A childhood lost

Hall of unspeakable horrors

For decades, Alison Carey has said little about the horrific abuse she endured as a child. But now, struggling with the debilitating effects of a brain injury, broke and abandoned by her family, she is ready to speak out. 

By David Baker
First posted October 15, 2016

One of Alison Carey’s earliest memories - she was probably under 5 years old - is of the castle.

It’s not really a castle. But to a small child, taken there in the dead of night, the huge building with the turrets could look like a castle.

It was there, Alison says, that Satanic rituals, led by her mother, Patricia, took place.

She says she remembers people wearing hooded cloaks, standing in a circle and chanting.

There was sexual activity. And then there were the sacrifices, which the participants believed would please the deity they were there to worship.

Asked if she had seen a sacrifice, Alison was silent for a moment. And then, with a pained expression on her face she said, “Yes.”

Alison was not expected to be just a spectator; She says she was to be trained to run what she calls the group.

At first, a small child would not understand what was happening. But as she grew older, she began to comprehend the horror of it, and that it was something most children were not exposed to.

Her recollection of the castle checks out. She describes it as being in Huntington on Long Island, close to a church and near water.

A check of Google Earth shows a large building off of Browns Road with turrets on the roof. It stands close to Huntington Bay. It’s called Coindre Hall. Next to it is a Unitarian Universalist Church, and behind the church is the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington.

Asked why no one in authority - law enforcement, or public officials - had stopped the abuse, Alison had a simple but highly disturbing reply. “Because some of them were a part of it,” she said. “They were in the group.”

Life at home also was traumatic. Her parents were constantly fighting. She says her mother was frequently drunk, and her brother Morgan, a year older than her, terrorized the family, at one point pouring gasoline on the floor outside the room Alison was in, forcing her, with infant Mariah on her back, to escape out a window.

Later, at the age of 11 after her parents separated, Alison went to live with her father, Alfred, while Mariah stayed with their mother. But she says she would be back with her mother on some weekends and holidays - and that she continued to be made to attend the rituals.

It was about that time Alison says that she started to repress the memories. Her psyche did this -  as is common with people who have suffered extreme emotional trauma - by creating a new identity, one that had no memory of the distressing events. She now struggles with post traumatic stress disorder - the same condition suffered by military personnel who have witnessed unspeakable atrocities in combat.
  

The result is a conflicted person, one who is uneasy with herself. And as many like her have done, she turned to drugs to escape.

In April 2015 she was in her apartment on Long Island when, she says, a stranger entered the home, demanded her jewelry, threw her down a flight of stairs and hit her in the back of the head with a baseball bat.

She spent the following four months in hospitals. Then in August, after being transferred to a rehab facility she collapsed and, in another hospital, had brain surgery and was put on life support, not expected to survive.

She pulled through. But the attack has left her with permanent brain damage, impairing her short-term memory and her vision.

Now 55 years old, Alison has been in a drug-addiction recovery program since February 2016. She goes regularly to a support group. She is working hard to turn her life around.

But all this seems to matter little to her family. Her mother, less than two hours away, didn’t come to the hospital when Alison was on life support and near death in Albany, N.Y. and hasn't contacted her since. Her eldest son, a Harvard-educated corporate lawyer, has repeatedly refused to help her since she was attacked. In September, a celebrity gossip magazine quoted “a source” as saying that after footing the bill several times for rehab, Mariah Carey has decided to cut Alison off.

And Morgan, her brother has repeatedly used Mariah’s fame and Alison’s misfortune to promote himself. Three times he has gotten international media attention with increasingly sensational rants; calling his younger sister ‘an evil witch”, and later, “a monster” in separate newspaper stories and in September telling a syndicated TV show he fears Mariah will have him physically attacked for speaking out. Then he tried to persuade Alison not to meet with the producer of the TV show he had just been on. He wanted all the attention himself.

“But it’s not his story,” Alison says. “It’s my story.”

It is. And now, down but not out, Alison Carey is ready to share it.

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davidbaker@fastmail.com

Twitter: @DavidFBaker