Description Of Place: Located in an open neighborhood lined with palm trees and other large homes, the Lamberts lived in a three-story four-bedroom Tudor Craftsman -style house with a large entry way and grand staircase to a broad upper balcony. Built in 1909 as part of a large development plan, the house includes a gabled attic, garret windows and full basement. The Lambert's second house was a smaller Spanish-style stucco house with three bedrooms on an enclosed property surrounded by hedges and fences. 

Ghostly Manifestations: Not everyone agrees what constitutes a haunted house. The typical haunted house is represented by the ghosts or place memories, often terrifying, rarely dangerous, that are said to haunt it. Poltergeist cases just barely fit this criteria since the psychic activity creating them is often connected to living persons, and then there are people like Josh Lambert, Cole Sears, Danny Torrance and even Heidi Wyrick of Ellerslie, Georgia whose proclivity to psychic phenomenon causes them to attract ghosts and spirits that would not be active otherwise. Things became so elaborate for Josh that in his youth, he couldn't have his photo taken without having strange figures appearing in the background. Eventually, he just stopped having his photo taken altogether. 

"I don't claim to be psychic..." Josh responds. "I don't claim to see visions. I just know that for some reason that I don't understand that ghosts tend to follow me around."

Josh is speaking indirectly about his former house in Victoria Park in West Los Angeles, a large Tudor-style house that from the exterior looks as if that if it wasn't haunted that it should be. In September 2012, Josh and his wife, Renee, and three children purchased the semi-historic house and moved in to it.

"It was a large highly elaborate mansion with a lot of fine details and intricate moldings." Renee adds. "I truly saw myself living in the house a long time, throwing large parties and inviting relatives over for the holidays, but oddly, that was not to be."

"Things started slowly at first." She continues. "Objects fell off shelves or disappeared. I recall unpacking textbooks from a box and placing them on the shelf, but then I got distracted by something and left the room. When I came back, the books I had left on the shelf had fallen out and were on to the floor. It was almost as if someone had come around and dumped them out. I asked the kids if they had did it, but they denied it."

Renee does work as a freelance artist doing artwork and specialty pieces for ads and billboards. Much of her work in the move had been secured safely in a box, but upon arriving at the house, she noticed that the box was no where to be found. She searched the other boxes, investigated the other rooms and interrogated the children and Josh who rationalized that it had been misplaced, but a week went by and as Dalton started exploring the house, Renee found the missing box up in the attic.

"I still don't have an explanation for how it got up there. We had not been in the attic yet... in fact, that was my first time up there, and I know it was not open to the movers when we moved in." 

In due time, both Josh and Renee began experiencing things. In his role as a high school history teacher, Josh was often staying late at school grading papers and coming home sometimes as late as seven to eight at night. Left alone in the house, Renee was frequently left to the mercy of strange sounds in the house as well as feeling a presence in the house and having the sensation of being watched. 

"I was hearing a raspy breathing coming from the attic." Renee continues. "Now, working from home, you get an idea and understand the kind of noises houses make, but this sounded like something I never heard before. I really thought someone else was in the house and would go wait on the front porch to wait for Josh to get home before going back inside.

"After a few days, I started hearing strange voices in conversation in the house. I eventually traced them to the downstairs baby monitor and realized someone was in the baby's room where the other monitor was located. I went up several times wondering where the voices were coming from but never saw anything. I never understood what the voices were saying, but I just rationalized the monitor was picking up conversations from another house. It was a weak excuse, but I needed it to keep from losing it."

Eventually, Josh began experiencing things on his own behalf. Every night as he was heading off to bed, it was routine for him to lock up the house and turn on the burglar alarm, but this one night tempered his patience. 

"I was upstairs in bed with Renee when I heard knocking at the front door." He distractedly recalls the incident. "I went down to answer it, but no one was there and while I was down there, I double-checked the alarm. On the way back upstairs, it seemed whoever I had missed must have returned and knocked at the door again. I answered it again, but once more, no one was there. It was kind of a lackluster start for what was about to happen. 

"I had just got back upstairs when the alarm suddenly went off and I tore downstairs to check it out. The door was hanging wide open, obviously setting it off. Believing now that we might have an intruder, I sent Renee to stay with the kids while I searched the house, and while I was doing so, the alarm went off again, and the door was hanging wide open again. I never saw a thing, and I'm not sure if I had merely scared the intruder out the same door, but I was more frustrated than scared.

"After things settled down, Renee was checking on the baby upstairs and reported seeing a face in the window. Now, it's a second floor window, and there's nothing to stand on out there, so it begs the question, who... or what did she see."

Roughly three months after living in the Victoria Park house, Josh and Renee's son, Dalton, was exploring the attic and fell backward on a broken ladder to a shelf and hit his head. At the time, he seemed okay, but he when failed to wake up the next day. Doctors weren't sure if it was a coma or brain damage, but the hospital made arrangements for Dalton to convalesce at home. One day after Renee had been tending to Dalton, she headed to her bedroom to relax and noticed what looked to be a figure pacing outside the window. As she watched, the large figure of a surly man in a long overcoat suddenly appeared in the room and looked straight at her alarmed at her presence. By now, nobody had seen an apparition yet, but Josh had had the last straw, moving his family to another house less than three miles away.  

"I was lucky to move almost immediately into a house several blocks over that was being rented out by another teacher at the school." Josh adds. "It was a smaller one-story cottage, but more importantly, it did not look haunted which was a big plus, but then Renee started seeing and hearing things again."

According to Renee, she was cleaning and listening to a record on the phonograph player when she saw the first of several ghosts believed to haunt their new house. As she walked outside, the music changed in mid-temp to another song on the same record. Noticing the change from outside, she moved to peek into the house.

"I had left the windows open to air out the place which was stuffy and musty from being locked up for so long." Renee recalls the account. "Looking in through the kitchen window, I could see clear to the living room, and I noticed what looked like a small child in period clothes before the record player and moving and dancing to the music, but when I tried motioning closer to look in through another window, the figure had vanished."

Trying to get closer to the presence, Renee remembers searching the house for the ghost. Since it was a child, she didn't feel threatened, but then something dashed by out the corner of her eye. The hobby horse in her son Foster's room was lightly rocking, but other than that, the house seemed empty except for her. When she went into her bedroom to compose herself, the figure suddenly jumped out from a dressing cabinet and ran giggling down the hall. 

"It wasn't a child." She describes it. "It was like a small man... light of frame with aged child-like features with arched eyebrows, a narrow face and sunken eyes wearing old clothes and a small hat on its head." 

History: Having endured three renovations and two restorations, the Victoria Park House was built in 1909 in a style by Frederick L. Olmstead within what was then a highly affluent residential district of Los Angeles. Established in 1908 by affluent property owners hoping to create an exclusive private neighborhood, the neighborhood is one of only two in the entire city of Los Angeles where the homes are arranged on a circular street. This design is based on the ideas of Olmstead, who felt that circular shapes would break up the usual linear look of urban areas, intended to be upscale with custom streetlights lining the area. Today, the homes serve as fine architectural examples of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. The area was intended to be all single-family homes, but was re-zoned in the Twenties when some duplexes were built.

Identity of Ghosts: Not much is known about the private history of the house, but the former Olmstead House has had several owners, none of whom reported seeing ghosts before the Lamberts moved in. One elderly local resident recalls rumors from her youth that Spiritualists used to hold séances in the house during the Thirties. Newspaper reports do confirm the story of a murder that occurred in the house in September 1919, when music teacher Eunice Gale shot and killed her parents when they refused to let her get married to a young sailor that they disapproved of. Slaughtering her parents, she allegedly turned the rifle on herself, but others aren't so sure. Josh Lambert says he saw Eunice and her parents sitting in the living room in a dream as well as the large figure in the overcoat and a spectral woman in long dark widow attire, but no one knows who these other people are. 

Investigations: Following what seemed to be a small poltergeist attack in Dalton's room, Renee contacted psychic Elyse Rainer who sent her assistants to evaluate the haunting. Quickly checking the house's environmental and electronic levels, Tucker began scanning the invisible wavelengths of light trying to see the ghosts. His scans quickly revealed two sisters in 1890s attire staring back at him from a bedroom doorway. He wasn't able to identify them, but Elyse did identify yet another presence, a dark malicious negative presence that had followed the Lamberts from the house on Victoria Park.

Source/Comments: Insidious (2012/2013) - Activity based almost entirely on the movie.