Demonic Warfare

My experiences as a youth are coming back to haunt me

Warning: The following may be triggering for some readers, particularly those who have, now or in the past, suffered from Sleep Paralysis or Night Terrors. Please proceed with caution.

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As a young man growing up in a West Indian family, the spirit world was very much a part of reality. Jumbies, soucouyant, loup garou, papa bois, we were familiar with most of the island’s supernatural creatures. West Indians can tend to be a superstitious lot, and my Father raised an ardent roman catholic in Port of Spain, Trinidad, was no exception. Thus, it is perhaps easy to rationalize away what I’m about to tell you. After university, I did the same, rationalizing them as figments of a child’s superstitious mind and episodes of sleep paralysis.

There was just one nagging problem with my rationalizations. I know that for the incident I describe below, I was not asleep. This is one of my earliest childhood memories, and it was so terrifying and so real that every detail has been burned into my consciousness.

Bedtimes

When I was very young, my brother and I shared a bedroom at the end of the hall of our two-story home. I slept on the top bunk, and he was on the bottom bunk. Our father read us stories before bedtime every night, followed by reading the bible, saying the “Our Father” prayer, and reciting Psalm 23 - “The Lord is my Shepherd.” When we were really young, he also taught us to make the sign of the cross until my LDS mother forbade it. He hugged and kissed us and tucked us in with our scriptures beside our pillows.

Aside - I never thought anything of this growing up. As far as I knew, my father was Mormon, even if he had some Catholic traditions from his childhood. After my parents divorced and he returned to the Roman Catholic church, I made a comment to him about the superiority of his LDS priesthood, to which he responded that he joined the LDS church for my mother but never believed it. For a long time, I did not believe him. I was sure that at some point in his life, living as a Mormon, he had to have believed it. He went to the temple and was in the bishopric and elders quorum presidencies. Surely, he was a “true believing Mormon” at some point. Right? Recounting this now, however, I see the signs, and it makes sense. He never truly converted to Mormonism.

My first encounter with the demonic

I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night feeling cold. I also could sense that something full of hatred and malice was in my bedroom. I looked up over the lip of my bunk bed and down into the room below. I couldn’t see a person, but instead, I saw a patch of darkness moving against the darkness of the room. There was moonlight enough coming in from the window at the foot of the bed to allow me to see it clearly - a shapeless mass of inky darkness moving slowly through the room towards the end of my bed and the ladder that provided access to my top bunk.