Mike Conley's Tales of the Weird: Rain Boy case still fascinates

Editor's Note: This is the first of a two-part column.

Twenty-seven years ago, one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of the paranormal took place in the city of Stroudsburg, Pa. To this day, those people who witnessed this weird event truly believe that they were in the presence of pure evil.
On Feb. 24, 1983, 21-year-old Don Decker was granted a furlough from the county jail in Stroudsburg, Pa. Decker had been serving a four- to 12-month sentence for receiving stolen property but he was allowed to leave jail because his grandfather, James Kishaugh, had recently passed away. He reportedly had no other relatives and no other place to live. After his grandfather's funeral and burial, Decker went to stay with friends Bob and Jeannie Keiffer at their house until his furlough was over, according to a Web site.
But not long after Decker came to stay with the couple, some very strange things began to happen at the Keiffer house on Ann Street. One day, the young man was sitting in the living room with the Keiffers and suddenly felt a deep chill. The temperature in the room started to drop. At about the same time, water started to drip from the walls and ceiling. And as the water dripped, Decker said he entered a strange trance.
The alarmed Keiffers saw the water dripping mysteriously from inside their house and immediately notified the landlord, assuming it was a plumbing problem. Ron H. Van Why, the landlord, checked out the house but could find no reason for the water to drip. There simply were no pipes in that part of the house or any other source for the water that just kept dripping.
Van Why called the police to come see what was happening inside the house. An officer arrived and found himself pelted with rain that was literally coming from nowhere. Another officer at the scene who witnessed the bizarre shower said he saw a drop of water move horizontally from one room to another. A weird mist was also forming in that part of the house.
"I literally had a chill going up my spine, made the hair stand up on your neck," said an officer who witnessed the event. "That's how I felt. This was a situation where things were happening that I never, ever dreamed could possibly happen. And there was no way of explaining what was going on."
After that, the astonished officers left to report this to their police chief. The Keiffers and Decker walked across the street to a neighborhood restaurant for something to eat. Van Why and his wife stayed behind. They observed that when the Keiffers and Decker left the house, the rain stopped and everything returned to normal, according to a Web site.
Pam Scrofano owned the nearby restaurant and she was a friend of Decker's. But this night, she sensed something was terribly wrong. Scrofano suspected that an evil spirit somehow had taken possession of her friend. She could tell he was in a trance and sure enough, the unearthly rain soon started falling inside her restaurant. Something told her to go find her crucifix and see what would happen. When she placed the crucifix on Decker's skin, it left a burn mark.
"There's no way that anybody could have played a joke like that," she said on a television program. "This was real. Donny was doing it himself. He was doing it without realizing he was doing it."
Scrofano told the Keiffers they needed to call a priest and not the police for what was going on.
When they returned to the house, Jeannie Keiffer and Van Why's wife told him that he was the cause for the mysterious rain and it had better stop. Then, some pots and pans over the stove started rattling. And suddenly, Decker found himself being levitated off the kitchen floor. He was thrown across the room.
Decker later said it felt like an invisible force had taken hold of his entire body. He was a large guy who was not used to being pushed around. But this experience instantly made him feel like a newborn baby when it is picked up, according to a Web site.
A few hours later, two of the police officers who had witnessed the weird incident in the kitchen returned to the Keiffer house. This time, they brought their police chief. When the chief entered the house, he was too pelted with water just as the others were. The chief said that this was simply a plumbing problem and ordered his officers to leave the Keiffer house. He also told the policemen not to file a report or even talk about it.
But the strange case of what became known as "the rain boy" would not go away. In the next few days, it would only get worse.