Welcome to the other world, I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This is part two of the lake house picking up right where we left off. And in her family moved into this house that needed to be renovated after the last tenant essentially ruined it. The house smelled of decay, they found blood splatter and claw marks all over the second floor. And this is all after the landlord went in and cleaned out whatever it is that he found. Then one day, the previous tenant showed up and told them she buried 19 cats in the yard. The addiction is a theme running through this series. Jen and her mom thought the previous tenant was an addict. They had a lot of experience being around methodics and anybody who has had experience being around somebody deep in addiction to this drug knows that it can sometimes make people do unspeakable things. I have unfortunately had some experience myself living next to somebody who is addicted to this drug, in fact they remind me a lot of how Jen describes this previous tenant. And after they moved out, I got to see the inside of her house because the professional cleaning team was so disturbed by what they found that they came over to just talk to me about it. These things that people can do, whether they are intentionally ritualistic, random acts of drug psychosis or some combination of the two, I can't really say and to me at a certain point, the line between them really starts to blur. Shortly after moving in, Jen and her siblings started to notice something moving their toys around as they played and eventually began hearing and seeing something walking around their bedroom and the upstairs of their house at night. This continued and escalated throughout the time they lived in this house, but the real reason this experience still haunts Jen is that it seemed as though the house or whatever was in it could impact the lives and behavior of the people inside of it. Once again I want to give a strong warning that this story covers many different disturbing topics that will be difficult for some listeners so please be advised. This is the Lake House Park 2 and you're listening to other world. So, we got the idea, me and my little sister. That we were going to go to my older sister and beg her to sleep in her floor at night. And we didn't want my parents to know because number one, it scared us really bad. Number two, my stepdad did not believe this was going on. It scared the shit out of us, so me and my older sister would lay shoulder to shoulder in her twin bed and my little sister would curl up at the bottom almost in a fetal position. That is the only way all three of us could fit. And unfortunately she was the smallest and that's where she ended up sleeping. But my sister, the older sister, had a bedroom door. Which for us we felt like that was protection. So it did not matter how bad you slept, whatever, you could shut that door and you could lock it. It didn't stop anything. What ended up happening is that all of the movement that was going on in that day room where me and my little sister slept would walk up to my older sister's bedroom door and you could hear it. You could see like even though it was dark, the darkness would change. Like there was something moving outside the door that you could see the shadows that were casting under the door onto the floor. It looked like somebody was standing outside that door. They didn't knock on it. They would press on the door like pressing up against the door like a grown man with all of their body weight slowly to where you hear this door almost about like to break through. It's a hollow core door, right? So cheap. And you would hear this throughout the night. And then it was time to get up and go to school the next day and keep this secret. How often was this happening to you guys? At this point, almost every day, this was not rare. This was not, oh my god, did we hear something? We prepared for this every night going to bed, every night. This was not like a maybe, this was a guarantee at this point. What was interesting about this time is that my two older brothers thought this was a game and they thought it was so funny, so funny to scare us girls over this, right? They were not taking it seriously at all. And right off the kitchen was a little dining room area. You come into the kitchen, stairs go up into our rooms, our dining room table where we ate every night was directly below where me and my sister slept. So we would be sitting there at dinner and when my dad was home, we would try to bring this up and talk to him or when my brothers would start making fun of us or y'all've got to sleep up there, ha, ha, ha. You could hear somebody walking around upstairs like in hard soul shoes, walking around and then it would stop. You start to talk about it again, here it goes again. All seven of us were sitting around the dining room table. My dad on the way home from work would pass a sonic, it was like a Tuesday special, but it was a big deal because we never ate out. This specific day was on one of those days that my dad brought a sack of sonic hamburgers home. We were all sitting around, it was an eight foot butcher block table that my mother had inherited from her great aunt. We're all sitting around this table. All five kids, mom and dad and the youngest brother is giving my little sister shit about being scared and the footsteps start upstairs. You've got my dad sitting there trying to ignore it. My mom terrified trying to ignore it. Me and my two sisters knowing we're going to have to go sleep up there and my brother thought this was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. It's during that exchange where the youngest brother is basically calling my sister a liar and telling her there's nothing going on, you're not experiencing anything. All things happen simultaneously in that moment. Footsteps are still there, they're loud as fuck. You can hear somebody walking around up there. At the same time, all of me and Sarah's little Barbie accessories, all of our little hair ties, just start not all at once, like somebody standing at the top of the stairs and just throwing them like a handful at a time down the stairs. And I'm sitting there. You can see the bottom of the stairs from where we are all sitting. And here comes all of our toys over and over and over. You've got my brother of the oldest boy's bedroom right off the dining room. He is the only one that had a TV in his room. It comes on and starts cycling through channels like at a pace, right, at a very consistent
like every one second, it would flip to a new channel. It was all static, it was all snow. There was no shows or anything that came up, but we're all sitting there, and all of this is going on around us. My dad doesn't want to believe it. My mom is trying to hide her fear. Us girls are thinking, "Oh God, we're going to have to go to sleep soon." I'm going to take the smallest bites of hamburger I possibly can to drag this out, because I don't want to go up there. The stuff is still just every now and then coming down the stairs. And it's all of me and my sister's little toys and stuff. We had to go to bed, right? It's bedtime. And so my dad is trying to laugh this off, even though I can tell that he just experienced something that scared the shit out of him. But he had to work tomorrow, so we all need to get over this. We've got shit to do. So we wash the dishes. We go back upstairs, and we've got a good bed. And the same routine happens. We all sleep in my older sister's room, and it's just chaos, noise, people walking around. And it didn't sound like that's the weirdest thing. It almost sounded like a bunch of people, just a bunch of people walking around making noise. And about this time, school had started again. I was going into fifth grade. What I did not know is that while we were at school, my mom was having a lot of experiences in that house. And so she would get up because she had no car, she had no phone, and there was a convenience store about two miles away. So when things got bad, she would take her little walk and stick, and when she would walk up to lanes, convenience store, and she would get a drink or some candy or whatever. And there were many days that she flagged the bus down while we were even on the same street to get us off the bus, because she didn't want us walking in that house without her, and she didn't want to walk in that house alone. Like this got really scary for her. What I did not know either at the time was that she had figured out from the landlord that the ladies that was there had to be doing animal sacrifice in that house. Whatever it was that she was doing with those cats was going on upstairs for me and my sister were now sleeping. If you are running a rescue, if you are an animal lover, you're not going to move out of the house and leave a bunch of dead animals. Be waited for rent collection to come back up, and she waited for a support show up, and she asked him very, very direct questions. "Do you know if she was practicing some type of ritualistic, dark magic in this house?" He said, "Absolutely." And she said, "Do you believe that this was happening upstairs?" He said, "Yes, I know it was." So I don't know if he is just talking about the mutilated animals. I don't know if he's talking about the dead animals. I don't know if he's talking about the scratches. I don't know if he actually found ritualistic. I don't know. But he pretty much told my mom that she was on point that the first person that they rented to right out of the gate that this is what they were doing in that house. She became extremely scared and in order to cope with it started drinking. I noticed about that time that we all started struggling in very unique ways. All of us kids as well as my parents. And it's almost like looking back at this now, whatever was there in that house, had a way of figuring out whatever your absolute worst fear was, and plaguing on that. My dad became very, very angry and violent. He became a person we did not recognize. My mom started drinking to cope with what she was experiencing what we were all going through. That became a lifelong issue for her. This thing was very, very smart. It had a very weird way of tearing people apart, including the people that would come visit our home. We had my mom's cousin come visit. She stayed a week within a month. She had walked in on her husband cheating and was in rehab for dependency. We had a gentleman that worked for my dad that came by the house to watch the Super Bowl. He was a very heavy guy. Brian was his name. This happened the night he came to our house for the first time, not the night after, the night. They wanted to drink and have a good time. They were going to do this at the house. He leaves that night, goes home. He was married, but his wife was either out of town or somewhere else. She was not there. He laid down on that couch and had a heart attack and died, like hours within leaving our house. But she did not come home until the next day. This guy was at least 300 pounds. Whatever happened, I am not a doctor. I got my degree from Google. But when he died, he filled with so much gas that he exploded open. I don't know if you've seen dead animals that lay in the sun too long. That's why it's gas in their bodies. So she came home expecting to hear about the Super Bowl and her girl's trip or whatever to basically walk into what looked like a crime scene. My dad's sister, my stepdad's sister, came up to visit with their mother. She ended up going through a major divorce within a couple of weeks that was dropped on her, like surprise, surprise. My mom started having heart issues. Never had heart issues in her life. Comes and visits us. Starts having heart issues. Those heart issues last another 30-something years and it's what ends up killing her. I could go on and on about the few friends that we would have that would come over and play or stay the night. That lasted one night. It was a lot. And so we got to the point to where my mom was not dumb. And she felt like there's something really going on here. Like you don't have this much tragedy, these many accidents, just back-to-back-to-back like this. You don't have an entire family that is impacted on all these deep levels, just all of the sudden like that, right? It just seemed to thrive. The more chaotic and desperate and sad things got. [Music] All right, we'll be right back after this quick break. Get ready for more of the gripping mysteries you love because forensic files is back. And they're revisiting some of your favorite episodes. Come along as investigators, scientists, and experts. Peace together, evidence, clues, and data. In search of the answers behind violent crimes, unexplainable mysteries, and to other strange occurrences. Listen to forensic files on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. The wilderness can hide a lot, but it can't hide the truth forever. I'm Dylia DeAmber, a host of Park Predators. And every week I investigate true crime cases hidden in national parks, forests, and beaches. I follow every lead, every clue, and every overlooked detail. Even when a trail seems to disappear, the truth has a way of resurfacing. Listen to Paul.
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(upbeat music) (soft music) - My mom had this friend, her name was Irlene, and she owned a reselled dress shop. Well, I guess my mother was in the house talking to her about what had been going on, and they're sitting at the kitchen table, and as Irlene is going through this, my mom had all these knick knacks and things on the wall next to them, just all started coming off the wall. You know, I had a little girlfriend come over, Emily, was her name, did make it through the night, called her papa to come get her, because she swore that people were coming up the stairs and trying to watch her sleep. I mean, it's just, I could go on and on about this, but it sounds fucking crazy. Like, when I say this out loud and hear this, it sounds nuts, it just does. It was very isolating, because anybody that we brought into our home or would talk about with this, oh, damn, I almost forgot, check. Okay, so I told you that my mother to get out of the house every day that she would walk to the local convenience store. It was Lane's convenience store, Michael Lane, wonderful, wonderful guy, and his son, Michael Lane Jr. went to, middles went to elementary with me. He was in my class, and my mom would walk up there and walk up there, and finally he asked her, like, dude, what is going on with you? And she sat down in that store one day during a rainstorm and told him everything. Guy died of a heart attack and his sleep that week. Like, this was devastating, 'cause she felt like, now, as an adult, when we did get to talk about this, it's like everywhere that she went for help to try to find help, to try to figure this out or have a safe place to talk about it, it was taken from her. So then you just keep everything in and just drink more, right? 'Cause God forbid, you tell somebody, you really, really, really care about, and another weird thing happens, and now, you know, it's just one less person in your life that you love and care about. Like, that messed her up for a long time. You know, so she was, in the later years, very, very careful about talking about this. It's probably one of the reasons there's so much fear around this for me as well. My oldest brother grew up to not only be a drug addict, but a child molester, just like his papa. The youngest boy grew up to be a severe drug addict. You have my older sister, my step sister, who her biggest, biggest fear in life. The only thing she ever wanted from a young age was to be a mom, because she had had such a shit experience with her biological mom, that she was so gung-ho, that she was gonna live this healthy life, raise kids, write all the wrongs that she had experienced. That's not what happened. She ended up having twins at 16, spiraling into drug use to the point that, we got a call saying that she had abandoned her children in a motel by the airport and to come get 'em. Poverty breeds a lot of problems that a lot of normal people can't really grasp or understand. Could all of these things have come from our situation? Absolutely, that all of these things hit all of us at the exact same time. And then we struggle with them the rest of our life. Me, my deal, it was always depression. And I felt, I think it's very, hard to imagine a fifth grader just suddenly starting with suicidal ideations and fantasies. I fought that the entire time I was in that house. So, with her trying to cope with that, my step-dad working all the time, there were a lot of days that we would come home and it was up to us to figure things out. I got home from school one day and my sister had ridden the bus home and gotten off on somebody else's stop because they were gonna play or whatever. So, I got off the bus, my mom had gotten a little car and she had started working at an insurance office. She wasn't home yet. And I walk upstairs and like, I'm gonna be brave, I'm gonna put my bag away, I'm gonna do what I have to do and I get to the top of the stairs and everything is super fucking calm, like real calm. And it's like I feel somebody behind me but there's nobody there, but in my mind, I can hear this, nobody loves you. You are a burden. Come get in the lake. Come get in the lake, come get in the lake. You're not loved, you're not wanted, come get in the lake. Almost like, you know, one of your friends begging you to come out like I'll buy your drinks. And I looked over at the end of my bed and there was a stack of queen clothes. And I had this vision in my head of just put on as much as you can and walk off the dock. Just walk off the end of the dock and I hear it again, come get in the lake. [BLANK_AUDIO]
I put on clothing. I put on several layers of clothing. I came down the stairs and I closed the sliding glass door. And it was really, really cold outside. It was like gray day. The sky was gray. The water was gray. It was really cold. It was like just the first really big cold snap of the season. I want to say this was right after Halloween and before Thanksgiving. And I came down that gravel driveway and I took a right. And I walked down to the shore of this lake where me and my sister used to play and there was a long dock that went off. And I did. I just, I felt like it was the happiest day of my life. You know, like there was no thought. It's like I can remember my shoes hitting the wood of that dock. And just looking out at everything like almost like you're saying goodbye. But there's no sense of urgency or sadness. Just everything's going to be all right. Just come get in the water. This is, it was almost like preparing for a massage appointment. It was not scary. It didn't hurt. It was like listening to your grandma or a friend or somebody that you really, really trusted. Just being like it's, it's going to be all right. Just, just come, come get in the water. Just come out here. And I just walked and kept going. I just walked straight off the edge of that dock. And I hit that water. I was not prepared for the water being so cold and it did shock you. It's like, oh, God, like it was a lot. I was still in such a days and it was ice cold, right? So it's going to shock your nervous system when you hit the water. But then you've also got on so many layers of clothing that it's going to take you under, right? It's like you're on. And I felt somebody grab my hand, pull me up. And it was this old man lived in the house to the right. He grabbed me by the left wrist. Every bit of me was underwater from my left wrist up. And that's how he pulled me out. He was so old at that time that there's no way he could have jumped in and got me. I do not know what prompted him to do this. I guess he must have seen me walking out and he brought me inside and his wife dried my clothes. I think that he knew what happened. But I was so scared. I was like, I am not supposed to be out of the house. I'm not allowed to be out of the house. If my parents come home and I'm not there, like I'm going to be in serious trouble. That is the only thing I cared about. He said, do you want me to take you home? Your hair's wet. And I said, no, because I don't want to be seen getting out of a car. So I walked back home, got back into the house before anybody got back home. And it's almost like I had the same feeling. All the peace and happiness was gone. And it's like I heard mentally, you're not supposed to come back. And I just started crying with the realization of what happened. It was this weird feeling that if I would just follow the directions and I would just do whatever that everything was going to be okay. There was such a sense of peace and ease and goodness around that feeling. That for me is where I had 11 years old wrestled with the consequences of life and death and like what is life worth, what just all kinds of different things. And I just remember saying a little prayer that it's like God, I'm so sorry I almost left my sister alone in this. Like please help me. That, that quickly escalated things. That brings us to the end of this episode. We'll be back soon with the finale of the series in part 3. I can say with certainty that Jen telling me about that last incident was one of the most haunting things that's been described to me on the show. And it really stuck with me. Her entering this sort of trans-like state being called to this lake and then ultimately attempting to take her own life. That is extremely terrifying. And I think that's partly because most people can relate to a time in their life where it felt like they were really not themselves. Like whatever it is that makes us who we are is gone. And something else is steering the ship. Of course I'm referring to only small subtle versions of that. But the idea of that happening in an extreme way with permanent consequences is really frightening. That is a theme running through this story. An outside force taking control and impacting people's lives for the worse. Whether you believe that's the house or just addiction, poverty, bad luck, it was happening to a lot of people. This has been The Lake House Part 2 and you've been listening to The Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theoshafer, Theocrants, Haley Parson, and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by Wiccafe's Springs Eternal, Juice Jackle, and North Americans. Our artwork is by Koldisek Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you could become a patron at patreon.com/otherworld. Our social media is at Otherworld Pod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, Lerie Stennis, Mora Curran, Josephina Francis, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gainer, and Hillary Schuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, you can send us your stories at
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