Afraid of the Water

Some people avoid the water because they cannot swim. Others are afraid of alligators or sharks or jellyfish. I learned to dread the water when I was just five years old, living on the banks of the Mississippi river in St. Charles parish with my Aunt May. She was only trying to warn me, not to scare me, when she told me to stay away.

"There are spirits in the deep," she said seriously, "and they can take you down with them."

Aunt May raised me from the time I was a baby. I don't know who my father is, and my mother abandoned me in pursuit of her acting dreams, never even coming home to visit. We don't talk about it. Aunt May is devout, never married, and works as a home health care aide. She never went into the water either. She knew about spirits because she saw them. I could hear her chiding them in the middle of the night, telling them to leave us alone and to go on their way, in the name of Jesus. When I said my prayers, I always asked God to never to let me see them. There were times when I would feel that there was something in my room, watching me from a corner or hovering over my face, but I refused to open my eyes, heart pounding, and sang hymns to myself as Aunt May had instructed me to do until my body relaxed, signaling that I was alone.

I never went down to the edge of any large body of water until the day of my baptism at the age of nine. When I confided my fear to Brother Rob, the pastor of our church, he assured me there was nothing to be afraid of because there is no power greater than the Holy Spirit. I felt safe, wading barefoot into the bayou up to my waist in my white shift with the other kids in my Sunday School class, holding hands with my best friend Beth. Brother Rob saved me for last so I could watch the other kids go and see that they were fine. I watched each of them being dunked and brought up out of the water over and over, so when it was my turn, I was confident. Brother Rob gave me a big smile as he put his hand on my shoulder and talked to me about the new life I would have in Christ. He dunked me gently, but once I was under, I felt a rope of algae somehow wrap itself against my ankle. He could bring me up, but I was stuck and couldn't walk. Instead of smiling as my friends did when they came out of the water, I panicked and began screaming. Brother Rob tried to put his arms around me and walk, then realized there was a problem. He was quickly able to free my foot, but I don't even remember getting back to the shore, and I didn't return to the riverside again for ten years. I knew then that the water spirits were real. I wanted nothing to do with them.

My childhood after this was mostly normal. Only my best friends Beth and Tim, who lived down the road from me, knew about the ghosts who would come to our house. They had family members who also saw things like my Aunt May, and as a result we formed a secret club devoted to learning more about the spirit world and how to protect ourselves from it, mostly from reading and sharing books, but sometimes we would talk to others we knew in our community who had experience with the occult. One person warned us we would be the type to attract spirits by virtue of our interest so we should leave the entire subject alone. Sometimes people would give us charms to wear or verses to chant to keep the evil away. A few wanted to train us to become witches. The older we got, the more we sensed we were being watched, and the more certain we were that we would not be able to escape the spirits who wanted something from us - for good or for bad.

When I was nineteen, Aunt May and I went together to Beth's wedding at a beautiful old plantation rented for the occasion. At the time it was built, people used the Mississippi River as the primary mode of transportation so the estate fronted the the water. After the ceremony I asked Tim, now my boyfriend, to get me a lemonade and I walked to the river's edge alone. I couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for myself. Would Beth have time for me anymore? Her new husband, Paul, mocked our interest in the supernatural and did everything he could to discourage Beth from talking to us. She chose him over us, and I felt like a piece of myself was missing. As usual, Tim sensed my mood and did not hurry back to me, but gave me some space. He looked very tall and handsome in his suit and boots, dark hair combed back and green eyes smiling at everyone he saw. I knew better than to leave him by himself too long before all the other girls started flirting. Unlike myself, Tim was very social and did well in big crowds. Aunt May had made my simple lilac flowered dress after I pointed out one like it in a magazine. I tied a leather belt around it and I also wore my best boots. I just wore my brown hair straight and long, and just put a little makeup on to try to cover my freckles and to darken my lashes.

Ripples under a footbridge caught my eye so I walked on it to get a better look. As I looked into the water I saw a shape taking form in the ripples: just the head and neck at first in the reflected light, then eyes lined with kohl and an angry, sullen expression. Astonished, I couldn't take my eyes away until someone approached me to tell me that dinner was ready. When I looked back down again, the man's reflection was gone. I walked back to the house wondering if I had lost my mind. But after the feast we had a complimentary tour of the plantation, and the guide told us that in the 18th century a pirate had tried to enter the home by force to search for a runaway slave and was shot off the footbridge by the owner while making chase to his boat. There was then no doubt in my mind that I had in fact seen this pirate, trapped in his watery prison.

After this experience, I saw drowned souls whenever I was near a large body of water regardless of whether it was night or day: young people and old, male and female, and of every race. The ones who have been there for hundreds of years like the pirate never do anything but stare at me, but the newer ghosts move their mouths so as to scream or to try to talk to me, their expressions frantic. Over time, they became more sad to me than scary. At night I would tell Aunt May about what I saw, and she would always listen silently and then just tell me to stay out of the water. Overall, I took her advice - I never went into the water - but I was starting to lose sleep, thinking about the faces that were haunting me in my dreams - I remembered all of them - and I wondered at what they are trying to tell me. I wanted to hear them.

The following year, I finally ventured out with Tim to see if I could learn more about the people I was seeing. He procured a pirogue and we took a foray into the bayou that runs along our country road. We went back to a bridge where I had seen a 15-year-old girl, Nancy Thibodeaux, beneath the waves. She had red, braided hair and grey eyes that were particularly pleading. It took me a month to figure out who she was by looking up news articles at the library where I worked about young girls in the area who had gone missing. She disappeared twenty years earlier; I wanted to know how she died, and I intended to try to bring peace to her family.

When we reached the spot where I remembered seeing her, nothing happened at first. Normally I saw a face within moments of looking, but we had time to eat our sandwiches while waiting. After about an hour, bubbles began rising to the surface. As we peered down from the boat, Nancy's face appeared, but this time the look on her face was not vulnerable or asking; instead, she smirked at me malevolently.

"Whoa!" Tim yelled, and the next thing I knew our boat was rocking violently, and the biggest gator I ever saw was trying to board or tip us over. Together we beat at it with our oars as hard as we could until it gave up and sank out of sight. By that time, we saw the eyes of other alligators gliding toward us from the opposite side of the water, and we set a record rowing back to land, not even stopping to secure the boat but abandoning it until we could run uphill to the road and call for a ride home. The gators stayed in the water, but I felt them watching our ascent.

Realizing I needed help, I decided to let Aunt May know my plans. "What happened?" I asked her. I didn't understand why the girl changed and wanted to harm me.

"It wasn't the girl," Aunt May explained. "It was a demon masquerading as her. It was targeting you." "I didn't realize that it was reaching out to you, tempting you!"

I could barely listen to what she said after that due to my shock and horror at what she was saying. A demon? She begged me over and over not to go back, but I didn't promise her anything. I was still afraid, but what about Nancy? I was nothing if not persistent and my questions were not yet answered.

That night, I was stewing in my bed, eyes wide open, when my closet door swung and Nancy Thibodeaux stepped out, silently dripping water onto my bedroom carpet.

"Oh no you don't!" I shouted, "Get back to where you came from!" As curious as I felt, I was not ready for her to intrude into my bedroom.

When she didn't move, I sprang from my bed and just pointed at her and the closet door repeatedly, screaming, "Go back! Go back!"

I wasn't afraid, but my adrenalin was pumping and I was furious. I then heard Aunt May come in behind me, praying softly. Nancy's eyes grew wide, and she only said, "Help me," before she disappeared before our eyes.

Turning to Aunt May, I asked her why the demon was asking me for help now?" She told me that this time it was not the demon, but it was Nancy's own soul.

"Now that you opened the door, your life will never be the same," she warned me, shaking her head at me regretfully, and then she went to bed. I thought over her words. Did I want my life to be the same? No. I wanted more for my life than my small town life was giving me. I couldn't go to sleep and since according to Aunt May it was too late for my life to go back to normal, I stayed up to devise a plan to free the souls from the river and send the demon back to hell - with Tim's help, of course.

The next morning was Monday, but when I opened the door to go out, that big alligator from the day before was waiting for me, not two feet away. I slammed the door shut as soon as I saw it. Aunt May called for help, but Tim made it over first and shot the gator with his rifle. You can only shoot an alligator outside hunting season in self defense in Louisiana, but we figured this would be allowed under the circumstances because well, this never happens. He hit the gator a few times, but it was still able to waddle away, leaving a trail of blood back to the riverbank. We called the sheriff back to let him know the problem was taken care of, and Tim gave me a ride to work before he had to go to class at our parish community college. I told him all about Nancy's visitation the night before, and he made me promise not to do anything further about her without him. I could tell that as cautiously as he wanted to proceed, he was just as excited as I was about investigating the mysteries that I was being introduced to.

Tim came over again early the next morning to check the house out from the outside before I left, and sure enough, he found a big cottonmouth trying to get into a bathroom window, climbing up the bush below it. After this there was no doubt the demon was coming after us, so Aunt May and I patched up every possible opening to our little home, then moved temporarily to my Aunt Tia's house in Terrebonne parish, far from the river. This time, all four of us were determined to find a way to fight back. We were going to exorcise that demon from the river.

The first thing we had to decide was whether to rely only on Baptist sources of help, which was what my Aunt May wanted, or to include people of other faiths. We were engaging in spiritual warfare, after all, so needed to decide who to ally ourselves with. After much argument, we decided to ask Aunt Tia's Catholic priest, Father John, to help us. Brother Rob had already told us long ago that demons can be territorial, so we decided to include people from each of the three river parishes and to split up the work. Aunt Tia and Father John took St. John the Baptist parish, Aunt May and Brother Rob took St. James, and Tim and I took St. Charles. We spoke to everyone we could who had knowledge or experience with exorcisms. The first question was, how to exorcise something without a body?" Then, how to fight a river demon when it was too dangerous to go in the water? The solution, we decided after much debate, was to ask the trapped souls in the river to join us in our spiritual warfare. Communication with the trapped souls was tricky though, since Aunt May was adamantly opposed to summoning a spirit on religious grounds. I decided that if we could not summon a spirit, we would need to let one come to us.

The following weekend Tim and I told everyone we were going to Florida for a couple of days for a break, but instead we returned home. We went in the afternoon and lit candles in every window. We prayed to cleanse the home and to ask for God's protection. That night, our risk was rewarded when Nancy stepped out of my closet again. This time Tim could see her too. He went pale and trembled, but bravely took solace in silently clutching the King James Bible he had brought along for the occasion. I was not afraid. I could tell by her expression she was not the demon, and I asked Nancy to tell me more about who was keeping her from moving on, and where he could be found.

"His name is Abaddon, she said, "and he resides in the river where there is no life, where all is desolate."

She could not tell us how to find it. When I asked her if she ever spoke to the other souls in the river, she was puzzled but admitted she had not. She did not know if it was possible, as the dead generally did not seek out company, but she promised to return the next night and let us know.

We did not leave the house the next day, nor could we, because come morning we looked out the windows and saw our house was surrounded by alligators. The one Tom shot had resumed his post in front of the door with an eager glint in its eye, but we were safe in the house. That evening, Nancy returned with two other souls. The first was a young man named Matthew, a shipwreck victim. The second was a woman named Marge who died after her home flooded in Hurricane Katrina. The three of them agreed to take responsibility for a parish each, and to recruit as many other souls as they could. I also found out who it was that took Nancy's life, an adult man she was seeing secretly.

Getting out of the home the next morning was even more challenging because Tim's pickup truck was no longer drivable thanks to gator attacks. We heard them demolishing it the evening before, rolling it over and growling. We called the police and they came out with federal game wardens and gator handlers, totally mystified by the siege.

After all the gators were driven away and Tim's truck was towed, Tim and I had to ride Sheriff Nate to go back to his office to explain the phenomena. To my relief, he believed us and promised he would round up whatever volunteer help he could to assist. "Only a supernatural force would command the animals like this," he said. His words encouraged me to share what Nancy had told me about her murder. Two weeks later, I read in the newspaper that when the sheriff went to speak to this man, he not only broke down and confessed, but he took them to the water cove where he had put her in a tarp and weighted her remains with rocks so she would not wash ashore.

Our successful tip to the police paid off in another way. When Tom and I returned to my home the following day, the sheriff sent us a police escort to and from the house. The gators kept a respectful distance from the guns. That night, our house was crowded full of hopeful souls. There was not one who did not agree to help, once they heard the plan.

After looking online for information about any places in the river where nothing lived, I learned that every year "dead zones" form in the Mississippi River, a result of watershed from farms decimating the oxygen levels in the water. The dead zones kill all plant and marine life. I located the dead zone, but it took up over 6,000 square miles. Based on this fact, our team decided we needed 100 people from each river parish to pray, and for the deceased souls in the water to surround and converge on the dead zone.

Finding 300 live people in a short period of time to assist us was not easy, especially because we did not want any publicity and didn't know who we could trust. We separated 33 people each in the east, center, and west of their assigned parish, with the leader also in the center. We ended up with Christian charismatic prayer warriors of every stripe, Roman Catholic and Orthodox priests, plus some voodoo practitioners and priestesses that we kept on the down low from Aunt May and Aunt Tia. I wasn't going to turn away anyone who shared our goal and who had the faith and desire to help us.

About a week after the alligator attack on our home, Beth showed up at the library. I hadn't seen her since her wedding and she looked like a stranger. For one thing, she was wearing a lot more makeup. For another, she was wearing hospital scrubs and had her blonde hair in a bun instead of in the braids she used to wear. She strode right up to where I was sitting, blue eyes blazing, and said, "What the heck! I find out about this demon from my MOTHER?!"

I was so shocked all I could do was gape at her and ask, "How did she know?"

"Aunt May called her!" Now Beth just looked sad and hurt. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why haven't you CALLED me?" I asked. Then it was her turn to hang her head.

"I don't have a good reason," Beth said, "but I miss you and don't want to be left behind by you and Tim." "Can we all meet up and talk like we used to?" I gave her a big hug in answer.

The following weekend Tim, Beth and I returned to my house to see if any other souls would show up to meet with us, but we couldn't stay. The house had flooded during our absence and the sewer drain backed up. Dead worms and slugs littered the floor. Everything in the home was ruined, and the stink made us dizzy.

Because the souls in the water could not tell time, we had already agreed to begin our joint venture based on the rising of the next new moon. When we all arrived to our assigned parking spaces near the river on the designated evening, it seemed the demon knew what we were doing. The water was wild, though there was no wind. We stayed in our vehicles and used walkie talkies to communicate. When the moon rose above the river, we each above and below chanted over and over, "In the name of our God, begone Abaddon to hell!"

After a few minutes, the river overflowed its banks and waves crashed into and ran under our cars. Pelicans and other seabirds began attacking from above, throwing themselves against our windows. My car began sliding forward, and I had an awful vision of my car floating away, but I kept up the chant, taking courage from knowing everyone else was doing the same. I knew our effort was working when I saw a tall, pale, naked horned figure jump out of the waves dozens of feet in the air and land onto the hood of my Honda Civic. The car immediately sank down to the ground from its weight, all tires deflating. It put its lizard eyes up against the windshield, glaring at me with hatred, and ripped off the side windows on the car in an instant. It smashed its fist on my windshield, sending cracks all across it. It pounded the top of the car, denting it so that I had to slink down sideways in my seat, shaking like a leaf. The demon steamed and raged and threatened me while trying to break through, but it could not. I was not only afraid, I was terrified. I screamed the chant determinedly without ceasing even though I could barely breathe, with my eyes closed, for what seemed an eternity. "You cannot stop me for long!" it screamed, and suddenly, my car stopped rocking. I opened my eyes and saw the river was quiet, and the demon and birds were gone. After rescue was called to pry me out of my car, I was too exhausted to do anything but go home to cry and be thankful.

I knew the souls in the river had moved on because I didn't see their faces in the water anymore. The lives of those who participated in the exorcism were impacted almost as much as the dead. Relations between religious denominations were a bit warmer, and law enforcement began training its officers on how to handle paranormal activity. I even heard the dead zone in the river mysteriously disappeared that year. I learned how to swim. When we eventually returned to our restored home, there were no animals about, and we did not receive any ghostly visitors for a very long time.