by Melanie Hemry
Any Deadly Thing Dan Staudacher sat on an exam table at a medical clinic, shivering and thinking about his Aunt Janice. Since his parents had passed away, she was one of his closest relatives. She was the one his father always referred to as the Holy Roller in their Catholic family. Aunt Janice invited him and her son Adam, when they were both 13, to attend a Halloween haunted house sponsored by a Baptist church. Dan remembered the dark, bumpy dirt road, and the bus they were on breaking down in the middle of nowhere. He also recalled the brightly lit lanterns he and the others saw in a nearby forest, swaying in the dark as the lights moved slowly toward them. In the moments that followed, the nearly 30 kids from the bus were hastily ushered to a nearby 1 0 : B VOV
“haunted” house. Once they reached the end of the house, the floor gave way—landing them ultimately in a “graveyard.” It was a harrowing and frightening experience, Dan admits. Afterward, the pastor looked at their stricken faces. “I know that was pretty scary,” he said. “But it’s nothing compared to hell. Hell is about a thousand times worse. How many of you want to go through something a thousand times worse?” None of them. The pastor’s altar call resulted in
a 100% salvation response. That had been Aunt Janice’s endgame, Dan recalled: to get her son and nephew born again. When they returned home she said, “Let’s celebrate by praising the Lord.” “She put on a Kenneth Copeland album and we danced and praised the Lord for what He had done,” Dan said. Sitting here now, decades later, Dan felt horrible about his aunt. He’d flown her from Ohio to Lantana, Texas, for a much-needed vacation. Instead, Aunt Janice had become
