The Demon House Site

A DCS worker watched a 9-year-old boy walk up a wall and across the hospital ceiling in 2012. She put it in her police report.

A DCS family case manager named Valerie Washington watched a nine-year-old boy walk backward up a hospital wall and across the ceiling. That's in her signed police report. Her exact words: the child "glided backward on the floor, wall and ceiling." A registered nurse who was also in the room told the Indianapolis Star that the boy's seven-year-old brother got "a weird grin on his face," walked up the wall, flipped over their grandmother, and stood there.

Both accounts were filed on the record about April 19, 2012, at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. Washington's signed report and the nurse's independent statement to the Star describe the same impossible thing, and they match on the details. The Ammons case can be dismissed a hundred different ways. The hospital incident isn't one of them.

The family had moved into the rental at 3860 Carolina Street in Gary the previous November. Latoya Ammons, her mother Rosa Campbell, and Latoya's three kids, ages seven, nine, and twelve. Within weeks, they started reporting black flies on the screened porch in freezing December weather, and heavy footsteps coming up the basement stairs at midnight. By spring 2012, the kids were supposedly speaking in deep unfamiliar voices with grotesque facial expressions. The twelve-year-old daughter allegedly levitated out of bed around 2 a.m. one night during a sleepover. Two clairvoyants told the family that over two hundred demons lived in the house.

Captain Charles Austin of the Gary Police Department showed up as a skeptic. A thirty-seven-year veteran cop does not walk into a demon house expecting to believe the family. He ended up convinced something was happening there. Father Michael Maginot, a Catholic priest from Merrillville, performed three minor exorcism rites at the address, sometimes with police officers and DCS workers watching. Maginot dug up broken concrete under the basement stairs and found buried objects he suspected were remnants of prior satanic rituals. He called the house "a portal to demons."

The skeptic's version of events is just as documented. A psychiatric evaluation concluded that the children had been "induced into a delusional system perpetuated by their mother." Psychologist Tracy Wright noted that the youngest son's possessed behavior flared up precisely when he got asked questions he didn't like. The previous tenant at 3860 Carolina reported nothing paranormal. Neither did the tenants who came after. Joe Nickell of the Skeptical Inquirer published a 2014 analysis picking apart the physical evidence piece by piece.

Zak Bagans bought the property in February 2014 for $35,000. He spent months filming inside, claimed his crew experienced "ongoing disturbances," and demolished the house in January 2016. He kept the basement stairs and the dirt underneath them for display at his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. His documentary, Demon House, came out on March 16, 2018. Dread Central called it "one of the single most compelling documentaries on the existence of the supernatural." The Los Angeles Times reviewer called it "hooey." Both reviews ran the same week. In 2024, Netflix released The Deliverance, a dramatized feature with Andra Day playing a fictional version of Latoya Ammons.

Here's the honest assessment. Most of the paranormal claims around this case can't be verified. Some of them were probably invented. Some were almost certainly a mother's belief system shaping her kids' behavior, which is what the psychiatrists said. But the hospital incident is different. Washington was doing her job. She had no reason to lie on a government form, and her account matches what the nurse told a reporter independently. Something happened in that hospital room, and either the official record is wrong in a way nobody has been able to explain, or the Ammons case contains the single best-documented levitation claim in twenty-first-century America.

The lot at 3860 Carolina Street is grass now. The basement stairs are in a glass case 1,900 miles away. A nine-year-old who did something impossible one afternoon in 2012 is a grown man somewhere in Indiana.