She Asked TikTok If Her House Was Haunted. Then the Cops Came

When Katie Santry picks up the call, the police have just finished their investigation. It’s 10 pm on Thursday, and, she says, cops are staying outside her Columbus, Ohio, home all night. She’s candid and friendly for someone going through what she is. Local news and curious neighbors have been outside much of the day. Online, hundreds of thousands of people have become voyeurs in her saga. Police are standing guard around the clock.

This is what happens when you ask TikTok if your house is haunted.

A few days ago, Santry and her boyfriend were putting in a fence in their yard and noticed a strange object while digging: something that appeared to be a rolled-up rug buried in the ground. A few days later, the 34-year-old opened her laptop to find the screen cracked and items on her desk misplaced. Her boyfriend and their kids said they didn’t have anything to do with it. She posted a TikTok talking about the rug and wondering aloud if her home was haunted: “I’m literally shaking.”

Santry went viral. The video currently has more than 3.1 million views.

Online sleuths—“motherfuckers,” Santry calls them—began pestering her for updates, telling her to dig up the rug, call the police. Eventually she did call, but the cops opted not to investigate further after seeing the rug.

On Thursday morning, however, Santry posted that she and some friends were going to dig up the rug later that day. Before she could, homicide investigators from the Columbus Police Department called and said they were coming. They brought cadaver dogs.

As the police searched, Santry went Live on TikTok. Investigators brought two dogs. The first one sat, indicating it smelled human remains. The second one did the same. Santry “started crying on the Live” and stopped the feed. (WIRED tried calling the public information office for the Columbus Police Department to seek comment, and the voicemail box was full. A spokesperson told The Columbus Dispatch on Friday that what was buried in Santry’s yard “could be anything” and that police were still investigating.)

“If I don’t get on a murder podcast after this, I’m going to be pissed,” Santry said in a post later Thursday night. “I’m not trying to, like, make a joke out of it … I’m absolutely freaked out, and this is how I handle things: dark humor.”

WIRED spoke to Santry late on Thursday night about that feed, being hounded online, and what it’s like when a true-crime admirer finds themselves at the center of their own episode.

Angela Watercutter: Hi, how are you?

Katie Santry: I am …

Sorry, I realized that was the wrong question as soon as I started saying it.

Yeah. I naturally almost went, “I’m good! How are you?” But it’s been a day.

I guess I’ll just go right into it. What is happening at your house right now? I think you said on TikTok that the police were staying overnight.

So there’s two or three police officers outside the house right now. They’re staying overnight, and then they are planning on having crime scene investigators here tomorrow morning.

How is that affecting your life? Obviously it’s upside down, I would imagine.

I’m technically trying to protect our address as much as possible. Actually, there was a Live going on TikTok with thousands of people in it and a few people hosting it, and one of them apparently lives in my neighborhood, and I actually popped on and asked them to stop talking about where we live because they were describing my house and they were saying that we left and that the police made us leave. I came on and I basically said, “Hey, we’re still here, and I would really like it if you’d stop explaining exactly what our house looks like and where we live.”

They actually ended the Live, which I appreciated. But I know there’s a few others going on right now too.

A few other Lives in your neighborhood?

Not in my neighborhood. There’s just a lot of Lives going on currently on TikTok of people talking about it and trying to figure out where I live, who I am.

Right. Everyone’s an investigator now. When you replied to my email earlier, you said you were locking down your Facebook. I imagine that was also part of this, right?

I was trying to make my Facebook private. I was trying to edit my name on Facebook just to help protect myself. Where I work and all that stuff was public on my Facebook. So yeah, I was just trying to edit that down to help myself.

It’s so wild to me when somebody goes viral, people will find out so many things so quickly.

My sister went into a Live and said that people are trying to figure out where I work. My sister’s freaking out. So luckily we have two large dogs. We have an alarm system, and we have three police officers outside. So I feel safe.

But it’s definitely bringing anxiety, everything that happened tonight, because I honestly expected the [police cadaver] dogs to find nothing and to put a bow on this and wrap it up and say, “OK, this has been fun, but it’s done now.”

Have the police said anything more? I imagine they’re done for this evening now.

The detectives that were here today are going to come back, and the police that are here tonight are just maintaining the crime scene and keeping our house safe.

Did you imagine any of this happening when you posted that first TikTok about your computer being broken?

Not in a million years. Basically when I came downstairs and I saw my laptop was shattered, and everyone is saying that they didn’t do it, it was like, “It was the ghost from the dead body in the rug.” It was a joke. Then I posted that and everyone’s like, “No, but really what’s in the rug?” I had no intent of digging it out.

After it blew up, I did call the police. They came out, they looked at it, they called somebody and whoever they called was not interested in it at all. So they left and they said we could dig it out ourselves, and if we found anything, we could call them back.

Do you wonder, because you had said this morning on TikTok that you were going to dig it up yourselves, that that’s what perhaps got the police to come back?

I’m sure that’s why they ended up here, because the virality of what was happening, if we had found something and the world already knew that they were here and gone and they didn’t care, I think the Columbus Police Department would’ve been under an immense amount of fire.

How have they been communicating with you about this?

They were so nice. They were telling me how the dogs are trained. That these dogs can go to a cemetery and mark on a body that was buried a hundred years ago, and that’s just wild to me. TMI, not to gross you out, but humans smell very different as they decompose than animals. So that’s how they’re able to decipher the difference between a dead dog and a dead person.

But they did say that there’s a potential that someone had a bloody nose or cut themselves, and there’s just blood [on the rug]. So there’s not necessarily … I’m banking on the fact that hopefully there’s not actually a body, and it maybe is just they caught wind of something else.

How does it feel at the center of all of this? I think you called folks on TikTok “impatient little bitches” for constantly asking you for updates.

They’re impatient motherfuckers, that’s for sure.

Tell me about that. In some ways, maybe this will help you find some resolution, but people can also be intense about these things.

If it wasn’t for TikTok, I never would’ve called the police. I felt so silly calling them that very first time and saying, “Hey, there’s a rug in the ground. I don’t know if you care, but come on by if you do.” I felt so dumb making that call.

But honestly, and I told the police right after the dog hit, I looked at the detectives and I was like, if it wasn’t for TikTok, this would’ve never happened. Obviously we don’t know what’s going to unfold in the coming days, but if something does, I don’t know, get solved, it wouldn’t have happened without TikTok. So I appreciate their impatient motherfucker bitchy attitudes.

Yes, I bet.

But there were times where it was overwhelming because I was out of town and a lot of people were getting really frustrated that I wasn’t digging and I wasn’t moving it faster, but I was not home. So that was kind of overwhelming to have thousands of people basically yelling at you over the internet. I was responding to some of them, and I was like, “I’m not there. I am literally working. TikTok isn’t my job.” I didn’t anticipate it to do what it has done.

This all started like four or five days ago. How many followers have you gathered in that amount of time?

I went from, let’s see, I haven’t honestly been on TikTok in hours. I went from 6,000 to 576,000, so I’ve gained 570,000 followers.

[Editor’s note: As of this writing, she now has 1.6 million followers.]

Geez.

This is insane. That’s the first time I’ve looked and seen it. This morning, I was at 200 something, so just today I’ve gone from 200,000 something to half a million people. That’s the first time I’ve looked.

I’m sorry I made you look, to be honest.

No, it’s so insane.

I’m interested in the sleuth aspect. I know because you’ve said in a couple of your TikToks that you are a true-crime aficionado.

Absolutely.

I’m sure you understand the sort of impulse of why people do this, but it seems like a reversal to now be potentially the center.

I feel like I’m in an episode of Crime Junkie. I usually just listen to it as I drive to work, and now I feel like I’m in an episode, so I’m like, where’s Ashley Flowers? Where is she at? We need to talk. Yeah.

I was alone for the first time, just now, for a minute without my phone blowing up. I just took a deep breath and I’m like, I’ve watched this happen to other people in movies, and the fact that it’s happening to me is blowing my mind.

Maybe this sounds like an obvious question, but does it feel different? There are a lot of conversations about the impact of people’s fascination with true crime. Has there been a moment where it got more real, in a way?

So when I was on the Live, I was singing Jeopardy! songs, because between the detectives getting here and the dogs getting here was 45 minutes. So I kept saying, “This is the commercial break,” and I full-on thought not a chance in hell was this going to happen. This was a fun ending to a crazy story, and what a cool way to end this whole thing. The dogs see nothing. They leave, case closed. That’s what I was expecting.

Then the dogs smelled something.

Yeah, that first dog sat, and I audibly in the video, you hear me go and I start shaking, and that’s when it became real to me. The second that white dog sat, I was like, “This just got so different.”

I bet.

You see things like this on social media and you’re like, “Oh, that’s so insane. One in a million.” To be that one in a million, I can’t even put it into words how out-of-body … I keep feeling like I am just going to wake up, and this was all just a crazy dream.

A couple days ago you were making T-shirts.

Well, back when we, I think we had just hit 10,000 followers, we made T-shirts that said, “Just keep digging.” Again, it was a joke. Then other T-shirts that said, “I’m just here for the update.” Pretty much what every comment on my videos would say.

So yeah, my sister works in graphic design, so she made the designs and yeah, This was a funny, haha, let’s ride the wave and then move it into something different once this is all done.

Was there a moment in this where it went from “Is this a haunting?” to “This might actually be something”?

The second the dog sat. Until then, I was like, this is so crazy, and I’m glad that the police are crossing their T’s and dotting their I’s, but this is going to be nothing, and this is just going to be funny. OK, well, we’re done now. This has been fun. Thanks for watching. When that dog sat, I can’t even express the shock that head to toe went through my body of no fucking way.

Also, you have a family and kids.

Yeah, and that’s really when I started to panic when the dogs sat and the kids were in the house. Honestly, the panic set when the cameras got here, because my boyfriend’s daughter was—she cried, she was getting upset, she was getting kind of freaked out, and that’s when I was like, oh, Mylanta, this is a real thing now that’s going to start happening to our family. Before this, it was just my TikTok, me making these videos and the kids weren’t involved.

So the news cameras got there when the police arrived?

The news cameras got there when the dogs got there, I think, and it’s probably because of my Live, so I very much brought it on myself, not even unintentionally, I guess, because I knew it was going to get some attention, but I didn’t anticipate what happened.

Well, news stations often listen to police scanners, so that’s not all on you.

Yeah, it could have happened before or without my TikTok, but I definitely started panicking at that moment.

So often with TikToks, they’re one-off. There’s a resolution in the video. Watching this unfold on TikTok in real time has gotten a lot of people involved.

Without TikTok, I never would’ve called the police. So as much as these, like I said, impatient little bitches were driving me crazy, I told the police while we were standing here, that if it wasn’t for these people pushing me to do this, we would’ve just put in our fence post and called it a day.

Updated 10-04-2024, 5:45pm ET: Shortly after this interview published, Katie Santry made a new post on TikTok claiming that there were no human remains discovered during the dig on her property.