Shaka Estancia Benítez: the house where a family left everything and the night the meters measured what we felt
In the Uruguayan countryside, between Lavalleja and Canelones, in the middle of a field with nothing around it, the Estancia Benítez Hernández is still standing: more than 200 years of history and a house where one family lived for generations, until one day they left and took nothing with them. I went in at night with my cousin, Gonzalo González, to see whether the paranormal phenomenon was as real as people say. And to try something I had never tried in a place like this: the Ouija board.
Note: the video is in Spanish. This page is the full story in English.
A ranch older than Uruguay itself
Before going I looked for information and found nothing. Everything I tell here we discovered on site, starting with a stone that says that in 1824 Don José Benítez Hernández bought this land. That's a time when Uruguay didn't exist yet: the Cruzada Libertadora, the campaign that led to independence, was still a year away.
Later, his son built this house, where the family lived for generations. From the outside it is still standing, although inside there are parts where the roof has caved in.
A time capsule
You expect to find an empty house, and instead it's full of things:
- School notebooks from 1911, where a child copied out a dialogue by hand: "Your dad and my mom, how are they? I heard your dad was ill." Next to them, still, the pen it was written with more than a hundred years ago.
- A frame with the name Rufina Benítez, the same surname that appears on the stone outside.
- The floor covered with newspapers and magazines from the 1930s and 40s, from the Second World War, where you can still read a headline: "Victories on all fronts".
- The ranch's papers: sheep records and day-to-day work sheets.
- And the wedding photo, with the bride and groom on their wedding day.
That's what struck me most. You can forget a lot of things, but nobody forgets their wedding photo. The whole life of a family stayed in there, a family that one day left, without anyone knowing when or why. And other investigators who have been inside claim that things happen there.
The night: first, nothing
We started after 8 p.m., with a K2, a Mel Meter, an SB7 Spirit Box, a sound recorder and a laser grid. The first things we found were bats, lots of them, and the smell of a skunk I had seen that afternoon in one of the rooms.
The first part of the house was very quiet. I did an SB7 session in the room with the old magazines, asking if anyone with the surname Benítez was there, and there wasn't a single voice. I didn't feel anything either: no tingling, no chill, no feeling of being watched. We ruled out the basement quickly: it's propped up with rotten posts and it was dangerous.
And it's good that this happens too. When you don't feel anything, the equipment says exactly the same.
The room where everything changed
In another room, everything changed. As soon as we walked in, Gonzalo started to feel a tight chest, as if it was hard to breathe and he had to take deep breaths. And right there the equipment started to register: first the K2, which is the most sensitive, and then the Mel Meter too.
I left the devices on a chair and asked that, if someone was there, they sit down and push them to orange. It reached orange twice, counted. At one point we were getting readings on both devices at once. And it wasn't interference between the devices: when we took them, together, to another room, they registered nothing.
"What amazes me is how the readings went hand in hand with Gonzalo's difficulty breathing. I always say the first instrument is the body. The rest confirms it."
Just as it started, it went away. I sent Gonzalo alone, twice more, with the K2, to the same room: he didn't feel anything and the device didn't register anything. The phenomenon is sometimes momentary: it shows up at one point and then, even if you stay until 5 a.m., it doesn't come back.
To be honest, there were two things I don't count as evidence:
- The door that had been closed and was found open. It was very windy that night and there was an open window on the other side. It could have been the wind.
- A scratching on the brick wall, which I recorded. To me it was some animal. That said, it was very curious that the noise stopped at exactly the same moment the equipment did.
The Ouija experiment
As many of you know, to me the Ouija board isn't just a game. That's why I wanted to do an experiment: use it while measuring with the equipment, to see whether the phenomenon on the board is as real as people say.
We set it up in another room, with the REM-Pod, the Mel Meter, the recorder and the laser grid, in case something passed through and distorted the light. I asked for the planchette to move on its own, and then we tried barely touching it. Nothing happened: not a movement, not a change in the equipment, not a sensation.
I think we tried it too late: by the time we got to that part, the atmosphere had already changed. So I'll stick up for the Ouija. It didn't work and there was no evidence, but I'm not ruling it out. We have to keep trying in places where the atmosphere is dense, and take advantage of that moment.
What I take with me
An investigation isn't all bogeymen, screams or voices. That night we got no voices on the SB7, and the Ouija gave nothing. But we were able to measure a feeling: what Gonzalo felt in that room was picked up by the equipment, and when the feeling went away, the equipment went quiet with it.
And it was the first time Gonzalo came with me. As he said at the end: watching a video is one thing, being there is another.
The video (in Spanish)
The full investigation: we spent the night at Estancia Benítez · Watch on YouTube
A request
The house is in very bad condition: there are collapsed roofs and a basement that could cave in. It's not a place to go into without permission. And if you ever go to a place like this, be respectful: a family's whole life stayed there.
🔦 Did you see the flashlight on the home page? One of the hidden recordings is from this night: look for the phrase "I measured a presence".
From the blog (in Spanish)
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