Steven LaChance Blog

I heard a quote once that described a haunted house as one that had gone insane. That made a strange kind of sense to me. The idea that a house could harbor something hidden inside it, a kind of internal system that carries something through its walls and floors like a disease. That is what it felt like to me, not just living in the Screaming House, but standing in others as well.

Yes, my house screamed. A man’s scream, the kind of pain that makes you believe he was on his way to death. It was the only way I can describe it, like the final moments of a man’s last torture.

I stood in a house once where everything came crashing down around us because a young girl missed her mother. Can you imagine the possibility that an emotion could be so strong it becomes destructive? That house also placed a 911 call on its own. The officer who walked into that house that night was never the same. A young girl’s pain playing out on its own, turning on her and her family in the worst ways.

An emotional infection?

I have been thrown against a wall in a deserted mental hospital by something I could not see. It bruised my chest where the force of unseen hands hit me. It shook me up.

The breaking point of the mind?

A little boy afraid of a headless Civil War soldier who longed to still be alive.

Longing that does not let go?

A voice of a man who called himself David, a Jewish victim in Leopoldstadt in Vienna, Austria. He told me they took his shoes.

The need to be remembered?

When you really think about it, it is not that far off to consider that a haunted house or location could carry something wrong inside it. And maybe a haunted person carries a version of that same thing within them.

What if that kind of thing is contagious?

A haunting kind of virus that could spread, something no mask could ever prevent.

I get asked all the time what I think these things are. To be as straightforward as I can be, I don’t know. Sure, I have theories and ideas.

I lived through one of the most intense hauntings in history, and I came out the other side with more questions than answers.

I have spent twenty five years looking into some very dark places trying to understand why.

My book The Architecture of Shadows is what I found in those twenty five years of searching around the world.

I hope people can learn from it. I hope it makes people stop and ask questions of themselves.

What do you believe?

What do you think these things are?

My house screamed, and after everything I lived through, I still cannot tell you why. All I can tell you is that I have seen enough to know something is happening, and whatever it is, we are only just beginning to understand it.