Life After Paranormals: Season 3, Episode 16

Matt Brown never believed in ghosts, but now his mind is wide open. Find out how "The Coven" changed his mind.

Could you describe the atmosphere the house gave off when you first stepped inside?
It was very cool when you first stepped inside. For me, I was excited because it was a new place. But, there was a family that was moving out, and they were kind of like in a panic to get out of there so that quickly changed things. But when I first arrived… I liked it because it was a big old house. There was plenty of land to hunt and fish on so I was excited about it.

How long were you in the house before you started experiencing unexplainable incidents?
Almost instantly. There was a family there that was leaving, and as soon as they left, me and a friend of mine that was there with me decided we were going to explore. We'd unlocked the door that had been locked for we really don't know how long. The family that had lived there before us had locked it. I think from that moment on, we had some sort of experience. Now, we didn't talk about it amongst our family because we all thought that it was something that happened to each one of us personally until towards the end when we realized it was happening to multiple members of the family at any given time.

What were the first few things that started off as soon as you opened that door?
Well, when we unlocked that door, I felt a cold rush come through me. That room was just so much cooler than the rest of the house. The house was cool – don't get me wrong, it had real tall ceilings. But, it was summertime in South Carolina, and summer in South Carolina is usually very humid, so it was kind of refreshing to kind of go into that room where it was cool.

You got this oppressive feeling when you walked in. Like there was something almost collapsing you when you walked in. It kind of took your breath away. Now, I can say something's there. Then, I didn't fully understand that. 

The locked room was like a time capsule. What era did it seem to belong in?
It honestly seemed like it belonged in the seventies. It felt like I stepped into something that had been closed up for twenty years, at the time. It didn't feel like anybody had been in there for a while. But, later I found out that there was somebody that passed away in that room a few years earlier.

You experienced a night in which flying glasses and jars attacked you and your mother. What do you think triggered this attack? Did it happen more than once?
We had just gone and done a cleansing on the house. We had tried as best as we could. We weren't experienced in any of that, at that time. This was a time frame when nobody really talked about that kind of stuff. Especially in the Deep South, it was very taboo to bring up that there was anything possibly malevolent or demonic going on in any situation. And nobody talked about ghosts because how could you be a ghost if you went onto heaven afterwards. So, we basically ended up having to do this stuff on our own. We had a pastor that we could talk to, but he didn't want to come out. He just wanted to give us guidance to do it on our own. So, we took his guidance and we were able to go around and do a cleansing on the house. And we anointed the house, and we felt like we had done something.

There are a few strange occurrences that had happened in the house, and my mom and I were just sitting down and were talking about some of the things that were going on. My little sister came in and she sat down with us. We were telling each other the stories about what had happened to each other. We had never swapped stories about what was happening. We kept it all to ourselves until we realized what was going on.

It was while we were sitting down, talking about these things that were happening and trying to put all the pieces together when that happened. We were sitting on the other side of the kitchen, and on the top shelf of the cabinet, everything came flying off and hit the wall. I jumped up on top of the counter to look up there and see why and how everything could have been thrown off the top shelf, and there was a lip on the top shelf – about a one-inch lip. So everything would have had to jump over that lip.  If the house shook, it would have only slid over to the edge of that lip.  There's no way naturally that could have happened.

Were the spiders and hornets that you saw solid or more of a hallucination?
They were definitely solid. The hornets, they actually stung me. I probably got stung twenty or thirty times before I jumped off the roof. There were welts all on my chest and my back, but while we were standing there looking at them, they started dissipating.

The spiders – they came out of the faucet in the bathroom. They came out of the toilet in the bathroom. They came out of everywhere. They were these large wolf spiders. After doing research on them, they tend to stick to themselves. They call them lone wolf spiders. Seeing a bunch of them together like that was odd.

Were you ever able to find out where the hornets came from? Was there a nest or did they just appear?
They would be there one minute and the next minute they wouldn't be. I did see them come out of the faucet one time on the sink. We put down some natural repellants to prevent them from coming, but they continued to show up in the oddest, most random places.

What do you think the landlord meant by "there are no more spirits in this house?" Wasn't your family still experiencing paranormal activity at this point?
One of them was actually pretty angry about it. She came out and said, "What did you do?!" And she said, "there's no more spirits here. Do you know how long it took for us to get those in here?" Me and my stepdad were just dumbfounded. Here, we had gone through absolute hell dealing with this, and come to find out these people put them in there.

Things had slowed down a lot by the time we left, but you're talking about a period of just a couple days where there wasn't something going on. Up until that point, it was almost every day that something was happening.

I don't know if there were particular spirits that they were talking about or entities that they were talking about when they were upset that we had cleansed the house, but I can promise you there were still stuff in that house. We didn't get everything out. There are people today that have attempted to live in that house and nobody can stay in that house more than about six months. Now, that house is a hunting lodge because nobody can live in it.

Why do you think the landlords wanted to trap spirits within the home?
There's a lot of speculation. I think that it was at first, they started just as a curiosity, but there was some kind of power trip. They were gaining something from it.

After leaving the house, did your family ever experience anything else paranormal?
Yes, they have. It hasn't been anything that was really bad. The experience of living in that house actually raised that question in my heart, so I became a paranormal investigator. It's caused me to continue to look for answers and try to help other people that may be going through the same thing I went through. I think that we have had paranormal experiences because I've kind of sought them out, but none of them even come close to comparing to what we went through in that house. Even the stuff that I've sought out to try to help people with, nothing comes close.

You said this experience changed your outlook on everything. Do you mind going into details on how your viewpoints have changed?
Before that, I had kind of the typical Southern Christian view of you're here on this Earth, while you're here you do the best you can, you serve God, when you pass on he takes you onto heaven and rewards you. Anything beyond that is taboo or considered Satanic in the church's eyes. I've learned that there's much more to that. There's a much larger picture spiritually and in the realm we live in and on this planet that we live on. There is so much more that we just don't fully understand. I'm not one of those that will ever say, "I don't believe that because it hasn't happened to me." I'm one of those types of people that the only time I'm going to a point where I won't believe in it is if I can prove that it's not believable.

I've broadened my horizons. I understand that there's more out there, and I can't look at things with a closed mind anymore because my eyes have been opened.