This is the demon hole?
Main Cast: Jeffrey Checker, Denise Checker
Director: Jeffrey Checker
We had a little time to kill yesterday while we ate lunch—not a lot, though; we still wanted to get a walk in before it got too late—so I went on to Screamify intending to watch one of their shorts. I was just about to click one when I noticed right below it a documentary. I wondered how long it was, but the app doesn’t have run times listed on the product page, so I hit play and checked it. An hour and 15 minutes? Hmm. Well, lemme check out the trailer first … okay that looks sort of familiar, actually, in that it reminded me of the few ghost hunts my wife and I had done at the local mental hospital over the years.
Sure, let’s watch this; it should at least be good for a laugh, right?
Nope.
AREAS OF HIGH STRANGENESS: STIMSON HOSPITAL is 75 minutes of repetition and noise perpetrated by Jeffrey Checker, self-proclaimed demon hunter.
His team, the Demon Hunter Society, enters the Stimson Hospital in Eaton Rapids, MI, in hopes of capturing evidence of paranormal phenomena and get, according to this short documentary of the events, both more and less than they bargained for.
According to their equipment, the spirits—or DEMONS as Checker insists they are—are very vocal, talking nonstop and engaging with the team. Myself, I understood very little of what was coming from the spirit box they were using, other than a lot of static broken up by the occasional grunt that may or may not have been a word. I certainly didn’t hear all the words and phrases the subtitles insisted on. I did, however, hear Checker repeating the same lines over and over because in addition to writer and director, Checker was also the editor of this mess, and whether to emphasize the importance of what he was preaching, or just to pad out the run-time because things need to be a certain length in order to considered a “feature film”, he kept re-playing the same clips over and over.
I love how these ghost hunters always seem to insist everything they encounter is a demon. The Warrens did it, Zach Bagans does it (so I’ve heard; I’ve never actually seen anything he’s done). Jeffrey Checker certainly does it. I’ve said for 30 years that my house is haunted, but I know enough not to say I know for absolute sure that ghosts exist. I just know I’ve heard weird things here and there in my house, things I couldn’t have heard if I was alone in the house, doors opening and closing, knocking on my office door when no one else is here, but even with that, I don’t say I know definitely that ghosts are real. And I certainly wouldn’t jump to, “It’s demons!” But all the paranormal investigators I’ve seen on TV, they always do it: it’s DEMONS!!!!
Alright, alright, calm down.
My wife was over this one REAL quick, but I was engrossed in just how off the rails the whole thing went by the end. What started as a silly documentary that had us laughing in the first 10 minutes eventually turned into a drinking game that would have had us both passed out on the floor before the credits ran. AREAS OF HIGH STRANGENESS: STIMSON HOSPITAL is just … wow … the fact that this was picked up and released as a real thing, as something that another person in the world saw and thought “yes, the world needs to see this,” just baffles me.
What baffles me even more, though, is that Checker has another one about an old mill that I’ve added to my Tubi watchlist (this one’s also streaming on Tubi, FYI) and, when the wife goes out of town to her parents’ for the night, I’m totally watching it!
Jeffrey Checker and his band of idiots just might be one of my new favorite things. Fair warning, though: if you’re NOT someone who can put on Nine Inch Nails’ THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL and play it at high volume, I don’t think you’d be able to sit through this one either, with the spirit box’s constant whirring and static and beeping going on nonstop. This was a noisy one for sure and if it had gone on much longer, I just might have had to bow out myself. This one’s not for everyone. Hell, this one’s not for anyone. Watch it as a joke, but that’s as far as it goes: for someone wanting a serious look at the paranormal world, AREAS OF HIGH STRANGENESS: STIMSON HOSPITAL is not the place to look!
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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