I'd forgotten to consider that there was another side to the spiritual realm. It didn't just contain God and His angels. There were darker forces in the spiritual realm as well. If there is a God, there must be a devil too, right?
I was having a particularly rough time at my dad's house. My relationship with my dad was getting rockier every weekend, because I could not get along with his wife. This inability to get along with her was nothing new, but because I was getting older, I was growing a bit of a backbone when I didn't have one at all when I was little. Whenever my stepmom tried to get me to do something or push me around, I fought back. I wasn't afraid of her anymore. I knew her threats were empty, and her blame against me for shattering her vision of the perfect family by lying to the court system to keep her son away from me, was completely baseless. I was 6 years old. 6 year olds don't know how to play the court system like that.
In an attempt to bring me to heel, my stepmom tried some new tricks, such as being nice to me for a time to bribe me into a relationship with her, and then pounce on me once she had enough emotional ammunition, but I never fell for most of those tricks. As tensions in the house grew, so did everyone's anxiety. By then, I was well aware of what anxiety felt like. It gave me a sense of impending doom and forced me to be on guard all of the time, but there was something else under that feeling of anxiety that I only felt at my dad's house, regardless if my stepmom was there or not.
When I was 13, my stepmom gained full custody of her son. So, for most of the weekends I was with my dad from then on, my stepmom was at her parents' house with her oldest son, leaving Dad at home alone with me and my little half-brother. I felt a little more relaxed without my stepmom around, but that other, almost indescribable feeling under my anxiety remained. I only felt it at my dad's house, but as soon as I left the driveway, I felt fine.
At my dad's house, I often got the feeling that I was being watched, and it was not a good or neutral feeling either. It felt malicious, like there was a predator hiding just around the corner, waiting patiently for the right moment to pounce. I'd check around the house and there would be nothing around that should've been giving me that feeling. Yet, I'd get that feeling often, day or night, alone or in the same room as my dad, but I never got that feeling of being watched anywhere else. It was just at my dad's house.
I wasn't sure how to let people know what I was feeling. I was worried that I was starting to lose my sanity, or that people would tease me if I told them what was going on. The only people I figured I was safe telling were my mom and grandpa Lyle, because they openly talked about those kinds of things to me, and I hoped they'd reassure me that I wasn't going crazy, and maybe I was just paranoid in that house because of my stepmom, or I was just letting my imagination run away from me. Nothing other than that feeling was out of the ordinary.
When I had both my mom and grandpa Lyle in the same room together, I opened up about my experience with feeling watched at my dad's house. I told them I couldn't explain it. It didn't feel like normal anxiety, it would just come and go at random, and I wouldn't feel it anywhere else except for at my dad's. I admitted that I was worried I was going crazy, and begged them to refrain from teasing me or blowing it off. I was losing a lot of sleep over it, and the feeling of being watched seemed to only get worse every weekend I stayed at my dad's. I went from being perfectly comfortable with staying there alone, to barricading myself in my bedroom and sleeping with the lights on because of that awful feeling.
My mom and grandpa both assured me that I wasn't going crazy, and that my concerns were valid too. There was a huge leather bible on the coffee table in front of us, and my grandpa cracked it open to a few verses and biblical stories he thought were relevant to my situation. At the time, I was more agnostic than Christian, but listened closely anyway. Perhaps it was true, and it had some worthy advice when it came to dealing with anxiety and horrible feelings I ought to take to my dad's house.
The first verse my grandpa opened up to was Ephesians 6:12, which read, "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."
The passage comes from a description of the Armor of God in the bible, which Christians are commanded to wear at all times. Of course, the armor of God is not literal chain and steel armor, but a metaphor to stay on guard because the spiritual realm, as Christians believe it is, isn't just God and angels. It is also the devil and his demons, which the bible openly states in plenty of other verses in nearly every biblical book, have the power to influence the world around us.
At least, that's how my grandpa described it to me after reading Ephesians 6:12. I knew what he was getting at, but I didn't like it. I didn't want to believe in that part of Christianity, not just because it initially sounded crazy to me, but because if it was true, then that was absolutely terrifying. It meant what I was feeling at my dad's house was not just anxiety or my imagination, but something very real that was powerful, not of this world, and was the furthest thing from all that is good and holy.
I asked my grandpa if these things were actually real, and if he could find any biblical stories that were more literal than metaphorical that proved these things were real. So, my grandpa turned to Matthew, verses 8:28-34 to be exact, and read me the story about how Jesus exorcised two demon-possessed men, and then cast those demons into a farmer's pigs, which ran off a cliff into the ocean and drowned.
That story definitely got me thinking, but I still wasn't all that convinced. In my mind, it was just a story in the bible. I wasn't at all sure if that story actually happened, or if it was just another fictitious tale in another ancient religious book. My grandpa chuckled at this and asked me if I'd forgotten about something. Since I was drawing a blank, it was clear that I had.
In the early 1990's, when my mom was a teenager and my grandpa Lyle's marriage with my grandma Debbie was falling apart, my mom got sucked into a pretty bad crowd of equally broken teens. She often snuck out at night to hang out with her friends at the local graveyard, where they did some very questionable things, such as automatic writing and medium sessions. That eventually escalated to my mom inviting her friends over for a sleepover to play with an Ouija board, which they did on the coffee table with the lights off and only a handful of candles illuminating the main living room.
Almost immediately after that night, stuff started to happen. At the time, my mom had a Chow Chow called Bear, who was a very protective guard dog. The day after my mom and her friends messed with the Ouija board, Bear went from being a fearless guard dog, to tucking his tail, hiding in the coat closet, and pissing himself for seemingly no reason. Then, my mom, aunt Jessie, and grandma Debbie all started hearing, feeling, and seeing things they'd never experienced before in that house, which they had lived in for over a decade before my mom decided it would be a great idea to mess with the occult inside the house.
My aunt Jessie would mainly see a dark shadow of a person wandering across the hallway and standing at the bottom of the stairs, always in full view, and rarely in her peripheral vision. My mom would usually see little balls of light floating in empty corners or shooting across the room at or away from her. My grandma would often see door knobs turn by themselves, only to see that door fly open and then slam shut, and also witnessed water faucets turning themselves on and off. However, while many specific things happened more often to specific people than to others, everyone experienced the same things as everyone else for the most part.
Interestingly enough, my grandpa never really experienced these things at first. He wasn't home often due to work, and being the agnostic atheist he was back then, he blew off the girls' experiences as just being paranoia because he was gone all of the time. His argument would've probably held more merit if Bear didn't react to the things everyone else was reacting to, as well as to things people could not see or hear. Bear's behavior alone was usually enough to scare everyone out of the house until my grandpa came home from work, because it was just so unusual.
My mom admitted she thought she was going crazy until her friends, as well as her mom's and sister's friends, began to experience things with them. One day, my mom and one of her good friends from middle school were at the house alone together when they both heard the distinct sound of the garage opening. As it slowly squeaked open, my mom decided to open up the door from the house into the garage to watch her dad drive in. But as soon as the door was open, she and her friend discovered that the garage door never opened in the first place, and the noises completely stopped.
Just as they closed the door to the house, trying to dismiss it as someone else's garage door, or maybe the house settling, the landline phone began to ring. The only problem was, the landline that was ringing was broken and had been unplugged for years, and it didn't stop ringing for 5 minutes until my mom gained the courage to hang up the phone. Needless to say, the girls didn't stick around after that.
The "paranormal activity" in the house peaked when my grandparents finally divorced. The negativity from their divorce, as well as from the death of the beloved family dog soon after, seemed to only feed whatever it was that was living in that house and tormenting pretty much everyone who stayed there for longer than a few hours. It went from only showing itself occasionally to certain people and messing with doors, to having the ability to chuck things across rooms, mess with electronics, growl, stomp around, mimic people's voices and figures, and physically mess with people.
My aunt Jessie recalls being scratched so hard by an unseen force, that her skin welted up, and my mom once stayed on the couch with the TV on all night long after she walked into her bedroom and saw the imprint of someone sitting on her bed slowly rising in the memory foam, as if someone had just gotten up. My grandpa was tormented by horrible nigh terrors, and a few nights was alerted by the sounds of glass breaking and men clambering inside, only to rush downstairs and see nothing out of place at all.
The activity didn't even begin to subside until one of my mom's friends came to stay with her for the summer during college. This friend was a very devout catholic woman, and immediately felt what she described as a demonic presence in the house. She picked up some holy water, salt, and a bible, and went around the house with my mom, saying prayers, reading verses in the bible demanding whatever my mom invited into the house to leave, and then finishing off by sprinkling salt and holy water on every door and window in the house. The only place they didn't bless was the basement. The entity was so pissed off that it growled at them when they opened up the basement door, and since they rarely used the basement for anything, my mom and her friend decided the demon could have the basement.
Over a decade later, I was born, and when my parents divorced, my dad stayed in that basement for a few months while he got his finances figured out and found another place to live. As skeptical and agnostic as he always was, even my dad admitted that there was something seriously wrong with that basement. He'd hear and see things he could not explain away, and despite hiring exterminators and setting off cans of bug spray every week to kill off anything and everything while he was away at work, my dad could not get rid of the massive spider infestation down there. He described the spiders as being unusually large and fast wolf spiders, and had to shake out his blankets every night because the spiders would crawl into bed with him sometimes.
My grandpa's point of telling me these stories was not to scare me, even though that's exactly what he did, but just to prove that spiritual forces besides God existed and influenced the world just as much as God did. But he did advise me to put on the full armor of God, so if it turned out I was dealing with something similar at my dad's house, I would be protected.
I argued with this point. As far as I knew, nobody was playing with the occult at my dad's house. Nobody was actively inviting anything negative into our lives as far as I knew. But my grandpa told me it wasn't just Ouija boards that had the power to provoke demons into our lives. Negativity had that same power, and there was plenty of negativity to go around at my dad's house.
