'Ghost' rides tricycle backwards in eerie footage from haunted 'poor house'
This eerie footage shows the moment a tricycle like the one in Saw appears to pedal backwards on its own in a supposedly haunted abandoned 'poor house'.
Paranormal investigator Lee Kirkland, 40, caught the creepy blink-and-you’ll-miss-it backpedal on video during a late night tour of an ‘insanely haunted’ house. The red tricycle, reminiscent of the one the creepy puppet rides in the Saw franchise, can be clearly seen moving backwards momentarily when illuminating by the torch.
The pedals appeared to be pushed by phantom feet as the front wheel turned and pushed backwards across the concrete floor at the Ashmore Estates in Illinois, US.
The abandoned building was once a poor house before it was turned into a mental asylum and Lee believes the 'haunted' tricycle is a 'trigger' item for the ghouls that still reside there.
Lee, from Kentucky, US, said: “I was making a joke to Nick [Groff, the paranormal investigator] and I was saying that he was going to get on the tricycle and ride it around. Then I pointed the camera down at the tricycle and it moved on its own. It was a pretty creepy piece of video for sure. Ashmore Estates is a very old 'poor house', which is what it originated as."
“They were community homes where people lived during the hard times and depression, and then it was turned into a mental asylum. There’s a lot of alleged spirits there in that area and one of them is supposed to be a little girl who is attracted to these objects. The tricycle is something that has been reported before on the estate and that’s why they put these trigger objects in there specifically to this area of the estate."
“They had different objects moving in there. I think they had a small ball and a kid’s doll and a tricycle, stuff like that. A lot of people didn’t see it at the time. I reviewed it and showed it to people at the end of the night and they were all pumped up. They all wanted to get back to the room and try to make it happen again.
“We made sure [afterwards that] it didn’t move on a slope. That was hard concrete. But there was nothing that could have made it move. It totally did move on its own. Nobody had touched it. You can see on the video the closest person to it is Nick and he’s a couple of feet away from it.”
Lee, who has spent around 17 years as a professional paranormal investigator, claims he has had many encounters with the supernatural including a ‘hunchback’, a ghost that threw a rock at his head, and a phantom dinner guest that ‘disappeared’ in front of his eyes.
But he claims the Ashmore Estates is his favourite location because it is the most haunted.
Lee said: “All throughout the night there was tons of stuff. One thing we do is we try to find a sceptic, somebody who doesn’t believe in the stuff, and we want them to have an experience. So that night this one woman had never had an experience and something grabbed her shoulder and left a mark. She got a little shaken up after that happened to her.
“Then another investigation on this same floor I saw a shadow figure come out of the hallway. This place is insanely haunted. I’ve been all over the country in some of the most haunted locations and this is by far one of the most haunted that I’ve spent time in. It’s about the third or fourth time I’ve been there. I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I run events and find these locations and bring fans in to meet some of the paranormal celebrities of the area."
“We like to be in lots of different places, but Ashmore is definitely the favourite because it is so haunted. It’s insanely haunted. It’s pretty wild. It’s lots of different ghosts. There are multiple spirits in this place for sure. It excites me [when paranormal activity happens in front of me]. When I first started, it was scary a little bit. But now at this point in my life and my career it excites me. It gives me a shiver down my spine.
“It’s like right before the game starts, or right before a show starts, whatever you do that gives you little butterflies and excites you a bit, that’s the feeling that you get when something happens. You can go a couple of hours and have nothing happen at all, and then something happens like this. And then you capture it on video it is even more exciting because you can go and show other people and they can relive that through you as well by watching the videos.”
Author: Jessica Cripps
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