(OPINION) Witchcraft… astral projection… and a deal with the devil. Seventeen-year-old Victoria Batiste was heavily steeped in the occult, and her dive into darkness started when she began hearing strange voices when she was five years old. It started as a little girl when she tried to escape a brutal home life, running to a made-up world where everything was perfect. “Everything that happened in that world,” said Victoria, “I was in control of it.”
“It was always about me,” Victoria said of her imaginative world. “People loving on me, people taking good care of me.” For little Victoria, it was a way to cope with the real world where parents were often drunk or high, and, at times, violent – especially her father who misused the Bible to justify his harsh brand of punishment.
“A few times of him slamming me on the ground and choking me, telling me, ‘If thine arm offends me, cut it off,'” Victoria scoffed. “Like basically he was saying that ‘I’ll just cut you off and leave you behind.'”
Then there was the verbal abuse, the constant accusation that she was never good enough. “I hated myself,” Victoria admitted. “Felt like maybe something’s wrong with me.” When Victoria was 5, other voices entered her life – voices only she could hear. “They (the voices) started to tell me that I’m special and that I’m not like other people and I can never be accepted,” recounted Victoria.
In the coming years, Victoria began exploring the supernatural, a search that led her to the study and practice of witchcraft. All the while, there were the voices, encouraging her, leading the way.
“I felt like they understood me,” said Victoria. “The witchcraft became more to me than just play. It wasn’t play because I knew that stuff was real. Deeper and deeper, I would go into it. Like I would… astral projection, that’s where you project your soul out of your body and you travel in the spirit realm. That’s where I felt like I had power.” Even then, it didn’t give her the power to escape the ongoing chaos at home. So when she was a teenager, she set witchcraft aside for another form of escape – opioids.
“It was like it altered something in me, like I was happy,” Victoria said about the pills. “Like the pain, the heaviness, the emotions that I felt when I woke up every day as a kid, I didn’t feel them anymore. This was something that helped me cope with what was really going on, on the inside of my head.”
Victoria came to depend on those drugs throughout high school. For a while, they were enough. Until one night after a heated argument with her mom, a 17-year-old Victoria heard a familiar voice. “‘If you just give your life to the devil, then everything will be okay,'” Victoria said quoting the voice. “And I was just like, ‘okay.'”
The next thing Victoria knew, she had her hands around her mother’s neck. “Almost choked my mom to death that night,” Victoria said soberly. “Couldn’t tell you why I stopped choking my mom. I just know I did.” Something had changed in Victoria as her life began to spiral further. She had several miscarriages, bounced from place to place, and the voices that once offered comfort, now tormented her constantly. (READ MORE)
