In the suburban town of Manchester, Connecticut, there stands a house.
It looks like any other house in this Northeastern town full of commuters, but in 1993, it became
anything but.
The Jones house would soon become known as a house of horrors that captivated the entire
country’s attention.
And it all centered around one little boy.
Denice Jones was a single mother, doing her best to raise her son Michael and his older
brother Kenny.
But when Michael Jones was only five years old, things started to go awry.
Denice was downstairs, preparing dinner, when she heard a bloodcurdling scream come from
her son’s room!
She raced over, dreading the worst as she burst in the room - but there was no one there.
At least, no one she could see.
Michael was alone, but he was absolutely terrified.
He was curled up in a ball, shaking and screaming.
When Denice was able to calm him down enough to speak, he said that he saw something terrifying.
It was a mysterious old man who stared at him.
The ghostly man reached out, touched Michael’s shoulder - and then disappeared.
But there was no sign that anyone had been in Michael’s room, and Denice had no idea
who the old man was.
But she would get a better idea soon.
It wasn’t long after the first sighting that Denice took Michael to her parents’
house.
It was a nice evening with the grandparents - until Michael took a look at the wall and
started screaming again.
But it wasn’t a ghost sighting that was terrifying him this time.
He seemed fixated on one particular picture, of an old man.
It was Denice’s grandfather - who had died seventeen years ago, long before Michael had
been born.
Michael had not only never met the man, he had never seen a picture of him.
But he recognized him.
Because the old man in the picture was the mysterious man who had appeared in his bedroom.
This was the first real piece of evidence that Michael Jones was seeing ghosts.
He had apparently been visited by a long-dead man who he had never seen before, and recognized
him after the fact.
Whether this was true or not, or if Michael’s great-grandfather just looked similar enough
to a ghost he had dreamed about that it scared him, it unsettled all the adults in the room.
But it actually made Michael calmer once he was informed of who the old man was.
He wasn’t being haunted - it was just his great-grandpa watching over him.
Michael’s mother hoped it would be the end of this scary chapter in their lives.
This was not to be.
Time marched on, and Michael mostly seemed to be a well-adjusted little boy.
But on and off, he would say disturbing things.
At one point, he claimed that evil spirits were inside the house.
Not only were they watching him, but they wanted to take him and make him join them.
This unsettled his mother, but she hoped Michael would grow out of it and that it was all in
his head.
She would soon meet a man named Bruce and marry him, and Michael gained a new stepfather.
The family would even move out of the house where Michael first saw the ghost, hoping
the scary events would be left behind and their dream house would mean a fresh start.
But terror would soon follow them.
Michael was soon haunted by the same ghosts that pursued him since he was five, and as
he grew up the hauntings became more intense.
By the time he was ten, he became familiar with one terrifying spectre in particular
- a being he called the Shadow Man.
Michael believed this to be the leader of the evil spirits who lived in the new house,
and it looked like a dark-colored man who appeared regularly - appearing in his bedroom
almost every day.
And he might have not been the only person to see it.
Denice rarely saw any evidence of the ghosts Michael claimed existed, but one night she
saw a mysterious shadow of a tall man moving against the wall - when there was no one of
that size walking in the house.
Could it have been a trick of the light that scared her?
Possibly - but given how many people around the world have claimed to see Shadow People,
it became one of the biggest pieces of evidence towards Michael being genuinely haunted.
But death would soon come for Michael’s childhood in another way.
The year was 1999, and Michael had been getting better for a while.
While he still claimed to see spirits - including a mix of light and dark shadows that he believed
were on opposite sides - he seemed to be a well-adjusted boy.
He had met with psychologists who seemed to think he was fine, just had an active imagination.
He even made a close friend with whom he spent long days playing.
But one June day, Michael’s best friend was riding his bike when he drifted into oncoming
traffic.
The young boy was killed instantly, and Michael lost one of the things tying him to a normal
life.
He tried to go to sleep, but sleep wasn’t going to be easy to find.
Scared of his personal demons, Michael kept the lights on - but it didn’t keep the spirits
away.
His mother and stepfather went to sleep, but they were soon woken up by a series of disturbing
sounds.
What was that banging and hammering through the house?
There was someone laughing and crying incessantly - and it didn’t sound like Michael.
The doors in the house opened and slammed without anyone there - and Denice could swear
she could hear someone pacing up and down the halls.
Then, she heard a chilling sound - a pained, sudden moan of “Mom”.
Denice and Bruce jumped out of bed, running to Michael’s room - but it wouldn’t open.
It was jammed shut.
There was only one problem with that - Michael’s room didn’t have a lock on it.
Bruce slammed up against the door repeatedly, eventually forcing it open.
When he stepped inside, he found Michael hiding in a corner.
His pajamas had been ripped to shreds and his blankets were on the floor.
But a closer look at the blankets revealed something truly disturbing.
The blankets had been twisted into the shape of a noose.
There were only two possibilities now - either Michael was deeply disturbed and needed professional
help, or he was genuinely being haunted by something otherworldly.
His family knew the boy needed an expert to take a look at him.
The question was - which expert?
They had collected a series of minor weird incidents from the house over years.
One time Michael and Kenny had been playing a board game, and one of Michael’s pieces
flew across the room and embedded itself in a wall.
Another time, they returned home and the kitchen had been ransacked - all the drawers emptied
and the contents piled in a deliberate stack.
But no one was sure if this was the product of demons solely in Michael’s mind - or
something far more dangerous.
Fortunately, there were professionals to call.
The family took Michael to a psychologist, who Denice claimed raised another possibility
- that of psychokinesis.
This ability to move objects with the mind is not proven or considered part of psychology,
but it provided another possible theory to the phenomena around the Jones family home
- one that would likely indicate that Michael’s subconscious was making him terrorize the
family and himself.
But the family wasn’t convinced, and they found a specialist group named ISSUE - Investigations
of Strange Sightings and Unexplained Events.
They dispatched their leader, Keith Auriemme, to investigate the house with a team and electronic
devices to pick up possible spirit energy.
His conclusion was shocking.
After investigating the boy and the house, Auriemme revealed that he believed demonic
forces were afoot in the house - and were in the early stages of possessing Michael.
He recommended an exorcist by a controversial priest, Reverend Robert McKenna.
McKenna, who founded his own congregation after being expelled from the Roman Catholic
church for rejecting the reforms of Vatican II, was a firm believer in demons and claimed
to have performed over a hundred and twenty five exorcisms over his career - none of them
approved of or confirmed by the Church.
He visited the family and used a crucifix and holy water to bless Michael, claiming
that the demons would now be banished.
But the phenomena continued, and Michael’s story would soon gain a massive new audience.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of the hottest genres on TV was the docudrama.
What started with COPS, Rescue 911, and America’s Most Wanted was soon joined by a more haunting
and unusual version - Unsolved Mysteries.
This series based on supposedly-real hauntings and creature features ran for fifteen seasons
and had several revivals, and the producers were always looking for new and terrifying
cases to investigate.
They soon found one in the Jones house, and in 2001 they deputized paranormal investigator
John Zaffis to the house.
Years had passed, but Michael was still haunted.
He was now a middle schooler, and seemed surprisingly well-adjusted despite his disturbing childhood
experiences.
He had undergone four exorcisms, and reported to Zaffis that he saw the Shadow Man during
one of them.
But he seemed calm, almost like he understood the spirits now and wasn’t as afraid of
them.
He believed that there were both good and evil spirits in the house, and that while
the good spirits were out to hurt him, the good ones - including his great-grandfather,
the first spirit he ever saw - were on guard to protect him.
He didn’t expect the spirits to leave any time soon.
Zaffis would leave no stone unturned to discover the truth.
He brought in a team to film the episode and spent hundreds of hours with the Jones family
- the most exhaustive examination the family had ever experienced.
Zaffis explored the home, looking for any evidence of supernatural phenomena.
He also made sure Michael got a full medical and psychological exam from outside sources,
ruling out the possibility that this was either the product of mental illness or a medical
condition like a brain tumor.
He interviewed Michael’s family for their own experiences.
And that uncovered one detail that provided a new explanation.
Michael was now a healthy preteen, but as a baby, he barely survived a serious illness
shortly after birth.
In fact, he nearly died twenty times, with his heart stopping.
This was not the first near-death experience John Zaffis investigated, and he believed
that these close calls changed a person.
Zaffis claimed that Michael had been to the spirit world, and now served as a door of
sorts between our world and the one beyond.
Thus, spirits were attracted to him, and he was more receptive to them - giving him the
ability to see them.
This also made Michael more vulnerable to possession - although Zaffis didn’t believe
Michael was currently possessed.
The case was fittingly classified as...unsolved.
The Jones family’s episode of Unsolved Mysteries aired on July 25th, 2001, and created a massive
surge of interest in the story.
But for the family, life went on.
Michael reportedly continued to see spirits, but the family soon faded from the public
eye.
Denice published a book titled “The Other Side: The True Story of the Boy Who Sees Ghosts”,
which received positive reviews.
In interviews, she said Michael had used hypnosis to get his visions under control and cope
with them, but continued to see the spirits around him and experience strange phenomena.
Evidence on where Michael is now is unavailable, but he would be in his early 30s.
Have his terrifying childhood encounters with spirits faded into the rearview mirror?
Or is he still haunted as an adult, tormented by specters from beyond the veil of the spirit
world?
Does the Shadow Man still haunt his room?
Only one person knows what happened in that Manchester, Connecticut bedroom many years
ago, and he seems to have had his fill of attention since his family’s episode aired.
And the mystery of the Jones house seems destined to remain just that - a mystery.
For more terrifying tales of hauntings, check out “New Video Evidence That Proves Ghosts
Are Real”, or watch “Weirdest Unsolved Mysteries” for more stories of the unknown.