Police Watched It Rain Inside a House. Then the Chief Ordered Them to Keep Quiet.

Sworn police officers went on the record. They watched water rise up out of a dry floor and fly sideways through a living room.

In February of 1983, in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, it rained inside a house. Not a leak. Rain, falling in a living room, out of the air, for two days. The family who lived there saw it. Their landlord saw it. The woman who ran the restaurant across the street saw it. Police officers walked in the front door and were soaked two steps inside it.

**And when the chief of police stood in that living room and was pelted with it himself, he called it a plumbing problem.** Then he ordered his men to file no report and never speak of it again.

## The man it was falling on

Don Decker was in his early twenties. A quiet kid who fell in with the wrong people, doing a few months in the county jail for receiving stolen property. Then his grandfather died, and the jail granted him a weekend out for the funeral.

He did not want to go, and nobody in that family knew why. From the time Don was seven years old, his grandfather beat him, hurt him. It went on for years, and Don never told a soul.

So he stood at that funeral and listened to the family talk about what a wonderful man they had buried. What he felt was relief. The evil was gone. He thought everything would change now. He was glad his grandfather was dead, and he had to hide it.

His mother would not take him. Friends did. Bob and Jeannie Kieffer told him to stay as long as he liked.

## The face in the window

Saturday evening, Don went upstairs to wash his hands for supper. And the room changed.

The air went out of it like a vacuum, and it turned very, very cold. Something was on him. He could not see it, and he could not get it off. Then he looked at the window. There was a face in it. An old man, wearing a crown.

Don looked down at his arm. Three scratches ran down it, side by side, blood beading at the ends.

He came down the stairs white as a sheet. Bob saw the blood and asked what he had done to himself.

> I didn't do it, Bob. There's something up there, I swear to God. There's a face in the window staring at me.

## It starts raining indoors

Then the living room went cold. The same cold. Water started running down the walls. Then drops began falling out of the middle of the air. A few, then more, then it was raining in the house. And there were no water lines in that end of the house. The plumbing was all in the back.

It did not fall the way water falls. It came down from the ceiling, sideways out of the wall, and up out of the floor. Catch a drop and rub it between your fingers and it was not like water. It was sticky, tacky. Some left an oily smudge where they struck.

Bob called his landlord and would not say why. Ron Van Why and his wife Romayne watched water come up out of that floor and rise. No leak. No condensation. It had not rained outside in days.

## The police walk in

A Stroudsburg police officer named John Baujan picked up when Bob called the station.

> Bob, this is the police station, not the water department.

> I just need you to trust me.

Baujan walked into that living room and had it in about a second. Droplets lifting off the floor, going up, defying gravity. He and Bob were standing a few feet apart, face to face, and a single big drop formed in the air between them. It did not fall. It flew, flat and level, across the living room, through the dining room, out into the dark of the kitchen.

Baujan's partner would not come in. He had to be talked through the front door. Two steps inside and he was pelted, soaked through.

And the strangest thing of all: it was only that one room. Step into the dining room and it was bone dry. And the second the officers were out of the house, the rain in the house stopped. The landlord and his wife were still standing in it. The officers left, and it left.

## The crucifix that burned him

Pam Scrofano owned the restaurant across the street. That night it started raining inside it, over the tables, into the food. She had been watching Don all day. Glassy. Looking at you without seeing you.

She kept a crucifix by the cash register. She picked it up and touched it to his skin. **It burned him.** The skin blackened where it touched. That crucifix had been lying on a counter. It was not hot.

And she said it out loud, in front of everybody.

> This boy is possessed. You need a priest.

## The chief

That night, the officers brought their chief. The water came at him the same as it came at everyone else, and it soaked him the same.

And he called it a plumbing problem.

He ordered his men out. He ordered them to file no report. He ordered them never to speak of it again.

## Three officers break the order

Three veteran officers drove back to that house the next day, against their chief's direct order. Men with decades on the job who could not leave it alone.

They were standing in the kitchen when the pots started rattling on the stove. And Don came off the floor. Lifted, and thrown across the room. One of them said it was like watching a man get hit by a bus. Don felt it over his whole body at once.

> I'm a big guy. It made me feel like a newborn.

Three fresh claw marks stood up on his neck, welling blood. And scratched into his arm, where the first three had been, was the shape of a crown. He did not know whose it was. He did not know why.

One of the men who watched it had been a cop for forty years.

> There's always an explanation when something happens. You investigate, you come up with something. This is why it happened. This case here, there is no explanation.

Romayne had already said to his face what nobody else would. *You're doing this. You made it rain here. You made it rain at Pam's. Make it stop.* They had tried everything on him by then. At one point, a bag over his head, in case he was somehow spitting it. The water kept coming.

And that was the worst of it. Don had started to believe her.

> They lived in that house for years and nothing ever happened. That's when I started realizing it was me.

## Every church in town said no

Every Catholic priest and every Protestant minister in Stroudsburg was called, and every one of them said no. One person said yes. An evangelical preacher. A woman.

The next night, she knelt on that living room floor, prayed over him, and read out loud from the Bible. The rain stopped falling at random and concentrated on her. Pelting her. Harder the longer she read. She kept reading, and Don, curled on the floor, convulsing, went quiet. The feeling of the whole house changed. By the time she finished praying, the water was gone.

Everybody in that house believed it was over. Don knew it was not.

> I knew whatever it was, it was still inside of me.

## Cell block, maximum security

A county jail took Don Decker back when his funeral furlough ended, and within days there was water in his cell. Moving horizontally. Moving vertically. Climbing the walls. His cellmate screamed for the guards to get him out. Not out of the water. Away from Don.

So they moved him to a maximum security cell on his own. Concrete floor, concrete walls, locked door. And sitting in there alone, Don had a thought. Not a prayer. Just a thought.

*I wish it would rain in here.*

And water came up out of the concrete floor.

All weekend this thing had hunted him, cut him, frozen him, thrown him across a room in front of police officers. **Now it was offering itself to him.**

> At that point, I thought I could do stuff.

Then two guards came down to his cell and dared him to prove it. They had heard what he was saying he could do, and they did not believe it. If you can really control it, make it rain in the office on the other side of the jail. Through door after locked door.

Don said, I'll try.

That office was in a totally different area of the jail, behind numerous locked doors. Nothing Don could see from where he sat, and nothing he could get anywhere near.

About eight that evening, Dave Keenhold was sitting alone in the administration area, writing reports. Nobody else in the room. An officer walked in and pointed at his chest. In the middle of his sternum, on a brand new shirt, a patch about four inches by two was soaked through with water.

He never felt it happen. He was on the far side of a jail from Don Decker, behind locked doors.

> It's just humanly impossible.

The officer who dared him was badly frightened now. So was Keenhold. And Keenhold made the call: get the chaplain.

## The chaplain was told not to pray

The jail chaplain, Reverend William Blackburn, found a meek, mild-mannered young man, and opened with a chaplain's weariness.

> Son, don't you think it would be simpler if you stopped all this nonsense? You're making this up, aren't you?

And Don's face changed. His whole manner changed. And a smell came into the room. Blackburn had met it before, in the room of a person dying of cancer. This was that, multiplied five times over. Evil. Foreboding.

Don told him what the crosses had done. They put a cross around my neck and it burned. They put a rosary in my hand and it burned. Then he raised his hand, rubbed his fingers together, and said:

> I have powers you don't. I can make it rain.

And it started to rain. A fine, drenching mist filling a closed room in the middle of a county jail, soaking both men standing in it.

> It was like the devil's rain. I was in the presence of evil.

Blackburn said, I'm going to pray for you. Don said, I don't want you to pray for me. Blackburn said, I don't care whether you want me to or not. Prayer is my prerogative.

The chaplain opened his Bible and read aloud, into rain that was falling indoors. The rain came harder. It drove at Don. It drove at Blackburn. It was falling on everything in that little room.

**Everything except the Bible.** It was open in his hands in the middle of all of it, and the pages never got wet.

> So help me. It was a frightening thing.

The stench got thicker. Don's own words for it: *I smelled death.* Blackburn kept reading and kept praying. As much for himself, he admitted later, as for the man in front of him.

## One sentence

The chaplain said one sentence.

> I bind you in the name of Jesus Christ.

The rain stopped. It did not taper off. It stopped. And something came into that room that both men could feel, and neither had another word for but peace.

Don's eyes filled, and he said, thank you. And a chaplain and a prisoner stood in that little room and held onto each other and prayed.

It never happened again. Not that night. Not that year. Not ever.

## Who is on the record

The chief of police never moved off his account. Called to the house twice. Saw nothing unusual. *Sometimes what people believe happens and what actually happens are two different things.* The jail's warden waved the whole thing off. *Hearsay. Everything I've heard is hearsay.*

The men at the top said nothing happened. The men who stood in the room said it did. **Ten of them put their names to it in public, and not one ever took it back.**

And John Baujan, the young officer soaked two steps inside that front door, who drove back the next day against his chief's order, went on to run that police department. Ten years as chief.

Don Decker never moved off his own answer for what came into that house. He said it was his grandfather.

> He abused me when I was young. He got a chance to abuse me again.

The witnesses tell this themselves, on camera, in [the Unsolved Mysteries case file on Don Decker](https://unsolved.com/gallery/don-decker/) and in *Paranormal Witness*, Season 1. Every claim in this film comes from what those people said happened to them.

Name it plainly. That was a demon.

And notice what it never did. It never spoke through Don. It never took him over. This was oppression. Violent, physical oppression. Not possession.

The old teaching names a ladder: oppression, obsession, possession. Attack from outside. Then the mind consumed. Then control.

Now watch the story again with that ladder in your hand. The marks. The burn. A man thrown across a room. Then a jail cell, where the hunted man smiles and says, I can make it rain.

Fear that moment more than the rain. The rain was never just an attack. The rain was a recruitment. The torment was the sales pitch. And in that cell, Don came into agreement and claimed its power as his own. He may have been days, maybe moments, from the last rung.

So where was the door?

Look at the family. An abusive man dies and nobody grieves him. A son is not taken to the funeral. A grandson glad the old man is dead, and still holding it, years later, on camera.

Scripture does not treat unforgiveness as a mood.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. — Matthew 6:14–15

Bitterness is a door left standing open.

And hear the whole warning. Jesus said that when a spirit is cast out and the house stays empty, it returns, and brings seven worse.

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. — Luke 11:24–26

That is what happened between the living room and the cell. A woman prayed, the rain stopped, and everybody thought it was over. The house was swept. It was not filled. Deliverance was never the absence of evil. It is the presence of Christ.

Now look at the man who ended it

No relics. No ritual. No months of ceremony. A reverend who had spent his life at cancer bedsides and in prison cell blocks. Visiting the sick. Visiting the prisoner. Exactly the life Jesus said His people would live.

I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. — Matthew 25:36

He was in that prison because his Lord kept sending him there. Told not to pray, he prayed. One sentence. I bind you in the name of Jesus Christ. And it was done.

Not his power. His position. That man was owned by Christ, and everything in that cell block knew it.

But when Jesus' own followers came back amazed that demons obeyed them, He turned them around.

Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven. — Luke 10:20

The demon is never the headline.

Forgiveness has a ceiling far above this story

The abused one, nailed up by the men He came to save.

Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots. — Luke 23:34

Don Decker was abused when he was young. He was delivered in a jail cell. We do not know how his story ended.

So do for him what that family never did for each other. Forgive.

And pray for Don Decker.