Sumith Prasad
In Netflix’s horror film ‘The Deliverance,’ Ebony Jackson and her family encounter a demonic entity soon after moving into a house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After the supernatural spirit possesses her children, she learns from an apostle named Bernice James that the house is haunted by Trey, a former tenant who died of demonic possession. Lee Daniels’ horror drama is based on Latoya Ammons and her three children’s experiences after she moved into a new home in November 2011. The family battled with alleged demonic presences for around half a year in her home. However, Ammons’ house was not in Pittsburgh, as the film depicts!
Latoya Ammons’ Alleged Haunted House Was Located in Gary, Indiana
Latoya Ammons’ supposed haunted house was located at 3860 Carolina Street in Gary, Indiana. She moved into the house with her mother, Rosa Campbell, and three children in November 2011. At the time, Charles Reed owned the property. He had been its landlord for over thirty years. In ‘The Deliverance,’ Ebony and her family moved into the Pittsburgh home years after Trey died in the same establishment due to demonic possession. His parents and sister also perished in the house tragically. In reality, however, Reed’s house didn’t have such a history, and he had never encountered any concerns in the establishment. While Ammons and her family were staying in the home, they allegedly listened to mysterious footsteps and the creaking of the door to the basement.
Like in the horror film, the house’s basement was the center of attraction, where Ammons set up an altar. Reverend Michael Maginot, who performed a series of exorcisms on her, spread blessed salt throughout the basement when he visited the property. “I thought I heard it all. This was a new one [for] me. My belief system has a hard time jumping over that bridge,” Reed told The Indianapolis Star about his reaction after learning about his tenants’ experiences in January 2014. By June 2012, Ammons moved from the house into a new home in Indianapolis, Indiana, with Campbell. Her children joined them in November 2012.
Zak Bagans Bought and Eventually Demolished Charles Reed’s House
In January 2014, The Indianapolis Star published a detailed feature about Latoya Ammons and her family’s experiences. After reading the story, paranormal investigator Zak Bagans, who created Travel Channel’s ‘Ghost Adventures,’ bought the property for $35,000. He wanted to make a documentary in the house, and during the production, he sought the services of multiple priests, including Reverend Michael Maginot. During the project’s making, unfavorable developments unfolded one after the other. “A camera operator begins vomiting during a shoot. At the hotel, he vomits blood and is screaming at the top of his lungs, trying to fight a ‘goat-man’ in the elevator,” Bagans told Indianapolis Monthly.
Bagans himself suffered during the documentary’s shoot. He started experiencing double vision after leaving the house, only to be diagnosed with diplopia. These experiences must have convinced him to demolish the establishment in 2016. “I don’t want anyone else to live there. I fear for my own safety in that house. The problem is that once I get in there, I start feeling like I don’t want to leave,” he added. The paranormal investigator demolished the house without seeking the advice of Maginot, who couldn’t bless the establishment to shut down the “portal to hell.”
“I think we were successful but the thing is, the portal is opened. Then, when I heard that when the documentary came out, people had been showing up there doing séances — you can’t do that. You can’t play ping-pong with these things… Once it’s cleared, the demon is free to bring seven worse ones in than before. They’ll do it, and they look for that opportunity. So that is always a worry,” Maginot told The Times of Northwest Indiana in 2019, a year after ‘Demon House’ was released. At the time, there were several visitors to the empty lot, which was cleansed by the priest.
In the same interview, Maginot expressed that the lot was “free for any demon to come through and attach.” After demolishing the house, Bagans took the wooden staircase from the property to put it on display in Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, along with dirt from the establishment.
Lee Daniels Created Ebony Jackson’s House Using Sets
The interiors of Ebony Jackson’s house are not real. Lee Daniels and his production department created them using sets in a commercial property located at 1310 Beulah Road Churchill Crossings in Churchill, a suburb of Pittsburgh. For the exterior of the house, the crew went to East Pittsburgh. The filmmaker was extremely cautious about the filmmaking process, as he didn’t want anything paranormal to unfold during the production. He even had an ordained Christian production assistant as a crew member to organize deliverances during the shooting. There were prayers attended by hundreds of workers throughout the filming schedule.
Since the house where Latoya Ammons lived was demolished in 2016, Daniels didn’t have the option of shooting the film on the real property. Even if he had the same, he might not have accepted it. “Part of what I told the producers was, ‘I can’t do this unless I have someone protecting me on the set,’ because I’d read all those horror stories on the set and the makings of ‘The Exorcist.’ Uh-uh, baby. I needed protection,” the filmmaker told IndieWire. While Zak Bagans and his crew suffered during the making of ‘Demon House,’ Daniels was able to shoot ‘The Deliverance’ without any paranormal activity challenging him.
Read More: The Deliverance: What Happened to Andre in Real Life?
