The Lets Read Podcast - 295: MY BEST FRIEND JOINED A MYSTERIOUS CULT | Rain Ambience / 7 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories | EP 281

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about creepy cults & dark family secrets HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT? [e-mail] FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ♫ Music & Cover art: INEKT https://www.youtube.com/@inekt

The I mentioned this over in the video game Urban Legends thread, and I think it's came time to make an entire thread on this. CarnEvil was an arcade light gun shooter that came out on October 31st of 1998 and was both published and developed by Midway Games. It was a best seller and even outsold Mortal Kombat 4 that year, yet despite its popularity, it never had a sequel, nor had it been released on a home console or PC. The game is noted for its extreme graphic violence and surrealistic dark comedy, but there's a much darker secret, and I've been trying to figure it out.

If you're expecting some low effort creepypasta, then look elsewhere. This is real, and I know what I'm talking about. CarnEvil was a game developed mainly by a right-wing Celtic pagan folk cult and was meant to be a part of a series and a complex set of rituals for Samhain, the Celtic New Year, which has often been misidentified as Halloween by clueless redneck Protestants. The game itself was the concept of Jackie Hgar, a Midway employee at the time who had no real connections to the cult and simply wanted to make a spooky Halloween horror game. For my former brethren working for Midway at the time, he was what is known as a useful

pawn. This game's radar article published for its 20th anniversary in 2018 is mostly just fluff, but there are useful tidbits of information in it. Namely, it confirms the existence of the lost console port and its bizarre development which Hagar was largely kept out of, and that midway higher ups were giving them some trouble. The real mystery is the tunnel, a level that was completely cut out, with the only remnant being the song

from the area found in the game's code by emulators looking into the cut content. The music sounds like the smooth jazz elevator music that you'd hear in softcore adult films on late-night Skinemax back in the day. It was obviously meant to be a tunnel of love, to fit in with the game's carnival fairground theme, and because it was meant as sort of an adult ritual, blending intimacy and violence which was part of an ancient Celtic pagan rites. Midway's higher-ups made sure the tunnel was cut because it was deemed too offensive, and they didn't want arcade owners to ban the game. If you played Carnival, you'd know that the Tunnel of Love would be really messed up if

it was deemed too offensive for one of the most twisted arcade games ever made. There's a bunch of other weird stuff in the game's code, including placeholder images of Sailor Jupiter, and a shocking image of Jeffrey Dahmer holding the severed head of a Midway executive that had given the devs issues, meant as a joke. The cultist devs were also weebs, the old school 90s kind who were known as otaku and enjoyed violent edgy content and gory hentai. Interestingly, the game's credits even mentioned Princess Serenity under Special Thanks. The cult that I was a part of had members in multiple states and even a small group in Ontario.

The leader of the Canadian branch was a stereotypical otaku obsessed with sailor mercury and was featured in a Dateline report, but much of his overt neat and otaku behavior was an act to fool people into thinking that he was an incompetent basement dweller instead of the Canadian equivalent of Lord Summers Isle. Greg wasn't the leader when that interview took place in the 90s, and I'm not sure if he had any connections to CarnEvil, specifically the Lost Console version. That version was an entirely different type of game rather than a mere arcade port. The tunnel was alleged to have contained shocking footage and coded messages that cult members would understand, but that

would be meaningless to others. Some of the footage and imagery included an array of Celtic paganism symbols, gory anime artwork, and clips from various titles complete with directors and release dates. Other footage I was informed about included the Bud Dwyer tape in GIF format and some taped rituals possibly involving nude people and animals or even human sacrifice. The tunnel and console port was both supposed to contain various clips from these sources, but they were cut for being illegal and difficult to use. Bud Dwyer's death is legally available, not under copyright, so what's left is either the ritual being illegal, or the footage involving movie and anime clips being unlicensed. There is more proof of the cut images that did survive in the game, like the Sailor Jupiter

placeholder pic, which is entirely different from the other placeholders, and the Dahmer image. Joe Pulato was offered a voice role for the console version, but refused because he was disgusted by the script. Pulato played Rhodes in Day of the Dead, and did some anime and cartoon voice work in the 90s, most notably in Digimon. And where did you get this information regarding the clips? Well, a close friend of mine worked at Midway on the dev team back then.

We were roommates in Iowa at the time and he had two places of residence. An apartment near Chicago that he rented in his name and the ranch in Iowa that the group owned where I lived. Midway games had their main headquarters in Chicago and several smaller offices in Illinois and Iowa for their arcade division. I know it sounds like one of those My Dad Works Nintendo excuses, but it's true. I've met many strange and varied people in the old pagan community. As you drift further away from Wicca and New Age garbage, a lot of people overlap or stay

in touch more closely. Like I said, I was part of a Celtic pagan folk cult mainly devoted to worship of Lu, Enya, Dagda, and Morayen. Many creepy and disturbing rituals are associated with the Morayen, and she is nothing like the Wiccan Goth girls of the New Agers portraying her as. If you read Celtic myth, you'd know that. And so the cult is a bunch of weeb D&D nerds that fetishize Celtic pagan ethno-nationalism? Yeah, that sounds typical for 90s game devs. I can't count the number of weird dudes on Doom forums exactly like this.

The weebs and D&D nerds were simply two of the demographics the cult recruited from. They also recruited in goth and metal circles as well, preying on outcasts and people from broken homes and dysfunctional families. The longer you were in the cult, the more that kind of behavior was discouraged. If you wanted to advance in rank, you had to get deeper into the cult, pagan, and the right-wing stuff. I left the cult in 2002, a few months after 9-11, and things were getting serious and I bugged out of there.

I no longer live in Iowa and I don't keep in touch with anyone from the cult. The game devs working on the console version of CarnEvil were a third party group contracted by Midway as opposed to the actual employee devs who did the arcade version. Only two of these guys were cultists, my old roommate and another person. They were in the lower ranks, and I actually met Greg, the Canadian weeb who loved Sailor Mercury around 1999 or 2000 when the Ontario branch met up with the other midwestern sets of the cult. He had lost weight and had become less interested in anime, more fixated on worship and rituals to gain rank.

I'm not sure if the cult is still active or if they have rebranded. And after Columbine and 9-11, the cult intentionally kept an even lower profile, and there were fears of law enforcement getting involved as many members stockpiled weapons and some sold drugs. A lot of cultists participated in various criminal activities and some of the advanced rituals would be considered felonies, and as a result, many people started panicking and jumping ship in the early 2000s. Some of the oldest members originally belonged to white gangs in the wider Chicago area like the Jousters, Gaylords, Stone Freaks, and Uptown Rebels. What would they do in these rituals? Do they worship Celtic gods?

Yes, they worship Celtic gods and goddesses. Rituals often involved intimate acts, both gay and straight, lighting candles, blood lighting, self-harm, and plant offerings. More advanced rituals for certain holidays or special events include sacrificing live animals, mainly farm animals like chickens, pigs, and sheep, and at one point a calf. There were rumors that other sets in Michigan and Kentucky performed human sacrifices of kidnapped people, such as potential informants or rival gang and cult members, but I honestly doubt those claims. Animal sacrifices were real and I saw them first hand, and I even took part in some of the self-harm and candle lighting rituals.

Initiation rituals were similar to gang initiations and included beatings followed by group intimacy, often of a sadomasochistic nature. I still have nightmares from my initiation. Having a bunch of people beat the crap out of you then literally assault you back to back is not fun, to say the least. But at the time, I wanted to prove myself worthy of this cult, and I welcomed it. I signed off on those acts more or less, but I deeply regret it now. I had a car, and I was a quartermaster and steward, and my job was to acquire weapons, food, fuel, ammunition, and other basic supplies for our stockpile in Iowa.

There were other aspects to the cult as well, like why we tried to infiltrate the video game industry and recruited from certain nerd fandoms and IT workers. You know how back in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s you had Christian conservatives going on about how video games, rock music, and any form of fantasy or horror fiction were inherently satanic and meant to program people. We believe that the Christians were wrong about those games and movies being satanic recruitment tools, but we believe that they could be used as propaganda and conditioning tools to program people to be violent, mixed with specific stimuli and mental and physical conditioning

regimens. We'd watch all sorts of extremely violent and dark movies, TV shows, and anime, and read similar books in our spare time when we weren't working or worshipping. The stuff we watched was always either R or NC-17 or X, and we also watched hardcore sadomasochistic stuff, as well as Gorean Demon Hentai, who was supposed to desensitize us and reconfigure our minds to make us warriors for the gods. Sort of like Fina, or from the Fenin cycle or the warrior hero Kukkanna. We also did lots of LARPs and campaigns for D&D and Vampire the Masquerade as a form of psychological training.

I don't think the programming was that effective, but still. Basically, the logic was that the Christians were wrong. These corporations weren't using media to brainwash people and make them violent, but we could, and it was up to us to do so. And too long didn't read. They read dark dungeons and thought that it was a how-to guide. And like I said, these guys were whack and I'm glad that I left them completely. My biggest concern is whether or not the cult as a whole is still in existence, or

whether any of these people did successfully infiltrate the gaming industry after the failed carnival attempt. Even if the cult itself disbanded, I could see some individuals retaining their twisted beliefs and trying to continue their experiments on their own or with a new cult. The two guys at Midway on the Carnival dev team were based out of Iowa and commuted to Illinois. However, the small studio contracted to do the console version of Carnival, which was more of a remake sequel than a true port, was from the Michigan set. I only met two people from the Michigan crew at a llamas gathering in the late 90s, a girl and a guy, both of whom were creepy even by

cult standards. The girl had a weird obsession with JFK, kind of like the goth girl who claimed that she was married to Sephiroth or something. Personally, I thought she was nuts, even back then. Like they could have been characters in an August Underground movie or something. And I wouldn't be surprised if the cult was organized as some black ops recruitment farm for some bigger organizations. I'm not sure if they were being used by the Deep State or some other larger cult unrelated to any of it, but I always thought it was

unusual for such a fringe cult to have so many sets in multiple states and even one in Canada. Still they were all small in number. The Iowa set that I was in ran about 20 or so deep at most. The Kentucky set had about 10 or 12 at its peak, and there were groups in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia whose sets were in the single digits. The biggest group was the Mother Chapter in the Chicago area which had around 50 members,

while the Michigan guys numbered anywhere from 15 to 25. Maybe some of the more promising cultists were led into a bigger organization. And we watched a lot of these zombie movies and used the term zombie apocalypse as code for training for a crap hit the fan scenario. And this was in the 90s and early 2000s, before The Walking Dead or even 28 days later, when zombies became a mainstream fad.

Then all of a sudden, the CDC and FEMA started using zombie apocalypse imagery to raise awareness for emergency preparedness and disaster prep. It could have been a test run for predictive programming, or maybe it was just a coincidence, I don't know. If the cult owns music, TV, and news, it probably owns video games too, especially when you consider that most games are essentially murder simulators, and how poorly game companies treat their employees is a telltale sign.

True, but this cult didn't own any of these things per se. They did however try to infiltrate these studios and companies. I didn't work for Midway, but my roommate did, and he never really said much about being treated poorly. He mainly complained about his meager paycheck, which may have been small on its own, but was also being siphoned off by the cult. Certain cultists had to pay dues every so often, and the higher up in rank you were, the more often you had to pay.

The money would go into a communal box and was often used for mundane expenses, stockpiling of supplies, and sometimes we'd all get small cash bonuses on certain days like Salway and in Beltana. He was one rank above me back in 1998. I had to pay once every three months, and while he paid once a month. By the time I left the cult in 2002, I was paying once every two weeks, and he had been transferred to the set over in Illinois for some secret ritual for high ranked members who were allowed leadership roles or the right to start their own set.

He got promoted around 2000, shortly after the Y2K New Year celebrations, and I never really saw him again after he left Iowa. That being said, if the cult that I was in was trying to infiltrate the industry, maybe they were being used as proxies for a bigger cult or organization with more real influence. The only place I could ever find this arcade game was at traveling carnivals and festivals. I liked it enough that sometimes that would be the main reason that I'd go to the carnival or festival. And that's weird. I've encountered it at mall arcades and movie theaters or bowling alleys in the wild and several places over the years, and I do know it at mall arcades and movie theaters or bowling alleys in the wild

and several places over the years, and I do know it was a massive success in arcades, which made its conspicuous lack of a sequel or console port all the more jarring. I also know that the console version wasn't meant to be a direct port, but a sequel slash remake hybrid like Evil Dead 2. It was done by a smaller third party company company and when you know who was involved in that unknown third party crew, it becomes more obvious why there was no follow up in the game's success. The decline of arcades in North America and Midway's collapse in the late 2000s only compounded

the issue further. So how exactly does Greg fit into this? This game was released in 1998, and in the 2000 video, he was still a weeb. Did he become a huge cult leader so rapidly that he was involved in the attempted console port? Nah, Greg was part of the Canadian branch of the cult. The carnival port was handled by the Michigan set. He was rising through the ranks, and the last I heard, he was being primed to become a leader of the Ontario chapter.

Greg fits into this mainly as proof of the cult's existence and the fact that they recruited from the outcasts of society and transformed them as much as they could. In that girl with the weird obsession with JFK, I think it was just because of his Irish ancestry. Obviously, the circumstances of his Irish ancestry. Obviously the circumstances of his death are incredibly suspicious, and I wonder if he was deliberately bred to be the King, President of the USA, and his execution was a large scale enactment of the sacrifice of the King ritual common to many Indo-European mythologies,

including Celtic. And that's why his bloodline has such a political dynasty in Boston to this day. They're the modern equivalent of the Celtic pagan divine kingly lineage. And I think you might be on to something. Also, if you're interested in learning more, I can give you the first name of the old roommate who was in the cult and worked on the released arcade version of CarnEvil at Midway. I can't remember his last name because it's been so long, but I do know his first name is Rowan. I always found it eerie that a guy in a Celtic pagan death cult had the same name as a tree

that figures into Celtic mythology, and is also the name of the missing girl from The Wicker Man. When you say that this cult was right-wing, what do you mean by that? What were some of their actual political beliefs? The cult was right-wing in the sense that we didn't go for the wiccan hippie feminist stuff like most of the left-wing neo-pagans. We were very pro-gun and very anti-government, and this was the 90s, so think along the lines of the old militia movement but pagan instead of Christian.

There was some ethnocentrism, but we weren't explicitly racist or supremacist. I don't think I ever saw a non-white person in the cult, but that may have been a coincidence. We did have a few non-Celts, or more accurately, people who weren't fully Celtic if their surnames were anything to go by. OP. This is the kind of stuff I live for. What are the chances of recovering any material to the tunnel scene? Any possibility of a script still existing out there? Maybe someone on the dev team could be contacted? I am absolutely enamored by your lead and thank you for giving this to us and please

keep it coming. I don't know if there's a script still out there, and I'm kind of worried about contacting the dev team. Not everyone in the Midway dev team was a cultist, and I know for a fact that Jack Hagar wasn't. It was only Rowan and someone else whose name I can't remember. I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to bother them about the cult stuff. If they're still involved, or if the cult is still active, it could blow back on both me and him. My name is Hannah, and I'm from St. Louis, Missouri, and I'm a second generation Bosnian American. My parents came here separately in the early 90s, and then after meeting in a Bosnian restaurant

on Union Road, they started dating and eventually got married. I was born in October of 1996 and apparently my parents were both very happy during that first year of my life, but the very hazy memories I have of my father from that time are the only ones I have of him. That's if they're not just false memories, planted there after hearing a hundred thousand anecdotes about him being such a wonderful person and a perfect father during my first year of life. But then, I suppose you're wondering how a man who walked out on my mother and I is remembered

so affectionately. So affectionately, in fact, that some people still call him a hero. Well, if you're sitting comfortably, I'll begin. My father grew up in a small Bosnian village called Obadi, which at the time was part of the now defunct nation of Yugoslavia. From what my mom's told me, it must have been a pretty beautiful place to grow up. It's nestled up in the mountains, surrounded by forests for hunting and streams for fishing, and for almost two generations following World War II, there was a long and uninterrupted

peace in the region. But then, and I'm ready to skip over a lot of the history here, war came. And when it came, it was very bad. And because it was based along ethnic lines, the Yugoslav Civil War was this real depressing neighbor-versus-neighbor kind of war. It was so bloody that the war sparked a number of smaller, more localized incidents of conflict, which included the Bosnian Civil War. And it's during this war that my dad escaped Bosnia. Mom and her side of the family left a little earlier, so while they had to suffer through

some of the war's earlier stages, they thankfully escaped before the war in Bosnia kicked off. My dad, on the other hand, stayed in Obadi to protect his family, even when other Bosnian families were fleeing to Europe, the UK, or America. And this was because, at first, he didn't think that they had anything to worry about. Without getting into too much detail, and please don't crucify me in the comments for oversimplifying this, the factions in the Bosnian Civil War were as follows. The Serbs were the minority while the Bosnians and the Croats formed the majority, and at first the Bosnians and the Croats were on the same side, so it looked like they were going to win.

But then the Bosnian Serbs started getting backing from their much stronger motherland, Serbia, which really turned the tides of the battle and prolonged the war. And so my dad and his family went from feeling safe up in the mountains, to having Serb forces getting closer and closer each day. The men of the village formed a kind of militia and held the line as long as they could before they were forced back into the village. But by that time, they'd managed to evacuate all their vulnerable family members, so by the time the Serbs surrounded Obadi, the fight was to keep them from burning it to the ground. And mom said, the way dad told the story, there had always been so much hope around

Obadi. Hope they'd be able to hold off the Serbs until NATO committed to driving them back. But as the Serbs surrounded the village and their snipers began picking off the Bosnian militia one by one, my dad and his friends realized that they were doomed. And even worse, their families were in danger too. Lisi believing they'd be able to hold off the Serbs long enough, the men of Obadi had told their women and children to wait in a neighboring village, and unless they warned them of the imminent attack they too would be surrounded, captured, and quite possibly massacred. The militia had no choice but to try their best to break through the encirclement, but

given how outnumbered and outgunned they were, that was considered to be the option that wouldn't end well. But then, one very early morning, in absolute desperation, my dad went out into the woods and tried to find a way through the Serb lines, and incredibly, he found one. The Serbs had neglected to properly guard an open field, which lay just on the other side of some trees and on the eastern side of Obadi. And presumably they believed that my dad and his buddies weren't dumb enough to try to run through an open field, especially not if they had snipers in the surrounding hills. But their assumption had left the

Bosnian militia with a golden opportunity for escape, at which point they could just circle around the Serbian lines and then rescue their families for a second time. My dad's fellow militiamen asked if he was certain the way was clear and when he told them yes, they moved out as quietly as they could and made it to the clearing just as the sun was rising ahead of them. They started running through the clearing, through the gap in the Serbian lines, and they're running and running without any shots coming their way.

And they're yelling at my dad that you're a goddamn genius, you saved us. And then just as they're all nicely grouped in the center of that clearing, the Serbs opened fire. My dad said that they didn't have a chance. All they could do was run or lay low, but all the same men were shot, cut down by machine guns or picked off by the Serb snipers. All my dad said he could do was run and just pray a Serb bullet didn't find its way to him, and by some miracle, my dad made it to the treeline, escaped the Serbs, and then managed to circle around the back of them when they swept in to finish off the wounded Bosnians and burn

Obadi to the ground. While the Serbs were burning and looting, Dad managed to get to the village where all the families were staying and warned them that if they didn't flee they'd be next. And having seen that his comrades were slaughtered, my dad decided that he was getting out of Bosnia. And after that, he didn't rest until he, his mom, and his aunt were on a plane to the United States where they'd eventually settle in St. Louis. Obviously, my grandma, God rest her soul, wouldn't shut up about how heroic my dad

was, how he'd personally led a near unwinnable charge against the Serbs in order to come to the aid of his family and other civilians. She also talked about how he was the only survivor of his militia unit, and that God must have blessed him something special for him to walk away from a bloodbath like the kind he experienced. Mom said that dad never liked her talking like that, so she'd never do it around him. But mom always figured that's because he had a kind of stereotypical survivor's guilt. Dad never liked her talking like that, so she'd never do it around him, but Mom always figured that's because he had a kind of stereotypical survivor's guilt. You know, the way the heroes never consider themselves heroes, that old schtick. But around 18 months into their marriage, just before I turned one year old, they had

a massive, catastrophic fight, in which my father revealed the truth of what happened that day. Mom told me that Dad would sink into deep depressions that would sometimes last for a week at a time. He'd drink heavily, stay away from the house for days on end, and by the time I was one, my mom was sick to death of it. She told me no more drinking, no more staying out with the other Bosnian guys until all hours of the morning, and that if he wanted her to stay, he was going to have to seek psychiatric help for his post-war traumas.

And then dad says something like, I don't deserve any help. To which she responds, of course you do, you're a hero. And he then hits her with a line he'd repeated over and over, which was, I got people killed. At which point Mom kept telling him, which she always did, that it wasn't his fault, that he couldn't keep blaming himself, and that above all, he did the right thing. And that's when he flips, and tells her she's wrong. He didn't accidentally get anyone killed. He did it on purpose. Dad knew that if they tried to break out of the Serb encirclement together,

he and his buddies would be cut to pieces. And if not a single one of them walked away to warn the next village, their families would die too. And so Dad took a risk, a major risk, but he sold his soul in the process. That morning when he was supposedly probing Serbian lines to find an opening, he wasn't doing that. Instead, he was looking for the Serbs themselves, and he did so with a white flag of surrender made out of an old shirt and a broken stick. The Serbs took him prisoner, and then took him to their commander who asked if he was an envoy sent to announce the village's surrender.

Dad said no, but the villager militia would die before surrending their homes to the Serbs, but unlike them, he didn't want to die. He wanted to live, even if that meant living someplace else. The Serbs laughed, amazed that this Bosnian had the balls to ask them to simply let him leave. But that's not what Dad was proposing. Oh no. He proposed handing over the entire militia so that the Serbs could slaughter them all

in one fell swoop. The only price that he asked was that they let him walk away once the shooting had stopped. And so, that's what he did. Dad ushered his comrades out into the open, but didn't run at the head of them like he'd claimed to have done. Instead, he simply waited at the tree line, watching as the Serbs slaughtered his brothers in arms in a pre-arranged and horrific ambush. Then once they were all dead and he heard the Serb commander yelling at his men to stop shooting, he just walked out into the open, stepped over the bodies of his lifelong friends

as he made his way to safety. He was convinced the Serbs would shoot him. In fact, he told my mom at one point that he wished they did. And the Serbs knew killing him would be the easy way out and that the ultimate knife through the heart of my father was going on with his life, knowing that he was a traitor to his country and his people. It's obviously when he reunited with his family in the next village over, my dad talked as little about his escape as possible, and allowing everyone to assume that what he'd

done was heroic instead of selfish and contemptible. He managed to keep it a secret for a while, but like I said, it was only a matter of time before he snapped and spilled his guts to my mom one night, and she told him to leave. She knew what he'd done was terrible and when it comes to ensuring the survival of yourself or your family, people sometimes end up doing some frankly unthinkable stuff to each other. But in the moment, she didn't know what else to do, so she told him to just get out. She said that she thought he'd come back, that he'd go get drunk at the bar that he

always went to, and then come back in the early hours of the morning, stumbling drunk and begging her forgiveness. But he never came back. Ever. He got into his car, drove out of town, and never returned. And mom thinks that he's still alive somewhere because they're technically still married and she's his next of kin. So if he does die, we'll probably end up finding out about it pretty quick.

And people say that I should think about reaching out to him, but honestly, that's not something I'm really interested in just now. People say I'll regret it if I don't and that you always think you have time when really you don't. But I'm not scared to face my father with a knowledge of what he did. I'm scared what he might have become. I know there's a chance that he moved on, made a life for himself, and that meeting him for the first time as an adult might prove the catharsis that sometimes I think I'm sorely in need of. that sometimes I think I'm sorely in need of.

But I think the reality isn't so rose-tinted, and that now he might just be more of a monster than the creature who betrayed his comrades. I know that, if he didn't do what he did, I might not be here to write this. But all the reasoning and rationalizing in the world won't change what he did. Based on sheer probability, I'm probably somewhat like you. I'm a male in my mid-twenties, currently lying down in bed, posting from a laptop with a rather annoying head cold, breathing entirely through my mouth.

I live in the southeastern United States, I'm listening to some music that I enjoy, and I work at a decent job that pays me only slightly above minimum wage, and I struggle to make it month to month. And there is nothing magical about me. Now then, since we've established that I'm not a special snowflake, and hopefully you've related to some aspect of what I said about myself, I need to tell a story and explain a few things to you all. what I said about myself, I need to tell a story and explain a few things to you all. The vast majority of the posters here are all role-players. The majority of people starting threads about magic, demons, ghosts, aliens, the occult, Thalima, and paranormal experiences as a whole are speaking from a standpoint of suspended

disbelief and speculation on events they have not personally witnessed. Purely for the sake of conversation, I'll use an example. It is akin to how I would describe Buckingham Palace. I've never been to England, or even out of the US for that matter, but I know Buckingham Palace exists. I can picture it in my mind's eye, but I've never actually seen the palace. Many of its nuances are just unknowable to me because I've never been there to experience its beauty in depth.

And this is how most people are experiencing the paranormal, through their mind's eye, and their imagination. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with creativity. But every once in a while, someone comes around these parts who has had first-hand contact with something they can't explain. Some sort of experience say it just doesn't quite fit into their worldview. The memory sits and grows in their brain, trying to assimilate like a square peg trying to enter a round hole.

And that, my friends, changes a person. It really does. There's a different vibe, if you will, after someone experiences the paranormal. Everything remains the same on the outside, but inside, something is different. To the general public, these people are normal, but to those who have brushed shoulders with the ethereal, they glow in the dark, so to speak. I would look like a normal person if you ran into me on the street or came into my job and ordered a cup of coffee.

However, if you met me, you'd know immediately that something was definitely going on. And this has been my experience time and time again. Now stay with me here. Remember how I related to you in the beginning of this thread? Nothing about that changes. Nothing about that is different. I'm no better, worse, or more special than you. I'm not a messiah, a light being, a vampire, or alien. The only difference between you and I is that

I've seen things in the real world that I can't explain and simply don't have the answers to. I've experienced things that don't fit into my concepts of reality, life, or anything logical, and they frankly don't make sense in my mind. On nights like these, when I think about those things, they resurface and they won't go away. The square peg tries to force itself through the round hole, but it doesn't fit. I've done a great deal of trying to forget about these things, and it doesn't work. The memories are always there, tugging at the back of my mind and lurking around in my subconscious like specters in the night.

And this is what this thread is about, and it's high time that I spoke about what happened. It's high time that I told someone the truth. This is not a ask me anything thread. This is not an attention seeking thread. This is not a role play. This is me recounting the experiences that took place in my life between 2009 and 2011, as accurately as I can remember them, in the hopes that someone on this board takes what they can from it.

For the sake of trying to keep this readable and not a short novel, I'll break down the backstory as much as possible into key points. It's mid-2009, I've just turned 19, I just got out of an emotionally abusive relationship with a girl I was planning to marry. She got increasingly unstable as time went on until a serious self-termination attempt from her raised red flags for me to leave and get her help. That failed, and she is faring rather poorly to this day. And this had put me in a near constant state of depression, and I turned to drinking to numb my feelings.

As time went on, I became unable to function without liquor daily, and I was subsequently kicked out of college due to being too drunk to make it to class, much less pass any exams. This began a six month long bender where I was drunk nearly every day, and pretty much living wherever I happened to fall down that night. I was eventually picked up by the police shortly before my 20th birthday for a DOI among other charges and I was given the option of out of state rehabilitation in a halfway house or a mandatory 6 months in jail and a hefty fine. I obviously chose rehab and moved a thousand miles away from my small hometown, leaving

behind anyone who knew or cared about me, into a strange new frontier in a big city. No, I will not be disclosing locations, it isn't important. I made it through rehab after an absolutely horrible detoxification process and moved into a halfway house full of the most insane people I've ever met. These people were lunatics, and I mean that never since the word. Living in a halfway house you learn all kinds of things about humanity. For example, some people don't shower more than once a week. Others cannot leave their home unless they have meticulously groomed every area of their

body and are looking fine. More importantly, some people are perfectly content living a lie for their entire lives. It's acceptable to them. I wasn't there long before I met the resident psycho, Jason. Now Jason was a guy a few years older than me. All of the other residents said that he was nuts and involved with a cult and to stay away from him, but when I finally sat down, Jason didn't sound crazy to me. He glowed in the dark, like I mentioned earlier. The things he said and the way he lived his life seemed infinitely interesting to me.

We grew to be acquaintances over many late-night cigars and metaphysical conversations. Jason, albeit with his quirks, seemed like the least insane person in a 10-mile radius to me. Eventually he asked me to join him at a meeting of the group that he was involved in. I was a bit wary given all the cult talk and I figured that I'd just go with them to see what was going on. What followed began the most insane two years of my life. If I could have seen the future then and where I would be today in my mental state, I would have taken the six months in the slammer and kept slamming back shots afterward because I knew what I was getting myself into browsing X and wishing I could experience something,

anything out of the ordinary. I wish I could go back. I wish that I never saw any of it. It's a curse to me." And the meeting was fairly small, primarily younger guys. I think the oldest was 33, which was extremely odd, as most AA meetings are populated by significantly older people, 50 plus. I was pretty happy, because being 20 and talking to a leather-faced old man about trying to get sober really sucked, and I immediately noticed that I felt better being there.

These guys were cool, all with the same aura as Jason, except Jason was the newbie here. Most of them were a year plus in the group and they were pretty interesting. I spoke with conviction about what they were doing, that they had discovered a foolproof method of sobriety and that all other methods were inherently flawed and selfish. I felt the same way because AA is a bunch of BS. And I was intrigued. What sold me the most was how happy these people seemed. I was literally torn apart emotionally and numb to pretty much everything, and since I had quit drinking, I woke up wanting to die every single day.

I wanted the joy these people had, so I was advised to get a sponsor. I eventually asked a guy to sponsor me, personally show me the ropes and help me stay sober, and he gave me a set of ritualized instructions to help me to call him tomorrow and we'd go from there. I noticed that there were pairs of people standing, walking around, sitting all over the place, and nobody was sitting alone or left out. My sponsor explained that these were called one-on-ones and that if I ever hoped to stay sober, I should get in one immediately. So I walked around and found the one person who was

alone and he was sitting in the back, smoking a cigar and playing a game on a cell phone. I introduced myself and he asked me to sit down and start talking. I started rattling off about my screwed up life and he didn't budge. He looked at me some time later after I was done and stared right through me, that thousand yard stare. He said, Listen, I know your life sucked. In fact, I know all about you. Your name's Chris, your parents are still together, you've had a pet die, even though you managed

to date women you're insecure and I even know that you probably have a sibling that's better than you. I know this because I've known a million Chris's. The vast majority of them are dead right now. Yeah, all my friends from when I got into AA are dead, in prison or drunk and they've dropped off the grid except one. One out of hundreds. If you don't want to end up that way, I suggest that you do whatever your sponsor tells you or go ahead and blow your brains out right now. Do your family a favor." And this went on for about 30 minutes. The thing about this is that he was dead on. He told me the truth, and that was terrifying. I've never seen anyone look at me the way

he did. He didn't break eye contact for 30 minutes. He pulled out all the thoughts that I was having in that conversation and laid them out before me and dissected them, explaining why they were wrong. I'd have never been so out of sorts in my entire life, and as I walked away, smoking what felt like my millionth cigarette, I must have looked like a ghost. It turns out that guy started the group. Cameron had been sober for more than a decade and had sufficiently put the fear of God into me. My sponsor put me back together, drove me home, and reminded me to start the set of

directions that he had given me, the ritual in the morning. One thought crossed my mind here. How did he know those things? There's no way it's just from studying people. He was dead on. Either way, I want to do that. Wow. And I found out how.

To glaze over around eight or more posts of explanations, I did the ritual, and I went to meetings every single day and night. I was coaxed to move out of my halfway house shortly after Jason did to join him on a senior member's living room floor. Total immersion, he said. And by this point, I had been sober for about six months. They had explained that the main concept of the group was other-centeredness or service to others, and that the knowledge that I had about staying sober was priceless. They painted me into a corner and I had no choice but to comply.

I had to recruit people, or I had no place to stay. And I was convinced to drop all contact with my family. I was convinced to cut off my old friends. I was totally immersed in this new lifestyle which involved more and more esoteric principles and occult ideals, Illuminism, ego destruction, guru worship, gnosis, etc. as time went on. The thing about all of this is that my 20-year-old mind could not take well to it. I had a lot of difficulty in the beginning, but eventually got on the horse after some more hard conditioning.

I was subjected to conversations like Cameron had with me the first night, every night, and then put back together, effectively painting the group as both nurturer and attacker, fulfilling all of my needs. Elaborate setups to bring me close to a person and then just rip them away. I got into a relationship with a girl and just as things were getting good, Cameron banned all women from the group, not even kidding. Eventually, I broke down and accepted the conditioning, and right here is where things get into that unexplainable category. I was doing

everything. I was doing the ritual. I was recruiting and sponsoring people, and all of a sudden I felt it. I was having a one-on-one with one of the guys I brought in, and boom, there it was. I felt gnosis. I felt the presence of God coursing through my veins and filling my body. It was like a powerful waterfall of pure love and light was crashing down upon my soul. I wasn't speaking my words anymore. I was somewhere else, reveling in the beauty of this experience. It was like I was floating above myself, watching myself smoke cigarettes and blow this new guy's mind.

And you should have seen it. I'm this 20 year old kid sitting across from a 45 year old heroin addict with a fire in my eyes, talking about things that I have no business knowing about in his life. He's visibly shaken, and he can tell something's up, and he can feel it too. I drifted there, listening to words that weren't mine for a while and when I finally slid back into my body, I stood up shakily and said, well, I guess our conversation's over because I'm out of things to say. Call me tomorrow, Richie, I'll pick you up.

And he just mumbled okay and shook my hand and walked away. It looked like he had just watched me grow a second head. And I immediately went to go find my sponsor, and I told him about the situation and he just sort of smirked and told me to go find Cameron. Interrupt him and have a one on one with him. Cameron was like the untouchable top rung of the hierarchy, so I knew this was big news. And I usually had no reason to speak to him and frankly didn't want to, since most of our conversations involved him picking apart my brain and freaking me out.

And so I found Cameron sitting alone, nearly identical to where I found him on the first night that I ever came out with Jason. It felt like an eternity ago that I was reluctantly getting into a car with the halfway house's crazy guy. I sat down next to Cameron and asked if I could talk. I told him what had happened and he stopped what he was doing, laughed for a bit and looked at me. That eye contact still haunts me to this day.

He said, You felt it on that first night, didn't you? You could tell that something here was off. You could tell that when I was speaking to you and smashing your worldview that something wasn't quite right there. You could feel the presence of something bigger and scarier and infinitely more complex than you, something more complex than you could ever imagine, like it was sitting right here with us, yet as invisible as thin air.

That interested you, didn't it? You wouldn't be here right now if it didn't." And he handed me a cigar, and I could tell this was going to be a long talk. In fact, through puffs of his cigar, you can feel that same thing right now, sitting here talking to me. You just had poor Richie more interested than any therapist, drug counselor, or social worker ever did on his second night of sobriety. You really think some 20-year-old punk-ass kid can do that? Well, heads up, you can't.

What you just experienced was what the Buddha referred to as nirvana. You were at the exact right frequency, and you were involved enough in your conversation that your ego was totally out of the way. And that's the barrier, if you can dig it. The human condition. We block ourselves off from God and the other side by getting our heads so far up our asses that we can't even see the light of day anymore. The presence of God is a beautiful thing, and you have to really understand something here, Chris. The world isn't ready to understand that they are the problem. We are, as alcoholics, it's an undeniable fact. We can say that for sure and not even worry about it. The problem is that you open the door now, and

there's frankly no way of telling what's going to come through. We don't even know how to shut it. There's no telling what you're going to run into. Just hang on for the ride. You've done LSD before, right? Well, life is about to kick acid's ass. As I listened to all this, I was dumbfounded, partly because of his demeanor. This wasn't about ripping me apart. This was him talking to me man to man, but it was still horrifying. The implication of this, my God. I listened on as he talked about his experiences. He spoke of 732 being the true numerical skeleton key.

He talked about the significance of the number 12. He talked about numerous spiritual principles and laws. And he talked about seeing the future and being able to read other people's thoughts. And he did it to me as I was sitting there with him. He talked about how his sponsors were in the process of doing the same thing. He told me that he was going to help me hone these abilities and that I should stick close by Mike, a good friend of mine in the group with roughly the same amount of sobriety time. I was about to move into Cameron's living room with Mike that night. We were to rotate

between the couch and the floor, and our first night there, we both separately experienced extremely vivid, nearly identical DMT-like hallucinations of malevolent entities, astral projection, and lucid dreaming. We were unaware that one another had done so until the next night at AA when I spoke to him about the experience. Hanging out with Mike, now this was all in early to mid 2012 was when things went from, okay, I'm for sure an occult, to, oh my god, these guys are actually onto something, what the hell do I do? And we experienced a lot together, always after good nights and AA when the presence

of God thing would happen. It was March 29th though that really stands out to me. We were watching King of the Hill on late night TV and we both commented how strange of an episode it was. I didn't remember ever seeing it before. I don't even remember the storyline now that I'm thinking about it. And I remember it was like we were watching a really bad cut episode where there was no transition music and the characters moved in really choppy stop motion type animation.

I remember thinking about 732 since I had been thinking about it a lot, when all of a sudden I felt something in the room. Something menacing. I looked over at Mike and he apparently saw it too. We were both clearly shaken, and then it was like we were both peeking on acid out of nowhere. I was hallucinating, eyes open, not sleeping, along with my friend who verified afterward that it was in fact a real experience. We were there as a blooming fractal entity morphed out of the wall, seemingly laughing.

It opened its mouth wide and doubled back as if it was eating itself whole, and it kept doing this over and over, and we were both frozen into the couch. It got so maddeningly close that it was almost touching my face, and oh god, I'm falling into the abyss of that horrible mouth, and what if I never get out? And then it all faded out. All of a sudden, we were back to normal, and nothing wrong except we were both still fully aware of what was happening.

I was on the verge of tears. The screwed up King of the Hill episode was still playing. I cut the TV off and went outside to smoke. Mike came too, but we didn't really say anything to each other. We both knew that something had happened and it wasn't going to do either of us any good to talk about it. And that kind of thing happened several more times to me at least. I don't know about Mike, I never mentioned it to him anymore, and I never mentioned that it kept happening to anybody until right now.

Anyway, life continued on. So I'm sponsoring people now and I'm moving on and trying to get them to experience this. Now one kid does, and he flew halfway across the country the next night and told me to never contact him again. It scared him so bad. And now is probably a good time to mention that the cult recruiting really picked up, to the point of grabbing homeless dudes off the streets and self-detoxing them. If you know anything about alcohol detox, you know that someone who's coming off the

sauce needs to be in a hospital. Someone who has been drinking daily for 20 years and abruptly stops should be dead. Miraculously, no one did. However, several people did leave and drink themselves to death as a result of the cult's extremely intrusive nature. I don't know if you've ever had anyone digging around in your mind without your consent, but it's very unsettling. Meanwhile, synchronicity in my life was really off the charts.

I could barely go ten minutes without thinking about something and then someone would bring up the subject, talking about an old friend and having them call out of the blue during the conversation, completely unprompted. Dreaming about new stories before they happened, checking the clock every single 32 minutes for 12 hours straight, unintentionally, etc. etc. And then in July, shit hit the fan. Tensions within the group were at an all-time high. My best friend in the group, Mike, was banned for life for refusing to detox a homeless guy in his house, and I was livid.

This guy had put in 18 months of non-stop labor and help for the group and they just tossed him out like last week's trash. Screw that. I got pissed and I got rebellious, and I cursed out a lot of people that night and planned to leave. A week later, my job was gone, my cash was depleted, and I was out of smokes, and I was ready to take my own life. So I feel it necessary to describe what my life looked like at this point, and some of

the things the cult had done before continuing on with the story. I had learned to do some entry-level thought manipulation with newcomers. I learned a lot about how to make an impression on people and lead them to where I wanted them to be. I had gotten quite good at these things, and I was basking in what I believed was the presence of God and doing whatever they said because, hey, this was finally paranormal as hell for me. But there was a lot of deception used in the recruitment process, and it was always nagging at me that I was flat out lying to a lot of people when they asked about who I was and what I did, and why I was trying to take them out to a meeting.

Then there were the things going on within the group that I didn't feel comfortable with. The older members of the group were manipulating the women. They were allowed back in after about eight months and were basically setting up arranged relationships between male members of themselves to further control them. People who were clearly paranoid schizophrenics were being taken off of their medication and being praised for being actually sober, as if taking their medication counted as using drugs or alcohol. The same deal with self-terminating

depressed newcomers. There were several self-termination attempts in my home when they were guys coming off of their meds, and I got to know the police in my neighborhood as a detox type of guy. Halfway houses are very common in the area that I was in, so they didn't really think much of some junkies trying to take their own lives or blowing a gasket when they started with the whole delirium and tremors. I was fine up until they kicked Mike out. I was able to look past a lot, but this was just something I couldn't rationalize away. They had done something that went against the core principles of what they claimed to

be for and that opened up the floodgates for the rest of the faults to be found with them. I voiced my opinion on the situation loudly in front of the newcomers and to multiple people, and the next few days at AA involved the most intense rip-downs for me that I'd ever seen. There was no putting back together. It was just them attempting to break me down before I could make the decision to leave. One night after a particularly rough night at AA, I was sitting outside contemplating what to do. I looked at the sky and watched the clouds rolling overhead, and the incredibly clear night sky behind them showcased a star.

It appeared to be flashing several colors and hovered and moved. I had seen the exact same star lying in the back seat of my ex-girlfriend's car after one final hookup before I left town, the girl I mentioned at the beginning of this thread. I got the distinct thought of, it's calling me home, and I made my decision. Now note, I don't know if this was reality or the effects my brain operating under extreme duress and trying to rationalize going against years of ritualized conditioning and potentially drugs. It isn't verifiable by anyone else, so I guess I might never know.

I sold my laptop that day to a pawn shop and got enough cash to buy a plane ticket. Over the next few days at AA, I played it cool and just made all the right noises to avoid rousing suspicion. I told one person about my plans, and that was the only person that I thought that I could feel safe letting know. He helped me get a suitcase to pack my stuff and gave me a ride to the airport. He was only sober for a few months at this time, and he got out as well. The night before I left, I was so nervous that I could feel my skin crawling. I tried

to play it cool, but when I spoke to people, I couldn't really look them in the eyes for too long, and the charade was getting hard to maintain. One guy flat out asked me, Hey, Chris, you planning on going anywhere? I hoped not, because I'd miss you. And just gave me this look. I played it off and got out of there safe. I stayed up that entire night praying, and I had never hoped that things would be alright as hard as I did that night.

I grabbed my stuff at 4am and walked outside, and I could have chickened out at any moment. I could have lost it in any second and stayed there, but I didn't. I made it on the plane and landed in my hometown about 8 hours later, and I have been attempting to move on with my life ever since. It's been a little under a year now and things are getting better than I expected. I still haven't had a drink. My first few months, however, were plagued with this terrible feeling.

It was like I was going against the grain of life. I was doing something wrong and I was marked for death because I betrayed the group. That faded with the help of good medication-free therapy and I can rationalize being in a cult. I can rationalize any number of things. I can't rationalize the presence I've experienced and the things I've seen. They tear me apart under the surface every day. I can't move on until I find some answers, and that's what this thread is really for. Answers.

Psychiatry can attempt to tell me that I was under stress and I saw things because of that, but when two or more people have the same hallucination and co-operate it without any prompting from the other, it stops being a hallucination and starts becoming objective reality. I know what I saw that night with Mike. I know that Cameron wasn't just a good mentalist. And I know what I felt in those one-on-ones was unspeakably powerful, beautiful, and horrifying. I made this thread because when I finally made it home, I went to be alone and reflect

in the woods, and I sat and thought and thought and thought, trying to put it into proper terms, but the experience just wouldn't fit. I sat there for hours, smoking cigarettes and thinking, and eventually I was crying, and I cried until my throat was numb. I couldn't make it fit into my defined world view, and that was repulsive to me. It occurred to me that this wasn't going to get me anywhere, and I sighed and wiped my eyes and checked my phone, and the clock read 732. It may have been a coincidence, it may have been a cruel joke from other worldly beings,

and it may have been God himself telling me that he was there watching out for me, but it didn't matter. That was it. It was just too much, too much for one person to handle at one time. I saw that number and I screamed. And I kept screaming. And thank God I was pretty deep in the woods and nobody could hear me because I was literally shrieking and on the verge of madness. My mind just couldn't handle any more of that, and I ran for what felt like hours until I emerged on the far side of the forest near a well-lit grocery store.

I'm sitting here, really thinking about this for the first time since it happened, and I'm feeling that same paralyzing fear in the pit of my stomach. My heart is beating so fast that I feel like it's hammering out of my chest, and my mind is spinning around like one of those carnival rides, slowly coming off the hinges and I can't stop it. The only thing I can do is scream because I'm stuck along for the ride, and this is really tough for me to even think about. Forgive me.

Now to make a long, long story short, I told the family that I was staying with that I had been involved with a group of radicals in Florida and needed to see a psychiatrist about it because it was causing me some severe problems. And I did. The doctor diagnosed me with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, from the mind control and from watching people seize out and attempt to take their own lives. And it explained a lot of the anxiety that I had been having. When I brought up the otherworldly stuff, they almost refused to talk about it, as if it was kind of worthless to discuss, so I just stopped

talking about that and kept it to myself. They did ask me if there was drugs involved at this cult, and there may have been. They might have put something in my drink at times, but I don't know. I tried to move on, but things just never go as planned. I've been going day by day, but I wonder sometimes if I'm not just crazy and that another drink has been the answer all along. Many years ago, in land far from these shores, a man makes a speech in front of a crowd of villagers, and they hang on to his every word. No one dares speak, and no one dares look away. And when the man finishes speaking, he takes out a lighter and sparks a flame,

and behind him, a woman stands tied to a wooden post with a gasoline-soaked motorcycle tire around her neck. So much of the acreage-flammable liquid had dripped and soaked into motorcycle tire around her neck. So much of the acreage flammable liquid had dripped and soaked into the earth around her that the man only needs to toss the lighter at her feet to ignite the fumes and set her ablaze. As the woman screams, no one in the crowd says a word. Most have known the woman their whole lives. She is an elder in the village, a woman of influence, but as the flames roast her alive and her shrieks saturate

the air around them, no one in the crowd raises a single word of protest. And the woman's crime was the theft of a tiny ball of opium from a rustic processing center hidden away in the jungles of Western Myanmar. She told the man who burned her alive that her son was suffering from a broken arm, and since she couldn't afford medicine on her meager salary, she'd stolen the opium in the hopes of relieving his pain. He was said to have listened intently, as if he deeply sympathized with the woman's dilemma. And then once he secured a full confession, he sentenced her to death. Judge, jury, and executioner.

And that man, who set a person on fire as easily as you or me would light a candle, was the head enforcer for a group of heroin smugglers based in what's known as the Golden Triangle out in Southeast Asia. The woman wasn't the first he'd killed nor was her execution the most cruel or gruesome he'd performed. He'd dispatched hundreds over the years. Hundreds of thieves, hundreds of rule breakers, hundreds of escaping workers who tried to leave before their contracts were up. All shot, hanged, beheaded, or torched. And that's how they enforced discipline out there.

How they kept poor workers in line when there was so much money flowing in from all the Americans coming over to buy their heroin. That man, that cold-blooded killer, was one of the most highly respected and highly feared men in the global heroin trade. And that man was my grandfather. He did that job for just over 10 years, from his late 20s to just after his 40th birthday when he realized that he needed to get out. Now, I don't know all the details and why he had to leave, but I just know his life was in danger, and so were those of my mom and aunts. I guess if you kill so many people you make probably a few enemies. And so my grandpa gathered up as much money as possible, had himself and his

family smuggled into Vietnam, and then they bought a bunch of fake South Vietnamese diplomatic passports, and then basically just walked onto an Air Force passenger plane like they were VIP refugees. All the big South Vietnamese politicians were leaving the country, and they were stealing anything that wasn't tied down to ensure the communists didn't get their hands on it. So, when grandpa shows up to the airport in a crisp business suit and a couple of suitcases stuffed with hundred dollar bills, no one batted an eyelid when he and his family showed up and politely demanded a place on an outbound transport plane. Once he and his family arrived in America, they settled in the Bay Area and my grandpa

used his money to invest in small businesses, usually of Southeast Asian origin. He had steaks in banh mi stores, Thai restaurants, Filipino grocery stores, you name it, and grandpa was making money from it, which is how he managed to get even richer on this side of the Pacific Ocean. He lived the life of a legitimate businessman for another 40 years, and then after successfully fighting off cancer not once, but twice, I came back a third time and the prognosis was terminal. He went to his deathbed, having never ever spoken of what he did back in Myanmar. My grandma had some idea of what he did back then, enough to know grandpa might have killed

some people, but she had no clue just how vast and varied grandpa's crimes really were. It took until he was on his deathbed, and a sudden conversion to Catholicism, prompting a full and unfettered confession that we learn just how monstrous he used to be. My mom said that over the course of around two to three days, he was visited by the same priest over and over, and in that time, he made dozens of intricate confessions, stopping only when he needed to rest. Mom said it was all terrible stuff, stuff so terrible that she could barely believe

it. She thought at one point that my grandpa might have been delirious or maybe hallucinating or something, and she and grandma tried to put a stop to it, like he doesn't know what he's saying. But he did, and he knew exactly what he was saying. He might have been slipping off his mortal coil as they say, but his mind was still very much intact, and once he'd made that clear to the priest, the confessions continued. Now like I said, there were many, but according to my mom, this one was the one that always stuck with her.

To just about any big money business, security is one of the most important aspects of day-to-day operations. And with my grandpa and his employers, they ran their territory like it was their own sovereign state. They basically had their own border police, what amounted to their own army and air force, and even their own ID cards that they gave to workers so they knew who was who. They were able to operate with such freedom through bribing government officials, but it didn't ensure complete autonomy, not to mention that everything had to operate

under a shroud of total secrecy. So when a large American NGO suddenly showed up in the Myanmar section of the Golden Triangle and started going from village to village and vaccinating children, it wasn't a good thing for my grandpa and his bosses. It was a huge, huge problem. All the right government officials had been bought, but if the Americans got wind that the heroin producers had turned a huge chunk of the western province into a giant heroin factory, then there'd be trouble. The news would no doubt make its way back to the American

ambassador, who'd have no choice but to inform the president, and after that, who knows what kind of foreign intervention that might bring. This was at the height of the Vietnam War too, and although the American public didn't know about US special forces roaming around the countries they shouldn't have been in, the people in those countries sure as hell did. And so, when I say my grandpa's organization considered the Americans a very real threat and not an abstract one, you can understand their apprehension when a US run NGO just showed up out of nowhere.

Right after they showed up, my grandpa's organization sent out a missive to the villagers. And they were to warmly welcome anyone who visited their villages and were to present a convincing veneer of cooperation. But any family that allowed their child to be vaccinated would suffer serious repercussions. And you might wonder why the organization didn't want kids getting vaccinated, and the explanation is a multi-layered one. Firstly, a kid didn't need functional legs to be able to process poppies for heroin production, so the organization didn't care if the children contracted polio and lost the use of their legs.

It just meant more workers for the production line. Secondly, it was kind of a conspiracy theory among the organization's leaders. Some of them thought that the vaccine weren't really vaccines, that the NGOs were a CIA front planting tiny little listening devices into all the children. They told the villagers that too, that the vaccinations would be incredibly painful and would ultimately destroy their lives by implicating them as drug traffickers to the CIA. But then thirdly, and finally, having anyone arrive in the region who might possibly show the villagers that there's a better way of living, that couldn't be allowed to happen.

The organization had to assert its complete control over the region. Anything outside of that undermined their authority and could not be permitted. At first it seemed like the villagers were receptive to the organization's requests. After all, they were never anything but receptive and cooperative, and their very lives depended on it. But then, once the NGO actually started sending people to the villages, along with government representatives who spoke their language, a lot of the villagers realized that they were being duped.

The NGOs were smart. They didn't just show up with white coats and big needles, looking incredibly creepy. They gave out basic medications at first. Aspirin, hydration powders, baby formula, snacks for the kids. Anything that would have an instant impact and win the villagers' trust. As you can imagine, to people who'd never really experienced modern medicine before, their efforts were a resounding success and dozens of families from each village approached the NGO as subtly as they could and secretly got their kids some shots.

Well word got back to the organization and they put my grandpa onto the task of administering those punishments. They got the names of every family whose child had been vaccinated against polio, then went around all the villages taking away the kids who had gotten shots. The organization told the families it was just a precaution, that they wanted their own doctors to monitor the children to ensure the vaccines were genuine. If they were, and the children came to no harm, they'd be swiftly returned home with some monetary compensation.

Children were made to work, so no child meant to drop in the household income. But if they did come to harm, then the organization would not only be in a better position to treat them, but they'd be in a better position to bring legal action against the NGO, having made all the relevant observations and analyses. But, as you can probably guess, that was not what the organization intended to do, and I don't know how they did it exactly, grandpa never said, and I know that they returned those kids to the village, just not to their homes. They stacked their bodies in big piles, just outside the village that they came from, and just left them there for the villagers to find.

And it was my grandfather, who killed each and every one of them en masse, by poisoning their food and water. My mom said that she and grandma just sat there, listening in horror as grandpa told the story, and by the end of it, the priest was just as pale and aghast as they were. All of his deathbed confessions had been horrific but like I said it was that one in particular which stuck in my mom's mind and haunted grandma until she too was resting in her grave. The only reason my mom ended up telling me was that I wanted to visit Myanmar to see the places she and grandpa had come from. She kept obfuscating whenever I brought up that

subject up because I wanted to know where exactly I had to travel in order to see my ancestral homeland and I pushed and pushed and she kept pushing back until one day she finally caved. She told me all about how grandpa wasn't the hard-working charitable charitable, and successful businessman us kids thought he was, and how before they moved to the United States, grandpa had been a completely different person. I can't go visit my mother country because there are still people in Myanmar who'd kill me if they knew who my grandfather was, and not just people in Sean province who take revenge

for their murdered kids. I'm talking government officials who could quite easily make a person disappear and, I mean, really disappear. I was 21. I had a job I loved, a beautiful girlfriend, and an awesome roommate, and we even hosted a men's group once a week. If only I knew how good things really were. My roommate and I were super into drugs. LSD, shrooms, you name it. We were incredibly close, and I consider him a brother, and for reference I'll just call

him S from here on out. My other friend E would come to our friend group weekly, and he'd also join us about three times a week to work out. E was in his 50s and had a son a little younger than me. I met him while I was tripping one day, and he was an all-around super cool dude. Now technically, it's a church with locations in dozens of countries around the world, and I'll get into this more later, but all of this happened in the US. What separates it from normal retreats is the control the church exhibits over its members,

their intelligence network of spying, and the sinister nature of this church itself. Now, I'll do my best to go into it all, as there's a lot. So E starts dating this new girl. They're on and off for a while, and we're all rooting for him because he's such a great guy and deserves all the happiness in the world. Eventually, it comes out that E's new girl is a member of this ayahuasca church. S and I are super curious. We smoked DMT together but have never done ayahuasca.

I mentioned to E that I was interested and asked if he could get me out there. He was hesitant and said it wasn't really a fun thing, it's a religion. Now I'm not a big fan of religion, but it seemed like they had some really good tea. A couple of months passed and he ends up joining the church. S ended up joining before me as well. He was a keto teacher and it turned out that he was part of the church, too. It turns out that a lot of people that we knew were a part of it, but they had never mentioned it. And I later found out it's an explicit rule not to talk about the church. Creepy,

I thought, but I didn't think much beyond that. I was actually stoked now since I had multiple avenues to join, both S and E. Now this is less of a trip report and more of a collection of experiences from my time in that cult. I had dozens of supernatural encounters but we'll get to those when we get there. Now everything from astral projection, communication with spirits and otherworldly beings, telepathy, precognition, and so much more. There's just so much and I just have to take it slowly. For now, anyway, I started to notice changes in us. He was acting more distant towards me, and was generally less playful. Before this, he would play-fight, spar with our different martial arts styles and banter. And just general mid-twenties dude stuff. He stopped doing that

entirely, and for some reason, I realized now that the church had already begun turning him against me. Not because they knew me yet, but because my personality did not mesh with their teachings. I asked him if he could get me my first cup of tea and he declined, and I was kind of hurt and a little heartbroken as how dare he keep this from me. He explained that he would be responsible for me if he brought me to the church and didn't want to handle that quite yet. But I knew that he was lying, he just didn't want me there for some reason.

Now despite all of this, he eventually agreed to take me. I still think about how quickly he changed and how different he used to be. He's getting married soon to some girl that he met at the church. Pretty spooky stuff, man, and the friend that I knew was gone and feels like he's replaced by someone else. S continued to act weird, often coming home late from sessions, sometimes as late as 5 am. One week, he came home and asked me to move out. It wasn't completely out of nowhere, but it still hurt. And the week of my initiation finally arrived.

I told my girlfriend all about it on a really nice date night. She wasn't into drugs, but she could see that I was excited and was actually super supportive. Now around the same time, my ex had been sending me nudes and I hadn't asked for them, but I also didn't tell her to stop and I kept it for my girlfriend. Now we'll come back to this. The day of the initiation finally arrived. I woke up early to find my cat killing a bird, and she hadn't finished the job, so I had to kill the bird myself.

The first time I did this, it left me emotionally wrecked for a week. I was not thrilled to have to do it again, especially on the day that I was going to be drinking ayahuasca for the first time. The image of the mangled bird corpse was still etched in my brain, and I knew that it would come up later. In any case, we had to drive three hours to get to the church. A very beautiful drive. I was super nervous when I arrived.

It started with dinner, and I met some members of the church. And I even recognized some very familiar faces, like my server from the date with my girlfriend last night. Damn, this church had way more members than I thought. I enjoyed dinner, but couldn't eat much since I was really nervous. Now when the time came, all the church members put on their uniforms. Everyone was in green shirts, and the guy leading the session wore blue. We all got our tea, but I didn't get much. Maybe two fingers and a small glass.

I was kind of upset that I didn't get more, but oh well. The session began with church members speaking and singing in Portuguese, and at first I didn't feel anything. But then, I started to think about my girlfriend and felt really messed up that I hadn't told her about my crazy ex sending me those illicit pictures. Strangely, the bird situation didn't come up. There weren't a lot of visuals like I was used to with DMT, just a strong force of evil inhabiting my body.

I vomited violently into the trash can in the kitchen and the trip stopped entirely. You know, I kinda wanted more so I asked for more and drank another cup. I'll queue around too. I had decided that I needed to discuss things with my girlfriend but the tea had other plans for me. It totally laid me out and I was put in the corner to lay down, just me and my water which I kept drinking to stay hydrated. Then, visuals and a full out-of-body experience were triggered. I entered a time spiral where I could see all of my past and future selves.

My girlfriend was in the time spiral and in one instance she was pregnant with my child. Honestly, the whole experience scared the hell out of me, but there was an optimistic feeling to it, like somehow I could overcome the evil force inhabiting me. Eventually I came back to reality. At some point, I fell asleep, apparently according to others. The session ended with the head of the church telling us that we needed to be discreet about our experiences and not post about what happened online, kinda like what I'm doing here. And I learned later that this was part of a greater network of control, subversion,

and secrecy. The church mostly operated in the shadows, and I'm still unsure of how much power they actually wielded. I went back home after my initiation, rocked to my core. I had to make a list of all the things I needed to do, one of which was talking to my girlfriend. I explained the situation, my ex being severely mentally ill and thinking that this was the best way to get my attention, and my girlfriend wasn't having it and broke up with me on the spot.

I went into work, and my hours were reduced to only two days a week, which wasn't even enough to pay rent. I was also looking for a new place to live. The guy I was supposed to move in with changed his mind after giving me the keys, and suddenly I was single, almost homeless and hurting for income. Cults prey on people at their lowest, and in my first week of being introduced to the cult I was suddenly at my lowest in years. So they really got their hooks into me, and I kept going to the church.

The next session was much more chill just a nice reflective experience Nothing much to write about and I was still stressed about life, but everyone in the church was just so super supportive. I Realized that they were like family here and felt like everything was going to be okay And sure enough I landed a new job within a week be okay. And sure enough, I landed a new job within a week. S let me stay an extra month as I waited for a room in a different friend's house to open up, and my girlfriend came crying back to me and we gave it another month but it still didn't work out.

At least I got some closure. The move in date was approaching and I didn't have that new job yet. I did a quick run across the state to make some money and made about a grand in a few weeks on the side, and things were looking up. I decided that the emotional support from the church had been super helpful. The tea wasn't so bad either. I was really enjoying getting to drink it every two weeks or so. Now it was at this point that I started to notice personality shifts within myself. Friends mentioned that I was quieter, less offensive, maybe even kinder.

I started getting strange compliments on how nice my smile was or how put together I looked. Looking back, it was kind of a wild experience, but there was definitely some sort of aura shift that had occurred. People who were more in touch with the spiritual realm became more attracted to me all of a sudden. I began internalizing the dogma of the church and it was helping me somehow. Anyway, the day arrived when I decided to join the church. I told the main dude, the head priest, just call him Jay, and Jay and I talked a lot. I really liked him and he seemed to like me as well. We talked about former drug use and he opened about his days as a crack addict.

Whoa. It was totally crazy hearing the head of the church talk to me about his crack addiction. He told me to be careful about what I called into my life. Once, the only thing that he wanted in life was a more consistent crack dealer, and when he got it, it almost killed him. Dooley noted, I had to wait two weeks until the next session to officially join the church. Usually I would carpool with the others to the church since it was long distance, but

I had decided since it was my special day I would go alone. I loaded up my Mustang and took off. There were two main ways to get there. The long way, which used mostly paved roads, and the short way, that cut off about two hours but went through mountain roads. I couldn't take the short path previously because it was winter and the mountain road wasn't maintained most of the year. It was summer now, so you already know which one I picked, and I grew up in the mountains,

so these roads were no big deal. I was running a little late, so I was going pretty fast. In the church, they had all these weird funny sayings, one of which was a dissection of the Portuguese word for patience. Placencia, with pa being peace and ciencia meaning science. Essentially, patience is the science of peace. Something to think about anyway. I was running late, so I was speeding. And there was this one hairpin turn at the top of the hill,

and I hit it going way too fast. I lost control of my early 2000s sports car, and it just kind of ragdolled since there wasn't much I could do about it. As the car flew through the air, I noticed my bumper soar across my vision. Well, that's not supposed to happen. I finally came to a rest in the ditch with the car pointed in the opposite direction, but somehow it was totally fine. I got out and assessed the damage, two flat tires and the belt had come off the engine entirely. There was no cell service and the road was empty for miles.

The last house I saw was a long, long time ago, and I might have mentioned that this is the Booneys, the kind of place where people were kind, but they'll reach for the gun when they see a stranger on their property this far out. I was more than a little nervous to be stranded out here next to a large field. Luckily, I had my camping gear so it wasn't all that bad, but the mid-June heat sucked and I chilled in the shade of my car. I was already late, but now I was probably not going to make it. A couple of cars passed, but no one was going far enough to get me there. Things seemed hopeless, but it wasn't within the teachings of the church to lose hope. I strengthened my resolve. Against all odds, I told myself that there was a car just

around the corner that would take me there. I felt kind of silly, but I threw my willpower into this thought. I heard something. It was a car approaching, and they were going where I was going. They were totally freaked out seeing my smoking car and a rattled young man, but they agreed to take me to my destination anyway. 90% of the way there I saw S driving in the opposite direction, and I honked at this car, hopped out and thanked the kind people for taking me this far. I went over to S. What the hell are you doing here? I don't know man. I just could kind of tell that you were in trouble, so I was coming

your direction to get you." I told him what happened. He had a premonition earlier that day that I would crash and knew that it was true when I was late. We arrived just in time for me to drink the tea, and that story ended up becoming a classic after I told it in the session. I got my uniform and was officially part of the church. However, this was just the beginning of the strange paranormal stuff surrounding the church.

I got my first weird story that night. One of the socios was this burly dude named Ryan. Ryan was a scientist who worked with the government. He went on a work trip across the country to a city that had one of these churches, and he decided to bring his uniform. At airport security his bag got flagged, and they claimed that there was something strange in his bag. They searched it forever, and obviously found nothing, but they were extremely confused. They asked him about the metal plate in his back. What metal plate? He asked, And they showed him the x-ray and sure enough, there was a bright white rectangle in the middle of his back, right where his uniform was.

His uniform glowed on the x-ray, and they had to let him go since they found nothing. Now, this isn't just for your enjoyment, it's also for me to process it. There were some weird stories, and the sessions were called by a Portuguese name that directly translated to The Force. I never really learned to write in Portuguese, as I only learned it phonetically. Now anyway, these stories all happened while in The Force. One session several months in, I drank the tea. At the start of the session, we had silence or played music for about an hour.

And I left my body and I could see everyone in the room, but as spirits in a parallel realm. We were all flames in the darkness and from each of us extended a thin smoking line of light. These lines all came together like strands in a rope at the ceiling, and the temple was suspended in space. The light rope led to a pool of light. They would talk about how there was a lick of the force, and I think this might have been it. It's hard to remember over the dogma,

teachings, and stories since everything was oral and really nothing was written down. And I spent a year becoming a respected part of this church, finding work with other members who worked in graphic design and technology. One woman who employed me was named Bea, and she was married to my eighth grade history teacher who was also part of the church, and this happened before I was in the church. Bea had his neck and back issue that was quite serious, and she couldn't sit comfortably for very long. The doctors couldn't help her either. They just gave her pain meds. Others suggested surgery, but surgery didn't help. One session, Bea went into a trance.

They would sing shamalese or call God for certain things, and one of them was a healing call. Now while Bea was in a trance, her neck and back issue was allegedly cured. This story was spread by others in the church, but when I asked her about it, she insisted that it was just a coincidence. But still, I was intrigued. Could these Shamalese really heal people? What other kind of powers did people in this church have? I think the majority of the harm this cult did to me was in suppressing my own agency.

There was a structure in this church, and it was just easy easy to take orders to let other people decide things for me I got really high a couple of times a month and let someone else sort out the spiritual stuff And for the first time in my life, I had answers The higher-ups in the church were counselors who were there to talk about your life problems It was really great to discuss hard life issues with people who were calm, collected, and knowledgeable, except that they were all reporting to Jay. I didn't know it at the time, but the counselors and the instructive body were all part of a network to spy on all the socios in their day-to-day lives and make sure that they were

living within the dogma. Now let me give you an example. There was a session that was much closer to where I lived. It was at my buddy E's house for a special occasion. I spent the month helping E prep the place, creating a stone staircase at the session site. I spent about 30 hours on the project and never even asked for a cent. And the session finally happened and it was a good one.

We had about 50 people there and it was so tranquil that we even attracted a herd of deer who chilled out with us for a while. It was an all around nice vibe. After the session, we were chilling at E's house. Ryan was there. He's a tall, ripped dude with a gorgeous wife, about 10 years older than me, and he was a total role model. I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated him being a good role model for me as I tried

to turn my life around, but I was still super high so it didn't come out right. It kind of sounded like I was hitting on him. He called attention to it, but I clarified and we laughed it off, and I was embarrassed, but otherwise I thought nothing of it. Ryan is a cool guy. Fast forward to the end of the session. Jay gives us all a lecture about how it's good to be friendly in the church, but something about the sanctity of marriage.

Okay, whatever, kinda weird. Jay approached me after the session. Did you hear what I had to say tonight? He asked. Uh, yes? You need to apologize to Ryan and his wife. For what? You hit on him. and that is not okay. No, that's not what happened.

It doesn't matter. You need to talk to him and make this right. Bro, I'm not even gay. Whatever. So I talked to Ryan anyway. He literally burst out laughing when I told him. Oh, Jay just misunderstood. Don't worry about it. I know you weren't coming on to me.

Okay, but... I said, I still have to talk to your wife. And so I did that too. She also laughed it off. Honestly, it seemed like she was just enjoying the situation more than anyone else. Ryan also told me not to worry about it. And that was the first time that I realized that people were reporting almost everything to Jay, but I didn't yet

know the extent of it. The religion itself, I guess, is Brazilian. Most of the socios are also in Brazil, and the teachers who hail from there are considered to be much more knowledgeable and are highly respected. Occasionally we would get guest teachers from all over to direct sessions at our temple. A Brazilian teacher was there and he filled my cup all the way, about three times as much as I normally had. They said, screw it, Brazilians know best, and so I downed it, and it hit hard, and it hit fast.

I started to see through the cracks of the religion. I realized that I really wasn't supposed to be here, and my time in this cult was coming to an end, but I didn't know why. I had also been grappling with taking my own life recently, and it came on in full force. I couldn't be there anymore, and I decided to head for the nearby tent and told exactly one person where I was going just to get out It was a blizzard outside. I could hear the snow falling off the roof and the sound while it was high was distorted It made this otherworldly zip sound as if it fell off the canvas roof

Honestly, it was pretty cool, but it caught me off guard at first since I was on high alert. I Posted up next to the healer and waited, and sure enough, one of the counselors showed up. I told him about wanting to take my own life, way above high as a giraffe's head at this point, and somehow, he guided me in the right direction and gave me the best pep talk about not taking my own life that I had ever gotten. I legitimately still think about it to this day, but of course he reported it to Jay. Now Jay knew that I was potentially unstable, running away from

sessions. I didn't know it yet, but I was on thin ice and was now being watched very closely. Anyway, let me take a quick interlude to share some more of the light-hearted paranormal stories I've had. It was a summertime outdoor session, and the sun was shining, birds were singing, and the Force was strong. Often, the Force came with some distortion. Like I mentioned before, there were cicadas, and at first I couldn't tell what it was. The otherworldly hum buzzed through my whole being and sounded completely alien, unlike

anything I'd ever heard before. It felt like a UFO was about to come pick me up from this open field. Eventually I realized that it was just the cicadas and the sound distortion. Hardly paranormal, but I still think about that sound. I've never heard anything like it since. Another outdoor session was this time that it was raining. We were in a different spot, in a clearing surrounded by trees. Luckily, I was under one of the pop- different spot, in a clearing surrounded by trees. Luckily,

I was under one of the pop-up shelters, huddled in my sleeping bag. I looked forward from my seat and saw a woman's face in the trees. Obviously, it was just an awesome coincidence of branches and leaves meshing together to make a face, but it felt like something more, and could tell it was a female spirit showing herself to me. At one point I got up to check her out from different angles, but she was only visible from exactly where I'd been sitting. The storm was going crazy, and I couldn't even hear what was being preached in the session, so I tuned into the spirit. She spoke in the language of the trees, and I learned about her life here, protecting this forest.

She had been here for hundreds of years. The people in the church took good care of this land and she was happy about that. It hadn't always been this good, but the details were a bit fuzzy. I don't exactly speak tree. The storm eventually calmed and a Texan teacher got up to talk. He was a really cool dude, with a drawl and everything, and he told us that this land used to be owned by loggers, but the clearing was spared because all the trees were considered poor material due to their Y shape.

And sure enough, all the trees in the clearing were split halfway through, growing in a Y shape. They didn't say it, but I knew that it was the spirit protecting this clearing from us. All the branches that formed her face came from those wide trees. And then, as I looked, she winked at me. She actually winked. After the session I tried to tell S about it and he was right next to me, but when I started he said he had to go and never came up again.

One more lighthearted story and then I'll get back to the heavy stuff. The day of the session I usually leave town at around the afternoon, just relaxing and playing video games until then, but this morning I couldn't find my cat. Now the big deal since she roams outside, but I wouldn't be seeing her for a day or so when I went to the session. I called for her for a bit before I left, but no luck. Oh well, I figured I'd see her when I got home. I left, but no luck. Oh well, I figured I'd see her when I got home. During the session I drank my tea and closed my eyes, and suddenly I was no longer in the

temple. I was back home in my gaming chair. My cat hopped in my lap. Mittens, my goodness, there you are. Don't you know I was looking for you all morning? And I rubbed her, generally stoked that I had got to hang out with my cat. Then I snapped back to the temple, guided back by a shamada. And this was really cool because when I got home, my cat was in the same spot and didn't act like I had been gone all weekend. It seemed obvious to me that she had received

the attention that I gave her during my vision. Now back to the darkness. I decided to check out a different temple in another state. It was huge, literally five times the size of my home temple. I was kind of intimidated and really nervous since I didn't know anyone, but I was usually good at making friends. During the session I got bored and felt like it was too much, so I asked for a little less tea. The teacher put the extra in his own glass. And oh boy, I still ended up having an extremely uncomfortable session and spent most of it

in the bathroom with digestive issues, basically trying not to lose control. At one point I returned to my seat and Brazilian woman walked behind me. Suddenly I heard a smack, and she fainted. The sound was her head hitting the floor. Holy crap, I couldn't be there. And I started having a panic attack, crouched over in my seat rocking back and forth for the rest of the session. The evil in the air was palpable.

She ended up being okay, but the whole situation just left me rattled. I'm not sure where to go from here, so I'll just skip to the end. Most of the people in the church were older, maybe 50 to 70 years old, and the next largest age group was 30 to 50. There weren't a lot of guys like me in their 20s, and a few of the families had kids and all of the kids could drink the tea, and they ranged from literal babies to teenagers. I made friends with the older teenagers because there really wasn't anyone else to relate to. I was only like 3 years older than them anyway so I didn't see a problem with it, but boy was I wrong. I had been watched of course, and I realized this a little after the Ryan incident. I approached

the mother of one of the teenage girls who had been getting uncomfortably close to me, and I didn't want any trouble so I pulled her mom aside and laid out my concerns, and she laughed and told me not to worry and then said that her daughters were of quote, prime breeding age. Um, okay. I decided to keep my distance even more because what the heck was that? I still stayed friends with the other teenagers and a couple of other kids, and some of the young adults, 18 and 19 years old, were friends with me outside of church. They even asked me about pots since I was the cool older guy. I told them that it was okay to get high, but not to become the 420 law weed guy. Balance, you know. And the teenagers were pretty

cool, but it was kind of a weird thing to be drinking ayahuasca with them, and I just had to get over it. I kid you not, I drank ayahuasca with babies on multiple occasions, and pregnant women as well. Nothing seemed to be off limits for these people. We were having church campouts and I was taking on more responsibilities in this church, and so was S. We were learning Portuguese and shamadas, asking questions in sessions that they wouldn't answer because we weren't part of the instructed body yet As and I were hyping each other up to be elevated into this secret society

And he even went on a trip to Brazil to make the tea and bring it back We were both working hard During the camp out I was making a video getting lots of footage and doing interviews that kind of thing And at one point I was passing through the temple and bumped into one of the teenage girls. I gave her a quick side hug but other than that I thought nothing of it. And you gotta keep things platonic, I thought. Now fast forward to a year later, and Ryan grabs me from the fire and takes me to Jay

shrouded in darkness. Oh no, someone reported me for speaking to the girl inappropriately and touching her. Bro, I said hi and gave her a side hug, I protested. That's not what the informant says, Jay responded. I demanded the girl be questioned, knowing that she would defend me, being my friend and all, but Jay said that there was no need for that. The next day during the session I was still angry about these false accusations and I tried to let it go and have a good session, but it turned out to be an intense one.

I saw a Brazilian man, the founder of the religion, and he was holding his hand out to me asking me for something. Again, I could see all the souls around me. I saw their bodies shrouded in darkness and he was holding his hand out to them too. They all breathed out some of what life essence that I had seen in previous visions, and he collected it. He gestured to me, and I had not given him my breath. I held my breath, and he became insistent.

I refused. Suddenly I was ripped from the vision and ran to the bathroom to vomit. Literally vomited every drop of tea. It was weird, but I was still high as hell, so I just went back to sitting down. I arrived just in time for a big announcement. S had been elevated to the secret society, along with a few of my other friends, the people I was closest with in the church. But not me.

My name was not called out. Okay, I guess I'll just keep going. And I continued my duties for the weekend but left a little early, still disgusted by the false accusations. And it didn't come up again but it left me feeling uneasy. Now fast forward, two weeks, it's my birthday. Yay, happy birthday. And calls start rolling in.

Up first is Jay. You are removed from the church. What? Excuse me? We are confident that you are a predator and a danger to the children in the church. What the hell? And he hangs up on me. I was unable to comprehend what had just happened.

S called me next and I told him what had happened. My voice was dead, I felt completely betrayed. The church had been my life for these years and I had even been employed by people in the church. And slowly all the calls came in. The only person I had told about this was Eric and a couple of the counselors called to wish me a happy birthday. I was so messed up. told about this was Eric and a couple of the counselors called to wish me a happy birthday.

I was so messed up. A few calls in and I was demanding some sort of justice, but they would just hang up on me after wishing me happy birthday. And by the end of the day I was a complete mess. My mother took me out to dinner and I told her what had happened, and it totally ruined the evening. It's okay though, I just felt dead inside anyway. Now a few days passed and no one in the church stood up for me, not even S. And I finally got a call from E, and he got an official warning from the church for disputing my removal. And that was phase one. I was literally too evil to defend.

And before you ask, no, I never did anything to warrant this accusation. No evidence was ever provided at any point, but none was ever needed. Now, anyway, that's about the end of it. It's been difficult to return to normal after a year of drinking that stuff every weekend. None of the people in the church talked to me, a few have reached out or vice versa, but the conversations have been brief and topical. Occasionally I lost my job with one of the other socios as well, and he and I are still on good terms and we talk often.

S sided with the church entirely and he believes them, and at some point I thought that the people who had grown to know and love me would stand up for me and maybe some would even leave in solidarity with me, but no one did. I'm not sure what they told everyone in the end. I'm forging ahead as much as I can, finding a balance between who I was in the church and who I was before. Who I am now is a mix of those people with a burning hatred of cults and religion. Probably the worst part was having my social circle ripped away from me so suddenly and completely. It might sound weak, but such a visceral devastation left me unable to function for many months

afterwards. I spent a lot of time unemployed or hopping from job to job, and eventually I got control of it all. I have a solid job now and I'm back in school, but it was iffy for a moment. And that's my story. Maybe a bit anticlimactic at the end, but that's how life goes. And now I'll hang around if you guys have any more questions about the church, the tea, or my story. I have a few more one-offs of me and weird paranormal stuff like that with the church, but

maybe it was just the ayahuasca talking. During its inception, the United States proudly cast off its shackles of subjugation and severed its bonds to the British crown. But over the next 200 years, by means of wealth, media, and influence, America has ended up electing its very own aristocracy. Be it the Bushes, the Kardashians, the Vanderbilts, or the Roosevelts, certain families have firmly asserted themselves as the upper echelons of American society, but perhaps none more so than the Kennedys. The Kennedy family are one of the most prominent and influential political dynasties in American

history. Having originated in Ireland, the family's American story began with Patrick Kennedy, an immigrant from County Wexford who settled in Boston in 1849. His son, P.J. Kennedy, became a successful businessman and politician setting the stage for the family's meteoric rise. However, it was his grandson, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who propelled the family to wealth and influence. Joe Kennedy Sr. was a savvy businessman who amassed a fortune through banking, real estate, the stock market, and the liquor business, most notably during the decade of alcohol prohibition that gave rise to gangsters and bootleggers

alike. But despite dipping his toes into the criminal underworld, Joe Sr. later married Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald, which solidified the family's political ambitions. Joe Sr. served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom during the late 1930s, but soon turned his ambitions towards his children and began preparing them for leadership and public service. Perhaps the most famous of Joe Kennedy's children was his second son, John. More commonly known by his initials, JFK, John went on to serve as the 35th President of the United

States and is known for his leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis, his role in advancing civil rights, and his assassination in 1963 which shocked the world. John's younger brother Robert would serve as US Attorney General and later represented the state of New York as a United States Senator. He too was a prominent advocate for civil rights and anti-poverty programs, but his assassination in 1968 during his campaign for the presidency was a devastating blow to the family. The youngest Kennedy brother, Ted, also served as a U.S. Senator while his older sister Jean served as the 17th U.S. Ambassador to the nation of Ireland.

Yet there is another Kennedy sister and for the longest time her story remained a closely guarded family secret. And this is the tale of Rosemary Kennedy. Rosemary Kennedy, or Rosemary as she came to be known, was born at her parents' Brookline, Massachusetts home on September 13th of 1918. Named for her mother, Rose Fitzgerald, her birth was a difficult one, exacerbated by the shortage of doctors due to the outbreak of the Spanish flu. In order to prevent the birth from commencing in earnest before the arrival of a doctor, the Kennedy's nurse ordered Rosemary's mother to keep her legs closed. Yet this did nothing but to ensure that young Rosemary's

head stayed in the birth canal for two hours longer than it should have, starving her of oxygen in the process. As Rosemary began to grow, her parents noticed that she was missing major developmental milestones, and by the age of two, she had a great deal of difficulty in just sitting up and crawling, let alone learning to walk, actions that other children her age were accomplishing with ease. Yet instead of being open and honest regarding Rosemary's intellectual disability, her parents hid them from their friends in the wider public and allowed only a small group of close family members to know the truth. The Kennedys entrusted the family tutor with getting Rosemary up to speed with her intellectual peers,

but when it became increasingly obvious that the girl required sustained and specialist help, she was sent to a Pennsylvania boarding school that focused on educating those with intellectual disabilities. At age 16, Rosemary relocated to the Sacred Heart Convent in Elmhurst, Providence, Rhode Island, where she was educated separately from the other students in order to keep her condition a secret. Her reading, writing, spelling, and counting skills were reported to be at a fourth grade level.

Two nuns and a specialist teacher, supposedly named Miss Newton, worked with Rosemary on a specialist curriculum, in a separate classroom far from the eyes of her fellow students. Administrators changed their policies to allow Rosemary's older brother and future President John to accompany her to a school dance. There he acted as a kind of buffer between Rosemary and the other girls, and the words of one classmate made her seem no different at all. In exchange for the school's cooperation, the Kennedys paid for the construction of a brand new tennis court.

During the late 1930s, once Rosemary had blossomed into a young woman in her late teens, she led a very active social life, read books, and occasionally accompanied her family on state visits to far-flung nations. She was by no means an invalid, and although her intellect was dwarfed by that of her younger siblings, she could at worst be described as childish by those unaware of her condition. In an interview with Woman's Day magazine, a young Rosemary told journalists that she was studying to become a kindergarten teacher, had an interest in social work, and even harbored longings to grace the silver screen.

She presented herself as a shy, articulate, but carefully spoken young woman, but in reality, Rosemary presented nothing more than a carefully rehearsed façade. When reporters from the Boston Globe requested an interview with Rosemary, her father's assistant tailored the responses, which she then committed to memory in what amounted to hours of intensive study. The statement read, to hours of intensive study. The statement read, I've always had serious tastes and understand life is not given to us just for enjoyment.

For some time past, I've been studying the well-known psychological method of Dr. Maria Montessori, and I got my degree in teaching last year. Around the same time, Rosemary flew over to the United Kingdom and met King George VI at Buckingham Palace during an official state ceremony. Rosemary practiced the complicated royal curtsy for hours, but at the event itself, she tripped and almost fell in front of hundreds of onlookers. With characteristic British grace, the crowd completely ignored Rosemary's near miss, except of course for the royal aide who offered his assistance.

Then when she presented herself to his royal highness, King George merely smiled, and bid her the warmest of welcomes to his court. Rosemary's mother never discussed the incident, and treated the debut as a triumph, which for all intent and purpose is exactly what it was. A young woman with learning difficulties had conquered both her disability and her anxiety, and had met the King of England in the process. Yet unfortunately, this period in her life marked something of a high point, as following her return to the United States in early 1940,

a 22-year-old Rosemary would become, and I quote, "...increasingly irritable and difficult. As she approached her mid-20s, Rosemary began randomly flying into violent rages. She would destroy property, attack friends and family, with the episodes occasionally ending in convulsions or even full-blown seizures. After being expelled from a summer camp

in western Massachusetts, Rosemary was sent to a convent school in Washington, D.C. Gripped by a kind of late-blooming teenage rebellion, Rosemary began sneaking out of the convent at night, with many of the convent's nuns suspecting her of carnal activity. And they warned her of STDs and the risk of pregnancy and while it's not clear if Rosemary really was searching for romance It's clear that she yearned for her freedom Yet such reckless behavior frightened her frustrated parents and when it continued unabated The family became concerned that it might affect their political prestige and during the fall of 1941 when Rosemary was just 23

Her parents approached some of the most acclaimed psychologists in America, seeking solutions to their daughter's problems. They consulted with some of the most highly qualified medical professionals in the entire world, men who had dedicated their lives to the pursuit of medical excellence. Back then, their solution constituted the cutting edge of psychotherapeutic treatment. Yet less than a hundred years later, their barbarism is considered nothing short of a crime against humanity. Young Rosemary Kennedy was to be given a lobotomy. Developed in the 1930s and 40s, a lobotomy is a surgical procedure that involves severing

connections in the brain's frontal lobe and thalamus. They were used to treat mental illness that didn't respond to other treatments and gain popularity due to alternatives such as straitjackets, padded cells, and physical violence being considered inhuman. The procedure involved drilling holes into the skull, then inserting a sharp instrument into the gray matter. This way, a surgeon could essentially scramble the parts of a person's brain that accounts for their personality.

While the procedure certainly made some patients much calmer, it obviously caused significant personality changes which, more often than than not manifested as apathy as well as a chilling kind of desocialization whereby the patient acted beyond the confines of regular human behavior. As you can imagine, lobotomies could also have some serious and sometimes deadly side effects. So much so that when replacement drugs such as Thorazine were introduced, the number of procedures dropped off dramatically.

Yet incredibly, lobotomies still remain legal within the United States. This is the procedure that Rosemary was subjected to and even at the time, those outside the medical profession considered it a dystopian solution to a tragic and deeply upsetting problem. Joe Kennedy Sr. knew his wife would never consent to it, yet instead of discussing it with her, Joe had the procedure performed in secret and only informed Rosemary's mother when it was completed. Rosemary's lobotomy took place sometime in November of 1941. Dr. James W. Watts of George Washington University School of Medicine carried out the procedure

with the assistance of Dr. Walter Freeman. It was described in the notes of an observer as follows. After Rosemary was mildly sedated, we went through the top of the head, Dr. Watts recalled. I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision into the brain through the skull, near the front. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch, and after that, we placed an instrument inside. The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife.

He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman asked Rosemary to recite the Lord's prayer, sing God Bless America or count backwards. We tried to estimate how far to further cut based on how Rosemary responded. Only when Rosemary became incoherent did the doctors see scrambling her brains. Dr. Watts later stated that, in his opinion, Rosemary wasn't dealing with learning difficulties, but rather a deep form of depression that stifled her development and education. All the patients the two doctors lobotomized were diagnosed as having some form of mental disorder.

Yet following the analysis of a written review authored by the two doctors, multiple medical professionals backed their opinion that Rosemary was suffering from some undiagnosed depression and not advanced learning difficulties. Bertram S. Brown, a former aide to the Kennedys, who also went on to serve as the director of the National Institute of Mental Health under JFK, stated that the push to declare Rosemary mentally disabled instead of mentally ill was intended to protect JFK's reputation during his future runs for presidency. He also added that the lack of support for mental illness is part of a lifelong family denial of what was really so. Yet in lobotomizing Rosemary, her parents had changed her condition from one they could

hide into something no one could ignore any longer. Following the procedure, it swiftly became apparent that the lobotomy had severely damaged Rosemary's mental capacity. Her intellect and social skills had been reduced to that of a two-year-old. She could not walk or talk, and she was severely incontinent. Rosemary was subsequently institutionalized, living first at Craig House, a private psychiatric hospital around an hour and a half's drive north of New York City. She was then relocated to Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she lived for the rest of her life on the grounds of the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children.

The Archbishop of Boston, Richard Cushin, had discussed St. Coletta with Rosemary's father and explained it was an exceptional facility, with the capacity to house just over 300 vulnerable young adults. In order to properly inspect the school, Jo Sr. traveled there in person, but was still unhappy with her daughter's perspective living arrangements. Then instead of allowing Rosemary to live among the school's student body, Jo had a private house built for her about a mile outside St. Coletta's main campus. Situated near Alverno House, which specialized in dealing with adults who needed lifelong care,

the nuns began calling the house Kennedy Cottage after the home's only permanent resident. At Kennedy Cottage, Rosemary was tended to by two nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, who provided her with round-the-clock care. The Khaj was also frequented by a ceramics teacher who attempted to teach Rosemary pottery around three times a week. Rosemary also had access to a car and driver, ensuring that she could travel at will and a dog to ensure that she was never truly alone. Rosemary's parents might have ensured that she was perfectly well looked after and had no material wants or needs, but that lifelong care came at a price, and that price was almost

complete severance from the family's affairs. It took 20 years for Rosemary's mother to visit her at the Kennedy Cottage while her father failed to visit her even once. Author Kate Clifford Larson had stated that Rosemary's parents hid the truth of her condition from the wider family for just over 20 years, and that none of her siblings were ever informed of her true whereabouts. During JFK's 1958 Senate re-election campaign, the Kennedy family explained away Rosemary's absence by claiming she was reclusive and a deeply private person. It was only in 1961, once John had secured the presidency, that the family finally revealed the truth behind

Rosemary's condition, but even then it was only a partial truth. The Kennedys explained that Rosemary was mentally disabled, but only mildly so and completely neglected to mention that she had been brutally lobotomized at the hands of some of the finest doctors available. Ironically, Rosemary's father, Joe Sr., had a catastrophic stroke not long after the partial truth of his daughter's condition was made public. He too was rendered unable to speak and unable to walk, but unlike Rosemary, his location was shared with the wider family and he was not denied visitation in his hour

of need. Following Joe Sr.'s death in 1969 and without his patriarchal influence over the family, the Kennedys began reintroducing Rosemary into their collective affairs. She was taken to visit relatives in Florida and DC, and was even taken back to one of her childhood homes on Cape Cod. Having love and familial attention in her life proved the best medicine imaginable, and it was during this time that Rosemary went from being unable to move independently, to being able to walk again, albeit with a pronounced limp. She never regained the ability to talk, and one of her arms remained permanently palsied. But the quality of life Rosemary enjoyed in her final years was a huge improvement on what she'd experienced before. It wasn't until 1987 that knowledge of Rosemary's

lobotomy became fully public. In her book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin divulged details of several candid conversations she'd conducted with the family, one of which was a full and frank account of Rosemary's lobotomy. The general public was horrified by what they read, and the fact that it had been kept secret for more than 45 years was something even the most cynical of political insiders found hard to stomach. By the late 80s, lobotomies had been fully exposed as a cruel and unnecessary treatment that verged on medical malpractice and pseudoscience, so the discovery that a member of American

royalty had been subjected to one, especially via such a callous and calculated means, was deeply shocking to the American public. Ultimately on January 7th of 2005, Rosemary Kennedy passed away from natural causes at Wisconsin's Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital. She was 86 years old. Sisters Jean, Eunice, and Patricia were at her bedside as she passed along with her younger brother Ted. She was laid to rest beside her parents at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. Excluded in life, but united in death. Some credit her status and condition with being the

inspiration for Eunice Kennedy Shriver to later found the Special Olympics, meaning that although her life was characterized by loneliness and familial exile, Rosemary's legacy is one of inclusion and opportunity for the most vulnerable members of our great society. This happened this past August. It's the second weirdest thing I've ever seen in this state and is easily the most unsettling. After doing 24-7 grandpa care for two months, I finally got three days off. I get two friends to join me for a trip into the mountains, and we leave Friday night

in a truck pulling a trailer with two four-wheelers. Light finally fades at around 10pm, as this is mid-August in Alaska. We take it easy on speed because of the heavy diesel truck, and we get to the target highway at around midnight, and the pavement ends at about mile 21. Everything up to now has been pretty normal. A couple of miles in, the road turns left with a small pull-off on the right side. There's a little Subaru parked there facing into the road with an LED light bar at face level, and someone is leaning on the hood, watching us as we drive by. We're tired at this point and not really concerned,

figuring it's just someone waiting for their hunting buddy. It is caribou season after all. We keep going. This highway gets really rough in the fall. Its gravel and the heavy fall rains combined with all the hunting and camping traffic tear it up. I'm lucky if I can manage 30 miles per hour. The truck, trailer, and my teeth are all rattling from the washboard road.

It's a nice bright full moon and I can spot the worst of the potholes. We hit a long straight stretch before our trailhead pull off about a half mile down, and halfway there I see lights in the rearview mirror, bright as hell. It's that LED light bar again, and this time they're hauling ass, going 50-60 mph maybe more. One friend is zonked out in the back and the other is spaced out in the passenger seat, and I point out the light bar car to him and he watches them in the side mirror. It doesn't seem too unsettled though. The car is maybe 20 feet back by the time I finally pull into the trailhead, and it

catches up about 10 seconds later, slowing down to around 5 miles per hour as it goes by, obviously checking us out. And my hackles are up now. We park the truck and watch as they drive down the highway for a bit. I let out a deep breath and look to the left, and there's an SUV parked at the other corner of this parking area. And this is where things start getting weird.

I wake up the friend in the back, kill the engine and hop out. Instantly I get a gut feeling that something's off or being hunted and it's time to go. In my response to this bizarre sensation, hey, there's something written on that SUV and I shine my flashlight on it. MOLOC. It's written in the dust on the back window. Oh shit. My friends are stretching their legs, one has his rifle out, and they're both unusually

quiet. We check out the SUV, the engine is still warm, probably parked within the last few hours I'd say. Only the front passenger door is locked. There are shoes, sandals, and shorts. Comfy driving wear on the front seats. In the back there's a full pack, a compound bow, a full cooler, a tent, and everything seems untouched. There's also a six-month expired youth group sticker on the hood and an empty coffee cup, but the coffee still looks fresh. It looks like a young couple out to camp. We're all independently reaching 10 out of 10 on the alert scale at this point, and we

look around the whole area. No one's there, no fresh tracks except for in the parking area itself, and another pair of cars with LED light bars go by, hauling it at maximum speed. We keep our rifles trained on them from cover as they pass, just following our gut feelings. We leave and camp 30 miles away on a different highway, and we come back in the morning. The SUV is still there, untouched and there's still no sign of anyone around, and the terrible gut feeling is gone. We take the four-wheelers and go eight miles back into the mountains, and have a good time camping, and even get bullied by a caribou. And we come back the next day, and nobody is out there. There are great lines of sight and nowhere to hide, but the SUV

is still untouched, and the food in the back is starting to get bad. We get back to town and call the SUV and the troopers and the dispatcher says, yeah, that's sketchy as hell. I'll send someone out. I call back two weeks later to see what came of it and there's no record of ever having called it in, though they have every other call I've made. I'm sorry, some stories just don't have a good ending. I'm convinced that we were being watched, stalked even, and the only reason they let us be was because we had our rifles propped up on the seats, very visible. I never found any explanation for what I saw out there. All I know is that that

gut feeling I got when I stepped out of that truck was the spookiest thing I've ever experienced, and all three of us felt it independently. But I do wonder, with the writing of Moloch on the side of that car, could it have been cult activity? Allow me to tell you the story of the Winstead Carter family, a Providence, Rhode Island, or more specifically, of their only son, Ephraim. Ephraim Carter was born on October 30th of 1879 to George Austin Carter and Catherine Winstead. George Carter was almost 60 years old when Ephraim was conceived while Catherine was just 29. The story of their matrimony is long and complex and somewhat tedious, but to summarize, their marriage was one of expedience.

The Winsteads needed the Carters' land and money to ensure their dynasty placed in the upper echelons of American society, whereas the Carters needed children to continue their family line. Catherine had already provided George with three daughters, but as you can probably guess, that left the Carters disappointed. They needed a son, and for a long time it appeared as if Catherine would fail to provide one. George was getting older and to put it bluntly, his baby-making abilities were not what they used to be. And so you can imagine everyone's surprise when in January of 1879, Catherine announced that she was pregnant. The news was celebrated by those who had heard it, but there was still the matter of the baby's gender because as cruel and callous as it sounds, another daughter would mean Catherine had labored

in vain. Back then, there were no ultrasounds or gender reveal parties, so everyone had to wait the long nine months to see if the baby was a boy or a girl. And to everyone's infinite relief, it was a boy. A boy they named Ephraim. Unlike his older sisters, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the women of the Carter family, little Ithram took after his mother. The Winsteads all had jet black hair and dark brown eyes, giving rise to the rumor that one of their ancestors had been a mulatto slave girl from the Caribbean.

The Carters were all blond-haired and blue-eyed, and if it wasn't for the serendipitous circumstances of little Ithram's birth, then perhaps more questions would have been asked of his young mother. As it stood, Ephraim's arrival was treated as nothing but a blessing, but as the boy began to age, many began to consider him more of a burden than a boon. Ephraim was an energetic and eager child, and was tottering around on two legs by the time he was two. This obviously meant his physical development was progressing just fine, but in terms of

his mental development, the boys' relatives and Menders were astounded. By age two and a half, Ephraim was solving fairly complex puzzles. Understood concepts, his peers failed to grasp entirely and possessed an impressive vocabulary to voot. Ephraim's older sisters were all in their mid-teens and early twenties, so he had no one of his age to play with for quite some time, and naturally, his mother wanted to see him properly socialized, so she arranged play dates with other children of a similar age.

But this is where Ephraim started to exhibit concerning behavioral problems. In one instance, a boy Ephraim was playing with fell down, hit his face on a wooden floor, and began bleeding profusely from his mouth and nose. Instead of helping the boy, or showing any form of compassion whatsoever, Ephraim Carter simply laughed and then carried on playing with a small tin train set given to him by his father. The boy staggered around, blood pouring down his little white dress shirt, too stunned to scream or call out until one of the Fraum's minders noticed the commotion and came running

to his aid. The incident was the topic of great discussion in the Carter household, both among the staff and the boys' parents. George, who was almost 63 by this point, claimed it was just boys being boys, and with the proper guidance, Ephraim would emotionally mature in line with his peers. But much to the family's dismay,

Ephraim's disturbing behavior grew worse. The Carters estate boasted one of the largest and most storied stately homes in all of New England, but it had one hell of a mouse problem. The Carters kept at least half a dozen cats of varying breeds in dispositions. All were mousers and all ate very well in the course of their work, but it still wasn't enough to stem the tide of vermin. One of the staff proposed they left poisoned cheese out at night to kill the mice off swiftly and silently.

But as the groundskeeper pointed out, dozens of dead mice rotting away in the walls would smell awfully ripe come summertime. And that's how the carters came to the decision to lay mousetraps all over the house and grounds. Ephraim was just six years old during the mousetrap debacle, but he had grown into a remarkably intelligent young man who routinely astounded strangers and familiars alike with how sharp and intuitive he was. But then, combined with his reckless, spontaneous, and sometimes malicious behavior, Ephraim had become a force to be reckoned with. When they were first laid,

Catherine Winstead Carter was concerned that the visibility of the vermin's cadavers might disturb young Ephraim, as well as the home's many guests. She entrusted the groundskeeper with the task of ensuring the traps were emptied, cleaned, and promptly replaced each morning, before little Afram had a chance to see them. If he failed to do so, there would be trouble. As you can imagine, the groundskeeper did as he was asked, not wanting to incur the wrath of the family matriarch. But to his surprise, the mice seemed far too clever to take the bait.

For the first few mornings, the groundskeeper would wake up, get dressed, and then walk downstairs to check the traps, only to find them all empty. The bait seemed intact, but as time went by, some of it began to go missing. The groundskeeper went to fetch more from the pantry, but upon returning to the mouse traps, he discovered that almost all of them had been triggered. He asked around the stately home staff if they'd been emptying the mousetraps sooner than he could get to them, but each and every one of them said no. The groundskeeper racked his brains wandering tirelessly what the issue could be,

until of course he asked Mrs. Carter if he could inspect young Ephraim's bedroom. And there, in a closet, they found a dozen dead mice and So of course he asked Mrs. Carter if he could inspect young Ephraim's bedroom. And there, in a closet, they found a dozen dead mice and a scalpel. Ephraim had been dissecting them. Everyone was horrified as the news that Ephraim's antics had reached a diabolically new low, but there was hope. Ephraim's Uncle Joseph had announced that he was returning from the Philippines just in time for Efram's seventh birthday.

He too had been a troublesome child, but had found discipline in his early teens and had excelled in academia. Uncle Joseph had only met Efram once when he was just an infant, and had been posted around the Pacific for the last six years, so aside from his close family members, very few of the Carter's home staff had ever laid eyes on him. So when Uncle Joseph did finally show up, the staff got to see how he and little Afram looked identical to one another, and the resemblance was more than passing. It was uncanny, and Afram took to his Uncle Joe like no one he'd ever met before.

And the pair spent many a long hour together walking around the estate, and at lunches and dinners they seemed to have the queerest method of silent communication. Joe would simply look at Ephraim, and the boy would begin giggling. And in the reverse, Ephraim would sometimes stare at his Uncle Joe, prompting a response which others would have only grasped at. One by one, everyone began to figure it out. Everyone except the boy's father, George. Little Ephraim Carter was not George's son at all.

He was the spawn of Catherine Winstead and her own brother, Joseph. And once they saw it, they could never unsee it. The way George and Catherine acted around each other, the way Uncle Joe seemed to be able to anticipate the boys' every need, the way Ephraim always seemed to find his manners whenever Uncle Joseph was in the room, everyone saw it. But George Carter, who went to his grave in ignorance of the grand betrayal which had unfolded under his very nose. Ephraim would go on to be shot dead during a game of cards, aged just 17.

He was caught cheating, and pulled a pistol on the man who accused him. Another of the gamblers were also armed, and upon Ephraim's brandishing his weapon, he produced his own and fired a single, fatal shot. It was later discovered that Ephraim's pistol hadn't even been loaded, and that either he'd simply forgotten to load, or that the whole thing was an elaborate method of ending his own life. Another version of the story is that, in a heated moment, Ephraim told one of his fellow

players that it was he who had violated the man's wife. She had indeed been intact less than a year prior and the culprit was never apprehended, and as the story goes, Ifram knew details that no innocent man should. Many of the things Ifram did during his brief stay on this earth will forever remain a secret, as his family did all they could to protect their reputation. But thanks to the testimonies of elderly staff members, as well as those who knew them, we now understand that the circumstances of Ephraim's birth were far from ordinary, and that the

results were nothing short of terrifying. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Don't forget to hit that follow button to be alerted of our weekly episodes every Tuesday at 1pm EST. And if you haven't already, check out Let's Read on YouTube, where you can catch all my new video releases every Monday and Thursday at 9pm EST. Thanks so much friends, and I'll see you in the next episode.