An Uncomfortable Coincidence

From: 
Story type: Ghost
Location: University City, Mo.
Source: Form Submission

While I am not sure if this story exactly qualifies as a ghost story, I don't know how else to classify it.

When the movie "The Exorcist" first played in theaters it was treated by the mass media not so much as a film but as some kind of serious social problem. There was a photo in one of the national news weeklies showing a janitor mopping up in a theater where the movie was playing. The accompanying story said that the staff had to clean up after every screening because viewers kept throwing up during the film. There was also a story circulated about three young men who claimed to have become possessed by the devil while attending the movie.

I was attending an all-male Catholic high school in a suburb of St. Louis at the time. Odd to say, The Exorcist premiered during the Christmas break, and it was an extremely popular subject at school for the first week or two of the winter semester. There was one especially impressionable young man in my class who claimed that he could not sleep for two days after seeing the movie. It was widely publicized at the time that the story was based largely on a case which had taken place in St. Louis, and, of course, this served to fire our interest, as did the fact that a priest who taught our religion class had met the priest who served as the basis for Max Von Sydow's character.

After I had been back to school for a few days I was sitting one night with my father at the kitchen table just after dinner was finished. I got to talking about the excitement the movie was causing and the question came up as to whether any good could come of this silliness; might the movie spark a genuine interest in religion in people? My family was fairly religious, but we weren't the kind of people who went around quoting the Bible regularly. Just then, though, I thought of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man from The Gospel According to St. Luke and I cited the line that if they won't believe Moses and the prophets, they won't believe one who returns from the dead.

An instant later, just after I said the part about one returning from the dead, there was a tremendous crash over our heads. My bedroom was directly above the kitchen, and the immediate impression my mother, father and I all had was that my bed had just collapsed. We rushed upstairs and turned on the light in my room. Everything looked fine.

I walked across the hall to my parents' bedroom and turned on the light (we were in the habit of having dinner late and, besides, this was January, so it was quite dark by then). My parents slept in twin beds which were pushed together. As I flipped on the light I found my eyes were focused on an object on the wall directly above where their beds met. For a moment I couldn't tell what it was; it looked as though a board was sticking out of the wall.

Then I realized what I was string at. When my parents married in 1946 my father's pastor had given them a large crucifix as a wedding present. It had a rather heavy metal statue of Christ which was nailed to two pieces of wood. My family had lived in the house for about fifteen years then, and the crucifix had hung in the same spot all of that time, aside from being taken down a couple of times when the room was painted. Just as I had quoted the Bible the statue of Jesus had ripped loose from the crucifix, pulling the horizontal piece of the cross loose with it. We found the statue, the wooden piece, and the nails scattered on the floor under the bed. The nails had curled around at right angles.