Some years later, my father gave a lecture at a church we were attending at the time. I had no idea what he was going to say, but what he did say chilled me to my bones and it explained everything.
His lecture was a warning to teenagers about the occult. He began telling them about the time he, my mother and a group of people from our old church in Kentucky were led into an occult practice known as channeling. He explained how a man from the church had convinced this group that channeling was a spiritual practice used to communicate with God.
My father went on to explain howhe became the channeler and that the spirit of a Native American took over his body and spoke through my father. What the Indian had to say, or what my father experienced during the "visit," isn't really all that important. But the channeling had apparently opened a door between our household and the paranormal. It wreaked havoc on friendships, the church and my parents' relationship so much that when my parents had had enough and broke from the group, it caused a fight that, to this day, neither my mother or father can remember what it was about.
The result of that fight caused my father to get into his 1969 Buick and drive headlong toward a stone wall that ran alongside a curve on an old country road. He intended to kill himself.
My father says that when he saw the stone wall, he hit the gas and headed straight for it. He came within ten feet of the wall... and what happened next is quite remarkable. My father said it was as if someone had grabbed the top of the car and shoved it downward into the ground to make it stop completely, then turned the car around 180 degrees!
After hearing this story, many things began to make sense. But I still wonder what or who Clifford was. A lot of things during that time scared me... but Clifford wasn't one of them.
