Beware the Night

by Ralph Sarchie

  A bit impatient with this intricate satanic scam, Joe cut to the chase. “So, did this story check out?”

  Not exactly, Gabby replied. “We went through old newspapers, phone books, and public records. There was nothing about Virginia or her parents, just some stuff about the family she lived with. Apparently, the Clarkes were landowners around here at one time, but we didn’t see anything about them having a son named Oliver.”

  Although diabolic forces have knowledge of the past and can view the lives of departed humans as if they were watching a videotape, these lying spirits will mix just enough fact with their disingenuous fictions to keep their victims hooked. All Gabby and Ruth had proven was that someone with the very common name of Clarke had once lived in Westchester. No doubt if they’d spent even more time at the library, they would have found some Taylors too.

  The utter lack of any newspaper coverage of a dramatic story that definitely would have made headlines—a bride murdered on her wedding day and the arrest of the groom—didn’t lessen the family’s faith in Virginia, who soon asked them to tackle another mystery. “She wanted us to find the grave of her fiancé,” Gabby said. “After his suicide, there was a big cover-up and no one knew where he was buried. Virginia—”

  Dominick broke in. “She had my wife in tears. Gabby felt very bad that she’d failed to find out anything about the parents, and now the ghost was weeping and carrying on about her dead boyfriend’s unknown grave.”

  Once again the spirit supplied a clue: The body was probably buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Since the next day was a school holiday, Gabby, Ruth, and their five kids drove over to the beautiful old graveyard in North Tarrytown that holds the final resting place of Washington Irving and the friends he used as characters in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. After trudging through the modern and historic tombstones for several hours without finding the grave, the two exhausted families decided to give up and go home.

  Just before they reached the church by the graveyard, Gabby suddenly went into a trance. “Something was pulling me up the walkway and back into the graveyard. I was yanked over to one of the headstones, which said ‘Catherine Clarke, 1859–1926.’ Virginia got very excited and said we’d found Oliver’s mother. There was a smaller stone next to it, but it was so worn that I couldn’t make out the name. Was it Oliver’s grave? Virginia didn’t say.”

  I was getting pretty curious about this devil myself. The trip to the cemetery was a stroke of genius: Because the spirit had dragged their mother over to a tomb near a church, they made a leap of logic and concluded that this was a nice Christian ghost. They were totally unaware that they’d ventured into the Devil’s favorite hunting ground!

  Gabby stopped resisting the spirit and actually gave it permission to enter her, so it could reveal more. “My oldest daughter went to the historic society and got old maps of Westchester. I spread them out on the table, got a pen, and asked Virginia to show me where she’d lived. My hand began to shake from side to side and was pushed to a certain area. It drew a letter we thought was either an ‘M’ or a ‘W.’”

  It all fit the demonic M.O. Not only do they do everything that’s opposite of holy, but at times they’ll write backward, so you have to read the words with a mirror, or upside down. Their writing is often crooked, as if a right-handed person were using her left hand. Strange writings, sometimes using obscenities, profanities about God, or phrases from obscure languages are also a hallmark of oppression. In this case, the demon’s deliberately ambiguous scrawl was a symbolic way of blowing more smoke and increasing Gabby’s confusion.

  The housewife, who clearly was still enthralled with Virginia, eagerly offered to show Joe the marked-up map so he could try to divine whatever hidden meaning it held. My partner shook his head: He wasn’t there to decode demonic messages or give the evil power in this house any unnecessary recognition.

  It was time to clue these people in. “Gabby, let’s get one thing straight. We’re not going to call this spirit ‘Virginia’ anymore, because it doesn’t deserve a human name. This isn’t a human spirit or ghost—it’s a demon.” After Joe explained the nature of these spirits, he began to debunk the demon’s tale. “This wedding story is a lot of crap to snare you through empathy and make a psychic connection with your lives. From now on, when we talk about anything this spirit provoked, we’ll say ‘The demon did it.’”

  Dominick’s meek, bewildered expression changed to a sly, triumphant look that shouted “See, I told you so!”

  Gabby didn’t need much convincing either. Instead, she described what the demon did on Halloween, right after Dominick called a priest, Father Williams, for help. “Virginia—I mean the demon—told me she wasn’t evil.” Once the parish priest was brought in, the demon knew it was only a matter of time before it was exposed for what it truly was. Therefore, it accelerated its plans for possession.

  On that same day the spirit tried to lure Gabby to its lair, the basement. She added, “She said she wouldn’t hurt me. I didn’t want to go there, then she said, ‘I’ve dealt with Father Hayes before—and this time I’ll win the battle!’” Even Gabby had to admit that it was more than a little strange for the spirit to claim it didn’t want to hurt anyone—and had only the most benign intentions—then announce that it was all set to kick ass against a man of God. But what was odder still was which priest the spirit named—not the one Dominick had contacted, but an out-of-state exorcist the family didn’t even know had been called.

  In its stuttering voice, the spirit delivered one final ultimatum: “H-h-holy ones must not come!”

  I should have been warned, but I wasn’t. Seeing that Joe didn’t need my help in conducting the interview, I decided to do the same thing I do in every case: Walk around the house and form my impression of the place. I can tell a lot about a family just by looking around. I check for signs of the occult, what religious articles are present, how the home is kept, what kind of books the people read, evidence of drug use, and any signs that might indicate there’s something wrong with their lifestyle. If I see anything that bothers me, I ask them about it later in the interview.

  With my tour of the house, I can sometimes pick up vibrations about the situation. I’m not psychic, so I can’t rely on my intuitions 100 percent, but every human is born with some degree of a sixth sense, as a gift from God. My big mistake, in this case, was walking through the house alone. I started with the upstairs, where there was a recently vacated apartment the family had been renting out. As I walked into the apartment, a doorknob in one of the rooms started rattling. I’ve run across this kind of low-level bullshit from the demonic in other homes, so I noted the location for further investigation.

  The rooms inside were unnaturally dark. When I found the light switch, I saw why: Everything was painted a deep, vivid black. Even the windows were so thickly coated that no light from the outside could penetrate. I searched the place, but the former occupant had left absolutely nothing behind. I would have loved to get a look at his possessions, because I was ready to bet my next paycheck that this guy, whoever he was, sure as hell didn’t spend his spare time praying the rosary! I made a mental note to ask the family about their ex-tenant.

  In the first-floor apartment, where the family lived, I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary in Gabby and Dominick’s bedroom, or those of the three younger children. In the future bride’s room, I saw an extremely bright ball of light whiz past me and vanish down the hall. I’d seen a blazing sphere like this once before, in an earlier case, so wasn’t particularly alarmed. I returned to the living room to ask the Villanovas if any of them had ever experienced this strange phenomenon.

  My question created a family uproar. “Yes, I’ve seen that light,” Luciana exclaimed.

  “So have I,” added Gabby. “It’s scary.” One by one the other members of the household described various occasions where the ball of light had appeared to them.

  Only Dominick was silent. He looked disappointed. Finally he inter
rupted the discussion of the light with a grumpy outburst. “I’ve never seen it! How come you can see these things, Mr. Sarchie, and I can’t?” He actually sounded insulted that the evil spirit hadn’t manifested itself to him.

  “Don’t feel bad,” I said. “Just be thankful that you don’t.”

  He gave a grudging nod of agreement, and I resumed checking the house. The remaining rooms were normal enough, though the kitchen was rather messy and the sink was piled with dirty dishes, I headed downstairs. I didn’t have any sense of evil when I first entered the basement, but when I got to a storage room with double doors, I could feel menace from eight feet away. The feeling was so overpowering that I stopped dead in my tracks, so afraid that I couldn’t move. I’ve been a cop for a long time and have been scared plenty of times before, but I always have reacted aggressively—that’s how I’ve trained myself. This was different: I couldn’t take my eyes off those doors, my heart started racing one hundred miles a minute, and I couldn’t catch my breath. Then the pain started in my head—it wasn’t like a headache, but a piercing pain in my right temple that I’ve sometimes experienced on other cases or during exorcisms.

  As the pain in my head got stronger, my stomach churned and I felt like I was going to vomit. There was no outward sign of anything that I could see—just a feeling of hellish terror and absolute evil. I was too frozen to move my lips or speak, so in my mind I commanded the demon to leave in the name of Jesus Christ. It released its hold on me just enough so I could reach the bottle of holy water in my pocket. I threw holy water at the doors and was able to back away to the stairs—not daring to take my eyes off those dreadful doors.

  Once I reached the living room, where the family was waiting, the pain and the sick feeling disappeared. I took Joe aside and told him what had happened.

  “Ralph, I think you should take a look at this,” he said, handing a note the “ghost” had dictated to Gabby the night before.

  One sentence immediately leapt out: “Harm will come to those below. Beware the night!”

  Chapter Two

  Nightmare’s End

  WHILE I WAS under attack in the basement, Joe had uncovered an alarming new twist to the case. About two weeks after the spirit began playing its smoke-and-mirror games, Gabby’s oldest daughter, Luciana, was subjected to a series of stunningly cruel preternatural assaults. Although the young bride-to-be was definitely the beauty of the family, with her long wavy black hair, pale olive skin, and dark flashing eyes, she had a sullen, almost hostile expression on her face. Everything about her radiated such an intense misery that it surrounded her like a thick, black cloud. You got the feeling that if you said the wrong thing, she’d lash out with thunder and lightning.

  Joe’s polite request that Luciana put on her St. Benedict medal, instead of leaving it on the table in front of her, immediately set off sparks. “I had a medallion of the Blessed Mother on a chain around my neck and this morning it was gone,” she announced angrily, glaring around the room as if she suspected one of her relatives of stealing it while she slept. “It was real gold too!”

  “Don’t worry about it,” my partner soothed. “The demon could have made your medallion disappear, to stir up trouble and turn you against the other members of your family. These spirits want to get you people at each other’s throats. Why don’t you put the other medal on?”

  “The string’s too long,” Luciana complained. She handed the medal to Carl, who was hovering in the background, looking both protective and wary of his fierce fiancée. Although he was only about twenty-five, his hairline was already receding, making his broad forehead and large, hawklike nose even more prominent. He was dressed entirely in black and wore a gold earring on his left ear. Reaching in the pocket of his rather tight jeans, he took out a Swiss Army knife and carefully trimmed the offending string.

  “What are you doing? Now it’s too short!”

  As Luciana looked on peevishly, Carl cut more string from the ball we’d brought. “Is this okay?”

  She grabbed the necklace and pulled it over her hair, taking care not to snag it on her thick ponytail. “I guess so,” she reluctantly allowed. Suddenly embarrassed by her display of bad temper, she added, “I’m sorry to be such a bitch, but I only got a half hour of sleep last night.”

  “Forget it,” advised Joe. “I know you’re very upset and scared. Let’s bring Ralph up to speed about the problems you’ve been having.”

  No longer animated by anger, she slumped back in her chair, as if she were carrying a very heavy weight on her thin shoulders. “Several weeks ago, around 2:00 A.M., I was reading in my room. I had a glass of water by my bed, and when I got up to turn on the hall light for my sister, who was out at a party, the glass flew at me and just missed my head.”

  This was the first attack on her person—and her screams brought the whole family running. Afraid to sleep alone, she spent the next night in her sister’s room. In the middle of the night, the bunk bed the two girls were sharing began shaking violently, actually jumping up and down off the floor. Again the family was jolted from sleep by screams, but as soon as they turned on the light, the shaking instantly ceased.

  This is characteristic of infestation; scary things happen in the dark and stop when the light goes on. It’s a typical demonic head game, where the goal is to create fear and bewilderment, as the victims ask themselves “Was the bed really shaking, or was it just a nightmare? Did we both imagine it?” Although the evil spirit operated covertly at first, it became more brazen each day. Infestation quickly progressed to outright oppression: No longer did the evil force flee at the flick of a light switch—in fact, it even began attacking during broad daylight.

  Each time the demon picked on the same person: Luciana. “I get scratched every day,” she told us. “Usually I get wide red marks up and down my arms that go away very fast, sometimes in minutes. One night, around two in the morning, I felt a very painful burning on my skin and woke up with a pentagram scratched into my stomach. Another time my arm started burning and stinging like it was on fire. When I looked in the mirror, I saw the number of the Beast—666—written on my arm in huge red welts.”

  Why the bride-to-be became the focal person is rather puzzling: Her two teenaged sisters both said she was the strong one, their beautiful, high-spirited, and rather willful leader. Yet, in the Work, I’ve found there’s no predictable pattern that explains why one family member is singled out for diabolical abuse, except that people are attacked through weaknesses the demonic are quick to exploit. Very often the focal person is a child, since these bullying spirits love to pick on kids. It’s a cruel but effective tactic: While the evil spirit was clearly out to get the mother, what better way to break down a parent’s will—and reduce her resistance to possession—than by brutalizing her child?

  Although the dark power could have accomplished the same thing by going after any of Gabby’s four children, I had a theory why Luciana bore the brunt of the abuse. Since the force of doom was posing as a pitiful ghost of a woman who was murdered on her wedding day, it may have reasoned, with perverse logic, that a mother would be most empathetic with its alleged anguish if her daughter, a genuine bride-to-be, was also suffering.

  If so, the plan worked: Gabby immediately asked “Virginia” what other spirits were in the house. Naturally, the demon had an answer: “She said there were two poltergeists in the house,” Gabby reported. “One was good, and the other poltergeist was very nasty and dangerous.”

  Joe winced. We both hate this term, which has become popular with parapsychologists, at least the ones who believe in spirits—and some don’t. They explain away cases of infestation, oppression, or actual possession as the work of “poltergeists,” a German term for “noisy or mischievous spirits.” (Others claim they are the result of natural phenomena like electromagnetic energy or underground springs—anything but the demonic.) That makes diabolical powers sound like a bunch of pranksters who are just out for some spooky fun. It’s like saying
rapists and muggers are simply socially challenged party animals, not a very real menace to society.

  I don’t care if you don’t believe in the Devil—I just pray you and your family never feel his wrath and undying hatred yourself. What I do object to is parapsychologists who “investigate” hauntings from the scientific point of view, going in with their cameras and gaussmeters instead of holy water and relics. They take their readings, snap some pretty pictures of spirit energy, and go on their merry way, while the family is left in a nightmare. How the demonic must delight at this! What better spin to put on their mission to destroy humanity than to claim it’s just the harmless mischief of so-called poltergeists?

  My partner didn’t let this go by. “The game here is good cop/bad cop, or good poltergeist/bad poltergeist—except that there’s no such thing as a ‘good poltergeist’ because this is just a euphemism some people use for the demonic. Make no mistake about it: The only spirits in your home are evil spirits, bad guys.”

  After scaring Gabby with its ominous pronouncement about the nasty poltergeist, the demon moved into phase two of the con game—volunteering to “help” the family with the very problem it had inflicted on them. This reminded me of human criminals who surreptitiously break a store’s front window, then show up a few hours later to offer the unsuspecting shopkeeper their overpriced repair services.

  The malignant force didn’t stop there. That same day it sent yet another “ghost” to vouch for its kindly intentions. “I saw my father, who died a couple of years ago, standing in front of me,” Gabby explained. “He called Virginia ‘the lady’ and said she was a good person. He came to me four or five times, and we had long conversations. One night DJ saw him too and spent a good hour talking to him.”

  “Was there anything unusual about his appearance?” Joe asked.

  “To me, he was my father,” Gabby insisted. “He talked about things from my childhood that only he and I knew about. You saw him, DJ—how did he look to you?”