The Demon House Site

The former location of a small rental house where the Ammons family reported extreme paranormal activity in 2011, attracting national media attention and a police investigation. Purchased by Zak Bagans in 2014, the house was demolished in January 2016.

The house at 3860 Carolina Street in Gary, Indiana, became the center of one of the most controversial and widely reported haunting cases in American history. In November 2011, Latoya Ammons, her mother Rosa Campbell, and Ammons's three children -- aged seven, nine, and twelve -- moved into the modest rental home. Within weeks, the family reported unexplained swarms of large black flies appearing on the screened porch despite freezing December temperatures, and the sound of heavy footsteps ascending the basement stairs at midnight when no one was there.

By early 2012, the children had begun exhibiting disturbing behavior -- speaking in deep, unnatural voices with grotesque facial expressions. The youngest son reportedly communicated with spirits of deceased children that only he could see. On March 10, 2012, the twelve-year-old daughter allegedly levitated out of her bed around 2 a.m. while unconscious, drifting upward before slowly descending back down with no memory of the incident. Two clairvoyants who visited the home warned the family that over two hundred demons haunted the residence.

The case crossed from private nightmare into public record on April 19, 2012, during a hospital visit with Dr. Geoffrey Onyeukwu. DCS family case manager Valerie Washington witnessed the nine-year-old boy walk backward up a hospital wall and onto the ceiling. Washington later confirmed in a police report that the child "glided backward on the floor, wall and ceiling." A registered nurse present told the Indianapolis Star that the seven-year-old got a "weird grin" on his face and "walked up the wall, flipped over [his grandmother] and stood there." The children were placed in emergency custody. Captain Charles Austin of the Gary Police Department investigated the case and became convinced of its legitimacy.

Father Michael Maginot, a Catholic priest from Merrillville, performed minor exorcism rites at the house on three separate occasions, sometimes in the presence of police officers and DCS workers. During his investigation, he discovered broken concrete beneath the basement stairs filled with dirt and buried objects, which he suspected were remnants of prior satanic rituals. Maginot called the house "a portal to demons."

Skeptics offered alternative explanations. Psychiatric evaluations suggested the children were "induced into a delusional system perpetuated by [their] mother." The previous homeowner reported no paranormal activity, nor did subsequent tenants. The Skeptical Inquirer published a detailed analysis questioning the evidence.

In 2014, Ghost Adventures host Zak Bagans purchased the property for $35,000 and spent months filming inside. He claimed the production was plagued by ongoing disturbances affecting crew members. Bagans had the house demolished in January 2016, though he retained the basement stairs and the dirt beneath them for display at his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. His documentary, Demon House, was released on March 16, 2018, to mixed reviews -- Dread Central called it "one of the single most compelling documentaries on the existence of the supernatural," while the Los Angeles Times dismissed it as "hooey." In 2024, Netflix released The Deliverance, a dramatized film with Andra Day portraying a fictionalized version of Ammons.

The lot at 3860 Carolina Street is now an empty grass field. The house is gone, but the case it generated -- documented in police reports, DCS files, hospital records, and sworn testimony from medical professionals and law enforcement officers -- remains one of the most heavily documented and fiercely debated haunting claims in modern American history.