The Oller House Investigation: When the Evidence Forces You to Pay Attention
“When you've been doing this long enough, you develop a feel for the difference between a location that's feeding off its own reputation and one that has something genuinely unresolved inside it. The Oller House felt like the latter.”
— Jason Hawes
I've walked into hundreds of locations over the years expecting one thing and getting something else entirely. The Oller House was one of those places. We came in with a plan, a process, and zero assumptions — and by the end of the night, we were working a lot harder than we expected to.
Every investigation starts the same way for me: you set aside whatever you've heard about a place, whatever stories followed you through the door, and you treat it like a fresh scene. Baseline the environment. Document the temperature, EMF readings, ambient sound levels, structural conditions. Look for the drafts, the faulty wiring, the settling floorboards — all the things that account for the majority of what people report as paranormal. That's not cynicism. That's respect for the process. If something genuinely unexplained is happening in a location, it deserves more than a rushed conclusion.
With the Oller House, we barely made it through the initial walkthrough before things started pulling at our attention. I want to be careful about how I say that, because I'm not in the business of amplifying every creak and shadow into something it isn't. But there were moments early in this investigation — before we had even finished establishing our baseline — where the team and I exchanged looks. The kind of looks that mean: note it, don't react, keep working. We documented what we encountered and moved forward methodically, because that's the only way you get to anything real. Reacting too fast is how you end up chasing your own adrenaline instead of evidence.
What made the Oller House interesting wasn't any single dramatic moment. It was the accumulation. Independently logged observations that lined up in ways that are hard to dismiss when you lay them out side by side. We worked through every rational explanation we could build — environmental factors, equipment interference, human error — and some of what we recorded held up to that scrutiny. Some of it didn't. That's the part that stays with me. The part that didn't. When you've been doing this long enough, you develop a feel for the difference between a location that's feeding off its own reputation and a location that has something genuinely unresolved inside it. The Oller House felt like the latter. I wasn't ready to say that after the first hour. But by the time we wrapped the investigation, I wasn't ready to dismiss it either.
This is what the field is actually supposed to look like. Not performance, not manufactured tension — just people who take this seriously enough to slow down and do the work. I've seen too many investigations, including some I was part of early in my career, where the excitement of the moment overrode the discipline. You miss things that way. You also confirm things that shouldn't be confirmed. My job, the way I've always understood it, is to be the last person in the room willing to call something paranormal — and the first person willing to say so when the evidence actually supports it.
The Oller House is a location I'll be thinking about for a while. I'm not prepared to hand down a definitive ruling, but I am prepared to say that what we documented warrants serious consideration and a return visit. Watch the full investigation and form your own opinion — that's always been the point.