03x03 - The Curse Of Lonergan Farm

[bunniefuu]

They were telling me more of these stories.

Mom, Vaunette wants to hear about Uncle Will.

[Gasps]

Is this the man you saw?

It just seemed like it was behind the trees, it was moving.

It was kind of a Dale boy initiation.

[Boys shouting indistinctly]

I didn't think you believed in ghosts.

[g*nsh*t]

[Boys shout]

[Screaming]

[Gasps]

Pull me up! Pull me up! Pull me up now!

Uncle Will wasn't... he wasn't a bogeyman.

[Gasps]

He was real.

It was in the winter of 1989, I'd...

Kind of come home. Found out that um...

That my brother Timmy and his wife, Susie, and their children were gonna be moving back into the farm.

Dan.

I didn't want to move back to the farm.

Good to see you.

You know, lost my job.

Where's your wife?

Just financially, we didn't really have a choice.

I didn't want my family to be on the street.

Hey, Matthew. Hey, Laura.

How are you guys?

Good.

I was very young when my parents moved in.

Laura, can you guys go play outside, please?

Okay.

It was a bit tight and cramped. There was a lot of people living there.

I know it put a strain on my mom.

She had lung cancer, and it was a hard time.

[Chuckles weakly]

Well, when Tim moved back to the farm, I was a, you know, teenager, getting out of high school.

My mom took him back in, you know, to help him out.

I thought it was nice. I liked Tim. I liked Sue.

Here, Tim. Here's something you can carry.

Oh, that's really funny. Thanks. Pass me something else.

With family, that's what you do. You help 'em out.

It was great having Tim and Steve and I back together in the farm.

That first night, well, we got together for Featherbones.

Hey, Timmy, where are those ribs at, buddy?

Oh, there they are.

I love cooking them. I really doctored them up.

Tim's an incredible... just an incredible cook.

Eating was big. We liked to eat.

Vaunette, at the time, we were dating.

She lived close by on a farm not too far away from us.

I had known Dan more or less my entire life.

I was living still at home with my parents.

Have one for the Chef.

And we sat around, and we were talking and having a good time, just reminiscing about when we were children.

When we would get loud, we'd get obnoxious, and the big line we'd hear from mom was, is...

"We've got 101/2 acres of land out there".

What are you doing in the house?

Get out of my house...

Both: And go play.

All the time.

Mom was the head of the family, the entire head of family.

She kept everything together.

You know what, mom?

Here's to you. Guys, drinks up.

I was becoming more a family member, so they were telling me more of these stories.

That is our great-great-grandfather, Dennis Lonergan.

Oh, yeah?

Dennis Lonergan had two sons.

Charlie, who would've been my great-grandfather, and his other son, Will.

Dan had told me that his Uncle Will had passed away in 1939.

Hey, mom, Vaunette wants to hear about Uncle Will.

And it was becoming clearer that not everybody is a nice person.

Tell her story about the time he laughed at you when you fell off your horse.

Really?

Uncle Will wasn't... he wasn't a bogeyman. He was real.

[Hoarsely] First, you got to...

[Coughing]

Mom, are you okay?

I'll take her. I'll take her.

It's overwhelming at times to take care of someone you love when you know that they're dying.

And there's nothing you can do about it, but try and make them feel more comfortable.

It was late in the evening, and I remember shutting things down.

Turning off the TV, turning out the lights, heading up to bed.

[Ominous music]

Good night, mom.

I just got this... got a strange feeling that something just wasn't right.

[Discordant musical flourish]

It wasn't long after we moved back, I decided to take a walk around the property.

Thanks so much for helping us move our things.

Of course, man. You're family.

Timmy and I were pretty close. We're pretty close brothers.

Yeah, it's good to see you again.

[Grunts]

Oh, no, you did not just start a snowball fight with me.

I did.

You jump over logs and go under trees and go through thistles.

And when you got through the woods, you'd start to see the house.

Back when it was first built, it was probably a pretty nice house.

And it was falling apart.

I mean, it was condemned.

That was Uncle Will's house.

You know, the place just scared me since I was a kid.

Do you want to go inside?

I tell you, there just seemed like a...

There was... there was something there.

And we kept hearing this pounding.

[Thud reverberates]

What's that pounding?

[Heartbeat thumping]

We finally figured out it was our own hearts.

[Chuckles]

[Chuckling]

My heart was pounding because I had heard ghost stories all my life growing up.

And here I am, going to this abandoned house.

Tim, I'm gonna... I'm gonna go back to the house and check on mom.

I'll see you later.

[Twigs snapping]

I heard something.

I heard, you know, a twig breaking.

And I had the feeling something was there.

Hello?

One of the things we had at the farm were many outbuildings.

That morning, I'm in the barn.

It's dark. It's kind of dusty.

[Metal jingles]

I'd heard these bells.

[Metal jingles]

I heard these bells.

[Metal jingles]

They were off in the distance, and there was no...

There was nobody there.

[Metal jingling]

Like, I hear these bells, like someone with spurs on their shoes. They're walking.

[Metal jingling]

There's no one in the barn.

There's no one outside the barn.

And it sounded just...

Very ominous, very...

Very frightening as it got closer and closer to me.

[Jingling approaching]

[Eerie music]

I go, "Danny, you hear the bells?"

He looked at me like...

Yeah, I heard the bells.

I don't know what those bells were.

I can't really explain it.

[Sighs]

What are you working on?

Oh, I'm just fixing the old saw.

She's in pretty rough shape.

Is that the well?

Danny, does this well still work?

We didn't have city water.

It was out in the middle of the country. Everybody had a well.

I remember it was the only water we had.

Still the same. Still no city water.

You'd look down, and it's a good 75, 80 feet deep.

It's a scary thing to look down and see just a little dot of water down at the bottom of it.

Two, three, four...

And I remember, when I was kid, that somehow an animal got down there.

It took me back to that day when I had to go down there.

Three, four...

Five, six...

[Water splashes]

Man, it stinks down there.

My mom was like, you guys need to go down and check the well and see what's happened.

Well, I didn't leave the cover off.

Well, if it wasn't me and it wasn't Steve, then it must've been you, Dan.

I swear it wasn't.

I was old enough to be able to do it.

Found this old rope in the back.

Seems strong enough. It should work.

So I got volunteered to get the dead animal out.

All right, let's do it.

Okay.

You know, you don't mess with a well, you know, that's very scary.

But you'd never want to fall down there because you knew you were gonna die.

I had taken a fish net to pick up the animal...

All right, start to lower me down.

And my brothers would pull me back up, and this was our plan.

I was extremely nervous about it.

Dan, you're heavy.

[Metal rattling]

And this well was pretty deep, so you couldn't see the bottom.

It was just a dark hole down at the bottom.

I remember lowering him down there it's a... you know, it's a deep well.

The lower I got, it got scarier and scarier.

[Ominous music]

[Water splashes]

Okay, I've reached the bottom.

I shined my flashlight down.

[Discordant musical flourish]

It was a dead raccoon that had been there for at least a couple days.

Oh, it smells.

And at that point...

I heard someone whisper to me.

[Whispering indistinctly]

Did you guys say something?

I think Danny thought that we were playing a joke or something, but we didn't say anything.

No, I didn't say anything. Did you?

I didn't say nothing.

No, we didn't say anything.

And as I'm reaching down with the net, I heard something talk in my ear again...

[Whispering indistinctly]

And it sounded like it was right behind me.

[Intense music]

[Whispering indistinctly]

I felt like I was... I wasn't alone in the well.

[Whispering] I'm gonna cut you.

No matter how I turned or spun around on the rope, there was someone right behind me. It was absolutely terrifying.

[Whispering] I'm gonna skin you alive, boy.

[Whispering] I'm gonna skin you alive, boy.

Pull me up! Pull me up! Pull me up now!

I reached down, scooped the raccoon up.

And said... yelled at them to pull me up now.

Guys, pull me up! Pull me up! Pull me up!

I started screaming at them, and they pulled me up the well fairly quickly.

Were you guys talking to me?

Wasn't us.

They knew that something was wrong.

Was it you guys?

No.

Come on, don't lie to me. Just get me out of here.

As a kid, that was my main fear, was that there was someone in the well with me.

But as an adult, I knew there couldn't be anything down there.

As I look back on it, I've never been able to come up with a rational explanation.

Well, as my mom's cancer progressed.

And they had kind of told us that mom wasn't...

Wasn't going to probably live through the weekend...

That evening, I was there with mom alone.

It had been at least a day since she'd even talked.

And it... she had been in and out of consciousness the entire time.

[Gasps]

[Gasping and stammering]

No!

Oh, my God. Oh, my God, no!

[Coughs and gasps]

No!

[Gasping and choking]

What's wrong, mom?

[Eerie music]

She was looking clearly at someone, and there was just no one there.

I was the only one in the room at the time.

It was a very eerie...

A very eerie moment.

I checked on her and realized that she had passed away.

She was gone.

I helped hold his hand. I held a lot of their hands.

Here were these three brothers trying to keep control of the farm.

And get over their loss...

Because she was their world.

Well, my mom was an awesome person. She...

I sure miss her sometimes.

Ready to go?

It was around Halloween. It was late October.

It was kind of chilly, it was...

Probably about 11:00 at night.

It was kind of a Dale boy initiation.

Make 'em feel part of the family.

Come on, I'll take you up to Uncle Will's, and let's see if I can scare you.

And I shook my head and said...

Eh, you're not gonna be able to scare me.

Hey.

Hey, wait up, Vaunette.

And as you look up, there is nothing but a wall of trees.

And as you got closer, it felt like the more the light, was just sucked out of the area.

There was no sound.

There was no animal sounds.

You didn't hear anything.

And as Dan and I were walking...

He began to tell me more stories about...

The past and what had happened.

When we were kids, they wanted us to stay out of the woods.

Uncle Will might get you.

I was just telling her, you know, a lot of it, of course, just to build up the scare a little bit.

He did warn me to watch my step.

And there was all kinds of debris and...

You really had to be careful.

Want to go check out what's upstairs?

[Stairs creaking]

[Wood snaps]

[Panting]

You okay?

I was convinced at that point that I was scare-able, and I'm gonna go back outside.

[Panting]

It's okay. It's okay.

You got to come check out what's in the basement.

I don't know.

I didn't think you believed in ghosts.

I don't.

[Trapdoor creaking]

He was teasing me. Well, no, you've got to come in.

You've got to check out the basement.

She didn't want to go into the cellar.

I kind of talked her into it. We went down there.

Watch your head.

So we go down the steps, and I'm shining the flashlight.

You could hear your own breathing...

And you could actually hear your own heartbeat.

Okay, it is a little creepy now.

So I asked Dan, all right, so...

What's purpose of all the holes?

And he's like, oh, that's where Uncle Will kept his treasure.

Anybody who tried to steal his treasure would lose their hand.

[Gasps]

Yeah, I wasn't gonna go for that, so I picked up a couple of sticks...

And I was poking them...

Into different holes.

There was nothing in there.

But there was one that was a little bit higher.

And for some reason, that was the one...

That I needed to touch.

I can't explain it. I just... I knew I had to put my hand in that one.

[Gasps]

Help.

[Intense music]

Dan, help!

Dan.

[Panting frantically]

What's wrong?

There was this searing hot pain in my hand.

And it was spreading up to my elbow, and we could see there was this bite mark.

What could've possibly bitten her arm like this?

It just looked like human... like someone had, like a person had bit her.

If it was an actual human bite, then the person was missing some teeth.

Let's go. Let's go.

Yeah.

Come on.

We needed to get out of there.

I felt guilty, because I took her up there. That's why she was hurt.

I really wish I hadn't done it, but nothing that severe had happened before.

[Ominous music]

[g*nshots]

[g*nshots]

Well, that was fun.

It was time to go. It was getting late.

We were walking back up to the farm.

Too bad we didn't get anything, though.

[Chuckles]

You mean too bad you didn't get anything.

Thought they were supposed to teach you to use firearms in the service.

Oh, shut up.

I remember the...

Oh, boy.

You could hear something...

[Metal jingling]

Like footsteps.

[Metal jingling]

Hey, Danny, wait up.

I'd say, like, Danny, did you hear that?

Think there's someone out there?

It was like something was stalking us. Something was there.

I don't think so.

[Twigs snapping]

Hey.

Hey, you!

[Dramatic music]

And I just take off in a flat run.

I'm gonna find out who this is, who's been following us.

Couldn't catch... couldn't catch up to whoever it was.

It seemed like it was behind the trees. It was moving.

I couldn't run fast enough. I couldn't get there.

It seemed like... it was just like trying to chase a rainbow.

Whoa, whoa!

You had the feeling something was watching you...

Danny.

But there wasn't anybody there.

So as we're cutting through the woods to get to the barn, then we can cut over and back up to the farmhouse.

I was kind of worn out, and I was trying to catch my breath.

Hey, Vaunette. Why don't you let me take that?

Thanks.

You guys okay?

Yeah.

Don't worry. I'll catch up to you.

It's like, I'll catch up with you. You guys go on ahead.

And I was taking a drink.

[Discordant musical flourish]

It was a man in a noose.

It was an apparition.

Okay, you're hallucinating.

It's not really there.

This was Uncle Will's property. This was his barn.

That night, that's when the nightmares really started.

[Eerie music]

It's always in the barn, and there was people.

[Voice echoing]

They were just laughing at me.

[Chuckles]

You're in trouble, boy.

You know, like, you're in trouble, boy.

The old guy that was deranged-looking, I couldn't get away from him.

All of a sudden, my mom showed up.

And she's pulling at me.

[g*nsh*t, woman screams]

You just got to get out of here. You can't be here.

[Shouting indistinctly]

Get the hell out of here.

Get the hell out of here!

I woke up outside Uncle Will's house in my underwear and a T-shirt.

There was six, eight inches of snow on the ground.

I was in my bare feet.

This thing that was chasing me, I've got the feeling I've seen this figure before.

Well, there was one recurring nightmare that kept happening more and more...

[Saw buzzing]

And it felt clearly evil.

[Breathes eerily]

There was something that wanted to get me...

And at that point, I'm completely terrified.

It's something bad I'm going towards...

And mom is there.

You got to get out of here.

She is yelling at me, get out of here now.

Get the hell out of here!

Get the hell out of here!

[Growls]

[Intense music]

They kept happening and happening, and I was asking myself, why are...

Why am I seeing this? Why is this happening?

[Ominous music]

I hadn't slept walked since I was a child.

I was terrified.

It brought back all the memories and everything that happened when I was a kid.

I just... I couldn't believe what was going on.

I mean, I was coming apart.

I'm telling Danny about it, and he just... he freaks out.

He just goes, it's the same kind of dream I'm having.

Mom's telling you to get out of there.

And then we kind of realize maybe she's trying to protect us from something.

Get in here.

It kind of made me remember something that happened back when I was high school.

[Eerie music]

Timmy and I took our friends Earl and Aaron...

Up to Uncle Will's.

They're a couple of guys we played football with. They're friends.

I don't want to terrify other people, but just scare 'em a little bit.

To make them understand what we... kind of what we lived through.

Hey.

You know, we say, Aaron, you can't handle going up to Uncle Will's, you know?

We saw the no trespassing sign. It was just nailed up.

It kind of remind you of looking at the old Western days.

We can't be trespassing if we're with the family.

We were gonna call his bluff, so that was the main thing on our... we...

You know, we're tired of hearing about it. Well, who is Uncle Will?

We didn't believe that there was a spirit.

And I really wasn't interested in trying to find out.

[Ominous music]

At that point, that's when the terror started setting in.

[Metal jingling]

What is that?

[Metal jingling]

I don't know.

And we seen something on one side of the porch...

[Metal jingling]

Start moving.

[Metal jingling]

You could start hearing the boards creaking, and we froze again like deer.

They felt something, they sensed something.

And I know that I started feeling there was something wrong.

[Intense music]

[Roaring]

[Screams]

[Boys shouting indistinctly]

All I just knew was, I was getting out of there.

[Shouts]

He was just coming at us fast.

Run!

Tall man coming up the path... it was moving fast.

And he's covered almost half the distance.

I was faster than I had ever ran in my life.

I looked back, and the man's only a few feet behind me.

Something's right behind Danny.

I was running full speed. Looked like a little human locomotive.

[Shouts]

I hit that gate, jumped the gate.

[Shouts]

[Growls]

We've been chased off the property by a man who's been dead for...

35 or 40 years.

The things that we saw when we were children were still there.

And it was just becoming much more frightening.

Did you sleep?

Me either.

I don't think that we're imagining this.

There's too many people here that have experienced this stuff.

There's got to be something going on here, right?

See you later.

We just... we're trying to figure out, why are we seeing...

Seeing these things that we hadn't seen before?

Uncle Will, that's what I thought.

Uncle Will is back.

Since mom had passed away, the one person I knew who would know about it would be my Aunt Mary.

She was like a second mom.

[Doorbell rings]

This is a nice surprise.

How are you?

I'm good. How are you doing?

So I explain to Aunt Mary what had been going on.

And kind of told her everything that different people had been experiencing.

There's this man, this...

Gaunt man with a mustache.

Everyone keeps seeing him.

He's in our dreams.

I didn't know who else to come to, so...

Dan, would you go get that photo album for me, please.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

I want to show you some pictures.

She had brought out some pictures to show me.

You remember this one. This one was at the house.

Yeah, I recognize a few of these.

And there's your great-great-grandfather, Dennis, and Dennis had two sons.

One was Charlie.

And one of the pictures she showed me was Uncle Will.

Is this the man you saw?

It was the person that had chased us off of his property.

That's him.

Aunt Mary told me that in the early 1900s, something bad had happened at the Lonergan Farm.

[Metal jingling]

Will.

Oh, he was a terrible r*cist.

An African-American that was working on the farm had...

Done something with a white woman that had so angered...

Will that Will and some other men decided that they had to get rid of this man.

I asked Aunt Mary what exactly had happened.

They lynched him.

[Macabre music]

[Macabre music]

I drove back to the Lonergan Farm.

I just... I couldn't believe that Uncle Will got away with this.

The idea that someone in my family could cause this much, torment for another person...

Is just sickening.

Uncle Will had haunted us when we were children.

And now he was haunting us as adults.

Growing up at the farm, it was scary when it was dark or night or...

But for the most part, I mean, it was a good place.

I was seven...

And I had to share a room with my sister.

When we were at the farm, I remember Laura had started having some nightmares.

Auntie Vaunette.

I used to have a lot of bad dreams.

Auntie Vaunette!

Sometimes I couldn't tell if they were real or if they were dreams.

Hi, Sweetie, why aren't you in bed?

Can't go to sleep. I'm scared.

Laura and I became really good friends, and she would tell me all kinds of...

Little things about what was going on at school.

And then she would talk about her secrets and her fears.

I wasn't sure if she had had a nightmare and that's what woke her up, but she just knew she felt scared.

And my Aunt would always tell me...

"Well, if it's a dream and you pinch yourself, you'll know because you'll wake up".

Good night.

I can remember one particular night.

The door, it creaked open, and it creaked open very slowly.

I saw somebody coming in the room.

[Door creaks, metal jingles]

I couldn't tell who it was, but I knew it wasn't my mother or my father.

Is this a dream, or is this happening? Is this a dream, or is this happening?

[Gasps]

If you're having a bad dream, just pinch yourself, and it'll go away.

Or pinch yourself to wake yourself up.

[Hisses and snarls]

I felt like I couldn't move. I felt frozen in my skin.

[Baby cries]

My sister was still there. Just pinch yourself, and you'll wake up.

I was thinking, I need to pinch myself. I need to pinch myself, but I couldn't do it. I was just frozen.

I just had that feeling that they were gonna take her.

I forced myself to pinch myself, and I screamed, and I screamed.

[Screaming]

[Indistinct radio chatter]

[Suspenseful music]

I was terrified. It was my fault that she was gone.

I didn't know where my daughter was.

I didn't know if somebody kidnapped her.

Melissa wasn't even barely crawling. She never even crawled out of the house before.

All right, folks. We're looking for a baby, her name is Melissa...

We knew that this is what all these events had been escalating to.

Move very slowly. Check everything, all right? Off we go.

Something took my daughter. Why they... why...

Why would anybody do that?

I went cold. I thought, Uncle Will.

Uncle Will's dead, and the cop isn't gonna know that.

The cop wasn't gonna believe something like that.

Why would they?

Melissa!

When a young kid is missing, you know, every...

You know, the community comes together to try to find her.

They would... they had formed human chains to walk along, looking for her.

There were people everywhere hollering, looking, screaming, Melissa, Melissa, and it just...

It started to echo in the trees.

[Echoing] Melissa! Melissa!

Melissa!

I was worried about not ever seeing my daughter again.

Well, my sister was married to Timmy, and I get this call saying that, Herman, Melissa's missing.

I had to join in the search.

Melissa!

I mean, it's Melissa. It's my niece.

Melissa!

Melissa.

I was feeling more panicked. I was becoming more worried.

And I looked over, and then I realized...

I was right next to Uncle Will's.

[Tense music]

So I was so focused at where I needed to go.

No reason, no rhyme. I don't know. I just have to be there.

We've already looked back there.

You know, it was like I'm driven to do something, and I don't know why.

[Metal jingling]

All of a sudden, I heard bells.

[Metal jingling]

It was a strange noise.

[Growls]

[Metal jingling, footsteps]

[Intense music]

[Indistinct radio chatter]

Melissa!

Melissa!

Melissa!

I knew Melissa was out there...

With the ghost of Uncle Will.

I had decided that I have to go this direction.

Somebody or something is telling me, Herman, this is what you need to do.

And I walked through this area anyway because I was being guided, and I don't know why.

[Metal jingling]

[Tense music]

At that point, I just see something that looked like an animal.

[Intense musical flourish]

I'm wondering, what is that?

And as I look down, I noticed it wasn't an animal.

It was human.

I holler... "I found her!"

I found her. She's over here. She's alive. I've got her.

I found her!

[Baby crying]

[Sentimental music]

I don't know who or what guided Herman...

My mom, a guardian angel. I can't answer that.

And thank God we got her back.

Everything that happened to me.

Everything that happened to everybody else...

Melissa's disappearance, I believe it was Uncle Will.

They had centered their life around their mother in a lot of ways.

And with her gone, Uncle Will wanted to come back.

He wanted to reclaim that which he lost.

And really...

No one was really upset to see the house go.

That place was...

Oh, sh**t.

That place was evil.

Uncle Will wanted us out of there, or something did.

I think it was a warning.

I can't say why.

It's just full of, you know, hate...

Malevolence. I...

I'll just... to this day, I don't understand.