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| Yours Truly, circa our arrival at 21 St. Helens Avenue |
According to the methodology I discussed earlier, I was planning to post my younger sister Jeanne's story next since she was the first surviving person in our family to experience any paranormal activity at the 21 St. Helens Avenue. However, she does not feel comfortable publicly sharing her story now, and I am sympathetic to her feelings. I will not press her to do so. Her tale is very personal and harrowing, and her unwillingness to share it in detail, even with members of the family, shows just how far the shadow of the beast extends into our current lives. Perhaps she will share something later. That is her choice.
So I guess it is my turn. Rather than wait to do an interview, I decided to simply write down my experiences. That said, I definitely want one of my siblings interview me so that we have video documentation of my experience. And, who knows, they might ask me a question I never considered that adds insight to the experience. But for now, here's my story.
First, I want to say that I never felt I had experienced any paranormal activity prior to arriving at 21 St. Helens Avenue. To me, it seemed to start after the Ouija board incident my mother discussed in her interview. However, after finally discussing the haunting in detail with my mother and siblings, I have begun to wonder exactly when the entity in the house began to work on me.
I had an intense but private very religious conversion in the winter of 1977, about three years after my arrival at St. Helens Avenue. As a result of that experience, I began to hear the voice of God on a regular basis. I guess, in evangelical circles, the phenomenon would be called "words of knowledge," but it wasn't quite that. I discuss the phenomenon in great detail in my memoir The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God. I considered this phenomenon an extremely rare blessing, which I did not discuss in any great detail with anyone at the time, aside from some veiled remarks I made occasionally to my first girlfriend Kathy Gardiner.**
Needless to say, I was quite surprised when my sister Jeanne told me, in our first meeting about the haunting, that she received a form of clairvoyance after her first encounter with the entity living in the house. Then my mother reveals that an angelic visitor warned her of impending deaths. Wow. Although the circumstances were quite different in these three cases, three members of our family had supernatural, prophetic experiences.
It makes you wonder. And I did wonder.
My book, which I do not have the space here to recount in full, dealt predominately with one word of prophecy I received in 1977: That I would marry the aforementioned Kathy Gardiner, whom I started dating two years later in 1979. My theology demands that any true prophecy would come true, but I didn't marry her and therefore I began doubt everything regarding everything I believed. In my anger and disappointed, I put God to the test, prepared to take my life in the living room of the house if he did not perform the demanded miracle. I was deadly serious. I was conscious of my decision, and, sadly, the repercussions my family would feel. Thankfully, the demanded miracle was delivered and my life was spared. Two of my siblings would later take their lives, but I was the first one of us to step out onto that precipice. Sadly, I was the only one to walk back.
I never told anyone about this incident until decades later. You can read about it here: Chapter 15 - Quarter To Midnight.
In the months after my close call, I still doubted my beliefs. Was God really talking to me, or was it all a delusion? Was I crazy? Ultimately, I concluded that I wasn't. There were just too many circumstances and coincidences in my life that wouldn't be explained without supernatural intervention.
Then again, perhaps it was supernatural intervention of another kind.
Once the entity made its presence known in an undeniable manner, I had to wonder if any of the actions I credited to God were perhaps demonic counterfeits. I had to consider that possibility again once I heard about my mother and sister's experiences. My sister's clairvoyance in particular seemed directly inspired by the entity. However, I rejected that possibility. Although I have mistakenly underestimated the power of the thing in the house in the past, I do not believe it had the power (or patience) to perform the acts God performed in my life. And, most importantly, I survived the suicide attempt. Had the entity been the main mover and shaker in my life, I would have died that night in the house.
However, that doesn't mean that the entity didn't play a hand in that event.
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| Yours Truly with Kathy, blurred for her privacy |
I only consciously became aware of the entity itself after my mother and her friend Ted used the Ouija board in the Hell Room. My bedroom was across the hall from the Hell Room, on the third floor of the house.
My haunting began as most hauntings do, I suppose, with noises. I started being awakened by scurrying on the roof. It sounded like something small, like a squirrel. There was a tall oak tree on the other side of our driveway taller than the house. Nowadays, there is considerable debate whether the branches actually extended over to the roof. (A subsequent owner of the house took down the tree.) However, at the time, I reasoned that a squirrel must gotten on the roof from the tree. No problem, right?
But something was wrong.
The scurrying would stop anytime I opened my eyes. I would just lie there waiting, but it remained still -- until I closed my eyes. Then it would start again. From the sound, I could literally follow its movements, but it would always stop when I opened my eyes. It was maddening. Sometimes I would jump out of bed and go the opening to the small crawlspace between my ceiling and the roof and shine a light in, hoping to see something, but there was never anything to see. I would be up for hours a night playing this game of hide and seek.
The really scary thing was that only way it could know when I opened my eyes was that it could see me.
That meant it was looking at me, and it was intentionally screwing with me.
That showed both intelligence and intent.
This would go on for days or maybe weeks at a time. Sometimes it would stop, but it would always start up again.
Then it got worse. Instead of the scurrying of a little animal, I began hearing footsteps -- human-style footsteps -- on the roof. Once again, my mind tried to rationalize what I was hearing. There had to be someone up there -- a person -- but there couldn't be. There were no low branches on the oak tree. It was essentially unclimbable. The only safe way to access the top roof of the house was through the window of my own bedroom. The roof of the sunporch was right below my window. When we were new to the house, my friends and I often hung out the sunporch roof on a lazy summer afternoon. However, none of us climbed from there to the top roof. Even us foolhardy kids recognized that the top roof was too high and too dangerous to play on. There was no one on the roof. Yet I could hear him. (I don't mean to be sexist or patriarchal, but the entity always felt more male than female to me.)
And, yes, of course, the footsteps stopped anytime I opened my eyes.
And I wasn't asleep. I would lie in bed awake listening to it walking, mentally following its movements.
It was bad enough when it was on the roof. Then it came inside.
I had a single bed with an old wooden frame, a wooden box spring and a thin mattress. I would be sleeping only to awakened by something moving inside the mattress. Something really big. Imagine a fifteen-foot python trapped inside a thin mattress. That's what it felt like. I never saw it, but it was definitely snake-like in its shape and movements. When it moved, it moved me, too. I shifted in bed, to the right or the left to accommodate it.
That really scared me. I tried to be as quiet and motionless as possible when it was in the mattress. Afterwards, either that night or the next morning I would pull the mattress off the bed and look for holes to see how it got in. Of course, that was totally irrational. Nothing that big could have gotten into the mattress without utterly destroying it. Not only that, how could something that big even get into my room without me seeing it?
Now you see why we never talked about any of this. It was insane.
There was no rational explanation for this phenomenon, except perhaps nightmares or mental illness. Unable to discuss this with anyone, I grew more isolated. Especially at night.
Let me say one thing: This was not sleep paralysis. I never experienced that. I could always move in bed. Nor was it night terrors. I never woke up screaming. I don't think it ever made me scream.
Sometimes the bed or the mattress would just shake. Like in the movie The Exorcist, but not quite that extreme. This confounded me even more. If the bed was moving in the dead of night like that, how come no one heard it downstairs? When we finally started talking about the haunting, we were all shocked that the others hadn't heard the things we experienced. It was extremely rare for more than one person at a time to see or hear an event.
Then things got really bad, and this is what inspired the key plot point in my upcoming novel Chapel Street.
One night, I woke up finding myself crawling out of my bedroom window. The window, as I said early, opened to the roof of the sunporch. But there was an extremely long drop off that roof to the stone patio below, or, worse yet, the metal stairs down from back porch. I still shudder to think what it would feel like to fall onto that. I would have definitely died. No question about it in my mind.
I don't know what stopped me, but I woke up suddenly. I was shocked. As I got back into bed, I looked over at my alarm clock. It was 3:00am exactly.
That would have been the time of my death.
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| Photo of my bedroom from the 2013 sale of the house. There used to be a radiator at the right rear of the room near the window. My bed was right in front of it with my head at the right wall and my feet by the window. |
Once is an anomaly. Twice could be a strange coincidence. Three times was definitely design. Something was trying to kill me. I was sure of that.
That was what I now call a suicide event. If I had sleepwalked off the roof, I am sure everyone I knew would have considered my death a suicide. Although I had never told anyone about my intentional suicide attempt two years earlier, everyone knew I had wrestled with depression since my break-up with Kathy. That would have been the perfectly reasonable explanation for my actions.
I can't remember who initiated the first family meeting about the haunting, but I think it might have been me right after these suicide events. I was finally desperate enough to speak up. I can't remember the month, but it was definitely in 1986 because my sister Jeanne was pregnant with her daughter Marion at the time. She and her then husband Jon were living in the master bedroom -- you know, the room with the closets where the entity seemed to live. Not the best place to sleep.
I know Jeanne, Jon and my mother were definitely at this first meeting. Somehow I think my late sister Laurie was there, too, but I am not sure. I know we discussed it with her later. My older brother Doug was not present. Neither was Mark. The meeting took place in the dining room. My father was in the living room watching TV. I went in and asked him if he wanted to talk about the haunting with us. He just looked at me like I was crazy.
But I wasn't crazy. And I wasn't alone either anymore. Everyone admitted to some private terror, and was questioning their sanity. It was a relief to finally talk about it. However, I don't know how honest everyone was. I, for one, was willing to talk about the bed and the footsteps, but I never mentioned crawling out of the window. That would be going too far. I didn't want to be fitted for a straight jacket. We decided that night not to mention anything to my kid brother John. We didn't want to scare him. (We didn't take into account that the entity was perfectly capable of scaring him on its own. It didn't cut him any slack because of his youth.) Our policy of silence also, over time, extended to my nieces.
The situation actually got worse rather than better in the immediate aftermath of the meeting. As far as I was concerned, this was the height of the paranormal activity in the house. Our daily reports revealed one thing: It only seemed to bother one person a night. It was always easy to figure out who that person was. You would find them sleeping on the sofa in the living room the next morning. The entity seemed content simply to drive people out of their bedrooms. It was agreed by all of us that the Hell Room, the front bedroom on the third floor, was the center of the activity at the time. We credited the Ouija board session to its strength in that room.
It was a really strange period. I was working at the advertising agency Smith Burke & Azzam and I loved it. Great people. Interesting work. Very exciting. My social life was active, too. I had my old neighborhood friends, college friends and new work friends. I went out practically every night to either dinner or a movie or both. However, no matter how much fun I had, a sense of dread would fill me when I headed home because I knew the thing would be waiting for me. It was unbelievable. During the day, I lived the life of a happy-go-lucky, rational, 20th century man, but at night I found myself buffeted by an ancient, nameless demonic entity that wanted to harm me.
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| Yours Truly as The Young Ad Man |
Strangely, despite crawling out of the window and nightly terrors visited upon us, I still considered the entity was more of a nuisance than a physical threat. Then a friend of mine, Tim Ratajczak, lent me the book The Demonologist by Ed and Lorraine Warren. The activity in our house seemed to follow a distinct pattern in their book. In fact, it indicated that our haunting had reached a critically dangerous level were people start to die by either murder or suicide. Something had to be done.
While my mother worked with her priest friends, I also took offensive action against the entity on my own. Although I had previously resorted to prayer at some of the worst moments, I never tried to cast out the entity. Ad-libbing my own prayers, I managed to cast the demon out of my room in the name of Christ. I really felt its anger then. Although it could no longer enter my room, some nights it would completely surround it as if it were coated on the outer walls. I could feel its seething malevolence, but it couldn't physically get to me.
The malevolence -- the pure hatred -- that it directed at me showed me that the entity was capable of emotion. That was another sign of moral agency in the entity.
Later, I tried casting it out of the entire house, but God told me: "It's not yours to cast out." (Remember, I said God would talk to me periodically.) Still, the entity could no longer bother me directly as it had done in the past, although I was still susceptible to the oppressive spirit one felt in its shadow. But I was not completely safe. Once my curiosity almost got the best of me. I remember one night, standing in the hallway outside of the darkened Hell Room, wondering about the entity. It hadn't been active in a while, and, when it wasn't active, it was easy to convince yourself that it was all just your imagination. I remember saying out loud: "There's nothing here. If there was, it would turn on that light."
And it did.
I never tested it or tried to communicate with it again. However, that little show of force of its part proved to me that the entity wasn't just a force or random energy. It was an independent intelligence that understood human language. It could interact with you if it chose to do so.
Later still, after hearing about some new activity, I asked God why he didn't cast it out. He replied: "You don't want it gone. You want to write about it."
I hadn't knowingly considered that possibility at the time, but I then resolved never to write about the entity. And I stayed true to that resolution until my mother recently asked me whether I thought the entity was responsible, in part, for the deaths of my two siblings. I wrote my novel Chapel Street to explore that possibility.
And now, of course, these blogs....
Am I being disobedient now? No, I don't think so. Remember God didn't say I couldn't or shouldn't write about it. He was just questioning my motivations.
One final story. I finally bought my own home in 1996. While I was upstairs in my room getting ready for the move after my final night at the house, it began banging on the door at the bottom of the stairway to the third floor. It sounded like someone was hitting it was a sledgehammer, but really fast. Both my mother and my niece Natalie were on the second floor and they were terrified. So was I. But then it stopped, and that was that. I guess the banging was its way of saying, "Goodbye, hope to kill you later."
The timing of that manifestation, which seemed to be directed at me, tells me that the entity was consciously aware of our activities in the house. It knew I was leaving and wanted to send me a message.
I frequently returned to 21 St. Helens Avenue for holidays and family events. However, I don't recall ever going back up onto the second or third floors again. Not until the auction.
In 2005, after the death of my father, my mother sold the house for $289,000. A pretty good price, since she bought it for $25,000. The buyers did not ask whether the house was haunted, and she didn't volunteer the information. She came to believe, perhaps accurately, that the entity fed off the energy of young people. Since the couple didn't have any children, my mother assumed they were probably safe.
The house later came up for auction in 2013 with a starting price of a mere $10,000. I wanted to buy it. I felt if I owned the house, I could finally cast out the demon. My wife, showing characteristic wisdom, wouldn't hear of it. Still, we went to the auction anyway. I talked with many of the potential buyers, telling them that I was a former resident. When they'd ask me about the house, I told them it was haunted. They'd all say, "That's cool." I would say, "No, it isn't."
I don't think I spoke with the people who actually bought the house.
I hope they are faring better than we did.
Because I know the entity is still active.
Continued here: The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 9, My Tale, Pt. 2
Here I am discussing these events on video:
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| Yours Truly in the Hell Room in 2013. |
Notes:
*21 St. Helens Avenue was the original address of the house when it was built. The street name and number changed over time, but I use the original address to protect the privacy of the current owners.
**Not her real name.
Additional blogs about the haunting:
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 1, An Introduction
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 2, The House
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 3, This Is Us
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 4, Arrival
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 5, Methodology
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 6, Clara's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 7, Clara's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 8, My Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 9, My Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 10, My Tale, Pt. 3
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 11, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 12, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 13, John's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 14, John's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 15, Come Inside!
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 16, Marion's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 17, Marion's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 18, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 19, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 20, Lisa's Tale
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 21, Recap, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 22, Recap, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 23, Recap, Pt. 3
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 2, The House
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 3, This Is Us
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 4, Arrival
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 5, Methodology
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 6, Clara's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 7, Clara's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 8, My Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 9, My Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 10, My Tale, Pt. 3
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 11, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 12, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 13, John's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 14, John's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 15, Come Inside!
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 16, Marion's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 17, Marion's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 18, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 19, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 20, Lisa's Tale
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 21, Recap, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 22, Recap, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 23, Recap, Pt. 3
My novel Chapel Street was inspired by the haunting. You can currently buy the Kindle and paperback at Amazon and the Nook, paperback and hardcover at Barnes & Noble.
Listen to me read some chapters here:
Chapel Street - Prologue - My Mother
Chapel Street - Chapter 1 - RestingPlace.com
Chapel Street - Chapter 2 - Elisabetta
Chapel Street - Chapter 3 - The Upload
Chapel Street - Chapter 4 - The Kobayashi Maru
Let's stay in touch:
Chapel Street - Prologue - My Mother
Chapel Street - Chapter 1 - RestingPlace.com
Chapel Street - Chapter 2 - Elisabetta
Chapel Street - Chapter 3 - The Upload
Chapel Street - Chapter 4 - The Kobayashi Maru
Let's stay in touch:
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