I'm placing this 'story' here because I don't know where else on the board it should go. It's not fiction, at least not in the sense that I myself made the story up. It is a 'true' family ghost story I've been trying for sometime to get written, but haven't ever been able to get the voice for it right. I think this attempt to get it down come out fairly well and upon Snacker's encouragement I'm sharing it with you here as well as posting it on my blog. I hope you guys will enjoy it.
This story does contain elements and references to Satanism and the Church of Satan and it's founder. If you are offended by such subject matter and persons consider this your warning. I will also NOT be answering generalized questions on the matter. So, please do not post them. If a reader is interested in learning more about Satanism or the Church of Satan or it's founder I strongly suggest visiting the Church of Satan's official website, www.churchofsatan.com.My Mother and the Red Eyed DemonBy Hydra M. Star
My mother was born in nineteen hundred and fifty-five. There was nothing remarkable about her birth. She was the fourth of five children in a family that could have, in a good year, comfortably afforded the upkeep of one child. By the time of her arrival her parents were utterly bankrupt of money and patience. Her mother, a stern and disagreeable woman under the best of circumstances, made no secret of the fact her daughter’s conception was an unplanned and unwanted surprise. Her father, a womanize with at least twice as many children as he raised, was a beckon of light and humor in an otherwise gloomy world. The pair fought nearly every day of their sixty-something years of marriage until death finally parted them. Her brother and three sisters, like herself, were unremarkable and under loved.
Kept on a constant move by finances and job prospects the family never lingered in one spot for then a year or two; usually only long enough, for my grandfather at least, to have another child. They lived in Georgia. They lived in Virginia. They lived in North Carolina, the state of my own eventual birth. They were farmers. They were shrimpers. They were bomb builders. They were a family of the Southlands; the Bible Belt, but had no real hometown. They were nearly every stereotype one might expect of such a clan; including superstitious.
Somewhere around the year nineteen hundred and seventy; when my mother was fifteen or sixteen-years-old; she’d never be able to recall for certain which; the family moved into an old farmhouse with a history very relevant to then current but now somewhat aged cultural concerns. It had only been a couple of years prior to my mother and her family’s move in date that a man with the peculiar sounding name Anton Szandor LaVey had, out in California, established a ‘church’ devoted to the devil. He’d written books and gone on television and the radio talking about Satanism. He’d toured the country and the world spreading his message. He’d drawn movie stars and musicians and common every day folks to his door to join up with his order and in the process spooked a lot of decent god-fearing folks right out of their illusions or normality. A Satanist was a scary enough thing when they were being played by Vincent Price in a funny looking cape and hat, but they were a whole other thing when they stepped off the silver screen and looked, dressed, and sounded like the people next door. So, perhaps it is not shocking to those who understand how such fear and panic has a nature of spreading that the house, as the story went, had been previously owned and occupied by a band of Satanists; who had, among other unspeakable acts, sacrificed a young boy and conjured up demons. Some of these spirits were said to still haunted the grounds.
The woman, the house’s owner before them, had delivered this story to the eager ears of my family complete with visual aids. Both her hands had been severally burned and permanently disfigured in a ‘cooking accident’. She’d been in the middle of taking a set of apple pies out of the oven, as she told it, when she’d been suddenly seized by unseen hands. This ghostly assailant or assailants had forced her own hands into the center of the burning hot pies. She wore gloves to cover her scars, but since my mother’s family had asked about this accessory she’d been compelled to tell them the whole sorted tale. It was after all her duty as a fellow Christian to warn them of the house’s dangers.
In no time at all my mother and various members of the family began ‘sensing’ scary things. This wasn’t a far jump from seeing things, which came soon enough after. Beside my oldest cousin, who was at the time a toddler, playing with the ghost of the murdered boy there was an incident in which the water in my grandmother’s prized fish aquarium had, overnight, turned cloudy and all her fish dead. My grandfather, after being kicked out of the marriage bed over something or other, had found himself literally thrown out of the guest bed by unseen forces. The bed had, he’d later claimed, risen up off the floor while he slept and he’d awoke to his nose touching the ceiling. That had been when he’d ‘jumped’ from the bed and fell to the floor. The bed itself had come crashing back down a second later. But perhaps most disturbing was my mother’s nightly visit; the Devil himself.
Like any good devil, my mother’s devil came equip with creepy effects, not the least of which were a pair of glowing red eyes, and troubling words; a prediction really. He told her she’d marry and be a mother. He told her that she’d have a daughter; only a daughter and no more children. She’d try, but she’d be unable to have anymore. But as bad as this sounded to my mother, who dreamed of one day having a large family, what came next was far worse. The heart and soul of her daughter, her only daughter, would be his.
There was no deal. He offered her no pay off in exchange for her unborn child; no way out. He was merely giving her the gift of fair warning. Her daughter would be one of his greatest followers, he said. She would do his work and take his name and there would be nothing my mother could do to prevent it.
The more astute reader will have already figured out by now that I’m my mother’s daughter. Her only daughter; her only child. The one she not only named after Christ but also, before I could even sit up, baptized in his name. The one she prayed over and for and used with the story of the farmhouse and the Satanists and their demons as a forewarning of what could happen if I went too far off the path of the righteous.
But the signs of failure and doom were there from the start. Even the date of my birth, September ninth, double nines an evil number and evil date, mocked her best efforts. When I, as a toddler, took to drawing with my left hand something had to be done. I was forced to favor my right. Then there was the non-sense language I made up and spoke with my ‘imaginary friends’ in. That tongue sounded too close to Aramaic for her comfort and I was again forced to stop it. By the time I was a teen the writing was already not only on the wall, but had dried, been covered over, and repainted on in larger letters, but still my mother tried and my mother prayed and my mother waited.
In my seventeenth year of life, seemingly right on schedule, a rock star with unnaturally pasty skin showed up in the American mainstream and brought with him that peculiarly named man, LaVey, and his Church of Satan. Suddenly, carrying around a copy of The Satanic Bible and calling oneself a Satanist was very in fashion. What was worse, some people were actually reading the books and like mostly everything else young people were figuring out Satanism wasn’t what the Christian churches of their parents and grandparents had painted it to be. My mother held her breath and her tongue. She knew by now that the more she rallied against something and made outlandish claims and tried to scare me the more interest in it I’d show and I was interested. But one question still remained. How far towards her demon’s prophecy would I go?
That is a question best answered by two little words, I’ve often spoken and have found suitable in almost every other occasion of power or doubt… Hail Satan!
Happy Halloween Folks!