By now mother and daughter were sobbing together over the phone. Like Claudia, the older woman was overcome by the impotent grief and despair of a mother who sees her beloved child in desperate danger but can do nothing to help.
The fiend wasn’t finished with Maggie. Her weeping turned into horrible choking gasps, as invisible hands suddenly grabbed her by the throat. “I couldn’t breathe, and my eyes were bulging out. I could hear a roaring in my ears and a lot of noise, like heavy furniture was being moved around. I thought I was going to die!”
Just as the older woman was on the verge of passing out, the satanic force released her. She collapsed back in her chair, struggling to catch her breath. At last she could speak again, and told her daughter what had happened.
“Mom, are you okay?” Claudia asked anxiously, and felt somewhat reassured when she heard a breathless yes and the familiar sound of her mother lighting a cigarette. Taking her kids to her mom’s house would be a terrible mistake, Claudia realized. Her childhood home was no longer a safe haven. Merely by talking about going there, she’d inadvertently put yet another family member in peril! Was there no limit to this foul creature’s malevolence that it could terrorize in two places at once?
As I listened to this story, I was struck by the eerie parallels to another mother-daughter situation—a strange attack on my sister, Lisa, in our mom’s house. Soon after I got involved in the Work, my mother and my sister moved to a new house on Long Island. One night Lisa was home alone and would be spending the night by herself. No problem, my then twenty-six-year-old sister thought, since she was a big girl and knew how to handle herself. But this night really put her courage to the test. Jen and I had been by earlier, and neither of us saw or felt anything out of the ordinary. Nor did Lisa feel there was anything to fear when she went into the living room around 9:00 P.M., hardly an hour you’d expect the demonic to attack. Yet 9:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. are considered the “psychic hours,” because that’s when supernatural energy is at its peak.
So there was Lisa, unwinding in front of the TV, when suddenly she heard a loud bang coming from the basement. It scared the hell out of her, and she froze in her chair, not daring to go downstairs to investigate. The pounding continued for about five minutes, then abruptly stopped. Finally she convinced herself it was the boiler, went to her bedroom, locked the door, and eventually fell asleep. In the safety of daylight, she got up her nerve and went down to the basement. What she found was extremely unsettling. The basement door, which could be locked or unlocked only with a key, was wide open. The sound she heard must have been the door crashing back and forth—but there was no wind that night!
Naturally, she called me. I was angry that she hadn’t contacted me the night before, when she was trembling in her living room chair, but I rushed over to help. I found the door and its lock to be working perfectly, and questioned her about different ways it might have gotten unlocked. She was 100 percent positive that no one had unlocked it—and knowing how security-conscious my mother was, I felt sure it was firmly bolted at all times. I also found no signs of forced entry—and believe me, I’ve seen lots of burglaries in my time. Still, I wasn’t sure if supernatural forces were responsible. Despite the Work, I’m not inclined to blame every unexplained event on the demonic. To play it safe, I put some extra locks on the door.
What happened a few nights later left no doubt of diabolic intent. Although my sister steered far clear of the Work and always cut me off if I mentioned a case, saying “I don’t want to hear about that,” she still fell prey to an evil power. She was sound asleep when something—she didn’t know what—woke her in the night. Such was its fury that it grabbed the back of her head and shoved her face into the pillow. To her utter horror, she felt her bed lift off the floor. Too scared even to scream, she thought she’d die right there with our mother sleeping in the next room!
But as suddenly as it started, the attack stopped. With the frantic strength of fear, she leapt from her bed and flicked on the light. There was nobody in the room! After lying awake all night, with every light blazing, she called me first thing in the morning. Now certain that my own sister had been assaulted by a satanic spirit, I again hurried to her house—with, as backup, Bob, a police lieutenant I worked with in East New York who was interested in the Work. Although not a Catholic, he was a very good man and kept watch while I read the Pope Leo XIII prayer in the house. When I got to Lisa’s room, the temperature turned very cold. Bob shivered and said, “Ralph, do you feel that?” I nodded, never stopping the prayer. After the final amen, there were no more problems in that house.
There was an odd sequel to this story a few days later. My wife is forever taking photos, and had taken some pictures of my sister in her bedroom before the nightmarish attack. After Jen got them developed, she spent a long time studying one of them. Finally she handed it to me and said, “What is this?” I took a look and almost fell off my chair. The photo showed Lisa and our daughter Christina—and something else. You can see spirit energy that is extremely bright and moving from left to right. At the very top of the energy is a shadowy figure starting to manifest itself. I never thought Lisa was imagining things, but here was physical proof that she’d been stalked by a sinister spirit. Thank God she escaped relatively unscathed!
My mother-in-law, Carol, had a similar but even more harrowing experience, also when she was sleeping. I can hear the skeptics and debunkers out there saying “Hey, they were asleep, so it was just a dream.” But consider this: The demonic love to terrorize people when they are most vulnerable, and what better time to do that than when they’re asleep in their own beds? I’ve had nightmares where I’ve literally woken up soaked in sweat, but I knew those were dreams, just as my sister and mother-in-law knew their experiences were real. The same thing happened to the McKenzie women: When they told their story on TV, a nonbeliever suggested that they were just sexually frustrated women who only dreamed they were stalked by an incubus. I couldn’t believe this debunker was so cruel and mean-spirited. Would he tell the teenaged victim of a human pervert that she only imagined being attacked because she was starved for sex? That’s just plain sick.
Here’s my mother-in-law’s true story, exactly as she told it to me. She was awakened one night by a suffocating pressure on her chest. When she opened her eyes, she saw a hooded specter. Its body appeared solid, but when she looked where the face should have been, there was only blackness. It looked like a monk, but its words were full of unholy menace: “I’m going to kill you!”
Beyond fear or even dread, Carol turned to prayer and began to recite the Hail Mary. The pressure on her chest grew more and more intense, and after reaching the words “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,” she lost consciousness. Her plea for help was heard, and she woke up the next morning to the sound of birds singing. She used the holy water I’d given her, and over the next several days, it slowly washed her terror away.
* * *
The McKenzie family, however, was still trapped in a web of fear. Convinced that the demon would hunt them down wherever they fled—or be lying in wait when they arrived there—Claudia and the exhausted children all huddled together on Jessica’s waterbed like cornered animals. Even with every light blazing and big, muscular Artie standing watch at the door, no one could sleep. Their hearts pounded, and their nerves were so on edge that if one of them moved, everyone jumped. Periodically, the house made some tiny creak, and they all screamed.
The incubus, however, didn’t attack that night or the next. For the next month it did absolutely nothing, except let the family marinate in their own terror, not knowing when—or how—it would next assail them. You might say it was toying with them, playing a cat-and-mouse game. With bestial cruelty, it was waiting for its prey to be lulled into a false sense of security.
Gradually the family let down their guard and resumed their old sleeping arrangements, except that the children now slept two to a bed, with the twins in
one room and Monique in her cousin’s room on the first floor. That’s when the predator from Hell pounced.
“It was a Sunday,” Jessica explained. “Sunday is never a good day in this house—and on a scale of one to ten, this Sunday was a ten! I woke up sweating and looked at the clock. It was three o’clock in the morning. That’s when a lot of horrible things happen here.”
Her cousins, the twins, also woke up drenched in sweat. “We heard crashing footsteps, looked at each other, and said, ‘It’s coming!’” Carolyn added. To their incredible relief, the steps ran past their door and stopped.
Jessica, who’d been sleeping on the waterbed with Monique, shouted, “It’s at our door!” Astonishingly, the locked door swung open, and a huge dark shape oozed into the room.
“I felt it land on the bed,” the cousin continued. “It was leaning over us, and the waterbed went crazy! It was shaking like the ocean during a storm. I was thrown against something, maybe its chest. The thing was roaring at us so loudly that I could feel my whole body vibrating from the noise. I was scared to death.”
Claudia was jolted from the first sound sleep she’d had for a month. “The children were screaming hysterically, and over the din I heard Monique shrieking at the top of her lungs ‘Mom, it’s getting Jessica!’ I fell out of bed, trying to run to them. It felt like I was running in slow motion and would never get there in time. My legs felt like lead.”
It seemed like an eternity before she reached Jessica and Monique. “Their room was as cold as a refrigerator. I threw my body across theirs and saw something running out of the room. It looked like a blur, it was moving so fast.”
The twins began shrieking in terror. The beast was now standing at the foot of their bed!
“I pulled the covers over my head to hide,” Marybeth said, “but the thing got on top of me. It was screaming horrible things in a male voice. What it was saying was so awful I couldn’t possibly repeat it, but I thought I’d die of fear! I tried to scream, talk, anything, but I couldn’t even whimper. It was all over me like a blanket, and I was suffocating.”
Wild with rage and terror, Claudia burst into the room, ready to take on ten demons with her bare hands, if that’s what it took to save her child. Once again the satanic stalker departed, in a blur of black. “None of us could stay in that house another second, so we got in the car at 3:00 A.M., and went to my mom’s house. I hated to do it, but there was nowhere else to go. Can you understand that? Nowhere to run!”
Mercifully, Claudia’s elderly mother and the rest of the family were spared any further torments that night. They dozed fitfully, reliving their ordeal in grotesque dreams. The next morning, the widow reluctantly drove the girls home, fearing what might happen to her mother if the family stayed in her house too long.
Monique was the most deeply affected by the nightmarish attacks. “When I was cooking, I’d get strange urges to pick up a bottle or knife and attack the rest of the family. Was I losing my mind? I was afraid of myself, and told my mother that this just wasn’t me.”
Jessica was also buckling under the stress. “My hand kept moving from side to side, against my will. I had a constant feeling of horror, as if I was splitting into a good side and a bad side. My hands felt like they had claws—and I wanted to scratch someone.” She stared at her hands in disbelief, as if they might betray her at any moment. I noticed that she’d clipped her nails very short.
Were these bizarre thoughts signs of possible possession? Actually, horrible visions or disturbing impulses are common during oppression and even can occur during infestation, as I’d already seen in the graveyard case, where the young mother was frightened by sudden, overpowering feelings of rage, hostility, and hatred. This is a form of psychological warfare, the internal aspect of oppression, where the demonic amplify a person’s negative emotions. It’s only natural that Monique and Jessica would be angry about their dreadful ordeal and might wish, at times, that someone would be punished for putting them through all this. With fiendish cunning, the demon eagerly seized on these fleeting feelings and turned up the volume until the children’s own thoughts became all but unrecognizable to them.
Yet what made these violent urges so peculiarly distressing was that they weren’t completely foreign to these girls. On some deep unconscious level, they did want to hurt somebody, just as they’d been hurt, scratched, and terrorized in their own beds. Who wouldn’t? We all have a dark side: A psychiatrist once wrote that “bad men do what good men dream.” With savage brilliance, the demon had confronted these children with the worst thoughts they’d ever had, during the worst time of their life, as if to say “See how vile and evil you are.” No wonder Monique questioned her sanity, feeling that only a monster would fantasize about stabbing her relatives!
Strange as it may sound, I was actually quite impressed at how well these kids were holding up to the mental and physical abuse they’d suffered. By the time oppression sets in, most families are quite dysfunctional. The people usually become extremely despondent and go off in their own little worlds—or turn on each other and quarrel constantly. This family, however, had the psychological fortitude to band together in their supernatural adversity instead of letting it break them apart. Perhaps it was because this was a house full of women, accustomed to sharing their feelings and fears with each other.
Suspecting that her family’s reactions might sound demented to outsiders like us, Claudia emphasized that they were normal people, caught up in a highly abnormal situation. “If anyone had told me ten years ago that this would happen to us, I would have thought they were totally insane. I didn’t believe in demons—or the Devil. I thought it was just superstition. But after living in this house, and all the awful things my family and I have seen and felt here, I not only believe in the Devil—I’m convinced he’s here in my house.”
The demon greedily drank in the family’s terrible dread and gained strength for its next rampage.
Not waiting for the witching hour of 3:00 A.M. this time, it crept into the twins’ bedroom around midnight a few weeks later. Although its feet made no sound that a human ear could hear, both girls woke up, instantly sensing that the malevolent force was stalking them. Too intimidated to open her eyes and confirm that it was there, Carolyn feigned sleep, while Marybeth peeked cautiously out from under the covers. “I saw a tall dark figure standing by the door. It was thin, like a shadow, and darker than the darkness of the room. It came at me in a rush: It was at the end of the bed, then it was on top of me!” To her unimaginable horror, she realized she couldn’t move or speak. “I felt a tingling, pins-and-needles feeling all over me and especially up my legs. It was even inside me! The sensation was so intense that every part of my body was lit up like an electrical current was running through me.”
Frozen helplessly in her bed, she felt an immense weight on her chest, belly, and thighs, as if a large, dangerous animal were settling on top of her. “It was pushing on me so hard, I felt like I was being pushed through the bed or maybe pulled into it with a magnet. The more it pressed, the harder and harder it was to breathe: For about a minute, I was smothering, then I somehow got my breath back and yelled for my mother.”
Claudia and Jessica rushed to her aid, as Carolyn pounded the bed with the only weapon at hand—the pillow. “Go away,” she shouted. “Stop hurting my sister!”
Hoping there was safety in numbers, all of the women piled on the bed and held Marybeth in their arms. Incredibly, she said, “it started happening again, right in front of everybody: the feeling of paralysis, of unnatural energy in the bed. It started raining outside, really hard, and I was more frightened than ever. I started hearing beeps like a StairMaster or a heart monitor when someone dies; and we all heard a woman gasping for air. The noise sounded like it was coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. As soon as I could move, it was gone.”
The demon’s deviancy didn’t stop there, however. Over the next several months, it stalked the other females of the family, one
by one.
Next was the oldest daughter, Monique. It wasn’t silent, stealthy footsteps that woke her in the middle of the night but unbearable noise. Mysteriously, no one else in the house heard it. I’ve seen this before: The Devil can project a sound to the intended victim, which only she will be affected by, while the rest of the family is totally unaware of what’s going on. The person singled out for this attack may attempt to wake her relatives but sometimes is unable to rouse them from sleep. It’s another example of how the demonic can ratchet up the terror, by making the person feel alone and isolated.
“The noise sounded like someone was banging the walls and floor with a sledgehammer,” Monique told us. “At the end of the bed was the outline of a man, looking at me as I slept. I had the sense of something really evil and scary, like it wanted to kill me. It flopped forward, on top of me, and I actually felt it enter my body.” She blushed and paused for a minute. “You know, sexual intercourse. It hurt really bad, like I was being ripped open.”
Worse even than the physical rape, the thin teenager explained, was the mental rape. “I also felt a presence in my mind, full of evil and obscene thoughts. It was worse than pornography—it was sickening beyond belief. I wish I could erase the things I saw from my mind—they’re like a stain that won’t go away. Even though I couldn’t move a muscle, my mind was fighting these visions the entire time, because I felt if I gave in, I’d die.”
Her cousin was the demon’s third victim—and the most reluctant to tell her story. “I was real restless that night and couldn’t sleep at all. I couldn’t get comfortable and kept tossing and turning. Finally I was going to get up and have some milk, when I saw a dark shadow in the chair. It was laughing weirdly and walked toward the bed in a staggering, wavy motion. The whole room looked distorted, crooked in some way I can’t explain. The corners were wrong, or something. The shadow also looked strange, not quite like a person. It had something red and glowing on it.” Jessica broke off her account and opened a can of Diet Coke.
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