BOULDER, CO- 

I come from a family nestled deep within the bosom of the Evangelical church. My parents were academics and argued for faith with conviction and logic.  Before the age of 20, I estimate that I attended church services on the order of 3,120 times.  It took me well into my 20s until I finally found the strength, the courage, and perhaps caught just enough of a glimpse of the outside world to rebel.  Having come out on the other side – still with belief in The Divine I think, although with vastly different definitions and expectations – I find that I am forced to confront my past on a daily basis.  I write this as a sort of therapy.  It’s healing.  And wacky.  Regardless, it’s bound to cause me some embarrassment.  So here goes: Hi.  My name is Erika, and I’m a recovering Evangelical. Now, let’s get started…

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Once the alarm had been rung that the Christian Academy’s girls were playing with Ouija Boards and were on the fast track to becoming Hell’s Handmaidens, it was time to bring in the big guns. 

The whole pagan pajama party had apparently been discussed at great length by the parents.  Clearly, the youth did not understand what it was messing with.  We did not appreciate that we were dealing with powers and principalities unseen.  There was a war out there, and dang if we weren’t oblivious to it.  On Monday, all of that would change. 

Both to our joy and apprehension, we arrived at school to find that we were on chapel schedule that day – despite the fact it was not a normal day for chapel.  But what they had to tell us could not wait.

We filed in reverently to the chapel auditorium.  Nobody was really talking to anybody else. I purposely avoided sitting next to anybody from the party – even though Leslie had patted the seat beside her as I walked by.  I sat near the front wedged in between one of the boys from the varsity basketball team and a woman teacher who had the annoying habit of sniffling every ten seconds.  I know this because I timed it.  Very annoying.  And to top it all off, one of them smelled like tuna fish.

But I would not dwell on this for long.  Just as I feared I was about to faint from nausea, the lights were dimmed and a large movie screen at the front demanded our undivided attention.  Rock music blared.  Colored lights and flashy lightning bolt styled graphics assaulted our retinas.  Some of the boys – obviously distanced from the awkwardness of having been busted worshipping the Dark Lord at a slumber party – began pulsing their heads to the rhythm.  And then all faded to black. 

Over the course of the next hour, my eyes and ears were opened.  What I hadn’t known until that moment was that I had been allowing myself to be controlled.  Since the time I had heard my very first rock n’ roll song, I had been listening to secret messages from Satan without even knowing it.  I thought I had been doing all right with the Lord and obeying His word, when all along I had been taking instructions from the Prince of Darkness, like a college intern with a Steno.

In numb shock I listened as Led Zeppelin sang an anthem to the Dark Lord when the words “a bustle in your hedgerow” were played backwards in Stairway to Heaven, producing “Here’s to my sweet Satan.”  

At the time, I had never heard of Stairway to Heaven, being more of a Madonna, Duran Duran, Tears for Fears and Michael Jackson girl myself.  Never mind the fact that I had never heard any of these artists above a whisper from my clock radio when I knew my parents were on the other side of the house.  But what did that matter?  If Satan had polluted one song, what was stopping him from polluting them all? 

I listened in rapt awe as the evidence unfolded. Queen told us backwards in Another One Bites the Dust that “It’s fun to smoke marijuana.” 

And then there was Jefferson Starship, telling us about the Son of Satan in A Child is Coming and the Electric Light Orchestra telling us backwards that “He is the nasty one/ Christ, you’re infernal/It is said we’re dead men/Everyone who has the mark will live.”  

We learned that it was not our fault – that we could not consciously detect that there was a subliminal message hidden in the forward running text of a song.  But it was still there, just waiting for our extraordinary brains to interpret and internalize it – even without our permission. 

A man named James Vicary had proven it.  In his groundbreaking study, a movie audience was flashed images of Coke and popcorn too fast for human perception.  As predicted, sales had skyrocketed.  That we were not all Devil worshipping blood drinkers and members of a coven after being exposed to the Satanic subliminal messaging was by the grace of God alone. 

Some messages were deliberate and clear when played backwards, like the backmasked message from Electric Light Orchestra that “Music is reversible, but time – Turn back! Turn back!”  Others were less clear.  “It’s fun to smoke marijuana,” for example, sounded a lot more like “Sfun scout mare wanna,” if it weren’t for the handy text samples printed concurrently with the backwards message.  And I could really only make out the word “Satan” in the several phrases that were really secret messages to win us to the Evil One.  But that just proved how secret the messages were.  Didn’t it?

That night, my dreams were riddled with imagery.  To this day, I still remember clips.  There was a man who looked like a goat with hooves for feet - and a man with long, curly ladies’ hair and a black tongue, which stuck out of his mouth.  He was trying to eat me.  Missy was there, too.  She wore dark rouge like a mistress of the night and kept trying to kiss me on the mouth.  We were in her room alone with a hot pink canopy over her bed and the stars that looked like pentagrams. 

When I woke up the next day, my heart was beating fast as if I had run a marathon.  Clearly, something had been communicating with me secretly over the years and causing me to have dreams like that.  I went straight to my tape collection and dumped it out on the bed in search of anything suspicious.  I spied a couple of Amy Grants and a Michael W. Smith in the mix and set them protectively to one side.  Surely, they weren’t to blame for anything.  A Mozart collection I had in my possession lay loose on the bed.  Mozart was no born-again Christian, I was pretty sure - but backward messages?  My eyes settled on The Magic Flute.  The Greek god Pan played the flute.  I flung it from my sight. 

Then came my Bobby McFerrin.  That was just what the Devil wanted us to do – to not worry and be happy. 

I pitched it into the trash before I had time to allow Satan’s messengers to instruct me otherwise.  I took a deep breath and knelt down by the side of the bed and prayed as hard as I could, begging for forgiveness and cleansing from any evil-doing that I hadn’t known that I had done.  A shiver of relief ran through me that I had not caused Tiffany, Missy’s little sister, any harm with my bare hands, as I had fantasized.  There. It was over.  I had a clean slate. 

But it wasn’t over.  That next Sunday I arrived at Sunday school to discover that we had a special speaker.  I am not sure how our youth Pastor, James, had caught wind of the slumber party, but he was also all fired up on the issue of backmasking and Satanic influence.  Then again, he was always fired up about backmasking and Satanic influence.  It is entirely possible that this was just a coincidence.

Whispers and murmurs reverberated in the Lion’s Den.  What was our king going to reveal to us?  Was he going to show the same backmasking video I had seen at school?  I was excited at the thought.  It was just so effective. 

Just that Friday, I had heard in the quiet conversations before and after classes that I had not been alone in my tape disposal efforts.  A bunch of the popular guys in the senior class had gathered all of their tapes together, too, taking turns running over them with a car.  Some of the boys even reported screams coming from the tapes as they were crushed beneath the wheels.  The car belonged to one of the more popular boys in our class, which served to make the event all the more meaningful.  If he had gotten rid of his filthy, Satanic tapes – reportedly a long list, including, but not limited to: Styx, Prince, The Eagles, Dead or Alive, and Chicago – then what was stopping anybody else? 

Finally, after everyone had found a seat and settled down, a woman we had never seen before approached the front.  She had thick, black and gray hair and wore a purple skirt and blouse ensemble.

“Hi.  My name is Sheri and I love the Lord.  But that wasn’t always the case,” she told us.  “Eight years ago, I was a member of The Church of Satan.”

A gasp rippled through the crowd.  I had to remind myself to breathe as she told us her story. 

It had started innocently enough, she told us.  She had gone to a friend’s house to make chocolate chip cookies and to paint each other’s nails.  When one of the girls had pulled out a Ouija Board, she had laughed. 

“Put away your silly game,” Sheri told her friend.  But her friend wouldn’t listen.  If only she had listened.  Instead, she watched as her friend began asking it questions, and then receiving answers.  She thought it was a trick at first, until her friend convinced her to try it so that she could see firsthand. 

“OK, if you’re so smart, Mr. Spirit, then what’s my favorite song?”  She thought this would surely stump it. 

“R-A-D-I-O,” it spelled.  She scoffed, thinking that “Radio” was hardly a name for a song. 

“It’s telling you to turn on the radio,” her friend informed her.  Sheri rolled her eyes and went over to the radio next to her friend’s bed.  She turned it on.  The song playing was “Devil Went Down to Georgia.”  It was her favorite song.

She was hooked after that.  Whoever or whatever was communicating with Sheri knew her well.  It began to protect her.  Once when she and her friends were using the board to communicate with the Spirit, who now went by the name of “Judas,” it told her to go to the window.  They did – just as a knocking began at a different window.  They ran to check it out and the knocking took up on the other side of the house.  They began to cry, chasing it back and forth as it knocked.  They went back to the board and begged it to stop. 

“I will protect you,” Judas told her.  And sure enough, it stopped.  Later that very night after she left her friend’s house, she was followed home by a dog.  The dog stayed with her at a distance the entire time.  And no harm came to her.

We listened in rapt awe as Sheri told us story after story.  We knew before that Satan and demons were real, but we had never actually known somebody who claimed to converse with them.  She warned us to stay away – that once you were sucked in, it was extremely difficult to get out. 

Well, spank my bottom and call me Peanut, if I wasn’t blown away.  I suppose it goes without saying, that kind of presentation makes an impression on a 14-year-old.  It didn’t exactly occur to me to question whether there was another way to look at the evidence with which we were presented.  I mean, there had been lights and cool graphics and scary voices and wicked looking men with ladies’ hair and a real live woman who had been through it.  It didn’t occur to me to ask the important questions.  Questions like:  “Has anybody been able to duplicate Vicary’s popcorn and Coke experiment since the 1950s?” or “How easy is it to find subliminal messages on any sample of singing?  Is it possible it is coincidence?” or “If we played Sandi Patti or Amy Grant backwards, would we find other things that kinda sorta sound like something kinda sorta Satanic, too?”  or  “If you closed your eyes during the supposed subliminal message and didn’t read the text concurrently, would it resemble at all what we were being told it resembled?  Did anybody else think that the written text translations of what we were hearing were stretching it just a wee bit?” 

I was only 14.  I didn’t really get the scientific method yet. 

I was only 14.  I didn’t know that Vicary had already confessed to faking his numbers. 

I was only 14.  I didn’t know yet to question whether anybody had checked Sheri’s references and ruled out any possible mental disorders. 

I was only 14.  It didn’t occur to me that Jesus, Himself, wore what we would consider today to be “ladies’ hair.”  Hell, he probably wore ladies, lace-up sandals, too.  But it didn’t occur to me to ask these questions. 

I was only 14.  I didn’t know yet that if you play Weird Al Yankovic’s Nature Trail to Hell backwards, you can find “Satan eats Cheez Whiz.”  Like I said, I was only 14.

At home that night after Sheri’s testimony of how she used to bite the heads off chickens in order to please her Lord, I called Scott on the phone.  We had been making calls to one another on an almost nightly basis, as of late.  We talked so much, in fact, that my father had threatened to hide the phone from my reach.  And still, I needed to talk to him.  He had admitted to me one time that he had come from a darkened past, himself – something about building a guillotine for his GI Joes when he was a kid. 

When he answered, I was instantly in tears.  I told him everything – how scared I was.  He waited patiently for the sobs to calm down before telling me that he, too, had experienced demonic presence.  His house had an unfinished basement, which he avoided for this very reason.  Apparently, the “presence” down there was so strong that he could feel it just walking by the door to the stairway.  

His ability to detect spiritual presences didn’t end there, either.  There was a bookstore across the street from his school in downtown Colorado Springs that had a New Age section.  Each time he walked past it, his skin would bristle and it was as if something horrid was breathing its hot, sulfuric breath on the back of his neck.  There were times when the feeling was so strong that he had to stop whatever he was doing and make a beeline to the boy’s bathroom where he could pray.  It wasn’t as if the bookstore could be avoided, either.  About every week or so, Scott’s science teacher would send him over to buy him a coffee at the adjoining coffee shop.  He would walk on the opposite side of the store, but it was no use.  It was as if the demons were reaching out to him from the bookcases.  For a long time, he was so angry at the bookstore owner for allowing such books in the store.  In his head, he composed a scathing letter, exposing the demonic influence hidden within the New Age section.  And then, one day when his teacher had given him some cash for coffee – plus a little extra so he could buy himself one – it occurred to him.  His anger, although justified, had been misplaced.  It wasn’t the owner’s fault that he had demons in his store.  Every self-respecting independent bookstore had a New Age section.  He was just trying to compete.  Perhaps he truly did not know better.  It was that day that he forgave him in his heart.

I hung up with Scott and took a long, hard look in the mirror.  I had been so busy blaming Missy and her friends for what had happened at the slumber party, that I had forgotten that I shared part of the responsibility, too.  I had been just as guilty as they had been for cursing her and her sister in my heart.  Yes, they had wronged me.  They had opened me up to being nearly in the same room as a demon.  They had caused me to stumble by showing me a sinful movie.  They had enticed me to the Wave, and later to the Sprinkler, and on and on. 

Regardless.

Jesus would never hold a grudge.  I had to bear at least part of the responsibility, too.  In that moment, as I stared back at my own eyes in my bathroom mirror – hoping desperately that the red, burning eyes of the Mother Mary would not appear, as was rumored at a different slumber party I had attended not so long before – I knew what I had to do.

I had to forgive her. 

I picked up the phone and dialed her house, fantasizing about what I would say.

“I have something I need to say to you,” I would tell her.

I realized then that she might be a little hostile, but she would hear the earnestness in my voice and would invite me to proceed.

“It’s just this – I forgive you.”

There would be a long silence on the other end of the line, as her heart would be flooded with relief.  Although I would not be able to see them, I would know that her eyes were welling up with tears.  Any minute, she would break down and I would cry with her.  She would ask me how it was that I could let go of all of my resentment.  I would tell her all about how Jesus had taken it from me – and He could take it from her, too – if only she would let Him.  Once she was saved, we would quickly become best friends, thus validating that I was a normal, at least mildly popular person.  She would invite me over to bake brownies.  I would invite her over to play ping-pong.  Our parents would even see past any denominational issues that existed and go on camping trips together.

“Hello?” Asked a male voice on the other end of the line.  It was her dad – the very man who I remembered clear as day doing the Scramble in the family room that ill-fated night.   It was an awkward moment.

“Is Missy there?”  I asked, emboldened by the memory of what I must do. 

“Sorry, no.  She’s out with her youth group.  Shall I tell her you called?”

I hesitated just long enough to waver.

“No, um, no that’s all right.  Thank you.  Good-bye.”  Click.  I hung up.  For about a full minute I stared at the wall on the opposite side of the room.

Then I walked straight to my room and dug out the Bobby McFerrin tape from the bottom of my trashcan and tucked it deep in the back of one of my desk drawers. 

Yep.  Hell’s Handmaiden. Vessel of the Devil.  Intern with a Steno. 

…And all because a couple of girls thought it would be cute to invite Satan to a slumber party.

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Stairway to Cheez Whiz: Part 1 & 2 comes from the as-of-yet unpublished humor memoir: “In a Handbasket: Confessions of a Recovering Evangelical.”  Erika is a freelance writer living in the mountains west of Boulder, CO.  

Tags: backmasking, Bobby McFerrin, chapel, Church of Satan, Devil Went Down to Georgia, Electric Light Orchestra, Erika Rae, evangelical church, James Vicary, Jefferson Starship, New Age, ouija boards, Queen, Satan, Stairway to Heaven, subliminal messages, Wierd Al

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Adolescence, Dreams, Education, Fear, Guilt, Hell, Humor, Memory, Music, Nightmares, Philosophy, Pop Culture, Psychology, Religion, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.