Scare yourself with these insane true-life paranormal events this lockdown

With us all on lockdown, it’s time to get a little spooky. Sure, we’re all dealing with a viral pandemic and things are looking bad. So we might as well enjoy and share our favorite real-life ghost stories. Sometimes you just need to be scared to face the horrors of the real world. 

There are some real doozies out there among the scariest paranormal events to recount for your lockdown. If there are movies based on these events, we’ll take a moment to recommend them as well. Here are some of our favorite paranormal events to share while you’re on lockdown.

Amityville

The story of Amityville is both paranormal and true crime rolled into one. So you’re getting a real twofer with this story. Let’s start with the true crime portion of events first. On November 13, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his parents and four younger siblings. He was sentenced to six concurrent life sentences and is still serving them to this day. 

The story that people really know, at least where Amityville is concerned, is that of the Amityville horror. During a 28 day period when George and Kathy Lutz and their three children resided at the home and were tortured by paranormal occurrences within the home, such as a deep male voice telling a priest to leave during an attempted blessing and later developing the stigmata. 

While people have questioned the validity of the Lutz family’s claims, it’s still a pretty creepy story.There are numerous films depicting the story of The Amityville Horror as it came to be known. Sometimes the classics are the best, so check out the 1976 film that shattered box office records. 

The Bell Witch haunting

We’re going back to the 19th century for the story of the Bell Witch. As it goes, the Bell family had come under attack by a poltergeist within their home. It was able to speak, manipulate the environment, and shapeshift. It was, according to research done, a very famous haunting within the area. The majority of the Witch’s rage was focused on patriarch John Bell, Sr. and his youngest daughter Betsy.

The Witch would, reportedly, slap and stick Betsy with pins while paralyzing John Sr.’s mouth. The Witch expressed a desire to kill John, eventually poisoning him. The Witch would interrupt the mourning to “sing drinking songs” to celebrate the death. Despite the ire the Witch shared with John Sr. and Betsey, the spirit was reportedly fond of John Sr.’s wife Lucy and would sing hymns to her. 

If you want to go further into the legend of the Bell Witch, then check out the podcast Lore’s episode “Going Viral” about the story of the haunting. There have also been films inspired by the Bell Witch as well such as The Blair Witch Project and An American Haunting.

The Philip Experiment

Now this one? This is pretty wild. So if you have a decent grasp on your paranormal knowledge, then you know about the theory that some hauntings are like psychic manifestations of humans under great stress? These are what we know as poltergeists. So the Philip Experiment is, well, an experiment that took place in 1972 to put that to the test.

The group consisted of eight people, who created a fictional person named Philip Aylesford, and attempted to communicate with Philip through a seance. Now, here’s the weird thing, stuff apparently happened: knocks, taps, breezes, unexpected echoes, and more occurred when the group communicated with Philip. Now there were detractors over the parameters of the experiment, but aren’t there always? It’s still pretty creepy.

There is a 2014 movie that is loosely based on the Philip Experiment called The Quiet Ones. It boasts a pretty impressive cast such as Jared Harris (Chernobyl) and Sam Caflin (The Hunger Games). 

Doris Bither/The Entity Haunting

The story of Doris Bither is one that’s not as well known as other hauntings, but it’s a very disturbing case to those who have heard of it. In 1974, single mother Doris Bither approached parapsychologist Dr. Barry Taft and his associated Kerry Gaynor. Bither said that she had been sexually assaulted by the spirits of three men in her home multiple times. 

When Bither moved into a home, a woman knocked on the door and told her that the house was evil before leaving. Things got weirder from there. Bither’s second son would back up her claims as he would hear the attacks from his bedroom. Friends, neighbors, and Bither’s three other children would also say that some weird things were happening at the house.

Bither was photographed and was always surrounded by light that was inexplicable to Taft or Gaynor. The attacks would eventually subsided and Bither would die in 1995. A film based on the story, The Entity, was released in 1983.