“When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out and deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth…”
Revelation 20:7-8
January 2006 – March 2006
That verse from Revelation—Satan released from his prison to roam and deceive—kept circling in my mind after the trial. I wasn’t obsessed with it, and I wasn’t trying to force a spiritual metaphor onto our circumstances, but the parallel was hard to ignore. When Dale was found not guilty, it felt less like a verdict and more like a release. The peace bond, flimsy as it was, had acted as a kind of restraint, a boundary that at least implied consequences if he crossed a line. But once the magistrate dismissed the charge, that restraint evaporated. The law had kept him contained for a season; now, unbound, he was free to act however he chose. We didn’t sit around waiting for something to happen, but the truth hovered over everything—we knew it was only a matter of time.
And beneath that realization was an even deeper one: our conflict with Dale was never really about the right of way. The right of way was just the stage he used, a convenient prop for whatever resentment was already brewing in him. It was a symptom, not the cause. For reasons we never fully understood, Dale seemed jealous of us—jealous of the farm, jealous that we were there, jealous that when he called the police nothing happened, but when we did, he faced consequences. The farm had once been his personal hunting ground, a place he treated as if it belonged to him. And after he pulled a gun on my dad, he was no longer welcome on the property. That boundary—being cut off from what he’d once claimed as his own—was a wound he couldn’t let go of.
All of this—his bitterness, his anger, the knowledge that he was now unrestrained—hummed beneath the surface of our days like a distant warning siren. Even when life pulled us forward and demanded our attention, the tension stayed with us, a quiet acknowledgment that whatever came next would come without restraint. The release had already happened; we were simply living in the space between that and the inevitable.
The alpacas helped keep my parents grounded during those winter weeks. Their routines didn’t leave much room for fear—herd health checks, vitamin supplements, grooming sessions, and my dad’s newest project, expanding the fence around the barn so the herd would have more space. The barn glowed under the fluorescent lights he’d installed, warm and humming with the alpacas’ soft, curious sounds. They’d stretch their necks toward you, sniffing your hair or your jacket, their hopeful faces making the barn feel alive in a way the rest of the property sometimes didn’t.
My days were swallowed by the start of the spring semester at Fairmont State. School had become a tether to normalcy, something structured and predictable in contrast to the uncertainty waiting for us at home. I loved being on the farm—being with my parents, being part of the daily routines—but what unsettled me wasn’t the farm itself. It was the journey to it. Driving up the right of way, knowing what waited at the bottom of the hill, carried its own quiet dread. Yet once the driveway swallowed my car and the house came into view, I felt safe again.
Thirteen Credits
Public Administration required me to take Principles of Management, which was surprisingly familiar. As the professor talked about Max Weber and management theory, I remembered stories Dad told from his time at the Lorain Ford Plant—how supervisors handled people, how morale tanked or improved depending on leadership. Having those examples helped me retain the terminology. It grounded me.
For Political Science, I took State and Local Government, a class about the interplay between municipalities and states, and how the federal government strong-arms both through unfunded mandates. Somewhere in the middle of that semester, I realized I might want to become a city planner. The material just clicked.
I wasn’t a senior yet, but I was allowed to take Senior Seminar. My topic—Can democracy thrive in Iraq?—felt like a question everyone was asking in the years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The class demanded a thirty-plus-page paper, but it felt manageable.
Spanish II was the opposite. Spanish I had been vocabulary, but now we entered grammar, conjugations, and sentence structure. This was the hardest class of the semester.
And then there was Flag Football—a rare bright spot. It reminded me of being a kid again, playing backyard football with friends. It was the kind of break I didn’t realize how much I needed.
It Begins
It didn’t take long for Dale to do something. After the peace bond expired, we’d braced ourselves for something bigger—some elaborate, in-your-face confrontation now that nothing restrained him. But instead, he slipped back into a tactic he’d used before.
More signs.
One morning we woke to another wave of yellow NO TRESPASSING signs lining the right-of-way. They weren’t new—we’d been dealing with versions of them for over a year—but this batch was different in scale. Dozens of bright yellow squares stapled to tree trunks all the way down the road, shouting their message from every angle. At the entrance to the farm, two more signs had been nailed to wooden stakes, angled just so, as if to make sure we could see them from the house. It wasn’t the dramatic escalation we’d anticipated, but the sheer number of signs made the point clear: Dale wanted us to feel surrounded, marked, singled out.
And there he was—Dale, with his wife beside him—standing at the lower end of the road, watching. Not speaking, not approaching, just waiting to see how we would react. It was low-key, almost mundane compared to what we feared, but the intent behind it was unmistakable. This was his reminder that he was free again, unrestrained, and still determined to insert himself into our lives however he could.
I walked up to the nearest sign, put my hand on it as if to pull it out. Dale yelled immediately, “Don’t you touch those signs!”
I looked right at him.
“This sign?” And I yanked it out, tossing it over the ravine.
Dad didn’t even look at them.
Silent as stone, he walked over to the wooden stake sign and ripped it out of the ground. No words. No reaction. He just walked it back toward the farmhouse.
A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was the police. The officer asked if we’d taken the signs.
Dad answered plainly. “Yes.”
“Then put them back,” the officer said.
We did. But Dad turned the sign around so the words faced away from the farm. The one I threw was on Dale’s property—if he wanted it, he could fetch it himself.
After that, the signs just became background noise. Exhausting at first, then annoying, and eventually just part of the scenery we drove past without noticing.
What came next wasn’t so easy to ignore.
The Poisoned Ducks
Our Muscovy ducks rarely wandered far from the pond. They were creatures of habit—breathy quacks, waddling little routines, always in their familiar loop between water and house. One day we noticed several of them all the way down by the property line, eating corn mixed with hay.
That wasn’t normal.
We herded them back toward the house and kept them close. But it was too late.
A few days later they began dying.
At first they became lethargic. Then they stopped moving. Within hours, they were gone. We lost nearly a third of the flock.
My favorite, a duck I named Godzilla—hatched from an egg almost twice the size of the others—was among them. He had been the first one to jump out of the incubator to greet me. He followed me around the farm like a dog, greeting me when I came home from school like he’d been waiting for me all day.
When I found him in the Hilton, he was barely responsive. He lifted his head when he saw me, but only for a moment. He died in my arms a few hours later.
Dad put his hand on my shoulder and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Mom cried. She was the first to say the words we had all been whispering internally—“Dale poisoned our ducks.”
We have no proof Dale put that feed down by the property line. But we don’t know anyone who would want to cause us or any of our animals harm.
We buried most of them. Sent a few to the vet for autopsy. The diagnosis: botulism, likely from bad or damp feed. That food should never have been there. And the only ducks that died were the ones that ate from the feed by the fence line.
After that, chores changed. We checked everything—every bowl, every corner of the barn, every bag of feed. We kept the alpaca barn locked. Chores that once felt routine now felt tense, cautious, watchful.
Deliverance
The first week of February, Mom was coming back from the Four States post office when Dale pulled his truck across the right-of-way, blocking her path.
Mom got out. Dale got out.
“I got something to say to you,” he snapped.
Mom wasn’t having it. “Move your truck.”
Instead he launched into accusations—telling my mom that we think we’re better than he is and you think we’re hillbilly trash. Then he told my mom that she better watch out for my dad because my dad told everyone at Thompson’s hardware that he is hoarding money and he’s going to leave my mom for a younger woman and leave her broke. All if it absurd.
Mom reached her breaking point. Panic surged. And in that fear she did something she rarely ever did—she prayed out loud. Right there, in the open, in front of him.
Her praying set him off. Dale started yelling, turned red, jumped back in his truck, and sped away.
When she came home, Mom said, “You will not believe what just happened.”
Dad was furious—not at her, but at the fact that Dale cornered her while he wasn’t there. But there was nothing we could do. Dale hadn’t technically broken a law.
Later that evening, after we’d all calmed down, we talked about Mom’s instinct to pray and how violently Dale reacted to it. She told us, in a quiet voice edged with certainty, that when she prayed she felt something in him recoil—not in the way an irritated person reacts to an inconvenience, but in the way something hostile reacts to being exposed. She said she thought there was a demon in Dale, or at least something dark enough to resemble one. The look in his eyes, the sudden shift in his face, the way his anger seemed to ignite all at once when she spoke the name of God—it wasn’t normal. And hearing her describe it, we realized that we had all sensed the same thing without daring to say it. For the first time, we began to wonder if this was more than a neighbor conflict, more than hurt pride or petty spite. If this was something darker. Something spiritual. Something that recognized prayer as a threat.
Our Friend Joe
On Valentine’s Day, a close family friend passed away—Joe, the pastor from our old church in Ohio. He had fought leukemia for a long time. His sermons always opened with a psalm—not just read, but felt, embodied. After hearing him read them, I never heard the psalms the same way again.
His wife later told us that the night before he died, Joe had been in pain and speaking to someone unseen. He asked, “How much longer?” After a pause, he smiled and said, “5 a.m.? Okay.” And at 5 a.m. the next morning, he passed. The nurse who witnessed this gave her life to Christ afterward.
Joe’s death quieted something in our house and deepened something else. My parents didn’t announce any decision to pray more or study Scripture—they just did. Mom read her women’s devotional Bible before bed. Dad returned to word studies, concordances, the kind of deep Scripture work he’d done years before. Seeing them lean into their faith instead of being swallowed by fear brought me comfort.
Because by then, fear had a way of creeping into every corner of the house.
In March things escalated
A Dark Gaze
March began with getting phone calls where the phone rang once. Sometimes a ring and a half. Never two.
The first time it happened we looked at the caller ID. It said Dale Eagle.
Then it happened again. And again. Two to three times a day.
It got to the point that when the phone rang, we’d freeze. Look at each other. Wait. If it rang again, we exhaled. If it didn’t, and the caller ID said Dale, that dread settled in our chests like a stone.
The phone calls unsettled us in a way nothing else had. They created a peculiar tension—an emptiness on one side and a presence on the other, as if we were both alone in the house and yet observed from just beyond its walls. Each half-ring carried an intention, a small intrusion timed with uncanny precision, the kind that suggested someone studying the contours of our days. It put me in mind of Sauron’s Eye from The Lord of the Rings—not the blazing spectacle from the films, but the one Tolkien wrote about: a “lidless eye, wreathed in flame,” driven less by sight than by will. The Eye did not merely watch; it searched. It pressed outward, seeking the tremor of a thought, the shiver of a hidden fear, the faintest sign of disquiet it could exploit.
That was the quality these calls possessed—a pressure rather than a sound. They felt like a presence leaning in, testing the air around us, trying to discover where we were vulnerable. Frodo once described a sensation of being “naked in the dark, and there was no veil between him and the wheel of fire.” I understood that line in a new way during those weeks. Dale didn’t need to be at the fence line or in his truck to make himself felt; his attention alone invaded the house, subtle as smoke and just as suffocating. His half-rings became a kind of summons—not loud, not even overt, but persistent, probing, an assertion of his gaze no matter how quiet the ridge outside remained.
We weren’t facing a Dark Lord, but the emotional architecture was the same: the sense of a hostile will turned deliberately toward us, patient and unblinking, waiting for its moment.
We never unplugged the phone; it was our only reliable line to the outside world. You had to climb the northwest hill to get even one or two bars of cell service. Thankfully, the calls never came at night. They came in the mornings or at dinnertime, when the house felt most vulnerable.
Looking back now, the months from January to March feel like the slow widening of a fault line that had begun the moment the verdict was read—when whatever had restrained Dale slipped away and a darker will began to move unhindered. The signs on the trees, the poisoned ducks, the confrontation on the right-of-way, the half-ring phone calls that felt less like communication and more like a presence testing the edges of our lives—they weren’t isolated incidents. They were the early motions of something newly released, reaching outward the way Revelation describes evil loosed “for a little season,” or how Tolkien wrote of a lidless eye seeking the faintest tremor of fear across Middle-earth. We tried to keep life steady—school, chores, prayer, the alpacas humming softly in the warm barn—but beneath every routine we sensed a truth we couldn’t yet name: the season of restraint was over. Something was gathering itself in the shadows, tightening its circle with each passing week, moving toward a single point of rupture. And when that moment finally arrived—in the gravel lot of the Four States post office—it felt less like an isolated explosion and more like the inevitable meeting of every dark current that had been stirring since Dale walked out of that courtroom unbound.