When Ghosts Attack: There's No Place Like Hell

There's a new show on Destination America called When Ghosts Attack, and I'm not going to watch too many episodes because it's one of the scariest paranormal shows I've seen.  I purposely watched it in the afternoon because I knew it would creep me out too much if I watched it at night, yet that still didn't stop me from looking over my shoulder every few minutes!  I watched the first episode, "There's No Place Like Hell," and the first part of the show focuses on the Settle family (Lori, Donny, and Kaitlyn, who is Lori's daughter and Donny's stepdaughter) and what happened to them when they moved into a new house in Fayetteville, West Virginia in September 2002.  Not long after the family moved in, Lori says that she felt like she was always being watched; Kaitlyn also experienced this and felt like something that wasn’t human was watching her.  Lori felt like she was not welcome in the basement, like she was “invading someone else’s space.”  She discovered flies in the corner of the basement, and nothing she tried ever made them go away.  A few weeks after they moved in, Lori finished cleaning the kitchen and walked out of the room for no longer than a minute; when she came back, all of the drawers and cabinets were open.  On December 7th, Lori and Donny went to sleep and woke up to the sound of heavy footsteps (like boots) on the stairs.  Kaitlyn came in and said that there was a man in her room, standing at the foot of her bed.  Lori told Kaitlyn she was imagining it and took her back to her room and plugged a night light in; after she shut the door, the night light exploded. 

On January 14, 2003, Lori was home alone when she saw a child standing in the hallway, “fists clenched, head down, no facial expression.”  When the child looked at Lori, she had no eyes, and Lori ran out of the room. (I wouldn't have just left the room...I would've left the house and never returned!)  Less than a month later, Lori and Kaitlyn were asleep in Lori’s bed when Lori was awoken by a hand pushing her down into the mattress; a few minutes later, it pushed her so hard she fell out of bed.  Lori and Kaitlyn ran out of the room, and when Donny was comforting Lori, they heard a loud cackle.  Lori’s mother, Beverly Settle, suggested she do some research about the house, and Lori found out that a man named William Bennett lived there in the 1940s.   He had a wife and child, and the wife left him because he was too overbearing, and the daughter died at a young age; William was so depressed that he shot himself in the basement (in the corner where the flies gather).

Beverly says that Donny began to change, that he “became distant from Lori, he didn’t talk much, and then it seemed like he started to go into a depression.” Lori says he often seemed angry and agitated.  On April 29th, Lori and Kaitlyn went out, and Lori dropped Kaitlyn off at Beverly’s house before she came home; when she walked in the house, she couldn’t find Donny and he wasn’t answering when she called his name.  Lori soon discovered blood in the hallway and followed the trail to find Donny sitting dead on the bathroom floor, which was completely covered in blood.  The autopsy said that Donny died of an aortic rupture, but since he was only 42 and in good health, Lori thinks the house had something to do with it.

June 27, 2003 was the final straw.  Lori was going to the basement when something pushed her down the stairs, and she decided it was time to get out of the house.  Beverly came over to help Lori and Kaitlyn get their things together, and she felt cold air in the house, even though it wasn’t cold that day. Something unseen hit Lori in the face and left claw marks, and they all ran out of the house, leaving their belongings.  Beverly believes that Lori and Kaitlyn would’ve been killed if they’d kept living there.  Lori did not believe in the paranormal before living in that house, but her experiences there led to her becoming a paranormal investigator.

The second part of the show is about single mother Marsha Eden and her daughters Katrina and McKenzie.  In September 2010, they moved into a house in central New Jersey that Marsha's boyfriend, Raymond Griffis, found for them.  The house was old, but everything inside was new.  The house was across from an old mill, which Katrina says was as “bad as having a graveyard in front of your house.”  McKenzie says that the house was okay during the day, but creepy at night.  The girls started hearing hissing noises and feeling like they were being watched not long after they moved in.  Marsha says she would see shadows that would disappear into another room or into the wall.

On September 21, 2010, Marsha came home from work early because she had a migraine; she went to sleep and woke up to a loud noise from the bathroom.  When she went in there, the shower door was shattered and glass was all over the floor.  Two weeks later, Marsha was fixing dinner and felt a cold spot around her; she suddenly dropped the silverware she was holding, and something she could not see attacked her.  She asked Raymond to spend the night, and they later “woke up from a dead sleep,” heard a creak, then the door opened, and it got really cold in the room.  Marsha felt the cold on her feet, then it traveled up her legs and got heavier until it overpowered her, and she saw a man’s face right in front of her.  After that disturbing incident, they decided to do some internet research and discovered that the house used to be a boarding house for the employees of the mill and that many people died there as a result of accidents that had happened at the mill.

On October 19th, McKenzie says that she felt cold all around her and Katrina felt a sudden burning sensation on her back as she walked into the room; Marsha and McKenzie examined Katrina's back and found a red welt. Marsha and the girls ran and locked themselves in a bedroom, and Marsha called Raymond.  The walls started shaking, and they heard moans coming from outside the bedroom.  McKenzie found scratches on her thighs after feeling a burning sensation. Raymond came to help them, and everything calmed down once he showed up; he took a picture of Marsha, Katrina, and McKenzie in the bedroom, and there was a glow behind them in the picture.  Marsha decided that they weren’t going to live there anymore. The apartment is currently being rented by someone else, and there have been no reports of paranormal activity.

If you like scary paranormal shows, you should check out When Ghosts Attack...this might be the scariest one I've watched so far!

My rating: 9/10

http://america.discovery.com/tv-shows/when-ghosts-attack