This podcast details true crime cases.

It contains adult themes and may contain descriptions of violence.

It is not intended for children.

Listener discretion is advised.

Thank you for joining me for today's episode of Once Upon a Crime.

We're in the series Ghosts in the Attic,

where I share cases of people who experience strange noises and disturbances inside their homes,

only to discover that someone was lurking within their very walls,

just waiting for a chance to attack.

In this final episode of the series, a disturbed young man goes from burglarizing homes to stalking young girls in their own home

before committing a shocking multiple murder.

This is chapter three of Ghosts in the Attic, the case of Daniel Lapland.

In a small Massachusetts town, a widowed father was raising his two daughters after the tragic death of his wife.

She had died the previous year after a battle with cancer.

The girls were barely into their teens when their mother was ripped out of their lives so cruelly.

Their father did the best that he could to see the needs of his two teenage daughters.

The girls missed their mother desperately, so much so that they got an idea in their heads to try and make contact with her from beyond.

One evening, when their father was away working his shift as a bus driver,

the girls took it upon themselves to conduct a say-on in their basement, hoping to communicate with their mother's spirit.

It was a crisp fall evening, and as the wind whistled outside in the evening grew dark,

the girls made their way downstairs to the basement with a couple of candles and a book checked out from the library on how to conduct a say-ons.

They sat across from each other on the cold cement floor of the basement and grasped each other's hands.

...