 ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. In 2015, a British court sentenced John Thompson Glover to three years in prison for hiding cameras in a school to film pupils when they were undressed. The judge described him as essentially a good man brought low by the demons that possess him. Of course, the judge did not mean that Thompson Glover was literally a victim of demonic possession and if he had been, he should not have been held responsible for his actions. Demonic possession is often used metaphorically like this. Indeed, we are more likely to encounter the idea in this sort of context than in any other. Yet the potency of the expression relies on the long tradition of belief in actual demonic possession. The phenomenon can be traced through history and around the world and for many religious groups, the idea of demonic possession as a literal and terrifying event is very much alive. It has changed little over the centuries except for one way. It is no longer just the religious who take it seriously. Now, a licensed psychiatrist and college professor says without equivocation that yes, demonic possession is real. I am Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome Weirdos, I am Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness Radio where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up this hour, different peoples build their identity around different facets of their culture, the Italians around their food, the Greeks around their architecture, America around expanding waistlines. The Isle of Man, however, has pinned its identity on low tax rates, motorcycle races and, oh yeah, mermaids and fairies. Would you be willing to eat your meals off the chest of a corpse in the process taking on their sins as your own? That is the gruesome job of a sin-eater and there were people willing to do it even into the 20th century. But first, Dr. Richard Gallagher is a New York psychiatrist and a psychiatric professor. He has spent 25 years viewing exorcisms and he says fallen angels target the devout and those who've meddled with the occult. He says it outright, being possessed by a demon can and does happen and he has seen it all too often. We'll begin with that story. If you're new here, welcome to the show. If you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen in with you. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to visit WeirdDarkness.com and click on Contact Social to follow Weird Darkness on social media. And also on the website, you can find the daily Weird Darkness podcast which comes out 7 days per week. You can enter monthly contests, find Weird Darkness merchandise and more. You can even send in your own true story of something paranormal that has happened to you or someone you know. You can find it all at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights and come with me into the Weird Darkness. He's heard the voices speak in ancient Greek. He's heard them speak in Latin. Dr. Richard Gallagher says they converse in Chinese, Spanish, French, that they're wildly smart and manipulative. The voices and the languages come out of people, he says, but they're not actually human. They're demons. They're real and so is evil, he says. Demonic Possession exists and he has seen it firsthand. They're fallen angels, Dr. Gallagher tells a reporter. This is what I literally believe. They're extremely bright. They're much brighter than humans. They've been around for millennia, so they speak all languages. I've heard them speak Chinese. I've heard them speak ancient Greek, which I studied, says the former Princeton Classics major. I've certainly heard them speak and understand Latin. The spirits do it, the psychiatrist says, probably to freak you out or to show off, to boast. The most striking thing about Dr. Gallagher before he starts to describe demons is his imposing six-foot-five frame as the psychiatry professor stands in the doorway of his office in suburban New York. He is reservantly polite in the small space where greeting cards sit on a table in family photos adorn a window ledge and he beckons to a low couch adjacent to a desk laden with files and papers. The window is book-ended by shelves of psychiatry and medical journals and books. In his 60s now, Dr. Gallagher's long limbs are clad in a blue blazer and khakis. He's extremely guarded about his own details, saying only that he has a family and siblings. He estimates he has treated 25,000 patients over the years. Not one walked through his door was actually possessed. Instead, the cases he's seen of possession and oppression, which is different and involves demons harassing an individual rather than taking control of them, he says, have all been referred to him, usually by exorcists. He's not even sure how it started a quarter century ago. I didn't volunteer particularly to get involved in this stuff. Evaluating people for possession, demonic attacks, says the New York native who was writing a forthcoming book about the subject and his experiences called demonic foes, experiences of a psychiatrist in the world of exorcism. I was just asked to do it and maybe people thought I was open-minded or whatever. Probably people knew that I was a practicing Catholic but I never volunteered for it and, you know, slowly I just began to be thought of as sort of an expert. The first case he saw involved a victim of oppression, a Hispanic housewife and mother from the American West who was being assailed by demons. She was an incredibly devout and charitable Catholic, Dr. Gallagher claims, but that exact holiness can sometimes open the door for an attack by evil. She and her husband both swore that she would be lying in bed and all of a sudden she would have the feeling of being assaulted by evil spirits and bruises would appear on her body. So I needed to do a medical work up, Dr. Gallagher says. I needed to make sure she didn't have some clotting difficulty or something like that. I needed to assess her psychiatrically. She appeared to be a very wonderful, devout, charitable person, he says, calling this woman and her husband salt of the earth people. I just came to believe their story and I can't say I knew a lot at the time about cases which a lot of people, including myself, tend to call a case of oppression. He explains, in possession an evil spirit controls that person, takes them over, whereas with oppression, people use different terms for it, some people use the term vexation, that indicates an attack by an evil spirit on an individual but the evil spirit can't or doesn't take over their personality. It's not random at all. There's almost always a discernible cause. The most common cause is someone has turned to evil or the occult. And paradoxically, it's often when they try to get away from that, that the demonic world feels they have a hold on that person. That person may have actually even promised themselves to Satan or some kind of evil and then they, in a sense, they're getting punished for trying to move out of that. That's the most common reason people get attacked. He adds, a lot of it depends on their internal intention. Are they kind of really, really committed to the occult as opposed to just kind of playing around with a Ouija board? There are a couple of other categories of people who can get attacked. Very holy people and there are many stories of saintly people throughout history that had demonic problems, he says. When it came to the middle-aged housewife from the West, he says he believes she was oppressed by evil precisely because she was so holy and was doing incredibly charitable work with people. I think she was attacked because the demon didn't like her level of sanctity. He says, all her medical tests were negative. Her blood work was all normal. She didn't appear to have any other medical or psychiatric illness. She just did not appear to be a psychiatrically troubled person at all. She had children. She had a normal family. And so I remember when the priest said to me, Dr. Gallagher, that's what I thought, but we wanted to make sure that we checked her out medically. I said, well, father, you know I'm pretty skeptical. And he said that's the type of person we wanted. So then he continued to send me things. He and his colleague, who was an ex-marine, who would also become a prominent actressist. I actually became very good friends with them. They're both deceased now, but I miss them terribly. Before that first case and his relationship with actressists and the demonic world, he says he was unaware of the intricacies of possession and oppression. He grew up a devout Catholic, one of five children born to an Irish American lawyer and his homemaker wife. Dr. Gallagher attended weekly mass with his family and studied at renowned Catholic High School Regis in New York City before being accepted to Princeton. I didn't know what I wanted to be, he says. I probably wanted to become a lawyer, a professor or something. I did like helping people, you know, so when I was at Princeton I had a number of roommates who were pre-med and I just got interested, intrigued by the idea of becoming a doctor. And I've also read a lot in my life so I got interested in psychoanalytic ideas and just kind of dawned on me that helping people as well as becoming a professor would be interesting if I did it as a professor of psychiatry. So that's what I decided to do. He laughs on the black sheep who became a psychiatrist in an Irish Catholic family. Following Princeton, he played semi-professional basketball in France and taught English at a French high school. Then he trained as a resident in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and he's currently on the faculty at New York Medical College and Columbia University Psychoanalytical Institute for Training and Research. It was as his career progressed, however, that his acquaintance with the world of evil spirits intensified. He says he's seen about four cases a year, though he has heard of hundreds more, especially at meetings of the Europe-based International Association of Exorcists. He mentions the case of another U.S. housewife, though he does not specify her location. This woman, he gives her the pseudonym of Catherine, as a teenager, had dabbled in satanic rituals and she had kind of promised herself in some fairly foolish way to evil spirits, he says. She did a few grisly things, which I'm not going to go into, but she also, with a couple of friends, they did minor satanic rituals and she became possessed. She was certainly violent when the evil spirit took over and she had a variety of signs of possession. It took multiple, multiple people to hold her down during exorcism. He adds she had a very odd symptom which is similar to a case in the Gospels where she selectively couldn't hear certain things. If you said to her, Catherine, did you go to the store today? She'd say, yes. What did you buy? Meat and potatoes. If you said, Catherine, did you go to church today? She would say, what? Catherine, did you go to church or did you pray today? Did I what? Her sense of hearing was blocked. So we had the bright idea, I was with a fellow psychiatrist, we were assessing her and we had the bright idea, why don't we write it on a piece of paper? So we wrote it on a piece of paper. What did you do this morning? And she said, well, I drove the car to the gas station. I had to fill up the gas tank. Catherine, did you pray today? Did you go to church and hold it up on a piece of paper? Do you know what she said to me? She said, Dr. Gallagher, why are you doing this? I said, what do you mean? Why are you showing me a blank piece of paper? Now, the obvious motive there was to prevent her from being able to talk about anything spiritual, get the help that she needed, get the solace and spiritual support she needed. The evil spirits take hold of people, he says, because they truly hate God and humans. We have the ability to love and turn to God. They don't. They made their choices, and they hate the image of God in human beings, he says. They truly seem to hate human beings. I mean, not only do they want to destroy us spiritually, alienate us from God, but they seem to take almost a sadistic pleasure in destroying us as creatures who can still turn to God to their enemy, creatures who can also still love, which they don't seem capable of anymore. They've rejected the whole idea of goodness and love in a kind of perverted way. He says the demons exhibit extraordinary powers such as personal knowledge and near clairvoyance. On one occasion, a demon told him how his mother had died, ovarian cancer, that evil spirit also knew how 15 other people's parents died too. It wasn't just me. On another occasion, a demon told him exactly what a priest was wearing, though the clergyman was nowhere near Dr. Gallagher and the possessed person speaking. In a different case, Gallagher was also personally addressed. I had a demon say to me, how's that book going? It won't do any good. That's when I was first thinking of writing a book, so I've had demons come and they said they hate me, but again, I think they hate all Christians. They certainly put more of their energy in saying how they hate the exorcist. That's their real target, not me. He tells another story of a woman in her 30s, a member of a satanist cult who was thinking about leaving which is when the evil spirit took over her body. This woman was in the back of a car once, and I was with the exorcist and she went into a trance, he says. She was unequivocally possessed and I heard her in the backseat of the car. She came out with some vile stuff, leave her alone, you effing priest, that sort of thing. And this went on for about five minutes. Then she came out. She had no remembrance of it at all. He continues, I never went to her exorcisms because I was busy but the priest would invite me to come to the exorcism. I wasn't around here and I'm on the telephone line, this is a landline with the priest at the time and he says, you know Rich, can you make this exorcism session? And then during that phone conversation and this woman was hundreds of miles away, that same voice came in on the phone and it said, leave her alone, leave her alone, you effing priest, she's ours, she's not yours. And I did hear that. That was creepy. He says that despite his work and beliefs regarding demons and possession, he has never felt particularly harassed or discriminated against because Americans tend to be kind of a tolerant pluralistic people. In the larger society, it's not a fringe belief, he says. This is actually a mainstream belief. Opinion polls show that probably about 60% and upwards, probably about 70% of America, believe in the devil and the majority of Americans believe in evil spirits and demons have some ability to directly attack human beings. People will sometimes say to me, how do you feel about talking about a fringe belief? I say it's not a fringe belief, I'm more mainstream than skeptics. The other thing about skeptics is, the extreme skeptics, they've never seen a case. They come up with all kinds of cockamamie theories. They say, well, you know, this person heard Latin babbled as a kid, but it's kind of absurd. The demon is speaking fluent Latin and is understanding fluent Latin and many of these people are not even Catholic, didn't even go to church as a kid. He adds, I understand believing in evil spirits is not a very comforting belief and it has implications that, you know, we don't want to accept. Having said that, and there's plenty of alternate theories, I don't think that those theories usually hold water. And when you've seen some of these cases, you realize that this is clearly not something that could be explained by psychopathology or trickery or anything like that. And despite having witnessed evil and his interactions with demons, he says he's not particularly worried that they'll come after the psychiatrist himself. He's bolstered by his faith and the faith of others. I have a lot of people praying for me, he says. I'm not seeing the devil everywhere, he explains, adding, I always tell people it's an equal mistake to see the devil everywhere as to deny the devil exists. The book Dr. Gallagher was writing was actually released under the title demonic foes, my 25 years as a psychiatrist investigating possessions, diabolic attacks and the paranormal by Harper One Press. I'll place a link to the book in the show notes if you're interested. And if you're interested in knowing more about demons, I narrated the book 20 commonly asked questions about demons by Daniel C. Okapara and I'll place a link to that in the show notes as well. Vengeance. Is he friend or foe? You'll find the answer to this fantastic mystery in Black Dragons. Join us Friday, January 26th for our next Weirdo Watch Party as we watch Black Dragons, presented by Horror Hotel's resident vampire, Lamia Queen of the Dark, bringing us trivia about the film, the actors and all things horror-related in between segments of the show. And then stick around after Black Dragons, because Doc Dredd will be with us with one of his popular and fun movie reviews, giving his opinion of 2023's award-winning horror flick Beneath Us All. The Weirdo Watch Party is always free to watch online with everybody, so grab your popcorn, candy and soda and jump into the fun and even get involved in the live chat as we watch the movie. It's Black Dragons, starring Bella Legosi from 1942, presented by Horror Hotel's Lamia Queen of the Dark, then Doc Dredd's movie review talking about Beneath Us All. Friday, January 26th, starting at 10pm Eastern, 9pm Central, 8pm Mountain, 7pm Pacific. See a few clips from the film and invite your friends to watch along with you on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. We'll see you Friday, January 26th for the Weirdo Watch Party. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar, and if you're a Weirdo and proud of it, you can find Weird Darkness t-shirts, buttons, hoodies, office supplies, clothes for your kids, stickers, magnets, coffee mugs and more in the Weird Darkness store with dozens of designs to choose from and a variety of colors to match your style. Grab some Weirdo merchandise for yourself or maybe as a gift for the Weirdo in your life by clicking on store at WeirdDarkness.com. Different peoples build their identity around different facts. The Italians around their food. The French around La France. The Poles, at least in times gone by, around their Catholicism. The Isle of Man, between Britain and Ireland, meanwhile built its identity at least in early modern times, around a belief in the wonderful phantom dogs, water bulls, and as beach coming will soon demonstrate, merfolk. The rest of Europe got all enlightened, revolutionary and with it, taking the long slippery slide that leads to social democracy, universal but mediocre healthcare, a do-gooding parasitical political class and obscene tax levels. But the Manx pinned their identity instead on pixies and related beliefs that the English were already giving up in the 12th century. Hence, Magical Man, an island famous today for low tax rates, motorcycle races, and ferries. Anyway, to the source. This text appears in a rare book on Man written by an English resident in the island toward the beginning of the 18th century. The book was written as a kind of tour guide but feels miserably as the author keeps getting distracted by the magical beliefs of the locals that he is skeptical about but he cannot resist reporting. Interestingly, he almost admits to being a reluctant convert to the fairy faith, having seen fairy circles and fairy footprints in the snow. The event here dates to the 1650s, about 80 years before the book was published. It is just within living memory then, but deep within the period when Manxman, as our author insists on calling the locals, would have been able to people the past with bold eyewitness events. Beachcombing is going to risk ridicule by suggesting that the following sentence contains the first ever explicit reference to mysterious beasts needing peace and obscurity, a favorite of later 19th century Marvel literature and 20th century cryptozoology. Certainly the account has a strangely rational entree. In the time, said they, that Oliver Cromwell usurped the protectorship of England, 1649-1658 at the broadest, few or no ships resorted to this island of Man, and that uninterruption and solitude of the sea gave the merman and mermaids, who are enemies to any company but those of their own species, frequent opportunities of visiting the shore, where in moonlight nights they have been seen to sit, combing their heads and playing with each other. But as soon as they perceived anybody coming near them, they jumped into the water and were out of sight immediately. But human curiosity naturally got the better of the good mank-spoke. Some people who lived near the coast, having observed their behavior, spread large nets made of small but very strong cords upon the ground and watched at a convenient distance for their approach. The night they had laid this snare, but one happened to come, who was no sooner sat down than those who held the strings of the net, drew them with a sudden jerk and enclosed their prize beyond all possibility of escaping. On opening their net and examining their captive, the largeness of her breasts and the beauty of her complexion it was found to be a female. Nothing, continued my author, i.e. informant, could be more lovely, more exactly formed in all parts above the waist, resembling a complete young woman, but below that all fish, with fins and a huge spreading tail. She was carried to a house and used very tenderly nothing but liberty being denied. But though they set before her the best provision the place afforded, she could not be prevailed on to eat or drink. Neither could they get a word from her, though they knew these creatures were not without the gift of speech, having heard them talk to each other when sitting regaling themselves on the seaside. Beechcombing presumes the mere folk spoke Manx, a language that died out in the 1970s. They kept her in this manner three days, but perceiving she began to look very ill notwithstanding and fearing some calamity would befall the island if they should keep her till she died, they agreed to let her return to the element she liked best, and the third night set open their door, which as soon as she beheld, she raised herself from the place where she was lying and glided with incredible swiftness on her tail to the seaside. They followed at a distance and saw her plunge into the water where she was met by a great number of her own species, one of whom asked what she had observed among the people on earth, nothing very wonderful answered she, but that they are so very ignorant as to throw away the water they boiled their eggs in. This question and her reply they told me was distinctly heard by those who stood on the shore to watch what passed. What is perhaps most interesting is the importance of belief in the creatures for the 18th century Manx, as I not yet attained a thorough knowledge of the superstition of these people nor the passionate fondness for everything that might be termed the wonderful, I was excessively surprised at this account, given with so serious an air and so much and solemnly avarred for truth. Indeed, the locals were not happy at our author's skepticism. I perceived they were not a little disgusted at my want to faith. Beachcombing hates baroque capitals and has normalized the English in this passage. However, he left that final word in its virgin F form. Loomage stories have never done anyone any harm, and Beachcombing hopes to come soon to Barnum's monstrosity and Carmichael's Hebridean mermaids. When Weird Darkness returns, would you be willing to eat your meals off the chest of a corpse in the process taking on their sins as your own? That's the gruesome job of a sin-eater, and there were people willing to do it, even into the 20th century. No matter the time of day or season, sometimes you need to find a way to rid yourself of those ghostly chills that bring raised hairs and goose bumps to your skin. Other times, you're looking for those ghostly chills. Either way, it sounds like you need a mug of Weird Dark Roast coffee. Weird Dark Roast coffee has deep notes of cocoa, caramel, and a touch of sinister sweetness that'll send shivers down your taste buds. This is an exclusive coffee that I selected specifically for you, my Weirdo family. Weird Dark Roast is not available in stores, coffee houses, mad scientist labs, or even the dark web, but you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. Weird Dark Roast coffee. Fresh roasted to order so it's as fresh as it can be when it lands on your doorstep and knocks three times. Grab yours now at Weird Darkness.com slash coffee. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. Weird Dark Roast coffee does not actually knock on your door because it doesn't have arms or hands, so if a hear knocks at the door and no one answers when you ask who it is, it's probably paranormal and you should just leave the door shut and locked. I'm Darren Marlar, welcome back to Weird Darkness. You can get more Weird Darkness seven days a week through the Weird Darkness podcast, which you can find wherever you listen to podcasts or visit WeirdDarkness.com slash listen. Dying before you've had a chance to be absolved of your sins is a huge predicament to find yourself in. But once you're dead, there's no going back as far as most people are concerned anyway. How then does a spirit go about acquiring a get-out-of-hell-free card? In 18th and 19th century Scotland and Wales, the doorway to deliverance came by way of Catholic sin-eaters. The term is as literal as it is figurative. Sin-eaters were tasked with actually eating a meal off a corpse's chest. In doing so, they symbolically consumed the sins of the deceased, thereby taking them on themselves. However, rather than being seen as a selfless and heroic act, eating someone's sins was looked upon with horror and the sin-eater was basically ostracized, at least until they were needed again, for being a rancid, crime-accumulating plague. Death, as everyone knows, is a profitable industry that says reliably eternal as, well, death itself. So is the Church, of course, but back in the day, the latter was really serious about eliminating industry competition. As OMG Facts explains it, the Roman Catholic Church viewed sin-eaters as competition, an obstacle to its efforts to establish a monopoly on the sin-absolving industry. That meant sin-eaters had to avoid Church authorities at all costs or face execution. It didn't stop there either. Authorities apparently employed fascist-like techniques for ensuring 100% domination in the form of doling out harsh punishments to families who sought the services of sin-eaters. Fortunately, however, these repercussions were hard to enforce as sin-eating ceremonies were often performed clandestinely under the radar. Even though sin-eaters were looked upon with abject horror, they still provided a valuable service, and people knew it. That's why, as WikiSource explains it, each village had its own official sin-eater to whom notice was given as soon as death occurred. He at once went to the house and there, a stool being brought, he sat down in front of the door. All of this had to be done right under the nose of the execution-happy church, of course, so being on call also meant potentially risking one's own hide for some quick cash. In addition to alcohol, typically served in the form of wine or brown ale, the sin-eater was required to consume funeral biscuits or death cakes, which were basically just exalted terms for the crusts of bread. As WikiSource describes it, the sin-eater was taken into the death chamber and a piece of bread and possibly cheese was placed on the breast of the corpse by a relative, usually a woman. It was afterwards handed to the sin-eater who ate it in the presence of the dead. He was then handed his fee and at once hustled and thrust out of the house amid execrations and a shower of sticks, cinders, or whatever other missiles were handy. At other times, the woman of the house would pour out a glass of wine for the sin-eater and hand it to him across the coffin with a funeral biscuit. The bottom line, some sin-eaters were treated better than others and some, albeit very few, even managed to get themselves a full meal. But all ended their workdays newly burdened with the crimes of the dead. Forget using a piece of toast to mop up some egg. Using a sin-eater to mop up someone's sins was infinitely more effective. As Atlas Obscura puts it, the family who hired the sin-eater believed that the bread literally soaked up their loved one's sins. Once it had been eaten, all the missed deeds were passed on to the hired hand. The sin-eater's own soul was heavy with the ill deeds of countless men and women from his village or town. Usually, the only people who would dare risk their immortal souls during such a religious era were the very poor. To those who believed in the powers of this ritual, sin-eaters were doing a necessary but distasteful job, literally becoming a bit more evil as they performed their task. So much for the verse, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who was rich to enter the kingdom of God. The sin-eater was basically the psychic toilet of the town. His duty was to take on and contain the filthy sins of others. However, unlike today's sanitation workers, who tend to make pretty decent wages, sin-eaters received almost nothing for their trouble. As OMG Facts puts it, the sin-eater served a dual purpose. He saved the departed from hell, but also prevented them from wandering the earth as ghosts. In other words, he performed a service for both the living and the dead, which is a pretty big client base. Considering that, it's even more outrageous that he got paid squat to do it, about half a shilling per job, which is the equivalent of a couple of dollars by today's standards. At best, in other words, the sin-eater got a free meal out of the whole thing and maybe a free night of drunkenness too, which he probably sorely needed, considering the increasingly heavy psychological burden he was carrying. The last known official sin-eater, Richard Monslow of Shropshire died and was buried in semi-disgrace in 1906, which still seems like a fairly contemporary era by sin-eating standards. However, Monslow's legacy, along with the merit of being a sin-eater in general, has since been more or less redeemed. In 2010, the BBC reported that Shropshire had raised £1,000 or about $1,280 to restore the grave of Monslow. A service was performed over the burial spot, though the Rev. Norman Morris who officiated also pointed out that he had no desire to reinstate the ritual that went with it. Sin-eating didn't just clear a soul for take-off into heaven. It also prevented the soul from becoming an eternally earth-bound ghost. As weak and weird was it, it was said that with the deceased's sins absorbed by the sin-eater, they had no reason to rise from the grave and wander the earth in discontent. For given and resting peacefully, they could remain in the grave to the ease of all those left behind. 1. Remain in the grave till judgment day or ascend outright. Bare choice. But since the sin-eater's much feared and unransomable soul was left to wander in the wilderness in its free time, it essentially ended up performing the function of a wayward ghost anyway. Have you ever seen a ghost or had a paranormal experience at home? While it might seem as though only a small minority of people would say yes to this question, the actual number appears to be a lot higher than you might expect. According to a recent survey of 2,000 Brits, 1 in 5 believe they're home to be haunted, while 1 in 20 believe that there is a ghostly presence at their workplace. Almost 70% of respondents admitted to believing that ghosts exist. Almost 40% maintained that they'd actually experienced something paranormal firsthand. Of those 40%, around half believed that the presence was benevolent. Geographically, the poll revealed that Londoners were the most likely to believe in the paranormal, with 75% claiming that ghosts exist, while in Edinburgh that figure dropped to 47%. 5% of respondents even admitted to moving to another house to escape a resident spook. I've always found belief in the supernatural interesting, and it's intriguing that so many Brits are believers, with many claiming to have their own experiences, said CJ Tudor, author and executive producer of the Paramount Plus TV show The Burning Girls. He continued saying, The idea of things we don't understand, or there being something other than this world, will always fascinate people and draw them into stories which examine those beliefs. And while the UK believes that they're living in haunted houses, Americans want to buy them. Americans say yes, they would buy a haunted house. Forbes reports that per a new survey out from Zillow, 67% to potential homebuyers in America would purchase a supposedly spooky residence if the home otherwise checked all their boxes, like having a swimming pool or hefty backyard, sitting in an ideal location, or being more affordable than similar homes on the market. The results of the poll conducted among more than 900 recent homeowners and nearly a thousand potential buyers underscores today's tough housing market. The combination of high prices for homes limited inventory and rising interest rates is creating a witch's brew of trouble for would-be homeowners, said Zillow. When balancing so many priorities in an inventory-starved market, avoiding ghosts and ghouls doesn't always make the cut. Some interested parties are braver than others. The Zillow poll found 29% of respondents would actually be more likely to scoop up a place if it was said to be haunted. The Washington Post details the challenges that real estate agents can have in showing and selling reportedly phantom-filled abodes, including laws in some states that require sellers to disclose a home's history to prospects, including if gruesome crimes were committed there in the past. Restless spirits may not actually materialize in the halls, but potential buyers get a bad vibe and they'll walk away spooked nonetheless. You can follow Weird Darkness on social media by visiting the Contact social page on the website. And please tell others about Weird Darkness who love the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do. Doing that helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. If you'd like to be a part of the show, you can send in your own paranormal experiences by clicking on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com. You can also email me anytime at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes, which I'll upload to the Weird Darkness website immediately after tonight's show is ended. Psychiatrist says demonic possession is real is by Sheila Flynn for Daily Mail. Catching Mermaids on Man is from Beachcombing's Bizarre History blog. Would you become a sin-eater is by Elisa A. Flowers for Ranker. Ghostly Homes and Ghost Loving Buyers is by Jen Gidman for a newser and T.K. Randall for unexplained mysteries. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. Another we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Matthew 6, Verse 25 Therefore I tell you do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food and the body more important than clothes? And a final thought. The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one. John C. Maxwell. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Hey Weirdos, keep listening. Hour 2 of the Weird Darkness radio show is coming up. The first letter seemed harmless enough. Possibly even just the result of a mistaken delivery. The second one drew concern. And paired with the unexplained visions of something darkly unsettling, Sam Morris finally caves. The everyman safe world he lives in is about to take a drastic and dark turn. He quickly falls into a world of insanity, the morbid and the macabre. He is drawn into a darkness that is just as deadly as it is mysterious, a darkness that dwells in a house that could only be conjured up by a mad brain. It is a house that calls you, a house that haunts you with its ghosts. They'll scratch and claw through your fragile hide, bringing madness bubbling to the surface. Come see the ghosts for yourself if you dare. Weird Darkness Publishing presents of A Mad Brain by Scott Donnelly. Now available on paperback, ebook and audiobook versions through Amazon and WeirdDarkness.com. I was a babysitter in my teens and I'd often stay up until parents came home, which was usually from around 11 p.m. even up to 4 a.m. I'd stay up and watch TV, and oftentimes that'd be local channels, which get totally weird in the tiny hours. They'd basically put interstitial things in instead of commercials, bits of music videos or weird local access stuff. Now the strongest channel was channel 8, and so if your tuner was crap, you'd pick up ghosts of it on channels 9 and 7, though thankfully channel 7 never had much on it and 9 was the same as 10, so you'd never really notice or have to worry about it. I learned channel 9 wasn't just 10 stretched across two frequencies, but was actually a mirror of it, so that 9 would go offline at about midnight while 10 kept airing. So one night, the kids are in bed, I'm sitting in the living room quietly watching whatever's on channel 9, and the program finally ends. But instead of it just cutting to black or loud beeping on a blue background like the higher channels did when they went offline, it cut to fuzz. But superimposed onto this fuzz was a skeletal face that kept shaking back and forth like a no gesture. There was no audio, just the face as it shook back and forth with no noise. It was frightening. So I scrambled to the TV to change it back to literally any other channel, and by sheer bad luck, I chose to click it down to 8. Something had glitched on channel 8's broadcast wherein a woman with her hair pulled back and very heavy smoky makeup was being interviewed, but the footage was looping about four frames over and over and over, going and, and, and, and, and, and in the middle of her turning her head. She wasn't a skeleton, she just had an expression showing her teeth and such heavy makeup that the ghost of it on channel 9 made her look like a skeletal face. Though seeing it, it was still horrifying in a way I can't explain. Then the channel I was on let out a loud piercing beep, and all the power went off. The TV blinked off, the kitchen lights turned off, everything. Even the clocks and the microwave, the fridge, everything. You could hear the electricity dissipate in a few noises, it all went down. The house had very big windows, so as soon as my vision adjusted, I realized that the power was completely gone for miles around. No street lights, no cars, absolutely nothing. The power was entirely off for another hour, until I saw lights from the parent's car turning into the driveway, which was the first artificial light I had seen for an entire hour. They came in and were glad everyone was okay. There had been a fire at the power station that, incidentally, was right beside the broadcasting station. I'm Darren Marlar, and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar, and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved, and unexplained. Coming up this hour, investigators noted the hair on the alleged victim's arms was singed and the skin burned. The grass where he claimed to have had an encounter was also scorched. Did this scout master and the boys with him truly experience a real UFO sighting in 1952, or was it all a hoax? Is the Thunderbird real or a myth? Most would say it is a myth, or if it was real, it's now extinct. But then, how do you explain sightings of this massive airborne creature as recently as 2018? But first, sometimes the darkness of night can hide brightening secrets, especially if you are alone. We begin there. If you're new here, welcome to the show. And if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen in with you. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to visit WeirdDarkness.com and click on Contact Social to follow Weird Darkness on social media. And also on the website, you can find the daily Weird Darkness podcast, which comes out seven days per week. You can enter monthly contests, find Weird Darkness merchandise, and more. You can even send in your own true story of something paranormal that has happened to you or someone you know. You can find it all at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. Some people like to rise early in the morning, watch the sunrise, and greet the day head-on with a hopeful attitude. Others prefer to stay awake long into the night, bask in the silence of a sleeping world, and only rest when the first rays of sunshine peek over the horizon. But sometimes, the darkness of night can hide frightening secrets. The Night Owls of Reddit congregated to share their scariest late night experiences, like the one we heard at the beginning of this episode. And some may make you reconsider pulling that all-nighter while the rest of the house is lost in Dreamland. From Redditor PennyPonyBoy Got a house share going on right now, and every one of the lads has heard a female voice in a particular hall. Thing is, none of us has brought a girl home in months. We've all just assumed one of us have got lucky. We've taken the cats to bed, so it can't be them, and our neighbors don't get back until January. We're not as afraid of her as we once were, but there is definitely a voice coming from somewhere in the house. And we can all agree she starts by humming, although no one has made out many of the words. I've heard her four times now, and I'm 90% sure she's not speaking Portuguese, English, or Spanish. From Redditor Beboopadoop I was sitting in the living room, facing the stairs to my bedroom. I was watching a movie and saw legs coming down the stairs with black suit pants and really shiny black shoes. They stopped coming down the stairs and all I could see was up to their knees. They turned toward me for a few seconds and then slowly went back up the stairs. I was home alone with my three dogs. The next morning I checked the cameras to make sure I didn't dream it, and you can see myself and my three dogs staring at the stairs as the legs come down the stairs and then go back up. From Redditor Heckingweeb Will you please take this bag off my head? says a voice in the corner of my room at about 2am. I'm alone on the third floor of my grandmother's mansion, save for her a sleep on the first floor. In the corner of my room I know that there is a ventriloquist dummy in a bag that I covered because of how creepy it looks. I just went back to bed. From another Redditor Back in high school I was watching a movie on the couch with my dad's laptop. Parents, little brother and dog were asleep. Then there was this noise. It was so loud. It sounded like someone threw a chair against a wall in the basement. No one woke up. I grabbed a bat, went downstairs and not a single thing was out of place. Spooked me good. From Redditor Activated 27 I used to share a room with my little sister. It was a huge room and it was really dark and late like 2am. At some point I hear someone clap their hands just once. I froze but didn't do anything. Then all of a sudden I feel two hands pushing down on my feet. I ran out of the room all the way to my parents' room downstairs. We came back and my sister was sleeping. She wouldn't have done that anyway and there was nobody in the room but us. I still can't comprehend. From Redditor Eagleman 1776 I live out in the woods and I leave my window open because my room is small and I produce enough heat to overheat my room. I didn't realize this was the perfect setup to get the crap scared out of me until it happened. I was texting a fellow night owl buddy of mine when I heard the loudest, most terrifying screaming of my life. Being an armed citizen I went for my peace, pointed at the window and almost did a blind fire at someone or something I didn't know like a dumbass. I ended up calling the guy I was texting and he rolled up 20 minutes later. We started searching the area together, back to back practically. When we got about a hundred yards away from the back of my house we heard giggling, like a child's giggling. You'd better bet we ran back inside. It's been about three months now. We do not bring it up with each other unless one of us is extremely high. From Redditor Cat220022 I was on Reddit at about 3.30 am just like now and I heard the sound of something falling downstairs. Now this happens sometimes, you know, weird house sounds so I ignored it. About 10 minutes later I heard a similar sound and now I actually started getting scared. Now I didn't want to wake my parents who sleep a floor above me because of my paranoid mind so my stupid brain decided to just take a weapon, a pretty big book, and go downstairs. Before I was even on the stairs I heard my dog who sleeps downstairs in a crate bark pretty loudly. By this time my heart was racing really fast because if my dog barks she probably sees a person or something move. I went even further downstairs as slowly as possible trying not to make any sounds. Then I was at the door that separates the stairwell from the main room. At this exact time I heard another weird sound, but now it sounded more like little clicks hitting the ground. This scared me so much that I had to stand still for a minute or so. I was trying to be the hero so I just closed my eyes and barged in the room with a huge book in front of my head and started screaming. Then I heard my dog bark weirdly right in front of me even though her crate is in another part of the room. After about 10 seconds I opened my eyes and I slowly realized it was my dog making all the sounds. So it turned out her crate wasn't closed properly and she was just roaming around the house and my stupid butt head thought it was an intruder. I'm also very stupid for trying to get rid of the intruder myself. I thought very stupid after this and I just put the dog in her crate and went to bed. I've had a creepy experience with the TV as a kid. I was watching some cartoons in the living room by myself and the screen abruptly turned to black and there was an image of some creepy puppet face like Jigsaw. No talking, just creepy blank stairs. I tried to convince myself I was probably just a kid with an overactive imagination, but I don't know why in the hell I'd randomly believe I saw that. From another editor, once the bedroom door slammed real hard, I sat up in seconds just like they do in the movies when they have a nightmare and I kept staring at the bedroom door but the door was closed. I went on and opened the door as I was 100% sure I had heard it slam. When I opened it, the light was on in the hallway and I know for certain I always shut the light off before going to bed. I checked on our main door to make sure no one had broken in and saw through the spyhole that the lights in the apartment's hall were on. They are sensor ones, those that are automatically turned on when someone passes by and we're the only ones living on the highest floor. Weirdly enough, my wife hadn't heard a thing. I was scared as heck that night. Didn't get no sleep. From Redditor, Valdox666. Was in total dark watching a movie and saw a shadowy outline with red eyes standing outside my glass door slash wall when lightning struck. I swear I almost went and grabbed one of my pieces. From Redditor, Melston9380. I live in the middle of nowhere. One night while I was awake and everything was completely black, I saw three flashes. No sound. About two minutes later, I heard two large booms like sonic booms and nothing else. I looked all over and the next day could not find any reason for either. From Redditor, currently deep frying. I couldn't sleep one night and out of nowhere I heard a really loud dog howl for a solid 10 seconds downstairs. I live alone and don't own a pet. From Redditor, RBF70. My parents house is haunted. As a child, I'd wake up to the TV being too loud. I'd go to the living room to tell my parents it was loud and the TV suddenly turned off while my parents were in bed. This happened a lot. In the basement we had a room with a stereo, TV, pool table, and pinball machine. I woke up to people laughing and music. I went downstairs and it was a party with adults wearing masks. Again, my parents were in bed. Years later, my nephew got hold of my camera and started taking pictures in the living room. In one photo, there she was. She was blurry with long dark blonde hair and a green nightgown. We couldn't see a face. In my teen years, when I'd wake up during the night and go get a drink, I'd see her in the living room and walk through her and it'd be so cold all through me. She was harmless, but still. From Redditor, JXWTF585. I suffer from night terrors and sleep paralysis every once in a while. One time I laid in bed for what felt like forever, trying to fall asleep, when I began to hear this mild, low growl, like a jaguar's. I opened my eyes and was able to see a lump inside my wall and it was moving around. Every time it moved, there was a scratching and cracking. A few other times I'd wake up from sleep unable to move and there'd be a figure at the foot of my bed mumbling to me. Couldn't make out if it was male or female, but my twin perished in the womb, so I comforted myself by believing it was him visiting me. From Redditor, KonigRomanNumeral7. Once, while I still lived with my mom, I was up late putting in job applications and drawing. I heard what sounded like sobbing and stopped what I was doing. I looked over to my younger sister, saw she was passed out and got slightly unnerved because the sobbing just continued, left my room to investigate and ran into my older sister who was also hearing the noise. We checked on our mom and stepdad, sound asleep, looked in our brother's room where the noise seemed to be coming from, he wasn't in there, and truly freaked out. So we went downstairs to see if maybe our brother had wandered off to cry and the noise had somehow carried through the air vents to his room, found him asleep on the living room couch, saw the TV was off, in fact all entertainment electronics were turned off, and checked the time, 306am. We didn't sleep the rest of the night and the sobbing sound continued until about 5am from Redditor Leakey Eddy. I used to live out in the country at the end of a dirt road south of Charleston, South Carolina. Right by my house was a historical marker for the old Belvedere school. More than once I was woken up by a little girl's voice saying hi. From a Redditor, a couple of years ago I stayed home with our dog while my parents went on a little trip. At about 3am the dog woke up and walked to the edge of the bed, he's 13 pounds, and started growling aggressively. There were a couple of lights on but the house was mainly dark. He jumped off the bed and walked to the doorway and growled like I'd never heard him do before. I grabbed a billy bat, my dad was a cop, and instantly was ready to mess somebody up. I turned on every light, checked every door slash window slash room, and there was nothing. From Redditor Trey Thomas Not too long ago, before we moved out of our previous house, one night I was drunk and passed out on the couch downstairs. When I woke up the next day, my son's baby bottle rack and everything on it was all over the kitchen floor, and the bar stool from the kitchen was sitting next to the couch I was sleeping on. I know for a 100% fact it was not me. Are you a member of the Darkness Syndicate? The Darkness Syndicate is a private membership where you receive commercial-free episodes of the Weird Darkness podcast and radio show. Behind the scenes, video updates about future projects and events I'm working on. You can share your own opinions on ideas to help me decide upon Weird Darkness contests and events. You can hear audiobooks I'm narrating before even the publishers or authors get to hear them. You also receive bonus audio of other projects I'm working on outside of Weird Darkness. You get all of these benefits and more, starting at only $5 per month. Join the Weird Darkness Syndicate at WeirdDarkness.com slash syndicate. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash syndicate. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar. You can stay up to date on everything Weird Darkness and also maybe win some cool prizes at the same time by signing up for my email newsletter. It's free, and I often draw names at random to win cool, creepy prizes from there. Sign up for the Weird Darkness newsletter for free at WeirdDarkness.com On a humid August night in 1952, scoutmaster D.S. Sonny Desvergers emerged burned and barely coherent from a dense palmetto grove in the South Florida Everglades. He claimed he had encountered an unidentified flying object that discharged a fireball which left him singed and barely able to see. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, chief UFO investigator for the U.S. Air Force, would later label the event the best hoax in UFO history. But the Desvergers incident remains one of the most intriguing cases from Project Blue Book. The Air Force has now declassified investigations into UFOs because it wasn't just a sighting incident but one involving a purported attack. To this day, it's still unsolved. A series of investigations conducted by the U.S. Air Force between 1952 and 1969, Project Blue Book was tasked with scientifically analyzing UFO-related incidents to determine whether they were a threat to national security. Some say the project was commissioned to find rational explanations for these mysterious phenomena to help quell a growing Cold War-era public hysteria over unidentified objects in the sky. UFO fever reached such intensity that in April 1952, four months before the Desvergers incident, Life Magazine published a story called Have We Visitors From Space? As Ruppelt would later chronicle, it is 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, which I will link to in the show notes. On the evening of August 19, 1952, hardware store clerk and scout master Desvergers, 30, was driving a group of Boy Scouts home when he saw a bright light flash over military trail near West Palm Beach, Florida. Thinking it may be a downed plane or car accident, Desvergers pulled onto the shoulder of the highway so he could take a closer look. Armed with a machete and flashlights, he entered the Palmetto Grove near where he saw the lights, leaving the three boys in the vehicle with instructions to alert the residents of a nearby farmhouse if he did not return in 15 minutes. According to declassified documents, after about four minutes of hacking through the bush, Desvergers entered a clearing in the grove. The first thing he described was an acute, nauseating smell and then the feeling of somebody or something watching him. He next experienced a sensation of oven-like heat coming from above. Looking up, Desvergers said, he could not see any stars as he was standing beneath a hovering object. The object was circular, Desvergers recounted, dull black with no seams, about 30 feet in diameter with a height of 10 feet, a convex dome atop it, and the bottom edge lit with a phosphorescent glow. What happened next is what separates Desvergers' encounter from thousands of other UFO sightings. As he slowly moved backward, he recalled, he heard a noise like metal against metal, like a hatch opening, after which a red flare-like light came from the side of the object and slowly moved toward him. Desvergers constantly referred to it as a ship when recounting the tale to the authorities. As he placed his hands over his face, fists closed, hand over each eye, the red ball of light grew into a red mist engulfing him. It was then, he recounted, that he lost consciousness. When he awoke, Desvergers said, he was leaning against a tree but could not see properly as his eyes burned. Scrambling back through the palmettoes, his eyesight slowly returning to normal, he burst incoherent out onto the highway where he was met by the boys and local authorities. The three scouts, Bobby Ruffing, 12, David Rowan, 11, and Chuck Stevens, 10, remained in the car after Desvergers entered the grove. Later, in recounting what he witnessed to authorities, Ruffing said he initially saw a semi-circle of white lights descending into the trees. Ruffing also recounted seeing a red light through the brush, as did Rowan and Stevens, who told of also seeing Desvergers's flashlight through the trees before going dark. That's when the scouts headed to the nearby farmhouse for help. A Palm Beach County deputy and Lake Worth Constable responded to the farmer's call for assistance. Returning to the site of the abandoned vehicle almost an hour after Desvergers first said he saw the lights, the officers and scouts witnessed the scoutmaster emerge from the Palmetto's, waving his machete and babbling incoherently. In all my 19 years of law enforcement work, I've never seen anyone as terrified as he was, the deputy is recorded as saying in Ruppelt's investigation. Back at the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, Desvergers and the boys underwent questioning. Officers noted that the hair on Desvergers' forearms was singed and the skin burned. They also noted three tiny burn holes in the bill of the scoutmaster's cap. Following procedure, the local authorities contacted relevant agencies with the incident report, which eventually made its way to Blue Book Chief Ruppelt. He later described the case as one of the weirdest UFO reports that I came up against. Arriving in Florida soon after the encounter, Ruppelt and his team began their investigation, obtaining statements from all parties involved and taking grass and soil specimens from the clearing in which Desvergers said the encounter took place. The latter evidence would prove to be the most inexplicable piece of the encounter puzzle. The fact that they documented and took samples at all is lucky, and one of the most interesting aspects of this case says Jeffrey Wilson, a private industry analyst who examines noteworthy ground phenomenon. As the co-founder of the Independent Crop Circle Researchers Association, ICCRA, Wilson investigates global circle phenomena. Though different to the crop circles he examines today, aspects of the Desvergers incident led him to further investigate. As the grass specimens were being tested, Desvergers' character would come under intense scrutiny, with authorities noting his other than honorable discharge from the U.S. Marines due to theft of a car, and what Florida locals would describe as his ability to tell tall tales. But when Ruppelt first interviewed Desvergers, he described the Scoutmaster as likable, willing to cooperate and displaying the immediate impression he was telling the truth. Taking into account the background checks on Desvergers, along with a return visit to the encounter site where he determined the Boy Scouts could not have witnessed Desvergers and the mysterious red light in the Grove due to their distance and denseness of the foliage, Rupert would later call the entire event a hoax. Desvergers was painted as an opportunist and media-hungry con man who sold his story to the American Weekly newspaper the following year. Though Ruppelt would come to believe the tale was fabricated and he and his team would come up with dozens of ways the event could have been staged, they never managed to prove the incident was in fact a hoax. Their biggest stumbling block? The grass samples taken at the site. After samples from the Florida Clearing were sent to Battelle Memorial Institute under contract with the USAF to provide scientific support to Project Blue Book, agronomists made some interesting findings. Though the soil remained consistent, the root structure of the plants in question were charred black and the lower leaves had deteriorated as if by heat. The only way the lab could come close to duplicating the effect was to place live clumps of grass in a pan of sandy soil and heat it about 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Though Wilson had witnessed singed grass in his investigations into ground phenomenon, it had always been an occurrence above the soil, never the roots as the lab findings in the desverges case indicate. Wilson says this is the only recorded example of such findings of which he is aware. I'll place a link to the photos of those examples in the show notes. With those associated with the case no longer able to comment or add context, desvergers and Ruppelt have both since died, the case remains unexplained. But according to Wilson, something unusual happened to that guy and the physical evidence backed him up. That's why I put the effort into checking this out. Why would you go to the trouble of faking something like this? Why and how would he stage that? It doesn't make any sense. If you like what you're hearing in Weird Darkness and you'd like to hear even more, you can check out the free audiobooks that I've narrated at WeirdDarkness.com. Coming up, is the Thunderbird real or a myth? Most would say it's a myth, or if it was real, it's now extinct. But then, how do you explain sightings of the massive airborne creature as recently as 2018? If you or someone you know is struggling with depression, dark thoughts or addiction, please visit the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. There, I've gathered numerous resources to find hope and solutions. For those suffering from thoughts of suicide or self-harm, there's the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, as well as the Crisis Text Line. Both have trained counselors at all hours to help those in need, and the page even includes text numbers for those in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, and Ireland. Those struggling with depression can get help through the Seven Cups website and app, and there's information for anyone to read more about what depression truly is and how to identify it through our friends at ifred.org. There are resources for those who battle addictions, be it drugs, alcohol, or self-destructive behavior, along with help for those related to addicts. The page has links to help you find a therapist or counselor, to find help for those who have a family member with Alzheimer's or dementia, help for those in a crisis pregnancy and more. These resources are always there when you or someone you love needs them on the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. Is the Thunderbird Real or Myth? A gigantic bird was sighted in Alaska in January 2018 by a woman driving, having a wingspan nearly as wide as the road, and in Pennsylvania on May 26, 2013, when two friends were walking through the woods near Brynathan Castle and were startled by something extraordinary. It was extremely loud and I glanced up and saw a huge black bird, Anthony said in his report. It was sitting above us and we seemed to startle it. It flew about 100 feet to a nearby branch. Its wingspan was at least 10 feet and judging how far it was, it looked to be around 4 feet tall. This was far from the first sighting of such a creature in Pennsylvania. On the evening of Tuesday, September 25, 2001, a 19-year-old claimed to have seen an enormous winged creature flying over Route 119 in South Greensburg, Pennsylvania. The witness's attention was drawn to the sky by a sound that resembled flags flapping in a thunderstorm. Looking up, the witness saw what appeared to be a bird that had a wingspan of an estimated 10-15 feet and a head about 3 feet long. This was just one more sighting of an incredible creature, most often considered a myth known as the Thunderbird. Sightings of these gigantic birds, apparently unknown to science, go back hundreds of years and are a part of many Native American legends and traditions. They have been even blamed for abductions or attempted abductions of small children. The South Greensburg witness told researcher Dennis Smeltzer that the huge black or grayish-brown bird passed overhead at about 50 to 60 feet. I wouldn't say it was flapping its wings gracefully, the witness told Smeltzer, but almost horrifically flapping its wings very slowly, then gliding above the passing big rig trucks. The witness observed the creature for about 90 seconds, even seeing land on the branches of a dead tree which nearly broke under its great weight. Unfortunately, no other witnesses saw the bird on this date, and no tangible evidence could be found for the bird after the sight was searched. What makes this story more interesting, however, even plausible is that other sightings of similar description were reported in Pennsylvania in June and July 2001. On June 13, a resident of Greenville, Pennsylvania was startled by the great size of the grayish-black creature seen soaring overhead, at first thinking it was a small airplane or ultralight aircraft. This witness observed the bird for at least 20 minutes, clearly saying it is fully feathered body and confidently estimating its wingspan to be about 15 feet and its body length at about 5 feet. This bird too was seen to perch on a tree for at least 15 minutes before taking to air again and flying off toward the south. A neighbor of this witness claimed to have seen the creature the next day, describing it as the biggest bird I ever saw. Less than a month later, on July 6, a witness in Erie County, Pennsylvania reported a very similar sighting. According to an item in Forty and Times Magazine, again the creature's wingspan was estimated to be 15 to 17 feet and was described as dark gray with little or no neck and a circle of black under its head. Its beak was very thin and long, about a foot in length. These were not the first sightings of thunderbirds in Pennsylvania and if these reports are accurate, these birds are the largest flying creatures not yet identified by science. By comparison, the largest known bird is the wandering albatross with a wingspan of up to 12 feet. The largest predatory birds, which the thunderbird is most often likened to, are the Andean condor, 10.5 foot wingspan, and the California condor, 10 foot wingspan. The legend of the thunderbird reaches back hundreds of years as part of the mythology of several Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest and the Great Lakes region. It might have remained strictly a part of those cultures had not the great wind creature been seen countless times by the white man over the centuries. According to the Native American myths, the giant thunderbird could shoot lightning from its eyes and its wings were so enormous that they created peels of thunder when they flapped. Many tales of the thunderbird are more recent than the Native American legends. The animals almost always listed in the catalogs of cryptozoologists' mysterious creatures. And although the thunderbird has been cited on numerous occasions, a credible photograph or video of one has never been produced, and a specimen has never been killed or captured, except perhaps once. A tale comes out of the Arizona Territory Desert about two cowboys who encountered the giant flying creature in 1890. As cowboys are wont to do, they took careful aim with their rifles at the amazing creature and blasted it from the sky. According to an article in the April 26, 1890 edition of the Tombstone Epigraph, the cowboys and their horses dragged the lifeless monster into town where its wingspan was measured at an incredible 190 feet and its body measured at 92 feet long. It was described as having no feathers but a smooth skin and wings composed of a thick and nearly transparent membrane. Clearly, their description more readily resembles a pteranodon, pterosaur or pterodactyl than a large bird. Most paranormal researchers consider this story to be a good example of Old West creative writing on the part of the newspaper. But there may be a hint of truth in it. In 1970, a man named Harry McClure claimed that he knew one of the cowboys when he was a small boy. The real story, as the cowboy told the youth, was that the creature they shot had a wingspan of 20 to 30 feet. They did not kill the Thunderbird, however, and returned to town only with their fantastic story. One more intriguing element to this anecdote is that a photo was supposedly taken of the great creature, held up with its wings, spread by several townspeople. Remarkably, many people recall seeing this photograph printed in Fate, National Geographic or Grit Magazine or in some book about the Old West, but as yet this photo has not surfaced. In his book Unexplained, which I will place a link to in the show notes, Jerome Clark lists many more sightings, including in the early 1940s, writer Robert R. Lyman spotted a Thunderbird sitting on a road near Towersport, Pennsylvania. It soon took to the sky, spreading its 20-foot wingspan. In 1969, the wife of a Clinton County Pennsylvania sheriff saw an enormous bird over Little Pine Creek. She said its wingspan appeared to be about as long as the creek was wide, about 75 feet. In 1970, several people saw the gigantic bird soaring toward Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. It was dark-colored, and its wings spread was almost like that of an airplane. In 1948, several witnesses along the Illinois-Missouri border cited a condor-like bird about the size of a Piper Club airplane. The most terrifying story about giant birds is that they occasionally attempt to carry away small animals and even children. This item appeared in the July 28, 1977 edition of the Boston Evening Globe from the United Press International, Carried Off. Ten-year-old Marlon Lowe and his mother, Mrs. Ruth Lowe, claim that one of two large black birds with eight-foot wingspans tried to carry Marlon off in its claws Monday evening in Lawndale, Illinois. Although several bird experts say that no bird native to Illinois could lift 70-pound Marlon, Mrs. Lowe says that Marlon was carried 20 feet before the bird dropped him when he struck the bird with his hand. Other abduction stories include that of a 42-pound five-year-old girl named Svanhilde Hansen, who in June 1932 was carried away by a huge eagle from her parents' farm in Leica, Norway. The giant bird carried her for more than a mile, the report stated, after which it dropped her unharmed on a high mountain ledge. In 1838, another five-year-old girl was snatched from the slope of the Swiss Alps, where she was playing, by an eagle that carried the child to its nest. Unfortunately, the girl did not survive that ordeal and her badly mutilated body was discovered some two months later by a shepherd. The eagle's nest, subsequently found, was said to contain several eagles surrounding heaps of goat and sheep bones. a lot of resistance, but his dedicated focus on the minds and motives of serial murderers created what we know today as criminal profiling. Plus, an atheist tells his story about being possessed by demons, or maybe he wasn't. Those stories in the sudden death overtime content in the podcast version of tonight's show. You can follow Weird Darkness on social media by visiting the Contact social page on the website, and if you'd like to be a part of the show, you can send in your own paranormal experiences by clicking on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com. You can also email me anytime at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes, which I will upload to the Weird Darkness website immediately after tonight's show has ended. You'll never guess what happened while you were asleep is by Sarah Blumert for Graveyard Shift. The Scouts and the UFO is by Colin Bertram for History, and The Giant Thunderbird Lives is by Stephen Wagner for Live About. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. 1st Timothy 6, Verse 17. Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. And a final thought, happiness doesn't result from what we get, but from what we give. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Don't go anywhere weirdos because sudden death over time is up next. The song White Christmas used to be one of my favorite holiday tunes, until the year of the ice storm. 1 December Robin and I heard a loud crash outside. Not only did the ice cause a large tree to fall onto our house, but it ripped out the power lines. We were suddenly in sub-freezing temperatures with Jack Frost nipping at our noses thanks to zero heat or electricity. Talk about baby it's cold outside. If this happened today, I'd be hooking up my Patriot Power Generator 2000X. This solar powered monster can power your lights, TV, medical equipment, like my CPAP machine, even keep your refrigerator running and possibly root all snows, although I can't vouch for that last one. Plus, it's expandable and comes with a free solar panel so you can begin using it immediately. And because it's solar and portable, you can use it indoors without having to worry about deadly carbon monoxide fumes and you don't have to spend money on gasoline to power it, because solar power is free. That's something even Ebenezer Scrooge could smile at. 4Patriots.com has a ton of great gift ideas and they're always offering special deals, and we've set up a special page for weirdos just for that purpose. Visit 4Patriots.com slash weird. That's the number 4 Patriots.com slash weird. Just like the holidays though, these deals never last long, so you'll want to check this daily to see what the latest special deals are. That's 4Patriots.com slash weird. Mapping the minds of killers is no small undertaking. Robert Rassler was the man who developed psychological profiling at the FBI Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Along with his colleague John Douglas, he was involved in some of the highest profile serial killer cases in American history, including John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Robert Rassler became fascinated by the act of murder and how one individual can take the life of another at an early age. He was a 9-year-old boy in Chicago, Illinois at the time of the 1946 Lipstick Killer case where two women and a young girl were abducted and murdered in the city. Young Rassler and his friend created their own detective group to catch the culprit. The case was dubbed the Lipstick case due to a message scrolled at one of the crime scenes. The killer appeared to be appealing for help to forcibly stop his murderous spree as he was unable to stop himself. William Hirons was arrested at the age of 17 and confessed to each crime, although today there are some serious doubts over the validity of his confessions. For Rassler, this case sparked his lifelong intrigue into the minds of serial killers and the opportunities psychological profiling presented. The questions of why they did what they did was at an irresistible urge that they could not control or do they make the active choice to kill were questions he could not put aside. These were the questions he spent a lifetime trying to answer. After graduating from Michigan State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1962 and a Master of Science degree in 1968, Rassler joined the U.S. Army as a military investigator and learned how to catch criminals. During his time in the Army, he served as a criminal investigation supervisor and military police operations and intelligence officer where he was awarded a number of medals and awards for his outstanding service. Upon leaving the Army at the rank of major, he joined the FBI in 1970. Robert Ressler had a desire to combine psychology with criminal cases in an attempt to gain an understanding of the mind of criminals. The motives of a killer became his focus. He was determined that if we could have a better understanding of the motives behind a murder, we would have a better understanding of such crimes and the people who commit them. The notion of psychological profiling was born. At that time, psychology was not as well received as it is today, particularly not in a criminal sense. Evidence and forensics were the center of attention, not theories and possibilities regarding the minds of murderers. Ressler pressed forward regardless and continued to focus his attention on serial killers, calling his methods criminal profiling. In 1974, he received a promotion to supervisory special agent and was assigned to the behavioral science unit at Quantico. William Webster was the head of the FBI at that time and sat down to listen to Ressler's ideas. Webster believed in him and believed his ideas for chasing killers through psychology were worth investing in. The basis of profiling for Robert Ressler was the creation of a psychological portrait of a murderer and a dedicated program was set up to do just that. By 1978, Ressler had built up a team within the behavioral science unit. They began to apply psychological theory, victimology and crime scene analysis across difficult criminal cases to generate a profile of the person responsible. Alongside fellow criminal profilers John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood, the experience was being gained in a new method of catching criminals. Upon reflection, police officers and criminal investigators had been using profiling techniques for many years without realizing it. The visual analysis of a crime scene, the logical sequence of events, the presence or absence of certain characteristics, all have been used to help understand a criminal and their motives. In 1985, with the support of Robert Ressler, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or VICAP, was developed and based at Quantico. A system which would collect and collate information on violent crimes across the country, allowing connections between crimes and criminals to be made. Robert Ressler has spent many hours exploring the minds of those who kill. In an ambitious project with John Douglas in the late 1970s, a series of interviews were carried out with some of the worst serial killers known in American history. The aim was to gain information on their lives and their personalities to see what could be matched with their crimes and how they carried them out. In total, they interviewed 36 serial killers, and the data from this study formed the basis of their theories on organized and disorganized killers with personality types and behavioral traits also being gleaned from the information discovered during those interviews. When the case of John Wayne Gacy broke in Chicago, Illinois in 1978, Robert Ressler offered his assistance to the local investigators realizing that this was an opportunity to test some of the psychological profiling theories. John Wayne Gacy was responsible for the murders of at least 33 young men between 1972 and 1978. Operating in and around Illinois, Gacy would lure his victims back to his home where he would strangle them to death. He buried 26 victims underneath his house and to further three victims in his garden. The remains of his final victims are thought to have been dumped in a nearby river. John Wayne Gacy was a community spirited man, often dressing up as a clown to entertain the local children, earning him the nickname Killer Clown once his murders were discovered. Serial killers who are organized tend to show planning, forethought and cunning, and are able to maintain full control over their lives and how they appear to those around them. A profile which very much bits the character and activities of John Wayne Gacy. Gacy was put on trial in February 1980, charged with 33 murders. He claimed he had multiple personality disorder and could not be held fully responsible for his actions. The jury however felt he was sane and found him guilty of all 33 charges. John Wayne Gacy was sentenced to death for his crimes and he was executed by lethal injection in Illinois at the age of 52 years old. Gacy's claim in his trial that it was in fact his alter ego who had committed the murders highlighted to Robert Restler that even the most organized of criminals can become disassociated from their crimes. It confirmed a controlled man who can function normally in society can also be the most dangerous. Robert Restler had the opportunity to interview Ted Bundy directly, one of the first criminal investigators to do so and found him to be one of the most intelligent and narcissistic criminals he had ever come across. Theodore Robert Ted Bundy kidnapped, raped and murdered as many as 36 young women between 1974 and 1978 across Colorado and Florida. Just before his execution in 1989, Bundy confessed to 30 murders but the true count of his victims remains unknown. There has even been speculation for many years that 15-year-old Ted Bundy may have been responsible for the disappearance of 8-year-old Ann Marie Burr who lived in the same Tacoma, Washington neighborhood in 1961. The very popular and now well-known book, The Stranger Beside Me, by crime writer Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally, describes a sadistic man who enjoyed holding power over women and inflicting pain on others. Bundy used his intelligence, good looks and charm to lure his victims who had no reason to fear this well-spoken and polite man. He also appeared to be very good at targeting victims who were the most vulnerable. Robert Restler reported he still felt uncomfortable years later about the conversations he had with Ted Bundy, never feeling he was able to understand Bundy and in fact felt concerned Bundy understood more about him than the other way around. Bundy offered to come to the FBI and teach classes about his crimes and motives, an offer which the FBI refused. According to Robert Restler, Ted Bundy was a master of his game. In February 1975, Ted Bundy was tried for the kidnapping and assault of Carol de Roche, one of the few women who had been able to escape Ted Bundy alive. Found guilty, he was sentenced to one to 15 years in prison. Now known to authorities, connections began to be made to a number of unsolved homicides. In 1977, he faced his first murder charges and elected to defend himself. During a preparation hearing at Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, he managed to escape and continued on the run for eight days before being recaptured. While awaiting the start of his trial, Bundy made a second escape in 1978, which saw him travel to Florida and attack four young female students, yelling two of them at Florida State University. From there, he went on to kidnap and murder 12-year-old Kimberly Leach before he was recaptured by police and returned to his prison cell. Ted Bundy received the death penalty three times over for these murders, and in 1989 he was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison. In 1991, police made a discovery in a small Wisconsin apartment that shocked them to the core. A quiet 31-year-old man by the name of Jeffrey Dahmer had been killing men and keeping their body parts. 32-year-old Tracy Edwards had accompanied Dahmer back to his home that evening unaware of his new friend's intentions. Edwards had fled the apartment reciting a terrifying tale to police of being captured and held by Dahmer and subjected to abuse. Returning to the apartment with the police, Dahmer was found rocking and in a state of disassociation, just as Tracy Edwards had left him hours earlier. Upon searching Dahmer's apartment, attending police realized they had a serial killer on their hands, and he'd been operating for some time. After Dahmer's arrest, Robert Restler was asked to interview him with the idea of testifying for his defense, based on an insanity plea by his lawyers. Restler was intrigued by the case, the details of which seemed incomprehensible and unlike any case he had seen before. Jeffrey Dahmer had killed and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991 in Wisconsin. He had taken photographs of many of his victims' remains and engaged in necrophilia and cannibalism, keeping his victims' body parts all over his apartment. Robert Restler was very surprised at the demeanor of Dahmer and his willingness to openly talk about his crimes, his motivations and feelings and the reasons why he committed the horrific acts that he had. He felt Jeffrey Dahmer was not of sound mind at the time of his crimes. He lived in a fantasy world where he wanted to have a compliant and submissive partner. Dahmer, according to Restler, was emotionally driven to commit his crimes and once an individual was in his apartment, he was unable to stop himself from trying to achieve his aim and keep this person with him. Dahmer invited Restler into his mind and opened the door to a hidden world of thoughts, feelings and emotions behind his killings, which Restler was able to access for the first time. Dahmer said he felt like he was watching himself during the crimes, which is a clear indication of disassociation often due to personality disorder. Jeffrey Dahmer's trial began in January 1992 in Milwaukee, where he pleaded guilty to all charges against him. His defense team argued Dahmer was insane and could not be held responsible for his actions. A number of psychiatrists and psychologists testified in Dahmer's defense, advising of borderline personality disorder and schizopal personality disorder. The prosecution disagreed and called in forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz who testified he did not believe Dahmer was insane or that he was suffering from mental illness at the time of his crimes. In February 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer was found to be of sound mind and found guilty of the 15 murders he was charged with. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The state of Wisconsin had abolished the death penalty in 1853, with no chance of parole. He was sent to Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin after spending the first year in solitary confinement. He was beaten to death along with another prisoner, Jesse Anderson, in 1994, by fellow prisoner Christopher Scarver. Jeffrey Dahmer was Robert Wrestler's first example of an organized killer who lost control in a psychotic episode and it changed the direction of his psychological profiling in the future. The mind and motivations cannot always be categorized so easily and clearly. The case of Dahmer also highlighted how the most brutal and horrific of killers could be the man next door, a family member, a friend, or a colleague. Without the work of Robert Wrestler and his colleagues, the insights we've gained into the minds of those who kill may never have moved forward. Wrestler retired from the FBI in 1990 after 20 years of service. He continued to provide teaching and education in the field of criminology, psychology, and psychological profiling. He also authored a number of books on the subject. Robert Wrestler died in May 2013 of Parkinson's disease at the age of 76 years. Criminology, specifically forensic psychology and psychological profiling, have developed and grown into a field in its own right, with the potential to provide us with understanding and knowledge into that question Robert Wrestler had as a nine-year-old boy. What makes a man kill his fellow man? If this question can ever be fully answered, the possibilities for preventing a criminal from becoming a serial offender or even intervening before the act at all becomes an ever-closer possibility. In 1975, when I was a fifth grader at St. William Elementary, a Catholic school in Cincinnati, Ohio, the devil began visiting me, or at least so I thought. During these episodes, my brain felt as if it were vibrating and then turning to concrete from the inside out. I wouldn't lose consciousness, but I would zone out, unable to speak. My reality was twisted in ways both nonsensical and scary. Most everything I saw either changed physically or registered as something else in my mind. For instance, a teacher would turn into an alligator, a pencil into a sword, a tree into a dinosaur. After each episode, I was left with a creepy feeling and a monstrous headache that caused me to be distracted and unsettled for hours. Still, as freaked out as I was, I didn't tell anyone what was happening to me. Not my parents, not any of my teachers, not my friends, not my brothers or sister, nor my parishes priests. In part, it was because I had trouble finding the words to describe what was happening. And at first, I wondered if it was really happening at all, or if maybe it was just my imagination run amok. A few months after my first episode, I experienced a visitation inside St. William Church where my school attended Mass weekly, and it was then that I began to suspect and worry that what was happening to me was actually the devil's work. In my impressionable and naive 12-year-old mind, it made perfect sense. What or who else could penetrate the thick limestone walls and spiritual force field of God's own house and have its way with me? The more I thought about it and considered the things I had been taught in school about the devil, the more it made sense. What's more, my hallucinations began about a year after the Exorcist was released in theaters. While I was too young to see the movie, I had heard all about it, and I mistakenly understood it to be a highly accurate documentary. Though my head wasn't spinning and I wasn't spewing green bile, the things I was experiencing were unbelievably vivid and defied logic. I had every reason to believe that I might soon start exhibiting the same disgusting and frightening behavior as the girl in the Exorcist. I was terrified, but also convinced more than ever that I had to keep my affliction a secret. I feared that if anyone found out I was possessed, they would either think I was crazy and send me to an asylum, or if they actually believed me, I would have to face possibly being seen as evil myself. While I hid my possession, I refused to accept it. I fought back hard. I embarked on a three-pronged plan to strengthen my body, my mind, and especially my spirit. To improve physically, I turned to long distance running. I ran every single day for years. My dedication paid off. As an eighth grader, I won the Citywide Catholic Track and Field Championships in the mile run, and as a high school freshman, I ran a marathon in three hours and 15 minutes. I hoped God was pleased. To enhance my mind, I worked harder in school than I certainly would have otherwise, earning mostly A's, thanks in part to completing every extra credit opportunity placed before me. Of course, what needed the most improvement was my spirit. I prayed multiple times throughout the day and volunteered to serve as an altar boy at every mass I could manage. This included the dreaded 6.30 a.m. weekday masses, but I hoped to prove to Jesus that I believed in him and wanted his grace. My super-secret weapon for my super-secret condition was self-exorcisms, which I would perform in my bedroom or when the rest of my family was out of the house in our dining room. I would place our family Bible on the table and then light a votive candle, which ironically I had stolen from church. With the rosary dangling around my neck, I would make the sign to the cross, splash myself with holy water I got at school, and recite prayers. I would then hold a small piece of sandwich bread over the candle's flame. In my young mind, this process turned the ordinary bread into devil-blasting communion. I'd swallow it, say a few more prayers, and then quickly hide all the accoutrements of my self-exorcisms before my family returned. I was desperate to be freed from my condition, and I was living a double life in hopes of being rescued from the devil. Still, my efforts to live a good, pure life were not always successful. Like most boys my age, I had impure thoughts about girls on a near constant basis. I sometimes stole money from my mom's purse to buy candy. In high school, I started drinking beer, a lot of it on the weekends. This is why I believed my purification efforts weren't successful. From fifth grade through most of the tenth grade, the devil's visits increased in frequency. Though everything I was doing didn't seem to be helping, I worried stopping would only invite Satan to come on even stronger. And one day he did. Big time. While attending a high school leadership seminar in Columbus, Ohio, a hundred miles from home, the devil came to visit again. This time, however, when the episode was over, I woke up in the back of an ambulance. I began to cry. I was scared and assumed I was headed to that asylum that haunted my thoughts. I was, of course, taken to the hospital, where I was given several tests, including an electroencephalogram, EEG, and a brain scan. I remember thinking that those sophisticated machines couldn't detect the real problem. Beelzebub was way too smart for that. I was at least right on that account. The technology did not reveal possession. What it did find, however, was that I had had a grand mal seizure, my first. I was diagnosed with epilepsy that I was told was perhaps caused by some trauma my brain suffered during birth. It turned out the devil wasn't taking control of my mind. My mind was flipping out on its own. There wasn't anything the least bit spiritual or metaphysical about it. I was relieved I wasn't possessed and I finally had a name for what was causing my episodes. But I was more than a little skeptical. For one, while my smaller, hallucinatory episodes stopped, these petite mal seizures had been seen as childhood daydreaming, not epilepsy. For several years afterward, I continued to have grand mal seizures despite being medicated. I wondered if this might all be part of Satan's plan, a neurological smoke screen of sorts. Beyond that, I had just spent about six years engaged in an epic battle of good versus evil. Admitting that I had royally duped myself for all of that time was a hard thing to do. As crazy as my belief in demonic possession may seem, I believe even now that it was in many ways a rational, if not obvious, conclusion to come to under the circumstances. In my Catholic bubble, God and Satan were very much of this world. To appreciate how a kid could come to such a conclusion and then go to great lengths to both keep it a secret and self-exercise his demons, one must consider the Catholic world view. As theologian Andrew Greeley has written, Catholics believe, in essence, that objects, events, and people can reveal God's grace, or the lack thereof. If we lost something, we prayed to St. Anthony, who would then guide us toward the wallet, keys, or whatever else we misplaced. A nun at my elementary school gave every student in her class a recycled Welch's grape juice bottle filled with holy water. We use the water to bless ourselves before tests at school and when saying our evening prayers at home. The people of my working-class neighborhood even put down money in an attempt to curry favor and influence with the Almighty and ward off the devil. In fact, I had an after-school job essentially selling special favors from God. For $5, you could come to St. William's Rectory, the priest's residence, and purchase a mass to be said in someone's name. This would bestow a blessing upon him or her, maybe to help them get a new job, recover more quickly from surgery, or aid in the conception of a child. Smaller requests, safe or good weather at the ball game, could be made by lighting a votive candle in church for $0.25. And once, in what remains one of my most quintessential Catholic moments, a feather floated down from the church rafters during a family wedding. At the reception, all the buzz was about that feather, how it must have somehow dislodged from the wing of an angel who came to bestow God's blessings upon the new couple. It's a lovely, nearly poetic sentiment, even for this atheist. The thought that it was probably a pigeon feather didn't seem to occur or matter to anyone. Ultimately, we saw the world as a stage where God and Satan battled at both the macro and micro levels. All that was good came from God and his angels and saints. All that was bad came from Satan and demons. Am I angry at the church or its enchanted world and what it led me to believe? Not really. The church, my family, and the larger community guided me toward goodness and light rather than evil and darkness. I'm thankful for that. My experiences also gave me an immense appreciation for science and its ability to explain the world. We humans once believed that the earth was the center of the universe, and that belief made a lot of sense. Then, after all, why wouldn't the planet called home by those made in God's image not be at the center of everything? But much can make sense on the surface, but still not be true with the core. My battle with Satan has a certain logic to it, given the larger narratives of my faith. But as I dug down deeper to, in essence, make my religious narratives more than stories to me, I came up empty. That doesn't mean I no longer respect those who choose to believe, nor does it mean that I don't miss certain aspects of my religion, such as the rituals and the communal events. I have four daughters, including 10-year-old twins who attend Catholic school, after completing their preschool years at a Jewish school. They don't participate in the sacraments, such as First Communion and Reconciliation, but I have no issues with them being exposed to Catholicism's basic tenets. They'll have plenty of time to figure out what faith means for them. But I do watch them carefully for any signs of them zoning out. Should I spot any such thing, I won't take them to church. I'll take them to a doctor, and I'll fight the urge to light a candle along the way. You can read more of Steve Kissing's story in his book Running from the Devil, a Memoir of a Boy Possessed. I'll place a link to the book in the show notes. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.