Sister of Darkness

by R. H. Stavis

  Now that my spiritual awareness is high, I’ve come to believe that I see religious figures because they want me to pass on a message to the rest of the world. The news is this: People often think that different religions and religious figures are at odds with each other, but that’s not the case. At their core, each belief system wants us to be kind to one another, to treat each other well, and to work together to better humanity.

  I’m constantly dismayed when I see how people have used religion to start wars, persecute, divide, and kill people. Don’t they realize that it was man, not Jesus or Muhammad, who wrote all the books that laid out so many oppressive rules and laws? Don’t they understand that the struggles on Earth have been created by man, but the beauty that comes from Spirit is great? And that if we tapped into Spirit regularly, we’d all be so much happier?

  Absolutely. We’d also be able to ward off the worst entities imaginable, like the ones I encountered in the next two chapters.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Slaughterhouse Collector

  Remember Jen and Sylvia Soska from the twin exorcism I performed in July 2016? Together, they host a game show called Hellevator for the Game Show Network and the highly regarded horror production company Blumhouse. The show is a horror-themed team challenge based around a central legend, with a gruesome, troubled character—such as a murderer, rapist, or serial killer—as the focus of each episode. The show is as much a mental contest as a scare-the-hell-out-of-you psychological test. By the end of each challenge, some contestants are covered in blood, some have been locked alone in a dark room, and others have been chased by cloaked figures wrapped in chains. At the end of the season, one team goes home $50,000 richer having outlasted and outsmarted all the other contestants.

  Each episode is filmed in a warehouse in downtown LA, which I would guess was built around the 1920s. From the outside, it looks like the perfect location for a horror series because it’s cavernous, bare bones, cold, and has dark levels connected by an elevator that seems like it might plummet straight to the basement at any moment. But the backstory of the building is far more fear inducing than what appears on-screen: for most of its history, this warehouse was a slaughterhouse. And for a brief window of time, it became a human slaughterhouse for an organized crime ring.

  Jen and Sylvia had a bad feeling the second they walked into the space, but they went forward with the producer and director’s plan to book it. After all, isn’t a terrifying building with a dark, twisted history a dream-come-true location for a horror-themed game show? Still, the twins are superstitious, unfailingly cautious, and very Catholic, so they decided to have the set blessed by a priest before the cameras started rolling. They even decided to carry their own white sage—which people, including myself, use to elevate the energy in a space—every day during filming for protection.

  Unfortunately, their precautions were for naught. White sage is really nice for making a space feel happy, but it’s no match for an entity, and this warehouse was a dark place with a bad attachment. While they were filming the first season, thirty-eight cast and crew members were hospitalized—all in a matter of days—with what seemed like food poisoning. But when each of them was tested for what had made them ill, they received thirty-eight different results, none related to craft services.

  The misfortune continued. Several crew members were injured on set, cameras stopped working, and every day in almost every room, something structural would break down.

  Midway through the second season, soon after we first met, the twins invited me out for dinner, and Sylvia explained what was happening.

  “Can you tune into spaces if you’re not there? I mean, can you figure out what’s going on with people or things even if you’re not right there with them?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If I really try, I can definitely do that.”

  “Because there’s a lot of weird shit going on where we film, and I think it’s because the building used to be a slaughterhouse.”

  “And then the mob ran it after that,” Jen added. “Then, it became a set, and—”

  I interrupted her midsentence because she didn’t need to go on. “Slaughterhouse” was red flag number one. If someone or something has been killed against its will, chances are its soul is trapped in the same location, and that’s prime real estate for a malevolent entity—like a Collector—to attach and feed.

  “When everyone started getting sick,” Jen went on, “we asked one of our producers, Edward, who’s also a medium, to look around. He went down to the basement and saw a ghost woman, with her fingers cut off. She was screaming for people to get out.”

  “Then he said he saw a man in the corner, who tried to grab him. When Edward tried to run, he couldn’t find his way out,” added Sylvia. “Now he refuses to come back. I don’t blame him.”

  I knew what they were about to ask. If it’s an entity that’s causing all of this, I thought, there’s something I can do. If this only has to do with dead people, though, this one is out of my hands.

  Jen interrupted my thinking. “What does this feel like to you?”

  “Well, I sense that it’s probably an entity. But I have to go inside to be sure.”

  I spent the next few days waiting for Jen and Sylvia to brief their production company about why they’d have to halt filming. Some of the execs rolled their eyes when they were told that an exorcist was coming in to check things out—but not too much. We all work in the horror industry, in Los Angeles, after all. It wasn’t so far-fetched.

  When I got word from Jen and Sylvia I went into my Spirit Room and pulled together my “travel kit.” I made what I call a blood vinegar, which is a combination of fermented red wine, specialized herbs, red wine vinegar, and a few drops of my own blood. The blood is to combat a sacrifice with a sacrifice, so I pricked my finger and let a few drops fall into a spray bottle, which I planned to use to clean the walls, floor, and ceiling. I don’t use this blend in every exorcism—just for Realm Walkers and Collectors because they require something especially potent. Blood vinegar is that. It immediately and forcefully cleans the energy of an area.

  I also gathered together a few herbs like wolfsbane and blue lotus, which I only use for exceptionally powerful exorcisms. I combined the herbs into blends that I planned to burn, loaded up my car, and drove toward the old slaughterhouse.

  As I got closer and closer to the building, I instantly sensed a darkness. Yep, I thought. There’s an entity here. This sure as hell isn’t a haunting.

  I’m a no-nonsense woman, so I decided I’d head right to the basement as soon as I told my friends I’d arrived. Since it had been a slaughterhouse, I knew there would be tons of tiny rooms in the massive 13,000-square-foot space, places where refrigerators, furnaces, meat hooks, and God knows what else had been housed. Most rooms were separated by vast, empty spaces that I assume served as the gathering place for the poor cows awaiting their deaths.

  As I walked down a set of metal stairs, I could feel the negative energy pooling in every molecule in the air. It was cold and empty, with a sense of violence and desperation. Even if I hadn’t heard about the girl with the severed fingers or the man who’d grabbed poor Edward, I knew that that basement was a low-frequency cesspool.

  “Here’s where they bled out the slaughtered animals,” Sylvia said as she pointed to an area near the meat locker. “They called it the bleeding room.”

  I walked inside and looked down. There was a drain in the middle of the floor that captured the blood from the cows who’d hung, dead, above it. I pulled off the grate to reveal a gaping hole, opened up my blood vinegar, and poured it into the earth below to cleanse it.

  There are gallons of blood down there, I thought. That’s decades of sadness and pain for an entity to feed upon.

  Then, I began lighting the blends I’d brought along. As the dark room began to fill with smoke, I called in the Higher Beings and began to communicate with Spirit. I frequently work with the Egyptian goddesses, so I welcomed them,
along with Lilith, a goddess with Hebrew and Sumerian roots, who’s famous for her powerful dark energy. Archangel Michael was there for protection, and I called in Diana, the goddess of the hunt, to help me assist the dead animals.

  Probably ten minutes passed, and then, suddenly, my vision cleared. Right in front of me I could see a dark cloud. It was hovering and barely swirling, and inside, there were shadowy forms. I could hardly make out faces, but I saw hooves, ears, and a tail here and there. Right away, I realized what they were: slaughtered cows, their mouths open as they screamed in silence.

  Holy shit, I said to myself, they’re inside the biggest Collector I’ve ever seen.

  Inside that bleeding room, I found just what I’d suspected: a Collector had attached, gathered up the souls of the cows killed there, and was feeding off their suffering. The cows were in limbo, trapped in the same fear they’d had at the last moment of their lives.

  Just then, a sharp voice cut through the dark and silence.

  “Stop! Right now! You have to stop.”

  I turned and squinted. It was pitch-black except for my burning herbs, but I could just barely make out three masked men standing directly in front of me.

  “You’re from the crew, right?” I asked. All of the production crew on Hellavator doubled as actors, and they wore masks during filming to scare the contestants.

  “Yes,” one of them said, “you can’t be in here doing this.”

  I never argue my way into an exorcism. It’s not my space and it’s not my place, and if someone wants to end an exorcism before it’s reached its logical, spiritual conclusion, I can’t stand in the way of that. Plus, I’d been interrupted before when I exorcised a building. I wasn’t going to take it personally.

  “Not a problem,” I said, and I gathered my things and walked back up the rickety steps. When I couldn’t find Jen and Sylvia, I decided to get back in my car and head home. After I buckled up, I texted them.

  Hey. I left. Somebody on your crew kicked me out. I started and didn’t get to finish, so I can’t be responsible for what happens now.

  It was true. When you disturb an entity, like I had, it goes on high alert. It knows that someone—specifically, me—is minutes away from killing it, and it’s going to lash out. Jen, Sylvia, and everyone on the Hellavator set were in for trouble until I finished my work.

  Jen finally called me an hour later.

  “I can’t believe someone kicked you out!” she said. “We had approval from everyone, every single person involved in this show. This is ridiculous.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “But I was told to go, and I do as I’m instructed. So just call me again when I can come back.”

  A few days later, Sylvia rang me up.

  “You have to get back here as soon as possible. Please. It took us fourteen hours to shoot our last episode. Nothing worked: The electrical equipment. The audio equipment. Our audio was bleeding into rooms that it wasn’t even linked up to. We lost so much footage. Then one of our girls fell, fractured her arm, and smashed her head. Please come back.”

  “I will, but who was it that sent me home?” I asked. “There were three guys, but one of them seemed like the boss.”

  “One of the crew. Strangely, he has no idea why he told you to leave. He can’t explain what motivated him to even speak to you.”

  He might not have known, but I did. The most malevolent Collector I’d ever encountered had taken control of him that afternoon, and it had coerced him to drive me out.

  The next day, I once again packed up my blood vinegar and blends, drove over to the slaughterhouse, and picked up where I’d left off. I’d already cleared the negative imprint from the bleeding room, so it was no longer emitting a negative frequency. But the rest of the basement was a different story; it was vibrating at such a low level that the entity was revolting. We could hear pipes cracking and squealing, footsteps in places we knew there weren’t people, and there was a low, moaning hum echoing throughout the entire floor.

  Despite that, Jen and Sylvia wanted to be with me as I worked. As you know, I usually don’t allow anyone to join me during an exorcism, but Collectors are a little different than most entities. They're attached to the space, so the possibility of them attaching to a person in the room is nil.

  “You can hold the lantern while I do my thing,” I said.

  “Aren’t you scared?” Jen asked.

  “No.” It was true. I knew what I was up against.

  I’d spent about an hour earlier that week exorcising the bleeding room, but I hadn’t closed up the space. On top of that, there were dozens of other rooms I hadn’t even walked into, and I knew that the Collector had entered each of them. Finally, I could sense that the trapped souls of the cows were still hanging in the balance. A lot of horror movies had been shot down in that basement, so the cows’ spirits had seen some terrible things: killings, decapitations, and gallons of blood. Since organized criminals later owned the warehouse, I suspected they’d done even worse. They’d murdered people for real, and God only knows how they’d done it. The poor spirits who’d lived in the Collector’s version of purgatory had seen so much violence, not knowing most of it had been fake. They weren’t yet able to pass back into Spirit because my exorcism the other day just hadn’t done enough.

  “Cows?” I called out as I put down my supplies, started lighting my blends, and summoned Hecate and the Archangel Michael. “You don’t need to be scared. I know you saw so much, but most of it wasn’t real. Your own murders weren’t being reenacted. And if you did see something real, I’m going to remove it now.”

  Just then, Jen, Sylvia, and I heard high-pitched screams cut through the room.

  “What the hell was that?” yelled Jen.

  “It’s all the neighborhood cats,” I said after listening for a moment or two. “Relax. Animals are very sensitive during exorcisms. They’re feeling the change in frequency.”

  Then the pipes in the room started dripping water.

  “Rachel, what exactly is that?” Sylvia asked. “I’m scared out of my mind.”

  I knew no water had gone through the pipes in years, so it had to be a message of some kind. When I exorcise a Collector, the spirits who’ve been trapped in a space—much like the cows who were screaming in the bleeding room—usually try to send me signals. If the mob used this room, I realized, these pipes were probably a way for them to get rid of bodies. They probably dissolved these dead people in acid, then sent them through the pipes.

  “There are trapped souls traveling through these pipes,” I said. “They’re trying to communicate with us. They want us to know what happened to them, so they’re making the water drip.”

  Jen went pale and Sylvia looked like she was about to retch, but I kept on my task as I moved from room to room. LA was suffering through a horrible heat wave that week—it was well over 100 degrees outside—but the rooms were all ice cold. As I pulled a sweater around me, the air around me started to constrict. I approached a corner of the basement, moving slowly to rid the room of low-frequency energy, and I saw a figure in front of me. It was a man, in his midtwenties, with dark hair and a nice suit. He was crying, his shoulders slumped as he lifted his head. I began to speak with him.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “No. I’m afraid to move on from this place,” he answered. “I’m scared I’ll go somewhere worse than this if I do.”

  “Rachel?” Sylvia yelled at me. “Who are you talking to? There’s no one there.”

  “Sshh,” I said. I knew I couldn’t answer her right away. After all, the spirit I was speaking to was a dead mobster, and I was trying to reassure him that the entity who’d kept him locked in a basement for decades would soon be letting him go.

  “Look,” I explained, “it’s going to be okay. You just need to come to grips with what you’ve done in life before you can pass back to Spirit. Can you do that?”

  Judging by how upset he was, the man had obviously committed h
orrible crimes in his life. But as he wiped tears from his face and nodded his head slowly, he seemed remorseful. That would likely be enough to allow the entity to release him.

  As my blends continued to burn, I could see that light had begun to seep into the basement. The air wasn’t so constricted anymore, and as Jen, Sylvia, and I moved toward a room that had been used to store props like coffins, I could tell that the Collector was exiting the space, leaving a void we had to fill so another entity wouldn’t come in.

  This storage room had electrical cables hanging from the ceiling and piles of papers and boxes stacked in every corner. It was a mess, but you could feel how light the energy was there. It was a radical shift compared to what I’d felt an hour before. The sense of desperation we’d all encountered had lifted ever so slightly as the spirits of the cows, the murdered people in the pipes, and the dead mobster had finally been freed.

  Then, suddenly, I heard Jen gasp.

  “Oh my God!” she screamed. “One of the cables is tied into a noose!”

  I looked to my left, and there was a perfectly tied noose hanging from the ceiling. This was no prop. No one except for Jen and Sylvia had been in the storage room in weeks.

  I knew right away what the noose was doing there.

  “It’s okay,” I explained. “Somebody probably hung themselves in this room, and they’re giving us a message that their spirit has been released, too.”

  As the room continued getting warmer, and light flowed in, I knew we’d officially turned a page. The Collector was gone, the basement was returning to a stable, steady frequency, and my friends could return to work. I took about three hours to go back through the warehouse and close the space up, but I left no room untouched and no stone unturned. Then I walked back up the steps, went home, and fell into my bed.