Today, let me show you a story about evangelical marriage. It’s the combination of many, many women’s stories. And it is a horror story about misplaced trust, monsters in disguise, and small towns hiding way too many secrets.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 10/28/2025. They’re both available now! Tag for Halloween marriage posts.)
Dawn Ridge, South Carolina
Three years before Courtney Gamble sold her soul for love, her dad uprooted the family from Atlanta to the tiny town of Dawn Ridge, South Carolina to become a pastor for Valley Baptist Church.
To Courtney, nearing Dawn Ridge felt like falling into another, much older world. Barely two thousand souls clustered at the bottom of a deep green valley embraced by old-growth trees and a picturesque old cemetery. The wheezing Titch River—barely even a creek—ran through its middle. Signs stood along the river warning passersby not to drink the water.
At first, Courtney felt guardedly optimistic about the move. Sure, she reasoned, life here would likely look very different from her previous life. She’d been a pampered evangelical girl in a huge megachurch in an expensive suburb of Atlanta. And sure, moving in junior year was going to be rough. But her dad had prayed a lot about his decision to take this job, and it seemed too good to be true: a small but well-heeled, mostly-older congregation that could afford a full-time seminary-trained pastor with a family and student loans to consider. She couldn’t deny that Jesus had sent them here. So she hoped to find good friends here—and maybe even a boyfriend, if her dad finally allowed her to date!
By the start of the school year, Courtney had made two good friends. They were the only other teenagers in her dad’s congregation.
Ashley was a happy, plump girl with shining bright brown eyes and a love for old-school hymns. Her mother was the worship leader at Valley Baptist. Wyatt was a big, affable fellow with the biggest hands Courtney had ever seen. He and his dad both worked as laborers, constantly fixing the decaying town’s spluttering appliances and crumbling stonework and dissolving wooden beams. The two readily accepted Courtney’s overtures of friendship. They both took pride in their little town, which made them eager to show their new friend all the best spots in and around it.
One evening near the beginning of the school year, their ramblings led them to the ancient tombstones of the Titch River Cemetery. Most of the names etched in the headstones had been lost to time, erased by rain and years, with the headstones themselves tilted in crazy directions or collapsed entirely to rubble.
When Wyatt saw Courtney staring at one such fallen tombstone, he drawled, “Every few years families come out here to fix everything back up.” But to Courtney, the place looked like it’d lain untouched for centuries.
A leaf-crackling noise drew the trio’s attention to the other end of the cemetery, where saplings doggedly grew around its fence. A tall young man idled near the gate there.
When he saw them, the stranger’s angular face settled into a frown that vanished quickly. He wore clothes that Courtney immediately recognized as hand-sewn, since most of her clothes were as well. But his long black wool jacket was clean and new. In the dusk of nearing autumn, he looked like an otherworldly creature.
“A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing,” sang Ashley under her breath. She reached for Wyatt’s upper arm, touching it tentatively, but Wyatt didn’t look back at her.
“Our helper He, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing,” laughed the stranger: the second verse of the hymn. His accent didn’t sound local, but his voice carried the tune well. He smiled crookedly—right at Courtney.
That’s how Courtney met Tom Barnaby, whose father was a recently-returned missionary from Germany. Wyatt and Ashley both knew Tom, though they hadn’t seen him or his family in some years. Pete Barnaby, Tom’s dad, had returned to help his elderly father run a hardware shop downtown.
From the first moment Courtney’s eyes met Tom’s, she felt an electric current running through her—one she’d never felt before. Wyatt, glancing at her, pressed his lips together and averted his gaze. Ashley, clearly disappointed, withdrew her hand from Wyatt’s arm.
As the dusk deepened, Tom sighed. “I have to be getting back. I’ll see you all at church on Sunday?” But his eyes were on Courtney when he asked.
Without waiting for an answer, he waved and turned away, walking out of the cemetery. The trees swallowed him up within moments, and the place was quiet again.
“He sure looks different,” said Wyatt quietly, as he guided the girls through the overgrown path back to his pickup truck. Courtney looked behind them, but the cemetery was abandoned again. The trees rustled with the wind. Tom was nowhere in sight.
Tom Barnaby
At church that Sunday, Tom and his family arrived together. They properly introduced themselves to the pastor and his family. Courtney, who’d taken great care with her dress and hair, blushed prettily and smiled at Tom and shook his mother’s hand with the dainty, barely-there grip of an evangelical princess. Her dad even let Tom’s parents talk a while before the sermon about their recent missionary stint in Germany. Not a single person in the congregation missed Courtney’s shining eyes as she gazed at Tom as he stood on the church dais with his family.
Ashley, Wyatt, Tom, and Courtney comprised the entire 11th-grade class that year at Dawn Ridge Public School. Tom carried a Bible to school every day, which greatly impressed everyone. In fact, Tom attended services three times weekly with his family—the usual Wednesday night service, plus two on Sunday—to listen to Pastor Gamble’s long, droning sermons.
It didn’t take more than a couple of weeks for Tom to begin chatting up her dad after church. Of note, Tom didn’t talk much to Courtney herself. But he didn’t need to. Even she knew what his actions meant. All she had to do was wait. Well, “all she had to do”? More like “all she could do.” Girls did not chase boys in her universe.
In late October, Courtney’s dad gave her The Talk. Of course, this wasn’t The Talk that most American kids get considerably before they’re 17! None of the pastor’s daughters had had that Talk. No, this Talk involved the dire and possibly eternal stakes of choosing the right husband. While the shadowy trees whistled and rustled outside her window, her dad showed her Bible verses about marriage, about wives submitting to husbands and husbands being like Jesus to the Church. With a very serious tone, he asked her if she felt ready to let Jesus guide her to a husband.
Her big blue eyes wide, Courtney nodded and said she was. After a moment of studying her face, her dad sighed. “All right,” he said. “He has a lot of potential. You can go out with him.” Then, he prayed over her and asked Jesus to bless her and keep her heart safe.
There’d be rules, of course, but her dad had given his overall permission. Her heart soared. Surely over the next months of dating, Jesus would tell her if Tom was really the man for her. But she had a funny little feeling Jesus liked the idea of them together.
The courtship of the marriage sacrifice
Over the next two years, Courtney and Tom grew closer and closer. She adored him to distraction. His handsome features, height, and charm drew her into his orbit like a moth to flame. For his own part, he treated her like an exotic foreign dignitary—someone he had to handle with great care. He brought her little gifts that her father considered appropriate, like inexpensive flower bouquets; he took her a restaurant the next larger town over.
In all ways, Tom behaved like a perfect gentleman. He hadn’t even tried to kiss her, though sometimes he gazed down at her like he really wanted to. Courtney’s friends back in Atlanta, when they spoke by phone, couldn’t believe her luck. The older women in church seemed extremely pleased with such a perfect match, reminding her often that she’d “found a good one.”
Ashley beamed at her whenever she mentioned her growing love for Tom. Alas, Ashley’s crush on Wyatt had never panned out, but it also had never died. After they graduated from high school, Wyatt immediately married a girl from another town and moved there. Courtney refrained from mentioning him. He became a ghost that flitted across her friend’s face every so often.
As for Courtney, she still thought Dawn Ridge was creepy. Its cemetery still always felt one minute away from swarming with ghosts or shadowy wolves. Its trees crackled and creaked at night, brushing against her window and sometimes waking her up with a shiver of fear. The town’s buildings continued to molder and decay. Its residents still gathered and guarded and traded secrets like cards at a casino. Oh yes, she’d spotted all of the troublesome parts of her new home, and avoided them where she could.
But, hand-reared as she was—like a baby parrot—to embrace male leadership over women, she didn’t, she couldn’t notice the many ominous signs of her future. As far as she could tell, Tom did everything perfectly: They prayed together all the time, read the Bible together, never missed church services, you name it. Not a single guide written before her courtship or since could have predicted any issues. When she prayed to Jesus, she didn’t feel any check in her spirit about marrying Tom.
So she didn’t notice that Tom never asked her about her career or educational dreams. He never asked her opinion about where they’d live or how many children they’d have. Nor did he express interest in any of her hobbies—painting, walking outdoors, decorating scrapbooks. His peremptory assumptions, his unspoken dominance, his occasional snide and sarcastic remarks, she could excuse them all because his shows of piety and religious fervor outweighed everything else.
Since Tom’s father was a comparatively-wealthy shopkeeper in town, nobody who knew better said a word to Courtney about Tom’s late-night drinking with friends, or about his arrest in Germany for harassing young women at a club—which was the real reason the family had returned to Dawn Ridge. If they had, though, Tom already had ready explanations involving sin and forgiveness.
Ashley in particular held a terrible secret about Tom: She suspected him of having weird flirtations with the other pretty girls in town when Courtney wasn’t around. These were only suspicions, though, so she held her tongue. She was very mindful of what inaccurate accusations could do to a man’s future. Even Pastor Gamble regularly preached about it—every time a new scandal erupted in evangelicalism.
The marriage lamb is led to the altar of sacrifice
Three years after Courtney’s family had moved to Dawn Ridge, Tom finally proposed to her. During a dinner party hosted by his family, before the meal itself, he took her aside to the family’s back garden. While crows cried ominously in the darkness, he knelt and showed her a delicate diamond ring. “Marry me,” he murmured, his deep blue eyes gazing into hers.
As he slipped the ring onto her slender finger, Courtney wept. She was shaking head to toe in joy.
Everything in her life was perfect.
When they returned to the dinner party, she realized every adult there had known in advance what Tom had planned for the evening. They smiled expectantly, then burst into happy cries as she wobbled into view. Her parents hugged her and Tom patted her hand as he helped her to her seat. Her father prayed extra long over the food.
She’d just sold her soul, and she didn’t mind at all. She barely even understood the terms of the trade she’d just made. But it didn’t matter.
She’d prayed for Jesus to bless her future marriage, to send her a perfect husband, and he’d sent her Tom.
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Five years later, Courtney wept alone in the home she shared with Tom. She had put the children to bed while he was running late at work again. But instead of doing her chores, she sank to her knees in a pile of clean towels and wept out her frustration and anger.
She didn’t know when things had begun going wrong. After the wedding, Tom turned into a whole other person. It was like putting a wedding ring on his finger had triggered a demonic possession or something.
He moved the family to Chattanooga so he could attend the college his parents wanted for him, a small evangelical private school with a business program. They rented a little house nearby, and he studied full time and worked at a tax preparation business. Courtney worked as well at a crafts shop. At first, their marriage felt perfect.
But they wouldn’t stay that way. Very soon, the couple began arguing about money, about where he spent time hours after his night classes had ended, about housework, about chores he’d said he’d do but had left undone, about how little Courtney saw or talked to him anymore. He’d never laid hands on her, thankfully, at least not yet. She wasn’t his princess anymore, but his household servant.
To combat his strange new personality changes, Courtney prayed. She prayed constantly. She never told her friends or parents what was happening, always maintaining a happy, cheerful demeanor. But in private, she was in Hell. For an evangelical woman like her, she knew that prayer was the only way to get Tom to change.
Somehow, though, prayer wasn’t working.
The house of cards collapses
When Courtney timidly told Tom she was pregnant a year after the wedding, he didn’t seem pleased by the news. It interfered with his plans for their future. But Jesus had indeed blessed them with their first child. Courtney didn’t even ask if she could stop working. She knew enough about their money situation to know they couldn’t afford it.
Once Tom graduated, she hoped things would get better, but they didn’t. He wasn’t out so late at night, but he only haunted their home rather than living in it. She saw signs of him, like someone expecting ghostly signals like slammed doors or whispers from other rooms, but she couldn’t touch or talk with him. They now had a second child, a toddler by the time of his graduation, and he barely interacted with the children except for quick cuddles and brief chats.
Now, this evening, this one singular evening when Tom said he’d be running late again, she’d found their phone bill in the trash. He never kept those bills, and when she saw it she realized why: rows and rows of calls on the outgoing log to a number she didn’t recognize in a nearby Tennessee town she’d never visited.
When she called the number, she heard an unfamiliar woman’s voice: “Tom?” this voice asked expectantly. “Everything okay?”
Courtney slammed the phone back into its cradle on the wall. A few moments later, she found herself in the laundry room, weeping like her very soul was being ripped from her body.
She realized she really didn’t know Tom at all.
Had Jesus meant for this to be her perfect, fairytale marriage?
She’d done everything right. She’d seen that Tom was fervent, pious, devoted, a proper gentleman. Of course, she’d prayed for Jesus to guide her away from him if he wasn’t the husband meant for her. Her father had approved the match. Everyone at church expressed nothing but support for it. In every way, Tom fit every guideline her religion had ever set for husbands.
But somehow, after marriage he had morphed into a monster.
No, she amended bitterly. No, he hadn’t suddenly become a monster. Through tears, she realized that the monster had worn the skin of a devoted Christian man, then discarded the disguise once its victim couldn’t escape.
She felt completely trapped in the house. The clock’s ticking nearby startled her, making her remember Tom was out still. She had no idea what she’d say to him when he got home.
In her mind, she began pulling names from memory. Could her parents take her back? Would they? No, she sighed. Her father would only lecture her about failing Tom as a wife. Her friends might shelter her briefly, but none of them had room for a mother and two children. And she couldn’t support her brood with a little retail job.
The moments passed: tick, tick, tick. The entire house held its breath around her.
Eventually, she slid back up the wall to stand again. She reached into the laundry basket for a clean towel. She stared at it. Then, shakily, she began to fold it. Her blue eyes gazed blankly at the task before her and her hands moved as if they were on marionette strings.
Outside, the wind howled and something chattered with insidious laughter.
NEXT UP: Ashley slowly fades into a wraith as she waits for the main character of her story to show up at last. See you soon!
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