Mike, who was fourteen or fifteen at the time, probably has the clearest memory of what happened next. "My cousin Richard came in from the garage and said that something was in there," he remembered. "Well, I wanted to be the hero, so I opened up the back door to go out. I’d always been taught to recite the Lord’s Prayer in scary situations, so I started saying. ‘Our Father, Who art in Heaven.’ But just as I got about halfway through, I suddenly forgot the words. I hesitated for maybe thirty seconds, trying to remember, when suddenly I felt two hands pick me up by the front of my shirt and throw me four or five feet up in the air and back into the kitchen, until I crashed into the refrigerator! The door was closed, and as I sailed through it, I broke off the latch."

Diantha, Lois, and Lois’s daughter Pam were in the kitchen making sandwiches. They looked up to see Mike hurtling through the air, tangled up with Shawn, who had somehow collided with his brother outside and was also tumbling head over heels in to the house.

"All we saw was a black shape, and then Shawn coming through the door backwards," said Lois. "He fell down, and Michael came flying inside. But he was headed in one direction one minute, and the next he was backwards in the air. They were both shouting hysterically that ‘she’ had attacked Mike and was going to kill them. We helped Mike up, and that’s when we noticed that he had large red marks and welts on his chest, evidence that he had been scratched when he was picked up.

"Of course, all the children were frantic, and it was a long time before we got them calmed down. But I was furious, because the kids had been hurt and our home was being invaded. I saw the black shape head toward the garage, so I went outside to challenge it. I said, ‘I don’t care who you are-I’m not putting up with you coming into my home and hurting the kids!’ As I went into the garage, I could see the black shape standing in the far corner. It’s hard to describe, but it looked something like a nun’s habit with the white removed from it. It was big, billowy, and dressed like a woman in something black and long.

"I kept screaming, ‘I’m not afraid of you!’ and I called it a few choice names. And then it started coming toward me, not like it was walking, but as if it were on wheels. It was just rolling smoothly toward me.

"Now it was night, we were in a dark garage, and the only illumination was from moonlight coming through the window. The shape was within a few feet of me when something black and cold started coming out of it, like strands or ribbons. Off of the thing, off of its clothing. And it started wrapping me with those strands, and I could feel their coldness. It started at my feet, not hard or pulling tight, but just a loose, cold wrapping. The strands looked like burning oil, like wisps or ragged streamers. I was rooted to the spot, and I cried out, ‘Oh, my God!’ and looked down at my feet. I couldn’t move on my own, but it was the fear, not the wrapping, that stopped me. I was terrified of what might happen if the wrapping went much farther up my legs.

"And then I felt my sister grab me from behind and jerk me all the way back into the house. She had seen the shape, too." Lois said, and years later her voice still quakes when she remembers. "She got me safely inside, but I was just wiped out. Here I had been so furious that I thought I could lick anything, but this encounter nearly devastated me.