Daily Strange's Spooky Sunday: The Demon's Daughter

Daily Strange's Spooky Sunday: The Demon's Daughter

The victim of one of the most detailed instances of demonic possession in 20th-century America was a mid western woman whose real name was never made public. As a child she had been notably pious, but when she was 14, blasphemous inner voices interfered with her religious practice, frightened her, and caused her much shame. In the years that followed she was examined by several doctors. Finding no physical illness or abnormality, they unanimously concluded that her personality was neither nervous nor hysterical — she was “normal in the fullest sense.”

Despite this diagnosis, Mary (a pseudonym) began to manifest the recognized signs of demonic possession. She would become furiously enraged and would foam at the mouth when a priest blessed her, and could infallibly tell when an object had been secretly blessed or sprinkled with holy water. She also understood languages she had never been taught.

In 1928, when she was 40 years old, Mary agreed to undergo exorcism. Her exorcist was to be Father Theophilus Riesinger, a 60-year-old Capuchin monk in the community of St. Anthony, at Marathon, Wisconsin, a man with considerable experience in the application of the ancient rite. For the place of exorcism, Father Theophilus chose a Franciscan convent in Earling, Iowa, where the pastor, Father Joseph Steiger, was an old friend of his.

On her first night in the convent, Mary became furious when she realized that holy water had been sprinkled on her food. She purred like a cat and refused to eat until unblessed food was put before her.

The next morning Father Theophilus and Father Steiger began the exorcism, for which a large room had been made ready. A number of nuns who were physically strong stood by to help, and Mary was laid on a mattress on an iron bed. The exorcism had scarcely begun when she became unconscious, with her eyes closed so tightly that they could not be forced open. They remained in this state throughout the service. A shrill cry filled the room, loud but seemingly far-off at the same time. And then a din of howling, like wild animals, came from Mary’s lips. “Silence, Satan!” Father Theophilus shouted, but the unearthly tortured clamor continued unabated.

Neither Father Steiger nor the nuns could long endure the howling or the sight of the woman’s body and face, hideously twisted and distorted by the onslaught. From time to time they had to leave the room, but Father Theophilus, accustomed to the screaming of devils at the pain of exorcism, remained constant and attentive throughout.

Day after day the exorcism continued, and with it the howling, the twisted limbs, and excrement and vomit in vast quantities. Although the victim had taken only a spoonful of milk or water during the entire day to sustain her, she sometimes disgorged bowlfuls of what seemed to be shredded tobacco leaves or other unsavory materials.

At last Father Theophilus learned the names of the devils infesting his patient. One, calling himself Beelzebub, told him that Mary had been possessed since she was14andthatshehadbeencursedbyherownfather, who had joined the company of possessing demons after his own death and damnation. This demon — Mary’s father, Jacob — spoke with Father Theophilus, revealing that he had frequently tried to force his daughter into an incestuous relationship but that she had always resisted him and that he had uttered a curse that she be entered by devils to destroy her chastity. A female demon, who gave her name as Mina, in life Jacob's mistress, joined the colloquy. She was damned, she said, because she had murdered four of her own children. A fourth demon, Judas, confessed that he had intended to drive Mary to suicide.

Whatever was expressing itself in these voice sat times demonstrated an uncanny knowledge of things that could not have been known to Mary. On one occasion, as a test, a piece of paper with a Latin inscription was placed on Mary’s head. The nuns, thinking the words were a prayer, were surprised to see that the demons tolerated its presence. In fact, the words had no religious content at all; but when a second piece of paper, which had been secretly blessed, was placed on the woman’s head, it was immediately torn to pieces.

As the painful weeks of exorcism continued, relations between the two priests deteriorated and Father Steiger began to wish he had never allowed the exorcism to take place in his parish. But Father Theophilus viewed this development as the work of the Devil, who seemed to regard Father Steiger with special malice.

“Just wait,” a demonic voice said to Father Steiger one day,“until the end of the week! When Friday comes, then ...”

On his way back from visiting a sick parishioner on Friday, Father Steiger, remembering the demon’s threat, drove with special care. Suddenly, just as he was about to cross a bridge over a deep ravine, a black cloud seemed to descend on his car. He could see nothing, but he felt the car smash violently into the railing of the bridge and then teeter on the edge. A farmer plowing a nearby field heard the crash and came running. Slowly, the pastor crawled out of the debris. He had no serious injuries despite the fact that even the cars steering wheel had been crushed.

When he reached the convent, a chorus of malicious laughter greeted him in the exorcism room.

“Today,” the demon screeched, “he pulled in his proud neck and was outpointed! I certainly showed him up today. What about your new auto, that dandy car that was smashed to smithereens? It served you right!” Was it true, the nuns and Father Theophilus asked? “Yes, what he says is true. My auto is a complete wreck. But he was not able to harm me personally.”

“Our aim was to get you,” the demon said, “but somehow our plans were thwarted. It was your powerful patron saint (Saint Joseph) who prevented us from harming you.”

(During these and all other conversations, the lips of the possessed woman did not move at all she - was unconscious, and her lips almost never parted. The voices seemed to come from within her.)

For two weeks the solemn exorcism was repeated without any sign of success. Father Theophilus decided to continue the exorcisms throughout the night, giving Satan (and himself) no respite. For three days and nights he prayed, but the demons held their ground; by the 23rd day Father Theophilus was near collapse. But now a change began to occur in the demons’ behavior. They were less aggressive and more apt to moan about the tortures the exorcism inflicted on them. Then, after Father Theophilus had demanded in the name of the Trinity that the demons depart, they agreed.

On December 23 at about 9 p.m., the possessed woman broke free from the grip of her attendants and stood before them. “Pull her down! Pull her down!” Father Steiger cried, while Father Theophilus blessed her and declaimed, “Depart ye fiends of hell! Begone, Satan! The Lion of Juda reigns!”

Then the stiffness left Mary's body, and she fell onto the bed. A sound arose, so piercing that the room vibrated, and then a babble of voices, repeating the names “Beelzebub, Judas, Jacob, Mina,” again and again, more and more faintly until, with the final words “Hell—hell—hell!” they disappeared.

Then, Mary sat up, opened her eyes and quietly smiled. “My Jesus, Mercy!” she said. “Praised be Jesus Christ!”

SOURCES:

I - Exorcism: Fact Not Fiction, Martin Ebon, ed., pp.212-45

II - Rev. John J. Nicola, Diabolical Possession and Exorcism, pp.126-31)

#possession#demon #demonicpossession #poltergeist #exorcism

Daily Strange's Fearless Friday: Spectral Incursions

"i get to be angry too" Photo By Daniel Danger

Those who scorn the idea that spooks and specters prowl and shimmer through the world do so because no one has so far caught a ghost in a bottle, because they are skeptical by habit, or because they resist the notion that death may not be final For many the word ''ghost'' conjures up an anonymous white-robed figure, a spirit who has come back from the grave to haunt the living. But in the annals of ghostdom, spectral beings come in a variety of forms and shapes, and some never put in an appearance at all, although they make their presence felt. Ghosts also differ in behavior — they may be aimless, purposeful, playful, angelic, and even demonic.

There are three lines of explanation for ghostly phenomena: the spiritual, mechanical, and psychological.

The most firmly established is the spiritual thesis, which holds that ghosts are intelligent beings. The first version of this idea is that ghosts are the spirits of dead humans. They continue to resemble their earthly forms in appearance and dress and are found reenacting things they did in the past, bound to their haunting grounds by guilt, remorse, desire, or habit. They may be malevolent, kindly, or indifferent toward human beings. People who take this view of ghosts regard them as marking time in a spiritual halfway house between this world and heaven, purgatory, or hell.

According to another version of the spiritual view, a ghost's resemblance to a formerly living person or animal is actually a masquerade adopted for its own purpose, the real appearance of ghosts being quite different. Some ghosts, for instance, appear as vaporous columns or clouds of light.

In the third view of ghosts as a spiritual phenomenon, these apparitions are not beings in either of the senses described above. Instead, they are illusions created by powerful classes of angelic or demonic beings for the purpose of helping or harming those who see them. Miracles are an example of intervention by angelic or enlightened powers, while most poltergeist episodes are held to be demonic.

In the psychological view of the phenomenon, ghosts reveal a spectrum of powerful but not yet understood capacities of the human mind. In these terms, some ghosts are the product of telepathic powers, as when a relative or friend appears to another at the time of death; others — poltergeist phenomena—suggest unwitting and uncontrolled psychokinetic abilities. And some — the appearance of phantom doubles — suggest that out-of-body experiences may sometimes be manifest to others.

In fact, most believers in ghosts are probably willing to accept all of these theses as helping to explain a complex and varied phenomenon. Skeptics, on the other hand, resorting to the dry but sturdy arguments of what they consider to be common sense, are apt to maintain that stories of ghosts are lies, hallucinations, or earnest reports of misperceptions. But the most convincing evidence of the existence of specters still seems to be their appearance on the scene.

#hallucinations #ghost #poltergeist #phenomena #spirit #spectralincursions #fearlessfriday

Daily's Strange's Toxic Thursday: Inexplicable Explanations

‘Thy Darkest Entities’ – 2021 – Photo by J Edward Neill

In addition to more or less scientific explanations of skyfalls are others that invoke mechanisms even more mysterious than the phenomena they explain. These explanations fall into the categories of extraterrestrial, supernatural, and time warp.

In the extraterrestrial hypothesis, alien spaceships are supposed, for unspecified but perhaps scientific or culinary reasons, to gather up supplies of earthly materials and then release them, or most of them. Or —a gain for undisclosed but perhaps horticultural or zoo cultural reasons or perhaps simply in spasms of interplanetary generosity—materials are directed to the earth from another similar planet and jettisoned upon us in the upper atmosphere.

In the supernatural theory, gods, demons, spirits, poltergeists, or other, unnamed, entities are responsible for the skyfalls, or at least some of them. Advocates of this theory point to those cases where dry ponds or newly dug ditches have been found to contain full- grown fish after a rainstorm — as though some aching need for fish had been mysteriously satisfied — as examples of a kind of supernatural benevolence, and to prolonged showers of stones from clear skies as in stances of otherworldly mischief.

In the time - warp theory, it is conceived that worlds of another dimension, but of parallel constitution, intersect occasionally with our own and that when they do, currents of fish, fields of ice, screes of stone, and mounds of jelly come tumbling into our ken.

The virtue of these theories is that they account for all contingencies, however bizarre. Their flaw is that they do so by invoking untestable powers and circumstances that are even more fantastic. This is not to say that there may not be some truth in the theories, but simply that if there is, it is a truth of the most remote kind.

On the other hand, if objects do indeed materialize in our world from other realms, perhaps those realms are subject to corresponding disappearances. Perhaps reverse skyfalls occur, in which objects are inexplicably sucked into the air. There is no evidence for this, of course, but if such events were to occur in our own world, we might feel more comfortable theorizing them in another. Therefore, the following reports of reverse skyfalls are included here.

The Times (London) of July 5, 1842, reported the following from the Scottish Fife Herald:

Wednesday forenoon [June 29] a phenomenon of most rare and extraordinary character was observed in the immediate neighborhood of Cupar (Scotland). About half past 12 o’clock, whilst the sky was clear, and the air, as it had been throughout the morning, perfectly calm, a girl employed in tramping clothes in a tub in the piece of ground above the town called the common, heard a loud and sharp report overhead, succeeded by a gust of wind of most extraordinary vehemence, and only of a few moments duration. On looking round, she observed the whole of the clothes, sheets, etc. lying within a line of certain breadth, stretching across the green, several hundred yards distant; another portion of the articles, however, consisting of a quantity of curtains, and a number of smaller articles, were carried upwards to an immense height, so as to be almost lost to the eye, and gradually disappeared altogether from sight in a south-eastern direction and have not yet been heard of. At the moment of the report which preceded the wind, the cattle in the neighboring meadow were observed running about in an affrighted state, and for some time afterwards they continued cowering together in evident terror. The violence of the wind was such that a woman, who at the time was holding a blanket, found herself unable to retain it in fear of being carried along with it! It is remarkable that, while even the heaviest articles were being stripped off a belt, as it

were, running across the green, and while the loops of several sheets which were pinned down an (sic) snapped, light articles lying loose on both sides of the holt (a wooded hill) were never moved from their position.

From the July 10, 1880, issue of Scientific American comes this report from the Plain Dealer of East Kent, Ontario:

Mr. David Muckle and Mr. W. R. McKay ... were in a field on a farm of the former when they heard a sudden loud report, like that of a cannon. They turned just in time to see a cloud of stones flying upward from a spot in the field. Surprised beyond measure they examined the spot, which was circular and about 16 feet across, but there was no sign of an eruption nor anything to indicate the fall of a heavy body there. The ground was simply swept clean. They are quite certain that it was not caused by a meteorite, an eruption of the earth, or a whirlwind.

#poltergeist #gods #demons #supernatural #supernaturaltheory #extraterrestrial