The Oller House Investigation: When the Evidence Forces You to Stop and Pay Attention
“We went in to debunk it — and we did, piece by piece, until we hit the part we couldn't debunk. That's the part that keeps me honest about this field.”
— Jason Hawes
I've walked into hundreds of locations over the years, and most of the time, I already have a mental checklist running before I even get through the door — pipes, drafts, electrical interference, settlement sounds, the psychological effect of darkness and expectation. The Oller House was supposed to be another methodical walkthrough. It wasn't.
We pulled up to the Oller House with the same mindset we bring to every investigation: go in skeptical, document everything, and work backward from the most logical explanation. That's not a gimmick or a TV approach — that's the only honest way to do this work. If you walk into a location already convinced it's haunted, you're going to find exactly what you're looking for, whether it's real or not. I've seen investigators make that mistake too many times, and it does a disservice to the people living with these experiences.
What made the Oller House different was the immediacy of it. Usually, the first hour of any investigation is the quietest — you're getting a feel for the space, laying down baseline readings, mapping out the structure, identifying the mundane culprits that account for most reported activity. Settling wood, HVAC cycles, carbon monoxide levels, electromagnetic fields from old wiring. We do all of that before we even start a formal session. But at the Oller House, we hadn't finished that baseline phase when things started happening that demanded attention. And my first instinct wasn't excitement — it was to slow down and get rigorous, because that's exactly when you're most likely to make mistakes.
We worked through each incident piece by piece, the way you're supposed to. Every time something occurred, we stopped, re-examined the environment, looked for the rational cause first, and only moved forward once we'd either found it or genuinely couldn't. Some of what happened had explanations once we dug into it. That's important to say out loud, because a credible investigation means reporting the full picture — not just the moments that look compelling on camera. But there were things at the Oller House that we worked through carefully, cross-referenced with our equipment data, and still couldn't put a clean, conventional explanation on. Those are the cases that stay with you. Not because I'm ready to declare the place haunted and move on, but because intellectually, they represent exactly what this field is supposed to be chasing — genuine unknowns that deserve serious attention rather than quick answers in either direction.
What I can tell you is that the Oller House earned a level of scrutiny that most locations don't. The history of the property adds context that matters, and when you layer that against what we documented during the investigation, there's a conversation worth having. I've said for years that the goal isn't to prove the paranormal exists — the goal is to find the truth for the people involved. Sometimes that truth is a faulty breaker box. Sometimes it's something that doesn't fit neatly into any category I've built up over thirty-plus years in this field. The Oller House sits in that second group, at least for now.
I'm not closing the book on the Oller House. There's enough here that I want to go back with fresh equipment and a second look at some specific areas of the property. What I'll say is this: we went in expecting nothing unusual, and we left with questions I haven't fully answered yet — and in this work, that matters.