1989. A tormented woman, a group of parapsychologists, one wild tale – and it was all caught on tape.
In November of 1988, Jackie Hernandez and her 2-year-old son moved into a home in the quiet Los Angeles suburb of San Pedro. She was pregnant, newly single, and she was looking for a new beginning. But she soon became convinced that her new home was haunted. She felt a presence in the home and weird things started happening: noises in the attic, objects moving across the room. Things only escalated from there. Over the course of the next several months, Jackie’s friend and neighbor, Susan Castenada became involved in the case and started experiencing some of the strange, unsettling phenomena herself. One night, Jackie turned up at Susan’s door in a panic, telling Susan that she had seen the figure of a corpse-like old man in jeans and a red flannel shirt in her children’s bedroom.
In August of 1989, Susan reached out to paranormal researcher / parapsychologist Dr. Barry Taff. Taff had previously investigated the 1974 case of Doris Bither, which would become the real-life inspiration for the movie The Entity (1982).
Taff rounded up a team that included photo-journalist Barry Conrad and school-teacher-turned-photographer Jeff Wheatcraft, who arrived at the house on August 8th, 1989 and began to experience weird phenomena right away – and this is where the story really starts to get interesting, as things just got a whole heck of a lot weirder from there.
Like, we’re talking plasma oozing from the walls and people getting strangled in the attic kind of weird.
The guys documented a good chunk of their time spent investigating the case, and Conrad turned it into a documentary called An Unknown Encounter – the extended cut of which we have included here for your spooky viewing pleasure.
Real footage from their investigations, cheesy 80’s-style recreations, a creepy host (the late character actor Ferdinand Mayne) and some truly bizarre claims make for a fascinating, engrossing watch. Even if you’ve seen the original documentary, the extended version covers so much more unexplained activity, and there is just so much going on that it is definitely worth checking out.
While some of the footage captured and claims made could easily be “de-bunked” as a hoax, we wonder about aspects like the clear, oozing material they found dripping from the walls that was supposedly tested and determined to be human plasma. Yikes.
Take a look and decide for yourself what was really going on at the Jackie Hernandez home.
One thing we know for sure – the eighties was a weird, wild time.
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