The West Grand Haunting author, Michael Oka

AOTP EP:3 Author, Michael Oka, discusses the paranormal activities at his childhood home that changed his life, inspired his book, and ignited his curiosity and ultimate investigation into the paranormal.

Pick up a copy of Michael's book at Amazon, here - https://a.co/d/jis9ibV

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Accounts of the Paranormal -

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Welcome to the show. Tonight I am pleased to bring you author Michael Oka, who is here to discuss the paranormal activities at his childhood home that changed his life, inspired his book, The West Grand Haunting, and ignited his curiosity and ultimate investigation into the paranormal. Michael, welcome to the show. Happy to have you here. This is a kind of a special um interview for me, touching on your book because it happens to be set in actually my hometown, the city uh I was born and raised in, Krona, California. And uh recently when I when I found that out, I I wanted to do the this interview even more so. But that's very exciting. And I'll add that I didn't we didn't know each other until uh going through this and talking about uh the podcast. So I just want to make that clear, but just it just happens to be from my hometown.

SPEAKER_02 1:41

Yeah, absolute coincidence.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

With that, uh let's get into it, if you don't mind. Uh when you guys first moved into this house, um, like the early life when you moved in, um, you know, what age were you, and what was your initial feeling uh when you got into the house? What did you feel and when did things change?

SPEAKER_02 2:00

Well, no, that's that's interesting. Like uh you're kind of familiar with the story. I don't know if you got a chance to read the book or or anything, but uh basically we had just come out of uh the uh mid-1980s, and it was uh, you know, my parents were separated for a bit, and we were hopeful, is what way they would say. We moved in this place. It didn't feel like anything at first, you know. It was hope, you know. We moved in, it was the first time we were back together as a family, and um we walked in and you know, it was a quiet house. It was a it was a pretty house. It was big, it was an enormous property, uh, bigger than anything we'd ever lived on. Um at the time, the backyard had like three orange trees, a uh pomegranate plant, um, swing set. It was it was an it was a nice property, garage and a root cellar. And for the uh for a very short period of time, it was just kind of inert, you know, is the best way I could say like not a uh a presence, you know. You walk into a place and you're like, oh, I can feel the history. It wasn't any of that either. It was just it was empty um for quite a while. Uh we my sister and I we moved in uh my mom and dad, and we uh had stored a lot of our toys from the mid-1980s, you know, G.I. Joe and the the Cobra Base, all that stuff was down in the root cellar, so we'd go down there to play with our old toys. And I was about, oh gosh, let's see, we moved in the house in October of 89. I want to say it's like October 4th of 1989. I'd have to double check, but uh, we would go down and play in the root cellar, and then one day, you know, mom and dad are like, hey, don't go down there. Well, why? It's not safe. Well, how? You know, you let us otherwise we just don't want you going down there. No real explanation. One day, uh, because we would get home from school and my mom was uh working the swing shift, and uh, we came home from school, and my mom's like, hey, stay inside, you know, uh your dad, your dad'll be home in about 10 minutes. So we're like, okay, and we had this dog Stormy that I'd had since I was uh about gosh, six years old, around five or six years old that we had gotten while we were living in Lawndale. And uh his name was Stormy, and he was a good boy. He's uh real protective. My sister and I, you know, we're not allowed in the root cellar without an adult, and technically, in dog years, Stormy's old enough, so we rationalized it. And she's uh two years younger than me, so she would have been six while I was uh well, I was nine. She'd be uh six or seven at this time. And uh we went into the root cellar to go play, and um gosh, we were down there for about maybe 15-20 minutes, and uh we heard footsteps on the floorboards above us, and it wasn't like you know, oh, the house is settling, the house was built, and turns out, you know, years later I discovered the house was built in 1910, it had plenty of time to settle. But uh we heard these, they sounded like deliberate footsteps, and they're going from the kitchen, you know, it to uh to understand the floor plan of the house. The backyard had the driveway and the garage, and we never used the front door because it was out by the front street. And as we know, uh anyone from Corona knows West Grand's a busy street, and right over by the 91 freeway, uh there were no stoplights, frequent car accidents. So we we we went in through the back, and uh we thought, oh, oh no, you know, we're we're in trouble because uh you come in through the backyard, you go up the stairs, there's the kitchen. Next door, the kitchen's the living room, next door to that's the den. To the right, you've got a hallway at the end of the hallway, mom and dad's room, uh, a restroom, my room, and at the other end of the hallway, my sister's room. And we hear these footsteps from under the house, you know, and we're like, oh no, you know, dad's home. Um, and and just for you know, any listeners you have, it was it was the 80s, uh late 80s, but still the 80s, and spanking was a thing. And my dad was he could be liberal with a belt if you if you got offline, and so we're like, oh no. I hear that. Yeah, you know, spare the rod, man. And so like we're we're kind of panicking, and I'm like, okay, we we can still we can still find a way out of this. And here's the thing, though, is like the uh the root cellar had this heavy door, you know. As a kid, I always likened it to like a medieval dungeon door. It was uh made with four by fours and crossbarred with two by fours, and there were the thick heavy bolts on the outside. It really looked like a dungeon door, and uh that was wide open, you know. My dog Stormy's whining and curling around my feet, and he's a black lab, you know. He's about oh gosh, 85, so four or five years old. He's curling around my feet and whining, and and I I'm I'm not I wasn't a dumb kid. I I knew you know my dad wasn't home because I didn't hear his van pull in. He had a minivan, one of the boxy kinds from the uh late 80s, early 90s, ugly gray thing. And uh I would have heard it coming in, but I didn't. But I would rather at this point, you know, I'm thinking I'd rather I'd rather get the punishment because I if I can lie my way out of that, it'd be better than you know the alternative. Because if he's not home and there's footsteps upstairs, that means someone's either in my home or worse, no one's in my home and there's footsteps upstairs. You know, and so me and my sister were we're thinking, okay, we we we can get out of this. And we're running up the root cellar ramp. There were no stairs, just a dirt ramp that went under the house, and we're shutting the door, slide latch in place, running up the stairs, going inside, and of course, you know, when when you're scared, you you try and lie to yourself that something isn't what it is. And you know, first thing you know I'm doing is like, hello, dad, and of course, nothing, and no one answers back. Um, no footsteps, you know. We do a room by room and there's no one in there, and not even five minutes later, dad arrives home and our mouths are shut. You know, it's one of those things, you're a kid, you want to tell someone that what just happened, but if you do, you are you know admitting liability on yourself, and that's a spanking. So you you say nothing. That was uh, as I I put it in my book, that was when the house woke up. It had been dormant for a little while, and then one day it was not anymore. And uh that was when the atmosphere of the house actually got kind of thick.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

About how long did that take?

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Oh gosh, I don't remember the exact um amount of time. We moved in in early, early October, and I want to say the first instances started, you know, within a maybe one in three weeks. I I would have to consult my notes on it because I was nine, you know, and I had to go through a lot of uh a lot of memory notes and some uh some old photos to kind of get an idea of where things started. Uh a history of the house, like as far as me figuring out when I moved in, I had to pull up a previous uh owner and renter list, and I was able to see when my um mom and dad actually moved in there, which was around I want to say either October 4th or October 6th of 89. And uh it wasn't it wasn't past the mid mid mark of the month, you know. Um it the house started pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Didn't waste much time. And I love how you and in the book you have a a diagram, the illustration, the floor plan of the house. That's really cool.

SPEAKER_02 8:35

That is um the actual floor plan of the house. Um a lot of it's based on memory, so like some of the dimensions. The restroom, if you see the floor plan, the restroom looks like a big skinny alleyway. It in fact was a big skinny alleyway. The toilet was immediately next to the bathtub, like you know, a leg's length away from the wall and a leg, well not I'm sorry, a leg's width away from the wall and a leg's width away from the tub. You know, it was it was a really skinny, weird bathroom. Master bedroom was big, my room was small, uh, my sister's room was big, which uh, you know, and since I know you've read the book now, you know, her and I ended up trading rooms. But um it was it was a weird layout, uh, but overall the dimensions of the house are exactly as you see it in the diagram.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

You had mentioned that your mom was the one that told you to not go down in the cellar. Was it her?

SPEAKER_02 9:23

Um it was it was it was her specifically, yeah. She's like, hey, you know, you and your sister, um, we don't want you to go down there anymore. Uh the the the reality of the the matter was, I know I said my parents said, but the reality was my mom.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

Did she say why by chance?

SPEAKER_02 9:37

She did not. Um she seemed what they you know, we're not too perceptive as kids, and yet at the same time, you know, they tell you kids pick up on everything, and um she didn't say much, and I don't want to say she seemed shaken. It was more like she seemed nervous. You know, no one was really telling us anything about anything, because if you're a responsible parent, you don't tell your kids, hey, you know, we had a really scary experience in the basement, don't go down there. Um, you you hide that kind of thing from your kids. And if your kids are disobedient twerps like we were, then we go down there anyway. Because when you say, hey, don't go down there, it makes it far more enticing. Lose lose for mom and dad. For sure. After that, things started getting like I said, the atmosphere seemed thick and it was tense. And uh in the book I use, you know, that that the house hated us. Um, as a nine-year-old, I if I had understood what that feeling was, I would have said the same. Um, I knew that it was tense, and it there was like a kind of a feeling of being unwelcome in your own home, you know. On one side, you know, you're you're living in this brand new place, uh, but on the other side, you know, you constantly feel like you've got eyes on you every time you turn around. Um, the worst places in the house that you could possibly be beside the root cellar would be like the kitchen, which was directly above the root cellar. Uh my sister's room, which was directly above the root cellar, my room, which was directly above the root cellar. Um and uh every now and then, you know, like the uh the den, which was uh just, you know, just next door to the uh you in the picture you can see it, but to describe it, um, it was right next door to the living room. And it was separated by these half walls. It was real pretty. Um all we had in there was like a spinach green, you know, classic late 80s IBM computer. Um no real furniture in there, an armchair. And that that room actually wasn't so bad as uh the living room was sometimes uh the bathroom was actually kind of scary sometimes, which was weird. You know, you wouldn't think, you know, I'm going to the bathroom and then I'm afraid to be in the bathroom. But um we we didn't hear anything, you know, at first, like ambient whispers, like in a horror movie. It was more like just a constant feeling of unease. And, you know, we had to do our homework in the uh kitchen, and I'd be terrified. I'd be sitting at the table, and we had these uh six windows. Uh they look like little uh half windows at the very top of the wall, and they faced out toward the back yard, and and you were, you know, you sit there and you always feel like something's looking through those windows. And to give you an idea, those windows were uh most of them, all but one of them, was pretty high up off the ground. So it was really irrational. And uh as a kid, you know, like I said, no one was telling me anything. I'd be doing my homework in the kitchen, and I'd just get real uncomfortable. I'd tell my dad he was I was scared, and he'd say, I have no reason to be and to do my homework. Thought I was trying to get out of my homework, you know, and I'll do it in the living room. No, you'll be distracted. And we, you know, I'd sit and suffer through it. Uh that it it started out like that. It started out kind of, you know, small things. Um, it didn't really hit critical mass for me until uh and I I don't know if you ever saw it, but it's most people I ever talked to uh refer to it as that episode, and it was uh that episode of Unsolved Mysteries with the uh haunted Titanic.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

And oh, I remember the the Queen Mary, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Or the yeah, I'm sorry, Haunted Queen Mary Titanic.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

Loved that show back then, and I remember that episode actually very well. I've I've seen it probably a few times in reruns.

SPEAKER_02 13:04

Everybody I talked to remembered that um one of my readers actually um I won't use an Afg language, but you know, he sent me a personal message he was reading, and he was like, Hey, by the way, F you and I was like, What? He's like, dude, I remember that episode. I was sleeping in my parents' bed for a week, you know. And so, I mean, I I actually just re-watched it before I wrote the book, too. And it it's creepy, but it wasn't scary as as an adult as it was when I was a kid, but that was neither here nor there, you know. I I wasn't really supposed to be up anyway, and I was never supposed to watch anything uh before I went to bed, because my, as my mom noted to my dad often, my mind has a tendency to take things to dark places, which is a weird thing to say about your kid when you're a parent. But um went to bed, and you know, the rule was, you know, we would leave the door half open, and we weren't a family that slept with the lights on. You know, we were raised, you know, if you if you think you saw it, you didn't see it, it's your imagination. Which um if we get a chance to backtrack in a bit, you know, that turns out to be just a family tradition of nope, that didn't happen. So uh I'm in bed, and uh as a kid, uh I was diagnosed with uh, well, at the time it was called ADD. We didn't have the HD to add to it yet. Um it was just ADD, but I couldn't sleep without background noise. Uh I had to have something to keep my mind busy so I can go to sleep instead of thinking. And um they got me this old AMFM radio, and it had the uh knob on it and the dial, just like the classic radios, that wasn't digital in any sense of the word. And uh my dad put on a baseball station because that well, even as an adult, I kind of found listening to baseball on the radio to be pretty boring, and so I'm laying there in bed and I'm about to doze off, and station starts getting scrambled. And this is gonna be the first major like incident that occurs. The station starts getting scrambled, and then there's a different radio station on, and then it's scrambled, and then uh it's Mexican radio, and then it's scrambled, and then it's a different station, you know, and it's like something like talk radio, and then it's scrambled again, and I'm like, what? You know, it's kind of jolts me out of sleep because I'm like, why is this happening? And I remember very clearly, you know, I was on my the bottom bunk of my bunk bed and I did not want to look at anything, if I'm being honest. And it was another one of those situations where you start lying to yourself. I'm like, no, this is this isn't happening. I'm not gonna look, but it's not happening. And then I edged toward my bed and I leaned over onto my stomach and put my left hand on the floor halfway out of bed, and I'm moving the dial back to where I know the baseball is, and I heard backslash detected movement, you know, kind of out of my peripheral vision, and I'm like, no, no, no, no. And when you're a kid, you know, you have two really interesting factors that go on about you. You're incredibly afraid of everything and like absurdly brave. You're you're you're the you're willing to look at things that most people probably wouldn't want to. And so I just I looked up toward the motion, and there was a shape. You know, my door's halfway open, and behind the door, there is a shape, and it's a solid shape. It's not like translucent, you know, ooh, spooky, Scooby stuff. It was a legitimate solid shape. And it looked like, you know, someone was sitting on the floor with like an old serapi or a woven blanket over them. And, you know, I immediately went into like survival mode. I'm like, hey, you're stupid. You know, I'm gonna tell mom and dad you shouldn't be behind me out or go back to your room. Uh, you're being stupid, you're stupid. And I knew it wasn't my sister. I wanted it to be my sister. I desperately wanted that to be my sister, because if it wasn't my sister, then it was what I suspected it was. And you know, I'm wide awake now. I'm got the shakes because uh what I know now is an adrenaline response to fear, and it didn't do anything at first, but then it moved and then it looked up, and I was looking at like what looked like an old lady sitting in the corner wrapped in a blanket, having it over her head. Um, she was a desiccated um semicorpse, I guess. No, nothing in the eyeballs where the eyes should be, just hollow caverns, you know. It was like looking into the face of a skull that had skin on it. Um as a kid, I always tried to draw it, but uh basically lips drawn back because they were tight and dead and just bare teeth and no gums where gum should be. And I uh screamed, uh a very, very shrill scream. I uh freaked out, panicked. And about the time that I was screaming and panicking, my mom had just arrived home from work. And so she's rushing in, the hall lights are on, my dad's in there, I'm screaming, the woman behind the door, the woman behind the door, my mom's freaking out, what's going on? Is you know, dad's dumb enough to admit that he let me stay up and watch something with him, and now my parents are arguing again, and the only thing I'm screaming is the woman behind the door, and then you know, the next thing I know, I'm sleeping in my parents' bedroom, and that's the the first major incident that actually occurred in the house. And the weirdest thing, you know, is my sister just slept through it all.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

That is straight out of a horror movie, I'm just gonna add. I can't even imagine being a nine-year-old boy, ten-year-old boy, and seeing something like that.

SPEAKER_02 18:15

Had just turned nine earlier that that year. It was something that I could not have made up because things like that, you know, I had never seen anything like that yet in my life. You know, not in horror movies or books or anything. It it was unfathomable as my adult self looking back, you know, I I I I sometimes like, oh, maybe I just, you know, maybe I imagined it. Maybe it was a shadow, but shadows aren't solid, they're not three-dimensional. And that was that was the first thing that I noticed as a kid is that it it didn't do what ghost stories said ghosts did, you know. You always hear about them, you could see through them, or there are half of a half of like a body that's hovering there, and this thing was solid as me or you, and it was physically there, and then it wasn't.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Did you see it disappear? Did it disappear in front of you?

SPEAKER_02 19:04

No, and that was things. So no, around the time I started screaming, right? I had rolled onto my back and I was screaming for help. And then by the time you know I looked in that direction again, my mom was opening the door, it was gone. It was it, I I should say it was preceded by a pretty foul smell. Around the time that I was getting ready to look in that direction, the room was stinky and not like boy stinky or locker room stinky, like rotting stinky, you know, and they always tell you things, you know, phantom smells. And uh yeah, that was uh that was one of the worst experiences. I actually um up until I uh finally wrote this definitive version, because this is this this novel that I wrote that you read is like the sixth or seventh incarnation of my attempt to write it and being unable to write it successfully, and I would every now and then, you know, you have those nightmares, and there it is again, you know. Except in the nightmares, I'm not a kid, I'm an adult, but it's still equally as terrifying. And uh after I wrote it, you know, mercifully those those kind of bad dreams have stopped. But looking back on it, man, there's there's no uh there's no rational explanation for what I saw. It was just that something in that house understood something fundamental about what scared us, uh individually almost, I would say. You know, some things like what would later happen with my sister in her room. Um, you know, it would be one thing for her, but like things that my mom experienced or that my dad never admitted to experiencing, but would later tell me about uh, you know, his next wife in line. Uh, spoiler alert, the parents get divorced, uh, that his, you know, girlfriend at the time experienced, they were all individually different experiences, wildly. Um, what people smelled in the air, wildly different. Um, what people heard or felt as far as the tension, you know, all completely different things.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Did you tell your parents what you saw right after you saw it?

SPEAKER_02 21:00

Oh, yeah, no, I well they they heard me screaming about the woman behind the door, so they asked me what I saw, and I told them, and that seemed to worry them pretty good. Uh didn't change my sleeping arrangements, not for a while though.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

I'm actually looking at the diagram of the house. It's like it's like a rectangle shape. Was your which room was your room the middle room on the left side?

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Yeah, so just after the bathroom, the first room on the left was my room.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Yes, like if you're laying in the bed that's against the wall and you're looking, you can see clearly behind the door. I see I understand it now.

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Yeah. So if the door is open 45 degrees, you know, half open, I'm looking behind the door, and there she is. From that point forward, now, you know, we sleep with the hall light on. And mom and dad, who usually sleep with their door open, now sleep with it a crack open so they can respond if they hear us crying for any reason. And um, the only rule though, which I mean I don't know if it was better or worse for me. The only rule now, though, is that um because the whole light's on and it's too bright for except we had for some reason 60 watt bulbs, but um, because it's so bright. We have to have the door uh closed three-quarters of the way so that the light's not shining in my eyes and keeping me awake. But it helped. You know, I slept a little better after that. Um I uh made it a point to never look over even on that side of the room after that. You know, once once that happened, when I got in bed, man, my eyes were up or they were facing the other way. I uh I wouldn't face the uh the door again.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

Did they just brush the story off? Tell you you're imagining things.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

My mom, God bless her, told me, insisted to me that it was a nightmare. And uh I knew it wasn't, and I told her it wasn't, but she insisted that it was, that I must, it was just a very real bad dream, honey, you know, things like that. Um I think she believed me. I wouldn't know that she had some inkling of even like moderately believing me until I was later in my adult life, but um she did what a good parent should do, which would be, you know, lie to your kids and say, hey, you imagine that that didn't happen, because the alternative is that that did happen, and now we can't live here anymore, and we don't have anywhere to go. We're just starting over in corona, you know. We had just come out of a bad thing, and uh our last place of residence as a family was uh in Lawndale, California on Freeman Avenue. It had been, oh gosh, 87 when they split up the first time. So almost two full years um between you know when they first split up and when when we'd be a family again. And I don't think anybody was in the market for looking for a new place to live, you know, especially over something that as an adult, you would write off maybe, you know, just like kids lie to themselves, you know, as an all it's just a bad dream, or he's he's got a bad he's got a dark imagination, it must be it. And uh she just she kind of brushed it under the carpet.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Did that help you? Did you actually question yourself once she told you that, or did you just still at even at that young age, you knew what you saw?

SPEAKER_02 23:47

I knew what I saw, I knew I wasn't asleep. You know, I um it it's uh being hyperactive with ADHD or ADD as a kid before the HD would have been invented. Being uh being somebody that's hyper-aware and hyper alert of everything that goes on from the slightest noise distracts you and it draws your attention, you know. Um if I had been sleeping, that would have been fine. But if I had been sleeping, I wouldn't have felt the carpet under my hands or the exertion of having to actually reach over because I didn't want to get out of bed. Because what if there was something under the bed? Because the house is scary, because the house is now always scary. There's always tension, you always feel like you're being watched. So naturally, you're not gonna get out of bed in the dark of your room, um, you know, for what could be under your bed, and it's worse because you know it wasn't. And uh, so I know what I saw, and I didn't believe her. I I mean, I believe I I chose to be in that state of denial, like, oh, you know, maybe it was a dream, but there was never a point where I was convinced that I was dreaming or that I had imagined it. I don't know that I had the capacity to imagine something so grotesque.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Yeah, I'm I'm actually looking at the image right now, and it's just it's wicked. I can't even imagine being a kid and seeing this. It's just insane.

SPEAKER_02 25:04

Well, you know what's messed up about that, right? I've been trying to illustrate that thing for since I was a kid. And when I saw that picture, I realized that is about as close as I could get to the reality of what it actually looked like, and it still pills in comparison. You know, what you're looking at just looks like a horror movie creature that you would see in maybe like a certain Hollywood horror feature. What I saw was so much worse than what I could provide by illustration, because it it wasn't just fine lines, it was a smell, but it was also physically visible. It was, you know, you're watching Sinus, you know, stretch and turn when it moves and its jaw working, the muscles in its jaw working. And even though it's staring at you with these cavernous eyes where where I should be, there's no eyes there, you know? And and it's it wasn't like looking at a a movie magic horror feature, even a practical effect. It was like looking at an actual living corpse, you know, bundled up in the corner of your room. And and in even as a kid, you know, I'm sitting there and I'm like, why would it look like that? Even, you know, even as a ghost, why would it look like that? You know, and uh I couldn't really wrap my head around it because, you know, we hear, like, well, and and you know, my family, we're people of faith. I'm Christian, you know, and we have a specific belief on exactly what ghosts are. But back then, um, my mom was just newly baptized, dad's a Catholic, and um anything that we'd ever heard about ghosts was that it, you know, it's the ghost is gonna look like the person who died. Not after they died and rotted in the grave, it's supposed to look like the person. So why would it look like that? And as a kid, I I didn't have the life experience or or functional experience even to say, you know, maybe it wanted to look like that, or maybe that was intentional because the sole purpose was to do something malicious to me. Which in my adult life I think that that was the goal, the end goal, because it spent our entire time living there, going out of its way to create fear and and uh tension in the family.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Oh no, this thing showing itself to anybody the intent has to be to scare the living crap out of you.

SPEAKER_02 27:14

Right? Because why else would it appear in that way? It was it only looked human in so much that like it had a face, it had where eyes would have been, part of a nose where a nose would have been, and it was humanoid, but it it wasn't what I would define as a you know, as an adult or a child as something that was human at any given point. And and that was the uh the thing about it is you know, the next thing that happened in the house I wouldn't hear about until I'm probably in my mid-20s, maybe late 20s, when I'm having lunch with my mom at a Denny's. Um, the next thing that happened that I was aware, you know, because for for for me, the rest of the uh nothing happened again for a while. Um, I mean, the house was always still the same nerve-wracking place to be. You know, it was so much tension in there. And it wasn't just the tension from mom and dad fighting, that was part of it. But I think mom and dad were actually fighting also because of the house. Because now, you know, we're in a place and we have to admit one of two things is um either there's something wrong here, or we have to say that there's that nothing's wrong here, and it's all of our collective imagination. And uh the fighting between mom and dad. I mean, dad dad had vices, so those those had roots in the uh arguments themselves too. But then the next thing that happens, you know, things kind of settle down for a little bit. And then um the next thing I remember is I'm going to sleep. And just you get to that point in elementary school, right? Everybody goes through Bloody Mary, and that came up in my sister's class, and she didn't play it. You know, we we we were always told that those games like that are devil games, and we're not supposed to play those, so we're not in the mirror calling out Bloody Mary and holding a candle up like a like you know, some daring kids. We weren't remotely that brave. You know, we weren't even brave enough to chicken out. It the even even the possible chance, especially after the you know, the things that we were feeling in experiencing, uh, it it never got to that point. But one night, my uh sister's screaming. It has to be after after 9:30, 10 p.m. Mom and dad are both home, so I have to presume it's a Saturday or a Sunday, something like that, because they're both home and no one's at work. And lights already on the hallway, their door's already open, and they're running into my sister's room, and I hear her screaming, the bloody Mary, the bloody Mary, and her her closet door's open. I didn't witness this myself. But like I told you, my sister when I experienced uh the woman behind the door, it didn't even wake my sister up. You know, of the two of us, she she's a far better sleeper. And uh, so she's screaming the bloody Mary, the bloody Mary. And I get up out of bed and I go in the room and she's just bawling, inconsolable, absolutely inconsolable. My mom or dad, hey, go back to bed. And I notice that her closet door is open. Now, to open that closet door, you know, to give you an idea of how it works, it requires actual effort. It doesn't just, you know, slide on open on its own and it wasn't office access. There wasn't anything wrong with how it was constructed. 10 out of 10 times you close it, it stays shut. Um, she didn't sleepwalk and open it and then run back in bed and scream. It wasn't her nature because she wasn't really genuinely aware of what was going on. And I had been forbidden to tell her about the woman behind the door. So it comes, you know, she's telling them what happened. She's asleep in bed and she hears rattling on her closet door. And when she when she wakes up and she looks over there, the door opens and this thing comes out. And you ask, you know, like I said, I'm nine, so she's eight. She's probably about seven now. Um, you ask a seven-year-old what that thing is, and she can't describe it to you. It is what I imagine a seven-year-old would imagine, whatever Bloody Mary is supposed to be. She just said it was it was gonna get her. And um, that one really upset my mom and dad. That one, especially my mom. And again, that's because, you know, uh she she too had experienced something. Uh we ended up having to trade rooms, my sister and I. You know, the way the way they rationalized it is, you know, whatever my sister had experienced, my parents insisted that it she also had had a bad dream. But she had a bad dream in her room, and I had a bad dream in my room. So if we switched rooms, those bad dreams would be kind of null and void. Which at the time as a kid, I'm like, yeah, you know, yeah, okay, made sense to me. Um, we did switch rooms and uh not a peep, you know, nothing really big happening uh going on, and um strange things did start happening that I didn't notice as a nine-year-old. Um, I uh I had a little black and white TV that I had had since I was like three, and it was in my room, and it was so that uh, you know, background noise and stuff. But we were in there watching The Simpsons and black and white, and my sister would intentionally fall asleep in my room. And this went on. Um, she would either intentionally fall asleep in my room or she would sneak into my parents' room and sleep under their under their bed. But she would um she would fall asleep in my room, and this went all the way on uh into the new year. By by Thanksgiving, we thought the worst had passed. No more nightmares. House was still tense, but it seemed to have calmed down and nothing was going on. Um, we made it into December. Um, my grandparents got us a Nintendo that was awesome, and things seemed like they were all going to be just okay. And then it was uh kind of inert again for a bit. It was sometime in the summer, though, that my uh parents uh announced they were going to get a divorce. And uh mom moved out with me and my sister, and we went and got this apartment on the other side of town. And custody battle was ugly, but we were spending uh until it was all figured out, the court had mandated. We'd do uh week on, week off. And I one of my dad's weeks, I was there, and gosh, um, we were in the living room watching TV, and we're we're in 1990 now, man. You know, hey, it's the 90s, welcome to the new decade. Let's figure out who we are. So everything seemed pretty much like it was a season for change. You know, parents are divorced, that's change. I'm going into fifth grade. There's some change. It was it was something new for me. And I I'm I'm in the living room watching TV with my dad and my sister, and the next thing I know, I'm waking up. You know, I uh had fallen asleep and I don't remember falling asleep, but I woke up and it's that that thing that I hate doing as a kid, and sometimes even as an adult, if I'm honest, but I especially as a kid, I I wake up and I'm looking around the house and it's quiet, man. And I don't just mean like quiet, like, you know, stillness. It was more like there it was the absence of sound, you know. And I called out, hello, dad, you know, and my sister's name. And not only was there no answer, but like there was no ambience. There was no my voice, you know, echoing down the hall or out of the bathroom or any of the open doors or the kitchen. It was just like speaking into a soundproof room. And I got this overwhelming sense that I was being watched, but more like um a gaze instinct. And I mentioned that in the book, you know, that gut feeling that you're being watched. And I get into a little more detail. They seem kind of silly, but it really is a thing, man. Your gut has over 80 million neurons in it, more than a cat's brain. And they tell you to trust your gut because your your brain and your gut communicate. And my gut tell told me as a kid, you know, hey, you're being hunted. Like I freaked out, the TV was off, the only light that was on it was in the living room. And so I'm rushing into the kitchen and I'm calling my mom and I'm crying my eyes out. And honey, there's nothing in that house. You're fine, you're safe. And I had never actually said there was anything in the house, you know. When she's saying there's nothing in the house, I was just, I was, I was bawling because I was afraid. I didn't tell her why I was afraid. But you know, there's nothing in the house. That it's you're, I'm sure they just went out to go get something, and literally within just a few minutes of being on the phone while mom's calming me down, my dad and my sister come back in, and it's weird, you know, they came in through the front door instead of the kitchen door, and they've got Taco Bell, and my dad's like, Who are you on the phone with? And the next thing you know, you know, he's getting chewed out by my mom, you know, and and now you get in and say she was being loud because you know, I'm away from the phone now and he's on it. John, how could you leave him in that house? You know you can't leave him alone in that house. And in things like that, you know, you're a kid, and I don't think I was meant to hear that, but like, why can't he leave me alone in the house? And I already knew why, but also why is she saying it if the house has nothing in it? You know, that's my last genuinely, truly, truly terrifying experience in the place. Um, the house after that, it was always really, really intense. But um, my dad always trying to be, you know, more of a friend than a father. You know, we were talking about the house, and he's, you know, I was told him talking about the woman behind the door, and my sister's talking about the bloody Mary, and we're in his van, and it's his week again, and he's got a new girlfriend, and I can't say her actual name, but I think in the book I call her Darlene or something like that. And, you know, she was a real sweet lady mostly. Um, said some stupid things that put a rift between my sister and her, but my dad's driving us to go pick her up and he's like, Yeah, well, Darlene saw a ghost, which is like, you know, your your kids have just confessed they're terrified of your house, and you're like, hey, by the way, my girlfriend saw a ghost in our house. Good job. Um, so we asked her, and you know, Darlene's going on about, you know, she smelt um gardenias. She had smelled gardenias in the house, which we didn't have any in the neighborhood. And she was walking into uh my dad's bedroom, and there was a woman sitting on um what used to be my mom's side of the bed. And the woman wasn't moving, she didn't look at her suddenly or or do anything. She was there, and just as quickly as uh Darlene blinked, she was gone. Smell lingered for a little while longer and then faded away as well.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

Did Stormy ever show any strange behavior? Did it ever stare like into a corner and bark or do anything um unusual?

SPEAKER_02 37:19

Um, okay, so about Stormy, you know, going back to Stormy, um my wonderful publisher, uh Madhouse Books, on behalf of Mrs. Ashley Pell. Um, originally in the book, there was actually the what the book says, you know, this is going to be mostly true, but there is going to be some, you know, creative nonfiction involved. And there had originally been in a chapter in there where we would see things from Stormy's perspective. Now we we can never know what an animal thinks. But, you know, um, I've been writing for a while and I tried to get inside the head of this situation because Stormy did behave in ways he would never behave. Um, and you know, we get into this chapter that ended up having to be erased for the sake of space and to keep people from getting pulled out of the story. You get the setting, well, you know, animals don't know day or night. It's one long continuous stream of time. It's either dark out or it's light out, but it's not day or night. There is no such thing as ours. And the only thing that you know is your family. And that was describing Stormy to a T. He was he was the dumbest freaking Labrador I've ever seen in my life. But one thing that could be said of him, more than anything else, is he would attack and fight to the death anybody that ever threatened our family. And while he was my dog, he was really my dad's dog, in so much that he would kowtow to my dad if my dad's voice got harsh. And um I told you uh in the root cellar, Stormy had whined and curled around my feet. He didn't, he wasn't allowed to come in the house. Um, he wasn't well potty trained, so we didn't want him doing that. But um, there was an instant instance where uh my dad came out of the garage and we were kind of roughhousing, and Stormy almost attacked him, which my dad um in Stormy's early life had uh spanked him a couple times, not with a belly, with his hand, but Stormy was afraid of my dad and would never have raised his hackles at him. Um Stormy got in between us, raised his hackles, snarling, you know, spitting, drooling, barking kind of thing. Um I'm glad my dad didn't get mad. Uh John had a very short fuse, and on the on his best days, he had a difficulty keeping his temper. But um dad must have seen how I looked. He's like, no, no, he's just trying to protect you. He doesn't know we're playing. Um now, as a side note, um, my dad had once told me that he never experienced anything while simultaneously getting goose flesh up his arms and his hair standing on end. I think he always lied to me about it. But also, I think just because of how vulnerable my dad was as a human being, how angry he was, how much difficulty he had controlling his emotions, I think he was also unusually susceptible to whatever was going on in that house.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

I was gonna ask about your parents uh if they ever expressed any experiences that they might have had in the house after the fact, like when you were older.

SPEAKER_02 40:01

They did. Um, my dad, um, when I was about 17 or yeah, seven, sixteen. Well, so when I was sixteen, my dad and I uh made up. We had had a horrible fight after he'd moved out of one uh the house. Um he moved in with his girlfriend. We had had an enormous fight where I thought like as a 10-year-old at the time, I thought we were gonna like throw down. Like I thought I was gonna get into a fist fight with my dad as you know a kid. It didn't happen. Um, but uh we remained estranged until I was about oh gosh, halfway through through um being 15 or 16, I can't remember exactly for sure. But um, he called up one day and we made up and we stayed in contact, but he lived outside of the country by now, he was over in Indonesia, and uh he would come by about once or twice a year, and time went fast, and so around the time I was 17, we were living in Baywood apartments, phase two, best phase ever. And uh my buddy Alan and I, we were uh um he was gonna take us out, you know, we were gonna go around town, get some fast food. He could meet my friends. I wanted my friend to meet my dad, who I'd spent so long being angry at this man, and I wasn't really mad at him. I was just mad that he hadn't tried harder, you know, like that he hadn't done better to try and keep his family. And when I got past all that, you know, he was just my dad again. And so, you know, um, I'm gonna be newly 17, and he's meeting my friends, we're going out, and on the way, he had to drop by my aunt's where he was staying. Uh, God rest her soul. Uh, he had to go pick something up. And uh on the way there, I asked him, I said, Can you tell me what actually happened at the house? And it got like thick silent in the car. And he's like, he looked down at his arm, and I looked, and his every hair on both of his arms, uh, standing on end, goose flush all the way up to his shoulders. Um, and he's like, Oh man, I haven't thought about that place in a long time. And I'm like, Well, we had some really bad experiences there, and you told us what Darlene said about what she saw. And he's like, Yeah, I didn't really see anything. He said, But the place was it was he says, I would I'd be lying if you know if I if I didn't say it wasn't hard living there. And I said, Well, so that was just because of mom. He says, No, it was just there was there was something you know kind of made me uneasy about the whole place, and that was all he was willing to say, and he left. And my my buddy Alan, uh, you'll hear me call them my brothers. We we we've known each other for over 20, some of us 30 years. Um my brother Alan's like, hey, I think he's hiding something, dude. And I'm like, Well, yeah. And he's like, Did you see his arms? I said, Yeah. He's like, Yeah, he he dummied up pretty quick. I'm like, Yeah, you know, but he didn't want to talk about it after that, so I had to let it go. And John wasn't big about talking about things that bothered him. He was a uh barrier, you know. He he had a tendency, uh uh kind of like I did when I was young, you know, you hold things inside so you can't hold them inside. And that was part of, you know, his temper issues, which actually got dramatically better as he got older. But he uh he didn't want to talk about it, he was not comfortable with the topic of it, and I don't know if it was just because of the house or the bad memories associated with it, you know. Um, but he he made just that one comment, you know, Darling was the only one who saw anything, the place made me uneasy, and then he dummed up and that was it. And uh he was I to this day, you know, he he he passed in uh 1997, same year, unfortunately, the uh late summer of that year, he would pass. And if he knew anything or he had a story to tell, he took that to the grave, man.

SPEAKER_00 43:29

Did you ever find out or look into the history of the house?

SPEAKER_02 43:34

So funny you should ask that. I did. Um, while I was in the middle of writing this thing, it dawned on me I should look into the history of the house. Um, we were told when we rented it, um, the manager at the time, it was an American craftsman home built in 1910. He was wrong. It was built in 1916, but what six years, you know. Um, it was an older house, uh part of the historical district in uh Corona, California. You know, that whole West Grand Circuit, the whole Grand Circuit. Circuit. It's just a beautiful drive of probably some of the creepiest houses in all of Corona, California. They're beautiful. They're American craftsmen. They're uh Victorian or Neo-Victorian. Um, some of them have kind of a uh neo-gothic uh architecture going on, and they're just beautiful homes, and a lot of them have a lot of uh secrets in them walls. And uh if it well, this one undoubtedly had no secrets, but unfortunately, or had some secrets rather, but unfortunately, when I looked up the history of the house, it stopped. Like um, the history of owners, uh, from what I could find for like paying like$15 to get you know a property's history, um the list of owners stopped in like 1980 something, and I couldn't get anything farther back. And I know the house had been lived in. Um, it was turns out years later, I would find out the house had a very naked, negative reputation in the neighborhood. Um, a lot of bad things had happened there. Sometimes bad people had lived there, and uh nobody really knew anything about uh its exact history, the origin of the first owners, what happened, why they sold it, if they lived or died in the house. Nobody knew. Um, there were a couple strange architectural fixtures. Um house had a chimney on it, but there was no fireplace. But in the living room, um there was a hutch that had been built into the wall, a china cabinet, and had been built into the wall and bolted into the wall, and they had used caulking around it. I mean, we always presumed that that was the fireplace behind the hutch. We couldn't tell. It was awful thick between the uh the hutch, the wall, and the kitchen, you know. Um, if there was a place that chimney went, it was definitely behind the hutch. So the the house had secrets. We just didn't know what they were. And in my adult life, attempting to find out what they were, I couldn't pull anything up. Um, I couldn't find the original blueprints of the house uh and any of the records I paid for. Uh, the only thing that I could say with absolute certainty is that it's an American craftsman style home built in 1916. The other one, my mom. You asked if she had ever had an experience. She told me later later, I didn't mention earlier on the Denny's ordeal, you know. We were we were at a uh I want to say it was a Denny's uh restaurant, it was a diner, and you know, I was talking to her. She said, Well, you know, she said I had an experience, and it was um it was one that would change how things happened for her in the house until the day her and my dad split up. And it was um she came home from one night and uh the grand circuit, uh especially near uh the 91 freeway on ramp over there. We get a lot of trucks coming through there. There were a few times we thought we were having an earthquake, but it was just a 16-wheel rolling past us going to the freeway or coming off the freeway. Um, but one night she gets home from work and it's about 10:30, maybe closer to 11, and she's telling me this story. She comes in, kitchen lights on, goes in the living room, turns on the living light, turns off the kitchen light, pops a squad on the couch, turns on some nick at night. She's walking to watching the old black and whites. Uh back then it was like my three sons, Mr. Ed, Green Acres, in that order. And um, she's just kind of flipping through it and then checking out other channels on the cable television, and she uh hears the blinds move. Now, uh, the one cool thing you know when a 16-wheeler passes by is you hear it. They got that Mac truck engine going on, and she's sitting in there, and the blinds kind of shift, and she ignores it. And so she just kind of ignores it, flipping through the channel, and then the blinds shake again, and she says something along the lines of, oh bullshit, prove it. And then the light, the blinds are shaking violently, but only those blinds, not the blinds in the den, not the blinds in the kitchen, just those blinds. And then, kind of like if someone they were horizontal blinds, if someone had taken a finger and just kind of xylophoned it all the way down, and by that point, she's screaming and panicking. John, wake up, go search the house. Something's in the house. Um, from that point forward, anytime she came home from work, she came in through the kitchen, she opened the door, and Stormy was the first person to go in the house. Well, first, first one to go in the house. He was a dog, but he'd come through the house and on occasion she'd get mad at him. She'd tell me he'd come in sometimes and he would stop at that hallway. And one time he stopped and he started cowering and rolled onto his back and started pawing at empty space and whining. Other times he would just he would kind of go down into a dog loaf, you know, and and put his snow on the ground and stare up into the hallway and Stormy, bad dog, you know, bad, stop it. You're you're being bad, Stormy, you know, because she's she's past the point of lying to herself at this, you know, point. And uh my mom, she'll say now, she she doesn't believe in ghosts, she does believe in demons and negative energy, and whatever was in the house, as far as she's concerned, was probably one or both. Um, but the way that the dog reacted was subservient, uh, if not terrified of whatever it would, and he always only stopped in the hallway. You know, it was that one lingering spot where we uh heard the footsteps stop the very first time when the uh house woke up while me and my uh sister were in the root cellar, footsteps from the kitchen into the hallway, just like that. And it was always the hallway where s where Stormy would stop and cower or whine or paw at the air and roll his belly over, you know, belly up, neck bare.

SPEAKER_00 49:29

And looking back now, are your thoughts about the house in line with your mom's? What do you feel you saw and experienced?

SPEAKER_02 49:39

My personal belief, I I would go along the line with my faith that it was something demonic. Um had it just been, you know, your your friendly neighborhood Casper, um, it wouldn't be a corpsed, eyeless woman behind the door or a bloody Mary, or something whose sole purpose seemed to want to sow discord and discontent and unhappiness and and absolute fear. It radiated from the walls, it was always watching you through the windows, it was always everywhere in the house, you know. And uh, if I ever get a chance to talk to you again, I could share my sister's story and just some of the other things that you know led into my uh practice of paranormal uh investigation because it was that house that set me on the path, which would like be a lifelong curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 50:24

Yeah, absolutely. I would love to hear about that. And let's touch on the paranormal research and development that you ultimately got into.

SPEAKER_02 50:33

Well, and that and that does stem actually from us um later in my my twenties. Dad's dead already. Every now and then I'd, you know, on the way to or from work, or if I was taking a shortcut, I'd pass the house. And one day I was with my uh my brother Mike Guess. He's like, I'm like, hey, you want to see where I grew up? And he's like, Yeah, I said, okay, it was uh it was a creepy place, dude. And we drove up and um he pulled into the driveway where my right nearby where my dad used to park uh by the garage, and there just happened to be this Hispanic woman out there, and she comes walking up, she's like, Can I help you? And I'm like, Oh, I was just showing a buddy of mine, you know, where I used to live. And she looks at me and she goes, Oh, and I say, I sorry, I didn't mean to bother you or spooky. And she says, Well, no, no, did anything weird ever used to happen, you know, and I that's a that's an entire like monologue of a story, and I don't know that you've got time for it, but um, the events after that uh led to us going over to my uh my brother Alan. His dad owned a uh a foster's freeze, and we all would meet up there at random times, and just as we were like speeding literally into the parking lot, kind of in a panicked state, um, my brother Alan and his girlfriend at the time, uh, they came speeding in. And we're all sitting there talking crossways to one another. You can't believe the weirdest shit that just happened, and almost in unison, not not necessarily verbatim, the exact phrase, but talking to each other over each other about the weird and inauspicious events that occurred. And it just so happened to be, you know, that those occurrences happened. Uh that that specific day was uh October, I want to say it was October 27th, 2001, when we formed the uh at the time it was the PRD. Uh the name changed after that. Um, we were a bunch of amateurs trying to figure out how it worked, but we did form our paranormal research and development team. Um, and the goal was not to rely on things that could not be proven. You know, um, it's all well and good with the tools of the trade that a lot of uh paranormal investigators use, but also none of those things can be repeated as a matter of fact. You know, it's a lot of it is very much a subjective experience, and if you have to prove it subjectively, have you really proven it? And that was our ground hypothesis for how we were going to approach it. And it would uh over the years, over decade a couple decades, I guess, uh, because I'm 45 now, you know, it would evolve. Uh, but I imagine that we'll probably have to wait. Uh that that was when we started our paranormal investigation group.

SPEAKER_00 52:59

We'll have to have you back where you can touch on that with the group and any investigations you've done or what you have found out since then, and even touch on uh that little uh tail end of the story of the house where you we talked to that lady. I would love to hear about that as well. But Michael, I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much. Love the book, The West Grand Haunting, published through Madhouse Books. If you want to tell people uh how they can get their hands on this awesome book or get in touch with you, if that's something you're interested in, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 53:33

Madhouse Books uh publish this bad boy. It's available on any major online retailers, Walmart, uh, Target, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, uh, you can uh get a hold of me. I have uh the author Mike Oka page on Facebook. Um currently working on a different uh unrelated non-paranormal project. But uh anybody who wants to talk to me or ask questions, I'm always happy to share ideas and things like that regarding the paranormal. You know, it is a fascination of mine that's followed me since my childhood. So yeah, whatever. You know, if you like the book, uh shoot me a line. If you want to get the book or ask about it, shoot me a line. I always answer, just uh not necessarily the same minute, but I'm always there within 24 hours to answer your questions.

SPEAKER_00 54:14

Awesome. Thank you again, Michael. Appreciate you coming on.

SPEAKER_02 54:17

Oh, glad to be on. It was an honor.

SPEAKER_00 54:20

Thank you for listening. I appreciate you being here. You can catch this show wherever you listen to podcasts, as well as our website, accounts of the paranormal.com, where you can access full episodes, as well as links to all our socials and our YouTube channel, where you can listen and watch along with visual images. And if you're a fan of what you heard here, please like, share, follow, subscribe. I appreciate the support. And if you have an account to share and you'd like to be on the show, email me at show at accounts of the paranormal.com and tell me what you saw. I'll see you next time.