“Where do we go from here?” JoAnn asked.
“Frank needs another exorcism, whenever he feels he’s ready to try again. This isn’t like going for surgery, where the doctor opens you up and removes the poison from your body. This is spiritual and has a lot to do with the spirituality of the person. When a demon attacks through the intellect, as it did with your husband, it’s harder for the possessed person to see his situation clearly. Sometimes this happens soon after the exorcism. In other cases it takes longer for someone to find his free will and help us force the demon out.”
Frank was very somber after his exorcism and was completely silent when I drove him and JoAnn back to the train station. The only words of encouragement I could offer Frank were that we would continue for as long as he was willing to accept our help. The bishop, however, wasn’t discouraged. He’s found that fewer than half of his exorcisms succeed on the first try, and even repeated attempts may fail if the person isn’t willing to let God back into his soul.
“By no means is this over,” he assured me when I returned to the church to pick up Joe. “Heaven only knows why this man refuses to give up the demon that is such a cross of suffering to him, but if he’s determined to punish himself, we must pray that the Lord in His providence will allow Frank’s soul to be saved.” Bowing our heads, we each lit a candle for the dry cleaner and his wife and stood in silence, watching the brave, hopeful flames shed their glow on the little church in Connecticut.
14
POSSESSED OVER THE PHONE
Like serial killers and sexual predators, whose crimes often have a distinctive pattern or “signature,” the demonic have their own M.O. While the goal is always the same—to destroy humanity—some evil spirits act like street punks, announcing their presence with lurid acts of vandalism and senseless destruction; others attack physically, clawing and scratching their victims in maniacal rage.
Donna was a thirty-year-old divorcée who lived in Pennsylvania with her eight-year-old son. She had a peculiar problem with her phone. While she was chatting with her boyfriend, Mike, one night, their conversation was repeatedly interrupted by bursts of static on the line. When Mike joked that it must be a poltergeist, the call was abruptly disconnected. Puzzled, he immediately called Donna back and asked if she’d hung up on him. She said she hadn’t, so Mike repeated his joke, “It must be a polter—” Before he could finish the word, the phone went dead again.
When Mike called me, my first question was, why did he say that word? He said he didn’t know—it just popped into his head from nowhere. Not from nowhere, I thought. Definitely not from nowhere! Now, you may say, “Hey, come on, how could you be sure that anything was really happening? Someone just happens to mention a poltergeist—and then they have one?” But that’s not what I thought at all, because I knew this was no poltergeist. These supposedly childlike, noisy little spirits that like to stir up mischief are pure folklore, but are sometimes confused with human spirits (ghosts of departed people that remain earthbound) or inhuman spirits (demons that are pure evil, and never walked Earth in human form). In this case, I saw the demonic at work, concealing its intent by sending Mike a misleading telepathic message. The bait was taken, and now he and Donna were primed to believe they were dealing with a harmless “poltergeist.”
I kept these thoughts to myself, however, and scheduled a face-to-face interview with the couple the next day, at Mike’s Pennsylvania home. His block was a maze of dreary low-rise brick buildings, set off at angles to the street. His two-bedroom apartment had a tidy but neglected appearance. Other than a few sickly-looking plants next to an old but comfortable sofa, he’d made no effort to decorate. Apparently, he preferred to spend his spare cash on toys, since the living room was dominated by a huge TV, a very elaborate stereo system, and one of the largest collections of CDs I’d ever seen. I also noticed a tape recorder attached to his phone and a pile of neatly labeled cassettes next to it.
* * *
After setting up my video and audio equipment, I began by explaining that I’m not a parapsychologist or ghost hunter. “I’m a Catholic and approach cases from a religious point of view,” I told the couple. “I don’t charge any money and make no guarantee of success, but I will do my best to help you. If you ignore my advice, however, or aren’t completely honest with me, my involvement ends. I’ll walk away and not come back. If that’s OK with you, please confirm for the tape that you asked me to investigate the problems you’re having.”
Both of them immediately agreed to these terms. I approached the interview the same way I would any crime report: I try to stay neutral and let the people explain what’s been going on, then ask questions, using the police formula of who, what, when, where, how, and why. There are times, of course, in both the Work and on the Job, that we never find out the why. In this case, I felt there might be a combination of factors. While Mike didn’t strike me as a gullible guy, he had a rather limited knowledge of spirits, which can be a dangerous thing. Although I can’t say for sure what attracted a demon to them, my chief suspect was a man they both knew. Not only was he a reputed drug dealer, but he was also a practicing Satanist.
As the couple began telling their story, I could tell they were good people—and I could also see, in a single glance, exactly who Mike was: a fellow police officer. He didn’t have to tell me his profession; it was written all over him. There are basically two types of cops: Those who consider police work just a job and the buffs, who have blue running through their veins. Mike was obviously a superbuff, what we call a “four-by-four,” a guy who works the 4:00 P.M.-to-midnight shift, then goes to a cop bar with his partner and drinks until 4:00 A.M.
I knew the type well—I used to be one of them myself. He had all the hallmarks of a buff: a large muscular build, with the distinctive doughnut gut we cops get teased about; a macho swagger; eyes that constantly scanned his surroundings for signs of trouble; and, of course, that stereotypical cop mustache: bushy, black, and trimmed with military precision. Like Donna, he’d been married before, and was the father of two young children.
Donna was as feminine as her boyfriend was masculine. She favored pretty prints, tight pants, and high heels. Despite her devout Catholicism, she had a strong earthy streak and often used language you definitely wouldn’t hear in church. Her son, Bruce, didn’t seem embarrassed by his mother’s loud voice and raunchy speech. He was a fat little kid with dark olive skin, remarkably white teeth, and a sulky expression. Throughout the interview, he chewed gum and played with an action figure he was holding.
The day after the poltergeist incident, Donna’s cordless phone seemed to develop a mind of its own. “It was driving me crazy with its beeping, so Mike came over to fix it,” she explained, speaking with a strong Italian accent. “He tried new batteries and moved it different places around my house, but nothing worked. Then he suggested we talk to the phone. I told him he was out of his fucking mind—and that’s when the phone stopped beeping, like it was listening to us.”
That convinced the cop that his hunch was right: The phone must be haunted. With cop-like persistence, Mike started to interrogate the poltergeist—not realizing he’d fallen right into the evil spirit’s trap by giving it recognition. Instead of communicating telepathically, as inhuman entities often do when they speak to humans, this one replied with beeps, but only if Mike and Donna were both on the line.
“Donna got very scared,” Mike added. “She said she didn’t like doing this—and didn’t believe in poltergeists. Without her knowing it, I started taping the calls. I set up a very simple format so I could communicate with whatever was on the phone—one beep for ‘yes’ and two beeps for ‘no.’ Through my questioning, I found out the spirit—or soul—on the phone was a little girl.” His questions eventually elicited an extremely touching tale from the spirit, who claimed that she and her brother had died as children, victims of an unspeakable crime.
Mike soon amassed hours and hours of recordings of his questions and answ
ers, with an occasional comment from Donna. Listening to the tapes, which I transcribed, I heard Mike ask a question that got no response. “She went away,” he says in a disappointed tone, then asks Donna accusingly, “Or was that you beeping? I want you to swear on your son that you weren’t doing that!” Even though she instantly did, I also had to wonder if one of them was making the beeps.
During the interview, I questioned each of them separately, as I would crime suspects at the police station, and asked Mike to write down the details of the case, which I carefully compared to the tapes. I also listened to their voices and reactions to what they were hearing and experiencing. Unless they were the world’s greatest actors, I knew what I was hearing wasn’t staged. Here’s an excerpt from one of the tapes in which Mike asked the questions:
Are you a little girl? YES
Are you dead? YES
Did you die in an accident? NO
Were you killed by a fire? NO
Did someone kill you? SERIES OF LONG BEEPS YES
Was it your parents? NO
Were you stabbed? NO
Shot with a gun? SERIES OF LONG BEEPS FOR YES
Did you die a long time ago? YES
Was it before the house was built? YES
Did they find your body after you died? NO
Did they find the killer? NO
Do you want us to help you? YES
On the other tapes, the story unfolds in bits and pieces, through Mike’s questions, which sometimes drew immediate beeps for yes or no, and sometimes received no reply at all. About fifty years ago, according to the spirit, she and her brother were kidnapped by two men and brought to the swamp behind Donna’s house. There they were both raped and shot in the head. Their bodies were then buried in the muck and never found. This story was enough to break your heart—and that’s exactly what it did. I could hear Mike and Donna getting more and more upset and more and more emotionally involved with the spirit. At first, they refer to it as “little girl”; later Mike calls it “honey” and “cutie.” Sometimes he even chides the spirit in a loving, fatherly way for being naughty when it made the phone go into outbursts of random beeps.
Fascinated and shocked by this ghastly tale, Mike wanted to know more. To find out the pathetic poltergeist’s name, he began with the letter “A” and worked through the alphabet. “I got a yes beep when I said the letter ‘I,’” he told me. “Then I went through a list of girls’ names beginning with that letter and kept getting two beeps for no until I said the name ‘Isabel.’ The phone went crazy with ‘yes, yes, yes!’ so I knew I had the right name.” He laboriously repeated the process for the brother’s name, until he was finally rewarded with a yes beep for “Louis.”
On the tape, I heard Mike pressing for details: “How old were you when you died, Isabel?” The phone beeped six times. “Oh, God!” His voice shook with emotion: That was exactly the age of his own son!
“And how old was your brother?” When the reply was eight forlorn beeps—the age of Donna’s son—the macho cop actually broke down in tears, as did his girlfriend.
While the couple considered this just a horrible coincidence, I shuddered at how evil this spirit was, to prey on these two parents’ sympathies with these touching details.
What a cruel scam, I thought. Such a tear-jerking story that would break the heart of any mother or father, but it’s all bullshit. The demonic are truly masterful, dangerous and extremely cunning! It reminded me of the Halloween horror: Although both cases happened years apart—to families in different cities who didn’t know each other—there were striking similarities in the demonic M.O. Not only did both spirits use old-fashioned female aliases and concoct sob stories about being murdered, but each cunningly included a second victim in their tale, who, not at all coincidentally, had some trait sure to tug at the heartstrings of someone else in the household. Just as the Westchester “ghost” claimed to have a fiancé who had committed suicide, thereby gaining the sympathy of the groom’s mother, this spirit pretended that she and her dead brother were the same age as Mike and Donna’s children.
Through sobs, Mike told Donna, “Babe, these kids need us! We’ve got to free them up—help them move on!” He then started a new line of questioning, and again the demon knew just what buttons to press. “Can you ever leave the property?” he asked, and got two muted beeps for no. “Do you want us to find your little bodies?” A series of awful wailing tones made the spirit’s longing plain. “If we find your bones and move them, can you leave?” The answer was a long beep for yes. Strangely, however, the spirit insisted that only Donna could locate its remains.
While Mike, true to his cop nature, wanted to charge into action, Donna was dubious. “I said, ‘What are we going to do—ask the police to dig up the swamp because of beeps on the fucking phone?’ They’d think we were crazy! Hell, I was starting to think we were crazy! The beeps went wild when I said that, then I remembered something really strange.”
Looking at her little boy—who suddenly stopped chewing his gum and began listening intently, as if he knew what she was about to say—Donna told me, “A couple of months ago, I heard Bruce talking when he was all by himself. I asked what he was doing, and he said he was talking to two kids who lived in the house. I figured it was some bullshit game—you know, just a kid’s imagination. After all that phone stuff started, I thought, ‘Oh my God, he was talking to those murdered kids!’”
Bruce refused to meet her eye. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he whined. “Don’t make me!”
“Come on—tell Mr. Sarchie about ‘the big one,’” his mother cajoled.
“He’s … he’s very bad!” The boy’s lips began quivering as if he was going to cry. His mom gave his chubby shoulder a comforting squeeze.
“My son said some kind of creepy thing lived upstairs. I thought he’d been watching scary shows on TV and didn’t pay much attention,” she explained.
On the tape, I heard her saying “Mike, I’m scared, really scared.” To reassure her, the cop asked the poltergeist if it meant any harm to Donna or her son. No, no, no, it beeped emphatically. And was there a “big one” upstairs? Yes, it replied. Was Donna in any danger from that spirit? A furious, frightening series of yeses shrilled from the phone, followed by dead silence. Was Mike in danger too? Yes. More than Donna? A long beep yes.
Listening to this had an oddly familiar ring. Suddenly I realized I was hearing a variation of the well-known “good cop/bad cop” routine, where one police officer intimidates the perp with harsh questions, threats, and a bullying manner, then leaves the room. The other cop then brings the suspect coffee, sympathizes with him, and implores him to confess before the mean cop comes back for round two. Here the game was good spirit/bad spirit, except that both spirits were actually the demon. The spirit ingratiated itself with Donna and Mike in the guise of a pitiful murdered child, then insinuated itself further into their lives by warning that a malevolent force meant them harm. Naturally this made them feel more dependent on the so-called good spirit to protect them from the bad one.
Despite being a cop himself, Mike didn’t recognize this ploy. Instead, he was drawn even deeper into the demon’s world of lies, even though Donna begged him to stop talking to the phone. On the tape you can hear her crying that she’s frightened, then shouting at Mike when he persists with his investigation. Fear, anger, and discord are the negative emotions that the demonic feed on and use to gain strength for new assaults. Things were beginning to heat up.
In another call, Mike asked a question that was totally out of the norm: “Does Donna love me?” A melodic chime proclaimed that she did. For once the demon wasn’t lying: These spirits will tell the truth when it advances their cause. “I’m going to take her out of her house,” Mike announced, only to be dissuaded by a double beep for no. The demon wanted Donna right where she was, so it could insidiously break down her will, opening the way for possession. Donna then suggested that they call in psychic researchers, receiving anot
her dismissive double beep.
“Are you afraid of them?” she asked, and heard a brief, timid beep. Damned right, “Isabel” was afraid of us—if we came to that house, the spirit would be exposed for what it really was. Here was another parallel with the Westchester case, where the demon insisted that “holy ones must not come!”
Not seeing the incredible illogic of a spirit who claimed to need help yet objected to getting it, the couple became consumed and enthralled by the events the “poltergeist” described. Communicating with it became such an obsession that Mike actually took a vacation from work so he’d have even more time to pursue his investigation of the spirit’s claims. The mystery fueled his cop’s curiosity. He and Donna began combing through phone books, trying to identify what town the two dead kids might have come from. The spirit beeped no to each possibility but remained strangely silent when towns that ended with the word “brook” were brought up.
The couple’s confusion only added to the creature’s credibility. Using this clue, Mike combed old newspapers at the library, looking for stories about missing children from a town whose name ended in “brook.” Of course, he found nothing, but being a cop, this only intrigued him even more. He began keeping case notes of what he’d discovered so far. One entry he showed me read:
Isabel, age 6. Comes from Brook? Broadbrook? Fosterbrook? Potterbrook? Blue car; two males. Remains: located in swamp. Sexually molested, then killed. Deceased, 50 years. States that she had blond hair and green eyes. She also states that her brother has blond hair. It is my opinion that due to the age at which she was killed, she has a very limited vocabulary. We are dealing with the mentality of a 6-year-old. We have to speak in words she understands.
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