New Life. Old Demons: Part 3 of 3

 

What follows is the 3rd of 3 parts to the investigation post titled "New Life. Old Demons."  If this is your first time visiting my blog, then you've missed something pretty cool. You should go and find Part 1 of this paranormal investigation post. If you're here because you read Parts 1 and 2, and want to read more, then Awesome! Glad you made your way back to join us for the continuation!

The Results

I sat my little corner of the bedroom where my writing desk perpetually supports my laptop, a fake plant--the only type that will grow in the house due to a lack of sunlight--a gooseneck desk lamp, a cup of coffee, and one of those things that produces a cool mist from water mixed with a few drops of Vanilla, Caramel, and Spice scented oil. 

I still have yet to figure out how it does that. 

With over-the-ear headphones plugged in and Audacity open on the laptop before me, I loaded up the first of my audio files and began listening to our voices as we started the EVP session in the largest of Kyle's bedrooms.

I could hear my own voice--which I hate to hear on audio recordings. We had begun talking about the female presence I'd felt in the room. "We just want to know that you're here," I told her. 

Then, a faint sound unlike the white noise and our own voices, broke through. I stopped the playback, clicked on the audio just prior to the noise, and listened again. I had to listen a few times before I finally understood what was being said. 

It was a female voice. "I'm here."

My heart quickened in my chest, because at that moment my feelings about a female presence were validated. There was a female there, and perhaps others.

I selected the section of audio containing the voice and saved it as a separate file, then continued listening. 

Before long another soft voice, lower that a whisper, broke through the shhhhhh of the ambient noise in the room. This time it was a male voice. 

"Don't step on that," the man said. 

I thought about the digital voice recorder sitting on the floor in the center of the room. Was this what the man was referring to? Or was there something in his realm that only he and the spirit he was addressing could see?

Whenever I found a voice in our recordings, I often asked Jeff to listen to it without telling him what I had heard. He never could hear what I heard. To him, the noise that I could hear as a voice speaking always sounded like an ambient noise, some drone of a car engine in the distance or perhaps the noise of a refrigerator running through its cooling cycle. So, unless the voice was loud and clear enough for him to hear, we never considered it evidence. 

I listened to the rest of the audio file from the bedroom and then closed it out. 

Next was the file that we recorded when we were in the lower floor of the building. I expected to hear another voice from that recording, and was surprised when I didn't hear anything more than ambient noise and our voices.

The next file was contained a few interesting voices that came through the spirit box while we were in Kyle's apartment again. 

With the constant ch-ch-ch-ch of the spirit box and the questions we asked were choppy bits and pieces of sentences and phrases that came through from radio stations within broadcasting range. 

When Kyle began asking questions, the voices seemed to change. 

"Why did you push me down the stairs?" he asked.

Then, the male spoke again. "Ain't your property."

I clipped that section of audio and saved it, then continued. 

A few minutes later, Kyle asked, "Why did you scratch me?"

The response came from a female voice, far more audible than the female who had spoken previously during the EVP session. "I was protecting..."

There was no doubt that the spirits in the apartment felt territorial. They still considered it their home, and were probably angered by Kyle suddenly moving his belongings into the space. I wasn't entirely convinced that the female was the source of the scratches that Kyle had suffered, though. With this type of activity, it was important to remember that demons are liars. They will often pose as a spirit to try to convince people that they weren't demons at all, but something far less sinister. This was one of their methods of hiding, because by hiding, they could avoid being banished from the location.

A few days after listening to the audio, something occurred that solidified my feeling that this wasn't just an angry woman protecting someone. 

I received a text from Kyle that morning.

So...going to have to stay here and fight.

What happened? I responded.

Went to look at a room for rent and the guy renting it asked about where I'm living now. So, I started telling him about it. In the middle of telling the story his doorbell rang, he got confused, not expecting anyone. We went to go see who was there, nobody was there. Dude was freaked out. We both heard it bigger than shit. I know this thing likes pushing buttons...? He said I needed to go and he'd be in touch. 

That confirmed it. A normal human spirit won't follow someone to a different location. Demons do that. This one had been waiting outside when Kyle left the apartment that morning and had followed him to the rental home. It was the demon's way of saying, "Hey, I'm here. I can follow you anywhere."

I did begin to wonder, though, if this demon had been following Kyle for a long time. Demons, contrary to what many people believe, don't just hang out in empty buildings. Demons are predators. They need a host, someone whose energy they can feed off of. With the building having been abandoned for a few years prior to Kyle's boss purchasing and renovating it, it was unlikely that this demon had been sitting around staring at that atrocious, lime green wall in the kitchen the whole time. 

I want to find out more about your life, I told Kyle. I have a feeling that this thing may have been following you for a while. It could be using your move into this creepy, old building as an opportunity to show its presence. That way you will believe the building is haunted and not that you have a demonic attachment. 

What I had described to him was a common occurrence. Demons are sneaky and manipulative, but also extremely intelligent. They will enter a person's life and wait, sometimes for years, while learning about that person. They want to know your strengths and weaknesses. They want to find out the best way to break you down, to cause chaos and pain and suffrage in your life. And they always commence their assault in passive, almost undetectable way. Perhaps lights in your home begin to flicker when they haven't before. Perhaps it's just a string of bad luck. Problems keep occurring more and more frequently. "Why am I having such bad luck lately?" you may ask yourself. Then one day you decide to go to a haunted place or move into a new home and suddenly all hell breaks loose. You had to have brought something back with you from that place, an attachment. Right? No. It's the same old demon that has always been there. It has just found an opportunity to manifest in a way that has you blaming that haunted house.

Soon, the phone rang. Kyle's number appeared on the phone.

When I answered it, Kyle said, "What you said made me start to think. You could be right."

What followed was a story about a home in North Carolina where Kyle used to live with his ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend's children were scared and insisted on sleeping huddled together in one bed each night. From the vantage point of the recliner in the living room, Kyle would see a dark figure passing from room to room at the far end of the bedroom hallway. 

Then, there was the other girlfriend. She had been a professional ballerina, he said, but she had been in a horrible car accident that left one of her legs shorter than the other. In effort to regain her ability to dance, the woman had made a deal with the devil. She offered her soul for the chance to dance again. 

Of course, Satan didn't appear to her and cause the shorter of her two legs to somehow lengthen. But that didn't matter. Making a pact with the devil, whether or not he held up his end of the deal, was an invitation to the forces of evil to make themselves at home in her life. Not long after telling Kyle about the deal with the devil, he was sitting in a chair watching his girlfriend. She sat on the living room floor, immersed in a craft. He used his cell phone to take a picture of her, but in that picture, the areas where her eyes should've been were black voids. 

Then, Kyle began telling me about all of the bad luck he had since the haunted apartment in North Carolina. He owned an oil company. Lost it all during that last major oil spill in the early 2000s, he said. He would save up some money and then something would happen that would wipe out his savings. He couldn't keep a relationship for long. He'd never had kids. 

One thing was clear: there had been something dark and menacing following Kyle for many years. If it wasn't stopped, then before long it might do something far worse that leave three deep scratches down his side. 

"You need to move into that apartment," I told him. "These spirits still think that apartment is theirs, and they won't quiet down until you show them that it's not."

The apartment was empty, devoid of all things Kyle. By filling that space with his belongings and thus, his energy, he would be asserting his dominance, his rightful ownership of the place. But this was just the beginning. There was more to be done to rid his life of the dark spirits inhabiting it. 

"Have you ever heard of a deliverance?" I asked him, and wasn't surprised when he hadn't. Many people, even devout Christians, had never heard of it. I did my best to explain what it was and how it was carried out. 

A deliverance relies on the full engagement of the victim, though. If that person fails to carry through with it, then he or she will not find the spiritual freedom that is available to him. I sent him the information he needed to start carrying out the deliverance, praying that he would have the motivation to follow through with it. 

A few weeks later, I heard from Kyle again. He had gone to the pound and gotten a dog, which I thought was a wonderful idea. Anything that added happiness to a home and made it more his would be a positive thing. The dog had started displaying some strange behavior. However, it wasn't clear whether the dog was reacting to some unseen force in the apartment or whether it was by nature a nervous dog. 

I haven't heard from Kyle again, but I plan on checking in on him from time to time to see how he is doing. 

These people, desperate for help, walk into my life. I throw my heart into helping them, and in the process, learn so much about them. I see them as my brothers and sisters, because all of us are God's children. I offer a way to help them, then all I can do is sit back and pray that he or she will accept the help and do what is necessary to ensure that it works. It's a heartbreaking mission sometimes. I love these people. I want to see them find the true happiness and peace that I found years ago. But, as Daddy always used to say, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.