A Haunting on Dice Road – The Hell House (2016)
Throughout the years I’ve watched hundreds of UFO, cryptid, and supernatural documentaries, and spent the majority of my life hoping to personally see something that would convince me any of those things existed. I have stood at the bow of a ship traveling through the Bermuda Triangle, scanning the water something, goddammit anything, to persuade me into believing all those stories I read as a child were true. I’ve been to Mt. Rainier, Gulf Breeze, Roswell, and half a dozen other UFO hotspots in hopes of catching any hint of a flying saucer zooming across the sky. Not a one. I even bought a book full of magical spells at a garage sale as a young teen and hid in my closet reading supposedly ancient gobbledygook in an attempt to summon demons to smite my enemies. None materialized.
It turns out the secret to experiencing the supernatural is forming a ghost hunting crew, buying some night vision cameras, and making a documentary. While despite my begging they’ve never shown themselves to me, it appears ghosts can’t resist coming out of the woodwork to make their on-screen debut.
Steve T. Shippy directed, produced, and edited the documentary A HAUNTING ON DICE ROAD – THE HELL HOUSE. Not only is Shippy a filmmaker but also a paranormal investigator and former professional rapper known as “Prozac.” If that’s not a combination of skills you can trust, I don’t know what is.
The titular house resides on Dice Road in Saginaw, Michigan and was originally owned by the Pomeraning family. According to the film, the house is one of the most haunted places in America, which I find odd as every single Google search I could come up with lead back to this documentary. The strange activity began back in the 1970s, when the original owners reported “loud knocks on the walls” to the local police dozens of times. Despite multiple stakeouts, investigations, and the fact that the family had two teenage boys, no one was ever able to determine the source of the knocks. Current and former residents, neighbors, police, firement, and other random people line up in front of the camera to give their first hand knowledge of the case. Based on the number of people interviewed and the events witnessed this house should be as famous as “that one” in Amityville.
The interview footage is intercut with Shippy and his ghost hunting pals snooping around the property in the dark. Half the footage is of Shippy alone, recalling spooky tales about the home. The other half is of all three stooges performing their own ghost investigation with random handheld gadgets that randomly flash and light up. It’s not important to know what these things do or how they work. All you need to know is that flashing lights means there’s a g-g-g-ghost! Half a dozen times an entity (read: shadow) passes by in the background. If you miss it, don’t worry as each time it happens the film rewinds, magnifies the grainy footage up 10x, and plays it again in slow motion. All of Shippy’s footage is filmed at night, either by flashlight or with night vision cameras. Incredibly, Shippy and his team were able to capture more paranormal activity on camera than every professional paranormal investigator combined has caught on film in the history of paranormal investigations. On cue, walls knock, shadows appear, doors creak open, radios turn on, and so on.
An hour into the film during one of these segments, Shippy breaks out the ol’ Ouija board and starts asking it questions in the dark. “Who are you!” he demands to know, with both hands controlling the planchette. The former rapper doesn’t get a reaction until he asks if the spirit is upset they are there, at which point the planchette doesn’t merely lead Shippy’s hands across the board but literally zips out from under his hands completely and slides across the board under its own power, stopping dramatically on the word YES. And it’s at that moment that viewers have to make a decision. Either MC Prozac and his gaggle of goons have just captured undeniable evidence of paranormal activity, or this scene is fake and everything in the entire “documentary” becomes suspect. Based on my use of quotation marks around the word “documentary,” you can guess which side of the pearly gates I land on.
The investigation footage goes off the rails when handheld “PK readers” lead the researchers to a jar buried underneath the house containing evidence of a witch’s curse. The longer the investigation goes on the more this documentary begins to feel like a knock-off version of the Blair Witch Project. The fact that I can’t find a single reference to this case online that doesn’t also mention this film makes me think that this entire thing was made up, or if not, extremely exaggerated. I don’t have a PK meter or an EMP scanner, but I was born with a BS detector and it was going off the entire time.
Mildly entertaining as a haunted house story, completely unbelievable as a documentary.