It was the first time she dared to do something like this. She had never undertaken an action of such magnitude before. Ana Gutiérrez, a steadfast believer in the Gospel of Christ, felt fear but understood that she had to act for the benefit of her friends. From a young age, the Church had taught her that she could combat any spirit, no matter how malevolent.
Paranormal Phenomena in Haunted Houses of Venezuela: The Cabimas Case
Additionally, in Cabimas, Venezuela, ghosts are hunted. These are the so-called Urban Legends. In her mind, Ana firmly ingrained the formula that she was taught to defend herself and safeguard others: to call upon the blood of the Messiah to cover herself, and to summon the angels in the name of Jesus to protect her.
She also understood that, thanks to the authority she believes she has in the name of Christ, she could expel demons and demand that every spiritual creature obey her command and leave. She was very familiar with this theory, but she had never put it into practice until that day when her friends, Estela de González and Luis González, shared a terrifying experience that was disrupting their lives.
Something, or someone, without visible or tactile form, was breaking her inner peace.
The González’ New House: A Terrifying Home
The couple had moved into their new house on October 15, 2005. This quite old building gave them a terrifying first visual impact along with a chill that ran through their bodies: gray and dark walls, black frames, stained doors, a narrow and gloomy hallway, and a floor with reddish streaks mixed with green granite speckled with white and black.
Even with its gloomy appearance, that house, built around 52 years ago or even earlier, was the best rental option due to its excellent location, directly across from one of the busiest avenues on the Eastern Coast of the Lake. The location was strategic: bakeries, butcher shops, supermarkets, public transportation, entertainment venues, fast food, and universities. Only the wall colors needed to be renovated.
Likewise, the property owner emphasized the merits of the location but omitted a disturbing detail.
Since the tragic death of her mother, the last person to inhabit the house, an unsettling parade of tenants had fled in their attempt to adapt. The maximum resistance against the assaults of spiritual presences lasted only six months. The terror reached such a point that one of the former occupants took his wife out in the middle of the night and fled without looking back.
First Signs of Paranormal Presence in the Residence
Ana remembers having visited Estela frequently, as they had been friends since college. The first time she crossed the threshold of that home, already inhabited by the newlyweds, she felt an unbearable oppression. She couldn’t fully enter, her skin crawled, and she experienced an inexplicable unease. Faced with her discomfort, Estela confessed the torment that living there entailed.
On the other hand, anonymous spirits did not give the couple any rest.
The first affront occurred when Estela fell ill with kidney issues and couldn’t stand direct air conditioning. She begged her husband, out of consideration, not to turn on the room’s unit but to settle for the fresh breeze from the living room. One night, at three in the morning, she woke up shivering from the cold and with sharp pain: the bedroom air conditioner was on. When she confronted her husband, he denied having turned it on.
At dawn, the neighbors looked at the new couple occupying the house with a skeptical gaze. They knew what awaited them. Previously, other tenants had reported that whenever they left the place, they found the furniture rearranged, clothes scattered across the floor, signs that someone had used their kitchen utensils.
“Ma’am, it’s haunted there,” they warned Estela bluntly.
Neighbors’ Warnings About the Haunted House
However, among the inexplicable experiences, the fact that every time Ana visited the home, her discomfort increased stood out. On one occasion, she asked to use the bathroom and, while passing by, briefly saw an older woman, with dark skin, a cloth on her head, standing behind Estela. When she blinked to get a better look, the woman was no longer there. This deeply surprised her.
That afternoon, Ana told Estela that she didn’t like the atmosphere of the house and that something needed to be done. Although she also felt fear, she understood that it wasn’t enough to point out the problem; she had to offer a solution.
For Ana, the solution was to pray, anoint doors, windows, and beds with oil as a symbol of protection — just like the Jews in Egypt who marked their doorposts so that the angel of death would not enter — and to ask Jesus to intervene, ordering the spiritual entities to leave the place.
Similarly, Ana was facing the challenge of becoming a ghost hunter, something that other people, with different beliefs, also attempt in their own ways. Ana would assume a role similar to pioneers like Joseph Glanvill, chaplain to Charles II in 1600, a paranormal investigator, or Friedrich Nicolai, who laid the foundations for what is now known as the Society for Psychical Research, an institution that claims to study the supernatural with scientific and objective pretensions.
Ana Gutiérrez: The Modern Ghost Hunter
Science has only managed to document captures of vibrations, strange images, or recordings of noises.
In this case, there were numerous disturbing phenomena: the smell of freshly brewed coffee permeating the air without anyone having prepared it, disappearance of sharp objects like scissors, knives, or potato peelers, sudden turning on of televisions, lights, blenders, and air conditioners, food mysteriously disappearing from the microwave, tempered glass pot lids broken into tiny pieces.
Consequently, the González family was facing a daily ordeal. They tried to counteract that presence with the help of two dogs. Estela, exasperated, ended up shouting loudly: “If you don’t want to hear noise, go to the yard and climb a tree! But the television stays on.”
She kept turning it on again and again, as if she was determined to show that they wouldn’t give up. That spirit wanted them to leave, but they had no other rental option. Thus began an exhausting war on their nerves.
Ana prepared ordinary cooking oil which, according to her Christian faith, needed to be sanctified through prayer to consecrate the place. Supported by the faith of other fellow believers, she disguised her fear and dared to act. Estela, not being a believer, accepted the help, desperate to restore peace in her home.
Consequently, Ana prayed vigorously and anointed everything with the oil. She let a drop fall on the wood that served as the headboard on Estela and Luis’s bed. She spread that drop with her finger and asked God for help, declaring that that place was now a house of peace, free of spirits or demons. Since then, a strange drop of oil seemed to drain incessantly for an entire year. Every day the same drop would appear, and Estela would spread it over her bed, thus obtaining the long-desired serenity.
The Tragic Past of the House and Its Spiritual Influence
Apparently, in that house, the owner died, a mother depressed by the departure of her children. She committed suicide with an overdose, not knowing if it was an involuntary act.
This woman liked coffee. Without Ana knowing, she was employing a method similar to the one that gave relief to Rebeca Broun, an American doctor trapped in a home haunted by what she called demons.
Meanwhile, Broun did not consider these presences as tormented souls of the deceased, but spoke of demons adopting human appearance to confuse, or of spirits of living people who, through astral projections, left their bodies to disturb. To her, they were servants of Satan.
According to this theory, these astral entities accurately describe the events inside the attacked house. They do this because they provoke them themselves. For this reason, the neighbor, a victim of confusion, resorts to witchcraft to “clean” the dwelling, without suspecting that it is a trap that contaminates it further, according to Rebeca’s summary.
Theories About the Spiritual World and Paranormal Phenomena
Theories about the thin veil between life and death are multiplying, weaving assumptions about the spiritual world.
Rebeca recounts that, in the midst of despair at objects thrown by invisible beings, she cried out: “Father, what can we do?”. Then, she took cooking oil, anointed doors and windows, and asked the Lord to sanctify her home, expelling any evil entity. The result was immediate and drastic.
This type of phenomena, a world of shadows, usually occurs in places marked by tragedies. There are at least ten sites plunged into darkness, where some of the most active and terrifying presences are reported: the Tower of London, the Whaley House, Crenshaw House, Winchester House, Loftus Hall, Amityville House, Beauregard House, Myrtles Plantation, Atherton Mansion, and Ñuñoa House in Chile.
Nevertheless, surely the reader can add other stories to this list. In the end, the experiences described in Cabimas, Venezuela, reflect that the spiritual world, paranormal phenomena, and urban legends find an echo in the experiences of people like Ana, Estela, and Luis, who, with fear and uncertainty, seek to regain peace in their homes.
Author: Marielys Zambrano / Diario Panorama
