This Michigan couple had never experienced anything related to the supernatural in their own home, so when strange events had begun happening, they were determined to find out what was causing these. At nights, they often hear scratching and other weird noises, but they never paid them any mind. One event, however, pushed them to finally seek help.
At first, the woman pointed fingers at her fiancee and accused him of setting those weird occurrences up, but he had vehemently denied having done anything wrong. To settle the score, she set up a CCTV camera. Little did she know that it would set off a series of discoveries about the place they had called home for so many years.
She set up a baby monitor at her child’s nursery, among other locations in their home. She had found scratches all over her little one and could not believe that her child was doing it to herself. Since only the three of them lived there, her natural reaction was to confront her partner Joshua about it, but he never admitted to anything.
Frustrated, she thought the CCTV footage would settle the issue once and for all. She sat down in front of the TV to view the recording, but what she saw in actual made her skin crawl. The person she was seeing on the screen was definitely not Joshua.
Joshua Higgins and Heather Brough had been living in Joshua’s mother’s guesthouse for over a year now with their one-year-old child Lily. But one day, they suddenly wanted to run from it. It all began with Heather took her baby out of the crib one morning and found scratches on her face and arms. At first, she didn’t really mind what she found, as babies do have a tendency to scratch themselves.
However, a day after the first set of scratches had healed, she found even more marks on her daughter’s body. Clearly, it was not something a baby could have done on her own. She confronted Joshua
For many who knew the couple, they were seen as living the dream. They had a stable relationship, lived in a nice home and had a super adorable baby girl. One day, everything changed.
While Heather was asleep, she heard weird noises from around the house, such as the squealing of a door, footsteps in the kitchen and thumps of the flooring. Now, it was her daughter who bore the proof of strange activities happening in the Highland home.
Heather asked Joshua if he was the one who had been getting up at night, even going as far as asking he had been visiting Lily at her nursery. Did he know about the scratches on their daughter’s face and did he have anything to do with them? Joshua couldn’t believe what he was hearing such a thing from his partner.
When he continued to deny everything, she found herself without any other option but to catch the offender in the act. What she didn’t know was that this decision would reveal something so much worse.
This was not the life she signed up for when she chose to be with Joshua. Why was he denying everything? Or was it she who was becoming paranoid? If it wasn’t Joshua, then it could be an animal that kept getting inside their home at odd hours.
However, Heather had always made sure that all the doors and windows are locked at night. That couldn’t have been it. The strange scratches could only mean one thing: something or someone was already inside their home.
Things have become tense between her and Joshua since the accusations were hurled, and Heather was determined to get to the bottom of everything before it completely wrecks their relationship. So they purchased a baby monitor to focus on the baby’s crib. At this point, Joshua was still convinced that Lily had just been scratching herself at night. But, Heather wouldn’t have any of this.
She had always made sure that their baby’s nails were well-trimmed, so the scratching couldn’t have come from her. The CCTV revealed the truth — but she wasn’t ready for the discovery.
She set up the CCTV with a mission: to find out who was responsible for the scratches on her daughter’s face and body. Heather had been so convinced that it was Joshua because nobody else lived there. She made sure that whoever had been doing this would be exposed, even going as far as purchasing a night vision capability for the camera.
She was hell-bent on putting a stop to everything. When she finally saw the perpetrator on the video, she never thought that their quaint little house would soon become a nightmare.
She saw a figure of a man in Lily’s nursery. She could not make out who it was because it was blurry but she was certain it was a person. Joshua had a tendency to sleepwalk sometimes, so this only confirms what Heather had been insisting all along. But why hadn’t he told her about it?
Why was he keeping it a secret? She continued watching the rest of the footage to find out more. What she saw next challenged her theories and shook her beliefs.
In the video, the grainy video of an adult male walks past her daughter’s crib. Lily, aware that someone was in the room, pulls herself up and looks around the room out of curiosity.
When the man turned his face toward the camera, Heather finally saw that it was not the man whom she thought it was.
Heather’s scalp prickled and her breath stalled. Her heart thudded louder and louder at the realization that this man was a complete stranger. She still couldn’t take her eyes off the video and continued to watch the mysterious intruder.
The stranger continued to roam around Lily’s room. Heather’s stomach knotted. Who was this man?
Now she knew why she had heard strange sounds at night and where the scratches had come from. She continued to replay the clip, over and over again. At one point in the video, the man becomes completely transparent as he moves past Lily. And then it dawned on her that this was no man.
What she was witnessing was not human. An icy chill ran through her veins and she pulled Lily closer. She had to tell Joshua. They had to get out.
After Joshua viewed the footage, he said: “It was chilling… It was literally a chill down your spine, like that ‘what if’ factor — Is this what I just saw?” “Seeing Lily’s face with the scratches was so bizarre and frightening,” Heather said. “I was crying, ‘What happened to you?’ I grabbed her jacket and ran over to my mother-in-law’s house.
Nobody knew what happened. We wondered if she’d scratched herself, but when we put her hands up to the scratches it did not match up.”
After watching the video, a ball of terror formed in Joshua’s stomach and chills chased up his spine.
He had to get his family out of there as soon as possible; he was completely terrified. Gasping, he ran out the door with Lily and Heather and immediately called the police, who referred him to the Scientific Paranormal Investigations of Michigan – and what they find rattles him even more.
Mike Priest, co-owner of Scientific Paranormal Investigations of Michigan, immediately sent out a team to investigate the highland home.
But what they discovered only made Heather and Joshua more determined than ever to leave. After reviewing the evidence, they concluded that the main house, and indeed the guest house attached to it, could really be haunted.
This wasn’t the first strange occurrence in that house. “I woke up to get ready for work one morning and it felt like someone was choking me,” Heather said in an interview.
“It shook me to the point where I decided to buy our camera.” She hadn’t told Joshua about this incident because she knew he wouldn’t have believed her. “There have been times where me and my fiancé would wake up in the morning and I would hear an angry male voice — like someone had stubbed their toe,” she added.
Mike Priest and his team are set to return to the house soon to continue with a full-blown paranormal investigation. He hopes to find exactly what it was that had been recorded in Lily’s room that night.
He explains that their goal will be to see if they can replicate the recording or find a logical explanation for the video before chalking it down to paranormal activity. But Joshua’s mother, Kris, who has owned the house for 11 years, may be able to shed some light on who could be haunting the family.
“I was told when we bought the houses 11 years ago the lady who owned the property died in the main house,” Kris said. “It’s an old farmhouse and according to her niece… she fell down the stairs, broke her hips and laid there for a very long time before she passed away.
She said that the guesthouse was built for the lady’s brother who was schizophrenic.” But Joshua’s father, Jim, has another theory.
Jim is convinced that the man who is terrorizing Heather and Joshua is a previous tenant of the guesthouse: “The gentleman that lived here originally… (jumped) out this window, which is one story down,” he explained to WXYZ-TV Detroit.
Although Heather and Joshua are no closer to finding out who is stalking around their baby’s room at night, they know what to do about it.
“It scares us that it could do something else,” Heather said. “It’s not physically just going after her, it feels like it’s going after myself too… This has made us want to leave as soon as possible. As soon as possible we’re out of here.
This is a spirit. I don’t know what its intentions are, but at this point it’s becoming physically harmful.”
Although the video, released by Heather and Joshua on social media, has become a viral sensation overnight and has chilled many viewers to the bone, there are also some skeptics. Some people do not believe that the figure in the video is an apparition at all and say that what was captured on film is far more likely to have a very simple explanation.
He continues: “I would surmise either (Heather) and/or (Joshua) had been watching television and had reason to get up out of bed, perhaps go down to the kitchen for a drink/food or a visit to the bathroom, paused the video and walked across the room not realizing they were being recorded. At a later, unspecified time, they reviewed the footage and due to a lack of understanding of video cameras, concluded the distorted figure was a ghost.” But how does he explain the scratches on Lily’s face?
“Aside from the technical issues, it is not uncommon for babies to scratch themselves.
We know from her statements that (Heather) discovered the scratches after waking the baby up from a nap,” Kenny wrote, “… but there’s nothing to rule out the possibility Lily scratched herself while sleeping.” After digging a little deeper into the story, Kenny discovered something interesting.
“I’m not sure exactly what the motivation behind these claims is, but I do have my suspicions,” He wrote.
“I went to Heather Brough’s Facebook page earlier today and noticed that she posted her first public post since November of 2018; it was a link to a GoFundMe account she had created that day (March 26, 2019) with a goal of $5,000. She was asking for this amount to help her move out of the guest house, citing her daughter’s safety from all the paranormal activity as the main reason for the fundraising.” Then, Kenny reached out to Heather directly with a Facebook message.
“Hello, my name is Kenny Biddle, and I’ve been investigating paranormal claims for the last 20+ years. Your video of what is believed to be a ghost walking in your house was brought to my attention by several paranormal groups. After taking a look at it, I was wondering if there was a longer clip – perhaps footage showing the few minutes leading up to (and including) the clip that was shared on ABC Action News.
The clip that has been shared starts with the figure already in motion, and I was hoping to see where it originates,” Kenny explained.
“I’m not sure exactly what the motivation behind these claims is, but I do have my suspicions,” He wrote. “I went to Heather Brough’s Facebook page earlier today and noticed that she posted her first public post since November of 2018; it was a link to a GoFundMe account she had created that day (March 26, 2019) with a goal of $5,000.
She was asking for this amount to help her move out of the guest house, citing her daughter’s safety from all the paranormal activity as the main reason for the fundraising.” Then, Kenny reached out to Heather directly with a Facebook message.