Celina Summers's Blog

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In 2016, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was rocked by the news that a priest, Erwin Mena, had been arrested on multiple charges--twenty-two felonies and eight misdemeanors--for crimes ranging from fraud to theft. Shocking news at the best of times. 

“We had always been raised not to question authority figures. He’s a priest — what he said is holy writ,” Joaquin Oviedo, a retired high school teacher, said. “We never imagined he was a phony.” Problem was...Mena wasn't a priest. In fact, he was an imposter. Not only did he abscond with tens of thousands of dollars (and that's only what they know about) but weddings had to be re-officiated by legitimate priests, as did baptisms, christenings, and other sacraments. But lost in all the legal mumbo-jumbo, there's a more intimate, painful, human cost. 
Mena's not the only such imposter. More fake priests are defrocked every year. In 2018, for example, a man named Miguel Angel Ibarra was exposed right before Christmas after eighteen years of posing as a Catholic priest. The Colombian native was caught at the parish he'd been preaching at in Medina Sidonia, Spain after investigation proved he'd falsified his ordination paperwork. 
Religion is a huge part of the human experience. Roughly a decade ago, the Pew Research Survey counted well over two billion Christians on this planet, and is now nearing two and a half billion worshipers. In recent years, there's been a huge rise in reports of dark or demonic hauntings. The Catholic Church was overwhelmed with requests for exorcisms, becoming so inundated that they were caught off-guard. This led to the establishment of a Course on Exorcism and Prayersof Liberation at the Pontifical University of Regina Apostolorum within the Holy See.

What's that, you ask? It's literally exorcist school. Right now, the Vatican is working to place an exorcist into every diocese in the world, including here in the US. In fact, the exorcism course is a non-denominational class, where prospective exorcists from any religion can study the most dangerous form of spiritual warfare possible. If that doesn't convince you of the urgency the Holy See is approaching the rising threat caused to humanity by the diabolical, nothing will. 

And this is where the paranormal and spiritual worlds collide in a very pragmatic and potentially lethal way. Although only about a third of America's nearly 200 dioceses have official exorcists who've been trained by a Catholic church, there are innumerable exorcists who claim to conduct spiritual warfare against demons outside of Catholicism. While some of these exorcists are sincerely going toe to toe with demonic entities, some are not. If the subject of a demonic attack gets hooked up with a fake exorcist, his situation can go from worse to worst. 

Yes, I used worse/worst instead of bad/worse deliberately. 

So how do you tell the difference between a real exorcist and a fake one? Well, it requires someone that most victims of demonic attacks are running a little short on. Meticulous attention to detail. 

Let's clear something up at the onset. Do you have to get a Catholic priest to help you if you're under demonic attack? Once upon a time--and a surprisingly recent time, too--the clergy of protestant denominations would tell people who'd come to them for help that only a Catholic priest could exorcise a demon. Even then, though, the Catholic church wasn't exactly happy to help someone out. Especially after the release of William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist and the subsequent film two years later, exorcism suddenly came 'into fashion'. The tag line 'based upon a true story' titillated audiences, and the idea that demonic possession was actually real permeated pop culture almost overnight--something that rarely happened in an age before the internet. 

In an interview I conducted with top US Exorcist Father Gary Thomas (San Jose, CA diocese) in 2017, the Exorcist craze caught the church off-guard because Catholicism itself was in a state of flux. There was a growing sense among the Catholic clergy that Satan and demons were allegorical--basically literary devices created to personify evil and give it a form of sentience. 
But that's not necessarily the case. While sure, there's a definite trend towards tulpas (a belief so powerful that it essentially creates what the person/people believe in) as a possible explanation for the growing number of demonic cases in the US, there's still a significant number of exorcisms conducted in the world--not only by the Catholic Church but by ministers and priests of a wide number of religions. So no, you don't necessarily have to have a Catholic priest exorcise you or your family or your home. 
But you need to do your due diligence. Make certain the clergyman you talk to is a practicing minister of a legitimate religion. Many scam artists operate under the umbrella of the "old Catholic Church" or the "Order of Exorcists" or "The Sacred Order of St, Michael the Archangel". Some purported exorcists claim to be able to train you to become one as well--for a nominal fee. The fact of the matter is that in my opinion, you need to go first to the minister of your own church and ask him or her for guidance. And before you let anyone drag you into a spiritual struggle with the demonic, you have to be--NEED to be--vetted medically and psychologically. That's a condition the Catholic Church has imposed in order for an exorcism to take place, and believe me: that's something you want to make absolutely certain happens. 
The easiest way to find out if an exorcist isn't what he or she purports to be is to run the street address provided on their webpage through Google maps. If the street level view is of a strip mall (with a UPS Store or Mailboxes storefront in particular) or an apartment block, I wouldn't trust my health, safety, and spirituality to that alleged exorcist. 
You could ignore me, naturally. I wouldn't recommend it. 
Stay tuned, folks. There are about to be a lot of new entries in the coming weeks. I'm researching my new books on the paranormal, Demonic Synchronicity (about common occurrences in pre-internet demonic hauntings) and The Bell Entity (why "Bell Witch" is an inhuman entity perpetrating one of the longest and most violent hauntings in America). I'll be investigating several sites just as soon as the quarantines lift, and I'll post my findings here. If nothing else, it should be a rip-roarin' spooky time. 
But even that pales in comparison to what could happen to anyone who falls into the clutches of the paranormal parasites. Next up in this series? Textbook cases of exorcisms gone bad and why they did. 
The Annaliese Michel case, and why that's not the only horror story out there. 

Our world is no longer ours, but it has a soundtrack and illustrations most folks don't know about. So play the soundtrack as you read this piece, and I'll share some truly extraordinary art. The arts are where I find my self-expression, and so I'll use them as I try to make sense of the last ten days. 


The soundtrack (hit play then read):
 

And back to our world as we all try to reclaim it as our own.
Danse des morts--1493 painting by Michael WolegemutOn the surface, nothing seems to have drastically changed. The spring is settling in. Leaves are fleshing out the trees. Crocuses, daffodils, and forsythia are blooming in my yard. When I stepped outside a few minutes ago in the earliest hours of a new day--March 30th, 2020--I could smell all the scents of an early Ohio spring, driven up the cliff this road winds along the edge of by the soft howl of winds still lingering from the storms that crashed overhead all last night and early today.

But now? Now we're dancing to a horrible new tune and we don't know the steps.

We all had ample time to prepare for this, frankly. Years. All the bug-out people we laughed at a few months ago aren't worried about finding toilet paper somewhere tomorrow. Most of the rest of us are. I'm not because I'm married to the kind of man who's just built for crisis management. Sent him out for milk and he came back with twenty rolls of toilet paper, sixteen rolls of paper towels, and six boxes of tissues. Sent him out the next day for bread and he shows up with ten pounds of ground beef, five pounds of chicken, and a huge pork roast. My husband is a handy guy to have around. I'm lucky in that respect. 
But there's no guarantee matters will remain this way. Now that the quarantine--yes, I'm calling "social distancing" what it really is at its core--has been extended for a full month I find myself wondering how things will transpire after Pandemic Day Twenty...or Thirty...or Seventy-five. 

[image error]Koper Regional Museum 16th Century fresco I'm no different from anyone else these days. I read the increasingly grim news, watch the briefings, lose my temper with idiots disseminating misinformation online, and then go back over all the news I've just tried to absorb in the hopes that I've missed something...that somehow, things are getting better and they're back on track. 
Then I have to force myself to realize that no, things aren't getting better at all. 
Three days ago, America had 1000+ deaths from COVID-19. Yesterday, that total had doubled. Tragically, that exponential growth is only too easy to calculate, and if I told you "you do the math", you'd be able to do that math easily and in your head. Math, never my favorite subject of learning, is even more loathsome now than it's ever been.

Facts and figures combine, dancing in front of my eyes like a mural on a medieval ossuaries like a violently spinning danse macabre and no one gets to sit this dance out. We're all dancing to a tune hummed by a virus and composed by microorganisms so tiny but oh so easily capable of felling the strongest humans it pirouettes around...then into...then through until finally the melody fades and man meets his mortality.
[image error] St. Nicholas Cathedral-Tallinn, Estonia
fragment 16th century painting
During the Middle Ages in Europe, the Danse Macabre was an allegorical reference to the inevitability of Death in times of plague or epidemic. In some of Europe's oldest extant cemeteries, the Danse Macabre was portrayed by artists as a bacchanalia shared by mortals and the Grim Reaper, where they danced wildly, drank freely, and had orgies--a last hurrah before everyone's dance ended.

Math, music, melody, macabre, mortality.

A pandemic with a soundtrack.

A way to tell Death to go fuck himself or to bring you a new bottle of wine. 
You probably recognized the music, but not many people would recognize this as the Danse Macabre, composed by Camille Saint-Saens in 1874. The images are all depictions of the Danse Macabre from medieval Europe. In a harsh day to day life and faced with the horrors of smallpox or the bubonic plague, people looked to what they assumed would be their last few days as a time to sample all of life's pleasures if they could. That's what the Danse Macabre is all about really. I mean--if you're going to have black boils rise on your body with a high fever and terrible pain and you know those boils are going to literally explode, spraying contagious black pus all over everything then who cares if the old guy next door sees your boobs? In a world where "medicine" consisted of drinking nasty potions that were usually poisonous or getting your veins laid open with a rusty knife to allow the "evil humors" to leave your body, your survival rate wasn't all that great. So they celebrated the fun stuff in anticipation of the fatal stuff. 

But for us, things are different. Instead of partying like it's 1999 with all our friends while we wait to die, the world of medicine is totally different. Clean. Sterile, Fighting off the contagion while relieving the symptoms. We don't have a kegger and invite Death to come on in and do body shots of tequila. No, our Danse Macabre is much different.

The Dance of Death,
Polish painting circa 1670Politics.

Look--the plague isn't partisan. Coronavirus will kill liberals, conservatives, communists, socialists, monarchists, moderates, and dictators without bias or prejudice. This isn't a Red State/Blue State issue or problem. Look around you right now--is there any political base untouched by this pandemic? No. So if you're too evolved, too educated to get a blindfolded group sex party together to combat "social distancing" with an allegorical medieval character toting a scythe, then you don't need to get your information about the pandemic from a politician/elected official/minister/waste management/Geek Squad/Reddit/old dude down the street/Twitter/Facebook/partridge in a pear tree/Grim Reaper/blogger.

You need to listen to the DOCTORS. Because right now? Medical researchers and physicians are the only ones who are providing information regarding the virus dispassionately and accurately. If you don't, you might as well invite the Devil to pick you up at five because what the politicians are feeding us as "facts" is actually all spin-doctored propaganda, devised with an eye toward the upcoming election. The doctors don't give a damn about their TV ratings or how much interaction their Tweets are getting. What they care about is advising the public on how best to avoid infection and that's primarily the information we all need.

See, the end result of the Danse Macabre has always been the same. Once the music ends, the dance is over for all the dancers. They leave their mortal shells behind for the death details to pick up and they follow the Grim Reaper into Death. And if you get your "facts" from a politician, that's the outcome you're risking.

So yes, our world doesn't seem to have changed much on the surface of things. But we all know--whether we admit it or not--that everything is totally different now than it was a month ago. We're facing a legitimate crisis that supersedes any global threat of my lifetime. It doesn't matter when this pandemic is finally brought to a close because COVID-19 is going to leave behind a world that's lost its innocent belief that our society is too advanced and tech-savvy to fall prey to a microbe.

Hopefully, we'll all end up wiser when this is over. One of the best ways to ensure that happens is to decline the temptation to twirl in the arms of Death during our ultra-modern Danse Macabre. Politicians aren't going to solve this pandemic. They're as qualified to cure you as those medieval "physicians" with their rusty, bloodstained knives and their possets made of stones from a goat's stomach crushed with ivory and mixed with donkey bile.

Whatever you do, sit out the Danse Macabre. For all our sakes.

I think we've all wondered at times if the world could survive a crisis. 

For those of us who were kids in the 1970s and 80s, the catalyst of disaster was nuclear weapons. I'll never forget the day that I finally figured out that "duck and cover" wouldn't do anything but give us something to do right before we died. I was ten. 
Then, of course, terrorism became the boogeyman. Not so much in small town or small city USA, which is where I've lived most of my life but in big cities. Washington. Los Angeles. 
Manhattan. 
The past decade or so the agent of dystopian fear has been more imaginary. The Walking Dead, aka the zombie apocalypse. Yeah, not too scary for me. I write horror for fun. 
But now? Now we're looking at an antagonist that shouldn't have ever existed--a pandemic that so far cannot be halted with modern medicine. The fears of a pandemic have been an on-again, off-again nightmare for the past twenty years. Pretty much started for me when those f**king idiots were sending around anthrax in the wake of 9/11. Whether it was ebola or SARS, there was always something lurking around the corner that fizzled out before it impacted too many people in Europe and the US.

Until now.

I don't have words of wisdom for you that will explain all this. I don't have the medical training to discuss anything more than the most minor factoids that the CDC and common sense would dictate. That being said, however--

Politics is something I can write about.

Here's the situation in a nutshell. The past 12-15 years, the American government has been stagnated by party politics. No, I don't give a damn about either party. When you get right down to it, the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans who are just as bad as the Democrats. I'd love to stack some more party names into that statement, but the fact of the matter is that we have no other viable parties. Corruption, back room deals, big industry and pharmaceuticals, special interest groups, PACs and SuperPACs, religious organizations, and lobbyists--that's who really controls the American government. Not the voters.

Not us.

Never has this been more apparent than now, during a global pandemic, when the US government couldn't get its shit together long enough to cross the aisle and come up with solutions to the crises now facing us. Yeah, I know. You've heard me snarling about the two-party system for years. But now it's no longer just a personal dislike. The COVID-19 virus has got me spooked and I'm not afraid to say it. And in the meantime, while you and me and billions of other people worldwide are staring down the barrel of the pandemic shotgun the United States government can't even agree on what's necessary to supply aid to its citizens who already are having to deal with supply shortages on food and other necessities, loss of pay for folks who live paycheck to paycheck or who are tipped employees, and a medical system that's already overwhelmed at the front end of this outbreak. With models of the outbreak leaning toward the peak infection rate in the US not coming until July, take a good look around you.

We're living in a REM song.

An article from The Atlantic over the weekend by Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer traced the nightmarish incompetence of the federal government to give the medical and research sectors the ability to assertively track, diagnose, and treat the coronavirus. Their article also gave viral expert and research scientist Trevor Bedford a platform to share some truly alarming facts.

If there is one thing about the novel coronavirus that you must understand, it’s that it is a firecracker with a long fuse. Here is what the explosion looks like: Every six days, the number of people infected by the disease doubles, according to estimates from Bedford and other epidemiologists. At the start of February, Bedford now believes, the United States had something like 430 infections; if American interventions have done nothing to slow the disease’s spread, then his simple calculations show that more than 120,000 people could be infected by this weekend. Because of the great uncertainty, it’s probably most appropriate to give Bedford’s range: About 60,000 to 245,000 people are now infected with COVID-19 in the United States.

So if the current models are correct and Americans won't see the virus peak until July, we're looking at four and a half months of dealing with the ramifications of the coronavirus. Think about it: life without schools, churches, and for most Americans their jobs and/or income. Sheltering at home turns into an elongated vigil, and when you do have to run out to the store or the bank then you face three weeks when every little cough or sneeze feels significant. And if you catch coronavirus, you face quarantine for weeks by a medical community that's woefully understaffed and undersupplied.

There is no one person to blame. The blame can be spread around evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the House of Representatives and the Senate, the CDC and state and local health monitoring facilities. The CDC didn't confirm community transmission of COVID-19 until February 26 even though there were already at least sixty known cases in the US.

And the White House. Oh yes, plenty of blame to be slathered onto the Oval Office where the President of the United States first mocked the virus and delayed federal response to the eruption of the medical and financial impacts of COVID-19 through January, February, and over half of March before Trump assembled his too-little too-late task force. And no, that's not partisan. That's a fact. Just a few examples:

At a February 10 campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire: "And by the way, the virus, they're working hard. Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away."
In a February 26 briefing at the White House: The infection seems to have gone down over the last two days.  As opposed to getting larger, it’s actually gotten smaller.  In one instance where we think we can be — it’s somewhat reliable, it seems to have gotten quite a bit smaller.

In a February 27 meeting with African-American leaders: "It’s going to disappear.  One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.  And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better.  It could maybe go away.  We’ll see what happens.  Nobody really knows."

And all sorts of other examples, which you can find for yourself in this cross-referenced article on the Mercury News.

But, it's not just the Trump administration who are guilty of screwing the biggest and most infectious pooch the US has faced since the 1917-18's Spanish flu epidemic.Both sides of the aisle have been tinkering with federal legislation to alleviate the disaster-in-the-making coronavirus, ticky-tacking so that pet projects can also benefit from emergency legislation. And just last night, the Democrats killed an Emergency Economic Relief legislation in the Senate--$1.8 trillion dollars of legislation desperately needed to help Americans financially and shore up the US stock market.

You know--maybe there were valid reasons for voting that aid package down. Maybe there were inherent flaws or oblique advantages for the big-pharmaceutical corporations that support Trump and other Republicans. But in the end, that doesn't matter to most Americans. What does matter right now is feeding their kids or finding things like meat, milk, fresh vegetables, and paper products in the grocery store. And as we stare into the face of what's looking dangerously more like another depression instead of a recession, Americans don't give a damn about someone getting a bridge package in Timbuktu approved. All they care about is getting the help they need, and it's glaringly obvious that nothing is more important to the politicians in Washington than scoring off their opponents no matter what they toss aside in the process.

So yes, Americans. Your government has failed you yet again, only this time we're not talking about some stupid impeachment trial. We're talking about decisions being made, legislation being killed, delusions being reported as fact. We're talking about a legislature that doesn't seem to care how many people are sick or dying because all they really care about is winning their reelection campaigns. We're talking about a President of the United States who's now glorifying himself as the hero of the pandemic by keeping COVID-19 when just in the past month he's mocked the virus, downplayed its importance, stalled a federal response that might have saved lives, and turned the pandemic into a polarizing morass of conflicting information so heinous that his own team has to step forward and correct or refute what Trump said just moments before.

We're talking about the real pandemic in this country: a two-party political system that should be held responsible for the spread of the virus in America and every single death that occurs because the patient was not diagnosed early enough or the hospitals and physicians don't have the equipment they need to help.

The real pandemic here? The escalating inadequacy of the federal government to effect positive change on behalf of its citizens. That's the real diagnosis of this disaster. The federal government is nothing more than a roiling, diseased collection of Typhoid Marys infecting the American way of life. And even when there is a vaccine for coronavirus (and we're realistically looking at 1-2 years before there's any sort of preventative or cure for COVID-19) the self-injected infection of the federal government will still remain and the citizens of this country are the physicians who are baffled about how to halt the spread of the disease.

Physician, heal thyself. Eliminate the real disease that's centralized in DC. Kick them ALL out and start over because this catastrophe could have been avoided with just one politician willing to take a stand on behalf of all the rest of us. We were failed by the people we elected to represent our basic existence in this nation.

So yes, physician, heal thyself and remember that there is a cure for the real pandemic here. It's called "Election Day".

Author's note: This preview was written sitting inside the main chapel of the House of Wills the first day that the Travel Channel's show, It Feels Evil, was shot. But there was literally no way to suspect that the investigation would take the turn it did. Present initially as a writer, not an investigator, I was quickly sucked in with the rest of the team as we tried to decipher just what in the hell was going on in that place. Or to us, to be honest.

When the team pulls into the parking lot of the House of Wills in Cleveland, Ohio the wind howls around us while rain slashes against the crumbling building. Perfect conditions for a landmark paranormal investigation. The team heads into the building for its first look at the location, and there’s a definite sense of unease pulsing around all of them. Although it’s still daylight, the interior of the building is dark. The central chapel would be pitch black and silent if it wasn’t for the thunderstorm pounding outside and the chamber open to the sky. But despite the wind that is shrieking through the narrow corridors and winding staircases, the air is heavy…humid…and smells of decay, death, and rot. I always thought something about the building was disconcerting.
Sitting inside it, I now see why. 
The House of Wills has a definite sense of purpose. A will of its own, if you’ll pardon the pun. The atmosphere is watchful and definitely sports a malevolent edge. There’s no way to escape the isolation of this ravaged beauty on a June afternoon that feels more like March, but it’s only inside the building that one gets the sense that something’s not quite right.  
The House of Wills is cold, cold, cold and its atmosphere presses in upon you like the grave.  
Through the gaping windows on the second-floor gallery, the sky looks orange and the tree branches are whipping from side to side. The chapel has gone from repressive to malevolent. The House of Wills is nothing like it was in its heyday. Once it was a Turnverein, a German social club that promoted the ideals of Eugenics—a theory which would become the foundation of Hitler's genocide in WWII—in the twilight of the nineteenth century. Then, in a staggering reversal of purpose, the building served as a Jewish school in the dawn of the twentieth century. Most famously it was a funeral home that was one of the largest African-American-owned businesses in the US for over three decades. This ruined building went, within the space of fifty years, from a building whose owners espoused beliefs that led to the Holocaust but then became a power structure at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement.  
How would such an volte-face affect a building? Is that conflict at the heart of the alleged haunting here?
Current owner, artist Eric Freeman, is high priest of a religion he co-founded with the grandson of Anton LeVey. LeVey took Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic cult and his writings on magick and turned them into a religion (and profitable business venture) in the San Francisco of the 1960’s.  Freeman uses the  former House of Wills not only as his curated art gallery, but also for religious purposes.
There’s never been a place more perfectly suited to be haunted, but that’s not what brings the team to Cleveland. The House of Wills was designed to channel, store, and conduct energy.  The building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was built by renowned area architect Frederic Striebinger, a thirty-second degree Mason, in 1900. 
That energy is what we're chasing.
This chapel was once a consecrated site, where thousands of families attended the Christian last rites of loved ones. But since the death of J. Walter Wills in 1971, the building’s been desecrated, first by the family who owned it, then by the gangs and drug dealers who took it over when it was abandoned. Now, the building would be almost unrecognizable to the people who once loved it. 
Something inimical and cautious lurks among these relics of Egyptian grandeur—fake relics, of course. A reproduction sarcophagus shares the space with a massive carved head of Baphomet, the horned god of Satanic worship, and the crumbling plaster of art deco glory. This old building still possesses dignity in her aged splendor, but has been cannibalized by her own children and desecrated by her own community. You can tell that desecration has been dark for it is never daytime in this place.
In the House of Wills, it is always night. 
On the former chapel's stage, an ornate casket sits upon a bier, flanked by two massive red-upholstered chairs that look like thrones. In front of one throne, ritual candles await their time to burn. The uses the building is put to are painfully obvious. The House of Wills is decaying faster than its owner can repair it. For all practical purposes, there’s nowhere in the world better suited to the task the team has been set: researching what we're beginning to believe may be a demonic attachment.  
I have to wonder if it's wise to expect this team, several of whom have been battling against their own demons for years, to attempt contact with any diabolical agency. The House of Wills, therefore, is both a battleground and a research facility, but hopefully will lead us all down a path that hopefully will lead to greater knowledge.  
Is it worth the risk? I'm not sure.
I have to be honest: this is one of the few places that has ever creeped me out instantly. I'm as sensitive as a brick so I'm used to everyone else around me being able to sense there's something about a site that just isn't right. Other folks have the instincts that lead them to paranormal activity. Tim Wood, our lead investigator, is one of the best guys I've ever seen when it comes to that. I tend to get dragged into paranormal synchronicities (like what happened when we were conducting the Zozo experiment) or I piss something off and get slapped upside the back of my head (like numerous trips to the haunted fields and cave involved in the Bell Witch haunting).
But in this moment, right after I first set foot into the House of Wills, I'm overwhelmed by the cold certainty that this is not a place to be trifled with. 
Aside from the general decrepitude of the building, it's pouring rain outside. And inside. That's rendered almost every square foot of floor into a slick, threatening expanse to navigate. Despite the fact that it's summer, the interior of this building is freezing. I'm usually the person who walks into an alleged haunted site without concern, automatically looking for anything that could debunk evidence previously caught by other teams or witness accounts. At the House of Wills, that's not possible. 
Not just because it's spooky. This place plays to a lifetime of horror movie tropes.
But something in this building feels like it's aware, and it knew we were coming. The House of Wills is anticipating...something. Or someone.
Naturally, that sends me straight into "blame Tim" mode.
Always has to be Tim's fault, right? I mean my research is rarely targeted by some supernatural entity...unless Tim's involved. Then all kinds of crazy stuff happens. But this trip is different. The crazy stuff started before I started the car to drive up here. I'm starting to think whatever is gloating at me in the House of Wills sent me a direct warning at home yesterday...the day before I left for Cleveland: 
Be careful. I'm watching you. No one involved in the shoot knows what I'm about to relate except the executive producer and Tim.
Yesterday, I was packing for the trip in my office, so my suitcase was open on the bed. I was talking on the phone when all of a sudden, a section of the ceiling collapsed. Flooring, drywall, insulation, and God knows what else fell all over me and my nearly-completed packing. 
Ever have to dig insulation out of a suitcase? I don't recommend it. Not fun. 
Aside from a sizable lump on my head, the way the whole incident went down was baffling.
Evidently something heavy in the attic had fallen between the floor joists onto the drywall, bringing a full three-foot section down in the middle of my office. Missed my bookcases, thankfully. I would have been hugely pissed if my books had been screwed up. In fact, the majority of the material that fell went smack dab into the middle of my suitcase. 
Except for one chunk of drywall. That smashed me in the head.
Here's the kicker: everything was dry. Not wet. As for whatever had caused the collapse, there wasn't a sign. It was almost like someone had stepped between the joists and stepped directly on the drywall. The incident made no sense in the normal, mundane everyday would we all inhabit.
But shivering in the dark chapel of the House of Wills, that "accident" makes perfect sense after the fact. The irony of trading one collapsed ceiling for another is too pointed to miss.
I was being warned by something that maybe this little jaunt to Cleveland wasn't such a great idea. Me being me, I shrugged it off and came up anyway like I'd been double dog dared by Flick on the playground. Nothing like a challenge, right? 
But as I sit here, with the storm lashing the building and the day waning into nighttime, I have to wonder if accepting the challenge was the smart thing to do. I have a good idea what might be lying in wait for us now that I've taken my first steps into this site. A familiar miasma, hovering over everything. The difficulties the film crew are having to combat. The mood of the investigators. The sense that something is just not right. 
I've felt this supernatural aura before. This is the first haunted location I've ever walked into and immediately had to evaluate my judgment as a result. I have no idea what's about to happen, but I have the feeling that it's going to be bad. 
Really bad.Author's note: By the end of that episode shoot, it was apparent that this time we had all miscalculated what the effects of putting this investigative team into that location would be. Disastrous. You can check out what happened at the House of Wills tonight at 11 pm EST, 8 pm PST in It Feels Evil on the Travel Channel. Basically, it's a master class on 'why you shouldn't ignore your guts when investigating'...for all of us. 
Additional note: As I was preparing to schedule this post for release, the same section of the same room's ceiling just collapsed. Again. Apparently, I've pissed something off. Again.

Author's note: This document continues our investigation into paranormal research, and was submitted to the producers of It Feels Evil as a comparison piece for/against the website currently maintained by the owner and on her website prior to the investigation. Sorry it's a little late--holidays and all that.

A few things to remember when looking at this website���many paranormal groups (including Ghost Adventures) have taken that website as gospel and reproduced it word for word. Never accept a ���history��� on a website as fact. Also, if there are paranormal instances cited throughout a history article, up to and including the names of alleged spirits and even what they say/do, that usually means someone doesn���t want you looking at the real history for whatever reason and want to distract you with a ���look at what our ghosts do!!!��� moment. But if the history is wrong, chances are that one or more of the alleged spirits is either what a psychic claimed to have sensed or imagination, providing a false validation of what���s really going on. So let���s take a look at what the o want us to think and what we know:

Website--From before 5000 B.C. to around 1000 A.D the area was the site of Native American encampments. Artifacts from this time can still be found here. Archeologists (sic) have provided evidence showing that Native Americans once lived in the area where the house currently sits. There have also been signs of a sweat lodge where Native Americans performed rituals. An ancient Indian burial ground is thought to be under the house.

Fact���okay anything from 5000 BC to 1000 AD isn���t Native American. It���s prehistoric. We���re talking about predating the Incan and Mayan peoples, and the dates cited cover both the archaic and the late Prehistoric period. HOWEVER, the period after 1000 AD is and should be the points of reference here. There���s no record of archaeologists (correct spelling) ever documenting evidence that proves Native Americans lived on/near the land where the house sits. There���s certainly not any record I can find of a dig conducted there. There���s no record of a sweat lodge. There���s no record of an Indian burial ground either, and if there WAS one under the house we should be able to record that by getting into the crawl space. (If there���s no crawl space, then there���s no way whatsoever that anyone knows what���s under the house for the simple reason that no one can get there.) All that being said, the area around San Antonio was occupied relatively continuously by indigenous people until the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Native American tribes were continuously forced west by the encroachment of European settlers and it would be odd if they hadn���t camped near a water source, especially during the summer when these tribes migrating for hunting.

According to the San Antonio Office of Historical Preservation, there were hundreds of Native American tribes in central Texas during the historic period from 1700 AD on, but these tribes are the worst documented in the historical and archaeological records.


Website: On September 18, 1842 General Adrian Woll, Sam Houston and his men massacred more than 60 Mexican soldiers during the bloody Battle of Salado. Their bodies were left to rot where they fell. Only one Texan lost his life, Steven Jett, during the battle.



Fact: That the battle took place there is apparently close to the truth, but General Adrien Woll was the French-Mexican general of the Mexican troops, while the Texans were led by Colonel Matthew Caldwell of the Texas Rangers. Woll commanded over 1600 Mexican and Cherokee troops against Caldwell���s militia of right around 200. There���s no mention of Sam Houston being anywhere close to this battle, since in 1842 he was serving his second non-consecutive term as President of Texas and was in, appropriately enough, Houston. Caldwell���s militia defeated Woll, who retreated back to Mexico, leaving his 60 dead behind. And yes���only one Texan lost his life and was interred properly while the Mexicans were left to rot.

Website: The Prescott House was built on the property after the civil war.
Sebastian L Rippstein (2/4/1824 - 7/14/1896), born in Switzerland, and his wife, Hemrieke "Betsy" Ackermann Rippstien (6/1/1834 - 9/15/1911), born in Germany, settled the land in 1867. The San Antonio Conservation Society shows that they built a stone house barn and milking barn on the property. Their children were Gustav Juilan (1851-1920), Henriettta Rippstein Seay (1854-1932), Bertha "Betty" Dorthea Rippstein Schaefer (1858-1920), Ida Rippstein Benfer (1870-1951), and Albert Rippstein (1874-1941).


Fact: You can see on this map the layout of the battle. About a third of the way down, you see the dark square that represents the Prescott house on top of a hill overlooking the river. What I find interesting about this is that there���s no mention of the Prescotts ever owning that property. (more on this confusion later) The first structures built on the property were built in 1867 by the Rippstein family, German immigrants who started a dairy business. The barn and dairy barn are purported to have been built by them. But the house that���s there now is NOT the house of the Rippsteins as best I can tell and definitely isn���t the Prescotts��� house either.



Now in this next shot, you can get a glimpse of the Black Swan Inn with the huge barns behind it, a cemetery in front of it, and across what appears to be a major road is Salado Creek. The historical marker for the Battle of Salado Creek is just outside and to the west of the gates to the BSI on Holbrook Road, which is the thoroughfare between the BSI and the Salado River���

Wait a second. I have to wonder where in the heck is the Salado River on BSI���s side of the river? Because of the claims of a natural spring on the property, you���d logically think they���d be on/near the river. Also, topographically, it���s obvious that the battle itself was fought with the Texan militia blocking the Mexican army���s advance from positions tight up against the river and behind the Prescott house which is right about where the road is today.

But that���s not all. As you can see, the big barns are behind the BSI, but on the map of the battle the barns the website claimed were part of the Prescott property are not there. There���s one outbuilding shown on the property, and it���s tight up against the big house. So the barns currently on the BSI property can���t have anything to do with the Prescotts, and were probably built in/after 1867 when the Rippsteins bought the property.

There���s a reason for that (and subsequently a reason that the big house wasn���t built until 1901-02). Many European farmers built two story barns with the animals on the ground floor and the people on an upper floor. They do that in Europe for the extra heat the animals give off. Obviously in Texas, this would suck profusely 7 months of the year. My guess is the ���stone house barn��� referenced on the website is what the owner���s talking about. That means the Rippsteins and the Mahlers, who bought the property twenty years later in 1887, lived in a residence inside/above the cows in the barn below until having the first house built on the property���but that house wasn���t the house that���s currently there.

Website: German immigrants, Heinrich "Henry" Mahler (9/2/1840 - 4/18/1925) and Marie Biermann Mahler (7/15/1850 - 7/25/1923), bought the property on January 10, 1887. They built the first house on the property in 1887 (Bexar County Appraisal District shows 1902 and San Antonio Conservation Society shows 1901 for the year built). Their children were Samuel George Mahler (1/21/1876 - 4/21/1937), Louisa Catherine Mahler Prange (11/1/1879 - 1/10/1918), Sara "Suzie" Mahler Schlegel (2/27/1882 - 3/23/1958), Daniel Henry Mahler (11/11/1884 - 5/27/1950). They also built a milking barn and named the farm Bluebonnet Dairy. Henry and Sam were known as the Cotton Kings. The Mahlers ran the dairy farm here until the mid-1930s.

Fact: What makes this odd is that the website claims the Mahlers built the house in 1887 BUT the San Antonio Conservation Society AND the Bexar County Appraisal District don���t show a house (that didn���t involve cow storage) built on the property until 1902/1901 respectively. Also, why were Henry and son, Sam, known as the ���Cotton Kings��� when they were running a 200-acre dairy farm? Shouldn���t they be known as the Cow Kings or the Cream Kings instead? So there are multiple red flags here that lead me to believe substantial parts of this section of the history have been manufactured instead of researched.

Website: After Mahler���s wife passed away, he followed suit two years later from lovesick grief. Heinrich also haunts the Milking Barn and roams the property, including inside the main house. His daughter, Sara "Suzie" pulls pranks in a building located behind the Black Swan.

Facts: Case in point. First off, there���s no way anyone dies of grief. That���s BS until and unless a proper medical association assigns ���lovesick grief��� as an actual diagnosis. I don���t expect that to happen anytime soon. Second off, again with stating anything paranormal-related as an actual fact. This continues to deteriorate as the "history" continues. Note that Suzie is Henry's daughter. This becomes important.

Website: Carl Mahler from Germany had a daughter named Sophia Louise Mahler Meyers, a spinster who lived in the house until she was 82, but haunts the house as an 8-year-old girl singing and laughing and known for playing tricks on people.

Fact: There���s no context for this. We don���t know who Carl is, or why he lived there. This is the first time he's mentioned. Same thing for his daughter, who is apparently stuck there as an 8-year-old girl. But here's the most telling clue that something about this "history" stinks to high heaven. Just one paragraph ABOVE this claim, it's stated that a sweet little Suzie was the daughter of Henry Mahler. There's no Carl mentioned, or a Sophia despite them purportedly both living in the house as part of the same family. Now there are TWO mischievous girl ghosts that are the SAME AGE.  This is the result of either historical confusion--possible--or haunted house myth-making--probable. The website can't even keep its own story straight, but still presents this all as "fact" or "history" when it's patently a fiction. To me, this is a strong indication that someone hopped onto a free genealogical website, where date/name confusion is pretty much the order of the day on any family tree, without double-checking through vital records.

All this does is create a scenario where a paranormal investigator or���even worse and more dangerous���a paranormal tourist takes a cheap voice recorder into the location to talk to ���Sara (Suzie)��� or "Sophia" the sweet little girl prankster ghost and accidentally summons an entity to interact with her/him. The lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you're part of an investigation team that does not perform legitimate historical research on a property and instead relies upon an owner's website or a previous paranormal group's findings, your team can be sent blind into a dangerous paranormal event without the proper preparation or protection. That's why research is legitimately the most important segment of an investigation and cannot be skimped.

See, anytime you use a voice recorder or call out a spirit, that���s conjuration and an amateur isn���t aware of that. There���s no telling what can and will respond���and follow you home. This is irresponsible on the owner���s part���first, by putting what psychics or an EVP or an odd feeling someone translates into ���little girl ghost Suzie��� down on the HISTORY page as FACT. Second, by attributing paranormal or supernatural events as being the actions of a specific named entity, the owner is creating a false narrative or mythology for the location. There isn���t really any way to prove the claim on any front.

An investigator can, perhaps, after a LOT of investigation, feel fairly confident in a hypothesis about a historical figure being part of a haunting. Usually, that���s in residual hauntings���like Lincoln���s ghost in the White House, for example. A person who witnesses a full-bodied apparition and later is shown a group of pictures of people who lived on the property and recognizes one of the photos as being the ghost he saw can create a reasonable assumption the entity is that historical resident. But either of these types of confirmation is extremely rare.

In this case, these definitive identification of entities as the historical residents on the property is just creating a reckless and ultimately reckless mythology for the site, making it more dangerous for investigators, paranormal tourists, and residents alike. ( Author's note post-investigation: this also generates an interesting factor when the subsequent investigation led the team to a doll as the apex of the haunting. You'll note that the owner of the BSI states in an interview that someone goes into that room every couple of weeks to "talk to the dolls". That's a conjuration, and may be the entire reason the inn has any intelligent haunting at all. Chances are correspondingly greater that this is a dark or demonic entity, lured in under the guise of sweet little Suzie, and may have taken up residence in the doll. Annabelle, anyone?)


Website: Henry and Sam Mahler were known as the Cotton Kings. They lived on the property with 200 acres after Marie died.

Henry and Marie's son, Dan, and his wife, Mary Mahler, lived on the property with 237 acres. They sold the house and surrounding land to two sisters and their husbands in 1941.

Katherine S. Joline Holbrook (9/17/1883 - 1/27/1950) and Joseph "John" Younger Holbrook (4/6/1879 - 9/3/1960), along with Mary Blanche Joline Woods (7/8/1887 - 1/17/1976) and Claude B. Woods (10/31/1882 - 1/17/1935) purchased the property. The sisters called the house White Gables. They conducted extensive remodeling, adding two wings to enlarge the mansion to accommodate the two families. The house was then called "White Gables". After purchasing more land a second house was built in 1901 but it later burnt down.

Fact: Here���s where the ���history��� contradicts itself directly. Earlier on the page, the website states that: Henry and Marie Mahler bought the property on January 10, 1887. They built the first house on the property in 1887 (Bexar County Appraisal District shows 1902 and San Antonio Conservation Society shows 1901 for the year built).Then the Holbrooks/Woods family purchase the property and evidently adds the two wings to the house, and then a second house was built in 1901 but it ultimately burned down. But this narrative doesn���t match up precisely.

At first, the website claims the ���Prescott House��� was built AFTER the Civil War. But���in 1867, the property was purchased by the Rippsteins, who I���m assuming lived over the dairy barn as would be normal for them as German/Swiss immigrants. So what happened to the Prescott House, that the website claims was built after the Civil War?

In 1887, then, the Mahlers bought the location ���and built the first house��� on the property, a fact that���s disputed by two different agencies in the Appraisal Department and the Conservation Department, which have the dates for this house as 1901 or 1902. Now we have the Holbrook/Woods family adding two wings and building a second house that burns down. What we DON���T have anywhere on this website is an undisputed and definitive date when the house that exists on the property was built.

In the book  Battles and Men of the Republic of Texas by Arthur Wylie, however, the author states that:

After forming 140 Texian volunteers Caldwell marched for Cibolo Creek, twenty miles from San Antonio. A little later Caldwell moved his camp thirteen miles closer to the city along Salado Creek near the Prescot (sic) House. Altogether, about 220 Texians had been assembled to fight the Mexicans���

This version of events is backed up by the Texas State Historical Association. So there was a house close to the Black Swan Inn called the Prescott house that pre-dates the battle, and as was pointed out earlier the current building is not in the proper location on the map to have been the Prescott house.

So my best guess without actually going in person to the County Clerk���s office and digging out plat books is that the Prescott house was not on the property now associated with the Black Swan Inn, that the first two families lived over the barn in an old-country ���house barn���, and that the first possible date for the current residence to have been built is the 1901/1902 date that the Appraiser���s Department and the San Antonio Conservation Department have listed on official San Antonio documents.

Therefore the house currently known as the Black Swan Inn wasn���t erected until 60 years after the battle, and has nothing to do with the battle save for the fact that the Mexicans rode over it on their way to be shot to pieces by the Texians holed up in the creek bottom.

That would also discount any possibility of a Rittspein/Mahler historical figure haunting the current house, because they would never have lived there. This would be an easy mistake to make for any amateur researcher, who wouldn���t be able to untangle the ���house barn��� mystery and subsequently ended up with multiple ���first house��� possibilities on the property.

Website: Attorney Hall Park Street, Jr. (11/10/1909 - 8/4/1965) and Joline Woods Street (12/15/1912 - 12/22/1959). They inherited the house in 1952 from Joline's mother, Claude Woods. After the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Holbrook and Mr. Woods, Mrs. Woods lived in the house with her son-in-law, Park, and her daughter, Joline. During this time a second story was added to the main house. While Park and Joline owned the property Earle Stanley Gardner visited the house and wrote some of his famed Perry Mason television series scripts here. Joline died of breast cancer in 1959. Park, Jr. was later found dead in 1965 hung by a neck tie with his hands tied behind his back...the death was ruled a suicide. They were survived by their daughter, Joline "Jingles", who was only 19 at the time and their son, Hall Park Street III. (no vital records found). Park Street supposedly committed suicide by hanging himself in the house, though this has been a highly controversial subject. A psychic consultant with Syfy's television program Sightings communicated with former resident, Hall Park Street, whom he believed was murdered in a south wing closet, then moved to another location, where the murderer made the death look like a suicide. They believe Street was killed because of a treasure he still guards in the south wing. Others believe that Heinrich ghost drove Park to commit suicide. The most unnerving spectral presence at the property is that of a man who has been spotted stalking angrily all over the house. Rumor has it that he is the ghost of Hall Park Street. Is he perhaps looking for his beloved wife Joline, whose spirit is also said to haunt the Inn after tragedy struck her at the tender age of thirty-eight when she died of cancer. Dressed in a luxurious white gown with a beaded jeweled medallion in from of headband with a feather at the back over her dark hair, this is a very beautiful female spirit roams the property aimlessly, especially around the gazebo, but Park and Joline never seem to meet.

Fact: Okay here���s where things get egregiously wrong. Thanks to the August 7, 1965 edition of the San Antonio Express and News, the fact-checking for this section of the website was easy. HALL PARK STREET JR DID NOT KILL HIMSELF AT WHAT IS NOW KNOWN AS THE BLACK SWAN INN OR ANYWHERE ON THE PROPERTY AT ALL. Street committed suicide at his home in the affluent Oak Park neighborhood, 401 Northridge Drive, which is 2.9 miles away. He also didn���t bother to mourn his first wife, Joline, all that much because he was already remarried at the time of his death in 1965. So there is no treasure in the south wing that Street was killed over and the murdered/moved. There is no chance that the vengeful ghost of Heinrich Rittspein drove him to suicide when Street was a nine-minute drive away from the property in his new house when he killed himself, and absolutely zero possibility that���s he���s stalking the house because he���s heartbroken over Joline���s death.

So no, they aren���t trying to find each other in vain.

What this IS representative of, however, is the worst kind of mythology creation that is perpetrated by someone needing to exploit the paranormal for reasons other than research/investigation. As for Street���s son, Hall Park Street III���while the owner claimed to find no vital records for him, I did find him���still living, in Austin, TX after a 30 second Google search. He can be found at https://www.parkstreets.com/ where he has this to say:

A native Texan born in San Antonio, I am the son of a noted lawyer and my godfather was the world's bestselling author of his time, Erle Stanley Gardner, of Perry Mason fame. My father was a member of the Court of Last Resort, a group of lawyers and forensic experts who worked to get prisoners they felt unjustly convicted new trials. Some of my fondest memories of my father was us driving from one state prison to another where he interviewed prisoners. I always got a kick out of seeing my dad in the opening credits of the TV show they made about the Court of Last Resort which showed for two seasons. I grew up in what is now one of the most haunted houses in Texas. It was spooky but not as spooky as it has been made out to be.

Bolding mine, for emphasis. He���s now a renowned photographer based out of Austin after careers in the law and foreign importing, and can be reached via his website. Might be a worthwhile on camera interview depending on how the investigation goes. I assume that Hall Park Street III, therefore, has vital records for anyone who cares to look.

The remainder of the ���history��� section on the website is modern, taking us through the Mehrens��� ownership, who bought the house in 1973. I would assume that either Joline the younger lived in the house between 1965 and 1973���she was 19 and evidently a recent bride in Wisconsin when her father committed suicide--or that the house was rented out after Joline the elder passed away in 1959. The Mehrens sold the house to Werner Schmidt in 1980. The house went into what appears to be some form of seizure, ending up as the property of Sunbelt Self-Storage in 1987 before being ultimately sold to Jo Ann Marks Andrews Rivera in 1991. She named the property the Victoria's Black Swan Inn, and built up a paranormal tourism site/B&B/Events business while living with her family on the site.

Other information on the location: Recent reviews of the Black Swan Inn have included growing accounts that the property is not just run down, but falling apart and filthy. There are reports of insect and rodent infestation���highlighted by the Ghost Adventures episode where they left a static cam rolling on the owner���s children all night due to her claim that something was ���pinching��� them as they slept. Turned out to be a fat, juicy rat instead.

There have also been negative reports left on the quality of the food at catered events, at the rudeness of the owner and the staff, and on a few occasions ���absolutely ruining��� weddings held there. Refusing to turn on the air conditioning for a summer wedding in Central Texas is a recurring theme, as is the owner taking drinks out of people���s hands and pouring them out. Take that FWIW.

The Rivera family appears to live on the second floor of the main house, and the house didn���t have a second story until the Street family added it between 1952 and 1965. So any paranormal phenomena up there should be surprising.

Conclusion: There���s a long provenance of modern paranormal teams gathering evidence at the Black Swan Inn, but there are no contemporary reports of paranormal events prior to Ms. Rivera���s ownership of the property. The ties to the Battle of Salado are tenuous, the stated history of the house is so unreliable that there���s not even a solid date of when the building was even built. And the suicide or murder/suicide the website wants prospective clients to believe happened in the house actually occurred in a different house almost 3 miles away.

The overall purpose of the website is to push the paranormal agenda to the exclusion of anything else in my opinion. The ���history��� in the history/about section of the website is peppered with references to spirits that are allegedly the former residents of the house despite the house not even being built yet. So this isn���t a history. It���s a mythology, comprised of historical half-truths and what psychics have said about the property despite the constant contradiction or even downright falsehoods (like the Street suicide) in order to make this house appear more haunted than it evidently was when Hall Park Street III grew up.

All this being said, though, considering the uses to which the house is put, the weekly ghost tours and ghost hunts, the scrying closet���s constant use and the seances in the room outside it, what you have here is a paranormal time bomb. IF there���s a haunting at this location, I���d find it almost impossible to attribute activity to the former residents on the property. I���m more inclined to think that whatever is contributing to the ���escalating��� negative activity on the location is the result of the constant conjuration going on there, opening doors without knowing how to shut them again. That would strand human entities there, probably pissing them off. However, that open door leaves the house and ground vulnerable to demonic infestation, which much be strongly suspected headed in.

Author's note, post-investigation: It's my opinion now that the investigation is completed that the paragraph above this one was the correct prognosis for the paranormal activity in Victoria's Black Swan Inn. The team, therefore, caught no evidence to support the owner/website claims save with a doll most likely empowered through regular and ritual conjuration. 
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Author's note: This document continues our investigation into paranormal research, and was submitted to the producers of It Feels Evil as a comparison piece for/against the website currently maintained by the owner and on her website prior to the investigation. Sorry it's a little late--holidays and all that.

A few things to remember when looking at this website—many paranormal groups (including Ghost Adventures) have taken that website as gospel and reproduced it word for word. Never accept a “history” on a website as fact. Also, if there are paranormal instances cited throughout a history article, up to and including the names of alleged spirits and even what they say/do, that usually means someone doesn’t want you looking at the real history for whatever reason and want to distract you with a “look at what our ghosts do!!!” moment. But if the history is wrong, chances are that one or more of the alleged spirits is either what a psychic claimed to have sensed or imagination, providing a false validation of what’s really going on. So let’s take a look at what the o want us to think and what we know:

Website--From before 5000 B.C. to around 1000 A.D the area was the site of Native American encampments. Artifacts from this time can still be found here. Archeologists (sic) have provided evidence showing that Native Americans once lived in the area where the house currently sits. There have also been signs of a sweat lodge where Native Americans performed rituals. An ancient Indian burial ground is thought to be under the house.

Fact—okay anything from 5000 BC to 1000 AD isn’t Native American. It’s prehistoric. We’re talking about predating the Incan and Mayan peoples, and the dates cited cover both the archaic and the late Prehistoric period. HOWEVER, the period after 1000 AD is and should be the points of reference here. There’s no record of archaeologists (correct spelling) ever documenting evidence that proves Native Americans lived on/near the land where the house sits. There’s certainly not any record I can find of a dig conducted there. There’s no record of a sweat lodge. There’s no record of an Indian burial ground either, and if there WAS one under the house we should be able to record that by getting into the crawl space. (If there’s no crawl space, then there’s no way whatsoever that anyone knows what’s under the house for the simple reason that no one can get there.) All that being said, the area around San Antonio was occupied relatively continuously by indigenous people until the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Native American tribes were continuously forced west by the encroachment of European settlers and it would be odd if they hadn’t camped near a water source, especially during the summer when these tribes migrating for hunting.

According to the San Antonio Office of Historical Preservation, there were hundreds of Native American tribes in central Texas during the historic period from 1700 AD on, but these tribes are the worst documented in the historical and archaeological records.


Website: On September 18, 1842 General Adrian Woll, Sam Houston and his men massacred more than 60 Mexican soldiers during the bloody Battle of Salado. Their bodies were left to rot where they fell. Only one Texan lost his life, Steven Jett, during the battle.



Fact: That the battle took place there is apparently close to the truth, but General Adrien Woll was the French-Mexican general of the Mexican troops, while the Texans were led by Colonel Matthew Caldwell of the Texas Rangers. Woll commanded over 1600 Mexican and Cherokee troops against Caldwell’s militia of right around 200. There’s no mention of Sam Houston being anywhere close to this battle, since in 1842 he was serving his second non-consecutive term as President of Texas and was in, appropriately enough, Houston. Caldwell’s militia defeated Woll, who retreated back to Mexico, leaving his 60 dead behind. And yes—only one Texan lost his life and was interred properly while the Mexicans were left to rot.

Website: The Prescott House was built on the property after the civil war.
Sebastian L Rippstein (2/4/1824 - 7/14/1896), born in Switzerland, and his wife, Hemrieke "Betsy" Ackermann Rippstien (6/1/1834 - 9/15/1911), born in Germany, settled the land in 1867. The San Antonio Conservation Society shows that they built a stone house barn and milking barn on the property. Their children were Gustav Juilan (1851-1920), Henriettta Rippstein Seay (1854-1932), Bertha "Betty" Dorthea Rippstein Schaefer (1858-1920), Ida Rippstein Benfer (1870-1951), and Albert Rippstein (1874-1941).


Fact: You can see on this map the layout of the battle. About a third of the way down, you see the dark square that represents the Prescott house on top of a hill overlooking the river. What I find interesting about this is that there’s no mention of the Prescotts ever owning that property. (more on this confusion later) The first structures built on the property were built in 1867 by the Rippstein family, German immigrants who started a dairy business. The barn and dairy barn are purported to have been built by them. But the house that’s there now is NOT the house of the Rippsteins as best I can tell and definitely isn’t the Prescotts’ house either.



Now in this next shot, you can get a glimpse of the Black Swan Inn with the huge barns behind it, a cemetery in front of it, and across what appears to be a major road is Salado Creek. The historical marker for the Battle of Salado Creek is just outside and to the west of the gates to the BSI on Holbrook Road, which is the thoroughfare between the BSI and the Salado River…

Wait a second. I have to wonder where in the heck is the Salado River on BSI’s side of the river? Because of the claims of a natural spring on the property, you’d logically think they’d be on/near the river. Also, topographically, it’s obvious that the battle itself was fought with the Texan militia blocking the Mexican army’s advance from positions tight up against the river and behind the Prescott house which is right about where the road is today.

But that’s not all. As you can see, the big barns are behind the BSI, but on the map of the battle the barns the website claimed were part of the Prescott property are not there. There’s one outbuilding shown on the property, and it’s tight up against the big house. So the barns currently on the BSI property can’t have anything to do with the Prescotts, and were probably built in/after 1867 when the Rippsteins bought the property.

There’s a reason for that (and subsequently a reason that the big house wasn’t built until 1901-02). Many European farmers built two story barns with the animals on the ground floor and the people on an upper floor. They do that in Europe for the extra heat the animals give off. Obviously in Texas, this would suck profusely 7 months of the year. My guess is the “stone house barn” referenced on the website is what the owner’s talking about. That means the Rippsteins and the Mahlers, who bought the property twenty years later in 1887, lived in a residence inside/above the cows in the barn below until having the first house built on the property—but that house wasn’t the house that’s currently there.

Website: German immigrants, Heinrich "Henry" Mahler (9/2/1840 - 4/18/1925) and Marie Biermann Mahler (7/15/1850 - 7/25/1923), bought the property on January 10, 1887. They built the first house on the property in 1887 (Bexar County Appraisal District shows 1902 and San Antonio Conservation Society shows 1901 for the year built). Their children were Samuel George Mahler (1/21/1876 - 4/21/1937), Louisa Catherine Mahler Prange (11/1/1879 - 1/10/1918), Sara "Suzie" Mahler Schlegel (2/27/1882 - 3/23/1958), Daniel Henry Mahler (11/11/1884 - 5/27/1950). They also built a milking barn and named the farm Bluebonnet Dairy. Henry and Sam were known as the Cotton Kings. The Mahlers ran the dairy farm here until the mid-1930s.

Fact: What makes this odd is that the website claims the Mahlers built the house in 1887 BUT the San Antonio Conservation Society AND the Bexar County Appraisal District don’t show a house (that didn’t involve cow storage) built on the property until 1902/1901 respectively. Also, why were Henry and son, Sam, known as the “Cotton Kings” when they were running a 200-acre dairy farm? Shouldn’t they be known as the Cow Kings or the Cream Kings instead? So there are multiple red flags here that lead me to believe substantial parts of this section of the history have been manufactured instead of researched.

Website: After Mahler’s wife passed away, he followed suit two years later from lovesick grief. Heinrich also haunts the Milking Barn and roams the property, including inside the main house. His daughter, Sara "Suzie" pulls pranks in a building located behind the Black Swan.

Facts: Case in point. First off, there’s no way anyone dies of grief. That’s BS until and unless a proper medical association assigns “lovesick grief” as an actual diagnosis. I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. Second off, again with stating anything paranormal-related as an actual fact. This continues to deteriorate as the "history" continues. Note that Suzie is Henry's daughter. This becomes important.

Website: Carl Mahler from Germany had a daughter named Sophia Louise Mahler Meyers, a spinster who lived in the house until she was 82, but haunts the house as an 8-year-old girl singing and laughing and known for playing tricks on people.

Fact: There’s no context for this. We don’t know who Carl is, or why he lived there. This is the first time he's mentioned. Same thing for his daughter, who is apparently stuck there as an 8-year-old girl. But here's the most telling clue that something about this "history" stinks to high heaven. Just one paragraph ABOVE this claim, it's stated that a sweet little Suzie was the daughter of Henry Mahler. There's no Carl mentioned, or a Sophia despite them purportedly both living in the house as part of the same family. Now there are TWO mischievous girl ghosts that are the SAME AGE.  This is the result of either historical confusion--possible--or haunted house myth-making--probable. The website can't even keep its own story straight, but still presents this all as "fact" or "history" when it's patently a fiction. To me, this is a strong indication that someone hopped onto a free genealogical website, where date/name confusion is pretty much the order of the day on any family tree, without double-checking through vital records.

All this does is create a scenario where a paranormal investigator or—even worse and more dangerous—a paranormal tourist takes a cheap voice recorder into the location to talk to “Sara (Suzie)” or "Sophia" the sweet little girl prankster ghost and accidentally summons an entity to interact with her/him. The lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you're part of an investigation team that does not perform legitimate historical research on a property and instead relies upon an owner's website or a previous paranormal group's findings, your team can be sent blind into a dangerous paranormal event without the proper preparation or protection. That's why research is legitimately the most important segment of an investigation and cannot be skimped.

See, anytime you use a voice recorder or call out a spirit, that’s conjuration and an amateur isn’t aware of that. There’s no telling what can and will respond…and follow you home. This is irresponsible on the owner’s part—first, by putting what psychics or an EVP or an odd feeling someone translates into “little girl ghost Suzie” down on the HISTORY page as FACT. Second, by attributing paranormal or supernatural events as being the actions of a specific named entity, the owner is creating a false narrative or mythology for the location. There isn’t really any way to prove the claim on any front.

An investigator can, perhaps, after a LOT of investigation, feel fairly confident in a hypothesis about a historical figure being part of a haunting. Usually, that’s in residual hauntings—like Lincoln’s ghost in the White House, for example. A person who witnesses a full-bodied apparition and later is shown a group of pictures of people who lived on the property and recognizes one of the photos as being the ghost he saw can create a reasonable assumption the entity is that historical resident. But either of these types of confirmation is extremely rare.

In this case, these definitive identification of entities as the historical residents on the property is just creating a reckless and ultimately reckless mythology for the site, making it more dangerous for investigators, paranormal tourists, and residents alike. ( Author's note post-investigation: this also generates an interesting factor when the subsequent investigation led the team to a doll as the apex of the haunting. You'll note that the owner of the BSI states in an interview that someone goes into that room every couple of weeks to "talk to the dolls". That's a conjuration, and may be the entire reason the inn has any intelligent haunting at all. Chances are correspondingly greater that this is a dark or demonic entity, lured in under the guise of sweet little Suzie, and may have taken up residence in the doll. Annabelle, anyone?)


Website: Henry and Sam Mahler were known as the Cotton Kings. They lived on the property with 200 acres after Marie died.

Henry and Marie's son, Dan, and his wife, Mary Mahler, lived on the property with 237 acres. They sold the house and surrounding land to two sisters and their husbands in 1941.

Katherine S. Joline Holbrook (9/17/1883 - 1/27/1950) and Joseph "John" Younger Holbrook (4/6/1879 - 9/3/1960), along with Mary Blanche Joline Woods (7/8/1887 - 1/17/1976) and Claude B. Woods (10/31/1882 - 1/17/1935) purchased the property. The sisters called the house White Gables. They conducted extensive remodeling, adding two wings to enlarge the mansion to accommodate the two families. The house was then called "White Gables". After purchasing more land a second house was built in 1901 but it later burnt down.

Fact: Here’s where the ‘history’ contradicts itself directly. Earlier on the page, the website states that: Henry and Marie Mahler bought the property on January 10, 1887. They built the first house on the property in 1887 (Bexar County Appraisal District shows 1902 and San Antonio Conservation Society shows 1901 for the year built).Then the Holbrooks/Woods family purchase the property and evidently adds the two wings to the house, and then a second house was built in 1901 but it ultimately burned down. But this narrative doesn’t match up precisely.

At first, the website claims the “Prescott House” was built AFTER the Civil War. But—in 1867, the property was purchased by the Rippsteins, who I’m assuming lived over the dairy barn as would be normal for them as German/Swiss immigrants. So what happened to the Prescott House, that the website claims was built after the Civil War?

In 1887, then, the Mahlers bought the location “and built the first house” on the property, a fact that’s disputed by two different agencies in the Appraisal Department and the Conservation Department, which have the dates for this house as 1901 or 1902. Now we have the Holbrook/Woods family adding two wings and building a second house that burns down. What we DON’T have anywhere on this website is an undisputed and definitive date when the house that exists on the property was built.

In the book  Battles and Men of the Republic of Texas by Arthur Wylie, however, the author states that:

After forming 140 Texian volunteers Caldwell marched for Cibolo Creek, twenty miles from San Antonio. A little later Caldwell moved his camp thirteen miles closer to the city along Salado Creek near the Prescot (sic) House. Altogether, about 220 Texians had been assembled to fight the Mexicans…

This version of events is backed up by the Texas State Historical Association. So there was a house close to the Black Swan Inn called the Prescott house that pre-dates the battle, and as was pointed out earlier the current building is not in the proper location on the map to have been the Prescott house.

So my best guess without actually going in person to the County Clerk’s office and digging out plat books is that the Prescott house was not on the property now associated with the Black Swan Inn, that the first two families lived over the barn in an old-country ‘house barn’, and that the first possible date for the current residence to have been built is the 1901/1902 date that the Appraiser’s Department and the San Antonio Conservation Department have listed on official San Antonio documents.

Therefore the house currently known as the Black Swan Inn wasn’t erected until 60 years after the battle, and has nothing to do with the battle save for the fact that the Mexicans rode over it on their way to be shot to pieces by the Texians holed up in the creek bottom.

That would also discount any possibility of a Rittspein/Mahler historical figure haunting the current house, because they would never have lived there. This would be an easy mistake to make for any amateur researcher, who wouldn’t be able to untangle the “house barn” mystery and subsequently ended up with multiple “first house” possibilities on the property.

Website: Attorney Hall Park Street, Jr. (11/10/1909 - 8/4/1965) and Joline Woods Street (12/15/1912 - 12/22/1959). They inherited the house in 1952 from Joline's mother, Claude Woods. After the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Holbrook and Mr. Woods, Mrs. Woods lived in the house with her son-in-law, Park, and her daughter, Joline. During this time a second story was added to the main house. While Park and Joline owned the property Earle Stanley Gardner visited the house and wrote some of his famed Perry Mason television series scripts here. Joline died of breast cancer in 1959. Park, Jr. was later found dead in 1965 hung by a neck tie with his hands tied behind his back...the death was ruled a suicide. They were survived by their daughter, Joline "Jingles", who was only 19 at the time and their son, Hall Park Street III. (no vital records found). Park Street supposedly committed suicide by hanging himself in the house, though this has been a highly controversial subject. A psychic consultant with Syfy's television program Sightings communicated with former resident, Hall Park Street, whom he believed was murdered in a south wing closet, then moved to another location, where the murderer made the death look like a suicide. They believe Street was killed because of a treasure he still guards in the south wing. Others believe that Heinrich ghost drove Park to commit suicide. The most unnerving spectral presence at the property is that of a man who has been spotted stalking angrily all over the house. Rumor has it that he is the ghost of Hall Park Street. Is he perhaps looking for his beloved wife Joline, whose spirit is also said to haunt the Inn after tragedy struck her at the tender age of thirty-eight when she died of cancer. Dressed in a luxurious white gown with a beaded jeweled medallion in from of headband with a feather at the back over her dark hair, this is a very beautiful female spirit roams the property aimlessly, especially around the gazebo, but Park and Joline never seem to meet.

Fact: Okay here’s where things get egregiously wrong. Thanks to the August 7, 1965 edition of the San Antonio Express and News, the fact-checking for this section of the website was easy. HALL PARK STREET JR DID NOT KILL HIMSELF AT WHAT IS NOW KNOWN AS THE BLACK SWAN INN OR ANYWHERE ON THE PROPERTY AT ALL. Street committed suicide at his home in the affluent Oak Park neighborhood, 401 Northridge Drive, which is 2.9 miles away. He also didn’t bother to mourn his first wife, Joline, all that much because he was already remarried at the time of his death in 1965. So there is no treasure in the south wing that Street was killed over and the murdered/moved. There is no chance that the vengeful ghost of Heinrich Rittspein drove him to suicide when Street was a nine-minute drive away from the property in his new house when he killed himself, and absolutely zero possibility that’s he’s stalking the house because he’s heartbroken over Joline’s death.

So no, they aren’t trying to find each other in vain.

What this IS representative of, however, is the worst kind of mythology creation that is perpetrated by someone needing to exploit the paranormal for reasons other than research/investigation. As for Street’s son, Hall Park Street III—while the owner claimed to find no vital records for him, I did find him—still living, in Austin, TX after a 30 second Google search. He can be found at https://www.parkstreets.com/ where he has this to say:

A native Texan born in San Antonio, I am the son of a noted lawyer and my godfather was the world's bestselling author of his time, Erle Stanley Gardner, of Perry Mason fame. My father was a member of the Court of Last Resort, a group of lawyers and forensic experts who worked to get prisoners they felt unjustly convicted new trials. Some of my fondest memories of my father was us driving from one state prison to another where he interviewed prisoners. I always got a kick out of seeing my dad in the opening credits of the TV show they made about the Court of Last Resort which showed for two seasons. I grew up in what is now one of the most haunted houses in Texas. It was spooky but not as spooky as it has been made out to be.

Bolding mine, for emphasis. He’s now a renowned photographer based out of Austin after careers in the law and foreign importing, and can be reached via his website. Might be a worthwhile on camera interview depending on how the investigation goes. I assume that Hall Park Street III, therefore, has vital records for anyone who cares to look.

The remainder of the “history” section on the website is modern, taking us through the Mehrens’ ownership, who bought the house in 1973. I would assume that either Joline the younger lived in the house between 1965 and 1973—she was 19 and evidently a recent bride in Wisconsin when her father committed suicide--or that the house was rented out after Joline the elder passed away in 1959. The Mehrens sold the house to Werner Schmidt in 1980. The house went into what appears to be some form of seizure, ending up as the property of Sunbelt Self-Storage in 1987 before being ultimately sold to Jo Ann Marks Andrews Rivera in 1991. She named the property the Victoria's Black Swan Inn, and built up a paranormal tourism site/B&B/Events business while living with her family on the site.

Other information on the location: Recent reviews of the Black Swan Inn have included growing accounts that the property is not just run down, but falling apart and filthy. There are reports of insect and rodent infestation—highlighted by the Ghost Adventures episode where they left a static cam rolling on the owner’s children all night due to her claim that something was ‘pinching’ them as they slept. Turned out to be a fat, juicy rat instead.

There have also been negative reports left on the quality of the food at catered events, at the rudeness of the owner and the staff, and on a few occasions “absolutely ruining” weddings held there. Refusing to turn on the air conditioning for a summer wedding in Central Texas is a recurring theme, as is the owner taking drinks out of people’s hands and pouring them out. Take that FWIW.

The Rivera family appears to live on the second floor of the main house, and the house didn’t have a second story until the Street family added it between 1952 and 1965. So any paranormal phenomena up there should be surprising.

Conclusion: There’s a long provenance of modern paranormal teams gathering evidence at the Black Swan Inn, but there are no contemporary reports of paranormal events prior to Ms. Rivera’s ownership of the property. The ties to the Battle of Salado are tenuous, the stated history of the house is so unreliable that there’s not even a solid date of when the building was even built. And the suicide or murder/suicide the website wants prospective clients to believe happened in the house actually occurred in a different house almost 3 miles away.

The overall purpose of the website is to push the paranormal agenda to the exclusion of anything else in my opinion. The “history” in the history/about section of the website is peppered with references to spirits that are allegedly the former residents of the house despite the house not even being built yet. So this isn’t a history. It’s a mythology, comprised of historical half-truths and what psychics have said about the property despite the constant contradiction or even downright falsehoods (like the Street suicide) in order to make this house appear more haunted than it evidently was when Hall Park Street III grew up.

All this being said, though, considering the uses to which the house is put, the weekly ghost tours and ghost hunts, the scrying closet’s constant use and the seances in the room outside it, what you have here is a paranormal time bomb. IF there’s a haunting at this location, I’d find it almost impossible to attribute activity to the former residents on the property. I’m more inclined to think that whatever is contributing to the ‘escalating’ negative activity on the location is the result of the constant conjuration going on there, opening doors without knowing how to shut them again. That would strand human entities there, probably pissing them off. However, that open door leaves the house and ground vulnerable to demonic infestation, which much be strongly suspected headed in.

Author's note, post-investigation: It's my opinion now that the investigation is completed that the paragraph above this one was the correct prognosis for the paranormal activity in Victoria's Black Swan Inn. The team, therefore, caught no evidence to support the owner/website claims save with a doll most likely empowered through regular and ritual conjuration. 

Dear God--if there is such a thing--ease my father's confusion tonight. Allow his fears to dwindle. Give him ease; grant him rest. Let him sleep sweetly, buried in the memories that are lost to him in the waking nightmares that torment him every day. Let him learn once more how to revel in the fleeting joys--a walk outside, or the deep-hued hue of a winter's night sky that sets the snow to glittering darkly. Let him dream of himself--not the self that's burdened by so much fear and anger right now but the younger self. The gentler self that fears nothing. 

Yes, please God--ease my father's confusion tonight. Let him be free of fear.
Dear God--if You really exist--let my father have moments when he remembers that he is loved...so loved by his wife; his children; his grandchildren; his great-grandchildren. Let the clouds of confusion melt away, so he once more is eased by the thought that his name, his history will not be forgotten. Let him remember--even for the briefest moment--who I am, what my name is, all the laughs and tears and anger and longing that any father feels for his daughter, his oldest child. Let him look on me with that lost clarity, and find it again even if it's only for ten seconds.

Yes, God--let my father feel loved tonight. Let him remember me.

Dear God--You know why I doubt that a deity exists--let my father prepare for his last great journey in the silent and now echoing in the vaults of memory that were once packed with the thousands of moments he collected in an amazing, full life. Husband and father, brother and grandfather, friend and ally, soldier and businessmen. My father's life reads like a bestselling novel of a man who learned how to live and sacrificed everything for his family's sake. Strengthen the child who grew to manhood in rural Tennessee, unable to attend more than half the school year because he was needed on the farm. Strengthen the young man who dreamed of being an architect, but joined the Army instead. Fortify him, like he swallowed his shyness long enough to approach a beautiful French ballet dancer while stationed in Paris post-Korean War and with her, founded a family.

Yes, God--let my father remember the courage he had tonight. Let him regain it, just once.

Dear God--why don't You answer me? We both know that I have good reason to doubt Your existence. What You've inflicted on my father is almost the nail in the coffin. Atheism is easier; agnosticism is faster. Either would have left me with no one to be angry with right now. I'd only be able to rage against the vagaries of fate. But my dad had faith. A lot of faith.

Did You take that from him too? Or did You leave him on his own, confused by Your silence?

Well, I don't have faith in You. Once I did. Once I believed in You and prayed to You and You never had anything to say to me. So now I'm talking to you again. It's hard not to feel like my father's condition is somehow my fault, that because of decisions I have made some omniscient power determined that the best punishment on me for MY behavior was to transfer its divine ire on my father. That's the kind of thinking that makes me look over my shoulder...makes me think that maybe I should place my faith in You again so I can find the answers to my questions.

But only for a moment. After that split-second of consideration, I flip right back to rage again. I'm angry at everyone. I'm angry at the doctors who didn't catch this sooner. I'm angry at the people who guessed his condition, and exploited it in business deals. I'm angry at the family, who left my stepmother to cope with him all by herself. I'm angry at my brother, who lives five minutes away but can't be bothered to help my father out.

I'm angry at my dad.

I'm furious with myself.

I'm enraged at You.

Yes, You. If You exist, then this is unforgivable. To take my father's mind, his memories, and replace them with confusion and fear is a torture method that make the Spanish Inquisition look commonplace. To reduce the brilliance of my father's intellect and to replace it with a vacuum that cannot be filled...is that how You reward people with faith? Is this disease the culmination of all those years when he tried to live by the precepts of Your church?

And You wonder why I turned my back on you for the last time. I turned away from You the first time when my best friend, who had the purest and most intense faith I've ever seen, died in that freak car wreck. That made me an agnostic at eighteen. Then I turned away again and instead watched helplessly as scores of young men were eradicated thanks to AIDS. That hardened my resolve against you. I walked precariously along the tightrope stretched between agnosticism and atheism. I prayed until I couldn't say another word, my throat ravaged with crying as my daughter was so consistently abused and I never got any sort of response from You. The abuse she endured continued, and I fell off that tightrope and rejected all belief that You or any other deity would intervene.

Now I'm mad at you again because what's happened to Dad is something I consider unforgivable.

For the first time, I'm sending a double-bird to heaven. I'll never forgive You for this. Never. To hell with platitudes or psalms or the power of prayer. Prayer is the spiritual equivalent to yelling in a cave for help. There's no response save for my own voice rebounding to me.

No. Wait. That's not right. I did hear one thing. I heard the fear in my father's voice when he asked, "Are you just throwing me away?" when he was admitted to the hospital and visiting time was over. I heard the despair, the longing, the confusion, the terror...

What am I supposed to tell him. You tell me: what am I supposed to tell my father, who honored You every day of his eighty-four years when he asks me, "Are you just throwing me away? What's wrong with me?"

My father deserved a better end than the one that's been given him.

Heh.I just read through this again. Funny in a way. I'm writing a blog post berating God, which is a concept that my analytical mind just could not accept. This is a child's reaction, a child's deferral of guilt from herself to someone or something wholly unrelated.

Yes, it sounds like the ranting of a child--which it is. This post is the ranting of an adult child. My father's child. Ostensibly Your child too, if the Bible is to be believed. So if You're out there, and I have no reason to think You are, answer me these questions.

Will You be throwing me away too? Like You've done my father?

Why?

I'll wait. I look forward to once again not hearing You.

This article concludes the two-part paranormal research series of blog posts, continuing the history of the haunted Monroe House.

When researching a haunted location, the purpose isn’t to prove the legends but to establish a connective thread between what the legends and claims say and events that can be substantiated by documents. And in this case, the evidence is building. Beginning with the violent and abusive situation in the Miars’ household, a pattern emerged that included paranormal activity, suspected infidelity, and bizarre accidents and misfortunes to the families that lived there. The Berger family was originally suspected as the source of the haunting, with some claims that John B. Berger was a violent and abusive barkeeper who punished his kids brutally. That doesn’t hold water, with the Hartford City News Telegram eulogizing him as “a man of sterling qualities, honorable to the core. He was big-hearted and genial and it is doubtful if any man in the city had more friends.”
And of course, John B. Berger was dead when the public fiasco of the Miars’ marriage became public knowledge.

In that period between 1907-1911, when the Miars’ behavior became fodder for the town gossips and their claims of desertion, cruelty, and the violent abuse of their children was hashed out in the courts and the newspaper, a series of strange disasters befell the Berger family at the same time—a shooting as the result of a hate crime; frostbite and a horse’s foot turned into gangrene and an amputation; death in childbirth; a carriage wheel falling off and resulting in a severe injury—these events seem to be interconnected with some strange energy or influence that both fueled and charged a sequence of tragic incidents that are unexplained.

The Miars children—Edna was eight, while Ernest was four—match up with the legends about the house, including a famous picture with two child-sized apparitions looking out from a window. The pattern of abuse also matches up with the claims of psychics and many of the EVPs and other communications received at the house, as well as the testimony of local residents who were brought up on stories about the residence. One medium said the energy of the haunting was fueled by an “angry jealous woman out for blood”. This, too, could refer to the Miars because the husband deserted his wife for another woman, and ran away to marry her illegally. That desertion of children was duplicated almost simultaneously by Frederick Nicaise, whose children lost their mother, Mary Berger Nicaise, in 1909 and by 1910 they’d lost their father as well. Perhaps he died, or left to find work and never returned. We don’t know, but the pattern of abandoned families seems to have continued.

And the pattern doesn’t stop there.

What makes Caroline Berger’s weird carriage accident in 1911 even more interesting is the gruesome death of Sydney Faulkner thirty years later. Faulkner lived in the upstairs apartment in 1940 with his wife, Myrl. He was killed August 18, 1940 when his car inexplicably struck the support beam of a bridge. Faulkner also had a passenger in the car: a woman not his wife. Mrs. WH Wolfe was with him that morning, and incredibly she wasn't injured.

Here again, the pattern emerges: potential infidelity and a strange accident while away from the home under suspicious circumstances.

While the Faulkners were living in the upstairs apartment, labeled as 220 ½ Monroe Street in the 1940 census, the house was owned by Harry B. Meyers, who lived downstairs with his wife, Emma, and their adult son Clayton, who was twenty-three. Meyers was a finishing superintendent at the paper mill which was the major industrial employer mid-century, and Clayton worked with him as a packer. After Sydney Faulkner’s tragic death, Myrl moved out of the upstairs apartment. A family with young children moved in later, and that’s when we start to get our first modern claims of paranormal activity, as evidenced by this August 12, 2016 comment left by an anonymous gentleman on a story about the Monroe House on HauntedHovel.com:

“I spent about six years of my childhood growing up in that house. I was always scared of the strange noises; they were not common but when it happened it sure got your attention fast. My mother would comfort me about the sounds and voices as a child but she mentioned years later about a woman she thought she had seen upstairs near my bedroom. She had always wondered if she had seen the apparition of the women who had taken her own life decades ago. I for one never liked the old house and was happy when we relocated in the early fifties to Muncie. Always been curious about the afterlife after my youthful experiences, and the house that brought it to my attention. Very good to find this site and pleased to see others chatting about the place. Brings a sense of normal to me who have spent seventy plus years in deep thought over my experiences(sic).”

But after 1940, we run into a brick wall researching the history of the Monroe House and the people who lived there. The last federal census made available to public research was 1940, since by law census details cannot be released until seventy years after the census date. Telephone directories become huge, and almost impossible to locate names by street address. The Monroe house became a rental property, although we have apocryphal online claims that previous landlords lived in the house until the late 1990s-early 2000s.

There are also claims that tenants in the house during the nineties were Satanists, and that their magic rituals and occult practices intensified the already-haunted property—claims that are lent credence by the objects that have since been purportedly discovered buried on the property: fetishes made of jewelry and human hair, wrapped in cloth; shorts that might have blood on them; and of course the discovery of the bones and skull fragments unearthed in the basement by investigators on a paranormal TV show.

It is important to note that there is absolutely no evidence to back up many of the legends’ claims. No one (that we can find) ever died in the house. There wasn’t a fire that killed a small child. In fact, there’s no evidence of the house catching on fire at any point after it was built in 1900. It’s also important, however, to mention that the original house on the property (the one built in the 1850s) may have burned down, and this house was constructed on top of what was left, incorporating wood that was physically sound but scorched.

What we did find was a series of bizarre and tragic events that could perhaps explain the origins of the haunting—and the stories that now have circulated in Hartford City for over seventy years.
In 2019, the investigations of the house are where the real questions now lie. The Monroe House has been vacant for over ten years, deserted by the living and occupied only by the dead…or the 

Author's note--I conducted the research for LiveSciFi's investigation of Yorktown Memorial Hospital for the new Travel Channel show It Feels Evil. The local folklore has been related as "history" by the owners of the location and almost every paranormal investigation ever conducted. This dossier was made available to the production company before the show was filmed, and demonstrates why legitimate research is a necessary requirement for ANY paranormal investigation--and also how often that research is ignored in favor of folklore and downright lies. This dossier has been presented in its original form.

Almost every online source claims that over 2000 people died at Yorktown Memorial Hospital in Victoria, Texas. Unfortunately, as with so many other paranormal sites being run as tourist destinations, those claims have been wildly exaggerated. The facts tell an entirely different story. It appears that the majority of these claims stem from the Ghost Adventures investigation of the hospital or were initiated by an owner or interested party, and are being propagated by the guides on ‘historical’ or paranormal tours of the property.  But there is VERY little about Yorktown Memorial Hospital in the newspaper accounts of DeWitt County, Texas. At first I couldn’t figure out why. And then I realized the answer was actually very simple: Yorktown Memorial Hospital wasn’t a hospital the way we think of them today. The hospital was more like an overnight urgent care. It was created to handle childbirth and labor, minor/routine mostly outpatient surgeries, and to stabilize patients with emergency care before transporting patients to bigger facilities. This wasn’t a hospital designed to handle critical care. That’s the reason why claims of 2000 or even 500 deaths at the location have been grossly exaggerated, and why almost every newspaper article archived about the hospital is a birth announcement.  According to records cited by Pam Culpepper of the Yorktown View-News, only 7 of the 33 years of the hospital’s existence ended with over 60% occupancy—of a 27-bed facility. These are the real statistics involving occupancy:  1951 - 367 - 27.1%  1952 - 624 - 33.1  1953 - 778 - 38.9  1954 - 773 - 41.3  1955 - 700 - 52.8  1956 - 689 - 50.0  1957 - 607 - 48.1  1958 - 717 - 53.9 1959 - 741 - 52.9  1960 - 713 - 55.0  1961 - 700 - 41.0  1962 - 630 - 74.7  1963 - 617 - 64.6  1964 - 546 - 65.1  1965 - 529 - 52.1  1966 - 577 - 58.5  1967 - 569 - 58.6  1968 - 579 - 72.3  1969 - 578 - 66.6  1970 - 585 - 64.5  1971 - 592 - 62.1  1972 - 560 - 64.5  1973 - 476 - 57.4  1974 - 458 - 54.1  1975 - 495 - 46.1  1976 - 518 - 52.2  1977 - 448 - 39.3  1978 - 484 - 41.4  1979 - 596 - 45.5  1980 - 452 - 39.5  1981 - 494 - 46.4  1982 - 654 - 52.7  1983 – 655 – 44.4  
That’s 19,501 total admissions in 33 years, meaning that in order for over 2,000 people to have died in the hospital, roughly one out of every ten people admitted would have had to died. Obviously, that’s statistically impossible. Any hospital would have been shut down long before 1984 with statistics like that, and particularly such a small hospital. The other number quoted frequently is 500 deaths, which is one out of forty admissions, but that seems rather high as well. This wasn’t a hospital designed for the kind of health care that would result in a high number of deaths. A boots on the ground researcher would more than likely be able to find the exact number of deaths in the hospital, but the rough average of deaths per admissions nationally is about 2.4% according the CDC (775,000 deaths per 31.7 million hospital admissions in 2000; 776,000 deaths per 35.1 million admissions in 2010). (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db118.htm)  That being said, it’s important to understand that this hospital was not equipped to do major surgeries, provide long-term health care, or to provide critical care. According to a history of the hospital in the DeWitt County View of June 27, 1984:  “In the spring of 1946 when the Dr. Allen Community Hospital of Yorktown was converted into a rest home for the aged, the city was left without a place to meet emergency needs, much less to handle births or ordinary surgery. It was then that agitation began in earnest to build a community hospital.”  That hospital opened on March 25, 1951. The building is a cross-shaped single story with only the center section having a second story. The second story is the convent for the nuns who staffed the hospital, including living quarters and a chapel. When the hospital opened its doors, there[image error] were ten doctors and nine nuns on the staff for the 27-bed facility.  After the closing of the local hospital when it was turned into a nursing home facility in 1946, the people of Yorktown came together to have a new hospital created for births, minor surgeries, and emergency situations—a place to stabilize patients before transferring them to a larger facility. By June of 1949, $150,000 had been raised, and when the committee in charge of the facility sought a religious organization to help the local Catholic priest suggested the Felician Sisters. 
The Felician Sisters are a Franciscan order of nuns whose members profess public vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Mrs. Louis Streiber, widow of a former town mayor, donated ten acres for the hospital, and that’s where the facility was built.  Something to know about the Felician Sisters here—the sisters were the last people paid for their work, and they were paid at a rate far less than what laypersons received:  “The Sisters, who comprise one-third of the professional help are on a salary much lower than the going rate for their respective positions. Their salaries are sent to the Motherhouse for the upkeep of the Motherhouse, education of the young Sisters, and medical care for the sick and elderly Sisters. Only after all has been paid, employee salaries and suppliers bills, do the Sisters get paid. Their salary has been in arrears many, many times for as long as found months until such time that enough cash flow was available to pay them. Each year’s audit confirms the fact that without the lowered rate of pay to the Sisters, the hospital could not have survived. The auditors and those in the financial know-how are amazed that the hospital has existed in spite of all the financial obstacles, primarily because of low patient census. The relief, the substitutions, and the 24-hour back up and call by the Sisters are the basic reason for the Yorktown Memorial Hospital's survival to the 80's.”  This makes sense, particularly when the hospital finished in the black only 7 years out of its existence. So taking into consideration these factors, the place of Yorktown Memorial Hospital in the community wasn’t that of a normal hospital, and the death statistics that were reported by a previous TV investigation were grossly exaggerated. After all, Yorktown’s population has hovered right at 2,000 for fifty years. I went through forty years of newspaper articles in the DeWitt County newspapers. Ninety percent of the mentions in the paper were birth notices. The remaining ten percent were announcement of board meetings, events notices, and death notices which were almost all events that had happened elsewhere—like massive heart attacks at home—but were brought to the facility for a doctor’s care and confirmation of a DOA. [image error] There was no suicide-murder-love triangle involving patients and staff ever reported at the facility. There was no death notice for a little girl (more on this later). There was no notice of the death of a man named Doug Richards in 1973. There is no article or report of Dr. Leon Norwierski having slit a patient’s throat during a thyroid surgery resulting in that patient’s death or any other allegations of incompetence. (Note here that if a doctor made that kind of horrific mistake, he’d be sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked. While I can find articles Dr. Norwierski wrote for the American Journal of Medicine, there is no indication anywhere that he was sued or his license revoked for incompetence. Current libel/slander laws state that once a person is dead, you cannot libel or slander them legally so everything’s fair game. That’s a dead shame because this facility and the groups that just copy/paste the history seem to be slandering a doctor who did nothing but good for that town.) There were no articles or reports that anyone died at the back door of the hospital from a drug overdose when his friends just left him at the ER entrance and rang the night bell for a nun to come find him. All that being said, what we seem to find here at Yorktown is the gradual creation of folklore built around an abandoned building. When the hospital was finally closed, it just sat there and rotted. Kids broke into the building, turning it into a hangout. Also, keep in mind that the second floor of the central hallway was a convent with the chapel and altar still intact. Considering that paranormal activity has spread across the street to the feed store/lumber yard and the second floor there is particularly active, it’s a reasonable assumption that the Felician Sisters’ convent, chapel, and living quarters have been defiled or desecrated. There’s no telling what happened in those area before steps were taken to stop/prevent trespassers.  However, here’s a tidbit that might interest you: “After the hospital closed it was then converted into a drug rehabilitation facility, which was eventually halted by the state for their inability to contain their patients. One example of this claim is of a patient that exited the facility, who then walked across the street to the local feed store where they slapped an employee across the face.” So there does appear to be at least an allegorical tie established between the feed store and the hospital, which could explain why the energy from the hospital is allegedly showing up across the street now.  And it does make sense that the nuns were incapable of keeping rehab patients confined and on the property. So I started thinking about the “TJ” who allegedly died outside the emergency entrance when he was dumped there by his friends after a heroin overdose. I thought that just maybe the legend was being told backwards, and that he was a patient who got out of the hospital without the nuns’ notice and subsequently tried to get back in at night when the place was locked up and couldn’t. But…no. Still no TJ deaths listed in any of the DeWitt county newspapers. Since death records are sealed in Texas for 75 years, the newspapers are the only avenue I’ve got. According to the DeWitt County Appraisal District Tax Rolls, the hospital ownership since it closed is as follows. City to James D. Short (no date), James D. Short to Short Family Trust (5/26/1995), Short Family Trust to Herbert Schaefer (11/25/1998), and Short Family Trust to Phillip M. Ross (8/07/2008), Phillip M. Ross to Jo Ann Marks Andrews Rivera.  A couple of things to mention—caretaker Mike Henson has told stories about seeing strange black creatures/masses in the hospital corridors that are “about the size of an adult German Shepherd”—which ties into a theory I have regarding demonic/negative haunts like the Bell Witch or the Welles House where this type of thing has been documented. Same thing with the little girl ghost—something that pops up all the time in demonic hauntings like the Sallie House. That would really make me focus on the second story and the chapel/convent during the investigation. I think you’ll be more likely to find evidence of desecration and that would explain the hauntings on this property.  While there were naturally some deaths in the hospital--most likely fewer than 100--I’ve found nothing to indicate that any of those deaths were connected to the reported ghosts that haunt this location. I’d be inclined to think that if Dr. Leon Norwierski haunts the ER/OR area, it would be as a residual entity. I’ve found no evidence of the other named ghosts to back up those claims. There were no reports of a double homicide in the basement and the “blood spatter” (if that’s what it is and I’d use luminol to test it) either post-dates the hospital when a trespasser injured themselves or a maintenance worker using a sharp tool injured himself—which makes sense seeing as the alleged blood is in a boiler room in the basement.  By passing on these legends as fact, the management of the Yorktown Memorial Hospital facility is recklessly endangering visitors and investigators of the site by sending them out thinking the entities are innocuous only for them to find something completely different. Out of all the stories I’ve found/researched, I’d be most interested in the link between the feed store and the hospital, which at least seems to be corroborated. For a haunting to spread that distance, I’d consider this to be a demonic infestation caused by a combination of thirty years of trespassers’ legends, misinformation, and the perpetuation of that misinformation by ownership, a previous televised investigation that seems to just have made stuff up, and tour guides/paranormal guides who reinforce those false legends on a daily basis.  However, not everything’s been good between the ownership of the hospital and the town of Yorktown. Local residents who were born at the hospital or witnessed the death of someone they loved at the hospital are horrified at the use the hospital’s been put to. In 2010, the city forced previous owner Phillip Ross to close the hospital for code violations. After a complaint by someone who had visited the site, the county building inspector and codes officer were denied entry into the hospital. When a judge issued a court order to the owner, a group of county and town officials entered the building, eventually finding code violations in the electricity, the structure, and the plumbing. The city administrator added that the two hours he spent in the building during the inspection didn't have him fearing ghosts. "If I am scared of anything in that building, it's tetanus," Puente said. ETA: I am waiting for a couple of phone calls that might impact this dossier, but I doubt it. I’m currently trying to dig out whatever I can on the drug rehab center but the powers that be in that town don’t seem to want to discuss it. As best I can tell after an extensive search of the historical record as documented by newspapers and personal accounts, none of the published stories regarding the hospital are based upon actual historical fact. Any haunting there—and there’s an extensive provenance to support the fact that the building is haunted—has to have been engineered by what happened on and to the location after it was decommissioned as a hospital and abandoned for a number of years before being turned into a paranormal attraction. And considering the nature and spread of the haunting, there seems to be evidence that the haunting began with the desecration of the convent and chapel and is now fueled by a steady stream of investigators and tourists and the energy they bring to the site.  

The following excerpt is from the book I co-authored with Tom Mattingly Empowered: The Fan ReVOLution That Changed College Football regarding the treatment then-head coach Butch Jones doled out to a player, Mykelle McDaniel, after he refused to play on a torn meniscus his freshman year at the University of Tennessee. To date, Mykelle McDaniel has yet to play a down of college football--first owing to Jones's blackball, then UT's refusal to release his transfer papers, and now the NCAA's ruling that he must sit out ANOTHER year and only have three years of eligibility wherever he decides to play. If you want to see what Mykelle says for himself, you can watch the series of interviews I did with him in 2018 on YouTube. Butch Jones is currently serving as an "intern" at the University of Alabama, an arrangement which allows him to collect monthly checks of $160,000 because the $35k Bama pays him doesn't end his buyout agreement with UT. 

That led us to Mykelle McDaniel, who I interviewed a couple of weeks later along with his mother, Chante-Amoure Simmons. Mykelle was another highly touted recruit, a four-star strongside defensive end who had thirty-one offers coming out of high school—including offers from twelve of the fourteen schools in the SEC: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Auburn, South Carolina, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Kentucky, LSU, Missouri, Ole Miss, and Tennessee. Mykelle and Marlin did not know each other, and Marlin’s full story is only being revealed now, in this book. So there was no way that these two young men somehow coordinated their stories. Marlin is in Knoxville; Mykelle is in Hutchinson, Kansas.

I spoke with Ms. Simmons before she and her son committed to an interview with me. The first thing she said struck me hard and made me feel slightly sick. “My son’s father hasn’t been a role model in his life. My second husband never had that bond with Mykelle either. The reason I felt comfortable sending my son to Tennessee was because Coach Jones presented himself as that father figure I always felt my son needed. I thought he was going to go to Tennessee and have that mentorship I’d always wanted for him. But I was a single mother going through his recruitment period with him, and I had no idea what to look for.”

I don’t think I’ll ever get over hearing the tragedy in her voice. Her voice was lovely anyway, soft and low-pitched, and she spoke with such sincerity and eloquence that as soon as she finished that comment, I started to get angry because I thought I knew what was coming. I just hated it for her and for her son, who I’d not yet spoken to. The bond between them was so touching. I mean—think about it. Before she would allow me to interview her son, she had wanted to talk with me first.
I don’t blame her for that. I admire her for it. She’d learned her lesson about trusting strangers with Mykelle.

As I said, I thought I knew what was coming. In actuality, I had no clue how bad that story was going to be. The next day, I interviewed Mykelle with his mother sitting in on the call.

During the pre-training camp physicals, the UT team doctors detected popping in one of Mykelle’s knees. They soon diagnosed a torn meniscus—an injury I can empathize with because I’ve had the same injury myself—and recommended that he have surgery to correct the issue. Because he’d finished a math class late—and not because he failed it. He had a score of 26 on his ACT—Mykelle already had an academic redshirt for the 2016 season, his freshman year. So his path seemed clear. He would have the problem surgically corrected, which was a fairly minor procedure, and would redshirt that season.

But the coaches didn’t agree. They were appealing the academic redshirt and thought there was a chance he could play that season. So Jones and his staff were pushing Mykelle to go ahead and play the season—with his injured knee. Of course, Mykelle, at eighteen, was anxious to start playing too. But a torn meniscus isn’t an injury to be ignored. The torn meniscus in my knee had led to a total knee replacement. I couldn’t imagine any responsible coach or trainer trying to get a young man to play with a torn meniscus and particularly not in the SEC.

“We had like a team advisor. You know, you go to him and just talk to him, you know what I’m saying? Just talk to him. The guy’s not supposed to tell anybody what you talk about at all. I did find out later on, the more I talked to him, the more I told him, the more he was going back to coach and telling him everything,” Mykelle explained. “So I got to talking to him and I was just going back and forth, getting his opinion and expressing my opinion as far as how I feel about playing on my knee right now and thinking about whether I wanna fix it or whether I want to go ahead and have the surgery. And the first day I actually tell him about it, later on that day in a team meeting, Coach Jones was…he didn’t say my name, didn’t mention any name at all, but he started saying that: ‘If you’re thinking about having surgery instead of playing, don’t be a bitch. Man up and help your team out.’ Didn’t say any names but I’m not stupid. I clearly know who he was just talking about.”

“So, after you decided to go ahead and have the surgery and that was with Knoxville Orthopedic Clinic, correct?” I asked.

“Correct.”

“Okay, were the trainers, the assistant coaches, or Coach Jones pushing you to not have the surgery and to go ahead and play even though they knew the doctors had recommended it?”

“Everyone except the doctor himself,” he replied. “When I approached everyone else about it, they said, ‘Don’t have it. There’s a chance you could burn your redshirt. We need you…’

And so on and so on. When I went to the doctor about it there was one thing consistently on my mind. It’s my career. I need to be smart about it. So I go see the doctor and I explain to him that the coaches have not been allowing me to have my surgery for a couple of weeks now and he says, ‘They can’t do that. I had no idea they were doing that. It’s illegal for them to do that. No one can pick and choose when you have your surgery but you.’ When he told me that, and once they (the coaches) were aware that he told me that, that is when they permitted me to have my surgery.”

Now there were all sorts of alarm bells going off in my head. Marlin Lane had also stated that the physicians at KOC were outstanding and provided great medical care, but that he had to go to them outside of the normal injury protocols with the trainers. Now, we have an eighteen-year-old freshman being told by a KOC physician that the coaching staff was making medical decisions on his behalf although that was illegal. That goes well beyond Jones and his staff micromanaging the program. If not outright abuse, that’s downright negligence.

Butch Jones was trading the health and future prospects of his players for wins on Saturdays in the fall and no one at UT had stepped forward as an advocate for those young men.

Mykelle’s mother put her foot down. Her son’s surgery was scheduled and successful, thanks to the Knoxville Orthopedic Clinic physicians. Three weeks later, Mykelle was back on the practice field, training with the team. Because he wasn’t active on the roster, he was working with the scout team. Six weeks into a fourteen week season, it would have been ridiculous to
burn his redshirt. Clearly, the smart thing to do was to let him sit out the remainder of his redshirt year, and then join the active roster the following season.

On his first day back at practice, Mykelle was wearing a green no-contact jersey that the trainers had told him to wear.

“I was back on the field. I came back. In my mind, I’m one hundred percent. I still have a green jersey on but I’m still working. I’m still practicing on the scout team. I walk onto the practice field and I’m like, ‘How you doing, Coach?’

“And Coach Jones says, ‘I’m doing good but I’d be better if you wasn’t in that green jersey.’

“I said, ‘It’s not me, it’s the trainers that got me in it.’

“And he said, ‘Yeah, you being a little bitch.’ His exact words.”

I have to admit that at that moment, I kind of lost my temper. What made it tough was that I was on a three-way call with Mykelle and his mother. The last thing I wanted to do was to follow my initial instincts, which would have involved cussing. So I took a moment and then asked, “Okay, so he called you a little bitch because you were wearing the no contact jersey when you first got back out on the field after your surgery, correct?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“So what did you do?”

“I chuckled and said, ‘Yes sir. I hope it gets better.’ and I continued on with my stretches. And he walked past.”

Always just a little embarrassing to realize a teenager is more mature than I am at fifty-two. But that’s the kind of young man Mykelle is. Like his mother, he’s articulate and extremely courteous. In this day and age, it’s positively refreshing to hear an eighteen year-old just being
polite. Those “yes ma’ams” told me more about his character than any amount of background research could have. These were good people, who could never have anticipated what was going to happen next.

“It’s South Carolina week,” Mykelle went on. “The next incident was South Carolina weekend and we come out for practice Monday and I’m pass rushing this particular day, against this person…a new starter on the o-line. He tore his meniscus before I tore mine. He had surgery before me but his body didn’t heal as fast as mine. He took his good time coming back, so he was literally just now coming back off his meniscus injury and they put him in the starting lineup and line us up to go to work. And I’m going against him and he’s shooting his hand…he’s heading for my face mask. He’s shooting his hands and he’s aiming for my throat, slapping me in my face and whatnot. I turn and Butch Jones is literally just standing right there.

“We had officials at every practice and they would throw flags and, you know, break up every fight before they happen. Literally. Every practice there would be twenty officials out every single practice. There’d be twenty officials. And he’s slapping my face mask and he’s doing it for so long and it gets to the point where I turn to Butch Jones and I say, ‘Are you just going to sit there and watch him do this?’

“He doesn’t respond to me, he just head nods. I don’t know what that means but I said, ‘Are you just going to sit here and watch him keep playing me dirty like that?’ He just nods his head. So I go back, and I come off the ball, and at this point, I do a post move. That’s a move that you don’t do at practice. You’re not supposed to do it against a teammate. At that point he grabs me and he throws me on the ground. Once he throws me on the ground, everyone else hops on top of me. I mean the offensive line was on the bench. They wasn’t even in the game or in the play. The line’s just jumping and stomping and beating me and nothing is happening. Officials
just standing there, not running onto the field. Coaches standing there, not doing anything. I was cool with all the running backs, the only people jumping me were the offensive line. Running backs just standing there watching. Wide receivers just standing there watching. Everybody just stood there watching.

“I talked to a couple of people afterwards, one of the running backs that I was cool with, his name was Jeremy Lewis, he tried to hop in, but his coach cussed him out and said, ‘Don’t you hop in. That’s your o-line. You leave them alone.’ I talked to Jauan Jennings. He told me he was running a fly route. He was way down the field, he didn’t even know what happened until he got all the way back. Everyone was asking, ‘Where were you when it happened?’ Everybody had different reasons but they all were saying it was just the offensive line when they did what they did.

“I went back and looked at it. I saw it on camera that same night, you can pull it (practice film) up on camera. I watched the offensive line just run in and jump in, I watched Jauan running the fly route, I watched the coaches just standing there, I watched the coach cuss the running back who tried to hop in to help me, I watched Butch Jones stand there, I watched the officials just stand there. The next day when I go back, everybody is in the locker room looking at it on their iPads. Everyone on the team gets it. Once Coach Jones comes in and sees everyone’s on their iPads in the locker room watching it, they take the film off of the site. They take that play off of the team thing (practice video site), they took that whole play off. It’s no longer there. I don’t know what they did to it but it was no longer there.”

When writers are conducting an interview and things like this come out, it feels almost like a double gut punch. The first response is a human reaction, visceral and raw, to what you’ve just heard. The second is like getting slapped across the face or punched in the jaw with
adrenaline. That feeling is like leveling up right before a boss fight in a video game. You don’t know exactly what’s coming, but you think to yourself that now might be a good time to head to the closest save point. You recognize the feeling that you’re getting close to something really big.

“So how many…when you say jumped, are you saying they physically pummeled you? They hit you?”

“Stomped, punch, beat. I was beat. By the entire offensive line. If you need me to go into names, as far as the offensive line, I could name the entire offensive line on the 2016 player roster.”

“Now were they instructed to do so by the coaching staff?”

“If you ask me? I know nothing as far as they did it. I do not know nothing for a fact. If you ask me, I’m no fool. I’ve seen other fights happen all through the season. I’ve seen other scuffles happen, the referees break it up, I mean within a second, like instantly. The officials are over there and then it’s over with. This particular fight, they all just sat there and watched.”

Mykelle’s mother was still on the line so I asked, “Ms. Simmons? You saw that entire fight on film, right?”

She’d told me that during our conversation earlier.

“Yes. I saw the fight but when I tried to go back the next day after my mom was saying you need to find some way to download it, the next day when I tried to go back it was gone.”

“How long would you estimate that scuffle went on before it ended?”

“I would say about at least ten minutes?”

Although nothing should have shocked me at that point, I found myself gobsmacked yet again. “That long? Ten minutes?”

“Oh yeah.”

Now, I cannot imagine she was running a stopwatch while she’s watching that film of her son being assaulted by a group of football players. I also am aware that during a traumatic situation, witness descriptions are usually inaccurate—over- or underestimated because of the stress those witnesses are coping with. That’s enough to make two minutes feel like five, or five like ten for most people.

Regardless, her testimony makes it clear that the incident went on much longer than an unplanned scuffle between football players in the heat of the moment would have. Keeping in mind that coaches and officials were standing by and watching—allowing—this to happen indicates to me that this assault continued for some minutes before it finally ended, and that is disturbing.

“All right. So what kind of physical shape were you in after that Mykelle?”

“My adrenaline was running so I don’t feel anything at the time. I get up and I grab my helmet. Coach Jones tried to go to the next play and none of the scout team players ran in to replace me. So he’s like, ‘Who’s supposed to be here right now?’ And then I’m putting my helmet back on and running back onto the field, and he grabbed me and was like, ‘No, you go to the sidelines.’ That’s when he started cussing out the scout team players. ‘Why the f*** are are you out of the game? Get out there, you’re not doing nothing, or I’m gonna take your scholarship!’

“So he went out there and that’s when I calmed down and realized that every time I moved my shoulder, my collarbone was popping out. Literally. I showed the doctors, they took me into the training room with the doctor to take a look at it and he said I needed to go to the emergency room immediately. And they put me in an ambulance and I went to the emergency room. He said the way my collarbone was moving, it was too close to my throat. They didn’t want my bone to cut anything, you understand what I’m saying? So, they took me to the emergency room immediately. They took me there, they X-ray’d it, put me inside the CAT scan, they said—they basically came up with the conclusion I got a contusion in my collarbone and they can’t fix it, because if they go in and fix it, nine times out of ten they would do nothing but make it worse. Just gotta pray it falls back into place.”

“Okay, at this point Ms. Simmons, you have documentation from the hospital that he went to. Was that UT medical center or somewhere else?”

“I’m not sure about what hospital it was because they never gave me documentation so everybody was telling me that Butch Jones had it, and I scheduled meetings with him. First of all, he wouldn’t take a phone call with me. I scheduled two meetings with him after that, both of which he cancelled. I was able to… Coach Strip (Steve Stripling) connected me to the doctor, and I don’t remember the doctor’s name. I have emails, I’m gonna go back through my emails and see what I can find.”
“So after that event, and I saw the text message exchange you had with Butch Jones on your Twitter feed. Did you ever discuss the incident more with him?”

Just as a note—that text exchange was just about what you’d expect from an angry eighteen-year old football player who just found out his coach was glad he got injured as the result of a fight. The language was probably cleaner than what I would have used if that had been my son on the field.

But not by much.

“Oh yeah, he called me after that and when he called me his exact words were, ‘I understand you’re frustrated, I understand you’re upset, but there’s a certain way you can’t talk to the University of Tennessee head coach.’”

“Oh wow, that’s just arrogant. My God.”

“Yeah, he said, ‘I apologize for what happened. I didn’t mean for that to happen. You won’t need to focus on getting any revenge from anybody, I’m gonna get the revenge for you. I’m gonna talk to them, I’m gonna get on to their coach. I’m gonna make sure they’re in trouble for this, they will pay for this.'

“So, I got off the phone and thought, ‘I’ll sleep better tonight.’ And nothing happened to the offensive line. Nothing at all. Yeah.”

“Some of my teammates—Taeler Dowdy, and Jauan Jennings, and John Kelly—they told me at the end of practice that Coach told the whole team that he was glad that what happened, happened. You got to understand that at the time, the whole starting defense…I’m the only scout team player on scholarship so everybody who’s on the field knows that I’m honestly there because I want to be on the field with them. So they respect me, I’m chill with them; they understand that’s who I’m with. So the whole defense has no idea that this happened to me so when, Butch Jones said, ‘I’m happy that happened because when we play South Carolina this weekend it’s going to be a street fight and that’s just showed me that y’all are ready for a street fight.’

“That’s why I texted him and I said, ‘Did you say you were happy it happened?’ That’s when the text messages started because right when I found out I texted him and I asked, ‘Did you say you were happy it happened?’

“He was trying to say that I was twisting his words. ‘I was happy that you got out there.’

“I don’t understand how you can even switch that. You were happy that I got out there? Or you happy that it happened? I don’t know how…I don’t really understand what he’s talking about on that.”

“Yeah, that’s not something any normal person would say.”

“Yeah, not at all. So, while I’m in the emergency room—I’m in the hospital when the defense found out. That’s when Derek Barnett, Corey Vereen, Kahlil McKenzie, Jonathon Kongbo—all of them, the whole defensive line—that’s when they went to the offensive line in the locker room and basically there was a fight in the locker room about what happened. A little scuffle, not really a fight because the offensive line wouldn’t fight back. They were like, ‘We don’t wanna fight, we don’t wanna fight, we didn’t mean for it to happen.’”

As soon as I heard that, my mind instantly flashed back to the 2017 season when ShyTuttle had his orbital bone broken and Butch Jones had claimed in a press conference that he’d fallen on a helmet. Obviously, fights on and off the practice field were a pretty standard event though—something these players were accustomed to under this coaching staff. Here again—I’ve been around football for a long time. I know how frequently tempers flare up on the field, both during practice and during games. But something like this?

How often was this type of thing going on? And how out of line was that with other teams?

Preferred walk-on Taeler Dowdy was one of the players that Mykelle had mentioned in regard to the incident. I spoke with him a week later.

“Okay, so you witnessed the fight that ended up breaking Mykelle’s collarbone, right?”

“Yes, I was actually in the locker room with him after it.”

“Okay, why don’t you tell me about what went down as far as you could tell with that whole thing?”

“I won’t say I saw the whole thing but I definitely heard from everybody, because everybody was talking about it. I think it was a play, and it’s funny because the coaches, like, I was a practice player at the time and, Mykelle, he was a scout player too. And they (the coaches) would like for real yell at us if we would beat the first stringers, like if we, I guess, went too hard and we actually beat them they would get mad. And Mykelle, he would just always beat the o-linemen and I guess they just all get mad and they jumped him. When he came into the locker room, it was just him when he came into the locker room, and I had to help him take his shoulder pads off and stuff. And then like five minutes of him being in pain, the trainers finally came. I don’t know, I just felt like they definitely dealt with that wrong. And then after that practice, Coach Jones says, ‘Good job to the offensive linemen for like sticking together and having each other’s backs’ or something.”

“What were other players saying in the locker room about what happened? After it happened?”

“Well, a lot of the defensive players were mad and, I mean, the linemen, them and Mykelle kinda like—they just didn’t like Mykelle because he would do good. He would do good against them at practice so they were gloating about that. I don’t feel like they felt bad that they did what they did.”

“Did anybody on the coaching staff, strength coach, GAs, other players, did anybody step forward and say what they did was wrong?”

“Not that I heard of honestly because that wasn’t the only fight. I mean, there were fights after that and I believe that because of that situation went so wrong there was more after that…because of that. There wasn’t a punishment for that or something.”

So, let’s take a minute to assimilate what’s been said. Another player has just corroborated Mykelle’s story. Keep in mind, too, that Mykelle’s account dovetails with what Marlin Lane had said earlier—not only about injuries and how the coaches demanded their players continue to play, but also about how Butch Jones used players against their teammates, setting some guys up as almost a gang in order to enforce his rules and expectations upon the others.

“While you’re playing, if you don’t perform to the way he wants you to perform, or basically carry a jug of water or do this and do all that, he was basically saying, ‘You’re not performing up to your abilities so I’m going to give you a year probation on your scholarship. If you don’t perform or do what you came here to do that’s…you’re done.’” Marlin (Lane)had said two weeks earlier. “And what kind of had me up in the air with the last interview I did, which I did not with you guys, but with some… I can’t even remember, who… I think it was SB Nation, I’m not sure but they quoted something that I said in the wrong—”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“It almost kind of messed my career up with jobs or…and everything else. But by me, you know, just knowing certain people that they gave me a chance at my job now. By them ( SB Nation article) saying he had me threaten kids’ lives, which I never did. I never said that. What I said was he would use me, because of my background, where I come from, my environment. On player staff meeting one day which is—we sit at a table like this of probably fourteen players that pretty much can have a voice to other players—and we were sitting in his office conference room and he literally told me, ‘I’m going to tell you why I got you on player staff because you got street in you and so you could go up to certain players and say this to certain players and they won’t react to you because of...’

Basically he was saying where I was from, you know, and I kinda laughed it off but at the same time I’m like…where is that going? Even Justin Worley, like they all... ‘Why would he say that?’”

“When I hear you talk or watch the way you are, I don’t instantly think street, am I wrong here? I mean you’re a very well-spoken young man, how could anybody get street off that?” I said.

“That’s what…‘The reason why I’m in here is because you want me to go to certain players and tell them that if they don’t act right, you’re gonna kick them off the team.’”

So now, all the pieces are starting to fall together. I’m getting a clear picture of what had happened to those earlier teams, those earlier players. I understand better what the environment must been like, and why those squads that looked so good on paper didn’t live up to their potential. I can see why so many injuries decimated the Volunteers, and why so many players transferred. I have three players on the record now: Marlin Lane, who was gone before Mykelle McDaniel and Taeler Dowdy arrived. I have a parent on the record.

As I write this now, I have a strong hunch that these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. Too many other players have been named by these three. And I know that for me, this story is just beginning. There are months of research ahead of me as I track down other players, staff members and former coaches, trainers and physicians and university officials.

And obviously, the person I want to talk to the most is Butch Jones. I would be shocked if he wasn’t restricted by a tight non-disclosure agreement after his termination from the University of Tennessee. I’d assume almost every high-profile coach in the country is. That being said, he should be given the opportunity to discuss these claims on the record and I’d be more than happy to provide him that platform.

But I think it’s essential to understand the following as the foundation of what we’ve been discussing: a football coach is in a position of near-absolute authority over the players on his team. A coach must administer that authority in such a way as to not needlessly endanger a player’s safety, or to negatively impact their prospects. Jones was responsible for his players’ welfare on multiple levels, whether they were superstars or on the scout team. Regardless of how you look at these stories—and this is just a fraction of what I was told by these interview subjects—at the end of the day, any coach that jeopardizes the players on his team must be held accountable for his actions.

That’s why the Maryland decision to retain head coach DJ Durkin after the investigation into the death of player Jordan McNair due to heat stroke caused such a backlash among students, media, and fans. The investigators had censured the coaching practices that led to these same kinds of repercussions on the Maryland football team, citing a culture where players were afraid to speak out, a athletic department that was deeply dysfunctional, a strength and conditioning program the university failed to supervise, and an overall lack of oversight warding the players’ health, safety, and well-being.

Being suspended for a few games isn’t true accountability. That’s a slap on the wrist. The University of Maryland had no option but to terminate Durkin the day after they had reinstated him as head football coach.

And let’s be honest—the similarities between Maryland under Durkin and Tennessee under Jones are striking. Considering the type of injury Mykelle McDaniel received, the two programs were closer than anyone, including me, would ever have guessed.

After I wrote this chapter, I sat back and thought for a few minutes about what I’d learned. When I first heard Marlin and Mykelle and Taeler tell their stories, I was kicking myself for not knowing what was happening to them even though I live hundreds of miles away. Like I should have possessed some sort of insight superpower. Then, I felt disturbed that Vol Nation revolted against UT because we were mad that the university was ignoring what we, the fans, demanded and expected from them when it came to hiring a football coach.

Coaches. The highest-paid, most-visible state employees with their multi-million dollar contracts subsidized by taxpayer dollars. And as I thought the above sentence, something clicked in my head.
The fan ReVOLution wasn’t just about winning football games after all. Without the uprising, none of these stories—or the ones we’ll pursue after this book is finished—might ever have come to light.
That’s how important it is for fans to hold their universities accountable for their decisions. Not just to win games, although that’s a big part of it. We must require them to discharge their responsibilities toward all students. If colleges don’t adequately safeguard their students, then it’s everyone’s absolute duty to hold them accountable for it, whether in Baltimore or Waco, East Lansing or Knoxville.

We really are the caretakers now.