PHILLIP LOBSINGER:
CLASS OF 1959
Lew Wallace High SchoolClass of 1959
Gary, IN
PHILLIP's Story
y: Aaron Rasmussen
In 2014, Ghost Adventures host Zak Bagans paid $35,000 for a home in Gary, Indiana, believed to be possessed by evil spirits. He had it demolished two years later — but the chilling, bizarre mystery surrounding the structure continues to live on despite its destruction.
“Something was inside that house that had the ability to do things that I have never seen before — things that others carrying the highest form of credibility couldn’t explain either,” Bagans told the Indy Star in 2016. “There was something there that was very dark, yet highly intelligent and powerful.”
Latoya Ammons rented the home on Carolina Street and lived there with her three children between November 2011 and 2012. She claimed their lives were thrown into chaos during their short stay.
The trouble, documented in nearly 1,000 pages of official records that include interviews with psychologists and police, began almost right away. The month after the Ammons moved in, black flies swarmed the home’s porch even though it was winter and cold outside, the Indy Star reported.
“We killed them and killed them and killed them, but they kept coming back,” said Ammon’s mother, Rosa Campbell.
The two women would also hear the sound of footsteps coming from the basement and creaking doors at night even though nobody was there.
The family’s terror grew when Ammons’ young children — then ages 7, 9 and 12 — seemed to be affected by whatever was in the house.
Around 2 a.m. March 10, 2012, Campbell awoke to screams and found her 12-year-old granddaughter levitating above the girl’s bed. “I thought, ‘What's going on?...Expand for more
’” Campbell recalled. “‘Why is this happening?’”
On other occasions, the children’s eyes bulged and they spoke in deep, demonic voices, the family said. Ammon’s youngest son would sit in the closet having conversations with an unseen presence; her middle boy described what getting killed felt like.
Perhaps the eeriest incident occurred when the Department of Child Services was asked to investigate Ammons for possible child abuse and case manager Valerie Washington interviewed the family at an area hospital.
The Indy Star, citing Washington’s report, reported that during the interview, the 7-year-old boy got a “weird grin” on his face.
He then “walked up the wall, flipped over [his grandmother] and stood there," Willie Lee Walker, a registered nurse who witnessed the incident in the small exam room, later told the newspaper. “There's no way he could've done that.”
Washington later confirmed to authorities the child “glided backward on the floor, wall and ceiling,” a police report stated.
Desperate, Ammons summoned Rev. Michael Maginot in late spring 2012 to perform multiple exorcisms at the property he called a “portal to demons.”
While some remain skeptical about the Ammons’ experiences in the home, then-Gary police Capt. Charles Austin admitted he is not one of them after he visited the home multiple times before its destruction.
“I am a believer,” he told Indy Star.
Ammons eventually moved her family out of the home she has always believed was possessed by demons.
“When you hear something like this,” she’s said, “don't assume it's not real — because I've lived it. I know it's real.”
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