This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." – Ephesians 6:12

Decades ago when I was very young, my grandmother, Mary Kupelian, told me a haunting story I've wondered about ever since.

As I sat in the kitchen of her cozy little home in Bethesda, Maryland, eating her delicious homemade bread and talking about a frequent topic – the Armenian Genocide, which she and my dad (as a little boy) had barely survived – she shared with me the following enigma.

"The Turkish people are very hospitable people," she said with surprising warmth, seeing as they had murdered her husband and dozens of other members of her extended family, just a few of the 1.5 million Christian Armenians killed by the Turks during the first genocide of the 20th century. Grandmom knew the Turkish people well, not just from having grown up in southern Turkey, but from having returned several times to the "old country" later in life, during more quiescent times.

However, continuing her story, she intimated to me that the Muslim Turks lived under the spell of strange forces.

"They were very hospitable and would invite you in," she said. "But, if a distant signal was given – it sounded something like a trumpet – then they would instantly change, and would attempt to harm you. Yet if the signal sounded again, they would immediately switch back to normal."

"Even," she added by way of illustration, "if they had injured you after the first signal, as soon as the second signal sounded, they would bind up the very wounds they had inflicted on you."

As I said – a very, very strange tale, with overtones of "The Manchurian Candidate" and its post-hypnotic suggestions (remember the Queen of Diamonds?) triggering murderous, pre-programmed behavior.

That story, so pregnant with hidden significance, has remained gestating in my mind for all these decades since my grandmother matter-of-factly shared it with me over her kitchen table. It has piqued my interest especially in recent years, as I have endeavored in my writing to sort out and make some sense of a world so powerfully controlled by dark forces.

Since today, April 24, is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, let's delve into my grandmother's mystery story and see where it leads.