The Thoughts That Weren’t Mine

I thought my house was haunted. I didn’t know I had an enemy.

A note before you read: this piece talks about suicidal thoughts. I’m only speaking from my own experience, not about what anyone else is going through.

Winter 1993

A rainy Saturday night. Rare for Southern California.

My parents were out and I was home watching my little brother. It was late and he was already asleep. The rain was coming down hard. My dog, normally outside, was locked in the garage so she could stay dry.

I came out of the bathroom, walked down the hall and stepped into the kitchen.

I stopped. What the heck?

Every burner on the electric stove was glowing red. Every knob was turned up high.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

The big, heavy door from the garage, the one we kept locked, was standing open. The dog was loose in the house, running around and panting.

I’d only been away a few minutes.

Did my brother do this?

No. He was sound asleep.

Is someone in our house?

I looked around. No signs of entry besides the garage door that led to the kitchen. No one could have acted that fast and left without a trace.

This wasn’t someone.

I turned off the stove. I woke up my brother and ran to my neighbor’s house. There were no cell phones back then. I don’t remember much else, only how scared I was.

That was the first sign something in our house wasn’t right. It wasn’t the last.

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Around the same time, the voice came.

My dad was always the last to say goodnight. He’d leave the door open, and the hall light would spill across my room.

I always started on my back with my covers pulled high, running through my day and thinking about tomorrow.

Then it was as if someone had stepped inside my head.

You know you want to…

It sounded like me. But I had never thought anything like it. And it wasn’t thinking. It was talking at me.

Telling me to kill myself.

I didn’t want to. That much I knew.

This was the early ’90s. No internet. No social media. Nobody I knew talked about suicide.

So where did that come from?

It terrified me. And it came back. Quiet. Sneaky. Every night.

It never came while anyone was with me. It waited until my dad had said goodnight, until it knew no one was coming back. Like something lying in wait, ready to pounce. Then it had me all to itself.

I started dreading bedtime.

Why am I thinking this?

Am I crazy?

What would my parents think?

So I didn’t tell them.

From the outside, I had it all together. We lived in a middle-class suburb in Southern California. My parents had good jobs. I was a Girl Scout, an honor roll student, a competitive swimmer, a drama club kid with plenty of friends.

I wasn’t depressed. I didn’t even know that word, let alone what it meant.

But inside I was fearful and insecure, a pre-teen with a skewed sense of my own worth.

I tried to fight the thoughts with willpower. The harder I fought, the louder they got.

It went on for a long time. Then one night it got so loud that I stopped being afraid of telling my dad. I couldn’t take the torment anymore.

He was up with my mom in the living room, watching the nightly news. I pulled him aside, crying and scared.

I didn’t know how to explain it without sounding crazy. I told him anyway.

He didn’t say much. He stayed calm and he hugged me.

We were an atheist family. So he took me outside.

We stood in the backyard and took it all in. The night sky, the stars, the whole wide world, instead of my little bedroom.

I think he wanted me to see how small whatever I was carrying was next to all of it.

He didn’t have the words. I can’t blame him. Now that I’m a parent, I know he must have been stunned. It was the last thing he expected to hear from me. He was blindsided, and there was no phone to grab, no internet to ask.

We never talked about it again.

But saying it out loud took some of its power away. I don’t remember the thoughts after that night.

What I remember is that things kept getting darker.

I had no framework for any of it. No tools.

I didn’t know how to pray.

I didn’t know to speak the name of Jesus.

I’m not sure I had ever heard it.

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The house didn’t settle down.

There was always something. Static coming through the speakers, going on and off. Lights flickering. Sometimes I’d hear people talking in the other room, and then I’d look up and it would stop. Over and over until I knew I wasn’t imagining it.

One night a couple years later, I was up alone watching TV in the living room. I’d become the night owl of the house. Everyone else had gone to bed.

My dog was asleep in her bed on the floor to my left. She’d been an outdoor dog until the Northridge earthquake in ’94. After that, she slept inside.

Out of nowhere, she jolted up, ears perked, just staring.

Then she snarled. I had never seen her do that before.

It was fierce. She felt threatened, and she was trying to scare off whatever was there. I leaned over to line my eyes up with hers, trying to see what she saw.

Nothing.

Goosebumps.

I swallowed hard. I turned off the TV and went to bed.

Another night, I was the only one up again.

The tiles on the floor started popping. They didn’t lift or move. They just made this sound, one after another. I’d never heard or seen anything like it. Our other dog jumped every time one popped, completely panicked. He had no idea what was happening. Neither did I.

I went to bed.

When I was about sixteen, my dad was away in Costa Rica, running his eco tour business.

One day while he was gone, I woke up to a man at the foot of my bed.

It was late morning. Sun filled my room. I was on my back, my eyes fluttering open, still hazy.

Then I saw him.

I gasped. Our eyes locked. He was staring right at me, and I could feel his evil. It was piercing. I had never been that afraid.

I knew right away he wasn’t a stranger who had gotten into the house. He wasn’t real. Not in that way. This was a visit from something I couldn’t explain.

He was glitchy, like electricity. And he hated me.

I couldn’t move my body. But I had my thoughts.

Oh dear God, help me. Please. Let me look away.

It was the first time I had ever called out to Him like that.

I turned my head.

It was gone.

I suppose you’d call that sleep paralysis.

The next year, I was sent to a program for troubled teens in Jamaica. That’s its own story.

Then came the night with the girls.

I was about nineteen. It was a weekend, and I’d been out with friends. We got home late, with my parents already asleep, and went to the kitchen for something to eat. My friend Jhonna went straight down the hall to use the bathroom, and my friend Erin began making a snack with me in the kitchen.

“Dan, I think I hear your dad calling you,” Erin said.

“There’s no way. He’s sound asleep.”

“I’m telling you. Somebody’s calling your name,” she said.

I walked down the hall and quietly cracked my parents’ bedroom door open. Snoring. I checked my brother’s too, out like a light.

I went back into the kitchen and told Erin she was hearing things. Everyone was asleep.

Just as I said that, the bathroom door opened. Jhonna came down the hall. “Hey. I think I heard your dad calling you.”

Erin and I looked at each other.

“See? I told you.”

I knew then. They didn’t. I had never told them about the house because I didn’t want to scare them or sound crazy. So I told them now.

“I’m pretty sure my house is haunted.”

Before I’d even finished, they heard it again. They ran out of the house.

I never heard a thing.

The commotion woke my dad. He came out condemning it, telling it to go to hell. Whatever it was. In our house.

Dad, don’t say that!

Maybe it was seeing how freaked out Erin and Jhonna were. Maybe he’d heard enough stories by then, since things always seemed to happen around me. Maybe he’d started to believe it himself, or experienced something he never told me about.

My dad grew up Catholic. So did my mom. But he was a scientist and an atheist, and they never raised us with God. Not long after that night, he asked my mom’s sister, a devout Catholic, to come bless the house.

Maybe he figured we had nothing to lose.

Did it stop? Not really.

And the voice never left. I believe it just changed its form. It stopped telling me to die and started telling me I wasn’t pretty enough, not skinny enough, not smart enough. Never good enough. It was always something.

Years later, I’d write it a breakup letter.

Eventually I just wanted to feel good. I was tired of not feeling good. Tired of my circumstances. Tired of life. If I wasn’t going to take my life, I could at least go numb.

My addiction took over. My brother died. That house was always full of chaos.

I got clean at twenty-two, and at twenty-six I moved out.

My parents are still in that house.

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Late spring 2020.

The world shut down, and Ephesians 6 was all over Twitter. I’d scroll on a break from work, and there it was again. The full armor of God.

It comforted me. Recovery had left me open to a higher power, just not the God of the Bible. But this spoke to me. It made me feel safe.

What do you mean, the armor of God?

What is the armor of God?

I wanted to know more. I just didn’t open a Bible. I never had.

A month or two later, I went looking for it. I had no idea where to find it, so I went back to Twitter and searched until it turned up. I took a screenshot, because I didn’t know how to find it in a Bible.

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:11-12, ESV)

I had always thought the house was haunted, and I never looked past that.

Then, slowly, the connections came. I believe that was the Holy Spirit.

The voice. The stove. The man at the foot of my bed. The one telling me I’d never be enough. It was all coming from the same place. Deeper than a haunted house.

I didn’t know I had an enemy. I didn’t know the fight never really ends.

I had only ever told a couple of people about the man at the foot of my bed, and only once I knew they were open to it and it felt safe. I’d never heard anyone else talk about anything like that. Later, I started listening to podcasts about spiritual warfare, and I realized I wasn’t the only one.

I never forgot him. And God reminded me that I cried out to Him that morning, and it freed me.

The Bible confirmed what I had always known deep down.

Relief.

I wasn’t alone. All these years later, I finally had the answer I’d been looking for.

I knew the dark was real. I had lived in it, and that year I could see it all around me. Now I was reading that there was armor, and armor means there’s a fight.

I didn’t want to live in the dark anymore. I wanted to know more about how to protect myself and my family.

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2026.

The voice still shows up. Some days it’s louder than others. But I fight it more than I lose to it now.

I recite scripture. I pray Psalm 91. I walk through the house praying. I repent. I say 2 Timothy 1:7 out loud.

I put on worship music. I praise. I stay in gratitude.

For years it came as panic attacks. A lot of people think they’re dying. Mine always said the same thing.

You’re going crazy.

Now I know what it is. Therapy helped me with the panic. Prayer and surrender to Jesus broke the torment. I still have moments here and there. Nothing like it was.

So I’m teaching my son what nobody taught me.

I’m raising him with Jesus as his foundation. He’s learning to be a prayer warrior, and to stand firm in who he is.

I can only speak to my own story. I don’t know what I don’t know. But I believe if I’d grown up with that foundation, knowing the power of the name of Jesus, knowing there were verses and prayers, knowing who I am in Christ, maybe I wouldn’t have been so easily influenced. By the voice. By the world. By my peers. By how little I thought of myself.

I had nothing greater than me to lean on. So I leaned on people.

A Christian home isn’t a perfect one. We’re all sinners. The people we look up to will disappoint us: parents, mentors, friends. Mine did.

But I want him to know there’s Someone greater than all of it.

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28, ESV)

Maybe this is part of the good. More than thirty years later, I’m writing about what I was too embarrassed to talk about for most of my life.

One morning before five, I was already up when my son came looking for me. He was rattled. Shaking.

We held each other. He didn’t have to tell me. I knew it was a nightmare. He doesn’t have them often.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked softly.

He nodded. In a shaky voice, he told me an old, creepy woman had been following him. He kept trying to get away, but she kept getting closer. Right before he woke up, she was in his face.

I told him his feelings made sense. We talked about nightmares, and how they happen to all of us.

Then he asked me to pray over him.

With his head buried in my shoulder, I smiled. I thanked God for tugging at my heart so I could teach my son.

I prayed over him first. Then I had him say the verse out loud with me.

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV)

Then he prayed.

He felt better. And he went back to sleep.

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If you’re struggling with thoughts like these, you’re not alone. Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

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