Back in the 90s, I was speaking in several churches in the Midwest, leading renewal weekends on the order of an old Southern Baptist revival. I would be there from Friday through Sunday. On Saturdays I would lead a Fun Night for Teenagers with games that were proven to engage them, speak to them a bit, and then close the night just before they exited the church with a ghost story. This was the highlight because every teenager loves a ghost story.
I would set the stage by making the room pitch black. With them sitting on the floor as close as I could get them to me right up to my feet, I would settle them down by speaking low and softly in total darkness and tell them that what they were about to hear was the absolute truth, which it was not. But all they have to think, if you really want a teenager’s hair to stand straight up, is that it is. Then I rudely broke into the night by whipping out my horror candle. This was a fat candle that glowed deeply within itself after I lit it in front of them and held it just under my chin so that the only thing they could see was my face with black eyes and moving lips. I had practiced this many times in front of a mirror. So I knew what I looked like if I got it in the right position. The effect was predictable. I appeared to be headless as the flickering flame cast a shadow of my dancing head against the back wall and ceiling.
I won't tell you story I told them because it is in my secret repertoire that I pull out at opportune moments, but it is a story about murder, the occult, an abandoned ranch in Southern California, and apparitions that appeared mysteriously, a story that I told them I had been a participant in when I was in college. Because I had taken away all distractions in the room and threatened to not finish the story if anyone made a peep, each of them concentrated on my words and ghoulish face and was gradually drawn in and mesmerized by the details that seemed authentic and believable.
I have told this story so many times that I know there is a point in the telling when each person transitions from the room in the church to the farm house in the tale and is sitting with me in the darkness that fateful night when the events I relayed to them took place. It is at this point when my voice is at its lowest and the tension is as taut as a guitar string that I do something that would be described by them as a gawdawful phenomenon that literally knocks all of them back as if they had been blown on at a Benny Hinn Crusade. I won't tell you what that is, but the effects are that sometimes I hear curse words, always screaming, and nearly everyone seizes his heart, chest, or mouth. One time when this happened - and this is the only time it has happened - down in Brewton, Alabama, the entire crowd of over 100 black teenagers jacked to their feet and ran en masse, screaming in terror, through the doors of the gymnasium. Not one remained.
Well, one night I was up in north central South Dakota in the early Spring in a small church in a little town called Pollock on the Missouri River, a joint of 241 people. I had just scared the hell out of a youth group. Usually being the last one to leave the church, I would step into the night to my car and drive off into the darkness. But this night when I emerged into the open air, a contingent of teenagers was huddled closely together just outside the door, unable to leave and gazing down the street and all around the corners in every direction as if they had just heard that Jeffrey Dahmer was in town looking for a midnight snack.
This was the kind of town so typical of small towns in North Dakota. Houses were old and quiet, people went to bed early, windows were dark at night, streets were bare and lonely, and street lights were faint, cloaked with a soft yellow haze about them as if fog lay over the town. They never shined much beyond a small circle they placed on the ground.
The star of the basketball team was a skinny bean pole who was 6'8" tall. He was in the middle of that circle of teenagers, towering above the timid herd like a telephone pole, but he was scared crapless. Around him and almost touching him for protection stood a gaggle of girls whose heads and eyes circled the black environment like turrets. Most of the time one’s mind would not be invaded by any hint of evil in this place where not even traffic violations occur, but when an adolescent’s memories have resurrected the Friday the 13th movies and sees visions of a bloated, faceless, female body floating face down with outspread arms on the black waters of the Missouri, imagination is enhanced. One girl was especially alarmed because she lived about a mile away and had made the mistake of walking alone to the church that night across an earthen dam that, as I peered to where she pointed, appeared to be an entrance that faded into a cemetery without a hint of light as it crossed the river. I left, and I have no idea what happened to that girl or how she got home, but when I looked down that street toward that earthen dam on this moonless night, I wouldn't have gone down there even if I had a police escort. But I do know one thing. That basketball player didn't walk her home.