NEIGHBORS OF THE FAMILY AT THE CENTER OF OHIO’S “HOUSE OF HORRORS” CASE, WHERE 16 CHILDREN WERE FOUND LIVING IN ALARMING CONDITI0NS… SPEAK OUT ABOUT UNUSUAL BEHAVIOR, WITH DETAILS THAT HAVE LEFT MANY PEOPLE CREEPED OUT
To some, Christina Siders seemed the picture of a ‘caring’ grandparent as she made the weekly trip to a local foodbank to collect supplies for her 16 grandchildren.
‘She came here every week for two years and she took as much food as I allowed her to take – produce, vegetables, fruit, breads, pastas, six pounds of meat,’ a local pastor, who declined to be identified, exclusively told the Daily Mail.
‘When she first came, she told us she had 16 kids and we were giving her extra food. Then we got to thinking: “Come on, no one can have that many kids in that house.”‘
Though seemingly beyond belief, Siders was telling the truth about her ginormous brood.
But little did the pastor know, the ‘cordial and sweet’ senior was harboring a darker secret.
Christina and her 16 grandchildren – along with their parents and her ailing husband – were allegedly living in a dilapidated home filled with human waste, filth and trash in conditions decried as ‘pure evil’ by Ohio’s top prosecutor.
The children – aged 17 months to 18 years – were ‘almost like feral animals’ and some couldn’t speak or walk when they were freed from the ‘House of Horrors’ in the tiny village of Hamden, 80 miles south of the state capital Columbus, on June 30, Attorney General Andy Wilson initially told reporters.
None of the children were enrolled in school at the time, local officials said.
Christina Siders, 67, and her husband Gary Sr, 73, were arrested alongside their son and daughter-in-law after their 16 grandchildren were found living in squalor in in Hamden, Ohio. The couple, who are pictured together in an undated photo, have pled not guilty
Christina Siders and her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Siders, 33, are each facing 16 charges of child endangerment. They have pled not guilty
The entire family were holed up in this 1,300sq ft single-family home, which was filled with human waste, filth and trash
Investigators found the kids in a 12ft-by-12ft room, one of five in the 1,300sq ft single-family home, which had only one bathroom.
Seven of the children were rushed to hospital, including two by helicopter – with one initially reported to be in a critical condition.
Few updates have been released about the children since then, other than they are ‘safe and being cared for’ by the county.
Astonishingly, the family’s appalling living situation was only discovered by chance after sheriff deputies conducted a search warrant for a separate investigation.
The raid resulted in the arrest of Christina Siders, 67, her husband Gary Sr, 73, their son, Gary Jr, 36, and his wife, Elizabeth, 33, on 16 counts each of child endangerment, a second-degree felony, to which they have all pleaded not guilty.
Christina, Elizabeth and Gary Jr are all being held in jail on a $300,000 bond. Gary Sr was released on an amended bond this week after requiring hospital treatment for a serious medical condition. If he is released from the hospital, he will have to wear a GPS tag.
Court papers seen by the Daily Mail show that Gary Sr now faces a judge-ordered mental evaluation to determine if he is competent to stand trial and whether he is not guilty by reason of insanity, following a motion by his attorney Dorian Baum.
Gary Jr, meanwhile, is separately facing four public indecency charges linked to incidents when he allegedly exposed himself to strangers outside the house at the end of May. A pre-trial hearing in that case is set for the end of this month.
The tragic child neglect case has sent shockwaves through southeast Ohio and beyond – leaving investigators and the community desperately seeking answers.
Gary Siders Jr, 36, and his 73-year-old father, Gary Siders Sr, were arraigned on the string of charges on July 1 and pled not guilty
Christina Siders, pictured with her husband Gary in an undated photo, appeared the picture of a ‘caring’ grandparent as she made the weekly trip to a local foodbank to collect supplies for her 16 grandchildren, a local pastor said
Many questions remain, chiefly: How did that number of children live under such horrific conditions undetected for so long?
‘It’s very difficult for me to understand,’ the pastor said.
‘When you have people coming to you, like Mrs Siders was, and she was getting as much food as she could get to take to her family, that makes you think that she cared.
‘Then when you see the other side of this, you shake your head and go, “How, why?”‘
‘I was oblivious to what was going on in the house, and when I found out, I was astounded,’ he added.
The pastor said he never spotted anything ‘off’ with the elder Siders or their teenage granddaughters when they occasionally joined them at the foodbank.
‘The girls were quiet, very shy, extremely shamefaced. They never really communicated with me, but they would whisper to her,’ he said.
‘But they never showed any sign of abuse, they never showed any sign of being hungry.
‘There was no stench or smell from them when they came.’
Christina and Gary Sr were already living in the rented house when Gary Jr and Elizabeth moved in June 2025, according to records seen by the Daily Mail.
But the Siders’ neighbors had no idea of what was unfolding in the house a few doors down.
Joe Stewart, 60, said five of the children smiled and waved at him shortly after they first moved in and he later spotted some of the kids feeding their dog and walking with their grandmother.
‘I didn’t pay much attention to them, and they didn’t say anything to me,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘It’s hard to believe, living that close to them. I didn’t even know they had kids,’ another neighbor Rick West, 60, added.
‘I saw Elizabeth last month. She was on her own and she looked like she was sad.’
Following a raid, investigators found the kids in a 12-by-12ft room
Huge piles of junk were spotted outside the house of horrors, including multiple bikes and children’s toys, after the sickening allegations came to light
A baby’s car seat was among the discarded items dumped outside the dilapidated home in the wake of the arrests
Others spotted telltale signs that all might not be well in the Siders household.
Elizabeth Long, a worker at the Hamden Dollar General store close to the Siders’ previous home, said she saw Elizabeth Siders throughout her pregnancy (Long believes she was due with twins) but ‘never once’ saw any babies.
‘I honestly assumed the way they lived and they looked that Children’s Services took the baby from the hospital,’ Long, who was using a pseudonym, told the Daily Mail.
She recalled the older relatives would come into the store ‘dressed nice’ and ‘very clean.’
‘They did not come in like Gary and Elizabeth at all. I only saw the kids twice in two years.
‘I saw four of the 16 kids. They were very pale, very skinny and they did cover their face with their hair to block out the outside world,’ she said.
‘They didn’t want to have interaction with nobody.
‘They acted just like their mom. Their mom was very quiet. I didn’t really think much of it.’
Growing up, Elizabeth and Gary Jr lived just one trailer apart in a mobile home park in Gallipolis, a village an hour from Hamden, just across the Ohio River from West Virginia.
The youngest of three children born to Brian and Lori Ann Russell, Elizabeth was 15 years old and heavily pregnant when she married Gary Jr, then 18, with her parents’ permission and a judge’s sign-off in Mason County, West Virginia, according to court records seen by the Daily Mail.
West Virginia had no legal minimum age for marriage at the time.
Gary Jr, 36, and his wife, Elizabeth, 33, are the parents of the 16 children found living in the house of horrors. They are being held in jail on a $300,000 bond in the wake of the disturbing charges and have pled not guilty
The grandparents, Christina and Gary Sr, were already living in the rented house when their son and his wife moved in June last year, records show
Two months after the March 2008 wedding, Elizabeth gave birth to a child, now the oldest of the 16 kids in the home.
Among the brood are three sets of twins, now aged four, two, and one-and-a-half, court records show.
Separately, in November 2022, Elizabeth gave birth prematurely to conjoined twins, Faith and Bailey, but they died the same day.
A tiny, printed plaque with an image of two angels marks the little girls’ graves in a cemetery close to the Siders’ Hamden house.
Tommy Stolley, Elizabeth’s attorney, confirmed she is the mother of all 16 children, who were all born in local hospitals.
But officials have admitted they are still looking for birth certificates for all the kids, many of whom have yet to be interviewed by investigators.
The newlyweds began their married life in Gary Jr’s trailer before they moved into a three-bedroom home a ten-minute drive away.
One neighbor, Melissa, told the Daily Mail her brother’s family had lived next door to that house and that her nieces and nephews may have talked to some of the Siders children through the fence.
But she said it was only after they left that neighbors got a glimpse into the squalid conditions inside the home, where multiple families, including the Siders, had lived.
‘Our neighbor took a tour of that house, and they said a couple of the doors had padlocks on the outside. She said the conditions were horrible inside. She said there was something really weird about the house, so they didn’t buy it.’
The Siders’ neighbors told the Daily Mail they had no idea of what was unfolding in the house (pictured above) a few doors down from them until news of the arrests broke
One neighbor, Melissa, told the Daily Mail that the parents had previously lived in a home nearby that was also dilapidated. When the family moved out piles of kids clothing were discovered in the attic and the floors had caved in due to the sheer amount of urine
Neighbor Joe Stewart, 60, told the Daily Mail he had no idea of what was unfolding in the house a few doors down. He said five of the children smiled and waved at him shortly after they first moved in and he later spotted some of the kids feeding their dog and walking with their grandmother
After the property was vacated, piles of kids clothing were discovered in the attic of the house and the floors had caved in due to the sheer amount of urine that had eroded the floorboards, requiring extensive renovation work, one local said.
Attorney Stolley is still pondering the question of whether his client could also be seen as a victim.
‘We are still not sure, at least at my office, whether my client is a victim herself or not,’ he told reporters at an impromptu press conference on Tuesday.
‘I have previously stated she does not characterize herself as a victim, but the investigation from the prosecutor’s office and my office is still ongoing.’
In an interview with 10TV, he revealed she has been constantly asking about her children and had said ‘positive things’ about her husband.
‘What she’s told me repeatedly is that she and Gary wanted a big family. I don’t know if they wanted a family that was this big.
‘She said that kids are a gift from God.’
Stolley has filed a motion for a recognizance bond for Elizabeth, who has no known criminal history and whose ‘principal desire (is) to reunite with her children,’ he said in court papers seen by the Daily Mail.
He strongly objected to early characterizations of how the children were found – particularly the descriptions of them being ‘feral’ and the living conditions being ‘pure evil.’
He said there was no evidence to show the children were locked in the 12-by-12 room and not free to move about the home or go outside – and revealed the kids even had phones and access to social media.
Social media sleuths claim to have uncovered a string of accounts linked to the children – some bearing images of pet cats and anime characters – but the Daily Mail could not independently confirm the accounts belonged to any of the Siders children.
‘This is a case of poverty. This may be a case of isolation. It may be a case of parents getting in over their heads when it comes to their children and their family. But this is a case of these people living together here,’ Stolley told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo.