Demon Haunted Room

I began working with cryptids in 2016 or 17 because I was homesick and isolated. I missed scary stories. Family. Talking. Listening. Hearing the same memories repeated year after year. Referencing local icons, local monsters. There has always been something loveable about hometown cryptids, something, that even if you weren’t from the area, that is charismatic, understandable, interesting about them. Sharing family stories, your favorite sounds and sights from home, the names of places and things that are there and not here, why they’re special... people don’t tend to care about that. It’s mundane. But Mothman, Grassman, Pope Lick Monster. Now that’s interesting and weird and funny. I made friends with monster stories, sold more art with their tales and images, kept a connection to home. They became my career and much more.

A lot of people take the wrong idea from my cryptid work. I don’t believe in any cryptids and I don’t think most of them could even exist. I just found them neat, and still do. They’re fun to imagine, they’re fun to draw. Sometimes they’re silly, sometimes scary, sometimes even majestic or stoic. Some are metaphorical, but more are things people really experienced and believe in. I used to think it was preposterous to think a big hairy man was walking around the woods, but could never be caught or killed or photographed. I used to think it was silly that people went out looking for ghosts in the woods, lake monsters in the water, and UFOs in the sky. I still don’t believe in any of these things, despite the hundreds of stories I’ve read and pieces of evidence for each I’ve reviewed. Nevertheless, over the last five years, my opinions have changed a lot and I am open to ideas and explanations, as long as they can be proven. There is much I don’t know or understand, and I’ve been wrong many, many times, which has cultivated me into an open skeptic.

What cryptids mean to me, what my work means to me is constantly evolving. It started as just putting a face to a story, then to preserving their stories, then adding more story to the stories, and now, adding a different kind of lore to each subject. It all means more to me each year. The idea of it all has been a reminder to me, a kind of personal symbol. In this essay, I’m going to tell a different kind of story. This isn’t a story I think much about, despite it having one of the biggest impacts in my life. It happened a long time ago, it’s a bit hazy in places, and it’s honestly an area of sensitivity.

I’ve only ever had two weird things that could be considered paranormal happen to me. This isn’t a fake story, it’s a real one, and it has some dark connotations. If religion or deconstruction makes you uncomfortable, skip it and look elsewhere.

-

When I was little, I saw something that terrified me. I was staying the night at my grandma’s. There was a cozy spare bedroom with a big bed. A window was next to it, a light shining behind and to the left. The light shined through the blinds, tilted in such a way that it beamed down towards the floor. As I laid in bed, I felt sad. Maybe it was because the room was different than I remembered, or it smelled different. My grandma had remarried and there were new things in the bedroom, things tucked away in the closet, a dark, looming gun cabinet that took up half the opposite wall.

I felt sad a lot when I was young. When I heard the atmospheric sounds of the ocean, when I watched the clouds, when I looked at old books. I’m not sure why, and there may not have been a reason at all, but I do remember that deep, hollow feeling as I fell asleep staring at the light reflecting off the yellow, lacquered wooden floor.

Sometime later, I woke up. The room was dark and I was on my back, staring up at the ceiling. My arms wouldn’t work and I couldn’t turn on my side to roll over more comfortably. I couldn’t move. I felt held in place. Staring up at the ceiling, a panic took over, the kind that makes you feel an almost out-of-body experience. Up there, on the dark wood, there were shadows. Swirling dark shapes, they slithered like fish swimming upstream. They had a ghostly form, like thin, quivering people with long, stretched faces; their distinct features were obscured, but their mouths were open wide, impossibly so. They floated quickly by, one after the other, so many in a row, all moving at different rates. Thinking back, it was like one of those rotating table lamps with picture cutouts on the lampshade, casting a loop of scenery. From behind me to the far wall, they disappeared in the crease of the room. The ceiling felt like it was coming down, pressing closer and closer, the shadowy people growing murkier, larger. The fear inside of me bubbled up, making my head feel hot; when I felt about to explode with emotion, I could move again. I hid under the covers and cried. From a breathing hole, I could see the yellow shine on the floor. I didn’t dare look up, because I could still feel something up there. Hot, sweaty, and trying to make my breath quiet so that the shadows thought I wasn’t there in bed, I fell asleep and told no one about it.

Much later, maybe five years or more, my family and I were at my grandmother’s, sitting in some fold up chairs on the lawn, under a huge shade tree. The conversation turned into a lesson on the evils that lurk in the world. I can’t say for sure, but I remember it as the first time such a thing had been brought to my attention. I was told that there are monsters all around you, many assigned to every living person; you can’t see them, for they are invisible, and they are there all the time, even when you’re sleeping. They exist just to watch and haunt and plague you. These creatures were called demons, and they wanted to hurt people in any and every way possible. They wanted to drag you to Hell with them. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about any of it, aside from praying and believing and being good. If you do those things, you should be okay. But, I was warned, sometimes you bring their violence and evil upon yourself. That happens when you open the door, and you should never open the door. Horrified of accidentally committing this great crime, I anxiously asked, “What door”, and “Where is the door?” Everyone laughed. “Silly, there is no physical door.” But I didn’t know that, all I knew was that whatever was being told to me was true and that I should take it seriously.

The door wasn’t a door, it was a metaphor. Any time you did something bad, your soul or your angelic protection got a little hole in it. Monsters and evil could then squeeze their way in and hurt you or people you cared about. You were responsible for the door and would have to pay its consequences. The possibilities of this were never fully explained or explored, and I didn’t think to ask; it was simple, whatever would or could happen would be very bad. And it could very easily happen. Many things could open the demon’s door: playing with Ouija boards, trying to cast spells, listening to demonic music, reading demonic books, watching demonic movies, playing demonic video games. A lot of it was vague, like what exactly the qualifications for something to be demonic were, and there were many minor infractions, too. You had to anticipate these things and not do them. You had to be on your toes all the time. It happened in our family once, in my grandma’s house, before I was born. Someone opened the door by watching a demonic movie and got someone else possessed that same week. It was terrifying. There were fevers and screaming and nothing to soothe the horrors – until the demon was exorcised. And then all was fine once more. A lesson was learned and passed on. Don’t open the door.

I thought about those shadows I saw. Talking about it, as best as I could remember, I asked if those were demons. They were aghast I never had mentioned it before, that such a thing happened. I was too little to have opened a door – you can only do so once you reach a vague level of maturity and understanding – it was probably demons, but caused by something else. Maybe, because I was little, I had a glimpse of the supernatural, the unseen. It could have been angels and demons fighting over me, fighting over the protection of my soul. Sometimes children get to peer behind the veil – another foreign concept – and I was one of the lucky few. Maybe it was the evils brought in by my grandfather’s immorality, left behind, somehow confined there. It was his room. But I was protected and so they couldn’t do anything.

From that day onward, I lived in fear. I was uncertain of how to stay safe, what the rules of life were. The laws were always changing slightly, never completely clear or precise. There were many people you could talk to about it, but each had their own ideas and answers. You had to be vigilant, carefully considering your actions, wants, and thoughts. You were responsible for the people you cared about around you, you were responsible for yourself, there was no room for weakness or failure, even though such shortcomings were not only common, but expected. 

I lived in a world populated by real monsters and magic, under the shadows of demons. I believed in them and their threats for most of my life, which held little joy or comfort. The world and everything in it was either dangerous or a test, and overwhelmingly bad. Suffering through it all was a small price to pay, though, for the reward in the next life. Sometimes I would fall asleep staring at the floor, thinking about how good it would be when I died, when the burden of making a mistake was gone, the looming threat of monsters replaced with unimaginable happiness, a place of beauty and belonging. I never considered that life or death could be anything different. I never considered that any of the beliefs I grew up with might not be true. I had always thought myself a genuine truth seeker, willing to weigh any idea and determine it true or false. It was essential to be right. Everyone around me believed mostly the same thing. No one ever contradicted anything or raised a question that I couldn’t find an answer for or wave away. I asked a lot of questions, everything was on the line, after all. But, I naively lived in curation. There were many important questions I never even thought to ask myself, considered an option. I had never learned to be truly curious or ask questions, and it was ruining my life.

-

It’s something that happens to people. Something strange happens and you look very closely at it. It is unusual, it isn’t following the rules that makes the world turn. It’s wrong. It’s upsetting. Slowly, the anomaly grows, encompasses more things. Some people can ignore it or make it go away, but I couldn’t. The truth was always important to me, and I believed if I pulled the thread, it would lead me back into the familiar comfort of what I’d always known. Instead, I began to notice more things that weren’t quite right, that didn’t make sense. I needed everything to make sense.

It is scary, standing on the edge of dangerous thoughts; it isn’t explicitly vocalized, but deep inside, you know that if you continue your investigations, the world you knew could crumble, you won’t know who you are or your place any longer. It wasn’t the first memory or idea I wondered about, but it was one I kept coming back to. What happened that night, more than 15 years ago? What could have caused demons to appear? Were they demons? Was there a door to be opened? Why do demons want to hurt you? How could a demon hurt you? Were demons real? Was supernatural evil real?

Over the past half decade, after reading and thinking and spending long nights talking it through, there is much I no longer believe in. Those shadows on the wall? It could have been some sort of reflection off the pavement out back combined with the swaying trees. It could have also been just a nightmare; I was prone to awful nightmares, many of which I can still vividly remember. It could very well be something child me imagined, a false memory.

I believed in things that weren’t real. Those things colored my perception of the world, people, and myself; they caused me to make bad decisions, form bad opinions, and live an unhappy life. The process was hard, but in the end, trying to find what was true was more important, and grieving who I was and what I lost has passed. Since my gradual, yet dramatic shift, I still continue to discover small statements or explanations I thought were true to be completely false. Personally, I don’t want to believe anything that isn’t true. Truth and honesty are what matter the most to me.

I am a part of a lot of communities, various art groups, paranormal gatherings, cryptid clubs, etc. When people discover I am not a believer in bigfoot, alien visitation, psychics, ghosts, or crystals, it can be offensive to them. I usually don’t bring it up and evade the discussion of my own opinions. I don’t want to influence other people or inadvertently hurt their feelings. Nevertheless, when they happen, the conversation usually ends with, “but the world is more exciting if this or that is true.” And that is a hard statement to respond to, especially as someone who has had a personal dark age of misinformation.

I am continually fascinated by how everything works, how everything has come to be, every little facet of nature. It in itself is magical and extraordinary to me, doubly so because it is real, tangible; I can see and feel and learn from it anytime, in this life. As Carl Sagan wrote in the Demon-Haunted World, “it is far better to grasp the Universe, as it really is, than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring… And if our naive self-confidence is a little undermined in the process, is that altogether such a loss?... To discover that the Universe is some 8 to 15 billion and not 6 to 12 thousand years old improves our appreciation of its sweep and grandeur; to entertain the notion that we are a particularly complex arrangement of atoms, and not some breath of divinity, at the very least enhances our respect for atoms; to discover…that our planet is one of billions of other worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy and that our galaxy is one of billions more, majestically expands the arena of what is possible; to find that our ancestors were also the ancestors of apes ties us to the rest of life and makes possible important reflections on human nature… When we finally come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and power, we will find… that we have made a bargain strongly in our favor.” 

I expand the stories of cryptids. I add information from science articles written on various animals or things. I make my cryptid stories ask lots of questions. It’s good practice for me. I keep learning, thinking of possibilities, gaps, practicing curiosity, skepticism. And if someone somehow comes across my written work, or listens to one of my podcasts, or even sees one of my pictures, I hope all the details help them think of what ifs and whys. Maybe they will inadvertently learn something about a real animal or environmental process. At the least, I hope it makes them realize that you should not trust what anyone is just putting out into the world – my stories are full of partial truths, fabrications, and not just of my own invention. 

Believing Bigfoot is calling to you in the woods or that a strange light or sound or sensation is something paranormal is not necessarily as harmful as the lies I once believed in. Yet, I’ve seen them lead to dangerous beliefs, such as those found in the conspiracy world. The state of the internet and AI, the things I hear on the news every day, the more and more upsetting conversations I have with people have made me more worried for the future. At the end of the day, do we care what is true? Does it matter? It does to me. That doesn’t mean I can’t have fun talking about cryptids and monsters and weird things people saw. It doesn’t mean none of it exists. It doesn’t mean that I don’t believe people. It only means trying to figure things out as best as possible, trying not to fall into the same traps we once have, it means being as open to things existing as to things not existing, while requiring undeniable proof for extraordinary claims.