Having shared a bit of my experiences with the unseen and the unknown, I knew to fully tackle the subject matter I would have to break up the many experienced into two pieces. This is essentially a piece about young helplessness and introduction to faith and fear. It took a while to get there but you can see the various struggles as I navigated through the feelings having a connection to the unknown and unseen.
This second piece leaves me at a state of innocence and naivete where I am still too young to focus on what was actually happening to me and reacting on pure instinct alone. My parents knew that a small two bedroom apartment was not ideal for four growing children so with much determination and several hours of overtime my father was able to start looking at houses in Long Island. They decided upon a house in Brentwood, Long Island. I was about five years old or so and it was summer. I could not tell you the joy as I looked around the yard and stood under a tall pine that stood proud and tall on one side of the yard and a medium sized evergreen on the other. There were about three bright yellow flowered forsythia bushes that lined the driveway, and rhododendron bushes that hugged the house budding magenta and white flowers. The smell of lily of the valley that were planted by the main stoop. Grass everywhere, green and crab grew without end. The back yard was big as well and empty with some birch trees and hibiscus flowers growing randomly along the fence that separated our property from the neighbors. There was a small deck outside that extended 3/4 from the back sliding glass door and was rickety and worn. Wild grapes grew along the fence and deck and jutting from the small corner between the deck and the fence that separated the front yard from the back, was a mulberry tree.
The house was a double ranch and had a kitchen, a dining room and living room, a master bedroom, a standard bedroom and a bathroom all on the first floor. Up stairs the Attic was turned into two bedrooms one with a crawl space that acted as a closet and the other with a standard closet. This house also had a full basement the length and width of the hole house, this is where the washer machine and dryer were and more storage space.
This was our new home. This was that safe space. My parents got acquainted with the local Jehovah witnesses and located the then nearest congregation which was on Beaverdam rd off of route 111/ Islip ave. We were warmly welcomed and everything was cake. This all felt surreal and new and I was too young to appreciate anything other than the new spacious home and my ability to have my own space and bed and the option to play in a yard. Sounds fantastic, right? Yeah, more like Phantasmic.
I was sleeping in one of the upstairs rooms and the closet door/crawl space would often creak and open. This was an attic and so although freaked out sometimes in the night with that sort of movement and sounds, I could always fall back on the wind which my parents always explained was the reasoning. This I could rationalize to some degree and find rest as needed. What I could not rationalize was the cold darkness that seemed to come alive at night and the sleep paralysis I would experience that rendered me useless and fright filled. I would often find myself aware of my surroundings could see wherever my eyes roamed and sometimes even see me laying in the bed freaking out as though another part of my consciousness was viewing me from atop. That's right folks, I was floating above myself looking at my self. Where they do that at? Apparently my room.
Having my wits about me I tried to utilize the remedy my parents had instilled in me, this was prayer. Praying to Jehovah that would stop demons, which is what I was told were responsible for all these supernatural events. James chapter 2 verses 19 "For there is one God, the very demons know this and tremble at the sound of the name." Sometimes, some very rare times it worked. I would call upon the name which blurted out in an incoherent mumble and sometimes the feeling would recede and I would be able to move. Other times it did nothing but further amuse the very thing responsible for holding me down, I knew this because sometimes I would here a guttural unnatural laughter that mocked my attempt to call on anything.
This is where I realized that God may not have been there for me. May not have been what I thought he was in regards to these things. This was a lot to ponder and mentally marinate as a young child.
The basement. That horrible, horrible place of which nightmares are born and horror movies are fashioned after. That basement I still shudder when I think about it. See my mother believed if I was high enough to reach knobs and tell colors from whites, I could do laundry. She would have be bring down the basket full of dirty clothes separate and start loads. This was fine, it was going down those stairs and feeling the ominous presence of things moving but unseen. Often while I was pouring detergent into the cap, or placing clothes in the dryer I would sense movement from the corner of my eye only to see the tail end of some ones garment as they turned the corner of now empty doorway. Or that peripheral vision where you could clearly see the image of someone you could identify key characteristics of, but when you turned your full attention to they would be gone. Particularly the skinny white man with long stringy shoulder length brown hair, porn-stache and gray quarter fur coat with brown fitted bell bottoms. Yes that man who watched me as I did laundry and practically leered at me only to dissipate before my eyes leaving me wondering if I ever saw him in the first place. Then there was the clothes hanging in storage moving and swaying on the line where no wind or breeze could be felt as if someone moved amongst them. The sound of feet pitter pattering around you and box lids moving, with no one you could catch with the naked eye.
Throughout the years with turn around in the house hold as siblings moved out and moved on I was able to switch bedrooms. This was a room previously occupied by my sister. This room always had a heavy feeling, while there I wanted to seclude myself from everyone. Doodle on paper, listen to music but not leave the confines of that space. This room was were constant apparitions would visit me. The old man in white robes and flowing beard, reminiscent of the character Saruman the white of Lord of the Rings. He would smile in the corner and extend a hand towards me as he came to my bedside, in greeting or just to touch I could not tell you as everything in me crawled up a wall and I screamed, cried, and prayed for him to go away. Sometimes in his place would be this little pale skinned girl with the blondest of hair and the frailest of looks. She would sit there looking innocent and yet wise beyond the years of any child I would consider a peer. There was the hunched over dwarf like man with rotten and snaggled teeth who would twirl his long beard around his finger and snicker as he stared at me. There was an instant these entities woke me up to the sound of screaming, I could tell it was my mother. She cried for help and screamed in agony, I got out of my bed to inspect and follow the source of sound only to find that my room no longer had a door I was surrounded by only four white walls.
Oh I was not the only one, my mother would often have insane nightmares of which she would wake up screaming and fighting the air. She would often scream in the middle of the night where she would describe a big man standing in the closet with the face of a rottweiler or large dog black dog. My mother once left the house anxious as we left for church one night. MY father asked her what was wrong and she said she had a disturbing dream early in the day that loud rock music was playing and three white men were rummaging through the house. Cabinets were open and things smashed and littering the floor. She couldn't shake the feeling but we went to church anyway. When we got home after that service, the neighbor flagged us down as we pulled into our driveway. Mr. Nixon, the neighbor across the street, had stopped a burglary in action at our home. He heard loud rock music and saw three white men who parked an unfamiliar van by our house and who walked into our back yard where they stood for awhile. He pulled out his firearm and followed their route around back and found they had broken in to the house and were throwing things about looking for valuables. He pointed his firearm and chased them out of the house. So as my mother had dreamt, this all came to pass.
My parents could not relay any further insight into what the super natural occurrences or strange events that transpired exactly were. They could only classify it as demonic and pray it away or ignore it, as if acknowledging it gave it some power. I could not help but acknowledge it, it was happening to me on an almost constant. I knew that God had it in for me, whoever this Jehovah was he might have needed a hearing aid or maybe I needed to do some extra activities in the kingdom hall so that he would respond to my prayers and pleas for help. So, I began to delve into this strange relationship with this supreme being who I couldn't see who had the power to stop the entities I sometimes saw or who effected me most but who wouldn't always show up when called. How's that for a toxic relationship with the Divine? Fear and faith and the fight as they coexisted in the same space. Until part III my peoples, this will continue.
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