Buried Secrets

This story took place at my parent’s home in Brooke County in a town called Wellsburg, WV. My parents purchased this home back in 1995 and it was built back in 1910. They had it completely remodeled due to it being in very bad shape and they moved into it around the second week of January 1996.

All was quiet until March of 2007, I had purchased a wrecked GEO Tracker from our local junkyard and I put it in my parent’s garage and restored it over the winter months of 2006 and finished it in March 2007. While I was in the garage all the lights started to flash like a Morse Code SOS sequence, then all the lights went out. I checked the fuse box and everything looked fine to me so I called my brother-in-law, he’s an electrician and he came over and checked it out and said everything was fine. It made no sense to him, he left.

We had recently put up a new section of fence to keep our dogs in the yard and I told my mother that one of the fence posts may have hit an underground wire that runs from the house to the garage and it was possible that it finally short out.

I went into the house and turned off the main breaker then went back out to the garage and started to dig in the area where I thought the power wire was. I dug down approx 3 to 5 inches and hit what I thought was just a big rock or possibly part of an old foundation. The more I dug the bigger it got. I grabbed a large prybar out of the garage and worked at it and it finally came loose, then up and out, and flipped over.

As I stood there looking at it, I saw a date written on it. It was dated 1880, the rest of the writing below the date fell off. It didn’t dawn on me at that moment what I had just dug up so I yelled for my mother to come to look at it. She came out and said, “oh my god that’s a headstone.”

Approximately 3 feet to the right of the headstone I found a small nameplate with “Lucy” written on it backward and also what looks like an Indian arrowhead. The power wire turned out to be fine and my mother contacted someone in charge of the cemeteries in our county and the guy told her they have no records of a cemetery being in our area and if there was one it must have been an unlisted private one.

Three to five days later we noticed caution tape was put around our neighbor’s business which is 40 feet from our backyard. A few cop cars were parked by his business but we didn’t know what had happened. A few days later my mother took our dogs over to his shop, which is a dog grooming business. My mother asked the owner, who at the time was also the mayor of Wellsburg, about what had happened. He told her a backhoe was working on his parking lot and it sunk down into a big hole and when they got it out they found human remains in the hole and that’s why law enforcement was there. The officers told them to cover it back up which they did.

My mother told him about the headstone and what the guy in charge of the cemeteries said. The mayor told her that back when our part of town was called Lazearville, our block was the cemetery. Supposedly, the bodies were moved to another cemetery but, as you can see, they didn’t move all the graves. He said they found a headstone underneath the floor in his business when they tore it up to replace the floor.

A few days later, our nightmare began. I was in my room reading a book around 2 am and I heard footsteps that traveled from the kitchen to the laundry room. My daughter’s bedroom door opened and in came a blue glowing ball of light about the size of a soccer ball. It hovered for a few seconds and then zipped into my bedroom and vanished at the foot of my bed. I rubbed my eyes and thought to myself am I half asleep or what?

The next day I told my mother about it and she said you only imagined it.

The next night around the same time I heard a noise in my daughter’s bedroom then a crashing sound. I jumped up and ran to her room. My daughter wasn’t in there she was in her grandmother’s bed because she was afraid of the dark. I noticed all of her toys, which were in a large cloth sack, on the floor at the foot of her bed and scattered all over her bed and floor. I put all of her toys back in the sack and put the sack back where it belonged. I tried to make sense of it and tried to recreate it but couldn’t come close.

The next day I told my mother again and she said, “John finding that headstone is messing with your head,” which I thought was neat finding that.

The next day it was my mother’s turn to experience something. She was in the restroom and we heard her yelling so I went and checked on her. She said to whoever is trying to get in the restroom that she would be done in a minute. I said, “mother nobody was back there trying to get in” and she said, “haha, quit playing jokes.”

The next morning I heard her yelling again and this time she was in the kitchen. When I walked in, her eyes were as big as saucers and she was shaking. I asked what’s wrong and she said something came from the living room and it walked right behind her and she said it sounded like it had heavy boots on and there was an ice-cold gust of wind with it.

“It” then decided to pick on my 9-year-old daughter the next day. She was in my mother’s bedroom watching TV and after my mother left the room to go to the restroom, we heard my daughter screaming. We ran in to see what happened and she said an old bald-headed guy wearing a suit walked along the bed then stopped, turned and looked at her, then turned back around, and walked through the wall.

We ended up calling for an ambulance because my daughter was so shaken up that she had an asthma attack and her inhaler wasn’t working. My daughter moved out and moved in with her mother and hasn’t been back here since.

I have a nephew named Adam, he was 11 years old back when all this stuff started to happen, he’s now 26 years old and now works for the Sheriff’s department. Adam said he will never come back to this house. He came to visit us and while he was here, he claimed that he saw an old man in the laundry room watching us while we were watching TV in the living room. My mother, dad, and I all looked and saw nothing. This happened three times, so I told him that I was gonna get my digital camera, and the next time he saw him to nudge me and I would start snapping photos, which he did.

I snapped several photos in a row as I walked from the living room to the laundry room. I did not look straight ahead as I walked, I was focusing on the small screen on the camera. It’s a good thing that I did because if I would have seen with my own eyes what was captured on the camera I would have probably crapped myself.

In the photos, there is what looks like a human skull and it was wearing an old-fashioned flat-top hat and as I approached the laundry room it turned its head and went out the backdoor.

On another day when my nephew was visiting, I was in the garage working on my vehicle. My nephew came into the garage and said uncle Johnny there is a little girl inside the house watching me out the backdoor. I looked and saw nothing. I had a digital camera in the glove box in my vehicle so I gave him the camera and told him to take a picture of her the next time he saw her. He came back into the garage and said here’s your camera back, I took photos of her. I went into the house and put the memory card into the computer and there was a little girl standing at the backdoor wearing a dress that others told us was from back during the 1800s.

One morning I got up and went to the kitchen to get something to drink and two dogs that we used to have, they’re both deceased now, ran past me and stopped in the kitchen where the kitchen meets the living room and both growled and barked toward the livingroom. I stepped into the living room to look and saw a small dark mass moving along the wall so I left and went back to my bedroom and grabbed the digital camera and as soon as I turned the corner I started snapping photos. I captured a bald-headed man wearing a suit, he was seen in my mother’s China Cabinet glass window, and as I walked into the living room I saw his face in a mirror. He said something to me in a deep voice and I felt threatened so I left the living room. As I turned around to yell for the dogs I saw a picture frame lift up off the living room wall and thrown, glass shattered everywhere. I left the house along with the dogs and didn’t return for a while.

We decided it was time to get help, my mother asked our church and they didn’t want to be involved for whatever reason so we wrote to paranormal groups and a group came from Ohio called the Ohio Researchers of Banded Spirits (ORBS). They brought a priest with them. They captured EVPs and EMF hits in the garage and said they heard footsteps. They went into the house and captured more EVPs, EMF hits, and said they saw a 7-foot tall shadow person in the basement, which they captured on a thermal camera. They said it attacked the priest by trying to hit him.

The priest blessed the house, property, and us. He said it was gone and we shouldn’t have any more problems, which it seemed like it did work for the first couple of months before it started back up again with knocking at the front and back door and when my mother went to look, nobody was there.

The group that came here contacted a TV show called “My Ghost Story Caught on Camera”, then those people contacted us, and they picked us to be on that show, which aired on December 28, 2012, and was titled “Beyond the Grave”. We were also picked to be on “Paranormal Survivor”, which aired on October 20, 2018, and was titled “Buried Secrets”. The priest that came here wrote a book called “The Ekballist“, which is based on actual demonic encounters, and put this house in his book. The Ohio group said they investigated hundreds of haunted locations and this house ranks in their top 5.

The most recent harmful thing that has happened here was last year, my elderly mother was pulled out of her bed and it was captured on a nanny cam, a camera was put in her room because she said something kept touching her, which was also captured on camera. I was partially pulled out of my bed after I saw a shadow person in my bedroom. I have been scratched and a few others as well, that have visited us. My mother had bruises on her arm that looked like fingerprints and a few others said it looked like a bite mark. We saw small flashing white lights all of the time and it’s been captured on security cameras multiple times. An apparition has been captured a few times on the cameras and voices talking and objects being moved and thrown.

The last paranormal investigator that visited was back around June 2018. He wrote a book called “Real West Virginia Hauntings: Volume 1“, which also had a story about this house titled the “Wellsburg Devil House.” When he was here he stood in an area inside our garage that is sinking and asked if he was standing on anyone’s grave. A female’s voice responded saying, “yes.”

We’ve been trying to get someone to come out here since the last investigator was here, we have reached out to most of the paranormal TV shows, and we have had no response from anybody. We would like to find a group that could possibly bring ground-penetrating radar equipment or even cadaver dogs so that we can find out where all the graves are. The house also needs to be blessed again, it has been blessed 3 times now and it’s still very much here!