Deliver Us from Evil (32 page)

Still worried about what she might be letting herself in for, she asked the priest if she'd be doing anything against God by working with me. He told her the prayers and sacramentals I use conform to Catholic doctrine, so there was no cause for concern. I wasn't the least bit offended by her caution—instead, I respected this woman's meticulous devotion to God.

A week or so later, she was back on the phone. By now it was near Christmas, and as is so common at this time of year, the activity had intensified. Hearing her rapid-fire, obviously nervous voice on the phone convinced me it was urgent to set up a formal investigation as quickly as possible. When I arrived at her home the following day, her first remark was a familiar one: “What I'm going to tell you sounds crazy—and if I didn't see it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it myself.”

“Don't worry about that,” I said. “Chances are that whatever you have to say I've heard before. From my conversation with your niece, I already have some idea of what you're up against.”

Ginny was a schoolteacher. She'd been teaching for so long that her eyes were permanently set in a steely stare and her mouth in a faint, disapproving frown. You got the feeling that she knew everything naughty you'd ever done—or even
thought
about doing—and was just waiting to get her ruler out and give you a well-deserved smack or two.

Frankly, she reminded me of some of the sterner nuns at my parochial school. Even her clothing had an austere, nunlike appearance, and her face was innocent of makeup. Although she was about fifty and her hair was heavily streaked with gray, she didn't try to hide it with dye. She was also extremely slim and fit, giving me the impression that her body was so well disciplined that no fat would dare settle on her angular frame.

As we talked, I could see that her daughters were in awe of her. All three of them promptly snapped to attention every time she spoke. While all this may make her sound rather unlikable, a softer side came out when she played and joked with her little grandson. I realized that this doting grandma wasn't nearly as fierce as I'd thought at first. Her only vice seemed to be coffee, which she drank black and bitter, in large quantities during the interview. Around the living room, which was extremely neat, I saw many pretty little statues, some of them of a religious nature, and numerous family photos in silver frames.

Between sips of coffee, she explained that the problem had begun in October, around the time her oldest daughter, Nancy, who was going through a divorce, moved back into the house with her three-year-old son. The little boy started waking up at 3:00
A.M.
, screaming and pointing at the wall. When his mother would ask him what was wrong, the little boy, who had a very limited vocabulary, would say he'd seen a monster. This went on night after night, but the family didn't believe he'd seen anything and wrote it off to nightmares.

One night the middle daughter was down in the basement, doing her college homework. As she was typing her paper, she heard her younger sister call her name. She turned around, but no one was there. She got back to work, and heard her name called again. It was definitely her sister's voice. By now she was getting mad, thinking her kid sister was playing silly tricks on her when she had an important paper to write. She stormed upstairs to give Sis a piece of her mind—and discovered that her sister wasn't home!

A few weeks later Ginny had an odd experience of her own in the basement. She put a load of laundry in the washer and went back upstairs to continue her housework. When she returned to put the clothes in the dryer, the washing machine had turned completely around, so the water hoses were stretched to the breaking point. And this was a three-hundred-pound machine! Even at this point, she didn't make a connection between all the strange things that were happening in her house. Instead, since the machine was too heavy for her to move back into place by herself, she enlisted the aid of her next-door neighbor, a New York City cop.

He asked her how on earth this had happened and, when she couldn't explain it, suggested that she get a new washer. “But it
is
a new machine,” she replied. “And it's never budged an inch before!”

All the bewildered cop could say was, “Pretty weird, if you ask me.”
My sentiments exactly: First we bust two seemingly satanic washing machine salesmen—if that's what they really were—and then it turns out that the aunt of the ADA assigned to the case has a washing machine with a decidedly supernatural “spin cycle”!

Other than the involvement of this ADA, however, I could discover no connection between the two cases, so I figured it was just a rather peculiar coincidence. Despite being in the Work, I'm
not
inclined to see the demonic under every rock or behind every bizarre circumstance. Still, I felt the Lord had moved in a rather mysterious way by sending this particular pair of cases my way.

Over the next several weeks, other odd events took place, Ginny explained. “It wasn't one strange thing after another but a gradual buildup,” she said. “One evening when I was in the living room, I heard a baby crying, but it wasn't a normal cry. I knew it wasn't my grandson—it sounded like a much younger baby, in great pain or fear. Another disturbing thing about the cry was that I couldn't tell
where
it was coming from. I even went outside and looked around, but I didn't see any child or animal that could have made the sound. It sounded horrible and upset me terribly.”

More unsettling incidents followed. After looking at her mother as if asking permission to tell her story, Erica, the youngest daughter, who was a senior in high school, said she'd also gotten a scare one night, when she was alone in the house, or so she thought. “All of sudden, I heard loud footsteps walking from room to room upstairs. I thought someone had broken into our house and was so frightened that I ran next door to get our neighbor, the policeman.”

The cop grabbed his gun and searched the entire house without finding any burglar—or any evidence of a break-in—while Erica stayed at his house. Having been at the house a month earlier to help with the washing machine, the officer now felt that things were more than “pretty weird” and joked that maybe the house was haunted. More terrified than ever, Erica refused to go home until her mom returned.

Although Ginny was still skeptical about the supernatural and tried to laugh off the cop's theory, it began to make more and more sense to her. Her grandson was still waking up every night at 3:00
A.M.
screaming, and she and her kids were getting increasingly jumpy. Reluctant to call her parish priest with such an outlandish story, she finally decided that it wouldn't hurt to put up a crucifix in the child's room, just in case.

He didn't wake up that night, but in the morning, the cross was lying on the floor, she said, watching me intently for any sign of disbelief. Finding none, she added with great emphasis,
“The nail was still in the wall!”

The eerie phenomena came to a head, she continued, when she was having a holiday party in her home. “I'd received a Christmas tree made of seashells as a gift and put it up on my mantel, over there. Right in front of my guests, family, and friends, the tree flew off the mantel! No one was near it or had touched it in any way. It just sailed clear across the room all by itself, landed on the floor, and didn't break!”

“And what was the reaction of your guests?” I asked.

“They all witnessed it, but no one said one word. We all just sat there in total silence.” Again her eyes raked over me, daring me to make fun of her or question her truthfulness.

Although I
did
dispute this “ghost” story, I waited a beat to see if she had anything to add. She did. “Now, Ralph, this party was on Friday, and I was planning to call you first thing the next morning, when another peculiar thing happened. I'd put your card on the dining room table, but in the morning, it was gone! None of my daughters had taken it or moved it, my grandson can't reach the table, and I even checked the garbage, but it was nowhere to be found.” Finally she called her niece, the ADA, who got out the extra card I'd impulsively given her and gave Ginny my number.

“Do you think the ghost took the card?” she asked.

No, I definitely didn't!
“Ginny, you
don't
have a ghost,” I said. The schoolteacher gave me a withering glare of hurt and betrayal tinged with scorn.
I'd promised to believe her, listened to her whole story, and now I had the nerve to argue with her? I felt like I was about to be sent to the principal's office!

“Let me explain your problem,” I quickly added. “Your home has been invaded by a demonic spirit, which is causing the phenomena you've described. Only a demon can inexplicably move something as heavy as a washing machine or make an object disappear. No human spirit, or ghost, can do that.”

As Joe unpacked the items we'd need for our ritual, I moved to the final phase of the investigation. Now that we'd established the
what
, we wanted to find out
why
a demon was here. Since Ginny had lived in this house for over twenty years but only had trouble after her grown daughter had moved back in, I questioned Nancy—and the rest of the family—about occult practices. All of them denied, very convincingly, any dabbling in magic, tarot cards, Ouija boards, table-turning, or other types of séances. Nor had they consulted mediums or psychics.

I then inquired about a practice Father Martin considered particularly insidious: the Enneagram method, which was developed by a now-deceased Asian spiritual leader, who claimed to have learned it from the Sufi masters of Islam. In this method, a nine-pointed figure is inscribed inside a circle to represent the nine supposed variations of human personality. Each type is given special spiritual exercises that purport to perfect the person's character—a form of heresy, the father explains, since humans are born in sin and ascend to Heaven only after God, in His grace, has cleansed and perfected their souls. This family, however, insisted that they knew nothing of this evil method.

My interrogation turned to a new tack. Knowing that Nancy was recently divorced, I asked if she'd had a bitter breakup, speculating that perhaps her ex had cursed her. No, she replied: She and her former spouse had parted amicably, without acrimony over custody or child support. As she explained that she knew of no one, including her former husband, who harbored ill will toward her or her family, I could see that Ginny had something on
her
mind.

Rather defensively, the starchy schoolteacher confessed that she hadn't been the best of Catholics. “I had all my children baptized and confirmed, but I don't go to church all that often. But I do believe in God!”

I didn't consider these lapses the explanation. I wondered if, like the two Santeria-practicing kidnappers I'd left in a police holding cell, Nancy might know more than she was letting on. Or could her former husband be the problem? But I was unable to find out what, if anything, she'd done—or whether her ex or some unknown enemy had done this to her—so Joe and I decided it was time to move on to the exorcism.

We asked the family to stay in their living room, no matter what they saw or heard, then began the Pope Leo XIII prayer. As I'd anticipated, this demon, which had only progressed to low-level infestation, made no noticeable protest when we filled the house with fragrant smoke, holy water, and blessed salt. We gave the family their own supply of these items and several blessed candles to use after we left, so the house would continue to be repellent to the demonic.

“It's now up to you to keep evil spirits out of your home,” I explained. “The way to do this is to bring God back into your life with prayer and church attendance.” The schoolteacher and her family promised to be more conscientious about practicing their faith. We concluded the ritual by putting blessed oil on the walls in the shape of a cross.

As mysteriously as it had arrived, the demon slipped silently away without so much as a bang or whimper. Although we weren't positive at the time that it really was gone, Ginny later thanked us for giving her the best gift of all: a peaceful, demon-free Christmas with her family. Joe and I felt that we were able to close the case so quickly because Ginny had called us promptly, before the evil spirit had time to get seriously entrenched in her home.

And as for the two bloodthirsty sorcerers who got me started on this case, the ADA solved that one herself. Thanks to her zealous prosecution, both were convicted of their bizarre crimes and spent
their
holidays, and the rest of that year, in that infamous New York hellhole: Rikers Island jail.

 

13

A DEADLY SIN

Last year I got a call from a woman named JoAnn, who had read an article about me in
The
New York Post.
She was a very articulate woman from Brooklyn—I later learned she was a schoolteacher—but the stress in her voice was obvious. “I think my husband is possessed,” she said.

I've gotten many calls like this over the years and always start by looking at the facts in a neutral way, just as I would if I were taking a crime report at work. To be perfectly honest, many people who claim that they or their loved ones are possessed are actually suffering from a mental disorder or simply an overactive imagination. Even when I realize that the demonic is not involved, I always take the time to speak to these people at length and try to help them as best I can. If I feel they are emotionally ill, I'll refer them to a doctor or, if their difficulties are in the spiritual realm, to a clergyman.

JoAnn started off by telling me that her husband, Frank, who was in the dry-cleaning business, had just started seeing a psychiatrist. I didn't want to interfere with this because the doctor was going to prescribe medication. Since some mental illnesses can mimic possession, I felt it was best to wait and see if the drug helped. A mentally ill person will respond to medication, at least to some extent, while the demonic spirit inside a possessed person is totally unaffected by it.