Bothell House Haunting
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The Bothell House is the site of an alleged haunting in Bothell, Washington. Between 2012 and 2016, Keith Linder and his girlfriend at the time experienced a wide range of anomalous activity in the house that became increasingly frequent and extremely hostile. The house has now been thoroughly researched by a variety of investigators, who have together documented hundreds of sounds, light anomalies, voice recordings, and other, far more sinister, phenomena. The case stands out for the sheer quantity of occurrences, and for the lines it blurs between different types of hauntings, poltergeists, and even apparitions.
Early Activity
After obtaining a management position at a healthcare technology company, Keith Linder asked his then-girlfriend of two years, Tina Davis, to move in with him on May 1st, 2012. The couple had found a rental house on Craigslist in the suburbs of Seattle: a relatively new home constructed in 2005. Keith and Tina claimed that the anomalous activity began the day they signed the leasing papers. They were sitting on the living room floor talking when suddenly they heard what sounded like a child’s cough.
Two weeks after moving in, Keith noticed that his extra car keys were missing, and cups, cutlery, and jewelry started going missing shortly after. Around the same time, foreign items began to appear around the house, such as other peoples’ mail and childrens’ toys. They also heard thumps and tapping sounds from behind the walls of the house, and had some lights flicker. Neither of them considered that the house was haunted until one night when they were watching a film. Thirty minutes into the movie, a plant by the entertainment stand levitated six inches off the ground, rotated 360 degrees in the air, then fell over on its side.
In the next few weeks, Keith and Tina both heard footsteps coming from areas of the house that they weren't occupying, and often heard someone running away upstairs as they came in through the front door. The bangs behind the walls got much louder, and Keith observed that they often preceded things being thrown around the house: usually potted plants. The ceiling fan in their bedroom would also start to squeak before something occurred - doors slammed, objects flew across the room, or the television changed channels, or powered on or off. The activity continued even after Keith had a security system installed.
In the summer of 2012, Keith was sitting in his upstairs office when the light was switched off in the room, so he rolled his chair back to look out in the hallway. In the doorway was a completely gray lady in a dress or robe with shoulder-length hair. She was small in stature, petite and frail. Keith saw the woman turn sideways as he looked at her, then she appeared to try to pass through the laundry room door, but couldn’t. She then darted off down the hallway. Keith chased her down the hall but didn’t find anyone there.
In the early summer, 2012, the bedroom door slammed when Keith and Tina were in the room, and the next morning, they found all of their kitchen cupboards and closet doors open. Around this time, Keith began setting up audio and visual recording equipment, and filmed some lighting anomalies. He uploaded these videos to a new YouTube channel where he soon shared hundreds more.
One night, Keith smudged the house. While smudging the upstairs hallway, he witnessed the front door of the house open and slam shut on its own. Later that same night, Keith laid out a Bible on the lamp stand in the living room with the pages opened to Psalms 91. When he woke up the next day, the Bible was gone.
The activity tapered off in the fall of 2012 and nearly stopped altogether by January 2013, although Keith maintained that the “feeling of being watched never subsided.” One notable exception was when Keith saw the shadow of a woman in profile walk across the living room wall and behind the entertainment stand. Also, in the summer of 2013, Keith was selected by Microsoft to be a beta tester for the Xbox 360 game console’s Kinect system prototype. While monitoring Keith's gaming behavior through a video camera, Microsoft engineers picked up slow-moving black blobs that neither they nor developers at headquarters could explain.
The Activity Returns
On January 2nd, 2014, Keith fell down the stairs, resulting in a torn patellar-tendon in his leg. While recovering from his injury, the anomalous activity returned. One day, Keith felt something jump onto the bed with him that felt like a cat. As the indentations in the mattress moved towards him, he rolled over to look at what it was, but there was nothing there. Keith then began hearing more rhythmic tapping sounds, bangs, and footsteps around the house, and noticed that there seemed to be a heightened energy before an incident that made the walls snap and pop, as if they were being microwaved, as Keith put it. He set up more video equipment after this, and soon noticed that phenomena that occurred quite regularly would not occur when being filmed, although he captured many noises.
On March 30th, the couple’s bedroom door was ripped off of its hinges with a violent crashing sound, and a ceiling light exploded in the hallway. Keith immediately contacted dozens of paranormal investigation teams, but No Bull Paranormal was the only one to respond that day. Jennifer, their lead investigator, immediately noticed a low humming sound in the house like the muted buzz one hears standing by a beehive. Everyone’s cellphones and the team’s A/V equipment died immediately after entering. After recharging, they captured a white mist on an infrared camera that wasn’t visible to the naked eye. Jennifer then did a half-hour sage cleanse in which the sage ignited by itself. The humming sound ceased after this, and the team left.
That night, Keith and Tina woke to the fire alarm going off, and saw a glow coming from under the remounted bedroom door. Sitting on the other side of the door was the open Bible that had gone missing nearly two years prior, with its pages on fire, and a small wooden cross inside that he’d recently acquired. This was the first of three Bibles to self-immolate.
On April 4th, just before the most active phase in the haunting, Keith and Tina had their bedroom TV turn on to a music channel blasting “Dark Horse” by Katie Perry. Each time that the TV came on, the song was in the second half of the chorus, where Perry sings, “Are you ready for… a perfect storm? 'Cause once you’re mine… there’s no goin’ back.” The last time the TV did this, it was completely unplugged from the wall, and it was long after that song would have ended if it were really being broadcast.
The activity escalated in the spring, straining Keith and Tina’s relationship. Pottery and furniture were thrown, doors were slammed, and more light fixtures exploded. Several times the couple came home to rooms that looked like they’d been ransacked. Foreign items began appearing around the house again, including a lot of female jewelry, leading Tina to accuse Keith of infidelity.
At the end of May, Keith was in the home alone drying off after a shower when the smoke alarm sounded. He bolted out to the hallway landing where he sensed an invisible force run past him that gave off an energy that he described as “pure evil.” Shortly after, the front door opened wide and slammed shut. Smoke was pouring into the hallway, and Keith found a poster in his office on fire. The Bothell fire department responded, but could not determine the cause.
That summer, Keith began seeing dark, silhouette-like figures with limbs and red eyes. One night in his office he noticed movement in the corner of his eye, and heard what sounded like a pencil being snapped in half. As soon as he turned to look, he saw a small shadow figure walk from the left side of his doorway to the right, disappearing as soon as it reached the threshold of the guest bathroom. Soon after, he began seeing these figures three at a time, typically in his peripheral vision.
Beginning on July 1st, writing began to appear on the walls of the office, first in sage ash, then in a thick black substance. The first time this latter substance appeared was on Halloween night. Keith found the room in disarray, and the numbers 666 were written on the wall. Later Keith found upside-down crosses, Native American symbols of a dead man, and the words ‘Die KL.’ Once, the couple even found three-legged paw prints on the office ceiling that seemed to taper off towards the window. Keith brought in a sample of the writing from the Halloween attack to a materials analysis lab at his work, and a co-worker used an XRF analyzer gun on it. They found that it was 84 - 94% Tricalcium phosphate, with phosphorus, calcium carbonate - one of the main products of bone combustion - and other carbon material. Keith photographed the writing at 1000x magnification, and determined that there was also some yellow oil, and a blue substance splattered around the black char.
By the fall of 2014, Keith was being poked and prodded in his bed at night, and was frequently haunted by the shadow figures. In October, three candles were thrown at a bookshelf in his office. Minutes later, he started hearing a sound like someone rustling dead leaves. The sound grew closer until a lady emerged from the left side of the doorway that was entirely white in color, just as the earlier woman was all gray. The lady was carrying something in her hands that looked to be a laundry basket, and she walked past the open door and seemed to continue into the guest bedroom to the right. But when Keith jumped up to follow her in, he found no one inside.
Also that fall, Keith accidentally dropped his piggy bank while trying to put more dimes inside, sending coins scattered everywhere. A few days later, he began finding single dimes around the house, seemingly placed where he would find them. One day he decided to read the date on one of the dimes he found, and realized that it was minted on the year of his birth: 1969. A few minutes later, he found another dime in the same place, also dated 1969. When he dared the force behind the dimes to make one appear “right now,” about thirty dimes dropped from above his head, all at the same time.
In November 2014, Keith was gifted a prayer card and an indigenous protection necklace. On Christmas day, both items reappeared nailed to a doorframe with the words “Die KL” written in black bone char on the card. The same phrase appeared in his car, as well. Two computer monitors caught fire, and smoldering, burn marks began appearing on Keith's clothing while he was wearing them.
In January, 2015, Keith saw the gray lady for a second time. He was sitting with his back to the sliding door in the kitchen when he saw a face and hands poke out from behind the wall by the stairway. The woman looked disheveled, and her eyes were bulging out of her head. She pulled back behind the wall, and Keith heard footsteps run up the stairs, down the hall, and into the guest bathroom overtop of him. He later determined that in order for the gray lady to have appeared where she did on the stairs, her head would have had to have been 12 feet off the step below her.
Investigations
After a friend contacted the Seattle Catholic Church in April 2014, Keith and Tina made repeated calls for a priest, only to be directed back and forth between the Bothell and Seattle Church. Soon after the poster fire, Keith and Tina managed to speak with Father Northrop of the Bothell Church. Two weeks later, he visited the house to conduct a cleansing, and did several other rituals there in the next few months. Each time, the activity would cease for a few days, then come back worse.
In early fall of 2014, Keith was able to connect with a family that rented the Bothell home in 2008 and '9. The mother, Rhonda Lee Jimenez, admitted that her family had all experienced similar activity, and that she began struggling with depression and alcoholism shortly after they moved in. She developed suicidal thoughts in this house, and made three attempts on her life. Once, she was even raped by a home intruder. Keith obtained a police report from 2009 in which an officer describes arriving at the home to hear Rhonda screaming from inside the garage: “Why are you doing this to me? I just want to go home! Stop it!” She came bursting out of the garage holding a screwdriver, looking completely disheveled and covered in mud, forcing the officer to strike the weapon from her hand after she refused to drop it. Rhonda committed suicide on August 15th, 2016.
Elisa Jaffe, a reporter from Seattle’s KOMO news, visited the Bothell house on October 30th, 2014, then contacted Dave Schrader, chief researcher at the Travel Channel show, Ghost Adventures. Keith and Tina were put in a hotel while the Ghost Adventures team conducted their investigation, although it's known that the probability of experiencing poltergeist activity is higher when the house’s occupants are present. The investigation was a mere five hours, and the Travel Channel aired the episode the following February. Keith claimed that the way that the episode was edited makes it appear that he and Tina were exaggerating or hoaxing it all, even though hoaxing was never uncovered. He believes that the Ghost Adventures team portrayed himself and Tina in a negative light to save face from their fruitless investigation. Still, the show’s team revisited the case for an episode in May 2020 and doubled down on their original assessment.
Keith and Tina broke up in 2015, just a few months after "Demons in Seattle" aired. Keith claimed that two factors in their breakup were the way that Tina was portrayed on the show, and the conjecture from paranormal teams and Church officials that a demonic presence was feeding off of her negative energy. Keith felt determined to stay, lest that be the final word on the haunting.
In the spring of 2015, a paranormal team led by Nicole Novelle reached out to Keith, and had CCTV cameras installed in the house, allowing for constant remote surveillance. Nikki and her team captured a variety of activity, including an image in the bedroom that Keith insisted was the gray lady, which he had then come to believe was actually the form of Rhonda. Novelle then flew out to Seattle with a colleague in late January 2016, and stayed in the house for three and a half weeks. The pair experienced a range of phenomena, including what sounded like a heartbeat coming from Keith’s bed.
In the fall 2015, Keith reached out to the Scientific Establishment of Parapsychology, led by British parapsychologist Steve Mera. After putting Keith through four months of evaluations, Mera and his chief assistant Don Phillips, visited Bothell, Washington in January 2016 and stayed for six days. They too heard footsteps and voices, and had equipment fail, or disappear and relocate: a phenomenon known as asportation. Keith asked Mera’s team to return to Bothell after the activity in the house showed signs of increasing. Nick Kyle, then president of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research, joined the team for an additional seven days - making 13 days total for Mera and Phillips. Mera and his team recorded a total of 523 unexplained vocalizations, the majority of which were part of conversations between different "voices" or with the researchers.
Keith made several unsuccessful attempts at exorcising the house along the way, then moved out entirely on May 8th, 2016. Before leaving, he self-published The Bothell Hell House, which documents all the occurrences up to that point. He republished the same book with added evidence in 2018: The Bothell House 2.0. Mera published his own book on the “Seattle Demon” with author Jenny Ashford in 2016.
Significance
The Bothell house was sold within three months of Keith moving out, and there have been no reports of new activity. However, Keith is occasionally haunted in his current home, also in Seattle, and the two other homes he’s had since 2016. However, since then, he’s also had night terrors and succubus visits. He’s been poked and prodded in his bed, and felt pulsations coming from within the mattress and pillow. Keith documented some of these occurrences, and shared his interpretation of the phenomena in 2019’s Attachments: Poltergeist of Washington State.
Robb Tilley of the Australian Institute of Parapsychology Research claimed that the Bothell House “is right up there with the most frightening of poltergeist cases… a major work, a turning point in poltergeist research." Kirsten A. Thorne, founder of the International Society for Paranormal Research, remarked on the sheer range of activity: “If ever there was a potpourri of paranormal phenomena, this is it. And that is a hallmark of the demonic – the deliberate creation of confusion, the delight in creating chaos, the impossibility of stitching together a story that explains why all this is happening.” The case involved elements of poltergeist activity, intelligent hauntings, residual hauntings, crisis apparitions, and living apparitions, for example. The convergence of these phenomena in the same house in Bothell suggest that at some level, they may all be related.
As Mera explained, most poltergeist cases involve children or adolescents in the home - usually female - as well as family trauma or extremely stressful circumstances. None of that was present in Keith’s case. Also of interest is the age of the home: as Keith discovered, it is something of a dogma amongst paranormal investigators that only old houses can be haunted. Keith said that most of the teams that he called brushed him off when he mentioned the recent build.
As in many cases of hauntings and poltergeists, the activity did not seem to be exclusively attached either to the location or to the people in it. While both Keith and the previous tenant experienced many of the same phenomena, Linder also experienced some of the same activity in three different houses since, and friends of his that engaged with the phenomenon have experienced activity elsewhere.
Keith is convinced that the entire Bothell neighborhood is haunted by some negative energy that was established when the local indigenous peoples were killed off by war and disease, or forced onto reservations. Keith believes that malevolent spirits descended on this area, feeding off the negative energy. He has stated that by engaging with, and even challenging these spirits, and especially by trying to capture them on video, he caused them to grow stronger, and to latch themselves to him.
Keith also believes that the spirits personalized their attacks, and tended to turn his own words, deeds, and beliefs against him. He believes that this is what was meant when he heard a voice say, “I’m a mirror.” For example, after he laid out crosses and Bibles, the phenomenon burned them, and wrote what Keith described as the “cliché” 666 on the wall, and started inverting crosses. Keith also believes that the phenomenon turned himself and Tina against each other, and against the entire outside world, in order to weaken them and feed off their negative energy.
Summary
For a time, at least, the Bothell House in Washington state was home to one of the most active and malevolent hauntings ever to be thoroughly investigated. The case contains a particularly striking range of haunting, poltergeist, and apparitional phenomena, while also standing apart as an anomaly on its own.
Tina Davis no longer discusses her involvement in the public eye, but Keith Linder remains an active proponent of the case. He maintains that he is only trying to spread awareness of hauntings and poltergeists, and to share his evidence and experiences with the scientific community. This commitment has put him through a living nightmare, and may be the reason he is still haunted today.
The Bothell House is the site of an alleged haunting in Bothell, Washington. Between 2012 and 2016, Keith Linder and his girlfriend at the time experienced a wide range of anomalous activity in the house that became increasingly frequent and extremely hostile. The house has now been thoroughly researched by a variety of investigators, who have together documented hundreds of sounds, light anomalies, voice recordings, and other, far more sinister, phenomena. The case stands out for the sheer quantity of occurrences, and for the lines it blurs between different types of hauntings, poltergeists, and even apparitions.
Early Activity
After obtaining a management position at a healthcare technology company, Keith Linder asked his then-girlfriend of two years, Tina Davis, to move in with him on May 1st, 2012. The couple had found a rental house on Craigslist in the suburbs of Seattle: a relatively new home constructed in 2005. Keith and Tina claimed that the anomalous activity began the day they signed the leasing papers. They were sitting on the living room floor talking when suddenly they heard what sounded like a child’s cough.
Two weeks after moving in, Keith noticed that his extra car keys were missing, and cups, cutlery, and jewelry started going missing shortly after. Around the same time, foreign items began to appear around the house, such as other peoples’ mail and childrens’ toys. They also heard thumps and tapping sounds from behind the walls of the house, and had some lights flicker. Neither of them considered that the house was haunted until one night when they were watching a film. Thirty minutes into the movie, a plant by the entertainment stand levitated six inches off the ground, rotated 360 degrees in the air, then fell over on its side.
In the next few weeks, Keith and Tina both heard footsteps coming from areas of the house that they weren't occupying, and often heard someone running away upstairs as they came in through the front door. The bangs behind the walls got much louder, and Keith observed that they often preceded things being thrown around the house: usually potted plants. The ceiling fan in their bedroom would also start to squeak before something occurred - doors slammed, objects flew across the room, or the television changed channels, or powered on or off. The activity continued even after Keith had a security system installed.
In the summer of 2012, Keith was sitting in his upstairs office when the light was switched off in the room, so he rolled his chair back to look out in the hallway. In the doorway was a completely gray lady in a dress or robe with shoulder-length hair. She was small in stature, petite and frail. Keith saw the woman turn sideways as he looked at her, then she appeared to try to pass through the laundry room door, but couldn’t. She then darted off down the hallway. Keith chased her down the hall but didn’t find anyone there.
In the early summer, 2012, the bedroom door slammed when Keith and Tina were in the room, and the next morning, they found all of their kitchen cupboards and closet doors open. Around this time, Keith began setting up audio and visual recording equipment, and filmed some lighting anomalies. He uploaded these videos to a new YouTube channel where he soon shared hundreds more.
One night, Keith smudged the house. While smudging the upstairs hallway, he witnessed the front door of the house open and slam shut on its own. Later that same night, Keith laid out a Bible on the lamp stand in the living room with the pages opened to Psalms 91. When he woke up the next day, the Bible was gone.
The activity tapered off in the fall of 2012 and nearly stopped altogether by January 2013, although Keith maintained that the “feeling of being watched never subsided.” One notable exception was when Keith saw the shadow of a woman in profile walk across the living room wall and behind the entertainment stand. Also, in the summer of 2013, Keith was selected by Microsoft to be a beta tester for the Xbox 360 game console’s Kinect system prototype. While monitoring Keith's gaming behavior through a video camera, Microsoft engineers picked up slow-moving black blobs that neither they nor developers at headquarters could explain.
The Activity Returns
On January 2nd, 2014, Keith fell down the stairs, resulting in a torn patellar-tendon in his leg. While recovering from his injury, the anomalous activity returned. One day, Keith felt something jump onto the bed with him that felt like a cat. As the indentations in the mattress moved towards him, he rolled over to look at what it was, but there was nothing there. Keith then began hearing more rhythmic tapping sounds, bangs, and footsteps around the house, and noticed that there seemed to be a heightened energy before an incident that made the walls snap and pop, as if they were being microwaved, as Keith put it. He set up more video equipment after this, and soon noticed that phenomena that occurred quite regularly would not occur when being filmed, although he captured many noises.
On March 30th, the couple’s bedroom door was ripped off of its hinges with a violent crashing sound, and a ceiling light exploded in the hallway. Keith immediately contacted dozens of paranormal investigation teams, but No Bull Paranormal was the only one to respond that day. Jennifer, their lead investigator, immediately noticed a low humming sound in the house like the muted buzz one hears standing by a beehive. Everyone’s cellphones and the team’s A/V equipment died immediately after entering. After recharging, they captured a white mist on an infrared camera that wasn’t visible to the naked eye. Jennifer then did a half-hour sage cleanse in which the sage ignited by itself. The humming sound ceased after this, and the team left.
That night, Keith and Tina woke to the fire alarm going off, and saw a glow coming from under the remounted bedroom door. Sitting on the other side of the door was the open Bible that had gone missing nearly two years prior, with its pages on fire, and a small wooden cross inside that he’d recently acquired. This was the first of three Bibles to self-immolate.
On April 4th, just before the most active phase in the haunting, Keith and Tina had their bedroom TV turn on to a music channel blasting “Dark Horse” by Katie Perry. Each time that the TV came on, the song was in the second half of the chorus, where Perry sings, “Are you ready for… a perfect storm? 'Cause once you’re mine… there’s no goin’ back.” The last time the TV did this, it was completely unplugged from the wall, and it was long after that song would have ended if it were really being broadcast.
The activity escalated in the spring, straining Keith and Tina’s relationship. Pottery and furniture were thrown, doors were slammed, and more light fixtures exploded. Several times the couple came home to rooms that looked like they’d been ransacked. Foreign items began appearing around the house again, including a lot of female jewelry, leading Tina to accuse Keith of infidelity.
At the end of May, Keith was in the home alone drying off after a shower when the smoke alarm sounded. He bolted out to the hallway landing where he sensed an invisible force run past him that gave off an energy that he described as “pure evil.” Shortly after, the front door opened wide and slammed shut. Smoke was pouring into the hallway, and Keith found a poster in his office on fire. The Bothell fire department responded, but could not determine the cause.
That summer, Keith began seeing dark, silhouette-like figures with limbs and red eyes. One night in his office he noticed movement in the corner of his eye, and heard what sounded like a pencil being snapped in half. As soon as he turned to look, he saw a small shadow figure walk from the left side of his doorway to the right, disappearing as soon as it reached the threshold of the guest bathroom. Soon after, he began seeing these figures three at a time, typically in his peripheral vision.
Beginning on July 1st, writing began to appear on the walls of the office, first in sage ash, then in a thick black substance. The first time this latter substance appeared was on Halloween night. Keith found the room in disarray, and the numbers 666 were written on the wall. Later Keith found upside-down crosses, Native American symbols of a dead man, and the words ‘Die KL.’ Once, the couple even found three-legged paw prints on the office ceiling that seemed to taper off towards the window. Keith brought in a sample of the writing from the Halloween attack to a materials analysis lab at his work, and a co-worker used an XRF analyzer gun on it. They found that it was 84 - 94% Tricalcium phosphate, with phosphorus, calcium carbonate - one of the main products of bone combustion - and other carbon material. Keith photographed the writing at 1000x magnification, and determined that there was also some yellow oil, and a blue substance splattered around the black char.
By the fall of 2014, Keith was being poked and prodded in his bed at night, and was frequently haunted by the shadow figures. In October, three candles were thrown at a bookshelf in his office. Minutes later, he started hearing a sound like someone rustling dead leaves. The sound grew closer until a lady emerged from the left side of the doorway that was entirely white in color, just as the earlier woman was all gray. The lady was carrying something in her hands that looked to be a laundry basket, and she walked past the open door and seemed to continue into the guest bedroom to the right. But when Keith jumped up to follow her in, he found no one inside.
Also that fall, Keith accidentally dropped his piggy bank while trying to put more dimes inside, sending coins scattered everywhere. A few days later, he began finding single dimes around the house, seemingly placed where he would find them. One day he decided to read the date on one of the dimes he found, and realized that it was minted on the year of his birth: 1969. A few minutes later, he found another dime in the same place, also dated 1969. When he dared the force behind the dimes to make one appear “right now,” about thirty dimes dropped from above his head, all at the same time.
In November 2014, Keith was gifted a prayer card and an indigenous protection necklace. On Christmas day, both items reappeared nailed to a doorframe with the words “Die KL” written in black bone char on the card. The same phrase appeared in his car, as well. Two computer monitors caught fire, and smoldering, burn marks began appearing on Keith's clothing while he was wearing them.
In January, 2015, Keith saw the gray lady for a second time. He was sitting with his back to the sliding door in the kitchen when he saw a face and hands poke out from behind the wall by the stairway. The woman looked disheveled, and her eyes were bulging out of her head. She pulled back behind the wall, and Keith heard footsteps run up the stairs, down the hall, and into the guest bathroom overtop of him. He later determined that in order for the gray lady to have appeared where she did on the stairs, her head would have had to have been 12 feet off the step below her.
Investigations
After a friend contacted the Seattle Catholic Church in April 2014, Keith and Tina made repeated calls for a priest, only to be directed back and forth between the Bothell and Seattle Church. Soon after the poster fire, Keith and Tina managed to speak with Father Northrop of the Bothell Church. Two weeks later, he visited the house to conduct a cleansing, and did several other rituals there in the next few months. Each time, the activity would cease for a few days, then come back worse.
In early fall of 2014, Keith was able to connect with a family that rented the Bothell home in 2008 and '9. The mother, Rhonda Lee Jimenez, admitted that her family had all experienced similar activity, and that she began struggling with depression and alcoholism shortly after they moved in. She developed suicidal thoughts in this house, and made three attempts on her life. Once, she was even raped by a home intruder. Keith obtained a police report from 2009 in which an officer describes arriving at the home to hear Rhonda screaming from inside the garage: “Why are you doing this to me? I just want to go home! Stop it!” She came bursting out of the garage holding a screwdriver, looking completely disheveled and covered in mud, forcing the officer to strike the weapon from her hand after she refused to drop it. Rhonda committed suicide on August 15th, 2016.
Elisa Jaffe, a reporter from Seattle’s KOMO news, visited the Bothell house on October 30th, 2014, then contacted Dave Schrader, chief researcher at the Travel Channel show, Ghost Adventures. Keith and Tina were put in a hotel while the Ghost Adventures team conducted their investigation, although it's known that the probability of experiencing poltergeist activity is higher when the house’s occupants are present. The investigation was a mere five hours, and the Travel Channel aired the episode the following February. Keith claimed that the way that the episode was edited makes it appear that he and Tina were exaggerating or hoaxing it all, even though hoaxing was never uncovered. He believes that the Ghost Adventures team portrayed himself and Tina in a negative light to save face from their fruitless investigation. Still, the show’s team revisited the case for an episode in May 2020 and doubled down on their original assessment.
Keith and Tina broke up in 2015, just a few months after "Demons in Seattle" aired. Keith claimed that two factors in their breakup were the way that Tina was portrayed on the show, and the conjecture from paranormal teams and Church officials that a demonic presence was feeding off of her negative energy. Keith felt determined to stay, lest that be the final word on the haunting.
In the spring of 2015, a paranormal team led by Nicole Novelle reached out to Keith, and had CCTV cameras installed in the house, allowing for constant remote surveillance. Nikki and her team captured a variety of activity, including an image in the bedroom that Keith insisted was the gray lady, which he had then come to believe was actually the form of Rhonda. Novelle then flew out to Seattle with a colleague in late January 2016, and stayed in the house for three and a half weeks. The pair experienced a range of phenomena, including what sounded like a heartbeat coming from Keith’s bed.
In the fall 2015, Keith reached out to the Scientific Establishment of Parapsychology, led by British parapsychologist Steve Mera. After putting Keith through four months of evaluations, Mera and his chief assistant Don Phillips, visited Bothell, Washington in January 2016 and stayed for six days. They too heard footsteps and voices, and had equipment fail, or disappear and relocate: a phenomenon known as asportation. Keith asked Mera’s team to return to Bothell after the activity in the house showed signs of increasing. Nick Kyle, then president of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research, joined the team for an additional seven days - making 13 days total for Mera and Phillips. Mera and his team recorded a total of 523 unexplained vocalizations, the majority of which were part of conversations between different "voices" or with the researchers.
Keith made several unsuccessful attempts at exorcising the house along the way, then moved out entirely on May 8th, 2016. Before leaving, he self-published The Bothell Hell House, which documents all the occurrences up to that point. He republished the same book with added evidence in 2018: The Bothell House 2.0. Mera published his own book on the “Seattle Demon” with author Jenny Ashford in 2016.
Significance
The Bothell house was sold within three months of Keith moving out, and there have been no reports of new activity. However, Keith is occasionally haunted in his current home, also in Seattle, and the two other homes he’s had since 2016. However, since then, he’s also had night terrors and succubus visits. He’s been poked and prodded in his bed, and felt pulsations coming from within the mattress and pillow. Keith documented some of these occurrences, and shared his interpretation of the phenomena in 2019’s Attachments: Poltergeist of Washington State.
Robb Tilley of the Australian Institute of Parapsychology Research claimed that the Bothell House “is right up there with the most frightening of poltergeist cases… a major work, a turning point in poltergeist research." Kirsten A. Thorne, founder of the International Society for Paranormal Research, remarked on the sheer range of activity: “If ever there was a potpourri of paranormal phenomena, this is it. And that is a hallmark of the demonic – the deliberate creation of confusion, the delight in creating chaos, the impossibility of stitching together a story that explains why all this is happening.” The case involved elements of poltergeist activity, intelligent hauntings, residual hauntings, crisis apparitions, and living apparitions, for example. The convergence of these phenomena in the same house in Bothell suggest that at some level, they may all be related.
As Mera explained, most poltergeist cases involve children or adolescents in the home - usually female - as well as family trauma or extremely stressful circumstances. None of that was present in Keith’s case. Also of interest is the age of the home: as Keith discovered, it is something of a dogma amongst paranormal investigators that only old houses can be haunted. Keith said that most of the teams that he called brushed him off when he mentioned the recent build.
As in many cases of hauntings and poltergeists, the activity did not seem to be exclusively attached either to the location or to the people in it. While both Keith and the previous tenant experienced many of the same phenomena, Linder also experienced some of the same activity in three different houses since, and friends of his that engaged with the phenomenon have experienced activity elsewhere.
Keith is convinced that the entire Bothell neighborhood is haunted by some negative energy that was established when the local indigenous peoples were killed off by war and disease, or forced onto reservations. Keith believes that malevolent spirits descended on this area, feeding off the negative energy. He has stated that by engaging with, and even challenging these spirits, and especially by trying to capture them on video, he caused them to grow stronger, and to latch themselves to him.
Keith also believes that the spirits personalized their attacks, and tended to turn his own words, deeds, and beliefs against him. He believes that this is what was meant when he heard a voice say, “I’m a mirror.” For example, after he laid out crosses and Bibles, the phenomenon burned them, and wrote what Keith described as the “cliché” 666 on the wall, and started inverting crosses. Keith also believes that the phenomenon turned himself and Tina against each other, and against the entire outside world, in order to weaken them and feed off their negative energy.
Summary
For a time, at least, the Bothell House in Washington state was home to one of the most active and malevolent hauntings ever to be thoroughly investigated. The case contains a particularly striking range of haunting, poltergeist, and apparitional phenomena, while also standing apart as an anomaly on its own.
Tina Davis no longer discusses her involvement in the public eye, but Keith Linder remains an active proponent of the case. He maintains that he is only trying to spread awareness of hauntings and poltergeists, and to share his evidence and experiences with the scientific community. This commitment has put him through a living nightmare, and may be the reason he is still haunted today.
Notes:
1) Keith Linder, The Bothell House: Poltergeist of Washington State (self published, 2018), 8 - 9.
2) Linder, The Bothell House, 10.
3) Linder, The Bothell House, 19.
4) Linder, The Bothell House, 11 - 13.
5) Linder, The Bothell House, 13 - 18.
6) Linder, The Bothell House, 22 - 23.
7) Linder, The Bothell House, 27 - 29.
8) Keith L., YouTube.com: https://www.youtube.com/@KeithLdemonsinseattle.
9) Linder, The Bothell House, 44 - 47.
10) Linder, The Bothell House, 49.
11) Linder, The Bothell House, 51 - 53.
12) Linder, The Bothell House, 61.
13) Linder, The Bothell House, 67 - 68.
14) Linder, The Bothell House, 73 - 79.
15) Linder, The Bothell House, 80 - 81.
16) Linder, The Bothell House, 82 - 83.
17) For the activity observed during the height of the haunting in April and May, 2014, see Linder, The Bothell House, 80 - 103.
18) Linder, The Bothell House, 95.
19) Linder, The Bothell House, 114: Keith L. @KeithLdemonsinseattle, "Haunted House Office Attack," YouTube.com, June 21, 2015: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q3meCW-YznM.
20) Keith Linder, “Bone Black,” self published December 2016. Available online: https://fliphtml5.com/lglzz/baql/basic.
21) Linder, The Bothell House, 242 - 243, 276 - 281.
22) Linder, The Bothell House, 188 - 193.
23) Keith Linder, “The day the dimes began appearing,” extract from The Bothell House, published on The Ghost Victim Experiment, October 1, 2022: https://theghostvictimexperiment.wordpress.com/2022/10/01/the-day-the-dimes-began-appearing-from-the-book-the-bothell-hell-house-by-keith-linder.
24) Linder, The Bothell House, 234 - 235.
25) Linder, The Bothell House, 240 - 241.
26) Linder, The Bothell House, 88 - 89.
27) Linder, The Bothell House, 99 - 103.
28) Keith Linder, Attachments: Poltergeist of Washington State (Self-published, 2019), 269 - 273.
29) Linder, Attachments, 274 - 282.
30) Peter Christian, KGVO News, https://newstalkkgvo.com. August 16, 2016: https://newstalkkgvo.com/train-strikes-kills-unidentified-woman-near-bonner.
31) Linder, The Bothell House, 207 - 213; Elisa Jaffe, “Bothell man claims his house is haunted: ‘This is no Casper.’” KOMO News, October 30, 2014: https://komonews.com/news/local/bothell-man-claims-his-house-is-haunted-this-is-no-casper; See also the original KOMO news report uploaded by Keith, “KOMO,” December 13, 2020, https://youtu.be/8LSTZT6Qvqc.
32) Linder, The Bothell House, 214 - 216, 248 - 258; “Demons in Seattle aired February 28th, 2015 on the Travel Channel: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4431448; "Demons in Seattle Decoded" aired on May 21, 2020: https://imdb.com/title/tt12371428.
33) Linder, The Bothell House, 259 - 270.
34) Linder, The Bothell House, 301 - 332, 338 - 342, 376 - 409. The investigative team was Nicole "Niki" Novelle, Jenn Berman, Karissa Hartley, Dominick Valerio, and Vanessa Hogle. For more on Nicole Novelle: https://nikiparaunnormal.com.
35) Linder, The Bothell House, 333 - 337, 343 - 375.
36) Jenny Ashford and Steve Mera, House of Fire and Whispers: Investigating the Seattle Demon House (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, August 9, 2016).
37) Keith Linder, Attachments: Poltergeist of Washington State (Self published, 2019).
38) Robb Tilley, “The Bothell Hell House: Poltergeist of Washington state (2nd edition) [Book Review], “the Australian Journal of Parapsychology 19, no. 2 (December 2019), 214.
39) Kirsten A. Thorne, “Keith Linder’s Poltergeist: The Ongoing Saga of the Sadistic Spirits,” International Society for Paranormal Research, International-spr.com, February 26, 2021: https://international-spr.com/2021/02/26/keith-linders-poltergeist-the-ongoing-saga-of-the-sadistic-spirits.
40) Steve Mera, “Demons in Seattle Uncovered," YouTube.com, uploaded by the Supernatural Files, September 6, 2019, https://youtu.be/lAsPe63vWEY, at 1:15:15.
Sources:
This video contains footage from:
"Demons in Seattle Uncovered (Full documentary)." YouTube.com. Uploaded by THE SUPERNATUAL FILES, September 6, 2019: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lAsPe63vWEY&t=1995s.
“Demons in Seattle.” Ghost Adventures, Season 9, Episode 12. Aired February 2015: https://travelchannel.com/shows/ghost-adventures/episodes/demons-in-seattle.
Keith Linders YouTube Channel, “Keith L.”: https://youtube.com/@KeithLdemonsinseattle.
Sources:
Linder, Keith. The Bothell House: Poltergeist of Washington State. Self published, 2018.
Linder, Keith. Attachments: Poltergeist of Washington State Part 2. Self published, 2019.
“Demons in Seattle Uncovered (Full documentary).” YouTube.com. Uploaded by THE SUPERNATUAL FILES, September 6, 2019: https://youtu.be/lAsPe63vWEY.
“Demons in Seattle.” Ghost Adventures, Season 9, Episode 12. Aired February 2015: https://travelchannel.com/shows/ghost-adventures/episodes/demons-in-seattle.
This video uses sound effects downloaded from StockMusic.com.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Research by Jason Charbonneau. Illustrations by V. R. Laurence. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
1) Keith Linder, The Bothell House: Poltergeist of Washington State (self published, 2018), 8 - 9.
2) Linder, The Bothell House, 10.
3) Linder, The Bothell House, 19.
4) Linder, The Bothell House, 11 - 13.
5) Linder, The Bothell House, 13 - 18.
6) Linder, The Bothell House, 22 - 23.
7) Linder, The Bothell House, 27 - 29.
8) Keith L., YouTube.com: https://www.youtube.com/@KeithLdemonsinseattle.
9) Linder, The Bothell House, 44 - 47.
10) Linder, The Bothell House, 49.
11) Linder, The Bothell House, 51 - 53.
12) Linder, The Bothell House, 61.
13) Linder, The Bothell House, 67 - 68.
14) Linder, The Bothell House, 73 - 79.
15) Linder, The Bothell House, 80 - 81.
16) Linder, The Bothell House, 82 - 83.
17) For the activity observed during the height of the haunting in April and May, 2014, see Linder, The Bothell House, 80 - 103.
18) Linder, The Bothell House, 95.
19) Linder, The Bothell House, 114: Keith L. @KeithLdemonsinseattle, "Haunted House Office Attack," YouTube.com, June 21, 2015: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q3meCW-YznM.
20) Keith Linder, “Bone Black,” self published December 2016. Available online: https://fliphtml5.com/lglzz/baql/basic.
21) Linder, The Bothell House, 242 - 243, 276 - 281.
22) Linder, The Bothell House, 188 - 193.
23) Keith Linder, “The day the dimes began appearing,” extract from The Bothell House, published on The Ghost Victim Experiment, October 1, 2022: https://theghostvictimexperiment.wordpress.com/2022/10/01/the-day-the-dimes-began-appearing-from-the-book-the-bothell-hell-house-by-keith-linder.
24) Linder, The Bothell House, 234 - 235.
25) Linder, The Bothell House, 240 - 241.
26) Linder, The Bothell House, 88 - 89.
27) Linder, The Bothell House, 99 - 103.
28) Keith Linder, Attachments: Poltergeist of Washington State (Self-published, 2019), 269 - 273.
29) Linder, Attachments, 274 - 282.
30) Peter Christian, KGVO News, https://newstalkkgvo.com. August 16, 2016: https://newstalkkgvo.com/train-strikes-kills-unidentified-woman-near-bonner.
31) Linder, The Bothell House, 207 - 213; Elisa Jaffe, “Bothell man claims his house is haunted: ‘This is no Casper.’” KOMO News, October 30, 2014: https://komonews.com/news/local/bothell-man-claims-his-house-is-haunted-this-is-no-casper; See also the original KOMO news report uploaded by Keith, “KOMO,” December 13, 2020, https://youtu.be/8LSTZT6Qvqc.
32) Linder, The Bothell House, 214 - 216, 248 - 258; “Demons in Seattle aired February 28th, 2015 on the Travel Channel: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4431448; "Demons in Seattle Decoded" aired on May 21, 2020: https://imdb.com/title/tt12371428.
33) Linder, The Bothell House, 259 - 270.
34) Linder, The Bothell House, 301 - 332, 338 - 342, 376 - 409. The investigative team was Nicole "Niki" Novelle, Jenn Berman, Karissa Hartley, Dominick Valerio, and Vanessa Hogle. For more on Nicole Novelle: https://nikiparaunnormal.com.
35) Linder, The Bothell House, 333 - 337, 343 - 375.
36) Jenny Ashford and Steve Mera, House of Fire and Whispers: Investigating the Seattle Demon House (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, August 9, 2016).
37) Keith Linder, Attachments: Poltergeist of Washington State (Self published, 2019).
38) Robb Tilley, “The Bothell Hell House: Poltergeist of Washington state (2nd edition) [Book Review], “the Australian Journal of Parapsychology 19, no. 2 (December 2019), 214.
39) Kirsten A. Thorne, “Keith Linder’s Poltergeist: The Ongoing Saga of the Sadistic Spirits,” International Society for Paranormal Research, International-spr.com, February 26, 2021: https://international-spr.com/2021/02/26/keith-linders-poltergeist-the-ongoing-saga-of-the-sadistic-spirits.
40) Steve Mera, “Demons in Seattle Uncovered," YouTube.com, uploaded by the Supernatural Files, September 6, 2019, https://youtu.be/lAsPe63vWEY, at 1:15:15.
Sources:
This video contains footage from:
"Demons in Seattle Uncovered (Full documentary)." YouTube.com. Uploaded by THE SUPERNATUAL FILES, September 6, 2019: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lAsPe63vWEY&t=1995s.
“Demons in Seattle.” Ghost Adventures, Season 9, Episode 12. Aired February 2015: https://travelchannel.com/shows/ghost-adventures/episodes/demons-in-seattle.
Keith Linders YouTube Channel, “Keith L.”: https://youtube.com/@KeithLdemonsinseattle.
Sources:
Linder, Keith. The Bothell House: Poltergeist of Washington State. Self published, 2018.
Linder, Keith. Attachments: Poltergeist of Washington State Part 2. Self published, 2019.
“Demons in Seattle Uncovered (Full documentary).” YouTube.com. Uploaded by THE SUPERNATUAL FILES, September 6, 2019: https://youtu.be/lAsPe63vWEY.
“Demons in Seattle.” Ghost Adventures, Season 9, Episode 12. Aired February 2015: https://travelchannel.com/shows/ghost-adventures/episodes/demons-in-seattle.
This video uses sound effects downloaded from StockMusic.com.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Research by Jason Charbonneau. Illustrations by V. R. Laurence. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
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