Steven LaChance Blog

HAUNTING STORIES – Monday

From the Case Files of Steven LaChance

(The real story behind what became my fiction book, Glow)

It began as these things sometimes do, with a group of friends, a few beers, and a Ouija board.

Nobody was expecting anything particularly extraordinary to happen that evening. It was supposed to be a little entertainment, something to laugh about the following morning. Instead, that evening would become the beginning of a disturbing series of events that would eventually find their way into my research files.

This story has played out over and over through the years. Friends gather, drink a few, and someone pulls out a Ouija board, starting a series of events they wish had never begun.

For this group of friends, the Ouija board began responding to questions, and before long, they believed they were communicating with the spirit of a man who had lived in Missouri during the nineteenth century. He claimed to have been enslaved and subjected to terrible cruelty. According to the messages received through the board, he had been separated from his family, sold, beaten, castrated, and finally hanged. It was a horrifying account of suffering, and the people gathered around the board were understandably moved by what they were hearing. This is how these things usually begin. The spirit of the board plays with your emotions. It uses that as its hook and then begins to reel you in.

When the group asked his name, the board eventually spelled out five letters.

M-O-S-E-S.

There was something terribly sad about Moses. At least, that was how he initially presented himself. He seemed less interested in frightening anyone than in having someone listen to his story. The group had gone into the evening looking for entertainment, but now they believed they had encountered someone who had suffered a terrible death. Rather than being afraid of him, they felt a deep sympathy for him. Perhaps, they reasoned, they could do something to help this unfortunate soul find peace.

Unfortunately, the evening didn’t end when they put away the Ouija board.

Not long afterward, the nightmares began.

One of the young men involved in the session found himself confronted by Moses whenever he slept. These weren’t occasional bad dreams that could be dismissed over breakfast. The figure returned night after night, making sleep increasingly difficult. What had begun as curiosity was turning into exhaustion and dread. Imagine being afraid to go to sleep because you knew exactly who would be waiting for you when you closed your eyes. He wasn’t afraid for himself, but he was convinced that Moses needed his help. The emotions he described were complex. Sure, it was unsettling and exhausting, but the idea that a soul could suffer was almost too much for the young man to handle.

The young man became determined to learn more about Moses. If the story communicated through the board was true, perhaps there would be some historical record of him. Missouri had a long and often brutal history of slavery, and researching that history revealed a great deal about the lives of enslaved people and the violence they endured. Some candidates seemed to fit parts of Moses’s story, but none could be positively identified as the man who supposedly contacted the group and was haunting the young man’s dreams.

Not knowing only complicated matters. Was Moses telling the truth? Had the group really contacted someone who had suffered such a terrible death? If they had, why did he keep appearing in dreams?

Eventually, the young man decided to consult a psychic. He hoped she might help identify Moses and perhaps explain how to end the nightmares. What he discovered when he arrived at her home was almost comically like something out of a horror movie.

The psychic lived in a perfectly ordinary suburban neighborhood. Her house was a well-maintained bi-level home with white siding, black shutters, and a neatly manicured lawn. Nothing about the place suggested anything unusual happened inside. In fact, it was the sort of house you might drive past a hundred times without giving it a second thought.

There was, however, one rather remarkable feature of the property.

The backyard was a cemetery.

Beyond the house stood rows of gravestones, close enough to be seen through the large glass doors at the rear of the home. Inside, the furnishings were modern, with white walls, white furniture, and touches of chrome. The psychic was nothing like the mysterious old woman one might expect in such circumstances. She was an attractive, professionally dressed woman who looked as though she had recently returned from work.

The young man explained the Ouija board session, Moses’s account of his death, the historical research, and the recurring nightmares. He was hoping to learn how to help the unfortunate soul who had contacted them.

Instead, the psychic told him something that came as a complete shock.

She didn’t believe Moses was who he claimed to be!

According to her interpretation, the group had not contacted the tortured spirit of an enslaved man. She believed they had encountered something much darker, a spirit that had used a tragic story to gain their sympathy. She warned that the Ouija board had given something unwanted an opportunity to enter their lives. Her advice was simple. Stop communicating with it. Back away from the entire experience.

For someone who had spent so much time trying to help Moses, accepting the suggestion that his story might have been a deception was difficult. The original motivation had been compassion. Nobody had gone looking for something evil. They believed they were helping someone who had suffered.

But the nightmares continued to reveal a different personality.

The sorrowful figure who had originally seemed so desperate for understanding began to change during the recurring dreams. The sadness gave way to something colder. The dreams turned into very real nightmares. The sympathy he had inspired no longer seemed to be what he wanted. His manner became mocking, his presence increasingly unpleasant, and what had once seemed like a request for help began to feel more like a demand.

Eventually, Moses’s identity gave way to another name and a transformation into a completely different persona. The young man described it as removing a mask to reveal the horror beneath.

That horror was a monstrous creature who called himself John Glow.

I can describe Glow the way he was described to me time and again. Long, stringy hair and white eyes that, of course, glowed. He was often described as having the face of Christ gone mad.

And he was violent.

He attacked.

The change was disturbing because it raised questions about everything that had happened since that first evening. Had the group ever been communicating with someone named Moses? Was the account of slavery and execution genuine, or a carefully chosen story designed to provoke sympathy? The historical research had never established the man’s identity, and the psychic’s warning suggested the answers might be far more troubling than anyone had imagined. And, of course, once he revealed himself to be Glow, it was very difficult to stop the violent madness that took over.

The experience might have remained an isolated mystery if other cases hadn’t come to my attention over the years.

I encountered accounts involving young men who described strangely similar experiences.

They reported visitors appearing during sleep, figures who initially seemed sympathetic, comforting, or unusually interested in their lives. These visitors appeared to understand their fears and vulnerabilities. In some accounts, the experience began almost pleasantly, with the dreamer believing he had encountered someone who offered companionship or reassurance.

Then the dreams always changed into horrific nightmares that sometimes stepped out of their dreams into waking life. This wasn’t like the horror movies we have all seen, and I immediately began to question it. Then I learned those horror movies were based on real cases. One in particular was young men being killed in their dreams in Indonesia.

The visitors became demanding and almost always violent.

What had once seemed comforting became frightening. Sleep was disrupted, and the experiences reportedly began affecting ordinary waking life. Relationships suffered. Work became difficult. Some of the young men described encounters that seemed to continue beyond their dreams, leaving them increasingly frightened and exhausted.

Did the phenomenon described in the far reaches of the world finally come to America?

The accounts differed, of course, and no one could establish that everyone had encountered the same phenomenon. But the similarities were difficult to ignore. Again and again, the stories began with an apparently sympathetic visitor who gradually revealed a much more disturbing personality.

Some of those cases ended in tragedy, including deaths by suicide. This is a very real result of some of these cases. I have never claimed that a supernatural entity caused those deaths. However, what troubled me was the pattern described in the accounts leading up to them, particularly the deterioration in sleep, emotional well-being, and everyday life.

Sleep deprivation is a serious and sometimes scary thing with horrific consequences at times.

The more I examined these experiences, the more I wondered about the original case. In that case, the first response had been compassion for someone believed to have suffered terribly. In the later cases, the visitor also seemed to establish trust before the experiences became frightening.

Was there a connection? Was there a common psychological explanation? Or did the similarities point to something we hadn’t yet understood?

Those questions stayed with me for years.

Eventually, those experiences, eyewitness accounts, and research became part of the inspiration for my novel, Glow. Although the novel is fictional, some of its material comes from real reports and experiences. I explain this in detail in the book’s foreword. I deliberately chose fiction to explore those ideas, letting me build a story without identifying the people involved or presenting every event as documented fact.

But fiction doesn’t necessarily make the questions behind a story disappear.

I still think about the Ouija board descriptions. I think about the terrible account of suffering, the unsuccessful search through Missouri history, and the psychic who warned that Moses was not what he appeared to be. Most of all, I think about the other young men whose accounts contained such unsettling similarities.

After all these years, I still cannot tell you who Moses really was. I can only tell you that he eventually became known as a creature sometimes called John Glow. And that people who reported encountering figures like him didn’t always have happy endings.

So, I leave you with this warning this Halloween week.

If you think you want to play with a Ouija board as a party game, understand it could turn frightfully ugly, and for some, once that turn happens, it never ends.

Be careful, my friends, because you never want to be woken and held down in the inescapable grip of an entity with glowing eyes and the face of Christ gone mad.