Between January 13^th and 26^th, 1980, I attended a band camp. (one of many, most of which I never really enjoyed.)

During this camp, quite a few unusual events occurred.

After the camp, I took it upon myself to write it all down, lest I forget. I’m glad I did, as I had forgotten most of it. Now I’ve rewritten what happened.

This camp was help during the school holidays at a Christian boarding school in Ballarat Australia.  There were two large rooms for sleeping in, and one of them led to a landing and a stair way.

When going down the steps that lead to the showers, a then friend of mine, Shawn, claimed that he got an uneasy feeling there and he didn’t like going down there at night. Naturally, I dismissed this as just being in his mind so he dared me to go down there myself. I did, and I did feel uneasy, but considering it was dark, that was no surprise.

The staircase itself was pretty normal. Just two flights of steps winding from the boy’s dormitory down to the boy’s shower block.  As a rule, it was well lit, except for the times when the light bulb blew. It either had really bad wiring, because the light at the top half blew four times and the one at the bottom half blew once during the 2 weeks, or there was some energy play going on. There was also this abstract painting on the first landing. It was like a red angry face, and I didn’t like it.

It wasn’t very long, though before we both felt a slight pressure every time we went through the double doors that lead to the stairs. It was a pricking sensation, like walking through a field of static electricity. It was almost as if some force was pushing against you. This gradually got stronger over a matter of days. It certainly didn’t take very long for it to become noticed by several of us.

This could have been a group phenomenon brought on by suggestion and then our minds creating this. It’s certainly one explanation for what we were feeling.

Foolishly, I told a few people of my experiences of my attacks, and how I was told it was the Devil. At that time, even two years later, I still had no doubt that it was still true. As I told the story, these black beetles filled the room (there was a plaque of them, I’m sure at the time)  and fell around me. I noted that none fell around the stair way or the toilet area.

Naturally, this excited every one, and someone suggested that we have a séance as there was a memorial in our room to someone called ‘Robert Rice’ and it was suspected that it might be connected. I never felt it was, personally. Just before the séance was to occur, the top light blew for the first time. They made a ouija board  out of paper and they put the letters in order in a circular format. They used a plastic cup as a pointer. Five people sat in a circle around the board and put a finger on the cup. They claimed they were just letting them hover over the cup, but I have my doubts about that, as one of them as a trouble maker called Norman and he was there for the lark.

The first question they asked was ‘Are you Robert Rice?’ The cup appeared to jump slightly and moved towards the ‘yes’ sign, but before they could continue, I felt the tingling pressure come over me. The sensation was the strongest it had been, and I wasn’t the only one who felt it. Norman suddenly shouted ‘Bullshit!’ and scrambled the ouija board and fled up the stairs. That led to all but three of us running up the stairs in a mad panic. Shawn and his friend Terry, were the other only two left standing with me. I stayed because I felt terror would have got the better of me if I had fled  with them. Shawn confirmed that he had felt what I had felt.

The experience was real enough for one of the boys named David to get this large down at the bottom of the stairs. This I had no knowledge of at the time, and when I went through the doors, I felt the stairway felt clear. I took a look and saw the cross. I called the Shawn and asked him to come and see what he could feel. When he joined me, he asked how come there was nothing there? I showed him the crucifix.

It didn’t take very long, however, for one of the brothers who were living at the college to find the cross, remove it, and complain to our band masters, who in turn said: ‘Come on! You have got to be kidding!’ I didn’t know it had been removed at the time, however, and when I went to the showers, I once again felt the energy. I was puzzled as to why, until I saw that the cross had been removed. Now the presence appeared to be angry. Such as the sensation I was getting and it was at it’s strongest. Then, abruptly, it disappeared and was gone the next morning.

Shawn and I were on the stair case that morning. Foolishly messing around with things we had no clue about. I looked at the painting of the face, and decided I really didn’t like it at all. I went and turned it over. I’m not sure why I thought that would actually make a difference, but Shawn decided that it needed to be turned around the correct way. I asked him why had he turned it back over. Did he liked it or something? He said, no, it just needed to be up the right way. He had to put it like that. I once again went to turn it over but he held me back so I left it. Who knows, maybe I should have just removed it when he wasn’t looking.

Between band practices, Shawn became more and more drawn to the stairs. He would ask me to come along. At one point, I said, I wasn’t going to come along. I wasn’t sure what was really going on, but part of me was now say: enough. Shawn said he felt he had to go there, and I asked if he could resist the urge, but he couldn’t or didn’t want to and went through.

I must admit, I, too, felt something drawing me there. I had gone to take a break, and I was the only one in the dorm, when the urge suddenly came over me. I didn’t resist very hard. I was too fascinated with the whole thing, wondering just how far it might go, and if any tangible proof would manifest itself, given me a story worth telling. Of course, those thoughts weren’t clear in my mind at the time. All I knew was that I didn’t really wish to resist the call.

I got up from the bed, and slowly, almost like I was in a trance like state, made my way towards the doors. I was about to go through them, when someone walked in from the other side and broke the spell I was under. I turned away, and went back to my bed. Five minutes later, Shawn walked in and asked if I wanted to go down the stairs with him. I was still amiable to the idea, and I agreed. We went down to the first landing and stopped. I suddenly felt more uneasy, and decided to leave. Shawn said, no, stay here. I said, you can, but I’m going. And I did. As I walked back out, I heard a voice in my mind say “Now I’ve got rid of you, now for Shawn.’

It was at the moment that Shawn claimed he suddenly felt weak in the legs and that he nearly passed out.  He did not look good when he came back through the door. We kept on getting the urge to return there, so I decided to just leave the dorm.

Later that day, I heard that Shawn and another friend of his were in the dorm. Shawn had a tennis ball and racket in his hands and he claimed to have heard a voice tell him to throw the ball at his friend. He hesitated for a moment, and then served the ball right at him with all his might. Fortunately, it just missed him. He later calimed that he couldn’t control himself.

At dinner that evening, he was looking flushed and his hands were shaking. Whenever he looked at him, he would just shake his head. During practice, I noticed that he was looking at everyone in a strange way, and his face was literally white. Lots of people noticed this, and commented. Afterwards, he walked up to me and said there was going to be another séance that night and I had to come to it. I said, no, I wouldn’t. I had finally decided that enough was enough.

A couple of other people decided that we should see one of the brothers that lived there to see what could be done. They, too, were taking this presence thing seriously. So three of us went to visit one. We ended up having a long talk with him. He suggested that it could be mental telepathy and said that you assume that there are no evil spirits around until you prove that they are there. Of course, I’m not sure what he meant by prove. He also said that if I really felt the need for protection, I could make an imaginary cross and call for God’s help.

This I did. I went to the stairs and felt the energy was there, though not as strong as it had been. I made my cross, asked for help, and the presence left and did not return for quite a number of days. Indeed, it only was felt, weakly, in the final days of that camp. Only three days had passed, and already a lot had happened.

The next day, we went swimming to a local pool (it was summer time) and everyone was throwing a tennis ball around to each other. Shawn got hold of it and threw it right at me. He managed to hit the side of my face, though, being a tennis ball, it didn’t actually do any damage. I was still shocked, though. Later he told me that he didn’t want to throw it at me, and that he couldn’t even throw straight. He said that every time he looked at me, he would hear a voice saying ‘get him!’ and he was being instructed to stay close to me.

A bit later on, he told me that he was going to have the séance that night, and that I must come to it. I said I wouldn’t, but he seemed confident that I would come.

Some people had been talking about what had been going on, and someone mentioned that if you said The Lord’s Prayer backwards while looking in a mirror, you would see the Devil.  Well, this was too much for Shawn to resist doing, and so, before he planned to have the séance, he took a group of people down to the showers and he had someone read the words to them while he repeated them while looking in the mirror.

I stayed away, no longer wishing to be part of it. If I had gone, I might have witnessed what many others said they saw happen.  He said the first five words, then his cheeks went white and his eyelids went rid, taking on a glow. When everyone came up the stairs, they all had bloodshot eyes, and looked exhausted. Once, apparently wasn’t enough for they went downstairs and did it a second time, and this time, he had his friend, Terry, join him.

Shawn told me that he saw his hair, which was blond, go dark and his eyes appeared to glow and Terry said that a shadow passed over his face.  They both claimed to have gone into a trance. They said they could hear themselves speaking, but they couldn’t feel themselves doing it. Wisely, though unexpectedly, Shawn decided not to have the séance after all.

The night, we were swarmed by black beetles again. I don’t know why he got in, as all the windows were closed. Oddly enough, all the bugs fell on Shawn and Terry’s bed, but missed mine. They even bit Terry three times and they were also crawling towards Shawn and biting him. These bugs did not bite to the best of my knowledge.

A voice in my mind said, ‘they won’t get you because you didn’t attend the Lords Prayer in the mirror business.  This time the bugs were also swarming in the shower area where they had done the prayer, even though the first time, it had been free of them.

I had borrowed a cross from a person named Glenn in the hope that it would help protect me from what I feared might be the devil. I decided to give the cross to Shawn to see if it would help him. It did. The bugs stopped crawling towards him and attacking him.

Shawn told me he was hearing a voice saying that it was going to get me. I denied that it would. He insisted that it would.

In the morning, he took off the cross and said he didn’t need it any more. I put the cross back on and felt it did give me some protection. Indeed it was a quiet day and I hoped that whatever it was that was happening, was over.

The next morning as I was going down the stairs, I noticed that the chain that the cross was on grow hot. It was an odd sensation. Shawn told me that every time he saw the cross, eh had the urge to get me to take it off. Indeed, he insisted that I should take it off. Every time I went down the stairs, I felt the chain get heavy, and the urge to take it off come over me. I nearly once did so, but thought better of it.

A bit later on, back up the stairs, I was walking with Shawn towards the doors on the other side of the room when they opened for him. We walked through and they closed behind us. I asked how he did that, as I had felt no wind. He said, he didn’t know. He was just thinking that wouldn’t it be good if the doors opened and it did.

The next day, the temptation to take the cross off was so strong that I actually felt uncomfortable wearing it. The night, Shawn was trying to make me take it off, once again, and I was refusing as usual when he suddenly doubled up in what he said was an agonizing pain. The thought that I should give the cross to him entered my mind. I asked him if he wanted me to give it to him, and he said, yes. I almost did, but decided against it. With that choice, the pain abruptly stopped. I asked him if he would have worn it  and he said, no, moods change, and he wouldn’t have given it back either.

Things become quiet after that for a while. As I wore the cross, I felt protected. The camp went one and was coming to the end. I found myself, ironically, being told to sweep the stairs with Shawn. We discussed what had happened, and I asked him about the voice he heard. I was curious about if I could talk to it, so I asked him if I could ask it some questions. He agreed.

The first thing I asked was if Robert Rice died there, and the answer was he didn’t, nor were his ashes upstairs. I then asked if this was the Devil. The answer was yes. Had he tried to get me before? Yes, he had and was trying to get me now. I asked, why me? It answered that it had failed before and it didn’t like failing and it was trying to possess me. I asked why me and I was told that I was more vulnerable than other people and I expected him to get me. It also said it had posed as my subconscious mind, pretending to be someone who was helpful. I asked if it was after anybody else at the camp, but it said it only me.

I then asked about the pressure we had felt in the stairs. What was it? He said it was trying to frighten us, and it was a stupid thing to have had the séance. I asked what it was trying to do to Shawn when he said the Lords Prayer backwards. It was trying to possess him. I asked if he had succeeded, but he said, no because he hadn’t done it long enough. He also said that he had possessed many people, but they didn’t know it. They just thought they had a bad temper.

I asked if I was interfering with him and if I was a danger to him. He said yes and I was. It told me that the cross gave me some protection, and so did asking for God’s help, but an imaginary cross was not powerful enough and I couldn’t ask for God’s help all the time and I was most vulnerable when I was asleep. It had decided to use the staircase because I had to use it to get to the bathroom. It had taken over Shawn because he was my friend and was using it as a stepping stone to get to me. It also said that it had blown out the lights.

My mistake had been leaving Shawn on the stairway at that time and telling him about my experiences, which left him open to such things.

I asked a few more questions, but all Shawn was now getting was ‘stop it your bastard!’ I stopped and Shawn came ‘back’. He told me that at first he had let me talk to this thing, but after a few questions, he had lost control and it sounded like two people have a conversation. He also couldn’t remember any of what had been said, something I later found out that this was typical of a channel. He also said that sometimes he was reluctant to answer my questions because he felt he was lying. 

Though I did not which answers were lies at the time, some of them are now obvious. Of course, it wasn’t the Devil, as I don’t believe there is no such thing. Of course, for me, it added to the dramatics of it all at the time.

The camp ended shortly afterwards, and I went home with a sense of wonder that such a thing could happen. I told several of my friends about it, but few were really interested in my story, apart from that fact it made a good ‘ghost’ story.

Shawn was never the same after that camp. He became the bane of all future camps (three more or so that happened afterwards.) It was almost as though he had made it his mission to make sure that my time there was as unpleasant as possible and he did a good job of it, but fortunately, I had started to come into my own and had much better protection.

I also heard that he was messing around with the occult when he was at home.  I never found out what became of him, but the thought of him, to this day, still makes me cringe inside.

The incident itself was isolated. Nothing similar occurred on future camps. For that I was grateful, though at the time, somewhat disappointed, too. There is a lure you have when you’re young to the supernatural, especially the dark side of it. Part of you doesn’t really believe it’s true, and the other part wants to believe and while that was the only camp where such things happened, it was by no means the only event of that nature that happened in my life.

Sadly, my ignorance and lack of knowledge might have contributed to the situation there. If I knew then what I know now, that stairway would have been cleared before anything even had a chance to start.

I wrote down all the events of that camp in a document. While I was doing that, my light bulb in the room I typed it up in (on my dad’s old shonky typewriter) blew three times. Also, the report disappeared for 9 months without a trace, and then suddenly reappeared in a book case. I had looked everywhere for it, and I was certain I had not put it there. I still have the document today.