by David Kiely
Two days after Katie’s experience with the drawers, Tricia was forced to accept that it was true. “I was in her bedroom tidying up when I heard the strange sawing sound, exactly the way Katie described it. I turned round and couldn’t believe my eyes—the four drawers were being pulled out and in, all by themselves. I nearly fainted. I knew then that I’d have to call on the parish priest.”
Father Frank McMenahan, a personable young man, new to the parish and the county, came to bless the house the following evening. He assured Tricia that a blessing would put things right.
All the family gathered in the Downeys’ living room, which looks out over the orchards. The priest prepared for the ceremony by lighting a candle, blessing two basins of water that Tricia had made ready, and reciting several prayers of protection with the family.
He then motioned to Katie to take the lighted candle and follow him; her brother Paul was to take along one of the dishes of water. The priest filled a plastic squeeze bottle with some of the water. Katie and her three siblings could barely contain a smile. They had been brought up accustomed to solemnity in the Church. Incense was dispensed from a brass censer, Holy Communion from silver and gold vessels. To see a plastic squeeze bottle being prepared for the sprinkling of holy water was highly unusual.
And it was more than sprinkling. The house was to be thoroughly drenched. So thoroughly, in fact, that water ran down the walls. They went from room to room, Father Frank making the sign of the Celtic cross on each lintel and window. It was a cross enclosed within a protective circle. Its significance was not lost on the Downeys.
“The moment I went into Katie’s room,” Father Frank tells us, “the hairs rose on the nape of my neck. A feeling of icy coldness cut right through me. I almost lost my balance with the force of it. There really was no logical explanation for it.”
We wonder if it could have been suggestion. After all, both mother and daughter had described in detail what had taken place in the room. It would have been fresh in his mind.
“Suggestion?” he says. “There’s always that possibility. But it was too real for that. I’m a skeptic at heart where such things are concerned, but that really shook me.”
The priest blessed the room, sprinkling—if anything—even more holy water than he had used elsewhere. He left the Downey home, confident that whatever it was that had “visited” the family had been expelled.
He could not have been more wrong.
“After he blessed the house, it went crazy,” Tricia Downey says with a shudder. “It was growling and banging, not only during the night, but in the daytime as well—upstairs and downstairs.”
Mirjana does not know how many hours she has slept. Yet, as always, she knows that the visitors have been and gone. She awakes to find that the bedroom door—locked by unseen hands some hours before—is now open. She sees her rosary beads discarded on the floor.
Everything is in disarray. She finds her shoes on the kitchen table, her clothes under the bed; all cupboards in the kitchen lie open, their contents on display.
She makes breakfast quickly and leaves for the orchards, glad to be gone from the house.
The thing Katie described has all the hallmarks of the incubus.
The incubus—the name derives from the Latin incubare, meaning “to lie upon”—is, according to traditional belief, an evil spirit or demon that takes male form to have sexual intercourse with a sleeping woman for purposes of procreation. Its female counterpart is known as the succubus.
There is reason to believe that the notion of the incubus was founded in misogyny. As early as the fifteenth century, the Church showed an unhealthy interest in female sexuality. The hunt for witches became an instrument for the further suppression of women. To many, it was inconceivable that a woman should have sexual desires of her own. Should a woman be seduced, willingly or unwillingly, then the blame might be laid at the door of the incubus. The Malleus Maleficarum of 1486, that notorious handbook of the witch-finder, recognized three categories of suspected witches: those who submitted voluntarily to evil, those forced by other witches to sleep with incubi, and those assaulted by incubi against their will.
Descriptions of the entity were not in short supply. “The incubus,” according to Francesco Maria Guazzo, in his Compendium Maleficarum (1608), “can assume either a male or a female shape; sometimes it appears as a full-grown man, sometimes as a satyr; and if it is a woman who has been received as a witch, it generally assumes the form of a rank goat.”
Belief in the incubus persisted up until the eighteenth century, when the medical profession at last began to question its validity. Some viewed the entity as being no more than the invention of a woman’s perverted imagination. It was pointed out that the incubus could be conveniently blamed for an unwanted pregnancy or used to conceal an illicit affair.
And yet, there is a high incidence of reports of such attacks in present-day Europe and America, in communities that long ago dispensed with many sexual taboos. There seemed to be no good reason why Katie Downey should concoct an account of a nighttime visitor that corresponded so closely to traditional descriptions of the incubus. That it was singling her out for attack was self-evident.
“We were more afraid for Katie than for any of the others,” Tricia tells us. “The thing only seemed to be interested in her. I mean, I’d heard noises and so did the others. But it seemed to be focusing on her. I was very worried by the sexual element. I mean, Katie knew about the birds and the bees—all the children did—but she’d never had a boyfriend. She found it very difficult to talk about what was happening to her. So why on earth would she make it up?”
Soon the unthinkable would occur. The incubus began materializing next to Katie’s bed.
“The first time I saw it I was wide awake,” she explains. “I’d just turned over on my side to try and get more comfortable when there it was standing beside the bed. I tried to get away from it, but as I did, I was lifted up. Then suddenly I was back on the bed and it was on top of me. I could make out this shape, the ‘head’ of whatever the thing was. It had a human shape, but on the top of the head there were two things—not horns exactly, more like ears of some kind. Instead of grunting and panting, that first time I saw it, it started screaming and howling, like something gone berserk. I was so scared I just passed out.”
Between October and January of 2005, there was little respite for Katie. The family took to saying a rosary in her bedroom before going to bed. Some nights it worked, but more often it did not.
“Just when I thought it had gone, it would come back,” she says. “My schoolwork suffered. I lost all confidence in myself. It didn’t like to see me happy. I got a part-time job in my uncle’s pub, just so I could stay out late. But, on my way home in the early hours, I’d start panicking. I used to stay over with a friend, but I couldn’t do that every night. Always when I’d go into my bedroom, it’d be there waiting for me. I could feel it. For a while, when it started to show itself, I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want to scare Mom. But in the end I knew I had to. I just couldn’t go on.”
It was a bad omen. Tricia Downey had the uneasy feeling that the sighting of the “black form” might be the beginning of another and more frightening phase of the haunting. She went to the priests’ house again, taking her daughter with her.
“Do you think,” Father Frank asked, “that you’d be up to spending a night in Katie’s room?”
Tricia had not expected this. She had assumed that the priest would suggest a second blessing, or perhaps a Mass.
“I want to know more about what it looks like,” he said. “From what Katie tells me, it sounds terrible enough. But I’d like a second opinion.”
“You do believe me, don’t you, Father?” Katie asked.
“I do. I believe that you believe what you saw. But Katie, nighttime is a strange enough time. Sometimes the darkness can convince us that we see things that aren’t there, or we mistake shadows for real things. That’s why I think we
should let your mother spend the night with you.”
Privately, the priest thought that Katie might be having psychological problems, as adolescents often do. He was also distressed to learn that his house blessing had proved ineffective.
That night, Tricia shared the bed in Katie’s room.
“Why did you turn off the heat?” she asked her daughter. “It’s freezing!”
“I didn’t, Mom. It’s up full. See for yourself.”
Tricia went to the radiator. As was the case in her own bedroom, it was a double radiator. The valve was open fully. In the small room the temperature should have been almost unbearable.
“I’ll have your father look at it tomorrow,” she said.
“It’s been like that for days, Mom. It’s him. He does it!”
Tricia’s unease was growing. She had come armed with her rosary beads, her prayer leaflets, and a St. Brigid’s Cross—woven expertly of rushes by a long-dead relative. She placed it, together with a Bible, on the nightstand.
Mother and daughter talked for an hour or more, not so much because they had a lot to say to each other but because neither was in a hurry to go to sleep. Both feared what dreams might come. At last, Katie told her mother that she was ready for sleep. Tricia kissed her goodnight and began silently praying. She was aware of Katie’s breathing growing shallower. After a while, she too drifted off.
Tricia awoke from what seemed like a long sleep. Panic gripped her. She found herself pinned to the bed, effectively paralyzed, exactly as her daughter had described it. Beside her, she could hear Katie’s soft snores.
“It was like a ton on top of me,” she recalls. “I knew it was bad—you could feel it was bad. I tried to make the sign of the cross, but it wouldn’t let me. As I was raising my right hand, it was gripped at the wrist. I had my rosary beads under the pillow, so I tried to maneuver my left hand underneath to get at them, but again my arm was gripped, so I couldn’t. I tried to pray, but I couldn’t even speak. My tongue was frozen.”
She did not see the entity that night, and for this she was thankful; her torment had been traumatic enough. Yet the fact that it had not made itself visible to her did not mean she was free of it.
On the contrary, Tricia believes that the thing took this opportunity to latch onto her, allowing Katie some respite. She claims that it pursued her to her own room and appeared to her the following night, while she slept in her own bed, her husband by her side. It was the beginning of a series of attacks.
“It didn’t matter that Hugh was in bed beside me,” she recounts. “I’d wake up and it would be on top of me. Then I started to see it. It was as Katie had described, an animal-like head, but the body of a human. It was a dense black form.”
Tricia screamed, waking her husband. Incredibly, he saw the attacker and described it in almost exactly the same way Tricia did. He could not believe his eyes. But he was courageous; he saw the danger his wife was in. He sprang from the bed and rushed to the dressing table, where Tricia had placed a bottle of holy water.
“He threw it over the thing,” she says, “and ordered it out of the room.”
It went. Katie’s father did not know it then, but as the creature vanished from the bedroom, it simultaneously materialized downstairs in Katie’s room. Having been thwarted in its molestation of the mother, it launched a fresh assault on the daughter.
At the breakfast table the next morning, the family held a council of war. They needed the priest again. Forty-eight hours later, Father Frank returned to the Downey home and offered Mass in Katie’s room.
Mirjana wakes. She has heard the door swing open. She looks to the far corner. The old woman and the girl are not there. But there is something else in the room. Outside it is raining. She has the impression that one of the guard dogs has just come in. She can smell the wet hair and feel its coldness. But the dogs are chained up.
Something is loping about the room, snorting and pawing at the floorboards, but she sees nothing. There is a small flashlight under her pillow. She gets up and shines it about the floor.
Something springs up onto her bed, grunting and panting. Petrified, she stumbles out of the bedroom and down the hallway. On reaching the kitchen, she feels the wet pelt of the unseen creature brush briefly against her legs as it bounds in ahead of her. It begins to squeal like a pig. Mirjana bolts back to the bedroom and slams the door.
“After the Mass we had about a week of peace,” Tricia says, “before everything went crazy again. In the middle of the night, all the doors and windows would start banging—opening and shutting. The boys started to talk about an animal in the bedroom that made pig noises. Eilish was the only one who wasn’t affected; she sleeps like a log. But the rest of us were all being worn down, and it seemed the more we prayed, the worse it got. Katie and I didn’t have the creature on top of us like before, but little did we know that after the Mass it went for poor Mirjana.”
Mirjana lies suffocating. She attempts to raise her head from the pillow, but something is holding her down. She tries to look at the picture of the Virgin, but something is moving in front of her eyes—a black form blocking it out.
I am dying, she thinks. Please, Gospa, don’t let me die.
She cannot move; she cannot scream. A grunting starts up close to her ear.
She smells wet fur; the phantom beast is on top of her. There is nothing she can do. She feels for the rosary beads at her right hand, but they are no longer there. I don’t want to go to hell, she pleads with the Gospa, as tears trickle down her cheeks.
At 6 a.m., Mirjana pounds on the Downey front door and collapses into the hallway.
It is then that Tricia knows it has gone too far, and drastic steps must be taken. At her insistence, Father McMenahan moves for an exorcism. The call goes out. It is answered by a venerable monk in the northwest of the country.
“I couldn’t tell you what Father Ignatius did,” Tricia says. “He spent a long time in Katie’s room, then down in the old house praying, but it worked. Thank heavens! We’ve never seen or heard it since. God willing, it’ll last. He said it probably was the spirit of a Hessian, which was a new one on me because I’d never heard the word before. But then Hugh started to look into it, and what the priest said started to make sense.”
The Downey land, which lies between two notorious battle sites, would have seen some of the worst atrocities and brutality perpetrated against the Wexford people. The Hessians, German mercenaries, were sent to Ireland in 1798 to help quell the rebellion inspired by the United Irishmen. According to more than one reliable account, they went on a rampage, raping, pillaging, and terrorizing the local population.
It is an intriguing explanation, not least because of the military elements in the haunting. There is the ghostly cavalry that the family heard in the night, the “battering ram” used against their front door, the sexual assaults on the females. All seem to reinforce the theory that the spirit of a marauding Hessian might have been at work.
Furthermore, the two women who appeared in the old cottage wore green dresses. It is significant that, in 1798, the wearing of the color green was forbidden by order of the English government. In County Wexford especially this order was defied almost universally by the women. They were to pay dearly for their defiance: the Hessians subjected them to the most vile and indecent sexual assaults. Many women died cruel and savage deaths.
But Hessian or not, Father Ignatius found it a very unusual and perplexing case.
“I don’t rule out the presence of an evil spirit,” he tells us, “but I feel that a sustained attack on the religious objects in the house would have been more in keeping with the activities of such, but no religious objects were disturbed. The Downey home had a great many holy pictures and statues, so the opportunity was certainly there. Given the bloody battles that were fought in that part of Wexford, it is possible that it was the spirit of a soldier. Like Father McMenahan, I had that same sensation when I entered young Katie’s room, that sense that I was intr
uding, that the room was its territory. Who knows—perhaps this Hessian was slaughtered on the spot where the Downeys built their new house. The killing could have been an act of vengeance for all the terrible things he did.”
And the incubus theory? Father Ignatius is noncommittal on the subject.
“The sexual element was obviously the most distasteful and frightening part for the females to have to go through,” he says. “I don’t come across that kind of thing very often. The incubus and succubus—are they simply myths? You know, there is the great danger in this enlightened age of ours to relegate all such ideas to the ignorance of the Middle Ages. Satan has managed to get himself out of the picture very well in these modern times of ours—and managed it very successfully, I’m sure you’ll agree. He can take on many implausible forms, so why not that of the incubus?”
Before we leave, Tricia takes us down to Katie’s bedroom. It is a typical teenager’s room, with its collection of cuddly toys and posters. There is not a whiff of the horrors that her daughter endured.
She points to a holy picture above the bed.
“That’s Our Lady of Medjugorje. Mirjana gave it to us before she went back to Bosnia. Katie and I went to visit her in May. She lives near the shrine and we wanted to go and give thanks. I got a great feeling of peace when I was there…it was a very spiritual experience. I just had the conviction that we’d never be bothered with that thing again. You know, I came across a book at the shrine, and it said when we’re bothered by these things, we should give them a nickname and laugh at them. The more you fear them, the more energy you give them to attack you.”
We wonder if Mirjana will be returning to the fruit farm.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Tricia says with a smile. “And who could blame her, poor thing? But we’ll be seeing a lot of her. I love Medjugorje and I intend to visit the shrine every year. Out of all that bad stuff came something positive. If anything, it’s given me a better understanding of spiritual things. That can’t be bad, now, can it?”