“Ghost Stories” have always been a love/hate situation for me. As long as I can remember, I have been intrigued by the supernatural. I looked at these stories as entertainment. As many are with street magic, I find myself focusing on figuring out the plausible explanations instead of enjoying the experience. I would hear stories from friends/family and respond with skepticism, probing questions, and a look of disbelief. Today, I look back on this behavior with a moderate amount of shame, because decades after my mission trip to a small city in Florida, I question what happened to me and recognize that look of disbelief on the faces of listeners… listeners to my own story.
I was not raised in a religious family. I like to think of myself as an analytical person and try to rely on evidence for most of my beliefs. Growing up in Mid-Western Michigan, there was a time in my adolescence that I am sure many people experience, a time when I was looking for some place to belong. While many teenagers drive their parents nuts by surrounding themselves with drinking and drugs, my rebellion was in the form of a church in my hometown. It had a pretty robust youth group and they accepted me quickly. It was a safe place, a community that acted like a family I could confide in. I threw myself into it and spent a few years being embroiled in everything they did, so much so that my parents questioned whether I was involved in a cult. This prolonged encounter with the church was an important step along my personal development and would also become the catalyst for one of the most frightening moments in my life. This was during a mission trip that we took to Sarasota, Florida in the summer of 1997.
Sarasota is a medium sized city with a population of a little more than 50,000 people. The city was very socioeconomically divided, being populated by the very rich and the very poor. The mission trip was located at a modest Baptist church within the city. The purpose was to conduct a Vacation Bible School for the children that lived in the neighborhood, mostly economically disadvantaged youth. I knew nothing else about the church – we were given no information about the congregation or beliefs ahead of time. The only background provided was that our Youth Pastor, David, made contact with this small church and agreed to donate our time to help coordinate this VBS program.
I was relatively close with several of the people on the trip. However, we were joined by a student who was not part of our youth group named Alvin. I do not remember exactly WHY he came, as I was never close to him, but I remember being told that Al’s mother wanted him to be a Christian in contrast to their Asian American heritage… an idea at the time that he seemed to be disinterested in. A dry, straight laced young man, he was almost an opposite personality of my friends and me (largely immature, outgoing goof-offs looking for attention). Nevertheless, he attended the trip with the rest of us. We all loaded onto the bus and headed South.
We arrived in Sarasota, got to work, and the first part of the trip was pretty uneventful. Nothing seemed unusual – we “worked”, teaching certain classes ranging in topics that a normal, non-denominational Christian Sunday school would usually teach. It wasn’t until the last couple of days of the trip where things started going off the rails.
Close to dusk, the second to the last day of the trip, our group was outside playing kickball with the children while we waited for their parents to pick them up. It was a hot summer day in Florida and so many of us Michigan kids were not used to the humid, hot evenings that followed.
I decided to go into the church to get a drink and cool down, escaping the large number of gnats that constantly accosted me whenever I stepped outside.
The church itself was made out of white plaster, a common style for Florida. The exterior was peeling, the roof seemed to be moldy and the windows need replacing. However, the interior seemed to have been cared for meticulously, almost in a decorative style that didn’t match the decrepit building seen from the road.
The dark green carpet was everywhere except for the chapel, which itself was burgundy with golden, ornate designs. The building of the church was shaped like a ‘T’. You entered the double doors at the bottom of the T, the long hallway had an extended mirror that was attached to one wall and a sitting bench was on the other. There was wood beadboard type panelling that went half way up the wall to the mirror. As you continued down the hall, at the T junction, you could take a left and walk into the chapel… or you could go right, and walk into a large dining room area that was filled with tables.
I walked through the doors at the bottom of the T and, as teenagers are wont to do, I glanced at the mirror to check my own reflection… check the outfit, the hair, the overall appearance. Adolescence is a vain time. As I gazed at myself in judgment, I saw a the face of a young man I recognized sitting in the bench opposite the mirror, just looking at me. It was Alvin.
“Hey, Al. What are you doing man! Don’t like kickb…” As I was saying speaking, almost to interrupt my sentence, Al smiled in what felt like a disingenuous, menacing simper. He then raised his hand, formed a gun-shaped hand gesture, and winked while pointing at me, flicking his tongue to make a clicking sound. The almost comedic, hyperbolized, American gesture seemed uncharacteristic for who I knew Alvin to be, so I chuckled and turned away from the mirror to speak to him.
As I did that, the chill crept in for the first time… There was no one there.
I looked back at the mirror to confirm that I was alone in the hallway. I didn’t understand. I didn’t just see him out of the corner of my eye. I mean, at first I did, but I then looked right at him, into his eyes, with the mirror simply as a conduit. I heard the sound of his tongue making what would soon be a familiar clicking sound. When the image of Al disappeared, the fright washed over me in what seemed to be similar to a panic attack. A tingling that transformed my warm body into a shaky, nervous husk of who I usually was. I ran outside and grabbed the first person I came in contact with, my friend Ronnie.
Ronnie and I were not extremely close, but we had fun together because we were both outgoing, obnoxious, overconfident males that focused more on fun than on the purpose of our visit. When I approached him, I immediately saw in his eyes that he knew something was wrong.
“Dude, I don’t know what is happening. I just saw something super weird. I feel like I am losing my mind!”
“What happened?!”, Ronnie asked, starting to smile with some humor at how freaked out I seemed.
“I don’t… I just… I walked inside and looked in the mirror to see Al just sitting there, smiling at me. But it wasn’t Al. It looked like him, but when I started talking to him, he just stared at me and made this gesture…”. At this point, I showed him the finger pointing, winking gesture. Something about the way I recreated the look stole the smile from Ronnie’s face.
“When I started talking to him and I turned to continue the conversation, Al wasn’t there!”
As if we were thinking the exact same thing, we turned to look and find where Alvin was at that moment. Our eyes scanned the crowd in opposite directions, both arriving at the same point where Al sat, watching the kickball game. He was not partaking, as I remember him to be a sober, pensive kid; definitely not the “kickball type” and definitely not one who would have given me some weird, pointing gesture while winking.
“Al is all the way over there… so what was it? A ghost? Like a demon or something!?” Ronnie asked, shocked.
“Dude, how the crap should I know?!”
At that moment, I saw this look of understanding wash over Ronnie’s face… like it all made sense to him. “You know what this is right?” he whispered, “This is Satan. He is trying to distract you from doing God’s work. He has no power here. Let’s go tell him.”
While I am no longer necessarily religions, I still considered what we did next one to be one of the worst choices I’ve ever made. Like we were on some crusade, I followed Ronnie into the church.
It was empty once again, but I felt this cold, uneasy feeling as soon as we stepped inside. As I said, it was the middle of summer in Florida and we were inside an old church with a barely functioning A/C unit… but I remember instantly being chilled…
And Ronnie starts yelling.
“Hey Satan! You ain’t got nothing on us! Bring it, you can’t stop us! Whatchu got?!”
(Did I mention we were overconfident?)
We waited in silence for what seemed like an eternity. Nothing happened. We looked at each other, seeing a ‘creeped out factor’ showing on each of our faces. We paused for a split second, then began laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of the situation. Maybe I just overreacted. Dramatic teenagers and whatnot.
The evening ended after the last adult arrived to pick up their child. My youth group and I loaded the bus and headed back to the condo that we had rented. It was dark by this time and I had calmed down a bit, momentarily forgetting what had happened.
The bus ride took some time, so I usually would just sit there, looking out the window at the landscapes that were unusual to me, a boy from the North. We drove along the coast, passing interesting architecture surrounded by unfamiliar foliage, common to the Florida ecosystem. As we rode, I looked out the window and saw a person sitting on a large stone sign for a different church, a Roman Catholic cathedral. I squinted to see him, as I was curious what the character was doing sitting on such a fancy looking stone slab sign. As the bus got closer and closer, to my growing fright, I could slowly make out the face of a serious, somber young man. A young man I knew…
Alvin was sitting on the sign, looking down at his feet as he kicked them, resembling that of a much younger boy. As we passed this vision sitting on the sign, he looked up from his feet and looked directly at me. His eyes were not Alvin’s eyes, they were somehow different. Another older, wiser man’s eyes – piercing through the motion and distance. He looked at me and smirked with that menacing, threatening grin. As we began to pass, I turned my head to look to the front of the bus. Just a few seats ahead of me, Al sat, quietly doing what I had been doing a few moments before, looking out the window at the passing beach and water.
I looked back out the window as we passed. The other “Alvin” raised his hand into the familiar gun pointing gesture and pointed at me. The only thing stranger in that moment, was that I could hear the clicking sound in my head… and, I am not sure how to explain this, but it wasn’t coming from me. It wasn’t my common inner monologue voice. It was someone else. Some thing else.
He winked.
For the lack of a better phrase, I began to freak out. I shouted and drew attention from some of my friends, my assistant youth pastor Jason, and my pastor, David. I remember thinking that I was losing my mind. The intensity of faux-Alvin’s eyes and the click of his tongue playing on repeat in my brain, and no one seemed to understand my panic. David said we would talk once we got settled back at our condo, and I should just take a breath.
We arrived at the condo. It was lavish accommodations to a small town kid, causing me to wonder how one would arrange payment for such a place, especially for a gaggle of teenagers. It had tall vaulted ceilings and the decor was designed in the early 90s, so it was fitted with brass lightning fixtures and lightly stained oak finishings. Exiting the bus, my knees were shaky. A fog of embarrassment settled over me as other kids gazed with an obvious wonder that only children with a lack of decorum would show. My youth pastors took me into a back bedroom away from the other kids, gave me a pint of Haagen Daaz Coffee Ice Cream that assisted in calming my nerves. Once settled, they proceeded to talk to me about what they thought was happening. David gave his version of what he believed was transpiring.
“There is a war happening, Porter. A war between Heaven and Hell, where angels and demons are in a battle for the souls and sanity of God’s followers,” David shared, “and what you and Ronnie did was incredibly stupid. You challenged Satan to a battle that you cannot win. He is too powerful. That was his foothold. You need to be careful.”This did very little to calm my nerves. It seemed uncharacteristically morose of David to be that blunt, especially with a teenager. He continued…
“Do not do that again. If you keep doing the right thing, God will protect you. But you cannot tell anyone else that this happened. It spreads fear that Satan thrives on.”
Being a naive, young Christian at the time, I believed him. I thought that this “war” could seem possible, but I also trusted a mentor that I shouldn’t share my story… and I would follow that advice for years.
I went to bed early that night, trying to move past this experience – Alvin’s face and the clicking gesture continuing to haunt my thoughts. It didn’t work.
The next day was our last at the church. We were done coordinating the VBS program but the leaders of the church wanted to treat us to a dinner as a way of saying ‘thanks’. I didn’t think about it at the time, but it was very strange that we hadn’t met the pastor of the church until this dinner.
Beforehand, we had packed up all of our belongings and were prepared to leave once we finished dinner. We all sat in the East side of the church, in the dining area with all the tables, eating the spaghetti dinner that they had provided us. It was a happy scene – I looked around at everyone enjoying the meal, laughing and joking around at the tables. Suddenly, the back door of the church opened, and a cold gust of wind rushed past me, (bizarre for a Florida summer afternoon) followed by the entrance of a tall, elderly man and two slightly younger women behind him. The women were both pretty, if not a little plain, with long straight hair down to their waist andclothes that looked like they could have made them theirselves. But my eyes were drawn to the man. He was an elderly man, with thinning grey hair and a white dress shirt, entirely buttoned up to his neck. His dark, deeply set eyes slowly moved around the room in what I can only describe as a humorless gaze.As with all members of the youth group, I had never met this man before. He was introduced to us as the “Pastor”, but none of us recall ever hearing his first or last name. All I could focus on was his eyes. They seemed familiar to me although I couldn’t place them. They weren’t kind eyes, although my mind couldn’t articulate that at the time. He spoke in short, generic sentences of thanks to the group as he proceeded to move past the tables. Small talk, disingenuous pleasantries, referring to my friends as “Guy”, “Ladies”, or, in the case of Ronnie (who was sitting next to me), “Young Man”.
As he slowly approached me, I continued to eat spaghetti, never one to turn down free food. “The Pastor” deliberately moved behind me until I could feel his bony hand touch my right shoulder.Turning around to look, I saw the pastor glaring straight into my eyes. Not a polite, stranger’s glance, but a deep, disturbing stare. Those eyes… I was right, I had seen those before.
He took his hand off my shoulder and spoke.
“Hey Porter, how is it going?”
Something was wrong, and then it became immediately obvious to me.No one had met this pastor, he didn’t know any of us from Adam and he referred to everyone as such, with generic titles like “son” and “darlin’”… but he knew my name. He looked at me like he knew me, and then I knew them. His eyes…
He smiled, in that familiar, menacing way, lifted his hand and made the pointing gesture while winking. He closed it out with the tongue-clicking sound.I shot up, backed up quickly, clambering for my footing as I knocked over some empty chairs, tumbling over my own clumsy feet. I pulled myself up from the floor and ran out of the dining hall. I ran to the adjacent chapel and did the only thing that came to mind at that moment, sat in a pew and cried. My pastor and my pastor’s wife, Kathy, followed shortly after.I expected to hear their voice of reassurance, the kind people that had been mentors to me for years. That is not what followed.“What are you doing, Porter?! That was the rudest thing I have ever seen! What is wrong with you?!”, David shouted.
“You are acting like a baby!” Kathy exclaimed.
This was extremely uncharacteristic of both of them, so I knew something was wrong. They were usually very calm, kind people in public. So I ran from them, I ran out of the chapel, down the long hallway, past the mirror where I had originally saw who I thought was Alvin, and out the front doors. Followed directly after me, Kathy stepped out of the door. Before the door even closed, I turned to see her expression transform from angry hunter to concerned caregiver.
“What is wrong, hunny? Why are you crying?!” I knew immediately why the anger left her. She had left the church. She was outside.
Something was wrong with that place.After discussing what I felt had happened, I never went in that church again. I waited outside for the rest of my group to finish eating. Afterwards, David, with a small group of us, did some weird type of ritual where we anointed the church and its door with oil. He read some scriptures that were unfamiliar to me and we boarded the bus and left. I haven’t spoken with David or Kathy in decades, but directly after this happened, Kathy, while coming short of saying I was lying, disagrees with the sequence of events. She claims to believe that she heard me making a ruckus outside, so she followed me directly out there, concerned for my well being. David remembers being angry at me, and while he seemed more docile out of the building, he seemed to treat me differently afterwards.
The church itself seems to have disbanded. I cannot find any mention of the church on the internet and some members of the youth group that I have kept in touch with have gone to Sarasota and not been able to find the location, even though we took the same route several times a day. One particular friend who claims to remember the directions said there is just a field where the building used to be… as if this experience had never happened.
Since David had told me that I shouldn’t talk about what had happened, I didn’t discuss this experience with any of my church friends for many years. Probably a decade later, I spoke about these events with friends I made outside of the church and my story is often met with the mixture of interest and skepticism that I often felt myself before I experienced this phenomenon.
I have since left my church and personally have arrived at a certain level of agnosticism. I like to think that I do not believe in ghosts or demons, but I also cannot deny that which happened to me in the summer of ‘97. I do not have an explanation and there are too many things that do not make sense.
I hope that I just had a mental break of some sort, because the alternative is much more frightening.