In horror movies, characters stay in haunted houses too long. In the real world, when the Callihan family of Olive Hill, Kentucky reported a haunting, they moved to another house as fast as they could. But the family was torn apart, and paranormal investigators faced an unprecedented accusation of conspiring with a demon: a dreaded “haint” straight out of Appalachian lore.
ABOVE THE LIVING ROOM COUCH — of the modest Callihan Home in Olive Hill, Kentucky, hung a framed print of Jesus, with the writing: “Christ is the Head of This House.” Suddenly, the glass cracked. There was nothing in sight that caused it. This was a Friday, November 15, 1968. “Then things began to break all at once,” Ora Callihan said later. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Ora, 71, and her husband John, 85, had been looking forward to the calm twilight of their lives. John was a retired worker at one of the brickyards of Olive Hill, where they both had lived most of their lives. Olive Hill was a hardscrabble yet quiet town in Carter County, eastern Kentucky, with a population of 1,200, give or take.
Over the next few days, mirrors shattered, the glass in picture frames split, and lamp bulbs popped. Glasses and plates cracked. Stranger still, the cracks in the damaged objects followed a pat tern. John noticed that all the broken glass looked like it had been “shot with a BB gun in the center,” the cracking forming a spiraling shape that one of their sons, Archie, 38, described as “corner to corner.” The washing machine also start ed to rise off the floor–not just shaking but practically levitating, as though an uncontrollable energy was traveling through it and trying to get out.
Roger, 12, their devoted and inquisitive grandson, was ready to stay over whenever he could to comfort and help his grandparents. “That boy was the only one [from my family] that I had to come to me in a time of distress and need,” Ora would praise him while hinting at problems elsewhere in the family.
No one passing the Callihan house would have thought anything unusual could happen there. The place looked like so many houses in the region, such as the one country singer Tom Hall described: “a frame house of pale-gray boards and a porch from which to view the dusty road and the promise of elsewhere beyond the hills.” Memorably, Hall had sung a quietly chilling lyric about his hometown: “I suppose that death is just as real in Olive Hill / As it is in some big city by a mill.”
The Callihans’ small, quiet corner of the earth descended into chaos. “Things break, and us sitting here looking at them, with no one touching them, no one near them,” Ora said, exasperated. Soon, they had filled two buckets of broken glass before the events wore them down. “Now we’re just leaving things lay where they fall,” she said, adding: “I just never did believe in haints.”
The word haint has long been used in Kentucky and across Appalachia to describe ghosts and hauntings.
Whatever this was, one thing was clear to Ora and John, despite a natural skepticism. Something inexplicable was happening to them.
Ora searched her memory to reflect on a strange sighting from many years before in the same house on Henderson Branch. Lorraine, their daughter-in-law, had experienced a shock. “A little girl,” Lorraine had recalled, “unknown to me, came to the door of the house. When I looked back, she was gone, and no one else had seen her.”
After a visit to the home in the wake of the shattering and smashing that began in the fall of 1968, longtime local newspaper reporter George Wolfford documented Ora and John as being “obviously on edge.” John looked worn out. At 6 feet tall and under 120 pounds, he was a thin man who wore flannel shirts under his denim overalls. His long, thin nose, wide ears, and keen smile lent him a boyish face if not for the stubble over his jawline. A cancer scar spanned his left leg above his knee.
Looks could be deceiving in the case of the frail-looking Ora, who appeared rail-thin even beside her slight husband. She was a ball of energy who could buck conventions and authority, a firecracker with a strong personality and a strident gaze to boot, though any scowl could swiftly turn into a smile. Ora was not one to sit by, waiting for someone else to take charge.
After a week of non-stop reported disturbances, the Callihans fled their home on Henderson Branch and moved to Zimmerman Hill, a half-mile away. The move was hardly convenient, occurring the Saturday before Thanksgiving, but Ora refused to wait another moment.
FLEEING A REPORTED HAUNTING — seemed hardly as simple as horror movie audiences might have imagined when shouting at characters on their screens. The Callihans reported facing a rash of additional incidents within days of moving into their new home, witnessed by various relatives and locals.
Beverly, 14, sister of twelve-year-old Roger and the eldest of the Callihan grandchild, entered a room of the Zimmerman Hill house when a small end table in the bedroom fell over, without anyone at arm’s length. Beverly testified that she heard a “cracking” sound and that the head of a chalk doll had “popped” off, a moment easy to interpret as threatening. Ten minutes later, while the family was in the living room, Beverly saw a horse figurine on the table that “came down after it had fallen and it landed on its feet.” The horse seemed to defy the laws of physics, floating in the air rather than just falling. Beverly said she looked up at her cousin Patty, who appeared “like she was hysterical, and I just looked at it and then just—I looked at her, it fell down.”
Ora reported a similar event in the kitchen as she prepared breakfast. Plastic cups fell from the top of the fridge, but they drifted down rather than dropping. Archie said it was like “where you see a moving picture show, and they would slow them down so you could see it. It was real slow.” Then, the cups flew through the door frame, sounding “like a whirlwind.”
Ora, her heart spiking with fear, spilled grease on the stove, almost starting a fire. The fridge suddenly and inexplicably veered toward the stove.
Saturday, December 7, was even worse. As reported by Wolfford, the local reporter, “Picture frames spun on the wall, and small kitchen items flew around.” One witness reported watching an ash tray and a glass bottle fling off a dresser toward a light and then circle it before landing on the floor. Like the patterns in the cracked glass at the Henderson Branch house, objects seemed to move in a complex and deliberate fashion. At one point, when the family swept up an accumulating mess of broken objects, the broom shot into the kitchen. “This is serious, more serious than anything I’ve ever seen in my life,” Ora said. “It looked like death itself was in this house.”
A stray cat had ventured into the home shortly after the Callihans’ arrival, but after a few days, it fled and refused to go back inside.
Bizarre movements were only the beginning. During the incidents at the two houses, the family reported encounters with several unexplained figures or specters. One night at the Henderson Branch home, Ora swore she saw the previous resident of the house, who had died before they had moved in. She yelled, “Where are you going?” But he disappeared. On a different day in the new home, both Ora and Archie were beside themselves after describing seeing the figure of Ora’s late brother, Russell, who had died 14 years earlier. He doubled over, appearing to be in pain, before he disappeared.
But the most imposing figure they purportedly encountered came to them another night. Ora woke from her sleep, screamed, and jumped out of bed. As she later reported, a white form moved toward her. She reached out. She could touch the shape this time, and it “felt cold.”
As Ora looked on, the specter revealed itself as something specific and, in theory, even comforting: a Catholic nurse in expansive white garments. But the nurse was larger than any human and projected a terrifying aura. Ora scrambled out of the room. Roger was in the house, and she would do anything to reach her grandson and protect him.
Sisters of Charity nurses
Ora struggled to get downstairs, lucky not to fall on the stairs. Once she crossed into the kitchen, a cabinet lurched forward, about to slam her against the wall before she got away.
Ora needed to figure out where to turn. “I’m ashamed to tell about this because people who hear me think it’s a lie,” she said. Soft-spoken John Callihan also lamented the prospect of convincing anyone outside the house what was happening: “Nobody believes anything you tell them.”
For an unfortunate family, they had fortunate timing when it came to a new source of possible aid.
IN MANY WAYS — Ed Frederick was a typical college student at Morehead State University, a military veteran (as so many students were in the Vietnam era), and involved in the college radio club. Handsome, with a sharp jawline and dark hair slicked to the left, Ed looked more mature than many of his peers. Before coming to Morehead, while in the Air Force, he had a leadership stint at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where he was an occupational therapy specialist in a groundbreaking study called “Project Strong Bones,” which invented methods for astronauts to preserve their strength in cramped space capsules.
Morehouse State University
Now that he was a student, one extracurricular set Ed apart on campus. He was one of the founders of the Society for Investigation of Supernatural Phenomena (SISP), which, after six months in existence, now counted 30 active student members. In forming one of the first college clubs of its kind in the United States, Ed and his fellow members took their pursuit seriously. As one of their guest speakers told them, “It takes courage for a person to stand up and say that he believes in spirits.”
Hearing about the Callihans’ situation in Olive Hill, Ed and his cohort found a chance to put their interests to re al-world use. Word came that the Callihans would welcome any kind of help. But before trying to understand what was happening to the family, Ed’s group had to understand Olive Hill better. The students had access to plenty of material through the extensive library and campus archives, including the history of the area’s peculiarities and collective trauma.
A formative incident for Olive Hill occurred in 1896 in a nearby town but was said to affect people for miles away. An “indescribably fierce” noise shattered the windless day. Terror was immediate. People froze. While the noise boomed for a full minute, multiple women reportedly fainted. A local newspaper said, “Horses and cattle shrank to the earth and uttered the most pitiful cries. Pigs and sheep were frantic to hide, and fowls acted… crazy.” It seemed something was unleashed, and nobody could explain the strange moment.
In 1915, a young woman was murdered by her uncle; he killed her with a hatchet on the side of the road, worried that his brother—her father—would discover that he had impregnated her. The site of the murder became known as Bloody Rock because every time it rained, it was said a blood-red liquid streamed from the rock. After the road was widened during the construction of a new brick yard, the rock was buried and lost, lurking, in a way, under the townspeople’s feet.
A few years later, Olive Hill was the site of a gruesome triple murder at one of those brickyards where so many locals worked. The victims included a former chief of police and deputy sheriff, and the murderer made a chilling quip after being caught: “The fun is not all over yet.” In 1941, an Olive Hill brickyard worker was found lifeless on company grounds in a strange position, with his hands frozen covering his face. The cause of death was never explained, and the company refused to pay the worker’s widow.
Even within this purportedly supernaturally active landscape were hot zones, such as a cave system known as Bat Cave, home to between ten and twelve thou sand bats during the winter. One local account noted that the area was known as olligonunk, a transliteration of an apparent tribal term meaning “the place of the caves,” and that “strange tales” of what happened within the caves–as well as abandoned mines that were closed off in the 1950s–were passed down through generations. The mountain ranges, similarly, gave rise to stories of witches and deadly curses.
The Morehead College investigative team–called a “supernatural study group” by the campus newspaper–was ready for fieldwork after gathering all they could about the region’s history. Though their resources were far from cutting edge, they secured a tape recorder, which was no surprise given Ed’s involvement with the radio station and the accumulation of other equipment. With their accessories in tow, they had begun to stay overnight in places alleged to be experiencing paranormal phenomena. They tried to approach their work rigorously, as when they slept in a purportedly haunted house that past summer and ended up dismissing all claims of the supernatural.
As for the Callihans’ Henderson Branch house, where the incidents reportedly originated, there were interesting details to uncover through interviews and family documents. When Ora mentioned seeing the figure of the deceased previous resident of their home, the investigators had reason to perk up. That resident, it turned out, engaged in the practice of “raising the knocking spirits,” meaning spirits believed to communicate through knocking on doors, tables, and walls. In addition, the house had once been owned and used by one of the local brick manufacturers–the same manufacturer where a worker had so mysteriously dropped dead in 1941 which had been altering the natural terrain and resources of the region over many decades.
While visiting the house, Ed and the other visitors could also closely observe the family dynamics. They could immediately assess 12-year-old Roger’s special bond with Ora and the fact that the junior high schooler seemed to possess a keen sixth sense about the phenomena that beset his family. Roger, it seemed, could be a key interviewee for the investigators.
Roger was both confused and compelled by the disturbances. When one investigator observed, “I think things have quieted down,” the boy tensed and responded: “When you say that, things start up again.” They did. After another brief pause in incidents, Roger insisted, “It will happen again. It will happen again.” Nothing seemed forthcoming, but when the investigator listened to the recording of the conversation with Roger, he noted three strange noises on the tape at that point. Then, the rest of the tape ended up blank without explanation.
THE CALLIHANS — were not known for displaying their emotions or reopening painful memories, but they knew they had to open up to each other to understand what was happening. The purported haunting became a kind of family therapy. Ora talked about an incident that had occurred before her brother Russell’s death. One day, Ora’s son, Homer, said goodbye to Russell, commenting, “I will be back tomorrow evening to see you, Uncle Rus.” Russell responded: “Homer, you won’t get back to see me. I will be dead when you come back.” Russell died that evening. Not long before that, Russell’s wife died at the Eastern State Hospital in Lexington, with the official cause listed as “general paralysis of insane.”
Meanwhile, Ora had to face her history living in a small town while not always conforming to expectations that women faced, to be inconspicuous, obedient, and even submissive. There had been accusations of promiscuity and loose morals in her youth, and in Olive Hill, she never shook that dark cloud. This reputation was amplified by the fact that Ora was significantly younger than John and that she had been a family friend during John’s first marriage, helping do the dishes and other chores at their home. A year after John’s wife died during childbirth, Ora and John married.
The ramifications had never left, even in old age. She had moments of despair and guilt. All of this also caused her own son, Tommy, to keep his mother at arm’s length. If there was a silver lining, Tommy’s alienation only strengthened Roger’s loyalty to his grandmother, as though unconditional love had skipped a generation.
In sorting out their patterns of pain, they hoped they could find some way to make sense of the oppressive events consuming them.
AS EVIDENCE ACCUMULATED, — Ed and his eager college club could not dismiss the events the way they had at the so-called haunted house where they had camped out. But the clock was ticking if they were to make a name for their club through this case. Word of the events had attracted intimidating company for the collegiate sleuths. Investigators from the most renowned parapsychology program, formed at Duke University, arrived in Kentucky. The North Carolina academics brought top-notch technology with them and resumes filled with multiple advanced degrees. Ed and his team of underdogs had to stay on their toes to keep up. Roger stood out even more as the club parsed all the evidence, including the complex family dynamics. This was particularly true of a critical turning point that first terrifying sighting of the purported specter of a Catholic nurse. Before Ora spotted the apparent phantom, Roger had a strange feeling. Climbing onto the couch, he turned his gaze to a spot outside. He saw “something white in the yard” that scurried behind a tree. In retrospect, this seemed to connect with the specter of the nurse that stampeded through the house.
Ed and his cohorts had a leg up in one respect over the visitors from North Carolina in fancy suits taking out state-of the-art equipment from large briefcases. The club members had readier access to local lore and history. This came in handy for interpreting that Catholic nurse specter.
Kentucky had never had a large Catholic population, but one seminal event staining state history involved Catholics. On August 6, 1855, more than 20 German and Irish Catholics were slaughtered in the streets of Louisville. Targeted by members of the Know-Nothing Party, a virulently anti-immigrant party that saw Election Day as the time to stoke fear among Catholics in the city, rioters stabbed and shot these immigrants and burned their houses. One man was stabbed with a pitchfork while still in bed, then was dragged through the streets as if to turn his execution into a parade. A priest was stoned to death in the middle of a street, while another was hanged, the rope cut moments before his death. The frothing mob, wielding torches and weapons, marched toward the St. Martin of Tours parish intent on burning down the church and was only stopped by the city’s mayor.
Catholic nurse
Owing to strong anti-immigrant sentiment, the injured Catholics’ safest destination for medical care was St. Joseph’s Infirmary, a hospital founded by Mother Catherine Spalding. In the coming years, Catholic nuns, including the Sisters of Charity, would serve as nurses on the Civil War battlefield, leading to a sea change of women working as nurses on the front lines. The old photos Ed and his team could retrieve from archives showed the women in their starched uniforms, projecting a powerful and mystical aura. Connections linked the Louisville events to Olive Hill: Charles S. Morehead was a Know-Nothing who was elected governor during Bloody Monday, part of the instigation for the riots. His family was the namesake for the town of Morehead and Morehead State University, where the student paranormalists now studied the mysteries in nearby Olive Hill.
The students could now connect the dots. Ora’s offhanded comment that a “haint” had appeared in their house simmered with significance. While the term haints was used generically for spirits or hauntings, a more specific etymology identified haint as a “she-devil” in midwestern or Southern lore, and the specter of a Catholic nurse fit with the unforgettable and traumatic Kentucky history going back to Bloody Monday. Through the lens of paranormalists, the little girl who once appeared and disappeared on the Callihans’ doorstep prefigured the later arrival of a haint, and the purported nurse specter was a figure of healing twisted into a force of chaos. For believers, that previous resident of the Callihans’ Henderson Branch house had invited in malicious “knocking” spirits known for heralding death. The cursed cave systems, the mines, the underground “bloody rock” beneath the ubiquitous brickyards, the sonic booms, and the region’s mountainous terrain all provided conduits and stimulants for spiritual manifestations. The specific, recurring pattern in the shattered and broken objects at the Callihan houses now appeared to be a possible psychic map tracing the circulation of powerful forces across Olive Hill.
The question facing Ed was this: where would that map lead?
THE CRISIS — of the elder Callihans, however bizarre, on some level, represented a universal experience, one in which an older couple who had cherished their independence were consumed by increasingly confusing circumstances, often initiated by medical problems, at which point they are suddenly forced to rely on others. The purported emergence of the ghastly nurse figure seemed to be pushing the older Callihans toward death.
Roger wanted to be with his grandparents every chance he could, especially as he felt them slipping away.
But the case had another twist coming. Roger was at his parents’ place when he asked to return to Ora and John’s new house to check on them.
But when Helen, Roger’s mother, called them, Ora said Roger was not welcome at their house. Of all the surprises of the past months, none scared young Roger more than this unexpected breach in his relationship with his grandparents. He broke down.
THE FAMILY WAS BEING TORN APART, — a byproduct–or perhaps a goal, depending on an observer’s perspective–of the unexplained forces. Roger’s parents, Helen and Tommy, were shocked–and downright angry–by Ora and John’s decision to keep Roger away. Banishing Roger from Zimmerman Hill implied he somehow caused–spiritually or through trickery–the events, even though he wasn’t even present in the house for all of them. Family discord mounted. At the elder Callihans’ house, Tommy’s sister, Nannie, lashed out at Ora. “You were never good to me!” she yelled at her mother, who called Nannie ungrateful and toppled a coffee table over as they fought, an unintended echo of the disruptions reportedly caused by the recent phenomena.
Suspicions flew. On the morning of December 17, Helen accused all of the investigators of being “actually in some way in league with the demon and [charged that they] had brought it from the grand parents’ home to theirs.” She demanded that they leave.
It was likely the first time in the annals of parapsychology that paranormal investigators were accused of conspiring with a demon–though, in this case, Helen may have been on to something for different reasons than she could guess. During all the observations, recordings, and interviews, the investigators documented the deteriorating strength of Ora and John, who were giving into despair that threatened both physical and mental health. In contrast, investigators could also chronicle young Roger’s unusual sensitivity and strength in the face of inexplicable events. There was one conclusion jumping out at the observers: Roger was the key to expelling the purportedly demonic spirit, but to do so, they had to draw the forces away from the weakened elderly grandparents and bring the “evil thing” (as Tommy Callihan called it) to the grandson, where it could be isolated without risking the elderly couple’s lives.
Though investigators would know it would break Ora’s heart to tell Roger he was not welcome, they would have had to do everything possible to convince her that prohibiting him from returning to their house was the only way to try to save the family. In private, Ora lament ed to the investigators at the turn of events that “[Roger] don’t deserve this,” she said, insisting that she knew nothing evil could be “working through him” while also begging for a way to end their siege.
By this point, the investigators could also identify reasons for Ora and John’s particular vulnerability to the purported spirit’s trickery. Parts of Appalachian lore involved specters able to shape shift, and the “haint” of the Nurse could be suspected as deliberately appearing to Ora and John as Ora’s brother, Russell, as well as in the guise of the previous resident of the house, in manipulative attempts to lull them into a notion of being protected by friendly spirits rather than being haunted, engendering a deadly complacency. This potential for an emotional trap was particularly relevant when it came to the alleged sighting of the deceased Russell. Ora cherished her memories of her brother. “I was closer to him than I ever was to anybody,” she said. “[His death] hurt me worse than anyone I have parted with.”
Just such potential trickery had been cautioned against by a renowned linguistics and communications scholar speaking to the SISP at a meeting on campus a few months earlier. “If there is communication [from the dead],” the scholar shared with Ed and his fellow members, “it is actually coming from evil spirits posing as dead relatives and friends.”
The high-risk plan to shift where the “haint” was targeting showed quick results.
Until now, Helen, Roger’s beleaguered mother, had been skeptical of the events. “I just thought they were exaggerating, myself,” Helen said, recalling when she had first heard the strange details her in-laws had experienced. “I didn’t believe any of it.”
But now Helen and Tommy’s household–which, in addition to Roger, included older sister Beverly–was terrorized, starting with minor anomalies; while the family was sitting on the couch, they watched a piece of fruit “quivering” bizarrely on the coffee table, as though about to jump into the air. It was so disquieting Tommy grabbed the fruit and threw it on the floor. They felt they might be losing their minds, which made it hard not to think back to Uncle Russell’s wife’s institutionalization. More incidents followed, comparable to those that had happened at the elder Callihans’ homes, involving flying objects, shattering glass, and domestic objects turning into dangerous projectiles. Tommy phoned Ora in a panic: “You got nothing to worry about now, Mommy, because whatever was up there [at Ora and John’s house] is now down here.”
The investigators had not counted on being locked out, nor could they have predicted the younger Callihan family bringing newcomers into the case–Jehovah’s Witnesses. Unlike their Protestant relatives, their household had followed Helen’s lead in her involvement in the Jehovah’s Witness church in Morehead. In doing so, they embraced the religion’s beliefs on haunting, which agreed almost verbatim with the SISP’s conviction that demons could try to lure observers by tricking them into thinking they were communicating with dead loved ones. Moreover, the Jehovah’s Witness belief system could be viewed as embracing an obsessive worry about the presence of demons. H. Ray Battels, presiding minister for the Morehead Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, came to Henderson Branch to assess their situation.
For his part, Roger, cut off from his grandparents, was left in a terrifying position, particularly once his parents locked out the paranormalists.
There was hardly a more in timidating adversary than the Nurse specter that had allegedly fixated on a family with deep emotional fault lines–particularly those of Ora, who convinced herself she was “damned” because parts of her life were labeled “sinful” by town gossips. The appearance of the Nurse also invoked–and mocked–Ora and John’s growing need for care at the area hospitals, which included St. Claire Medical Center, a Catholic hospital. Depictions of Catholic nurses like the one described as appearing to the Calliahans projected a distinctive appearance through a cornette habit. This large headpiece resembled broad wings, a memorable sight even for those accustomed to nuns and other Catholic nurses. To eliminate Roger was to destroy the strongest if youngest protector of Ora and John.
WHILE THE BETTER-EQUIPPED — out of-state investigators had to board their flights back to North Carolina, Ed Frederick could attempt to change Helen and Tommy Callihan’s minds. However, Ed and his fellow Morehead State students faced a new obstacle when they found themselves in the midst of a campus-wide panic. Rumors had begun that an ax murderer was stalking women on campus, as well as planning to sabotage the stands at the football stadium so they would collapse and kill hundreds of students. During the same period that the Society was inspecting the Callihans’ houses, women on campus blocked the doors of their dorm rooms with wastebaskets and glass bottles to be alerted to intruders, an echo of three years earlier when students slept with hammers under their pillows after insisting strange faces were appearing in the windows that were never explained. Nobody could pinpoint the origins of the latest panic, as though an unknown darkness had encircled the campus.
There was no way to reach Roger. But before the investigators had been expelled, Ed had time to interact with Roger, which at least allowed him to share intriguing strategies for the boy to use. From his time in the Air Force leading the “Project Strong Bones” study, Ed could impart to Roger the meticulous psychological and physical exercises found to heighten mental acuity for astronauts in confined spaces for weeks or months to keep them sharper than previously thought possible. Ed had to hope he had implanted a way to halt the phenomena in young Roger.
Using these techniques, Roger had to remain focused, forced to shake off his deepest fears. He was in an unusual position for a preteen; he faced a dramatic version of an expected transition when a younger family member suddenly had to take care of the oldest ones. In the eyes of believers in the Callihan phenomena, he had to find a way to do no less than beat back a bringer of death, utilizing the unusual sensitivity he seemed to have toward his environment. Urgency increased, as did a sense of an imminent change. “Something will happen at one o’clock tonight,” Roger announced at one point. He was becoming as profoundly connected as ever to the phenomena. “The table will flip over,” he yelled at another point. He seemed to be staring into space. Going to the kitchen sink, he suddenly turned around as eyewitnesses watched the kitchen table jump into the air, rotate about 45 degrees, and come to rest–impossibly–on the backs of the chairs around it, with all four legs off the floor. As one observer said, “It happened in the twinkling of an eyelid.”
There was no sleeping at the Callihans. Helen, now convinced of a haunting, was frantic. Not only had she banned the trained investigators from their house, but now she and Tommy insisted the Jehovah’s Witness representatives take matters into their own hands. “These are demon attacks, brought on by the devil,” Minister Battles said. The interloper embraced a narrative of Roger being at fault for the hauntings. They gathered some of Roger’s clothes and set them on fire, along with any recently acquired objects (which they believed could harbor the demon), as part of an exorcism ceremony. Roger begged them to stop, but his mother carried armfuls of his clothing to destroy.
As one o’clock approached, the time of night Roger had predicted would see a crescendo, Roger and his sister Beverly witnessed everyday items fly across the room from a dresser. A metal shelving unit toppled, coming close to crushing Roger.
Three knocks came simultaneously at the front door and more in the kitchen. Family members checked both locations but found no one. The knocking evoked what Ora and John had experienced in their house, the “knocking spirits” that were believed to come as a signal of death and the original unexplained sonic boom that had petrified the region. It also recreated the three strange noises the investigators had picked up in the background of the audio tape recording of Roger talking to them.
Roger had to keep himself together. As he walked through the room, a neighbor came in and watched as a bedside table lifted into the air, traveled over Roger’s head, and flung to the floor after traveling approximately 10 feet. “That scared me worse than anything I [ever] saw,” the neighbor later said. Minister Battles and two other church members saw a coffee table “rise into the air, flip over, and crash to the floor, breaking its contents.”
Knocking continued at the door, but nobody was outside when family members opened it.
As though being chased, Roger ran through the house. While he sprinted from room to room, objects shuffled be hind him: tables, chairs, heavy items.
Finally, Roger spoke directly to the phenomenon: “It’s not a demon.” Roger was taking control over the specter by denying its very identity.
The church visitors produced flames, smoke, and prayers. But Roger’s approach came from something internal, something personal, turning into a statement of inner strength and love for his grandparents that emerged from his slight frame.
Knock-knock-knock.
You’re not a demon! You’re not a demon!
Knock-knock-knock.
In a twist on mythological and theological traditions that naming demons robbed them of power, the 12-year-old intuited another approach. This specter’s evil, so it seemed, had to be rejected to defuse it and to strip it from their lives.
INCIDENTS CEASED — at all the Callihan homes. Whatever had allegedly plagued them seemed to be gone. Locals have since believed that spirits overtake Olive Hill roughly every 50 years, including in the homes still standing on Henderson Branch (now called Cr-1812A) and Zimmerman Hill. A tour of local haunted spots does not stop at Cr 1812A, perhaps heeding the warning of a distant relative of the Callihans, who in 2018 put out “a friendly warning… I think you might want to steer clear of that part of town.”
After the Callihans’ crisis, the panic at Morehead State also petered out, and Ed Frederick finished his degree. Extend ing his experience helping youth as he had done with Roger, Ed became a high school teacher.
The well-funded parapsychologists from Durham had seen something special in Roger. They wanted to bring him to North Carolina to determine to what degree he possessed RSPK–or “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis”–the connection of a human mind to unexplained events. However, Roger’s parents, Tommy and Helen, stayed firm in refusing any further access to him, and Roger chose to remain out of the public eye as an adult after a period of service in the military. His grandfather, John Callihan, died in 1977 at age 94, while Roger’s beloved grandmother, Ora, died in 1987 at age 89.
In contrast to the tension among the investigators, Helen and Tommy, part of Ora’s emotional journey was opening up to investigators to reveal years of suppressed feelings and fears. Sometimes, she entered poetic reveries about life. “I don’t believe we go to heaven as quick as we die,” she said. “I think when we leave this world, our spirits go to paradise, and we rest right there in paradise till the morning of the resurrection, and then I think we are brought up in front of the judge—and you know our judge is God—and you know he will give us justice.”
The events had taken a toll on the entire Callihan family. “I’m just not right with the Lord,” Ora said at one point. “I ain’t.”
“I’m honest-hearted,” she said, casting light on her personality. “Oh, I get out of sorts and maybe say things I shouldn’t say—just things that I oughtn’t to say, and I know I oughtn’t to say it, but I say it.” The family fights and arguments during their nadir of the incidents–the accusations and hurtful comments to ward each other–still stung. The things they said to each other haunted them as much as the purported spiritual haunting.
“And you know that,” she said, “is the devil.”
