A grandmother's bizarre turn to the occult leads to paranormal activity and a terrifying discovery

Do you believe in witchcraft and the power of the occult? The author of this story, who wishes to keep her identity anonymous, certainly does. N.L. had a close relationship with her grandparents until her grandfather died and her grandmother changed drastically. It was as if something took over her personality. Perhaps the dark secret they were to discover hidden in this house was the cause. This is N.L.'s story....

I THINK SOMETHING EVIL is happening. As I would like to remain anonymous, I will only say that what I am about to tell you is taking place in a small, not-very-well-known town in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

IT BEGAN WITH A DEATH

When I was 14 years old, my grandfather died from cancer in one of the living rooms of my grandparents' house. For several years after that, we would smell the strong aroma of roses and baby lotion. You see, I would often rub his feet with baby lotion when he was dying. And it wasn't just my imagination. Other people, including my grandmother's new boyfriend, who had no idea of the story or that someone even died in that room, smelled these scents as well.

This was paranormal in my mind, but also very welcome; I felt nothing negative about it. There were even instances when the doorbell would randomly ring when we spoke about my grandfather, and no one was at the door. Keep in mind the yard is fenced in with a 6-foot-high wrought iron black fence, so a game of "ding dong ditch" by neighborhood kids was not the case. My grandfather's spirit was the case, I was sure.

EVIL CREEPS IN

Over the past two years, however, things have gone wrong. My grandmother has had a drastic personality change. She used to be a kind person who tended to be fairly positive, and now she hates the world, never smiles, swears like a sailor (she never used to), is cruel to most people, and detests the mention of my grandfather's name.

The reason for me writing this now is because two weeks ago, we got into a heated fight where she bashed my grandfather's name and declared that she was happy he died. Needless to say, I moved out of the house (as I was living with her) and back with my parents. I already feel a veil of hostility removed from my life.

But this story is about what led up to that fight two weeks ago that has me scared and filled with anxiety.

WITCHCRAFT

My grandmother started buying items of witchcraft and meditation. I always thought of meditation as something positive, but I am starting to wonder how far she took it. I know from my mother that my grandmother dabbled in witchcraft in her younger years, and terrible things happened. But that's another story. This is now, and she was buying Tarot cards, pentagrams, Wiccan books and spell books, candles, some sort of mortar and pestle, voodoo dolls, crystals, and everything you would see at some creepy witchcraft store in a dark alley.

She also bought weird clothes, like cloaks and gothic dresses. The whole thing struck me as weird, although she laughed about it and said it was all in good fun, just for amusement.

One night between 10 and 11 p.m., I was in a really gloomy mood from things that were going on in my life, so I sat at the table with her to talk about it. She was supportive and asked if I wanted to feel better and make the problems go away. "Umm... okay?" was my reaction as I watched her light a number of small candles in a zigzagging row and put on a meditational CD.

The music sounded very peaceful, and I went along with her technique because I wasn't quite sure what it was. She turned off all of the other lights except for the lit candles... and the room was quite dark. She told me to focus on one flame - and just that flame - and to will someone's spirit to control its energy. I picked out one flame in particular that drew me to it and I stared at it. It was all I could concentrate on. In fact, I starting spacing out and I believe was becoming hypnotized by the flame. The rest of the universe disappeared for me and my entire being felt paralyzed.

There was no sense of time, place or anything other than the intensity of that flame. It flickered horizontally, picking up energy and flickering quicker back and forth. The flame seemed to be out of control; it was growing taller and jerking in several directions. My heart started beating faster. I could not remove my gaze from the flame. The only thing I was noticing besides this flame was that the other flames around it out of my peripheral vision were small and calm. But the flame I was staring at so intently was spiraling out of control now and towering above the others. I sensed fear in myself, yet could not look away. I knew something wasn't right in my mind, so I got the will and abruptly turned my head sharply to my right shoulder. At that moment, the flame flared up into a flash of fire that warmed the side of face and lit the room brightly.

My grandmother jumped back from her meditation in startled surprise. Then it was gone. The flame was back to normal, the same size and the same calmness as the others. "What was that?" I remember asking. She did not answer me. She turned the ceiling light on and turned off the CD. She blew out the candles and that was the last thing that was said about that. I could tell she was frazzled and she changed the subject to some issue with the pool filter, so I let it go.

Next page: The Bite Mark

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

THE DISCOVERY

I knelt down and looked into the hollow space behind what used to be the board. She told me to look at what was inside. Every hair on my body stood up. I pulled out two things: a Satanic Bible and a pentagram amulet. The metal amulet looked so old it was rusting. They looked slightly dusty, but it was obvious she already took them out and wiped them off a little.

I couldn't stand to touch them. I dropped them on the floor and walked out the house as fast as I could. After about ten minutes passed and I calmed myself down, I went back inside and discussed it with her. I asked her what happened that she decided to tear up that board. She said that she knew what that star meant now and, having a bad feeling, knocked on it and felt it was hollow. She just felt that there was something behind it. That's when she found the Satanic Bible and amulet.

We both agreed that all the witchcraft things she bought had to go. Who knew why those Satanic items were hidden behind that board to begin with. I was terrified by the thought of occult practices being in the house in the past and whatever was done there.

THE ATTACK

A few days passed. My grandmother got rid of all the witchcraft stuff she had bought, and also the disturbing things behind the board. Nothing strange had happened, so I figured all the noises I had been hearing - faint voices, a baby crying, and footsteps in rooms where no one was - were gone.

I was very wrong.

It was really cold one night. My grandmother and I were in the kitchen rubbing our arms because it was so cold. She was about to take a shower in the downstairs bathroom and then go to bed. I would do the same after she did. I was exhausted and I cradled my head in my arms on the table to relax while she was in the shower.

About ten minutes later, she came upstairs in a towel and her hair in suds, holding her neck. Something tightened her throat, she said, and she was having a hard time breathing. I got up and looked at her neck. Sure enough, there were red marks forming around her throat in the form of fingerprints! I freaked out and we went over the situation, but she was too stubborn to leave. She couldn't just up and leave her house, she told me.

But for me, that was the last straw. I found myself constantly warding off evil spirits with prayers and searching frantically for some answers and solutions. Things were getting worse. She was starting to wake up with bruises all over her arms and legs that she couldn't explain. Her demeanor was so hateful now that I avoided her at all costs. I left the house whenever I could. And every time I set foot back inside, the same heavy, dreadful feeling washed over me.

The door bell started going off all the time, but there were no good feeling with it anymore. There were no warm feelings, no scent of roses and no comfort. There were, however, frequent gusts of coldness, strange noises, and then I began getting large bruises all over my legs and thighs during the night. I had no trouble sleeping at all, but one morning in the shower I noticed multiple bruises all over myself.

THE DEPARTURE

Then, two weeks ago we got into that fight. Words I never thought I'd hear her say rolled off her tongue. But I could not help someone who didn't want to be helped. And that night was the last I have spoken to her.

I am presently at my parents, and I am hoping my grandmother seeks professional assistance in blessing that house. The experience of everything that has happened has shaken my beliefs. It has also given me respect for the paranormal and a deeper striving to live a holy life. I can only hope that readers will take this as a warning not to open up doors to things they will regret. Never so much as give evil a sign that it is welcome.