Couple of years ago, I was asked to photograph a wedding at the registrars office in Preston, I was asked if I'd do it as a favour, so I said yes, I'd like to have a go. I was told the bride was a Jehovah's Witness, well I thought, "Should be a decent wedding, and a respectable one at that." So nearer the time me and Margery went and had a reconoitre around the place, and found some fairly decent locations for the photography.
Fast forward to the day of the wedding. Me and Margery went over early to Preston, and went in the town center Methodist church for tea and lunch (You get a lovely big pot of tea, half a dozen cups at least," so we sat in there for an hour or so until it was time to stroll down to the registery office. I loaded my cameras, checked and double checked that everything was right, and then set off.
First of all we were over an hour early, so we sat in the reception, and then a wedding party turned up, which I thought was ours, never having met the bride or groom. They went in, and there was still another wedding before ours. The guests for this wedding began to arrive, and one man turned up with the most bizzare hairdo you could ever imagine, I thought I hope this isn't going to be our wedding, it wasn't. They went in.
It was our turn next, the guests started to arrive, so I started to photograph the most important guests, and went to sit down to await the arrival of the bride herself. Then out of the corner of the window, people began to turn up dressed in black and red, I thought, "They're not to a wedding dressed like this," but they were, that was not the worst of it, everyone was wearing occult jewlry, crosses hung upside down around their necks, upside down pentagrams, two points up representing the Goat of Mendes.
The bridegroom was from Jamaica, he could not have been darker skinned, the bride turned up, she was so white that she looked completely drained of blood, how on earth was I going to get detail in both their faces as the brightness range exceeded the latitude of the film. It seems that both the bridegroom and the best man were practising voodoo, and the black and red party were a coven of witches, whom I'd seen some of them round Darwen, two of the guests were sisters, one must have weighed 40 stone and her sister wasn't much less.
Well I took the pictures, and felt happy with what I'd taken' I used tissue and a piece of white cloth over the flash to soften the light, tripod outside, framed everything ok, and I was looking forward to shooting some pictures in the local park, that was when things were beginning to go wrong. I left my film in the reception, and had about a dozen frames left in the camera, so everyone had to count, I wound the film on, and got to frame no37, its normal for me to get 39 frames out of a roll of film, and then I wind on ever so carefully, waiting for the film to tighten, if the film had snapped off the take up spool, I could simply have taken it to a camera shop and they would have retrieved it.
But to my horror of horrors, the film kept winding on after frame 40, I do not know what happened to this day, but I found a toilet that I could black out, so I got the camera open and the leader of the film fell on the floor, I couldn't tell whether the film had gone through the camera or not. Found out later it hadn't, none of the flash pictures turned out taken inside the registrars, the whole day had turned to disaster.
Now I don't know what you think, but if Julie had been here in Darwen with the kids and I'd gone round there later in the day, the kids would have picked up on my spiritual state, and where I'd been, they would have become hyper and argumentative, and Julie would sensse something very spiritually wrong, then she would have aranged a prayer party to cast out any unholy thing that may have followed me home. The question is this. Do you think that in such a setting as this, that the demonic and negative influences of witchcraft and occultism can work against the presence of someone who is a Christian? The Bible seems to point to that, in the blessings and curses, of being faithful to the Lord, and the curses of turning to other gods? I'll finish by saying that if I'd known about this wedding beforehand, I would have flatly refused to take it on.