I Want To Be Haunted

The Evil Series Part 4: Demons

NOTE: This is Part 4 of my 5-part Evil Series. You can read them in any order. The first three are about cult leaders, vampires, and machines. If you like this kind of writing, I’d love to have your support via a paid subscription so I can continue creating these kinds of letters.

“Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.”

― Remy de Gourmont

I can still see the shape of him if I close my eyes.

The demon that tormented me didn’t have a face. He had a panting blankness, like the silhouette of a person burned away. He existed in the in-between space, between Earth and hell, in a sunken world. He stood at the foot of my bed. He stood behind me every time I walked up the stairs or went down a long corridor. No matter how much I prayed, he wouldn't go away. In fact, this made him seem to grow even stronger. He fed on the attention.

For years he wouldn’t let me sleep.

Once when I was a child, my parents had some friends over. They sat around the dinner table together and spoke about how they’d had to exorcize a demon from their home. They talked about having multiple pastors come over and pray, remove all demon-haunted books and media, and every other temptation.

They spoke with grave seriousness and fear, voices husky with anxiety, like people who’d been touched by a serious illness and barely survived.

Children have a natural fear of monsters. They understand what adults often don’t: that the dark harbors an infinite number of terrors and that space away from the light is dangerous territory.

Children under the age of five have some trouble distinguishing dreams from reality. I had a troubled childhood, and it manifested in the gray wasteland of my nightmares. I can remember once finding a deformed doll in my bed, and I spent days looking for it. It's still difficult to classify that memory as a dream because it felt so real.

When the sun dipped low, my dreams bled into my bed. Demons and monsters danced in the warm haze of my mind.

Adults had been telling me my entire life that the monsters underneath my bed weren’t real. I was imagining it. I didn’t need to be afraid.

But these adults believed monsters were real. They confirmed my worst fears. They’d revealed the truth everyone else had tried to hide from me. I could be destroyed by a force without respect for walls or boundaries. A force that wanted to do nothing but hurt me. Hurt me in any way it could, if not with fangs and blood, then with the dissolution of my will, my trust, my ability to reason, or get a good night’s sleep.

I became obsessed with the idea of demons. It took me years to be able to sleep well again. For years no matter how much I tried to tell myself that a demon wasn’t following me, I still felt his presence every time I closed his eyes.

I’d explore forums on demonology. I’d read accounts of people who were possessed by demons. I became obsessed with movies about demons. Every time I indulged in this habit, my sleep would worsen, and I’d be assaulted with fresh nightmares.

It was like picking at a wound. I couldn’t stop. I wanted to pry open my sight to every fresh horror. I wanted to know what could stalk me in the dark. I wanted to know every way in which I could be destroyed.

I grew out of the fear of demons in my adolescence. The visceral realness of my nightmares started to recede. But when I met my first boyfriend, I called him my demon. I was once again unable to sleep, beset with the flush warm anxiety of love instead of terror. When we sat in the back of his car at the end of an empty street, I’d wrap myself around him, sweating, heart like a trapped animal. My demon. My demon. It felt like a new way to become corrupted.

And years later, when I met my girlfriend, I also called her a demon. Before we got together, I created a Tumblr and dedicated it to her. I’d write her sick little love stories in which she hid inside the walls of my house and poisoned my drinks and ate my skin.

When we got our first apartment and moved in together, for the first time, I invited a demon back into my life. (You can read more about that in another letter I wrote, The Dangers of Summoning Demons.)

This is the first time I’ve admitted to recycling the demon theme in two different relationships.

Maybe it’s also time to admit that I love the idea of being haunted.

I had a book as a child that contained a print of Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare.” I would often pull the book off the shelf to stare at it. I’d never seen a painting that so accurately captured what it felt like to be paralyzed in terror. The woman is caught in a twisted, regal paroxysm as the incubus sits on her chest and stares right at the viewer. Whether we are seeing the woman's dream, or reality, we don't know. The painting offers no easy answers, and Fuseli has never given us an explanation. We are stuck in the terror of unknowing alongside the woman in the painting. And whether or not the demons in the painting are “real,” we recognize them as true agents of fear.

I've spent most of my life trying to convince myself that demons aren’t real. I told myself they're just products of our imagination or tools of a religious ruling class used to try to control us. A thing that looks over our shoulder to make sure we don’t step out of line, that we take ordained paths lest we fall forever.

But even when I didn't believe in demons, they came when I called them. They were eager to infiltrate my mind and take my attention. The demon that haunted me as a child wasn't “real.” it never manifested itself outside of my imagination. But it still tormented me and caused me years of terror and nightmares and sleepless nights. The second demon I summoned came with sleep paralysis and waking nightmares, hallucinations that existed between dreams.

So who am I to say they aren’t real?

Demons, like vampires, have existed in some iteration in almost every culture. A demon is what comes into being when we give our nightmares a shape. And although accounts of people being able to levitate and chant dead languages are most likely fake (Although I'm not entirely ruling out their possibility), I think there's probably some truth to the idea of demonic possession. A demon is just a cognitive process that's been anthropomorphized, given a forked tongue and a sharp tail and red skin so that we can name and understand it.

Have you ever had a thought that you can't get out of your head, even though you know it's bad for you? Have you ever seen something so profoundly disturbing that you replay it in your mind, over and over again, until the memory of it becomes lodged permanently inside you? Have you ever had an idea you can't seem to escape from, a word, a phrase, or a subject that pops up repeatedly, a vicious pattern, no matter where you look?

You're probably possessed by a demon right now. And not just one, but hundreds. If not thousands. We all are.

Sometimes, demons don't announce themselves as eagerly as mine did. They infiltrate your mind, slip inside your thoughts, and then develop behavior patterns as infectious as a virus. My parents' aforementioned friends were sort of right to remove things with “demonic influences” from their homes, but demons can come from anything, really. A demon is an idea that becomes a thought that translates into an action that causes us harm.

You can pick up a demon from an aesthetic thinspo Instagram account that convinces you an eating disorder would solve your feelings of ugliness inside. You can pick up a demon from an old book of philosophy that convinces you that life is meaningless and plunges you into despair. You can pick up a demon from your friends who convince you to make a BORG drink with a bottle of Vodka, some water, and caffeine packets, only for you to end up in the hospital that night. You can pick up a demon from the “gender discourse” on Twitter and become convinced you'll never find love.

You could even get demons by reading a Bible verse in a way that makes you feel vindicated to take harmful action (As many famous people have done throughout history), or from a youth group pastor who twists the words of his religion to feed his narcissistic desire for power. There is no shorthand to protect yourself, no easy shield. A demon is not like a vampire that can be repelled with garlic and sunlight. Demons are everywhere, and once they come, they can be difficult to get rid of.

So how do you recognize a demon? The Bible has a good way to do this. Matthew 7:15-20 states:

15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

We know something is good or bad by the results it produces. No matter how noble or beautiful something may appear, if it causes harm, it is bad. It's a simple formula, but we can often be misled by intentions. We can become confused by the twisted path that brought us to disaster. Sometimes, we even convince ourselves that we like the pain of evil things, so conditioned are we to expect them, so full and fearful is our self-hatred. Even as we're falling apart. Even as we're killing ourselves at the behest of an idea that wants us dead.

By their fruits, you will know them.

That is the demon's weakness. It whispers honeyed promises. It can appear gilded and magnificent, like a dark-winged friend, something to soothe you on lonely nights and inoculate you against pain. But the demon's true nature is always revealed by the results.

So once you've identified a demon, how do you get rid of it? When I prayed to get rid of my demon, it only made it stronger. If I tried not to think of it, it only made me want to think about it more. But that's because I didn't know I was dealing with an idea, and fixation on an idea only feeds it.

As I grew older, I just naturally replaced the demon with better and more interesting ideas. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote:

The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.

You don't need an exorcism, holy water, Bibles, fire, terror, or whisper-screams of haunted agony. You can just find something more interesting to think about and let your demons go. They didn't serve their purpose, and now it's time to give them up.

Tell me in the comments below: What kind of demons have you dealt with? And if you got rid of them, how did you do that?

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The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.