Beware the Night (38 page)

Donna laughed at this. “I feel fine,” she insisted in her strange new voice. “And my car is working perfectly. I think I’ll take my son to the beach.”

“Are you nuts? Get out of that house while you still can,” Mike yelled, then realized what was happening. His girlfriend had dreamed up a ruse to escape Isabel. He called the Warrens, who arrived at his office shortly before Donna and her son pulled up in their car. How did she escape? The demon had achieved its goal—possession—and no longer found it necessary to keep the woman trapped in her house. The sudden, chilling change in her personality was conclusive proof that the evil spirit had entered her, after using its terrifying powers to break down her will.

Other than looking exhausted, the mother seemed fine when she arrived, but she went into a trance during the meeting and said nothing. Finally Lorraine suggested that Mike take Donna to a motel for the night, while she and Ed reviewed the tapes he’d made, but Donna refused.

“She gave me a very evil look,” Mike recalls, a haunted glare of overpowering hatred. No longer under the sway of “Isabel,” he was finally starting to wake up to the truth. “I knew I wasn’t looking at Donna, and whatever was inside her knew that I knew. After about fifteen minutes, the real Donna came back—happy and full of energy, and I thought everything was okay. Boy, was I wrong!”

That night Mike’s doorbell rang. “When I saw Donna at the door, the caution flags went up immediately, because she had that scary look again. ‘Hi, baby,’ she said flirtatiously. ‘Glad to see me?’ I said I was glad to see
Donna,
but we both knew that only her body was there. ‘Why the dirty looks, baby?’ she asked. ‘You don’t love me anymore?’”

Mike just stared, too appalled to say anything, as Donna entered his home, sashayed right by him, and plopped down in his favorite recliner. Not wanting to be in the same room with her, he retreated to the kitchen, shouting “Go to hell, Isabel!”

“Why don’t
you
go to hell?” Contempt dripped from her voice. Just as she spoke, a thunderbolt of staggering pain hit Mike in the head, and he clung to the kitchen sink so he wouldn’t fall to the ground.

At that very instant, Donna laughed harshly from the next room. Although she was sitting in a recliner facing away from the kitchen and couldn’t possibly see Mike reeling with pain, he shouted to her—or whoever was inhabiting her body, “You know what you just did, don’t you?” Donna only laughed harder, as Mike staggered into the room and looked right into a pair of eyes that didn’t look like his girlfriend’s at all. “You’re trying to take me over, aren’t you?” he accused.

With that, Donna cackled more maniacally than ever. “Have a little headache, Mike?” the woman he’d loved for the past two years taunted in her strange new voice. “Fuck you!”

*   *   *

Since the Warrens were about to leave for England, Ed asked me to handle the case for them. After hearing the whole story, I was amazed by the demon’s power and cunning. In just two weeks it had managed to break down Donna’s resistance and enter her. While successfully keeping Mike away, it had also gotten him so thoroughly on its side that he only grasped that he’d been conned after his girlfriend was already possessed! This was a crucial element of the evil spirit’s strategy, because it needed to separate Donna from her source of strength: the tough cop you couldn’t push around without getting a face full of fist. While we don’t know all the factors that made possession possible at this time, it’s clear that Donna had no power to resist without Mike at her side.

Luckily, a light had finally gone on in Mike’s head while Donna was still in the earliest stage of possession. Had he called the Warrens sooner, she might have escaped invasion entirely. But at least the demon hadn’t had time to really dig in. That made it important to hold an exorcism for the young mother as soon as possible, before the evil spirit could gain complete control.

My priority now was to prepare her for the upcoming ritual. Being a Catholic, that meant she had to make a full confession of her sins and get into a state of grace. (For people of other religions, I tell them to do whatever their faith prescribes to get them into a righteous relationship with God.) Prayer is extremely important, but some possessed people, including Donna, can’t pray, because the demon won’t allow it. Whenever she attempted to pray, she became violently ill.

Donna strenuously resisted my first instruction. Since she and Mike weren’t married to each other—and in the eyes of the Church were still joined in holy matrimony to their previous spouses—I warned her that both of them had to resist romantic temptation. That drew a mocking look from Donna, who pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about. “No messing around,” I said. “Is that clear enough for you?”

“No sex?” Her tone was taunting. “Not even sometimes?”

What does she expect me to say?
I thought.
It’s okay to have sex on Wednesdays, but not on Sundays? Sin is sin, any day of the week.
“No, none, and that’s final!”

*   *   *

The night before Donna’s exorcism, a peculiar thing happened at the station house where I work. Since it was a slow night for crime, the other cop on duty and I didn’t have much to do, so I decided to finish transcribing Mike’s tapes. A cop friend of mine, Frank, came in the room and we started talking about the case. It was just after 3:00
A.M
. when a phone nearby rang three times. Because this was an inside line, which can only be used by people in the station house, Frank and I were very puzzled. There were only two other people there that night—and I could see that neither of them were using the phone.
How could anybody else call this particular number? It simply wasn’t possible.
When I picked up the receiver, I got only silence.

A few minutes later the phone rang again. I picked it up. Again no one spoke. Within a minute or two it was shrilling away. I just sat there, and Frank didn’t budge either. “Ralph, I’m getting spooked,” he finally admitted. And this was a guy who’d previously worked at the morgue, reconstructing the faces of decaying, unidentified corpses! I told him to check if anyone was on the phone now. He looked around and said no. Not wanting to make a lot of drama about it, I silently commanded whatever was on the other end to depart peacefully. The phone stayed silent for the rest of the night. I had the feeling the demon I was dealing with was trying to scare me off from the exorcism.

If so, it didn’t work. Joe and I got to Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel in Monroe, Connecticut, where Bishop McKenna was holding the exorcism, early. The other assistants began to arrive around 9:00
A.M
. We gathered our equipment: a videocamera, tape recorder, and still cameras. I use these videos as training tools for student investigators and, most important of all, for the legal protection. It’s not impossible—or even unheard of—for a victim of demonic possession to die during an exorcism. In fact, it happened to a young girl named Analise Michele during an exorcism many years ago in Germany. I don’t put any savagery past the demonic. Many exorcists’ lives have been destroyed by false accusations of physical abuse or other wrongdoing.

Once we were ready, we walked in the church as if we owned it. Inside, two elderly women were praying the rosary. One jumped up and asked me in a stern whisper if I knew where I was. I was in no mood to explain myself—I’d been working all night and was now here to do battle with the demonic. I just said, “Yeah, I know where I am.” Just then Bishop McKenna came out and removed the Most Holy Eucharist, then ushered the two old ladies into the sacristy. I had to laugh when I returned to the church a few weeks later, when the same woman who had scolded me now asked sweetly if we were having an exorcism that day. The bishop must have explained it all.

Anyway, the church was buzzing with activity when Donna finally arrived, nearly half an hour late. Mike took me aside and told me his car had a full tank of gas when he and Donna left their house, but after he’d driven just twenty miles, he looked at the gauge, which now read empty. When he remarked on this, his girlfriend gave the same horrible laugh she had when he was hit with racking pain in his kitchen.

“Did anything else happen?” I asked. He said that Donna had been complaining of an agonizing headache. It’s not uncommon for a possessed person to suffer physical torments on the way to an exorcism. We wasted no time getting ready for what we feared would be an extremely violent ritual.

Being a cop to the core, Mike brought handcuffs to the church and suggested we use them on his girlfriend, but I couldn’t allow it. At least he’d left his gun home, as I’d instructed. No metal restraints are ever used during exorcisms, because they can easily become weapons. And as a policeman myself, I knew how easy it is for someone whose hands are improperly cuffed in front of them to swing his or her arms up and injure bystanders or the arresting officer. Even with her hands cuffed in the correct way—behind her back—Donna would be at risk of injuring herself, which is why the bishop later started using soft fabric restraints like those the New York City police force uses to secure mentally disturbed individuals.

Unfortunately, at this time we didn’t have those restraints, so Donna was left unbound on her chair as the Roman Ritual began. She flinched from the bishop’s first words as if from a blow, then slumped forward, her hair spilling over her face. Four of us grabbed her so she wouldn’t collapse on the church floor and held her firmly throughout the exorcism. We saw that it was no longer Donna sitting in that chair—the demon had made its presence palpable.

Her body went into a fit that took the strength of all the assistants to subdue, as first her hands, then her entire body began to quiver uncontrollably, like someone in the throes of a raging fever. The bishop sprinkled holy water on her, and the demon moaned in inhuman anguish. Outside, the bishop’s dog began to bay, almost as if it wanted to help its master, and its long, drawn-out howls echoed through the church. Donna’s face was now masked in murderous fury—and we were the enemy!

As the prayers continued, her chest heaved, and she started retching. Thinking she might vomit, as possessed people often do during exorcisms, Joe put a bowl in her lap, and she bent over it until all we could see was her wildly tangled hair. When the bishop reached the part of the ceremony where he must make the sign of the cross on the exorcee, Donna let out a low growl and suddenly sprang forward, slapping his hand away. Being a true warrior of God, the bishop moved forward and made the holy sign over her head and chest. That provoked rhythmic panting and groaning that made her sound like a woman in childbirth, except that what we hoped she’d expel was the demon.

The groans gave way to horrible growls, and she rocked from side to side, baring her teeth like an animal. Although she looked as if she might snap or bite us at any second, we maintained our firm grip on her arms. With amazingly supernatural strength, she fought against our grasp and lunged at the bishop with bestial fury every time he touched her with a cross. The battle had lasted only a few minutes so far, and we were already exhausted. During the next few hours, holy water was sprinkled on Donna over and over, which caused even more frenzied struggling, and dreadful screams filled the church. At one point, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she appeared unconscious. The demon was in torment—the agony of the damned.

The bishop put a blessed crucifix on her, and her body went limp. But he wasn’t fooled by this apparent retreat. “I know you’re in there, demon!” the exorcist said. Donna lurched wildly, desperately trying to break free of the crucifix.

“I command you to speak, in the name of Jesus Christ,” the bishop thundered. The demon was silent. The struggle continued for another half hour before the devil was finally defeated.

In a weak voice, Donna whispered, “It’s gone.” Naturally, the bishop continued the ritual, in case the demon was screwing with us to make the exorcism stop.

But we could see a dramatic difference in Donna. Her features had softened and that murderous look was gone. The sense of oppressive evil that had filled the church had also lifted. Sun streamed through the stained-glass windows, and I felt relaxed and peaceful again. Donna, on the other hand, was sore as hell from all her struggles and could barely get out of her chair. She was in such pain that Mike had to help her walk. Yet her face was radiant—you could feel her joy and immense relief. She bowed her head as we said prayers of thanksgiving to our Lord for freeing her from the creature that seeks the ruin of souls.

Before we left the church, I asked the couple to swear they’d
never
attempt to contact the demon again. They both promised and we left the church together. Outside, I told Mike to call in a few days and let me know how Donna was feeling. A week later he did. “She’s doing great,” he said. “She’s attending mass and praying a lot.” That was the best possible sign, since she’d been unable to worship God during her possession.

“Any more trouble with the phone?”

“Not one beep,” he assured me. I knew the case was closed.

Afterword

I
THANK
G
OD
for calling me to a vocation where I can rejoice in the triumph of ultimate good over ultimate evil. My journey of discovery is far from over: Even after ten years, I continue to learn with each new investigation. There are no experts in this Work, and anyone who tells you differently is full of it. Demonology isn’t something you can study in a classroom: You have to go out on cases and get your hands dirty. Over the years, Joe and I have had many trials and made many errors, but the methods we use have been effective in more than half of our cases. A combination of faith, common sense, experience, and contact with very learned people are what we use to reach our goal of helping people. We don’t do this for money or reputation, or to satisfy our egos. Instead, our only mission is the greater glory of God.

I found my faith again because of the Work, but it’s not because of the Work that I have faith. Faith doesn’t just happen: It comes to those who seek it and are willing to let it into their lives. Sometimes you reach a higher spiritual level quickly, and sometimes you stagnate until more is revealed to you. For people in religious life, like Bishop McKenna, everything is centered on faith. For people in secular life, who may be married and have jobs, it’s harder to keep your eyes only on God. I can understand that: I definitely don’t have
my
eyes on God when I’m wrestling some violent perp to the ground, but He’s never far away. Once you accept God into your life, it’s very hard to live without Him. My faith goes through cycles, however. Sometimes God is at the forefront of my mind, and other times I have dry spells where I don’t go to church or pray that much. Even then, however, a part of me is always conscious of Him. I know it’s wrong to ever let prayer take a backseat, but that’s what can happen when there are many aspects of life competing for your attention.