Subs created by: David Coleman.
He is a very bad man.
Where is he right now?
He got 30 years in jail.
He's killed people.
She was murdered, and it was never solved.
He was white, and he was covered with sweat.
Why are they here?
This thing is just playing out over and over.
They conducted the autopsy right on the property?
A gruesome day.
Uh..
The house might lash out at them.
I don't want to be in here.
There's something down there.
My name is Amy Allan.
A lot of dead people are here.
I see dead people. This is not good.
I speak to dead people..
He is very pissed off.
And they speak to me.. The house is angry.
But there's only way to know if my findings are real.
He's killed people.
I rely on my partner..
I'm Steve Di Schiavi.
I'm a retired New York City homicide Detective.
He got shot at his house?
I know every person, every house has secrets.
Aren't you terrified being here?
It's my job to reveal them.
That sounds like something out of "The Exorcist."
But Steve and I never speak..
We never communicate during an investigation..
Until the very end. It's bad.
And we uncover if it's safe for you to stay..
I'd like some answers.
Or time to get out.
Amy and I conduct our investigations independently.
We never cross paths or share any of our findings with one another
until the very end.
Hopefully between the two of us, we can find some answers for our client.
The trouble is, he spent his entire childhood terrified of that house,
seeing and hearing things no one can explain.
To this day, he's convinced the house is haunted
and needs to know if he and his family need to get out.
Even though I haven't opened yet and invited the dead to speak with me,
I started picking up on flashes of death in the area.
Lots of energy going on.
I'm also feeling like there was some kind of nasty illness
that just one of them had.
I feel like I may throw up.
Before Amy begins her walk, I clear the location of any photographs
which might influence her.
Old houses like this one can be difficult
because over the years residents tend to accumulate a lot of personal photos.
But once they're removed, Amy can begin her walk.
Someone is saying something happened to it bad..
Bad..
And a lot of, uh, dead people are very unhappy about it.
And there's dead people that are miserable, uh, angry, uh, confused.
The whole thing's a fricking mess.
So, Ryan, it's good to finally meet you in person.
You as well.
Now you're a grad student, am I correct?
Yeah, I came back home to take a medical leave.
Why am I here?
Basically, you're here to provide me some answers
that I've been seeking for quite a while.
This house has unusual noises.
You know, sometimes when people aren't there, my family and I will hear things.
But the actual seeing of what's here.
Has just singled me out for some reason.
I would tell people what I heard or what I saw,
you know, and there was a lot of skepticism.
And I just would like to know, you know, is this stuff gonna keep happening
the way it did when I was younger?
There's, like, one uh, older man..
And, uh, I get the name Charles or Charlie.
He really liked it here.
He likes to futz around and fix things.
Do you think anybody, uh, is experiencing anything here, that lives here?
They can sometimes hear the noises from the old man fixing things.
But he can't breathe.
His death is weird, and I think it is heart-related.
When I was about 15, I was sleeping, and all of a sudden I just wake up,
you know.. Just in a second, and I see a young woman,
probably early 20s, late teens, and she appeared to have, like,
a, uh, Victorian-style dress.
The best way to describe it is like a misty fog.
You didn't get a color of hair or anything like that?
It was definitely dark.
Okay.
I had, um, recently been in an auto accident,
and maybe a month or two after I'd been home,
I started having this upsetting dream.
The woman that I had seen by the bed said, "you were just in an auto accident."
"If you don't want to help me, your little brother is next."
I mean, I was terrified, and I started screaming, but nothing was coming out.
There's a female here. She has long brown hair.
She's young.
Uh, she's probably, like, 15.
She's yelling. She's screaming.
There's a lot of fighting. She's unhappy.
"Aah. They don't understand me. Aah."
It's kind of like that teenage angst.
Okay, so, Ryan, what happened here?
I was home alone, um, and I started hearing someone coming up the stairs.
I come out to greet who I thought was gonna be my Mom or whoever,
and it was the same woman that I had seen previously.
She turned, she looked at me, looked forward again
and then proceeded to walk on straight.
- So she said nothing to you. - No, didn't say a word.
What do you know about the house?
It's a pretty well-known house in the area.
There was a young woman who used to live in this house.
She was murdered, and I know they implicated her boyfriend,
but they still haven't determined who the killer was.
Really?
I just want to have, you know, closure and understand if something's here,
you know, who is it, you know, why are they here.
When she's walking up and down the stairs,
sometimes you hear footsteps from a girl.
Her essence has been seen.
The younger girl..
Is stressed out and angry.
Like acting..
Like this thing is just playing out over and over and over again.
Robin, I spoke with Ryan your son..
Mm-hmm.
And he told me about a specific incident in his bedroom
where he got woken up in the middle of the night.
Can you tell me anything about that?
I woke up to a scream probably trying to get out, and I ran into Ryan's room,
and he just.. He was white, and he was covered with sweat.
And he held onto me, and he was 15,
and 15-year-old boys don't hold on to their mothers and not let go.
Did you ever see anything in the house?
Well, I was in the kitchen with my son Ryan,
and we were discussing whether we should
have you come and investigate what's going on here,
and then a pie plate flew out of this cupboard and smashed on the floor.
The house is different.
Mm..
It's disturbing.
Uh, it's not good.
Angry.
Disturbed.
The house is angry.
I feel like the house might lash out at them.
Sometimes structures have an identity all their own,
and I feel that this house has one that is extremely disturbing.
The house is angry.
Why?
Because they damaged its heart.
They ruined it.
Janet, thanks for meeting with me.
You know the house I'm investigating.
You had told me you house-sat there back in the '80s.
Yes.
Was there anything that happened while you were there that you can't explain?
Yes. There were some things that would never happen in a normal house.
- What kind of things? - When I was taking the trash outside,
the light in the attic flicked on.
- Were you there alone? - Yes.
Okay.
Was there anything else that happened while you were house-sitting?
I was on the phone in the living room, and the phone in the kitchen rang.
And there's only one line in the house?
Yes.
There's no cell phones, so..
There were no cell phones and no party lines.
Did you know anything about what happened at that house?
Yeah, everyone knows about the Nellie Cropsey house.
Nellie Cropsey and her family had lived there.
She had disappeared off the front porch,
and then I'd heard that she'd been found in the river,
and she was murdered, and it was never solved.
Would you live there?
No.
I know this might be weird, but I have to do it.
My spirit guides are telling me to lie down.
I never second-guess them, because they help me communicate with the dead.
Someone is saying, "there is blood."
She pointed to the other man and said.. "He's a very bad man." Up there.
Uh..
Ryan knows that a girl that lived in this house
was murdered about 100 years ago, but why would she be begging for his help?
Maybe she wants her killer to be identified.
So I'm going to meet a Professor who literally wrote the book on this case
to see if I can get some answers.
One of William Cropsey's daughters was very lovely, the spirited Nell Cropsey,
and she began seeing Jim Wilcox.
And they'd been seeing each other for three years
when we get to the night of her disappearance, November 20, 1901.
It's a family that sadness seemed to strike.
After Nellie's death, Nell's sister Ollie became reclusive,
and she suffered colon cancer, a very painful death.
Sickness, like, right here really hits hard.
Somebody definitely had, like, cancer.
This is a female.
Just a really bad feeling right here.
I'm experiencing everything this young woman felt.
The nausea and pain she endured was overwhelming,
and now I'm feeling it myself.
Oh, I feel so sick up here.
So, um..
I feel so sick up here.
Somebody definitely had, like, cancer..
Very sick.
So the night she goes missing, she's here with her sister..
Yes.
- And Jim Wilcox. - Right.
Jim Wilcox got up to go home.
Nell had hardly paid him any attention that whole evening,
and he asked if he could see her out in the hall to say good night,
and Ollie, Nell's older sister, nodded that that was all right.
And a little later on Ollie came out in the hall.
There was no Nell or Jim, and fairly soon it became apparent
that Nell had disappeared.
Um..
Like, she felt trapped, um..
Trapped.
Um..
And, uh, you know, she wants to be free.
Uh, she's just pissed and, uh..
You know, she was always fighting and fighting and fighting.
The man and the woman went off together.
Did they ever find her?
37 days after Nell Cropsey went missing, she was found out here,
straight out in the Pasquotank River.
- Right across from the house. - Right offshore, yes.
They brought her body up to a building out back of this house
for an all-day autopsy.
They conducted the autopsy right on the property?
Yes, Sir, with an audience of a couple thousand people.
- Can you show me where? - Yes, right around back.
They turned this into a.. A morgue of sorts.
They laid Nell Cropsey out here and brought in their tools..
Scalpel, saw..
And conducted a two part all-day autopsy.
The coroner's report said that Nell Cropsey came to her death
by being struck on the temple and by being drowned in the Pasquotank River.
Notes of a gruesome day.
Were people just like, "he did it," and that's it?
Many, many people thought he did it, and he was tried and convicted
on pretty circumstantial evidence.
Well, Bland, now that you say that,
what were, uh, some of the other theories that they had?
There are an awful lot of people here in this community who have believed that..
Uh, Nell's own father killed her.
The ice bill for the Cropseys went up,
and the gruesome conclusion that a lot of people made, uh, was that
they were keeping her body on ice.
And the uh.. The other theory, uh, really was that she committed suicide.
This goes with Jim's report that he had broken up with her.
She's upset. She's crying on the porch.
What does she do?
She runs down a pier and throws herself into the river.
I just see this guy, uh, picking off, uh, tools.
"Cut them up."
With what?
Knives, different knives.
I see just people laying.
Like bodies.
Female. A lady.
And I like he's killed people.
I get, like, a creepy guy in here.
He's a pervert..
And I think he's killed people.
Ryan says a young girl whose murder was never solved
is begging him for help and scaring the hell out of him.
Hopefully finding out who killed this young girl will bring everyone some peace.
And now that I've got Nell Cropsey's autopsy report,
I can meet with a forensic pathologist to see if I can get some real answers.
Doctor, I sent you the report. You had a chance to look at it?
Yes, I did.
You know, the defense said that she committed suicide.
Do you see suicide here?
I don't see any indications of suicide in this report.
I don't think it was drowning.
Uh, her lungs aren't filled with water.
What we do have is this glaring mark on the neck, probably due to strangulation.
Doctor, if Nell Cropsey was strangled, what was it like for her?
She would have felt intense pain as her neck was being compressed,
probably would have felt her hyoid bone snapping.
And smothering, strangle, smothering, smothering, smothering.
Hmm.
Her neck, I mean, it really cracked.
She snapped her neck.
After meeting with the medical examiner,
I'm convinced Nell did not commit suicide.
She was murdered.
With Jim Wilcox behind bars and Nell's body discovered 37 days later,
the question is, who did it?
So I'm going to meet with a marine scientist
who helpfully can help me figure out a few things.
Dr. Luettich, a lot of people think that Nell's father
had something to do with her murder.
Nobody believes that her body could have been floating
in this river for 37 days and gone unnoticed.
They assume she got dumped in the river right before she got discovered.
They also say that Jim Wilcox couldn't have committed the murder
because he was in jail when the body was discovered right by the house.
How is that possible with this river?
Now I went and looked at the weather records uh, from 1901,
and there were several cold fronts that came through.
Those probably had North winds, which would have sent her body downriver.
The bottom of this river, uh, no telling what's down there.
That could have hung her up.
It would have made it real hard to find her
while they were trying to dredge the river.
Apparently in this case, her body was not decomposed,
and that's what got people thinking
that she couldn't have been in the water that long.
Well, the temperatures were cold,
and at that time of year, the sea life that is in the river
are probably fairly dormant.
So you're saying it's very possible that she was in the river this whole time.
Uh, very possible.
Everything in my investigation points to Jim Wilcox being the killer.
But something tells me that this story doesn't end with his trial,
so I'm going to the Courthouse to meet with a local historian
to see if she could provide me with more details.
What can you tell me about the trial?
Jim was convicted of second degree murder, and he got 30 years in jail.
But he only did 16 years.
Governor Bickett decided to pardon him.
Why does he get pardoned?
The governor felt that after 16 years, he had been punished enough.
- And he comes back to Elizabeth City? - He comes back to Elizabeth City.
What can you tell me about Jim Wilcox?
What kind of guy was he?
Jim was, um, kind of a strange guy.
He was eccentric in his behavior.
He always had been.
He became an alcoholic.
His life just got worse and worse.
In 1934, Jim Wilcox put a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger.
Can you see his face?
I see him.
Where is he right now?
Up there in the hole.
He's laying on the floor, and he's masturbating and drooling.
He gets overexcited.
I think he killed the women, female, female.
I don't want to be in here.
Three people who were at the Cropsey house
the night Nell disappeared ended up committing suicide.
One of them, of course, was, um, Jim Wilcox.
In 1908, the sister Ollie's gentleman caller that evening, Roy Crawford,
he apparently went crazy and shot himself to death.
Um, in 1913, um, Nell's brother Will killed himself
by drinking Carbolic Acid in front of his wife and child.
After Nell's murder, the sister Ollie, she continued to dress
in the Gibson girl style of 1901.
She was frozen in time, the year of her sister's death.
And she died of colon cancer, I believe.
So, there's a lot of tragedy attached to the whole case.
It wasn't just the death of one young beautiful girl.
It affected several other lives.
The young girl I saw on my walk
was one of the most scared, angry, and frustrated I've ever encountered,
so I decided to meet with a sketch artist and recreate how she appeared to me.
- Her face was oval. - Mm-hmm.
Tell me about her eyes.
She kind of had doe eyes. They were dark.
The nose?
It's so hard to explain it.
- Like, delicate. - Mm-hmm.
Okay.
What do you think?
That's the girl.
Amy and I haven't spoken to each other since we started this investigation..
So tonight we'll be hearing each other's findings for the first time.
Amy, the reason we were called in is because Ryan as a child and a teenager
was tormented in this house.
Uh, for a long time, and..
He went away for school.
Now that Ryan's back in the house,
he wants to know if it's safe for him to stay in the house or if it's not.
That being said, I'm gonna turn it over to Amy
and just have her describe what she saw on her walk.
Well, the.. The first person I encountered
was an elderly gentleman by the name of Charlie.
And what he does here
is he likes to fix things.
It could be a little, um, creepy at times, because what he does
can sometimes be heard.
You hear things in the house, don't you?
You know, you'll hear, you know, just really weird noises that wouldn't happen.
The other thing that I encountered was a female.
And uh, sometimes when I do my walks, I, like, merge with them,
and she was suffering from cancer.
Like, there was somebody here who was really sick.
I feel like my body is
falling apart.
And I feel like I want to throw up all the time.
So I was feeling, like, nauseous, dizzy.
I wanted to pass out.
I was just horribly, horribly, horribly ill.
And this actually made my walk very hard to do.
So did she give her name?
No. I was in her body, she was in my body, kind of a thing.
Well, there was a woman a long, long time ago..
Her name was Ollie Cropsey..
- And she died of colon cancer. - Oh.
- But she spent.. - Wow.
Most of her painful life from the cancer in this house.
I also came across um,
another female, and she was between um,
15 and 19.
And this was on the second floor.
And she..
Is full of anger, depression, and fear.
She's yelling. She's screaming.
There's a lot of fighting. She's unhappy.
Like, she's coming in here and slamming the door.
And she was involved with a male
and was having a hard time with him,
because she was always fighting.
That's who I saw, was a young.. A young lady,
and she was in the corner of the room, and she called my name twice,
and she said, "help me. Why won't you help me?"
Like, she was, like, on the verge of crying almost.
And that's when I just screamed as loud as I could, and my Mom rushed in.
She had I had, like, a death grip on my sheets.
And the minute she came to me, I held her, and I wouldn't let her go.
This is probably the main reason we're here.
The thing about this house is back in 1901
uh, a family lived here called Cropsey.
They had a daughter named Nell Cropsey who on a November night
was here with her boyfriend Jim Wilcox.
And her sister and her boyfriend.
Her sister Ollie is.. That's her sister,
- the one that had the colon cancer. - Oh, okay.
Nell Cropsey, later that night, went out on the front porch with her boyfriend,
and she disappeared.
When I first met her, what I felt was the neck snap.
Initially, I was like, hmm, you know, maybe she hung herself,
because I knew with all the emotions,
but I feel people who have hung themselves, usually it's strangulation.
It doesn't snap the neck.
I may be able to clear it up a little bit.
Um, Nell Cropsey was the girl I told you went..
- Disappeared when she went on the porch. - Mm-hmm.
They found her 37 days later in the water.
I got a hold of the autopsy report, the original.
She had a bruising on her head that they blamed for her cause of death.
I've seen 1,000 autopsies.
That contusion was not enough to kill her.
She also didn't drown. She was dead when she hit the water.
That being said, they did the autopsy from her clavicle down.
They never did from the neck up.
In my opinion.. And I met with a forensic pathologist on this.
We both came to the same conclusion..
She was probably strangled to death.
So, Amy, you did a sketch of the girl you saw.
- Yes. - Okay.
- She.. She looks a little annoyed. - Angry.
Wow.
I'm shaking.
It's okay. Just take a deep breath.
Is that the girl you saw by your bed?
Yeah.
I got pictures of Nell Cropsey.
What do you think?
I mean, the face shape is.. Is point on.
When I saw her, she was, like, storming past me, and it was very brief,
and I pretty much only got one side of her face,
so this was really hard to do for me.
- She's done that to me. - Okay, yeah.
She did a quick look like that and just kept.. Kept going,
- didn't say a word to me. - Mm-hmm.
How do you feel that somebody else saw a woman in the house?
A lot better.
Every time I would tell my stories of what I saw,
there were very few that actually believed me.
Yeah.
That was very hard, growing up.
So the next person that I encountered was outside in the shed.
He was disgusting.
He was a sexual predator.
I just see this guy, a uh pervert.
Picking off, uh, tools.
And I think he's killed people.
I see just people laying, a lady.
Do you think he killed somebody, or do you think he was trying to come across..
Oh, no. He definitely killed at least one woman.
The man I saw in the shed bragged about being a ruthless killer.
He took pride in claiming his victims.
He was a monster.
The man who's in the shed, I think he killed her.
Oh.
It's interesting you mention the shed.
Jim Wilcox is the guy that got sent to jail for her murder.
- Okay. - This guy got arrested and was in prison
when they recovered her body out in the river.
Amy, do you think the guy in the shed is Jim Wilcox?
I don't know.
I don't know the name of the dead man in the shed,
and I couldn't see his face clearly enough to sketch him.
What I do know is he claimed to have killed the dead woman lying on the floor.
A part I didn't tell you until now
is they brought her body to the shed to do an autopsy.
Oh, wow. Okay.
So Jim Wilcox is, uh, convicted of murder and gets 30 years.
He gets pardoned by the governor in 1918.
In 1934, Wilcox blows his brains out with a shotgun.
Pardon or no pardon, I'm convinced Wilcox did this murder.
He strangled Nell in anger, panicked, and threw her body into the river.
I've seen it 100 times.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no mystery about how Nell died.
Ryan, you've seen the results of our investigation.
You heard everything we uncovered.
But the big pressing question is,
is it safe for you and your family to stay here?
Mm-hmm.
With that, I have to turn it over to Amy.
Um, so basically there's some good news, and then there's some bad news,
but we'll start with the good news first.
The elderly man Charlie's a really nice guy.
I think he was a priest or a preacher, um, very religious
and, um, just for some reason has an attachment here.
No problems with him.
The killer outside in the shed..
You can kick him out.
You just tell him to get out of the house,
and he's not allowed in here.
And then the younger girl..
Her soul is no longer here.
You may have, at some point, moved her on,
and there's just this residual imprint of that emotional state that she was in.
It's something that you can do and not even know you're doing it.
Maybe when you were asleep, at some point you..
- Mm-hmm. - Helped her go.
I've had a lot of bizarre dreams about her.
- Really? - Yeah.
I was sitting in the kitchen, and she would come down the hallway,
and she would just say, "I really want you to help me."
"If you don't help me.."
"You got in a car accident."
"Your brother could be next."
And I don't.. It really scared me, because I had that dream
every night for two and a half months.
That might be something else.
- Really? - Yeah.
Here's the bad news.
The problem is the house.
- My house? - Yeah.
Taking on her image and threatening you that way.
The house has its own identity.
And this house is angry.
Like, the other structures that I've dealt with that have had this
either burn down or are demolished.
It's just like they're not meant to really be lived in.
- Basically the house doesn't want us here. - Yeah.
You know, it's funny you say that,
because there's a lot of death actually attracted to the house.
The night Nell went missing, everybody's lives got changed.
Nell got murdered.
Wilcox gets convicted, then kills himself afterwards.
Nell's younger brother actually committed suicide
by drinking Carbolic Acid in front of his wife and kids.
What?
Ollie winds up with colon cancer. She dies.
Ollie's boyfriend killed himself also.
I would just like to know what are some precautions that we could take.
I mean, would it help having a priest come in and bless the house?
There's really not anything you can do.
So my concern is, like, illnesses in this house being a major issue.
- Mm-hmm. - Mm-hmm.
You know, if you are feeling ill, if it's an unusual illness,
I would actually leave
and go to a friend's house or another relative to recover.
Ryan and his family have finally found some closure,
knowing their experiences with the dead people are real,
but that knowledge comes with a price.
Their next move is really up to them.
Death revolves around this house.
I don't exactly know why, but I do feel that no one should live here ever.
Subs created by: David Coleman.