This may seem like an ordinary attempted break-in, but the intruder was trying to do something much worse…
“When I was a kid we’d go to these beach cabins in Maryland. They were small, rustic ordeals with basic comforts, nothing fancy. Two bedrooms and a cot in the kitchen, and my siblings and I rotated on the cot so that no one got too sore from it. A small tradition was that my mom and I would have a hot cup of tea before bed, in our summer jammies, as a way to relax.
One night I was settling on to the cot when she picked up the tea kettle to fill it. Out of the corner of my eye I see her flinch, then say in a steady voice ‘What are you doing there?’ My head whipped over to the kitchenette, to see her looking out the window. Then she jumped back and started screaming for my father. Somehow he knew something was wrong, ran from the back bedroom and barely paused to see my mom point towards the left side of the house. He burst out the door and towards the left of the cabin. I’ll be the first to admit I ran like crazy and baseball slid under my parent’s bed, because I was 10 and that’s what kids do when they’re terrified. I still remember the smell of the old wood and the feel of my teddy bear shielding me from whatever the heck was happening.
Outside my father managed to tackle the guy that had been peeping into our kitchen window. He put him in an elbow lock face down on the ground while my mom ran to get the cell phone we’d bought just two weeks earlier (this was in 95 when those suckers had cords and everything). While my mom called 911, I remember hearing the guy talking. He was saying things like ‘The Ouija board f–king told me…’ ‘I want the devil to suck my f–king brains out…’ ‘Satan is in cabin 10, I have to get to cabin 10…’ ‘The devil wants me to kill myself…’ and so on. We were in cabin 3, over half a mile from where he apparently intended to meet the Devil. My dad kept a grip on him for probably a good 15 minutes until the cops showed up. The first thing out of the one’s mouth was ‘Jamie, when’d they let you out?’ He’d been released from jail just 2 weeks earlier, for arson. You know where he was standing, when my mom was at the sink in the kitchen?
Right beside the propane tank.”
