Every Town - The HAUNTING They Couldn't Debunk - Caught On Camera: THE GHOST I N THE ATTIC

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Today we’re headed to a little bungalo with a BIG haunted story. One where the ghost actually left evidence behind. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/SCDLFsnZ3Kk 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform.

New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the Dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. I'm Richard Serrett. Join me on Strange Planet for in-depth conversations with the world's top paranormal investigators, alien abductees, bigfoot trackers, monster hunters, time travelers, and more. The handler one day told her this whole thing about how they've been terraforming on Mars,

and they're building a colony, and they're recruiting specific people of specific bloodlines and specific talents and skill sets to go onto the planet. On Richard Serrett's strange planet, we're redefining reality. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. Everybody's got a good ghost story, or at the very least, they know somebody who does. the house they grew up in, that hotel room that was in an old building, for the young who swears she can see things others can.

The issue with all these is they never quite hold up under scrutiny because the second you go looking for proof, it's just not there. It's always a story they can only swear by, which is why the skeptics went out almost every single time. Almost. Because every once in a while a haunting comes along, that doesn't fall apart when you dig into it. One with witnesses who have never met each other,

and investigators who showed up to debunk it and then left rattled. And a freaky photograph that people are still arguing about to this very day. And that's exactly the story we got for you guys tonight. Hey guys, it's Andrew, thanks for tuning into every town. But right now we're headed to a little bungalow with a big haunted story. One with a ghost actually left evidence behind, So let's head over to California now, getting to the story of Jackie Hernandez

and the San Pedro haunting. For the first few months, everything that happened was small. A bump in the night here and there or that feeling like something was looking at her from the shadows in the closet. Things that had nothing bigger happened would have never gotten mentioned,

but looking back, this was most definitely the start of it all. And 23-year-old Jackie Hernandez has had every reason in the world to explain it all the way as nothing to fuss about. She had just walked away from a marriage that wasn't working. And if that wasn't stressful enough, she was pregnant with a daughter, and she had her son Jamie with her, who was just a toddler at the time. And they rented out a small bungalow in San Pedro, California.

She was working multiple jobs and going to school, so with all that, honestly, who has time for a ghost opening a door or turning the lights on and off. It was easy for her to remind herself that hauntings aren't real. Anyone in her shoes would have told themselves the exact same story, because it's a whole lot easier to believe you're just exhausted and not thinking clearly than it is to believe you're not alone. But then, somewhere in that first year,

the story she was telling herself simply stopped working. because one night something happened that scared her stiff. In the dead of night, Jackie woke up to a sound. She couldn't tell exactly what it was, but something was moving around, and it was coming from the direction of where her son's bedroom was. She got up to go check on him, still half asleep, and when she opened the door, there, standing on the edge of the baby's bed, hunched over her sleeping toddler,

was the full-bodied apparition of an old. man. He looked decrepit and haggard. As she stood frozen in that doorway trying to process what she was looking at, he slowly turned his head and looked right at her. He was very grayish in appearance, and he looked as if he was very angry and evil at the same time, which made me feel uneasy. It wasn't like a friendly, welcoming type of thing. Before she could do anything, Well, he just up and vanished. And so that was officially the moment the whole thing changed, because now all the weirdness going on, that made sense.

It was not all the trick of her tired mind. Somebody or something in that house had stared at her child and then her. And it didn't want to be friends. Now, the one person Jackie had in her corner through all this was her neighbor, a woman named Susan. When Jackie came knocking, shaking, and trying to get out what she had just seen, Susan didn't dismiss her or laugh her out of the room. She believed her.

That's important because when you think about who Jackie was at the moment, young, pregnant, alone, and a fresh face to the neighborhood, a lot of people would probably shut the door and say, sorry, but I can't help you. I mean, think about yourself. The new neighbor came crying about a ghost, Would you be willing to take them in and listen to their problems? Well, most people, especially nowadays, would assume they were probably being pranked.

Susan became a shoulder to lean on, and Jackie caught her up to speed on what was happening. The two became friends from there. And one day when Susan was over the house, they were sitting in the living room when a crash came in from the kitchen. They got up to look, and there was a painting, one that had been hanging on the wall, now torn down, and propped up against the sink. But it didn't just get knocked loose and fall. It was propped there, set in place deliberately, like somebody had decided they wanted to move it.

And the nails that had been holding it up? Well, they've been pulled clean out of the wall and laid out on the floor. Points facing straight up, exactly where a bare foot would land. Now, this was a message being sent, and now Jackie wasn't the only one who saw it. And that right there is really the thing that sets the San Pedro case apart from the thousands of other haunted house stories floating around out there.

And Jackie wasn't the only one seeing it. Susan saw things. The babysitters who watched Jamie saw things, like streaks of light that appeared to whip around the room before vanishing in a thin air. Even friends who just stopped by to say hello walked out having seen or heard something they couldn't explain. It could be something minor, but the general consensus coming out of that bungalow apartment was that something odd was going on. I had a cat at the time, too, that I just recently got, and the cat was like a really mellow, mellow cat, but when it got into the house, it was strange. It acted really peculiar.

It would follow the lights. It would chase the shadows. It would arch its back like cats do when they're really afraid of something. Now, a house that only frightens the ones. one person who's already convinced it's haunted, well, that's one kind of story and it's an easy one to wave off. Any individual can have some issues, both physically or mentally. And Jackie, she's the prime target for naysayers. She was looking perhaps for attention and help, so they'd say all these things happening were a manifestation. Except that in this case, on several occasions,

but you'd have the skeptics walk in rolling their eyes only to walk out a believer. That brings a whole lot more validity to it, and by the time this case was over, it'd even have photographic proof of just how violent and creepy this haunting would get. Before that photo would ever be captured, though, things slowly graduated. And in a lot of hauntings, that seems to be how it goes. It's a slow rollout, almost as if the poltergeist or whatever you want to call. call it, a spirit, needs to get you comfortable with it in order to have the maximum effect. In other words, if it came out swinging right out of the gate and showed its face and got violent

and tore paintings off the wall, it would be too much and the person, in this case Jackie, would leave immediately, no matter how inconvenient that might be. But a slow roll gets you just used to the uncomfortableness enough to keep you there. A week goes by without anything, maybe even a month, and you think all is right again. The mind plays tricks, and that's exactly what happened here. It was enough to keep Jackie on edge, but not enough for her to reach out to her landlord out of fear of looking crazy, or at the very least, a problem tenant. And it certainly wasn't enough for her to pack up and move her kids out, at least not yet.

One day Jackie came down to the kitchen to find a fowl smelling liquid, on the floor. It was thick and dark. She figured it was some pipe issue. She mopped it up quick on the way out the door to work and she'd deal with it later. A few days after it showed up again, only this time there was a trail of it. She looked up at the ceiling and saw it was coming from the attic, then moved the hatch and peeked up there expecting a dead animal, but there was no animal and no pipe leaking. In fact, there was no pipe leaking. In fact, there was no pipe. pipe at all. But man, did it stink, and the liquid appeared to have no source. It was just a puddle, like someone had just taken it in a cup and dumped it there. By now, Jackie was past the point of

needing somebody to hold her hand and tell her to be okay. She didn't want comfort anymore. She wanted somebody who could actually do something about it. So that's when Susan gave her the name Dr. Barry Taft, a parapsychologist who had spent the better part of a decade, working out of an unofficial little research lab over at UCLA, chasing down reported hauntings all across Southern California. And this guy was no stranger to cases that ran this hot either. A years before, Jackie ever called him, he looked into the case of a woman named Doris Bither,

who claimed she was being attacked in her own home by something, nobody could see, a case that would go on to become the basis for the 1982 horror film The Entity. And so, if there was one person in all of L.A. who maybe had seen something like this before, there was him. Taff pulled together a small team, drove out to the apartment on August 8, 1989. He brought a cameraman named Barry Conrad and a photographer named Jeff Weecraft, both of them there to document whatever they came across,

and both of them, if we're being honest, probably expecting to document a whole lot of nothing, because that's usually how these things went. And they'd show up, sit in a cold house for a few hours, where the homeowner's where something's there, and the something never shows. Well, this, that wasn't that. They didn't even make it out of the entryway before it started.

The second day came through the door, all them got hit with the smell. This thick, rotten, wrong kind of smell that none of them could place and none of them could trace back to a source. Then came the banging. It was loud, heavy, rhythmic crashes coming from directly over their heads.

Hard enough that you could feel the ceiling move with it. And Taff would later describe it as sounding like a 200-pound rat running laps up in the attic. Jackie told them about the liquid that it came from up there. And so somebody had to go take a look. We craft volunteered. So he climbed up into the dark with his camera in hand,

and he started snapping pictures. And he actually caught a few of those strange balls of light Jackie and her babysitter had described. And then, according to every account of that night, well, something reached out of the black and tore the camera clean out of his hands. I was shooting behind over my shoulder, maybe the third, into the third frame, all of a sudden, it just pulled out of my hand. He came back down, shaken.

When the team went back up with a flashlight to find it, the camera, it was in pieces. The lens cleanly separated from the body, like something had taken its time pulling it apart. Not smash, just pulled apart. That was only the first night. Taff's team stayed in contact with Jackie over the weeks that followed, and the activity in that house only ramped up. Right up until September 4th of 89, when they came back for a night that would end up defining this whole case. This time, Weakraft went back up into the attic with a second photographer alongside him. Down below, Jackie and Taff and Susan waited to hear how it was going,

listening to the muffled sound of two row men moving around over their heads. Footsteps, a bit of back and forth, nothing out of the ordinary. But then all at once, that changed. Because what came down through the ceiling next was the sound of a struggle, fast and violent one, and then, just as suddenly, nothing at all. Complete silence. There's no way that Gary could have done anything to cause Jeff. to be hung in the attic or played any kind of trick on him because he was, he was in the attic

door. We were talking to him as when Jeff, when the actual hanging occurred. Up in that pitch black attic, the second photographer was watching something take hold of wheatcraft and pull him clean off his feet. A length of clothes line had come out of nowhere, wound itself around his throat, looped up and over a nail, set high in one of the support beam. and hauled him up off the ground. All of a sudden I had this thing around my neck, and it's pulling me like this, up and hooks me on something. Gary had to take me off. And there, he hung, barely conscious, feet dangling.

He only lied in that whole black space coming off the stuttering strobe of a camera flash. And I felt it was colleague. One man alone in the dark in an absolute panic to get him down before the cord could finish what it started. Now, he managed to get him down, and he also managed to get a photo of it. That picture, it shows wheatcraft strung up by the neck, mid-struggle, frozen in the frame. It is now the single image most people picture the second they hear the words, San Pedro Haunting. It's the shot that made this case famous, the one that turned it into talk show's segments and documentaries and decades of late-night paranormal specials.

That night was the last story. straw for Jackie, and she packed up her kids and walked away from that bungalow for good, and she kept on going, nearly 400 miles north all the way up to Kern County, betting that if she just put enough distance between herself and that house, and whatever was living in it would have stayed behind. No, after that night, I didn't go back to the house. I didn't live in the house any longer. I was afraid to go back to the house.

It didn't work, though, because, according to Jackie, the thing in that house had never really been tied to the house at all. It was tied to her. She described watching a dark, shapeless mass drift through a new home one afternoon, and she knew it was still there. But over the years, she claims that it began to fade. The activity became less and less, until eventually whatever had its hooks in her seemed to finally let go. And Taff, though, and Taff wasn't finished. Because at one point he sat his team down for a session with a Ouija board up at Jackie's new place. He claimed that in that circle, with everyone's fingers resting on the planchet, they made contact with the thing itself. It gave them a name, and Taff took

that name and chased it down to something real. It was a 38-year-old man named Herman Hendrickson. whose body had been pulled out of the San Pedro Harbor back in March of 1930. A death, the LAPD, had filed away as an accident at the time. But, according to what came through on that board, it had been no accident. It had been murder. The spirit claimed that Jeff Weecraft, the one guy who had gone after harder than all the rest, bore a striking resemblance to the very man who had killed him all those decades ago and walked away clean.

In 1997, the cameraman Barry Conrad packaged years of footage into a documentary titled An Unknown Encounter, a true account of the San Pedro Haunting, which included the infamous attic footage. And made the rounds from there. Jackie and Taff both did the talk show circuit for years afterwards, together and separately. And here's a detail that true believers in this case point to more than a little. anything else. The two of them, Jackie and Taff, they didn't get along personally, and they hadn't for years. And yet across decades of separate interviews, their accounts of what happened in that house have stayed true. Same events in the same order, but the same details. So, that is the story as

it's been told, but now let's actually pulled apart a little. Let's start with Barry Taff's credentials, because they get inflated a lot in the retelling. You'll often hear him described as a former associate director of the Parapsychology Lab at UCLA, which sounds like a formal academic title with a corresponding academic budget. Well, that's not really what it was. Taft didn't run some official department at UCLA.

He was a research assistant in a small, unsanctioned, entirely unfunded lab operating out of a cramped corner the university's neuropsychiatric institute. It was run by a professor named Thelma Moss who studied things like telepathy, clairvoyance, and haunted houses on essentially no institutional support and was staffed largely by volunteers.

The UCLA itself eventually shut the whole thing down in 1978, more than a decade before Taft ever set foot in Jackie's attic. And they did that specifically because the university didn't want an embarrassing PR scandal attached to its name. And Tav's most famous prior case is worth a second look, too. The Doris Bithr investigation, the one that became the entity. It's generally regarded by mainstream skeptics today as far more likely rooted in Bithar's own well-documented history of trauma,

substance abuse, and psychological distress than an actual supernatural assault. A Taff himself has said on the record that the overwhelming majority of the roughly 4,800 cases he personally investigated over his career, they turned out to have what he called unusual but conventional explanations, which means even Taff, by his own admission, spent most of his career finding rational answers. San Pedro, though, is one of the small handful of cases he's ever pointed to as the real thing. Here's where it gets genuinely interesting, though, because Taff's own theory about why this house was so active means a lot more towards psychology than most retellings give him credit for. He pointed directly at Jackie's circumstances.

A young single mother recently separated and exhausted. It was a lot to deal with. Since the Victorian era, investigators and parapsychologists have noted that poltergeist-style action, activity, it tends to cluster around people living through genuine emotional crisis. It could be because a stressed mind is more prone to misperceiving ordinary events as sinister, or because emotional turmoil itself is somehow capable of generating the kind of energy that moves nails or tears paintings off walls. Either way, even the man who investigated this case has suggested the real story might be less about an old man's ghost, and

more about what happens when a person under enormous pressure starts experiencing our own environment differently. Then there's the physical evidence itself, and how little of it was ever actually tested by anyone outside Taft's own circle. That foul liquid in the kitchen that's been described in some retellings as laboratory-confirmed human blood plasma, complete with traces of copper and iodine, confirmed by Hu-do and published where. the detail that tends to disappear the moment you go looking for it. There's no peer-reviewed lab report on that sample. That's never surfaced publicly.

And the camera that came apart in the attic and landed in two different corners is presented as proof of something violent and inexplicable. It also is exactly what could happen when a camera strap gets yanked hard enough. It can separate camera bodies from lenses through nothing more exotic than a cheap enough mount. And then, of course, there's the picture, the one everybody remembers in this case. A we craft hanging from a nail by a clothesline wound around his neck, caught at the exact right instant by a camera flash and otherwise pitch-black attic.

And there are really only two ways you can read that photo. Either it's an extraordinary stroke of luck, a second photographer just happening to have his camera up ready and aimed in exactly the right direction at the exact right half second to freeze a man mid-air? Or it was staged. The cord, the nail, the pose, a flash time to catch it. A photograph, not of a haunting, but of a man playing along. And there's another angle to all this that tends to get left out of the version built purely to scare you.

It's the financial one. Because this case didn't end with Jackie moving up to Kern County and trying to put her life back together. it became a commercial documentary. As mentioned, it became years of talk show appearances for Jackie and Taff both. It became books, and to this day, a little bungalow is still a paid stop on Los Angeles go stores. Now, none of that proves a single thing was faked. I mean, plenty of true stories end up monetized. It's just something to think about.

All the evidence that ever came out of the San Pedro, through the hands of people who had something real to gain from you believing it was real. And so then, where does that actually leave us? You've got a woman, under more stress than most people ever face, in a new apartment that may or may not have had something genuinely wrong with it. You've got a parapsychologist with a real interest in the paranormal and an actual track record of finding mundane explanations for almost everything else he investigated. And in this particular case, he claims it's all real.

You've got a photograph that's either extremely compelling proof of a poltergeist at work, or it's a fake, and you've got a piece of physical evidence, that blood plasma sample that's never once been independently verified by anyone with nothing again from the answer. And so maybe, a frightened, exhausted young mother had her mind playing tricks on her, before she knew it was caught up in something bigger than her and couldn't stop it. And maybe by the time she realized that, if she ever did, he figured, why not roll with it, make a couple bucks? Sure beats working multiple jobs and running yourself ragged.

Or maybe, a man really did die angry near those San Pedro docks in 1930 and spent the next 60 years waiting in an attic for the right person to walk through his door. It chose the vulnerable mother whose defenses were weak, and maybe it even attached itself to her when she left. Either way, the story itself outlived everybody's reasons for telling it. The skeptics couldn't kill it, and the believers couldn't prove it. So it's just kept going for the better part of 40 years now. And wherever you fall on that spectrum, well, that's totally up to you,

as it is with every ghost story that's ever been told. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you all enjoyed it. If you did and you want more from us, check out another episode of either Everytown or Scary Mysteries, both available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. And please do remember to come on back here next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories

because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.