The Ammons Haunting (Gary “Demon House”)

In November 2011 Latoya Ammons, her mother and Ammons’s three children moved into a rented single-storey house in Gary, Indiana. According to the family, strange things began almost at once: swarms of black flies on the porch in December, footsteps and creaking doors, a shadowy figure, and, in the grandmother’s telling, an unseen force that choked her. Over the following months the accounts grew more dramatic. A daughter was said to have levitated above her bed, a son to have been thrown across a room, and a boy, according to a Department of Child Services record, to have walked backwards up a wall.

The case entered official files in April 2012. After the family called their physician on 19 April, he found their behaviour delusional and recorded no paranormal events himself; his office alerted police, and the children were taken to hospital. The state’s child-welfare agency became involved. On 22 April a Catholic priest from the Diocese of Gary, Fr Michael Maginot, interviewed the family and concluded they were being tormented, going on to perform three exorcisms, one of them on Ammons herself. Gary police captain Charles Austin, who visited the home, publicly said he believed something unusual was happening there. The family left the house for Indianapolis in 2012, and the activity is said to have stopped.

The story might have remained local had the Indianapolis Star not published “The Exorcisms of Latoya Ammons” on 25 January 2014, a long report based on police, medical and child-welfare records that Ammons agreed to share. It circulated worldwide. In February 2014 Ghost Adventures host Zak Bagans bought the house for $35,000, filmed there, and had it demolished in January 2016. His 2018 documentary Demon House, released in theatres on 16 March 2018, treated the haunting as real; critics were mixed, and skeptics called it a pseudo-documentary. A fictional Netflix film, The Deliverance, drew on the story in 2024.

Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell, writing for the Center for Inquiry (CSICOP) in 2014, concluded that the events were misreported, exaggerated or had ordinary explanations; he noted that the levitating girl may simply have thrown herself up, and that the boy said to walk up a wall was holding his grandmother’s hand. The landlord and other tenants reported nothing paranormal, and psychologists who interviewed the children concluded that they were acting in line with their mother’s beliefs. Ammons has maintained that what her family experienced was real. The case matters because it shows how a private family crisis, a priest’s ministry and a television host’s purchase turned a modest rental into a national symbol of the “demon house”; the people at its centre, including three children, deserve to be remembered as people first.

According to the family: swarms of flies, footsteps, a shadowy figure, a boot print, a woman choked by an unseen force, a girl levitating, a boy thrown across a room and another walking up a wall. A physician, police, social workers and clergy were involved, and several of the most dramatic claims have been challenged.

A single-storey rental house in Gary, Indiana. The house was demolished in 2016 and the site is private property; no address is given here.

The case inspired Demon House (2018), the Netflix film The Deliverance (2024) and many podcasts and television segments.