Vampires, werewolves, and the very real evil stalking our souls



Since the dawn of October, I’ve found myself thinking often about two iconic monsters — the bloodthirsty vampire and the shapeshifting werewolf.

Perhaps it’s the Halloween decorations everywhere, the pop-up costume shops on every corner, or the horror films Netflix keeps recommending to me.

The vampiric spirit of bloodlust is easy enough to see in the widespread demand for unfettered abortion.

It could also be my recent discovery of “Haunted Cosmos” — a podcast for the highly curious that examines myth, legend, and the paranormal through the lens of Christian doctrine.

The creators of the series, Ben Garrett and Brian Sauve, make the case that much of what Christians dismiss as superstition is either true, partially true, or, at bare minimum, inspired by something true.

They take seriously the notion of aliens, dragons, Bigfoot, faeries, monsters, and the like. Using scripture as their decoder, they ask: Does the Bible offer support for the existence of these creatures?

Mask off

Whether or not stories about vampires and werewolves refer to actual creatures in the world (Garrett and Sauve have devoted fantastic episodes to this topic), one thing seems undeniably true to me.

The evil depicted by these legends is real — as real as the ground beneath our feet.

I’ve also been connecting the dots between this primordial evil and two of the most alarming modern issues contributing to the decline of the West. While these concepts may seem worlds apart, I sense a sinister connection between them.

The vampire and werewolf must be regarded in earnest because they pervade history. Every culture across time has some version of these evil entities. And when a thread of thought weaves through time and place, surely it hides a deeper truth. But what?

As a Christian, my answer to that question is that supernatural forces that crave human blood and revel in the idea of shapeshifting exist. They are demonic in nature and very powerful.

The anti-gospel

A vampire is a being who lives by taking the life force (the blood) of others. Is that not the antithesis of the gospel message? The vampire says, "Your blood for my life," whereas Jesus gave his blood so that we might live.

Vampirism is an anti-gospel. It expresses the rebellion of the original fallen angel — that great foil to Yahweh, Satan. That’s not to say vampires with fangs who sleep in coffins exist but rather that the entity that gave birth to such a myth exists.

The same goes for the spirit or entity that inspired the werewolf archetype. A werewolf is a man who, infected by evil, is forced to reject his nature and become a grotesque version of who he was intended to be. Again, we see an obvious perversion of God’s design. The rejection of our own nature is a rejection of our creator, who made us in his own image. This is also an anti-gospel.

Perhaps it’s a stretch to say that the same demonic entities that inspired vampires and werewolves are currently terrorizing the West, but I don’t think so. Not when I look closely at two of the biggest evils facing us today — evils directly caused by the rejection of our Judeo-Christian heritage.

What are abortion and transgenderism, after all, but the return of those iconic creatures of death, the vampire and the werewolf.

Shout Your Abortion

The vampiric spirit of bloodlust is easy enough to see in the widespread demand for unfettered abortion — especially on the furthest flank of the left, which openly relishes the slaughter of the unborn. One particular attendee at a pro-choice rally comes to mind. On her rotund, third-trimester belly were painted the words “NOT A BABY.” The image still haunts me.

There’s also the Shout Your Abortion organization, which quite literally encourages women to celebrate their abortions and share their “success stories.” SYA’s mission statement outlines its intentions to create a society where “abortion is free, de-stigmatized, and accessible in every community across the country.” In other words, these people really love the idea of boundless bloodshed.

Consider the murderous zeal of Minnesota governor — and Kamala Harris' running mate — Tim Walz, who signed a statute repealing the law that required babies who survive botched abortions to receive life-saving care. Even those whose lives have been miraculously spared cannot escape doom under the Walz regime.

Father of lies

However, not everyone is so candid about their desire to facilitate a genocide against the unborn. There are vampires who employ seduction to achieve their twisted desires. Like the serpent who used language to ensnare Eve in the garden, these cunning bloodsuckers deceive their victims with poetic discourse.

In Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” the titular count tells his quarry, “Mina, to walk with me you must die to your breathing life and be reborn to mine.” That’s a very polite way of expressing your intentions to gorge on someone’s blood and turn them into a fellow wraith.

Pro-choicers of this kind speak in euphemisms. They make abortion — the bloody disruption of the holy process during which God knits a soul into being — sound practical, moral, even benevolent: Women’s health care, reproductive rights, life-saving interventions.

Having been wooed and deceived, the vampire’s victim walks willingly to her — and it’s almost always a her — death. Similarly, young women are seduced by euphemistic pro-choice language and agree to not their own death but something even worse — the death of their innocent child. We see the common thread: Young women, deceived by language, make a decision that results in a bloody death.

Unleashing the beast within

As for the demonic entity that inspired the shapeshifting werewolf, I see its handiwork primarily in the transgender movement. An ideology that is capable of subverting language, butchering healthy bodies, removing children from loving homes, and obliterating the guardrails that have long protected women is a demonic ideology.

At its root is Satan’s original sin: He thought he was better than God. Transgenderism shares the same core belief — the same pride-filled ideation that we supersede the King of kings.

A man who believes he is a woman and attempts to reshape himself in accordance with this belief sins in three ways: He rejects himself, thereby rejecting the one in whose image he was created; he rejects God, purporting to know better than his own creator; and he imitates the deceiver, who is also a shapeshifter. The same goes for a woman who attempts to shed her God-given form and become a man.

Like the werewolf who is both destroyed and inflicts destruction, so, too, the transgender individual destroys his or her own body and/or psyche and perpetuates a destructive, demonic creed.

The darkness remains

I do not believe that the millions of people foaming at the mouth demanding abortion access for all just have a different perspective than me. I do not think that the doctors sterilizing children and cutting off their healthy body parts merely grew up differently than I did. That’s an oversimplification of the problem at hand.

Of course, we need to speak out and fight back against the organizations pushing these causes, the politicians working to enshrine them in law, the billionaires funding them, and the protesters storming the streets chanting for abortion access and trans rights.

At the same time, however, we need to look beyond these flesh-and-blood adversaries in order to see the true author of these evils. It is not man.

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12).

As Halloween approaches, my neighbors are quite literally pulling skeletons out of their closets, adorning their porches and lawns with all varieties of dark paraphernalia.

Two doors down from me, one couple has turned their entire front yard into a haunted graveyard featuring every monstrous creature imaginable, including — you guessed it — a vampire and a werewolf.

Although I find myself averting my eyes when I walk by, their celebration of darkness has set me down a path of considering how society at large celebrates darkness — the abortion and trans issues being just two on the long list of ideologies poisoning the West.

When October passes and the plastic monsters and tombstones are banished to dusty attics until next year, the darkness they represent will remain, and it will continue to erode society.

I wonder if the evil associated with Halloween, which many Christians rightfully avoid, might actually present an opportunity for us to consider how darkness — vampires and bloodlust, werewolves and shapeshifting — doesn’t ever go away. It merely puts on a new mask.

Is Bigfoot in the Bible?



Sometimes, you’re going about living your life, and a book, a person, or a sermon comes along and completely upends the way you think about something. For many of you, that might have been Tiger Lily’s recent article “Bigfoot is real — and more dangerous than you think,” a convincing case for the existence of the looming bipedal creature that stalks the forest.

For me, it was discovering the podcast “Haunted Cosmos.”

It is the brainchild of Ben Garrett and Brian Sauvé, two mustached Utahans with a proclivity for dark mysteries. I first encountered them as guests on the “Steve Deace Show." Sauvé is the lead pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, and Garrett is his congregant and friend. They've been hosting "Haunted Cosmos" since its debut episode in March 2023.

'Christians should be the most interested people in the world.'

For a long time, I had mistakenly assumed that the podcasting industry was oversaturated, thinking there was no way someone could bring something truly original to the table. Well, I was wrong. These two have tapped into the fringe in a unique way, combining gripping storytelling with meticulous research.

Every episode of "Haunted Cosmos" begins with the same introduction:

“What if I told you that there’s another world — a world beyond sight, beyond senses, beyond the mere natural, but a world no less real, a world of phantasms come to life, a world haunted with the supernatural? And what if I told you that that world is no less real than the one you walk around in on your normal Monday and Tuesday? The thing is, if you keep your eyes open, you’ll see that other world blinking through the cracks.”

As Christians, we are accustomed to believe that the tangible world of mankind exists parallel to a largely invisible realm of both angelic and demonic spirits. Demons wreaking havoc on humans, some of whom are aware of their presence, while others — usually non-Christians — walk around heedless of their existence but afflicted nonetheless.

As for the vast and varied realm of pagan legends, myths, tales of old, and all things paranormal — these, we are accustomed to believe, are fundamentally unreal, a matter of mere superstition.

The hosts of “Haunted Cosmos” dare to take this world seriously by looking at the paranormal through a Christian lens.

Garrett and Sauvé pose the question: What if some truth is hidden within many of our legends and mythological creatures and ghost stories? What if the Mothman was a demon sent to terrorize cursed land? What if sea monsters are fallen angels lurking in the deep right now? What if Atlantis was a real city ruled by a demon god named Poseidon and his Nephilim sons?

And most importantly, what if the Bible contains evidence that corroborates the existence of these so-called “fictions”? What if scripture could offer some explanation regarding the vampire, the shapeshifting werewolf, the fae folk, and the Bermuda Triangle?

In any given episode, you could be instructed in history, theology, and, at times, Hebrew etymology. You’ll hear anecdotal evidence from people across the ages that will make your blood run cold. You’ll connect the dots from the death of a Native American chief in 1770s colonial America to a series of freak events in a 1966 small town in West Virginia to a verse in the deep reaches of the book of Numbers. You’ll hear the teachings of Paul shed light on an incident of “werewolfery” (yes, it’s a real thing) from Bedburg, Germany, in the 1500s. By the end of an episode, you’ll be picking your jaw up off the floor. At least, that’s been my experience.

The duo outline their intentions very clearly at the start: “In each episode, you’ll find us telling stories of high strangeness and then interrogating them, trying to figure out what they are, what’s going on, why it matters, and what we ought to do about it.”

What we ought to do about it never involves venturing into the depths of the forest in search of Bigfoot, like Joseph from Tiger Lily’s account; it never involves scouring haunted houses armed with EMF meters and thermometers; it never involves graveyard visits, mediums, ouija boards, or seeking evil out in any capacity.

Garrett and Sauvé never venture into physical places of evil, nor do they meddle in dark paraphernalia; in fact, they would strongly advise against these things.

Rather, they intellectually enter into dark places. That is to say, they take a good, long look at anything that fits the bill of what they call “high strangeness” — things “that can’t be explained away by brute nature, by moving atoms, colliding molecules, and crackling wavelengths of light and energy” — with the gospel as their torch in that darkness.

Some Christians might balk at this endeavor.

They might protest, “Aren’t we called to dwell on ‘whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable’ (Phil. 4:8)? Blood-sucking creatures of the night certainly don’t fit that description.”

Undoubtedly, we are called to dwell on the things outlined in Philippians 4:8.

And yet: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search it out" (Proverbs 25:2).

Garrett and Sauvé cite this scripture in their first episode. “Christians should be the most interested people in the world,” Garrett told Deace in the interview. Much of the inspiration that fueled “Haunted Cosmos,” he explained, came from “a gap in the church’s interest” in matters of myth, legend, and the paranormal.

Sauvé added:

You can tell a story of darkness really well with the craft turned up to 11 as best as you have in your strength to produce and ... you're not actually saying, ‘yay demons, yay Satan.’ When Tolkien told the story of Helm's Deep and made you fear the Orcs crashing on the walls and the women huddled in the caves — and when he made you feel that, Tolkien wasn't sinning; he wasn't on the side of Sauron and the Orcs.

However, both men acknowledge that “there certainly is a danger in discussing the demonic,” but a greater danger is "not to know your enemy.”

I’m reminded of French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire’s famous line: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The rise in paganism we’re seeing in the West, the uptick in UFO/UAP sightings, and the fact that satanic trinkets can now be purchased from a Super Target shelf, makes me think that Christians would do well to tune in to matters of high strangeness — with restraint and discretion, of course.

When Deace asked them how they “stay on the narrow road while broadcasting such material,” the hosts answered:

Two things — one is the proper ordering of your loves. You should love God more than Bigfoot. You should be more interested in the Lord than Bigfoot ... so if you care more about the haunted graveyard in your town than you do about your daily devotions and prayers, you're doing a really bad job of that.

Number two is reformed confessionalism — submitting yourself to the reformed doctrinal work of your spiritual forefathers, like the Westminster Assembly ... being able to say, ‘Yes and amen to all of this; this is the tradition that I'm a part of; this is the history and the faith and the religion that I adhere to.’ That provides you with a fence of orthodoxy, and within that fence, there's a rich field that you can graze in.

Ultimately, every dark spirit, entity, or principality flees in terror before the Lord God Almighty, whom we serve and whom we belong to — and whose authority over such evils has been bestowed upon us.

“Haunted Cosmos” is an invitation to use our God-given ability to think critically and creatively about the embattled cosmos in which we dwell, to use our imaginations as we weigh dark phenomena against the light of God’s word, and to dare to wonder what we might not know about the powers that seek our destruction.