A has revealed the horrific impact it had on her life, when, on her 18th birthday, a ghost began to haunt her.
Five and a half years after leaving her childhood home, Brianna still gets nightmares, and now, she’s ready to share her story in a new episode of discovery+’s .
Days after turning 18, Brianna, the eldest daughter of her family, noticed strange occurrences in the house, with glasses smashing off counters, and the TV turning itself on and off when no one was in the room.
‘I could feel in the corner of the room like there was something lingering in the darkness. I could feel like something was watching me to see my reaction,’ Brianna says.
She was left terrified.
One night, Brianna saw a young girl’s figure in the garden, but when she went out to investigate, what she found shocked her.
Placed on a mound of dirt were teeth, which suddenly disappeared when Brianna turned around.
That night, as Brianna slept, she woke up to a girl hovering over her and holding her hand over her mouth, pushing her down and leaving her unable to move, screaming into the demon’s hand.
‘I couldn’t move, and then she was gone.’
As more haunting experiences occurred, Brianna felt unable to tell her friends for fear she would be labelled ‘crazy’ or have them think there was something ‘wrong’ with her.
‘It was very depressing,’ she says. ‘I felt like I was always keeping a secret, and like I was alone.’
As she grew more and more ‘terrified’, Brianna also felt some ‘shame’ of what was happening in the house.
She turned to using her mother’s religious necklace to protect her, but would still wake up at night and feel the ghost’s presence in her room.
‘I was very scared laying in bed hearing all these things,’ she recalls.
She eventually chose to sleep elsewhere in the house, to avoid the ghost haunting her at night.
‘It can be really scary to not know what can happen next, it was definitely apparent that there was something in that house and that something was very wrong.’
Brianna was left questioning whether she was haunted, or her family, or their home.
‘This thing, it felt like it kept getting stronger.’
Brianna turned online to look for answers, where she discovered evidence that a ‘poltergeist’ was haunting her.
‘It feeds off a negative energy, this is what it wants.’
‘But why this house? Why me?’ she wondered.
One terrifying incident saw Brianna researching the poltergeist when a chair with a child’s doll, scratched it’s way into the room.
When she turned to pick up the doll, an apparition of the ghost suddenly appeared in front of her in terrifying scenes.
‘It seemed like something out of a horror movie to see an inanimate object being pulled into the room by an unknown unseen ghost,’ she recalled.
Brianna went on: ‘She wanted me to see her crying and I remember thinking to myself that if she lifted her head up, something bad would happen.’
Despite Brianna’s terror, her parents wouldn’t believe her, and she was left feeling even more alone, and unable to sleep, for fear the ghost would ‘get her’.
Brianna continued having nightmares, including one in which she felt a cross was being burned into her arm.
‘I felt very helpless and alone,’ she says in her confessional, remembering how convinced she was that the spirits wanted to ‘tear her down’.
The more incidents that occurred, the more Brianna would confide in her mother, who would dismiss the nightmares.
But Brianna was left with a feeling that her mother did in fact know what was going on, but not telling her anything.
Eventually her mother told her she’d had experiences ‘of the paranormal’ when she was growing up, which had led her to burying a mysterious package to protect the house.
Her mother went to see a witch doctor, who had told her of the curse on their family bloodline which was why she saw a child’s ‘charred’ face standing at the bottom of her bed at night.
To rid themselves of the curse, the women of the family had to make a personal sacrifice, Brianna’s mother learned.
Brianna’s mother and aunt had both ‘cleansed’ themselves, by sacrificing their blood, and hoped it would protect their future bloodlines.
But there was nothing to be done, and no idea of how it all began.
Hoping to ‘cleanse’ Brianna, her aunt performed an ‘egg cleanse’ on her, but, after the ritual the poltergeist grew even ‘more upset’, leaving Brianna and her mother on ‘edge’ even more that the ghost was trying to ‘torment’ them.
After the egg cleanse, things seemed to ‘calm down’, Brianna recalls.
But, everything changed when Brianna’s mother revealed she was pregnant with a baby girl.
‘I hoped she wouldn’t see or hear all the things I did,’ Brianna says.
‘But the longer that my mom was pregnant the more that it became apparent that it might be the same way that it was with me, because it seemed like the things that were happening late at night were now happening in the day, more frequently.’
She adds: ‘I was scared, but I was also getting a little fed-up. It was getting worse and worse and worse.’
After her baby sister was born, Brianna would use holy water in her home to protect them and visited church for guidance on how to get rid of the ghost, but the demonic force still tried to capture Brianna and the baby.
One night, in terrifying scenes, the child ghost, a charred figure in a white dress, crept out from under the sofa and tried to grab the baby, before Brianna sheltered it in the corner of the room, terrified.
‘That was the icing on the cake for us,’ she says, revealing that her family eventually felt forced out of their own home.
‘I was so ready to start a new chapter and let that part of my life be closed forever.’
Now, Brianna takes precautions in her new home, doing cleanses and avoiding horror.
‘I feel like I lived it, and don’t really want to relive it again.’
‘You’re not alone, these things do happen,’ she urges others. ‘Don’t let these entities dictate your life because that’s exactly what they want.’
Eli Roth Presents: A Ghost Ruined My Life is available to watch from July 14 on discovery+.
