From historic dream to living nightmare: A TRUE haunted plantation story

Haunted houses are prime material for horror movies, but is there any truth behind the idea? Can physical spaces really be inhabited by evil spirits?

On this episode of “Strange Encounters,” a podcast on biblical spiritual warfare, BlazeTV host Rick Burgess interviews Eric Davis about his bone-chilling book “Deliverance at Springhill Plantation.”

The book follows the true story of Eric and his wife, Cindy, and their paranormal experiences after purchasing what they thought was the plantation home of their dreams.

After two decades of grinding through a failing marriage, an antebellum-era plantation sitting on 34 acres of rolling green property in Alabama seemed like the perfect place for Eric and Cindy — both history buffs and antique collectors — to reconnect and begin anew. But they were hardly settled before the horrors started unfolding.

One morning shortly after moving in, Eric saw a moving fog — like “dry ice” — traveling from the barn to the old hospital on the property, where the original owner, who was a doctor, used to treat wounded soldiers during the Civil War.

“There was an absolute feeling of absolute evil all over me. I felt the electricity of evil,” he says.

A short while later, Eric saw a physical manifestation of a demon near the same barn. Eric was sitting on the front porch watching his wife go out to feed the cats, when suddenly he saw a man with “long, white hair” dressed in Civil War-era clothing approach her. At first, Eric thought it was an oddball neighbor, but when he made eye contact with the being, it “[disappeared] into a puff of smoke.”

But then things got even darker. One morning while sitting on his couch, Eric was overcome with a sudden and deep hatred for his wife. “I would have loved to seen her dead,” he confesses.

Eric’s animosity toward Cindy was so tangible, the entire family recognized it as demonic oppression. That night, they walked through the home burning sage, anointing doors with oil, and reading aloud from Psalm 91.

“I’m anointing the doors and screaming for [the demons] to get out of my house and get out of our lives,” Eric recounts.

Then Eric walked to the top of the staircase, where there was a “small cubby hole door.”

“I felt a big time pressure behind that door, and I jerked the door open. Naomi [Eric’s daughter] put the sage in. I put my head in there and screamed, ‘Get out of here in the name of Jesus!’ And in the back of my attic was a very, very loud scream. It was like a woman screamed,” he recounts.

“I heard the sounds of barking dogs in the house. … The sage would be lit, and all of a sudden, this cold draft of air would just blow it right out. … It took probably two hours to get the smoke out of my house, but at the end of that night, everything was gone.”

The next several months were uneventful, and Eric’s family settled back into everyday life, believing the demonic activity had been driven out for good.

Then one day, Zoe, the family dog, started randomly whining and growling. “I turn, and out of the wall in my bedroom within six foot of me appears a black figure floating. … It very much looked almost like the Grim Reaper the way it looked. It was dark. It was levitating. It had sleeves. It had a hood. Had no face inside it, no hands, no feet,” Eric tells Rick.

“I screamed, ‘Get out in the name of Jesus!’ … I chased it downstairs and out of the house, and it left.”

At this point, Eric was utterly crushed in spirit by the warfare waged against his family. Having nowhere to turn, he “looked up to the night sky” and cried out, “God, where are you?”

“And suddenly this peace comes on me. I don’t know how to explain it. This peace was on me, and I heard one word,” says Eric.

That word was “church.”

Even though Eric and his family were believers, it had been many years since they’d belonged to a local congregation.

Eric reached out to a local church and told one of the people on staff what was going on inside his home. After Sunday service one day, several members of the church came over and “went to war in [the] house.”

Eric, who was standing outside with his family, says he could “feel [the demons] as they’re leaving.”

One of the women in the church group then shared a word the Lord had given her.

“She said there’s unforgiveness in this house,” says Eric.

“I pointed at Cindy, and Cindy pointed at me, and we released forgiveness toward each other. And when that happened, everything broke.”

“That was the root” that was permitting the darkness to temporarily flee but come roaring right back, Eric explains. “You can rebuke Satan in the name of Jesus all day long, but if you’ve got unrepented unforgiveness in your heart, nothing’s going to change,” he says.

But final deliverance for the Davis’ home wouldn’t come until eight months later after one final demonic siege.

To hear how Eric’s harrowing tale ends, watch the full episode above.

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