by David Kiely
“‘Wasting disease’ was what I kept thinking of,” Malachi says. “I read it somewhere, and those words kept coming back to me. I didn’t understand it at all. I was eating the same as I always did—Blenny saw to that. In the end Dr. Moran sent me into hospital for tests. I was there two days; they looked at me from top to bottom. Couldn’t find a thing wrong with me.”
He was discharged and advised to have lots of bed rest. But this was to prove impossible. His arrival home coincided with the onset of a series of paranormal events that served to drive him further into despair.
“It was the second night I was home. I was sleeping on my own because of my illness, and I wakened to see something happening to the picture of the Sacred Heart which hung on the wall. It was suspended in the air at the foot of the bed. And as I was lying there trying to figure out if I was seeing things, these two hands appeared either side of the picture and turned it back to front. God, it had a terrible effect on me.”
In Malachi’s eyes, the sight of the disembodied hands was frightening enough. Yet what caused him the most torment was the idea that Christ was—almost literally, as he saw it—turning his back on him. Malachi felt that he was being sent a very clear message.
He increased the frequency and intensity of his prayers, but seemingly to no avail. Whatever it was that was haunting him was not to be put off so easily. It stepped up its nocturnal visits.
“I’d see nothing,” Malachi says, “but I’d always feel an evil presence in the room, near my feet, at my shoulders. I’d get stone cold in my feet and legs, so cold. I couldn’t move. I’d wake up and feel it coming into the room. Sometimes I’d feel it on my chest—this terrible weight. One night it was so bad I screamed.”
Blenny Gant awoke with a jolt to find Malachi in a very distressed state. She could not discern a cause; there was nothing out of the ordinary that she could see. The crushing weight had lifted at the moment Malachi cried out. Not wishing to frighten her, he pretended he had had a nightmare. But Blenny did notice something odd: a smell of burning in the room. She described it as being “like the smell of a fire in a gypsy’s camp.”
“From then on, I’d only smell it in the middle of the night when she’d be asleep,” Malachi recalls. “I’d wake up to the terrible smell and I knew it was the thing again. I knew it was standing beside the bed and I’d just lie there terrified. I felt that if I turned on the light I’d maybe see it, and I just couldn’t face that.”
But face it he must, as he discovered. Malachi could just about endure the frightful apparition in the dark of night, but when it began attacking him in broad daylight, his torment became unbearable.
“Sometimes I would feel it moving through the house. God, it terrified me. I always knew when it was coming for me because my body temperature would drop. The temperature in the room wouldn’t be any different; it would just be me. I’d start to shiver and turn blue from head to toe—really freezing cold. God, it was terrifying. I’d concentrate on Brother Canice, sort of talk to him in my head. I’d ask him to help me. I believed his spirit was somehow watching over me, and that was a comfort.”
Nevertheless, the “presence” in his home refused to leave. Almost every day, he had the unsettling and constant feeling of being under observation.
“One time when I was driving I looked in the rearview mirror and felt it on the back seat. I nearly crashed the car with the shock of it. After that I stopped driving. It was just too dangerous.”
Malachi’s son-in-law and daughter would take turns accompanying him whenever he made a long journey. He found himself visiting the monastery less often than he would have liked. At the same time, he sensed a power of some kind attempting to come between him and his religious faith.
“There was a time when I couldn’t say my prayers,” he confesses, “and I was somebody who prayed often. I couldn’t say my prayers or read my missal. I’d have the book in my hands and wanted to tear it up several times. I couldn’t read anything anymore—my missal or anything else for that matter, not even a paper. I felt I was being worn down. Whenever I tried to go to Mass, some kind of force seemed to be preventing me. I’d get terribly agitated and confused on a Sunday morning. Those times I was well enough to go, it would be pushing against me as soon as I got through the church gates. It hated anything holy.”
The last should have alerted Malachi to the true nature of his torment. In fact, he concedes that it did. Yet he was trying to convince himself, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that it was a battle he could fight alone. He toyed with the notion that his problems were psychological, that it might all be in his head. For all he knew, he might be imagining everything. He might even be going a little insane.
He decided to seek medical advice and went to his general practitioner, Dr. Moran. Malachi had been seeing him off and on for many years, and the doctor was well acquainted with his medical history. Dr. Moran had been unable to ascertain the cause of Malachi’s physical decline in the wake of the Sherrin attack. Now his patient was coming to him with a story so fantastic it beggared belief. Moran was being asked to make a leap of faith in order to explain the inexplicable.
“I told him everything. He had no trouble believing me because he knew I was a man who didn’t invent things. At the end of it all he said, ‘It’s not a doctor you need, Malachi. It’s a priest.’”
It was a highly unusual statement for the doctor to make. Most victims of demonic oppression report that they encounter a wall of skepticism when they confide in their doctors. It is understandable. Few members of the medical profession are willing to allow that a patient’s difficulties may have a spiritual, as opposed to a psychological, cause. It is perhaps an indication of enlightenment and insight that Malachi’s doctor recognized the presence of something unclean behind the attacks.
So a priest it had to be. Malachi turned to the obvious: the monastery.
It is situated on the outskirts of a small town, no more than a large village, in County Sligo. It is reached from the road by a driveway that meanders between pasturelands where many cattle once grazed but that are now bare, save for a small flock of sheep. In its heyday, the monastery housed a community of over two hundred men; now there are fewer than thirty, the numbers dwindling inexorably with the passing years, as the old monks die off and no young novices come to take their places.
Malachi had a friend drive him there. He had no fears as they negotiated the familiar driveway. He had driven it countless times, knew every bend and pothole. The nearer they drew to the big house, the more at ease he became. On rounding the final bend, he caught sight of the chapel with the monks’ quarters to the rear. Adjacent was the house itself. It is a fine building in the Queen Anne style, once the home of a prominent Anglo-Irish family. The last heir, a convert to Catholicism, died in 1912 and bequeathed the house and lands to the religious community. Over the past two decades, the monks had disposed of much of the original acreage, as well as hiring a farm manager from the area, the first time the business of running the agricultural wing of the establishment had been entrusted to a layman.
There was only one other car in sight as they drew to a halt on the gravel in front of the entrance. It belonged to an elderly woman, who emerged from the little shop that sold religious goods as Malachi’s driver cut the engine.
He had a four o’clock appointment with a certain Father Ignatius. He only knew the good man by sight, but a younger brother at the monastery had recommended him as an individual distinguished by his purity, his piety—and his reputation as an archfoe of the demonic.
“But I nearly didn’t get to see the priest that day,” Malachi says. “When I approached the door there was a pressure like a wind. Only it wasn’t a wind; it was something like it, trying to stop me from entering. It was like walking against a very strong gale. It was like what I used to experience going through the church gates of a Sunday—but worse, much worse. Something didn’t want me to see that priest.”
“Father Ignati
us thinks that Charlie Sherrin is possessed,” Malachi says. “He came to that conclusion at once. He asked me about the family, about Charlie’s daughters. He was also keen to know about Charlie’s father.”
Father Ignatius would indeed have identified, from Malachi’s account of his neighbor, several of the hallmarks of the possessed. During the furious sexual assault, Charlie Sherrin revealed what could be construed as evidence of a demonized personality. Charlie used the plural pronoun when referring to himself. His face assumed, if only fleetingly, bestial characteristics. He was capable of “possessed gravity”—that is, of acquiring immovable weight. Malachi likened the weight on top of him to that of “a big plow horse.” The attacker emitted inhuman sounds: the piglike squeal. Furthermore, Malachi often felt repulsed by Charlie’s behavior around his own family, including violent outbursts at minor upsets and lewd talk and behavior in front of his offspring. In the aftermath of the assault, when he visited Malachi in the hospital, he claimed to have no recollection of what he had done.
Finally, there was the hellish vision of the disembodied heads. Not only had the preternatural broken cover during the assault but further phenomena were continuing to oppress Malachi.
What Malachi recounted in the course of a number of interviews is harrowing, for want of a better word. The events reduced a once-robust man to a nervous wreck, a man who dares not be alone for more than a few minutes at a time.
As we take our leave at his front door, our eyes are inevitably drawn to his garden. There are seven species of roses growing there, in colors ranging from saffron to an almost purple red. Somebody has trained a wilder variety to climb the brick wall almost to the second-story window. Across the way, the green fields have been earmarked for a new shopping mall. For now, it is a tranquil place, far from the main road. We hear only a dog barking off in the distance. Malachi nods in the direction of a patch of grass under his living-room window.
“I don’t like that spot in the garden,” he says with sadness. “I only mow it. I thought of digging there last year, to lay a little ornamental pond, but I couldn’t do it. I broke out in a sweat at the thought of it. I wouldn’t put a spade in that now if you paid me.”
There is a great deal unresolved in this case, yet Father Ignatius has total confidence in Malachi’s ability to heal his spiritual self. “He has come through this ordeal a stronger and wiser man,” he says. “That is the compensation for enduring great evil. It forces us to learn great lessons. Malachi’s faith was always strong, but since this dreadful episode he’s had to draw on the power of God more and more. That is the victory.”
Would that the same could be said of Charlie Sherrin. “Charlie needs an exorcism, but he must want it himself,” says Father Ignatius. “It has to be his decision. And he’s not ready yet to make that decision.”
An acquaintance agrees, but feels that the civil authorities should be alerted. “Malachi ought to have gone to the police as soon as that happened,” he says grimly. “It’s a criminal matter as well as a spiritual one. He still can. It’s only five years, and the hospital will have records. I have the feeling that more people are in danger. I have the feeling that Charlie’s done this sort of thing before.”
Having listened to Malachi’s appalling account and observed his ongoing suffering, we are prompted to ask a very pertinent question. Why does he continue to live so close to the man who caused him such anguish? Surely it cannot be pleasant to look out—every day of his life—at the garden in which the ferocious attack took place. Malachi answers without hesitation. “Oh, but I could never leave this house,” he says. “My grandfather built it. It was his home and he was very proud of it. I’d be letting him down if I left. Charlie Sherrin has taken a lot from me but he’s not going to drive me out of here.”
When put in those terms, his reasoning is hard to fault. He is a courageous man, and his faith is strong. His battle is not yet won, but he believes that good will triumph over evil in the end.
“I go to Father Ignatius whenever things get really bad, and he keeps me on the right road,” Malachi tells us. “I’ve asked him to do an exorcism but he says I’m not the one who is demonized. He prays with me and for me, and I’m praying the thing won’t win. But it keeps on trying. Whenever I go to see Father Ignatius there’ll be that same wind again, trying to keep me away from the monastery door.”
He reaches into his shirt and brings out a little silver chain. There is a medal attached; it is circular and displays a bearded saint in a monk’s habit. “It’s St. Benedict,” he says. “Father Ignatius gave it to me.” He points to a large cross on the reverse, around which are arranged a number of letters. “Latin. It means: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan! Do not tempt me with vain things. You offer evil? Drink your own poison!’ Father Ignatius says it’s the only Catholic medal with an exorcism on it. He says it’s very powerful against evil spirits.”
“I still have the presence in my room at night,” he continues. “I’ll wake up to find the awful stench, that burning smell. I still get the pressing weight on me, but it’s not so often now, thank God! Sometimes when I go to the monastery, I’ll be attacked that very night. Father Ignatius always asks me the same question. He asks if I can forgive Charlie, and I’m always honest with him. I say, ‘Father, there are times when I can, and other times when I could kill him and be done with it all.’ Father Ignatius says those times when I feel the most hatred against Charlie Sherrin are when Satan’s in his element. He loves to see us in despair, to give up hope and live tormented. That’s his goal, you see: to wear us down so that suicide becomes an option. And the more I’m able to look at things in that way, the more I’m able to forgive Charlie and feel better. I know he wasn’t in his right mind when he did that to me. That’s the only way I’m ever going to have any peace. So I pray now for the strength to forgive. And I pray also for his children.”
It is tragic that a man like Malachi has been left in old age to carry such a burden. How could he have known, as he traveled the world with Blenny, that those two glorious years would be followed by five years of torment? In Egypt he accidentally stepped into the path of evil in the form of Walter Ehrlich. No one could have foreseen that, upon the Gants’ return, that same evil would manifest itself on the very road where they live.
The Egyptian episode continues to intrigue us. We wonder if it was in some way linked to Malachi’s 2004 experience. Father Ignatius does not dismiss the notion. “It’s entirely possible,” he says, “but very difficult to establish. Do not forget that evil is to be found just about everywhere in this world of ours. It’s also true to say that men like Malachi Gant—spiritual men—will always be more susceptible than most people to attack from evil forces.”
On leaving Malachi’s home, we draw level, some distance farther on, with the Sherrin house. We cannot help pausing to steal a look. In the garden there is a man with his back to us, off to one side, clipping a hedge. At the sound of the car, he turns slowly to stare at us, but we do not linger. The weight of Malachi’s testimony proves too much; we have no inclination to examine at close quarters the face of evil.
THE HESSIAN WHO RETURNED TO HAUNT
The following events, which occurred on the Downey fruit farm between August 2004 and January 2005, were recreated through interviews with Patricia Downey, the owner’s wife, her daughter, seventeen-year-old Katie, and a deposition written by Mirjana, a twenty-one-year-old foreign worker.
Mirjana does not like to see the sun sink and darkness stain the sky. She continues to work, even though it is ten o’clock and the boss’s wife, Mrs. Downey, has told her it is time to stop. Even though she has worked a nine-hour day and is exhausted, still she works. The red Braeburn apples feel cool in her chapped hands as she plucks them from the tree and places them in the basket.
She misses her family back home. This is her first time abroad, but soon the fruit-picking season will be over, her work in Ireland at an end, and she will be returning to her village in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“Mirjana!”
“Yes, Miss Tricia, now I finish!”
Reluctantly, she carries the basket to the trailer and tips it in carefully. She is the only female employee left on the fruit farm.
Her co-worker, Marta, took sick a week ago and had to return home to Eastern Europe. She misses her very much, and most especially when darkness comes.
Today, the women in green did not appear in the orchard.
Perhaps tonight they will not come.
She waves to her employer and makes her way down the winding lane to the old cottage. Her heart quickens as she nears the front door. She would do anything rather than enter. But she is tired and needs to sleep. Besides, there is nowhere else to go.
In the bedroom, she undresses and lies down, holding her rosary beads to her heart. She concentrates on the picture of the
Virgin of Medjugorje—Our Lady Queen of Peace—and hopes and longs and prays, just as she has over so many nights, that the sounds from the far corner will not come….
Always, there was something not quite right about the farm, as far back as anyone could remember. It was the land, not the homes that had been built upon it in the course of five centuries or more. Neighbors and friends suggested that the land was cursed. Tricia Downey did not rule this out.
“I never would’ve believed it myself,” says the mother of four. “That wasn’t how I was brought up. We’re Catholics and we believe in what the Church teaches us. But, given what we’ve been through, I keep an open mind.”