He Read It Out Loud at Twelve. It Stayed Nine Years.

*"We are Legion. And we will never leave."*

That came out of a young man's mouth across a table from Bill Bean, a deliverance minister who had faced the worst of this work and never once flinched. The voice was not his. It was low and gravelled, scraping up from somewhere deeper than a throat. Bean looked into the young man's eyes, and something looked back.

**And for the first time in all his years of this work, one instinct fired, cold and certain: walk away from this one.**

To understand what was sitting across that table, you have to go back nine years, to a shack rotting in the Maryland woods, and a twelve-year-old about to walk inside.

## The shack in the woods

It was the summer of 2003. John Drenner Jr. was twelve. Behind his grandmother's house in Odenton, Maryland, the woods ran back for acres, and one afternoon he and his older sister pushed in deeper than they ever had.

Then the trees opened on a building that had no business being there. A shack, boarded and sagging, half swallowed by the brush, the wood gone black with rot. They both stopped. The same thought hit them in the same second: do not go near it. His sister would not take another step.

John went in alone, to be the brave one.

Inside, the air was still and sour. In the far corner, under a skin of grey dust, lay a book. Stamped on its cover was a cross, hanging upside down.

He picked it up and opened it. The pages were crowded with words he had never been taught. But he was twelve and curious, so he sounded them out. One at a time. Out loud. Into the empty room.

On the last word, something clamped his chest shut like a fist. The air went cold. He could not pull a breath. He threw the book down and ran, and behind him, back in the woods, rose a whisper he could not make out, from no one he could see.

He knew it in his body. Whatever had been in that room was following him home.

## The devil's church

His sister heard him that first night, through the bedroom wall. He was talking: the quiet back-and-forth of a kid with an imaginary friend. Question, answer, question, answer. Except no one else was in that room. Then it stopped, and the silence was worse than the voice.

She pushed open his door. Her little brother was sitting bolt upright in the dark, staring, and his nose had begun to bleed. No one near him. Nothing in the room touching him.

The people who lived near those woods had a name for that shack. **They called it the devil's church.** Satanic rituals had been done there, they said, and whoever went poking around it came back wrong.

Nobody had told any of this to a twelve-year-old boy.

## Seven feet of it

Back home in Pasadena, night after night, it worked its way out of the walls. First the scratching, slow and patient. Then a fist, pounding right next to him. Then the bed itself, shaking so violently it felt like an earthquake.

And one night it stopped hiding. It stood in his room, seven or eight feet of it, black straight through and shaped like a man, with nothing at all in its eyes. It did not lunge. It did not speak. It stood there, and then it was gone.

It came back the next night. And the next.

His mother trusted what she could see and touch, and nothing one inch past it. The paranormal, as far as she was concerned, was about as real as the Easter Bunny. She took him to a psychologist. The verdict came back tidy: night terrors, a prescription, he would grow out of it.

So John learned to sleep with the blanket pulled over his head. It did not keep the thing out. It meant that when it came, he would not have to see it.

## A crucifix in his room

His grandmother was the only one who did not reach for a diagnosis. When he finally told her the truth, that a man was tormenting him every night and would not stop, she believed him on the spot. She was a religious woman who read the children the Bible, and she hung crucifixes in his room.

And the thing came anyway. Bigger now, and furious.

**Whatever the crosses were meant to do, they had done the opposite. They had enraged it.** John lay there, boxed in by holy objects, and understood the whole of it at once: nothing in that house, and no one in his family, could make this stop.

So he stopped telling them. He shut every one of them out, his mother, his sister, his grandmother, and he carried it alone.

## The board

By his teens John had quit expecting anyone to believe him. But his friends never called him crazy. So one night they set a spirit board on the table and tried to reach the thing themselves, to find out what it wanted and make it leave him alone.

Nothing. The planchette sat dead under their hands. Then one of them jerked back. Something had grabbed his leg under the table.

Now they had all felt it. For one second John almost felt relief. He was not insane, and they knew it too.

Then the weight dropped onto his chest, and he asked it who it was. The answer came up through his whole body, deep and gravelled:

> We are Legion. And we will never leave.

Then it lunged. He could feel its breath on his face. Something closed around his throat and squeezed, and no one came to help him.

They had opened that board to send it away. Instead they had pulled the door wide open.

Later, John looked up the upside-down cross from the book in the shack and found what it was: a symbol used by devil worshippers. It all landed on him at once. The thing had latched onto him in that room years ago. **It had never come to haunt him. It had come for him.**

## Nineteen, and living alone

By nineteen he was living on his own in Glen Burnie. The visions and the voices came every night, with no end in sight. He had stopped believing it would ever end. As far as he could see, he would carry it for the rest of his life.

Then, a girl. Mary. Green eyes, and a way of looking at him that pushed the dark back for the first time in years. After a year together they moved in. He told her none of it, certain that the day she found out, she would decide he was crazy and leave.

Mary began to feel it anyway. Being watched in an empty apartment. Something breathing behind her, and nothing there when she turned. And John was changing in front of her: sweet and loving one minute, snapping at her the next, his eyes gone black.

> It wasn't my John.

One night, alone in the dark while John worked a night shift, she turned on her phone. Full battery. It died in her hand. And in the dark that came down over the room, the figure was face to face with her.

He finally told Mary everything. She did not run. She said what no one else ever had: *we'll work on this together.* It was Mary who said he needed help from a higher power. So the two of them went looking for one.

**And church after church turned them away.** They would not touch it. They would not deal with it.

## February 2012

In February 2012, a friend put John in touch with Bill Bean, a deliverance minister. By then John was willing to try anything.

Bean took one look at him and said what no doctor and no church ever had. He could see the thing behind John's eyes. It had attached to him when he was a boy, and now it was close to taking him over for good. Nine years it had worked at this.

Even Bean felt the warning rise up in him again: *don't do it.* He did it anyway. John forced himself to take Bean's hands, and Bean locked on and would not let go.

The instant the prayer began, the thing lashed out. The weight came slamming down on John's chest, heavier than the woods, heavier than the bedroom, heavier than any night of the nine years. John's own body turned against him. Then it came up his throat: the same deep, gravelled voice from the spirit board, snarling through John's own mouth.

Bean did not flinch. He pressed in closer, gripped harder, and commanded it out. For one second John's real voice broke the surface, and then it was buried again. Two voices fought for the same mouth.

Then Bean spoke straight past it, to the real John buried underneath.

> Do you renounce it?

And John's own voice broke all the way through, and held.

> Yes. I do.

> I cast you out.

And the thing that called itself Legion, the thing that swore it would never leave, left.

## "I got my John back"

John opened his eyes and nine years of weight was simply gone, lifted clean off him. He would call it the most amazing feeling of his life. Mary knew before he said a word.

> I got my John back.

He went back to his sister, the one who had heard it through the wall when he was twelve. Back to his mother, the skeptic, who to this day cannot explain a single thing that happened to her son. All she knows is that it is gone, and he is free.

And John made his choice: to go back down into the dark after other people and pull them out of the same thing that so nearly kept him. He went to work beside Bill Bean.

## Who is on the record

John Drenner Jr., his sister, his mother, Mary and Bill Bean told this on camera for *A Haunting*, season 7, episode 6, "Devil Inside Me," first aired in 2014. Two years later John told it again in his own words, to his hometown paper in [the Pasadena Voice's October 2016 interview, "Pasadena Man Recalls His Terrifying Battle With Demons"](https://pasadenavoice.com/stories/pasadena-man-recalls-his-terrifying-battle-with-demons,13145), and on camera in [a 2016 convention interview about his episode of A Haunting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr-MeaPVsUs).

To the paper, he described the moment he asked the thing what it was:

> And it said, 'We are Legion. You belong to us.'

Bill Bean, to the same paper, on the first time he met him:

> I felt tremendous hatred and hostility toward me, and he hadn't said a word to me yet.

And John's last word to the paper was for anyone living with something like this:

> I want people to realize that there is help out there. Don't give up. Reach out and get help.

So where was the door?

Something was done in that shack long before a boy walked in, and it gave that thing a claim on the ground. Then a twelve-year-old read the words in that book out loud. He did not know what they were. It did not matter.

Demons are legalists. Ignorance is not a defense. God said it, about His own people.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children. — Hosea 4:6

Unprotected

Now look at the house he ran home to. A mother who did not believe in the supernatural, or in God's word. No father in the story at all. No headship over that boy. One grandmother who prayed, and praying grandmothers have done a great deal of good in this world, but she reached for crucifixes.

A sign with nothing behind it is wood.

John was unprotected. And the thing knew it.

The board

Then his friends put a board on the table to send it away. That is necromancy. It widened the gate, and it told them what it was. We are Legion. Jesus heard that name once, from a man among the tombs.

And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many. — Mark 5:9

Not one. A crowd. And from that night it ran a campaign: break him down, widen it further, until it had all of him.

The churches

So church after church shut the door on him. Hear what Jesus commissioned, and not for the Twelve only. For everyone who believes.

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; — Mark 16:17

A church that has given up the supernatural is not modern. It is contradicting Scripture.

It was John

One man did not. Bill Bean took his hands in the name of Jesus Christ.

But in the end, it was John. Nine years afflicted. And little by little, in agreement: the board, the giving in, the living with it. He went to churches for help. He never once gave his life to Christ.

No darkness can live where the Holy Spirit lives. Bean did not just cast it out. He led John to renounce it, out loud, the same way he had let it in, and to receive Christ. The house changed owners. And the thing that swore it would never leave, left.

The armour

So how do you protect a house like that? Not with objects on a wall. With the Word of God in you, and the armour of God on you.

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. — Ephesians 6:11

Truth. Righteousness. Faith. Salvation. The Word. Nobody put that on this boy. Put it on yours.

There is a name

Jesus Christ. The authority is His, He is greater than the thing that called itself Legion, and He has to be yours. Not respected. Yours.

And if you have ever put your hands on one of those boards, that is forgiven. Not excused. Forgiven.

Go home and tell them

So why does God allow this? Look at what happened to the man who had the legion.

Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee. — Mark 5:19

John went home. To his sister. To a mother who to this day cannot explain one thing that happened, only that it is gone, and her son is free. And then further than home, back down into the dark after other people, telling them what the Lord had done for him.

And out of it, a man in his right mind, glorifying Christ.