The Ammons Haunting – When Police Afraid of Demons!

The Ammons Haunting case, also known as the “Demon House” case, revolves around the experiences of Latoya Ammons and her family in Gary, Indiana. The case gained widespread attention due to its bizarre and paranormal nature.

There is a house in Gary, Indiana that has been dubbed the “Demon House”. Now, if you were to walk past this house on the street, it wouldn’t stand out to you. It’s a very modest single-story three-bedroom home that looks like all the other houses around it. But the history behind this house is totally bizarre.

Latoya Ammons, a mother of three, lived inside of this house with her three kids. She began to report to the police that demons were throwing her children against the wall. When the police got the report that children were being thrown against the wall, their first thought is that she’s an unfit parent. So, they sent Child Protective Services and the police to check out this residence and make sure that she really was a competent parent.

They are shocked at what they find, and what they find is documented in a police report, courtesy of the executive producer of 317 films, Christopher Geizot. I have a copy of said police report, and when I read through this thing for the first time, I literally wrote him an email and said, “This is fake. There’s no way this is an actual police report.” And he said, “No, that’s real. It’s from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. It is the official police report, and it’s just mind-blowing.”

After numerous reports that Latoya Ammons was mistreating her children, based on reports that she gave, she was telling police that demons were throwing her kids around the house. Ammons Haunting

Based on those reports, Child Protective Services was sent to do a home study—to go to their house and make sure it was a safe, clean place for children to be living. In addition to the case manager, Valerie Washington, who was going to be going over to do this home study, the Lake County Sheriff’s Department also sent over Lieutenant Gruska, who would be assisting Valerie and watching the home study take place.

When Gruska arrives at the house, he is met with Valerie Washington, also Latoya Ammons (the mother), and her two sons, Andrew (who’s nine) and Amante (who’s seven), as well as Latoya’s mother (the boys’ grandmother), Rosa.

The case manager pulls Gruska aside out of earshot of Latoya and her family, and she starts telling Gruska about what happened at the hospital eight days earlier.

Because she, the case manager, had already begun investigating Latoya Ammons and that whole situation with her kids eight days earlier, Washington was at the hospital sitting in a waiting room. Washington was with a psychologist, and they were speaking to Rosa, who was the grandmother of these children. In the room was also Andrew (the oldest son) and Amante (the youngest son). Ammons Haunting

As they’re chatting, Amante, the youngest son, stands up and walks to the middle of the waiting room. His eyes roll back into his skull, and he begins emitting this growling sound that sounded too deep for a boy of seven years old. The grandmother reacted to it like she had seen it before.

She got right up, marched over to him, and took him by the hands and yelled, “You are not you,” and she kept saying that. The boy’s eyes are still back in his head, and he’s not responding to anything his grandmother’s saying.

As Rosa is repeating over and over again, “You are not you,” Amante begins backpedaling towards a wall behind him, and Rosa holds his hands the whole time. She’s holding his hands firmly. He gets to the wall, and instead of stopping, he puts his foot up against the wall—this is a seven-year-old boy—and begins walking up the wall by pressing against Rosa, and she’s holding on tight, and he’s pressing back at her and using that weight to walk backward up the wall.

The psychologist and Washington are just watching in disbelief. Rosa’s holding on to him as he walks all the way up to where he’s on his tiptoes on the wall, and then he flips forward in front of her and lands on his feet on the other side of Rosa. The psychologist and Washington literally run out of the room and go get a doctor and explain what happened.

The doctor comes in not having any clue what to make of this and just says to the boy, “Can you do that again?” And Amante, at this point, his eyes are back to normal, and he’s sitting now next to Rosa and says, “What? I didn’t do anything,” and acts like he had not been walking up the walls.

Now, it’s not in the report how Lieutenant Gruska responds to Washington’s story about the hospital. However, the entire police report that I’m pulling all this information from is written by Lieutenant Gruska at the end of the investigation.

So this exchange between him and the case manager, Washington, about the hospital visit that he was not part of apparently carried weight in the entire investigation that he felt compelled to add it into the report.

Even though on paper, you would think if you’re doing a home study for this house, why would you incorporate something that didn’t have anything to do with the house? It gives you maybe an insight into Lieutenant Gruska.

Although his language remains super professional and very pragmatic, that perhaps Lieutenant Gruska at the end of this investigation was starting to think this might be paranormal. Ammons Haunting

After this story, two more police officers show up to the house to assist with this home study. One was Brian Miller, and the other was Charles Austin. At this point, the three officers—Gruska, Miller, and Austin—along with the case manager, Washington, begin walking towards the family and towards the front door of the house.

Latoya says that she and her kids will not go back in the house because they had moved out very recently due to the strangeness that they claim was happening inside of the house. They felt like they were under attack by demons, and so the police needed someone to bring them in. Rosa, the grandmother, offered to go in with them.

The house is a single-story three-bedroom house. You walk in, and you’re inside of the screened-in porch. You go into the main level—there’s a few bedrooms. Then there’s a stairwell that leads down into the basement.

So, they go in, and Lieutenant Gruska is in charge of taking pictures and recording audio the whole time they’re in the house. They were not aware that they had already moved out, so it’s a bit of an awkward home study because they’re not even living there anymore. But either way, they’re going to do their job.

They’re walking around, taking pictures of each of the bedrooms. There are three bedrooms, there’s a kitchen, basic stuff upstairs, and then they go downstairs to the basement. Ammons Haunting

Now, the basement was where Latoya and her family claimed the majority of the paranormal activity was taking place. The steps leading down to the basement were wood. They went down into the basement—the basement floor was concrete, and the walls were concrete blocks.

As they go down, Lieutenant Gruska notices that there are candles that had been placed all over the basement floor that had burned down to their wick. Ammons Haunting

There was also an altar and a nativity scene that had been placed near the underside of the stairs. When Gruska goes over to take pictures of the altar and the nativity scene, he recognizes that under the stairs, near where those two things are placed, it’s all dirt.

The concrete that made up the floor of the basement had been broken away, and there were jagged pieces of concrete where there should have been a continuous flow of concrete underneath the steps. It had been snapped up and broken away—it was gone.

When Rosa was questioned about the strangeness of the basement with all the candles and the altar, she just said that there’s a presence down here, and that’s all she was able to articulate. The other officers, the case manager, and Rosa—they go back upstairs.

Lieutenant Gruska and Charles Austin, the other officer, they stay in the basement and take a few extra pictures, a couple more underneath the stairs, and just of the candles before they ultimately go upstairs as well.

When Gruska comes upstairs, Rosa is waiting for him, and she’s about to turn the light off leading down into the basement. She asked him, “Did you get any pictures underneath the stairs?”

He said, “Yeah, yeah, I did. I stayed down there and took some more pictures.”

She looks at him and she says, “Sometimes at night when we’re sleeping on the main floor, we’ll hear commotion in the basement. It sounds like maybe someone bumping on the underside of the stairs. And then you hear footsteps walking up the wood steps, and whatever it is stops on the other side of the door leading into the main floor, and it will stay there for hours. We’re too scared to open the door to look.” Ammons Haunting

Gruska goes back to his office, and he immediately uploads the pictures that he took with a focus on the ones he took in the basement.

He finds that there are a couple pictures he took under the stairs that, in the right-hand corner of the picture just behind one of the steps, it’s partially obscured by a white mist or a white cloud. Ammons Haunting

He zooms in on it, and he brings in other officers, and they look at it. If you zoom in close enough, it looks like a man’s face. As they’re zoomed in on this mist underneath the stairs, they can see—only because they’ve zoomed in—that there appears to be a faint green mist on the left side of the picture. It appears to be a woman’s face.

Gruska and Austin, who are the only two in the basement at the time of these pictures taken, swear they did not see a white or green mist under the stairs when they took pictures.

Gruska, again—it doesn’t say in the report how he’s feeling, but you can imagine he’s starting to feel a little bit uneasy about what he’s witnessing. Gruska just goes to his audio recording, so he fast-forwards to the section where he and Austin are alone in the basement taking these additional photos. Ammons Haunting

You can clearly hear on the recording Gruska and Austin talking to each other as they’re taking these pictures. At some point, as they’re taking these pictures of the basement, a third voice—not Austin, not Gruska—says directly into the audio recorder, “Hey.”

The audio recorder was one that Gruska was used to using, and it had never malfunctioned before. He and Austin were the only ones down there, and so they couldn’t explain where the third voice was coming from, and neither could any of the other officers who listened to it.

On April 30th, Gruska set up a meeting with Latoya Ammons’ priest who she was very close with. They were regular churchgoers. This priest, his name was Father Maginot.

He had been at the Ammons residence five days before this home visit was done, when Latoya Ammons and her family were still living in that residence. So, Gruska went to interview him to get a sense of what it was like when they were still living there.

Father Maginot said he was there because Latoya had reached out and said, “I don’t know what to do,” because she’s claiming there are demons here.

While they’re sitting in the living room on the main floor, Father Maginot was telling Gruska that the bathroom light started flickering on and off. It was distracting enough that ultimately Father Maginot got up and walked over to the bathroom.

As soon as he went inside, the flickering stopped, and then he’d go back down, and it would start again. Repeatedly, Father Maginot would get up when it was flickering, he would go in, and it would stop. He’d come back, and it would start flickering again.

While this is happening, and Father Maginot is going back and forth to the bathroom trying to figure out why the light is flickering, Latoya points out that a liquid is forming on one of the window blinds in the room that they were all sitting in.

There was this oily liquid substance that was just kind of trickling down the window blinds. Father Maginot walks over and looks at it. They’re all looking at it, and there’s no leak in the ceiling, there’s no source for this liquid, and it hadn’t been there before—at least that’s what Latoya Ammons and her family are saying—that that’s not from us, we don’t know what that is.

As they’re looking at this oily substance on the blinds, the cord that controls the blind itself starts swaying back and forth. Everyone’s startled as they’re looking at it because there’s no draft in the room, the window’s not open, there’s no reason it should be swaying.

While they’re looking at this cord, Father Maginot looks down and sees this huge footprint in the carpet near where they’re standing. That was too big to be his, and nobody else in the house had a footprint that was that big.

At this point, Father Maginot doesn’t think it’s safe for the family to be there and advises her to leave. This would actually be the episode that prompts Latoya Ammons and her family to leave the house and not come back.

On May 10th, Lieutenant Gruska, a new Child Protective Services case manager, and a host of police officers go back to the Ammons residence.

The Ammons residence has been unoccupied, with all utilities shut off, locked, and sealed since the last time they were there, which was on April 27th. So, it’s a two-week period that no one has been in the house. But there was a customary follow-up to this house they had to do as part of the home study.

When Lieutenant Gruska arrives at the property, outside are Father Maginot, Latoya Ammons, her mother Rosa, Latoya’s two sons Andrew and Amante, as well as a host of police officers.

There’s a canine unit present. Although it’s not said explicitly in the report, it would appear that the reason for all this additional police presence and a canine unit is because there’s enough weirdness being reported about the house.

There could be, you know, a home invasion situation happening or somebody else living in this house. Any number of things could be happening, but they can’t write off all of the strange testimony about what’s happening in the house.

So, before they go in for this second home study, they have one of the dogs from the K9 unit go into the property and search for intruders, just in case this was a home invasion or something like that.

They wanted to check the box. The dog comes out, hasn’t found anything unusual. The police, along with Father Maginot, the case manager, and Rosa, go back into the house. The main level looked untouched; there was nothing strange happening. It looked like no one had been there in two weeks.

They open the door to the basement, turn on the light, and a couple of weird things happen right away. On the wooden steps leading into the basement, they notice an oily substance with no clear origin that goes all the way down the steps, snakes around the side, and disappears underneath the stairs.

As they begin walking down the stairs, the case manager from Child Protective Services touches a cabinet along the stairwell leading into the basement. Immediately, she pulls her hand back, grabs her pinky, and reacts like something had hurt her.

They ask, “What’s going on?” She says, “I don’t know. I just touched the cabinet, and my hand now hurts. My pinky hurts; it’s tingling.” It apparently had turned white. There are no images to show that, but her pinky had been wounded just from touching this cabinet.

The officers go down into the basement, following the oily trail. They’re thinking, all the utilities have been turned off; there’s no reason there should be any water down here.

Not to mention, there’s no origin for this oily substance, and no one’s been in the house for the past two weeks. So, they can’t account for it by saying that one of the family members might have spilled something.

Even though it’s not written into the report that they were scared or considering this could be beyond rational explanation, it’s clear from what happens next that everybody there was ready to explore the idea that something was happening underneath the steps.

Now the family claims there’s been something crawling out of there and walking up the stairs at night. You have the strange oily substance coming from the underside of the stairs. You have the white and green apparition inside the pictures.

Father Maginot suggests that if there was some sort of demonic possession happening in the house, there’s a good chance they would find things underneath the steps that were tied to the family. So, they decide to dig up the dirt underneath the steps.

Gruska begins digging into this dirt patch under the steps. He makes it about two feet down and finds a press-on pink fingernail. He also finds women’s underwear. As he keeps digging, he finds a political pin for your t-shirt, the lid to one of the cooking pots from upstairs, trash, and miscellaneous papers.

It dawns on the group that someone or something is leaving the basement, going into the main section of the house, taking things from the family, going back downstairs, going underneath the steps, and burying them. Probably has been doing so for some time.

At some point, they stopped being able to dig any farther; the soil was too hard. So, they put the soil back and decide to leave the house. As they’re leaving, Rosa is the last one to leave. She says, “Hey, come over here.” She’s standing in that screened-in porch, looking up at the window blinds.

On the window blinds in the house is that same, or it appeared to be the same, oily substance trickling down the blinds that match the description of what Father Maginot had said he had seen when he was visiting the family before and saw a liquid coming down the blinds.

The officers react by asking Rosa, “Did you do this? Are you responsible for putting this liquid on the blinds?” She said, “No. There was no clear source for this liquid; there was no leak, there was nothing.” Lieutenant Rusko wipes the liquid off the blinds and tells everyone to leave the house for 25 minutes.

They waited, then went back inside to see if there was going to be liquid there. There was. Father Maginot would say that after that first time he was there and saw the liquid dripping down, he did some research, and it’s very common over the history of time that if there’s any sort of demonic possession in a house, liquids will ooze from different areas in the house.

It’s this oily substance that matches the description of what they just saw. At this point, Lieutenant Gruska and the police tell everyone to vacate the premises; they lock it up and leave. That is the end of the police report.

Not included in this police report where I pulled all of the story from is Charles Austin, the other officer who was in the basement with Lieutenant Grusco when they were taking pictures underneath the steps and heard that voice on the recorder.

Charles Austin actually worked for another police department, the Hammond Police Department. He took some pictures of the outside of this house during the time that no one was staying at the house.

One of the official police pictures shows a shadowy figure standing in the screened-in porch of this house, right near where that liquid was dripping down the blinds.

In 2014, Zak Bagans, a popular paranormal investigator who hosts the show Ghost Adventures, purchased the Ammons Haunting Case and filmed a documentary called The Demon House.

You can check that out for yourself. He demolished the house in 2016. So, I’d love to get your opinion on this story because I told it based on information that was available in official police documentation. Now that doesn’t mean that it was paranormal, that this house was haunted, that there were demons there, but it at least makes you wonder what was really happening in that house…