The “Satan Shack”

A couple days ago, I came across a series of scary/creepy videos – I’m sure all of which were faked. Nonetheless, it reminded me of two of my own creepy experiences, which I thought I could write about.

I have a predisposition as to what was actually happening when I encountered the things I’m going to tell you about. You can put 2 & 2 together to figure out what I’m getting at, but I will not humor the things which I believe caused it. Hebrews 13:2 states that some entertain angels. Let’s be careful to not entertain all of them.

About ten years ago, slightly less, I was finishing up a high-school semester and taking the exams to do so. At the time, I was close friends with a guy named TJ, and at the time of exam-week, he and I were hanging out with another guy named Jamal. There was absolutely nothing irregular going on that week – just a bunch of high-schoolers trying to get out ASAP. However, for that week, TJ was stuck at school from noon to three, waiting on his ride. I lived just a quarter-mile away, so I walked home. I can’t remember why Jamal was there, but we three were looking for something to do.

You could say that every school has its own stories. Some have more; others have few. Most, though, do not have a “Satan shack.” Yea, seriously, we had a building in the woods behind our Christian school, where people in the 80’s and early 90’s would gather to practice evil (supposedly). Stories had been passed on from earlier upper class-men about how this club would meet to burn bibles, worship Satan, play with witchcraft and so on. I guess all that’s really interesting, but it holds no weight. Who better to stir up stories like that than high-schoolers?

It wasn’t uncommon for a group of people to dare a few to go down to the Satan shack to snoop around a little bit. From the side of the school, you could clearly see the shack off in the woods. So when the many dared the few, the many would stick behind and watch them go off. Typically, the few would walk in, look around, not see much more than an old barrel, then leave. I know that’s how it went, because I had been dared to go more than once. It wasn’t what we saw that scared us; it was the stories and the ambiance.

Of course, this blog is not about those times. During the exam week, someone had informed me or TJ that the Satan shack had a sub-level. I had been a few times, but I never realized that. Apparently, most people were not aware of that. How this one person knew is still a mystery, since they would never have gone to find this out on their own. TJ and I were invincible as teenagers, so going into the real Satan shack would be no problem for us. I guess Jamal felt the same way.

One afternoon, as soon as we were able to, we made our way to this shack. By myself, I would have felt uneasy, but with my cohort I was fine. When we found the basement we had been told about, it was nothing but a huge mess. The windows had broken, and so weather and bugs had been getting at that stuff since who knows when. There was a beehive in one of the walls. Ripped out pages from the bible and blocks of wood covered the floor. Stacks of wood trimming leaned against the wall in a back room. There was writing on the walls, made by a deep red-colored marker. Ouija board dice also laid scattered.

After seeing what we came for, and not seeing any reason to be scared, we decided it would be a cool idea to clean the place up and make it a place to retreat to when we felt like it. Most of the mess we were able to just throw out the broken windows. As we were cleaning, I kept finding these short blocks of wood, about 6” 2×4’s, with newspaper articles glued to one side of them. Each article was different, and so I found them interesting to look at before I threw them out along with everything else. I went to throw another block of wood out, but after turning it around from the side with the article, I saw writing on it. In the same deep red-colored marker that was used to write on the walls, was written, “TJ”.

In the moment, in unbelief, I showed TJ; we shrugged our shoulders at the coincidence, and he threw it out the window. We didn’t see it as a big deal, and alone it wasn’t. Minutes later I found the same thing, and in the same red marker was written, “NATE”. This started to creep us out, but we all just laughed and in our insecurity decided to stay. We threw out the last of the sticks and blocks of wood, and decided we would have to sweep the rest.

During this time, we had been finding Ouija board dice, and after finding the block with my name on it, we found a third die. The third find presented us with the opportunity to try to make a word. None of us had ever played the game before, so we didn’t know what to do exactly; we just did what anyone would do with dice – we rolled them. As I try to remember how it went, I think I decided to only roll once. That would have prevented us from making things up – I wanted it to be real. Instead of rolling them at once, I dropped each one by one. I played by myself. The first die dropped onto an old wooden bench in the shack, “O”, the second, “S”, the last, “N”. There was only one word those three letters could make – “SON”. And as soon as I thought what you just read, TJ, still cleaning up, stopped and said something like, “Whoa! Look at this.” He told me that he looked away for a second, and when he looked back he saw what I was able to see for myself. There was a surreal beam of sunlight shining through a hole in the wall, lighting up a fourth die. The diameter of the beam was only large enough to illuminate the die, but nothing else. What was most interesting was that TJ had been looking in that exact spot just moments before, and there was nothing there, that and the homophone between the words son and sun.

It wasn’t until we found Jamal’s name also written on another piece of wood that we decided to leave. We went to our school’s gym to talk about it, but none of us could really believe it.

Years later, as a camp counselor, I told this story to a bunch of thirteen year old guys in my cabin. It royally scared them, but I didn’t make it to sleep without being scared myself. As I lied in my sleeping bag that night, I felt a strong tug on the end of my sleeping bag. I jumped up, looked around, saw nothing, heard nothing. I rested my head back down, not wanting to find out more.