Draft Part III ch01 — A Life Among Them (13 encounters)

Clean up first_demon.md voice-to-text into structured testimony:
13 chronological accounts, voice preserved, facts untouched, each
with header + Lesson. Author's own stated realizations used where
given; interpretation gaps marked [NEEDS YOUR INPUT] rather than
invented. Updated OUTLINE Part III.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

input/dedication.md

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+The purpose of this book, or series of books, is to help preserve the knowledge we have gained over time. This is to serve as a way to archive what our family believes, the experiences we've had, and to provide guidance on how to interpret the current world. It ensures that future generations, as well as Sarah, can always look back to this so that they can deal with whatever may need to be addressed. I love my family very much, and I want to make sure they are armed with as much knowledge as possible to help defend against the challenges they may face in their lives.

input/first_demon.md

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+Times I dealt with demons.
+
+When I was 19, I was staying with a friend constantly. I didn't actually live there; I just spent the nights on the weekends. We decided to watch a movie called *The Craft*, which is about witchcraft. It was a fun movie, and I enjoyed it, but then I tried to go to sleep. I couldn't sleep, so I started watching more TV. At this time, I was laying down on the couch with a drink on the table beside me. Everything was laid out so that I could just reach my arm out without even looking, grab the drink, and take a sip while watching TV. One time, when I went to do that, the drink wasn't there, and when I looked over, I discovered that myself and the couch were about three to four inches off the ground, levitating. This scared the absolute hell out of me. I jumped off the couch onto the floor and screamed like a little girl. All of my friends woke up and came in to see what was going on, and I explained that I was probably crazy.
+
+Later one night, we started playing around with the idea of talking to static, which is a method to possibly communicate with spirits or other things in the spiritual world. We would tune the radio to static and ask questions. While we started playing with this more and more, we started having incidents where we would see shadows, hear things, and see objects move in other rooms. As we went to investigate, one night in particular, Eric, my friend, was thrown across the room by something I couldn't see, and my other friend, John, was grabbed by the throat and picked up about six inches off the ground. It looked like his throat was actually being collapsed but also expanded from the inside. When we looked at Eric later, we found that he had marks on his stomach and chest where the thing had hit him.
+
+When I first moved into my grandfather's house, that's when I found on my first proof of a demon. It first started with random objects disappearing. I would see shadows out of the corner of my eye and hear other strange sounds constantly throughout the night. I talked to my friend, John Carter, and we decided to experiment with my webcam taking pictures using motion detection to see if we can find something.When I set up the camera, I placed it in a hallway so that we didn't influence the camera in any way. I then decided to wait about three hours. After three hours, I looked at the pictures and there were two three-foot-tall shadows that walked into one of the bedrooms, and a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall shadow that walked through the door as well. When it walked through the door, you could actually see the shadow's head go through the doorframe. Which, needless to say, was terrifying. We did this several other times and found out the things. Also, the cats that lived in the house would randomly track things with their vision, things we couldn't see, which was also just as terrifying. Eventually, I realized I needed some help with this, and John's mother, Mary, she was able to do this. She actually worked for the church as a house cleaner. I arranged for her to come over and give her look-over on the house. What we found was that she actually said that she could not do this at the time because the house was crawling with a demonic presence. A couple of days later, she and another deacon from the church came over, and we started cleansing the house.
+
+At this time, I did not actually believe in Jesus, God, or anything else. Instead, I was completely science-based; I didn't think any of that stuff existed. During this cleaning, I had to accept Jesus as my personal Savior, which meant that I actually had to dedicate myself to him and his teachings. I did this, and I also prayed with them in my house. As we moved room from room, I would see shadows out of the corner of my eye. I would see things that didn't actually exist at that moment. I would see a shadow and try to look for it, and it would disappear in front of my eyes. Eventually, we came to one closet in a room. When we opened that closet, and the deacons started doing their prayers, a giant black shadow shot past all of us, ran out of the kitchen, and out the back door. Needless to say, this completely converted me.
+
+One of the things that Mary Carter told me was that if I did not continue to believe in Jesus or deal with praying, what would happen is these things would come back three times stronger. I remember one particular time she said that I would hear them scratching at the windows and to listen for tapping on my windows, and it would be three times at the time. I thought she meant three times stronger because she had just said that. Turns out I was wrong. Later, one night when I was sleeping, it was around 3:30 in the morning, and I heard three taps at my window. Now, to explain this: the window was 12 feet in the air from the ground. It was impossible for a person to have done that. I looked out the window and didn't see anything and, of course, was extremely scared.
+
+Later in that same house, I had roommates. One of them was Adam Sweeney, a friend of mine. We would see weird things, but we kind of chalked it up to whatever, and we didn't care about it at that moment. One night, he came to my door and asked if I was okay when he knocked on my bedroom door. I said, "Yes, I was fine." Why was he worried? And then he told me that he was trying to sleep and woke up to a scream that was very loud but seemed to be coming from my room. However, I know for a fact I was not making noise because I was gaming on my computer and wasn't talking to myself. Later the next night, while sleeping, I woke up to a horrible, blood-shrieking scream directly over my face that lasted for about two and a half seconds. It almost sounded like Adam, but it was a little off. I then jumped out of bed, ran over to check on Adam, and he said he was totally fine and didn't make any sounds. And that's when we realized we probably had a ghost at the time. We didn't think it was a demon; we thought it was a ghost. I wasn't going to tell him about demons because he would think that I was crazy.
+
+Eventually, I got to the point where I could actually feel these demons in a room and I would see them because I saw them all the time. I eventually prayed for God to please remove the ability for me to see them because I was terrified all the time. God granted that wish, and in a way, I wish I hadn't asked for that. I did find out that there was a way I could feel the demon in a room; I could kind of feel a pressure on my skin if I walked to a particular area. I could use this to kind of locate where the spirit might be, and that helped me determine whether or not that was something in the house. During this time, a lot of times I would have my hand hang out so that I could kind of point and feel with my hand what direction the pressure was coming from, which let me know where the demon was. I could track it down. I eventually kicked all of these things out of this house and lived a relatively quiet life after that for about a year or so. That's when I met my wife, Mary. 
+
+Mary and I eventually moved into a house that was a trailer with an addition on the front of it. I lived almost across the street from John, but he was one house down on the opposite side of the street. For a year or so, we had no problems; everything was fine. The show *Ghost Hunters* had just come out, and John asked if I could start doing that with him because he was interested in possibly finding the ghost of his father, who had recently passed. We started going on ghost hunting trips together. We started buying a bunch of equipment and things to record our experiences, including a camera, a video camera that recorded to a DVD, and also several audio recorders and other things such as infrared lights to help investigate these areas. There are several supposed haunted areas around Augusta, and we went to several of them and did our own investigations. Most of the time, we didn't find anything major. There were two places where we did find things. One was an abandoned plantation home that was off in the woods. Several times we had to deal with spirits and demons, which we didn't know were demons at the time. We just thought they were ghosts. We would see things or hear things, and we would record occasional moments of things happening in the background with our cameras. We sometimes would take other people along with us to help be the skeptic or to help keep us in check to make sure we weren't hallucinating, because the mind does strange things.
+
+I was working at a school at the time and talked to the historian, librarian, and yearbook editor who also worked there. She was a fellow teacher. Talking to her about this randomly one day, we came up with the idea that she was the president of the Historical Preservation Society, and she knew of a very old home built in the 1700s called Rock House. It was one of the first rock houses built in Georgia. It's probably one of the oldest standing structures still there. She said often people would go out there and do seances or look for ghosts and things of that nature, and she gave us permission to go out there. We went out there several times to do several investigations. Many of the times we would find strange things happening, or we would hear weird things happening. One time, when I was walking down the stairs into the root cellar area, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a giant. That giant was kind of like a ghost or a demon. He was white, he was big, he was like a linebacker. And again, I only saw it for about a half a second or so. I told John about this because he asked why I freaked out and acted like I was trying to punch air. John chronicled that and then said, "I had an idea." That idea involved him and a friend of mine named Chip, who didn't believe in any gods or anything, to go to the house as well. While Chip and John were there without me present, and I had not told Chip any of this, Chip went down the stairs and saw the exact same thing in the same spot. John later told me that this was happening, and that's when we realized we were probably dealing with something interesting.
+
+Over our time investigating that house, there were many times where we would see shadows. We would even record balls of light moving around. We usually ruled these out as possible dust particles. However, one time was interesting. On the video, you can see a white ball of light come out of the rocks of the fireplace. It moved across the air for about [incomplete: specify distance] feet and then it did a complete 90-degree turn straight down into the floor. It went through the floorboards; it then continued moving. We could only see that because there was an opening for the stairway, and we saw the ball of light come out of the stairway, go across the stairs, go back up, and then go into a radio that we had that was playing static. It stopped the minute the ball of light hit it.
+
+There was one time we were walking in that particular area outside and at the house in the yard, John and I were about three feet apart. He noted that it was extremely cold that day, but where I was standing was warm. There was about a 15-degree difference in temperature. We switched places and had the same temperature. That made us think that it was possible that a demon was following us or a ghost. At the time, we did not realize that it was a demon. Later, when we looked back at the house, you could see the bottom of the basement had a window, and in that window, we saw a dark, shadowy figure pacing back and forth like it was trying to come out of the house. It did not have a good presence; it seemed to want to hurt us.
+
+We then went into the house, like a bunch of idiots, to see if we could possibly capture it on film or a sound of some type on the sound recorders. We didn't get anything on any of the devices, and we didn't see anything or hear anything while we were in the house. When I went to leave the house, as I stepped out on the last step, I felt something reach out and grab the bone in my leg. It grabbed my left femur and I fell down. I did not have a bruise or any marking to tell me that something had grabbed it. I just could feel something grab the bone in my leg, and of course, that scared me at this point. I had started fully believing again in God and realized that I needed to do more studies on demons because I started to think, at this point, these were not ghosts; these were demons like I used to deal with in the past.
+
+We decided to stop ghost hunting because we started having problems appear with us at our home. One night, Mary and I were asleep and we woke up to a really bad feeling. We could hear the floorboards of the house creaking around the bed as though something was walking or pacing back and forth at the bottom of the bed. We couldn't see anything because the room was dark. But the dog that was in the bed with us could hear and see everything and was shaking and started to pee in the bed because it was so scared. I did the prayer that Mary Carter had taught me. And we didn't have a problem back to that point. I told John we need to stop doing these ghost hunts and even hunts, and realized that we were bringing this stuff home and it was attacking us. One of the last things that happened was John had said that his wife was on a trip and, for some reason, even though the house was empty, he was hearing her voice constantly at night. We set up the audio recorders and we recorded him at night. I went back and looked at the audio, cleaned it up, and I can tell you for a fact that Stacy's voice was heard on that audio recording, even though she was not there. She was in another state. This confirmed to John that we needed to stop the demon hunts, and we put all that behind us for several years.
+
+I didn't have a problem with anything demonic after that period. It wasn't until we had our first daughter, Sarah, that we started having problems in the house. Eventually, we got the house clean and didn't have a problem even after we moved to Atlanta. It was many years before I had to worry about another demon problem. I was well guarded and protected, and knew how to battle these things quite extensively at that point. I had read the book "The Demonologist" by Ed Warren, as well as many Bible scriptures, to help protect us and engage in spiritual warfare.
+
+After we moved to Tennessee and were living with dad, that's when we started noticing little things would happen in the home. But our bedroom was safe. We constantly cleansed our bedroom and did our nightly prayers to help keep us safe. Eventually, when we moved out of dad's and into our house on the hilltop, we never had to worry about a demon problem again.