A Sinful Mind: A Memoir of Surviving Satanic Ritualistic Child Abuse

By Samuel Koppes

A page-turning, first-person account of a real-life nightmare…

It would take years and years before Sam finally understood what had been plaguing his mind for most of his childhood and his entire adulthood. The answers began coming in terrifying, surreal visions. They came uncontrolled, day and night. But what Sam t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katsilean Publishing
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578561066

Book preview

Introduction

This was a difficult book to write. I imagine, for many, this will be a difficult book to read. It involves childhood sexual abuse and I have elected to pull no punches. You will read graphic accounts of the abuse. These accounts are drawn from my own memories, which were repressed for decades but then came barreling into my conscious mind after an especially grievous event in my life. The graphic nature is necessary to tell my story truthfully and, more importantly, to tell the larger story. This is the story of organized, ritualistic, satanic childhood sexual assault. It is little-known to the general public. I will make a case herein that it is not, however, as uncommon as you might wish it to be.

The first, roughly, half of this book is my backstory. I want you to understand the human being behind these memories. I want you to understand the ways in which my assault affected my life. The general understanding of how something as brutally terrifying as organized sexual assault impacts the life of a child victim is necessary if, as a society, we are to do anything at all about addressing this scourge and healing the survivors.

In the second half of the book, we’ll move from the specific to the general, and I will make a case for the prevalence of organized sexual abuse even as society remains generally ignorant of it. And I will discuss the importance of awareness, both in terms of eradicating the abuse and of repairing the enormous harm that’s done by it. If you are a survivor, you may find help here. If you are a parent, teacher, church leader, daycare worker, or occupy any other position that deals with children, you might get more of an education here than you bargained for. I sincerely hope so.

I need to say right out that my personal story is, as I write these words, incomplete. I have only a few clues and a rough idea as to who my abusers were. My story will end when I someday face them. If you read my story hoping for a finale where everything is wrapped up in a nice tidy package, you may be disappointed. Life, I have discovered, rarely works that way. But this book documents the turning of the tide, my emergence from a multi-decade stupor of mental repression to bring this fight to the doorstep of people who feed on little children. I have just begun to fight. I will continue to follow the clues and work towards my hoped-for and long-awaited rendezvous with a much-needed reckoning. My idea is to detail this in a second book. But whether I ultimately find any kind of satisfactory resolution to my own trauma or not, my work at sounding the alarm will continue, and that’s the purpose of the book you now hold. There is too much at stake for the world to continue to ignore the plague of organized sexual abuse. People do things to little children that are hard to believe. But we must spread the word, for the only way to stop it is to make sure everyone knows.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my editor here. Jerry Payne has become an unwitting champion for children who are most desperately in need. Bravo, good man!

Finally, I need to note for honesty’s sake that many names in this book relating to my own story have been changed. We in America are a litigious bunch, unfortunately, and not in a good way.

CHAPTER ONE

Vision

The scene plays out in my mind over and over, paralyzing me mid-stride. No, it’s worse than even that. It’s as if I am experiencing it. From a shadow over my shoulder, I hear and feel a man’s heavy breath. His weight on top of me is crippling. There are other people standing around me, watching and smiling. Now one of the other ones has come back, and I am overwhelmed with nausea. The one holding me is tightening his grip on my neck as I start to kick, and soon I can feel myself dissociating. A woman whispers in my ear that I am to be sacrificed and that I am about to become one with some kind of spirit creature they keep talking about, something they call god. They say I am going to be sacrificed to please it, to slake its fury, and to make it gain power.

For a moment, it seems as though I’m leaving my body, watching the events unfold from a distance. The body that I see being pinned down belongs to a little boy. But now I can’t escape from the physical sensations. I writhe and twist, trying to tear myself away from my own skin. I fragment and deflect, mentally focusing on areas of my body that are unaffected by the assault. But I can hear the attackers, and no matter how I focus, there is no turning off the sounds of their voices. I can’t breathe. I try to close my legs but they are pulling them apart.

And then nothing; my memory goes blank.

CHAPTER TWO

Demon Inside

Thus it begins. It feels like some kind of crime to put hell on paper. So be it. It seems hell is reserved for the innocent.

–FROM MY JOURNAL, 12/12/2013

My first memory involves a doll. I am five years old and it was given to me by the police officers. I am pointing to it in places to show the officers where the people did their bad things. The police officers look enormous to me, but they are very nice and friendly. They smile at me and ask me questions and are reassuring and patient. Still, there is a grave and solemn feeling in the air that I can sense. Something serious and bad has happened. I feel cold inside, with no thoughts in my head—an unnatural quiet. Eventually, the officers take their doll back and leave.

I will learn later in life that my parents had called the police as a response to what I had told them about daycare that day. I had told them that a man did some bad things to me, then threatened to shoot my parents if I told anyone. My father had wasted no time in calling the authorities but, for most of my life, I remembered nothing before the questions from the officers.

Everything after is oddly detached, like a person playing a video game that is someone else’s life. I appeared normal as a child to most people, or so I gather. I did normal things, like play soccer and video games. But I struggled with terrible anger and fear that I could not understand. When I was eight, I started to experience mental imagery that made no sense to me. The imagery was associated with violently reactive emotions that I didn’t identify with. I had no real sense of self, a fact that I was acutely aware of for some reason. I tried hard to compensate, to fit in with others. I learned to react to things appropriately for the situation.

Anxiety plagued me at every turn. Being around people I didn’t know was stressful. I remember my father sitting with me at the bus stop one morning because of my fear of waiting with the other kids who were strangers to me. My social instincts were strong, and I could make friends with people, but my friendships were always limited in numbers to a few, close, trusted buddies. Other kids probably thought of me as standoffish. It wasn’t that I was afraid of people, exactly. Truthfully, I didn’t know what I was afraid of. I just knew that when I was around strangers, I’d be overcome with a sense of fear, as if something terrible was about to happen, as if someone was going to jump out of the bushes or out from behind the sofa.

Besides fear, the only emotion I felt was anger. Otherwise, there was an absence of feeling. It required great discipline to hide this from others. I noticed others expressing themselves emotionally in a variety of ways and it always confused me, making me wonder why they couldn’t control themselves. My general landscape was a kind of ambient gloom, though I managed to paste a smile on my face in the hopes that things might feel better tomorrow and to better blend in with the smiling people around me.

I learned to suppress my anger through a lesson that came when I was eight. My brother Nathan and I were fighting as brothers do and he pinned me against the wall, then leg-pressed his hips into my abdomen, crushing my partially full bladder. It was a kind of pain I had felt before, though I didn’t know where at the time, and it threw me into a blind rage. Our father happened to be in the room, and he pulled me away from Nathan before I could unload on him. I had fully lost my mind. Later, my father would tell me he didn’t recognize me in that moment, using the word demonic to describe my actions. In time, I began thinking of it in demonic terms, as well. The incident scared me; it felt like I’d become someone else, something from another life.

I was often overwhelmed with directionless hatred and mindless violence. I had a sense that at any moment, I could explode. There was some murderous fury contained deep within, and yet I didn’t recognize it as coming from me. I could not explain it to myself. I was a calm, stable kid. What was this thing inside of me? In retrospect, I was too calm. No one is that calm, ever. Unless they’re comatose, which, in a sense, I suppose I was. In any event, from that incident with my brother onwards, I maintained an even harder grip on my emotions. I knew I could never allow that fury to escape again.

I had less success suppressing my fear and anxiety. My first full-blown panic attack occurred when I was eleven. I was in my room, feeling trapped in my own house, feeling a sense of restriction, feeling unsafe. Soon I was hyperventilating and shaking. My parents came in and tried to get close to me, but I shuddered at their touch. I must have looked to them like a cornered, scared animal. The thing is, unbeknownst to me at the time, my parents had been told this day might come. They’d been warned that the signs of my traumatization may one day appear. My father probably thought back to the incident with my brother a few years earlier.

After the panic attack, my parents wasted no time in getting me into therapy. Dr. Jerry Cap was enormous to