“There’s a Maatapi outside”- Piikani Nation family convinced former family home is haunted

The home belongs to the Bad Eagle family, but you ask any of them, there’s never been anything lucky about it. In fact, most of the family won’t set foot on the land surrounding the home, never mind going inside it. They’re convinced it’s haunted.

Coincidentally or not, the house was built almost exactly in the middle of several unmarked graves. Small hills surrounded by rocks are the only indications of the bodies that lie beneath the ground close by.

Jay Bad Eagle, the youngest member of the family and a Blackfoot healer, believes that a creek running directly behind the house prevents the spirits from crossing the land- perhaps keeping them inside the abandoned home.

Not one person has anything good to say about it, although most will describe the plethora of frightening incidents they’ve experienced both inside and outside of the dilapidated structure.

“The house was built in the late 80s,” says Bad Eagle. “There was no tragedy. My parents -they were abstainers. They never drank alcohol. They brought us up in a kind and loving home. They were hard workers, traditional people.”

The children and their parents moved out of the home when the anchor of their family, their grandfather, died in 2001. They moved onto a property adjacent to the home and now, their front windows look directly into the front windows of their former abode. Often, they say they will see a figure with no face in a dark robe standing in the doorway, looking at them.

In Blackfoot tradition, once a home has been abandoned for several days, spirits will take it over.

Bad Eagle explains that they have a strong connection with and respect for, the spirit world. When the sun goes down, the curtains in their current family home are closed.

His grandmother would say, “don’t look outside at night, a spirit is gonna come and twist your face.”

“In the Blackfoot way, there is no word for devil, for demon,” he explains. “We say, when we see a spirit being ‘there’s a Maatapi outside.’ We know what they’re saying… in our way, you’ve got your good spirits and your bad spirits. A good spirit would be like in our ceremonies. We’ll see a vision like our grandfather…but a bad spirit is like something we would hear outside at night. Like a dog that will bark or cry. They say animals and children see things that we can’t.”

LNN took a photo of the inside of the home from an outside broken window. There are no filters or enhancements on the photo, other than zooming in.

The belief in the bad spirits is so great, Bad Eagle’s sister Charmayne shared a picture with LNN she says was taken a few years ago. The picture shows Bad Eagle and his brother Pat standing in the basement. Three shadows can be seen. One that they say can’t be explained appears to be standing over the brothers, looking at them.

A third, unexplained shadow overlooks Jay Bad Eagle and his brother Pat, in the basement of the haunted home

“We took some pictures with our digital camera,” said Bad Eagle’s brother Pat. “My sister took them. We were going back through our pictures. There’s J.R., me, and there’s a person standing beside me. It was weird when we were taking that picture. We heard someone walking around when we were recording, too.”

Not long after the picture was taken, the brothers made an audio recording in the basement, but while doing so, they lit a blade of sweetgrass. When they listened back to the audio, they heard a voice not their own.

Jay and Pat Bad Eagle perform smudging and blessing ceremony before LNN reporters go into the haunted home for photos and video

“I asked the question out loud, ‘does this offend you?’ And then we heard in the most deepest, scariest voice possible ‘F*** off.’ And the weird thing was after that, with his (Jay’s) daughter, there was literally nothing wrong with her, she landed in the hospital for two weeks. She got a kidney infection. So, we didn’t go in there anymore.”

He says other family members who’ve gone into the home have suffered the ‘twisted face’ their grandmother warned them about. Trips to the hospital they explained, didn’t result in any diagnosis of a stroke, Bell’s Palsy or other ailment. Symptoms would mysteriously clear up after a few days.

Pat recalls from the time he was young, he would sometimes experience a type of sleep paralysis, but he would somehow end up in the basement of the home where he’d see a black figure in one of the corners.

“It was so dark. I swear to God I saw someone standing there all in black. And I was trying to move, but I couldn’t. After I saw the person, I forced myself to move and I was practically crawling up those stairs, running in the hall and crying, I was so scared.

“To this day, I still have bad dreams of this house. In my dreams I’m always trying to leave, but there’s an old man who won’t let me leave. About a week ago, I had a dream about this house. I was in there, and I was trapped.”

Jay Bad Eagle says the secret now, is not showing the spirits in the home their fear.

“In the Blackfoot way, we never give in to a bad spirit. We never show that fear. It will make us sick. But that’s the seriousness of these spiritual things.”

by Lara Fominoff and Videographer Brandyn Montgomery

“There’s a Maatapi outside”- Piikani Nation family convinced former family home is haunted

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