What Came From the Closet, and a Spirit in the Garden

Easter is usually a holiday of color: pastel eggs, blooming yards, brightly colored baskets. For one Longbranch family, Easter 2026 is remembered instead for its total absence.

Karlie and Ben have lived on their rural property for more than two decades, in an old farmhouse where, as they’d joked for years, you can hear somebody cough or roll over in bed two rooms away. They have two active teenagers, and that Easter weekend, Ben had taken the kids across the state for a week-long camp. Karlie stayed behind to feed the horses, look after their two dogs, and keep the place going.

Karlie and Ben are not their real names. The couple agreed to tell their story only if they and their children were not identified. They know how the story sounds, and what it could mean to how people see them.

That Sunday night, Karlie had dinner across the street with her parents, came home a little before 10, checked on the animals, and went up to bed with the dogs, a lab and a heeler mix, and was switching between TV shows.

The first sign something was off was when her heeler mix sat up at the foot of the bed, hackles raised, and started growling at the doorway of their bedroom closet. Then, Karlie said, the room went black — not lights-out black, but something deeper.

“It was like I was in a black vacuum,” she said, “even though the power hadn’t gone out.”

Out of that darkness came something she called “demonic” and “blacker than black”: a tall, narrow shape, almost cylindrical, flaring out near the floor, moving toward her and pulling back, repeatedly. Small orange lights drifted in the corners of the room. Karlie tried to get free of the bed sheets and found she couldn’t move the way she normally did.

“The air felt hard to move through. My body felt heavy,” she said. “Everything was slow and heavy. It was really hard to move.”

She started screaming, throwing whatever she could grab, fighting her way out of the bedroom while the dogs barked. The shape seemed to retreat into the closet and reappear as she made her way down the hall.

“I really thought it was trying to kill me,” she said.

Getting out of the house took longer than it should have. The back door wouldn’t open at first. When it finally did, she ran outside barefoot into what she described as a kind of fog. Yard lights seemed to be coming from places they shouldn’t. Without keys to their cars, she ran across the property and road toward her parents’ house.

She said things didn’t start to feel normal again until she crossed the road, as if she’d stepped out of whatever had been holding onto her.

She hit her parents’ back door at 10:30 p.m. Her father, a retired police officer, assumed a home invasion and went for his handgun. In some ways, Karlie said, she almost wished that’s what it had been.

“I would have been better had it been a home invasion and a human in there,” she said. “I would have been better.”

A burglar, she reasoned, comes with a plan: call the police, change the locks, search the house. What she was describing came with none of that.

When her father walked her back later that night, every light in the house was on, and neither dog wanted to go inside. The golden retriever was cowering behind an outbuilding. Outdoor security cameras aimed at the part of the yard she fled through had recorded nothing.

“They should have caught me,” she said. “I was in the line of the cameras.”

When Karlie called Ben that night, he remembered her being terrified and not making much sense. He offered to come home. She told him to stay with the kids and that she’d sleep at her parents’ house. They didn’t want to explain to two teenagers that their mother believed she’d seen something trying to hurt her.

Ben didn’t doubt that his wife was scared. He just wasn’t ready to accept her explanation.

“We figured she was half sleeping and had a nightmare kind of thing,” he said.

For about three weeks, that explanation held, until their daughter came screaming into their bedroom around 4 a.m.

Both parents were somehow awake when their 15-year-old appeared screaming in their bedroom doorway. Karlie described it as “feral terror.” Neither had heard her coming, even though she had been screaming in a house that usually carries every sound.

Karlie had deliberately kept the details of her own experience from her daughter, worried about planting the idea in her head. But her daughter described the same blackness swallowing the room, the same inability to find the dog that sleeps in her room, the same heaviness pinning her in place, the same door that wouldn’t open right away.

That was the detail that got to Ben.

“That wasn’t just, ‘She had a nightmare,’ ” he said. “That was true terror.”

The family moved into the grandparents’ house for more than a week. The first night, all four of them crammed into two twin beds pushed together, lights on, nobody sleeping much.

Ben had picked up sage after Karlie’s experience, and the family burned it through the house. While they did, their son looked out the living room window and commented that some of the outdoor lights appeared to be burned out. Ben was confused because the lights his son seemed to be looking at weren’t where the outdoor fixtures were. That caught Karlie’s attention because it sounded like the misplaced lights she’d seen while fleeing the house Easter night. She later tried to recreate the view to rule out a reflection in the windows but said she couldn’t.

Other oddities followed. Karlie and her daughter’s phones went haywire during another hurried trip to her parents’ house, their screens going black and making unexplained chirping sounds. A years-long text thread between Karlie and Ben disappeared, and days later her daughter found a screenshot of the clock on her phone that was time-stamped around the time of her own experience.

Individually, any of them could’ve been a coincidence. Together, it kept the family looking for answers.

It was a neighbor, a longtime friend of Karlie’s parents who’d once spent years with an amateur paranormal investigation society, who connected the family to Kaedrich Olsen, a Colorado-based paranormal consultant and a recurring guest on the national overnight radio show “Coast to Coast AM.” He never asked the family for money.

Olsen said his first instinct with any case is the opposite of dramatic.

“I always debunk the mundane first,” he said. If someone tells him a spirit is flickering the lights, his first question is: ‘What did the electrician say?’ ”

Listening to Karlie’s account, he said he heard real fear, but some of what she described could’ve been her body’s response to panic.

“Some of this is physiological for sure,” he said. Fear can compound fear, especially when movies have taught people to associate paranormal with something evil.

During a video call with the family in May, Ben quietly got up, walked upstairs to the closet where Karlie said the figure had first appeared. He told whatever might be listening that this was its chance to speak for itself. Then he returned downstairs without telling Olsen what he’d done.

Olsen said he felt a shift within a minute.

Olsen started asking whether the family had recently changed anything outside. They had removed a dead cherry tree that had fallen over and removed its stump. In its place, they moved a chicken coop into the area to help kennel the dogs. Around that same time, the family’s dogs started acting strange and becoming aggressive with each other.

Olsen’s read was that the family had disturbed something residing there.

He called it a land spirit; a being tied not to a person or a house but to a place. Olsen said versions of land spirits appear in some form in folklore worldwide.

“They are invisible people that live in the rocks, the trees, the air, the water,” he said. “They’re like caretakers or monitors of those spaces, and those places are their homes.” Left alone, he said, they tend to leave people alone. Disturb their ground, and the relationship changes.

“You messed with its home, and now it’s coming to mess with yours,” he said.

His advice wasn’t to drive it away; it was simpler than that: apologize and undo what could be undone and make peace with what couldn’t. The family had the chicken coop hauled away from the property, and they dragged the old cherry tree and its stump back to where it stood. Olsen mentioned that land spirits are drawn to yellow and purple flowers. Two days later, Karlie found bluebells and buttercups growing there that she didn’t remember seeing in previous springs.

They named it L.S., for land spirit, which became, simply, Ellis. Where the chicken coop used to sit, there’s a small garden now, with seating and shiny trinkets left as offerings.

Ben still isn’t fully sold, but he built the garden anyway.

“Because, hey, it’s not hurting anything. Might as well try and hedge our bets.”

Weeks later, while digging up some bluebells, Karlie said she heard a word she couldn’t attribute to her music or her own thought that made the hair on her arms stand up:

“Stop.”

She stopped. She hasn’t touched the flowers there since.

Nothing like Easter night or their daughter’s experience happened again. The feeling Karlie used to get walking upstairs — the sense of being watched, the reluctance to go near the closet — is gone, she said. The family moved back into the farmhouse, but Karlie still isn’t sure she could spend a night there alone.

She knows how the story sounds. That’s why she asked her family not to be identified. She isn’t interested in convincing anyone. She knows what she saw, what her daughter described without knowing the details of Karlie’s experience, and that whatever changed on their property, something changed along with it.

“I definitely view the world differently now,” she said.

Where the chicken coop once sat and the cherry tree was returned, the flowers are still coming up. The family calls it Ellis’ garden now.

“It’s weird, and it’s unique,” Karlie said. “But I could have done without it.”