The purpose of this book is to recount an incident of demonic possession that afflicted my daughter when she was fifteen. As a result there were harsh, traumatic consequences for her—leaving scars to this day, eighteen years later. Demonic possession, I learned the hard way, is very real. It isn’t just mental illness. It happened to my own family, and we weren’t hallucinating. My daughter was possessed by demonic entities, period. The incident not only drastically altered her own life, but it also negatively affected the lives of everyone in the immediate family.
I have been a journalist for twenty-five years, so my immediate reaction to my daughter’s demonic possession was to keep a detailed journal of what was happening to us. Now, I’m immensely glad that I wrote these bizarre occurrences down while they were going on. If I had waited until later, I’m sure that my rational mind would have convinced me that we had somehow imagined the whole thing or that there was some kind of logical explanation for what was seriously plaguing my family for that initial year, e.g.: “You know, it must have been the wind that moved those items around and rearranged them into neat little stacks; or maybe the floor settling caused all the drawers to open and close by themselves—and then keep banging. Yeah, that’s it. Sure, that’s all it was.”
But luckily I wrote it down when it happened, so I could never be tempted by my rational mind to disregard what my “lying eyes” saw.
It seems curious to me how modern-day Christians base their belief in God, their spirituality, on a book about paranormal/supernatural events that happened thousands of years ago—and yet they deny that paranormal events could possibly be happening today. While they readily accept the premise that Eve talked to Satan and her behavior was influenced by his charisma and abilities of persuasion, they scoff at the notion that Satan and his demons are at work corrupting human beings, stealing souls, and causing very real emotional and physical havoc in contemporary society.
No practicing Christian will deny that Jesus Christ had the divine power to cast out demons. The Gospels are full of incidents depicting him doing just that. But they roll their eyes at the possibility of demonic possession in the twenty-first century (or basically any other paranormal event). They treat anyone who claims to have had an up-close-and-personal experience with a demon as though that individual isn’t dealing with a full deck. Jesus cast seven demons out of Mary Magdalene and later sent them into a herd of swine—but that was just in the olden times, right?
With the advent of modern psychology, it’s more fashionable today to say that the disciples weren’t actually casting out literal demons; they were instead casting out mental illnesses. Really? Are we meant to pick and choose the passages we want to believe and disregard those that seem too fantastic? Sure, if that makes the naysayers sleep better at night …
After our experiences with demonic possession, I read the Bible cover to cover, front to back, like one would a novel—not just passages plucked from here and there or selected ones referenced by ministers, priests, or rabbis. I wanted to see for myself, so I read it from start to finish, paying particular attention to passages related to demonic possession, angels, miracles, and other paranormal events. Nowhere in the New Testament does it say that once the original apostles, Paul and his disciples, had gone on to their final rewards, the dangers of demonic possession would come to a screeching halt.
The threat of possession by demonic entities is still very real in the modern world, just as it was in the days of Jesus and his apostles. The threat of demons working their evil and trying to influence our lives did not evaporate into thin air after the original Christians passed into the pages of history.
At the time of my daughter’s possession, I had been an Episcopalian for twenty-one years (formerly being Roman Catholic). Both my children were baptized into the Episcopal Church, and we had had the same priest most of that time. I truly believed that he was not only our priest but also a close family friend. Apparently I was wrong. When we needed an exorcism, I was unable to obtain one from the Episcopal Church—even though exorcism is an approved rite of that church. As a result of this rejection by my parish priest, I left the Episcopal Church and even Christianity for fifteen years.
But my daughter’s possession and our brush with demonic entities and the paranormal merely made me thirst all the more for spiritual answers to the universe. For fifteen years I read everything I could get my hands on, trying to explain what had happened to us. I learned about how Christianity as well as the world’s other religions deal with mysticism and the unexplained. But more relevant to this book, I learned about the paranormal—which simply means “beyond the accepted norm.”
After all my studies, I cannot say with any certainty that I know exactly what demonic entities are, precisely where they come from, or exactly why they feel compelled to torment mankind. But I have theories and I have learned to deal with the paranormal experiences that plagued my family for many years.
This book is also, and perhaps most importantly, a spiritual journey—a journey away from God and then full cycle back to his grace. As my daughter and I did battle with demonic entities and tried to deal with the destruction left in our lives, we concurrently went on a spiritual journey—though we veered far from it for a decade and a half. I returned to Christianity, albeit with numerous other influences. My daughter, however, is still searching for the exact metaphysical format that will give her spiritual satisfaction.
This book is not primarily about returning to religion. I’m not here to preach, and I won’t be quoting scriptures. The book is primarily about the paranormal occurrences that turned our family upside down so many years ago. Things happened in our home that I know will be hard for most people to believe. Even at the time, I knew these things would be difficult for me to believe later if I didn’t write them down immediately. So being a newspaper reporter and editor, the natural thing for me to do was to keep a detailed journal. That’s what I did in 2001 as it all transpired. I knew that if I didn’t, my logical, rational mind would convince me later that it either hadn’t happened at all or, perhaps, it wasn’t as bad as I had initially thought.
But even though I kept a journal of our paranormal events in 2001, I couldn’t bring myself to go any further with it for many years. Frankly, it was too traumatic a subject for me to process for a very long time. I told myself that someday I would turn that journal into a book—with the goal being to help others who might be having similar paranormal disruptions in their lives.
Meanwhile, I continued to write for a newspaper and also penned eleven plays and one screenplay. My educational background is in theatre, and I taught theatre at two universities and in other schools over the years. I continued to direct and act in plays and produced the plays I wrote here in Nashville. But the journal of our paranormal brush with the demonic languished on my computer. Then one day, out of the blue I suppose, I just decided it was time to write the book.
I think that my decision to finally finish the story had a great deal to do with the spiritual awakening I was going through—partially because of years of reading about the paranormal and partially because of personal spiritual revelations. But my spiritual rebirth is only a very small part of this story.
I feel it is now my mission in life to help anyone else who might be going through what we went through in our battle with demonic entities in 2001 and since. Not only does the fallout of these events still affect my daughter and our family today, eighteen years later, but paranormal episodes still happen occasionally in my home and to my daughter. Some of these post-possession events are described later in the book.
I have finally reconciled with my Christian heritage and returned to the Episcopal Church. The priest who turned me down for an exorcism was acting out of his own fear—and not official Episcopal Church policy or proper procedure.