Blessed Are the Wicked

by Steven A. LaChance

  It took about six months for me to understand the message I was given when I came back into my body from what I assume was death. “I know why babies cry when they are born. It hurts.” My whole adult life, I had run around complaining about someone did this to me or this horrible thing happened to me. I was never strong when dealing with my life. As a matter of fact, in some ways I was behaving like a big, old, whiny wimp. The message was given to me in order to understand that I was going to get to live more life, but with the understanding life is gonna hurt sometimes. Sometimes, it is going to hurt so bad that pain is going to resonate throughout your whole body and take your breath away. Life is not good or even easy all of the time, but it is within those hard times and pain when the work on the soul is really done. It is supposed to hurt. Without the pain of life, the lessons would not be learned. I needed to accept and even embrace the pain as much as I did the happier times. Life hurts, and guess what, my mother was right when she told me she never promised me a rose garden. In complete contrast, Ms. Pittman was also right when she told me to stop and smell those roses. This is the contradiction of life, and within those contradictions, a soul can and will become whole again.

  [contents]

  Chapter 25

  August 2012

  I look back throughout the years, and I see how everything seems to have come full circle. I remember Zoe and the Tower card. I have a clear understanding now of the message it was trying to give me. All I was ever willing to see was the destruction that the card depicted. I would not allow myself to see the full picture, the cycle of demise and resurgence. There is a rebuilding. I completely overlooked the idea that sometimes things have to be destroyed in order for them to rise from the ashes, wiser and stronger than before.

  Sure, I had seen my share of damage. Let’s face it, I had encountered total and absolute obliteration at times, but that is not the end of my story. My story is not going to end with me, a sad, demolished person, because I have been given the gift of rebirth. I have been given a chance to start fresh. I have had mediums come forward and tell me that my vision during my surgery, about the pain of coming into this world, was actually signifying my rebirth. The reason the supernatural had stopped within my life was that it could no longer touch me, because the bond or hold it had on my soul was broken at the moment I died.

  Everything that has happened to me was responsible for my rebirth and making me the person I am today. There are always going to be haunted houses. There are always going to be those who want to hurt others for their own selfish or evil ends. There are always going to be people who choose to serve something other than a kind, loving, and impartial God. People you love are going to die and move on. You are going to die and move on, but while you are here, it is your responsibility to live your life to the fullest. To live fully means to have pain, as well. Bad things will happen to you.

  There are people who are going to try to hurt you and destroy you. But just remember that out of the rubble you will build again and live again. Life hurts and through that pain is how we grow. The tower in the end can be rebuilt. I have been asked before if I would like to go back and change the horrible things that have happened to me. I can honestly, without hesitation, answer “no.” I am the person I am because of every single thing that has happened to me during this life, and because of those things I am stronger.

  So in the end, there is not much more to say. Bless those who hated me and hurt me. Bless those who lied to me and beat me down. Bless those who deserted me and forgot about me when I needed them most. And may God’s blessing come down upon the demon that tried to destroy me completely, because in the end even the wicked need to be blessed and forgiven. BLESSED ARE THE WICKED.

  “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”

  —John 19:30

  [contents]

  Epilogue

  March 6, 2013

  I left Union, Missouri, on August 10, 2012. I think “left” is the wrong word, and “moved” just doesn’t fit what my intention actually was. I ran away from Union. I ran away from all of the pain, the heartache, and the memories that haunted me day in and day out every time I would walk down a street or pass by one of the places that played its part in that whole old nightmare. I ran away from my family and my friends. I needed to decompress. I needed to learn how to live once again, without having to look around every corner or being afraid to enter every dark room.

  I can remember the sense of relief I felt as I drove away from the Union city limits. I felt free for the first time in years. Free to once again feel my life was on some sort of normal track. Maybe I cannot find the right words to explain those feelings, but they were there and they were real. The first time I had really allowed myself to feel in a long, long time. I had a tear in my eye as I saw I was finally leaving it all behind me. The wicked hold it had on me was finally letting go, and I was free.

  I drove 15 hours straight to get to my new home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I drove as fast as I could. Almost as if some unseen hand was going to come up from somewhere and rip me back. I ran. I ran as fast as I could. I did not give myself time to think about what I was doing. I was leaving behind two of my grown children, my mother and father, and my grandchildren. Don’t you see it was something I had to do? The other option was to stay there and die. The place was killing me. That I knew. I knew if I stayed there it was going to get the best of me, so I went as far east as I could. I did not stop until I made it to the water.

  For six months I stayed there at the beach. And every day when I woke up, I felt a sense of security I had lost a long time ago. I was healing. I was putting it all behind me, and I was beginning to heal the wounds, which by staying in Union had just ripped further and deeper into my soul. I was becoming whole again, and as I began to feel again, I understood I had made a serious mistake by running so far. With healing comes understanding. I understood I had left every single person I loved behind.

  The day before Thanksgiving, I was in my kitchen getting things ready for the next day’s feast, when a knock came on the door. The FedEx man was there, handing me a package when I opened the door. I was taken aback a little by its arrival, because I had not expected anything. I opened it and saw it was mail sent to me by my publisher, Llewellyn. They had received this and had sent it on to me. It was a 156-page book, and on the cover it said, The Roman Catholic Church: An Analysis of the Steven LaChance Haunting. It was written by a demonologist for the church. I took it out onto my patio, in the sun where I felt safe, and for the rest of the day I read.

  It started off with an explanation of the choirs of angels who fell with Lucifer. It explained about the cherubim. All the things that I had uncovered myself or suspected were finally being explained to me by someone else. The strangest part was that a lot of the information in it were things that this priest could not have possibly known. These were things I had not shared with anyone publicly until I had written this book. This book was already written and was in the process of being edited at that point.

  This priest knew so many things about myself and my life that he could not have possibly known. I had always thought the haunting had started with my ex-wife, but I was never quite sure exactly how they were connected. He explained to me that the haunting had started before my first child was born. He knew my ex-wife had been doing something she should not have done. I had always suspected this. He talked about her emotional demeanor when she had thrown Michael to the ground so many years ago. I had always told people that she was not the same person I had married. I knew there was something wrong with her, but I could never put it into words. The priest made it crystal clear. She was possessed at the moment she did something no mother would ever do. I sat there reading, and at times I was crying because he was right. How could I have been so stupid? I knew all of this and yet I needed this complete stranger to come along and make sense of
it for me. Had it been one of my cases, I would have picked it out right away. Why did I not see it for myself ?

  I continued reading as he went step by step and point by point, explaining to me things that in my heart I knew to be true. My haunting started with her. My haunting began way before she left me, and I had not seen the clues about where we were headed. The priest named a major demon in his report, Belial, whom the church believed was very much part of this haunting and the possessions.

  According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, “Belial is a term occurring in the Hebrew Bible which later became personified as a demon in Jewish and Christian texts.” In one of the Scrolls, Belial is the leader of the Sons of Darkness:

  “But for corruption thou hast made Belial, an angel of hostility. All his dominions are in darkness, and his purpose is to bring about wickedness and guilt. All the spirits that are associated with him are but angels of destruction.” —The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness

  What does this mean? The easiest way I can explain it to you is that Belial is one of Satan’s commanders in the war against God, or anything holy, for that matter. He falls at the top of the hierarchy of the fallen, at the right hand of Lucifer. A cold chill ran through my body. I shut the report for a moment and walked away to clear my head. That was the first time I heard the name, and this will be the last time I ever speak or write about it again.

  I thought back to a dream I had a few years ago. Those of you who had read my book Crazy might remember this dream, from the last section of the book. I told very few people that this was actually my nightmare. Here it is again, because it is very important to my case and my life.

  I was in an old farmhouse. The floors were wood and I could hear them creak and moan beneath my feet.

  I was following my grandmother. We were moving almost as if in slow motion, and she would turn occasionally, motioning and whispering to me, “Follow me, child.”

  The house was very old. There were no modern amenities that I could see as we passed from room to room. It must have been rather large because it seemed to take us forever to reach the back door. My grandmother stepped outside, saying, “Follow me, child.”

  The land outside was flat and dry. There was a windmill in the distance. Nothing fancy, just one of those scaffolding types made from wood. There were storm clouds bubbling up in the distance and the wind was blowing.

  Somehow I had lost sight of my grandmother and I started to panic, thinking that I had lost her. I looked around, not seeing her until I heard her voice.

  “Over here, child.”

  There she was, sitting in a rocking chair with her back to me. Relieved, I went over to where she was sitting.

  “Kneel down here, boy,” she said, motioning for me to kneel next to her chair. Of course I did as she asked. We sat there with her rocking; the clouds were bubbling up closer and closer over our heads. We said nothing. We sat there quietly. The wind blowing. Quietly.

  Then she spoke, “Listen to me carefully. It is in the bloodline.” Instantly my grandmother cracked into several ravens, which began to fly into the angry clouds above.

  I thought about this dream as I read something the priest had included in the report. He spoke about the possibility of generational things being at play with the haunting as well. Oftentimes, priests’ families will be plagued with demonic activity. The activity is actually an attack against the priest—by causing harm and distress to his family. My family are descendants of the Order of St. Michael. This is a French order of knighthood that was granted to nobility. It was named after St. Michael, the archangel who led the armies of angels against Satan and the fallen, defeating them. Billions of angels fell from the heavens at St. Michael’s hands. It makes sense when you put Belial in the context of the haunting, and relate that to the historical significance of St. Michael and his “relation” to my family. I think about my grandmother’s words, and I now fully understand what she meant when she said, “Listen to me carefully. It is in the bloodline.”

  The report continued, and for many reasons, I am not going to tell you everything included in it. One of the major reasons is that it dealt with very personal details of the case that were not only mine, but also everyone else’s who had been affected by the haunting. The report concluded with a final finding, which was that the Roman Catholic Church found that the haunting was a classic case of demonic infestation, oppression, obsession, and possession. In the end, that is all that really matters.

  I closed that report with a greater understanding of the haunting that changed my life. It had answered the questions I had spent years trying to find answers for. What struck me even more was that I had the answers the whole time. I may not have had a specific name or religious understanding, I just needed to trust my own heart and my own thoughts, because the answers were there right in front of me. Maybe it was because some of it was so hard for me to handle, or I was not ready to admit understanding, so I had blocked it out or did not want to really accept the truth. In fact, I felt, after reading the report, that I might have been performing this strange masquerade for a truth I really did not want to know. Whether I accept it now or not, it is what it is. I can no longer run from it under the guise of seeking it. A strange contradiction in thought, but at the same time I can see it was the way I protected myself from it and the truth.

  When I finished reading that day, I could feel the final steps of healing and understanding had begun. With each passing day afterward, I became more and more homesick for my family and my friends. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be back with those who mattered most to me. This was not home. This was a self-inflicted sanctuary that I no longer needed, and with that understanding all events and circumstance began to pull me back to where I belonged. Back to home.

  On December 7, 2012, I packed up and headed back home—home to where I grew up. This was my childhood home in Washington, Missouri. I drove straight through the night, and I could not get there fast enough. I arrived early the next morning at my father’s and mother’s house once more. The last time I had stayed there was when we had first fled the Union house. Now I found myself there by choice. I felt safe and protected. Later that morning, my granddaughter Caroline came through the front door. She had no idea I was there, and when she saw me, she ran to me and put her arms around my neck with the biggest hug. When she pulled back, I saw tears in her eyes. “Papa, never go away again,” she said to me, and then hugged me once more.

  “I won’t, baby. I won’t,” was all I could say.

  Those days are behind me now. I found a place to live in the town of Washington. This was my homecoming. Things fell into place quickly, and before I knew it, life was back to a normal pace. The beach seemed like a long time ago, and I could not imagine what I was thinking when I moved there. I moved halfway across the country to end up coming home again, but I guess that is part of the learning journey, isn’t it?

  I settled into my new home and started my journey once more, only to receive some disturbing news shortly afterward. The phone rang. I could hear Bill on the other end of the line. He sounded worried and not like himself at all. “Steven, it’s Tom. He is in the hospital. He had some sort of stroke last night. He has not awakened yet. Steven, it is serious.” I listened quietly. How could he be talking about Tom? I was getting ready to spend time with him very soon. As a matter of fact, I needed to tell him I saw one of his ghost pictures in a movie I had watched a few nights before. He couldn’t be talking about Tom?

  Unfortunately he was. Tom Halstead died at 7:10 a.m. on Valentine’s Day. Phil and Ivana Booth were there, holding his hands as he passed, with his family. It took our breath away. For days, all of us walked around feeling like we could not breathe. We walked around with this tremendous sadness, which would not go away. All of the things that had separated all of us, years ago, seemed so insignificant. We were a family once again and we had been so distant from each other for w
ay too long. Within the shadow of death, we came together again. We came together to remember, and we came together to grieve.

  On a snow-covered Sunday afternoon we once again gathered at Zombie Road. We gathered to say our final goodbyes to Tom, who had meant so much to each and every one of us. We stood there on the clearest blue day, in the snow. We shared thoughts of Tom and we prayed together. James played “Amazing Grace” on his bagpipes, which Tom loved to listen to so much. A wreath was put on the edge of the Meramec River. The last thing we did was release balloons. As we watched the balloons sail into the sky, there was a moment that I will never forget. The balloons formed into a perfect heart in the sky. At that moment, you could feel a sense of peace. I have no other words for it. It was a moment that literally took our breath away, and I have to tell you it felt like Tom was with us for that singular moment, and he was happy. We stood there in the snow and that was the instant we said goodbye to Tom.

  Together.

  December 10, 2013

  Helen is dead. There is no other way to say it other than just to spit it out. The words seems strange to me now, even as I write them. She died on an ice-covered, snowy Friday—just a few days ago. She went out to clean the ice and snow from her car and when she returned inside, she collapsed from a major heart attack and was gone in an instant.

  Gone in an instant? What the fuck does that mean? After all we had been through. After all we had survived, she goes out outside to take care of the most mundane of tasks—and dies? It just doesn’t make sense. She was stronger than that. She wasn’t supposed to die on me. She was not supposed to die alone. I should have been there. I should have been there to hold her hand. She was like a big sister to me and, in many ways, she had replaced my own sister who had died. Out of all the nightmares and craziness, I was given back something I had lost. Helen was the only one who really understood and knew what we went through during the haunting. I feel so alone. I want to get mad and I want to scream, “This is not fair!” She was only 66 years old. We should have had plenty of time left. Instead, I am left here alone with “gone in an instant.”