Moody's Believe It or Not pt. II

Chapter Three: Breaking Up Is Hard for a Witch to Do
During my second and third years at Oregon State I started hanging around more and more at the co-op house known as Heckart Lodge. Then I took the plunge, moved in, and absolutely loved it. I first started going there because I had a couple of high school buddies living there, but it didn't take me long to take a strong liking to the interesting group that called it home. Heckart had a bit of a bad reputation among the other co-op houses, who saw us as a sort of "granola house" (i.e. full of hippie types). Actually, during the time I was there, out of the forty plus members there were perhaps four or five individuals who fit that profile. The rest was a uniquely varied assortment...a veritable cross-section of society all wrapped up in one eccentric and chaotic yet generally civil package.

Of course, with a motley smorgasbord of humanity like we had at Heckart, weirdness was par for the course. There was certainly no shortage of the unexpected and the bizarre, and that's one of the reasons I liked it there. However, I was never really quite sure what to expect...

When I first met S, she was "married" to M, one of the guys at Heckart and thus more or less lived there. (No S & M jokes, please...) An art student, she was an eccentric and emotional (to put both terms mildly) woman who was fond of poetry, herbs, fantasy, and giving backrubs. Both she and her "husband" became very close friends of mine, and I spent a lot of time visiting with them, especially when I had to stay in town during part of the summer holidays so I could work. They seemed like a very intimate and stable couple, so it came as quite a shock when S suddenly went ballistic and kicked M out of the house they had only just moved into.

The fact was that S actually blamed me for that, claiming M was spending more time drinking and playing games with me than sharing quality time with her (which was pure bullshit, but she dealt a lot in that). Then, both tellingly and ironically, she immediately started pursuing me. She was quite persistent, but I made it about as painfully clear as I could (without resorting to violence) that I intended to remain her friend but had no desire whatsoever of getting romantic with her. She was pretty upset, to be sure, but we did remain friends and often confided with each other during our troubled remaining years at the university.

Not long after the breakup with her "husband" S became a Wiccan. She was quite devout about it, too, and seemed intent to involve me. (I might add that at least one if not other members of her Wiccan circle got on her case to bring me in...saying I had some kind of power I didn't know about. That was the third group in my college days to claim that. I kept my distance from them just like I did with the others.) Anyway, one October day she came to visit me in my room at Heckart saying she had something important and very private to discuss.

It turned out that she felt "haunted" by lingering feelings for M (i.e. his soul was still attached to hers) and thus wanted to cast a spell to "purge" him once and for all. To do that, she had to perform the spell over a likeness of him and then see to it that he touched it. She had already made a little yarn doll and attached a photo of him to it. She told me she had also already performed the necessary incantation. That only left delivering the doll to her ex. She wanted my advice on how to do that. I suggested that she simply go and talk to him, since he also still had feelings for her and might have actually appreciated the gesture. She disagreed. For one thing, she didn't want to face him. For another, he was out at the time, and she didn't want to wait. That left only breaking into his room and planting the doll somewhere where he was bound to find and touch it. I knew that would be a bad idea, and I tried to talk her out of it, but to no avail. She was insistent. Finally, over my protests, she simply climbed out my window, walked along the roof, and entered M's room via his window. Then she returned to my room saying she felt an enormous weight had been lifted from her soul.

I said I wanted no part of it and promptly left to go for a long walk...alone.

I remember that, when I came back a couple of hours later, I had a very bad feeling I couldn't quite pin down. I approached Heckart from my room's side, and when I glanced up at M's room I suddenly had a strange sensation in my mind as if someone were screaming at me from the window, but I heard nothing. The whole building seemed to be radiating bad vibes like a transmitter from hell. I slowed my pace, went around to the front door and, with some reluctance, went in.

All of Heckart's evangelical Christians (about a dozen or so out of our 40+ members) were gathered in the living room together with their fellows from Reed Lodge, our neighboring female counterpart. They were sitting in a circle praying like their lives depended on it. Many of them looked sorely afraid. Several were in tears. Meanwhile, the prayer leader was whining and warbling like a crazed exorcist: "...therefore we beg you now, almighty Father in Heaven! Come to us now in this time of darkness! Free this house of the demons that have come upon it..."

My heart went straight into my mouth, and I hurried upstairs to find half the (non-evangelical) members of the house shuffling around looking very jittery. Meanwhile, a couple of our resident New Agers were pacing along in the hallway saying, "No...no...it's getting weaker now. Back up...back up..." Unfortunately, they saw me before I could make my escape.

"[Moody]! Just the person we were waiting for! Come here and stand in front of this door!"

Not surprisingly, they beckoned toward the door leading to M's room. I went and stood in front of the door, noting that all eyes were on me, including some noted skeptics.

"Feel anything?" asked someone.

I shook my head. "It just feels like the rest of the house." Actually, that was true. The whole house felt wrong somehow. I didn't tell them that, though, and they seemed relieved at my words. After a little while the bad feeling passed, and life returned to (ab)normal. Then I heard the full story:

Apparently, when S had snuck into his room and left the doll, M had been out walking with one of the evangelical Christian girls from Reed Lodge (read "trying to hit on her"). The two of them had returned to his room later and found the doll. M had understood immediately that it was part of a Wiccan spell S was trying to cast on him, and he'd said so to his companion. Naturally, being a typical evangelical type (i.e. "all magic is Satan"), she had gone totally crazy. She'd immediately insisted that they take the doll outside and burn it, so they did just that.

Not long after that, one of our house's die-hard skeptics (and a Marine to boot) had walked by M's door and suddenly collapsed. His arm and his leg on the side of his body facing that door had both gone totally numb. He hadn't known about the doll at the time, and when M and the evangelical girl had found out what had happened they'd both panicked, sending a chain reaction through both Heckart and Reed Lodges. The evangelicals had immediately gathered to exorcise the "demon". The New Agers had immediately set to work trying to track down the "psychic wave". Everyone else in the house had just gone into a fit hoping it all would end soon. Fortunately, I'd come back just as it was all winding down.

So...ain't you a little old to believe in witches? I know I am...but I've met one, and at least one of her spells apparently backfired...with nasty results.

Chapter Four: Ouija Deathwish
Not long after the "cursed doll" incident, the New Agers at Heckart started playing with a Ouija board. I'd played with one myself in my elementary school days, and it had actually made a few accurate predictions, but I was satisfied with my tarot cards (and wasn't eager for anything like the tarot madness of a few years before). I joined in a few sessions, but I was mainly content to sit and watch, which also made them happy (since, again, they claimed I had that "unknown power"). It wasn't long before they were spending almost all their free time playing with that thing, so I started excusing myself to participate in real life from time to time.

One night I came back to Heckart to find the group playing with the board, as usual. When I came closer to watch, however, the slider suddenly came to an abrupt halt, cutting off the current "message" mid-sentence. Then it spelled out a seemingly meaningless combination of letters and numbers.

"What's going on?" asked the group's leader as they looked at each other with puzzlement. He looked at me and said, "Do you know what this is?"

I didn't tell the others, but I knew that pattern well. It wasn't meaningless to me at all. In my youth I had used that combination as a sort of code name for myself. I had never told it to any of them, and to this day I haven't revealed it. That in itself would have been strange enough, but then the Ouija board suddenly started spelling out "KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM" over and over again with great speed. At one point, the participants even lifted their fingers up, and the slider continued to move, though much more slowly.

"Kill who ?" demanded the group leader.

The board then spelled out my name.

The group then set about trying to find the identity of my apparent enemy, but he only identified himself as "maelstrom". I finally decided I'd had enough, and I excused myself.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, the same thing happened every time I came into the room while they were doing the Ouija thing. On one occasion, when the New Agers were out, I invited a couple of the evangelicals at random to try the Ouija board, and after the slider circled around meaninglessly for a few minutes it suddenly started spelling out "KILL HIM KILL HIM" again. Finally, after consulting a "professional medium" about "maelstrom's" identity, the leader of the New Agers started telling "maelstrom" to go away. He seemed pretty stubborn at first, but finally he shut up and left us alone. Then, after a while, the Ouija thing wore thin, and the New Agers started doing something else.

I still have no idea who or what "maelstrom" was or why he had a deathwish against me. If I can believe the medium, he is "a great evil", so I'd rather not deal with him anyway.

Still more to come!