bible/book/part3-testimony/ch01-a-life-among-them.md

Part III · Chapter 01 — A Life Among Them

These are the most notable encounters of my life — the ones worth preserving. There are many others. I have set down the clearest of them here, in the order they happened, so that you will know this is real, and so that you will know it can be survived.

A note on these accounts: I am telling the truth as I lived it and as I remember it. Some years I no longer recall exactly; where a date or detail would help, I have left a mark to fill in later. Nothing here is invented.

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1. Chip's Home

When: Age 18 (1998). Where: A friend's home (Chip Williams), where I had moved out to live. Who: Me, Chip, and his mother.

Chip doesn't actually believe in anything spiritual. At one time, though, he used to play around with the idea of ghosts — he was looking for the possibility that they were real, and his mother, Susan, was very much into it. We talked about this often as a group, and we occasionally played with things such as Ouija boards and automatic writing. I would see the occasional thing, or notice that the Ouija board seemed to be real. One night, while it was working, we saw the little stylus move on its own, with no one touching it. Another time, while the group was using it — I was only watching, not involved — the stylus shot across the room.

When I slept in that room, which was my bedroom, I would see a dark figure in the doorway staring at me. I was constantly afraid of it but never told anyone. Even now, just thinking about it makes me want to cry; it was that frightening. I would never sleep with that room dark.

Lesson: Ouija boards and automatic writing are not toys — they are doorways, and a bedroom is a terrible place to leave one open. [NEEDS YOUR INPUT: confirm this lesson or replace it with your own words.]

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2. The Levitating Couch

When: Age 19 (1999). Where: A friend's home (Eric Maddox), where I spent weekend nights. Who: Me, alone, late at night.

We had watched The Craft — the movie about witchcraft. I enjoyed it, but afterward I couldn't sleep, so I stayed up watching television on the couch. I had a drink on the table beside me, set up so I could reach out without looking, grab it, and take a sip while I watched.

One time I reached for it and the drink wasn't there. When I looked over, I found that the couch and I were both three to four inches off the ground — levitating. It scared the absolute hell out of me. I threw myself off the couch onto the floor and screamed like a little girl. All my friends woke and came running to see what was wrong, and the best I could tell them was that I was probably going crazy.

Lesson: The opening of a door can look like harmless entertainment — and the door does not always close when the movie ends. For a while afterward, any time I was driving with that videotape in the car, I would have strange experiences. One time five deer jumped out in front of me and I drove straight through them — and that is when I realized it was a vision created to torment me, and that I needed to be rid of the tape. I burned it, destroyed it, and never returned it to the library.

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3. Talking to Static

When: Around the same period (age ~19, 1999). Where: The same friend's home (Eric Maddox). Who: Me, Eric, and John.

We began playing with the idea of talking to static — tuning a radio to dead air and asking questions, as a way to reach spirits or whatever else listens from the spiritual world. The more we did it, the more things happened: shadows, sounds, objects moving in other rooms.

One night, as we went to investigate, Eric was thrown across the room by something I could not see. John was seized by the throat and lifted about six inches off the ground. It looked as though his throat was being collapsed and forced outward from the inside at the same time. When we checked Eric afterward, he had marks on his stomach and chest where the thing had struck him.

Lesson: Inviting them to speak is inviting them in. Static was not a game; it was an open line, and something answered it with violence. I still remember some of the questions we asked — "Who are you?" and "What do you want?" It never told us what it wanted, but when we pressed it to say who it was, to give a name we could put to it, all we heard back was the word Legion. We were careful about this: instead of saying aloud what we heard, each of us wrote it down and we revealed our papers at the same time, so that no one could change or color what another had heard. It was the most scientific method we could manage at the time — ask the question, write the answer, then compare the written answers to be sure none had been altered by another's suggestion.

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4. First Proof — The Camera in the Hallway

When: 2001 — when I first moved into my grandfather's house. Where: My grandfather's house on Dorn Street in Grovetown. Who: Me and John Carter.

It began with objects vanishing, shadows at the corner of my eye, and strange sounds all through the night. John Carter and I decided to test it: I set my webcam to take pictures on motion detection and placed it in a hallway, where nothing we did could influence it. I waited about three hours.

When I checked the pictures, there were two shadows about three feet tall that walked into one of the bedrooms — and a shadow seven and a half feet tall that came through the doorway. You could see its head pass through the doorframe. We repeated this several times and kept finding them. The cats that lived in the house would track things across the room with their eyes — things we could not see. That was just as terrifying as the photographs.

Lesson: When you stop trusting your own senses, trust the witnesses that cannot lie — a camera that was not touched, an animal with no reason to pretend.

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5. The Cleansing — and What I Came to Believe

When: Days after the camera proof (2001). Where: My grandfather's house. Who: Me; Mary Carter (John's mother, who cleaned for the church); and a deacon.

I asked for help. Mary Carter came to look the house over — but she said she could not work in it yet, because it was crawling with a demonic presence. A couple of days later she returned with a deacon from the church, and we began to cleanse the house.

At that time I did not believe in Jesus, in God, or in any of it. I was entirely science-minded; I did not think such things existed. During the cleansing I had to accept Jesus as my personal Savior — to truly dedicate myself to Him and His teachings — and I did, and I prayed with them through the house. As we went room to room, I kept seeing shadows at the edge of my sight, things that were not there a moment later, vanishing as I turned to look.

Then we came to one closet. When the deacons opened it and began their prayers, a giant black shadow shot past all of us, tore through the kitchen, and went out the back door.

Lesson (in my own words): That moment completely converted me. I had walked in a skeptic and walked out a believer — not on faith alone, but on what I saw flee from the name of God.

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6. Three Taps at the Window

When: Six days after the cleansing, ~3:30 a.m. Where: My grandfather's house. Who: Me, alone.

Mary Carter had warned me: if I stopped believing in Jesus and stopped praying, these things would come back three times stronger. She told me I would hear them at the windows — scratching, tapping — and that it would come three at a time. I assumed "three" just meant her "three times stronger."

I was wrong. One night while I slept, around 3:30 in the morning, I heard three taps at my window. That window stood twelve feet above the ground. No person could have reached it. I looked out and saw nothing, and of course I was terrified.

Lesson: Take the warnings literally. What sounds like a figure of speech can be a precise instruction — and 3:30 a.m. is their hour. Demons love to play with the number three. Often you will hear three taps, three knocks, or three scratches. I am not sure why the number three is so prevalent with these things, but it is something to be mindful of. A sound once might be nothing; a sound twice or three times in succession is when you should start to pay attention. These things constantly leverage the number three.

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7. The Scream

When: 2002. Where: The same house, when I had roommates. Who: Me and my roommate Adam Sweeney.

One night Adam knocked on my door to ask if I was all right. I said I was fine and asked why he was worried. He told me he had been trying to sleep and woke to a very loud scream that seemed to come from my room — but I had been gaming at my computer, not making a sound, and I know for a fact it was not me.

The next night, while I slept, I woke to a horrible, blood-shrieking scream directly over my face. It lasted about two and a half seconds. It almost sounded like Adam, but slightly off. I jumped up and ran to check on him — and he was perfectly fine and had made no sound at all. That was when we decided we probably had a ghost. We thought it was a ghost, not a demon. I wasn't going to tell him about demons; he would have thought I was crazy.

Lesson: They wear the voices of the people you trust. A sound that is "almost right" is a tell — it is mimicry, not the person.

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8. Learning to Feel Them

When: 2002. Where: The same house. Who: Me.

In time I reached the point where I could feel these demons in a room and see them — I saw them all the time. I was terrified constantly, so I prayed for God to take away my ability to see them. He granted it. In a way, I wish I had not asked.

But I found another sense had been left to me: I could feel a demon's presence as a pressure on my skin when I walked into a certain area. I learned to use it. I would let my hand hang out and feel for the direction the pressure came from, and that told me where the thing was, so I could track it down. Eventually I drove all of them out of that house, and I lived a relatively quiet life for about a year. That is when I met my wife, Mary.

Lesson: What looks like losing a gift can be the trading of one weapon for a safer one. Sight terrified me; the pressure-sense let me hunt them without being unmade by the seeing.

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9. Ghost Hunters — The Plantation Home

When: 2003 or 2004 — after Mary and I moved into the trailer with the front addition; around when the show Ghost Hunters first aired. Where: Augusta-area sites, including an abandoned plantation home in the woods. Who: Me and John (and occasional skeptics we brought along).

We had a quiet year in that house. Then John — who lived a house down across the street — asked me to start investigating with him; he hoped to find the ghost of his father, who had recently passed. We bought equipment: a camera, a video camera that recorded to DVD, several audio recorders, infrared lights. We visited several supposedly haunted places around Augusta.

Most nights we found nothing major. But at the abandoned plantation home in the woods, we repeatedly had to deal with things we then called ghosts and now know were demons — seeing things, hearing things, catching moments on camera. We often brought a skeptic along to keep us honest, because the mind plays tricks, and we wanted to be sure we were not simply hallucinating.

Lesson: Going looking for the dead is how you find the things that were never alive. We thought we were hunting ghosts; we were drawing the attention of demons. We would often find where other people had come to do their own investigations — Ouija boards and other items left lying around. Remember that the Ouija board was created as a tool to communicate with spirits. These things are one hundred percent doorways. You do not need to talk to them. You do not need to play with them. They are terrifying. There are many gateways in this world, and you must watch for all of them.

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10. Rock House — The Giant on the Stairs

When: 2005. Where: Rock House — a home built in the 1700s, one of the first rock houses in Georgia and among the oldest standing structures there. Who: Me; later John and my friend Chip, separately.

A fellow teacher — the school's historian, librarian, and yearbook editor, and president of the Historical Preservation Society — told us about Rock House and gave us permission to investigate. People often went there for séances or to look for ghosts. We went many times and often found strange things happening.

One time, walking down the stairs into the root-cellar area, I saw a giant at the corner of my eye — something between a ghost and a demon. It was white, huge, built like a linebacker. I saw it for only about half a second. I told John, because he had seen me freak out and swing at the air. He said he had an idea, and later took Chip — a friend who believed in no gods or spirits at all — out to the house while I stayed away. I had told Chip none of this. Chip went down those same stairs and saw the exact same figure in the exact same spot. When John told me, we knew we were dealing with something real.

Lesson: Independent confirmation is everything. A skeptic who has been told nothing, seeing the same thing in the same place, is worth more than a hundred of your own frightened nights.

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11. Rock House — The Ball of Light

When: During the same investigations (2005). Where: Rock House. Who: Me and John.

We often saw shadows there, and recorded balls of light moving through the air. Most we dismissed as dust. One was different. On the video, a white ball of light comes out of the stones of the fireplace, travels through the air for about [incomplete: specify distance] feet, and then makes a complete ninety-degree turn straight down through the floorboards. It kept moving below — we could see it because of the stairwell opening: it came out at the stairs, crossed them, went back up, and then went into a radio we had playing static. The static stopped the instant the light reached it.

Lesson: To me, this video was one of the most complete pieces of evidence we ever gathered. It is something a reflection of dust simply cannot do. It proved to me that these things are real, that they can be recorded, and it gave me the evidence I needed to go on with this study.

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12. Rock House — The Cold, the Window, the Hand on the Bone

When: During the same investigations (2005). Where: Rock House — the yard and the last step of the house. Who: Me and John.

One day John and I stood about three feet apart in the yard. He said it was bitterly cold where he stood, but where I stood was warm — about a fifteen-degree difference. We switched places, and the temperature switched with us. We thought a demon, or a ghost, might be following us. Then we looked back at the house and saw, in the basement window, a dark shadowy figure pacing back and forth, as if trying to get out. It had no good presence about it; it seemed to want to hurt us.

So we went back in — like a pair of idiots — to try to capture it. We got nothing on any device and saw and heard nothing inside. But as I left, stepping off the last step, something reached out and grabbed the bone of my leg — my left femur — and I fell. There was no bruise, no mark, nothing to show for it. I simply felt something take hold of the bone inside my leg. By then I had come fully back to believing in God, and I realized I needed to study demons seriously, because these were not ghosts. These were demons, like the ones I had dealt with before.

Lesson: They can touch you without leaving a mark, reach past the skin to the bone. Do not mistake "no evidence on the body" for "nothing happened."

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13. Rock House — The Skeptic Gets Grabbed

When: During the same investigations (2005). Where: The attic of Rock House. Who: Me, John, and Chip.

We had brought Chip out to be the skeptic — the one who still didn't believe in any of it. We were in the attic, completely in the dark, though John kept a hand on a flashlight. (Those flashlights were handy; they had built-in tripods.) We had the audio recorders running so that anything said or heard would be preserved for later analysis. Chip would ask questions, I would ask questions, and we would try to interact with these things — which, again, we still thought were ghosts. Now and then we heard sounds from the far part of the attic, where we couldn't see, and we would ask whether that was it, trying to communicate.

Then, in the complete darkness, Chip said, "Okay, I'm going to prove whether this is real or not. Right now I'm going to stick out my hand into nothing. I'm going to hold my hand out, and if there's a presence or a spirit here, I ask that you please grab my hand and squeeze it." He said the area around his hand went very cold. He didn't feel anything touching him, but it was very cold. We said, "Dude, that's possibly the evidence and proof you're looking for." He dismissed it: "No, it's just a temperature change. Probably just a lack of blood flow." And the moment he said it, the flashlight was knocked clean out of John's hands and across the attic.

Lesson: These things seem to have feelings. They get irritated and agitated, and many times they can be mean and hurt you.

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14. Bringing It Home

When: 2005 — toward the end of the ghost-hunting years. Where: Our home; and John's home across the street. Who: Me, my wife Mary, our dog; and John.

It was when problems began appearing at our own home that we decided to stop. One night Mary and I woke to a terrible feeling and heard the floorboards creaking all around the bed, as though something paced back and forth at its foot. We could see nothing in the dark room — but our dog, in the bed with us, could hear and see all of it. It shook and wet the bed, it was so frightened. I said the prayer Mary Carter had taught me, and after that we had no more of it.

I told John we had to stop the hunts — we were bringing this home, and it was attacking us. One of the last things to happen: John's wife, Stacy, was away on a trip, yet night after night he kept hearing her voice in the empty house. We set up the audio recorders and recorded him through the night. I went back, cleaned up the audio, and I can tell you for a fact that Stacy's voice is on that recording — though she was in another state. That confirmed it for John. We put all of it behind us for several years.

Lesson (in my own words): We were bringing this stuff home, and it was attacking us. Whatever you go looking for, you carry back to the people you love. That is the price, and it is paid by them, not only by you. The best way I can describe it is the moth and the flame. People who don't notice these things are dark to them — they move through the world unseen. But when they notice that you notice, they realize you can see them, and that makes you a target. A moth in the dark doesn't care; the moment it sees a light, it goes toward it. That is how these things operate. If you don't notice them, they probably won't notice you. Most people never have a genuine encounter because they don't believe, and so they don't see. But the more you dabble in this, the more they can see you — and they start honing in and attacking you specifically.

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15. The Quiet Years, and Standing Guard

When: 2011 onward, through Atlanta, Tennessee, and the house on the hilltop. Where: Several homes. Who: Our family.

After that I had no demonic trouble for a long time. It returned only when our first daughter, Sarah, was born and things began happening in the house — but by then I knew the work. We cleansed the house and had no further problem, even after we moved to Atlanta. Years passed before I had to face another. By then I was well guarded and protected and knew how to battle these things thoroughly. I had read The Demonologist by Ed Warren, and many scriptures of the Bible, to protect us and to wage spiritual warfare.

After we moved to Tennessee and lived with Dad, small things began in that home — but our bedroom stayed safe, because we cleansed it constantly and said our nightly prayers. When we finally moved out of Dad's and into our own house on the hilltop, we never had to worry about a demon problem again.

Lesson: This is the whole point of the book in your hands. The hunting years taught me at terrible cost what the quiet years proved: a guarded home, faithful nightly prayer, and a cleansed room hold the line. The danger never fully leaves the world — but a household that knows the work is a household they cannot take.

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Cross-references to add once Part I (Doctrine) and Part V (Battle Manual) are drafted: the cleansing prayer Mary Carter taught me → Part V; "talking to static," Ouija boards, and channels of contact → Part I / Part V; the pressure-sense as a discernment tool → Part V discernment; Legion → Part VI glossary / Part I.