When the ghosts came out

By Don Bradley

Marie Jackson sat in her Jeep Wrangler on a narrow street in the Longview Road area and told her haunted house story.

Hey – look at the calendar. ‘Tis the season. Just go with it and…who really knows?

Jackson is 40, a mom of four and an insurance adjuster. Her story has all the usual suspects: shadowy figures moving through the house, objects rearranged, noises in the walls.

Screams. Blood.

Occasionally, she glanced to her left, toward the little ranch home on the corner. Like something in there might remember her; might know she’d come back.

She turned to her passenger: “This place still….” She shook her head to finish her thought.

She lived there as a little girl. It was in that house that she, her words, got to know the dead. She and her siblings held on tight to each other when the ghosts came out into the dark.

She knows the story she tells is perfect for the Halloween season. That’s when people want to hear it and she will tell it. She’ll also tell it any other time; it’s not a seasonal tale to her. A sister backs her up.

And the story always ends the same – with their mother loading up the seven kids into a station wagon in the middle of the night and getting away from that little house.

Marie Jackson said her siblings later did their best to move on and forget what happened there. She couldn’t. As an adult she began to study paranormal activity and has become known as one of the rare African-American ghost hunters.

She wrote a book called “Ten Feet Under” about the Longview house. She has a podcast called Paranormal Impact and an investigative service called Ghost Link.

And, maybe related, maybe not, she is in talks to bring some form of murder mystery dinner theater to a south Kansas City location.

None of these things was the plan. But her life changed in 2016 with the death of her father. He was a good man, a stern man. Ex-military, old school dad. He drove a cab.

He knew there was something going on in the Longview house, but he didn’t want to talk about it and he definitely didn’t want the kids telling stories to their friends.

Two reasons for that, Jackson said.

The family had sunk all their money into moving there in the first place. Rent, deposit, utilities. They couldn’t afford to move again so soon.

“But mainly, he was a black man,” Jackson said. She paused then locked eyes on her passenger: “Black men didn’t talk about ghosts.”

All those years later, no one in the family talked about what happened there. Not about the shadowy figures that appeared in the Polaroid film or her brother being lifted from his seat and thrown to the floor. Not even the growling voice in the walls telling them to “Get out.”

Or the time Marie was in the parked car and the doors suddenly locked. The engine started and the wipers and radio came on and her father had to break a window to get her out.

Couldn’t talk about any of that.

“But when my dad died in that nursing home, my first thought was that house,” Jackson said.

When she brought up the house to her siblings, they were like: “We can talk about it now?”

Jackson did more than talk. She found the property management company and learned the house had several renters over the years, but, according to her, nobody stayed long.

Her research into paranormal activity became an obsession, and by 2018 she had become known as a “ghost hunter” and doing investigations. She’s been featured in front-page stories.

And for her intrigue, she has been shunned by friends, the church and society.

People would ask her, “Don’t you believe in God?’ or “Were you molested?”

Her sister, Melanie Evans, acknowledged her sister paid a price for speaking out.

“But we all had our experiences there,” Evans said. “I shared a room with Marie and I can corroborate every bit of her story.

“I think most of us tried to move on. Marie couldn’t. She was very young when that all happened and it drives her today.”

Marie would agree. And not only does she have the drive, she has the gift – if that’s what you call it.

She uses the term “heightened sensitivity.”

“I have the ability to feel energy,” she said. “And when the energy is there, I feel complete.”

Her story-telling done, she started the Jeep and slowly drove away from the little house where years ago she heard the screams.

But she never gets completely away. The little girl is in her, and she will always hear the screams.