CHAPTER FOUR
The Church Lady Monster
Theorizing about these cases would be a more straightforward task if every werewolf-transformation report included tunnels, lights, or other anomalies, but unfortunately that’s not so. Still, a trans-species transformation in itself (like those we’ve examined earlier) is still worth examining. Here’s one that was sent to me in mid-April 2015.
It’s an eye-popper. This multiwitness event occurred in 1992—not in some dark tunnel, not in a Los Angeles park, but in what I would have thought the least likely of places: a Baptist church in a small Midwestern town, in the middle of a Sunday worship service. Because this is such a sensitive incident, the main witnesses are providing their names, contact information, and a few more specifics to the publisher, but they spoke to me only on condition of complete anonymity. I will add that the related information they gave me has all checked out as factual.
A pleasant, religious couple in their sixties (I’ll call them Ken and Sara) witnessed this event from a close—almost too close—vantage point, along with more than two hundred congregation members. I could not imagine a more credible pair of witnesses. Ken is a Vietnam veteran who worked in the construction industry for many years. Sara, a homemaker, worked part-time as a maintenance person at their church at the time of the encounter. I interviewed them several times—online, by phone, and in person. The building where this incident occurred no longer exists, and the land has changed owners several times, said Ken and Sara. They also wished to keep the town’s name confidential.
I expect not everyone will be able to accept as fact what these very sober and solid citizens claim to have witnessed, but I have not been able to find any hint of deception in their accounts. They agree on the appearance and actions of the phenomenon involved. They never changed a word of their statements, always answered my questions to the best of their abilities, and did not overstep when they weren’t sure they could remember any particular thing accurately. With a story like the one you are about to read, witness credibility is paramount.
The following is a combination of written and oral comments from Ken and Sara. Ken wrote:
“What I want to tell you about is a creature that actually came out of a woman in a small little church about twenty-five years ago in a morning service. The church was occupied with about 225 people, and the sermon was being given by a minister. He was on a stage approximately twenty feet from the front row of pews where this woman sat.”
Ken and Sara thought the woman was middle-aged and said they didn’t know her because she had been attending for less than a month. That day, she sat quite close to Ken and Sara’s family. The rows of pews were arranged in a semicircle, which gave all the parishioners a better view of one another.
“For some reason, my eyes were drawn to this lady,” said Ken. “I didn’t know why then, at first, but just the same I could sense there was something strange about her. She was a big-boned lady, nothing beautiful, and she had this strange, very strange grayness about her. I was sitting in another row of pews with my family just about ten feet from her.” Ken said he sat closest to the woman, with Sara on his other side and their children next to Sara.
Sara said that she also found herself paying particular attention to the woman. “It seemed like that Sunday was a weird Sunday,” she said. “She walked in and sat near us. For some reason, she kept drawing my eyes to her.”
The woman had dark hair and very ordinary features, said Sara. She wore a white shirt and black slacks. Although there was nothing especially memorable about the woman’s appearance, Sara noticed that she seemed to be fidgeting a lot. Suddenly, the unthinkable—the inconceivable—happened.
Ken continued, “Our minister had just wrapped up his ending and had closed the sermon and had left the podium to go to sit with his wife and family. For him to do that, he had to walk past this woman. As he grabbed his Bible and papers, he stepped down off the stage and proceeded toward her when all of a sudden she stood up, let out a bloodcurdling scream, and began to literally contort her head and body. Now, I had never believed in such things, but on that day, right then, I saw the real thing take place, as did my wife and everyone else who was in that morning service.
“As she contorted, suddenly she just changed into a hideous creature. I mean she just transformed into this huge beastly creature similar to what people might call a wolf, but actually wasn’t. This creature that came out of her was quite large. It stood on hind legs and roared a roar that would have made a lion cower. It had fur, it had legs like the Pan creature [of Greek and Roman mythology], long teeth, and very long claws, and its growling and screaming echoed in every corner of the church from ceiling to floor.” It also seemed to emit a foul odor that reminded him of sulfur, he said.
Eyewitness sketch by “Ken” as he remembered the transformed creature in his church. (Published with permission.)
Sara’s description matched the account Ken had given me days earlier. “This girl stood up and she gave out the most horrendous scream,” said Sara. “She contorted and then instantly changed. There was no metamorphosis, no transition sequence. She just changed right before our eyes. She kept roaring—it was a sound I’d never heard before, like a roar with a growl. When the pastor walked past her, she put her claws up and looked at him by doing this.” (Sara demonstrated by dropping her head forward and then swiveling her face to the side while her head remained dropped forward, hands upraised and fingers curved.)
“It had to be a supernatural change, not physical,” Sara continued. “Her face was not a dog face; it was more like a baboon or dog-faced monkey face. The eyes were solid black; the teeth had grown four inches. Her body was more muscular than anything I’ve ever seen. It was massively built, with big shoulders and chest that came down to a narrow waist and then muscular thighs. The bottom part of the legs were thin, more like a deer’s, and they ended in cloven hooves, about this long.” Sara made a gesture with her hands that indicated a size of five to six inches. She remembered that the woman had been wearing shoes, she said, but there was no evidence of the shoes or the white blouse or black slacks, just gray fur that covered her head to toe. There was no tail. “The roaring went on for several minutes,” said Sara.
Ken said, “As it stood there looking at the church people, we knew that this thing was evil. It appeared mad, appeared very angry, frenzied as if it were in a protective stance. Its arms were extended from about its waist, and it had long sharp claws. I will never forget its claws or its teeth. The fangs were as long as the ones on this kind of deer in Vietnam [there are certain species of deer such as the muntjac that have long fangs]. No, it didn’t get physically violent, but it’s possible it could have. No one moved. We all just sat there. As we began praying with the rest of the people my daughter said, ‘Mom, what is that thing?’ My wife said, ‘Don’t look at it—she’s having an epileptic fit.’ My [eighteen-year-old] daughter replied, ‘Mom, that is no epileptic seizure!’”
Sara added that her daughter also said, “Do you think I’m stupid?”
Ken expressed his own fear of the entity. “When she was screaming, you could hear that and this guttural noise from deep inside her throat in every part of the church,” he said. “If this hadn’t occurred in a church I believe there would have been violence.”
The first to react to the roaring creature was the minister. “He stopped and held out his hand,” said Ken. “He said, ‘Satan, you have no authority here.’ That’s when she really growled. She began to pant as if debating fight or flight. This thing just stood there for what seemed like the longest time, and then one of the ushers, Tom, walked up behind it and he grabbed it and took it down onto a pew. Four other ushers came up then and helped Tom out. There was an enormous scream and just as fast as it had reared up when it came, it was now gone. In an instant. Tom was half [lying], half sitting there in the pew with this [woman] in his lap almost.”
The woman had returned to her normal appearance, including clothing, said Ken. The group of ushers then half carried, half dragged the unresisting woman into another room. She looked dazed, said Ken. I have a feeling that was an understatement.
I asked Ken and Sara whether the congregation was fleeing in panic by that time—I’m sure I would have been considering that option were I in their place—but as far as the couple knew, everyone stayed put until the woman had been removed from the sanctuary. “After they took her out, people were saying, ‘What was that? Did you see that?’” said Sara. She added that everyone seemed quite shaken and that people were reluctant to talk about what had happened. “It became hush-hush,” said Sara. She believed that this attitude of shared privacy was due to the protectiveness the members felt toward their church, and added that from then on, no one ever mentioned it.
Sara said that as soon as she could, she ran outside to the car and cried. Her children were very affected—one of them was shaking and just wanted to leave. Ken said that he asked the pastor whether he had seen what he thought he had seen, and the pastor replied that yes, he had. Ken also said the pastor told the first usher who had grabbed the creature, “Don’t you ever touch one of those again!”
The woman was kept within the church building until elders were sure she was no longer an immediate danger, said Ken, and that according to church elders, she had been given “treatment” of some kind, although he wasn’t sure exactly what that entailed. “From what I was told, she was taken to someplace where people came to examine her and look at her,” said Ken. He said that his church’s pastor and elders seemed to believe that what they considered a demonic, possessing entity had been successfully exorcised from the woman.
I asked Ken if he knew where this woman was taken to be “studied.” A higher arm of the church? The government? Some clandestine organization officially designated to handle cases of lycanthropy? Unfortunately, Ken was not privy to this information, and he thought that the men who assisted at that time had by now either become very elderly or passed on.
Ken told me that the entire episode had been recorded due to the church’s usual practice of videotaping services, but when he inquired about viewing the tape, he was told it was no longer in the church’s possession. “They either gave the tape of the incident to someone, or the church leaders destroyed it, but I was told [the tape] no longer existed.” And, of course, in the late 1980s, the parishioners would not have had cell phones with cameras in their pockets and handbags to snap pictures and video.
There were other indications that the creature’s manifestation may have left some residual effects at that church. One of these came in the form of poltergeist or psychokinetic (objects moved by “psychic” or other unknown force or energy) phenomena that occurred in the weeks following the creature’s manifestation. In what Sara recalled as the most frightening example of these “strange things,” she said that she was at the church alone one day during her regular cleaning hours when she found a butcher knife lying on the floor of the church library. Puzzled as to how such an object would have gotten there, she placed it on a shelf in that room and carefully positioned it to lie safely flat. When she returned later, the knife had changed its position so that it now lay precariously on its back edge, with the sharp side up. No one had been in the library to move it.
Ken added, “I had never seen anything like that [creature] in my life and I don’t ever want to again as long as I live.” He added that the closest thing to it he could recall was during his service in Vietnam when his company would sometimes encounter what they called “rock apes,” animals that reminded him of small, four-to-five-foot-tall baboons. “They had great strength in their arms and could hurl heavy rocks,” he said. “They were meaner than all get out and we avoided them. They ran on all fours but would stand up to throw rocks.” (These creatures Ken described are considered unknown animals or cryptids, and have been reported by numerous other Vietnam veterans. The Vietnamese call them Batutut or “forest people.”)
“But what it was, we still to this day do not know,” Ken continued. “It was not a guardian spirit and we knew that it wasn’t human but a demon of some sort. The thing about this was, the woman it came out of, we didn’t see her [physical body] after this thing came out of her. What produced it, what caused it to come out . . . we figured it was a confrontation between good and evil right there.
“What I saw in that church that day was—I believe—a satanic manifestation of a demonic entity. It was real, it was possessing her, and it may have been demonstrating it had power. What I know is, whatever [these creatures] are, they’re real. Either I’m nuts or they’re real.”
Ken provided a very meticulous sketch of the creature (p. 61) drawn especially for this book, and Sara agreed that he captured its likeness accurately. He had no problem with that because the sight was engraved on his mind, said Ken.
The woman evidently left town after the incident. Ken and Sara didn’t know where she had gone and they didn’t have any other contact with her. They also moved away not long after, and the congregation soon disbanded. The pastor left as well. I did contact him, but before I could ask any questions he gave me only a standard-sounding statement that he never discussed former pastoral duties. I have no idea whether he suspected what I intended to ask him. And I do know that maintaining congregational confidentiality is common ministerial practice.