In 1986 Allen and Debbie Tallman moved into a modest ranch house in Horicon, Wisconsin, a small town known mostly for the marsh and the geese. They had a baby daughter and a young son. They were ordinary people, and nothing about the house seemed unusual, until the children’s bunk bed arrived.
It was secondhand. They bought it at a used furniture shop in January of 1987. Within weeks their son was sick again and again, and their daughter would wake screaming that a witch was in her room. The clock radio in the kids’ room changed stations by itself. A chair rocked with nobody in it. A fog seemed to drift in the hallway.
Then it got worse. Debbie’s mother came to babysit and heard a voice tell her to come here. Allen came home one night and saw fire pouring out of the garage, except when he ran to it, nothing was burning.
In January of 1988 the family fled the house in the middle of the night and never went back. Their pastor had blessed it. It did not help. When they finally told their story that fall, it reached millions of people. The bunk bed, they said, they burned and buried.
The Tallmans never asked for money. They moved away and asked to be left alone. Families who have been through something like this do not tell it like a ghost story. They tell it like a car wreck.
What if an object can carry something into your house that was never meant to leave the place it came from.
A family under stress and a creaking old house, or a bed that brought something home?
