Deliver Us from Evil

by Ralph Sarchie

  That wasn’t the first time I’d seen a strange shadow like this. People often ask if I ever saw any ghosts or demons when I was growing up. Actually, it was only after I entered the Work that I started having preternatural experiences. Once you give the demonic recognition, you draw them to you—something I didn’t realize when I began this Work. Now I understand that when you get involved in investigations, you cross a line, and once you cross it, you can never go back. The chances are high that you will be disturbed and harassed in your own home, because the demonic never forget and never stop seeking revenge.

  That revenge comes in ways you’d never expect. In the winter of 1992, my wife had a harrowing encounter in our home. I was off on a case and she was watching TV, while Christina slept. Suddenly Jen saw something out of the corner of her eye: a huge black shape about eight feet tall, with no features at all. She felt a terrible chill and every hair on her body stood on end. The shadow was at the doorway of our baby’s room! Paralyzed with fear, she watched as it glided down the hall and vanished. As soon as she recovered enough to move, she crept cautiously into our bedroom, got one of the bottles of holy water that’s always present, and sprinkled it everywhere.

  By the time I got home, she’d gotten over her fright and was boiling mad. “You go off on these cases and bad things happen when you leave,” she shouted. “I’m scared to death being here all alone with a baby. Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life worrying about shadows and creepy stuff I don’t even like to talk about?”

  Her words were like a kick in the balls. I’d signed on for the Work, but my family hadn’t. Why should they be subjected to harassment from Hell? It was like having somebody I’d arrested show up at my door or threaten my family. I did my best to calm her, then got another bottle of holy water and performed an exorcism of my own home, with the Pope Leo XIII prayer. We fell asleep in each other’s arms around dawn, under the relic of the True Cross that hangs over our bed.

  Not satisfied with scaring the shit out of my wife, this demonic spirit showed up again a month or so later. This time I was home, lounging on my living room sofa in front of the TV, when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. A big black shape was moving away from Christina’s crib! Although the room was dark, the shadow was blacker than darkness. I have often heard people I’ve interviewd describe shapes they could see clearly in the dark, things so unnatural that they appeared to be swallowing up darkness. Now I knew exactly what they were talking about. I got off the sofa like a madman—I don’t think my feet even hit the floor—and ran to my daughter. To my relief, she was sleeping peacefully, but the feeling I had was utter terror. Even after using holy water, I couldn’t sleep all night, knowing that a demon had been so close to my baby girl.

  The worst incident of all was in 1995. Christina, who was then five, peeked into her baby sister’s room and screamed. “I saw something that was all wavy, like it was melting,” she told me later. “It was leaning over Daniella’s crib like it was going to pick her up. I yelled to Mommy, ‘One of those things you and Daddy see is here—and it’s getting Daniella!’” Jen raced into the room and saw the shadow hovering over the crib. Just as she frantically picked up the baby, the formless mass vanished. My wife and daughters fled the room, with Christina in tears, slamming the door behind them.

  I was wild with rage when I got home from work and heard about this. When I entered the Work, I knew that anyone who goes up against the Devil pays a price. I’d expected that for myself, but not for Daniella, who is now four and weighs all of twenty-five pounds, most of it her long silky hair; or for Christina, nine, a sturdy little athlete who loves soccer and horror movies, just as I did as a kid. Yet I’ve discovered in case after case that’s exactly the M.O. of satanic spirits: One of the cruelest ways they get at people is by attacking their children. This raises the fear factor much higher than if I were the sole target, and has caused me to feel tremendous stress and guilt.

  To safeguard against satanic attacks, I’ve done my utmost to make our home extremely repellent to evil spirits, just as my burglar alarm and gun make it hostile to thugs of the human variety. It’s not just holy water and blessed salt that I rely on, but I have made God—not the Devil—the center of my life. I avoid dwelling on demonology. In my everyday life, my focus is on being a husband and father. Even when I’m actively involved in a case, as I was here in D.C., I devote attention to it only during the investigation or when I’m writing up my report on it. To obsess over occult horrors is unhealthy and dangerous to the soul; lifting up your eyes to the wonder and majesty of God’s creations is the cure. It’s only through His mercy that we can survive dark nights of evil.

  * * *

  When I returned from my search of the patio, none of the McKenzies said a word to me, yet I could tell they’d seen the shape too. They just nodded their heads in grim satisfaction, as if to say “See, we told you so!”

  In the family room, Claudia was describing the times when they could actually hear the demon entering their basement. The portal—the opening in the spirit plane that lets a fiend from Hell enter our world—was the laundry room, the site of the satanic rituals. The family could always sense when the spirit was coming. Your body will react to pure evil, even if you may not understand what you’re feeling. Sometimes the spirit crept up the stairs silently, as the family members’ bodies instinctively broke out in icy sweats; other times its steps were so loud that it sounded like someone was running with cinder blocks on his feet. The footsteps always started in the basement, and the family’s terror would mount as they pounded up the stairs toward them. The noise provoked terrible fear, since the family members never knew what horrible thing would happen next.

  Ed asked Claudia to pound on the wall to show what the steps were like. He’d done this in other cases, so we could get an idea of what the noises sounded like to the family, but no one can ever really reproduce exactly what was heard. The mother slammed her fist into the wall three times, and with each blow her kids and boyfriend upstairs literally jumped out of their chairs. That’s how thoroughly the demon had trained them in terror. I comforted them by explaining it was just Claudia, demonstrating the sound for Ed, and they settled nervously back in their seats.

  Next, Artie told his tale—a brief one, since he’d had few encounters with the unearthly force. Well into middle age, he had the beefy build of a man who made his living through manual labor and drank a lot of beer afterward. He was wearing worn blue jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off to reveal tattoos on both of his massive biceps. Having spent some time under the tattoo needle myself, I admired the intricate workmanship of the fire-breathing dragon on his left arm. For all his size, he seemed a bit shy and mumbled his words, perhaps because his speech was rough and uneducated. “One time I thought I heard one of the twins crying and went into her bedroom to tease her back into a good mood. There wasn’t nobody in the room, but when I looked at the bed, I seen a baby doll lying on the pillow—with real tears in its eyes. It wasn’t the kind of doll that cries, just a regular plastic doll. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  The next occult episode was at 4:30 A.M., the hour this hard-working man customarily got up on weekdays, since he had to be at his job by six. “I came out of our bedroom and seen what looked like a monster. There ain’t nothing else I can call it. It had rough fur sticking up all over its body, and was hunkered down like it was hiding. I looked at it and just kept on walking, hoping it wouldn’t see me. It vanished.” He had one other run-in with the spirit a few months later: This time it took the shape of a man’s shadow, much larger than Artie’s own, and moved along the floor beside him, deliberately keeping step with him. Strangely—or perhaps not so strangely—one of his coworkers sensed that he was having problems and gave him a rosary when he got to work that day.

  Claudia confirmed that she’d also heard a baby’s cry, as had several other family members and visitors. The bizarre phenomena didn’t stop there, she added. “We’d just come bac
k from church with our friend Jamie, and sat down to say some special prayers, when my younger twin, Marybeth, said her stomach was burning, as if she’d just been scratched. I lifted her shirt and she’d been clawed from hipbone to hipbone, in a wide red line that was welting up. I was in awe and didn’t know what to do.”

  She, Marybeth, and Jamie folded their hands and resumed their prayers for a few minutes, until Marybeth let out a loud yelp of pain. “Mommy, my face is burning,” she cried, and Claudia saw three side-by-side scratches appear on her daughter’s cheek. There was that number again, the calling card of the demonic.

  “All I could think was that it was angry that we were praying,” Claudia said. Obviously worried that we might have doubts about such an incredible incident, she quickly added, “Marybeth couldn’t have done it to herself, because her hands were in a praying position the entire time. Then my friend Jamie cried out: She was getting scratched too! We all heard growls and saw red marks appear on her face, her forearms, and her chest.”

  The attacks became increasingly physical. The next day Claudia’s niece, Jessica, felt the demon’s claws, which raked her face and arms so hard that she bled. “The kids looked like battered children,” Claudia said. “I felt we had to get out of that house, so we went to my brother’s home.”

  There the family discovered that they could run, but they couldn’t hide. “It followed us,” Claudia explained, “and the children were attacked again. Marybeth was scratched right in front of me, on the face. It burned her, and she was looking pretty bad. It was a horrible feeling that as a parent, I couldn’t protect my own child. I put her in between me and my boyfriend, and we put our arms around her, but she still got scratched.”

  Not satisfied with these cruelties—or the abject terror it had already aroused—the demon showed an even more sadistic streak when they returned home. That night it told the terrified twin that it had a special plan just for her—a girl’s ultimate nightmare. As Marybeth sat sobbing in the living room, with tears and blood streaming down her ravaged face, she saw a terrible sight—so horrible that she could barely describe it to us. With her eyes fixed on the floor, the thirteen-year-old told us, “I looked through the bedroom door, and it was lying on the waterbed, with its legs open.”

  She stopped there and gave her mother a pitiful, imploring stare, as if to say “Do I really have to go on?”

  “We’ve all seen it differently,” the mother interjected. “To me, it looks like a beast with short black fur.”

  “No, it was hairy and huge, like Bigfoot,” the teen insisted. “And it was saying really vulgar things.” She hesitated again and buried her face against her mother’s bosom.

  Almost inaudibly, she added, “It was masturbating!”

  “I thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown,” Claudia said. “She was crying her eyes out.”

  Summoning up every ounce of nerve she had, the girl continued, so softly that we could barely hear her murmuring into her mother’s chest. “In this really ancient voice, it said, ‘You can kiss your family good-bye, because your ass is mine tonight!’”

  “She was completely hysterical,” Claudia said. “She told me she knew it was going to rape and kill her that very night.”

  Was such an unspeakable atrocity even possible? As a cop and a father myself, there’s nothing I loathe more than a child molester. I could hardly imagine the dread that threats of revolting violation and death must have evoked in this timid, haunted girl! Each time I think I have finally grasped the evil of which these demons are capable, they reveal new depths of hatred and depravity that stagger the mind.

  Yet I wasn’t entirely shocked that this diabolical force was attacking sexually, given the unnatural lust that originally drew it to this house: the brutal molestation of two little boys. Demonic spirits have no gender—they are neither male nor female—but are still capable of rape because they can assume the shape of a person of either sex, complete with genitalia. A demon that takes female form to violate a human male is called a “succubus”; one that sexually oppresses women is an “incubus.” That’s what was lurking in this house of women, wantonly exposing itself to a little girl in full sight of her mother!

  It’s often said that rape isn’t a crime of sex but of violence—and that’s certainly true for the demonic. They derive no pleasure from the sex act, because the damned never feel joy or delight of any kind. They’re doomed to eternal misery and suffering, but they mount incubus or succubus attacks to degrade, humiliate, and further terrify their victims. It’s also an insult to God, who created us male and female so we can be fruitful and multiply. Joining as one flesh is part of holy matrimony—and the demonic are driven by a relentless hatred of anything holy.

  Any supernatural attack is horrifying, but this has to be the worst. Imagine being sexually assaulted by a hairy brute or a shapeless creature you can’t even see. Such an intimate violation is enough to drive you insane. At times, when the attack is over, the victim will have a sticky and vile-smelling substance on his or her skin—the foulest mark of the devil.

  While Claudia didn’t know all this, she was scared witless by her daughter’s plight. With desperate courage, she addressed the incubus. “I’m begging you, as a mother, not to take my child tonight! Whatever cursed thing you are, don’t hurt my daughter—hurt me, if you must! I’d die right here and now to save my child.”

  The only reply was mocking laughter that shook the house. Hoping for divine protection, the single mom called a minister from the Baptist church the family occasionally attended. He referred her to a Catholic priest, saying that what they needed was an exorcism.

  The priest, however, wasn’t very sympathetic. “How dare you call me at this hour?” he demanded peevishly, even though it was only 9:30 P.M. After hearing about the growls, baby cries, bloody scratches, and lewd threats from the beyond, his only comment was “Maybe this is God’s way of getting you back to church.”

  He hung up, leaving Claudia clutching a dead phone. The savior she’d counted on had refused her. Who else could she possibly call, if even a man of God couldn’t—or wouldn’t—help?

  6

  THE SATANIC STALKER

  Truly, this was a family under siege—attacked at every turn, in ever more horrifying ways. What could they have possibly done to deserve such ghastly punishment? As far as I could tell, their only mistake was buying the wrong house. I didn’t believe that they were singled out for satanic wrath for not going to church often enough, as the priest had heartlessly—and erroneously—suggested. After all, there are legions of outright atheists out there—and most of them don’t have any problem with the demonic. It was true that Claudia, a widow, was living in sin with her lover, but the world is full of people whose sins are far greater than that but are still spared diabolical retribution. And what about her sweet, scared children—what offense could they have conceivably committed? None that I could see. Yet I also knew that the Devil couldn’t possess or oppress anyone without God’s permission, since He has ultimate authority over the forces of darkness.

  People have often asked me why God allows the demonic to do anything at all, especially to good people. Since I’m a cop—not a theologian—I’ll rely on Bishop McKenna’s explanation. He points out that the Old Testament addresses the issue of unfair suffering in the story of Job, a virtuous, God-fearing man who was blessed with many children and great wealth. Satan, however, asked if he could tempt Job, and was allowed to strike him down with one misfortune after another—first killing Job’s cattle and camels, then all of his children. Although devastated by these losses, Job said, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  Again the Devil tempted this innocent man to curse God, by covering him with boils from head to toe. Plunged into despair, Job wished he’d never been born, but remained steadfast in his faith. Three of his friends told him he must be sinful indeed to be so horribly afflicted, prompting him to question God. Out of a whirlwi
nd, the Lord reminded Job of His infinite power and wondrous creations. “Were you there when I founded the earth?… Have you ever, in your lifetime, commanded the morning, and shown the dawn its place?” Humbly, Job repented of doubting the divine plan and was rewarded with a new family, double the riches he’d lost, and an extraordinarily long life.

  Beyond that, I can’t explain why this particular family was subjected to such trials: It’s one of God’s mysteries. I simply put my fate in His hands and my faith in His loving protection, knowing that it’s only by the grace of God that we can stand in the presence of pure evil and survive.

  * * *

  The hour was growing late and Claudia felt utterly helpless. She had to do something to protect her daughter Marybeth from harm, but what? She’d already tried the prayers her minister recommended, to no avail. Not only was this particular demon so powerful that it could withstand holy words, but it was actually provoked to greater viciousness when she invoked God’s name—choosing that moment to slash its mark on Marybeth’s smooth face. Fleeing to her brother’s house hadn’t helped either, and it would be pointless to call the priest again.

  When it seemed like there was nowhere to turn, Claudia remembered one final refuge: a place where she’d always felt safe and protected from danger, where there was always someone to soothe away her fears and worries with calm words and comforting arms. Although she was forty years old, had borne three children and buried a husband, Claudia picked up the phone and called her first protector—her mother Maggie. “I know it’s almost midnight, but we’re coming over,” she said, her voice breaking like a frightened child’s. “Please, it’s an emergency.”

  The demon decided to let loose with some spectral sound effects: first the anguished wail of a baby in unendurable agony, then hideous laughter that rattled the house like an earthquake.

  On the other end of the phone, an unseen force bludgeoned Maggie. “The cigarette I was smoking was knocked right out of my mouth and flipped through the air. Outside, I heard unbelievably loud whistling, and something struck the side of the house. There was a tremendous crash, and I saw that a large sculpture of an angel I’d owned for many years had been flung off its shelf and was lying in pieces on the floor. Then a chill went right through me. Three times I felt it, and each time it felt like the chill of death.”