(#2) The Real Life Waterbender
No matter where he went, it rained. Even indoors.
“After watching it for a while, I discovered that it wasn’t only coming from the ceiling down. It could come from the wall over or from the floor up. There was no basic direction that it was coming from.” — Ron Van Why, witness of the mysterious rain of Don Decker
Leaks. Almost everyone has experienced one in their home. We spot the water stains, notice the lower water pressure in our shower, and utilize buckets to catch whatever is dripping from the ceiling as we figure out a solution to the problem.
Most of the time, repairing a leak is something we forget about after having accomplished it. Perhaps you tried to DIY the drywall and it came out a little incongruous, but beyond that minor eyesore, the leak is just water under the bridge.
Most of the time.
This is not the case for a Pennsylvania man named Don Decker.
Rain, water, leaks — these things will forever haunt him. This is because in 1983, Don Decker experienced something that many have called inexplicable, otherworldly, paranormal, and even demonic.
It is a mystery that befuddles — and spooks — many to this day. It is a mystery that has multiple eyewitnesses, including police officers, jail guards, a restaurant owner, and a priest. And yet, despite the multiplicity of witnesses, hard evidence for the Don Decker case remains elusive at best.
Some have called it an elaborate hoax. Others have pointed to natural explanations to make sense of what happened to Don. Still others say that there is no other explanation than the direct influence of the sinister forces of Hell.
What happened to Don Decker? What did those eyewitnesses really see? That’s what we’ll be exploring today.
Rain, Rain, [Won't] Go Away
I love the rain. Growing up in southern California gave me an appreciation for any amount of precipitation falling from the skies. Our year-round mild weather leaves us starving for something more than the same old forecast.
Rainy days, even the most nondescript of them, are considered a big deal where I come from.
I never understood why we were sung that nursery rhyme that asks the rain to depart and come again some other time. Excuse me, but I happen to enjoy the rain. Don’t tell it to leave.
That is, of course, if the rain stays outside.
Indoor “rain” is an entirely different story.
In February of 1983, a man named Don Decker was granted furlough from a Pennsylvania jail to attend the funeral of his grandfather, James. Don, then 21 years old, was serving time for receiving stolen property. Despite this, the warden allowed him to pay his respects to his deceased grandfather and travel to the funeral.
Only Don didn’t have much respect for his grandfather, who had secretly abused Don as a child. In fact, Don was so angered at his parents for lavishing praise upon his dead grandfather that he refused to stay the night at their house. Instead, he lodged at the home of his friends, Bob and Jeannie Keiffer.
What happens next will forever live in the memories of several eyewitnesses, whose testimonies were captured in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
While at the Keiffers’ home, Don began to feel strange. The air around him seemed to vibrate, and he fell into a trance. Water began to drip from the ceiling of the living room in which Don was sitting. The Keiffers were perplexed. There were no pipes in the front of the house. How, they asked, was water leaking from the ceiling?
Unsure of what was going on, Bob Keiffer called his landlord, Ron Van Why. Ron travelled to the Keiffers’ residence and was equally astounded. Don remained in a trance-like state as Ron and the Keiffers examined the situation more closely. After a while, Ron noticed something peculiar. Not only was water falling from the pipe-less ceiling — it was also travelling in random directions across and even up the walls.
Ron had no explanation for what was happening, so he called the police. Officers Richard Wolbert and John Baujan arrived on the scene. Upon entering the house, Officer Wolbert claims that a raindrop flew past him and travelled horizontally across the living room. As expected, the officers searched the house and found that the living room was the only room in which the “rain” was falling. Wolbert and Baujan decided the issue needed to be elevated to a higher place in the chain of command and went to fetch the chief of police. In the meantime, Don and the Keiffers decided to grab a bite to eat at a local restaurant while Ron remained at the house.
And this is where the fun begins.
The rain immediately stopped when Don and the Keiffers left the house, and the “storm clouds” followed Don to the restaurant.
This particular restaurant was owned by a woman named Pam Scrofano. Upon being seated, Don and the Keiffers notice that water began to drip from the ceiling above them. Pam, who was at the restaurant, jumped to the conclusion that Don was possessed by a demon, and that somehow, he was the source of the indoor rain. To test her hypothesis, Pam instructed Don to wear the gold crucifix she kept with her.
Don (or whatever was inhabiting his body) didn’t like that. He complained of a burning sensation and couldn’t stand to have the crucifix touch his skin. Don and co. then went back to the house, and in so doing, took the rain with them from the restaurant.
Back at the house (in the kitchen, more specifically), things became more intense. Romayne Van Why, the wife of Ron, began accusing Don of deliberately creating trouble and somehow causing the mysterious rain to fall.
According to eyewitnesses, in the middle of Romayne’s tirade, Don began levitating. Soon after, he was hurled across the kitchen with great force. Whatever suspicions Romayne had about Don’s motives and agency in the situation quickly vanished. Everyone there was now convinced that something otherworldly was responsible.
[Water] Boys, [Water] Boys, Whatchya Gonna Do? Whatchya Gonna Do when They Come for You?
After this, Officers Wolbert and Baujan returned to the Keiffers’ residence with their chief, who was irritated about being woken up in the middle of the night to attend to the rain mystery.
The police chief was not interviewed for the Unsolved Mysteries episode, so we don’t get to hear his side of the story. According to the other witnesses, the chief was skeptical about the paranormal origins of the rain and insisted that it was a plumbing issue. He then demanded that he be taken back home and that the other officers refrain from making any kind of official report about the incident.
But that was not the end of the cops’ involvement.
The next day, three more officers arrived at the Keiffer house to investigate the rain phenomenon. Officer Bill Davies recalls placing a cross in Don’s hands, which burned his skin just like the crucifix from the restaurant. Officer John Rundle describes that Don was then thrown across the room once more. Upon lifting Don off the ground, the officers observed Don bleeding from two sets of scratch marks on his neck.
All of the officers involved, with the exception of the chief, could not come up with a single explanation for what was occurring. At this point, the Keiffers were done with trying to find straightforward solutions for what was going on. This time, they were going to turn to the supernatural for assistance.
The Exorcist, but IRL
The Keiffers and the Van Why’s [I always feel like I’m doing the plurals of last names wrong] managed to arrange for an evangelical preacher to perform an exorcism on Don. According to Ron Van Why, after an evening of prayer, the rain in the house stopped, and for the Keiffers, that was the last time they would ever see any mysterious rain in their home.
So, that’s the end of the story, right? NOPE. Nope as in “big red X on Family Feud” nope.
Don would soon return to his jail cell, and with him came his mysterious rain. Only this time, there was a twist. Whereas the first time the rain would start and stop at random, this time around, Don claimed he could control the rain himself.
One day, Don began to cause, in his own words, rain to “come up out of [the] concrete floor” in his cell. It became such a problem that his cellmate demanded he be removed from Don’s cell and placed elsewhere. A skeptical jail guard interrogated Don about what was happening. To test Don’s alleged abilities to manipulate the rain, the guard told him to cause rain to fall in the administrative office of Lieutenant David Keenhold, an officer at the Monroe County Jail.
According to Lt. Keenhold, it then started to “rain” in his office.
Apparently, the first exorcism didn’t work, but that didn’t stop the jail staff from calling a Catholic priest, Father William Blackburn, to the scene.
Fr. Blackburn claims that when he visited Don, he smelled like rotting flesh, and that despite the rain falling in the room in which they met, his Bible remained completely dry. Seeing the direness of Don’s situation and the fact that it seemed like he was being controlled by an entity other than himself, Fr. Blackburn decided to perform an exorcism of his own.
And it worked.
According to Don, after his meeting with Fr. Blackburn, the mysterious rain never fell again, and he was never thrown across the room or scratched by…whatever was afflicting him way back during those chaotic days in 1983.
And that’s all she wrote. The story ends there.
Wasn’t that chilling? Strange? Feeling a little rattle-snakey after that one?
If I’m honest, this is one of the harder mysteries for me to analyze. So many seemingly independent eyewitnesses interviewed, and yet so little evidence beyond that. Such an elusive case. Thinking about it, I can come up with three different explanations to make sense of what happened in Stroudsburg, PA all those years ago: 1) The hoax explanation; 2) The ice explanation; and 3) the paranormal explanation.
Let’s get it.
You Just Got Punk’d
In reading up on this case, I noticed a lot of people immediately jumping to the conclusion that Don Decker and co. staged an elaborate hoax. While automatically calling something unbelievable a hoax is a bit of a copout, this explanation does have some weight to it.
In researching what happened to Don Decker, I found it difficult to get my hands on any hard evidence other than the eyewitness interviews featured in the Unsolved Mysteries episode. Every other account I have come across on the Don Decker case are all derived from this one episode. I did a Pennsylvania-wide search of a massive newspaper archive and found little contemporary newspaper coverage on the incident. Perhaps I missed something, and that very well could be the case. In fact, I was only able to get my hands on one newspaper article that was written a couple of weeks after the incident allegedly took place.
The only news coverage of the Don Decker incident I found. Via National Paranormal Association on Blogspot.com.
I can’t confirm the authenticity of this account, but it seems to largely align with the accounts given in the Unsolved Mysteries episode. Bear in mind that these interviews were conducted years after the fact and that the eyewitnesses’ memories of what happened are probably a bit fuzzy. In any event, this one newspaper clipping seems to be the only other piece of hard evidence I can find on the Don Decker case.
How come there are no pictures? Back in 1983, cameras were not embedded in smartphones like they are today, but still, household cameras were commercially available for personal use. Why didn’t the Keiffers try to document the water damage in their home, especially given the fact that they were renters? Why didn’t the police take any photos? What about the county jail staff?
Based on this lack of evidence for something so astonishing, one could reasonably conclude that the Don Decker case is just an elaborate hoax, a complicated prank played on a gullible public enchanted by paranormal stories. No pics, no widespread news coverage, just the words of a bunch of people who claimed to have seen something strange take place.
But therein lies the problem with this explanation — the fact that we have so many witnesses. The sheer number of them and their relative independence from each other should give us pause about calling this a hoax and moving on.
Furthermore, we also have to ask ourselves this question: what exactly did these people gain by hoaxing the rain phenomenon? Certainly not money. Fame? Unless you think that one episode of a TV show taped years after the fact and an apparent lack of contemporary news coverage constitute fame, then this probably isn’t a good reason for them to hoax either.
I’m afraid we can’t just label this a big lie and continue on with our lives. I think something happened here, which is why we have to go on to explanation numero dos.
Ice in His [Roof]
One of these days I am going to run out of punny section titles, so enjoy them while they last.
At least one researcher who has looked at the Don Decker case has speculated that ice damming is responsible for the indoor rain at the Keiffers’ house, the restaurant, and the jail.
Paranormal investigator Robert Bartholomew took a doubtful stance towards the Don Decker case. While he doesn’t think that nothing took place in Stroudsburg all those years ago, he thinks that the strange water leaks could have been caused by ice damming.
Essentially, ice damming occurs when warm air enters an attic and melts the snow on the outer surface of the roof of a house. From there, water leaks may occur, even in parts of a house that do not have any piping running through them. Given that the Don Decker case allegedly took place during a Pennsylvania winter, this explanation does hold some weight. Admittedly, I have no direct experience with ice damming given that I live in California, but from what I have read, this seems like a plausible explanation.
But there’s one small problem.
How come the eyewitnesses describe the rain as having stopped completely in any given location upon Don leaving? Do water leaks spontaneously cease without some kind of intervention [it would be nice if they did]? If ice damming were the culprit, then why did it seem to only play a part when Don was in the picture? Furthermore, wouldn’t a bunch of Pennsylvania natives know what ice damming looks like given their lifetime of experience with snowy winters [I am somewhat jealous, although being able to wear a tank top year-round is also nice, so take that]?
This explanation only goes so far once you really think about it. This leaves us with our final — and most exciting — explanation. Demons!
Wait, So Was It Demons?
Before anyone comes at me, allow me the time of day to explain myself.
“John, you’re falling off here. Why even consider the possibility that something paranormal was involved? What kind of evidence do you have?”
Glad you asked that. Part of what I do here is consider all explanations for a given mystery that fall within what I call the “Zone of Plausibility.” Think of it like a wide arena in which we can play with different possibilities that are backed by some kind of logical and/or empirical sense.
And here is where I will wade only waist-deep into the debate on the existence of God. Regardless of what you believe, you cannot deny that there are many well-founded philosophical arguments that demonstrate either the necessity or possibility that God exists. Whether these arguments are from cosmology, ontology, or even anthropology, they show us that it is at least possible that the supernatural exists. If you don’t believe in the supernatural, you can at least acknowledge that there is some basis for why others would believe in it. I think that is more than fair to ask of anyone.
That being said, let’s continue.
Wouldn’t the involvement of the paranormal possess quite the explanatory power? Ice damming doesn’t go all the way. It doesn’t seem likely these people hoaxed everything. The eyewitnesses insist that something demonic was involved, and Don himself reported that after undergoing an exorcism, the rain phenomenon never happened again. By process of elimination, it seems like this is the only explanation that…makes sense…of the craziness that is the Don Decker case.
And that’s really all I have to say about the matter.
So, do I leave it there? Am I allowed to say it was demons? Do I slowly back away and bounce out of here?
So, What’s the Verdict?
Look, quite frankly, even after thinking through all the possibilities and writing this article, I am still somewhat indecisive on what to make of all this.
I can’t get over the fact that there seems to be so little information out there on this case despite there being so many eyewitnesses and even a bit of newspaper coverage during its early days.
I will tell you this. I lean towards the paranormal explanation, although if this were to go to trial, I would say the likely result would be a mistrial due to jury deadlock. The lack of evidence, to me, is my stumbling block here. While this doesn’t mean that I think the whole thing was a hoax, it does mean that, well, there’s just not a whole lot to go off here. Honestly, I’m not sure this case would even make it to trial. The DA would probably not even file charges in the first place.
So, what does this all mean? What’s the moral of the story here?
Sometimes, we have to acknowledge the difference between knowing something happened and proving that it did take place.
I do not doubt something strange happened to Don Decker and that there was some kind of otherworldly rain phenomenon that puzzled many. That being said, I can’t firmly land on one explanation without some further pieces of evidence.
I hope you picked up the Better Call Saul reference. Bonus points if you did.
Until next time.