Warning: this article mentions sexual assault which some readers may find distressing.
Thinking you’ve got a ghost in your home is scary enough, but what happens when you find out it’s much worse than that?
This is what happened to two sisters in Massachusetts in 1986 who were convinced that they had paranormal activity brewing in their home.
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With strange happenings going on such as their milk being drank, things being moved around and even a message like ‘I’m in your room. Come find me’ being scribbled in the wall using condiments, it’s easy to see why they thought it was a ghost.
Tina and Karen Bowen went on to explain their concerns to their father, Frank, but he told them not to worry and that it was probably one of them playing a prank.
So, the girls carried on as usual until 8 December when they came home to find that someone had used their toilet.
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So, taking them seriously, their dad searched the home and what he found was shocking.
It was Tina’s school friend Daniel LaPlante in the wardrobe and the 16-year-old was brandishing a hatchet and wrench.
Ordering the terrified family into a bedroom, All That’s Interesting reported that Tina managed to flee out of a window before he could lock her in and ran to a nearby home for help.
When police arrived, they found no signs of the boy and thought he’d legged it.
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But two days later when Frank visited the home to collect some belongings, Morbid Knowledge reported that LaPlante was looking out of the bedroom window and had written a message in the home, ‘I'M STILL HERE. COME FIND ME’.
Thankfully, this time police were able to find him inside of a wall cavity in the cellar which they believe he had been livening in for an extended period of time.
But why did this boy target the girls?
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Because he had dated Tina some time earlier and she ended their relationship when she discovered he was facing rape charges.
This led him to him becoming obsessed with her and play the part of a ghost in their home for the better part of a year, having watched the girls attempt to contact their late mother using a Ouija board.
Author Joe Turner, who wrote a book about LaPlante told the Daily Star in 2022. “He haunted his victims for almost a year, constantly upped his game as the months went by and even watched them from behind the walls during their most intimate moments.
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“When Danny first started living in their home, he was basically using it as a hiding place to watch Tina.
“But over time, he began to relish the fact he could terrify this family. His actions got more bizarre as time went on, and at one point they discovered a bathtub full of urine and a trail of pennies scattered over the floor."
But it gets worse.
When he was sent to juvi for his crime, he was released within a year because his mum paid his bail.
Weeks later he would go on to enter the home of the Gustafson family, where pregnant nursery schoolteacher Priscilla Gustafson lived with her husband Andrew, William, five, and Abigail, seven.
Armed with a 22 firearm, ATI reports that he didn’t expect to see anyone in the home and was attempting to burgle it.
Instead, he raped Prasilla and shot her in the head twice and drowned her two children while Andrew was at work.
At 17-years-old, he was handed three consecutive terms of life imprisonment.
It would have been better if he was a ghost after all.
Britt Jones