Are Ghosts Haunting Ted Bundy’s Childhood Home?

In addition to being a paranormal investigator, I’m also an armchair expert on serial killers. Jack the Ripper is the one I’m most fascinated by, but I’ve also extensively studied Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, the Zodiac, and of course, Ted Bundy. I have some thoughts on this news, as you may have guessed…

A contractor hired to remodel the childhood home of serial killer Ted Bundy claims to have encountered ghosts inside the Washington state residence — which had the skeptic scrawling Bible verses on walls and calling in pastors.

“I’m not one to believe a lot of this stuff, but this house made me a believer,” Casey Clopton told The News Tribune in Tacoma.

He had been hired to work on the four-bedroom home in Oct. 2016, and said he started noticing eerie things going on there, soon-after.

“Periodically, throughout the course of the job, we had weird things keep happening,” Clopton said, claiming that cellphones and other electronic devices would occasionally get unplugged or immediately die without explanation.

On at least two occasions, the words “Leave” and “Help me” were found written inside the house — in sheetrock dust on a bedroom floor and on a basement window, respectively.

Dressers were known to inexplicably fall over, and drawers sometimes opened on there own, despite the doors to the house being locked and nobody being inside.

“It was really eerie, but really neat,” real-estate broker James Pitts III remembered.

Things apparently got so bad that Clopton penciled Bible verses on the walls, and called in two pastors to bless the house. The pair reportedly went from room to room, reading scriptures and saying blessings.

“Everything in that house fought us, and I was kind of weird about it,” Clopton said. “But I go to church and I have God with me.”

The frightened contractor told the Tribune that he knew something was up with the house when he took his 11-year-old daughter there to check it out — like she does with all the homes he works on — and she freaked.

“My daughter started crying,” Clopton recalled. “She said she felt weird. She didn’t like it there.”

When he returned the next week with a demolition crew, Clopton said a worker made similar statements about the home and claimed it just didn’t feel right.

At the time, no one had any idea that Bundy — a notorious serial killer who was linked to at least 36 murders in the 1970s, with some fearing that he may have committed many more — had resided there as a kid.

The madman moved into the home with his mother, stepfather and four siblings in 1955. He was just 9-years-old at the time.

It wasn’t until Clopton started chatting up neighbors about the strange occurrences that he and Pitts found out about the home’s infamous resident and called in for backup.

“We made sure to keep quiet initially because we weren’t sure how people would react to knowing a serial killer lived there,” Pitts said.

While there is no evidence that Bundy actually committed any crimes in the house, he stated in interviews before his execution that his murderous streak stemmed from an obsession with pornography as a teen.

According to the Tribune, some believe that Bundy took his first human life when he was 14, though he later denied the allegations in a letter to the girl’s mother.

Clopton wound up completely re-doing his childhood house, giving it a fresh coat of paint, a bright yellow front door and new floors and ceilings.

The home was eventually sold for $335,000 to an anonymous buyer. It’s unclear if they were aware of its history.

On the one hand, reports of paranormal activity picking up when renovations are done to a home are very common. The theory being that whatever haunts the location is either confused by the changes, or angered by them, thus causing an increase in noticeable activity. It is not uncommon to hear stories from contractors about missing tools, weird electrical issues, and spooky feelings. Which, to be fair, can all be explained away by people working long hours in an unfamiliar place. Fatigue, unfamiliarity, and general carelessness can cause these same “symptoms” of a haunting.

These occurrences could also have been hoaxed. You have contractors coming in and out of the home to work on various projects. Sure, maybe Clopton didn’t know the history of the house, but it’s quite easy to believe that maybe one of the local contractors did, and decided to mess with him by drawing words in drywall dust, or unplug some devices. Again, long hours, lots of people in an out, an unfamiliar environment…it would be easy to pull some ghostly pranks on your fellow workers.

But let’s assume for a moment that the activity in the home was, in fact, paranormal. Why would this particular home be haunted? Ted Bundy, as far as anyone knows, never killed anyone at the home or stored any bodies there. His crimes came later in his life. So it probably wouldn’t attract the ghosts of any of his victims. It could be his ghost there, as he is now dead. But why would the same ghost write “Leave” and “help me?” Which, by the way, would have to be two of the most overused and stereotypical tropes in the paranormal world. Sure, it makes for a creepy story to link one of the most notorious serial killers in history with a haunted house, but it just doesn’t track, in my opinion.