Maddie is then lured by the light from her lamp and her favorite toy into her closet, becoming lost in an unending void. As she turns to see her bedroom drifting away further, she is dragged into the darkness by ghosts. Griffin is grabbed through a window by the branches of the old tree outside their house, which pulls him outside. Amy and Eric arrive home to see Griffin being tossed around in the tree branches, which releases its grip when they come close, while Kendra hysterically tells them she cannot find Maddie. The family hears Maddie's voice emanating from the television. Amy places her hand on the television screen while Maddie's static hand is seen to be touching Amy's hand from the other side of the screen. Amy and Griffin visit the Paranormal Research department for help. The staff set up equipment in the house and install GPS devices on everyone in the house. During the setup, Boyd has a near death experience in drilling a hole in the wall, yanked in by spirits by his arm. While trying to contact Maddie, Eric is ambushed in the closet by a ghost resembling her. Angered, he breaks down the closet wall, throwing a section of a broken table into the darkness inside the closet; the table segment falls back into the living room (nearly crushing Griffin), revealing a potential portal for Maddie to escape through. The investigators deduce and confirm that the haunting is caused by a poltergeist. The lead investigator, Dr. Brooke Powell, decides to call occult specialist and television personality Carrigan Burke (revealed, much later, to be Powell's ex). Carrigan explains that Maddie is a possible psychic, able to communicate with spirits. He reveals that the ghosts are trapped and are angry because only the headstones were moved to the new cemetery, but the bodies remain; they plan on using Maddie "to free them from their purgatory". Carrigan comes up with a plan to get Maddie back. He anchors a rope in Maddie's room and tosses it into the vortex. They attempt to use Griffin's toy drone to guide Maddie out, but it is immediately destroyed by the ghosts when inside the portal. Griffin, guilt-ridden over leaving Maddie alone in the first place, goes through the portal himself. When he finds Maddie, the ghosts attempt to destroy the rope to trap them, but Griffin and Maddie grab onto the rope and fall back through the portal into the house. Both children are unconscious and covered in grey matter, to which Carrigan instructs for them to be washed and they awake.