Does the demonic spirit always manifest as a black, cloudlike mass?
“The ‘black mass’ I speak about,” says Ed, “is the most common way the demonic introduces itself into the physical realm. I don’t know if this represents the mechanics of its manifestation, or if it’s peculiar to certain kinds of demonic entities. But a demonic spirit can ultimately manifest as Jesus Christ himself! It may be seen as a ghost; it may come as a hooded specter; even in the form of an animal. A few years ago, sitting in my office here, I happened to catch something move out of the corner of my eye. When I looked, I saw a black animal I have never seen before about twice the size of a woodchuck, walking across the rug. It was furry and fat and waddled when it walked—as though its body didn’t belong with its legs. I didn’t know what it was and presumed that it had walked in through a door out of the woods. But when I got up, I saw no door was open. By that time, though, the animal was heading for the passageway. It seemed to have a snout for a face—like a skunk. I followed the thing as it waddled down the passageway. Since the door was closed it couldn’t go any further, so as not to corner the thing, I stopped—but it kept going and walked right through the closed door. A second later, when I swung the door open, the animal was gone. It was then I realized it was a spirit—or at least the monstrous creation of one. The room it entered—if it did enter the room—was self-contained with no access doors. Whatever the thing was, it vanished. In effect, the inhuman demonic spirit can take on any form it chooses.
If that is so, then why does it come as a black mass?
“Because the watchword of the demonic spirit is anonymity,” Ed replies. “The spirit comes across as a large, undifferentiated black mass that is easily visible on the rare occasions when it is seen during the day, though it will more likely be witnessed during the psychic hours of night. Only rarely, though, will it show itself in preternatural form. Why come comprehensibly, it reasons, when the spirit’s best protection—in fact its ultimate protection—is anonymity and disbelief in its existence? As a physical phenomenon, though, the black mass is the spirit, and as such it is perfectly dangerous. When it corners a person, as it did, say, with the Foster children, the individual then reports a critical lack of air, incredible coldness on his body, and a pressure like the weight of a boulder bearing down on him, “When the person can’t get away, then that’s it: one of two things will tend to happen. Either spontaneous combustion will occur—the person bursts into flames and is reduced to ash—or he’ll dematerialize completely, sometimes forever. Incidents of human combustion are very rare: there’s only about twenty cases on record. More likely, though, the individual will dematerialize. In the Carlsons’ house, Lorraine was able to discern that the black mass engulfed two people there. The first to be literally spirited-away was a soldier’s lackey who was approached by the black mass in the stable behind the house in the year 1776. He was never seen again. The second to vanish was a little girl about 14 years old, named Laura DuPre, who ran into a closet in the house to escape from the black mass, but it subsequently enveloped her too. This occurred around the turn of the twentieth century, and she is still listed by the state police as a missing person. The third to go might have been Mrs. Carlson, if she hadn’t the foresight to get hold of us before the spirits in the coaching inn did the same thing to her too.”
Ed speaks of the demonic spirit showing itself only rarely in preternatural form. What does the demonic spirit look like? The question is an uncomfortable one for him to answer.
“Although the spirit can project itself in any form it chooses,” says Ed, “its appearance is an abomination, a monstrosity. To see what’s really behind the phenomenon is not something to be desired. To actually see the demonic is to feel ruin. What shows is something distinctly preternatural in appearance: something real enough as you see it, but yet something not of this world.”
But what does it ultimately look like?
“Ultimately,” Ed answers with great reluctance, “it is not human. It is inhuman. It has scales. It looks... like a reptile. That’s it,” he cautions. “I won’t complete the rest of the image.”
Oppression is not always external and observable, however. It is just as often subjective. Internal oppression is an emotional and psychological demonic intrusion, dedicated to bringing about an overall change in the person’s way of thinking. Here the oppressing spirit’s strategy is to so manipulate the person’s will that bad habits become worse, and worse habits become impulses toward “sin” or self-destruction. As a creature of sin, the demonic spirit seeks to make the human being culpable, by dragging him down to a level that rejects all life. Writing on this very point in the fifth century A.D., Saint Augustine noted that a habit unchecked becomes a necessity. “This,” says Ed, “is precisely what happens during psychological oppression. The individual stands in jeopardy of becoming a stooge, if not a slave to the spirit oppressing him. In advanced stages of oppression, the spirit may so dominate the will that the person has no autonomy at all. At which point, of course, you’re at the doorstep of possession.”
“The objective of the oppressing spirit,” Lorraine adds, “is to possess the person’s body, or failing that, to drive the individual to commit murder, suicide—or both. Before that point is reached, however, the individual under oppression will already have been the victim of a very complex strategy. Let me give you an example of just how comprehensive internal oppression strategy can be.
“In April 1978, we received a call from an articulate, well-educated woman of about thirty-five who was beside herself with fright. This woman, Patricia Reeves, was under oppression, but she didn’t know what was happening to her. She had extreme difficulty getting hold of us, while Ed and I had just as much trouble getting up to see her. Patricia and her friend had bought themselves a bona fide haunted house in New England. Although the events of the case are interesting, what is significant here is how demoniacal strategy figured so prominently in their purchase.
“Patricia was born and raised in Ohio, the daughter of a long line of Baptist ministers. Patricia wasn’t married; instead, she split the rent with another woman named Melinda. Though she was a capable adult in every way, money, happiness, and contentment seemed to be withheld from her, and she got to the point of even planning her own suicide. In utter frustration, she purchased a book on witchcraft. Out of that book, Patricia selected one ritual: for prosperity. A few months after she performed the ritual, she received a well-paying, high-prestige job.
“Interestingly, ever since the age of twelve, Patricia had a vivid recurring dream about living in an old colonial farmhouse. Getting this ‘dream’ house was a lifelong goal. For Patricia, it meant ‘going home.’ The house was in a rural, upper New England setting and had to have been built no later than the early 1800s. So every week without fail, she’d go downtown to the city library and scan the Boston paper for its real estate ads. Using her own word, she did this ‘obsessively.’ Insofar as oppression is also called obsession, this whole process was going on right under her nose, though she didn’t know it.
“One day, about two years after taking over her position of employment, Patricia found an old farmhouse listed in the paper that seemed made to order. Desiring to see it, she and her roommate Melinda took a joint vacation and drove East. They first saw the house on January 1, 1977.
“The place was quite lovely, down a long, wooded lane almost a mile back from the main road. Though the place seemed perfect,” Lorraine says emphatically, “it was a setup” The previous owner of the house, it turned out later, was a Satanic black witch. Rather odd, don’t you think, that they should be drawn three thousand miles from the sunny Southwest to the middle of the New England woods to inhabit this particular house? Well, it might seem odd, but by performing the black witchcraft ritual, Patricia and to a lesser degree Melinda, were in debt to the demonic. And what better way to draw them to their doom than by making a dream come true?
“Over the course of a year, the two women d
rove East a total of not once or twice, but three times before ratifying their desire to own the place. On one occasion, Patricia’s sister Susan also came along for the ride. During that period, none of the women suspected there was anything wrong.
“When the process of internal oppression first begins the problem is almost impossible to recognize because the shift occurs slowly, one step at a time. Essentially, the person is being groomed or ‘prepped’ for the day when possession can take place. On December 31, 1977, Patricia made a major decision: to resign her job and buy the house. Both she and Melinda were independent sorts and said they wanted to ‘get back to nature and raise animals.’ In reality of course, this was the Law of Attraction at work.
“By the time she resigned,” continues Lorraine, “Patricia had been through all the paperwork needed to buy the farmhouse. But no bank on either coast was willing to give a large mortgage to two unmarried women. Buying the house would require them to put up a substantial down payment, and they didn’t have the cash. No problem, though! While visiting Los Angeles, Melinda got herself on a television game show, and on her birthday, won ten times the amount needed for the down payment. In fact, her winnings virtually paid for the house. Yet when they went back to the bank, the lending officers for some reason wanted three signatures on the mortgage. Because of this, Patricia’s sister Susan was brought in and co-signed the mortgage with the other two women. Traditionally, when a pact is signed, the demonic often arranges for three people—three human wills—to participate in the commitment, again as an insult to the Trinity. To Susan’s misfortune, her fate was now formally tied in with that of the other two women.
“The night the mortgage was signed, heavy-booted footsteps entered Patricia and Melinda’s apartment in New Mexico. What sounded like an intruder pounded on the doors to the women’s respective bedrooms. Cut off from the living room phone, both women spent a night of dread terror, each huddled alone in fear. What they didn’t know at the time was that this was the classic entrance of the demonic. The bill for the prosperity ritual had now come due.
“With the mortgage secured, Patricia and Melinda moved East to the farm at the end of January 1978. As soon as they took up residence in the house, they had a terrible feeling of being watched. The feeling was so intolerable that they both often slept at a nearby motel, while fixing up the inside of the house during the day. They also had two dogs, Corgis, that’d always gotten along well before. But just as soon as these two dogs were brought onto the property, they began attacking one another. The women had to keep them separated lest they tear each other apart.
“Around the same time, Patricia and Melinda also started to argue and fight with each other over petty, inconsequential things. Rather than work, they’d argue for days on end over who would paint a window and who would paint a door. These women, you see, were unknowingly oppressed into this behavior, as were their dogs. In fact, oppression was all set, waiting for the group to arrive.
“Eventually—under oppression—the women decided it was their house and they were going to sleep in it and not patronize the expensive local motel. At that point, the feeling of being watched turned sour, into an atmosphere of evil in the home. Believing their feelings were only psychological, the women did their best to play down these emotions, but then strange things started to happen. At night, from outside the house, they heard ominous chantings that turned their blood cold. During the day, ammonia and cleaning agents disappeared; in their place would be drops of blood. Inside the house, money and personal items also vanished and were never found again. One afternoon, there were knocks at the back door. When they answered it, no one was there. Instead, what the women found were a series of left footprints—a sign of the demonic—in hip-deep snow leading to the barn. The prints were spaced three feet apart, yet they’d penetrated only a half-inch into the soft powder.
“A few months after they purchased the house, Patricia’s sister Susan came to help with the fix-up job. Susan was a sensitive woman in her twenties. When she arrived at the farmhouse this time, the place overwhelmed her with morbid terror, and she immediately flew back to her home.. Yet, she was still affected by the oppressing spirits, because a few weeks later, out of nowhere, Susan brutally stabbed herself with a butcher knife. The doctor who worked on the young woman said her wounds—and there were three stab wounds—should have been mortal, and he didn’t understand why she hadn’t died.
“For leaving the farmhouse, Melinda, too, received a similar penalty. No more than a month after they moved East, Melinda became so totally repelled by the evil in the house, that she also returned to Ohio. But Melinda was there no more than a few days when she was forcibly and violently raped by an unknown intruder. At that point, she succumbed. Believing mental terror preferable to gross physical violence, she returned to the New England farmhouse.
“By the spring of 1978, after experiencing a catalog of horrors for months, these poor women had now fully come under oppression. Both developed wrinkles on their faces, their brown hair turned to gray, and, physically their features aged twice their years. ‘I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror,’ Patricia told me. ‘The look in our eyes was one of emptiness and death.’
“Now and then, Melinda would be involuntarily overwhelmed by an evil personality, especially when Patricia wanted to make any radical change to the house. The worst episode came when Patricia rented a chainsaw and was about to cut down the pine trees in front of the house that kept the interior dark.
‘Melinda came running out of the house like she was on fire,’ Patricia said to me. ‘She had the most incredibly wicked face—the face of someone else! She threatened to kill me if I put so much as a nick in one pine tree!’ Patricia now understood there was something wrong—metaphysically wrong—and saw the need to get help. After having an incredible time getting anyone to believe her, someone finally gave Patricia our name and she called on us.
“I couldn’t tell them at the time,” Lorraine goes on, “but for these women, death was really just around the corner. That farmhouse was a killing place. When Ed and I drove down the access road to the property, I saw—through second sight—people in robes performing some kind of profane ritual in the meadow by the house. There was chanting, and the whole show was going on at night; they were using a human being as an altar—or victim. When we got into the house, it was apparent to me that whoever lived there before had engaged in the slaughter and mutilation of animals. I could feel the sorrow of many hundreds of animals, large and small, that had been killed there. And in the house, the atmosphere, the very air you breathed was thick with evil and perversity. The place repelled me too, and it was evident that only through demoniacal oppression could anyone ever live in such a hellish domain.
“I think what we’ve said makes it quite clear that an invisible, negative intelligence was guiding events here. But I’d like to make the point that in this case, in this house, it wasn’t just invisible. While Ed was interviewing the women, I decided to walk through the dwelling. One of their Corgis came with me. The place was like most of these infested homes—uncomfortable and threatening, with an overlay of sadness. Suddenly, the dog bolted and ran down the hallway, skidding to a stop at the closet door, where it began growling viciously. I opened the door. The closet smelled like a cesspool. The dog lurched at something in the closet and then a few seconds later, to my astonishment, a totally black figure—in the crude form of a man, but having no features—ran right past me out of the closet and scurried up the stairs, with the Corgi in hot pursuit. In all my days, I have never seen the demonic take on such an overtly humanoid form.
“In this case,” Lorraine concludes, “the thrust of oppression strategy by the demonic was subtle—more psychological than physical. Either way, though, the strategy of the demonic remains the same: to break down the will of the human being in order to possess the body, or to oppress the individual to commit some negative act, preferably one involving bloodletting and death. And here, it was nearly
successful. Both women required a form of exorcism to be performed on them in order to be freed from the influence and physical distortions brought about by the inhuman entities that inhabited that place. In the end, Patricia and Melinda sold the farm for what they paid for it, and returned to New Mexico where they both live sadder but wiser today. Although Ed and I could go on and on with all the densely knit factors that make up this individual case, I think it’s quite apparent there’s more than coincidence involved in a case such as this. Lurking in the background is a negative intelligence directing the activity.”
“By the time the phenomena move from the infestation to the oppression stage,” Ed agrees, “the demonic spirit is really no longer able to veil its presence. Instead, out of pride in its own effectiveness, it begins leaving calling cards—some literal, some symbolical.
“Often the demonic spirit likes to make its presence known in writing. It particularly likes to write on walls and mirrors, even going so far as to prefer lipstick or crayon as a writing implement. The demonic spirit tends to write backwards, from right to left, so the script has to be read in a mirror. The words and phrases appear as though someone has written on the walls with the ‘wrong’ hand. As far as what they say, about all these spirits tend to write are vulgarities, smut, and blasphemies, usually in the language spoken by the person or family being oppressed. Other languages may be mixed in, though the mixing of languages more often occurs when the spirit speaks during possession. In later stages of oppression, or in situations where devils are at hand, more sophisticated languages may be used.”
The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren Page 15