Jake Cordero here of The Austin Séance. During the weekend of May 2-3, 2025, my partner Albert Lucio and I facilitated several short séance sessions on the grounds of the Scream Hollow Halloween Park, located in the Lost Pines Forest area of Bastrop County.  I took the photo shown at right during one of those sessions, at about 11 p.m., on Saturday, May 3rd. This is my testimony describing the dramatic events I witnessed that weekend.

Clearing in the Woods
As you can see from the photo, we were conducting the sessions outdoors, in a clearing in the woods.  In this image my partner Albert is standing at the head of the table, just in front of the tree with the red light. I’m not pictured because I was behind the camera, standing on the table’s opposite end. The image also shows our sitters gathered around. All of the sitters described in this testimony — indeed, all the sitters who joined us for the entire weekend — were entirely unknown to us and for privacy reasons we did not ask them to identify themselves.

This clearing is located in the back of the 20-acre holiday park, which had contracted with us to provide services for a weekend masquerade ball. Park staff informed us in advance that several abandoned and now unmarked gravesites were located near or at this site and also that it was the location of various troubling events, including one recent case in which several paranormal investigators had become physically ill.  The park workers themselves (and even a member of my own family) likewise reported a sense of unease around the clearing.

Sitter Collapses
Shortly after I snapped this photo, in the midst of the séance we were facilitating, one of the sitters reported sensing the clear presence of someone or something named “Charlie.” We then began asking this purported entity questions, attempting first to get some notion of their appearance. We failed to receive any clear response to that first question and so followed up with others:  “How old are you?” ” How did you pass? ” At about this time another of the participants, a man sitting at the front edge of the table no more than two feet from where I was standing, unexpectedly began convulsing. He then fell back from his chair. I rushed to help just as he collapsed to the forest floor and started crawling in a panic on all fours away from the séance table. He was groaning and gagging and spitting up something rather violently, and at first I thought he was choking or had eaten something that hadn’t agreed with him. But the gentleman, clearly in crisis, made it clear then and shortly afterwards that he had been affected by the proceedings, that he had become overcome by one of the spirits with whom we were attempting to communicate, and that this spirit had taken at least partial control of his body.  During the episode it looked as if he was trying to expel something, almost as if the gentleman might start producing ectoplasm. 

He was helped to his feet and away from the clearing by Albert, one of the park workers, and some of the gentleman’s friends. Albert checked on his welfare. The gentleman was obviously badly shaken (as were we all) and it took him at least a half hour to regain his wits. I went again to check on his welfare afterwards, and standing exhausted with friends outside the park he repeated that he had felt that something had entered his body. He also seemed to have lost some memory about what had just transpired, judging from what he said to friends.  But he otherwise seemed to have recovered somewhat.

This was the fourth session we had facilitated that evening, and each seemed more strange than the last.  One of the messages we received during an earlier session was “I am tired.”  We also received several names other than “Charlie.”  After the troubling incident May 3rd we closed the circle, thanked the spirits for joining us, and asked respectfully that they might depart. Some of our sitters wanted to continue soldiering on, but given the circumstances we thought it best not to press our luck. That was our last session of the weekend.

X Marks The Spot
The night before we also facilitated three other mini sessions, and during each we separately received messages relating to the symbol “X”, the word “ex”, or a cross.  One of the sitters became quite emotionally distraught upon receiving the “cross” message, which she said had appeared very clearly in her mind during the session. Several sitters who had been working separately with a ouija board before our séance sessions also reported receiving the mysterious X message from the board.  We were unsure what to make of the “X”, “ex”, and cross messages, but one of the sitters associated them with crossroads symbols. To my knowledge, the sitters in each of these unconnected sessions did not know one another and had not conspired in advance, and so it seemed particularly strange to me that such similar symbology would figure so prominently in each of these separate gatherings.

I affirm that the above statement, to the best of my ability, describes factually events I witnessed on the weekend of May 2-3, 2025.

— Jake Cordero
      May 5, 2025