Years after "The Blair Witch Project" came out, Nicky still thought it was real. Actually may still think it's real to this day.

And another interesting thing to note-Nicky used to not only date a "witch", he participated in certain rituals with them many times and never had a problem with it. On the contrary; he was glad to in order to show his contempt for the Christian church.

an old letter I had written
03 Sep 2001

Note: This is an email I had written to a contact of mine in the summer of 1999, since I had been posting up journals which I had written about some of the hauntings in Illinois, I thought I would share this email that I had composed to a friend via email. The letter would refer to some of the things that I had written in entries of this blog.

to: (protected)
From: "Nickolaus Pacione" ravenswood@collegeclub.com
Subject: Ghost Story from Illinois

Dear Moree,
As I write this letter, you have asked me about suject of the unknown and of witch cults. This narrative I about to relate is the result of three years of research on the subject -- this is what inspired most of the fiction that I have written in the two and a half years time. That one I spoke of this with in Iowa had suggested that I should take the time to write these observations that I made over the years. I have experience both supernatural and psychological horrors as well as atmospheric terror which is are the things that lurk inside of the depths -- the depths of one's darkest nightmares and of things that are unimaginable or unspeakable. Things like this I had been told not to think about because of my mental condition. I know that what I am writing would be a target of a witch hunt but it has to be said.
There are things that are taboo in the eyes of a person who had been taught in the Christian tradition, namely in rural America. One does not speak of the subject of self murder or of drive by shootings in the open -- where it is in an urban landscape such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Du Page County, and New York City these topics are spoken of openly. The thing which is the subject for the Blair Witch Cults are kept well hidden and the revelation of this is too chilling to relate, but as one sat in coffeehouse or a diner stool -- this is the subject of a deep philosophical discussion in the eyes if one from a city such as Chicago, hence where I am from. When I moved to the North Iowa in 1998, my observations of a small town are not as one from a small town would see it -- one that would follow their high school sports closely.
That I would ask them about a thing that is unnerving, such as the murders in Addison -- they would view me as a witch because I read books as horror novels and music as heavy metal music, namely Death (such bands with the names Six Feet Under and Obituary) and Grindcore. It is as this that would invoke a witch hunt such as the one in New England in the 1700s and 1800s -- the thing that intrigued three film students to go film a documenty in the woods of Maryland. This is the very thing that inspired many horror fiction tales and urban legends that would live forever -- such as the haunted areas in Chicago and dark histories that taken place in its surburbs, namely macabre murders and evil deeds of poisonings. If one may ask why one as I whom had been taught in the Christian traditions would explore such a morbid topic -- it as H.P. Lovecraft had wrote, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown."
The narrative which I am about to go more into detail is that of a place -- one that is similar to the Blair Witch Cults in New England, but this setting is in Glen Ellyn, Illinois back in 1997. Three years after they had disappeared. This account is of my own encounter with a Witch Cult and a place that I have seen their markings. In the eyes of a Christian from a small town in Iowa would say that I have been consulting with demons because I openly research the darker side of human nature -- examining and exploring the things that invoke the nature of evil.
This sort of thing I was told not to be writing of as a Christian because darkness has no fellowship with light according to what I had been taught in the Pentacostal Church, but as I write I am not innocent of the darker side of life because I have seen a friend who got jumped into a street gang back in 1993, at the tail end of my junior year of high school. But as the story I relate goes on -- I must describe the location of the seminary called the Marynol, an old vacant building on the cornwer of two major highways, IL 53 (Rolwing Road) and IL Route 38 (Roosevelt Road). Just off the highway 53 is a street named Marynol Blvd. Seminary was vacant for quite sometime, but as I walked up to the place there was some activity to it, activities that are of an unnamable nature -- that they a result of a witch cult. A witch cult -- as one that takes part in the Black Masses, a dark sabbat.
That the picture that I can still see to this day is that of the graffetti which is left by various high school kids that would ditch class to smoke or to do coccaine which was usually the case. But there were stories of the Marynol being haunted -- the type of thing that would birth a gothic tale, though in the eyes of a Southern Baptist the stories are an act of witchcraft in themself. If one was to ask a person raised in the Christian Church about the seminary, they would say that the stories are not true then com up with a sermon where one should repent of the curiousity -- like one who has a mental condition such paranoid schizophenia or mutliple personality disorder is possessed by demonic forces. But as one writes this, the question of mental illness is not the issue or of what had been taught, namely what was taught in the Assemblies of God churches. That as one from Iowa would say that I am not right in my mind because I read horror and find urban legends intriguing because that is what drove one to have such an imagination.
As I would go further, one recalls the details inside of the hallway, namely of the inside of the Marynoll. The images were that out of "Call of Cthulhu" with the graffetti -- it seemed like it was taken out of the Necronomicon, inside -- indeed was as dark as the barron subway tunnels and the caverns as what I had visited in Eagle Cave during the years that I had been a Boy Scout. The place was similar to the setting of a vampyre novel but one thing that made it even more disturbing is that the floor was covered with shards of broken glass and torn pages from books that appeared as old bibles. In fact they might of been pages from the Holy Writ, but in the darkness and the dimly lit sunlight of the dusk sky one was not really able to tell.
Though the thoughts inside my mind are dawn from the dark images which I read of in the numerous horror novels and short stories I read, but the things were that of a nightmare I could not awaken from, though according to my friends whom were from the church would say that my curiousity is unnerving. Unnerving as some of the things that I have seen while walking around in Cabrini Green, and as some the stories I overheard while riding the L-trains in Chicago. This is where I first heard the story about the Marynol.
In the time that I have been writing I crossed paths with many different individuals -- especially while riding the L-trains and the commuters into the city. I would often compare notes with local covens that I knew of while I'd spent some time in Naperville. Some of the most frightening tales were often told by them. This is whom I had shared the account of going into the Marynol, though it almost ended with me wearing a pair of silver bracelets attached with a connecting chain. A friend of mine here from Iowa, from a small town called Charles City had once asked me about the inspiration and I had to tell him about the place -- the place that mirrors the setting for the Blair Witch Cults, but in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, instead of in Maryland. What I told him was of the details inside of the chapel.
The roof of the chapel was made of stained glass, and it was all broken, weather beaten -- as it would look on the outside of a run down housing project in Addison. The floor of the chapel was cover in water from the years of rain water and melted snow, which in the dark appeared as blood from a human sacrifice. The center of the chapel had a table of some kind -- looked as an altar to a morbid ritual since there were candles that had been burned down to almost nothing. A picture out a book I once read describing a Black Mass that I found in the Glenside Public Library a year earlier. I had been told by Jerimiah, a former classmate that what I am researching is forbidden, but what I had uncovered are the horrors that should not be.
Though the narrative would give one the insight or the research that one would need to write about the subject about the occult, or of the places that inspire modern day horror stories of which will be passed down -- an urban legend. In the remaining details inside, I write of the details that were in each room -- the domitories had walls that were crumbled and broken glass blanketed the floor as a carpet full of razor blades. That one if they told of this as I had written this letter, it would be the creation of a nightmare -- a nightmare in reflection, a mirror to the wtich cults that inhabit New England as the place that would be the location where the three had disappeared back in 1994. This in the eyes of the Iowa Christian would be the suject of a witch hunt because of what they fear what they cannot begin to understand -- that one who has an open mind is a target for persecution in a Bible Belt.

Sincerely,
Nickolaus Pacione