The Voodoo Exorcism
Daystar told me about a friend of hers named Hans who was a psychic and had been trained to be a Zulu sangoma—what laymen might refer to as a “witch doctor.” Hans was an Afrikaner from South Africa, where he had been trained as a sangoma since the age of four when his mother died and his father had placed him into the hands of a trusted black employee who just happened to be a sangoma himself. The Zulu immediately recognized an incredible amount of psychic ability in this young white child, so he inducted the boy into the Zulu Pagan religion and taught him everything he knew.
Daystar felt certain that Hans could rid Brittany of any demons that might still be there and prevent any more from entering, but probably more importantly, he could teach her to use her own psychic abilities.
“A child like Brittany only comes along once or twice in a lifetime,” said Daystar, “and I think Hans will be anxious to work with her.” She gave me his phone number and told me she’d call him and let him know I’d be contacting him.
That evening I called Hans. Daystar had indeed already talked with him, so he said he’d be happy to work with Brittany. But first he wanted to talk to me. So we made an appointment to get together that Saturday afternoon.
I took a hard copy of the original narrative of the “holy water incident” with me, but basically relayed the whole story once again, verbally. He seemed confident he could help. I expressed my gratitude but told him I wouldn’t be able to pay him much, since I was far from well-off. Hans said that money would not be an issue, because mainly he just wanted the opportunity to work with Brittany. He felt like it was a chance for him to “give back to the universe.” Someone had once helped him develop his abilities, and now he would have the chance to help someone else. I liked this young man immediately. He was only twenty-six years old but appeared extremely knowledgeable about metaphysics and occult phenomena.
We made an appointment for him to meet her the following week after I picked Britt up from school.
That next week, Britt came back to my house. As I drove her to school Monday morning, I told her about Hans. I didn’t know how she’d react. I half expected her to just tell me she didn’t want anything to do with this new weird scheme of mine. However, she was extremely interested and very much wanted to meet him. She seemed very excited about the possibility of him helping her develop her own psychic abilities. I told her that we had an appointment with Hans for Wednesday afternoon.
“Can’t we go see him sooner than that?” she asked. I was delighted to see her so enthusiastic but assured her that Wednesday would be soon enough.
“Call him and see if we can’t go today.”
I asked her what was so urgent, and she just replied that “weird things had been happening at school” and she was scared. She said she had begun seeing spirits at school. I reiterated that Hans was pretty busy, and I doubted he could see us any sooner than Wednesday anyway.
As I was preparing to go to rehearsals on that Monday evening, I noticed a couple of times that Britt had a vacant look on her face. When asked if she was alright, she’d seem not to hear for a few seconds, then shake her head and snap back to reality. After Dave came over, she seemed a bit more alert but I still wasn’t certain whether I should go to rehearsals or not.
Then, as all four of us were standing in the kitchen, Brittany collapsed on the floor. I rushed to her side just as she came to. She looked at me like she didn’t know who I was, so I called her name, hoping to retrieve her from wherever she’d psychically gone. The entity just stared back at me with a rather malicious grin on its face.
“Brittany, Brittany,” I called. “Come back, now.”
“Fuck you” was its only reply. Then it started growling and hissing.
I took her by the wrists and told Dave to hold her legs as we pinned her to the ground. I developed a new and unexpected respect for Brittany’s boyfriend at that moment. A lot of kids would have gone screaming out into the street, but he kept a level head and seemed eager to help. Mima was standing over us shouting at the demon to “leave this child’s body in the name of Jesus Christ.” At the time, invoking the name of Jesus wasn’t the route I would have taken—but I was glad to see Mima participate and eager for any divine intervention we could get.
I was starting to realize that the important thing in exorcising any entity wasn’t in engaging it in any way. What was more important was to recall Britt from wherever she’d gone and get her to reclaim what was rightfully hers. So I started singing “Dixie”—that song from her childhood that had brought her back from the abyss back in January.
And it worked. After only a few verses, the light came back into her eyes and I heard the magic words, “Daddy? Daddy?”
Mima and Dave stayed with her while I went to rehearsals, and everything returned to normal.
Although I had kept a pretty detailed journal of the events of Brittany’s actual possession, subsequent exorcism, and the ten months or so afterward—I did not make an entry describing the second exorcism conducted by the sangoma, Hans. I always assumed I’d go back and put this very important episode into my journal, but that never happened. So here I am over a decade and a half later trying to remember exactly what happened. The minute details you’ve found in the rest of the story, I’m afraid, just can’t be replicated to describe this particular episode. Summarizing the events is simply the best I can do. As subsequent events over the years have proven, Hans’s exorcism was far more significant than I realized at the time.
I picked Brittany up after school that Wednesday and we drove to Hans’s apartment. Hans lived on the other side of town with his wife and her son from a previous marriage. When we got there, his wife answered the door and led us to the living room. Hans had gone to the school to pick her son up. She brought us soft drinks and we chatted about the various Pagan artifacts that decorated their home. There were a couple of cats wandering around and Brittany and I are always happy to get a chance to play with cats.
After a few more minutes, Hans and his stepson arrived talking about the rugby match they were preparing for. Hans coached a rugby team for the kids after school, so I learned more about this very non-American sport that day than I’d ever known before. Being an Afrikaner from Johannesburg, Hans has a thick accent that takes a bit of getting used to—so the Rugby discussion gave us a chance to get to know each other and also for Britt and me to adjust to his accent.
Michelle’s son went to his room to do his homework, and she took the car to run errands. Hans led us into the kitchen where Britt and I sat at the table as he gathered together the voodoo paraphernalia he’d be using. There was a little leather bag of small bones that he would cast out on the table, some kind of incense, and feathers, which he’d use to direct the billows of sage.
There was nothing really spooky or otherworldly about anything Hans did. But then I’d never witnessed anything remotely like a voodoo ceremony before. He moved a chair away from the table into the center of the room and had Brittany sit there. He told her just to relax and not try to block anything. Then he took sea salt and encircled her chair with it. I’d filled Hans in on all the channeling Britt had been doing the last few months, so he’d be ready if that happened. He chanted something in a language I did not recognize, but I assume because of where he’d gotten his training that it was Zulu. He told us he was calling on his ancestors to protect us. He lit the sage and directed it toward Brittany, cast the bones out on the table, and said something else in Zulu.
By now, Brittany’s head had tipped to the side and her eyes had closed. Hans demanded to speak with whatever spirits were in her at the time. His demeanor was considerably more confrontational than Laurel’s. But then I figured different psychics or shamans have different styles.
I hadn’t expected this to be so much another exorcism as a minor cleansing—kind of a tune-up maybe. Laurel had gotten the big bads out, so this would be like a booster shot.
However, he had told us earlier that he wasn’t certain all the demonic spirits had left that night of the exorcism. He demanded that the entity speak to him. Brittany’s eyes reopened and she straightened her neck. She looked at me and smiled.
“Well hello there, Bill,” she said in that Irish brogue we had come to recognize as Spence. “And who would this be?” she asked pointing to Hans.
“That’s Hans,” I replied. “He’s a shaman, and he’s trying to make sure no more unwanted spirits or demons get into Brittany.”
“Well now, lad, that’d be my job, don’t you know? Don’t you worry, I’ll be takin’ good care of her,” said Spence in his usual chipper voice.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” replied Hans.
It soon became clear than Hans did not regard Spence as the friendly Irish guardian angel that he’d been claiming to be. Laurel had totally agreed that Spence was basically who he said he was (a fallen angel who had returned to the light), and that he was a protecting force in Brittany’s life—even if he might not exactly be a guardian angel. She felt that he was, at the very least, one of her guides.
But it seemed that Hans wasn’t buying into it. He challenged Spence to offer up some kind of proof that he was indeed a positive entity. Spence seemed quite offended by this and stubbornly refused to answer most of Hans’s questions.
Not having written this incident down in the journal, the details of the conversation between Hans and Spence are floating around out there somewhere in the ether. I can remember that the discourse was quite contentious. Hans kept demanding evidence from Spence to prove his guardian angel status, and Spence resolutely stood by his guns proclaiming that he had no need to prove anything to Hans or anyone else. The atmosphere was more than a little heated. All the while, Hans circled Brittany as she sat in her chair in the middle of the room. She spoke with Spence’s voice in weaker and weaker tones as he wore her down with his accusations intermingled with chants in Zulu, waving his bag of bones in her face and directing burning sage and incense around her head with that feather.
Hans continually kept asking Spence to state his “true name”—not Spence and not the angel name of Kalikalik he had given Laurel. At first Spence, just as adamantly, refused to even qualify this with an answer. At one point, they were practically shouting at each other—with Hans accusing Spence of being a lying demonic entity, and Spence proclaiming his innocence and purporting to be Britt’s guardian angel. But after nearly an hour of this back-and-forth match of wills, Spence started to weaken.
As Hans drove his accusations home, his voice became louder and louder—and Spence’s voice became weaker and weaker. He seemed to have lost his will to fight. Over the preceding ten months or so, the Spence entity had almost become a member of our family—more of a friend than just some personality that Brittany channeled. As Hans continued to badger his witness like a prosecuting attorney, I felt more and more sympathy for my new Irish friend. I asked Hans if he really felt this was necessary, but by then he was so wrapped up in the righteousness of his mission that he barely paid any attention to me. I felt very sorry for Spence, but my main objective was to help my daughter—so if Hans believed this was the way to relieve her distress, then I was just going to have to trust his judgment.
Hans continued to ask Spence for his true name, and Spence kept asserting that his name was either Spence or Kalikalik, the name he’d given Laurel. This seemed odd to me. I mean, why would this be so important even if Spence were a demonic entity as Hans suspected? I learned later that most exorcists and demonologists believe that if you can get a demon to state their true name given them by God, then you have power over them. Once you’ve successfully identified a demon, supposedly they must leave the body of the person they’re possessing if they are commanded in the name of the deity you believe in. At least, that’s the theory.
So Hans continued to hound the Spence entity for his true name. Spence’s resolve not to give out any more information than he already had was becoming decidedly weaker. Hans loomed over Brittany-as-Spence. He never touched Spence/Brittany, but his presence was overwhelming.
“Again, give me your real name,” said Hans forcefully. The entity Spence looked at me as if pleading for help, then looked away from both of us.
“I am ‘nothing,’” it said.
“What?” asked Hans. “Say it again!”
“I am ‘nothing,’” replied Spence, now in total defeat.
Hans seemed victorious, as if he had solved a Rubik’s cube he’d been working on for hours. “Leave this child now!” he thundered. Britt’s eyes closed, and her head tilted over to the side as if she’d suddenly fallen asleep.
Hans then gently touched Brittany’s face. “Brittany, come back,” he said softly.
Brittany came out of the trance and looked at us with bewilderment. “Is it over?” she asked. “What happened?”
Without going into much detail, Hans told her he had gotten the entity out—and that Spence was actually a demon pretending to be her guardian angel.
Hans then asked us if we would care for anything to drink, but as I recall it, his wife came into the kitchen about the time he was pouring Brittany a soft drink with some domestic emergency demanding Hans’s immediate attention. So the session came to a rather abrupt end when Hans had to leave. He told us to call him if we had any more questions or if anything else happened.
Britt finished her drink, and we were soon back in the car headed home. Since Brittany didn’t remember 95 percent of what had happened, I tried to fill her in on the way.
As we drove along in my black ’89 Sterling, I tried to explain to her what Hans had done and said and why he seemed to think Spence was the actual demon. I mentioned that with all the pleasant and often comic interactions the entire family had had with the affable Irish-sounding spirit, I was highly skeptical about Hans’s conclusions about Spence—especially since Laurel had also been convinced that Spence was basically who he said he was. The family had come to enjoy having Spence around during his impromptu visits. He was funny, gracious, and seemingly Brittany’s staunchest ally during her times of need.
Brittany agreed, and was actually quite appalled that Hans thought Spence was a (or the) demon. He seemed to have been such an enormous help in a time when we all felt so alone, seeing Spence as the actual cause of the problem was just too much to accept. We frankly felt the trip to see Hans had been a waste of time, and Brittany was afraid that her friend, Spence, might never come back.
But Spence did come back. Just a couple of days later, Brittany came down the stairs with a huge grin on her face, speaking in the Irish brogue with which we had all become familiar. When asked how he felt about Hans’s voodoo exorcism, Spence just laughed it off, saying he thought at the time it would be best to simply “play along” with Hans.
“Sure and it didn’t seem he was going to give up,” Spence said with a laugh, “so I humored him. He was determined to chalk it up as a win for the voodoo team, so I just gave him the game, faked a whimper and went on me way.”
Spence would continue to make sporadic appearances in our lives during the next four years—usually only showing up at times when Brittany would be particularly stressed out about something. Essentially, he did seem to be playing the part of something of a guardian, so we basically just accepted him in that or some beneficial role. But he didn’t seem to be omniscient, so I eventually decided he wasn’t cut from angel material—when asked questions of world import, he never gave an answer approaching Edgar Casey’s sleeping prophet. Spence always seemed to be more interested in what was in the refrigerator.
He was funny, and he was immensely entertaining, but he just wasn’t interested in sharing the secrets of the universe—if he even knew any of them. I finally assumed Spence was really just a disembodied human spirit because he frequently mentioned his wife from a life he’d lived in Ireland as a shoemaker. According to Spence, angels sometimes lived in human form just to “get the feel of what bein’ human is like.” I was pretty sure that was just a bit of blarney coming from an Irish spirit who missed his wife.
Spence played a relatively important role in our lives for that first year after the possession, but by the time Brittany was eighteen or so, we rarely heard from him.
Psychic Training Maybe Not So Free
Hans had initially promised to work with Brittany for free just to have the chance to help her develop her psychic abilities. However when I asked him later about tutoring her, he indicated there would be a fee. He made his living from his skills in voodoo, so I totally understand why he needed to charge. We simply weren’t in a position to pay, so that tutelage never happened. But since Brittany nor I believed that Hans’s conclusions about Spence had been correct anyway, it seemed best to disregard that option.
Airborne China and Unsettled Cabinets
A few weeks after the cleansing with Hans, Britt and I had just returned from visiting my mother at her apartment for Grandparent’s Day. After we arrived at home, I worked a couple of hours on my weekly theatre review, while Britt watched TV. I finished up and went upstairs to get ready for bed. Britt went into the kitchen to take the nightly regimen of pills the doctors had put her on during her stay in the hospital.
I heard a piercing scream from the kitchen and rushed downstairs. Brittany was standing at the far end of the room by the kitchen table, shaking like a leaf and still screaming and crying.
“The cabinet doors started flying open by themselves. Dishes and bowls were flying out!” she screamed.
She went on to describe how the apparition of an old woman (whom she said vaguely resembled her grandmother) had appeared in the kitchen. The apparition was laughing, as she opened and slammed the doors to the cabinets. Then dishes and bowls started flying of their own accord out into thin air, dancing about at six or seven feet above the floor. She said most of them flew back into the cabinet, but one bowl hurled itself down onto the floor.
Indeed, there was a shattered bowl on the floor in front of the cabinet doors. Brittany was completely on the other side of the room fifteen feet away.
This particular set of dishes is extremely durable, made by a French company of virtually indestructible colored glass rather than china. I’m terribly clumsy and have dropped various pieces onto the linoleum in the kitchen—and the dishes are nearly impossible to break. The bowl on the floor at my feet must have hit the linoleum with incredible force, or it simply would not have broken into tiny pieces like that.
My first objective was to try and calm Brittany down. I hugged her and relayed some information I’d just read the previous week about telekinetic energy in a book entitled Psychic Connections: A Journey into the Mysterious World of PSI by Lois Duncan and Dr. William Roll.
The book concerns the study of logical parapsychology as opposed to things mystic and supernatural. The concept of there being scientific, physical laws that could be applied to events that psychics and mystics of various religions have claimed for centuries to be supernatural appealed to me. This particular book was a real revelation to me, and it seemed to explain many of the bizarre things that had been happening in my household and specifically to my daughter.
There’s a detailed account of an investigation by Dr. Roll of supposed poltergeist activity in the home of teenager Tina Resch. Physical objects were observed by family members and friends (and later scientists under laboratory conditions) to rise up of their own accord and fly across the room. Dr. Roll even has a photograph of a hand-held telephone sailing through the air in front of Tina who is seated in a chair. What was first thought to be ghostly activity was eventually diagnosed as intense telekinetic ability on the part of Tina. The fourteen-year-old proved quite adept under laboratory conditions at moving forks, spoons, hair brushes, and other small objects up to fifteen feet through the air as scientists observed and took notes.
Tina fit the typical profile of a telekinetic young girl. Those most often observed to have telekinetic ability appear to be teenaged girls who have an unusual amount of real or perceived stress in their lives. She was an adopted child who lived in a household in which a number of foster children were always present. They were usually much younger than her, and she felt slighted and neglected by her parents who seemed to require her to follow the same rules as the younger children. She was also having difficulties with her boyfriend at the time. Often the telekinetic activity was directed at the foster children, e.g., their toys would break or the TV show they were watching would turn itself off. Once the TV even came on while it was unplugged. At the dinner table, the chairs of the foster children would often slip backward, leaving the children sitting on the floor. The lights would also come on and off, with observers even seeing the switches flip up and down and no one causing the activity.
Anyway, I tried to explain a little about telekinetic activity and some of the things I had read in the book to Brittany. I tried to make her see that we may have been wrong all along about there being malevolent spirits lurking out there. I said that what she saw might just be concentrated energy—sometimes lingering from the past after traumatic events, or sometimes even projected by our own minds. Dr. Roll explained that there are cases in which persons with psychic ability have projected ghost-like figures, which other people have actually seen.
I tried to explain that this didn’t make what had been happening to her any less real. According to the things I was reading about parapsychology, these things actually happened—at least on some level. Viewing the events as parapsychological activity could explain strange and frightening things in rational, scientific terms.
I came to believe that the things happening to us might someday have logical, scientific explanations. But while viewing the incidents plaguing our family under a more scientific microscope helped me understand and cope with them, I’m not so sure that Brittany was much convinced. She showed interest and politely listened to my revelations, but I really can’t say how thoroughly she bought into the whole parapsychological explanation at the time.