Believe me dear readers, in my years as a paranormal investigator I know what I can and cannot expect from a particular investigation. My motto is always: reality is real. And that rule applies to these events as well. That is why I rate the investigation of the farmhouse in Maršovice as one of the few places in our country that tested the limits of this saying of mine. Although in the video itself we soberly conveyed that the biggest discovery was the contents of the former pond at the house, the truth here is more complicated. And the more water that has passed since the investigation in question, the stranger the results we have seen here.

Let us begin by saying that I had never heard of any Marshes before the investigation. If anyone had told me over a cup of coffee or a glass of beer that it was a cellar in Moravia, or a bus stop in the highlands, I would have believed them. For paranormal investigators, it's a completely untouched, pristine place. Yet a family on a farm called Topolovina experiences what they believe to be paranormal phenomena.

According to the narrative, types of paranormal activity take place here, ranging from purely subjective sensations that we cannot objectively confirm: feelings of pressure in the chest, sudden nausea, feelings of panic on the stairs to the first floor (this was later experienced by Katerina Běhanová without knowing the legend), etc. To objectively recordable anomalies, perhaps even here concretised into revelations: the owner's conversation with a person she thought was her husband, even though she was home alone at the time. Seeing the figure of a man by several people at once in a place where no one was. The spontaneous opening and closing of doors (which falls under kinetic paranormal activity), banging on the dining room table, and seeing the figure of a man in a window facing the yard where no stranger has access. Animals sometimes behave in the same strange way, for example two cats watching one empty window on the first floor (see attached photo below).

I can give my own testimony to the above on my own behalf. When I stayed overnight in this house with the actress during the filming of the feature film The White Death (in the unfinished pub on the ground floor), at about four o'clock in the morning (a year after the investigation), as it was beginning to dawn, there was a crash from the first floor. It woke me up to find that something had opened the door to the room above us, which we had closed that evening after filming. And there was no one else in the house but us.

We arrived in Maršovice in August 2017, yes two years before writing this article. It was not an easy time for us, because we had returned from an expedition in Romania and had a veritable ocean of videos to analyze. So my personal expectations from Marsovice were not high, after all, after Hoia Baciu I expected that there would be again several years of absolutely peaceful research, where key mysteries would be revealed and explained. Well, I'm only human.

At the time of our arrival, the Topolovina farm was one big construction site divided into two parts. One residential, where the family lived, and the other with a dismantled pub on the ground floor and on the first floor a building site divided into several living cubicles plus a modern attic extension. There was little of the former furniture left and we could only guess what had been used where. Yet the whole area had one more specification. Ten years before our investigation, it had burned down shortly before Christmas. It hadn't burned to the ground, of course, but the black ceiling, the blackened window frames, all were still visible as a kind of memento of the past.

A year and a half after the investigation, I was contacted by a person who had lived there before and experienced the fire first-hand. For this reason I can - if not by video - enrich the article with further interesting testimony.

Before Christmas 2007, Topolovina was caught in a house fire in one wing of the house. It was a part of the house that was occupied, and the electronic equipment was on fire. Apparently a short circuit. No one noticed the fire in its initial stage, it was when everyone was asleep, until a barking dog roused the occupants of the house and drove them out. The fire destroyed the first floor of the house. It did not reach the second wing of the building. Later that part of the house was rebuilt and raised by a new floor. However, the work had to be interrupted due to moving.

It is interesting to note, however, that even from the point of view of the original owners of the house, there were, according to one member with whom I had the honour of speaking personally, similar phenomena of abnormality, which were previously described to me by a witness, but who never met this person.

I have no doubt that 99% of the time the fire had a rational explanation. It is true that in the few recorded cases of poltergeist in our area, there has always been first kinetic paranormal activity (spontaneous movement of objects) in these cases, which shortly thereafter evolved into spontaneous ignition activity of specific objects. Jaroslav Mareš informs about this well in one of his videos (he also gives specific testimonies). However, given that none of this happened before or after our research and the abnormalities in the electromagnetic field were not so intense for such radical manifestations, I lean more towards a rational cause of the fire, because paranormal activity here has a different disposition.

We did paranormal research in the area that burned. That's where most of the paranormal testimony comes from, and that's where the owner is afraid to go. Cameras, electromagnetic field meters, motion detectors, sound recorders, we've been monitoring reality here really closely.

During the day we also looked into a local legend that said that at the end of the war the Nazis dumped all the military material they had stored here into the pond. To give you the historical context: this whole area was displaced in order to train the soldiers of Nazi Germany. But by nightfall, we hadn't found any military material. For this reason, we returned to the house to investigate further into the paranormal and leave this research into the bottom of the former pond with the metal detector again until the following day.

The first phase of the investigation to monitor the natural electromagnetic field was a great success. Everything was fully compliant with standards and nothing showed abnormalities. Except for one of our devices called a motion detector. It was showing motion all the way through. I mean, movement that wasn't noticeable. So either it's doing its job perfectly and something we can't see is warming up to it, or it's not working properly, which later detailed analysis confirmed.

The second phase, called the intervention phase (because we are now using the facts obtained by the first phase to make various methodological interventions in a controlled environment to investigate whether the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field and in the other units of measurement are normal or abnormal and why) did not work as it should have because a factor we had not counted on intervened. The storm.

 With its arrival, our electromagnetic field meters began to show strong fluctuations. During our research, a tightly sealed window was ripped out (perhaps by the wind) and temperatures flew like a wild goose chase towards lower values. The electromagnetic field abnormalities, however, showed no sign of any communication, for example. They appeared randomly.

For these reasons, we decided not to have a third phase of investigation called isolation and try to solve at least the mystery of electromagnetism during the storm.

It was in fact a unique opportunity for us to explore natural phenomena on a haunted house device. It was true that now the instruments were driving us crazy, but this madness had no logic. It happened randomly, whether the lightning illuminated the sky or not. Simply a desperate situation for us, because a rational explanation would not and could not come. Then the storm moved away, but the abnormalities in the EMF field continued for another hour or so.

Then from about three to four o'clock in the morning there was complete calm and both the weather and the equipment were as in the first phase of the research, i.e. no abnormalities, status quo.

Later analysis of the recordings did not yield camera discoveries, but some really interesting dictaphone recordings. In fact, several interesting situations occurred during the research. The first took place before the storm, when Kateřina Běhanová heard a voice. It was later found on the recorder and is part of the documentary film The Ghosts of Maršovice Farm. It is therefore not an EVP because it was physically heard by a human being, i.e. not just in the form of an electronic device such as a dictaphone.

The second interesting situation happened an hour after the window decided to switch from the "closed" to the "open" position with the approaching storm. Kateřina Běhanová was standing by the stairs to the ground floor at the time. Then she heard footsteps coming towards her. At the same moment Michala Valešková started to register the reaction to the K2 EMF meter in her hands on the other side of the house, in an empty room. The camera recorded all this, so we have a good recording of the moment of Katya's acoustic phenomenon and of Misha's reaction to the K2 EMF meter. However, we did not hear the actual sounds of footsteps due to the rain drumming on the windows and therefore cannot confirm them evidentially.

What we did hear, however, is one EVP after the storm had passed, and everything began to return to calm. On that audio recording we are all (i.e., Michala Valešková, Kateřina Běhanová, Kamil Valeška and Ondřej Bezouška) in one room near the stairs to the ground floor. We reflect on current events and abnormalities previously recorded. At that moment a voice that does not belong to any of us is heard, and we agree that it says two words of two syllables concretised as "come away".

You can see all the EVP and other interesting facts from the research with your own eyes in the documentary Ghosts of the Maršovice Farm, which you can find on our youtube channel and which we attach below for viewing. It also covers the EVP we mentioned above.

What to say in conclusion? Well, let's go back to Maršovice on the second day after the investigation. It was there that Michal and Kamil found a major discovery in the soil by the pond dam. A discovery that turned legend into fact. Yes, discarded ammunition and other remnants of military equipment from the end of World War II were found after fleeing Nazis. This discovery is a beautiful capstone to this investigation. Often, legends will always remain legends. No more evidence can be traced to dismantle the information into fact and myth. Here it has been done. And even if nothing paranormal had happened here, this would have been a success. So the research at Marsovice has been a successful expedition for us, introducing us to a truly paranormally active site, where we have also discovered physical remains proving our nation's hard times.

Author of article: Ondřej Bezouška

video of the investigation

• in Czech, without English subtitles