Beware the Night (27 page)

With a benevolent gesture that made Joe look more monkish than usual, my partner brushed his hand through the air as if to say “Don’t worry about your past mistakes—just get on the right path now.”

I reminded the students that they were to start a black fast three days before the exorcism and go to midweek confession if they were Catholic, even if they’d been absolved of their sins the previous Sunday. “You want to be in a state of grace when you go up against this demon,” I said, feeling as if I were giving the patrolmen I supervise at the Four-Six their sector assignments. “And don’t forget to pray the rosary—every day, if possible.”

I place great value on this form of devotion. During a period of difficulty in my marriage with Jen, I went to Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel to pray about our problems. When I finished, Sister Philomena, one of the nuns there, sensed I was troubled and asked if I prayed the rosary.

I had to admit that I wasn’t
that
devout. “No, I don’t, Sister,” I replied.

“Try it,” she said. Since then I’ve made the rosary part of my daily routine and find it an unfailing source of comfort and strength.

After reminding the students of our religious rules, Joe briefed them about Michael’s background, which gave few clues about how the housepainter came to be possessed. Nor did the man himself have any recollection of when or how the demon entered him. Raised in a poor but religious Jewish family in New Jersey, Michael later converted to Catholicism. At eighteen, he enlisted in the Navy, hoping to better himself. He didn’t take well to military discipline and often found himself in trouble for drinking, mouthing off to his superior officers, or getting into fights with other enlisted men. After his term of duty was up, he drifted from one menial job to another, eventually settling on a career as a housepainter. Despite being a rather difficult and quarrelsome man who had few friends, he wooed and won the affections of a young nurse, and married her in 1960.

At some point—he has no recollection of exactly when—Michael began feeling alienated from himself. “He told me that some of his thoughts seemed very strange, as if someone else had taken over his mind,” Joe told the class. “He also found it harder and harder to control his bad temper, which steadily got worse. To his horror, he became physically and psychologically abusive to his wife and children during these rages. At times he felt so full of hatred that he even frightened himself.”

Like many of the people who consult us, Michael tried psychological counseling without success. He also saw many doctors about his frequent, agonizing headaches and the sense of impending doom that sometimes overwhelmed him, but despite extensive medical tests and scans, they found no physical explanation for either ailment. There were also periods when these problems lifted on their own, sometimes for months or even years on end, but the darkness always returned.

Gradually Michael started to see that his problems were in the spiritual realm. As sometimes happens, this demon had attacked without warning, skipping the stages of infestation and oppression. Instead, it invaded like a thief in the night, taking over this man with such stealth that he didn’t know exactly when or how it entered him. He consulted clergymen of all denominations, and attended Jewish, Pentecostal, Baptist, and Catholic healing services, none of which helped. Through a priest in Queens who holds this type of healing masses, Michael learned about Joe, who told him about the bishop’s frequent success in casting out evil spirits.

My partner’s investigation turned up some indications that Michael may have been cursed by his mother-in-law, who was of a different faith, and bitterly opposed his marriage to her daughter. Even many years later this sour, reclusive woman continued to be extremely hostile to him.

“Was she some kind of witch?” asked Chris, our teenaged investigator, who had come to the class with his parents, Rose and Phil.

“I don’t know,” Joe said. “Since Michael was never invited to her house, he couldn’t tell me if any signs of the occult were present. But it’s certainly possible.”

When he began looking into the housepainter’s problems, Joe—who was then a novice at the Work—didn’t realize the old man was possessed. A small but telling incident tipped him off, my partner told us. “I had invited Michael to my home for dinner, and as we ate, it started snowing heavily. Because the driving conditions were so bad and this man lived a considerable distance away, I invited him to spend the night. During dinner, he seemed extremely uncomfortable—and now insisted on heading home, despite the blizzard outside. He later told me that the religious articles in my home were causing him actual physical pain, a feeling like spikes were digging into his spine and neck.”

Joe encountered what he’s convinced is the same demon in another case a few years later, which involved a mother and daughter who had practiced witchcraft. He said, “When several of us, including two psychics, went to their home at the bishop’s request, one of the psychics actually felt this demon crawling on her skin: The mental picture she got was of a scorpion with spikes. I suspect that this demon came to her, and possibly Michael, through a curse created during a Brazilian black magic ceremony.”

Although not psychic, Joe has also seen this demon in his mind’s eye on several occasions. To him, it didn’t look like an insect but something even more frightening. “Its face was inhuman. The best word to describe it is reptilian. It resembled a lizard, with big teeth and bat wings. Hatred was all over it.”

But why would a South American demon possess a New Jersey housepainter? Joe had a theory: “During her lifetime, Michael’s mother-in-law, who died a few years before I met him, owned a business that employed many South American workers. Since many forms of black magic are practiced in these countries, she may have found a sorcerer among these workers and hired him to curse her son-in-law.”

When Joe mentioned this, I was reminded of an investigation I was involved in, where a man was possessed by seven demons. We had that many exorcisms, and each time, the bishop would ask the evil spirit, “How many are you?” The answer would always correspond to the number of exorcisms that had been held, because at each ritual, one more demon would be cast out, forcing the next, more powerful demon forward. Each ceremony increased in violence, to the point where we all felt it wise to have a medical doctor on hand. After a frenzied struggle on the part of the possessed lasting well over thirty minutes, the doctor checked the man’s vital signs. In an astonished whisper, the physician told me that his patient’s heart rate was as calm as if he’d been sitting on a couch watching TV—while every one of the assistants was exhausted from the battle.

Curiously, this case also involved a curse by a relative. This man had an evil stepfather who incited the Devil to attack him, leading to the stepson’s possession. As a rather understandable result, the younger man had developed an extreme loathing of his stepfather, which actually amplified the curse, since the demonic gain strength from negative emotions. Due to the intense hatred inside this man, his exorcisms weren’t successful until he finally consented to forgive his stepfather. Once he did this, he was finally freed.

While the reason for Michael’s possession remained unclear, there was no doubt about the ferocity of the demon inside him. Although my partner wasn’t present at this man’s first exorcism by Bishop McKenna, he still paid for having set it up, I told the class. At the exact moment when the Roman Ritual was beginning in Connecticut, Joe was walking down a sidewalk in New York City, when a van roared out of a nearby gas station and slammed into him. Fortunately, the blow flung him to the side of the vehicle, so he escaped certain death from its wheels, but he was left with agonizing injuries that took weeks to heal.

Back at the little chapel in Connecticut, Bishop McKenna was also under attack. “We had Michael roped into a chair in front of the altar,” the exorcist told me when I reviewed the case with him. “There was a strong sheet wrapped around his arms, but this tiny man slipped out of these bonds as easily as Houdini. Six large men were present to restrain him, but he struggled so furiously that it taxed their strength to the ultimate. Michael had a weak, quavering voice, but when the demon came forth, he spoke in a deep, harsh tone of tremendous menace, making many gruesome threats. ‘I’ll kill you,’ this devil howled—and indeed, he would have done me in, right there in my church, if he could. But in the end, these were vain threats, because the Devil can do no more than God permits.

“I have an audiocassette of this exorcism, and it shocks the wits out of all who hear it. The Devil ranted and roared terrible protests at my prayers, yet as soon as I’d stop exorcising Michael, he’d immediately come to himself and be polite and pleasant. His fury was extreme when I applied relics of St. Dominick, the founder of my order; St. Vincent Ferrer, also a saint from my order; St. Catherine of Siena; and St. Patrick.”

Relics, I reminded my students as I shared the bishop’s recollections, are extremely potent weapons against the demonic. It’s not that Catholics consider bones, ashes, hair, or clothing from saints, or splinters from the cross Jesus died on magical, as some people outside our faith mistakenly argue. Instead, they are holy because they embody miracles of God. The Bible offers several examples of this: The Book of Kings describes a dead man who was brought back to life after his body touched bones from the prophet Elisha, while Acts relates how handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched the body of St. Paul were then used to expel evil spirits or cure the sick. This shows that God sanctions the use of relics to drive out satanic forces in His name.

In Michael’s exorcism, one particular relic elicited some extremely revealing remarks from the demon, the bishop recalled. “When I held up a crucifix containing a piece of the True Cross that I wear on my breast and adjured this devil to depart, he pointed a finger at the cross and said something I’ll never forget. ‘You weren’t supposed to die,’ the demon shouted, indicating that Satan knew all along that the crucifixion would be his undoing. If the Devil could have prevented Our Savior from sacrificing His life to save mankind, he surely would have.”

A picture of the Virgin Mary also had a remarkable effect, the exorcist added. “The demon howled and pointed a finger at Our Blessed Lady. In a low, tormented voice, he said, ‘She wasn’t supposed to say yes.’ This confirmed that I was dealing with an evil spirit—no ordinary human being of faith would ever condemn Mary for having consented to be the Mother of God. During the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel told her that she would conceive Our Savior, she replied, to the Devil’s eternal torment, ‘Behold the handmaiden of the Lord, be done unto me according to Thy word.’ By saying yes, as the demon well knew, she brought Jesus Christ to this world, who later became the first exorcist.”

No miracles occurred at Michael’s first exorcism—or the second, which Joe assisted in. “I’d stayed away from the original exorcism because I’d just started in the Work and didn’t feel I was holy enough to be at an exorcism,” my partner told the class.

Several students nodded in apparent sympathy, and I remembered feeling the same way myself. Even after I rediscovered my faith and got into the Work, nobody ever accused me of being a saint. “Ralph, you have a lot of rough edges, but so does the Devil,” Ed Warren once said. I took that as a compliment. So I could understand why the students—or my partner—would question their spiritual fitness.

For the second exorcism, continued Joe, “The bishop convinced me that as a lifelong Catholic, I
was
up to the job. It was my very first exorcism, so I didn’t realize until later how extraordinary Michael’s ritual was. At certain points, the back of his head bulged out a good two or three inches and began pulsating. He looked like a space alien with a big, throbbing brain. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life: It was like a Hollywood special effect on
Star Trek.”

During this exorcism, which was tape-recorded, the demon repeatedly babbled in a language no one understood, frequently using a word that sounded like “sarabande.” When my partner later played this tape to language professors at a local college, one identified the tongue as a mix of Spanish and Portuguese. Since the only foreign language Michael knew was Hebrew, his otherwise inexplicable knowledge of these languages supported Joe’s theory that the curse Michael was under originated in some form of Brazilian sorcery, perhaps based on Bantu or Congo beliefs.

“Years ago an exorcist from the Vatican said that the toughest cases of all involved black magic of this type,” my partner said, while the expressions on our investigators’ faces became increasingly grave.

Ultimately this exorcism failed, as did five subsequent rituals held over the next few years. Since Joe wasn’t at these rituals, I asked the bishop about them. Sounding very tired and sorrowful, the man of God described these epic struggles as the most harrowing he’d ever experienced in all his years as an exorcist. “We had repeated sessions lasting for days on end, all of them so violent as to exhaust those who restrained Michael. I’d go on for many hours at a time trying to exorcise him, because from the way he was acting, I never knew if at the next instant the demon would be gone. I didn’t want to give up if there was any chance the Devil was weakening and might leave. Finally Michael’s restrainers would plead with me to break if off because their strength was giving out.

“At one session, I had only one nun to help me, yet all by herself she was able to restrain Michael. I was never so frightened in my life as I was that he might break loose and kill me, but the Lord in His providence kept us safe from harm. I’m ever grateful to God for this, but that nun later left our order. Again, as soon as the exorcism stopped, so did the danger because the Devil quieted right down.”

Bishop McKenna paused and gave a long sigh before he finished his story. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to help Michael much or deliver him from the demon.”

Nor could several other exorcists of various faiths the housepainter consulted, all of whom fell victim to the same curse that afflicted Michael. Each time the Brazilian scorpion stung in a different way. A Lutheran pastor who worked with the painter for four futile years developed life-threatening health problems, while a Catholic priest who planned an exorcism for him had to cancel it after receiving a telegram that his mother had died—three days before the scheduled ritual. The Catholic father returned from the funeral and scheduled a new ceremony only to have his church burn down shortly before the appointed day.