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I'm fascinated with the paranormal,
the thrill of it, the excitement.
There was this prison.
I hear that it's haunted.
When you walk into the building, you know you're being watched.
You can feel it.
I know there's a chance of,
when you leave haunted locations,
spirits, entities can follow you.
That's when things got really bad.
It was one of the scariest things I'd ever seen.
You know, if you're going out looking for something,
you know, you just might find it,
and it might not be exactly what you want to find.
My name is Amy Bemis.
I am from Cincinnati, Ohio.
This is a story I have kept to myself.
Hey, Jake.
I've talked about it with my husband and a friend,
And that's it.
It's just too hard to talk about.
Sure I can't tempt you?
No way.
I've always been fascinated with the paranormal
since I was very young.
I wanted to go to some notoriously haunted locations
close to where I live.
There was this prison, you know, not far north of me,
just outside of Columbus.
You know, I hear that it's haunted,
and, you know, people have some very interesting experiences.
So, at the end of May of 2016,
I was able to go up for a ghost-hunting event.
I traveled by myself.
Driving up to the place,
I am so excited to finally be here
after years of waiting to finally get there.
I can't imagine how long it took
to actually build this building.
It's humongous.
It goes on and on.
Like, the pictures don't do it justice.
It's a rather large, menacing building.
I didn't know anybody there.
This is gonna be so much fun.
First time?
When you walk into the building,
immediately...
You feel eyes looking on you.
You feel uncomfortable.
Hey, stick with me.
You'll be fine.
There was people kind of floating
throughout different areas of the prison that night.
When you start to head to the cells,
paint is chipping off.
Like I said, it's a very musty smell.
Hey, check this out.
You coming?
It's gonna be fun, remember?
Going down into the basement,
or the hole, as it's known,
you know you're being watched.
You can feel it.
I believe it was 1930.
There was a large fire,
and I believe it was the largest prison fire in history.
Over 300 people died in that fire,
so I know, right where I'm standing,
there was a horrible tragedy.
Standing with my back against the wall,
looking up at all the different levels on the cell block...
When you look up, you just... You feel like there's people
on all the different levels just looking down on you,
like there's dozens of people watching you.
Hey, slow down a bit.
I was alone.
There was nobody around me with flashlights.
I felt very uncomfortable,
for the first time, in the prison.
In the pitch dark, your feelings turn from excitement to fear.
The farther you get into the building,
I mean, it changes.
You're constantly, you know, looking around and wondering
if you're gonna walk around a corner,
if something's gonna be standing there
that's not supposed to be there.
The energy in the air...
It changes.
It becomes very thick, very electric,
like a static charge is all around you,
like you can feel that it's coming,
and that's when your emotions kind of change,
and you start to get that fight-or-flight instinct.
I keep telling myself to stay calm,
to stay calm until there's a reason to not be calm.
And I'm looking, and I'm seeing...
In the cell, I'm seeing a shadow,
and I don't see any features.
It's just a dark shape of a man.
Are my eyes playing tricks on me, you know,
'cause it's dark?
I was watching it with my own eyes.
I couldn't think of a logical reason
for what I was seeing.
And I went to snap a picture,
and the flash did not go off, so I was, like,
"Okay, I don't know if I got anything or not."
Open!
Knowing the history inside the prison with the fire,
I mean, I have no doubt what I was seeing
was some sort of spirit or entity,
you know, whatever you want to call it.
Luckily, whatever was in there
somehow showed up on the picture I took on my phone.
It was nice to get out of it and to drive away
and to know that I was getting away from it.
I thought that was it.
It wasn't.
Hey, boy.
Come on.
Come on! Jake, come on.
Come on, boy.
Come on.
You know, I'm thinking back on it,
and now that I've had time
to kind of process what happened,
it's a bit of a mixture of feelings.
It's excitement, you know?
I had this amazing experience
that I'll never forget, you know?
But it was a little bit scary.
So I get home, and I'm telling my husband,
you know, about my experience.
He's a total skeptic, you know?
He tried to kind of find a logical explanation for it,
you know?
And when I showed him the picture
I had gotten from the cell in the west cell block,
he was a little bit in awe of it.
You know, he couldn't find an explanation for it, you know?
He was asking me, "Well, was there somebody with you",
you know, that was standing inside the cell?"
I'm like, "No, I was by myself. There was nobody in there."
There was nobody around me at all."
Late that Sunday night,
I had stepped outside on my front porch.
I was out there about a minute or so,
and I heard my dog on the other side of the door
just whining,
and my dog is 11 years old.
That's not his behavior,
and I was like, "Okay, that's a little weird."
Hey, Jake. What's up, buddy?
That's when things got really bad for me,
and it lasted for months.
Kill yourself.
About a week after the incident,
my husband woke up by something...
A manly, dark, raspy voice whispering in his ear,
"Kill yourself."
Geez, dog. What the hell?
My dog was sitting in the doorway.
Jake is sitting at our bedroom door
and would not cross the threshold.
He didn't know what that was about, you know?
He thought it was a little bit weird
and, you know, he was worried.
I'm fascinated with the paranormal
and possibly finding answers to things we don't know
and questions that have been asked
for hundreds and thousands of years.
So I started to think about it, and, you know,
it definitely creeped me out,
and I know there's a chance of,
when you leave haunted locations,
spirits, entities can follow you,
can follow you home.
Jake?
Jake!
Jake, where are you?
Jake!
What is up with this dog?
Come on, boy.
Jake, come on.
Come on, boy. Let's go.
Jake, come on.
The nightmares started that night.
I'm dreaming, or it's happening.
I really can't tell,
and I look over in the corner of my room,
and I see the same exact dark shadow figure
in the corner, looking at me.
Bobby.
I don't see any features.
It's just a dark shape.
Wake up.
Bobby, wake up!
And it's just slowly walking towards me,
and I feel the intent of it.
Bobby!
Wake up! Wake up! Please, wake up!
I'm standing there, looking at myself sleeping.
I'm looking down on myself.
I can't move.
The only thing I can move is my eyes,
and I'm wanting to get up and run
or try to yell for my husband,
and I can't.
Wake up!
Please, please, wake up!
Wake up!
As it's getting closer to me,
it starts to reach out to me and starts to lean down,
and as it goes to grab my legs...
Wake up!
Please, please wake up!
Wake up!
I wake up.
And this type of dream went on for months.
About a day after that would happen,
I would find bruises on the top part of my legs
that looked like fingerprints.
If somebody was to come up to you
and dig their hands into you really hard,
that's what it looked like on my upper legs.
Oh.
I was terrified to go to sleep.
Sometimes, I would be able to wake myself up
from the nightmare
and fall back asleep,
and it would start over.
These are not regular nightmares.
These are lucid nightmares.
I had them multiple times a week,
the same dream all the time.
Somewhere between 20 and 30 times,
I had the same nightmare.
It was really difficult to sleep for months.
My husband... He was in bed asleep.
Something tells me to turn around
and walk through my house towards my back door.
And I go to turn,
and as I peer around that corner,
I see my dog by the door, like he wants to go outside.
Jake?
Jake!
Jake?
Jake, where are you?!
Jake.
Jake!
What is it, Jake?
As I'm starting to lean a little bit farther,
I see what I would best describe as a hellhound.
When I saw that, it... I mean, it terrified me...
...and so I start to run back to my house.
Aah!
And the next thing I know, I'm awake.
It was one of the scariest things I had ever seen.
When I saw this in my dream, I looked it up.
If you see a hellhound or a black dog,
it's supposed to be an omen that you are going to die.
But I was like, "Okay, that's just a bad dream."
I had found out that actually seeing
some sort of black dog in the prison
is an encounter that people have had.
They are seen in graveyards, cemeteries,
places of execution...
Wherever there's been a lot of death,
that's where they're seen.
I had no clue that anybody had ever had any sort of experience
with what would be known as a hellhound in the prison.
So, for me, that kind of added a little bit of validation
to what I had experienced
to know that other people had seen the same thing I did,
although I didn't see it there...
I saw it in my home.
Jake!
I let my dog out early in the morning...
Jake!
Food's ready, boy!
Jake!
What's the matter?
Bobby!
...and would not get up.
Bobby!
So I get my husband.
He won't get up.
You're gonna be okay.
So, we took him to the vet.
My husband had to carry him out to the car.
So, we got to the vet's office early Saturday.
They give him some medication, some steroids,
to try to see
if it would help him get some feeling back into his legs,
and it didn't work.
So we had to, unfortunately,
make the decision to put him down.
Basically, they said it was a spinal-cord-type issue...
Nerves going to the back of the legs
were not functioning properly.
He could not feel his back legs.
He could not walk.
This is something that would occur in dogs
over months, years,
so the fact that this happened out of nowhere,
I mean, just in a split second...
They couldn't explain that.
When I walk past Jake's ashes,
I can't help but think...
...that it was my fault,
that what I did by going to Mansfield
led to his death...
That I did that to him.
When my dog died three months to the day
of me having that nightmare,
it kind of all came together.
And going back through the dates when the nightmares started,
it was May 22nd when they started.
I had the dream with the hellhound and my dog
on July 22nd...
...and on October 22nd, we had to put our dog down.
My husband is not a big believer in the paranormal,
but this changed.
He agrees that how this played out
is just a little bit too weird
to not think that there's something paranormal about it
when you factor in everything that happened
from the night I left Mansfield until the day my dog died.
It absolutely has changed my life.
I am definitely a little bit more cautious
when it comes to the paranormal.
You know, I would like to try to find answers
for what happened to me.
I would like to find out if anybody else has had
the exact same experience as me.
I almost want to go...
And confront and face my fears
and try to get some resolution.
If you're going out looking for something,
you know, you just might find it,
and it might not be exactly what you want to find.