Forward

My Brother is willing to go places that most will never go. He has been many places that most will never know. Before we walked in the light we all have been in darkness. As we come out of darkness we come out with knowledge . This knowledge is very valuable to those who may travel down paths that end in destruction or eternal life. Those who are truth seekers like Derek will not settle for the tradition of man and or religion that binds men to each other through emotional soul ties. They will not stop until they receive the Truth that will make them free. The spirit of Truth will lead Derek and others into the full knowledge of their priesthood.

Joseph Taliaferro aka Brother P

This is the testimony of Derek Grosskurth.

Birth And Beyond

I was born in Houma, Louisiana on January 17, 1984. My father didn't stick around very long. He left when I was a few years old. From then on out my mom was searching for us a new father. She would bring all types of men home, some would stay a year, some a few weeks or a few months. She worked late nights bar tending and afterward she would go out drinking and partying. We never knew when she would come home. As soon as she left we invited our friends over. We searched her room until we found her stash of weed and cigarettes. We also got into the alcohol that she kept under the counter. We invited all kinds of people over while she was gone and we partied. That's where we learned to fend for ourselves. Sometimes when my mom had a boyfriend stay over, we would sneak in there and try to get a look at the guy she had over and me and my sister would evaluate him, trying to figure out if we wanted him to stick around or not.

My sister and I also have an older brother. Lots of times while our mom was gone to work my brother would torture me and my sister. He always threw us around in wrestling moves and he was way bigger. He locked us in drawers and chests. Whenever we cried we would suffocate us. He would lay on top of me and put a pillow over my head so I couldn’t breathe. I screamed and screamed into the pillow for my life. I was scared to death. Even after all of that, I knew when I grew up I wanted to be just like him. He started selling drugs and he always had money and had big parties over at his place. He always got me high and he would take me to the mall and buy me stuff and it felt good to be with him there spending all that money. My uncle told me I needed to stay in school and asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and if I wanted to go to college. I told him no, I didn't want to go, I wanted to be the dope man. That’s the life, right? Easy money, always have drugs, get all the girls and throw the biggest parties.

Well, my brother stayed on top for awhile but on the streets there is a saying: "Never get high off of your own supply". He always smoked weed, but he also started smoking crack and then before you know it all the money he was making was going to his overwhelming crack habit. I knew a few of the guys he used to buy it from. They would get on a late night high, making frequent trips to the dealers house. They would buy a good bit and smoke it up and want more, so they would go back a few hours later and buy more. After a few trips, the dealer told me that my brother and them ran out of money and came over begging them for some more and he said "Hold on", and went into the back room and broke them off pieces of soap and he sat there and watched them smoke it. I hung out with some of the dealers and they would be wearing all nice new clothes and shoes and I thought, "Man...my brother paid for your shoes". He always walked down the street with a really big bag of pot tucked in his pants leg by his crotch.

My brother also started stealing and breaking into peoples houses for crack money. I also would break into houses, but just for fun. We pulled up to a big house one day and I walked up and knocked on the door. That's how you see if anybody was home. If they came to the door I would just ask if a random person lived there. No one came. We walked around to the back and my brother checked to see if a window was unlocked. He found one and took the screen off and helped me climb through the window. He then went back and sat in the car. I brought out some CD's, a VCR, a camcorder, and a stereo. I never took anything big from a house before I always took small stuff like money and jewelry, so I thought I hit it pretty big. We left and we didn't have much gas in the car. We were going to get rid of some of it and make some cash. I thought we would go to the pawn shop and make a lot of money off of the things we stole, but I wanted to keep the camcorder for myself. My brother said no because they could trace it back as stolen and we also wouldn't get as much money by pawning it. So we started driving through the projects and we passed a group of drug dealers standing on the corner they kind of jumped out at the car and yelled my brothers name out, "Hey Herb!" They were holding up sacks of crack rocks. I thought to myself, "WHOA!" They knew him by name. My brother was laughing and said, "You don’t want no crack, huh?" I said, "No. Do you think they have any weed?" He said, "No, just crack." So he pulled over to his friend's house in the hood for a minute and he went inside while I sat in the car. He then came back out with a guy and they started getting all of the stuff that I stole from the big house out of the car and the guy said, "Yeah I think my baby mamma could use a VCR," and they took all of the stuff inside. I got more nervous and mad. So then we left and I asked him about how much money he got for all of the stuff and he said, "Only two dollars." I said, "Did you at least you get any weed?" He said no. Then it was kind of quiet and awkward for a few minutes. We left the projects and went to his other friend's house, where he told me to stay in the car. I sat there for about 1 and 1/2 hours listening to the radio. He came and got back into the car all geeked up on crack and drove me home. I didn’t say anything to him the whole ride home. I was really disappointed. So much for all of the parties. So much for all of the money. So much for all of the girls. I believe that was the day I lost all faith in my brother being some type of role model/father figure in my life.

Shadow People

When I was around three years old, I can still remember that I awoke in my bed to a terrible feeling and the presence of two shadow beings lying on each side of me. The shadows were pinning me down to the bed. I was terrified and did not know what to do. I felt like I had to cough, but I was too scared to. I couldn't even speak. I was paralyzed with fear. Also around that same time frame, I woke up after midnight and walked through the house and walked into my mom's room. There was a clothes basket right past the doorway and the room was dark and in the basket were two red glowing eyes looking at me.

Throughout my childhood, my friends and I were always trying to scare ourselves, either by hiding from each other and jumping out, telling ghost stories or watching scary movies all the time. Pretty typical stuff, huh? But throughout my whole childhood it tortured me. Every time I turned the light off I was scared, but the even scarier part was when I closed my eyes. Most of the time, I had nightmares. I had them so often that I learned how to get out of them. Every time I wanted to wake up, I would smother myself in my dream, cut my own throat, drown myself or jump head first into a rock to kill myself or break my neck. Pretty weird, huh? But it worked every time. I always woke up out of the nightmares when I did this.

The scariest dreams were when I was trying to go to sleep and looking around at my room and I didn't know that I had fallen asleep. In my dream I would still be lying there in bed looking around my room and either a demon would come walking in my room, or one would be on top of me and I couldn't move. This phenomenon was quite different than the experience that I had as a child with the shadow beings lying on my chest. The Lord didn't give us a spirit of fear, but of love and a sound mind. I just hadn't learned this yet.

Finding Jesus

We moved around a lot, being raised by a single mother and not having a father. My mom started dating a man by the name of Emmitt. They got pretty close and we eventually moved in with him and his son Michael Ray. Emmitt was always drunk and on pills and never seemed to be in his right state of mind, so there was never a dull moment with him around. Emmitt's son Michael on the other hand was a born again Christian and there was something different about him because I'd known professing Christians and he wasn't like them. He actually lived what he believed. He would lock himself in his room for hours during the evening, light candles, read his Bible, pray and listen to worship music. He always invited me and my sister to go to church but I never really wanted to go because church was always boring to me when I was a kid.

Michael became a big brother to me. He took me with him to hang out with friends, play basketball, go swimming and other things. He told me things about God and the Bible in a way that I could grasp and it didn't seem as foreign to me. Knowing that I wouldn't go to church with him, he invited me to a prayer meeting. I really had no interest in going to that either but he told me that there would be a prophet there. I asked "What's a prophet?" He said that a prophet was kind of like a Christian psychic, someone who was very near to God and had a close relationship with Him. This piqued my interest so I decided to go and check it out.

I can't say that much came from the prophet but what I did notice was that there were many people gathered together in an apartment singing along with the worship music coming from the CD player who seemed to be in another place. They were singing with their eyes closed and their hands raised towards heaven, some were even crying. They seemed to be in an ecstatic state of joy and it appealed to me, because inside I felt sadness, hurt, and many other negative feelings. I felt alone on the inside but outside I was fine. Then one of the men who was there whose name was brother Barry came and sat down on the couch next to me and asked me if wanted to ask Jesus into my heart to forgive me of my sins. I told him yes. He began to lead me into a prayer of repentance and confession of Jesus dying on the cross for me. I began to cry uncontrollably and began to get really hot and burn with a fervent heat. This heat was very hot but at the same time it felt amazing. I began trembling as the heat increased and all of a sudden I experienced that same joy that the others in the room possessed. I felt as if the fire was burning out all of the wrong that I had ever done. I felt clean on the inside for the first time ever. I felt an intense weight lift off of my shoulders. I felt forgiven.

After the prayer meeting, we went home and I went straight to my weed stash and flushed it down the toilet because that fire sensation was way better and more euphoric than any type of drug high that I had ever experienced. That fire is known to many as the Holy Spirit or the Presence of God. I got addicted to that presence. Just as I would smoke weed, take pills and drink to briefly leave this reality behind and go to a place where nothing mattered, this euphoric ecstatic presence of the Holy Spirit was so much more intoxicating and took me to a different place where everything was ok. We went to many different prayer meetings all over Mobile County and hung out with different people who had the same desire to worship God. We loved it so much that we couldn't wait to get out of church because we would all gather at someone's house for prayer and fellowship and we knew it would end in people getting saved and everyone laying on the floor having a genuine encounter with God for themselves.

The First Demon

One day, I was cutting grass in Emmitt's big backyard and I was out there for a long time. I started thinking about my mom and the way she was treating me and the way she treated me as a child and how she was never there. I began to get mad and sad at the same time. I then heard the Holy Spirit say to me, "You have a demon." I didn't know what to think. Was it really God's voice or was it just me? I dwelt on it for awhile and kept cutting grass. Well, a couple of days later we went to Mrs. Carolyn’s house for a prayer meeting. Back then we went to her house all the time to meet together and pray. We couldn't wait to get out of church to go somewhere to pray. While we were there praying together in the living room, I pulled a friend to the side and told him I needed to talk to him in the den. We went into the dimly lit den and sat on the couch. I told him about what happened when I was cutting grass, and that I heard God say I had a demon. I told him everything about my mom and what I was thinking about at the time of my encounter. He told me to stay there and he went to get someone else out of the living room to pray with us. He told me that we were going to pray and just stay calm because we might see something manifest. In my mind I thought that a Gremlin looking creature would jump out of me in the den. I didn’t know what to expect. I was a bit scared and excited at the same time.

While we were sitting on the couch they began to lay hands on me and pray for me. All of a sudden, my muscles locked up and my knees buckled. I crouched over and began to scream really loud. Growling and roaring, they knew what they had to do. Everyone came running into the room and they all began praying for me. I became violent and started pushing everyone off of me while I was still screaming. A lot of people held me down and they began to try and cast the demon out of me. This lasted for about three hours straight. I began talking in satanic tongues. I began switching back in forth from me and the demon talking. I couldn't control any of it. When I came to I was crying telling Mike to put on some worship music that I knew. Then I would switch back to the demon, growling and cursing. This lasted all night, and I was crying the whole time. My face had small red spots all over it from crying and screaming so hard and so long. Another guy who was there manifested a demon as well, but his didn't last long and they were able to handle him easily.

They ended up calling a pastor to come over really late because they could not handle what was happening. So the pastor came over really late. They had to wake him up. I was laying on the floor when he got there everything was calmed down a lot and there were still some people who had hung around to pray with me. They told the pastor the situation with my mom and he came up to me while I was laying on the floor exhausted. He told me to repeat after him. He had me renounce the demonic spirit. He then told me to say that I forgive my mother and that I loved her. This was the hardest part. For some reason I couldn't do that simple task. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't say it. I began to cry more. He said if I wanted this thing to be gone and if I wanted to be free, I had to say this. Finally I was able to say it and mean it, and I felt the spirit leave. I felt a weight go from me. Mike told me not to tell my mom or my sister what happened, but I didn't know how I was going to explain why I was hoarse and why I had a face full or red blemishes. I got home and went to bed. The next morning they asked me what was wrong and I simply said I was praying a lot, when in fact I was. Now it feels so good to tell my mom that I love her.

My Other Half

So at school while walking to class, I always passed these hippie/alternative type people. I could not for the life of me take my eyes off of one of the girls, but I would never talk to her because I was a little more on the thuggish side and didn't think she would even go for me. I saw her every morning, but didn't want her to see me looking at her. I even saw her while we were hanging out at the skating rink and told my friend that I thought she was cute but didn't think she would give me the time of day.

That Monday, I got my friend to talk to her for me and he actually got her number for me. I was happy but at the same time very nervous. I called her and we hit it off pretty good and little did I know that the whole time I had eyes for her, she was looking at me thinking the same things, 'He's cute, but he wouldn't give me the time of day.' Come to find out, it truly was love at first sight. We started dating and got really serious. Her name is Arien.

Arien gave me a sense of confidence that I was lacking. She accepted me for me, and loved me for the person that I was and that took away my need to be accepted because I knew that she loved and accepted me no matter what.

The first time Arien came over was while I was living with my mom at Emmitt's house. Arien walked up to the front door and there was blood all over everything. There was blood on the walls, on the doors, on the concrete and even the window on the door was busted out. That was a great first impression.

The night before, I had a friend come over and stay the night. His name was Michael Wade, but we called him Quade. We stayed up for a while and later went to sleep in my room. Emmitt and my mom were fighting as usual, and it was getting pretty rough. We heard a lot of hollering and screaming back and forth from the both of them. Emmitt started calling my name to come in the living room to help him. I got out of bed and went to see what was going on. My mom was standing over Emmitt and she was trying to pull his wooden leg off, but it was stuck in his pants leg. It was a weird sight because it now looked as though his leg was six feet long! He told me to help him, but I turned around and went back into my bedroom. He then called Quade into the living room to help him. He wouldn’t stop calling so we went to see how bad it had gotten. We walked in there and my mom had thrown a mason jar across the room and hit him in the head with it. It busted his head wide open and blood was everywhere.

My mom saw what she had done, so she went outside to the laundry room to get some towels to clean it up. When she stepped outside, Emmitt locked the door and locked her outside. She couldn’t get back in and he was laughing, saying that he was going to get her for murder cause he was going to bleed to death. So then my mom punched out the glass in the front door, and unlocked it. I held a towel on his head to stop the bleeding and the blood got all over me. Oh, and by the way, this was Quade's first time coming over as well. My mom called the ambulance to come, so we went back to bed. Emmitt hobbled back to my room and put his hand on the white doorframe and stood in the doorway, covered with his own blood. He opened his mouth and very sarcastically slurred the words, "Thanks for helping me, thanks a lot!" He was really drunk and pilled up. The ambulance came and picked him up and the night was over.

Over the next few months Arien and I got into a lot of trouble. I actually got her into drinking and smoking weed with me on a regular basis and we would hang with our friends and get really wasted together. Her parents hated me, and why wouldn’t they? I got her to run away with me twice. Both times were when my family was moving from Alabama back to Louisiana and both times ended up with the police finding us and bringing her back to her parents. They made her see a psychiatrist and put her on anti-depressants. I guess by this time it is needless to say that I backslid and totally fell away from God and we both started to dabble in witchcraft and dark magic.

The Man That You Fear

One time Emmitt had been arguing and fighting with my Mom all night, and I don't think they ever went to bed. Five o'clock in the morning came around. Emmitt came into my room and woke me up and told me to get up and go cut the grass. I went back to sleep. He woke me up again at seven o'clock cussing me and thought I was already cutting the grass. I want back to sleep for a few minutes and then I heard him yell and ask if I was getting up. I slowly got up and started putting my shoes on. All of a sudden, he came in the room cussing me out again. He was really drunk. He actually fell off my bed and I had to help him up.

He started to tell me some really sadistic stuff he was going to do to me and told me some pretty mean things. Then he went back to his room. I got up and was really mad, so I put my Marilyn Manson CD on the track "The Man That You Fear". I heard him fighting and cussing my Mom from his room, so I knew he was going to come back into my room and it wouldn't be pretty. I started looking around my room for stuff to defend myself with. My eyes stopped on my acoustic guitar.

The Manson music playing in the back ground pumped me up for what I was about to do. I heard him say "Where's Derek?!" and he said he was going to kill me. He was cursing the whole time. I grabbed the guitar, turned the stereo up all of the way, and met him and my Mom in the hallway. He never knew what hit him. I hit him in the mouth with the guitar and three of his teeth flew out. Then he put his arm up to block and I kept swinging at him busting his forearms up and then his head. He fell back into his doorway to his bedroom. He looked at me covered in blood said, "Go ahead! Hit me again!" I still had the guitar in my hand ready to hit him again, and then I realized what I had just done.

I grabbed the door knob and held the door shut. My Mom was in the hall with me. I looked at her and said, "Mom, hold the door shut!" and she said, "He ain't gonna mess with you. You got him pretty bad." So I ran to my room, packed my clothes into a backpack as fast as I could, and jumped out of my fifteen feet high window only to hit the ground unharmed with my adrenaline still pumping. I then ran behind the house.

He came outside looking for me, still covered in blood. He had the phone in one hand and a shotgun in the other. He had called the paramedics and they were on their way. I ran into the woods and lay down. I saw the cops and the ambulance arrive and put him in the back. After they left, I walked back up to the house where my Mom was. We got in the truck and she took me over to where my sister was staying with one of her friends. They were big pot smokers and partied a lot. I stayed there for about a month until I got kicked out. After that, I went to stay with another friend.

Pops, Demons and Elementals

My girlfriend Arien and I were studying black magic and the occult, and we were limited when it came to the books that were available. We had a lot of them. We would walk into any book store wearing our biggest baggiest clothes to get as many books as we could and shove them in our clothes, but just reading the book was not nearly as effective as talking to a teacher or someone with experience. That's were Pops came in.

Pops was a friend of ours. He was in his late 30's and lived in a trailer park close to Arien's house. All of the neighborhood kids hung out at Pops' house. We all sat around drinking and doing drugs. Almost every single day was like a huge party. He was a Warlock. He knew everything there was to know about the craft, so we were in luck.

Pops would tell us everything we wanted to know. We would sit over there and drink and get high and ask him all the questions we could think of and he would tell us what we wanted to know. We stayed up all night talking to him and would usually end up crashing on the couch.

One year I was living in Louisiana, and for my birthday I asked my mom to drop me off in Alabama to be with Arien for a week. We picked up my cousin Alan from Atmore first. Then, we went to Saraland. We had a place to stay at a friend's house for two days. Before we left their house, I knew I was leaving back to Louisiana in a week, so I stole from my friends and filled my tote bag with all the cool stuff I could get my hand's on like CD's, clothes, video games and controllers.

Well, we had to leave there after the two days and went to the next friend's house, where we stayed for the two days and stole even more stuff. My cousin and I waited for my Mom to come get me, but day after day she never showed up. I stayed with all the friends I could think of, but their generosity ran out and I had a tote bag filled with all of their belongings. I put my bag at my friend Daniel's house (his stuff was in there also). Pops lived right across the street, so we hung out over there and stayed about two days there. We had finally talked to my mom and she was supposed to show up the next day to pick us up, so we decided to steal a Dungeons and Dragons video game from Pops. We got the game and walked next door to Daniel's house and put it in the bag (by that time we had acquired a lot of stuff). Then we walked back to Pops' house and we were chilling. Mom delayed again and was going to be a couple of days, so we tried to stay at Pops' for a few more days till she came.

Well, we were sitting on the couch in a room full of people, some I knew and some I didn't know, and our friend Stevo walked through the door with the D and D video game in his hands that we had stolen from Pops the day before. Alan didn't notice it, but my heart stopped. I was really scared. Pops looked at this other big dude and they shook their heads and whispered something to Stevo. They then walked to the back room. I immediately got up and walked over to Alan and told him we had to leave now. He didn't want to because they were about to start drinking and smoking pot, but I whispered, "DUDE LET'S GO." We walked outside and I told him what I had seen. He then started to look really sad. I felt like we had to get out of there because most of the people there were involved in gang activity and I knew the situation would turn ugly fast. There were a lot of people outside that I didn't know, so we walked up to some dude in a car who had a lot of people hanging around him and I said, "Dude, we need ride bad." So he gave us a ride down the street. I used his cell phone to call Arien because we were stranded in Creola with nowhere to go.

We went over to her house where she said we could try to sneak and stay in her tree house. The guy who gave us a lift dropped us off down the street because Arien's parents wouldn't be cool with us staying over there. Alan and I walked a long way and hid in the bushes close to Arien's house. We were waiting for the right moment to run to the tree house. While we waited, it started to get dark. We saw a light behind her house that looked like someone walking around with a flashlight, but we didn't see any person. Just an eerie light floating around and back and forth. We watched the light for about an hour thinking that her dad was walking around with a flashlight. We tried to avoid the light and walk to the other side of the bushes where there was an open field that went around to the back of her house. We went around and as soon as we got in the field, something that looked to be a shadow of a huge eight foot camel came running at us! Both of us saw it, and both of us were knocked to the ground. We were dazed. We both freaked out and got up and ran as fast as we could to Arien's tree house. Then we made it. Arien and her friend Wendi came to stay the night up there with us. We later found out that Pops was supposed to have a protection spell on his belongings. That means that if someone happens to take something of his, the spirits would track the stuff down and actually track the thieves down. These spirits are known as elementals which are manifested into our reality by being summoned though earth, air, fire, water or spirit.

The next morning we woke up after Arien's Mom and Dad left. Wendi went home and we went inside to go back to sleep. After we woke up we chilled for a while inside and Arien's Mom came home, so we ran to her room and both of us piled into the closet. Arien unlocked the back door for us to run through when the coast was clear, so we waited for a while and kept hearing her Mom come in the room and stuff. She looked at the back door and said, "Arien, why is the back door unlocked?" Arien just said, "I don't know." while her mom locked it. We were like, "uh oh." Then her mom went to the back and we hurried up and ran out and hid. We waited for Arien to leave in the car, and picked us up at the end of the road. We hung out for awhile and my Mom still didn't show up. It was getting late, so we tried the same thing again. Arien dropped us off at the end of her road. We were planning to let her go inside and then run to the tree house. When we started to run, the dog barked at us so we quickly hid behind the trees. Arien came outside and said, "I don't see anything." Then she went back inside and shut the door. Then her Mom and Dad came outside and said, "No, that was his human bark." We expected them to find us. Her Dad walked down to the tree house with a flashlight shining it at the woods. He still didn't see us. He went to the tree house and looked inside and was walking back to the house. We almost got away, but he shined the flashlight at me and said, "Busted!" I said, "No I'm not." He walked us inside and sat us down on the couch and was talking to us. Thinking he'd let us stay, we told him our story. He called the cops.

The cops arrived and took us to a very small station in Creola. We waited there for a long time and finally they said it was against the law for my mother to drop me off in Alabama and leave without us having a place to stay. After awhile, a cop came inside to get us and put us in his car. We had been through a lot and it was late, so we fell asleep. We woke up somewhere in Mobile at a Baptist Orphanage.

They put us in a room where we slept for the night and woke up with a lot of kids in the kitchen, so we went in and ate with them all. My hair was shaved short and blonde with red and blue polka dots on it and I had on a Marilyn Manson shirt. They asked me to take it off because it was a Baptist home. We stayed a few days and Alan's Mom came from Mobile and picked him up, but they wouldn't let me leave with him. I was really sad. I had to stay there for two more days, and in some ways it was kind of fun, but still really lonely. They had a swimming pool, Nintendo and a basketball court. But the main reason it was sad was because the kids all kept saying, "My Mom's coming back to get me in a year". They wanted to believe that so bad.

After a few days my mom finally showed up to get me. She took me back to Louisiana where I spent a lot of time in our trailer in the woods, alone in the middle of nowhere. Those spirits, also known as elementals, continued to harass me. I was sitting at home alone waiting for my mom to get home at around midnight. I was sitting on the couch inside our trailer when the wind started blowing and I heard soft whispering voices like in the movies, only I couldn't understand what they were saying. It was like a few people whispering secrets to each other.

The Sickness The Cure

After Arien graduated she moved in with me in Hammond, Louisiana in my grandmother’s trailer. My grandmother went to work every week to stay and watch the elderly. She usually came back on Saturday and then left Sunday. Arien and I pretty much had the house to ourselves. That’s where we really got deeper and deeper into witchcraft. Granny didn't mind too much. After all, she did candle magic. We made an altar in our room and had everything you needed to be a witch. We studied religions, looking for power. We tried Satanism in high school, but we later converted to Wicca. Wicca is one of the most popular and glamorous forms of witchcraft. It was mostly about being nice. Wiccans do not believe in putting curses on people, but rather helping your fellow man. Wiccans are called the "Peaceful Pagans". We studied the craft for a long time. We would frequently visit the occult stores in our area and it didn’t take long to get to Bourbon Street. We wouldn't go to Bourbon Street to drink, but only to visit the witchcraft stores. But we smoked weed everyday and got drunk as much as possible.

I focused more on seeing and hearing spirits so that I could be a psychic. I laid on the bed and meditated and told the spirits they could do whatever they wanted with my mind. I just wanted to see something. After doing this a whole bunch, I didn't see much. I wanted to see direct results. We also learned to summon elemental spirits. We had black cats and the whole works. Sometimes we would watch TV in the dark and we'd see a big shadow of a person standing in the corner out of the corner of our eyes. When we turned our heads it was gone. Or we'd be laying there and we'd see a shadow run by the TV really fast. That was pretty freaky stuff. I had a necklace with a talisman charm on it and I took it off and asked the spirits a question and they would answer by swinging it a certain way. This became a party favorite. I pulled it out whenever people were over and freaked them out. I asked the spirits if they could make the charm spin around in big circles and it happened. We also played around with candles and we would take a small flame and ask the spirits to make it grow and it would stretch really big. We also did all kinds of rituals inviting spirits into our lives.

It got bad for awhile. We had no money and no jobs, so we only ate what we could find in the house and we had eaten everything up. I made Arien go into her coin collection and get all of her quarters she was collecting that her grandma gave her and made her go buy some cigarettes. Sometimes we got a few dollars and bought some cigarettes and with the money left over we bought a whole bunch of Ramen noodles. We ate so many of them I can tell you every way you can make those things.

Sometimes when I was sleeping, I'd have a dream where I was about to die and right before I died I called out for Jesus. No matter what god I was serving I always knew that I would go to hell if I died. I tried to believe the witchcraft beliefs, saying I would go to a happy place called the Summerland. I ended up getting really sick and I was sitting on the couch and I started getting really cold. All of a sudden I would see all these spirits flying around the room and start hearing weird noises. I got really scared. It would eventually go away and I'd come back to my senses and I'd have tears in my eyes. I stayed sick for a few days and while I was sick I was watching TBN, the Christian TV station. I kept it on Benny Hinn and Rod Parsley. I was longing on the inside for the times when I used to be saved. Arien got really mad at me for keeping it on the Christian channel so much. Finally it got so bad and I kept coughing up blood. I laid on the sofa and the weird feeling came back. It got really cold all of a sudden and I started to see the spirits again and Arien couldn't see them. I told her "You know how people say I'm losing my mind? Well I literally feel like someone is taking my mind from me." I WAS losing my mind. It occurred to me that if I was to tell someone what was going on they would freak out because I was the only person who could see it. They would think I was crazy and probably admit me to the mental hospital. It got really bad and I was terrified for my life.

I began to become schizophrenic. Whenever I went to a restaurant, I felt like everyone was staring at me and I freaked out and got scared and had a panic attack. This happened everywhere we went. I couldn't stay outside of the house for long. Whenever we went to McDonalds it was so bad I couldn't talk to the people at the counter. I had to get someone else to order my food. This was all a result of demonic attack.

So that night I was going through one of those times, and I said "Arien, its happening again." I got Arien to pray for me. She prayed for God to heal me, even though she really didn't believe in God, she was willing to try anything for me. The next morning I woke up and I was healed! I felt a lot better, but there was still a lot there. I looked in the phone book for local Churches. I called many of them and left a messages on the pastor's answering machine. I said that I used to serve Jesus, but I fell away and got real big into witchcraft and I felt like I was possessed by a demon. I left my number and told them to call me back. I went into my room and started tearing down all of my posters. I wiped everything off the altar and started throwing everything away. This scared Arien because she had no idea what I was doing throwing all of our stuff away. She started to cry when I was telling her that I was going to be a Christian again and that I couldn't handle what I was doing and I rembered the peace I had with Jesus. I knew without a doubt He was real. She was still crying and said she couldn't believe in something she thought was a lie. I told her that we served a god and a goddess and worshiped the moon, then what's so hard with believing in Jesus? She was still against it. I told her either she could get saved with me or she could go back to Alabama. I was set on doing this. I was tired of the way I was living. She loved me more that anything so she didn't want to leave. I told her this: I said, "Let's try Jesus for two weeks and if our lives aren’t 100% better, then we will go back to witchcraft and I will agree to it." I knew that Jesus was going to show himself strong.

So she agreed to do this. She agreed to give her life to Jesus for two weeks. I think it was a few hours later a pastor called me back and I talked with him a little while and he said that he would make a house call and come over to talk to us. He came over and talked with us. He said he didn't think I was possessed by a devil, but oppressed. He prayed over us and we repeated after him the sinners prayer. He seemed like he wanted to help us out in any way he could so he scheduled a meeting for us to come over to his church and meet with him and another pastor. When we went they prayed for us and anointed us with oil. I had made up my mind I was going to serve God again. We started going to church there and the first Sunday we went there, he asked us to stand up and he gave a short testimony to the crowd. We started going to Bible studies there as well. Arien and I were sitting on the couch one night watching Rod Parsley on TBN and he was going off preaching. The band was playing a beat while he was preaching running back in forth across the stage. Arien and I were sitting together and we started bobbing up and down on the couch a little. We began to get a little faster. We then got up and started dancing in our living room and the Holy Spirit was all over us. It was the first time Arien felt the presence of God. I was so happy to feel him again.

We were delivered from smoking cigarettes and pot and drinking instantly. We had no desire for these things anymore. We felt like new people! We took our CDs and pawned them and we took our witchcraft books and sold them to the occult store. We took the money and bought two Bibles and I bought me a cheap suit of clothes from the dollar store to wear to church. I also bought a P.O.D. CD and put a Darrell Evans CD on order. We took all of our clothes and put them in a bag. All of our Marilyn Manson, Korn, and Coal Chamber shirts and we gave them to our friend. We were still hanging out with the same people who were still doing the things we just got delivered from. We drove our car back in forth to church and the car was in real bad shape. Whenever you cranked it up, the car would start going by itself like someone was flooring it. You had to drive holding the brake. My granny took it to have it fixed and paid the guy a lot of money, but it was still broken like two days later. We so wanted new friends. We wanted Christian friends, and we wanted to move back to Alabama. We prayed every night that we would be able to do all of these things. Every night we prayed.

Arien's Mom called and Arien told her about the car. Her Mom said for us to come down there and they will pay to have the car fixed. We told her we had no gas money to get there and we weren't sure that the car would make it. She told us to look in the trunk and told us where she had hidden a single twenty dollar bill behind the jack.

We got the money and drove down there. Her parents didn't want us to sleep in the same house while we was there so they bought us a hotel room for a few nights. They let us use their Blazer while the car was being worked on. We went to church and it was nice being back. At the end of the service there was an altar call for prayer. We went up front to receive prayer and when the Pastor prayed for me and laid his hands on me, I felt the fire come on me. Suddenly my muscles tensed up and I fell to the ground and started screaming. I knew what was happening because it happened to me once before. They picked me up and brought me to a room in the back of the church. They told Arien not to come back there. She was kind of scared because she had never seen anything like that before. She heard me screaming and everyone praying a demon out of me. I started growling satanic tongues and laughing like Freddy Kruger. Arien walked in the room and I was on the floor crying and laughing, and they told her to start praying. The spirit left me and I felt a lot better. We went with some friends and met an old acquaintance David at work. After he got off we went to go hang out and pray at his house. We went there and we had a holy ghost fire filled time. We prayed and worshipped until like five in the morning. We did this for the next two or three days. David let me and Arien sleep over for a few days because his parents we gone out of town and he had the house to himself. When they came back, we had to leave and Arien's parents said it was getting too expensive to put us up in a hotel, so they began looking for a small travel trailer to let us stay in. They found one and moved it into their front yard and let us stay in it until the car was fixed.

Arien went to visit her boss at her old job at Neighbor's restaurant. As soon as she walked through the door her boss said, "Hey Arien, you want your job back?" Arien was surprised and said, "Yeah!" So she gave her an application and told her when to come in.

The next thing we knew, God had answered all of our prayers. We got the car fixed. We moved to Alabama and He gave us Christian friends. So it was crazy. God answered all of our prayers in less than a week! This totally built our faith and by this time Arien developed a strong faith in God for herself. We ended up moving the small thirty foot trailer onto an R.V. campground. We got married and stayed there the first year of our marriage and God continued to bless us and teach us about faith in Jesus and fellowship with the Holy Spirit.

Deliverance

Arien and I started going to a home prayer group. Stan and Jay Achenbach were the ones over it. A friend of ours told us lots of good things about it. The first time we went we really wanted to go, but we had no gas money to get there and back. It was about a thirty minute drive. We went on faith. At the end someone gave our friend some money and said that God told them to give it to us and we didn't tell anyone about the gas situation.

It was a small group, but very powerful. They also had a ministry where they counseled people, families, or couples with hurts from the past, ungodly beliefs, spiritual soul hurts, and sins of the fathers or generational curses. To tell you the truth, everyone is dealing with these issues if they want to agree with or not. Even you. We wanted Stan to marry us and he requested that we go through their ministry individually. We really wanted to go through it together. They gave us an application and we went home and filled it out. To sum it all up, check the boxes where the enemy has lied to you in your life, like if you ever thought and believed you were gay or had cancer or anything the old sleuth foot could think of and a good bit of personal back ground information. You needed to be real honest so they would know how to pray and what spirits they would have to deal with. I just knew that after we went through this we would never we the same, so I couldn’t wait until we did. The Lord really did a work in us and in fact we've never been the same. We let go of a lot of baggage we were holding on to. I was healed of a lot of things. My anger used to be so bad I would punch and kick holes in the walls and a lot of this was after I got saved. So contrary to popular belief after we receive Jesus Christ as our Lord and savior, everything doesn't get fixed all of a sudden but we now know the person who fixes our broken pieces. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done by the blood of Jesus. While we were going through their ministry me and Arien were still living together in the R.V. trailer. We had just gotten saved a few months ago and we were living together while we were in the world, so we caught a lot of flak from the church leaders about this. We wanted the full deliverance so badly, so we decided to sleep in separate beds until I could find another place to stay.

With the victory at hand the devil got mad. It was no longer us on the defensive side but the Devil. I was sleeping on the couch and I had another nightmare something was chasing me and I tried to run. I ran and from the monster and dove into a rock but I didn’t wake up. While I was lying there asleep I felt as if something had reached its hand into my head and grab my brain. When this happened I couldn't move, I couldn't think, I couldn’t even breathe. I lay there for a minute and started to plead the blood of Jesus anyway I could. I suddenly woke up and was gasping for air. I was shouting "I plead the blood of Jesus over my life. I put on the whole armor of God. I take up the shield of faith and the sword of the spirit and I command you to loose me in the name of Jesus!" I then felt total release. After that sometimes while we were sleeping I woke up speaking in tongues really loud or yelling "In the name of Jesus!" or "Jesus!" Arien would wake up weirded out and pray with me.

After we received deliverance, I really felt that old man die. I felt an even deeper peace inside of me. I knew I was obtaining victory over the enemy. About the same time we were going through the ministry, the Lord started to show me a lot of things in the spirit and began to teach me about the prophetic. I was very interested in these things. After all while we were in witchcraft we were studying about spirit guides and trying to become psychic and communicating with the dead. Arien had gotten very good at tarot card readings and would amaze people and leave them in tears when she read their lives from the cards when we were in witchcraft. When we went to the prison to visit my brother, the Lord would tell me what certain people were in jail for. This scared me at first, and I also tried to tell myself that it was just me. I would try and rebuke the devil because I was judging these people. Soon after the Lord led me to MorningStar ministries. I found myself reading a book by Rick Joyner, "The Final Quest," and listening to their music which goes off in the spirit and prophetic worship a whole lot. I then began to study prophesy and the prophetic in the bible and read more books from MorningStar school such as Steve Thompson's "You may all Prophesy," based out of 1 Corinthians 14:31.

Then at the meetings at Stan and Jay's, we began to practice prophesying to one another with the help of the Holy Spirit. We learned that the things that we were involved in in witchcraft was a perversion of what God was truly wanting us to do. We were using spiritual gifts for the devil, now that we're with God, how much more awesome it is to be hearing the Holy Spirit than hearing Demons!

My Prayer

People must understand that there is a world beyond this plane of existence in which we live. A dimension that is more real than we can understand. A realm that is eternal and flourishing with life and there are things that you can do on this side of the field that have significant reactions in the spirit realm. Many people believe in God and even believe in the existence of angels, but when it comes to the concept of demons they somewhat feel like that part is all fantasy or Hollywood. I hope that my story in some shape or form has informed you to the existence of life beyond the mundane realities and encouraged you to understand that that there are doors or pathways which can be opened either knowingly or unknowingly to forces that do not play by our rules or operate by the same laws by which we operate. So I pray that you approach this subject with intrigue and imagination, but also with much sensitivity and caution because a door that is easily opened can be a bit harder to close. But be of good cheer, because we know that the scriptures testify that Jesus is able to open and close doors that no man can shut. If you have opened any demonic doorways into your life, then with the power of God those doors can be shut and all wrongs can be erased by the blood of Jesus.

I believe that God wants nothing more than a relationship with his creation, and you can know him in an intimate way much like some of the instances I have described. If you do not know Jesus as your Lord and savior please consider what you have read and know that your sins are forgiven no matter what you have done, and that there is nothing too big that God doesn't understand. Jesus went to the cross and suffered a horrific death, taking our sins upon himself and threw them as far as the east is to the west. There is no remembrance of your sins and no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. The Bible declares that Jesus is the Way, The Truth and The Life and that NO man comes to the father (God) but by Him. I am a living example of this truth. I have sought God through many different teachers, religions and practices but can boldly share with you that forgiveness of sins alone can only come through the person of Jesus Christ. Thanks for sharing a part of my story and maybe this is the beginning of a new chapter in yours. God bless.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2Corinthians 5:17

Table of Contents

Forward

Birth And Beyond

Shadow People

Finding Jesus

The First Demon

My Other Half

The Man That You Fear

Pops, Demons and Elementals

The Sickness, The Cure

Deliverance

My Prayer

Back Cover