‘Our roommate went and grabbed his holy water.’

Donnybrook was torn down over the summer.
Courtesy | Daniel Doyle

The heavy metal door flung open with a bang, and three roommates huddled 20 feet away. They edged up to the door and found nothing inside, nothing to explain how the door into the garage had flown open.

“Do not take your eyes off that door,” a roommate whispered in the darkness to Luke Martin ’17 and David Johnson ’17. They stood facing the door outside of the garage at the then-off-campus house, Donnybrook.

Martin and Johnson currently run the band “Lost Mary,” which has 155,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Their song “Donnybrook” was written about the haunting memories of living in the house.

In 2016, Martin and Johnson were living in Donnybrook for their junior year. The house, which has since been demolished, had a legend of one room in the basement where multiple people had gone insane.

“It’s the basement room, and there’ve been multiple cases of people who’ve stayed in that room, and have gone crazy: schizophrenic and paranoid,” Martin said. “The older Donnybrook generations were into weird things. One of them drew pentagrams in one of the closets. There was another guy who was a self-claimed pagan and would worship the tree in the back.”

Prior to living there, Martin and Johnson were unaware of the oddities that had occurred at Donnybrook in the years past.

“People would say ‘Did you know Donnybrook is haunted?’” Johnson said. “At the time, it was kind of cool and creepy. But then one of our housemates, who was living in that basement room, started snapping.”

Martin interrupted: “He started to tell us he would hear voices, and got super paranoid about the house, and then he’d snap,” Martin said. “He would take all the glasses on the table and start throwing them against the walls, breaking them.”

Johnson and Martin said the same roommate would take loaves of bread and shred them around the house while they studied.

“It was insanely disturbing, there was nothing funny about it,” Martin said.

Martin described an evening where the roommate said he needed to talk with him but began acting erratically. According to Martin, the roommate then locked himself in his room for three days, chain-smoking cigarettes, wearing a black suit, red tie, and fingerless gloves.

“There was something very demonic about it,” Martin said.

The following weeks, Johnson, Martin, and their seven other roommates devised a plan to remove the roommate from Donnybrook.

“We knew we had to get this guy out of the house. We called it the four-week plan,” Martin said.

After they had succeeded and the roommate had moved out of Donnybrook, Martin said it soon became evident there was something else going on.

“I was in Johnson’s room, and it was probably 12 a.m.,” Martin said. “We heard a gunshot in the distance. So we turned off the lights, looked outside, and didn’t see anything. DJ [Johnson] then goes downstairs to get some water, and he comes back up into the room, and he says, ‘Dude, I smell sulfur in the house.’”

Johnson said the two went to the living room to investigate.

“Our buddy was there studying and then we went down to the basement, where this room was,” Johnson said.

As they crept downstairs, they decided to check the lock on the back door. The smell of sulfur grew stronger as they descended, and Martin slowly reached for the door handle.

“DJ was right behind me, I went up to the door to make sure it was locked,” Martin said. “I was looking out the window of the door, and there was nothing out there. Then, sure enough, a loud bang hits on the window.”

They jolted and looked out, but nothing was out there.

“It felt like all of my guts were just coming out,” Johnson said.

Martin recounted the moment he realized something was not right.

“I turned around, DJ looked at my face and I had gone pale white because something hit the door, but there was nothing there. We could barely stand. We were shaking,” Martin said.

Martin and Johnson ran upstairs to their roommate, who was studying. He instructed them to go to bed, saying they were just spooked.

“We went upstairs but then we went back downstairs,” Martin said. “Our roommate who was studying was now upright in blankets on the couch with a violin bow in his hand, staring straight forward, looking terrified. He looks at us and says, ‘I can hear the windows, they have been opening and closing.’”

The fear was tangible, Martin and Johnson said. They got their roommate to go outside and investigate.

“We went outside — you grabbed your baseball bat,” Martin said, indicating Johnson. “I grabbed my buck knife, and our roommate grabbed a samurai sword. We went outside and we started inching our way around the side of the house, and we got to the edge on the other side of the garage. All three of us are standing right here, and the door to the garage. The metal shed just flew open with a huge bang. Inside the door was just blackness. And all three of us just froze and watched the door, waiting for something to come out.”

Martin said they were paralyzed with fear and wanted to find out what had caused the door to open.

“DJ went inside, got a flashlight, came back to us, and it took us 15 minutes to inch our way up to this door,” Martin said. “We finally get to the door, and we shine the flashlight in there — nothing. There was nothing in there, but it was unbelievable the way the door just flew open.”

Johnson said they were trying not to think it was paranormal, and  they tested the door to see if the wind caused it to swing open.

“We’re trying to be super rational,” Johnson said. “We were like, ‘Was it the wind?’ ‘was it just something weird?’ We were feeling the door to see how heavy it was, how quickly it swung, and how loud the bang had been.”

At that point, Martin said, it all began to feel demonic.

“Our roommate went and grabbed his holy water,” he said. “We went to each individual room of the house, saying his Latin prayers and sprinkling holy water in each and every room.”

The three roommates made their way through the entire house, and they finally came to the basement room where their former roommate had lived.

“We opened the door, turned on the light, there were flies everywhere,” Martin said. “But it was January and there should be no flies.”

Martin said they quickly sprinkled the room with holy water and left the room. They did not enter it again.

In the following weeks, seven of the eight roommates experienced sleep paralysis.

“I experienced it, too,” Martin said. “One roommate would wake up and he would see this other kid standing over his bed, and he couldn’t move, stuck in sleep paralysis.”

Another roommate, Andrew Kern ’18, said his sleep paralysis would happen at the same time as his roommate that shared his room.

“We would have dreams where we had the same dream at the same time,” Kern said. “We were both in the dream, and we were both being attacked by a demon. I remember sitting up in my bed and, gasping for air, and then over in his bed, seeing him sit up and ask, ‘Did you see that?’”

Without a doubt, the basement was haunted, Kern said.

“The basement looks back at you,” Kern said. “The shadows are watching you. You’d hear windows opening and closing by themselves. There’d be footsteps when nobody’s there. If you went out in the woods — just everywhere you went, the shadows were watching you. There was definitely a very palpable darkness.”

When their junior year ended, Martin and Johnson attempted to forget the haunting memories of Donnybrook, but it has since been difficult to forget entirely.

“Before he moved out of the house, the roommate stayed in the garage for a few days,” Johnson said. “The lyrics ‘The Devil’s next door in the cabin cell’ were because of that.”

The song, which has more than 370,000 streams on Spotify, was a way for them to move on from the experience, Johnson said.

“Think of a friend of yours, if they started acting incrementally stranger and stranger,” Johnson said. “You know something’s going on, you might even get used to it, but at some point it gets abnormal.”