“How do you feel?” the bishop asked in a kindly tone.
“I know you did your best, but it’s still there.” The housepainter sounded weary. “I guess that’s just how my life is meant to be.”
Although the bishop offered to set up another exorcism, Michael declined, then thanked all of us for our efforts.
“I’ll always pray for you,” Bishop McKenna said.
“So will I,” added Joe, giving Michael’s arm a friendly squeeze. “You can always call me.”
I also prayed that our efforts might bring him some relief in the future or had helped weaken the demon. Joe refused to be discouraged by the result, pointing out that our efforts may well spare Michael the most heinous form of demonic captivity: perfect possession. In ordinary cases of possession, even though the person’s will breaks down and he can no longer fight off the invading demon, his soul—contrary to what most people believe—still belongs to God, not the Devil. Only when the person voluntarily surrenders his spiritual essence, by making an actual pact with the Devil, can he suffer perfect possession, lose his immortal soul, and consign himself to eternal damnation. As the great exorcist Father Martin once said, “Ralph, if you ever come in contact with someone who is perfectly possessed, run like hell!”
Michael’s exorcism wasn’t the end of the case for him—or for me. Every September since then, the demonic has gotten its revenge on me for the moment of sheer terror it felt in the bishop’s church. It didn’t do this through outward phenomena, such as hideous apparitions or formless black shapes. Instead, it acted under the cover of darkness, with a new form of psychological attack. Every September since this exorcism, my life suddenly becomes a battleground.
Now, the people who know me best will tell you I’m not the easiest person to get along with. You might say there’s a touch of Michael in me, because I can be bad-tempered, nasty, and argumentative. Yet even with these combustible traits, the problems I’ve had in this particular month aren’t always my fault. The first September after the exorcism was when Joe and I had our big blowout, after my partner got lost on the way to a case. Our split resulted in the New York organization we’d run together breaking up, which is why I worked alone during some of the supernatural cases I investigated. We didn’t speak for six months after this quarrel.
When I finally did call Joe, we got to talking about what happened, and he said, “Ralph, do you know what month we had the fight?”
I replied, “Yeah, it was September.”
“Right,” he said. “Now remember this: Michael!”
His words hit me like a sledgehammer. The exorcism! I said that all made some sense, but when I’m done with a case and no longer working on it, I forget about it. No point in dwelling on evil, unless I’m giving a class or lecture on the Work. With all the stuff in my life, Jen, my daughters Christina and Daniella, and the Job, I didn’t pick up on the connection, but Joe has a more analytical mind than I do and is forever looking at possibilities I’d miss on my own. He’s also very inventive about adapting and developing prayers for the different aspects of our Work.
Joe feels that during this exorcism, I may have inadvertently been too casual or gleeful about tormenting such a potent demon with my relic. He suggests that in my zeal to help Michael, I went a step too far and got personal with the satanic spirit, unleashing its undying wrath into my life and relationships. I have to admit that there’s something to what he says. Today I’m more relaxed than I used to be, but back then I would yell “Charge!” and run right in rather than standing around thinking things over.
I’m the same way as a cop: It’s a wonder that I don’t get my ass shot off more often! With his clear, sensible thinking, Joe is always the one who reins me in. And now that he’d figured out that it was the demonic—so rightly described as a “cause of discord” in the Roman Ritual—that had busted up our partnership, we made up and resumed battling Hell’s armies together.
The next year, 1995, I had a serious problem on the Job that kept me from being promoted to sergeant. That September I was on foot patrol, alone, in an area notorious for drugs and shootings. While I was checking a rooftop that was a known drug hangout, all of a sudden I saw someone exit a stairway onto the rooftop of the next building. The man drew a gun and started firing at the building across the street. Through a window, I saw kids in an apartment, playing a video game—clearly in danger of being hit or killed by his bullets.
I yelled to him to stop, but he didn’t hear me, so I decided to shoot at him to protect those children, or anyone else, from being wounded or worse. Whether I hit him with any of my rounds or not is unknown, but he fled the scene without leaving any blood trail. The department investigated the incident and my firing of my weapon. Fortunately, I was eventually vindicated. It wasn’t until five years later, however, that I finally got my sergeant’s stripes.
Despite my problem on the Job, 1995 was a happy year on the personal front: On September 29—the Feast of St. Michael, the Archangel—my wife and I were blessed with our second daughter, Daniella. I was a wreck while Jen was in labor because she’d had such a difficult time with Christina, whose umbilical cord was wrapped around her foot and was finally born by emergency C-section. And Jen had had problems with bleeding during this pregnancy. I brought holy water and sprinkled all four corners of the hospital room.
To make sure our newborn got off to a good start in life, I called Father Martin. In his book the father describes a case of demonic possession where the man wasn’t properly baptized as a child, leaving a foothold for the Devil to seize on. I didn’t want any slipups with my daughter, so arranged the best baptism of all—a christening by the father himself, who performed the ceremony when Daniella was only a few hours old, right there in the hospital.
Amazingly, Father Martin himself was baptized even sooner than that. He was literally christened in the womb, by his father, a very devout Catholic doctor who also delivered him. Because his birth, like Christina’s, was difficult, the doctor felt that his child needed all the spiritual protection he could get to arrive safely into this world. It seemed that the Devil knew Father Martin would grow up to be an exorcist and was trying to stop this from happening. Because little Malachi was a breech baby, Dr. Martin had to reach into the uterus to turn him around—and baptized him at that time, as any Christian layperson is allowed to do in an emergency.
I rejoiced that this extremely holy exorcist was baptizing my child, just as his own father had done with him. I felt that God had truly smiled upon me—and Father Martin.
The next year the demonic got another chance to divide and conquer. This time the confrontation was with my mother, and I managed to tick her off so much that I had to apologize from here to eternity before she’d speak to me again. As before, I wasn’t aware of the connection until Joe brought September to mind. I was furious with myself that I hadn’t taken some steps to prepare myself spiritually and steer clear of disputes.
The year of worst revenge, however, came when the satanic power got around to Jen and me. Now, I hope I don’t make her mad again by telling you that she’s as temperamental as I am, and our marriage has been a real rollercoaster from the start. The ride that September was straight downhill until we hit bottom. I withdrew into myself and became more and more impossible to live with. Eventually my partner on the Job got so concerned that he actually called Jen to find out what the hell was going on with me. I in turn saw nothing wrong, and didn’t realize where my wife and I were headed until it was too late.
For the entire month, we argued night and day about the most trivial matters. I even became enraged at a message one of our close friends left on our answering machine. Because I work the graveyard shift, I sleep during the day. Usually I can sleep through a ringing phone, but when the machine picked up, this friend was in a chatty mood and left a lengthy message. As she talked on, I became more and more enraged. I wanted to rip the phone right out of the wall and throw it out the window! When Jen got home from work, s
he’d barely taken off her coat before I lit into her like a lunatic about our talkative friend. Naturally, the nastier I was, the madder she got. We fought for hours, and she ended up throwing me out.
Having nowhere else to go, I went home to Mom. Although my mother is a wonderful woman, I was suddenly back to being her “little Ralph.” Staying with her was like reliving my childhood all over again, except that I was a grown man of thirty-five and a father myself. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling Jen to apologize for acting like such an ass, I let the demon of anger mess up my life even further. I spent a few months living with my mother, and when I couldn’t stand that anymore, I took a little place of my own.
During this time I let my faith lapse and stopped attending church regularly. I sat around marinating in misery and broke off contact with everyone I knew, including Joe. Although we had two active cases, I left the Work, recognizing that in my angry, hate-filled state, I wasn’t emotionally stable enough to help victims of the demonic. To go up against the Devil in this frame of mind could lead to serious mistakes in judgment, potentially endangering myself or others. Nor could I hope to repair something as delicate as a marriage if I exposed myself to satanic influences when I was already in such a spiritually vulnerable frame of mind.
Miserable as I was, I refused to admit that I was giving the spirit that had attacked me through my weaknesses an easy victory. I was now literally hellbent on getting a divorce—and Jen felt the same. At the time I was too distraught to think about the demonic and its role in shattering my personal life. Later on Joe made the connection for me: As we both knew, the Devil hates love-and especially hates holy matrimony, because it’s a union made in the eyes of God. Because a strong marriage is an important support system for people like us, who are involved in the Work, Satan’s forces will work overtime to destroy our relationships, knowing that an angry, grieving, and emotionally troubled demonologist is likely to be powerless against evil. Just about every investigator I know has experienced marital problems that brought him to the verge of a breakup. Some of these marriages made it, and some didn’t. Because I’d let my marriage founder, the Devil now had one less foe in this world.
God hadn’t forgotten me, though. One Sunday I actually felt like going to mass, for the first time since the separation. I don’t know why I was drawn to church on this particular day, but it’s a good thing I was, because the priest seemed to have picked his Gospel reading with me in mind, choosing the text from Matthew 19:4–6: “Have you not read that at the beginning, the Creator made them male and female and declared, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall be as one’? Thus they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore let no man separate what God has joined.”
From that moment on, I decided that I would do everything in my power to stay married, if that was at all possible. Without my wife and our daughters, I was alone and adrift. Well, it was very hard—and it took a lot of work on both our parts to make ourselves better people—but Jen and I finally patched things up. After eight agonizing months, our separation was over. To celebrate our new life together, we moved to a new apartment and Jen decorated it just the way she wanted it, with angels all over the place. Every room, including the bathroom, is covered with angels. Now when I come home, I feel like I’m in Heaven, in more ways than one.
Chapter Twelve
Real-Life Ghost Stories
IN ONE INVESTIGATION, my two lives collided. First, as a cop, I was called in on a case that had some occult aspects. Knowing of my interest in the supernatural, the lieutenant I was working under at the time, who is a great guy and one of the few practicing Buddhists on the New York City police force, consulted me about a bizarre incident that had happened on the previous night’s late tour. Two Hispanic males had been arrested for unlawful imprisonment, menacing, and assault. While these crimes aren’t exactly unheard of in the slums I patrol, the male victim, who was also Hispanic, reported being subjected to an extremely odd ordeal.
According to the “vic,” the two perps had set up shop in a condemned building, where they repaired and sold used refrigerators, washing machines, and other appliances. This man said he’d innocently gone there to buy a washing machine, but for reasons he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain, these guys grabbed him, tied him to a chair, and threatened him with a shotgun. They told him that they had a bloodcurdling plan in mind: First, they were going to wash and purify his feet, and then they would cut his heart out! Scared out of his mind, the vic managed to break free and ran for his life.
The story got even stranger. After summoning police and leading them to the perps, the man suddenly clammed up and refused to give any further details of his kidnapping. When I spoke to the victim, he seemed like a decent man, but I had to wonder if he really was an entirely innocent bystander who was just looking to save a few bucks on doing his laundry. I strongly suspected that he knew these guys and could have told us a lot more about why they’d chosen him as a potential human sacrifice.
When I questioned the two perps in their cell, they weren’t talking either—but they were obviously terrified of something. Noticing they were both wearing rosary beads, I had a hunch that Santeria or a related form of black magic was involved. Since everybody, even the victim, refused to answer any further questions, we got a warrant so I could search the perps’ residence. It was the most horrible place I’ve ever been—not because of any preternatural happenings, but because it was filthy beyond belief, splattered with urine, and strewn with rotting garbage. The stench in this condemned building was enough to knock you cold, but I poked through everything and came up with one object linked to sorcery: a rather beat-up ritual sword, apparently the weapon the kidnappers meant to use to carry out their gory threats.
When I returned to the station house to voucher the evidence, an assistant district attorney (ADA) was there to oversee the case, as procedure requires when a serious crime has been committed. After the lieutenant introduced me as an expert on the occult, the ADA took me to the side. I had a feeling I knew what was coming—and I was right. “Do you know anything about ghosts?” she asked. “I think my aunt’s house is haunted!” I handed her my card, then some intuition told me to give her a second card to keep for herself. Why I did this, I don’t know, but it turned out lucky that I did.
A lot of my cases start in a similar way—and the question I have to answer is, Haunted by what? Most people think that all supernatural beings are the same, but there are actually three very different types. Human spirits are the ghosts of departed people, while nature spirits, also called “elementals,” are spirits of air, streams, trees, or other living organisms. Joe and I have never run across an elemental in one of our cases, but if we do, we’re covered, since my partner’s modifications to the Pope Leo XIII prayer command all spirits “not in worship to the Trinity” to depart, including nature spirits. Very little is known about these beings. So-called “white witches,” usually Wiccans, call upon elementals to help them cast spells, while “black witches” summon diabolical powers for their magic.
Inhuman spirits never walked this Earth in human form. Inhuman spirits can be pure evil (the demonic) or pure virtue (angels), while ghosts come in every flavor in between, depending on the moral character of the person during life. To further confuse matters, satanic powers may pose as ghosts, to prey on their unsuspecting victims’ sympathy; or the human spirits of wicked people may draw the demonic to the place they haunt, following the Law of Attraction: “Like attracts like.”
Although the demonic’s motive for invading our world is obvious—to destroy humanity—you may be wondering: What’s the reason for ghosts? An earthbound human spirit is a tragedy: It shouldn’t be here. Ghosts have many reasons for lingering among us, however. Some only make one appearance before moving on. This is called a crisis apparition and can occur when a living person is lamenting the loss of a friend or relative. To console the mourner, the deceased may ma
nifest himself to show that he or she is not suffering but has found happiness in the next plane. Grieving too long or intensely is unhealthy and can even be somewhat dangerous, since the negative energy could draw a demonic spirit and serve as an invitation to infestation.
To calm and protect those left behind, the departed may come to them in a dream or vision, bearing a message of peace to start them on the road to recovery. In some cases, the spirit may not take on the physical shape of the deceased but leave some other reminder, such as the scent of his or her favorite cologne. The problem is that the demonic also can do this. Many times, during diabolical activity, people will see what appears to be the ghost of a loved one. However, there is usually something subtly, or sometimes flagrantly, wrong with the manifestation, since evil forces can’t perfectly reproduce what God has made.
However, in some cases, a human spirit may have an abnormal appearance. The other day, I responded to a homicide where the victim’s ex-husband had stabbed her repeatedly in the face, neck, and chest until the woman was almost decapitated. I don’t know if this woman’s spirit moved on or not. But if her ghost remained earthbound, it might manifest itself with a gash on the throat. So if we heard about a spirit appearing in this condition and knew that a person had been murdered in this manner, we’d suspect that it was a ghost. But it’s also possible that such a horrible crime might draw a demon to the scene. To determine what type of spirit was present, we’d take a close look at the phenomena that were taking place.
In one of my cases, which was referred to me through the Archdiocese of New York, a Bronxville woman told her priest that she’d seen a ghost in her apartment shortly after her next-door neighbor died during heart transplant surgery. The specter was only marginally human in appearance: She described it as a semitransparent black shape with only two similarities to her deceased neighbor. Like him, it stood about six feet tall and had broad shoulders, but its head had no face. “I got the sense it was sad and waiting for somebody,” she said. “I am the most unbelieving person on the face of this Earth, but when I saw this ghost, I got a good feeling from it: that it was there to look over my life, and was protective.” Once the spirit was gone, she was engulfed by a sudden dread—and prayed it wouldn’t return.
Beware the Night Page 23