Alright folks gather around, this is one of the most frightening and bone chilling stories I have to offer. This is a true story.

Yesterday my ward youth went necro-dunking in the Vernal, Utah Temple. I and another priest were the only priest quorum guys to go. Fortunately, that priest, we will call him Steve, is one of the majority who knows that the church is bogus.

We had both been through the whole necro-dunking thing before many times. But this was an experience like none other. So we stuck together the whole time, which was nice. We entered into the temple and marched down to the basement where the spiritual hot tub is. We made our way over to clothing area where we were issued a pair of silly briefs and a white jump suit. Apparently budget cuts had to be made, because we didn't even get those nice moccasins or slippers or whatever they are. So we went into the dressing rooms, took off our regular sunday garb and donned the jumpsuits. We then went out to the waiting area and just sat together and just talked about random bullshit.

We were first called to go into the confirmation room. That's where this fucked up horror story unfolds. As soon as we got into that room we got hit with feelings of discomfort, anxiety, and a great amount of fear. We both looked at each other like "What in the fuck is going on!?" He mouthed to me "I'm scared". I was too. My blood was pumping, and we were both shaking like goddamn crack addicts. The feeling we felt was that primal instinct right before the flight or fight response. I was scared out of my wits. I let him go first to do his confirmation so he didn't have to be alone in that fucked up room. When I got confirmed I was alone in that goddamn room of horrors. I could feel my heart pounding, I was breathing a little hard, and of course shaking. As soon as that goddamned confirmation was over, I got the hell out of that room as fast as I could.

I was directed to the changing rooms, which lead to the spiritual hot tub. I walked in the locker rooms, and shut the door behind me and took a moment. I thought to myself, "What the hell just happened?" and I tried to get my breathing and heart rate under control. I then went and got dunked. I met back up with Steve back in the changing rooms after we were dunked. We were both shivering, but I don't remember being cold. We got changed and went and sat back in the waiting room, and tried to understand what the hell happened to us. The feeling of fear wasn't as bad, but we were still scared. We both felt that we were not safe in that house of horrors. We sat in the back and whispered "what the fuck..." repeatedly. As soon as we could make it out of the temple we both jumped over the stairs and literally ran off the grounds and to my father's truck.

Steve said "Dude, that was really fucking weird" and totally agreed. We both also agreed that we felt better and safer once we got out of the temple. We went to a member's house and had ice cream after that.

Personally both of us felt spiritually violated. Steve went so far as to say he felt spiritually sick. We both agreed that we would never talk about that dark experience again, and that we would never do it again.

I can never look at that building the same again. I don't care what you believe. There is a dark curse, black magic, evil presence there.

Thank you for reading.

Geez, what are you complaining about? It's not like you had an old guy feel you up under your poncho. ;)

That sounds awful, I really hate the temple. One thing I wanted to clarify, you were confirmed before the baptisms? Or were you confirmed for someone else who had already done baptisms? Then you were baptized for other people?

No fuckin' clue

Its common practice now a days to be confirmed for names that have already been dead dunked before you get dunked as proxy.

That way the kids getting dunked only have to change twice. Once into the jumpsuit and once out of it.

The confirmation rooms are funny. They are smaller than 6x6, and seem really crowded. There are usually 2 or 3 people officiating. Two possibly confirming and one checking off the names as they are done. My memory is a little hazy with those specifics. In the middle of the room is a really creepy looking chair for confirmations. There are arm rests for peoples arms when they are doing the confirming. That way they can relax and not give the kid being confirmed massive neck problems.

Thanks for explaining, I haven't been in the temple in a long time, even longer for baptisms for the dead. I didn't mean to sound like I was doubting EA, just curious that it's done differently than I remember.

I'll say it again--I hate the temple. And I do believe you felt evil there.

You have a wonderful gift of language, I hope that you'll continue to develop your writing. Now as to the content--

In my TBM phase I'd say that God was giving you a warning to repent. You were in the house of the lord with an impure heart--tinkering with sacred things--and were given the Holy Ghost to let you know that your very soul was in peril.

FUCK THAT!!

In reality, you were in the deepest heart of the cult doing something that you know is vile. Your physiological instincts gave you and Steve the urge to get the fuck out of there! I find it difficult to even be around men wearing their Mr. Mac suits without wanting to run. Seeing men dressed all of in white really weirds me out! I even get the creeps hearing any General Conference talk, it's makes me want to puke.

So, cheers! Good for you for wanting to get out of there! Fuck the Morg! And keep writing. The Boner.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/05/2016 01:05PM by BYU Boner.

Behold, the words of the Boner are true and faithful.

That sounds very much like something inside was screaming "I don't want to do this," and got louder the longer it was ignored.

Sounds about right

I'm with ya Boner. Been 55 years since my one and only dead dunking trip. By that time in my life I was starting to spank it regularly, had already smoked some coffin nails and was an inveterate cusser....but I never felt any evil spirit shit in the big house...but then again I've never felt anything religiously spiritual in my entire life.
I'd forgotten all about the confirmation part but my dead dunking session degraded into a water fight....an eternal black mark on my file at Cult HQ I'm sure.

RB

Doing confirmations before the baptisms?

Huh?

Are you pulling our leg Exmo Aspie?

Nope. Not even kidding

They often have a backlog of the confirmations. At least when I was a teen they did.

Have things changed since I did the baptize thing in the temple? (Of course, that's a dumb question - lots of things have changed).

When I did baptisms, it was always with a group of other kids. You were each baptized several times for different people, and only THEN were you confirmed. Not confirmation first. And the confirmation was done at poolside, not in a special room.

Yeah I did a poolside confirmation once and it FUCKING SUCKED!. I was shivering like a bastard and I just wanted to get warm

I'm 35 and they would do "private room confirmations" when I was 12.

Thanks for sharing your experience. It's really quite reassuring to know that I am not the only one who has felt that dark feeling in the temple. My last temple experience was one i'll never forget.

I had been attending the temple quite frequently trying to find answers or peace or something about all of my questions concerning the church. I had actually set up an appointment to talk to the temple president earlier in the week, hoping that he would be able to provide some answers or guidance. My bishop had only told me that I was on the road to apostasy and excommunication, which wasn't very helpful.

The temple president didn't have much to offer, but encouraged me to attend the temple and to pray, which I did.

I remember sitting in the chapel at the Mt. Timpanogos Temple in American Fork, Utah. I was there with my uncle Mike. He was on the same journey as I was, and we had come together that day in the spirit of prayer, asking for God's truth to be unfolded to us to help us know what to do with all of our concerns. Well we got what we asked for..but it wasn't quite what we were expecting.

I felt very uneasy, for some reason. I turned to him and whispered, "I feel really weird..like something isn't right." He said, "I know, I feel the same thing." I closed my eyes and prayed with all my heart for God's spirit to come and comfort me. But my prayer for truth apparently trumped my prayer for comfort, because the more I prayed, the more intense the dark feeling got. I remember sitting there with my eyes closed and seeing horrific demonic images coming into my mind..seriously, it was really messed up. I was like, "am I going crazy?" So I chose to open my eyes instead of seeing those awful things, and the officiators had come into the chapel by then. I'll never forget the man that was talking..he looked dark, and his eyes were just plain evil. It was really startling, because I had always had really beautiful experiences in the temple..feelings of peace etc up until today. But it was like the blinders came off, and I saw it all for what it really was..my "eyes were truly opened," as the endowment ceremony had promised..for those who choose to "take the fruit." (i.e. the "red pill" for any Matrix fans out there..;)

It was all I could do to stay through the whole ceremony. It was awful..I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. But I felt like I needed to stay, to see it all for what it really was; a lie. It was like everything that felt so full before had suddenly become a husk...a shell, void of meaning, a whited sepulcher..white, and beautiful on the outside but full of death and bones on the inside. Strange how appropriate that analogy is to the temple..with all of the "work for the dead," that goes on inside...or necro-dunking as you called it..lol.

It goes further, there's necro-sealing, necro-endow-ing, necro-initiating...all sorts of dead people stuff going on inside.

I could hardly stand to touch the officiators hand to do the handshake's throughout the ceremony. I looked him right in the eyes at one point, and just a cold-as-ice gaze returned back to me. I am pretty sure he could see it on my face, but I was disgusted; I saw how sick the whole lie really was - and it made me physically ill.

After it was over, Mike and I didn't even stay in the celestial room and pray like we had done in the past. We just got the hell out of there. I remember looking back at the front view of the temple that I had admired so many times before as the "House of the Lord." As I walked out my car..I swore a new covenant in my heart, to supercede the one's I had made in that temple years earlier: and that new promise was to never enter that place again.

I left the church in 2008 and have never been happier than I am today. It hasn't been easy, but I am truly a free man today and live an absolutely amazing life - free to think, explore, question anything I want. I have a new relationship with a God of my own understanding. I don't know too much about it..but it's real, and super liberal, and non-judgmental and just helps me try to be a good person.

Anyway, there's my novel of a response. You're not alone, man. And either am I! That's the bottom line. Peace!

Wow, Jeremiah, that's exactly what I did my last time through the temple--I made a new and everlasting covenant NOT to ever go back! Thanks for sharing that experience. Da Bone



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/05/2016 05:18PM by BYU Boner.

How long until you reach the magic birthday and can opt out of the culty weirdness, EA?

couple months

Yay! At least it isn't that long until you are your own person.
Whenever I read your stuff I feel frustrated on your behalf. I really applaud your patient endurance and I'm glad you come here to vent.

A lot of the Christians here will probably tell you, "duh, cuz Mormonism was conceived by the devil appearing as an angel of light."

I have to admit, my first reaction to your story was my typical Mormonism thinking: "of course you feel bad. You're not worthy to be there. You're making a mockery of God's house." It wasn't articulated in words like that, but that's about what the feeling was. Then my skepticism kicked in: "Exmo Aspie must be testing us or something. Did that really even happen?" Then my last thought: "the human experience is weird and mysterious. Who knows what one might feel if he walks into a weird place where everyone seems to be under the same spell (assumptions about an invisible reality) and how might that mere body language communicate things to someone's mind who isn't there under the same spell?

I don't know. That story sounds terrifying though. I'm sure you're not alone in having such feelings. My experiences at the temple: I swear I felt presences of people long dead. I also had a terrible crushing weight of guilt for being a fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen year old who lied about masturbating and got a temple recommend. But I still believed that shit was real. In fact, I think it was because of the guilt hat I was convinced of a higher dimension of reality or whatever you want to call it. Theres a Book of Mormon verse in Alma 42 that says "remorse of conscience" is evidence of God's broken law.

I read the OP through the lens of The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. SPOILER ALERT: The "gift" is that danger rarely comes at us out of nowhere. We usually pick up on danger signs and signals but talk ourselves out of acting on them because it seems silly or irrational or whatever. I think your brains picked up on the perceived threat of the cult ritual/mind control exercise you were both about to engage in and your fight-or-flight (or fuck or freeze up) response fired up.

Really interesting... Thanks for posting this.

Any one pee in the warm water?
I always hated getting dunked. You come up, the water is running over your face and before you can take a breath you were put back under. Also seeing that TV next to the pool didn't make me feel safe.

You're right to stay away from a place that causes such a bad reaction.

I was dead dunked as a teen and hated it. The SLC temple was much worse than the Logan for some reason.

I hope you are keeping a journal. You are a good writer...it could turn into a book someday.

The temple is demeaning in multiple ways. That's what it's about. It's about demeaning and insulting the intelligence of those who enter. That's its purpose.

It promotes silly rituals as having spiritual components when in fact they have none. It requires adherence to arbitrary and pointless rules regarding dress and verbiage. It promotes a quid-pro-quo reward system: just do as we say, and you'll get something after you're dead. It promotes a faux equality among participants that ends the moment one steps back into the sunlight.

I catch a lot of flak because I stopped going to the temple, but that's better than the flak I catch by going. Having people whose breath smells like dog crap criticize you for not eating from the same plate of steaming dog crap where they just dined is not as bad as actually eating the crap, after all.

It's weird how our subjective experiences of thought and emotion can play games with our rational thought processes.

Two experiences of mine while in the temple:

1. One time while sitting in the terrestial room, waiting to go through the veil, I had the strongest impression come over me that my husband was going to die. It was all at once both terrifying, and a huge relief! Which made it even more terrifying!

I went home thinking "How could I be a good person and be relieved that he was going to die???" and "If this is true, then it's a warning? But if I'm feeling such relief that it could be true, then it's obviously of the devil and meant to tempt me. But how on earth could I receive evil inspiration while in the LORD's house????"

Now - 2 years after leaving the church, I can see clearly what it was. Our marriage was bad, and we DID end up divorcing. What I was experiencing was a convoluted way of expressing what I was really feeling deep down, and afraid to admit. I wanted out of my marriage.

2. 3 months after leaving the church (inactivity, I hadn't resigned yet) - I went to the temple drunk. Yep. My daughter had just turned 12, and she wanted me to take her to do baptisms for the first time. I had gone on a date earlier that day, had 2 beers at lunch (which for a newbie lightweight totally did me in), and hadn't planned on the spontaneous request. I still had my recommend which wouldn't expire for another 6 months, and I was still in flux with my feelings about the church. So I went, figuring if it was really true, that God would know that I was drunk, would somehow give some kind of special message to the man at the desk checking the recommends, and I'd be kicked out. And if he didn't kick me out, then I could be more certain that the church really was a fraud, that revelation was non-existent, and that I'd have peace to leave. In any case, I went in, passed the recommend desk with no problem, and proceeded to show my daughter how to navigate the baptistry. (Yes, we did confirmations first so we didn't have to change twice. Expediency of a corporation, of course). During that whole time, I just felt really buzzed, and all kinds of warm fuzzy feelings - the temple was still a familiar place, and it set off pre-conditioned feelings that usually happened there. I took this a sign that I could leave the church with no remorse. I should have felt really guilty, dark, and heavy, according to the ideas of worthiness needed to enter - and I felt none of it. It all seemed a bit surreal.

Feelings are subjective. They can lead us to crazy conclusions. But usually, when I feel that fight or flight response, I listen. It at least puts me on my guard.