MINERAL WELLS, Texas — Anyone driving through Mineral Wells, near the Baker Hotel, would be wise to avoid The Haunted Hill House.
Built before the Civil War, the house has been the site of bootlegging, prostitution, murder and the occult.
Experts have called it “the most haunted house in the paranormal world.”
“I won’t sleep in this house,” said owner Katherine Estes. “I have in the past and that’s when I was attacked.”
Attacked by what?
“They’re not spirits,” she said. “They’re entities. They’re bad things.”
Katherine and her husband Eddie aren’t the only ones who’ve been attacked. Visitors can rent the house and do their own paranormal research.
However, most people who stay don’t make it through the night.
“Something crazy happens and they’re like, ‘we need to go ahead and go,’” Eddie said.
“We’ve had scratches, bite marks, burn marks, things carved in people’s faces,” said Katherine.
A lot of it comes from an entity they call "Toby."
One night, inside a room named after Toby, one of their guests took a picture and in the background is what appears to be a demonic figure. Katherine and Eddie believe it’s Toby.
“And it was one of the creepiest things,” Eddie said.
Other guests say they’ve heard Toby’s demonic voice speaking to them.
“Growling,” Katherine said as she mimicked the sound. "It’s very quick.”
Katherine won’t even go upstairs anymore, but what happened downstairs makes her skin crawl.
“The most horrible things have happened in this room,” she said, referencing a bedroom that’s the oldest part of the house.
The room is reportedly haunted by a spirit called Dr. Yeager. One night, a guest was lying on the bed in the room and started taunting Dr. Yeager.
All of a sudden, something pulled her off the bed. The Estes’ have cameras all over the house and they were able to capture footage of that moment.
A year later, the same woman visited the house again and in the same room, she was scratched so badly, blood soaked through her shirt.
It’s all hard to believe for anyone who hasn’t experienced it themselves, but our WFAA crew encountered something while filming.
In the middle of our interview, we heard the front door handle rattle. Eddie checked the security footage and no one ever came to the door.
Immediately after, our crew heard scratching noises in one of the main rooms.
Then later, after our cameras were off and our crew was about to leave, they heard the same demonic growling that many others have described.
There’s no way to say if it actually was a ghost, a spirit or a demon.
But if you’d like to have an experience yourself, you can make a reservation at hauntedhillhouse.com