SOLOMON FARM
Location: Ten acres of property on flat, uneven land at the base of hills, the Solomon Farm rest three miles outside of Belton, North Dakota, a tiny farming community about twelve miles northeast of Fargo.
Description of Place: A ramshackle house, a desolate barn, silo and open metal shed out on the middle of nowhere, the Solomon farm is little over a mile from their closest neighbor. The house is a two-story wood Victorian covered in vines at the end of a two-hundred foot long driveway surrounded by sunflower crops.
Ghostly Manifestations: From the second she saw it, Jessica Solomon felt the place was haunted. It had sat empty for almost five years since the Rollins family who had last lived there had vanished. No one knew where they were and rumors were that a drifter had happened on the isolated farm and killed the family, but the local police could find no evidence that a crime had been committed... at least not then. The house was never really bright, the roof was always covered with crows and the cellar itself seemed possessed as if it were hiding a dark secret. Jessica always felt she was being watched in the house, and when she was outside on the grounds, she sometimes noticed figures vanishing around the back of the house or beyond the corner of the barn. At first, she thought it was her imagination, but then...
If anyone knew the truth, she was sure it was her baby brother, Ben. Young Benjamin Solomon was just barely three years old and his manner of speech mainly consisted of incoherent cooing and grunts as he tried mastering speech, but he apparently saw something the family could not. Paranormal theory is that before the age of five that children are processing information on both a mental, sensory and psychic level. Ben was definitely aware of things around him that the rest of the family could not see. He would begin laughing at unseen events out of nowhere and invisible distractions caught his attention at times. As he mastered walking, he'd be fascinated by the cellar door and would want to go down there, but just what fascinated him about it and what he wanted down there never exactly became clear.
Jessica meanwhile continued to see and experience tiny events her first year on the farm her parents either ignored or possibly failed to notice. At night, she could hear the place creaking and reacting. She'd hear odd noises when she knew everyone was asleep. Sounds of someone moving through the first floor, the front door creaking open and someone moving through the house. If she heard her father grumbling half-asleep or cursing from stubbing his toe, she would relax and go to sleep, but sleep was not the absolute solace she hoped it would be. In one particularly vivid dream, Jessica had a dream of a particularly violent force grabbing and dragging her down the stairs into the cellar. Her parents just smiled and assuaged her of her fears with the thought she was not used to strange surroundings and silence. Jessica had spent her youth and up-bringing in Chicago where her father had been an accountant. Based on happy memories of his father's sunflower farm in Turek Township, Idaho, Roy Solomon abandoned the hectic rituals of life in the city for the retired regimen of living on a farm.
Jessica's beliefs about the house were partially confirmed by local youth, Bob Pursell. The son of the local store-owner, young Pursell and his friends knew the former Rollins farm as the local haunted house and often held ghost story rituals in the cellar as well as daring younger impressionable kids to sneak and take something from the basement. When he wasn't getting shooed off the property by the police, he was sending e-mails to the Collinsport Ghost Society and TAPS to come check out the house. Most investigators prefer doing research into locations to see if they warrant an investigation, but there was no info at the time to suggest the place was even haunted so the old farm always became passed over for more active or interesting cases.
Activity seemed to pick up closer to harvest time on the farm. Denise Solomon, Jessica's mother, also started noticing that Ben was often distracted by things she could not see in the house. Roy began seeing large flocks of birds festering around the house. An entire murder of crows or ravens sometimes covered the entire house. In lore, the appearance of a raven was a portent of death. Today, forensic experts will tell you that ravens like predatory birds are attracted to carrion and locations of unburied dead. Roy would fire off a shot gun to get them to scatter and they would take flock, scatter and then return en masse to the roof.
According to Jessica, the entire house seemed to take on a much more obvious presence. She could feel something tangible in the air that she could not see and young Ben was becoming even more restless. Certain rooms terrified him and he was trying to alert the family to something in the house. Creaking noises of someone walking the empty upstairs happened a bit more often. Denise thought she heard Jessica rummaging through the house and looked for her to no avail. Roy started sleeping with the shotgun under his bed at night. He didn't believe in ghosts, but he could not escape the thought someone was lurking around the house. He later confessed to seeing figures in gray wandering through the barn. Local neighbor John Burwell often helped Roy get the farm up for the harvest and even he noted that with the silence and solitude of the farm could promote feelings of uneasiness in the house. In no place was it felt worst was in the cellar. Dark and filled with the belongings of the previous Rollins family, the cellar had remained a foreboding source of interest to Ben and the subject of nightmares to Denise. Eventually, Denise somehow got it into her mind that there were bodies buried down there. After discussing the idea off-handedly with the local constabulary at the coffee house, Roy decided to let the police pull up the log floor. The Rollins family disappearance was a case that they rather had seen closed and Roy was quite willing to let them search the cellar if but to assay Jessica's imagination. After dragging the furniture and crates aside, they pulled up two logs...
...and were surprised by the loosened dirt around the skull of one of the Rollins family.
History: The Solomon Farm has been a sunflower farm going back at least twenty years. It was originally the Rollins Farm after Sam Rollins who built the house and first tilled the ground. After he passed on, his family left it empty until his son, John, came back upon it and decided to rebuild the farm with his family, but he may not have been the farmer his father was. Based on the resulting evidence of the murder investigation, he apparently lost his mind one one night and killed his family, later taking time to bury their remains in the cellar and covering them up under the floor before cleaning up the evidence of the murders and leaving the area for five years.
Identity of Ghosts: John Rollins killed his family, wife Mary, daughter Lindsay and son Michael in August of 2001. Forensic evidence reveals they had all been killed by a shotgun. Since the bodies were removed by the county coroner's office, the hauntings have abated.
"The crows are gone, the house isn't as oppressive and the sounds at night have stopped, but every so often, " Jessica continues. "Ben notices something in the house we can't see. At least it isn't scaring us."
Source/Comments: The Messengers (2006). Activity based on the Old Moore House in Villasca, Iowa (featured on "Scariest Places on Earth" and "Haunting Evidence")