The Demons Upstairs

An interesting experience from when I was younger

*** Over the next couple of weeks, I will be sharing some of my older stories that I originally published over at my previous host before I shut it down completely. These are not necessarily the most popular, but they are the ones I have enjoyed the most. In some cases, they have been edited to bring the information up to date.

This is one of those stories. ***

When I decided I felt like God was telling me they wanted me to be a minister, I envisioned a simple world of preaching sermons and baptizing people.

I might have to do a funeral or conduct a wedding.

But most of my time would be spent reading the Bible and studying theology books and public speaking.

I was sorely mistaken.

I was about 17 years old and I really believed I felt some kind of calling in my life. And raised in a church environment, if God was “calling" you, that meant only one thing.

You were supposed to be a pastor.

And at 17, I wanted to be a youth pastor because I was young and still wanted to do all the young people things.

I worked for a short time as an intern in the church my family was attending at the time and then went to college with a focus on Biblical studies and ministry.

While in college, I landed a job as a youth pastor at a small church near campus. So I started doing the things I thought a pastor did.

After a time at this church, a young family started attending and were present for almost everything.

And then they stopped coming for a few weeks.

We made some contacts and eventually they showed up again. When they did, they told the pastor and myself a story of how they believed their house had demons in it and that they had left a few days before and not gone back since.

They wanted our pastor to come to their house and pray the demons out.

The pastor I worked under was extremely skeptical of these sorts of things, but not wanting to drive them away or make them feel like they were being unheard, he tasked me with going over to their house and praying over it.

So, at nine o’clock on a Sunday night, I found myself exorcising demons from a house.

I and another family from the church went to the house and were standing in the back yard. The man who owned the house began telling us the story.

They lived next door to the local psychic. She ran a palm reading business from her home. This man and her husband had built a friendship and she was not happy about it. She told the man of the house that there was something in their basement that would be of interest to him, especially considering his newfound spirituality.

Later that day, he went into the basement where he found an Ouija board. He immediately broke and burned it in his backyard.

And that is when things got scary and they left their house and did not come back.

I said ok and I walked in the back door, which led right into the dining room/kitchen.

The room was freezing. You could see your breath. Food was left on the table from dinner the evening they had gotten out there. I checked the thermostat and it was turned to the hottest setting and yet nothing but bitingly cold air came from the vents.

Since it is what I had been asked to do, I began to pray. I do not remember my exact words, but I asked that whatever was present in the house be banished and not allowed to return.

Suddenly, hot air began to blow from the vents in the kitchen, and the gentleman who had come with me and I heard a faint scratching sound in the ceiling.

We walked from room to room. We said the same prayer over and over again. Each room we entered had cold air blowing from the vents. We would pray and the air would turn hot and we would hear that same scratching in the ceiling.

Each time we left a room, the scratching would become progressively louder.

We wound up in the living room and the scratching was out of control. It sounded like hundreds of tiny nails scratching on a hardwood floor.

And the snarling.

I have never heard anything like that sound in my life and I have never heard it again.

I cannot say that I am disappointed.

Fear was overtaking my senses. This room was freezing cold.

Refrigerator cold.

Each breath came out in a cloud.

I wanted to leave.

To give up.

But I had come this far. I had to finish.

So I said the prayer one last time.

The scratching and snarling became frantic. Like whatever was in the attic was scared and trapped and unsure where to go.

There was a shriek and then silence.

A deafening kind of silence.

And the room began to warm as the cold air stopped and the warm air began.

We brought the family back into the home and said a prayer with them and then I went back out the way I had come in.

I walked back to the church full of questions and confusion.

Questions and confusion follow me around to this day.

*** I have left this story largely intact from when I first wrote it. I do not like how it reads. And I am uncomfortable with the assumptions I was making at the time about what is and is not true. But I have done that mostly for myself. I want to see how far I have come since I started writing regularly 7 years ago. ***