Horrific Hauntings : Haunted by a Murder Victim || Marie Spannhake

 One day, Idie Herrera was waiting at her doorstep in Chico, California with excitement to meet her best friend Jodi Foster and her four-year-old daughter, Hannah. Jodi was a single mother who was moving to Chico from Montana due to her financial and personal problems. Leaving Hannah in Idie’s house, Jody started her search for an apartment that would fit into her budget. In her search, Jodi stumbled upon Walnut Gardens, an inviting apartment building that was present in the perfect neighbourhood to raise her daughter.

 However, the only available apartment in the building was present on the first floor and its balcony made Jodi extremely anxious as there was a possibility of her daughter falling off it. Despite her fear, she decided to take the apartment because of two reasons. The first reason was that she couldn’t find another apartment in her budget and the second reason was that the building manager promised to give them an apartment on the ground floor as soon as it became available.

Beginning of Sequential Nightmares

 The first day at the apartment was hectic for Jodi as she had to arrange and organize her things inside it. Thus, Jodi and her daughter dozed off earlier than usual. That night, Jodi had a dream in which she saw a young couple dressed up in clothes from the 1970s walking around their locality as if they were hunting someone. Jodi constantly kept seeing a weird “H” symbol in this dream. The coupled walked until they reached directly under the balcony of her new apartment and stared at Hannah with evil intent. The moment Jodi saw them calling Hannah towards them, she woke up from her dream panting and the time was exactly 3:37 am. The dream seemed to be too vivid and she immediately called Idie. Idie convinced her that she was making it up and asked her to go back to sleep.

 The next night, Jodi had a similar dream but this time the young couple were walking down the hallway towards her apartment. Jodi shut the door of her apartment but they suddenly appeared inside her apartment and tried to abduct her daughter Hannah. As Jodi started screaming at them to stop, she saw Hannah turn into a young woman whom she hadn’t seen before. Jodi woke up at once with a panic attack and the time was 3:37 am.

Shifting to another Apartment

 The next day, the building manager told Jodi that a ground-floor apartment was open for her to move in. Jodi was relieved hearing this and moved into the apartment without a second thought. As the apartment was extremely dirty, Jodi and Idie decided to clean it before moving Jodi’s things. While cleaning, Idie felt an eerie presence inside the apartment and it felt as if someone invisible was stalking them. Also, Idie felt extremely cold inside the apartment. Despite the strangeness, she decided not to say anything about it to Jodi as she did not want to scare her friend.

 After moving into the apartment, Jodi and her daughter started seeing strange things. Jodi would find her keys go missing from the key hanger only to reappear in the middle of her bed. Also, Hannah started seeing a young woman in front of her and being a 4-year-old kid, she thought it was her mother’s friend until she saw a gash on the neck of this young woman. Little did the kid know that the woman she was seeing is the same woman her mom was seeing in her dreams. Eventually, Jodi’s dreams resumed.

Sequential Nightmares Resume

 One night, while sleeping in her new apartment, the young couple appeared again in Jodi’s dream and this time they were driving a blue car. Jodi saw this couple drive up to the young woman she had seen before and they offered her a drive. The couple drove the car into the locality of Jodi’s apartment and dropped the woman in Jodi’s apartment building. While the woman was about to go inside, the man asked her if he could use the restroom in her apartment. Jodi was shouting in her dream asking her not to allow him but she was not able to hear Jodi. Jodi immediately woke up from her dream in fear and the time was 3:37 am yet again. From this night onwards, Jodi started trying her best to not sleep but even her best efforts couldn't stop her from falling asleep.

 Later, one night, Jodi saw the man pour some liquid into a piece of cloth and cover this woman’s nose and mouth with it until she fell unconscious. The couple then made her look like a drunk college student to avoid suspicion, took her into their car and drove away. Throughout the dream, Jodi kept shouting for help but no one was able to hear her. Eventually, Jodi woke up from her dream and the time and similar to the previous instances, the time was 3:37 am. Jodi noticed that her dreams were in a sequence and despite her best efforts they never stopped.

 In her next dream, Jodi saw the young woman wake up in the back of the car with tied wrists and she started screaming for help. Hearing her scream, the man stopped the car and grabbed a grilled metal helmet and locked her head in it. The woman looked so scared that her eyes appeared to be the personification of fear. The couple dragged her into their brick basement and shackled her already tied wrists to chains over her head thus putting her in a defenceless position. 

 Jodi saw the couple slowly strip off her clothes with force and the man started forcefully kissing her. The woman put her lipstick on, walked towards the tied woman and started biting her as she squealed in pain. The kisses slowly turned into sexual abuse and not being able to witness the torture she was going through, Jodi woke up from her dream. The time was 3:37 am.

Nightmares accompanied by Paranormal Events

 The next night, Jodi dreamt about the woman again and this time she saw her screaming inside a bathroom as the couple held her tight. As the woman pleaded with the couple asking them to not harm her, the man pulled her head back and cut open her throat with a knife. As she was bleeding to death, the woman looked directly at Jodi's eyes through the mirror and told her, “Help me”. Jodi immediately woke up and just as always, the time was 3:37 am. But when she woke up this time, she saw the blinds of the window in her room aggressively go up and down sporadically and the lights in the apartment started flickering. The lights kept flickering until they burst and shattered.

  At this point, Jodi started feeling as if she was making things up and she decided that if she had a companion in the house, these strange things would stop. Thus, she asked a family friend named Misty to babysit her daughter. Misty was an extremely warm person but she couldn’t speak. She had to wait at the doorstep for a brief period of time as Jodi and her daughter were not in the apartment. The moment Misty stepped into the house after Jodi returned, she had a strange feeling of being watched by something invisible. Within a few seconds, they heard Hannah’s favourite Ernie doll repeat “I feel great” in its programmed voice. Jodi asked her daughter and Misty to step back and walked towards the bedroom following this sound. When she entered the bedroom, she found the Ernie doll on top of a pile of things and it had a noose around its neck.

 This sight terrified Jodi and gathering Misty and Hannah, she rushed out of the apartment. After coming out, Jodi called the police asking them for help but when she told them about the doll, they just ridiculed her and cut the call. With no other option, they decided to go back into the house and sleep. Thus, after setting the alarm for 5:30 the trio went to bed. Jodi woke up in the middle of the night as she felt the apartment shake. The lights started flickering and things were being thrown around on their own. To add to the creepiness of the situation, Hannah’s Ernie doll started repeating “I feel great”. Overwhelmed by the eeriness, the trio ran out of the house and Jodi was caught off guard when she saw the time on a clock on the hallway wall. The time was 3:37 am.

Another Change of Apartment

  After Jodi complained to the building manager about the strangeness in the apartment, she offered her an apartment in a different building downtown. However, there was one condition and she was asked to not talk about the haunted apartment. Jodi immediately agreed and moved out of her apartment in Walnut Grove.

 After leaving the apartment, Jodi’s life changed for the good. She found herself a good job and also, a good partner named Joel Wiley. She was starting to become financially stable again and her nightmares stopped as well. Thus, Jodi was finally moving on from the traumatic things she experienced in the haunted apartment. However, this did not last long as her daughter Hannah started seeing the young woman yet again. She started drawing pictures of this woman and in one of these pictures, she perfectly portrayed the couple abusing the woman after tying up her wrists over her head. After seeing the drawings Jodi understood that the spirit from the haunted apartment had followed her. 

Identity of the Woman in Jodi's Nightmares

 After giving a deep thought, Jodi told Joel about the things that were happening and to her surprise Joel actually believed her. Also, he encouraged Jodi to investigate more about the woman.

 Thus, Joel and Jodi started searching for details about this strange woman in Jodi’s dreams and after the couple spent multiple hours in the library, they found an article about a young woman named Marie Spannhake that went missing in 1976. The address mentioned in the flyer of Marie was the address of Jodi’s old apartment. As they kept reading the article, they found a photo of Marie and looking at this photo, Jodi was dumbstruck as Marie was the woman she was seeing in her nightmares. Following this discovery, Jodi’s dreams about Marie returned.

Portrait of Marie Spannhake

The Discovery

 Eventually, Jodi reached out to a local crime journalist named Roger and shared with him the events she had been seeing in her dreams about Marie. After listening to her story, Roger told her about a similar case where a couple named Cameron and Janice kidnapped a young woman named Colleen in Red Bluff. The couple imprisoned her in a coffin under their bed and used her to attain sexual gratification. Colleen had to endure the abuse for seven long years before getting rescued by the police. When Roger showed Jodi the photo of Cameron and Janice, she confirmed that they were the couple she was seeing in her nightmares. Also, Jodi got to know that Janice had testified against her husband during which she mentioned abducting and killing another woman a year before they abducted Colleen and her name was Marie Spannhake. Marie’s body, however, was never found.

Portrait of Janice and Cameron

 On Joel’s suggestion, Jodi called the police to tell them about the details she knew about Marie’s disappearance. The detective on the call was surprised by Jodi’s call as they were about to work on Marie’s case that day. After interviewing her for multiple hours, the police were stunned by the details she had on the case but because of the lack of strong evidence, they couldn't do much with the information.

Validation of Jodi's claims about her Nightmares

 Seeking validation, Jodi reached out to a local investigative reporter named Meredith and told her about the details she knew about Marie’s disappearance. Although sceptical, Meredith agreed to investigate the case. To confirm that Jodi’s claims were true, she had to find one detail shared by Jodi that was not released to the public by the police. Thus, with the permission of the police, she started checking Janice’s interrogation tape from the Chico police’s missing people files. In her statement, Janice revealed how her husband killed Marie.

 According to Janice, as Marie kept shouting while they abused her, Cameron decided to cut her vocal cords to stop her screams. Thus, he pulled back her head and started cutting her neck with a knife but this caused profuse bleeding and Marie died. The detail about how Marie was killed was not shared with the public by the police. Hence, Meredith understood that Jodi’s claims were indeed true. After this, Jodi stopped getting dreams about Marie and the paranormal events that occurred in her house stopped.