The Place of Shadows is a terrifying non-fiction novel written by Mary J. Quirion. I know that the story is bizarre, but I also know that it’s true. I know because I was there. Demons exist. Screwing around with the paranormal destroyed her life, took everything from her and I firmly believe that her involvement in the paranormal was what led to her untimely death.
Mary’s story begins in 1960 when she was born in Italy. Her family came back to the States when she was a few years old. She spent her childhood in Florida for a little while, but predominantly she grew up in Connecticut. One of her first childhood friends was a little girl who only she ever saw, who went by the name of Melissa. Melissa was always wet. Melissa disappeared after a few years, never to be seen again. Melissa was also the name of a little girl who used to live in Mary’s neighborhood and Melissa was dead – drowned long before Mary met “her”.
Like most people, Mary assumed she was seeing and communicating with spirits of dead humans. She saw them, she talked to them, she conveyed true and accurate information from them to their loved ones and felt like she was doing God’s work giving comfort to people. By the time Mary realized she was wrong and that what she was communicating with was demonic the whole time, it was too late.
We started messing around with paranormal groups in 2006. For years we crept through graveyards at night with our cameras and our audio recorders. We went into “haunted” houses which were of course infested with demons. We used dowsing rods, yet we thought Ouija boards were dangerous – go figure. We used “Angel Cards”. We thought we were chasing out negative spirits with sage – all we were doing was giving the demonic spirits a good laugh and inviting them to interact with us even more.
We had no business screwing around with any of these things. Mary was in full blown possession by 2009/2010. Her marriage failed. She lost her job and couldn’t get another one. She was broke. She would have been homeless if her crazy old aunt hadn’t let her and her kids stay in her house. Worst of all her health started to fail, quickly.
Diabetes, fatty liver, scar tissue on liver, Grave’s disease, Lupus, a magnesium deficiency that had her hallucinating wolves and elves and almost took her out. Ruptured verices which had her coding in the ambulance multiple times and finally in August of 2020 she died in the hospital under hospice care.
She wrote two books in the last ten years. One is called The Tower of Dabble and it’s on Amazon. It’s a short read and it’s a Christian study on occult practices and why we shouldn’t be involved in it. The other is The Place of Shadows and it’s a brutally honest autobiographical piece. For those of us who knew Mary well, it’s a painful read, but worth every minute. It’s a cautionary tale and a tribute. It’s a testimony. It’s a legacy.
It’s a story that I might not even believe, except I was there.
Tracy Petry 