Anonymous: No, there really aren't restrictions. It's one of the facts that the people who are involved in [exorcisms] are so disturbed by them, shall we say that they're so personal and so emotional that they are reluctant to really talk about it very much except in certain circumstances where they feel there's a need to or they feel it would be helpful to help someone understand the reality of demonic possession.

There are only a few people that really have a first hand knowledge of it. They are chosen to be exorcists, to perform ceremonies to drive out the demons that may possess someone and they're usually people that are chosen because they have backgrounds that are without any question — they're usually pretty moral and clear holy people because in demonic possession one of the things an exorcist faces is a spirit that knows pretty much all of their secrets and will openly attack them on the basis of knowing those secrets. So you don't want to go into a situation like that facing a demon and have all of your sins and inhuman characteristics exposed, so, they're usually kind of special people to begin with but then it becomes almost like a personal confrontation. They're so moved by it that they never get over the experience. It's sort of like a soldier who has been in a real war. The soldiers who brag haven't really been there too much but the ones that have faced the worst are the ones who rarely speak of it because they're reliving it again when they talk about it.

We had a professor in the seminary who had been at the seminary in Hawaii and he had been not only an exorcist but he actually had a case of possession there among one of his students and as a result of his being the role of exorcist, the demon didn't possess him but it basically harassed this priest. I don't think he ever explained how or why he [the student] became possessed. Anyway, all the students slept in one large dormitory area and this one student, just in the middle of the night would have this deep demonic sounding voice come out of him and laugh insanely. He would fly out of the bed and go into the aisle and when he brushed his teeth the tube would explode and shoot all over the place, that kind of crazy stuff. It got to be worse and worse over a period of months and it came to fruition when they were in the ceremony in the chapel — it's called Benediction, where you take the blessed sacrament and you have the ceremony where you venerate Jesus and the sacrament and the Eucharist — it's what we call the Real Presence. And when they held up this golden holder and blessed the congregation with it, the priest and everybody in the room was locked in slow motion as this demonic laughter rang out throughout the chapel, like mocking the presence of God. They did an exorcism on the whole school and chapel.

Emily: Did it work?

Yes, they didn't have any more cases of it in the school, except that the demon harassed this priest for a period of months to the point of when he was sleeping at night the bed would fly up six feet off the floor, come crashing back down. He would get blankets pulled off the bed, he would have demonic laughter in his room. When he would try to eat, he [the demon] would throw the food on the floor. He wasn't possessed; he was what they call obsessed. Possession is when the demon internalizes in the person and obsession is when he doesn't go within the person but he harasses the person externally. It's like the devil becomes obsessed with the person or angry at them.

Emily: And you heard this from whom?

Anonymous: I heard this from the priest himself. He was a professor in my seminary and he had formerly been at this seminary in Hawaii. The only time he ever talked about it in all the time I knew him. He was a humble man, he didn't brag about it.

Emily: Why did he talk about it?

Anonymous: He was talking about not underestimating the power of the devil and the importance of your faith and trust in God in difficult times and somebody asked him, "we've heard that you dealt with cases of possession and yet you never talk about it." He didn't bring it up on his own. He talked about it reluctantly. He reluctantly went through all these details and said that he didn't talk about it very much because it wasn't a pleasant experience, but that people tend to not think these things are real but through his experience he learned they were, and told us that if we ever came into contact with anything like this, to be careful because what happened to him could happen to you. It's an area that you don't go into lightly and only those with honest spirits or lives that are on a strong moral path and can be approved by others, like church leaders, for example, can be put in a situation where you're challenging Satan — because he doesn't play fair. You kind of have to be prepared for, I guess, demonic revenge.

When he talked about it you could see how difficult it was for him to discuss these things. Telling the story is like being back there and all the emotions of it come back to the forefront, and I guess you're always afraid that it may hit you again just because you're talking about it.

Emily: Did he say how it ended?

Anonymous: It basically went on for couple of months and he told it to go away and prayed over it. It tapered off and went away. The student had to be removed from the seminary and I don't know that he ever really got rid of it. The priest didn't say what happened to him.

[image courtesy of Raphaël Haentjens]