This is my first thread on ATS, so bear with me.... I have somewhat of a "Ghost Adventure" that I'd like to share.
Has anyone ever heard of the Hillcrest Sanitorium in Howell, MI? Its also referred to as Michigan State Sanitorium. It was a hospital that opened
in the very early 1900's for the treatment of tuberculosis. later, it was expanded and designed to also house the mentally disabled. Yes, whether it
was bipolar disorder, or an actually disability, this was a place where people were left by their families so they would no longer be a "burden." It
was eventually closed in the 1980's and later the structure itself was torn down. Currently, the land is being developed (houses, maybe a small
subdivision), so its nothing more than woods and a small clearing at this point.
Anyway, my wife and I have always wanted to go ghost hunting, and our neighbors do it all the time, so they offered to take us up to this
Sanitorium (I'd never even heard of it before then). We head up there around midnight, and stay for about 2 hours. While we were there, we heard
laughing coming from the woods, and my wife thought that she saw a couple quick flashes of a girl in white. Upon arriving back home and listening to
my recorder, Im broke so all i had was my cellphone, we discovered that we had recorded a young girls voice saying "who's there", and a very loud,
raspy male voice saying " Right here...... NOW!"
After listening to that, we decided to go online and see what other people have heard/seen when visiting that place. After research, to our
knowledge, we are the ONLY people to have ever recorded a male voice. other people have seen the girl in white, but nothing anywhere about any male
"entities". Needless to say, that inspired us to go again.
On our second visit, we didnt catch a single thing on our recorder, however, we saw the girl. Plain as day, and scary. Not that it was a
terrifying sight, it was just the fact that she was there. More of a surprise, than anything else. At first, I thought it was an actual person, so i
pulled a knife out and started making threats. But it was her. So we ran. We ran like our lives depended on it. After we got back home, one of our
neighbors we were with kept saying the name "Valerie", over and over. He said that name popped in his head and kept repeating. He then proceeded to
throw up, and finally snap out of it. A couple days later, our curiosity got the best of us, so we went a third time. Bad idea.
This time, we went a friend of our neighbors, who claimed that she could see spirits and communicate with them and whatnot. Yeah. I know what
youre thinking, i thought the same thing.
So this time, we go to a different area in the woods, a big clearing, where several different trails converge. we sat for a while in a circle,
calling out to Valerie. (everything considered, we assumed it was the name of the girl) and there, we saw her. The little girl in white. This is where
things go a little off the deepend, and if I wasnt there, i wouldnt have believed any of what happened next.
I apologized for pulling out a knife and threatening her he last time we were there, and in a way, i wish i never said anything. I closed my eyes
to itch them (bad allergies) and i had the equivalent of a lucid dream/ nightmare, which lasted all of 5 seconds. I saw myself going down a hallway,
in a wheelchair, or a bed, or something, and i was tied down. I knew something terrible was going to happen, and i kept screaming "No, please dont! I
dont want to! Please stop, Im scared!" and every time i screamed, it was a young girl's voice, not mine. After that, i was in a room, looking into a
doorway, where a man stood. i could make out his face, but not clearly what he was saying. I opened my eyes, and i was sitting in our circle in the
clearing, and i was crying. This terrified my wife, because in the years we have been together, she has only seen my cry once. This, being the second
time. A few minutes later, the "spirit seer" friend of ours, claimed there was a tall dark man standing behind "Valerie" in the clearing. Very
tall, very dark, and very scary. at this time, we decided to leave. While we were exiting the area going back to our truck, we saw flashes of
"Valerie" at different points, almost as if she was following us, seeing us on our way, so to speak. We got home, and listened to our recorder. we
heard a girl crying. followed by 6 low growls, which were extremely unsettling. I told our friend that went with us what happened to me, and she went
online. after some time, she came accross an old photo album from the sanitorium, dated from the late 1930's. She asked me if i could describe the
man that i saw in my.... "episode". I described him several times before she turned her laptop around, and showed me a picture that she found. It
was a picture of a doctor, who i described down to the T, performing an ice-pick lobotomy on a patient at the sanitorium in 1938. With that I went to
bed, and had nightmares for 2 weeks.
In those 2 weeks, our neighbor and her "spirit seer" friend went to those woods nearly every single night. What had started as curiosity, had
practically become an obsession. They came back one night, and claimed to have seen the tall, dark shadow up close, and that it was a demon, and that
there was more than one demon there, possibly keeping the spirit of "Valerie" there against her/its will. They said it had "dagger fingers" and
horns and all that, to which i though they were a sandwich short of a full picnic basket and needed medication. I thought it was so funny, i made an
Autotune song about the demons being everywhere, Its actually quite funny. We heard so much day after day about all the friggin "demons" that were
there, my wife, our younger neighbor, and I, all decided to go. One last time. Just to see for ourselves that the other 2 were crazy. (in case youre
wondering, i live in an apartment, have immediate neighbors, and were all good friends, its like a little community
So, the 3 of us show up there at 1 am. We went in the woods to the top of a hill, where have a good view of the area, and which is also where we
would usually see "Valerie" She was always there, she was never really scary, we kinda looked forward to seeing her whenever we would go there. So
there we stood, looking for her. Instead, we saw something else. Something terrifying.
We thought we saw some light flicker of to the right of us, so we looked, and what we saw, at first we thought was something being built. It was
7 black figures, with one at one end standing twice as high as the other six. These figures didnt move, and we watched them for several minutes. My
wife then thought she saw something in another direction, so we looked away for 10 seconds, realized nothing was there, and went to look back at the
figures, and they were gone. Keep in mind, there was a full moon, so the lighting was pretty decent. We were so scared, we instantly turned and
started running. When we were halfway to the car, i turned around because our neighbor was behind us. What I saw behind him, I will never forget. It
was at least 8 feet tall, slender, and was NOT there when we initially walked up the hill. I went for a full on sprint to the car. once we got to it
and were getting inside, i flashed my flashlight towards the hill where i saw the figure, and it was gone. nowhere to be seen.
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