Life After Paranormals: Season 3, Episode 2

Find out how Edwin Gonzales and his wife Lillian are coping after battling spirits in their dream home, as depicted in "The Lost Boy."

What were your initial feelings when you first moved into the house? Did you have any sense that there might be some darkness, other than the warning from the realtor?
The only thing that I remember in our first visit was feeling very excited and feeling really good throughout the house. It was only in a couple of rooms that I didn't feel right…I was kind of like overwhelmed and could not be in certain rooms… I had no reason or inkling as to why I was feeling that way, and I just couldn't explain it. 

When your neighbor Mike witnessed the lights flickering on and off, were you home at the time? Did you ever experience any similar incidents?
Oh, absolutely. That would happen from time to time, to the point where both Lillian and I actually would try to communicate with it. We noticed that one particular evening it [the lights] kept flickering, and I remember we were in one of the rooms and Lillian said, "If there's someone here, can you shut the light off," and the light went off. And then she said, "If there's someone here, can you turn it back on," and the light came back on. And there were other incidents… for example, Lillian would see a light on and then she would park the car, and when she went upstairs, she realized that the room where the light was on was no longer on. And I would actually do the same thing as well – I would just go across the street to grab something to eat, knowing that I had just arrived at the house and there were no lights on, and then I would look and there were some lights that were on that were never turned on.

After the first few signs of the paranormal, were you still trying to rationalize what was going on? Did you automatically assume it was something paranormal?
I work as a researcher, so I tried my best to figure things out. I always try to figure out why something is happening and how to come to a conclusion. So at first I would look and say, "Well, that just moved, but is the floor a little crooked?" "That just moved, but did it roll off?" or "That door just swing open, but why would it swing open?"

It's almost like, you're trying to think of everything … like the dogs are growling at something and you look and you pan out into the hallway and you see a black shadow, but like, is that me in a groggy state just thinking I'm seeing that? But then again, why would the dogs be growling at something? And you just try to rule it out, and then sometimes you might question your sanity, like – "Am I okay? Am I like working too hard or something?" But, this would be happen sometimes everyday or a few times a week where I would be baffled with some of the things going on in the house. Like for example, the voices, the shadows, and things opening and closing, and the knocks – so, I guess after awhile, it kind of wears on you.

After Joshua told you about the little boy he saw, what were your first thoughts and feelings?
The first thing I did was I got chills, because this was not the first time that this was being told to me. Sometimes neighbors would drive by and they would assume that we had kids, or people would drive by and say, "Well, we've seen a boy up on the second or third floor." So you kind of brush it off, and you're like, "Well, I don't know what people are seeing," or maybe it was the owners that used to live here many years ago. She's [our neighbor] shocked when she realizes that we don't have any kids, and then she's looking almost like puzzled, and then she says, "Well, Joshua says there's a little boy upstairs and his mommy won't let him come out." It leaves you like, "What is going on? Why are people now seeing this little boy?"
 
A lot of the experiences you had seemed more child-like than malevolent, is that correct?
Right. But then sometimes, you know you think that it's something innocent – it's just something moving or something just wanting to get your attention with things, like that of a child. But is it really a child doing that? Or is it something more sinister posing as a child? That's the thing that I always wonder –if that's what's going on. It wants you to believe it's so innocent, but is it? That's the biggest question.

Apart from the sounds and shadows, did you ever feel like there was a presence with you in the room, especially earlier on before you figured out what was going on?
Yeah, it was really weird, because I've never experienced that before. You'd sense that all of a sudden there was something there, like sometimes there would be like at night for example. And every other place that I've always lived in, I've never had that experience… I can just lie down and basically just feel comfortable. But every so often there's a sense or overwhelming feeling that somebody's watching you, and sometimes you can actually sense it from the direction where they are too, where you're feeling that there's something going on there. I could never pinpoint why I was feeling that way, but sometimes it would start with just a footstep, and then all of a sudden you would just pan off and you'd know there's something or someone there, and sometimes you wouldn't want to look to see what's there.

How often did you hear the sounds around the house? Was it a daily occurrence or did it happen more infrequently?
It's really odd because it would come in bunches. Sometimes you'd get like six or seven things in one day, whether it's the doors moving, the shadows, the footsteps, or things being thrown, and also the knocks and the doorbell would start ringing. Things that you know are not normal, and they all seem to come in bunches at a time. And then you try to figure out, "Why is it happening today? Why didn't this happen yesterday or the day before? Why was it so quiet last weekend, and why is it louder this weekend?" You don't understand because there's no pattern. The only thing that I did – I started writing specific times of certain things that would happen, you know the time of day or certain dates… and the conclusion that I came up with [was] that sometimes these paranormal things would intensify whenever there was a full moon.

What made me realize that that is the case was about two years ago… there was, I think the moon was closest to its Earth for the first time in I think a hundred years. That was October 2009 or 2010… and for some reason, that weekend was probably the craziest weekend that we had ever had as far as the paranormal is concerned. There were basically footsteps happening all over, all during the whole weekend, including Saturday and Sunday, to the point that somebody like my brother-in-law who had been in the house a couple times got so scared that he couldn't handle it. He actually had to leave and hasn't been back. That's how scary it was.

Why do you think the mother spirit attacked Lillian in bed and held her down?
I feel that there was a series of different things that happened that made me believe that it was this woman. It started with me seeing the images and the intense visions – first I thought it was a dream– of a woman up on the window, which would happen night after night for three consecutive nights when Lillian was downstairs when she could not get up the stairs.

Knowing her [Lillian] for over twenty years … we've always wanted to go to bed together. We've always made sure that we were okay before we would lie down, and for some reason that didn't happen those three days.

We just lay down for ten minutes until all of a sudden she's screaming off the top of her lungs… "Tell her to get off me!" And I'm feeling that, here I am, I'm supposed to protect her, and I felt like I couldn't do that any longer. That I could not fight whatever this is. It was no longer something that I wanted to be part of, so I basically just said the next day, "I'm just done." I think it was definitely trying to use her to do something. I mean, to me it's puzzling as to what it wanted her to do… it's almost like, everything is so happy. It's almost like it's jealous and doesn't want her to be happy…and the only way it can do that is by trying to harm her or trying to use her to do something that she wouldn't normally do. After that experience, you decided to leave the house the next day.I think it was the next day, the day after, or maybe it might have been two days after, but I know that we had a conversation. The next day I went for a drive, and I said to myself we're done. 

What led Lillian into the basement? Was it a feeling, a voice, a dream?
She remembers going in and out. So basically what happened was it all started with the voices. It was a chanting, and the only thing that I can think of is that it was not scary on my part and it was not scary on Lillian's part. She heard the voice on a different occasion. I heard it probably around seven in the morning. It was definitely trying to communicate with me. It was either – it sounded like a prayer or some type of a chant, but it was coming right directly in my ear, probably within like an inch of my ear, and it wanted me to do something, but I could not make out for the life of me what it was trying to do.

I found out Lillian heard the exact same thing and she described exactly what I heard. However, what happened with her was, she has two heavy thick blankets that she wraps around her, and she found both of them off of her. And that's what woke her up again the second time when she heard the voice. But this time it started, it was really strange … I noticed when she walked around the bed she was humming a weird song that I had never heard her sing. Almost like a lullaby.  And then the next thing I know, she went in the bathroom and she showered – the bathroom is cold so usually she'd warm it up - she didn't do that. She did her hair and makeup and got dressed to go out, so I thought she was probably going to run an errand. So a few hours passed by, and I noticed that the car had never left, so I decided to look for her. I looked through the first floor and couldn't find her, throughout the second floor… I go down to the basement and halfway down I can hear a shuffling and a noise and there she is in the corner, digging. So I'm looking at her, and at this point I know she had been digging for quite some time.

So I just [said], "Hon, what are you doing?" and she looks at me with a straight face and she says, "I don't know what I'm doing," and I said, "What?" and then she kind of like snapped at me. Almost like to say, "Let me finish what I'm doing." I said, "I don't know what's going on." I just decided to leave her alone, so I went back and twenty minutes later, she comes up the stairs. What was strange was that her mood had changed. She was no longer upset or snapping, and she was in a happy mood. It's almost like she did what she had to do and whatever this thing was wanted her to do. So now she's back to herself, and she says, "Hon, I found something," and she says, "It's a pelvic bone." And she didn't say, "I think," she said "I know it's a pelvic bone."

So there are a lot of things going through your mind. Then you start thinking, well this is not good because obviously it's using her, almost like channeling into her to make it do something it wanted to do.

Have you experienced any other paranormal phenomenon since leaving the house?
We did, actually - for the first time, about a month ago. Which was, in my opinion, kind of scary in a sense. What happened was, Lillian was on the computer upstairs, and usually she has the TV on in the background. She's on the computer and she's by herself, it's about two in the morning. I was already asleep. When all of a sudden, she's on the computer and she realized that the TV had paused, which it had never done before. So she thought it was weird. She was like, "Oh, maybe something is wrong with the TV." She glanced at the TV; she noticed that it was paused, and then she went back to the computer when she heard a voice – and the voice said, "Come back." And then she kind of like, turned her head, looked at the TV, almost like in a shocked way, and then the TV started playing the same program that it was playing, which had nothing to do with what was said. 

She didn't even finish the story when she told me the next day, and I already knew it was a message. Since we've left the house, we've had a couple people come in to do investigations, and one of the first things that it says, it mentions Lillian's name – this thing called the Ghost Box. It would say Lillian or it would say Edwin. Now the chances of that happening are like one in a million because this thing is only programmed to say so many words. It channels/scans through radio frequencies, and you could be there ten years and not get an Edwin or a Lillian, so what are the chances of that happening? Obviously there is a connection… I feel that the house did not want us to leave, but something there gave us no choice. So there's definitely something sinister there. There's something there that's not supposed to be there.

Do you still own the house or did you put it back on the market?
We can't put that house on the market. Nobody would want to buy it. You can't get a family of four to move in there. I would not want that to happen because of the things that we experienced.

Was anything else found in the paranormal investigations you mentioned?
There's a woman who lives in the area and ever so often… she would go into the house and she would make sure everything is okay, and she shovels the driveway. It was the middle of a snowstorm— maybe about ten inches of snow. There's nobody around. It's very quiet. She goes into the house, and she's with a friend of hers, and the friend all of a sudden had a thought in her head. She basically had a camera, and she put it up and said, "If there's anybody here, I'm going to take a picture," and she had a recorder playing. So, all of a sudden, she took the picture and there was nothing there. She took the recorder. She rewound it, and all of a sudden you hear a little kid say, "Come and get me." Which was very, very creepy. You can clearly make out that it was coming from the stairs, at the top of the staircase.

How has this experience changed your outlook on life or the afterlife?
There's no doubt in my mind that this has made me a believer. Once someone passes on, there's a part of them that still remains. If you had asked me four years ago, I would have thought I was freaking crazy or I was losing my mind to admit something like that. You know, these things do happen, and when they do happen they can leave such a bad imprint mentally and physically on someone, that you're never quite the same again. That one particular incident that basically changed my life is when you see a full apparition within a few feet of you… it takes it to a different place, and a place you don't want to be. The way I look at it is that I wish I had never experienced it [the paranormal] because I didn't understand why this was happening to me. Why was I being singled out? Why am I seeing this, and what does it want? And is it going to harm me? Is it going to do something to me, to my family or something?

So now, I am such a believer that I want to tell people my story. It's something that you will take with you for the rest of your life. It's something that you'll just never get over … it's like a snapshot in your life.