Tag: incest

Ralph Smith Died a Convicted Child Abuser and Got an Obituary so Whitewashed Tom Sawyer Would Be Jealous

Repost of a 2019 article that I never want forgotten when I’m gone. It is a difficult read, but please do it for me. Please read the linked articles as well, and know that if I die tonight, I’ll go knowing that it wasn’t all in vain, wasn’t useless and that maybe my life really mattered, if only for one brief moment when outrage gave me courage. And that maybe you could use whatever you find here to help others in pain.

This article also sheds light on why I hurt so much for women and children, why The Face In The Window will ever haunt me, from now to my meeting with God. We’re here for such a short time, some of us very short, and everything we do matters. Help others. Be encouraging and unfailingly gentle. Love freely, let compassion fill your heart. It opens you to pain, but the reward is far greater. If you can manage it, you’ll see.

This is one of my oldest posts, and one of the few oldies to still get hits on my Stat page. I hope others have been helped by it. I hope the change in me between then and now is visible, and encouraging. I’m not cured. There’s no such thing, but I have shed some of my bitterness as I’ve looked for God and a faith I thought lost forever. Thank you for caring, sharing and giving me a few moments of your life. You are loved.

 ~ MICHAEL SMITH

WARNING: This article contains material of a disturbing nature and contains mature subject matter. It contains triggers for victims of abuse. Read with care.

OBITUARY

Accidentally, while hunting clues for a cold case murder, I ran across my father’s obituary. I didn’t want to see it.

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/baltimoresun/obituary.aspx?n=ralph-leon-smith&pid=1004186

Nice, isn’t it? Except I never heard once that he was a lawyer. In fact, there’s evidence that he never made it past 7th grade. He did work for B.F. Moffitt, who was successful in legal work with or against the then-feared Interstate Commerce Commission. Moffitt, by all accounts, was an honorable man. Ralph Smith wasn’t. And this obituary boils my blood.

It says, very simply, that he was a lawyer, later owned Comet Fast Freight in Glen Burnie, and he died at age 75 in Salisbury MD in 2002 after a lengthy illness. Fucking vanilla shit. It doesn’t mention that he was one of the worst sex offenders in state history. Not a word.

A decade earlier the same paper said something very different.

Following are several articles from after the trial. Read them, and I’ll tell you something really fucked up.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1990-12-30-0503030308-story.html

Jay Apperson was a fine writer and reporter. I knew he was the only spectator in the courtroom during the three-day trial of my parents. We later did things I don’t believe he understood, and that’s what you should expect from a story so horrible; how can he be blamed? But a month after the verdict, when the sentencing hearing came up, reporters from printed media, TV and Radio were there. I particularly remember watching CBS reporter Bruce Morton later on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Mr. Morton was obviously unable to keep a bit of emotion out of his voice. When both Ralph and Betty Smith drew about 99 years apiece for their crimes, the state dropped the remaining cases brought against them for crimes against the rest of my siblings, who I won’t name. It wasn’t fair; they’d taken the time and invested emotionally in writing their police statements and being interviewed first by Detective Jill Klinger of the Sex Crimes Unit of the Anne Arundel County Police Department, then by Assistant State’s Attorney Cynthia Ferris. They got no closure.

But then, neither did I. The trial and my time on the stand was traumatic. And it forced me to feel emotions and speak out loud the unspeakable. It opened up every wound I’d buried. And to this day, those wounds bleed.

As for the 99-year sentences, that was a joke. The judge ordered the terms to be served concurrently; therefore the charges with the most time, 15 years, would be served. They would be eligible for parole in considerably less than that. But they didn’t get their first hearings past the Department of Parole and Probation. Betty Smith served ten years in Jessup Women’s Correctional Facility while Ralph Smith “Esquire” served around eleven. He was in ECI, Eastern Correctional Institution in Queen Anne, after which he wound up in Salisbury, most likely in a halfway house. He died there or in a hospital.

He left behind a shattered family, and all have had their personal struggles. Not being one to compare one person’s pain with that of another, I’ve learned to keep a perspective: all victims of rape, sexual assault, incest and child abuse are, by medical, anecdotal and empiric evidence, walking wounded. I have seen the evidence for myself. It fucks people up.

NEW YORK

One of my biggest regrets is going to New York and appearing on Phil Donahue’s show. Afterward, I thought it took some of the credibility away from our case. I know Jay Apperson thought so. While there, we were approached by Spectacor Films and offered money for the rights to make a film about us. It was a mistake I was too young and too damaged to understand (Spectacor’s portfolio consisted of feculent films like Amityville 3 or 4). When Mr. Apperson reported it, I thought we’d fucked up. We looked like greedy attention seekers. We were not. We hoped to help other people to stand up to their own abusers. I hoped also to show people in my past why I had been so weird, that it wasn’t my fault. That I was just a messed up kid.

I was happy that I abandoned the book. I was happy the movie contract expired without so much as a draft-script written. When the project was pitched, not a single sponsor would touch it. Too horrible, they said.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1992-03-12-1992072037-story.html

Decades later, no one remembers anything of us. We didn’t change a goddamn thing. How I’d dreamed we could. How bitter I was that the world moved on without me. As I grew ever more sick, I went through a divorce. I tried to kill myself. I went through jobs. Then my children died. My whole fucking life was a waste. As if I never mattered, never should have existed. God damn it.

I need no longer speak to my sister. She’s a goddamn Neocon saint whose relationship with the Lord is historic, unprecedented since the death of St. Paul of Tarsus. Piss on her. She judged me and told her friends lies about me. That’s a mistake; I heard about it and now I pretty much think of her as more fucking mental than I am. I didn’t deserve that bullshit. That bridge is burned forever now.

But I feel sorry for her. She’s missed the whole point. Forgotten it. Forgotten her own fucking words to the press. How we could finally be a family.

I don’t like the whitewashed obituary. The man didn’t deserve it.

https://newspaperarchive.com/annapolis-capital-apr-28-1990-p-1/

You see from the articles that the case of the State of Maryland vs. Ralph and Betty Smith was a big deal. The grand jury said the reports read “like a horror story” and the State’s Attorneys office was cited as saying it was the worst case of child abuse they’d seen. The Honorable Judge Raymond Thieme, after it was over, was said to have entered his office, thrown his robe on the floor and stormed from the building. The source said she had never seen him do such a thing.

Sometimes, I think back on that. Even he needed closure, and probably wished he could forget the shit he had to hear.

Ralph Smith had moments when I looked in his eyes. He would take his glasses off, rub his eyes, and for just a second or two, I saw into the soul of a human being trapped in a diseased body. Did I see regret?

No.

Was it guilt?

No.

It was a broken heart.

Then the devil got into him again and the man was gone, replaced by a monster.

And he did not deserve that vanilla obituary.

“VINDICTIVENESS”

Defense attorney Thomas Morrow told reporters: “Even if the charges are true, I can’t understand that level of vindictiveness.”

Holy shit. What a crude thing to say. What a stupid thing to say.

Well it wasn’t vindictiveness at all. Perhaps some desire for vindication was there. But that’s not what started it. I started it.

I was motivated at first because a sister, long lost, called me out of the blue one day. She was in such obvious pain that I knew she couldn’t keep it inside anymore. Some of what happened to her happened to me at the same time. We were made by my parents to watch 8mm porn films, then do things together, and then we split up; my father and my sister alone in another room, my mother taking me into another. We both saw, did and knew things we both had to do, see or otherwise. When she called, she told me about the things I hadn’t witnessed. Things our father had done to her that were so evil, so horrible that I can’t describe even one of them here. As I listened, my heart was aching. Things people should never have to imagine, much less endure, were vividly pictured in my mind. Before the long call ended, I was full of rage. Goddamn it, they had to pay.

I had an immediate plan. I was going to go to Bart’s Sporting Goods on Ritchie Highway, buy a shotgun, drive to Pasadena, kick the door to their house of pain and evil open, and fill my parents with double aught buckshot. But I happened to spot a copy of the Gazette lying on the coffee table and I picked it up and read it. There had to be a reason I was so motivated. Because there was a story about kids from my neighborhood who grew up with us. They had gone through the same type of abuse. They waited until the youngest turned 18 years of age, then went to the police. Their father was arrested, tried and convicted.

I remembered those kids. One very little girl, the youngest as far as I know, a little girl whose face should have been lit up by an innocent smile, showing up at the bus stop with red, swollen, watery eyes. Tears flowing. Her body held in a position I knew caused by physical pain. I can’t get it out of my head; I’d known something was wrong. When I learned why she’d been like that, I regretted that with my own experience, I didn’t see it for what it was. I will always be sorry I didn’t know, couldn’t help, and they were right down the street all those years.

Maybe I didn’t have to commit murder and throw my life away in an act of revenge. Maybe, this family I’d known so little about had done something we could do. As if there was a hand guiding me to read that paper.

SAVING A NEPHEW

A few of us talked. My youngest brother, still living at home, dropped a bomb on me one day: a sister who had gotten divorced and had a toddler son had moved back home. If being a parent is hard, being a single one is really difficult. But that’s no excuse for what my brother told me she did.

It seemed that when the boy cried and wouldn’t go to sleep at night, she would get our father to beat him with his belt.

Goddamn, it’s hard to write this. I wish I didn’t have to. I wish it never happened. But it did.

Suddenly the imperative was to get the boy away from that. It wasn’t about payback. Justice. Revenge. The kid had to be saved before he was so traumatized that he became one of us.

I contacted the boy’s father, living in North Carolina at the time. I told him our story. What was happening to his son. And I said she had two weeks to get him the hell out of there, or something very bad was going to happen. According to my brother, the asshole did call her, but she convinced him that I was quote “full of shit”.

She had thrown down a gauntlet. When my youngest brother turned 18, he moved out. We went to the police and made statements, and that is why and how it all began. I have no remorse; once sentenced, my parents lost the house. They went to prison. The boy was as safe as we could make him. But I’ve never forgotten that my oldest sister was still a monster, and I’ve worried over the years that my nephew never got out of it unharmed.

AFTER

In 2015, I was outside smoking. A warm summer night. A neighbor had a window open. His daughter was screaming and her father yelled, “I’m your father and I can beat you whenever I want.”

Very uncharacteristically, shaking with rage, I finished my cigarette. I went inside and took two Ativan to calm down. I should have called the police. I didn’t.

The knocking on his door pissed him off. He’d been nice to me, always saying hello and smiling. But now I knew what he was. He was my father. Different shell, same demon.

He stepped out onto the porch. I leaned to whisper in his ear.

“I heard you. I know what you just did. The next time I hear it, I will kill you. She’s worth it. I’ll go to jail, but you’ll be sitting on Satan’s lap, you piece of shit.”

He turned. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I looked right into his eyes. He knew I meant it.

It was a mistake. He moved his family out. I couldn’t help her; I’d probably made it worse.

I have the hope that he was so scared that he sought help. Or he changed.

I believe the hope to be unrealistic.

In the end I wonder what I’ve ever accomplished that was good. It all seems so useless, so futile.

The monsters don’t change.

They can’t. Ralph Smith died a monster. And everyone forgot what he really was. He got a lie for an obituary.

The world forgets.

And I…am an asshole.

Post-Update, Father’s Day, 2022.

The final verdict is in; Ralph Smith never practiced law.

He never finished college. When he was working for the motor truck association, he was a fucking clerk, typing tariffs and doing billing.

I have a cousin named Bonnie, and another named Terri, on Ancestry. Both are hostile toward me and one is responsible for making his ancestry profile make Superman seem like a milquetoast compared to my father. The motive: they’re from the south. Family can be serial killers, but they’d conceal it if they could. I’ve blocked all updates and emails from the site, and I’m never going back. Because fuck the Smith family. Inbred shit beyond the ability to accept truth or to tell it.

They’re all mad.POSTED IN THE BIOGRAPHY OF A DEMONASSISTANT STATE’S ATTORNEY CYNTHIA FERRISBALTIMORE SUNCOMET FAST FREIGHTDETECTIVE JILL KLINGER-ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY POLICEJAY APPERSONJUDGE RAYMOND THIEMENORTH CAROLINA COLD CASE 1958-1960PHIL DONOHUERALPH AND BETTY SMITH TRIAL 1990RALPH L. SMITH 2002 OBITUARYSPECTACULAR FILMSSTATE OF MARYLAND VS. RALPH AND BETTY SMITH

Published by Michael Smith

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2 thoughts on “Ralph Leon Smith Died A Monster And Got A Whitewashed Obituary He Didn’t Deserve. His Victims Have To Live With That Final Insult”

  1. Pel AbbottEDITMay he N.E.V.E.R. rest in peace, but instead get exactly what he deserves.Liked by youReply
    1. Michael Smith EDITGuys like him don’t deserve fucking obituaries, much less this bullshit.LikeReply

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John Frederick Thanos

It was April. The fifth, to be exact. At the Eastern Correctional Institute, a medium-security prison in Westover, Maryland, the system failed and an inmate was out-processed eighteen months earlier than he should have been.

Now of course, these things happen. I can’t say how often; usually we read about a prisoner sentenced to eighteen months, yet still inside after twenty years. Prisoners released too early, however, as in the case of John Frederick Thanos, can bring trouble to the outside. In short order, the world would know that lesson all too well. John Patrick O’Donnell, clerk for the prison records, for whatever reason he had, asked his boss, Chief of Classification for the Maryland Department of Corrections, Warren R. Sparrow, about releasing prisoner John Thanos. And just like that, two men became, through sheer carelessness, responsible for turning a monster loose on the State of Maryland. He got a handgun.

You know where this is going.

It turned out that the man had some violent tendencies, so before I go any further, it has to be asked why a rapist served time at a medium-security prison at all. Rapists are treated far too lightly in Western culture, particularly in the United States. Youve heard the stories — convicted rapists sentenced to two years. Or six months, causing public outcry, and on an occasion or two, putting judges off the bench. On rare occasions, even being disbarred. Recently a judge and several politicians — Republicans — advised women to “keep their legs closed” and other vile things. The question must be answered, why this is so? Why the hell is it possible to send a rapist to light time at a prison not having maximum security? Why is America a rape culture?

And John Thanos was born to evil. It isn’t clear, decades later, what his psychological evaluation consisted of. His mother and sister would later maintain that he was so disturbed that he was incompetent to stand trial. That was immediately cast out as a defense because he was pronounced otherwise, although not without serious mental illnesses, one being borderline personality disorder. And people with that kind of learned behavior and mindset are very often highly dangerous. He had been severely abused by his father, who started out parenting by cutting the heads off animals or breaking their necks for fun in front of the little boy.

He was psychologically abused and sexually abused. His world must have been Hell on Earth. He was in trouble almost from the beginning. And the abuse, cited by his attorneys during trial, seemed to trigger him. He called them names and threw other verbal abuse at them. He was then treated as a “hostile defendant”, a term one does not hear every day. In fact, he was hostile to reporters who asked him questions from the other side of a chain-link fence as he was led from a transport vehicle to the back entrance of the courthouse. He said shocking, weird and crazy things, taunted reporters, and videotape, if I could find it, would truly disturb anyone who sees it for the first time. Thanos even taunted the judge and at one point even stated that he wanted to repeat the crimes. And those crimes…still haunt me.

Somewhere in Baltimore County, on dates I can’t pin down, he shot three people: Billy Winebrenner, Gregory Allen Taylor, and Melody Pistorio, who was only 14. Two killings took place together. Melody was working at or visiting a convenience store. Her parents later sued the DOC for prematurely releasing Thanos. Warren Sparrow got demoted.


By 1992, John Frederick Thanos was convicted and sentenced to Death by Lethal Injection. The first inmate in Maryland to be executed by that method; and the first prisoner executed since the death penalty had been reinstated. But that wasn’t exactly the whole story.


At the sentencing hearing, he rejected all efforts by his family to have his life spared. He said, “I’ve been convicted and I accept it.” And he had this to say when he had the opportunity to make a statement. “I don’t believe I could satisfy my thirst yet in this matter unless I was to be able to dig these brats’ bones up out of their graves right now and beat them into powder and urinate on them and then stir it into a murky yellowish elixir and serve it up to those loved ones,” he said, indicating the families of the victims. Those words will never die. The records all contain them, from sources such as The Washington Post clean across the Atlantic Ocean. Two years would pass. And John Frederick Thanos was put to death. I had mixed feelings about capital punishment before that case. But I thought, regarding a man who graduated from rape to shooting kids in the head — he literally walked up to them, icy cool, and raised the pistol and pulled the trigger — that the death warrant issued from the bench was fully justified. But for me, it never ended there. I never forgot him. And as it happened, later in the same month that Thanos was released from ECI, the prison gained a new inmate — my father.


If you know my story, you know this has to be awful for me. For a long time, I’ve thought ECI was a max prison. I would have thought he would be sent to Jessup, but no. If you don’t know my story, look at my archive. Then you’ll know. Because I remember John Frederick Thanos. And I know, under different circumstances….


There, but for the grace of God, was I.

The House Of Pain

Yes, I have led a life full of misery and pain beyond anything I could have imagined. Even as it all began.

Welcome. Pull up a chair, grab yourself a cup of tea, and I’ll tell you a story. I warn you now that it is disturbing and may trigger you. I advise care, and reading slowly so that if you need to, you can close this post. The last thing I want is to hurt you.

Sometime in or around 1964, I had a bedroom facing east in a brand new house in North Shore On The Magothy, a development in Pasadena, Maryland. I had the room to myself, but I was not alone. I was never alone. Something else was in there with me, something not human. And I could see it. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Kids see things. Monsters, boogeymen. Except this, my friends, was not the Boogeyman, nor was it a big monster that lived in my closet. At the time my young mind knew nothing of what it was or why it was there. It just was. It looked like it was made of a drawing. Gray lines that crossed each other to form a shape. I would liken it to the animated character that represented Dennis the Menace on the live-action TV series: A tornado wearing a traditional fireman’s helmet. But it wasn’t solid, and I never saw it in midair. It was only a few inches tall, and it was always on a wall. It hid a lot, usually in the same corner, but occasionally, it would dart across the room, seeming to stick to the ceiling as it moved. It was fast, challenging my visual acuity, but I still kept sight of it. In daylight, it looked like it had one eye. It was the height of the golden age of chrome-trimmed cars, when bumpers, mirrors, window frames and door frames were all chrome, as were some types of wheels and wheel covers. You know, hubcaps. If I was lying in bed for an afternoon nap, I would see cars going past on the road out front reflect the afternoon sun into my window and on my walls. These reflections changed as the cars moved, traveling along a wall or the ceiling. I had something to compare the shadow with, and I knew no car was causing it.

Besides, I could feel it. It was full of malice, full of evil. I could feel the hate it had, and I knew it was something living. It grew stronger with time, and my fear more than likely fed it. I’d see it, and scream for my mommy. Unfortunately, my father was always there; his office was downstairs. And he hated screaming. If he was working, that was bad enough, but he also had migraine headaches that were relentless. He called them what everyone did back then, “sick headaches.” That’s because migraines often make the sufferer vomit. He had a hair trigger temper, with or without the headache. And did I mention that he hated screaming? Because, even at age four, upsetting him meant the belt. A thin leather men’s belt made long before the 1970s and the stupid extra-wide belts worn by hippies and jetsetters alike. This belt made for an excellent whip. I had two sisters at that time. And two older half brothers. They didn’t live with us. If the three of us did something he didn’t like, he’d line us all up, get behind us and the whipping would start. It would leave blistered stripes on our backs, and these would weep with clear sweat or water, I’m not sure which. He would swing until he was literally physically spent. Our screams of pain and loud sobbing would be met with more lashes until we were reduced to sighs that kids make when trying hard not to cry.

It gets worse. That thing in my room wouldn’t go away. When I saw it, I cried for mommy, not my father. By the age of four, I was already afraid of him, and since my memory doesn’t go back much further, I can give a pretty good guess as to why. Sometimes he would try to sit me on his lap, but I would cry until he let me go. Then later, I would be yelled at for never wanting anything to do with him. Then one day he brought home a Popeye nightlight. I no longer had to sleep in the dark. You’d think that would help. But now, instead of sensing that thing on the wall in the dark and being very often frozen in terror and unable to call mommy, I could also see it. I didn’t care if I got a whipping. Several times I was able to scream, and finally the light was left on in my room. That of course did not help. One night I saw it on the wall above my closet. I called out, and both mommy and my dad came running in. By this time it had happened so often that I could tell they were taking me seriously. I believe they could sense something; this night they were visibly upset, but not at me. Lying in bed, I pointed right at the thing. “Don’t you see it?”

Mommy said something like, “What is that?“

And it jumped on her. She gave a scream, not too loud, but it was full of terror. She could feel it. She ran out of the room, trying to shake something off as if a squirrel had jumped on her.

That was the night she stopped being my mommy. She was never the same. That summer, I had my fourth birthday. Our next door neighbor baked my birthday cake. I got a pop gun and an army helmet. The gun fired a cork tied to a string, so you could put the cork back in, cock the rifle and shoot again. Outside, on a sunny July day, with no one to play with, I played soldier by myself. And just outside my father’s downstairs office, I spotted something I had never seen. Wondrous creatures, like tiny birds. They hovered around something stuck to the brick wall. Never imagining what would happen, I shot at the thing on the wall. Yellowjackets immediately set upon me, and they hurt. Stinging and burning, I screamed, cried, and ran to the kitchen door for my mommy. But before I could get treatment for my stings, I got the belt for screaming.

Everything changed. She used to defend me from my father. She used to put salve on my stripes. She used to hug me. One day she brought home an orange drink in a half pint carton, opened it and put a straw in it, and told me to go outside and drink it so my sisters wouldn’t see and get jealous. Times were hard, and she could only afford the one. I never forgot that day. I felt so special. I felt loved. Mommy was so kind, gentle, always humorous, always ready to give me a bit of attention because I was sandwiched between two sisters. I was lonely. She would draw me pictures of Batman. If I was sick, she took me to the doctor and then to Bob’s Village Drugs for my medicine. If I could handle it, she would let me have a fountain Coke at the soda fountain counter. Served in an old-fashioned Coca-Cola glass with crushed ice and a paper straw. Once in a while a small toy would find its way home with me. Well, maybe it was small, but it was priceless to me.

A year earlier, when we had almost no furniture, and no carpet yet, she would sit in a dim light with us in the living room and we would play games. But after the night that thing jumped on her, she wasn’t my mommy anymore. Never again. Anything good in her died there and then.

But the horror was only beginning. In 1966, my older sister was given a Ouija board for Christmas. She got weird shit, too. I liked my Captain Action and G.I.Joe dolls, but I always asked for things that went with them but were sold separately, like the Captain America outfit for Captain Action, and the Jeep and the Sea Sled for Joe. You know who got them? My older sister. It was like my father was torturing me even without the belt. Even so, most of my memory during this time is full of gaps. One thing, though. A year, maybe even two, after my older sister got the Ouija Board, she had two friends over. It was after school, in the fall, when it got dark early. They turned out the light. They came out screaming. My father had the worst time getting rid of that bloody thing. The two girls, I never saw them again even though one lived right down the street. She was older, so I didn’t ride the same school bus and I just never saw either one of them after that. My sister would not, even decades later, tell me what happened. She told our parents. He threw it in the trash.

Next day it was back on her closet shelf and as she was getting ready for school, she saw it and screamed. Now my tough big sister, who often bullied or pranked me into shit that wasn’t funny, to hear her scream, that was extraordinary. I ran into her room, a forbidden zone for me, and I saw the thing sitting there along with older games like Candyland, Hi-Ho Cherry-O and Green Ghost, and a stack of others. Our father broke the board in half. I swear he was hysterical with terror. He stomped the glass and plastic planchette and smashed it.

After the next trash pickup, it was back. Same place, in one piece, even the box. He wound up burning them in a nice hot wood fire in the fireplace. I cannot recall whether blue or green, but the board, box and plastic melted and burned with a color I asked my father about. He had no real answer.

That was when everything in that house changed for the worse, when real evil was done. Again, you and I are here having tea together, but I warn you, this gets very dark from here onward.

There’s a belief about Ouija boards that goes like this: If you have made contact with a hostile entity with it, you must close the session by moving the planchette to “Goodbye”, and you cannot burn the board if the entity has entered your home. Some say it may still be attached to the board, and burning it releases the entity into your home, where it essentially has free run. Well, that’s exactly what happened.

Mom and dad began to take me out of my bedroom at night and into the den, in order to teach me about sex. They did some things together, but most of it was her having sex with me. I was seven-years-old.

At one point, they did something that would ultimately prove their undoing: They had me and one younger sister together doing things with them, and a few times, each other. They showed us 8mm porn reels, and moved me out of my old room into the old office downstairs, because dad had a warehouse and trucking terminal in Glen Burnie, a town between Pasadena and Baltimore. Usually, though, my night was Saturday. At the time, I had no idea that all of the kids were going through this except the older sister, who for some reason was left out. Probably because she was cold-blooded mean and had threatened to run away or call the police. But whatever, I didn’t know. As kids were added to our family, eventually four girls and two boys plus two half brothers, that house saw more child abuse than I can picture even to this day.

Years went by. Dysfunctional and afflicted, I would make friends, then lose them. I had horrible nightmares, trouble sleeping, and even though I never saw that shadow thing again, I guessed it was still in that room upstairs, or in my mother. It was the beginning of my experiences with demons, dark spirits described and fought by Jesus of Nazareth.

Every Saturday night, just hours away from Sunday School, my mother would come into my room late, after everyone else was asleep, and fondle me. I tried to pretend I was asleep. Sometimes I tried to fake being sick. She would put a hand to my forehead, say “You don’t have a temperature,” and if I still resisted, my father would come in and say, “Get your ass out here, boy.” And threaten me with the belt. How sick could you get? Threatening to beat your son for not wanting to have sex with his mother?

Oh, I know what some of you are thinking. That every adolescent dreams of having sex with his mother. Well, there are three things I’ve studied in my life. One is the paranormal. One is PTSD. The other is incest. All three still baffle me, but there are some things I’ve learned. First of all, having a sexual fantasy, no matter what it is, should never be allowed to come true. Reality is not the same. People get hurt, scarred, and victims commit suicide or crimes in the aftermath. Second, not many boys really do fantasize about having sex with their mothers; it may occur for a short time, but it’s fleeting. I always had this sick feeling in my gut that it was wrong, all wrong, and that there was a good reason for me to be sick about it, to resist the way I did. Another thing I’ve learned is that first-person porn stories, like the old “Penthouse Forum” letters, are very often about incest, but they’re bullshit. Today these types of porn live on with the internet, but much of the time, it’s written by men who have little sexual experience and less knowledge of anatomy and physiology. Many stories written as if by a woman talk about being penetrated in their cervix. Sick, but laughable; it’s almost impossible. Women who need cervical exams often have to be given pain medication, it has to be dilated by drugs, and any procedure may involve general anesthesia. Because it fucking hurts. But I digress.

Incest happens more often than I can stand to think. It usually involves rape, although sometimes even a fourth degree sex offense is so traumatic that the victim’s development arrests at the moment it is initiated. Whatever their age, their psychological, emotional maturity will stop and proceed abnormally from there. There is no cure for post traumatic stress disorder. Only time and treatment can help the most severe cases, and personally, I count every case as severe. Until the age of sixteen, I went through this. My social behavior got worse and worse. I wound up with literally no friends but tons of enemies. Any relationship I did have was dysfunctional from the beginning. My teen romances ended badly, with a girlfriend’s parents totally freaked out and pissed. By the time my father was involving himself in threesomes with my mother, I was finally able to defy him and demand it all stop. Sensing something in me he didn’t want to test, he agreed. But the damage was done.

In a community called North Shore On The Magothy, in a house no longer resembling the one I lived in, there was once a bunch of children tormented, tortured and raped. It has a new owner now; has for years. I’ve seen it on Google Street, and I don’t recognize it. But I will always know it as the House Of Pain.