The Dead Files (2011) s04e05 Episode Script

There's a lot of frickin' dead people here.
We just get that creepy feeling.
You feel it.
He was evil.
He's missing his whole face.
He was found guilty.
- They lost everything? - They lost everything.
There's a hole in my head.
[Bleep.]
I want the answers.
This is not good.
Could this be dangerous? There is an unhealthy attachment to the dead.
They're being watched.
My name is Amy Allan.
This thing likes death.
I see dead people.
This thing's, like, a monster.
I speak to dead people And he's pissed off now.
And they speak to me His head was cracked.
But there's only one way to know if my findings are real.
This guy was murdered.
I rely on my partner I'm Steve Di Schiavi.
I'm a retired New York City homicide Detective I cannot help you unless I know the whole story.
And I know every person, every house has secrets.
You saw her? It's my job to reveal them.
Why would you stay here? But Steve and I never speak We never communicate during an investigation.
Until the very end.
[ Echoing .]
Stop it.
We uncover if it's safe for you to stay I want to know the truth.
I want to know what's happening.
Or time to get out.
[ Crying .]
I told you there were ghosts in this house.
Di Schiavi: Amy and I work independently of one another.
I interview witnesses and research the history of the location.
To see if there's anything unusual about its past.
While Amy communicates with the dead.
I'm in Rock Island, Illinois, a few hours West of Chicago.
I'm on my way to meet with a woman named Melissa, who says she and her are being terrorized by spirits in the house.
She sounds pretty bad, and I'm hoping Amy and I can help.
Anderson: Before Amy arrives, I have to clear the area of any leading information.
This house contains a lot of family photographs.
So it's important I remove them, along with the kids' names.
To avoid influencing her findings.
Allan: There's a lot of frickin' dead people here Very, very negative.
There's, like, people under the trees.
There's also this other really creepy dude.
He wears a cloak, and He's missing pretty much his whole face.
He works with these people in the trees, though.
They're, like, underlings for him.
He wants to get rid of living people.
So, Melissa, I understand that you and your four year old daughter, are having problems in the house.
- Yes.
- Okay.
Who else lives here? My husband, Mike, and our And how long you living here? We've lived here about five years.
So, what kind of things are you experiencing? We're seeing apparitions, shadows.
Our daughter, Madison we want her to not be afraid.
We want her to have a normal childhood.
What's going on with her? She would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, that a little girl was in her bed.
What about Nathan? He mentioned that there was one time he was coming up the basement stairs.
And it felt like someone grabbed the back of his shirt, and was trying to pull him down the stairs.
Now, when did things kind of pick up here? When we moved in, I was pregnant with my son Noah and Nathan was about 2.
And um, I noticed Um, a shadow in the basement.
Okay.
You said your son Noah.
You didn't mention Noah.
Yeah, I was pregnant with Noah when we bought the house.
He passed pretty much right away after he was born.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
There's two people here who are mediums.
One of them is extremely developed.
It might be a child.
[ Child laughs .]
This living person is very attracted to death.
They want it around.
I think there's family members that this person's held onto or friends.
Unhealthy attachment to the dead.
This is the room that I and my son feel most uncomfortable in.
We just get that creepy feeling.
I feel like I'm being watched down here.
And we've heard footsteps above us.
Has anybody else heard it besides you? Yes.
When we've had friends over, they have heard it.
I don't like it, and it's like when I go up the stairs to go back upstairs It's almost like if you were being chased up the stairs, how you want to hurry up and get to the top.
That's how I feel.
The people from the trees, they do have to [Bleep.]
with people.
Because they do have to follow the orders.
The cloaked man who's in control of the dead from outside sends them into the basement to torment the living.
I think it's his mission to have this house destroyed.
Some of them don't have legs.
I saw one, like, pulling, pulling on the person's leg.
I know that the living person's scared.
They should be, because these things are not good.
This is where most of her experiences, if not all of them, happen.
She would wake up almost nightly between 3:00 and 3:30 A.
M.
And she would be screaming and crying, there's a little girl in my bed! Okay.
Now, does she say the girl is threatening her? She says she wants to play with her.
She says, the little girl wants to play, and I don't want to play with her, mom.
She wakes up in the middle of the night, crying um Just blood-curdling scream that there are guys in her ears.
And she'll say that sometimes it sounds like a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
I don't like being in here by myself.
So I don't really blame her for not wanting to be in here.
By herself at night.
Mm-mm.
No, no, no.
They just come in Solid-ass dead people.
Like, they present themselves.
It's a thing they do to mediums.
If they're doing that, then the kid is advanced.
So, what's going on in here? This is actually where Madison was sleeping with me one night.
She wasn't feeling well, and she was talking about the man under the bed.
Which bed this one? This bed, and, actually, there is no under the bed.
- What do you mean? - The mattress sits pretty low.
You got about this much room under there.
Right.
And so, I decided to give her a piece of paper and a crayon, and I asked her to draw me the picture.
And she drew a circle with a frowny face and red circles all over its face.
- Do you have that picture? - I don't still have that picture.
Anything else in this room? This is also where I experienced what felt like someone sit on the bed And I actually felt the bed Like this, like someone sitting there Okay.
And I looked and there was nobody there, and I'm like, well, maybe I just felt something, and then I felt the bed lift.
- When this happened, were you sleeping? - No, I was not asleep yet.
I was laying there, trying to fall asleep.
The dead in here Are from out there.
They are the people from the trees, and so many come in.
Anderson: What are they trying to do? Hurt them.
Di Schiavi: Mike, I spoke with your wife, Melissa.
It seemed obvious that your daughter was her biggest concern.
That's the biggest concern for me is my daughter And Melissa has always told me things that have happened to her, and I haven't seen it myself, so for me, it was hard for me to believe Right.
But now that the daughter's in the picture, telling me kind of the same stuff, I tend to believe Madison because she's so small.
Have you had any experiences? - I've had one here in Madison's room.
- Explain that one to me.
It was actually this shopping cart right here.
And the shopping cart was actually in the middle of the room, like this Okay.
Loaded up with toys, and Madison woke up screaming and pointed at the shopping cart.
Did you ask her what she was screaming about? I just assumed that she wanted it back by her bed again, so at that point I just said, all right.
Put it right here next to you.
Must've been probably a half-hour later I was back in bed again myself.
She woke up screaming, shrieks.
Okay.
And then I came back in here, and this rug was in the middle of the floor and the cart was turned and pushed to about here.
- What happened? Did she push it? - Well, that was my first thought.
I'm like, you know, she just pushed it away, but then if she just pushed it away, why would she be screaming about it? She didn't tell me that anybody had pushed it.
She didn't tell me that anybody took it away from her.
She was just screaming, pointing at that cart that moved.
Now, Mike, after this incident happened, the stuff you can't explain, are you a skeptic, not a skeptic? What's your story? It opened my eyes is what it did.
Okay.
Allan: There's a disturbance.
I hear things moving Like, chairs moving Mm, maybe a little bit of a poltergeist.
Yeah, and stuff happens in here Poltergeist [Bleep.]
you know? Poltergeists are usually created unintentionally, when someone with abilities represses intense negative emotions.
These powerful forces can interact with the physical world, and in some cases, harm living people.
Do you have any idea who it's coming from? - Allan: I want to say a female.
- Okay.
The living person doesn't know how to release their [Bleep.]
emotions properly.
Anything that could be dangerous? Yes.
Di Schiavi: Mike, I know you're probably at your wits' end with this, but what are you hoping we can help you out with this investigation? I just want my kids to feel comfortable and safe everywhere in our house.
Nathan is not really comfortable going in the basement by himself.
Melissa is not real comfortable with the attic at all.
- The attic? - Right.
- She didn't mention the attic.
- There's an attic out here in the hallway.
- Can you show me? - Yeah.
Di Schiavi: What's the story? Why does Melissa not like going up here? Just kind of a dark, creepy thing.
She's just not real comfortable.
I don't think she's ever been up here once.
Right, and do you know much about the house? I know it was built back in the '40s.
Before there was a house on the land, it was owned by John Looney, and he was a gangster back in the '20s to '40s in Rock Island.
Okay.
Let me ask you a question, though, Mike.
If at the end of our investigation Amy turns around and says, you know what? You can't fix this.
You got to get out of this house, what would you do? That would be hard for me.
You know, as the husband and the father of the house, I want to be able to find the answers, to stop my daughter from screaming in the middle of the night.
So I'm hoping having you guys out here, we'll be able to find some sort of answer.
Okay.
A lot of the people that are in the kids' area They kind of live up here or hang out up here.
But they all kind of work together.
And they died in various ways and places.
[ Sighs .]
[Bleep.]
This is not good.
So, Nathan, I was talking to mom and dad before.
They told me that you've been experiencing some stuff in the house here? - Uh-huh.
- Explain that to me.
I was in my bed, looking at the closet.
I saw, like, a gray shadow running across it.
- Which closet the one outside? - Over there.
- Can you make out what it was? - It was kind of a person shadow.
- All right.
So, did that scare you? - It scared me a lot.
Just tried not to think of it and have a nightmare.
- Okay.
Did you tell anybody about it? - No, I haven't yet.
You haven't? Okay.
So, anything else happen? I felt someone trying to pull me downstairs.
- Down in the basement? - Mm-hmm.
- How? - Like, grabbing onto my shirt.
Di Schiavi: I've been lied to by seasoned sociopaths, and I can always see through their lies, so when I'm talking to a kid, I know when they're telling me the truth, and this one is.
Are you scared to be at home? Yes.
Allan: The ones that are coming in here, they can get kind of nasty.
They more look like shadows But they, like, are up against the walls.
Two groups of dead people are roaming this structure The ones presenting themselves to the mediums who live here.
And the ones crawling across the floors of the basement and Master Bedroom.
They have one thing in common they both have bad intentions.
Is there anything else these people can do to the living? You see them out of the corner of your eye, but you feel them.
What will these things eventually do? Well, they can kill.
Di Schiavi: Mike told me that a mobster used to own his land, so I made some calls, and it turns out he's right.
Going to meet with a local author who says a guy by the name of John Looney used to run a bloody empire right off of Mike and Melissa's property.
Di Schiavi: So, you wrote this book about Looney, and from what I understand, he actually owned the property that I'm investigating.
- Is that correct? - That's correct.
This is John Looney about the time he came to Rock Island.
In the late 1800s He met a woman named Nora O'Connor.
They got married, and they had two daughters and a son.
Okay.
But about 1903, his wife dies.
And after she left He spiraled downward into this life of crime.
He was involved in gambling, moonshine.
He was involved in prostitution.
This is Looney from sort of the height of his power.
How powerful did this guy get? Well, he basically controlled the town.
People were very afraid of him.
Basically if there was something going on in town that was illegal, Looney was involved with it.
Okay.
Now, I assume he was a violent man.
Well, we know that a lot of people died, and Looney had people on his payroll who were, you know, basically paid hit men.
Do we know if he ever buried any bodies on the property? Just the fact that he had, you know, this large, piece of land with nobody living around it, the opportunity existed.
Allan: There's, like, a family out there You know, like, a mother, a father, I think like two or three kids.
But their father he's kind of freaky Kind of creepy-looking, too Dressed all in black.
I'm getting something about dirty dealings.
What does he do? He's, like, burying bodies.
Ruthart: So, it was about 1922 and Looney's empire started to fall apart.
In what way? There had been a big split in Looney's organization.
Some of his former lieutenants who'd formed their own gang basically set up a hit on Looney.
They didn't get him, but they got his son.
Was he there when the son got shot? - Yes.
- He was? Basically they pulled up in front of this hotel.
Looney was going in to get some papers, and these other guys pull up Or they jump out and open fire, and Looney runs for the hotel, goes up on the second floor, and starts firing back, but the son gets shot down on the sidewalk before he ever got to the door.
And eventually dies later at the hospital.
Uh-oh.
I just got a nasty headache.
And someone's yelling about a gunshot.
I do feel like there's a hole in my head.
[Bleep.]
[ Gasps .]
There's, like, blood and then confusion.
Like, I don't know if they lived.
After his son was murdered, things just sort of fell apart.
The city leaders started to shut down the gambling parlors and the hotels and the houses of prostitution and started arresting people.
And when the whole house of cards fell in, the Feds went after him and he was arrested.
And then subsequently, they filed murder charges against him for the murder of a local bar owner named Bill Gabel, who refused to pay him protection money.
He was eventually found guilty.
He ended up sentenced to 14 years for the murder and served 8 of it.
Where did he wind up when he came out of prison? Well, his daughter picks him up at the prison gate and, he goes to live with her and her husband in Texas.
And he's there about eight years, and then he ends up dying from a lung condition.
And how old was he when he died? He was 75 in 1942.
Okay.
This guy dressed all in black He's probably, like, in his early 70s.
He's fairly recent he's fairly recently dead or something.
But I keep seeing these bodies all over the place.
He's, like, digging them and just throwing them in the ground, you know? [ Man laughs .]
Nobody likes him.
He was evil.
He definitely was not involved in good things.
Di Schiavi: I'm at the library to see if anyone else of interest owned my clients' property before John Looney.
Digging through the archives, I discover a man named Sam Bowles, who lived on the property in the 1800s with his wife, Eliza.
But what really caught my attention is the headline surrounding their marriage.
Turns out Eliza went to the newspapers to make their troubles public.
Claiming her husband beat her.
I'm no expert on the 19th century, but I don't think it was real common for women to go to the newspaper, claiming their husbands abused them.
I'm on my way to meet with a local historian who promises to tell me the rest of the story.
I thought it strange that in 1886, a woman would actually go to the paper about domestic violence.
That wasn't common back then, was it? - No, absolutely not.
- Okay.
Domestic violence was a taboo subject back then.
You typically didn't read about it in the newspaper, and you wouldn't have talked to your family about it.
Now, Bobbi, you mentioned on the phone that there was a little bit more to the story.
One week after that was published in the newspaper, Eliza died of a stroke.
Do you know if she was sick? No, she wasn't.
It was a sudden death.
Okay.
Did they have any children, the two of them? Yes, they actually had one daughter, Telitha.
She was born in 1861.
Okay, now, what kind of guy was Samuel? He was a very prominent man in his community.
He actually had built them a school, a church, and a cemetery for its citizens.
So, Bobbi, what ended up happening with this guy? He actually died in 1893.
And Telitha inherited his estate.
She sold it off piece by piece, and eventually the last piece was sold to John Looney.
Allan: I'm seeing a female.
She is kind of prissy, uppity.
She's wearing a very lacy dress, comes all the way up.
I think that her parents might have died pretty young.
And she's disgusted by the people she's surrounded by.
This house is crawling with dead people.
And what has me disturbed is their attraction to the children's rooms.
She's just very Advanced.
Di Schiavi: During my research, I also discovered that before Samuel Bowles, Native Americans lived all over what's now my clients' property.
In this part of the country, that's no big surprise.
But when I called the local Curator of the Native American museum, she said that what went down there may be helpful to my case.
So, I understand the property I'm investigating used to be Native American territory? - That's correct.
- Okay.
What can you tell me about it? Well, the last tribe of Indians to inhabit that area were the Sauk Nation of Indians, and they were here from about Okay, so, what happened with the Indians there? They lost their land to the American government in 1804, but only about two-thirds of the tribe was willing to go.
About one-third of the tribe, that was led by the warrior Black Hawk.
Refused to leave the land of their ancestors.
Black Hawk said, I'll die before I leave.
But one of their spokesmen was a man named Keokuk Who was very friendly to the Americans.
He was able to convince his own people, that there was no point in fighting the American government and it was better to just move as they were told.
What about the people that didn't support him, how did they feel about him? Well, they felt that he was a coward A traitor to their nation.
Black Hawk felt nothing but disdain for him.
So, the people that sided with Keokuk, did they prosper with the deal he made? Well, no, they were removed over into Iowa And told that they could live there forever.
But within 10 years of this promise, they're gone.
- They lost everything? - They lost everything.
I'm seeing this leader guy again, who's wearing a cloak.
And he says, they're still our territories and we still watch over them.
But when he was alive, he screwed up.
He wasn't doing his job.
He says that everybody who's come since has just [Bleep.]
everything up and destroyed it.
He feels justified as far as wreaking havoc on people.
What does he do? Basically whatever needs to be done, but he sends his people in to do it.
What do you mean? The people that he puts in the trees Were from his time Like 17-something.
When he sends people into the house Why is he doing that? That's him trying to get rid of this building.
Di Schiavi: Now that Amy and I have completed our investigations.
We're ready to reveal our findings to each other and our clients for the first time.
Mike and Melissa have been here about five years.
Melissa's had experiences from the minute they came here.
They have two beautiful children, and one of their kids is having a very tough time here.
Waking up in the middle of the night, screaming, crying.
She's afraid to be here.
So they're concerned if their kids can live here in a safe environment, and that's why they called us in.
With that, I'm gonna have Amy start to talk about her walk.
Allan: I immediately get the sense that someone here is contributing to what's happening in this house.
But I can also tell they're not emotionally ready to hear it yet.
One of the first people that I encountered was a male.
He's not a good guy.
He was dressed all in black.
I did get that while he was alive, he was particularly evil.
And he definitely was not involved in anything good.
Who do you guys think it sounds like? - John Looney.
- John Looney? John Looney was a gangster that owned this property back in the 1920s.
He was involved in everything prostitution, gambling, bootlegging.
He was supposedly very ruthless got convicted of murder.
He was suspected in many, many more deaths.
There's pictures of him here.
Interesting.
I think his reason for buying the property up here was because it was perfect for - Burying bodies great.
- Burying bodies.
Now, you think the guy you saw was him? Looks like him, yeah.
What else did you see? Well, then I saw something out back which was pretty freaky.
Under the trees are all these people.
And all of them used to live on this land.
And their leader was this man who came up.
He walked up, and he was wearing a dark cloak.
And I got that this guy was from a very long time ago, like 1700s.
He feels that his job was to be in charge of a large territory.
And he screwed up.
He just made a big mistake.
And now that he's dead he, does an incredible job of watching his territories Psychotically too well.
It's interesting you say that.
There was a tribe of Indians called the Sauk Nation that inhabited your land.
There was an Indian by the name of Keokuk.
And when the white men came, he kind of appeased them And kind of played both sides of the coin.
He basically sold out the whole Indian nation here and had them displaced.
This is Keokuk.
Even to this day, that tribe feels he sold the whole tribe out.
Well, it kind of makes sense, because what this person wants is the house to be gone.
He said he's not the only one who watches this territory.
He'll send other people to, like, take care of business.
Now, did you see any of those people inside this house? There was a lot of them in The Master Bedroom.
On the floor, around the bed basically.
Some of them can't walk.
Some of them can only crawl or, like, pull themselves.
Tell Amy about Madison, what she saw.
Melissa: She was sleeping with me in bed one night.
She said she didn't want to go to sleep because of the man under the bed.
And I said, well, there's no man under the bed.
And she goes, yes, mommy, he's under there.
And then she got down and looked under the bed, and I said, see, there's no one under there.
She started pointing, and she said, mommy, he's right there.
That thing with the bed you had told me about you were laying in bed alone.
- Mm-hmm.
- Tell Amy about that, too.
Yeah, I had just gotten into bed, and I felt somebody sit down on the bed, so I turned to look and there's nothing there.
And then I felt it whatever it was get up off the bed.
Would that have been what you were talking about in The Master Bedroom? - Doing that to the bed? - Um, probably not.
That's probably him.
I just got goose bumps.
So, what else is going on? Then I went down to the basement.
And uh, I saw some of the specific dead people that I think were sent to destroy your house.
They're all naked, they're all in different levels of decomposition.
And I think two of them want help.
I actually saw somebody doing laundry, a female.
This was a living person, and one of them was crawling on the floor.
And was actually trying to grab the person's pant leg.
Yeah, there's something about that laundry room.
I feel like I'm always being watched.
Nathan had another incident in the basement here, going up the stairs.
Tell Amy about that.
He was walking up the stairs, and then he felt a little tug on the back of his shirt.
Okay.
Interesting.
And do you think this would be one of these people that tugged on him? Yes.
Let me ask you something.
You said you saw a living woman? - That's what you saw? - Mm-hmm.
Well, I sketched it.
- You sketched that scene you saw? - Yes.
She's gray.
Her hair is all kind of wet.
Her legs are kind of bent sideways.
Wow.
That's creepy.
Wow.
- That's pretty scary.
- It's sad.
It's just so uneasy for me in there.
Maybe this person is reaching out to me for help.
Why would they be reaching out to Melissa for help? I did get that there was someone here who brings in the dead.
There is a female who they think is a medium here.
So, when you are a medium, dead people are attracted to you who want help.
And I did get that this individual doesn't quite know what to do with this ability.
There is a slight unhealthy attraction to death.
Like an obsession with it.
It's dangerous because there's a fine line there.
And a lot of the dead here can inadvertently harm you.
Allan: I did get that there was someone here who brings in the dead.
There is a slight unhealthy attraction to death, like an obsession with it.
It's dangerous, and a lot of the dead here can inadvertently harm you.
Well, when I first started interviewing Melissa, she had told me that she's had experiences since she was a kid.
I always felt like I had had psychic abilities, but I had never really been afraid of my experiences.
Mm-hmm.
Now that my daughter had been really, really frightened.
I was like, okay, there's something going on, and we need to get this taken care of.
Now, you believe this stuff gets passed down through generations.
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
And the other thing was getting that there was a child who's extremely open here.
And very well developed, which is very interesting.
When I went into their bedroom, the dead lined up and greeted me.
It's a type of introduction.
Usually this is, like, for, you know, really advanced mediums.
- So I was, like, shocked.
- And you saw this in Nathan's room? I don't know.
It had the bunk beds, I think.
Yeah, that's Nathan's room.
Allan: I feel like Mike and Melissa have always known, that something wasn't right in their home.
They've just been too afraid to admit it to each other.
I think your daughter has something going on, too.
But right now, he is way more advanced than your daughter.
It makes sense, with him not being afraid.
This is Nathan.
Aw.
Cutie! Has anything traumatic happened to him? Nathan was about 2 years old.
We had another son, named Noah Okay.
And he actually passed away shortly after birth.
I have Noah's picture.
Can I show that to Amy? - Is that all right? - Sure.
This is right before he passed.
Aw.
We knew something was wrong halfway through the pregnancy.
So, you guys were preparing for this before, even.
I never prepared for it.
I didn't accept that he wouldn't live.
Now that I know about Noah, it all makes sense to me.
So, the last thing was a little bit of poltergeist going on here.
I felt things were sliding across the floor.
I felt that the adult medium won't let go, specifically to the family and friends.
And this is kind of something that is being held inside.
And is coming out in this manner.
And I think this person has some anger.
And it's not being properly released.
That sound like you? Sorry.
It's okay.
I've had other people tell me that I haven't grieved properly for Noah [Sniffles.]
So that makes sense.
I can't think of um Anything I've noticed, like, moving.
The one thing that I've found unexplainable in this house since I've been living here is a, shopping cart that Madison has in her room, a little toy shopping cart.
It was parallel to her bed at one point, full of toys, when she was younger.
And she woke up screaming.
I came into her room, and it was - turned and in the middle of the room.
- Hmm.
No way she could've pushed it there Mm-hmm.
And so I put it back, and then she woke up screaming about a half-hour later, and it was, again, turned and in the middle of the room.
Interesting.
That's a pretty big movement.
Di Schiavi: Could that be from the poltergeist? Yes.
Melissa, I know tonight was pretty rough.
You heard a lot of things that you probably didn't want to hear.
But the big question is your children.
- Right.
- Is it safe for them to be raised here? With that, I'm gonna turn that over to Amy.
You have a lot of dead around this location.
So the first thing you need to do is grief counseling.
This is going to allow you to let go of the dead and to process emotions in a beneficial way.
This will also help you get rid of the poltergeist.
For Nathan, something he should do every night before he goes to bed, is to have him state that, he only allows the good dead and guides to stand by him and help him.
He has that power, and the good guides and the good dead are going to be pushing the bad out, as well.
- Will that get Looney out of here? - Yes.
The last thing is you can go to the tribe That Keokuk is from, and ask them to do a ceremony in your backyard.
To release him and the people that he's imprisoned.
I feel really good about it.
I'm anxious to start helping Nathan and Get rid of these negative energies.
We have a game plan now.
For me, I feel like a puzzle has been put together in front of me, to be honest with you.
But are you gonna follow Amy's advice? Definitely.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Allan: Melissa has a lot of work ahead of her to rid her property of the evil that resides here.
But once she confronts her past and follows my advice.
I'm confident that her family will be able to live in peace.
[ Breath exhales .]
[ Wind whistles .]