Haunted Hanover

Residents Surrounded by the Supernatural

By Brendan Raleigh + Photography by Noel Kline

One night, DeAnna Simpson felt a strong presence that she could not see on her steps, followed by the sound of running footsteps toward her. Suddenly, she felt a thrust of hands on her shoulders, and was pushed off the steps to the bottom ledge. She suffered a hairline fractured coccyx.

DeAnna Simpson’s house in Hanover is a far cry from the old, dilapidated mansions of today’s horror movies. Its cozy front porch and colorful, well-maintained garden make the small brick house the very image of your typical suburban home. However, the stories that emanate from the house are anything but ordinary.

Simpson, along with her husband Tom and their daughter, moved into the residence in 2007 without the slightest idea of the terror and anguish that it would exert on them over the next seven years. Though Tom was initially against buying the house, DeAnna’s inexplicable fascination with it led him to overlook his doubts and consent to the purchase.

While touring the house, DeAnna noticed that small, orb-like particles would repeatedly show up in the pictures she took of the house’s interior. Attributing these to dust particles from the curtains or hardwood floors, the Simpsons thought nothing of it. But, the experiences became stranger immediately after the purchase, first in the form of what DeAnna calls “the shadow man,” a dark, towering figure that showed up in her pictures directly after the move-in, and has continued to emerge time and time again since then.

While touring the Simpsons' home, photographer Noel Kline captured this flame, which was not visible when the photograph was taken, in the dark basement.

“We had just signed for the house, and I was in the home alone taking pictures to send to my family in Kentucky,” recalls DeAnna. “Later, as my husband and I were looking through these pictures, I noticed this man’s face looking through the kitchen door, looking at me. It started that quickly.”

The figures persisted, despite DeAnna’s trying out multiple cameras, including a high-end digital Canon. But the strangest, most dangerous occurrences had yet to come. After restoring the attic into a bedroom, she received her first hints of the beings’ hostility.

“I started having dreams immediately upon moving in and sleeping upstairs,” DeAnna says. “I would have dreams of these two men approaching me, trying to talk to me. It happened so many times. One night, I felt my hair touched, and when I opened my eyes there were the two men at the side of the bed. They looked at me with such hatred and such scorn, like they were saying, ‘Get out of my house. What the hell are you doing here?’”

The door to the spare bedroom, pictured here, opens on its own. The Simpsons have seen a black, thick mist swirl out of the closet and under the bed. This is where "Mastema" appears. They've also seen the ghost of a woman in the window.

After experiencing these dreams over and over, DeAnna decided to ask around the neighborhood regarding the figures in her dreams. When she began to describe the men to her neighbors, many responded in frustration, asking why she was bothering to ask about the previous residents when she had clearly already met them. She hadn’t.

Apparently, DeAnna had been describing the previous residents, who had passed away in the home, to a tee. One of her other, more vivid memories took place while she was in the bathroom looking in the mirror, where she claims she saw a young, pale, and clearly deceased little girl.

The haunting soon became much more than strange visions. Over the seven years that the Simpsons have inhabited the house, they, along with their family and friends, claim to have been scratched, bitten, burned, touched, slapped, and harassed by malevolent beings inhabiting the property. They would also hear walking, crying, screaming, growls, and witch-like laughter from various places in the house and experience dark, shadowy forms (sometimes limbs, sometimes other figures) protruding from the walls and ceiling. These incidents became so common that several babysitters quit while the Simpsons were on vacation. To this day, the Simpsons’ daughter refuses to stay at the house.

One night, the Simpsons heard their cats hissing and growling. They walked to the kitchen, where a huge, black mist was coming out of the wall. Frozen in fear, they watched the mist start to swirl, then quickly suck up into the ceiling (where the stain now resides) and disappear.

Sometimes, DeAnna’s dreams and the injuries would intersect. At one point, she received a scratch in the shape of the letter “M,” only to later receive one of her most chilling visions, in which the shadow man approaches her, saying, “My name is Mastema. Your Yahweh cannot help you now. I’ve been given the permission to roam the earth with 10 others.”

Eventually, the Simpsons contacted the Travel Channel’s “The Dead Files,” a TV show starring a homicide detective and paranormal medium, to investigate the house. Of the 20,000+ requests that the show receives, the Simpsons’ house was chosen for investigation.

The family cat, Ramsey, sits at the basement steps, where he's seen plenty of paranormal activity. 

Not only did the show’s medium sense the presence of “dark forces” on the property, but the detective was able to find documentation of several of the dreams and visions that DeAnna had experienced, including the young girl she had seen in the mirror, who apparently had drowned near the property, along with five of her siblings. According to the medium’s research, the property had an extensive history of violence, murder, treachery, and untimely deaths. The psychic medium attributed the apparition’s malevolence to the house’s sinister past, which clashes with the Simpsons’ moral and religious resolve.

“When [Amy, the medium] walked into our home, she said she’d never come upon any location where the dark forces she felt were so many and so intense in one location,” says DeAnna. “There are so many of them. ‘It’s not just a haunting; there are five men here, and they want you dead,’ she told me. ‘They want to harm you.’”

Despite their terrifying encounters, DeAnna and Tom Simpson have no plans to move. Friends and family, including their own daughter, are too frightened to enter the home.

Just several weeks ago, a camera crew from Fox-43 came over to the house to do a report on the haunting. Though skeptical at first, the crew also felt the presence of an otherworldly force, with the show’s cameraman being scratched within the first few minutes of an interview with DeAnna.

Though the Simpsons have wished to leave the house since 2010, their realtor says the only way to do so would be to take a $40,000 loss on the house, from which DeAnna believes they would never be able to recover.

To learn more about the Simpsons’ house and their supernatural experiences, head over to her Facebook group, or watch the Simpsons' “The Dead Files” episode on YouTube.