The Man Who Met the Devil

Jake and Mike were walking home from the last day of sixth grade, but instead of feeling happy for summer break, it was bittersweet. Jake's family was moving the next morning, and it was their last day together too. As they walked in silence, Mike turned to Jake and asked, have you ever been to the Devil's Gate? Jake shook his head, so Mike insisted he needed to see it before leaving California forever. It wasn't too far from when they were now, and so they walked to Hamongna Park and then to Lakajada Verdugo Road. Across the busy street, past a cul de sac, and over a concrete bridge. They walked past the first dark tunnel. That is the wrong one. The correct tunnel is past a bridge, and Mike was leading the way. After the tunnel, they found themselves in a very wooded area, and their clear path grew difficult with each step. There were rocks everywhere, and Jake almost tripped when Mike yelled, out, there it is the rock surrounding the sketchy gates really did look like Satan. They took turns pointing at spots on the rock that looked like a horn, eyes, a sharp nose, and a chin. It was a strange sight. Jake wasn't so sure. He wanted to get closer, and he found a saving grace. There was a pond, and between them and the entrance of the gate, there was no way to get in without getting wet. Plus the water was murky green. It kind of smelled bad. But when he pointed this out to his friend, Mike told him not to worry. That there was a ladder they could take to avoid the pond. Jake didn't want to, but Mike begged. He said it would be one last adventure together, and so he followed him down the old rusted ladder. They were halfway down when they heard a grunt coming from the bottom right from the gate. Jake asked his friend what the sound was. His voice was shaking. Mike told him to relax that it was probably the wind, so he climbed down one more step when they heard it again. This time, it repeated three times. Then it paused and they heard it again three more times. Jake wasn't sure about this anymore, but Mike was already at the gate. Don't worry, it was just a frog man. I just saw it jump inside the gate, and so with that, he continued down the ladder to join him at the bottom. When they reached it, they shook the gate, but it was locked. They couldn't see very far inside because it was so dark, but they did see weird symbols painted on the walls. Jake felt a heavy weight on his chest, but he didn't want to tell Mike. Since it couldn't get in, they figured it was time to go home, so they turned around to climb back up. Before they started making their way up, there was a scream. They turned around but still couldn't see anything. Mike turned his phone light so they could see better, and that's when they noticed. At the back of the tunnel there was a flat rock. It was smeared with a red liquid. It looked like fresh blood. Jake grabbed Mike's arm and yelled, let's go, and they heard the sound of a girl yelling help. Mike insisted they needed to help whoever was in there, but when they pointed a cellphone light inside the tunnel, there was no girl. Instead, there were two men in long hooded cloaks and they were heading straight for the gate, straight for them. The boys ran to the ladder and climbed as quickly as he could, and then they kept running. They ran all the way home. They never spoke about what they saw that night at the Devil's Gate. I'm sure you can probably think of one. I know in my city nearby there's Turnbull Canyon that also has a Devil's Gate. So there's a lot of so called Devil's gates around the world, and this one in Pasadena, California has a very dark past. So today I'm going to be exploring the ties between this gate, Satanism, and a man that connected the two. My name is Edwin, and here's a horror story. Stories of the Devil's Gate and Pasadena go way back, and I mean way back. The indigenous Tongva believe this spot was a gateway between the world. The sound of the water passing over the rocks sounded like the laughter of a coyote spirit. For that reason, they avoided this sight. The first white person to visit the Devil's Gate was John C. Fremont, and he felt the same way that the tong But did. Over the years, this area went from natural wonder it's dark and mysterious. It was turned into a dam in the nineteen twenties, and in the nineteen thirties the Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL was built just north of the gate. The roar of engines could be heard for miles and this added to the eeriness of the area. People started saying that Jack Parsons, the head of JPL, chose this place for his lab specifically because it was right next to the Devil's Gate. Now, Jack Parsons was a rocket scientist, but he was also a follower of Alistair Crowley, and occultist who is thought of as the father of Satanism today. Alistair believed that this site was one of the seven gates of Hell. He, Jack Parsons, and l Ron Hubbard, the creator of Scientology, would gather at the site and perform rituals. Now, these rituals had one purpose, and that was to invoke the Moonchild, their name for the anti Christ, aka the Devil. But before getting into the man that was trying to open the gates of the underworld, I want to talk about something because I've wondered this myself. With the Satanic panic from the eighties, I'm not sure if you remember that the never ending stories of Satanism and all the fear that was around it. I started asking myself, why does it frighten us? Like? How old is Satanism? Is it recent? Really that old? So I looked it up. The idea of the horned, red, demonic, hoved human figure that we know today as Satan wasn't always around and wasn't always connected to Christianity. The idea of a being that tempted humans in the most evil ways goes back to ancient Iran the second millennium BCE, that's before Common era. One of the oldest organized faiths is called Zoroastrianism. They believed in a benevolent God of wisdom, but when there is good, the opposite has to exist. They also believe that their God had a twin one who embodied complete evil, and this evil being is what would eventually become the devil that most people fear today. The name Satan doesn't appear as a physical person in the Bible right away. His first appearance is actually in the Book of Job, but as an idea, the idea of defiance. His name comes from ha Satan, which means the opposer or the adversary. This version of the devil comes and goes until the story we're all probably familiar with shows up that Satan was an angel, but it wasn't enough for him. He wanted to be worshiped too. He started a rebellion and was kicked out of heaven. But when he fell, he wasn't alone. One third of the angels actually fell with him. They became demons, and they do the devil's work. So the devil and his demons use their power to tempt us to kill, to steal, and destroy. They sin, and this idea of an evil force out there trying to make us like it is pretty scary. But it got worse during the witch Trials, which was literally an era where people were being burned at the stake for fear of them being witches, and so many of the accused witches claimed the devil was making them do things or that they were possessed by demons. For those who follow Christian religions, this fear only grew over time. So now if we fast forward to the nineteen hundreds, Satanism in the United States is taking off. This is thanks to occultists like Aleister Crowley. In nineteen thirteen, Alistair wrote a poem called a hymn to Lucifer, and in it he celebrated the devil as a provider of soul and rebellion to the universe. Alistair led a very interesting life. See he was born into a very rich family, but was always very rebellious. It said that his mom gave him the name the Beast for this reason. He ended up loving the nickname and called himself the Beast six six six. During his life, he was an occultist, a philosopher, magician, poet, painter, writer, spy, and a mountaineer. He founded a religion called Thelema. He believed that his purpose in life was to restore paganism in a purer form, but it's not clear what he meant by paganism. He wrote the Book of Law, which became like the Bible for his religion, and in this book he talks about a voice called Avas. The first time he heard his voice, it came to him over his left shoulder from the furthest corner of the room. It echoed, and it was a voice like nothing he had ever heard before, deep, musical, tender, fierce, all At the same time, it came from a tall, dark man with the face of a savage king. The man's eyes were covered with a veil because his gaze had the power to destroy what they saw. She later described Avas as his guardian angel, but other times he said Avas was Satan. They called him our Lord God the Devil. In a later version of the Book of Law, Alistair Crowley wrote about human sacrifices during rituals, but it doesn't seem like he actually sacrificed anyone but for the rituals. Yes, there were actual rituals, and that ritual that he Jack Parsons and l Ron Hubbard tried went horribly wrong. The three men had tried to bring out Satan from the Devil's Gate and they apparently managed to open this portal to hell. They never saw the Moonchild, which was their name for the devil, actually come out. But from that moment on, Alistair Crowley started to experience bad luck. He believed that this was because they never closed a portal at the Devil's Gate in Pasadena. He even had a fight with his former friends because they refused to go back there and do a new ritual to close it. By this time in his life, Alistair had moved from California to the Boleskin House in the Scottish Highlands. By the way, this place is on the southeast side of Lochness, home of the Lockness Monster. But this house already seemed to be cursed. You see, before Alistair set foot inside, before it was a mansion, there was an old church and a graveyard. This was during the seventeenth century, and according to local legend, there was a wizard that brought all the dead back to life. A minister named Thomas Houston was woken up in the middle of the night by the nearby villagers. He ran over to the graveyard to put all the corpses back in their graves. But not long after that that same church caught on fire during a service. Everyone inside was dead by the time the fire was put out. And then later a colonel built a hunting lodge at the site that eventually turned into the mansion and had a connecting tunnel straight to the graveyard. But why did he purchase that house specifically, Well, he wanted to perform his biggest ritual yet. Alister Crowley bought the house from the Fraser family in eighteen ninety nine. He chose this house because it was isolated enough for him to perform his biggest ritual yet, the sacred magic of Abramelin the Mange. He believed doing this would undo all the bad luck from the open Portal to Hell, the one in Pasadena, California. He needed a house in a secluded place. There needed to be a door opening from north to south. The room holding that door is where the ritual was going to take place. Right outside of the door, he was to build a terrace covered with sand from a river. This terris was supposed to end in a lodge. That's where all the conjured spirits would meet. The ceremony was so complicated that it required at least six months of preparation, which included six months of celibacy and no alcohol. But for some reason, Alistair didn't wait the required six months. Instead, it cut that in half. And this ritual was bizarre. And here's how it went. The ritual involved summoning the twelve Kings and Dukes of Hell. He was supposed to bind them to remove their influences on his life, but somehow one hundred and fifteen spirits showed up, including Satan himself. Now there were already far too many spirits. But then during the ceremony, he was interrupted. He was summoned to pair by the Golden Dawn, a secret society he was involved in. I'm not sure why, but he left right away, failing to banish the demons that he summoned during the ceremony, And from that moment on, strange occurrences began to take place at the Boleskin House. Immediately after the failed ritual, Alister Crowley's housekeeper, Hugh Gillies, suffered tragedy after tragedy. The worst of those were the death of his two kids. First, his ten year old daughter died suddenly at her school desk, and a year later, his fifteen month old son died of convulsions while in his mom's arms. Then Alistair started having money issues, who was forced to sell his precious Boleskin House, leaving the property in nineteen thirteen. Locals avoided the house as much as they could, but those that got too clothes could hear screaming in the middle of the night. As for Alistair himself, leaving the mansion wasn't enough to escape the curse. He died dirt poor and was very sick with chronic bronchitis in a failing heart the curves from the failed ritual remained at Boleskin, and after this the house went through several owners, no one staying for very long. After World War Two, Major Edward Grant bought the house, but that didn't last long either. He was found dead and the room Alister Crowley slept in. He had shot himself with a shotgun. The next owners were newlyweds, happy with the first home, but for some reason after moving in things started changing. Began to fight more, they weren't sleeping, and it was too much. After one month of living in Bileskin, the husband left his blind wife. She left the house too. In nineteen sixty nine, filmmaker Kenneth Anger ranted the house. He happened to be a follower of Thelma, the religion invented by Alice. He was also friends with Jimmy Page, the guitarist of led Zeppelin. The band. Jimmy Page had a lifelong interest in Alistair Crowley, and he wanted to restore the house to look like when the man lived in it. It would be difficult because by the time he got it, he had been abandoned for decades. Jimmy hired his friend Malcolm Dent to restore the house and care for it. Malcolm was the one who spent the most time there, and right away things started to happen. One time, he was walking to one of the rooms when he heard whispers in the hallway. He ran to take a look, but there was nothing there. Other times he would pass by the living room and see the furniture move on. Another night, while he was fast asleep, he was woken up by the sound of a snorting animal, and then he heard loud knocks coming from his bedroom door. He stayed frozen in bed. The nagging at the door went on for hours. When he looked in the morning, there was nothing there. Turns out he had been the only one home. He of course didn't tell anyone what he heard because he thought no one was going to believe him. But then a friend stayed the night and had a similar experience. She was asleep when suddenly the door to her room started opening and closing, opening and closing. The chair in the room started moving around, and the rugs rolled up on their own. Then she heard footsteps run up to her bed and felt like something jumped on her. She screamed and screamed. Malcolm ran to her room, and she told them some kind of devil had attacked her. Strangely enough, he never moved out. He ended up meeting his wife and raising his family right there. Eventually, the house was sold to the mcgilibray family in nineteen ninety two. When they owned it for ten years, they denied any supernatural experiences in the house and hated any talk of Alistair Crowley. After them, the house was sold again and became a private house until twenty fifteen. On December twenty third of that year, a motorcycle driver on the A eighty two road called emergency services to report flames coming from the Bulescan house. By the time firefighters arrived, over half the house was in flames. When the fire was put out, they learned that the fire started in the kitchen, but it was strange because no one had been at the home at the time. In twenty nineteen, there was another fire that further destroyed the house, and yet the house still stands today. There's a group almost done with the restoration efforts. They might be done by Christmas twenty twenty five. We'll just have to wait and see if the curse remains once it's done. You know, in this podcast, we kind of have an unspoken rule that we believe everything for at least these twenty menes that we have together. That being said, this Portal to Hell in Pasadena, California is only one of seven welle that Alistair Crowley managed to open and then never close. It's no wonder anyone associated with Crowley had misfortune after misfortune, and the Devil's Gate, well, weird things keep happening there. During the nineteen fifties and sixties, local college fraternities hazed their new members in this area. But these hazings seemed to go beyond the normal stuff. They used to eat raw meat as part of their initiation right, and because of that the public thought that they were doing Satanic rituals. Thirty five students were arrested after getting caught in the middle of one of these hazings. Then around the same time, in nineteen fifty seven, eight year old Tommy Bowman vanished while hiking with his dad. Three years later, his twelve year old Doug Hendrick disappeared just miles from the Devil's Gate Dam. One month after this, someone attempted to kidnap a three year old boy even closer to the Devil's Gate. It wasn't until nineteen seventy that mac Ray Edwards confessed to these kidnappings, all near that same gate, So all the death and mystery only makes the Devil's Gates even more intriguing. Even those who visit find themselves running away quickly, especially when the screaming from inside begins. Thanks for your ideas for stories. Remember we're on Instagram and Facebook if you want to get in touch. Links to support our channel and access the stories without ads will be in the description of this episode. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.