WILLIAM SHATNER: Deadly forests.
Haunted houses.
[children laughing]
Mountains where visitors
never return alive.
Are there such things as evil places?
Places that are really born bad?
There are those who believe
that not only is such an incredible notion possible,
but that there are literally thousands of these places
all around us.
But how could a seemingly harmless destination
like an amusement park
really be thought of as cursed?
[chuckling]: Well...
that is what we'll try and find out.
♪
SHATNER: In central Japan,
60 miles southwest of Tokyo,
lies the Aokigahara forest.
Located at the base of Mount Fuji,
it is considered by the Japanese to be sacred.
Although, in recent years, many believe
that these woods have become not a holy place,
but a place of evil.
Each year, shockingly high numbers
of people come here to end their own lives.
So many, in fact, that the place has become known
as the Suicide Forest.
If you ever walk through any other woods or forests,
you always hear the birds, and you hear rustling,
and you hear all sorts of things,
but not in Suicide Forest.
In Suicide Forest,
it's just completely and absolutely silent.
[silence]
I didn't see a living thing other than those plants,
and I certainly didn't hear anything.
So, it's the silence that really hits you at first.
It definitely had a different feel to it,
and that kind of raises the anxiety.
A lot of locals will tell you
that as they grew up near the forest,
they were told never to go there.
It's a dark, scary place.
It's not a place for you.
Stay away from it.
DOMINIC STEAVU: Aokigahara literally translates
as "the field of green trees."
This forest is also known as the Jukai,
"the sea of trees."
Many people go and commit suicide,
typically by hanging, or also by prescription drug overdose.
Officials have stopped publicizing the numbers
so as to not encourage more people to go there,
but it really has become a magnet for suicides.
SHATNER: At the entrance to the park, signs are posted
advising those who enter the forest with suicidal thoughts
to stop and turn back.
It is a warning meant to prevent people
from being swallowed up by the darkness of this place,
a darkness from which there is no return.
These signs tell people,
please don't commit suicide.
Think of your parents. Think of your family.
They give you information on who to call
if you need some help.
It's very clear that this is a concern of theirs.
They know it's a problem,
and they ask you, "Please don't do this."
And you'll see those signs everywhere,
which remind you of how prevalent the problem is.
STEAVU: Aokigahara is also a non-camping forest.
So camping is strictly forbidden,
yet people who contemplate suicide
sometimes bring their tents.
We do have lots of these traces of the departed
that remain in the forest, from personal effects
to thread marking the paths.
ONO: Part of the mystique of Suicide Forest is
quite often people who want to commit suicide
will bring these ribbons because they haven't figured out
whether they really want to do it or not.
So they'll tie the ribbon, and if they change their mind,
they could find their way out.
But if they don't change their mind,
at the end of that ribbon, you may find a body.
SHATNER: The Suicide Forest
has one of the highest suicide rates
of anywhere in the world.
But unlike other such places,
like the Golden Gate Bridge
or Niagara Falls,
where people jump to their deaths,
here they come to experience
a different and arguably more disturbing
method of release.
In Japanese belief, any person who dies
has to receive a proper, um, ritual treatment
in order to transition to the world of the dead.
If they don't receive these very specific--
generally Buddhist-- rites,
there's a belief that the soul of the deceased person
will linger in the physical plane of existence.
If someone commits suicide in the spot, it's believed
that the yurei,the ghost, will be hanging around that spot
where they committedcide-- they're tied to it there.
So it becomes a potential danger spot
if other people are just walking through it.
They can get lured by the yurei,
who's gonna influence them somehow
to commit suicide themselves.
Aokigahara becoming a suicide spot
is a relatively recent phenomenon
that started in the 1960s.
It can be traced back to a novel called The Tower of Waves,
in which two of the main protagonists
could not live out their love,
and then decided to commit suicide
This is one of the reasons towhy the forest became.
a very famous suicide spot.
DAVID WHITEHEAD: It's rather strange that they say
around a hundred bodies a year are found in that place.
And it begs the question, is there something
about the place itself
that attracts people to go there to commit suicide?
GEORGE NOORY: It probably started off
as just a dense forest,
but as more and more people killed themselves in this place,
I think the evil permeates all over the place,
and it's probably affecting people who go in there.
SHATNER: Evil...
permeating the atmosphere?
Could such an extraordinary
and frightening notion be true?
I think everybody has gone to a certain spot
and they feel uncomfortable with it.
They just don't know exactly why,
but they just don't feel right.
They feel like, "Something's wrong here."
"This doesn't feel good to me."
"It's kind of evil."
There are certain regions
that have had bad things happen to it.
And you can feel it.
We have to realize that the human body
is one of the most ultimate pieces of scientific equipment.
You have so many different types of sensors on your body.
You can see, smell, hear, taste, feel.
And all that information that you're receiving
from your environment causes you to feel the way you do
at any given second.
So, if your body is not feeling right
and your brain is telling you something's not right here,
it is possible that it's an evil location, right?
SHATNER: In recent years,
scientists studying the morbid phenomenon
of Japan's so-called Suicide Forest have suggested
that the answer to the mystery might be
not a paranormal one, but geological.
One of the really interesting things about Suicide Forest
is it didn't exist, uh, until
the last massive eruption of Mount Fuji,
which was more than a thousand years ago,
and that's what laid out this enormous bed of lava
that eventually hardened.
There are chambers within the ground.
And in these chambers is where people will go into
and commit suicide.
Some of them will just take pills and lie down,
and eventually, you'll find a body
inside one of these chambers.
There's a possibility that the volcanic region--
the rocks, the basalt-- might have some sort
of piezoelectric-type material within them
that could generate electric and magnetic fields.
And it's also known that electromagnetic fields
do impact the brain activity.
I would think, from the evidence,
that this geomagnetic field
is having some impact on mass depression.
The connection between magnetic anomalies
and chemical reactions in the brain could lead
to a type of depression that would enhance suicide.
You can imagine a person who is suicidal
or thinking about suicide,
but is fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea,
moving into one of these areas.
And this interaction makes them just comfortable enough
that now they will carry through on the suicide.
SHATNER: Could hundreds of ritual suicides
really be the result of magnetic anomalies in the brain
caused by the unique properties of volcanic rock?
Or, as many Japanese themselves believe,
could the cause be something even more incredible?
There's an old saying that says
what we do in life echoes in eternity.
And if we have a forest where hundreds of people
have gone to that forest to commit suicide
for over 60 years,
could the dark energy of all of the departed souls
be lurking there?
Could that energy
be what is attracting people to come to the forest?
SHATNER: Tragic souls of the departed
luring others in... to join them.
A far-fetched notion, perhaps.
But no more bizarre than what has been happening
at the Aokigahara forest for the past six decades.
And no less disturbing
than what happened to a group of hikers
on a mountaintop nearly 4,000 miles away.
A mountain that the locals have named...
"Don't Go There."
SHATNER: January 1959.
Nine mountaineers from the Ural Polytechnic Institute
embark on a perilous journey through Russia's Ural Mountains.
Their destination:
a remote mountain peak known as Otorten,
which in the local Mansi language means:
"Don't Go There."
STONEHILL: They went out on this very strenuous trek, or mission,
to show that the mountain could be conquered.
As far as we know, they were all experienced.
Igor Dyatlov, who was in charge of the group,
had about seven missions to his name.
Similar missions.
They were supposed just to study the mountain,
to show that they can withstand the incredible cold
in this desolate place, and come back.
SHATNER: A few days into their trek,
the hikers move through a mountain pass with high winds
and poor visibility,
causing them to veer miles off course.
Realizing their mistake, and faced with the bitter cold
of the coming night, they choose to stop and camp
on a slope called Kholat Syakhl,
which in Mansi translates to "The Mountain of the Dead."
[wind whistling]
STONEHILL: It's a really windy area.
When I say "windy," the winds are horrible.
And they should not have put the tent on that slope.
They could have done it easily,
what, 100 meters away, in the forest.
They went against all the knowledge
that experienced trackers should have.
So, why would they put it out there?
What drove them? Nobody knows for sure.
[wind whistling]
SHATNER: Weeks later, when it becomes clear
that the group has failed to return from its expedition,
a military search and rescue operation is launched.
They find the campsite abandoned
and a tent that has been torn to pieces.
Curiously, the investigators determined that the tent
was cut and ripped open from the inside,
and the hikers appear to have fled in socks, or barefoot.
We're dealing with a group of experienced hikers
who escaped their tent in the middle of the night
without any reason,
unless something happened to their minds.
SHATNER: In search of the hikers,
the investigators move to the edge
of a nearby forest.
What they eventually find
has defied explanation for more than 50 years.
STONEHILL: Four of them were discovered initially,
and five of them were found later.
And they all died differently.
Some of the bodies died from exposure, and were intact.
Some of them were dressed completely.
Most of them were naked, so to say.
Others had horrible wounds on them.
Their bones were crushed inside their bodies.
Others, their skull was crushed.
One woman lost her tongue and parts of her face.
Others were burned,
like somebody put their feet in the fire
or they put it themselves.
[alarmed shouting]
They escaped like some force, something scared them.
SHATNER: The official causes of death for the hikers
claimed that six had died from hypothermia,
and the other three from fatal injuries
caused by an unknown compelling force.
But the inquiry was forced to an abrupt end
by the Soviet government,
and the chief investigator refused to sign off
on the final report.
STONEHILL: There were two investigators, initially,
and they were told to shut up and close the case
with the determination that the cause of death
was an invisible force of nature that killed them.
NOORY: In some cases, the fact that some of them died
from the bitter cold, okay, that makes sense.
They're in a region that's freezing.
But what about the other people?
Fractured skulls, crushed lungs.
There's something weird here.
SHATNER: What was the "compelling force"
that inflicted such brutal and grotesque harm
on these victims?
While some have speculated that it could have been an avalanche
or even an attack by Mansi tribes,
there was virtually no evidence to support these claims.
Others point to local legends of some kind of monster.
A creature capable of tearing people apart
with its voice.
There are descriptions of Mansi warning people
not to go to this mountain, not to go to this area,
because the sounds that come from there can kill you.
The entity that lives in that mountain
emits horrible shrieking sounds...
[shrieking]
...that can destroy human beings.
[shrieking]
SHATNER: Recently, a new theory has surfaced.
One that suggests this mountain pass
may be just as deadly as the Mansi name for it implies.
Not because of some supernatural monster...
[wind whistling]
...but for a surprisingly scientific reason.
So, this is a very windy pass in the Ural Mountains.
Uh, in 2014, there was some study that was done
that showed that the wind kind of whipping through
because of the topography
caused low-frequency sound-- kind of a hum.
And low-frequency sound can cause the eyeball to vibrate.
It can cause people to see shadows
out of the corner of their eyes.
Especially if you're in an environment
that is desolate, which is what that was to begin with.
DENNIN: The dimensions and the physics of the actual pass
are likely to lead to very low frequencies,
which is exactly what infrasound is.
Infrasound is just referring to any sound
that's below our normal hearing.
But sound itself is just pressure waves
and vibration of the air.
So your body is still detecting it,
your ears are still reacting to it,
your eardrums are moving, and that's still generating
electrical signals in your brain.
So there's an impact of the infrasound
that we don't fully understand yet.
TAYLOR: Being exposed to this sound,
it's fatiguing your body.
Any type of fatigue that's long-term
can cause significant psychosis.
In fact, there were several cases
on the Mirspace station where the Russian cosmonauts
were exposed to various vibrations,
and it caused them to actually have psychosis.
I have a friend who worked on consoles for Mir,
and he said that once, one of the cosmonauts
actually pulled a knife on one of the other cosmonauts
because of this type of exposure.
STONEHILL: It's not like, uh, a rock
falling on somebody's head.
It's happening inside their minds.
And infrasound is a powerful weapon.
And, apparently, it's affecting those
who are coming to the mountain.
That's why it is a hypothesis now
that is being explored more and more in Russia
as to the cause of death of the Dyatlov tourists.
I don't subscribe to the theory that heavy winds
created an atmosphere where these people went nuts.
I think there was something else afoot,
something very evil and strange
that happened to these nine hikers.
And I hope we get the answers to it.
But again, maybe we don't want the answer.
Maybe because it's so hideous and so evil,
we don't want to know it.
Did the harsh windsof the Dyatlov Pass
really create a low-frequency noise
that caused the hikers to lose their minds
and brutally kill each other?
Or could it be that a mysterious, unknown monster
was responsible for the hikers' deaths?
For the nine men and women whose bodies were found
horribly mutilated, the question is academic.
As far as they were concerned,
evil... happened here.
And it's an evil that isn't only found
on remote mountaintops, but right next door.
And often in the unlikeliest of places.
Mercer County, West Virginia.
Here on the bank of Lake Shawnee stands the abandoned remnants
of what was once a simple, wholesome family amusement park.
[carnival music playing]
Opened in 1926, the park thrived for decades,
until it was abruptly closed in 1966.
According to local historians, the reason for the closure
was that what started as a playground for children...
[children's laughter echoing]
...became the site of numerous tragic
and disturbing incidents.
[children's laughter echoing]
In the 1940s, a little girl was riding the swings,
to the concession stand.k delivered soda
[children's laughter]
And whenever he did, he backed up
into the path of the swing, and it killed the little girl.
SMITH: They tried to play it down
because it was a child getting killed.
She wasn't the only child killed here.
There were several kids that drowned.
One was a really sad story, and I would hope
it wouldn't happen nowadays.
[splashing, children's laughter]
A mother brought her nine-year-old here
and dropped him off to go swimming.
And she went on her merry way.
She came back when the park was closing,
and she couldn't find her son.
And they looked for the son until 10:00 at night,
when they found him.
His arm was stuck
in the drain of the swimming pool,
and it had sucked him in, and he couldn't get out,
and he had just drowned.
There was another incident
where there was a family out on an outing.
They was riding a canoe in the lake.
-The canoe overturned... -[boy screaming]
and a little boy drowned in the lake.
SHATNER: Before its doors were closed,
six children had died in the park.
And that might have been reason enough for the park
to remain closed... but it didn't.
In 1985, local resident Gaylord White
purchased the property with hopes of reopening it.
JEWELL WHITE: In the 1950s, Gaylord, my husband,
worked here when he was in high school.
He fell in love with it.
So that was his wish,
that someday he would own the park.
And somebody had sent us word
that the heirs d finally decided
they were going to sell it.
That's how we bought it.
We wanted to have a children's ride park.
SHATNER: For years, locals believed that the park was haunted.
Maybe even cursed.
Then, in the late 1980s,
the White family made some curious discoveries.
CHRIS: We started finding a lot of pottery
and Native American tools and arrowheads, stuff like that.
So we stopped doing the bulldozing.
We called Marshall University.
They put together an archaeological team
that would come down to the park.
They started uncovering bodies.
So that's when we knew we had a Native American burial ground
on the property.
I know that one of the burial sites
was a Native American 14-year-old girl,
and the belief is that she died from giving childbirth
because the child was buried next to her.
SHATNER: A series of tragic deaths
at an amusement park built on the site
of a Native American burial ground?
-A coincidence? -[children's laughter echoing]
As far as paranormal investigators are concerned...
not a chance.
SPINKS: The first time I stepped foot on Lake Shawnee Amusement Park,
I felt like I was being watched.
It was an ominous, just negative feeling.
I don't necessarily believe that places are born bad.
I believe that things have to occur
for a place to become negative in nature.
CHRIS: People said whenever they come to the park
that they see the swings move on their own,
or maybe they see an image of the little girl
that's riding the swings.
SMITH: Seeing only one swing move when I look at it,
and no one else sees it,
or it stops as soon as someone else is looking,
that's pretty scary.
More than scary, it's unexplained.
We tend to be scientists now, all of us.
We know everything that's going on.
And when you see something that you don't understand,
it gets to be creepy.
AUERBACH: Millions of people have had these experiences.
Not just hauntings, but also of ESP experiences
and-and related experiences.
These are questions that science should be looking at
very carefully and closely.
And to say, oh, it's mass hallucination
or it's this kind of explanation
without looking into the experience itself,
either the singular or the general patterns,
is not scientific.
It's highly unscientific.
SHATNER: Is the dark history
of the Lake Shawnee Amusement Park
the result of a curse placed upon anyone
who dares to desecrate this sacred ground?
Or was the area always a place of evil?
A place where bad things will always happen,
regardless of what is built there?
Perhaps the answer can be found by examining a place
where some people believe evil not only happens
but can actually be measured.
Not only in fear and suffering, but scientifically.
And can be proven to be as tangible
as flesh and blood.
SHATNER: Cayuga, Indiana.
February 16, 2019.
Paranormal investigator Dave Spinks
and his associate Haley Sharp
have traveled here to this small town
to investigate a house that many consider
to be the most evil place in North America.
Referred to as Willows Weep,
it has been the site of a series of gruesome deaths
since it was built in the 19th century.
Brenda Johnson owns Willows Weep.
-Hi, Brenda. -Hi, Dave.
SHATNER: She dismissed the rumors
about it being an evil place
and purchased it only a few years ago,
with plans to renovate it.
-This is my assistant, Haley. -Hi.
-It's nice to meet you.
SHATNER: But recent events
have convinced her that she may have made
a terrible mistake.
To this end, she's invited Dave and Haley
to come and investigate the house,
and see if her strange experiences can be verified.
SPINKS: So... how are you doing?
[chuckling]: Not good standing here.
All night last night, I was sick
thinking about coming over here around this house.
So tell us a little bit about the house,
some of your experiences here.
Well, when I bought the house,
we started working on it,
and then my son was working on the ceiling,
the boards come flying off at him and hurt him, and...
I've been scratched in there.
Six claw marks down my back.
Doors slamming on you, banging underneath the floors.
SPINKS: I understand there's been deaths in this house.
Can you kind of go through those a little bit?
Yeah.
The man that built the house, he died in the bathtub.
There was two suicides, and then another hanging.
And I heard that three men had been poisoned.
About six months prior before I bought it,
there was a man that, he committed suicide in there.
He fell into the chair and...
SPINKS: That's where they found him?
They found him, what, a couple days later, right?
-JOHNSON: A week. -SPINKS: A week? Week later. Okay.
Do you think what's in that house is evil?
Yes, I do.
-Without a doubt? -Yes, I do, without a doubt.
If it wasn't evil, it wouldn't be hurting people.
I don't think there's nothing good in there.
-The house was built in the late 1800s, correct? -1890.
-Yes. -SPINKS: So, regarding the shape of the house,
it's in the shape of a-a cross.
Upside-down cross.
-SPINKS: Strange. -JOHNSON: Yes.
[chuckling]: Very strange.
SPINKS: Do you think the guy was into some weird stuff,
like occult stuff, that built it?
Why would you build a house like that
if you wasn't into something?
SPINKS: Absolutely.
So we're getting ready to go into this house
and investigate it. Would you like to join us?
No. No way. Never go back in there again.
-Ever. -All right. We're gonna
-get in there and investigate. -All right.
-SPINKS: Here we go. -SHARP: All right.
Pretty heavy in here.
SHARP: Definitely.
Well, where do you want to get set up?
-Right here. -Okay.
SHATNER: To see if the house might contain strange anomalies,
Dave and Haley will use a temperature sensor,
which can detect fluctuations in both temperature
and electromagnetic fields.
All right, 41, 40 degrees, and it's going down.
SHARP: It really likes this area.
SPINKS: Yeah. It's going nuts.
SHATNER: The temperature sensor has been dropping steadily,
by as much as nine degrees.
But why?
So, this room is appearing to be
-pretty active so far. -Yeah.
I mean, the whole house really is.
But we've got a lot of hits right here, uh, on this device.
SHARP: This is the chair that Brenda was talking about.
SPINKS: Yeah, look at the blood on it.
It's a really sad, heavy feeling right here, too,
in the pit of my stomach.
Almost immediately, the device started going off in the chair,
where a man who killed himself in the house several years ago
-was found in. -SHARP: Something there.
SHATNER: Could the strange changes
in the temperature of the house
be caused by some explainable force?
A sudden drop in barometric pressure
caused by the presence of a deep underground well, perhaps?
Or could it be caused by... something else?
Something that can't yet be explained?
I'm getting the sickness, the headache.
Definitely something negative in here, in my opinion.
-I agree. -All right, so let's get out of here.
-Let's go. -All right.
SHATNER: Dave and Haley are beginning
to suspect that the stories
of Willows Weep being an evil place
might be based on more than fear and superstition.
SHARP: The house is scary.
I wouldn't want to be in this house alone.
I'd say this house does have some evil in it.
It does not give you a good feeling.
It wants to suck the life out of you.
SPINKS: I've been to many locations,
and this one stands out above all of them so far.
In my personal opinion, there are many spirits
and entities in this house.
There are human spirits and possibly demonic spirits
that influenced the humans that have lived in this house
and quite possibly have caused them to harm themselves.
SHATNER: Once outside, Dave and Haley give owner Brenda Johnson
a report on their findings, but not before
Dave makes Brenda a rather surprising offer.
I know you really don't like this place.
-No. -And I know that you want to get rid of it.
-Yeah. -Because I'd like to purchase the house from you.
[laughs]
-Mm-hmm. -Okay.
-Yes. -SHATNER: Dave is willing to be
-the next owner of Willows Weep. -All right.
-All right. Thank you. -Thank you, hon.
SPINKS: I told Brenda, if I owned this house,
I could investigate it much further
and much more in-depth,
and possibly come to a conclusion
as to what's causing the evil that lurks within its walls.
That is, if something doesn't happen to me first.
JOHNSON: You, too.
SPINKS: Luckily for me, she agreed.
She really couldn't wait to sell the place.
Was Willows Weep really built to attract evil spirits?
For Brenda Johnson, Dave Spinks and Haley Sharp,
the answer is a very disturbing yes.
But why would someone
deliberately want to construct an evil place?
Unless, perhaps, it wasn't meant to attract demonic spirits,
but to entrap them,
in an effort to create a deadly warning
that demons are real.
SHATNER: Honduras, February 2015.
[birds chirping, insects trilling]
Deep in the heart of the jungle,
a team of American explorers, journalists and archaeologists
make a dramatic discovery:
evidence of an ancient city
that has been lost for more than 500 years.
We were standing there on the banks of this river,
and the archaeologist was pointing to this wall of jungle
and saying, across the river,
"That's the beginning of the lost city."
So we crossed the river
with the soldiers with machetes cutting a path for us.
And all of a sudden, there it is rising up out of the jungle.
Just straight up, practically.
It was the most amazing thing.
And then what we saw was a cache of sacred objects
carved out of stone that had been left
at the time the city was abandoned,
and this was a gigantic mystery.
Why did these people leave all of a sudden?
SHATNER: The expedition announced
that they had uncovered the top level of a vast city
which has been buried under centuries of jungle vegetation.
Soon afterwards, many began to speculate
as to whether the ruins were those of a legendary place
known to Hondurans as Ciudad Blanca,
or the White City,
a place that was believed to have been deserted centuries ago
because of a deadly curse.
When we went to do our ground expedition in 2015,
many of the local Hondurans and the Honduran Air Force people
that were with us and the special forces people
said, "Oh, yeah, my grandmother or my grandfather told me
"all about the lost city when we were kids,
and they said it's cursed."
They said, "If you go there and you pick any of the flowers,
you will die, you will never come back."
TOK THOMPSON: In the case of the White City,
there is a very interesting tradition of a Tawahka Indian
who came to live there with them,
uh, and they refused him shelter, chased him out.
And in turn, he cursed the city,
-and he cursed that area... -[man screaming]
so that it became, basically, a poisonous area to live in
and the people had to abandon their city and leave.
PRESTON: You know, we heard these stories,
but, you know, we're scientists.
We're anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnobotanists.
You know, we don't believe in curses.
Or so we thought.
But, you know, sometimes curses are based on the truth.
♪
ELKINS: After we completed our first ground expedition,
everybody came back alive, nobody got injured.
We're shaking hands,
tipping a beer and going, "Great, we made it."
You know, everyone survived.
We all had hundreds of bug bites.
Didn't think anything of them until about a month later.
And 60% of our crew, including the Hondurans,
they had a bug bite that didn't go away.
It got bigger.
Eventually, it became a big open wound, a big open ulcer.
A couple other people became very, very ill.
Two of them almost died.
And then we had them diagnose it at NIH, and they said, yes,
you have leishmaniasis, but not even just regular leishmaniasis.
This is an entirely new one.
We just did a genetic sequence,
and it's a really virulent one we've never seen before.
SHATNER: More commonly known as "flesh-eating disease,"
leishmaniasis is a rare parasitic disease
that is spread by the bites of certain sandflies.
The affliction eats away at the skin
of the limbs, nose and mouth.
The new strain that infected the explorers
is particularly aggressive
and, if not treated properly, fatal.
But even so, a parasitic disease
is hardly proof of an ancient curse.
Or is it?
WHITEHEAD: What's interesting about the legend of this curse
is that it actually does appear to be true.
How can we explain that hundreds of years ago,
a man left a curse saying that, forevermore,
people will be ravaged by disease and all of these things,
and then we actually see it happen?
SHATNER: Was it merely a coincidence
that the American team happened to contract
a deadly and previously unknown disease
at a site believed to be cursed?
Or could the curse have been real?
As far as journalist Doug Preston is concerned,
the answer is obvious.
PRESTON: I used to think that curses were just kind of silly,
but not anymore.
Next time I go somewhere and I'm told that it's cursed,
I'm really gonna think twice about it.
SHATNER: If evil places really do exist,
is it possible to cure them?
To rid them of the pestilence
that infects anyone who gets too close?
There are those who believe the answer is a profound yes.
And it involves fighting fire...
[man screaming]
...with fire.
SHATNER: Dogotuki Village, Fiji, July 2018.
Members of a church group set two houses on fire
and burn them to the ground.
The blaze is intended to purge the village
of evil spirits believed to have been responsible
for the recent deaths of 20 people.
These houses were older houses, but they had been
traditionally associated with magical practices
and the reports of witchcraft being practiced.
WHITEHEAD: And as they burnt the places down to the ground,
some of the villagers reported seeing a demon
come out of the ashes.
And they've reported all kinds of really creepy things
that happened once they tried to burn down those houses.
So the question is: Were they successful
in getting rid of evil in that place?
Or did they actually just aggravate it more
by burning those houses to the ground?
THOMPSON: Fire is a very common means
of spiritual purification.
And so many different traditions incorporate fire in some sense,
very often for its destructive properties,
and yet at the same time, cleansing properties.
I've had a lot of people on my radio show who have apparently
cleansed haunted houses and haunted areas.
They talk about putting sage
around the perimeter of the house
and things like that that chase away the evil spirits.
But by and large, I'm not sure that works.
I think once a place is haunted, it's gonna haunt,
it's gonna do what it does.
ONO: I think there are energies in life that we don't understand.
Either created through our own minds
in our own physical energy,
or perhaps the physical energy of a place.
There are places where people have died either violently
or tragically, and that creates this dark energy.
There might be some negative spirits, some ghosts.
And that force that's happening within it
could also affect people.
SPINKS: I've been to some of the most evil and nasty locations
one could imagine, and I've seen people's lives ruined
by these negative evil forces.
And in my opinion, some of these locations are stained forever
with the blood and the energy of these tragic events.
These murders, these suicides.
And to me, that can never go away.
Fire,
cleansing the evil that infects certain cursed places.
Nonsense, right?
As far as you're concerned,
there's no such thing as evil places.
Well, then maybe you'd like to spend the night
at Willows Weep, hmm?
Or ride the swing set at Lake Shawnee Amusement Park.
Or perhaps you'd like to have a picnic lunch
at Japan's Suicide Forest.
No?
What's the matter, are you frightened?
Or are you just too smart
to tamper with things in the world
that are The UnXplained?
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