Exorcism, spirits, and the people “from the stars.”

I. “An Apparently Demon-Influenced Teen”

There’s a strange reference to be found in an article about the now-former pastor of a large mega-church in South Florida, Hayes Wicker:

I don’t know anything about the church member with the gun, but I know Hayes Wicker. I also know the “apparently demon-influenced teen.” I actually knew that guy quite well, and was present, along with Wicker and several other people, at his exorcism.

The night it happened, it was five men and one woman against a severely out-of-shape, overweight teenager screaming profanities in a blood-curdling voice. One of the men there was Hayes Wicker. Another was the youth pastor of the church, a guy named Doug. There was another teenager there, and a fourth man whose name I can never quite remember. The fifth man’s name was Cliff I think, and he had the body of a former linebacker—about six and half feet (2 meters) tall and roughly 275 lbs (125 kilo).

They were all pinning that “apparently demon-influenced teenager” down on the ground. The big guy had his knees pressed into the demoniac’s chest. With a shocking amount of strength, the kid on the ground threw that man off him really hard. The other men then held his feet and hands to the ground while the youth pastor’s wife read scripture at him like it was a spell book.

This all went on for about 20 minutes. The pastor spoke to the demons, demanding their names, compelling them in the name of the Holy Spirit to leave their host. The possessed youth’s voice kept changing as each demon revealed itself and appeared to flee from his body.

All but the last one, anyway. It wouldn’t reveal its name or what kind of spirit it was. Though it eventually fell silent, I don’t think any of us were certain it had truly left.

II. What Happened to Diana

I’ve written quite often about Diana lately, and perhaps that’s why I suddenly found myself thinking of another Diana, a friend—or former friend—whose story two decades later still haunts me.

That particular Diana was a completely knock-out of a woman. Neither “beautiful” nor “gorgeous” go far enough to describe her beauty. “Shocking” and also “breathtaking” get a little closer to the truth, but even still that’s all insufficient. For even a man without the slightest erotic interest in the female sex, Diana’s beauty was startling to behold.

To some, it’s considered a bit misogynistic to describe a woman first by her looks. That’s hardly my intention, though, but rather to give you a sense of the power and presence she had on those around her. Undoubtedly, she likewise saw her affect, the way others around her became a bit slackjawed and mute when they had her attention.

She was hardly arrogant about this. Actually, she was a deeply warm and authentic person, never caring for the sorts of influence games she most easily could have won in any social circle she entered. Diana was also deeply intelligent with a sharp wit. She’d read well and widely, and though her specific education was in fashion design she could just as easily discuss classical music, continental philosophy, economic theory, and obscure film critique as she could anything else.

I adored being around Diana. We’d meet for coffee often, though it was very rare we’d be alone. Others were often there, seeing her through the window from the street and dropping whatever else they’d planned to do in order to talk to her. When more joined us, I’d watch her become instantly expansive. It was impossible to become jealous for her attention, because she never seemed to divide it but rather multiply it with each new person.

She was truly a lovely person, a fact which made what came after that much more horrid.

As the months of our friendships grew, I started to notice something very…well, odd. We’d be talking, laughing or deeply engaged in some intellectual theory, and she’d suddenly say something very, very cruel. The first time it happened, I couldn’t believe those words had come out of her mouth.

“Why’d you say that?” I asked, feeling quite hurt.

“Say what?” she replied, a response I soon learned to expect from her much more often.

I repeated what she’d said, and she stared back at me blankly. “I didn’t say that,” she replied, and then added, “you must have misheard me.”

Because she was as warm as ever, because nothing had changed in her voice or her presence, I let the matter drop. The rest of the conversation was quite pleasant, very much like all others had been, so I did what I could to put that strange cruelty out of mind.

We’d hung out quite a few times after that event, and she’d been those times the same charming, effervescent, and brilliant woman I’d so adored. So, when she said something even more cruel a few week later, I was really disturbed. I wasn’t really angry at what she said, but I got quite frustrated with her when she again denied she’d said anything mean. She even seemed to turn it back on me a bit, suggesting that I’d willfully misheard her.

You’ll perhaps then understand why I didn’t return her phone calls for a few days, and why the next time I saw her at a cafe I decided to keep walking by. She waved, though, and smiled, and so I stopped in. That afternoon’s conversation reminded me again why I adored her so, and so I let drop my earlier grievance…until it happened again.

This time there were several people around, and they all acted as if she’d said nothing strange. I didn’t confront her about it, because by the time I’d really understood her words and then noticed no one else had reacted, everyone was laughing about something else.

I decided to stop seeing her. I liked her a lot, but the sudden insults and her subsequent refusal to apologize really felt awful. Worse, I felt a little crazy after that conversation. No one else had reacted to her words, so I worried maybe I wasn’t mentally well myself. My mother has a severe form of schizophrenia, and at that time I was quite afraid of becoming schizophrenic as well. Perhaps I’d heard something that wasn’t really there.

A few weeks later, I ran into a mutual friend of ours. She asked me if I was still hanging out with Diana, and I told her no. “What about you?” I asked her.

“No. She said some really mean stuff to me, denied she said it, and wouldn’t apologize.”

Hearing her say this was a deep relief but also a deep sadness. I wasn’t going crazy, then. Diana was being cruel to others, too. But that’d didn’t make things any better.

Other mutual friends attested to the same thing. We’d all noticed Diana would suddenly blurt out horrible insults, and then act as if she’d said nothing strange at all. Stranger still was how we’d all just wondered if we’d been going crazy, if we’d not actually heard what we thought we heard.

“It’s like she’s possessed,” someone had said. “Like, something comes over her that she doesn’t even notice, and then it’s gone.”

That felt true, but also not true. I’d personally witnessed a possession and exorcism. Something certainly seemed like it was inside her, but it didn’t feel like a demon to me.

III. The Man From The Stars

One of my favorite ancestors is my great-aunt Connie. She was the sister of my father’s mother, and despite coming from a family of severe addiction and other problems, she was a deeply cosmopolitan, wise, and very calm woman.

She died a few years back. I knew she’d died before I got the text from my sister. I don’t really know how to describe that feeling, but it was like a strange shift in my consciousness where all the recollections of her in my head suddenly became memories. When I think of it now, it felt like the sense of a pencil drawing being inked: everything that was tentative about her became permanent.

She had some land. I don’t know how that came about precisely, but in that area of Appalachia it wasn’t so strange for even very poor people to have a little land. For instance, my grandmother—her sister—had several score acres on a beautiful hill behind the trailer where she lived. The land wasn’t worth selling, nor could it really be developed, so it just stayed as it was.

On one of the pieces of land Connie held, there was an old native burial mound. Shawnee burial mounds were everywhere in that area, and the closest town to where we lived was named after one of their larger tribes, the Chalagawtha (Chillicothe). The government made very little effort to preserve these ancient sites, with the exception of the most famous of them (Serpent Mound, Mound City): many other mounds had been plowed down, or were ripped up for factories and other industry.

Connie had preserved the mound on her land, and she’d had a small park created near it as a rest area for passing motorists. I’m really not sure why this had all come about, or what specifically her logic had been. I have suspicions about her motives, motives she herself may never have acknowledged. If there are ancestral magical threads that pass down through blood, she’s a pretty clear candidate for a witch-by-blood, though she’d never have admitted such a thing.

I remember visiting that mound only once. It was such a strange place, and while it’s really improper for an eight year old child to play on millenia-old ritual graves, I ran up and down that hill with an intense amount of childlike joy. I remember rolling down it, then climbing up to the top to roll down again. It was early autumn, and I napped atop it with the sun’s warmth cradling me to sleep.

That night is when the dreams started.

We lived in an old rotting A-frame house built upon a clay pit. Its concrete septic tank over-flowed often, creating an awful reek but feeding some really gorgeous flowers. Across from our house were several large forested hills, and I’d play in the muddy front yard and stare into them. At night, I’d sneak out of the house and stare up at the stars, talking to them.

I’d woken that particular night to a light coming through my window. My bedroom was an unheated, dusty room floored only with particle board. My bed was a broken and stained couch along one wall, while the rest of the room was furnished by cardboard boxes and a carpenter’s metal swivel stool. I got out of the bed, crept past the boxes to the window, and stared out in awe.

There was a spaceship there. When I try to recall exactly what it looked like, its form changes. Sometimes it looks like one of the Apollo lunar crafts, but at other times it looks completely unlike a spaceship altogether. In fact, I was only certain that it was from space because there was a man standing outside it, dressed in something like an astronaut’s suit, beckoning for me to come to him.

I did, and he brought me inside. It wasn’t a spaceship on the inside, though, and he wasn’t wearing space clothes any longer. Instead, it was a stone room with a small slotted window through which I could see the stars and a strange land in the distance. I remember violet and blue in that land, and really tall buildings that were something like castles but not at all.

“I cannot go home yet,” he told me, and he pointed to a very large book on the table.

He didn’t actually tell me I needed to help him fix his spaceship. In fact, he never told me it was broken, and I’m sure that’s not at all what was happening. But I was eight, and I assumed that’s why he pointed to the book. I assumed he needed some help, needed me to read the book so I could repair his ship.

So, I started reading, and then I got really tired. “You can read more tomorrow night,” he told me, and so I went back to the house and back to sleep. The next day, all I could think about was waiting for the night so I could have the dream again, see the man from the stars, and read more of the book so I could help him.

I had the same dream every night for at least a week. Each time, I’d see him through my window, waiting outside his ship for me. The spaceship looked different each time, but the room inside was always the same. He rarely spoke, but he smiled a lot and I knew I was making him happy by reading the book.

The last night of those dreams, I finished the book and closed it, excited to tell him what I’d learned. In horror, though, I realised that everything I’d just read disappeared from my mind the moment I closed it. I started crying, telling him I couldn’t remember it anymore.

“You will later,” he said, and smiled. “And now I can go back to the stars.”

IV. Spiritus Sanctus, Spiritus Immundi

There’s a lot that can be learned about the folk magical practices of Rome during the life of Jesus by merely reading the Acts of the Apostles and the gospels. Besides the worship of Diana in Ephesus, we read of slave girls pronouncing oracles, renowned sorcerors accumulating massive crowds rivaling those of the apostles, and even rival exorcists casting out “unclean spirits” without the help of the Holy Spirit.

Exorcisms occur very frequently, performed both by Jesus and his appointed emmissaries (one of the original meanings of the Greek word that became “Apostle”). Most known of these examples was that of the exorcism of the demoniac named Legion, who lived in a cemetary. He possessed unusual, “supernatural” strength, such that he couldn’t be bound even with chains. According to those writing decades after the event is said to have occurred, the unclean spirits (spiritus immundi in Latin) felt threatened by Jesus’s presence and begged him to be cast into swine. Jesus agrees, and the entire herd of two thousand pigs are driven mad, rushing into the sea to drown.

Besides miraculous healings, exorcisms are the most common miracle attributed not just to Jesus but to all the early Christians. What may not be immediately apparent to our modern mind, however, is that exorcisms were a primary magical act throughout Greek, Roman, and Semitic folk practioners.

In fact, it’s even broader than this: the command, communication with, and occasional banishment of spirits has been a primary feature of religion since as far back through time as we can reasonably reach. All three monotheisms continue to practice exorcism rites to deal with demons (Christianity), dybbuk (Judaism), and marid or jinn (Islam). Taoism and other ancient Chinese folk religions, Shinto, Buddhism, and Hinduism likewise have rites to expel malign spirits (usually thought of as ghosts or restless dead), and the various rites to cajole or coerce spirits back into their proper place are major features in most African religious traditions.

With such prevalence of exorcisms, it might perhaps seem strange that exorcisms are depicted at all as miraculous in the New Testament. Indeed, there are quite a few references to non-Christians doing the exact same thing within those same scriptures. However, this is more our modern lack of context: what Jesus and his emmissaries were purported to do was to exorcise unclean spirits by force of will alone.

This detail gets both Jesus and his followers in trouble, actually. Because they command demons to leave by “authority,” rather than any of the prescribed rites, religious leaders and rival sorcerers begin to suspect them to be aligned with the malevolent spirits themselves. In response, Jesus and the cult which sprung up around him then claimed their authority was through the “spirit of god” or the spiritus sanctus, that is: the Holy Spirit.

It’s a rarely noticed point that, in Christianity, the doctrine of the trinity was a politically-motivated compromise triggered by competing beliefs about the holy spirit. The context here is again mostly lost to us in the modern age because it’s perhaps even harder for us to conceive of a world full of spirits than a world full of gods.

Spirits were seen as really-existing beings, “breaths” (pneuma) that could inhabit or overtake a human. Such beings could be willingly invited or inadvertantly allowed in, depending on the species. The “unclean” spirits targeted by exorcism were of that latter sort, latching on to humans due to their lack of “purity.” States of impurity could come through failing to purify yourself after certain “unclean” acts (the Greek idea of miasma) or, specifically for the Jews and Christians, living in a state of unatoned sin.

Other spirits, including holy or sacred spirits, could also come upon a human. In fact, these were the spirits most often associated with the gods: thus, an unruly lot running about saying they were inhabited by—or acting in the name of—a holy spirit wasn’t really all that strange a matter. Of course, the specific spiritus sanctum by whose authority they claimed to act was the one imparted on Jesus by an Essene cultist, John the Baptist. That spirit was claimed to be spirit of the Jewish god, the “one-god.”

The mystery (in the old sense of the word, meaning more “esoteric truth” rather than something confounding or unknown) of the trinity, then, arose to explain how that spirit of the one-god could also be the god itself, as well as the annointed (the meaning of the Greek word “Christ”) human who also claimed to be the god. The problem was that spirits were seen as completely independent beings, even if they emanated (or proceeded from, as the Catholic have it) from another being. In other word: breath is independent from the person who breathed it, so how could the breath and the breather be the same?

This problem was compounded by the many accounts in the Acts of the Apostles of believers who’d not yet “received” the holy spirit, as well as those who were performing miracles (including exorcisms) without the spiritus sanctus. Even more troublesome for Paul (who, again, had never met Jesus and was often in competition with Peter for dominance over the new cult) was that there were people who’d received the holy spirit but were acting in ways completely contrary to his vision of the new Church.

That later compromise (or mystery) served an extra purpose, elevating the specific sacred spirits of the Christians out of the realm of other spirits and making it a singular spirit. Already, the early Church had created new hierarchies of the spirit realm, retooling the Jewish belief in angels—fallen or otherwise—into a cosmology in which all other gods and spirits were renarrated not as rival beings to the one-god, but rather unclean and malevolent beings created by him.

Thus, there was now only one benevolent spirit, just as there was now only one benevolent god. All others were evil, to be avoided and cast out whenever seen.

V. The Spirit From The Forests

One night, I guess 22 years ago, I was drugged by a friend of a friend. Then, he raped me. The whole thing was a really awful experience. It felt like my consciousness was underwater somehow, as if I were staring at the world from the bottom of a swimming pool. My mind and soul screamed for it all to stop, but I couldn’t compel my throat and lips to form anything more than a barely-voiced “no…please, no.”

The strangest thing for me during that experience was that I remembered the feeling. That rape wasn’t the first time I’d felt myself drowning and my soul imprisoned while people did things to me against my will. That earlier time felt like a rape, too.

That “apparently demon-influenced teen” cited in the article at the beginning?

That was me.

I honestly don’t really know what happened, but I’ll tell the story as best I can. I was 15, I think, or possibly 16. Life was pretty tough at that point. My mother’s schizophrenia had gotten quite intense, so it was just me raising and providing for my two younger sisters. This meant working a lot, often starting shifts just after school let out for the day. Then, after work, I’d stay up late trying to do homework for the next day’s classes, and often fail to wake up on time in the morning.

Despite how busy I was, I also spent a lot of time at church. Without fail I was there both for Sunday morning and Sunday evening services, and always at least for Wednesday night youth group meetings as well. There were also events many Saturdays, and sometimes Tuesday evenings: if I wasn’t working those evenings, I was there for those, also.

The church I went to was a burgeoning mega-church. There were several services on Sunday mornings, because its 800-person capacity auditorium couldn’t accommodate everyone. Its new pastor, Hayes Wicker, had radically changed the way it was run, growing its popularity and increasing its influence not just in its small city, but also throughout the state and the country. Suddenly, there were politicians, business leaders, and famous sports figures appearing in the pews, while the youth and other outreach programs exploded in size.

I genuinely liked the new pastor. I liked all the new programs, and was especially thrilled that there were so many new events. Also, because I was both really devout and also really smart, I was invited very often to lead prayers and even some bible study lessons.

A few days before that exorcism, I’d gone on a youth group camping trip. I think it was to one of the Carolinas or somewhere similar, definitely in part of the Appalachian Mountains. I remember whitewater rafting, and also some guided group “team-building” activities.

What I remember most about that trip was a sense that I was being watched by something in the forests. It felt familiar, like an old friend. It was the same sense I’d had as a child, staring out into the forests across from our dilapidated house. Something—someone—was there, making sure I was okay.

That’s where this tale turns from history into mystery, because I don’t really know what happened. I have a memory that I called out to it, but I’m not sure if that really happened. I also remember being really sad about everything around me after that, oddly angry about being on a religious trip. I felt a weird protective rage about the adult leaders on that trip, like they’d all done something really horrible to me that I couldn’t quite understand.

The vans that took us on that trip brought us back to the youth annex of our church. My mother was in no shape to pick me up, so someone had agreed to bring me home. So, I waited there while all the other kids left, and then suddenly I was strangling the youth minister, slamming his head against the wall, and then wrestled to the ground by the other men.

What happened after? I really don’t trust my own memory to put a truthful account together.1 I remember speaking in strange voices, and I remember the physical struggle matched by an even greater struggle inside me. I felt as if parts of me–important, crucial, sacred parts–were being torn out of me like ligaments and tendons.

Several different voices, or personalities, or characters, or beings spoke. Each in turn was commanded “out” of me, and I felt something leave each time. Each time, that is, except for the last. It stayed and hid, or I hid it. I really, really don’t know how else to explain it.

I don’t remember how I got home that night. I remember the days after, though, and especially the probing questions from those who’d been there and others who’d heard about it. They wanted to know how the “demons” had gotten into me, what I’d read or done to invite them in. None of their questions were hostile or intrusive. In fact, many of them seemed deeply grateful to me, because my possession had renewed and strengthened their faith. They’d read about demons in the Bible, knew they must exist, but never until my exorcism had they encountered tangible proof.

Even the pastor, Hayes Wicker, was deeply curious. I’d said something during the exorcism about how demons got into children. Something about video games. I remember saying that. That was at the end, when something told me to say that. Maybe I told myself, maybe someone else did. I don’t really know.

VI. Pneuma Astheneias

There are quite a few other kinds of malevolent spirits mentioned in the New Testament, including one mention of the pneuma astheneias, a “spirit of infirmity.” Along with “spirits of affliction,” such spirits tend to be the one you hear mentioned most in modern evangelical or pentecostal prayers, as they’re the sort that cause sickness and disease. I’ve been present during several church services where these are invoked and bound, especially at Pentecostal services I attended with a close friend.

On the matter of such spirits, I saw my friend Diana a year after I’d finally decided to keep my distance. She was sitting alone at the same cafe where we’d first met. I recognised her from a distance, though she’d cut her formerly long, dark hair down to just a few inches, and she’d shaved it on one side. She’d also gotten some sort of tattoo on her scalp, or that’s what I’d thought until getting closer and realizing they were staples.

I said hello, and she replied, “they just cut a baseball-sized tumor out of my skull.”

I was pretty floored, but even more so after she told me the rest of her tale. Several months before, she’d woken from a medically-induced coma in a hospital bed with no idea how she’d gotten there. They told her she’d been in that coma for more than three months, and before that she’d been found in her apartment by a concerned neighbor. She’d been naked, covered in food, urine, and feces, and her apartment looked like a bomb site.

“I’d blacked out,” she explained. “I was still somehow doing stuff, even feeding myself, but I was babbling nonsense when they found me. I don’t remember a thing of any of this.”

She’d had the tumor for quite some time. In fact, her doctors had explained that it probably had made her act erratic—and unconscious of that strange behavior—for months before it had made her black out. In other words, each time she’d uttered something cruel and then acted as if she’d had no memory of what she’d said, she’d not been acting at all. She’d really not known she’d said those things.

“I’m moving in with my parents,” she’d told me. It wasn’t an ideal situation for her—she’d told me many times before that they were not just deeply religious, but aggressively so. They’d never approved of her moving to a city, nor studying fashion design, nor any of her cosmopolitan opinions about the world. But she’d lost her apartment, had missed too many courses at her university, and wasn’t in any condition to hold down a job.

Her decision to move back made sense, but it all felt very sad. It felt even sadder when I saw her one last time, yet another full year after that. She’d called me to let me know she was in town for a short visit, and would I please like to meet with her? I was thrilled, and invited her to dinner at my place.

She sounded a bit disturbed by this invitation. “no…let’s just meet somewhere neutral, like in a park, okay?”

The “neutral” part seemed weird, but I agreed, and then I arrived to meet her. She looked different again, even more different from when half her scalp had been flayed back to get at the tumor. Her hair was long again, her face clear of makeup. What tipped me off that she was different was her clothing, though. I’d rarely seen her looking anything less than fashionable, usually in black, and never anything not clearly from a European designer. This time, however, she wore a very long beige skirt down just to above her ankles, a fluffy white sweater covering a brown turtleneck, and the sort of tan, low-heeled shoes seen most often on elderly church ladies. It was, to say the least, a bit uncharacteristic of her.

We talked for a bit. She seemed different, aloof, distant. The burning light of her felt to have diminished. She laughed, though not with the same delight or joy as before. She spoke eloquently, but with more hesitation, as if constantly guaging her words.

And then I found out why.

“I don’t need to tell you that Jesus is coming back very, very soon,” she said abruptly.

It was a complete non sequitur—we’d just been talking about a mutual friend’s second child. I didn’t know how to reply, so I let her continue. She did, explaining all the signs and portents of Christ’s imminent return, and how she’d finally given her life to God and confessed her sins before him because of how he’d saved her from the “spirits of infirmity” that had given her that tumor.

I could only respond with silence when she then added, “It’s time for you to do the same.”

I laughed uncomfortably. “Diana—you know I’m a pagan.”

She nodded. “Yes, and a homosexual. But God can redeem you and save you from all of that. In fact, he already did when he sent his son to die on the cross for you. All you need to do is accept his sacrifice.”

VII.

I could never talk to Diana again after that, though I could also never begrudge her sudden fundamentalism. How could I, after what she’d been through?

And anyway, what’s the real difference between having a tumor and having a “spirit of infirmity?” In ancient and non-western worldviews, malevolent, unclean, or merely misplaced spirits might cause all manner of illnesses and ailments. At no point did such frameworks deny there was actually a physical problem, nor would they exclusively favor prayer and exorcism over medical intereventions. You would treat a fever or a wound both physically and with ritual, never just one or the other.

In fact, this either/or belief, this false dichotomy between spirit and body, seems to be a completely new one. Faith healers who urge people not to go to doctors aren’t primitive throwbacks to a time before scientific medicine, but rather obverse creations of the very order in which there is only such medicine.

That same modern order renarrates “apparently demon-influenced” people as mentally-ill and in need only of the correct medical treatments. Of course, no one is ever really “cured” of such ailments, only medicated to a point of placidity and passable functionality.

Before this is read as an assertion that the mentally-ill are merely demon-possessed, I’d remind you that this is a false dichotomy. My mother is quite certifiably schizophrenic, and she also talks to beings she calls demons and angels. I don’t think for a moment they’re actually demons or angels, but I also don’t think for a moment that she’s talking to nothing at all, either.

Almost a decade ago, before I left on a pilgrimage to sacred sites in Europe, I was a residential social worker for mentally-ill people in Seattle. On my last evening shift before that trip, I explained to some of the clients that I’d no longer be working with them because I was leaving for Europe.

“That’s okay,” one of our most “insane” clients said when I told him. The man was often utterly coherent, rarely ever able to form completely sentences. And yet he was smiling a broad, toothless, knowing grin. “You won’t get lost. All you have to do is stand on the steps of a cathedral, and the woman from the stars will come down to help you get where you need to go.”

The Greeks called what was in him a pneuma pythona, by the way, a “divinatory spirit.” There are Greek magical texts for summoning them, and a woman bearing such a spirit is said to have dogged Paul for several days, proclaming him a servant of “the most high god” until, annoyed, he forced it out of her.2

Again, none of the exorcisms or command over spirits which Jesus or the early Christians publicly performed were actually unusual or “miraculous” by the standards of the time. Rather, it’s the establishment of a heirarchy of such spirits that is new. That same heirarchy, in my opinion, opened the breach between humans and the natural world of spirits—this new dualism or binary between body and spirit—which now defines our world.

Thus, we have no other way of understanding encounters with spirits except either through the framework of demon possession or the materialist framework of psychology. Therefore, I was either possessed by demons, or I was mentally ill, or I was merely playing along in a psycho-drama through suggestion and manipulation.

None of those explanations work for me, especially because I still see and feel that something—or someone—is looking back at me each time I look into certain places in the forests.