My Uncle Phil (Part One)

by Anna

This is a story that I feel my body afraid to tell. Somewhere inside of my self a part of me says not to tell this family secret, and yet another part of my self says that the story must be told. There is a lesson in it that may help other people. Even after years and years of therapy and recovery, I am still afraid to tell this. My parents would definitely not approve.

What happened to me still scares me a bit, but it will also always fill me with awe about a power greater than myself.

My Uncle Phil was a very troubled soul. He was an alcoholic and a horribly violent man. I cannot count the many times that my seven siblings and I all ran around the house locking the doors and windows when one of us would spot my Uncle Phil walking up to the front door. He was usually drunk when he came over and he was always carrying a knife. It still chills me to remember him screaming and banging on the front door for us to let him in. This happened when my Aunt Teresa (Uncle Phil's wife) came over to our house to hide from Phil. I can still hear him out there screaming, "I know she's in there".

My Uncle Phil and Aunt Teresa lived just two houses down from us while I was growing up. I had been in their yard many times to play with my cousin Sheila who was their adopted daughter. I went into their house sometimes when Uncle Phil was not there.

There was a room in their basement that I was told to never go into. My Aunt Teresa looked so terrified one time as she told me that I was never to open the door to that room or ever go inside. It was Uncle's Phil's special room and no-one was allowed to go in.

It was a couple of days before Christmas and I was seven years old, when curiosity finally got the best of me. I was looking around our house to try to find out where my parents hid the Christmas presents. When I didn't find any presents, I decided to go to my cousin Sheila's house to see if the presents were hidden there. Sheila wasn't home at the time, but my Aunt Teresa let me in for something to drink.

When Teresa wasn't looking, I slipped away and made my way down their steps to the basement. I looked everywhere down there, but didn't find any presents. Suddenly, I turned a corner of their basement and found myself face to face with Uncle Phil. I will always remember the look on his face. All of these thoughts started going through my head. My Uncle Phil had mentioned quite a few times that his dream was to some day kill someone. One time he looked at me and my sister and said, "Your parents have eight children, they won't miss you". As I stood there in that basement looking at Phil, I was certain that I was about to die.

Uncle Phil's face was tortured, twisted and dark. He had a smile that you would see in a horror movie. He was excited to see me there. I saw him look around to see if anyone else was in the basement. When he saw that no-one was there, he looked very deeply into my eyes. As he looked at me, I felt myself going into a kind of a trance. I felt powerless to fight or to do anything to get away from Uncle Phil. He took my hand and started to open the door to the room that no-one was supposed to enter. Just then, I felt my Aunt Teresa behind me. She grabbed me and pulled me away from Phil. I could feel her hands shaking. She yelled, "I told you to never come down here and never go in that room". Uncle Phil looked at my Aunt Teresa and I could see rage in his eyes at her. I thought at that time that Phil was going to kill us both.

In that moment, something else happened. I felt an intensely powerful energy come down into me. It seemed to come through the ceiling above me. As it entered my body, I had a feeling that I had never felt before. I was so powerful with this energy. I felt as if no-one could hurt me and that I was the most powerful being in the universe.

The energy seemed to take me over and without being in control of it, I turned my face to stare at Phil. I stared at him in such a determined and powerful way and I kept looking into his eyes. To this day, I can still see the horror and shock in my Uncle Phil's face. He was frozen with it. He stared back at me as if he couldn't get away. Then, I saw his face change. It seemed like his face changed over and over again until he ended up looking like a sweet and innocent child. His eyes softened. I almost couldn't recognize him as my Uncle anymore. I could hear someone saying something behind me and it was my Aunt Teresa. She was saying, "Oh my God, what's happening".

After that, my Uncle Phil sat down on the floor and did not get up. The powerful energy started to leave me, and I turned and ran home.

Uncle Phil was kind of changed after that for about two weeks, and then he slowly reverted back to the way that he was before. His face once again became tortured, twisted, and dark. He went back to terrorizing my Aunt, my cousin and us. Only one thing had really changed. Every time my Uncle Phil saw me, he turned and went the other way. He did everything he could to avoid me. I didn't tell my mother that story back then and it was a mystery to her and my siblings why Uncle Phil would be so afraid of me.

When I was grown, I talked to my mother one time and she said that my Uncle Phil had ended up murdering someone and that he was put into a prison for the criminally insane. He died in that prison. She said, "You know Anna, I never told you this, but your Uncle Phil was satanic. He used to have a room in his basement that had an alter in it. I don't what he did in there, and I wouldn't want to know."

I felt frozen when my mother told me that. My mother put all of us children in a Catholic school for the first eight years of our schooling and we went to church every Sunday. My Aunt Teresa and my cousin Sheila also went to church every Sunday. I suddenly remembered that I had never seen my Uncle Phil in church.

I didn't tell my mother what had happened to me, I just excused myself and hung up the phone. Then I said a prayer to God thanking him for saving my life.

My sister Laura was not so lucky. Laura was put into a mental hospital when she was 16. I was 13 years old at the time. I had been very close to Laura when we were little.

When Laura got older, I became afraid of her because of her violence. I watched Laura go insane until they put her in the mental hospital. Since Laura and I had been so close as children, the psychologists at the mental hospital asked my mother to bring me to the mental hospital every weekend to see Laura in the hopes that it would bring Laura out of it. I remember sitting in the lobby waiting to see Laura and just staring at a picture hanging on the wall of a saint. For some reason, I always felt comforted when I looked at that picture.