SUPERNATURAL

BATTLE

“Michael Jackson’s career was shooting through the

stratosphere. This is the true story of Tory, who
worked at Motown Hitsville studios during the
preparations for the Motown 25 television special.

As Michael performed a music history-making

moment with his song, “Billy Jean”, Tory would be
snatched into a supernatural battle for her very soul…”

By Tory Connolly Walker

I was once a radio and part-time television news reporter for several years
after graduation from Ohio State University—working in Columbus, Ohio.
But one fine day I jumped a smoking jet to L.A. when I became bored with
my “dreary little town”.

It was 1983. I was twenty-seven years old, and no reporting jobs were
immediately available during my impatient California work search.
Curiously, when a tantalizing offer in the music industry was given to me
through the friend of a friend, I had no problem making a dramatic career
switch.

Suddenly I found myself working as an assistant manager at Motown Hitsville

Studios in Los Angeles. It seemed to be the emerald gate to
“Excitement City”. Songwriting was something I did semi-professionally, and
I loved music even more than I loved news—so I thought I had died and
zoomed to job heaven.

Lionel Richie, Smokey Robinson, Jermaine Jackson, Rick James, and Stevie
Wonder—all casually walked through the studios or sat at a desk across
from mine, making celebrity small talk and telling cool jokes.
It seemed I laughed through my work all day long.

Spiritually for me it was anything-goes-designer time. After work, I dabbled

in Hinduism, did Buddhist chants, read the Koran and practiced metaphysics
while attending the Church of Religious Science. Did I mention I became
confused?

My rarely-opened copy of the Holy Bible gathered several layers of dust as I

went looking for Jesus and His “lost years” in esoteric texts, but didn’t find
anything. On the job I continued in the studio office work surrounding
preparations for the Motown 25 television special. Giddy with excitement, I
drank myself to sleep every night.

Moving toward another level of my game to combine journalism and the

music business (I intended to write an article on the television special while
working on it) I was blindsided as if opening the door to a nightmare world…
Boom! I fell into a frightening abyss.
-3-

I began to hear voices, see people’s faces change, and heard and felt
demons whizzing past me uttering garbled curses.

I never made it to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium to watch the taping of the
Motown 25 television special—the program I had worked on—from a
coveted seat. Instead I was spirited away by my mother on a fast and
spooky jet to a mental hospital, a world away in Cincinnati Ohio.

I was terrified just looking at the walls. Six weeks later the taped version of
Motown 25 came on national TV. I stared forlornly at the television set in the
dayroom of the mental hospital in smiley-face green foam slippers, while
Michael Jackson made music history with his “Billy Jean” song-and-dance
spectacle that shot his career into the stratosphere.

Devastated, I watched Michael Jackson’s jaw-dropping precision dancing

and gravity-defying spins. I looked at him in his black fedora, his feet a blur
in sparkly socks and patent leather dance shoes. I looked down in shame
and bewilderment at my smiley-face green foam slippers.

“I worked on that show,” I said weakly. Some of the other patients tittered
and one mocked me.

“I worked on that show,” I said again in an even tinier voice.

More patients whooped in laughter and one of the nurses asked me if I had
taken my medication. I was diagnosed as manic depressive.

For a total of twelve years, racking up a tally of twenty-two agonizing times, I

was admitted into an unholy-go-round of psych wards. I had been
prescribed enough drugs to “kill a horse, as my Aunt Marian would say.
Sometimes Haldol, Mellaril, Lithium, Thorazine, and Elavil—all at once. Then
for another several years I struggled with vicious alcohol, cocaine, and
finally crack addictions.
How did I think I would escape this thing called mental illness. This horrible
Thief of Time and Destination—when my beloved father,

-4-

“Q.A.”, had lost his entire career as a popular junior high school science
teacher and his marriage to my mother and his chance to be with me
consistently, because of paranoid schizophrenia?

The medical field calls it genetics, the Bible calls it generational curses of
lunacy. My most effective doctor, Jesus Christ, would whisper his

prescription in my spirit, pointing to Matthew 17:21. “This kind (of demon)

goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.”

Instead of following the Lord’s advice, through disbelief, rebellion, and

frustration I gave up and was sucked into an underworld of hustlers,
gangsters, con artists and drunks. I was the main drunk. My first husband
was a Vietnam veteran and photographer who was angry at the planet for
what he suffered in the war. He soon came and went. I continued to suffer
from mental illness.

The 1990’s were upon me. One bright spot on the horizon was that I met a
tall, handsome, and talented man named Geno, with whom I had deep
intellectual conversations and who made me laugh. We traveled to Las
Vegas to get married immediately, then returned to Los Angeles to live. But
we both grappled with who God really is—and our personal struggles tore us
apart after only a year together.

I began to read my Bible, searching for answers night and day.

“Lord!” I cried, “If you freed Mary Magdalene of seven demons, couldn’t you
free me?!” My Bible fell open to “this kind goeth not out, but by prayer and
fasting.”
As a news reporter, I had been taught to be skeptical and report only what I
had seen. But I can testify that there is an active teeming world of real
angels and real demons just beyond the realm of sight.

Not until I had a supernatural battle with an entity that attacked me on

several occasions, and once sent me shrieking in terror as its force shot up
my spine, clawed and catapulted me to my knees, did I begin to believe that
the paranormal is NOT normal, but oh, brother, is it real.

-5-

I had had it. I accepted Christ as Savior and Lord of my life. I went to
church and read the Bible. I fasted and prayed like a house afire. I called a
prayer partner I have never met. He said:

“Lady, you’re going to stop singing the blues!”

Then he prayed for the Lord to deliver me. That afternoon, on Ash
Wednesday, February 25, 1998, I got down on my knees in a cold and
deserted New York City area park and prayed for the Lord to deliver me—
from manic depression, alcohol and drugs. I walked out of that

park a free woman. I haven’t had to take psychotropic medication in over

eleven years. In 2002, my husband and I were reunited in New York, after
not seeing each other for almost nine years.

My deliverance is a miracle. My testimony is true. The power of prayer with

fasting unto the Lord Jesus Christ set me free. I have been free from that
Ash Wednesday day to this, as I minister to others. God’s love is astounding.
And oh, His grace is amazing.