Satanic

A NORMAL-looking terraced home has hit the market for £140,000 – but it hides a “satanic” secret.

The two-bedroom house went viral on TikTok after Ashleigh Anderson, 33, shared its unique decor with the world.

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The tattoo enthusiast bought the property in Barrhead, Scotland in 2022 and spent three years turning it into her dream home.

With its brick walls and manicured lawn, the house appears like a regular terraced home from the outside.

But inside lies a Goth’s paradise – fit with jet black cabinets and radiators, as well as signature Halloween-inspired artwork.

Ashleigh said her living room was inspired by a tattoo studio.

To achieve this particular look, she adorned the walls with a number of eclectic decorations.

The house features spooky sculptures and a large neon sign that covers part of the ink-coloured wall.

Eerie statues form the base of a glass-mounted coffee table, while dark sofa cushions are emblazoned with bold exaggerated eyes.

Meanwhile, two mannequin tattoo-covered legs poke out from either end of the sofa.

Continuing the gothic theme, skulls appear dotted around the room, alongside a zebra head taking pride of place by the steps.

Now on the market for £140,000, with Kelly Residential, the property has gained widespread acclaim for its “unexpected character”.

The listing reads: “This two-bedroom semi-detached property may appear understated from the outside, but step inside and you’ll discover a striking interior with a bold, gothic-inspired design.

“The front door opens into a spacious living room, where dark hardwood flooring, dramatic black walls, gothic artwork, and a distinctive tartan media wall create a stylish and memorable space.

“To the rear, the generous kitchen continues the contemporary feel with high-gloss black cabinets, integrated appliances, and ample worktop space, offering both flair and functionality.

“Upstairs, the main bedroom is large and finished with a neutral feature wall and built-in mirrored wardrobes.

“The second bedroom, currently arranged as a dressing room, offers ample space to serve as a comfortable double bedroom or versatile home office.

“Combining a bold interior aesthetic with practical modern living, this home is ideal for buyers seeking something truly distinctive.”

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“Is football a game or a religion?” the sports broadcaster Howard Cosell once asked with exasperation. The horror film “Him,” a striking but vacuous gridiron Grand Guignol by Justin Tipping (“Kicks”) takes it as faith that the answer is both. Any fan with a sacred good luck ritual and any player who’s thanked the man upstairs for a touchdown knows the two overlap as tightly as a freshly laced pigskin.

In the home of young elementary schooler Cameron Cade (Austin Pulliam), the fictional San Antonio Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) is the messiah. Next to the TV, there’s even a shrine with devotional portraits of their icon. When White wins a game while suffering a nasty injury, Cameron’s father seizes the moment to deliver a sermon: “That’s what real men do,” he insists. “They make sacrifices.” The candles on the altar flicker ominously.

Tipping, working from a Blacklist script by Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers with Jordan Peele as his producer, considers the sports-as-religion idea so obvious that the film doesn’t bother analyzing why it exists. Instead, “Him” wonders what kind of spiritual practice it is: hero worship or a sinister cult?

Fourteen years later, Cameron (now played by Tyriq Withers) has grown up to become a star college quarterback in line to be the NFL’s top draft pick and take over Isaiah’s position on the Saviors. A violent concussion knocks him off course, but Isaiah, a living legend still leading the team, offers to vouch for the kid if he passes a private training camp at his intimidating desert estate. It couldn’t be more obvious that Isaiah doesn’t have Cameron’s best interests at heart if he blared a warning on the Jumbotron.

The film’s title comes from a bit of braggadocio — “I’m him” — that started sprouting up in sports leagues during the last five years. (It’s why you’ll sometimes see Lakers shooting guard Austin Reaves called “AustHIM” Reaves.) Anointing someone the GOAT, as in “Greatest of All Time,” has been around longer, but the silly thing about both compliments is they’re getting handed out like Halloween candy. Whether Cameron can become the next GOAT is the movie’s main obsession. Yet it resonates, albeit vague and unexplored, with biblical references to goat offerings and images of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb and the movie’s visual allusions to the goat-headed occult idol Baphomet. Plus, it offers us in the audience the thrill of wondering if someone will get spit-roasted.

Cameron enters Isaiah’s home to discover his host surrounded by what looks like taxidermy sheep skins. Nearly all of the film takes place in his compound, a circular warren that looks like a combination of an ancient temple and the Superdome. We’re continually happy to discover all the menacing delights that production designer Jordan Ferrer has concocted. Inside, there’s unnerving minimalist furniture, dramatic saunas and ice baths and an indoor football field with a throwing machine powerful enough to knock out a tooth. Even more terrifying, there’s Isaiah’s lifestyle-influencer wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), who stomps around with a pointy shard of jade that Cameron is supposed to stick up his rear. (You know, for peak performance.) Meanwhile, outside the gates, Isaiah’s cult followers — like visibly brain-fried Marjorie (Naomi Grossman) — are furious that their champion may retire.

Like “Kicks,” Tipping’s excellent 2016 feature debut about a kid who risks his neck for a pair of Nikes, “Him” is about the bloody quest for respect. It wants to be “The Substance” with jockstraps: a Satanic-tinged, steroidal “Rosemary’s Baby.” The film is so stylishly done that I could accept it on those plain terms. Every shot is a stunner, from stark images of eerily spinning footballs to goalposts that loom like devil’s horns. Editor Taylor Joy Mason and cinematographer Kira Kelly have put together queasy-brilliant montages with some kind of an eye-popping camera technique — a mix of thermal imaging, X-ray footage and visual effects — that seems to see right inside the actors’ bodies to their gristle and goo. Bobby Krlic (a.k.a. the Haxan Cloak), who also composed the music for “Midsommar,” wows us with a tragic, thundering score.

But the movie’s thoughts about pain and devotion and locker-room manipulation are still gestating. After I made it to the end of the story and ran it back, little of the plot hung together. I couldn’t with any conviction answer rudimentary questions such as how much does Cameron even want to play football? Or what in Hades will happen to the surviving characters?

Part of the issue is that Tipping and Withers have created a rising football player who might be too authentic. Withers moves with physical confidence and perfect posture and drilled obedience. Participating in a mock media training day, you buy that he was born to sell sneakers.

He speaks with an athlete’s guardedness, too, that post-game interview cadence where each wooden sentence tries to bore the camera into leaving them alone. Cameron describes his football career clinically and neutrally like he’s a product; he refers to himself “performing,” not “playing,” as the latter would imply he’s on the field to have fun.

Surrounded by trainers and doctors and his childhood hero, he acquiesces to pretty much everything, from receiving random injections to a brutal bludgeoning. (At least he doesn’t do you-know-what with that jade crystal.) I’m willing to blame some of that passivity on his head injury, but it’s hard to care about a character who only has a personality for three minutes.

At least Wayans gets to cut loose. His bullying Isaiah sprints from pep talks to threats in the same breath and runs around in nifty outfits covered in weighted beads. He’s in such peak physical condition that you believe Isaiah’s conviction that it’s possible to outrace Father Time. Realizing afterward that Wayans is 53 — almost a decade older than Tom Brady when he retired after announcers even more bold than Cosell treated him like Methuselah — you just might be tempted to bow down to Baphomet yourself.

It was a July evening when Elyse Pahler, 15, sneaked out her bedroom in the Central Coast town of Arroyo Grande, planning to get into some mischief. A boy from school had gotten her number from a friend and invited her to smoke weed in the woods near her family’s home.

The boy was Jacob Delashmutt, also 15, and he brought along two friends. Delashmutt and his schoolmates Royce Casey, 16, and Joseph Fiorella, 14, all shared a passion for death metal, and they formed their own band called Hatred.

One of their favorite groups was Slayer, a popular metal act that featured a song with lyrics about worshiping Satan and sacrificing a blonde, blue-eyed virgin.

Pahler fit that description as she walked to join the three metal heads that night in 1995. Three decades later, Delashmutt described what happened next to a state parole board.

Delashmutt, now 45, said that once they had smoked marijuana, he and the two other boys attacked Pahler when she was distracted by the sound of a passing car. He wrapped his belt around her neck, strangling her while Fiorella stabbed her and Casey held down her arms. Then they each took turns stabbing her with a 12-inch knife, according to his testimony, first in the neck then in the back and shoulders.

Casey told state parole officials this year that Pahler begged for her mother and Jesus before he stomped on the back of her neck. They had planned to violate her remains, Delashmutt testified to the parole board, but instead hid her body in the woods and fled the scene. She wasn’t found until eight months later, when Casey confessed to his pastor.

Royce Casey, Jacob Delashmutt and Joseph Fiorella pictured as teens after their arrest in March 1996. They were convicted of murdering Elyse Pahler, a teenage peer, in a satanic ritual. Casey and Delashmutt were released on parole recently, 30 years after the murder in Arroyo Grande, Calif.

(U.S. District Court for the Central District of California)

Today, two of the killers — including the admitted ringleader — are walking free after receiving parole. But the youngest of the group, Fiorella, remains behind bars despite claims that he is intellectually disabled and that his case was mishandled.

The releases of Casey and Delashmutt this year have come amid a surge of high-profile murder cases from the 1990s entering the parole process. Erik and Lyle Menendez, the Beverly Hills brothers convicted of killing their parents in 1989 as teens, were denied parole this month after a months-long resentencing effort.

Pahler’s murder occurred while the Menendez brothers were on trial, and the grisly killing of a young, white girl provoked a similar level of media frenzy. Prosecutors alleged the death-metal-obsessed teens had plotted to commit the murder as part of a “Satanic ritual.”

Pahler’s family has fought against letting out any of the men over the past decade, with her father, David, often bringing a picture of his daughter to show the parole board.

David Pahler told the board at a 2023 hearing that he believed Casey still lacked remorse, reading from a transcript of Casey’s journal taken when he was arrested in which the teen wrote about believing Satan had “taken my soul and replaced it with a new one to carry out his work on earth.”

“If you give up your soul to Satan, how do you get it back? How do you get it back? I — I don’t have an answer for that,” Pahler said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

Casey and Delashmutt pleaded no contest to first-degree murder in 1997, each receiving 25 years to life in prison. Fiorella, also charged with being armed with a deadly weapon, got 26 years to life. Since they became eligible for parole, their paths through the system have led to vastly divergent outcomes.

Casey was denied twice by the board, then approved in 2021 and 2023, only to have Gov. Gavin Newsom reverse the decision. Newsom argued Casey needed to do more work to ensure he would make healthy relationships outside prison and learn the “internal processes” that led him to kill Pahler.

Delashmutt was also denied twice by the parole board in 2017 and 2022 and once by the governor’s reversal in 2023. The rejections often referenced his tendency to shirk responsibility onto his co-defendants for his role in the murder.

Although Delashmutt was the one who called Pahler and invited her into the woods, at the time of his arrest he blamed the other two for orchestrating the murder and recruiting him to carry it out.

This year, however, Delashmutt told the parole board he was the “ringleader” of the group.

“I know that I am the most responsible for this crime. I had every opportunity to put a stop to it, and I didn’t. I was involved in the planning from the beginning and I made this crime happen. Elyse Pahler was safe in her home that night when she received a phone call from me,” Delashmutt said.

The teens were influenced by death metal music — specifically by Slayer — to channel their anger at the world into physical violence, Casey told the parole board.

“That music, especially Slayer, was all about suicide, murder, sacrifice. So, I started learning a specific way to express those things,” he said.

Pahler’s family unsuccessfully sued Slayer and its record company for its lyrics in 2001, claiming they incited her murder, but lost on 1st Amendment grounds.

Casey was released from Valley State Prison in early August to transitional housing in Los Angeles County, his lawyer told The Times. “Our legal system is not based on emotion,” his lawyer and prison advocate Charles Carbone said.

Despite what was “one of the most notorious crimes committed in San Luis Obispo County,” Carbone said, there has been an “enormous consensus” over the last few years among prison psychologists, the full parole board and the governor that Casey should go home.

Delashmutt, who was released in late July, didn’t believe he had a future when he was a teen, said parole hearing lawyer Patrick Sparks.

“His background was about a lot of poor decisions,” he said. “He started to change his life, and it gave him hope for the future again.”

Both apologized.

“I want to acknowledge all of the pain and the trauma that I’ve caused,” Delashmutt said. “It is impossible for me to understand the magnitude of the crime, the impact that it’s had on the Pahler family.”

Casey said he remembered how David Pahler often brought a picture of his daughter to the hearing.

“Something that I remember hearing over time when Elyse’s dad has come, is that she has a face. And I try to remember every day, whatever decision I’m making or whatever I do, that the ongoing impact of what I did is present all the time.”

Fiorella, unlike the other two men, has yet to participate openly in a parole hearing, according to hearing transcripts from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He waived attendance for a 2019 hearing, and, according to the transcripts, was advised by his lawyer, Dennis Cusick, not to speak or answer questions in his most recent hearing in 2023.

Cusick declined to comment on whether his client would attend or participate in an upcoming parole hearing scheduled for next year.

Court filings show Fiorella has long looked to overturn his conviction, arguing that a court-appointed defense attorney failed to give his due diligence prior to accepting the plea deal.

A complaint filed in the Central District of California in November 2023 argues that Fiorella’s first trial lawyer, David Hurst, waived a fitness hearing after receiving a neuropsychologist’s report that Fiorella was developmentally disabled and had an IQ score of 68, indicating a mild intellectual disability.

Hurst said in a 2020 deposition that he “felt that we would lose the fitness hearing and it would be a waste of time,” despite knowing about the report and other circumstances of Fiorella’s life, the complaint said.

Hurst was terminally ill at the time of his deposition, the complaint notes, and died by the end of the year before an evidentiary hearing.

Fiorella scored at just above an eighth-grade level on a basic education test, according to a transcript of his 2023 parole hearing. He earned a GED more than two decades prior, in 2002, but the parole board noted a report from a doctor who alleged he could not pass it and paid someone to take it for him.

Cusick argued to the parole board that Fiorella is still developmentally disabled and “is not the kind of person to take on a leadership role in anything.” The habeas corpus complaint repeatedly characterized a teenage Fiorella as a shy, quiet child who was teased by peers for being “slow.” It also challenged the idea that he orchestrated the murder, instead placing blame on Delashmutt.

Fiorella’s complaint has gone through several levels of state and federal courts, with most agreeing that the challenge to his conviction was years past the statute of limitations. Courts also said it was questionable whether the forgone fitness hearing, as his trial lawyer suggested, would have resulted in any action.

The complaint was dismissed and then appealed in March to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That case is awaiting an opening brief due in November.

Fiorella’s federal public defender, Raj Shah, did not respond to requests for comment.

In his 2023 hearing, a representative of the San Luis Obispo County district attorney’s office, Lisa Dunn, opposed Fiorella’s release, arguing he had not done the work necessary to prove he was ready for parole.

“Mr. Fiorella, frankly, is a dangerous individual,” Dunn said. “He’s been dangerous since he was 15, and there’s no evidence to support a finding that he’s less dangerous now.”