
under it, but they required a separate power button. We
had gone to bed, the movie was over, turned everything off,
and maybe about twenty thirty minutes after we had fallen
asleep asleep, I heard like the loudest music ever. So
I had heard the music at full blast, so I
(10:35):
went running up the stairs. It scared me so bad
that I turned on the camera on my phone because
I thought that I was going to find an intruder
in there. It turns out that the projector was still off.
The firestick is powered by the projector, but the speakers
had turned themselves on. It was playing the end credits
music at full volume. These are like thousand watts speakers,
(10:57):
so it was enough to wake up the entire neighborhood.
In the new place, the home theater was on the
upper level and our bedroom was on the lower level,
and so I kept hearing this weird kind of a
buzzing grinding sound coming from upstairs. When you go up
the stairs and look to the left, there's the bathroom
(11:19):
and you can see the mirror. Immediately, as soon as
I would walk up the stairs and look to the left,
the sound would stop. I did it once, I did
it twice. Every time I went downstairs, I would hear
the noise again. It would three times, four times, five times.
Finally on the sixth time. I was so freaked out
at this point because I knew that something weird was
(11:39):
going on that I live streamed it on Facebook and
I was recording it so that video is uploaded to
my YouTube page. So I started going up the stairs
and I hear the buzzing sound. I'm like, okay, great,
ill go all the way up to the stairs. It's
getting louder. As soon as I look into the mirror,
it stopped. At the time, we had thirteen security cameras
(12:03):
in our home. If you're a foster parent, it's very
important to be able to document things that are going on. Also,
as a photographer, and I worked with female models, so
you always want to have some sort of a documentation
in case there's an incident or an allegation. There was
always just this weird feeling in the house. I would
always feel like things were moving out of the corner
(12:25):
of my eye, but I never stopped to really check
the footage, because if you don't believe in paranormal activity,
you have no reason to check footage. If there's nobody
else in the house. How about and knights had passed.
I remember I was sitting on the couch upstairs in
a home theater room. I got this weird giddy feeling
(12:46):
where everything was funny and silly, and I felt a
little bit light. It's almost like feeling like I'm high.
There was no gas leak in the place. Everything was
all electric, so there was no gas or anything like that.
And my ex had come up this stairs. She was like,
do you smell that. I started cracking up because I'm like,
you know, it's your upper lip or whatever. And she
(13:08):
had said, no, it smells like eggs or something. It
smells like something disgusting, like a skunk. And I was like,
I don't smell anything. She's like, no, come over to
where I'm at. So then I went over to her
at the top of the stairs, and sure enough I
smelled would smell like a rotten meat smell. We're just sniffing.
It was maybe about the size of a person. Like
(13:29):
you know, if we went one foot to the right,
we wouldn't smell it, two feet to left, we wouldn't
smell it. But right there we could smell it really bad.
Then suddenly we didn't smell it. I was like, Okay, well,
I don't know what that was, but it's gone. And
so I started to walk back over to the couch
and I smell it again. I was like, wait, I
smelled it again, and then the same thing happened again
(13:50):
and it moved. I didn't know what was going on.
So I had done like a Google search. I was like,
you know, rotten meat smell was coming up with leak, etc.
Just from a lart. Just because we had experienced some
other weird stuff. I had added in that the search
term ghost. It said that dark entity like a demon
(14:14):
can create this rotten meat smell. I had looked up
how to annoint oil. At the time, I had essential
oils frankincense, and you know I used olive oil for
my skin and hair, so you know, I had these
oils and I looked up how to bless the oils,
and at the time, I barely believed in anything, but
(14:36):
I was willing to give anything a try. At this point,
I did it, and I went upstairs and I splashed
the oil where I smelled it because it had moved again.
As soon as I splashed oil instead of prayer, it
would move somewhere else. There's a video. There's maybe a
five minute long clip of my ex and I running
around this room sniffing where this smell had gone off to.
(15:00):
It went on for I don't know, maybe another half hour,
another hour or something like that. Then it was gone
and it never came back. By this point we believed
that something was going on. At night, we would hear
the banging. Again. We live in California, so you think tremors.
The building was only like twelve years old, so we
(15:22):
were thinking that maybe the building was settling. But we
had been hearing these knocks. It was like a knock
on the door. It would be like in series of three,
or it'd be like one really big loud bang, like
somebody was dropping a piano, and it was usually coming
from upstairs. At the time, I'd made a new friend.
She had come over. I was making them ramen, and
(15:45):
there's a video clip of the bulls of ramen and
a bottle of saracha. I'm cooking, so I'm not looking
at this happening. In the video, you can see the
bottle of saracha slide across his table by itself. I
had heard her say, why is this bottle of saracha
moving by itself? And I turned my head and I
(16:06):
saw it just moved that last inch, and I was like,
there's no way somebody else witnessed this. So we tried
to recreate it. I was like, well, you know, maybe
it's hydro planet. Maybe there was water on the table
and it kind of trapped air pocket, and you know,
it slid across. So we were trying to recreate it,
and we couldn't recreate it, and she was like, you
(16:28):
should download that footage. It was the first piece of
footage I downloaded from the security cameras. I started being
hyper aware of anything unusual that was going on, and
we started to detect a lot. So my friend had
around the time that my ex wife had moved out,
(16:49):
she had moved in shortly thereafter, and we started just
recording all of these bizarre occurrences in our home. So
it'd be like that the typical lights turning on and off.
So we had a mix of smart lights and we
also had them manuel push rocker switches and we would
see the lights turn on and off. I was a
(17:11):
photographer at the time, so I had like the big
paper backdrops. There's one time where it just started blowing
like there was a wind, but there was no wind
in there, but you could see this backdrop, this huge
nine foot backdrop just kind of whipping back and forth.
The very last day that my ex was removing her
(17:34):
belongings from the bedroom, she walks out of the bedroom
and we both heard a voice say watch it. It
was like, that's unmistakable. I said, did you say something?
And she said no, I didn't. So I downloaded the
footage and you can hear it in a woman's voice
(17:55):
say watch it, like a really loud whisper. And I
was a good five feet away from my ex at
the time, but I heard it very, very clearly. There
was another time a couple of days later that I
was sitting on the toilet and I had heard of
woman's voice say hello. I didn't say anything back because
(18:18):
I didn't know who it was, and so, you know,
I just kind of went about my business and I figured, okay,
well let's see who just came in, and there was nobody.
So I pulled the footage to see if anybody had
entered the loft. Nobody had entered the loft, but in
the video recording it's kind of garbled because of the
audio compression, but you can hear a voice say hello.
(18:42):
The occurrences started happening even more. We had a big
seventy five inch TV that was on like a rolling
cart with locking wheels. There was one time I can
remember I had locked the wheel. I had always had
the wheels locked, but it started moving by itself. It
started spinning in this circle. Another time when Maria and
I Maria's my second wife. She was the friend that
(19:04):
I had met around that time. We were meal prepping.
We were making burrito bulls, and so there's a can
of corn that started spinning on it the same table
that the Siracu mottel moved on. It started spinning and
then it slid across. At this point, we had accepted
that this has to be some sort of paranormal activity,
(19:27):
and it's very weird when you experience true paranormal activity.
Because we live in a universe that's based on rules.
You have laws of thermodynamics, you have physics, you have
conservation of energy. Paranormal activity doesn't make any sense from
the perspective of any of the laws of physics. So
(19:47):
it creates this sort of feeling of cognitive dissonance, this
uncomfortable feeling where you believe in gravity, you believe in physics,
you believe in a law of thermodynamics, but you just
heard a voice whisper in your ear, or you just
heard banging on the walls, or the lights just turned
on and off, or you watched an object move by itself,
(20:07):
and it would even happen in front of witnesses. There
was one time I was saying karaoke in a garbage
cam lid started spinning and just flew across the room,
and I'm like, this is crazy because I believed in science,
but I was experiencing things that science couldn't explain. So
(20:28):
we had contacted a number of priests and we finally
got one in Culver City to agree to come out.
So we had sent him a number of videos and
we had you know, maybe like five six of us there,
and we were explaining everything that we had experienced. He
had said, you know, I'm a Catholic priest. I have
(20:51):
to believe in demons, but I'll be honest and say
that I've never seen anything like this before in my life.
He said, I believe you guys, because there's a number
of you who have experienced things, and I've seen the videos.
It looks very compelling. He did what he referred to
as a house blessing in a minor exorcism, and he said,
(21:11):
I want to prepare you guys, because your guys are
going to hear some language that you don't typically hear
in the Catholic church. And you had a little book
with him. He had holy water and he had blessed
some sult so he would take this holy water and
he would splash it on every doorway around the house.
He first blessed us and he started talking in Latin
(21:33):
in a very very loud voice, and he had said,
if this doesn't work and this comes back, please let
me know and I can get permission from the I
think he said the bishop to send some additional help out.
At that point it stopped like a light switch for
(21:55):
about a month. My new wife Maria had heard recorded
laughter from an old TV show, that fake laugh track
(22:17):
that you hear in old comedy shows. From that point,
the paranormal activity came back. This time it came back
a lot worse, and I would get things like scratch
marks on my back, the doors would slam. Something was
happening with our sun at the time. He was my
(22:39):
step son. He was around two years old at the time,
and he kept seeing things and hearing things, but he
didn't have the language to articulate what he was hearing
and seeing. He was just terrified by now. It was
around June of twenty twenty. We needed a smaller place
(22:59):
because the pandemic had kind of killed most of our business,
so we had moved to a place in the arts district. Again.
Things were okay for maybe a couple of weeks, but
then we started experiencing paranormal activity on the level that
we had never seen before. The closet door in my
(23:21):
son's room would suddenly fly open, and we have video
footage of that happening. After the birth of my second son,
my wife was changing his diaper and there was a
stuffed animal that was right next to him that moved
on its own as like a dinosaur. Stuffed animal. The
lights would turn on and off. There was one time
(23:42):
where we had guests over and suddenly all of the cabinet,
not one, all of the cabinets in the kitchen slammed
all at once, and it made such a loud sound.
And you know, by this point we had experienced so
much that we would try to find excuses, so, you know,
we'd try to blame it on the cat or you know,
blame it on the wind, or like a mini earthquake
(24:03):
or something like that. It started happening every single day.
There was another time that I was playing religious music
and switched to a podcast about the Amityville Horde. There
was another time that I was walking towards the sink
and there was a drinking glass and the sink, and
I walked towards it, and that drinking glass exploded like
(24:26):
somebody put a grenade inside. It was the loudest shards
of glass everywhere, and we caught that on camera as well.
Another time, we'd heard noise in the bathroom that like,
there's an unmistakable sound that comes to when somebody slams
the toilet ridge shut. Nothing else sounds like that. We
(24:46):
had heard that sound and my son says to me, Daddy,
what was that. I was like, Oh, it's your aunt.
She's in the bathroom and she called out from another room.
She's like, I'm not in the bathroom. We walk over
to the bathroom, my son and I. His electric toothbrush
turns on by itself and we're like, oh my god.
(25:08):
About a year after we had moved from the first
loft into the second loft, I had walked into my office.
So it was a wide open loft and had had
an office area with sliding glass doors. It's why I
liked it. It looks so commercial, so I could do
my work there and I could have clients over and
it didn't look like an apartment. On the floor of
my office was a folded up piece of paper lined
(25:33):
like a child have in their book. I had opened
it up and it had said I love and then
the girl's name. This was a year after we had
moved from the first loft to the second loft. Nothing.
There was absolutely no chance that I had taken it
from the first loft into the second loft. I was thinking, Okay, well,
(25:57):
a name is one thing, and she had not an
unusual name, but a name that you probably only hear
maybe once or twice a year or two. So it
was an uncommon name. We'll put it like that. And
so I had looked at the picture that she had
sent me. She had drawn a picture of this entity
that she had seen, and she had also kept a
(26:20):
journal that she would write in, so when she was
in class she would write notes to a friend. I
noticed that she had three forms of handwriting. One was
super cutesy, like super girly. One looked like chicken scratch,
just completely nonsense, and the other one looked just different.
(26:42):
I mean, yeah, I can't really say that it looks
feminine or masculine or whatever. It just looked different. And
I noticed that her handwriting would change depending on what
mood she was in. I had looked at there was
a certain way that she drew her ease. I had
taken a picture of the drawing of Malibell. I'd thrown
away the original because I just didn't want it in
my house. So I had taken a picture because it
(27:04):
was so scary. It was like a pitch black, demonic
looking woman with sharp teeth holding a knife. She had
like scraggly black hair. So I had looked at the
way that she had drawn her e for Malibell versus
I love, and then her name. So I'd compare the
ease and they were identical. It looked like it was
written with the exact same pencil. And the other thing
(27:26):
was that that note was written in pencils, and I
had no pencils in my home. It's kind of a
small detail, but if you think about it as a
grown man, I don't need to have pencils for anything.
I had pens, and so that struck me. And I'm
not a handwriting expert at all, but the handwriting was
so distinct that I could tell that it was hers,
(27:47):
and I had no idea. So the very first thing
that I had done when I'd seen the letter was
I crumpled it up. And then i'd opened it up.
I was like, this is impossible. This isn't a knock
on the door, This isn't a voice in my ear,
this isn't a light on and off. This is a
physical piece of paper. How can that possibly manifest in
a different place than she lived? A year after she
(28:08):
was removed from her home, And so I had stretched
it back out, I had taken the picture. I still
have that picture to this day, comparing the lettering of
various writing samples. So we had called the Catholic Church again.
The first priest that came out, strangely never returned our call.
(28:29):
So we started calling other churches and explaining what had happened,
explaining that we had already had a priest out and
it was super effective. But then it came back after
we started retelling the story too many times, so they
sent out another priest. I remember he came with a
younger guy, So I think the younger guy was like
an altered roy or something like that. You know, he
(28:52):
kind of wasn't taking it serious. He had said, well,
what this is you know, it's playful. It's just trying
to get your attention. And you know, at this point
I believe that there was paranormal activity going on, but
at the same time that explanation sounded a little bit silly.
It upset me a little bit because it felt like
he wasn't taking it very serious. And so he had
(29:12):
done a smaller house blessing, but there was just something
that was just off about the visit. There was something
that was off about him, and the very next day,
the paranormal activity dialed up to about eleven. We were
(29:33):
laying in bed and I felt our bed get kicked
and kicked hard. It was enough to wake me up
from a deep sleep, and I'm like, what the f
was that? I'm looking around. I pulled the footage and
you can hear the kick clear as day. From that
day forward, whenever we would go to sleep, our bed
(29:53):
would sort of vibrate and shake. It would feel like
it was jumping up and down without actually making the noise,
so you could feel it. So I would wake my
wife up and say did you feel that. She's like,
oh my god, it's an earthquake. It's not an earthquake.
I was like, just sit still, feel this. Take it in.
(30:13):
This is happening every night. She's a deeper sleeper than I,
so she wouldn't wake up most nights. When I would
wake up in the morning once more, I would have
scratch marks on my back, and I took a lot
of pictures of these scratch marks and had her take
some as well, on my back, on my arms, on
my legs, and I started getting bite marks. When you
(30:34):
have a bruise from a bite, it's a very very
particular shape. Nothing else looks like it because it looks
like a ring of purple with normal colored skin inside.
You could even make out individual tea. So I would
wake up and I would get these bite marks, and
maybe just like two, three, four at a time, but
they were very consistent. My son once woke me up
(30:57):
and said that you could feel something getting in the
bed with him, And I said, what do you mean
something he had gotten in the bed with you. He's like,
it felt like a person got in the bed with me.
So I had him describe more, and he had explained,
like how he could feel that the sheet being pulled
and like that depression in the bed that wait right
next to him. So then he did not want to
(31:19):
sleep in his bedroom after that. So we would have
him either sleep in bed with us, or we would
set up like a little makeshift bed for him right
next to us in our room. And like you know,
we moved onto to air mattresses, but he was terrified.
(31:39):
Towards the end, one of our election units started calling
nine to one one by itself, so it called like
maybe about three times. There would be a lot of
nights that we would wake up and we would hear
knocks somewhere in the house. It would be like wraps
of three again, like bang bang bang, or like really
loud bang to the point where we could feel it.
(32:01):
At the time, I was a mix of a photographer,
but I also hosted productions in my home, so it
would be things like TV shows, movies, music videos, etc.
So even there's three celebrities who have experienced paranormal activity.
The first one had felt something grab her arm, and
(32:21):
I remember I was talking to her about parenting because
at this time my wife was pregnant and we thought
that she was going to lose a baby. Like as
this woman was recording her music video, and I was like,
you know, how do you do it? Have you ever
experienced that? And then she started telling me a story
of when she thought that she was going to lose
her son. And then suddenly she stopped and she turned around.
(32:42):
She's like, was that you She had said to somebody.
I was like, what do you mean. She's like, something
grab my arm. I'm like, nobody grabbed your arm, and
it's like I immediately knew what it was. So it's
like I just you'd rather than say, yeah, well, we're
having paranormal activity in our house. I just kind of
changed the subject. There was another time where they were
filming a like time movie in our lock and lock.
(33:06):
Most of it was open, but there were two bedrooms
and I would usually hang out in one of the
bedrooms and read comic books or something like that while
everybody worked, so I wouldn't be tripping over them or
getting in their way or whatever. They would feel like
they would have a little bit more freedom. It hurt
a knock on my door and so I'd opened the door.
I was like, hey, what's up, do you guys need anything?
And there was nobody there. So I went around to
(33:28):
where they were filming. It sounded like they had a cut.
They weren't actively recording, so I said, hey, just only
knock on the door. They're like no, and they sounded
really mad about it, and they were like, have you
been banging on the walls. It's like we can't get
a clean take for sound because we keep hearing these
banging sounds. And I was like no way. I was like,
this is a film crew of about thirty five people
(33:50):
and they're witnessing the knocking sound. So I'd said, hey,
can you play that back for me? He was like yeah,
he played it back, and I heard the banks. I
just kind of said, Okay, here's what's going on, guys,
there is paranormal activity here. And you know, of course
that immediately diffused the situation because they experienced something themselves.
But yeah, we'd hear a lot of people. God, there
(34:10):
were even people that would hear voices. I'd had it.
My nerves were afraid because I'm thinking, why is this
happening to us? This is going on close to five years,
just daily occurrences. And so one night I was sitting
on my bed and my son runs over to me, terrified,
(34:34):
said Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I heard a voice. I heard
a voice, Like wow, what did the voice say? And
he said it went and so I'm thinking, like it's
the fan or something. So I was like, okay, let
me pull the footage. So then the footage shows that
he's racing a car al on the floor and then
suddenly you hear voice go. Later, he told me that
(34:59):
he could also feel the breath on the back of
his neck, but he just didn't have the language yet
to really express what he had felt in addition to
what he had heard. At this point, I was so
fed up that we ran out of the apartment. Before
we did, I started playing Christian music. In the past,
whenever I would play Christian music in the house, the
(35:22):
paranormal activity it wouldn't stop completely, but it would be
maybe a fraction of what it was before. For some reason,
the Christian music would greatly reduce the amount of paranormal activity.
So I played the music and we ran out of
the house and I called my wife. I said, listen,
whatever you're doing, drop it, come home. We need to
find a church that's open. I want to get some
(35:44):
holy water. I want to bless this place. I'm so
tired of this. I'm not going to live there anymore
if we don't do this. And so we had found
the church that was open, we got the holy water.
We came back and I didn't really know what I
was doing, so I started reciting prayers and splashing the
holy water, and suddenly the music changed from Christian music
(36:07):
to a song called Monster by a band called Seether.
It's a song about demonic possession. I remember it freaked
me out so bad. And I had uploaded a video
of me splashing the holy water and then the music
changing and I just started just shouting, get out of
my home. Get out, Get out. In the name of God,
(36:28):
get out of my home. We called another Catholic turs.
We called the closest one to us. They said, okay,
well I need to give you a call back. And
we've gotten a call back and they said, okay, we're
going to come out and we're going to do a
house blessing and we're going to see what we can do.
(36:49):
And I'm thinking another house blessing, like this did not work,
This made it worse the last time. But you know,
I'm not going to turn down any help. The man
comes in and he identified himself as a priest who
specializes in exorcisms. It was at that moment I was like,
(37:11):
this isn't honest to God exorcist And I said what
church are you with? He said, I was sent directly
by the archdiocese. I was thinking, oh my god, this
is an actual exorcist in our home. And I was like, well,
how did they notice send you? They said, they know
about your case because you've been calling all these churches.
You've had two priests come out already, so they had
(37:32):
a record of the last two times that they had
come out. I was like, okay, well, I have all
of these videos to show you, said, I don't need
to see them. I got mad at the time because
we had been dealing with this for almost five years.
We'd been scratched bit and our bed would jump up
and down at night, we couldn't sleep, doors would slam,
(37:54):
the lights would turn on and off. Object heavy objects
like big boxes full of seven five pounds worth of
weights would suddenly slide off of flat services. We had
been through a lot. I was just so sick and
tired of feeling like we were being condescended to. I
was like, well, this can't be normal, Like, you know,
(38:14):
why aren't you taking this more serious? He said, I
tell you what. What you have is like a person.
He said, it's conscious. It's not material, but it's aware
that you're here. It's demonic in nature. I said, there's
no way that you've seen this before. He said I have.
He said, In fact, after I leave here, I have
another appointment just like this. I said, well why and
(38:37):
he said, well, as people stopped believing in God and
they stopped going to church, this has become more commonplace.
And he said the word commonplace. It's like, this can't
be that common he just kind of looked at me,
and so he said, Okay, we're going to go ahead
and begin. And so he had given me the blessed
salt again, you know, to put around the windows. I
had started with the blessing of us and he had
(38:59):
done basically the same thing that the first priests had done,
but it stopped the paranormal activity like a light switch,
and it never came back in the same way. When
(39:25):
he left, it was like I felt thirty pounds lighter,
because when you deal with paranormal activity, when you see
things that can't possibly be real, it makes you feel crazy.
It's that cognitive dissonance where you believe that the universe
has rules, but you're watching those rules get broken right
in front of you, and so it makes you feel
(39:46):
crazy and you question yourself. And the human mind has
this uncanny ability to reconcile almost anything that's going on.
So if you can imagine waking up with bite marks
on your legs and you sleptear because your bed was
jumping up and down, and you know, you heard voices,
the TV turned on by itself, but you still got
(40:08):
to pay the rent, so you still got to wake up,
get dressed, go to work and you can't let it
rule your life. It makes you feel crazy inside because
life is so mundane and then you see these incredible,
impossible things happen. It felt like after he had left
that all of that weight, all of that just feeling
(40:29):
of just weirdness left me. And I've only had one
paranormal experience since then. This was again caught on camera,
so we had moved again. That place actually had black molds,
(40:50):
so we had to leave there very quickly, so we
moved into a house northern Los Angeles County. I was
still working in in production. I was still hosting productions
and they were filming a TV show that is ironically
about paranormal activity in my home. Right before he left.
The producer was like, okay, I need to get my practicals.
(41:12):
Those are light bulbs, so I used smart led bulbs,
but they don't video very well, so they bring their
own Tongusten practicals so that they can get in even light.
So I was collecting them all from the Wisconsin's on
the wall, the lamps, etc. Was holding them and then
he had said, wow, Richard, that lit up in your hand.
You have the power or something, and he was kind
(41:33):
of laughing about it, and then my wife was like,
oh my god, the light bulb lit up in your hand.
This is a disconnected lits. This is just a standard
tungsten bulb, but it had lit up in my hand.
I saw it kind of for a half second out
of the corner of my eye, and the producer was like,
you know, now that I've had a chance to really like,
let that sink in, I see how absolutely weird that is.
(41:57):
My wife was like, yes, as soon as it lit
up in your hand, all of the other lights flickered.
The Wisconsin's that were connected to mains flickered. So I
told them, yeah, we used to have paranormal activity, but
we haven't had anything in like a year. This was
the very first time and that was the last paranormal
activity that we experienced. Your listeners, I don't want them
(42:27):
to say, wow, that's a weird story and then just
kind of keep moving on. No, this is real. So
there's a very big part of me that gets mad
just just recalling this, and it's like this is nonsense.
Bite somebody's leg, Like what is that accomplishing? Like I
don't understand. It stuck with me and I feel like
(42:48):
we were blessed enough to have all of these security
cameras and our various homes that have recorded so much
of the footage. I need to tell this story. I
feel compelled to tell it because we live in such
a mundane world where nobody really believes in anything, and
(43:09):
I have almost one hundred videos of paranormal activity and
probably close to one hundred witnesses that have experienced objects,
moving doors, slamming knocks, getting their arm grabbed, and so
I just feel compelled to share it to let people
know that this actually is real. The whole situation freaked
(43:32):
me out so bad that I became an ordained minister.
I became a practicing Christian and an ordained minister. It
was a life changing experience. I mean, it was mostly negative,
but it's let me know that there's more to the
world than just what we see.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Thank you Richard for sharing your story with our community.
You can tell me about your story over on true
scarystory dot com for us to have it featured here
on the podcast. To support our program and the rest
of the shows on scary FM, you can try out
Scary Plus. You'll get all of the episodes without ads.
You can play them right here where you're listening, and
get them early when we have them available. It's free
(44:24):
for fourteen days and then four a month. You can
cancel anytime. This episode of True Scary Story was edited
and sound designed by Sarah vorhis Wendel. A VW sound
scheduling was done by Bianca Chavez. An additional production by
me Edwin Kobarubias and the Scary fmteam. If you're following
the show, I'll be back next week with another story.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone,
See you soon.
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