Note, this is a NaNoWriMo 2008 post -
Due to the resent rise (yet again) of the demon possession and witchcraft accusations and questions from non church members, asking me what the church members talking about, I have decided to write a book about Etiole, who he is, how I met him, why people started calling me a witch, and what these religion crazed nuts did to me as a result of their unfounded fears of Etiole. This blog will contain the first drafts of it. I’ll be posting them over the next month or so.
From the time you was 4 until you was 8, you talked about nothing but this white monkey, and you drew several hundred pictures of it. The first editions of Friends are Forever and the Twighlight Manor stories, were said to be a non-fiction stories you wrote about this white monkey. Than, suddenly your stories changed. You haven’t told any one the story of the white monkey, since. What happened? Why did you stop telling adults about him? What made you go back and rewrite all your stories into fictional versions?
Church members and deeply concerned relatives gathered up my drawing ands writings, my manuscripts and all copies of my original stories and set fire to them. I was pulled out of school, and I quickly became labeled schizophrenic, and was the hushed up dark secret no one wanted to talk about. I had written things that no 8 year old child should know; it scared the hell out of every one around me. Over the next 6 years I rewrote and redrew every thing over and over again, and the more my drawing and writings were destroyed the more persistent I became, taping them to the walls and ceilings of every single room in our house. And than it all stopped. Our bishop called Pine Land Center and asked the doctors to come to church and take me away. This was done without my parents’ knowledge or permission, because it was thought that they would never allow me to be taken to Pine Land, but once I got there it would be next to impossible for them to get me out.
The doctor came right into Sunday school class and took me out. He explained why he was there and than asked me about the aliens, the UFOs and the white monkey. In my interview, I told him I was writing a book, which I planned to have published. By the time he left, he was satisfied that the people at church were over reacting highly superstitious folks who had confused me writing a book, for me believe in aliens. After he left I told the bishop one thing: “You shouldn’t have done that, you have no idea what Etiole’s temper is like. You don’t know what he can do.” Two years later Pine Land Center suddenly closed its doors; some blamed Etiole, but most took to calling me a witch and said I put a curse on the place.
The bishop himself suffered one ill fate after another, including several severe injuries and broken bones, caused by his new found and unexplained clumsiness (“Someone pushed me, but when I looked there was no one there. I must have tripped but there was nothing to trip on either.”)
Rumors that Etiole was not an alien, but a poltergeist started up, as every single person involved in the Pine Land Center incident suffered from an alarming string of events from car engines blowing up to houses bursting into flames, to people being pushed down stairs by ghosts to a tornado hitting the church and lifting off the roof, and lightening hitting the second church and burning it down. (I was going to 3 different churches back than.) The tornado is what really scared people the most, in Maine where we don’t have tornadoes. People died in car accidents, where the cars, witnesses said, lifted off the ground and were hurtled into trees. One car drove out of control and went under a tractor trailer truck, cutting off the top of the car, and the woman’s head. Another car flipped, up in the air and into the Saco River, the people inside drowned.
Me, I didn’t have a TV at the time, so no contact with the news, and the only time I ever left the house was to go to church on Sunday, so I usually found out about the accidents, fires, explosions, and freak weather patterns, a week or two after they had happened. I found out about them, because people, adults, would come storming up to me in the front hall of the church, and out right accuse me of having put a curse on the victims. Every one pointed their finger at me, and several suggested that they call in an exorcist, to cast the demon out of my car. They now believed me on some level that Etiole was real, but most said he was a demon sent from Hell and that I was the child of Satan.
Etiole became known after that as the demon that lived in my car, which protected me fiercely and with a deadly force that could move objects, control the weather, and start fires. These religious crazed fanatics had become hysterical. If someone said they did not like me, and than broke a fingernail, they said it was Etiole protecting me. Every little mishaps that happened to everyone, not only the members themselves, but to people they know as well, suddenly became my fault. And these people were the ones accusing me of having an over active imagination? WOW! They’d get mad, because after they came to me and told me to stop putting curses on them, I’d laugh in their face and tell them they were crazy. I don’t believe in curses, I never have, and I found it hilarious that these grown adults were believing in them.
The whole thing was warped. I mean, think about it. I was a little kid. They were in their 30’s and 40’s and 60’s. They were grown men and women, yet, they were acting so, I don’t know . . . Insane? Every one became terrified to be near me, for fear that if they said something to offend me, that I would sic my “pet poltergeist” on them. And they had the audacity to say I was the one who was crazy? OMG! I started telling them, they should take their noses out of the Bible once in a while and get a life, because obviously they were the ones with the mental problems, and had lost touch with reality, not me. I mean, come on, I was a kid for crying out loud!
Well, that is how I came to be the “lone hermit” I am today. Being alone all the time is not some thing that I like, but it is the way things are, because people are simply afraid of me.
In the end, I have only one friend who did not turn heel and run. Oddly this was someone I meet during the height of the Pine Land Center ordeal: my than new Sunday school teacher, who, oddly enough, spent his none religious activities studying alien abductions. He became my only friend and still my friend all these years later, because he was the only person who believed me.
In any case, as a child I talked constantly of the white monkey/alien/Etiole/Captain Goldeneagle, because as a child I was oblivious to how much my talk was bothering the adults around me. The less they believed me the more I talked. The more they insisted it was a figment of my imagination, the more determined I became to prove them wrong.
As a teenager, my talk of the white monkey/alien/ Etiole/Captain Goldeneagle, not only came to an end, but I just stopped talking all together. I had come to the realization, that the things I said bothered people, really, REALLY, bothered people; not only did what I said bother people, but it outright terrified them. As a child they could pass on my talk as imaginary friends and over active imagination, but when those things didn’t go away and here I was on my way to adulthood, people started getting scared, because that was when it hit them, that this was much more than imaginary friends; that’s when they realized that one of two things were happening:
1.) Either I was telling the truth, aliens were real, UFOs come to Earth all the time, and not only was I in the habit of talking with aliens, but I had an injured one living in the woods behind my house.
2.) Or, I was absolutely insane, and raving on a bunch of madness.
They chose the follow the theory that I was insane, and acted in accordance to that line of thinking. It was a wake up call to me, which told me quite quickly one thing: People do not want to face the reality of things they do not understand or are afraid of and it is easier for them to ignore the things they fear, by removing the person saying it, from society, rather than face their fear. They hope that by forcing the person out of sight and out of mind, that that alone is enough to wipe out and irradiate the thing which they are afraid of.
And what where they afraid of? If what I was saying to them was true, than they would have to face the fact that not only are we not alone in this universe, we as Humans are not alone on this planet, and we already have walking among us a race of beings so far advanced that they could take out this planet in the blink of an eye, and we as Humans do not have the technology to stop them. That, frightened them, because it means that there is something out there more powerful than them, and that all the time they thought they were the lords of the Earth, they were wrong. That’s a hard fact for most adults to face. Of course, here I was 4 years old, and had no idea I was scaring the daylights out of people. It took me 10 years to figure out why people didn’t believe me. Thus, I learned that it is pointless to talk to people about anything they are afraid of, because no matter what it is, they will react violently against you, thus I stopped talking about the white monkey/alien/Etiole/ Captain Goldeneagle, and eventually stopped talking to Humans all together.
People being terrified of me, my car, and Etiole, did not end there though. I eventually stopped going to church, and I guess, from what I now hear, the ill fates suffered by church members got worse, than when I was going to church, and they still were blaming me for it, even though I was not even going to church anymore. Apparently the new going theory is that they are being punished for driving me out of church, and so started a full force campaign to get me back to church, by sending missionaries, home teachers, and visiting teachers to my door every week. Odd, because in the 20 years while I was going to church, I had never once received a visit from any of them, even though I had been requesting the visits on a monthly basis.
Every visit they bring me another copy of the Book of Mormon and ask, “Have you read this yet?” Do you have any idea how my copies of the Book of Mormon I now have in my closet? I read the whole thing cover to cover when I was 11. I have read it several times since than. They know this, because I told them so, each time they asked. But the next week and the next visit later they ask me again. Didn’t they hear me the last dozen times? I don’t get it. These people are nuts.
In 2003, (some 15 years later!) there became a movement to destroy my car, after one member of out church became town manager, and than fired every one in the town hall and replaced them all with these high strung overly superstitious members of the church. This movement got the backing of the Old Orchard Beach Town Council to back them and was what resulted in me becoming homeless (see the chapter On Being Homeless for that story.) These people had become so crazed with fear that they had convinced themselves that destroying my car would destroy Etiole.
Well, I have two cars, so you destroy one he’d just take up residence in the other, or go back to living in the trees as he did before the car was there. I tried to explain this, but have you ever tried to talk some sense into a fear crazed mob? They don’t listen. (I have several dozen copies of the Book of Mormon which prove just how much they don’t listen too.)
When the town council stepped in and started saying they would take my car, I told them, same as I had told the bishop all those years ago: “This has to stop. You people need to just leave me alone. You can’t get Etiole angry. He will protect me at all costs, it’s what he does. If you come against me with the whole town, the whole town will regret it, because he will take on the entire town, and he can. He’s just one little creature, but he can, and he will pick off every body that he feels has caused me grief. You will lose your tourists. He will make them too scared to come back. You’ll lose your residents, he’ll drive them out. Years ago, he used to just scare people, but things have gone too far now. You people and your relentlessness, this has been going on for too many years now, you have taken things too far. Etiole was mad before, but now he’s angry. He’s really angry. People are dieing now, and I can’t stop him. Leave me alone, and he’ll stop. The more you bother me, the worse he becomes. Destroying my car is not going to stop him. It’ll only make him worse. He’s not the car, he only lives in it. You take his home away from him, how do you think he’s going to react to that? He wants you dead, just for what you’ve done to me, now you want to antagonize him? He’ll kill you. He’s not a Human, he doesn’t think or act the way we do. Can’t you people see what you are doing? You are digging your own graves.”
While there in my yard, something happened to confirm their fears. While telling me the car was going to be sold for junk, wither I consented or not, the top of my 300 year old pine tree, came crashing to the ground, right onto their car. Panic seized them and they fled. This did not become an isolated incident, as from that day forth, every time some one says they are going to junk my car, moments later, they suffer some terrible accident, end up in the hospital, or simply drop dead from a heart attack or stroke.
There have been so many deaths, fires, freak accidents, and murders in Old Orchard Beach since 2003, that it made headlines in the news. A study in 2007, said that there was an alarmingly high rate of heart attacks and strokes in Old Orchard Beach in the past 5 years, and that it had become the #1 cause of death in our town. There was another report this year, which said that the murder rate has more than tripled, and that the town’s 40 year murder free run ended abruptly with a string of murders in 2005. In 2008 alone, there have been 5 murders, five drownings, and one fire that killed the entire family. That’s quite high for a town 7 miles long by 2 miles wide.
Than, something even stranger happened. In February of 2008, the day after the mass murder that killed an entire family, I was ordered into the Town Hall, and demanded to get rid of my car or else. I told them, that if they wanted to see an end to the town’s bad luck, all they had to do, was leave me alone. “Stop harassing me. Stop harassing my car. Stop trying to force me to leave me land. Just stop. Have zero contact with me. Get rid of every one in the town hall who has been harassing my family. See what happens.”
That was the last time I heard from the town hall. The following month, the town manager (one of the terror crazed members of my church) was fired, and in the days, weeks, and months to follow, one by one, every one that he had hired during his time as town manager (each of them also terror crazed members of my church), were also fired.
By August of 2008, every one who had harassed me, my family, and my car, had been kicked out or given notice, and the Town of Old Orchard saw an abrupt end to its 5 year run of skyrocketed death rates, freak accidents, unnatural weather patterns, fires, murders, drownings, amusement park malfunctions, and its other assorted bad luck events. And Etiole? He’s stopped attacking the town. Still attacking the church members, but, no longer attacking the entire town. Will he ever leave them alone? The question is: will they ever leave me alone? He will stop, when they do.
Edit February 17, 2009: Parts of this book can now be seen on a Squidoo lens.
What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!
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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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