America’s First Haunted House

This isn’t your typical haunted house story with a few ghosts that spook you when they appear. No, a demonic presence haunted this kind family for 4 years! It would ruin most things that they owned, down to their bedsheets before they could get away from it. But what’s even stranger is what happened after the evil presence was gone…

It's the middle of the night when the Livingstons hear a knock on the door.   Adam gets up and heads over to the door, wondering who would be out this late. When he opens the door, he sees a strange man standing, dripping wet from the storm, on his porch. 

The man asks “Can I sleep here tonight? I have taken ill while passing through and have nowhere to sleep”

Adam doesn’t think twice about it and welcomes the stranger into his home. As he shows the stranger to the spare room, Adam notices that the man is weak and flushed from a fever. He sets the man up in the room and lights some candles. 

But before Adam can head back to bed, the stranger asks “Can you call for a catholic priest? I don’t think I will make it through the night and would like my last rites”

Adam's thrown off by this request. Being Lutheran, he’d never seen a catholic priest. And common thought of what a catholic priest was a bit outrageous during this time. Think horns and hooves.

Adam replies “There is no priest in this neck of the woods, and even if there were, he’d never darken my door!” and with that, he heads to bed.

But Adam doesn’t stay in bed long. He’s anxious and agitated. He gets up and paces around for a bit, then tries to go back to bed, but he doesn’t get much sleep.

Come morning, Adam gets out of bed and goes to check on the stranger. The man is not doing well and the illness is getting worse. Adam and his family do what they can for the man and even call on a friend to keep vigil for the man that night. When his friend enters the room, the candle in his hand goes out in a puff of smoke. After a few attempts, they realize that no candles will stay lit in that room.  

They hear what sounds like horses trampling around outside the house, going round and round. Knowing that all the horses should have been in the barn, they looked outside. No horses. Maybe they were imagining it. Maybe it was just the thunder…

After the stranger passed away it felt like something invisible was still in the home. The whole family felt it, but couldn't explain it. The next morning, Adam took the stranger's body to the far edge of his 70-acre farm and buried him. But he could still feel that presence, even on the outskirts of his land... It was like something was here for a reason…

When Adam walked into the kitchen, dishes flew off the shelves and pans that hung above the counter crashed into one another. Hearing all the commotion, the rest of the family rushed into the kitchen to see what was happening. No one could believe their eyes. It was like someone or something was trying to break anything they could.. but no one else was in the kitchen. Freaked out, the whole family thinks something evil has come to their home. 

A few nights after the kitchen incident, they hear what sounds like shears clipping. The sound is everywhere and everyone in the family can hear it, so they figure they’re not all going crazy. This sound haunted them at night. Throughout the farm, they would continue to find bed sheets, blankets, clothes, and even saddles and boots torn to pieces. The weirdest thing about it was, all of the fabrics were destroyed using the shape of a crescent moon.

One afternoon Mrs. Livingston went out to gather the laundry from the line, she found the clothes piled on the ground, having been cut from the line. She could only assume that whatever was clipping the other fabrics had done this too.

And then there was the furniture. Some days Adam would notice that furniture was missing, or not in the same spot. The first few times, he asked his family if they had moved it, hoping they had. But they always said no. After a while, he stopped asking… knowing that it was the evil presence taunting him.

One night, the family was sitting by the fire and the burning logs rolled out of the fireplace and across the floor. The whole family watched, too stunned to move. No one had an explanation other than the Devil himself was haunting the home. 

It wasn’t long before the occurrences started spreading around the farm. Animals began to die in strange ways, the bodies of cattle would be found dead, with no clear cause of death.  The heads of chickens looked like they had been squeezed off by an unseen hand.  No signs of predators that could take down such an animal were found in the area.

On top of all this, the barn mysteriously caught fire and blazed so fast that it couldn’t be put out. Leaving just a pile of ashes behind.

By now, word was out about the Livingston Farm haunting. They tried to keep it to themselves, but when your livestock die and your barn burns down, it's kinda hard to hide that. One old lady stopped by the farm to see this demon for herself. 

Doubting that anything would actually happen, she wrapped a silk cap in a cloth and hid it in her pocket. She thought that if no one knows I have it, nothing can happen to it. After being at the farm for a while, she checked on the silk cap. She found the outer cloth was still intact, but the cap inside was shredded. She left the farm pretty quickly after that.

Another such doubter stopped by the farm one day, a young man who was about to be married. He declared “I don’t believe in ghosts”. But not long after staying at the farm, he found the boots and coat he planned to wear for his wedding were now looked like spaghetti spirals. He couldn’t believe it. 

Then Mrs. Livingston became suddenly ill. Nothing seemed to help her get better. They assumed the worst, that the evil presence was now causing this too.

One night while his wife was sick, Adam had a dream. He was climbing up a mountain, using bushes and roots to pull himself to the top. When he got to the top of the mountain, a figure was standing there dressed in priest-like robes, and a voice said “this is he who can relieve you”.

The next day, Adam reached out to his Lutheran pastor for help. He described what was going on at his home, hoping the pastor would know how to help. Instead the pastor replied that it was not within his power to banish the evil from the Livingston home. 

Feeling like he had to find this man in his dream, he then went to an Episcopal church in Winchester. Seeing the man didn’t dress like the figure in his dreams or resemble him in any way, Adam left and went back home.

By this time, he was desperate.  He accepted help from anyone and everyone who said that they could get rid of this evil. A conjurer gave him some herbs, a book and a riddle to trap the evil. But before Adam could use them, he found the herbs had been thrown in the toilet along with the book and the riddle.

Adam continued requesting help from the church, but he continued to get denied and those who did agree to help, would never show up. 

With little hope left, Adam went to Shepherdstown and found a Catholic priest by the name of Father Denis Cahill. When Adam saw Cahill, he instantly recognized him as the man in the robes from his dream.

At first, when Adam approached Cahill, the father didn’t think much of his tales. But when other members of the congregation came forward, saying that they too had seen the occurrences at the Livingston Farm, Father Cahill said he would stop by.

When Father Cahill arrived, he began to pray and sprinkled holy water around the home. For a while, the clipping sound stopped, and Adam’s wife got better. The satchel of coins that had been lost even appeared out of nowhere on their front steps. But it was only a few days before the evil occurrences began again.

Father Cahill enlisted the help of Father Gallitzin, and together they performed an exorcism of the home. They said the home shook with what they described as the rattling and rumbling of innumerable wagons. After this, the evil occurrences stopped.

Father Cahill returned a short time later to perform a mass in the home just to be sure. The evil occurrences never returned. 

After living on the farm for only 4 years, the Livingstons' decided to move back to Pennsylvania. After the evil events, they converted to Catholicism and donated half of the 70 acre farm to the church when they moved. They did give a few stipulations though. One was that a clergyman should always remain on the property.  And second, any profits made from the land should go toward building or repairing a church on the land. Today this area is Priestfield West Virginia.

But what’s even stranger than this haunting, is that once the evil presence was gone, the Livingstons began hearing another voice. But this was a caring voice that guided them in the ways of Catholicism. It taught them how to pray and told them kind things to do for their neighbors. Some things that this voice guided the family on were a bit much though. It required that they pray for 3 hours each day and would shame them if they didn’t complete the full 3 hours... But all in all, the family seemed more than happy to follow the voice’s guidance. They believed it to be the voice of a soul in purgatory which they followed for the next 17 years.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that as soon as the evil occurrence stopped that this new voice shows up?

Could it really have been a voice in purgatory? Or was it just the same entity that found a way to control the family?