You're lying in bed when you hear a weird creeping sound coming up your stairs. You think it might just be the wind, but the sound gets louder and louder. You peek through the sheets and see a figure cloaked in black standing in front of your bed. It leaves you paralyzed in fear. You shut your eyes in terror and when you open them again, the figure is gone. Extreme haunting stories like this are only the imagination of Hollywood, right? Wrong! In a 4-hour special, guest host Dave Schrader (email) welcomed Christopher Lutz (The Amityville Horror), Andrea Perron, (The Conjuring), and Carmen Reed (The Haunting in Connecticut), who shared their true accounts of surviving terror the rest of us experienced only in a movie theater.

Lutz talked about the notorious Amityville Horror house, where in 1974 Ronald DeFeo murdered his entire family. Despite what was presented in the 2005 movie, the haunting did not involve any members of the deceased DeFeo family, he revealed. Paranormal researchers Ed and Lorraine Warren captured a photo from the second floor landing which shows what appears to be a young boy looking out of a door way. According to Lutz, his sister identified this 'ghost boy' as the imaginary friend with whom she played.

Reed blasted the media for turning her family's ordeal in the haunted home into a media circus and regretted ever going public with the details of the case. Lutz agreed, also lamenting his family's decision to involve the media. Reed shared details from her case, including the day she witnessed a disembodied hand molesting her niece. "We knew it was a demon from the smells... rotting flesh, the sounds, and the growls and scratches," she said. Reed admitted she was afraid to ask friends or family for help as she believed the problem would spread to them and they would get hurt.

Perron thought her case had been treated fairly in the press and by the filmmakers. "[The] studio decided to tone down the actual facts of the case," she said, noting how only the exorcism scene in The Conjuring was exaggerated and actually never occurred. Instead, a séance was conducted at the instance of the Warrens which nearly caused the death of Perron's mother. Reed also shared her experience with the Warrens and a séance that went horribly wrong. According to Reed, Ed and Lorraine had asked her if she would channel the demonic entity through herself. Perron suggested the Warren case files may include some discrepancies regarding her case and pointed listeners to her books for the real story.