DARKER AND DARKER
After this incident, I felt even weirder about the Wiccan things she had in the house. I started warning her that God does not like things like that. But she blew me off and continued to say that it was only for fun and none of it was "serious witchcraft stuff."
Weird things were beginning to happen. I could no longer smell the roses and baby lotion in that living room. I no longer felt that I was being protected or comforted by my grandfather's spirit.
I tried to talk with her about it, but she seemed to focus on the negative things about him when we talked, almost to a hateful tone. Her personality as a whole was different. Little things that she would otherwise brush off were depressing her and causing her to have hostile outbursts.
These outbursts were being directed at me, since I was the only one living with her, as well as my uncle (her son), who stopped by every other day. Every time my grandfather's name was spoken, she sighed in disgust and her mood went sour. She stopped smiling, laughing, speaking without swearing vulgarly and talking harshly. I did not recognize this person anymore.
THE BITE MARK
One night, I was in my room and could not sleep. My throat was very dry so I went downstairs to get something to drink. My grandmother always preferred sleeping on a sofa, so she mostly slept in the enclosed porch we call the Florida room. As I walked back to the stairs, I saw the TV was still on, so I went in because I figured she was still awake, but she wasn't.
She was sleeping and the room was absolutely freezing. I saw that she only had a quarter of the blanket covering her and wondered how she wasn't freezing herself awake. That just made me want to go to sleep even more, under my warm blanket in my warm room.
The next day, she was sitting in a kitchen chair when I came downstairs. "I think Mario nipped me when I was sleeping," she said. Mario is a poodle, one of three dogs she has. The others are Pumpkin and Honey, a collie and a bull mastiff, all three with gentle, friendly dispositions.
I looked at her arm. "That's not a dog bite," was the first thing I remember saying. If it were a dog bite, it would have been pouring with blood, and she would probably be at the hospital, not the kitchen table. There were two puncture marks spread about three inches apart. Yes, they were bloody, but they were not the punctures of dog teeth, but by something narrower, like the punctures made by a thick needle or something. I couldn't tell how deep they were, but there was dried blood around them, which led me to believe they had bled for a while.
A little higher up on her arm were a few scratch marks, which were much more obvious. There were four painful-looking scratches stretching about five to six inches on her upper arm. I asked how she could have possibly done that, but she had no clue. She said when she woke up her arm was very sore, so she assumed that maybe her arm flipped off the sofa while she was sleeping and it startled Mario and perhaps he bit her. "The dogs weren't in there when I went in," I told her. Pumpkin was sleeping under the kitchen table when I got my drink, and Mario and Honey were sleeping on the living room floor.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
With all that was going on in that house, I considered the idea that the bite might be something paranormal. I had been getting bad feelings in that house for months: hearing weird noises and footsteps, feeling ice-cold rushes of air and, to top it off, now there was physical evidence of something evil. If it was paranormal, it did not mean well. The puncture marks and scratches told me whatever it was was vicious. And that was enough to have a serious talk with my grandmother.
So a couple of days after that incident, I spilled my heart out about the bad energy I was feeling, and the bad feeling I had about her arm. I expected her to dismiss my bad feelings and assure me once again there's nothing bad in the house, but she was silent. Then she told me there was something she wanted me to see.
THE PENTAGRAM
I followed her to the top of the game room steps to the powder room. The powder room is a small, square bathroom with just a toilet and a sink, and outside along the wall just to the right of the doorway is a nook where she keeps a lamp on a lacey cloth, and below the nook there was a painted-over little board, only a little over a foot in length. On this little board were little holes that formed a star. (It looked like a connect-the-dots star, to give you a better understanding of what this was; the holes were very small and were poked through the board. When I was little I thought it looked cool.) When I looked down at what she was telling me to look at, the little board was gone. She told me she smashed it out, and I was thinking to myself that she had lost her mind. I didn't know what she was talking about.
"That was a pentagram," she said. Those words sent a chill down my spine to my very blood. She explained that she was reading a book she bought about the horned pentagram in which three points of a star are on the bottom and its other two points are above it much larger than the three beneath, resembling horns. That was what was engraved onto the board, and at that moment my heart felt like it dropped.
Next page:The Discovery
After this incident, I felt even weirder about the Wiccan things she had in the house. I started warning her that God does not like things like that. But she blew me off and continued to say that it was only for fun and none of it was "serious witchcraft stuff."
Weird things were beginning to happen. I could no longer smell the roses and baby lotion in that living room. I no longer felt that I was being protected or comforted by my grandfather's spirit.
I tried to talk with her about it, but she seemed to focus on the negative things about him when we talked, almost to a hateful tone. Her personality as a whole was different. Little things that she would otherwise brush off were depressing her and causing her to have hostile outbursts.
These outbursts were being directed at me, since I was the only one living with her, as well as my uncle (her son), who stopped by every other day. Every time my grandfather's name was spoken, she sighed in disgust and her mood went sour. She stopped smiling, laughing, speaking without swearing vulgarly and talking harshly. I did not recognize this person anymore.
THE BITE MARK
One night, I was in my room and could not sleep. My throat was very dry so I went downstairs to get something to drink. My grandmother always preferred sleeping on a sofa, so she mostly slept in the enclosed porch we call the Florida room. As I walked back to the stairs, I saw the TV was still on, so I went in because I figured she was still awake, but she wasn't.
She was sleeping and the room was absolutely freezing. I saw that she only had a quarter of the blanket covering her and wondered how she wasn't freezing herself awake. That just made me want to go to sleep even more, under my warm blanket in my warm room.
The next day, she was sitting in a kitchen chair when I came downstairs. "I think Mario nipped me when I was sleeping," she said. Mario is a poodle, one of three dogs she has. The others are Pumpkin and Honey, a collie and a bull mastiff, all three with gentle, friendly dispositions.
I looked at her arm. "That's not a dog bite," was the first thing I remember saying. If it were a dog bite, it would have been pouring with blood, and she would probably be at the hospital, not the kitchen table. There were two puncture marks spread about three inches apart. Yes, they were bloody, but they were not the punctures of dog teeth, but by something narrower, like the punctures made by a thick needle or something. I couldn't tell how deep they were, but there was dried blood around them, which led me to believe they had bled for a while.
A little higher up on her arm were a few scratch marks, which were much more obvious. There were four painful-looking scratches stretching about five to six inches on her upper arm. I asked how she could have possibly done that, but she had no clue. She said when she woke up her arm was very sore, so she assumed that maybe her arm flipped off the sofa while she was sleeping and it startled Mario and perhaps he bit her. "The dogs weren't in there when I went in," I told her. Pumpkin was sleeping under the kitchen table when I got my drink, and Mario and Honey were sleeping on the living room floor.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
With all that was going on in that house, I considered the idea that the bite might be something paranormal. I had been getting bad feelings in that house for months: hearing weird noises and footsteps, feeling ice-cold rushes of air and, to top it off, now there was physical evidence of something evil. If it was paranormal, it did not mean well. The puncture marks and scratches told me whatever it was was vicious. And that was enough to have a serious talk with my grandmother.
So a couple of days after that incident, I spilled my heart out about the bad energy I was feeling, and the bad feeling I had about her arm. I expected her to dismiss my bad feelings and assure me once again there's nothing bad in the house, but she was silent. Then she told me there was something she wanted me to see.
THE PENTAGRAM
I followed her to the top of the game room steps to the powder room. The powder room is a small, square bathroom with just a toilet and a sink, and outside along the wall just to the right of the doorway is a nook where she keeps a lamp on a lacey cloth, and below the nook there was a painted-over little board, only a little over a foot in length. On this little board were little holes that formed a star. (It looked like a connect-the-dots star, to give you a better understanding of what this was; the holes were very small and were poked through the board. When I was little I thought it looked cool.) When I looked down at what she was telling me to look at, the little board was gone. She told me she smashed it out, and I was thinking to myself that she had lost her mind. I didn't know what she was talking about.
"That was a pentagram," she said. Those words sent a chill down my spine to my very blood. She explained that she was reading a book she bought about the horned pentagram in which three points of a star are on the bottom and its other two points are above it much larger than the three beneath, resembling horns. That was what was engraved onto the board, and at that moment my heart felt like it dropped.
Next page:The Discovery