Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing (2 page)

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Authors: Stormie Omartian

BOOK: Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing
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There was something more that bothered me. Something about the
spirit
of what had gone on there that was familiar. It was like meeting someone you know you’ve met before, but you can’t seem to place him.
I had been heavily involved in the occult for years. It started with Ouija boards and horoscopes. Then headlong into astral projection and seances to summon the dead. Numerology fascinated me so much that I considered changing my name when I learned that if the letters in your name added up to a certain number, you could become successful, beautiful, and fulfilled. However, I knew of a promising young actress who paid a numerologist to devise a new name for her. She changed her name legally, moved to New York City to begin her life of success, and was never heard from again. A numerologist sending me into obscurity was not what I had in mind, so I decided to go on to other things.
I took hypnotism classes which were very popular in the entertainment industry. I frequently went into a trancelike state and told myself things I wanted to hear. “Stormie,” I would say, “you are beautiful, successful, and a wonderful person. You can talk, sing, and act, and you are not afraid.” But, like all other things I had tried, the help was only temporary, and afterwards I was worse off than before.
Next I threw myself into Science of Mind. It seemed perfectly logical to believe that there was no evil in the world except what existed in a person’s mind. And if you could control your mind, you could control the amount of negative experiences you would have. I bought every book available on the subject and read each one thoroughly. I associated with other Science of Mind advocates, which wasn’t hard to do because so many of the Hollywood show-business people, especially actresses, were into it. Unfortunately, the help I so desperately sought was only temporary.
I became involved in anything that told me I was worth something and that there could be a life without pain in my future. I frequently visited mediums hoping that they could give me good news. Sometimes they did and I was elated. When they didn‘t, I was despairing. I rode an emotional roller coaster and there was no balance to my life.
Devoting myself to Eastern religions, I began meditating daily. However, the God I searched for so diligently was distant and cold, and peace eluded me. Once, when I was in the middle of meditation, I opened my eyes to find that I was looking at my body lying on the couch across the room. This was the out-of-body experience I had read about and desired, but it didn’t bring the “oneness with the universe” I had hoped. Instead it brought fear. The more involved I became, the more I saw strange things—odd beings and forms floating in front of my eyes. I didn’t understand what was happening or why.
Despite the frightening aspects of the occult, I was irresistibly drawn to it. I knew there was a real spirit world because I had seen it. And the books promised that by pursuing these methods I would find God and eternal peace. Why did it seem to have the opposite effect on me? Yet because I was desperate for anything that could possibly fill my emptiness inside, soothe the intense emotional pain I felt constantly, and quell the unreasonable fear that threatened to control my mind, I continued my search. There had to be an answer for me, and I was going to find it.
Something about my occult practices reminded me of the Sharon Tate murders. I felt I was a part of what happened even though I knew I wasn’t. Remembering the old adage “You always recognize your own,” I found the events all too familiar. Somehow I was aligned; I could feel it. I feared that if I continued the path I was on, what happened to Sharon Tate could happen to me. Yet, I felt powerless to stop it.
“I can’t think about it anymore,” I said to myself as I slipped into a thin summer nightgown and headed into the bathroom to wash my face. I flipped on the light switch and was startled by the sight of hundreds of large cockroaches scurrying everywhere on the tile floor. I had lived there for more than a year and had never seen a single cockroach before.
I dashed into the kitchen for a can of pesticide and sprayed the bathroom ruthlessly until every bug was dead. The thought of sleeping there with even one living cockroach drove me on. When there was no sign of life, I finally stopped. By then the smell of poison was deathly strong. In my tiny place I knew that I couldn’t stay in those fumes for long, yet at two o‘clock in the morning it was too late to go anywhere else. I threw open the bathroom window as wide as it would go to try and air out the room and hopefully the whole apartment.
I went to my closet just outside the bathroom and began to hang up the clothes I had tossed there. As I put the last garment in place, I heard a rustling of leaves through the opened window. My apartment building was located in the hills surrounded by trees and bushes and often there were small furry animals that scampered about.
I held very still and listened for more sounds. The rustling came closer and sounded more like footsteps than small animals. They stopped directly under the window and I heard something slide slowly up the wall. When I saw what I thought was a hand grab the top of the windowsill, I was terrified. Having no place to hide, I screamed with every bit of bodily strength I could muster and ran for the front door. Thoughts of Sharon Tate, the LaBiancas, and bloody knives raced through my mind. The way the apartments were situated on the hillside, each one was isolated in a checkerboard effect with bushes and trees in between. For me to try and run to someone else’s apartment would be risky, especially if no one was home. Once outside, I stopped screaming and hid in the thick bushes.
I hardly let myself breathe. My heart nearly pounded out of my chest. I stayed like that for what must have been close to a minute. Then I heard movement again, this time on the roof of the apartment closest to me. That apartment was situated above mine and nestled into the hillside so a person could hop on the roof easily from the road above it. I peered through the bushes, and there was a man’s form coming cautiously over the roof. He held a flashlight and shined it to and fro on the ground just in front of me. In back of him I perceived another form. The glare of the flashlight made it difficult to see clearly, but it appeared that there were two men dressed in black. One man yelled in my direction.
“Is anyone down there?”
I was silent.
He shouted it again with more conviction. I held my breath.
The third time he yelled, he turned in such a way that I caught a glimpse of a gun in its holster and what looked like a policeman‘s hat. From the bushes I called, “Yes. I’m down here. Who are you?”
“We’re the police. Come out where we can see you.”
“Thank God!” I cried as I moved cautiously from my hiding place. “Someone tried to come in my bathroom window. I screamed and ran outside and hid here in the bushes.”
“We heard the screams from our police car as we were patrolling the neighborhood. You stay right here. We’ll check around back and see if we find anything.”
I was filled with relief that they had providentially arrived in perfect time, but I didn’t want them to leave me alone. I hid in the bushes again as they made their search. It was only a minute or two before they came back and said, “Whoever was here is gone now. Your screams probably scared him away.”
They escorted me back inside the apartment and searched it thoroughly to make sure no one was there. The apartment was so tiny it took all of 30 seconds to check the kitchen, under the bed in the main room, the closet, and the shower. There was no place else to look. They could have just passed it off as nothing but a petty burglar, but I could tell that because of the Tate-LaBianca murders they were taking this event seriously. I desperately wanted them to stay, for I was still afraid. Instead, I thanked them profusely, bid them goodnight, and locked the door and the bathroom window. After they were gone, I suddenly realized that in my fright I had not mentioned the roses to them.
I went to bed but tossed and turned. With every noise my body stiffened and my heart pounded. I could hardly breathe from the heat, and sleep eluded me.
The next day my boyfriend, Rick, called. He was back in town after a long tour with his band. We had sung together in the same group for several years and then started dating. I told him about all the events of the night before, as well as about the roses, and of course we talked about the Tate-LaBianca murders.
We went out that night, and on the way back home we drove over the canyon near Sharon Tate’s house. It was a direct route from Beverly Hills to my apartment and one we traveled frequently. The road was deserted and appeared unusually dark. Terror crept over my back, inside my chest, and up into my throat until I nearly convulsed with fright. The fear was so strong that if someone had touched me at that point I’m sure my heart would have stopped. I tried desperately to pull myself together so Rick wouldn’t notice what was going on inside me. Keeping up a good front was very important. No one must ever learn that I wasn’t totally together.
Rick walked me up the long winding stairs to my door, and there, draped over the door handle, lay another rose. He picked it up. The beautiful red velvet petals were unfolding.
“Stormie!” A young woman’s voice penetrated our intense silence. It was my friend Holly, who lived a few apartments down the hill. She was just coming in with her boyfriend.
I grabbed the rose and ran down the stairs. “Holly, look! Another rose! They keep getting bigger, and I’m afraid that whoever is leaving them might be planning to do something terrible.”
Holly was concerned as well. This had all started as a joke, and we had laughed over it just the week before. But now it wasn’t funny anymore.
“I have an idea,” said Holly. “Let’s wait out in the bushes tomorrow night and see if we can discover who it is.”
“Are you serious?” My voice betrayed my fear.
“Don’t worry. He’ll never see us. We figure he comes around ten every evening, right? Let’s meet here at nine.” Rick and Holly’s boyfriend agreed to watch with us.
When the time came, we positioned ourselves in four strategic places, hidden in the bushes outside of my apartment. In order to get to my front door, the rose man would have to go by one or all of us.
We waited.
No one came.
We were silent except for a brief exchange at about 11 concerning whether we should stop at midnight or continue on. Midnight came and still no one showed up. Finally we were tired and aching from staying cramped for so long and decided to call it quits.
Holly and her boyfriend went home. Rick walked me to my apartment, came in for a drink, then left around 12:30 A.M. I readied myself for bed, then went to the front door to make sure it was locked securely. As I opened the door to slam it tightly shut, a bright, beautiful rose, almost in full bloom, fell at my feet.
I gasped and my heart started to pound. Quickly I slammed the door shut. My mind raced. Always before the roses had come around ten P.M., never at one A.M. The only answer was that the rose man had been watching me. He knew we were waiting in the bushes. He knew that Rick was in my apartment. He knew when Rick left. He had been watching.
I quickly called Rick who had just arrived home. Without giving him a chance to speak I told him what happened. “Obviously we were observed,” he stated. “Perhaps it’s someone in the apartment complex.”
I called Holly and she suggested that the two of us go door-to-door in the morning, telling our neighbors about the roses and the near break-in, and asking questions. Maybe someone had seen or heard something.
The next morning we started knocking on doors.
No one
had heard the screaming of two nights before even though two policemen driving by had heard it from inside their car. No one had seen anyone suspicious. But, yes, they would tell us if they did.
The last apartment we checked belonged to a large, dark-haired, mustached man named Leo. He was in his mid-twenties and a would-be actor like every other male in town. We had talked briefly several times and each time he had asked me to go out with him. I always assured him I was steadily and seriously dating someone else and he always backed off. I tried to maintain a friendly but distant relationship with him because something about him was strange.
When we questioned Leo he said he had heard the screaming. This was odd because other people who were home the night of the attempted break-in, and whose apartments were closer to mine, had
not
heard it. I was amazed that he heard me cry for help but never even checked to see what was wrong. I told him about the roses and he said he had seen no one suspicious.
“I’m concerned,” I said. “Anyone who would leave a rose on my door handle 14 days in a row without identifying himself has got to be a weirdo with a sick mind.”
The moment I said the words “weirdo with a sick mind” I saw Leo’s eyes wince and his expression darken. It was ever so subtle and only for a moment, but his look was exactly what one would expect if I had said that about
him.
In that very instant, I knew it
was
him. I had wounded him with what I said and now I was even more afraid. Politely I thanked him and we left quickly.
I knew I had to get out of my apartment so I made plans to move immediately. I found a place away from the hills and moved quietly and secretly early the next morning while it was still dark. Because I had few belongings, the move was easy. I left no forwarding address.

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