Manson in His Own Words

by Nuel Emmons

  I can’t say what was going through her mind, but I felt like I was sixteen and she was my first girl. She had been a cherry, and for that instant I was a virgin who had just made love for the first time. We kept going until both of us thrilled in one of life’s greatest pleasures.

  It hadn’t been dirty or forced but simple, clean and beautiful. At thirty-two years of age, after a marriage, many girl friends, and countless sex encounters, that thirty minutes of passion in the arms of a fourteen-year-old girl put me a little bit closer to liking a world I had hated since the very early years of my life. Some might think I should feel shame, but I didn’t then and I don’t now. None! You sent me all those children in the 60s who went through hell with me, yet she is the only one I took from you.

  While we were at Mendocino, Ruth Ann’s parents had reported her as a runaway. The police picked her up and in an effort to dissuade them, I got booked for interfering with an arrest. Dean and his wife came to get their daughter and I was put on the good preacher’s “don’t come around” list. But when a guy wants something, he doesn’t follow all the rules. When I thought about moving permanently to L.A., I realized I wasn’t above looking into the mouth of the lion if there was a possibility of stealing away the young cub. Besides, I wanted to show Dean what his gift of the piano had transformed into.

  When we arrived in San Jose, the preacher’s welcome wasn’t warm and inviting, but the good reverend soon saw the bus full of kids as a captive audience to whom he could pass on the Holy Word. With a full congregation before him, Dean went into his spiel. Pat, Mary, Lyn and Susan were well-versed in the Bible, so Dean’s preaching was not falling on unschooled ears, but those girls had their own ideas about Biblical concepts and they had Dean’s head spinning. They provided counter-opinions to everything he said, and the poor man couldn’t afford to make even the slightest misquote, or one of the girls was sure to call him on it. But Dean revelled in the challenge. As he tried to convert the people who rode in the bus, I took advantage of his ignoring his immediate family and whispered our plans to Ruth Ann.

  At the time, I’d have liked nothing better than to tell Ruth Ann to get her things ready and leave with us, which is what she wanted to do, but she was still just fourteen and already on probation for running away. Taking her with us would have been inviting police trouble. Instead, I told her, “We’re going to southern California, so we won’t be seeing you for a while.” She broke into tears and said she wanted to leave with us now. Until she was older, or the situation different in her home, I explained, there wasn’t any way she could go without creating a lot of problems for me and the others.

  Lyn also spent some time comforting Ruth Ann. In the process Lyn had told her: “Right now, you’re so young that almost anything your parents tell you is law, but if you married someone your parents wouldn’t be able to tell you what to do. Anything you decided after that would be up to you.”

  A few weeks after we left, Ruth Ann married a bus driver and became her own person. Shortly after the marriage, she left him and joined us in L.A.

  Though we had pulled out of San Jose without the reverend’s daughter, we’d no sooner gotten to southern California than up pops Dean Moorehouse. How he found us is still a mystery to me, but I guess a black school bus full of girls isn’t the hardest thing in the world to trace.

  We had stopped at a friend’s acid pad. I was pretty stoned and enjoying a trip. All of a sudden there was Dean and another guy with something that looked more like a cannon than an ordinary pistol pointed straight at my head. Dean’s friend aimed the gun while and the red-faced, raging preacher told me what a rotten, child-raping bastard I was. It seems that after we left San Jose, Ruth Ann couldn’t dry her tears. Her father asked why she was crying, and was told: “Daddy, I love Charlie. We made love together and I want to be with him.” Dean overlooked the “we made love” and came after me like I had beat the girl and raped her.

  His threats sounded anything but religious. Dean wanted some ass, and I think if I’d seen him coming, I’d have found some place to hide. Talk is what I wanted, not an argument with that pistol. As calmly as I could, I had one of the girls get Dean and his friend a soft drink while I listened to him rant and rave about what a low-life I was. He threatened police, castration and beating my ass to a pulp. His temper finally seemed to subside and when he reached an almost normal tone of voice, I said, “Look, Dean, this is between the two of us. Why don’t you have your friend put his gun away and go for a walk so you and I can straighten our problem out?” Dean nodded his head in approval, so his friend put away the gun and left the house. I handed the preacher a tab of acid and said, “Here, this’ll keep your blood pressure down.” He paused, gave the pill a blank look and downed it with a sip of Coke. Then he continued telling me what my life was going to be like when I got to hell. As the acid started taking effect, I started talking. “Look, Reverend, it ain’t like I did something nasty to your little girl. I only did what goes through your mind every time you look at a pretty girl. Now you’re a preacher, so you know it’s just as evil to lust for something as to do it. Hey, I only did what you would like to do. And you can’t blame me or that girl. If you’d spend more time paying attention to your family and doing what you preach to everyone else, that girl wouldn’t be looking for some way to get out of your house. Man, don’t you see, with all your religious convictions, you’re not giving your daughter a chance to live her own life. Kids grow up fast these days. They got to have space. Space that ain’t smothered by parents who are locked into yesterday ...”

  By now the acid was sending Dean into a world he’d never seen. I wasn’t sure how he was going to react, but for the moment I felt I had escaped violence. Not to press my luck, I suggested he get in his friend’s car and head for home. He left without further argument. And though he came looking for me weeks later, it wasn’t for his daughter’s sake, but for more acid to join a world he had always preached against.

  Several weeks before we decided to come south, I had met a lady in Frisco. She was a trippy broad, about forty-five years old, who experimented with everything. When I met her, she was pumped up about devil worship and other satanic activities. I didn’t attend a lot of the places she invited me to, but we often discussed the good and bad sides of different beliefs. As a result of our acquaintance, she had given me a standing invitation to visit her home in Topanga Canyon. I was in L.A. waiting for some action on a recording session. We needed a place to park the bus for a while, so we went looking for her house. Taking Topanga Canyon Boulevard, we came to a two-story house with a peculiar winding staircase, which one of the girls quickly dubbed the “Spiral Staircase.”

  I don’t know much about the history of the place, but long before we arrived there, it had become a meeting place, a party house, a freak-out pad, and for some, a hideout. Its isolated location served a lot of purposes for a lot of different people and, like the lady who owned the place, some far-out, spaced-out, weird people were frequent visitors.

  The day we first drove up, we were innocent children in comparison to some of those we saw during our visits there. In looking back, I think I can honestly say our philosophy—fun and games, love and sex, peaceful friendship for everyone—began changing into the madness that eventually engulfed us in that house.

  It was a kind of “house of transition.” Those who lived in the mountain communes, practicing things that would not be tolerated in the cities, would use the house as a place where they could shed their commune attire for more acceptable city clothes. Not only did they change clothes, they took on new personalities as they went into the cities to do business, recruit followers, or simply re-live what they had originally left. The mixture of people, the variety of beliefs and practices and the assortment of drugs would have shaded any of the parties in Haight-Ashbury.

  On the other side of the coin, there were those who lived in the city and walked the straight and narrow by day—people with beautiful faces or charming personalities
, people who made great contributions to society. They came in the dark of night, visiting the Spiral Staircase to indulge in what they preached against by day. There were nationally respected celebrities, a prominent sports figure or two, some of the influential and wealthy, and on occasion, some who wore the cloth and preached the word of God. It was a strange house, but one to learn in; a place where mental sickness and mass confusion were the best one could expect.

  Normally, I am a person who picks up on vibes. Acquaintances, decisions, the songs I write and the music I play are all reflections of the vibes I feel. Though I was welcomed to the house by hearty hugs, good music, and passionate kisses, I had bad vibes about being there and staying longer. Yet I stayed. And though I would often leave in the weeks to come, I would also return.

  Each time I returned, I would observe and listen to all of the practices and rituals of the different groups that visited the place. I’m not into sacrificing some animal or drinking its blood to get a better charge out of sex. Nor am I into chaining someone and whipping them to get my kicks like some of those people were. Still, through the drugs and listening to the ways a particular leader or guru maneuvered his people, some of their rap may have become embedded in my subconscious. Planting fear in their people is the way a lot of leaders keep control. At the time, love and doing our own thing was what held us together and that’s the way I wanted everything to be, but at a later date, the things I was exposed to at the Staircase may have come back to me.

  To those who live within society’s moral code, the house might have resembled a movie scene of a massive party at a dope fiend’s pad: music playing, often blaring, sometimes soft and sensual; strobe lights blinking, or hardly any light at all; guys and girls everywhere, seated on couches, chairs and pillows, on the floors and on the beds; marijuana joints being passed around; tables showing long lines of coke; pills and capsules of all colors, each providing a different high; long-haired, bearded guys in weird clothes with exaggerated lengths of gold and beaded chains; scantily-clad girls, obviously drugged, willing to have sex . . . If the movie switches scenes at this point, it has only scratched the surface of the parties at the house in Topanga Canyon. Needless to say, when Charlie Manson arrived with a dozen young, pretty girls, all eager to experiment and play, I was an immediate favorite.

  The girls and I entered the house as a group, and as a group we maneuvered through the crowded rooms, pausing here and there to listen to a word or introduce ourselves to those who indicated they would like to be friends. Some did and some didn’t, depending on what state of mind a drug had left them in. There were one or two familiar faces and they quickly approached me, mostly for introductions to some of the dozen girls who were always near. Once we had toured the entire house, understanding and accepting all that was going on, some of the girls, with my nod of approval, began sampling the drugs, sticking mostly to LSD.

  Earlier, the lady of the house had handed me a small vial filled with pills, saying, “Welcome, Charlie, here are some special treats for you and your friends.” So with four of the girls still at my side, I found an area on the floor where we could all sit. Rather ceremoniously, we formed a circle and sat with our legs crossed in Indian fashion. I handed each of the girls an LSD tab, and like Indians passing a peace pipe, we shared a Coke to down the pills. It was potent stuff. In a matter of minutes, the five of us were drifting off in separate worlds.

  Acid, depending on quality and amount taken, is not always a pleasant trip, but it does always provide a hallucination that goes far beyond the realm of everyday thinking, surpassing the most vivid of imaginations. Among other things, acid can reach into the subconscious to bring forth the experience of deeply-smothered thoughts, long-forgotten dreams, real or imagined incidents that happened long ago.

  To illustrate what I mean, I’ll backtrack to the days when I was at the Gibault School for Boys. One stormy night, a day or so after I’d had a visit from my mother, I was going through one of the loneliest periods of my life. Lying there in bed, my sorrow and self-pity were so strong I couldn’t help but cry. To keep the boys who slept on either side from hearing me, I got up and moved to a window some distance from the nearest bed. I looked out the window into a dark rainy night. I stood there for a while crying, wishing for a life different from the one I was living. The more I thought and wished, the more I cried. Finally I knelt and prayed to God with the strongest emotion possible for a boy of twelve. My prayer may have seemed selfish because every word was for myself. Not for riches and other things a kid might pray for—I asked that someone love me enough to need me.

  My prayer finished, I stayed at the window watching the rain beat against the glass and wondering if there really was a God up there, and if so, whether he heard me. Thunder sounded and a flash of lightning brightened the sky. I pressed my face closer to the window just as another flash lit the sky, and on the other side of the glass I saw a vision of Jesus. He said no words, just gave me a slight smile and an encouraging nod of his head. I went back to bed with a secret and my face was dry of tears. By morning I was not sure if my vision was just a dream or if I really had stood at the window. Perhaps it was just the strong imagination of a boy who wanted things to be different. Not wishing to be looked on as a nut, or laughed at as a fool, I have seldom mentioned that night, but for the longest time, I knew something good was going to happen for me. When weeks, months and years went by with nothing improving in my life and no love, I ceased to think of that night at all.

  The vision came back to me at the Spiral Staircase. I had often taken the acid route and was familiar with the valued awakening of senses that allows a view of a world that begins where this one ends. I had in the past felt vibrations of cosmic force and revelled in psychic phenomena, yet the trip I was about to undergo would give me the deepest penetration into awareness, extra-sensory perception, confrontations with devils, travels in divinity and association with multiple deities I had ever encountered.

  I was a boy and at the same window. I was no longer kneeling, but standing next to a man in a long white robe. His was not the face of Jesus in my vision, but the atmosphere seemed holy. Our feet touched nothing but air. His hand was on my shoulder and he did not speak, but deep amplified echoes voiced a message as though out of the skies: “Now, Charles, these are your loves and you are their need.” The message rang in my ears, and the words vibrated through every pore of my skin, giving my body an awareness of what was registering in my mind. Still suspended in air, I looked out over.a sea of faces, faces full of love and trust, faces looking at me. The words faded and the robed man drifted away. And as he did I was no longer a boy but a man, and myself in a white robe.

  The vision left me. I glanced at my clothing and there was no robe. I searched for the sea of faces, but saw only four girls with glazed eyes on trips of their own. All of us were still sitting Indian-style in a room of people just as spaced out as we were.

  I realized the image had been nothing but a trippy result of the acid, yet, as I looked around the room, all the faces were open books. I could enter their minds or bodies if I chose to. Seated across the room much like some Buddha, a giant of a man had not taken his eyes off the girls or me since we had taken our positions. He stared with contempt and anger. Why, I didn’t know. I resented his stare, and as my thoughts registered the resentment a staggering couple on their way to another room overturned a heavy floor lamp, putting a gash in the man’s head. I smiled and looked away, feeling very much as though I had delivered the blow.

  Sadie was in the doorway between rooms dancing topless. The doorway gave her the attention of people in two different rooms, the one where the music was being played and the one we were in. It was the closest thing to center stage that Sadie could find. When my eyes first focused on her, she had had her back to me, but as though I had called her name, she turned, paused in her routine, and gave me a questioning look. I smiled and nodded my head as though approving, and she resumed her dancing, trying to be the most seductiv
e girl alive.

  The four girls and I sat there in a world of our own, communicating without the use of words. I felt a twinge of thirst; Lyn, without speaking or being spoken to, went to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. I drank my fill and Mary started to rise and return the glass, all in silence. My thoughts were: “Mary, you are carrying my child, so relax and let Pat return the glass.” Mary relaxed and remained sitting on the floor. Pat reached for and returned the glass. I leaned forward and placed my hand on Mary’s stomach. Mary had become pregnant by me in the early months of the time we had spent in northern California. Beneath my hand her skin was transparent and through her flesh my eyes saw the five-month foetus that was clearly a male child.

  The experiences and perceptions that seemed to be achieved through the use of acid made it and other mental stimulants a very substantial part of our lives. While being under the influence, certain things became so pronounced and real that I couldn’t help but believe in them long after the drug had worn off.