The next destination on my itinerary was the greatest enigma of my existence.  God’s House was the haunted mansion that we’d moved into after my father had quit his assistant pastor job at Our Redeemer Lutheran in downtown Waikiki and joined up with the Jesus People.  The Jesus People is a movement that sprung up in California and Hawaii at the end of the 60s, where hippies looking for a spiritual high became Born Again Christians, modeling their lives after the examples of the apostles in the New Testament.  Their beliefs included being born again, praying for healing, the casting out of demons, being filled with the spirit, and speaking in tongues.

Hawaii at that point was a backwater of lost souls who’d come over looking for paradise, only to freak out on drugs and get decimated by bad hygiene and poor nutrition.  My father had met his people through a Thursday night prayer meeting he was overseeing.  After quitting the church, they all went looking for a place where they could live communally, and came across God’s House, a mansion that had been built by a physician.  The rent was so cheap because it was reportedly haunted.  Before we moved in a local newspaper had offered a hundred dollars to anyone who could last one night in the house.

My father and some of the other men from the movement went up and claimed the house for Christ, anointing the doors with Olive Oil.  They built a cross in the front yard with a sign that said God’s House on it. 

There was still something way off about the place.  There had been ti leaves wrapped around the wooden banister on the stairway to ward off malevolent spirits.  Tiki gods were stashed in secret cupboards in the kitchen.  The people we were living with were prone to psychosis and drama.  One woman walked through a sliding glass door one day and had to be rushed to the hospital.

Upstairs there was a library where the group would meet and have prayer meetings.  It was that library I was trying to get to in a dream when a snake came out of the jungle and chased me across the slippery patio, whispering in my ear.  I’d woken up and run into the library where the group was meeting.  They’d laid hands on me and prayed for the baptism of the Holy Spirit.  I began to speak in tongues and the next day was baptized in the ocean.

Now it was incredible to think that the house even existed.  I’d done a search for it on Google and come up with a news story about a monster house in Manoa that seemed to match my memories.  When I tracked down the address on an envelope, it turned out to be the same place.  To get there I took 9^th Avenue down to Dole Street and then cut across the University of Hawaii, where my mother had gotten her Bachelor of Fine Arts.  The bike I was riding made the trip down memory lane even more improbable than it already was, as its more rightful designation would’ve been an instrument of torture.  There was no seat to speak of, only the head of a spear to balance on.

When I got past the university, I began to experience flashbacks once again, basic scenes that I would’ve seen over fifty years ago, driving to the house and back.  At one point I’d had a birthday party in the house that had been interrupted by a doctor visit that had been scheduled at the same time.  What the parents who dropped off the kids at the party thought about all the hippies milling around, I’ll never know.  We were always the outsiders, wherever we went.

When I got to Paty Drive, I had to get off and walk the bike again.  There had rarely been a time I’d felt as much suspense approaching any destination.  Then I was there and could see the top of the house breaching the trees.  To reach it I needed to descend a long curving driveway.  On that same driveway I’d once placed my brother John on the handlebars when I was just learning to ride a bike and ended up catapulting him into a brick wall.  Now someone was coming up it with a garbage bag. 

I retreated and waited a few minutes then started back down again.  It was private property so I couldn’t go much further.  I only saw the front of the house, but that was enough to prove that it had all been real.  We’d lived in the house for less than a year, but it had lived in me since then.  I frequently dreamed about it, rummaging through it, lost in a maze of claustrophobic rooms.  If there’d ever been dark spirits living in the house, I’d been carrying them around since the day we moved out.  It was time to set them free.