Steven LaChance Blog

From the Case Files of Steven LaChance

It was years after I left the Screaming House when I encountered one of the most intense cases outside of my own personal experiences.

It was autumn, and I was called to a home in Southeast Missouri. Through conversations with the homeowner, I suspected it was most likely a poltergeist-type situation. An unhappy young girl living with her grandparents was at the center of it, and the activity seemed to revolve around her.

I could tell this family was terrified.

When they described objects flying around the house and being destroyed, I approached it all with caution and skepticism. For anyone dealing with these kinds of events for the first time, it is the scariest thing they have ever experienced. So, in many cases, these events get blown completely out of proportion. A door opening by itself might terrify them. I have seen that kind of experiential exaggeration before.

To a frightened homeowner, the door slammed open by unseen hands, but in fact, it was much simpler and less dramatic. The door closed by itself. No need to say it was the unseen hands of a demonic entity who hated the family that slammed the door off its hinges. The degree of fear shapes how a homeowner explains what happened.

That’s why I always proceed with caution and skepticism. I don’t want to feed into their fear. That would be the worst thing I could do for them. And remember, I am there to help them, not myself. Everything needs to be handled with that one goal in mind.

Help the family.

I arrived early that evening and was greeted at the door by the grandparents. Sweet, weathered people who were clearly worried about what was happening in their lives. There is a sadness when you meet people for the first time in person who are going through something horrific in their lives they can’t explain. These people were hurting, and I could pick it up instantly by looking at them.

Stepping inside the house felt like entering a fucking war zone, with objects scattered everywhere and holes punched through the walls.

In the living room, a heavy metal basket was lodged halfway into a large projection television, as if it had been hurled with great force. The grandparents explained that the activity had begun shortly after their granddaughter moved in with them. They had taken custody of her while her mother battled addiction. The girl missed her mother and didn’t want to be there. I thought, like anyone might, that this was her expressing grief and rebellion. Nothing should be ruled out when examining these events objectively. You need to stay as objective and calm as possible.

When they called their granddaughter into the room, she looked nervous, soft-spoken, and almost fragile. She told me she was frightened by everything happening around her. She told me that she missed her mother. As she spoke, a large china cabinet in the dining room suddenly tipped forward and shattered. Plates broke across the floor as it crashed down.

The timing was too perfect to ignore. The girl was not in the room with it. In fact, no one was. We were all gathered in the living room, safely away from the dining room.

We all froze. The grandmother ran forward, crying over her shattered china. The grandfather turned toward me, tears welling in his eyes, and whispered, “Help us, please.”

I can’t get his face and his words out of my mind when I think about that night. It was almost as if he was pleading with me. It broke my heart because I knew exactly what he was feeling, because I had personally stood in the exact type of moment he was currently in.

“Help us, please.”

The activity continued all night.

At one point, there was a loud knock on the front door. The grandmother answered it to find a police officer standing there. Somehow, a male voice had called 9-1-1 from the house’s landline, reporting that the family needed help.

But no one had touched the phone.

We were all together in the same room.

The officer entered after we reluctantly explained what was going on and that the phone call had come through for no reason. You could tell he was uneasy as he entered, explaining that he needed to look around.

When he reached the hallway, a large linen cabinet at the far end started to move. Not slide, but push forward, racing toward him. He instinctively drew his weapon, but nothing was behind it.

No hands to force it.

Only force without a physical body.

Later, when I was giving a lecture at a local college, I heard the officer had admitted to others that this night had changed his life forever.

He was now a believer and had become a paranormal investigator himself. Things like this change people, and once changed, they can’t go back to where things were before the thing happened to them.

Of course, I was worried about the family’s safety, to say the least. This was violent, and at any point, it was not unreasonable to believe it could turn on them physically. At my urging, the family left the house that night to find rest.

They were exhausted, unraveling.

When they returned the next day, the house was unrecognizable. The entire interior looked as though a tornado had torn through it. Furniture was splintered. Walls were ripped apart. And on one living room wall, written in thick red lipstick, was a single word.

LEAVE.

They did, and they never returned. Later, they told me that once they left, the activity didn’t follow them. It ended as abruptly as it had started.

I’ve always wrestled with this in my mind. Was it the grief of a child torn from her mother, so intense it shattered reality? Did something unholy latch onto that sorrow, turning it into a weapon? Or was it the restless spirit of an angry man, awakened from death to seek revenge?

There’s another possibility I can’t ignore.

Maybe it wasn’t an angry spirit after all. Perhaps that explanation is too simple. It might be what’s known as a Thought Form, created from human emotion itself. Rage, sorrow, and despair can accumulate until there’s nowhere left to go. Then they spill outward.

They take shape.

They move objects.

They tear down cabinets.

They can make phone calls in voices no one can identify. And once they’re loose, once they’ve gained form, they are like wild animals that are untamed, unpredictable, impossible to call back.

The truth is, I will never be certain what was inside that house. The explanations vary from mild to wild, each as plausible and impossible as the next. That’s the reality of this work. You want a clear answer, a villain to point to, a solution to give the family who looks at you with tears in their eyes and begs for help.

But most of the time, those answers never come.

I wish I could tell you I swooped in like some type of paranormal hero, banishing the thing with ritual or prayer, but that is not how these hauntings work. They resist neat endings. They resist control. And anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who claims to know for certain in a world built on shadows, is most likely lying to you.

What remains, years later, is not clarity but the memory of that night: the cabinet rushing down the hallway, the officer’s hand on his weapon, the grandparents’ grief, and the lipstick word left on the wall to be found the next morning.

LEAVE.

I do not know if it was a command to the family, to me, or to anyone who dares to look too closely at the rage of the dead.

Rage of the dead?

Even now, that still seems too assumptive to me.

What I saw in that Missouri house was not just chaos. It was rage made visible. In that way, it mirrored the stories the world has told for centuries. Every culture has found words for the dead who do not rest peacefully, for those whose grief turns into violence and whose presence pounds through walls and hearts alike.

But then the question goes through my mind: are these things the dead at all, or something far more complex and disturbing?

Who knows? I know I sure don’t.

Sleep well with that thought kicking around in your head.