Witch-Hunt
Witches are where you find them. But where is that?
(Page 2 of 4)
“There have been signs something was going to happen in San Antonio for a long time,” he began. And then he immediately started telling me about one John Todd, a man about 28, who had come to Castle Hills with the story that he was a former grand druid, one of the ten or so highest ranking witches in the United States. Todd had been converted just six weeks earlier after seeing the movie The Cross and the Switchblade. He had then made his way to Castle Hills with his story of the world meeting Halloween night. Todd added that his occult name was Lance, that the meeting would be attended by Anton LaVey, high priest of San Francisco’s Satanic Church, by Jeanne Dixon, by the Amazing Kreskin, by representatives from the Woman’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, by a voodoo priest from Brazil, and possibly by representatives from the World Council of Churches and the Vatican. Todd claimed he feared for his life now that he had converted—his past associates would stop at nothing—but his list of witches, in spite of the great secrecy he insisted surrounded all their doings, sounded like pretty much the same people David Susskind would choose to gather for a TV show on the occult. But Todd’s paranoia ran full depth: Nixon had consulted astrologers while in China, proving his connection with the black arts, and George McGovern was a member of a Chicago coven where he used the name Lanaca.
The church had bought the whole story. “I was skeptical at first,” Malcolm told me, pointing his forehead straight into my eyes, his reedy voice gaining in timbre, “but I’ve prayed with him and heard him testify. There’re too many other things happening that all point to this. John even has a scar on his arm from the time he sealed a covenant with Satan with his own blood.”
Blood again. Malcolm would later tell me he had claimed his office with the blood of Jesus Christ to protect us from the devils that would surely come around when we started talking about them. Malcolm watched me warily; I tried without completely succeeding not to watch him the same way.
Malcolm’s office ran about fifteen feet on a side, had a carpet, a comfortable couch, several chairs, a five-foot desk. He sat before a large window flanked by built-in bookcases filled with biblical reference books and Christian tracts. The sun was shining through the window making the office light as outdoors and, as he talked, my eyes sometimes drifted to the hard blue November sky above his head.
“They’ve chosen San Antonio,” Malcolm went on, “because of the water around here, they need it for their rituals, and because the climate and everything else is like Palestine.” In fact Todd had said that the witches were going to build a temple. It would have a rounded top with bulletproof glass and doorways with no doors that still keep in heat in winter and cold in summer and a stained glass window with a pentacle and a cross. There would be one story above ground and four below. It would have some noncommital name so the general public wouldn’t know it was the world headquarters of witchcraft although the general public would all agree it was a very beautiful building.
No wonder everyone was so upset. Todd had even warned that witches were infesting the humane society so they would have access to animals to sacrifice in their rituals.
Todd’s warnings had not been seeds cast upon rocky soil. Satan, Malcolm believed, had been making his presence felt in San Antonio for some time. One of the first cases he had himself seen was that of a Mexican man who complained of hearing voices, of feeling that he had fouled his pants only to discover that he hadn’t. He felt parts of his flesh burning and was beset at night with grim visitations. The man went to a curandero, a Mexican sorcerer, who gave him a potion to rub on his flesh when it burned.
That treatment failed. Through a relative the man came to Castle Hills and Malcolm prayed with him to cast out the devil. The man admitted he was homosexual. He thought the spirit inhabiting him was in the form of a woman who made him seek out men for her. Malcolm allowed no other explanation but possession for either the man’s behavior or sexual preferences.
“I’ve always wondered how homosexuals can come into a new town where they don’t know anyone and very quickly find others like them,” Malcolm explained. “It’s the devil in them that draws them to others that are possessed. Satanists can recognize each other the same way.”
It was difficult to know what to say next. Fortunately, Malcolm was used to taking the ball and running with it. “Humanism, science, rationalism,” saying them as if he were spitting out bad tasting seeds, “are really the work of the devil because they tell us not to believe in devils and spirits and that makes us all the more susceptible to them.” Then he leapt into the breach with proof. He pulled a file from his desk which contained, among other things, clippings from a 1971 copy of the Village Voice. The clippings were all the ads that had anything to do with meditation, eastern religion, Gestalt therapy, psychotherapy, astrology, drugs, plays and movies about sex; a play called “Sodom and Gomorrah” had him particularly upset. He showed me these ads one by one with great solemnity, but never letting them out of his hands and watching me carefully to gauge their effect. He was peculiarly silent during all this. Then he mentioned with horror the television show “Bewitched.” He said that you could walk into any bookstore and see hundreds of books on demonology, witccraft, Satanism, eastern religion, etc. All these things, he said, were produced by either willing or unwitting cohorts of the devil. Allowing them in your house was simply giving Satan a door through which he could pass into your soul.
As final proof he pulled from his file a Marvel comic called “New Gods.” He pointed to a picture of an immense hairy monster with tentacles streaming from its mouth. “This is close,” he said. I didn’t understand. Malcolm and I glanced at one another but said nothing. He turned to another, larger picture, placed it in front of me, and tapped the edge slowly with one finger. It was a picture of a swarm of scaly devils riding screeching pterodactyls toward a frenzied, helpless man. “This is very close,” Malcolm said. And then I understood.
There was more but he stopped as two women joined us in the office. He placed the folder back in his desk and with a smile now back on his face, introduced me to the women.
They were the youth minister, a tall white-haired woman in her fifties, very unlike the “dynamic,” well-dressed student council types youth ministers tend to be, and a much younger woman with curled, beauty parlor hair, hose, heels, a nondescript though relatively new red and blue dress. Attractive enough in an oval, fresh-faced, hearth ’n’ home way, she was in charge of the church’s day care center. She believed that many childhood difficulties—anger, frustration, disobedience—can be attributed to demon possession. “We can pray and get rid of the demon,” she said, “but it doesn’t do any good if the child goes right back to a house where devils exist.” It seemed likely that a child who threw a tantrum and had to suffer through a long bout of prayers because of it might think twice before throwing one again. “I used to be possessed with the demon of self-pity,” she said, her perky voice assuming a kind of perky sincerity, “but I was able to rid myself of it through prayer. And now—she sat up straighter, smiled happily, wrinkled her eyes— “I’m not bothered with self-pity any more.”
John Todd had said that San Antonio high school students were drinking dog’s blood in witchcraft ceremonies, and the youth minister concurred. She said that a girl in whose home she was regularly visiting admitted that she had been involved in something like that. The principals of the high schools mentioned had been notified and given the names of the girls supposedly involved. It’s interesting to reflect that the Salem trials began with adolescent girls accusing people who for one reason or another they didn’t like.
And there really had been a book-burning. Malcolm’s account made my imagined scene seem pretty close to the truth.
Many objects of the devil had been burned. The high point had been the arrival of a girl dressed in black robes who said she had set out that Halloween night to have sex with Satan. What perverse strain of that erotic desire had led her to Castle Hills would make interesting speculation. But show up she did. Later she said, knowing there were rabbits in the woods behind the church, that she thought she was taking the form of a wolf; she wanted to find the rabbits and drink their blood. According to Malcolm, several strong men had to hold her down so they could pray over her and exorcize the devil in her.
John Todd, unfortunately, could not be seen. He was frightened that his old cohorts in witchcraft were plotting revenge for his exposing them. “But go see Jim Dolan,” Malcolm said. “He’s a reporter, too. He knows about these things.” Finally Malcolm gave me some tapes, one by Todd telling about his escape from witchcraft and another from a woman who, right in this same office, had been delivered from Satan and seen visions of Satan and Jesus while it happened.
As I rose to say good-bye to the three of them, Malcolm asked, “Are you a Christian, Greg?”
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