Hi! Welcome to this month-long series of tiny daily essays shaking out to be little explorations the ins and outs of growing up in a cult, and other daily adventures.
Our occasional babysitters, the Todson sisters, lived in an old farmhouse out in a field. There were no other houses for miles. A few trees, long winding empty roads flanked by ditches, a coat of dust over every car. They were young Church women made old by the caked foundation on their faces, many shades too pale, and the old-fashioned, high-collared shirts they wore tucked into long skirts.
They told us stories——because we begged——about the tv or the stereo blasting in the middle of the night, doors opening wide by themselves as if by a tornado wind, the tap tap tap of tiny feet traipsing over the hardwood as they slept, a sliver of light in the bathroom flipping on and off.
We didn’t believe in ghosts in the Church, because all of our dead were buried & waiting to be resurrected when Christ returned. So, of course, it had to be demons. Like the demon who lived in my closet at home, who rifled through my things at night. Or the demon in the form of Freddy Krueger who slid under my bed with a long blade, waiting for me to move a fraction of an inch, but I stayed still as a corpse.
The demon who entered my dreams, nailing me to the floor, or the demon whose head had been lopped off, or the demon who looked like a goat at the foot of my bed, or the one who was a man in a white suit on fire. Or the demon who took my voice away so I couldn’t scream.
Demons were everywhere and required diligence, prayer, and rebuking in Jesus’s name to be protected from the real evil of being inhabited, our bodies not our own. But even prayer couldn’t take away that bone-chilling fear of being a child with those stories in her head in the middle of the night.
My one teenage bout of sleep paralysis involved Elvis in a white jumpsuit.
I don't remember if there were sequins.