Haunted Cosmos - A Haunting In Kansas

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Brian and Ben conclude their study of the enigmatic and spooky Sally House in Atchison, KS.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Want to keep nefarious fairy Bigfoots away and also avoid icky seed oils, preservatives, artificial colorants, and other nasties in your daily shower routine? Then check out the vast array of homemade soaps from our friends at Indigo Sundries Soap Co.! Go to indigosundriessoap.com to learn more—and as our gift to you, use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!This episode is sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee! Visit their website here to purchase your first bag!  Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully. This episode is also sponsored by Stonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today.This episode is also sponsored by Aaron D. Schneider. Visit his website here and support him!Finally, this episode is sponsored by New Dominion Design Co. Visit their website here and learn more!Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap, New Dominion Design Co, Stonecrop Wealth Advisors, author Aaron Schneider, and Squirley Joe's Coffee, and our supporters at patreon.com. Did you know that our top two patrons get early access to all of our main shows, and all of our patrons get our main shows ad-free? Patrons also get access to our exclusive weekly show, The Dusty Tome, only available on patreon.com. So, if you like the show, consider becoming a patron today to get access to all these benefits and more. And now on with the show. In the late summer of 1849, a boy was born to a young couple living in Victorian England's small town of Hinkley.

The boy, whose name was Robert James Lees, seemed quite normal in his infancy. He slept, ate, cried, and dirtied up his cloth diapers with a cheeky smile on his little face. His parents adored him to the heart. and over his early years, young Lees settled nicely into his middle child spot. By the end of his mother's childbearing, he would be surrounded in both sides by seven siblings. He started to speak at a normal age, forming clear and full sentences between the ages of two and three. But it was once he finally hit three that his handle on the English language really started to take root. And despite his otherwise ordinary existence up to that point, his parents began to notice some oddities about the lad.

One morning he told his mother that he had been troubled at the beginning of the previous night and wasn't able to fall asleep. He told her that it was because he felt afraid of the dark. His mother amused at yet another child displaying the almost universal first fear of children, assured him that he did not need to worry, that she and his father would not let anything happen to him, and that he can sleep soundly so long as he is home with them. But Lees stopped his mother in the middle of her words of comfort.

She had not let him finish, he said. He told her that he was only afraid of the dark at first, just for a little while. But then something happened that really frightened him. As Lee's tossed and turned on his bed, longing for the comforting warmth of dawn, he said that he was suddenly aware of someone else in the room with him. He looked over his covers and found at the foot of his bed the looming shadowy figure of a man who looked like a Scottish highlander, killed, bagpipes, and all.

As you might expect, this initially did not help take the fear away, but rather added to it. However, the Scottish shadow comforted the boy with soft words and assured him that nothing existed in the house for him to fear. Somehow this worked and Lees drifted into a peaceful and dream-filled sleep. His mother thought this to be an odd way for a child's mind to comfort itself, but ultimately forgot about it, more than happy to be content with her toddler's son sleeping soundly at night. But some years later, Elizabeth would be forced to remember her little boy's story and to wonder whether or not it might have been more than just his imagination. At the age of seven, Lees moved with

his family into a new home in the bustling city of Birmingham. Soon after, as Lees walked toward the stairs up to his room one night, after getting up for a glass of water, he caught sight of a ghastly cloud of spirit shade drifting down the stairs toward him. Lees was initially calm at the sighting. He had, after all, known many spirits other than the Highlander by this point in his life. But Eventually, though this entity had been creeping slowly through the house without paying any mind to Lee's, the ghost abruptly stopped. It slowly turned, as if cranked by some rickety mechanism of gears hidden in the floor beneath it, and stared daggers directly at the young boy.

In that moment, Lee's mind was laid open with terror at what he saw. The ghost, a boy not much older than him, had a horrible wound at his throat, a wound pouring out misty blood under a face that looked drained and lifeless. The sanguine ethereal life was dissolved back into the unseen before it ever hit the floor. Lees fainted at the macabre site. The following evening, after his mother had nursed him to help throughout the day, Lees left his bed. Sleep was hopeless for him after the sighting of the previous night.

He descended the stairs and stood in the drawing room, in much the same ways he had just 24 hours before, and again in much the same. way, he saw the gory ghost of the ripped boy come down to him. He steeled himself against the prospect of seeing the ghastly wound in full view again, and this time he did not faint, but rather kept his nerve to see what would happen next. The entity, after staring at him in heavy silence for an unsettling amount of time, continued along its path through the house. Lee's followed. He followed the apparition through the home's kitchen, turning neither to the right nor to the left, before going down the stone steps into his own cellar,

whereupon the vision ceased altogether, dissolving into the black darkness of the subterranean room. Somehow Lee's knew what it meant. He scrambled up the stairs to wake up his father, who, sympathetic to the boy's fearful struggles of the previous night, followed him into the cellar and started to dig. To his father's amazement, it didn't take long for him to find the remains of a young boy

haphazardly tossed into the dirt that covered him. The police were called, an investigation was done, and the previous tenants were sought out, but alas, they had immigrated to the United States years prior. Perhaps they fled in horror and grief after the loss of their son. We will never know. Robert James Lees went on to establish himself as a prominent leader in the field of spiritualism, occultism, and clairvoyance. He was a medium and apparently a dang good one.

So good, in fact, that Queen Victoria herself, for whom the era of her realm is named, would employ Lee's as her own resident medium many times. Lees told her that her late husband, the beloved Prince Albert, had visited him and shared many wonderful things. And so Buckingham Palace became the theater for many royally sanctioned seances in an effort to ease the queen's pain at losing her husband. All very strange, isn't it? And this is just one example of the many stories of supposed mediums in the tale of history.

From the witch at indoor to the psychics who probably rent space in the seedy strip mall a few miles from your house. Stories like this should make us pause and venture the question. Are mediums only ever charlatans? Are there any real ones, the kind that really do talk to spirits? Are there really people who can divine secrets and reveal hidden things through their unholy communion with the world just beyond the veil?

In every marriage, there are differences from spouse to spouse. Perhaps the husband is especially outgoing while a wife prefers a night in with just her man and the kids. Maybe a wife is more inclined to propose a vacation where a husband would probably opt for a weekend working around the house. Some people like Mexican food more than Chinese food. You get the point. Usually these small idiosyncrasies actually lead to great joy in a marriage. Little inside jokes only the two ever understand, the gladness of knowing that you alone really know the other in all the earth. However, sometimes these differences pronounce themselves in much bigger ways.

Sometimes these differences leave their generations reeling from the consequences, good or bad. Sometimes the husband doesn't care much for any supernatural encounters of any kind, while the wife, as always, since she was a little girl, wanted to have a friendly ghost haunt her life. When a couple, such as this, find themselves living in a house that appears genuinely to be occupied by some unseen force, apart from their love and affection, it can spell serious trouble. Such was steadily becoming the case for Tony and Deborah Pickman, where Tony was a skeptic, the kind of skeptic who just doesn't want to mess with it all, Deborah was a kind of believer that wanted something to happen.

So as the presence of Sally increased in their small Atchison, Kansas home, and as this supposed Sally's interactions became a bit more bold, the instincts of the husband and wife flew in opposite directions. Tony wanted it gone, or at least ignored, until it just sort of fizzled out. But Deborah wanted Sally to become the family friend, a sort of supernatural pet, you might say. She wanted Sally to feel welcome with them. And so when their psychic friend of a friend, Barbara, called Deborah one day and asked if it would be all right for her to come visit, Tony wasn't so sure, but Deborah was the one who picked up the phone.

So it was that Barbara was given the okay to swing by during her radio show trip to Kansas City. her stay would be eventful and formative, but the events that followed would prove to be ponderous, both in their significance and in their terror. Barbara really did have a history of strangeness in her life, a strangeness that manifested in what she claimed to be an uncanny ability to see beyond the veil, so to speak. As a girl, she claimed to know her brother very well.

According to her, they played together and spoke all the time. As you might expect, this wasn't received very well by her family, seeing as how her brother had died in infancy, years before Barbara's mother was ever pregnant with her daughter. She had never known her brother, and as a toddler so young, had hardly even heard of him either. The parents, an extended family,

just figured that she had heard tell of him here and there and had put things together about him in that childlike way. They assumed she didn't really know what she was talking about. But this all changed one day when Barbara's mother heard her humming this one unmistakable tune. A tune her mom had stopped humming years prior after the death of her son. It was the tune she would sing to him while he was still in the womb and in the few days of his infancy before tragedy befell them.

Her parents accepted that there really was something different in Barb, something they didn't understand, some added sense or ability or sensibility. Barb stood by the story too. She claimed that her brother, though he died as a small baby, had appeared to her as a young man very early on, and steadily grew alongside of Barb as he guided her through different stages of life. Deborah did not quite know what to do with herself as she waited at home with her son Taylor that day. Eventually Tony would come back from work.

He would no doubt bring his brother for this. And then after that, the mysterious Barbara would arrive too. What would they do? What would she do? To keep her mind to occupy, Deborah decided to clean up the house a bit more than usual. After all, a clean home is hospitable to company, and Deborah wanted to make a good impression with Barbara. It had been a quiet few days in regards to Sally. No scratching or disturbing of cats or cold spots striking Deborah as she journeyed up and down the stairs. But despite the excited mother wondering if this meant that they didn't have a ghost,

that somehow everything that had already happened was some sort of crazy accident or coincidence. A well-timed, inexplicable spinning of one of the ceiling fans' dangling knobs would remind her that whatever Sally was, she was definitely still there. The fan would not be on. no door or window would be open, and the other knob would be entirely still, while the adjacent one spun wildly, as if it was a rock tied to the end of a string being swung around by a kid trying to act like David killing Goliath, the oak tree in his backyard. Oh yes, this home was still a curious place, even on the most uneventful of days. Eventually, Tony did come home, bringing his

brother George with him. As the two got to work putting together the Polaroid and Camcorder they had borrowed from friends and neighbors in anticipation of that night, they clearly expected something dramatic to happen. Deborah kept anxiously shuffling here and there, adjusting things on shelves for no other reason than to be moving. Why was she doing this? Was she nervous? What would she be nervous about? Were she to be honest, she might have confessed that she was most nervous about Barbara coming and finding nothing. She had always wanted a daughter, and as we've seen, Deborah was willing for that desire to be satisfied, if necessary, even by a supernatural surrogate. The evening rolled on and Barbara was running late. But just as the final traces of sunset

dove behind the horizon and their chase after the sun, the rental car pulled into the driveway, and the Pickmans watched as Barbara stepped out of the car with her sister. It was 8.30 p.m. She had planned to arrive no later than six. In the intervening time, the Pickmans and George had started taking Polaroid pictures of the three of them, and some neighbors who had stopped by for a bit, holding Taylor in different positions and rooms of the house. They swore that the Polaroids kept showing some hazy white distortions around the child, and they were eager to get Barb's opinion of their theory. However, the psychic quickly took charge, declining to view the pictures at all until she had gotten acquainted with the place.

Instead, she confidently entered the house and began pacing haltingly through all the different corners of the home's lower levels, mumbling to herself the whole time. Her eyes, scanned the world around her with a surety that heralded some insight from the ether. Charlatan or not, this lady wore the role with conviction. Her breathing grew strained as she crossed the threshold into the home. She sounded like a woman trying to stay calm and breathe her way through a punctured lung. This eventually subsided. She would later say it was because the air grew suddenly more inviting, not so thick and heavy.

Later still, she would admit that this lightness came from her straining to tell the spirit that she was a friend who had come to help, not an intruder seeking to bring harm. Whatever thing was claiming residence in the house apparently accepted this and lowered the proverbial bridge. The medium thoughtfully walked over to the couch in the living room and sat down. She remained quiet for some time, closing her eyes here and opening them there to scan some new part of the room. When closed, her eyes would twitch to be more tightly closed or loosely shut, as if she was viewing a set of pictures in her mind, some pleasant and some not as much. Finally, still not paying much mind to any other visible person in the room, Barbara asked if anyone

had a toothache. She felt at her jaw as she said this. Nobody did. She asked if anyone had hurt their hand recently. Again, she rubbed her own while she asked, but nobody had. She claimed that she was starting to get it. She was starting to discern between the energies of the other people and the energy of this little Sally. Sally had a toothache. Sally had a hurt hand. Maybe, she supposed, it was related to how she died. With a sudden jerk of her head over to Deborah,

the medium began complaining in a childlike tone that Mrs. Pickman is too bossy. She has too many rules. She's too uptight. She does so many things that bother. It was stream of conscience complaining befitting a child, given free rein to vent his or her chief grievances in life. Deborah sat stunned.

Yes, she had been trying to give rules to Sally, but she always labored to be kind. She had even started to talk to her throughout the day as if she was always right there, but it was hard to tell if she ever actually was. Suddenly, Deborah remembered what had happened that afternoon, before all the excitement of the Polaroids showing the cloudy bit of distortion around Taylor. Deborah, Tony, and George were all sitting in the living room, talking about what they might prepare themselves for later. George rose to his feet and gingerly made his way to the kitchen for some

reason or other that didn't matter then and doesn't matter now. But on his way back to the living room to join his kin, he glanced into the little half bath that opened off the laundry area. It had been fixed some weeks before, and upon its finally being able to be used, Deborah had placed some candles on the shelf behind the toilet. They were lit. George asked why they had left unscented, decorative candles lit in the bathroom like that. his tone was not one of concern, rather one of playful jesting that often happens between a brother and sister-in-law who are fond of one another. They start to act like a normal brother and sister. Deborah wasn't able to play along, though.

She could offer no retort and lost any sense of serenity or playfulness that may have been left in her heart that day. She had never lit the candles. It wasn't just that she had never lit them that day. She had never lit them ever. She had watched George on his trip to the kitchen. He never once stepped foot. in that bathroom. He and Tony had been with her in the living room since they got home, so it hadn't been her husband either. A bit frightened at the prospect of her friendly ghost being able to play

around with fire in the same house where her actual child was living. Deborah stood up and loudly reprimanded Sally right then and there. The men felt awkward. Tony even felt embarrassed, but they all understood why she had done it. None of them thought it could have been anyone but Sally playing with them. As it came back to her memory now, she understood more why Sally might call her a little bit bossy. The night continued on with little drama, unless you consider a medium sitting in your house communicating with the undead spirit that dwells there dramatic, and Barbara finally grew more able to share Sally's wishes and personality with the pickments. According to the medium, any worry or reservation that she may have had about her conclusions when she had made that phone call to Debra

were unfounded. What the family had on their hands was exactly what she had expected before, the spirit of a young girl, for whatever reason drawn to and stuck in this house, who longed to just be a part of a happy and loving family. Sally spoke through the spiritualist and made clear to Tony and Deborah that she meant no harm to them or Taylor, that she loved their baby and felt a strong urge to protect him. When asked what she wanted to protect him from, the answer that came back was a rambling form of everything. According to Barbara, Sally may have had exposure to abusive fathering of some kind in her life, whether towards her or a friend of hers from early childhood. They were never told. So she was always suspicious of new men in the house. At the same time,

she explained to Deborah that she continued waking Taylor up throughout the night because she was worried that he would forget to breathe and suffocate. She was not afraid to pull tightly at the empathetic nature of Deborah either. When the mother asked if Sally was ever with them when she and Tony sat down for dinner after having put Taylor to bed, a question which caused Tony to grow noticeably uncomfortable. The ghost replied that yes, she had often stood next to their table. Deborah made a mental note to pull out a chair for Sally to sit in. What family would make a little girl stand for dinner? Deborah asked if Sally liked the crayons and paper she had left out for her on the little drawing table. Many days had passed since they were first put out, and there had been no noticeable response from their little ghost.

Deborah was worried Sally didn't like her idea. Her troubles were quenched, however, when Sally assured her that she did like it all very much and was trying hard to write her answer to Deborah's question, but it was hard for her. after some more strangely ambivalent conversation between the family, the medium, and the incorporeal spirit, the pickmans offered to take Barb up to the nursery. They thought that seeing the room in which their saga began might help the psychic give them more insight into the nature of what was happening. Immediately upon entering, Deborah felt an urge to get out, a sense of claustrophobia stronger than any she had ever felt descended on her.

Barbara began to breathe heavily again. She was laboring under some added weight of things not necessarily. normally felt by mankind, or so it seemed to the rest of the group. She pointed to the corner of the room opposite the crib, the one which contained the emptied-out water jug that Tony and Debra were using as a piggy bank for Taylor's savings account. In an exhausted voice, struggling to get each word out like a swimmer fighting to keep her mouth above the surface of a choppy sea, she told everyone that was Sally's corner, that she was standing right there looking at them. Tony took two pictures with the Polaroid.

In that childlike voice, Barbara said, Too many people, get out. Tony, George, and Barbara's sister filed out. Immediately the whole atmosphere of the room changed to warm and inviting. Uncanny. What had seconds before been a room that made Deborah feel some of the most disquieting things she'd ever before encountered had suddenly become just a normal room,

and just as suddenly. With a new wave of pleasantry passing over her, Deborah asked whether or not Sally would like for them to give her her own toy. a doll. They could put it in her corner, and it would be hers alone to enjoy. Barbara said that she did want that very much. They would get her that doll the very next day, in fact. At least the pickmans were going to make good on their good promises. Thus ends the psychic's visit. For Deborah, it was better than she could have ever hoped. For Tony, it was a nail in the coffin of his peace and sanity. He had not asked for this,

had not signed up for it, did not want it. But it was what he was given, and so he took it Nonetheless, however begrudging he may have felt inside. As the group walked down the stairs to wish Barbara and her sister goodbye, the medium stopped near the bottom, turned to Deborah and said, She runs up and down these stairs a lot. Oh, and one other thing. At some point in the pseudo-discussion, an interview that night, someone had asked Barbara whether or not the spirit's name was really Sally.

Was it actually the girl they had all thought it was, or was it someone else? To this, Barbara assumed her little girl's voice replied, That's okay, yes. That's okay. Sally was not some name given to this entity by birth, but rather by default. The thing accepted the name, but didn't seem to require it as if to say, sure, you can call me that. After the psychic left, the remaining group stood around in the kitchen talking over the events of the night.

As they chatted, for any worry had left them for the moment, the lights in the living room went off for a second. Then it came back on. The lights in the kitchen followed suit. off, back on. In unison, they all have smiled and said, Thank you, Sally. The next day, after Tony and George had returned from the store with the dolls, Deborah had promised to give Sally,

they walked calmly up the stairs in order to place the new toys in Sally's little corner by the water jug in Taylor's room. They never did, at least not then. Deborah turned to observe them coming back down the steps to her with uneasy looks. No one had been upstairs before them. They knew that. They asked again anyways. In a voice bordering on the strained but saturated with disbelief,

Tony informed his wife that a teddy bear had been moved again, and something was written on those papers she had left out. Deborah bolted up the stairs with something akin to glee. She happily remarked, Oh, you really like that teddy bear, huh, Sally? She strode right to the construction papers sitting on the small desk. Her questions still remained at the top written in red crayon. How old are you, Sally?

but it was no longer a blank page otherwise. There, written in green, a color which was only in the drawer beneath the desk, a light but unmistakable reply was scrawled. Seven like. Sally had written them back. Their ghost had written them a message. She was seven, or close to it, seven like. Another nail in the coffin for Tony, another point of excitement for his wife.

That same day after washing the news, doll with Sally. Deborah set all the toys up in her little corner and skipped over to the doorway of the room with a camera. She told Sally to smile with her toys and snapped the shutter closed with a bright flash. A trip out was to follow for the wife and mother, and so she would stop to drop these photos off for development. There were others on the camera, no doubt, but for some reason she was most excited to see this one. She couldn't wait to hopefully catch a glimpse of their happy little ghastly girl, staring with her toys, maybe wearing some misty and otherworldy smile on her rosy-cheeked face. Finally, after waiting and agonizing four days, Deborah drove like mad to the store to pick up

the developed photos. She snatched the little envelope off the counter with a smile and wave given to the clerk and made off to stand in line at the register to pay. She groaned and fussed at the length of the line. Her joy was boiling over. She really had always wanted a daughter, and she could barely keep herself from ripping open the envelope while in line to look at her cute and sweet little ghost, her son's little guardian cherub. She couldn't take it anymore. She did tear open the packages.

They'd still be able to scan it and hurriedly flipped through the pictures until she found the one she'd been craving to see. Oh, how her heart fluttered as she saw the corner of the picture she wanted beneath the one just in front of it. She knew what would come next and closed her eyes

while she moved the picture in front of it to the back of the pile so the reveal could truly be a grand one. She moved the stack back away from her chest with a satisfied sigh and opened her eyes once more to take it all in. She nearly dropped all of her things. She herself nearly fell to the cold linoleum tile right there in the store. Her warm heart felt a cold chill stabbed through it. It skipped a beat and retort and sprinted with anxiety.

Her stomach dropped into her heels and the world spun. What madness was this? What horror was over her and her home? Such despair comes even from a single seed of doubt sewn in the blood-dark soil of unmet expectations. This was the beginning of the end. In the middle of the picture lay the toys. A refurbished doll propped in the corner

with a clipboard of papers and crayons in front of it, a scene one might find in any happy home of the time. The teddy bear wallpaper covered one side of the frame as the water jug filled with coins next to her son's crib filled the edges of the other. But there, surrounding the toys in the middle, like the eye of some demonic hurricane, a swirl of black and blue shadow loomed like a dying rose,

doubled and bent by wind and sorrow and hatred and hopelessness. Could this be Sally? It looked more like a devil stalking some ripe unbeliever, filled with fallen blood ready to be spilled on his own altar. This was evil. What had she welcomed into her home? What nightmarish creature from the dark had she spoken to with soft and friendly words.

This was a thing from some vile plane beyond the world. This was a thing from an outer darkness, a place filled with weeping and gnashing of teeth. Join us as we continue our look at the Sally House haunting. We're glad you're here. Well, welcome back, everybody, to another episode of

Haunted Cosmos. Here's Sally House part two. I thought we were doing it in unison. No, well, we did a rare moment when we weren't completely locked. utterly locked in with no words. Before we get into this episode, I just want to say for those watching this on YouTube, elephant in the room,

yes, we are still, like this is now a new set. A third set and three episodes. From our last episode. And like you're going to be able to look at this set and see like the drywall's not yet finished. It's not painted yet. We still only have one camera angle.

Right. And here's the deal. There's a rule. Okay. You're allowed to roast us. like that we were sitting very close to each other on a love seat that Ben. Huge dub for us. Apparently there's some things about Ben's chin.

People said that we're very rude. It hurt his feelings. Huge elf. It didn't hurt my feelings. He heard his feelings. But huge dub for me that I have a mustache. He does. And he looks really good, guys.

But here's the rule. You can make fun of us freely like you have full permission as long as you're a patron. Yeah. That's the new rule. Here's the thing. And here's the reason why. Because like, yes, this set is not finished yet.

No. Yes, we only have one camera angle. But guys, like, don't be Democrats or freeloaders, but I repeat myself, just, if you like it, you got to support the show and we'll be able to add some more camera angles. Cameras are, here's the thing. I looked, they're not free. No, they aren't free. And you know what?

I'm going to say something, too. Yeah, let's hear it. If you, if you're listening like on Spotify or Apple podcast or something and you've never seen our YouTube video, just join up. And yet you're also a patron. Like, just round of applause. Good for you. For you.

I mean, you're just a real one. So thank you. And all you YouTube viewers, I hope you guys like this new set. A little bit better than the last. Yeah, we're working on it. We're going to be finishing it up, painting, hopefully adding some more camera angles,

the whole nine yards. But, you know, it's a work in progress, and we're just chipping away here. And for the people that are concerned about my chin, first of all, I understand. I used to be a lighter man. And the weight gain over the past few years has not helped my jaw line.

But all muscle. I'm taking some lessons from some trusted friends. And I've started to do this thing called mewing. You know what that is? Yeah, I've heard of it. It's when you fix your tongue position when your mouth is at rest, and it reshapes your face. It's for people that need a stronger chin.

Which, of course, I don't. But I'm still doing it. I want like the crimson chin, you know, from fairly lot of parents. Dude, absolutely. Okay. That's enough of that. Anyway, guys, welcome back. We're excited to talk to this episode.

I think there's a lot that's instructive here in this story. There is so much to be mined out of it. And thank you genuinely to everybody who is supporting the show on Patreon. That really helps keep us going. Like we told you before, Ben works full-time for the show. And we couldn't do without your guys' support. So jump on board. If you like what we do and you want to see more of it and keep us going, then you can help in that way.

But let's get into this and talk about some of the – some of what we talked about in the cold open. Just to recap, we're talking about the Sally House in Atchison, Kansas, where there is a history of strange and unsettling phenomena and from people being scratched to set on fire. Cell phones being disappeared and then texting people. Wait, what? Over a period of months, including text messages that have characters

that don't even exist in the alphabet on the phone. TV remotes going missing and then turning up melted, even several miles away in another house. I remember the TV remote thing. Apparitions appearing in the guys of a dusty old crone lady that's trying to steal you. EVPs that say that they're going to swallow your soul. I'll swallow your soul.

I mean, we'll get there. This is a crazy story. And what's interesting about it is that a lot of it actually comes to us firsthand from the Pickman family who experienced a lot of, what happened in this house and then also from dozens and dozens of investigators who have been sucked in

we would say by the deception of the demonic or spiritual beings that are running their play there at the Sally House in subsequent investigations. This house is so popular that the city of Atchison actually manages it for the owner as a

supernatural tourist attraction. So the city kind of rinse. It's still owned the same guy that owned it when the Pickman's were there. This, that's a police officer. But yeah, the city now rents it from him effectively. Crazy. And runs it as a tourist, not trap, actually. It's not a tourist trap. Because we'll find that some of the strangest stuff to happen in the house happened after the Pickmans left. Yeah. And they started, you know, letting these investigative teams come in to study the home.

Yeah, it's crazy. But to dive in, I have a question. I have a question. real quick. Yeah. You're going to to repeat that. Can you make sure my mic is still working? Check, check, check, check, check.

I turned it and it kind of yoinked it a little bit. Dude, if you yoyank, I boink. And if you dip, I dip, we dip. If you dip, we dip. Put your hands on my head. If you dip, I dip, we dip. Okay, go ahead and just ask that question again. There's something I wanted to do.

You said something really good. It was a question. It wasn't it. And to start us off, right off the bat, I have a question. I want to ask a question. Because one of the, the themes that I heard about in the astonishing legend series, which by the way is really good.

It's really exhaustive. It's very exhaustive. It's five-parter. They kept going back to this thing of like, whatever it is that's in the house seems to be able to control how it's perceived, which seems reasonable enough on the surface. But then we also get into stuff like energies and mediums and how they're saying like, oh, I'm sensing this energy. here and it's very weak. This one's very strong. So here's my question. When we start to take pictures of these things and see different, what we would think of are as like weird anomalies in the photos.

Do we have any reason to believe that that actually could be some paranormal phenomenon taking place? What do you think? Yeah, because so here's my, I think you back up to a broader principle that plays out in this story in spades. And that's the principle that what you're dealing with in the demonic and in the satanic and in the malevolent supernatural is fundamentally deceit.

Okay, so Jesus said when he was rebuking the Pharisees, that they spoke their father's native tongue, which was lies, because Satan is an accusing deceiver. He's the father of lies. So you would expect for his servants and the effects of their work to demonstrate a lot of deceit, Hence, the manipulating people's perception, deceiving them, messing with them, everything from like,

you see these doppelganger events that happened in the house to where Tony, I don't know if we're going to talk about it, but Tony sees Deborah at one point. And then he is like walking by her in the hall and she just kind of like walks past him. And then he goes back in the other room and Deborah's there.

And this thing had walked past like in the opposite direction. Which that to me is like, that's one of the creepyest. things that can ever happen. Yeah, doppelganger stuff. So we have all sorts of events where sense perceptions, people are being manipulated, but all of it is fundamentally pointed at this central theme of deception. Yeah. It's, oh, I'm this. I'm that. You know, why don't you just think about me and, you know, get wrapped up in my lives and get wrapped up in my web? Right. And so I think you could very much have the possibility of manipulating of technology or something like

that with photography or things like that where the thing is. But I think it's stage managing the whole time. I don't think you're like, oh, we got it. We sent a little trap and we recorded it on an EVP or an electronic, we'll get to it, but, you know, or a photograph or something like that. And part of that is because you're, you're dealing with the unseen world and the, you know, quote unquote physics of the unseen world is something we're not, we don't know anything about. Yeah, we don't know how. We're not privy to it. The Bible does not pretend to be a taxonomy or a textbook of how the unseen world works.

It gives us images of the unseen world that would make sense to us living in the created scene world. Yeah. And so it is, it's worth noting like, you're not going to capture something with a recorder and then say like, ah, I tricked it. I deceived it into giving me this information. And this is why mediums are so dangerous. as precisely because they aren't all charlatans. Right. To answer that question that we posed in the cold open,

they think, pridefully, that they have some understanding of the rules here, of the physics and the natural laws that govern the unseen world, but they don't. Yeah. And so they're very effective in deceiving others because they themselves are the most deceived. Yeah.

And they think they're giving people true information. They're really talking to these spirits that have passed or something, and they just aren't. they unequivocally are not. They aren't Samuel and the Witch of Indoor. The reason that that passage is so striking, the reason that even the witch in that passage, it says that she is shocked and reels back with fright is because it didn't go as planned. God hijacked the demonic seance, and it was actually the ghost of Samuel, which she was not expecting. She was expecting it to be

the demon familiar posing as this, as this lost prophet. And so, yeah, it's just all that to say, we don't get to make the rules. We don't get to take control of these things. These are things that are occurring that we are forced to respond to. And the way that we respond to them is where we do have some level of control and can either obey the Lord or reject him and try to twist his arm or the arm of the supernatural in general to our own ends. Yeah, there's one of the strong themes that runs through the Sally House, like many of these, supposed haunting stories is trickery where an entity is pretending to be something else.

In this case, pretending to be this little girl, but then also revealing itself to be something other in other evidences like there are EVPs from this house where it's this raging demonic scream. And we'll get into even another medium that comes in and says, oh, there's three. There's three. Yeah. But then even you think about, oh, oh, we've tricked it with this polarite picture in this electronic voice. Like, let me just explain an EVP really quick.

We're going to talk about it later, but I'm going to reference it a lot. So an EVP is an electronic voice phenomenon is what it's called. And it's basically when supernatural investigators, they go into a place and they take like a handheld digital recorder or really anything that records audio, a camera, a handheld audio, like a reel-to-reel, phone, digital. and they set it down and then they like talk and they ask questions to the to the room and and then they wait. And the idea is that the ghost can interact and manipulate the digital or the analog recording in a way that it can't in the airwaves. And so it can actually leave answers

on the recorder that you can't hear when you're in the room, but that you do hear when you listen back. Okay. So some of them are definitely like in terms of audiology, just people hearing things in static and like interpreting. Yeah, we're white noise, interference. We're pattern recognition machines. And so people will hear things when they're not there, especially if you prime them, like the whole Yanni Laurel thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, where you say, like, do you hear this or that? Yanni. You're guaranteed to hear one of the two. Laurel. It happens a lot in low-resolution audio files because our brain is filling in the gaps. Yeah.

Kind of like a movie where there's only maybe two or three frames per second instead of 24 or 30 or 60, your brain can fill in motion, right? Your brain does the same thing with audio. If you told somebody, you're going to hear the word Ben is handsome in this clip. That would be true.

It'd be true. Not a deception. And then someone, and then you listen and your brain is likely to pick out something that's maybe not really there. But anyway, even if you just,

even if someone just told you, you're going to hear words. Yeah, you're going to, then your brain is prime. Yeah, exactly. You are going to be able to, put together words. It's kind of like, hey, look at this picture and there's a snake hiding somewhere,

and all of a sudden, you start seeing snakes everywhere. Or like when you play Stairway to Heaven backwards, and there's like the lyrics on screen of what the satanic message is. Yeah, I'm Satan. Yeah. You start, you're like, oh, I guess it is. I've done it. I've done it at age 12.

Bacon is meat candy. Way younger than age 12. Yeah, I'm saying. So, anyway, EVPs, things ghost hunters do, you know, they put them into this environment. the photographs, all this supposed evidence of ghosts and spirits and things like that. A lot of what's happening, I think, even when there is real manipulation of the technology by the spiritual, is that it's doing it as a little lure. It's putting a...

That was the word I was about to use. It's putting a bait on a hook, and the bait is the creepy picture. The bait is the EVP. And what it's really trying to do, and you might think, well, isn't that undermining it's pretending to be Sally? You go, well, yes, but they're playing a much more sophisticated deception than that. They're not just trying to convince you that they're Sally. They're then running another level of deception where they're trying to draw in all these ghost hunters and they're trying to get all these people to come in the house and talk to the demons.

You know, that that EVP that you just heard that sounded really bad, well, that's why Sally is afraid because she's not alone. There's this other entity that's chaining human souls. And you see the through line is that often it will play on Christian themes, but just warped enough that what you will end up believing if you believe the narrative is not Christianity. Yeah. It's not the truth. And I think the metaphor could be helpful in thinking about all of the demonic activity that we have in our modern day after Christ has won the victory on the cross and risen and has ascended as like fishing. It's not a sure thing.

You know, the nations will no longer be deceived because Christ has done that work. And yet we still have demonic activity that's a sword of fishing. They're putting the bait on the hook. They're trying to lure people in. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes fish are very willing to take that bait and even be happy with it. Be happy with the hook in their mouth. And then others are a little bit more leery or more cautious.

But that is, I think, a helpful metaphor to think about it with is because it may seem petty. Like one of the things that I've complained about with stories like this in the past is, well, yeah, I get like it could be deceptive, but that seems like small potatoes. Putting the salt in this pepper shaker and at Skinwocker Ranch. Right, exactly. What was the point of that? Well, but then it's like, oh, the point of that was to make the dog jelly later in the woods. Well, the point of that was, hey, now you believe that I'm real.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You actually think that there is something. And harmless. And so now what can I do with it? But it still always seemed like small potatoes where I'm like, it's this one family. It's the early 90s. They have one kid.

They're not even believers at this point. They have since started to claim Christ and they do today. But they weren't believers then, you know? And so like, why do this to this pagan family? But look at the bigger picture that actually shows, A, that your life actually matters. There are real stakes to this world that you live in, even though you're just one. and if you were to go away, yeah, really, in the grand scheme of things, not much would change. But at the same time, you're married to a woman.

That is in the image of Christ in the church. That enough is worthy of all the demons' hatred. It may seem like small potatoes at first, but look at how it propagates out. And now you have thousands of people that have made pilgrimages to this place to try and interact with these devils. So, you know, don't hate the small beginnings. Well, also don't scoff at the small beginnings, even if they're evil. Bless you, by the way. Sneezing.

My goodness. Well, the construction, guys. The construction zone. We actually have, oh, dude, we didn't even talk about these. I was just going to be really cool about it. Oh, no, these are our dusty tomes. Yeah, now we're reading. The dusty tome is a patron-only show that we make.

And, but here's the thing. Real fellow. We are now, instead of reading off of a cell phone, which I agree with everybody that commented on YouTube, Did it lower the gravitas? Yes. Unprofessional. Slightly.

I was playing chess the whole time. Ben was playing chess while I was reading. I, for the record, was raptly paying attention to Ben. Yeah, I know. During his reading. You know what? I'll take the L on that one. Okay.

But we're now reading from very ancient. Vellum. We found this whole script for the show in a, you know, a dusty cavern. This belongs to Solon, actually. Really? It includes the plans to Atlantis. Are you kidding me? Yeah.

And so, hey, once I fill this book up with outlines, because Brian was lying, but I wasn't. No, I'm like, we didn't find it with our outline already written. But once I fill it up with outlines for the show, I'll give it away to a patron. Yeah, we're going to give it away. Yeah. And that'll be way cool. Another thing that I wanted to talk about from the cold open. And it's another way that sin works its way through a lot of these stories is that demons

tend to manipulate people around their tendencies and proclivities towards deception. and sin. So one of the common strategies of the satanic has been to play on empathy, particularly on feminine sensibilities. Yeah. To bring sugar-coated rat poison into the world, into the church, and, you know, into humanity. So you see this with something like critical race theory is an example, CRT, that often what the demonic deception is, is like, hey, what it really is, Marxism under the rapper. It's like this demonic socialist, horrible, evil Marxism. But what it gets wrapped in is, well, don't you just want peace between all of the, all of the

peoples? Like, don't you want to care for the poor and for the oppressed? Fairness. Right. Don't you want fair. And then, but what it ends up, this isn't a podcast about critical race theory, but just as an example, what ends up being smuggled in. in the rapper of empathy and niceness and, oh, let's all love one another and let's care about the oppressed is

nobody actually cares about the oppressed. Right. There's really just a leveraging for power over the world in God's people in an ungodly way. And you want proof. Well, where are the leaders of BLM now? Well, they took all of your money and they bought massive houses and Calabasas. And now they're chilling there and they don't care about their neighborhoods at all. Right.

Like at all. Yeah, like not even at all. So what happens in this story in the Sally House is really instructive is that, and we played on it in the cold open, is that you have this married couple. And what does the demon do? Well, it goes in and it says to the wife, hey, I'm just a little girl. You've always wanted a daughter. Haven't you always wanted a? And she's deceived.

Yeah. And she's genuinely deceived. She really does earnestly. She does, she no longer does, by the way. She's repudiated this. and admitted her fault. So I don't want to, you know, rub salt in the wound or, you know, when you repent, you really are forgiven.

Yeah. But she sinned through deception. Right. She did buy into it at that time. She believed, oh, this is a little girl. I need to nurture her. And what she's doing now is she's thrown out the, not just like, you know, where people say, well, if you listen to rock music, the demons will get in through your ears,

you know, natural, whatever. But really, she threw out the welcoming, the welcome match. She was like, come on in. Right. Demon Sally, I'll take care of you. Let me nurture you. Right. How many demons, ghosts, or vampires do you have in your investment portfolio?

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in the description below. Investment advisory services offered through Stonecrop Wealth Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A boy finding monsters in shadowy ruins, an exile searching the edges of civilization, a child who could change the fate of nations, disgraced dwarfish soldiers fighting behind enemy lines. I'm Aaron D. Schneider,

military and heroic fantasy author. You can find the stories I've described to so much more at my website, Aaron D. Schneider.com. If you're looking for stories that are beauty wrapped in barbed wire, worship amidst war, and jagged characters carving their way to the truth, and check out my books at aaron d.shneider.com. Brian, you know how sometimes you wake up in the morning? Yeah, hopefully everybody does that.

Sure, maybe. But do you ever feel tired when you wake up? Well, yeah, Ben, I used to all the time, but then I started drinking this new drink. It's actually called coffee, and it helps you wake up. No way. there's a drink that does that, man, I should give it a shot. You definitely need to try this. And when you do, you should buy your coffee from Squirrely Joe's Coffee. They're a thoroughly Christian company who sends you a great coffee at an affordable price.

Plus, they even donate some of their proceeds to Operation Underground Railroad, helping the effort to end child trafficking. Okay, wait, I actually have heard of Squirrely Joe's coffee, and they are really great. They make it super easy to order exactly what you want if you go to WWWW, squirleyjoos.com. That's www.squarelyjows.com and click shop coffee. And first-time buyers can sign up to receive 20% off of their first order. Just go to www.com or use the link in the description below. Squirley Joe's coffee, share coffee, serve humbly, live faithfully. And believe everything you say. There's even a covenantal aspect to it as well. Because what did she do to Tony on the flip side? Well, she. The demon also fed into his natural tendency,

which was aversion. And so the demon made him more averse. It was just like, and it polarized the husband and wife more than they already were in their like fun little disagreement on whether or not ghosts are cool or not. Well, now the stakes are much higher and they're much further apart, which is bad. But Tony also, because he already was averse to this, you'll see that one of the themes is he just kind of is like, I just don't want to deal with this. He was very passive. I don't want to talk about it. He was very passive. So covenantally, the head of the household is letting this happen more and more. And I mean, I feel for, I feel for the guy. He already is afraid. He's getting like tortured and we'll get into more

of how he suffered. But he also didn't do the job of standing up to the serpent in the garden and cutting off its head. Yeah. And saying, no, no, no, that's not who we talk to, wife. That's not what we do here. It was just like Paul's comment on the garden in First Timothy when he says that Eve was deceived. The man wasn't deceived. Eve was deceived. And so the man sinned in a different way than she did.

It's similar in this story. Deborah sinned in a different way, a way of genuine deception. And Tony was always skeptical and had this check and aversion. He wasn't fully deceived by the thing. No. So what it did is it not only played on just normal, I'm going to suck people into a deception, it also demonstrating the demonic hatred of all of the image of God, including, like you said, God's image in marriage, the gospel presented in marriage.

It divided the couple by deceiving the wife and then really attacking in an aggressive way, the husband. It would present one face to her, this, give me empathy, love me, I'm a little girl to her. But then to the husband, it was horror and evil and torture and mental torture and demonizing him. Right. And she then did not believe him. At first. Yeah, at first she was like, oh, I'm not going to, you know, no, you're just exaggerating. Sally's just, you know, she had a tantrum.

But she set you on fire. She was just playing. She was just playing. She doesn't know her strength, you know. Right. But then they began to drift apart, and it really was seemingly attempting to destroy their marriage and attack that. So there's multiple layers of attack on the image of God and on what is good, true, and beautiful in the story. You know, ultimately, coming out of it now with, goodness, almost 30 years of hindsight, praise God, the pickmans are now where they are.

where that covenantal torment has at least to some degree been stopped and reversed by God's grace, where, you know, Taylor, their one child who grew up in the home, doesn't seem to have suffered anywhere to the extent that his father did. And also doesn't seem to be deceived as much as others. So, you know, that at least is, I think, a light in the story. that we can just thank God for his faithfulness there and generosity. But yeah, I mean, there are other things, too, that we probably get into the weeds and it's not even worth asking. Like, there does come a point where you're asking questions about this stuff and you're like, it's not worth it. We can literally never know.

But there's something that fascinates me about the whole location thing. I know that we talk about how these false stories that the demons weave can draw people in and sell them on the fact. fact that this particular home somehow is special. Yeah. In a bad way. But, and, you know, I, I know that I mentioned in the fairies episode how I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility to have angelic intelligences or angelic powers over certain geographical regions that are then directing the natural processes. But what if we did, or what if we were able to distill that down to a family and say, and not say like a guardian angel thing? I'm not saying that, but a demonic power that is somehow focused on a family where like that's their whole thing.

Yeah. And they're not going to let, and like they'll follow them wherever they go. They're not going to let go. I don't know. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think that that's a possibility because you have, as people get sucked in, it's like gravity. It's like a black hole. You start getting pulled towards it.

and then there's a point where you go over the point of no return where you can't get back out and it just sucks you in and devours you all together. And there's also that point where you are beginning to be sucked in, but you turn and flee in repentance and faith. Like we see both in scripture where somebody's demonized and they're just destroyed, but then we also see people who are delivered from demonic oppression, particularly when Christ shows up in Israel, Israel is overrun by unclean spirits.

Right. Because they have covenantally, they violated the covenant, they have welcomed in the demons with their activity. They've become like Egypt as a theme. Yeah, and especially up in the region near Mount Hermon, which is... Interesting. Their king, Herod had become like Pharaoh who was trying to destroy the male children. So he's trying to, you know, Farid, but Farid. Herod kills the male children, trying to destroy the seat of the woman, Christ. just like if Pharaoh tried to, he destroyed the male children to prevent Israel from becoming strong and overthrow him. So you see the result of a place that's full of unclean spirits is that they're always seeking people. They go through the waterless places. They go through the desert waste, but they come back. They're always seeking a home because their object is rebellion against God.

Right. And so in that rebellion, they're not. satisfied to just do mischief out in the desert. They want people. Right. They want to come and demonize and dwell and, you know, attack and horror, you know, terrify and terrorize and steal, kill, destroy people. So certainly when a family gets sucked into the deception. Yeah. You could absolutely see like the, like, I don't even think the pickpins have gone far enough even to this day in saying like, no. No. let's, like, and they should be telling everybody, like stop. Stop going to this house.

Yeah. You stop, like, Atchison, Kansas, shut this thing down. You're just giving the demon exactly what it wants. Right. Cut it out. Like, just proclaim Christ in there and move on. Like, stop with the whole, hey, let's keep sending people in and get more EVB. Yeah, let's do another episode of Ghost Hunters.

Yeah, let's do like more, let's go to the abandoned asylum. Right. And I just think the demons are so smart. They play on this. and they know that they can suck people in with it. It's a thing you have to be really careful with when you indulge any level of curiosity about the subject at all.

You can find yourself reading books about it, watching videos about it, listening to EVPs. And it sounds silly, but it really can change you. If you give yourself over to it in that way, Jeremiah Burroughs says in the rare Jewel of Christian contentment that one of the greatest judgments, if not the greatest judgment, that God can give to a person, is to give them over to their own desires, knowing that their desires are not trustworthy until they're sanctified by a spirit and redeemed by Christ.

And you'll find that we love drama, we love tension, and where do you find some of the most intriguing drama and tension in the world? Well, it's in the demonic. It's in the supernatural battle. supernatural battle. And so when people get drawn into that in the wrong way, it can be really detrimental, really quick. But in a sneaky way, that's not always obvious to an outside observer, but it's wreaking havoc on their heart. And their soul is being twisted and, you know, all the water is being drained out of it until they're left with just this dry, dirty rag that's worth absolutely nothing. You shouldn't hear these stories and think, oh, I hope more. Yeah, exactly.

Our goal is, we've said this many times, but this show, like, what is our goal in telling these stories? Our goal is actually Ephesians 511, to take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. We say turning the lights on in the darkest cracks. We don't want to go down into the dark and turn all the lights off and sit there. Right. We want to go and turn the lights on and say, oh, look, let's expose what the demons are doing with their alien deception or their big foots or with their haunted houses or with their psychic media. mediumship or with their witches or, you know, let's expose what's happening so that we can proclaim Christ there. Right. And then, and then turn around and move on. Yeah, as the knowledge of

Christ covers the world like the waters cover the sea, you want the cockroaches of the demonic to be pushed into smaller and smaller cracks. Yeah. And so finally, they're just suffocated. Yeah. And so what we don't want to do is indulge in this glorified way of saying like, oh, man, you'll never believe what happened to Tony next. Like, it's interesting in that it gets the the story across to you, but it's really important that you never stay there. But you instead say, like, that's really messed up. Yeah, you're supposed to hate the evil. You want to hate it. Yeah, exactly. You're supposed to hate the evil. And that is what happens when the kingdom advances, is that the demons flee, the old gods die, the pagan child sacrifice cults are put down.

Yeah. And churches are erected in their place. So I'd love to see this house raised and build a church there. That would be a huge win. A huge win. A huge dub. All right. So some of the stories as we go from here, we're going to keep kind of working through the deception that's unfolding in Atchison. Some of them lose a little bit of their chronologicality. Yeah.

The timeline's more funny because we want to talk more about categories. But we tried to make the timeline make sense. Yeah. So do you want to take us into this next one or do you want me to? Dude, I want to because the story's crazy. Okay. All right. Then take us into the next door with Tony.

Despite the fear, that image of Sally had inspired in Debra. The first real surge of doubt in her previously strong fortress of thinking this ghost was friendly and out for her good, life still went on. They couldn't just move. And after all, it was still just that one thing. You know, what if it wasn't Sally? What if the film was just somehow corrupted in that one spot? What if it was Sally? But that's just how she was able to present herself from the visible world at that particular moment.

The list of reasons for Deborah to be justified in her attempt to brush off this foreboding picture was a long one, and eventually it worked. All was back to whatever type of normal this situation was. Once again, Sally was just a part of the family. But for many days since that picture and some other minor poltergeist incidents, she was being an especially quiet ghost. Not much had been happening to them at all. Maybe this helped Deborah get over her reservations. If there's one thing ease and comfort does to a person, it's that it makes them forget the discomfort they had been strung up on before.

Such was the overall attitude in the house on a cool fall morning in 1993. Deborah had woke up early, but as usual, not early enough. She dragged herself out of bed and went downstairs to finish up some laundry before she would have to leave for work. Tony was still working that graveyard shift. He wouldn't be waking up for some time still. She switched loads around, closed machines, turned knobs and dials to proper settings with such casual familiarity. It would make some ancient mother think her a sort of astronaut or something, and then just pulled herself back up the stairs to take a shower.

After this, she realized just how late for work she really was and started to scramble. Those dang hot showers just don't let you go easy. She flew downstairs, tossed open the dryer door, and set a basket just beneath it to catch any clothes she'd occasionally pull out during her, frantic search for what she needed that day. Outfit secured, she left the small mess she had made where it lay and sprinted back up the stairs now to finish getting ready. She left soon thereafter, not giving any thought to the laundry. Who would?

Tony got up much later. It must have been some time in the early afternoon, for the sun felt bright and high and hot through his window. The Riverside Street outside swam with slowly moving cars and kids playing. The river itself trudged on in its unwavering and it's unwavering. unceasing and immutable way. Anyways, Tony went downstairs to eat something. He played with Taylor for a bit after that.

He eventually walked back into the kitchen, and that's when he actually noticed the laundry mess that his lovely wife had left him. Somehow it charmed him. He felt around and noticed that even after all that time, the clothes were still a bit damp. She never did get the timing right when she was rushed. Without a second thought or care in the world towards them,

he tossed the clothes in the basket back in the dryer, slammed the door, pressed start, and walked away. Immediately he paused. What was that loud thumping noise in the dryer? It sounded like shoes or tennis balls had been thrown in. But while it probably wasn't tennis balls, Tony figured it must have been some shoes. He continued his walk without looking back.

Taylor was waiting and he was in the mood for some play. Soon enough, Taylor's nap time came and so Tony's attention turned a bit more to working around the house. He and Deborah had worked out their system long ago, and it had worked for them thus far, so he was happy to grab the vacuum from the broom closet and plug it in to start tidying up a bit. Before he started, he flipped the stereo on.

But after he had only taken a couple of steps back to the living room, the music snapped off. He walked back, it wasn't the outlet or the breaker, the switch had actually been turned back off. He turned it back on and walked to the vacuum. Click. It was off again. This happened a handful of times before Tony gave up on the stereo and settled for vacuuming in otherwise silence. He didn't get off that easy, though. Seconds after the vacuum was switched on, it would wind back down as if it had lost power. Something was turning it off.

He'd push it forward a few feet and it would power down again, infuriating. It was like he was trying to mow thick, tall, and wet grass with a tiny electric lawnmower whose battery just couldn't keep up and was begging for a break. But he wasn't doing that. He was just vacuuming like he always did. Six times this happened on and off, on and off. Tony looked down at the thing in frustration the last time and actually watched the switch move on its own to the off position.

He screamed at Sally to stop, and she did. He finished his chores, and the rest of the afternoon was quiet. Deborah got home, and she sat in the kitchen with Taylor and Tony. Each wondered whether or not Sally was there with them too, just one strange and fragile family. As they spoke, Deborah remembered the laundry and walked over to understand. unload it from the dryer Tony had started earlier. He remarked how loud the shoes were. She didn't remember putting any shoes in it. As she pulled clothes out, she started to notice brown blotches of staining on different articles. They were deep stains, dark brown or crimson. They didn't have a

pin that color. She had never seen a pin that color. The staining got more pronounced deeper inside. Every shirt and pant leg was painted in this caked-on sludge that had been baked into the fabric. way this would come out. And that's when Deborah stopped. She stood up straight and dropped what clothes she had. She began to let out a shrill and weak scream like a yelp. She staggered back, pointing, crying, moaning with grief. The world became quiet then, and time inched forward only slowly. Tony jumped across the kitchen over to her. He was focused on her. She was staring into the dryer, though. He finally followed her fingers direction and crouched to look inside. There, tucked under a sock that covered its face was the remains of one of their cats. The banging sound

suddenly made sense, but so did other things. The stereo, the vacuum. Had Sally been trying to warn Tony? Later, this question would linger, but would change slightly in form. Later, they started to wonder if Sally had not been trying to warn Tony, but rather trying to brag to Tony. He cleaned up the mess after sending his wife and son to his parents' house for the night. Deborah didn't blame him for it. In all of it, the underlying friction between Tony's lack of desire to live with a ghost, and Deborah's exact opposite instinct was growing. Tolkien once said that, if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomable at the foundations of the earth. True enough, but one might also say that if joy becomes tarnished between man and wife, you can bet that

the roots of bitterness feeding the adversity are equally deep. Those bitter roots, roots that Tony would never have thought of labeling as bitter even two weeks before they grew stronger, started to flower and bud to fruit very soon. Tony had never liked the idea of acknowledging Sally, and so he didn't. Anytime he did acknowledge Sally, it was begrudging, an outburst here and there, but he never actually accepted or welcomed his ghastly adopted daughter. At least never to the extent that Deborah wanted. At most, Tony was resigned to despair for his circumstances. Deborah was excited about it, but her excitement at Sally meant growing frustration with Tony's lack. Apparently, Sally's frustration grew as well. She started to really mess with Tony in ways not too far off from a toddler

throwing a fit, just for some kind of attention, but in a way that also had a bit more maliciousness to it than that. Tony, as was his habit, would walk downstairs before bed to grab a glass of water. Most nights the TV would still be on when he did this, and so he would also walk over and turn it off before going back upstairs to bed. Sally started turning the TV back on after him, but not right after him. She would make him walk all the way to the stairs, maybe even partway up before turning the buzzing and bright light back on. This was just one of the many annoying tortures she worked on Tony,

all in his own home. Have you ever heard of that Chinese torture method where you strap the victim down, face and all, drop of water onto the same spot of their forehead for days without stopping. The annoyance of it, the inconvenience, the helplessness and lack of control breaks people quicker than you might think. This is exactly what was happening to Tony, only it was happening to him in the one place in the world where he was supposed to be safe and comfortable and at peace. He was none of these things. One day, Deborah got out of the shower to see Tony standing there right in front of her,

a look of exhaustion haphazardly drawn onto his face. He pulled down his trousers slightly to show her something on the back of his thigh. She bit me. And sure enough, there in his thigh was a beet-red bite mark, teeth marks at all. And no, they were not teeth marks from their other cat. Deborah just laughed. She said Sally probably wanted him to start treating her more nicely, start including her more in his life.

And he shrank away, visibly upset. His own wife took the ghost's side. It continued its crescendo on the morning of Halloween that. year. To Tony, whose son was not even one yet, it was just a normal morning with a few fringe decorations thrown up over the rest of town. You might say, given the state of his life, that he was glad Taylor wasn't ready to go trick-or-treating yet. At any rate, he had just gotten home from work and so went about his normal wind-down routine before going upstairs to bed. It was 7.15 a.m. He walked to the fridge, shuffling in between the wooden butcher block island

that stood firm in the center of their kitchen. Open the fridge door, got out some orange juice, and then shuffled a little more to the left to open the cabinet containing the glasses. He set the glass down on the linoleum faux wood counter and poured a generous glass. After restocking the juice, he gingerly picked up the glass and turned around to lean against the counter while he sipped it. He stopped dead. Standing in the center of the room, just on the other side of the butcher block, was a little girl. Her eyes were wide and blue. She stood up to the middle of his belly, and he was not a tall man.

man. His face betrayed surprise. Tony dropped the glass. His mind reeled with panic questions. Who are you? Why are you in my house? A few seconds passed and his mind reached up to reality. The doors had not opened nor shut. Her hair was neatly done up in a bow on top of her brown curls. It was old-fashioned Sunday best. Her clothes rolled too, out of time and dated like one of those black-eyed kids he would later hear about from people more interested in this stuff than he was. She just stood there. a girl completely ripped out of time and space and plopped into his kitchen. It was Sally. All of this realization happened in the time it took for the glass to fall and break upon the floor.

The sharp shattering noise broke his trance and sent his eyes shooting downward to follow the path of the glass as it slid in orange sugary juice all over his shoes and into the toe kicks. It would be sticky soon. He looked back up instinctually. His mind forced once more to face what he had seen head on, but she was gone. Sally was gone. What came next was a flurry of stumps as he sprinted up the stairs.

He burst into the room to see Deborah already stirring. The stomping would have woken anyone. His voice quivered and faltered as he approached the bed. I saw her, Deborah. I saw her. He dropped to his knees and rested on the bed with his arms outstretched. The time to linger on what Tony had experienced was cut short by the normal rhythms of life. This is almost always a good thing.

They say that time is a good healer, but you have to get on with it to feel it. it. Work still had to be done, a family still had to be fed, and the holiday season was just getting spooled up. Christmas parties would have to be thrown. This year for the first time ever, the Pickmans wanted both of their families to come to them to throw a fun, old-fashioned family Christmas party and their little charmer of a home. Perhaps it was the busyness keeping minds occupied and eyes more focused, but the weeks leading up to the party on December 18th were unusually sally sally free. In fact, it would prove to be the longest period.

of inactivity in their entire sojourn in the home. Some lost instinct pricked the back of Deborah's conscience the whole time for those weeks. Is Sally mad? Is she planning something big? Would it come during the party? The actual day of the party began perfectly. Tony and Deborah had spent much of the previous evening blowing up hundreds of balloons with helium, so the ceiling would be totally decked out with Christmas colors on the lower level.

They had drinks and food and games ready for their 45, five or so guests to play. The master bedroom had been renovated into a large coat closet, and one of the guest rooms had been fashioned into a mini-theater for the kids to watch movies in, while the grown-ups had fun downstairs. Soon, the awkward silence of a quiet home geared up for a large party was all gone. People flooded in, coats filled the pickman bed, kids ran upstairs for the next movie, and laughter sang off the walls. Though Taylor had gone to bed around eight, a relative dressed as Santa had shown up sometime after that, running late, and brought a sack full of gifts in for all the kids.

They sat on his lap and got pictures taken. Deborah remembered feeling sad that Taylor had missed it. This sadness was soon quenched by the strength of another sorrow, though. She had forgotten to leave a gift for Sally. How would Sally not feel totally forgotten and unimportant? How could she forgive, Deborah? The night wore on and the party died down. More and more people left to rest in their hotels close by,

but as Tony made his way to the stairs, to fetch some of the remaining coats in his room, the home's fire alarm started letting out a terrible scream just as he reached the second floor's landing. He smelled smoke for sure, but where? He turned his head here and there before finally turning around to look behind him. At the bottom of the stairs,

one of the guests stood with a horrified look on his face. He covered his mouth and pointed to the fifth step. The raggedy and doll, the doll Tony had just walked right by on the way up, was engulfed in flames. flames. Black smoke plumed from the red hair as the thick-boned flame poured up towards the waiting balloons. Tony ran down to grab the doll and flew with it to the bathroom sink. He sunk the cloth face into the water to drown the heat and cursed Sally under his breath. He had burned his

forearms pretty bad because of it all, and his guests were terrified. How did it even start? There was just a pop, and the doll was burning. Interrupted in shallow sleep was there a lot that night. The next morning, still reeling with worry at Sally's domestic terrorism, Tony and Deborah sat at the table with growing concern. Finally, Deborah went to fetch a toy for Taylor from the nursery. But before she turned to leave the child's room, she caught something in her periphery. A small streak of thick green color on the papers she had left out for Sally. She snuck over to them and could tell it was a word, but the light was dark and her eyes weren't so good and the color was so thin.

She snatched it up and ran down to Tony. He read it and started to shake. Deb. It says G-O. Go. So, Brian, and here's the thing. There's a crazy stories, obviously. Wild.

But we're just scratching the surface even still. Absolutely. Astonishing legends did a five-part series on this house, and each episode was at least two hours long. Yeah. We simply don't have the time. They interviewed the pickments. They did interview the pickments.

It was very fascinating. Well, you know what? I'm going to link to that show in the show. But just keep that in mind. Like, we're not telling you absolutely every little thing that happened, partly because a lot of stuff happened multiple times. But there's entirely other stories that we just have to leave out for time's sake. Like one time, Deb wrapped up a doll in a Walmart box for Sally and put it in her room.

And then a few days later, she saw that doll lying in Taylor's crib. and the wrapping was still totally wrapped, taped up and everything. She opened the present that she wrapped and it was empty. Yeah. Like Sally unwrapped a gift. Brian, I got bad news. The other day, I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself. And I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee.

And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also, I started Googling ticket. prices to Taylor Swift concerts. Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone-disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl. Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant normie. All you've needed to do is go to indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties. Okay, I am literally going to

indigosundrysoap.com right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six-pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle. Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men-six-pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't. So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry's soap company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps, discount code haunted coffee. No spaces. Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast.

I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description? Ben, you ignorant normie. It's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to indigo sundry soap.com. I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle, and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout, all caps, no spaces.

And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show. Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things, and maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something. dignified. We are living in the beginning of a new reformation. Christian content is being produced at a rapid rate.

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institutions, publishing houses, and other content creators around the globe, raise the bar of excellence in our Christian culture. If you're ready to build, New Dominion Design Co is ready to work with you. Visit New Dominion Designco.com. new dominion designco.com and reach out to Jenkins for all your graphic needs. And as always, that link will be in the description. Yeah, like I mentioned this at the beginning, but this was after they move out later, that the cell phone thing happened.

Yeah. Like, so I forgot about that. One of their cell phones went missing. And this was like early cell phones, flip phone type stuff. Do like razor. Early texting even, you know, like right when texting was first starting to come out. You got your cordies. T9.

You, Zumers, you have no idea. Like we used to have the T9 text under the death. It was amazing. Did you, people who got so fast at it? Physical, physical buttons. That was fast. Okay. So this cell phone went missing and they couldn't find it, but they were getting texts from it.

That's creepy. They were like weird characters and allegedly even like characters that literally were not in the code or the phone at all. You know what that reminds me of? Skimwalker Ranch. Skimwalker Ranch. That was perfect. When they were up on a Mesa. When Thomas Winterton and Travis was like,

I'm getting all swimming-headed a little bit. You're feeling swimming-headed? And then the phone? And then the dude's phone starts freaking out. Go see our published works. So true. No, it was like that. Or, you know, they would have stuff go missing

and they moved like a couple miles away, but still in the same region. And they would find things from their house that had gone missing at the Sally house. Because remember, they were still connected to it via the tourism that was happening the people that would go, like, they would still keep up on the investigations, right? So they'd, like, they would lose things at their new place.

Like their TV remote. And then they'd go find it in the Sally house. And it would be located later at the Sally house. See, that is like Belwitch. That's like Bell Witch stuff. Which is like traveling across the country. Yeah. And this is just across city lines.

Yeah. Or in terms of mental manipulation even, like when Tony is laying in bed. And then he's just, everything starts shaking violently. And then like this dust cloud forms in the sunlight. kind of coming through a window like the dust moats, but it gets thicker and thicker. And then it forms into like this old hag lady that's like coming towards him

and says something. I can't remember what she says. It's like, probably like... Got you or something like that. I'm evil. Yeah, like, I'm a demon. Burn me. Listen to Hama Cosmos.

Wait, no, the demon wouldn't be singing. There was another thing Tony saw that was really creepy. It was like this, it was like a humanoid but crawling on all fours. And it looked like, Anakin Skywalker post-burn, but pre-Vader. Disgusting. That's a really lame.

Yeah, I can't believe you just made a Star Wars reference. I just made. But bottom line, the thing was just like melted and the eye was falling out. And again, I don't remember what it's. So, but here's the signification of these things. Yeah. Is that out, because of this, a team, one of those television show investigator groups got involved and they ended up actually making a show where they bring in more psychic

and they bring in a whole TV crew, and they start to document things like him being scratched. And so why don't we go into those, that next era? Can I say one more thing? No, yes. I'm actually, it's like lunchtime. I'm hungry. I'm like, Brian's very hungry.

He actually said, Ben, don't say anything. We're just going to read. He didn't say that. I didn't say that. So you guys are worth it. It's not just Tony and Deborah that are seeing things. It's not just, you know, Barb the psychic who, who's her to see things. But, you know, Tony's brother saw things, but then also Deborah's dad, who was staunchly, like, anti-supernatural stuff.

He was not into it at all. Okay. He would be played by Clint Eastwood. Right. Which, huge dub for him. He came over for the Christmas party. And he, like, sober as a judge, he had not had anything to drink yet that night. The day after called Deborah and was like, hey, something really weird.

Like, it's kind of stuck with me. I was just looking over at your TV during the party randomly, like nothing was even on the screen. And I noticed the teddy bear that was beside the TV started to move. And the teddy bear just turned its head slowly until it was looking right at my face. And then didn't look away. Let me give you some advice, listener.

If that ever happens to you, leave that house. What you want to do is immediately start saying the Lord's Prayer. Right. From the heart, believing it. Believe it. Take hold of that teddy bear. probably throw that thing away, burn it.

But here's the problem. What if it shows back up, slightly burned in your crib, dude, that's creepy. You know, Tony's like, let's get rid of this bear. Because the bear was the cause of all these. But Deborah was like,

but that's Tony's favorite, or that's one of Sally's favorite toys. It's Sally's bear. He should have said, Eve was deceived. And so are you. The woman was deceived. No, yeah.

And we, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, this ends today. He should have said. And then he would have said, demon be gone, this house belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ. And then he sings a few Anodom, or, Curier, Elie Sons.

Yeah, then he sings. Yep. Oh, sing a new song to the Lord for wonders he has sings. Psalm 98. Oh, Lord, how many are my foes? How many are rising up against me? He chants him from three. That's what he should have done.

That's what you do in this situation. Like, you know, sofa quarterbacking, Brian and I would have done a much I would have sung the Latin of Philippians, too, in E minor. Christus Esfactus? Yeah. Christus F-E-S-T-U-S. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. That's so good.

Go look it up. Kings College. It's a boys' choir. It's a boys' choir. It is insane. It's called Christus, C-H-R-S-T-U-S-F-A-C-T-U-S-E-S-T. Go look it up. It's on Spotify, whatever. That's not a sponsor, by the way. No, Spotify, believe it or not, they don't sponsor the show. Speaking of, one of the things that never you never see in this home the entire time, is that they never

cleanse themselves with soaps from Indigo Sundry Soap Company. That's so true, King. And you know what? Had they done so, the demons would have fled right away because Indigo Sundries is not just made with high quality materials

that God made first, but it's also made by a Christian family. Did the company exist at this time period? No. But it's a low effort excuse to say that. In terms of God's decree and providence, it did exist in a very real story. This is like our raid shadow legends.

Raid Shadow Legends. What a dumb. Don't ever. Okay. Don't play it, but do you know they actually emailed us? Raid Shadow Legends? No, they didn't. Oh, 100%.

Are you kidding? They wanted to. Dude, we're doing it. No, we're not. We could make hilarious. No, it's actually a very bad game. It's got like scantily clad-inth ladies and stuff. We're not going to do it.

Okay, anyway, but let's move on now. We would make a good one. It would be funny. It'd be so funny. But we have standards. So we're going to move now into the era of the sightings investigation. And I think, I think you read last. So I'm going to go ahead and open my dusty tone.

Do you just throw down a, yeah, open up your DT. We need to get dust. And I'm going to take, do we need to get fake dust. Post-After Effects, put that in. Is there such a thing as fake dust? Isn't it just dust? Would it just be real dust? Dust is not an expensive thing.

You need a counterfeit. What a good point. What a good point. Barbara, the psychic who had come to visit the pickments and read their house earlier in 1993, the one who had provided excited relief to Deborah, while simultaneously hammering nail after nail into Tony's piece was a busy woman. In addition to consulting on criminal cases now and again, she traveled the country and even internationally,

quite a bit for speaking engagements. But when she wasn't doing either of these things, she regularly lectured at a school in California for an audience of students, skeptics, faculty, journalists, and even media. It was during one of these lectures that Barb let some details about the Sally House slip. this would prove fateful in the story of the small home in Atchison because in the audience that day there happened to be a representative from the then very popular television show sightings that representative spoke with Barbara after the lecture

gave her their contact info and practically begged her to reach out to the pickments that same day in the hopes of getting the young family to agree to a TV special done on the activity in their home now normally this is the point in the story where the activity slows, the cameras catch nothing, and the entire ghost hunting crew leaves the site feeling very disappointed and wondering how on earth they're going to scrounge together enough compelling B-roll and interview footage for a halfway decent episode.

Not so with the Sally House. In spite of their reservations, Tony was already tired of the whole charade, and he and Deborah had started getting into nastier fights over this, the Pickman's agreed to do an episode with the sightings crew. Tony insisted on his identity being hit, It would be a two-day shoot, a busy two-day shoot, and this first round of cameras would act as a catalyst for many more visits, four of which took place with the Pickman still living there, but some even happening after the family had finally moved out. This is the story of some of these shoots. On the Saturday of their arrival, both Pickmans were surprised to see such a lean crew show up, just three guys and minimal equipment. They wouldn't be so packed like sardines after all. Deborah sat down for an interview as Tony Rock.

baby Taylor in the other room, viewing the interview in real time on a small production monitor. Only minutes in, the darkness would descend. A neighbor came by knocking on the door, which abruptly stopped the interview. But after getting business done with the neighbor, Deborah turned around to see Tony looking strange. I don't think she likes the new people here. They all followed Tony into the living room, where one of the cameramen led out a sharp and shocked gasp. Tony had lifted up his sleeve to reveal three deep and bloody scratches reaching down his tricep. Pooling at the bottom of each were drops of blood ready to fall and stay in the carpet. Deborah had just seen Tony standing with the baby. He hadn't left the room, and the neighbor

had only been there for a minute. While Tony focused on what on earth this thing from hell was that was attacking him and his family, Deborah predictably worried more about what Sally may want. Did she want the cameras to leave? While they all anxiously waited for Barbara's arrival, even Tony was excited at the prospect of familiarity, one of the showrunners, Greg started jumping up and down in nervous excitement. It's cold right here. Just right here by Tony. It's freezing cold.

Come feel, he shouted with glee. Tony felt like a lab rat. Barbara arrived and any hope Tony had of her bringing some calm to the fiasco died out quickly. Sally's here. She's excited. A bit scared, but very excited. This at last brought Deb some comfort. Soon as the cold spot started to come back again,

they were all gathered in a sort of circle with the cameraman looking on. Even the cameramen were extremely nervous and excited at what was happening. I guess they had never seen much actual activity before that day. Suddenly, Tony stopped talking mid-sentence as if he had choked on his own spit and couldn't work up the reflex to cough it out yet. He finally spat out more words and said that Sally was right there with him, that the cold was running through him. He started to shiver.

After a few seconds, he lifted up his shirt in full view of everyone. Right there in the middle of his stomach, three deep red scratches had been carved in him yet again. This happened again later, too. Three instances of scratches randomly appearing on Tony's skin as deep, bleeding welts that were long and thin. The last time was even captured on camera for an unbroken nine-minute shot as it formed on Tony right before their eyes. That footage has since been touted as some of the most frightening and compelling evidence of paranormal activity in the world. Later, as the crew packed up to leave, Tony walked up to Deborah as she sat at the kitchen table with Barb and whispered into her ear. She quietly stood up and followed him over to the window just above the kitchen sink.

On its sill was an empty glass Coke bottle which Tony had placed a flower in the day before, a memental of love to his wife before what was sure to be a crazy weekend. He nudged her to look closely at it. She did. The edge of every petal was singed as if by the kiss of fire, but none were withered away. It drooped and looked weak now where minutes earlier, according to them, and had looked healthy and fine. They tried recreating the effect with other flowers by either leaving them out to dry or putting a match to them.

But nothing could replicate the effect. The match was too crude and burned everything all at once. That wasn't it. Was Sally trying to drive a symbolic wedge between lovable Deborah and exhausted Tony? By the end of that back-to-normal week, sightings producers were already calling and asking to do another shoot at the home. Apparently the higher-ups were very impressed with what they saw and wanted more, as much as they could get, in fact. Even the show's openly skeptical host, Tim White, was chomping at the bit to actually join the crew on their visit

and see these things for himself. He had never done that before. Days went by, the pickmans discussed, sometimes they fought about it, but ultimately they succumbed to the request. Tony desperately wanted the world to know that he wasn't crazy, that this stuff was really happening to him and he couldn't do anything about it.

In the days leading up to the second visit, tensions in the house were high. Tony became worried, that it was all a setup to make him look like a fraud, to defame him and his family and ruin their good name. Deborah reassured him that wasn't the show's style in previous seasons. Why would they start doing that now? They fought hard while Taylor slept.

Tony was distraught. At one point he even stormed out of the house to catch his breath and take a walk. According to Deborah, at the moment that the front door slammed behind Tony, the little baby monitor on the kitchen counter let out a horrid screeching static sound for 30 straight seconds. It had never done that before. Deborah peeked into the room to see what could have caused it.

There was nothing. Taylor was still asleep. Ultimately, this second visit was less eventful than the first. Tony received a few scratches that seemed to really unsettle the host that was on site, and lest we reduce the indescribable strangeness of those scratches, let's take a moment to appreciate them as the distilled horror they are. But other than that, Sally seemed unwilling to show herself very much. Perhaps it was the presence of the other professional investigator

they had brought in, a man named Al Rober. From his first steps in the door, the Pickmans knew he would be difficult. His greetings were terse. His words were condescending, and he cared not for the objections the couple and crew made to his various natural explanations for all of their experiences. The scratches certainly gave him pause, and he never quite let them go. Later, the Pickmans would learn that Al had been treated poorly by sightings, and had not been allowed to do the real investigation he wanted to.

He wrote them a letter ex post facto explaining himself and offered a pseudo-apology for his harshness. At the end of those two days, though activity had been lessened, Tony and Deborah were no less exhausted than they had been after the first filming. Tony, for his part, still had new scratches to deal with. He had not had a casual two days at all. They both remarked on how they hoped it would be the last time they had to put themselves through that. It was not. And they were in for far worse than they had already seen and heard. You see, though the second visit's activity levels had seemed low for the pigments,

the sighting's host wasn't so accustomed to the haunting presence. He was left with very real and lingering fear and stress. He feared for Tony especially. He had seen the bags under the eyes of the sleepless man, who carried a weight of unendurable despair and resignation on him. He feared for Taylor, too. What would the child partially raised by a demon become? Using this sincere concern as their angle,

Deborah was soon fielding more calls from the producers of sightings as they begged her to come film again, even if just to try and help them in some way. Despite visceral animosity coming from Tony for most of the discussion, the Pickmans, for some reason, eventually agreed to let the crews come back for yet a third time. Peter James was a renowned paranormal psychic who had done official work on dozens of famously haunted locations in the U.S. and UK. sightings figured him for the perfect man to join the crew on this third visit. Not only was he famously sympathetic to the plight of those supposedly suffering, but he also had not yet heard of any details regarding the Sally House.

He, in contrast to many people in his field at that point, was able to go in completely cold. Sightings made sure that Peter stayed as in the dark as possible regarding the house before he came, and only gave him a basic outline of the home's trouble before his arrival. poltergeist activity, a new baby in the home, a wife who's had little cause for concern, and a husband who has suffered some more direct attacks. But that was all they told him. Deborah watched the car carrying Peter pull into their little driveway. The sound of the Missouri River across the street drowned out its approach nicely.

She watched Peter climb out of the backseat. He was immediately greeted by the crew director. They exchanged their pleasantries and then started off on the short walk towards the front door. Immediately, Deborah noticed Peter stopped dead in his tracks and look up. He stared at what she later learned to have been the upstairs master bedroom window. His face wrinkled with an interested look. They told him the young couple had a baby boy. So why was he seeing a little girl peeking out at him?

They let him in and he greeted Tony and Deborah with a refreshing warmth. His charisma calmed whatever nerves they may have had about meeting this newcomer, and he was soon winding and twisting his way around the home with his head down, and eyes mostly closed. The Pickmans had started to grow accustomed to the odd behavior of these medium types and were more than happy to remain quiet as Peter started his work. He whispered to himself here and there. He didn't wince or groan or grunt. He was calm, but he did seem to stop and start his motion a lot, as if he was in a crowded place or stop and go traffic on the way home from work. He did this all around the lower level and finally reached the bottom of the stairs where he came to a

full stop, opened his eyes, and lifted his head towards the second floor landing. He pointed and said, There's a little girl standing right there. Thus began the sojourn of Peter James in the Sally house. It would prove to be a story two-day stay. Later, after Peter had learned, presumably from the spirit, that her name was Sally, he led Tony and Deborah up the stairs and through the hallway of the upper floor in an attempt to find areas wherein the spirit resided. As they approached the door to the master bedroom, Tony started to act nervous. He began to pace the short width of the hallway behind him. He bit his nails raw. His legs started to rattle beneath him and feel like jello. Peter, of course, noticed this. For his part, he stated that he could feel a strong wall of

resistance blocking the doorway to the bedroom. In a commanding and loud voice, he demanded the spirit within speak to him. But all that happened was Tony beginning to complain about stinging pain in his lower back. It was happening again. Peter, not more than knowing about the fullness of Tony's previous scratches, encouraged his new friend to remain in control. Tony knew the fullness of this exhortation's naivete, but thanked Peter nonetheless in a sort of breathless and strained tone. He was in a sincere pain.

Peter could see that. Deborah went to lift Tony's shirt, and there found two new scratches, but these were unlike the others. Where the scratches on Tony had previously been straight and closely akin to the scars of sharp fingernails and fleshy skin, skin, these were deeper and were a very distinct shape. The first, reading left to right, was in the shape of the capital M, and the one next to it was an equally large C. MC had been carved into the

skin of Tony's back. MC, what could that mean? Well, in that moment, Deborah remembered something from her research into the Holmes history. That one doctor who supposedly bore witness to the death of his young patient Sally, he had a father. In his father's name, was M.C. Finney. The terror did not stop there. As she and Peter continued to study the scratches, electrical popping sounds like sparks and circuits being broken rang out all around them.

One of these blasts hit Peter directly in the wrist. He cried out in quick pain and yelled, Easy, I'm not afraid of you. He re-entered the room and tried to figure out the name of this violent spirit. Somehow he felt sure it was not the little girl he had seen. He couldn't get anything, though. nothing but the letter B. And it was at this moment that the hammer dropped

and a crew member filming from behind the group started the scream and pointed the back of Tony's shirt. Deborah looked to see it slowly smoldering as if a match had been touched to it and then pulled away. As she went to pinch out the smolder though, the shirt burst into large and violent flames. Tony's shirt had spontaneously combusted on him and Deborah jumped with Peter just behind her

to smother the blaze as quickly as possible. The term lab rat came to, to mind once more for Tony. He could not continue living like this. Once the fire was out and was only throwing some final plumes of smoke up into the low ceilings, Tony was inspected. To everyone's relief, his skin hadn't been harmed at all. His shirt had brightly and aggressively burned for about 10 seconds, but somehow his skin had not felt a thing. It wasn't even red. The shirt was removed and tested. No accelerant was found. Later, while Peter stood once more in the midmost to the master bedroom, looking for some answers to these aggressive outbursts, he started to

complain of a punctuated burning feeling covering his entire face. With it cupped in his hands, he briskly fled the room and trotted downstairs for relief. Thus ended the third sightings investigation of the Sally House. Tony and Deborah were exhausted. Tony was physically harmed to the point of looking like he had received 40 lashes. Their marriage was greatly suffering. Peace of mind was non-existence. This haunting had indeed left its haunting mark. Everyone in the comments hands up if you appreciate

words like wherein and like unto... Every time I'm editing these episodes, Ben sneaks in phrases like, I mean, he'll be talking about something like going to the store to get a candy bar and he'll be like, I saw and behold the candy bar was like unto a great raft or arc

which flowed out from underneath the gates of Valinor. Dude, and I'm like Ben, look, it has like a place. That's amazing. No, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, place is there. Okay. Okay. Let us. I'm not going to let you comment on this. Okay. Okay. I have two things to say. One, sightings did come back for a fourth visit with the pickmans, but it was more of the same stuff. Uh, and, you know, again, not to reduce the craziness of that stuff, but we didn't feel like. But then they were like, hey, let's get a

witch in there. Yeah. Let's look. Maybe that'll help. Some like, we'll get a witch. You know, basic white girl who had studied Native American spiritism or something in college. doing mushrooms. You know, you know, the lady that you've seen on TikTok and all the tattoos? I said, basic white girl. Yeah, but I mean, that's, that is a basic. She's like, I've been talking to the aliens. Oh, yeah, that shit was crazy.

And then she's doing like, dude, that lady's definitely talking to demons. Yes. They got a lady like that. Well, yeah, she said that she like, what, what condition did she have healed, like some autoimmune deficiency? I had some kind of liver healed my kidneys. They healed. She was singing the whole time. It was really weird. So yeah, they got

in this like shaman lady. who starts to do a cleansing of the house to expel the evil spirits. Of course. And this is where she found three spirits. And by the way, the whole time, she's making Tony and Deborah, like, sit in a circle with stuff like charms in the middle. Like, it's a full on religious, right. Hey, by the way, a house divided against itself, can't stand.

Dude, Abraham Lincoln said that once. Wasn't that Jesus? Jesus also said that. Okay, that was actually Jesus. Wayne Gretzky, Michael Scott. Okay. So they found three spirits, supposedly. a nice old man, of course, of course, like very stately, a young girl, okay, Sally, presumably,

and a mean old hag who took forever to leave. Like she was very happy to just stay. She kept hiding from the spirit, from the shaman, you know, curses. From the witchy lady or whatever. Here's the thing. That made it worse. That's a guarantee. Never, and I mean never, ask a pagan shaman to come into your house, period. But if you ever find that to be the case, and you're in the same house as a pagan shaman, certainly don't encourage them to go about their shaman activities. It's like, look, I've got an infestation of mice.

You know what I'll do to get rid of it? Pagan shaman. Why don't we release some termites in the house, too? Or like rats, like sewer rats, to eat that. That'll help. That'll help. Right. Or, you know, Black Widows. Like a bunch of them.

No. So the Pickmans eventually move out in 1994. Yep, they do move out. Taylor, their first baby was the only of their three children to live in the house. Yep. But they continued to be involved in investigations for many years. They continued to be involved in the supernatural tourism. And so even though they moved a few miles away, they continued to have stories like the cell phone thing I told.

Yeah, for example, they even got into the EVP thing, which is how we're going to close the show in a few minutes here. And they realized that during Taylor's first birthday, which was pretty recently for them, like they had just moved out and they had just had Taylor's birthday right before they moved out. And then, you know, a little later, some investigators came and were like, well, hey, do you have any camera footage of when you were in the home? And they did from Taylor's birthday. And they actually claimed to have found a number of weird EVPs in that footage. Like the kind where it was the voice. of someone there, but they weren't in the room at the time. And they know that, like, they remember

they weren't in the room. And it was saying things, like, weird things like, like fish guts, you know? And it's just these weird, like, fish guts. Or, uh, Taylor would be unwrapping a gift. And there would be a voice that sounded like a normal human voice, but that no one could recognize, say something like, is that all he's getting? Is that all he's getting? Poor kid. Or something like that. I got news for you, man. At that point, I'm not just moving from the house. I'm moving states. Well, here's the thing, too.

I'm crossing state lines. They would... When ghost hunters would go to... Because this continues on down to this day. This is still happening. Yeah. Still ghost hunters. This was 94.

For decades now, people have been doing this. And when they say, the Pickman said at one point that when ghost hunters would be their poking at the demons, they would have stuff start happening at their house, too. Like crazy, you know, more crazy stuff. I do remember that. the astonishing legends episodes. Like, what's so great about Atchison that you have to stay there? That's my, like, repent and move.

Just repentance looks like moving. Ration. L plus ratio. Find God plus ratio. No, so. Let's close it. We got to close it out with some of these, because this is some of the crazier stuff to me. And this is where it hits home for me personally. Yeah.

Because the first time I experienced one of the, ZVPs at the Sally House, I was sort of accidentally thinking it was going to be, you know, kind of interesting. And anyway, we'll tell the story. But this stuff actually can't hit close to home if you're not careful. So keep a ready sword and love the Lord. And don't go ghost hunting. And don't. If any of you go ghost hunting, so help me. I was reading comments somewhere about people who listen to the show. They were like, yeah, I'm going Bigfoot hunting and ghost hunting. I'm like, stop. Stop it. We don't. We actually. It's not that I don't recommend it.

It's that like, don't. It's that you shouldn't. It's very foolish. Don't be doing it. Okay, so. Here at Haunted Cosmos, we have a bit of a reputation. We have a reputation for talking about all these dark but admittedly fascinating things for anywhere between 90 and 120 minutes, only to eventually come in with the line.

Obviously, it was the demons. Look, we get it. And we get that it's become so predictable. It's funny. But we also mean it. Take this whole story. story arc, for example. This Sally House narrative of the poor girl who died and just wanted to belong to a loving family quickly evolved over the course of just two years for the pickmans into a

no-nonsense malevolence that even continued to haunt them in some degree after they were forced to leave to move out to save both their marriage and their own selves. And now the legend has lived on with such force that hundreds, thousands of casual dark tourists and professional ghost hunters and everything in between, have ordered their lives around investigating this place, thinking it to be some part of some key that will allow man to finally pierce his eye into the realm beyond the veil of life. This place, this quaint little haunted house on the bank of the Missouri, is a lure, and it is an effective one. And here's the thing. These people are not walking away empty-handed. But the question is, are they better off for gaining what this entity gives to them? The demons are still active.

demons are real. As Christians, we need not fear, for they fear the one to whom we belong. But we shouldn't take it lightly either. We shouldn't be surprised when in a world where demons are real, we encounter real demonic activity. Keep a ready sword. Stay curious, but stay holy. Now, there's a thing that happens sometimes in the world that has come to be called an electronic voice phenomenon, EVP. Some people suppose that when certain recorders are used in certain places under certain conditions, said recorders can pick up the voices of disembodied spirits that are somehow lingering in the unseen part of creation. The idea is that these vocalizations are beyond what the human ear is capable of detecting, but somehow still within the range of inputs

acceptable for recording devices. Hence the case that these EVPs from beyond might be captured in a room filled with people being totally quiet who nonetheless don't react to it. They don't react to it because they didn't hear it. Some EVPs mimic the voice of someone else present, some seem to have a voice of their own, or at least of someone who is not present at the time of the recording, some that will sound altogether inhuman, rage-filled in fact, and appear at first to be a true glimpse into the condition these spirits are under in their hopeless state of rebellion. These EVPs have been attested by many throughout the history of sound and video recording, even dating back to the pioneering inventor Thomas Edison himself.

One of his stated goals in developing this technology, in fact, was to communicate with the debt. Seems the old Coot had a medium bent somewhere not so deep down. In 1959, a Swedish artist named Friedrich Juergensen recorded disembodied human voices while alone in the woods trying to record bird sounds. He even wrote a book on it, Rostrna Frein Rimden, voices from the universe. All this to say, EVPs aren't as new as some suppose them to be.

It seems from the onset of recording devices in general, people have wanted to see how they might be used to walk through that door of death and gain answers about what lies there beyond. This matters for us now because, in addition to the overtly hostile attacks experienced by the Pickmans and the walls of the Sally House, multiple EVPs have been captured there by them and investigators after them that seem to defy explanation and leave one more and more certain that whatever is there is far from being benign towards man.

The home has since become a popular spot for paranormal hunters who make pilgrimages to it from all over the world. One such pilgrimage embarked upon by not professional ghost hunters, but rather a pair of podcasters named Scott Philbrook and Forest Burgess, was the catalyst for me personally realizing just how tight a rope we must walk, as we indulge our curiosity in this sort of thing. On a quiet Monday morning and building 1285 of Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah, sometime in 2019 or so,

I sat at my desk and clicked away on an engineering report. In my ears, Scott Enforst's podcast, Astonishing Legends, played through my headphones. At the beginning of this particular episode, the hosts warned of something they would play later on that could potentially be unsettling for some listeners. You see, when they went to the Sally House,

they took a recorder with them. The history of the recorder is beyond the scope of this episode, but suffice it to say, it's one that ghost hunters everywhere swear by, for whatever that's worth. One of those that automatically records any time a sound is made above a certain decibel constraint. Anyways, they went into the nursery that had been the theater of most of the activity throughout the home's history and set the recorder down. In a very serious and even reverential tone, one of the hosts said that they would leave the recorder and exit the room for a while.

He said further that if anyone or anything in the room wanted to say something, they were free to do so without any disturbance or interruption. Then with gentle steps and movements, he left the recorder on the bed and closed the door behind him when he exited. I stopped typing at this point and pressed the headphones into my ears, thinking that I would have to try really hard to hear whatever message from beyond they had allegedly received. That was a mistake.

seconds after hearing the door click shut, a fuzzy white noise sort of sound evolved into what can only be described as the deafening screams of rage and weeping and gnashing of teeth from some dark place of agony. I was shocked at the noise but continued listening. With each passing second, the sound seemed to grow more and more malicious. It was angry, but at who? At me, at you, it was just angry. And this was not the only compelling thing picked up by the team from, astonishing legends. At one point, the team, consisting of both hosts, a tour guide, and their

research assistant, were all standing and sitting in the nursery asking for any entities to make themselves known. Suddenly, the research assistant, a girl named Tess, let out a cry and started up from her seated position. She was shaking and nervous, and not the least bit excited. Something brushed my hair! She claimed that, as they asked for unseen things to make themselves known, a particular piece of air that felt strangely like a hand brushed her hair to the side to expose her ear. She then felt a whispering breeze that was like a friend trying to say something far too quietly to actually be heard. She stood by it too, even months after the event. Her story didn't change.

Back to EVPs, though. One of the more striking messages caught at the Sally House predated the astonishing legends expedition by some years. In 2005, a team of paranormal researchers called the Canning... paranormal group were doing an investigation at the Sally House. They recorded almost everything from the moment they stepped foot on the property until the moment they left. At one point in their study, as the group was filling one of the home's rooms and discussing the finer points of what these disembodied and wandering spirits can and cannot do, a leader among them told the group that they can't kill anyone or cause anyone to kill themselves.

They can incite someone else to kill another person, a sort of possession or persuasion, and so can kill indirectly, but that's it, as if that was nothing to be worried about. But as they analyzed the audio from this calm discussion later on, they found something weird. Right after the gentleman gets done saying that the spirits cannot directly kill anyone, they heard the voice of someone else talking over the man.

Nobody present remembered anyone else talking at the time, nor could anyone recognize whose voice it could have been. But even if it had been one of them, what was said made everyone extremely uncomfortable, Surely nobody would have said that. Right there, as the so-called expert waxes poetic about the limitations of what we know are the demonic and unclean spirits in the world, a voice as clear as the sun breaks in to interrupt him and say, that audio has been tested extensively.

No evidence of a hoax has ever been found. To conclude, it's worth remembering the effect these things have on real people. That can inform us as to the origin or the source of the experience itself. In other words, how people react to a thing can tell you a little bit of some basic truths about the thing reacted to. To that end, let us return to the first EVP I mentioned, the one I heard while typing at my desk at work. Scott Philbrook, one of the hosts of Astonishing Legends, had a particularly strong reaction to that recording. Right when he heard it, he stormed out of the house in a rush, while he told his co-workers, that's it, I'm done. He never went back into the house, except to go through the back door and out the front.

The only reason he even did that was because of what was waiting for him in his car out front. It was his young son. He hadn't wanted his son to experience an environment that could be haunted, and so the boy had been watching movies in the car the whole time. And Scott didn't want his boy to see his dad so rattled and afraid. Scott composed himself and walked calmly out the front door.

He forced a smile to greet his son, and he never did go back inside. For my part, I was also, pretty unsettled. Sure, the sound could have been totally natural. I could have just been projecting what I wanted to hear onto the AC kicking on in the room after so much buildup from the beginning of the podcast. I fully admit that's possible. Perhaps it's even the most probable thing, although that AC unit would definitely be broken if that was the case. But I also can't deny that after I listened to that recording playback on their show, I took my headphones off, took my

cack out of my computer to shut it down, walked outside of building 1285, and prayed. That seemed the only thing to do. Want more Haunted Cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content, as well as exclusive content, in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. So go to patreon.com slash haunted cosmos and sign up now.