When a woman and her family moved into what they believed was their perfect house, their lives were flipped upside down when they learned it was haunted.
And as if living amongst the dark spirits weren’t enough, the ghost of the slave owner who resided on the land has been tormenting the family, pushing them to move out as their dream swiftly turned into a ‘nightmare’.
Chris O’Toole moved into a house originally owned by American novelist J R Abernathy with her wife Vicky and their son Granger.
‘Something drew me to the house – and I don’t know what it was, I just felt compelled to purchase it,’ she explains, in Discovery+’s A Ghost Ruined My Life.
Vicky adds: ‘We thought great things were going to come with this purchase.’
‘Little did I know those memories weren’t going to be the best,’ Chris warns.
They first ignored the fact that there were countless crosses and Bibles placed around the property, and that one room in particular was locked that the previous owner had’refused’ to unlock.
However, shortly after cutting the padlock to the ‘eerie’ chamber, Chris noticed wet tracks on the floor, presuming them to be her son Granger’s after he mischievously walked to the pond outside their house, despite being prohibited to do so.
‘That was the first paranormal experience in the house – the first day I moved in,’ Vicky says.
Chris removed the crosses from the walls over the next several days in an attempt to make their new house their home, but in doing so, she unintentionally tampered with the demonic powers already present.
As a consequence, odd things began to happen: she heard knocks at night, her kid begging for assistance, and when she broke into his room to check on him, she discovered his hand being ‘lifted’ into the air by an unknown force.
Chris later explains in a confessional: ‘I saw that his hand was in the air while he was asleep. It looked like someone was holding his hand, and I put his hand down – it was kind of odd.’
When Chris turns her back, Granger’s arm is hoisted into the air again in the reproduction.
Chris first saw Abernathy’s ghost when she went to examine where a second pair of wet tracks had come from, only to discover a scary man staring back at her through a cabinet’s reflection.
Later that night, Chris noticed additional tracks, and when she went to check, she noticed a guy in the mirror of a cabinet.
‘There was a man, and he looked straight at me, and I’m thinking to myself, where did this come from. Looked there again, and he was gone.’
She continued: ‘Right there I should have known that it was a sign that maybe I shouldn’t have bought the house.’
Chris became’scared’ as further unusual events occurred, including witnessing a small girl playing with Granger who soon ‘vanished’ into apparently thin air, and more and more strange things began to occur.
‘I hear footsteps and I was in the house by myself,’ she says, recalling one terrifying incident.
‘I could see a shadow of boots walking and I could feel the floor flexing and I felt this anxiety come on, and I felt that there was something on top of my shoulders, and it wasn’t heavy but I could feel that there was something there, I told it to get off, it would not get off, I said the name of Jesus Christ, I even cussed at it.’
At that moment, Vicky made a sign of a cross on Chris’ forehead with olive oil, in the hope that it would help, ‘but that’s when things started to get crazy,’ Chris warned.
‘A lot of things happened that changed my life,’ she continues, after the recreation shows one evening when Chris drove home from work and saw Abernathy’s ghost peering around the back of her house.
Another’secret’ she found was the appearance of a’slave lady,’ who vanished minutes after Chris noticed her.
Chris learned that Abernathy was not just a slave owner, but also a murderer and rapist, and that many of the slaves he possessed perished from “accidental drownings.”
‘A lot of bad things happened here, a lot of deaths,’ Chris says. ‘The house was haunted, the land was haunted.’
She adds: ‘These spirits communicate, they want peace, they want their stories to be heard.’
Chris claims Abernathy was ‘in her brain’ during the interview, preventing her from speaking and telling her, ‘No.’
Chris also admits that she was once in a trance and sketched Abernathy’s image while oblivious of what she was doing.
Chris is shown in another horrifying film stepping into the water before being grabbed and dragged down by a hand.
She ultimately fights the creature off and is gasping her way out of the water.
Chris and Vicky eventually seek the assistance of a psychic, but not before Chris finds Abernathy believes she is one of his offspring, which he attempted to drown after raped enslaved women he owned.
‘What I found out wasn’t going to be part of a happy ending,’ she says.
Things really became worse after the medium’s assistance, and one night, the spirit of Abernathy threatened to kill Granger by encircling him with knives for no apparent reason.
‘J R did not like the fact that we knew about his secrets – he wants to kill me,’ Chris tells the camera.
Chris and Vicky eventually decided to leave the house and go elsewhere, but not before revealing who Abernathy truly was.
Chris says: ‘The voices still need to be heard, everyone needs to find peace.
‘If I could give that to those souls, then so be it.’
Chris can still hear Abernathy’s voice despite having moved on.
‘It is surreal to know this energy exists around me,’ she says.
‘He’s still with me and keeps an eye on me.’
Eli Roth Presents: A Ghost Ruined My Life is available to watch from July 14 on discovery+.
Source My Celebrity Life.