Deliver Us from Evil

by Ralph Sarchie

  Sensing this, the bishop took two steps back, to my relief. Tony began breathing heavily through his nose, and his head and neck jerked wildly from side to side, as if he were afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome. The demon was finally showing itself, and the musician muttered something that sounded like “No.”

  Bishop McKenna reached the point where the ritual calls for the exorcist to drape his stole around the possessed person. He touched a relic to Tony’s head, chest, left shoulder, and right shoulder—the sign of the cross. The response was a very loud and distinct scream: “Shit!” The flagrant obscenity was in sharp contrast to Tony’s usual mild, soft-spoken manner. “Shit!” he screamed again. No pretense here—the demon wasn’t bothering to hide itself.

  As the ritual continued, the demon roared its defiance in an unknown language, a Babel of tongues. Sometimes it sounded like Arabic, at others Hindi, but for all I knew it might be an ancient tongue humankind has forgotten or that was never spoken on Earth. The only word I could recognize, if you want to call it a word, was “Nayacota,” the nonsense term that Tony had told me was the demon’s way of saying “no.” I have never come across this expression in any other case, so it was probably unique to this particular evil spirit.

  The words became a torrent, but the bishop ignored them, saying “Tell me your name, Devil!” Tony yelled out two completely incomprehensible syllables. “How many are you?” the man of God demanded. He received no reply until he sprinkled holy water on the musician.

  “Shit!” the diabolical spirit yelled again, then Tony broke into heart-rending sobs. The priest paid no attention to either the cries or the curses: The demonic have a million tricks to stop the Roman Ritual. As he sternly intoned the prayers, the musician alternated between shouting vulgarities and weeping like a child. Suddenly he turned to me, tears streaming down his cheeks, and asked for a cross to hold. I will not respond to an exorcee during the ritual, but the bishop once again allowed him to hold the crucifix, and Tony grabbed it like a lifeline.

  You might think this meant he was freed of the demon, but not so. We could see Tony struggling with the evil spirit, weeping and clutching the cross when he was in control and recoiling from it with dreadful shouts when the Devil regained the upper hand. It was incredible to watch the battle raging inside this man.

  * * *

  Over two hours had gone by, and the bishop was on the third reading of the ritual. Tony’s yelling and jerking had subsided, but he was still snared by the satanic force. He whispered that his back was causing him great pain, so I lifted his shirt so that the exorcist could anoint his spine with holy oil and apply relics.

  When I lifted Tony’s shirt, I couldn’t believe my eyes: His vertebrae had actually sunken into his body! It looked like he had no spine at all, just an unseen force holding him up. Stronger measures were needed, so the bishop did something he rarely does during an exorcism: He brought out the Most Holy Eucharist, which is normally taken out of the church during these rituals so it won’t be defiled by the demonic.

  After placing the body of Christ in a monstrance and safely covering it with a gold cloth, the exorcist showed it to Tony, who just sat there staring. Next the bishop touched Tony’s back with relic after relic, each time eliciting a violent jerk.

  When the exorcism was finished, Tony was clearly spent. I asked if he was all right, and he whispered yes. His next remark, however, was chilling. “My spine feels very threatened.” He was still possessed—and still refused to admit that a demon dwelled inside him! Instead, he viewed it as part of his own body, not a hostile invader.

  We knew then that the exorcism had failed. You may wonder why, after going through all this, Tony couldn’t recognize the demon for what it really was. It’s because the demonic are masters at masking themselves. Tony was actually holding on to the evil spirit because he didn’t understand that it was separate from himself. I was disappointed that the ritual hadn’t worked. I realize it’s ultimately God’s will, but in this case, the problem was that the musician just couldn’t see the truth.

  I don’t blame him for being taken in, but it certainly was frustrating. I told Tony that he needed to pray about the matter as best he could until we could set up another exorcism. He said he would, but I wasn’t so sure. I spent a long time talking to him, and every time I reached a point where Tony seemed to be about to admit that a demon was responsible for his situation, he’d say something contrary like “For the life of me, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  That’s why I was extremely surprised to get a call a few days later from a very excited Tony. The day before, he’d gotten a strong feeling that he should go to a church that was having a twenty-four-hour Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. There he’d spent two hours sitting in front of the Most Holy Eucharist, commanding the demon to leave in the name of Jesus Christ, just as the bishop had done. Immediately after he’d left us, he explained, he’d finally realized that the evil power was a separate—and most unwelcome—presence, and prayed that God would banish it from his body.

  As he gazed at the Most Holy Eucharist, he miraculously felt a powerful energy depart from his spine and the veil lift from his eyes. The only explanation I have for this is that, as I’ve said, there is no time frame in the spirit world or for getting an answer to prayers. I feel the exorcism did work, after all, but its effect wasn’t felt until Tony finally grasped his true situation and decided to exercise his free will. That and the power of the Holy Eucharist were too much for the demon to withstand, which is why it was finally expelled.

  Although Tony was positive that he’d been freed, I urged him to go through with the second exorcism anyway. He assured me he didn’t need it. I had to go along with him, since I couldn’t very well drag him to the church. As we talked, I discerned a change in his voice—it didn’t sound so weak and defeated anymore—and in how he described the evil force. For the first time he spoke of the demon in the third person, using the word “it.” That’s when I truly believed he was freed.

  He thanked me over and over for our help. Marveling over this astonishing news, I called the bishop, who pronounced it a miracle. The holy man didn’t sound the least bit surprised, however. “God works in mysterious ways,” he said. “You know that, Ralph.”

  8

  THE WEREWOLF

  The message on my machine was garbled and indistinct. “Help me!” were the only two words I could make out. I could tell immediately that it wasn’t a prank call: It was a case, and, by the sound of it, an urgent one. Earlier that day the Warrens had appeared on The Richard Bey Show, a daytime TV talk show, to discuss Bill Ramsey’s demonic possession. Bill’s remarkable life story is chronicled in a book he wrote with Ed and Lorraine: Werewolf. I’d also been asked to go on the show but couldn’t get the day off from work. At the end of the program, the producers flashed Joe’s name and phone number and mine on the screen as the investigators to contact. Not knowing what terrible emergency my mysterious caller was facing, I just about went crazy playing the message tape over and over, but I couldn’t figure out who’d called or what number he’d left.

  A couple of hours later Joe called. “Ralph, you wouldn’t believe the call I got a little while ago. This guy was on his car phone, calling from somewhere on the Long Island Expressway. He was in a real panic. He has strange seizures that terrify him and his family—and had just had one right there on the highway! He said he’d almost crashed his car before pulling off the road to call me. Then he told me that things are so bad he can’t live like this any longer.”

  Joe managed to calm the near-suicidal caller and offered to contact the man’s wife, Lucinda. He was just about to dial her number when she called him. Although she didn’t know about her husband’s terrifying attack on the freeway, she wasn’t at all surprised to hear about it. “That’s why I’m calling you, Mr. Forrester,” she said. “Greg—that’s my husband—has been having these fits for almost twenty-five years.”

  Like my mother, Lucinda Morto
n was a beautician who cut people’s hair in her home to earn extra cash. Earlier that day, when she was between appointments, she flicked on the TV and happened to see The Richard Bey Show. Her jaw dropped when the Warrens discussed Bill Ramsey’s case, because it had such astonishing parallels to her husband’s problems. She immediately called her husband at work to give him Joe’s and my phone numbers, then decided to call my partner herself. “I know this may sound really far-fetched,” she told him, “but I think Greg might be a werewolf, like that guy your friends were talking about on TV.”

  Given Greg’s desperate frame of mind, Joe made an appointment for us to meet with the Mortons that very night. Right off we noticed something peculiar when we parked at the couple’s Long Island home. Although the driveway was relatively new, the asphalt was oddly scarred in several places, as if someone had attacked it with a rake. The house itself was a very attractive white stucco Tudor, with red roses growing on a trellis around the front door.

  Lucinda, who was about fifty, was holding a small, yapping poodle in her arms when she opened the door. She was living proof that some people grow to look like their dogs, because both she and her pet had big puffs of fluffy black hair on their heads. The beautician’s hair was teased and sprayed into a gravity-defying beehive that resembled black cotton candy and her full mouth was generously coated with glossy purple lipstick. She wore a turquoise pants suit and several pieces of chunky gold jewelry. I liked her immediately. Despite a rather anxious, fluttering manner, she was very friendly and seemed delighted to see us. She led us into a well-lit living room decorated in flowery patterns, where her husband was waiting.

  There was absolutely nothing wolfish about Greg Morton’s appearance, by day or night. Far from being abnormally hairy, he was actually bald, with a bland, moon-shaped face, and he wore thick glasses to correct his nearsightedness. Oddly enough, when I met Bill Ramsey, he was also balding, clean-shaven, and looked like a million other middle-aged men. If you passed either of these guys on the street, you wouldn’t give him a second glance.

  Since Joe had already heard part of the Mortons’ amazing story from the beautician, he took charge of the interview. “Lucinda, why don’t you tell Ralph what you told me on the phone?”

  Running her long, manicured fingernails through the poodle’s fluffy fur as she spoke, she said, “Well, this is going to sound really peculiar. For many years, Greg has been having these spells where he acts like an animal.”

  “You’re not speaking figuratively, are you?” my partner asked.

  “Not at all. It started one night when we were in bed, sleeping. All of sudden, my husband sat bolt upright in the middle of the night. I woke up and asked what was wrong, but he didn’t answer. His eyes were open, but he didn’t even blink. He was just staring off into space, like he was in a trance. Then he let out a loud growl that didn’t sound human at all.”

  “Did it sound like a wolf?” I wondered, thinking of the Ramsey case, which Joe had helped the Warrens investigate a few years before I got involved in the Work.

  “No,” she said. “It was more like a large cat or a tiger. It didn’t sound like it was coming from his lips but from deep inside his body, kind of a rumbling roar that scared me half to death. I kept screaming my husband’s name, but he couldn’t hear me. I felt like a stranger was in our bed, because he didn’t seem like himself at all. It was as if someone else had taken over his body. Then he started talking in a different voice, ranting and raving in a language I’d never heard before! I almost had a heart attack, I was so frightened!”

  “Had anything unusual happened in Greg’s life before this episode?” Joe queried.

  Both Mortons shook their heads. “No, everything was normal,” Greg said. “A few years before that I’d started my contracting company and was working hard to build up my business. We didn’t have that much money then, but we were happy.”

  Greg’s experiences had eerie similarities to the Ramsey case, except that Bill’s first attack took place when he was a nine-year-old boy in England, his native country. He describes it in his book by asking “Have you ever walked into a meat locker right after you’ve been outside on a hot day? That’s what this was like. I was playing and … it felt like my body temperature dropped a good twenty degrees. Sweat froze on me. And my whole body started shaking. It was as if I’d opened this door and stepped inside to another dimension.”

  A very violent dimension, he soon discovered. Although the uncanny chill—and an incredibly rank odor that accompanied it—faded away later in the day, he felt irrevocably marked with “a coldness at his very center” that set him apart from other children. As he hurried toward his house to have dinner, he stubbed his toe on a fence post and flew into a frenzied rage. Like Greg, young Bill let out terrible growls that rose from deep inside his body. Filled with supernatural strength far beyond that of any normal nine-year-old, he ripped the offending fence post right out of the ground and swung it overhead like a baseball bat—with its wires still attached. Although his maniacal rage soon subsided, the experience transformed him. “Something had entered my soul … something that didn’t belong there,” Bill recalled years later.

  Greg, on the other hand, had no memory at all of his nighttime fit. Just as suddenly as the spell came over him, it left him, and he lay back down, fast asleep, leaving Lucinda to stare at him in horror all night long. Who was this man she’d married? Had he gone insane? Or was he just in the throes of a bizarre nightmare? Her peacefully snoring husband had no answers, either that night or the next morning. When he woke, he refused to believe the incident had actually happened.

  “He said it was probably just my imagination—or a dream I’d had,” Lucinda said. “I knew it wasn’t.” She found herself fearing her usually mild-mannered husband. Days went by, and Greg acted just like his old self, heading off to his renovation business at 8:00 A.M. as always and returning at the stroke of 5:00 P.M.

  Here again was an odd echo of Bill’s story, since he also behaved completely normally after his strange frenzy. In fact, Bill did nothing out of the ordinary for nearly two decades, as he grew up, got married, and, like Greg, entered the building trade, as a carpenter. Like his American counterpart, he had three children—and some very peculiar problems in the bedroom. First, he began having a recurring nightmare where he’d call his wife’s name, and when she turned to look at him, she’d recoil in horror, as if she’d seen a monster. One night he suddenly sat up in bed, just as the Long Island contractor did, and let out a ghastly growl. That’s when his nightmare came true: Just as he’d so often dreamed, his wife opened her eyes in real life, took one look at him—and screamed.

  Greg’s wife had almost convinced herself that the peculiar incident was some strange fluke when her husband had a second spell, also in the middle of the night. This time he got out of bed and walked on all fours, like a wild animal, growling that deep growl. He moved with a catlike grace, similar to that of a large predatory panther. Clutching the sheets to her chest in abject terror, his wife watched him claw savagely at the wood paneling in their bedroom, ripping it apart with his bare, bleeding hands. Again he flopped back down on the bed, slept like a dead man all night long, and woke with no memory of his berserk frenzy.

  Lucinda, however, now had tangible proof of his nighttime rampages—and showed him the hole in their bedroom wall. The otherwise inexplicable injuries to his hands also testified to the truth of her words, although Greg still found it hard to believe he’d behaved this way. At his wife’s urging, he consulted their family doctor the next day. After a complete physical, the M.D. found no evidence of epilepsy or a seizure disorder of any kind. Nor did the tests show any other physical ailment. Except for his scratched-up hands—and two peculiar fits—Greg was the picture of health.

  “The doctor prescribed tranquilizers,” Greg explained. “That didn’t help at all.”

  Naturally, the next stop was a therapist. The shrink also did a battery of tests, but found no signs of menta
l illness in this hard-working businessman who, rather ironically in view of his propensity to destroy his home, repaired other people’s houses. During the day, Greg behaved completely normally: He was a perfect father to his three kids. You might say he was a loving family man who happened to have one bad habit: From time to time, at totally unpredictable intervals, he turned into a beast and tore his home apart.

  Over the years, the pattern changed, Greg told us. For a while, the attacks lessened, and his business thrived. “Then the fits of madness, or whatever you want to call them, started happening in the daytime, when I was awake. I could actually feel the frenzy coming on. It was like a roaring in my brain. For the safety of my family, I’d lock myself in the bathroom when I felt this way, because after this force took hold of me, I’d lose all control.”

  With an embarrassed expression, he told us that during these episodes, he’d dig at the bathroom tiles until his fingers bled. The fits became so frequent that he’d sometimes go completely berserk and run from his house to rip up the asphalt driveway, leaving the marks we’d observed when we parked. Understandably, he went back to the psychiatrist, but once again, the doctor was no help. Greg was simply sent home with a stronger prescription for tranquilizers that did nothing to tame his rages.

  Greg and his wife were now haunted by horrifying questions: What if he attacked his family—or someone else? Just how dangerous was he? Could he kill someone during one of these episodes? And what was the cause of his terrifying affliction?

  I could understand his fear, given what happened to Bill Ramsey: Roaring in the night led to horrifying daytime rampages. In the throes of one seizure, Bill brutalized a nurse, tearing at her arm with his teeth and drinking her blood. Police found him on all fours, his face contorted into a hideous, bestial expression, growling with inhuman fury. The officers wrestled him into a straitjacket and took “the wolfman,” as the British press later dubbed him, to a mental hospital. When Bill came to his senses later that day, he had no memory of his behavior but told the psychiatrists he felt there was a beast inside him. After his release from the hospital, he went on to attack several other people, including a prostitute and an entire police station full of cops.