Beware the Night (24 page)

While exorcising a home that’s demonically infested is far less arduous than a full-fledged exorcism of a possessed person, I suspect this priest was too unseasoned to handle the case. His flesh was willing—and he showed up, right on time—but his spirit didn’t have the special grace that Father Martin so eloquently described. I don’t fault him for knowing his limitations or for his cowardice, since it’s very dangerous for an inexperienced priest to go up against the demonic, but I do consider him negligent for not reaching out to other clergymen and finding someone who could help his terrified parishioners.

The more interesting question, however, is
what
stopped the priest in his tracks and sent him scurrying back to the safety of his rectory. Why had this particular house become so singularly inhospitable that it repelled even a man of God, and terrorized a family of such devout, unswerving faith as the Salvatores? Nina was firmly convinced that the devil-worshippers in the basement had unleashed satanic forces on her family.

“Nina, I’m still willing to help, but I have a few conditions I’d like you to agree to first,” I told her. “If we come back, it’s going to be the last time we’ll come because we don’t go where we’re not wanted. If your family truly wants our help, I want you or Marco to give us written permission to enter your home and do our Work.”

We always make sure to cover ourselves legally in these cases, to limit the possibility of being sued. Hey, the Devil has many avenues of attack—and without being too disrespectful to the legal profession, litigation is certainly one of them. I have heard of many exorcists from all different faiths who ended up in hot water because they didn’t cover all the bases or, as we say in the police department, CYA (cover your ass).

Since we’d now covered our asses, and Marco had promised his complete cooperation, I returned a month later with the same team of investigators. We agreed that Joe, Antonio, and I would handle the house, and Rose and Chris would remain outside on the steps, where they felt most comfortable. But when Marco Salvatore answered the door, he looked grim. “My wife’s back in the hospital for more tests,” he told us. “I sure hope the doctors know what they’re doing, because I’m very worried about her. She’s very sick.”

Joe, Antonio, and I looked at each other. Hearing that Nina was so ill gave us added impetus to cast out the demon in her home and put an end to the infestation if at all possible. Marco was also extremely anxious to resolve the problem before his wife got out of the hospital. “I don’t want her or the boys frightened any more. I don’t think Nina can take too much more of this—and frankly, neither can I. The last few weeks have been a nightmare for us.”

He led us into a rather cluttered and gloomy living room. From the musty odor, I got the feeling he hadn’t been doing much housekeeping since his wife got sick. Although it was daytime, heavy brocade drapes blocked most of the light from the windows, and only one lamp was lit, apparently with a 25-watt bulb. I could see damaged plaster on the ceiling where the chandelier that Nina had taken down used to be. The room resembled an antique shop, crammed with old-fashioned mahogany furniture. The armchairs and sofa were upholstered in dark brown velvet and piled with needlepoint pillows. There were also several little tables, some of them covered with crocheted doilies and little knick-knacks.

Marco looked quite out of place in this dainty decor, which was what you might expect in an old lady’s home. The house, it turned out, was owned by Nina’s mother, who had chosen the furnishings. Marco was a rough-and-tumble guy, who’d briefly been a professional boxer and had a battered, Jake LaMotta–like face to prove it. With his rippling muscles and powerful right jab, the former heavyweight feared very little in this world, yet he now feared his own home.

I remembered a story Rose had told me about him. Several months earlier, a mugger had the misfortune of pulling a gun on the ex-boxer in an attempt to relieve him of his hard-earned cash. Even looking down the barrel of a .38-caliber revolver didn’t intimidate Marco, who now worked as a nightclub bouncer. He just knocked the mutt out with one well-placed punch to the jaw. Leaving the would-be robber lying in the gutter, he continued on his way. He’d handled it himself, without the police, just as he’d handled every other problem he’d ever been faced with—until now.

I could immediately sense how frustrated this macho guy felt. For all his physical toughness, he was powerless to do anything about the situation he was in now. An evil force had invaded his home, terrorized his wife, and beat up his son. But what good were his quick fists when he was up against an enemy he couldn’t even see? This wasn’t a problem he could solve with his brawn.

“Did my wife tell you about the fight she had with those Satanists downstairs?” he asked. “They actually tried to recruit my son! And that thing that attacks us on the stairs is their doing, I’m sure of it!” He pounded his fist on the coffee table emphatically.

I told him I’d already heard about these problems, but there was something we wanted to know. “When exactly did your wife first get sick? Was it before or after the confrontation with your neighbors?”

“It was about a week later. I don’t know if the argument had anything to do with it, but believe me, having people like this in your house is enough to make anybody sick!” Marco’s face darkened even further.

Joe and I suspected that a curse was at the root of this family’s problems. If so, it was urgent to learn everything we could. We needed to break the curse, if at all possible. It’s conceivable, though very rare, for curses to cause death if the spell isn’t broken in time. We wanted to find out how the spell was sent and what kind of black magic was used. The evil arts take many forms, and some covens use an eclectic and highly potent mix of methods. My partner Joe knows all this firsthand, because after taking on a large coven of witches in one of his cases, he became the victim of a curse himself and spent the next three years fighting for his life, as he was struck down by one serious illness after another and was the victim of a near-fatal accident. The only thing that saved him, I believe, was his knowledge of the occult and his strong faith in God.

Curses are typically used to exact revenge. Some magicians attach their evil spells to physical objects that carry the malevolent intention into the victim’s home. These are called “contact objects.” Just as a religious medal blessed by a priest has a positive charge of holiness and protection, objects cursed by a sorcerer have the opposite effect. They are repositories for negative energy that acts as a catalyst for demonic infestation. Some particularly fiendish occultists spread evil spells by making seemingly religious objects, such as ceramics or pictures with a Christian motif, then adding something extra: a curse. These artworks are then sold at craft shows to spread the germs of evil to the pious, unsuspecting people who buy them.

In one case, a schoolteacher who also did volunteer work at a Catholic organization fell victim to this satanic scam. While celebrating Christmas with her daughter, she heard a terrible explosion. All the glass on her shower door had shattered—not outward, but inward. She called my partner Joe immediately. He noticed a painting over her bed of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, which was so hauntingly beautiful that he couldn’t take his eyes off it—or the magnificent black lacquered frame around it.

Proud of her painting, the teacher told Joe how she’d gotten an incredible bargain on this lovely work at a street fair. Joe admired it with her, marveling at the artist’s skill at depicting anatomical details. Suddenly he spotted something extremely unsettling. Everything else was correct, but Our Lady of Guadeloupe, who is normally depicted trampling on a two-horned devil, had no feet! That was the tipoff, he explained. “Sometimes a demon will appear as a saint, or even as Christ, but there’s always an imperfection. By
leaving out
the Devil and the Lady’s feet, that satanic artist, rather ironically,
revealed
his painting’s diabolical intent,” at least to experts like Joe.

Right after he decoded the painting’s secret, sinister message, the temperature in the schoolteacher’s bedroom dropped a good twenty-five degrees, he adds. “The demonic spirit was right there in the room with us. I read the ritual, and the room warmed up. Everything was fine, but I had to remove the painting for her own safety.” The question was, what to do with it? Explains Joe, “Some sorcerers booby-trap these objects, so if you burn them, another curse with a burning effect hits the victim, and makes her skin feel like it’s on fire. What you have to do is either bury the object in ground consecrated with holy water or blessed salt or drop it in deep water. I took the painting to a bridge between Brooklyn and Queens, attached a five-pound weight, and dropped it into the canal with a couple of other cursed objects from other cases.”

The power of curses is very real. Many scientific studies show that prayer has the power to produce medical miracles. A recent conference on faith and medicine drew over a thousand American health professionals, who testified to recoveries from illness that science couldn’t explain. A Yankelovich poll of family doctors found that 99 percent of the physicians surveyed believe that religion can aid healing, and one-third of medical schools in this country now offer courses on spirituality and health.

A study at Dartmouth College showed that the best predictor of who will survive heart bypass surgery is the degree of the patient’s religious faith. Six months after the operation, 12 percent of those who rarely or never attended church had died, while all of those who described themselves as devout were still alive. When Dale Mathews, M.D., reviewed three hundred studies on healing and religion, he found that 75 percent of them confirmed that believing in God or a higher power benefits health, with the deeply religious having lower rates of substance abuse, depression, or anxiety; enhanced quality of life; quicker recovery from disease; and a longer life expectancy. Another study found four times the rate of high blood pressure among atheists as churchgoers, even though the people who were studied from both groups were smokers. And other research shows that spiritual practices can help people overcome infertility, insomnia, chronic pain, and swelling from arthritis.

Since it’s been established that invoking God, through prayer, can improve your health, why couldn’t invoking the Devil have the opposite effect—and cause harm? The Salvatores didn’t believe in curses, but you don’t have to believe to be affected by them. Although Nina was only in her forties, wasn’t overweight, and didn’t smoke or drink, her previously excellent health took a drastic downturn after her confrontation with the Satanists. She was hospitalized repeatedly with heart problems and other ills. As I’ve already told you, belief in God benefits blood pressure and heart health, so I consider it equally likely that the demonic can attack in these areas. This was a curse.

After Marco told us everything he knew about the Satanists, which wasn’t all that much, Joe and I began the exorcism, with Antonio watching our backs. Rose and Chris, who remained outside, were in the right place at the right time to witness a strange event that took place while we were in the house. As we were doing the ritual, burning incense, and reading the Pope Leo XIII prayer, the Satanists below were involved in their own little battle. Soon after we started the prayers, a car pulled up in front of the house and an impeccably groomed man in his late fifties got out. The head of the Satanist family hurried out of the basement with a large, extremely ornate book in his hand and gave it to the man in the car.

While my investigators couldn’t see its title, my hunch is that it was the Satanists’ “book of shadows,” or “grimoire.” These are names for a spell book that’s often handed down from generation to generation in devil-worshipping families, and contains their personal collection of black magic incantations. Such books—unlike the spell books sold at most bookstores these days—are the hallmark of what we call “organized” or “generational Satanists.” As St. Peter wrote in one of his letters, and is still true in modern times, the Devil “prowls around like a lion seeking whom he can devour” and recruits people like this to join his pride.

The two students on the steps heard snatches of the Satanist’s remarks. “My wife has a 104-degree fever,” he told the man in the car, “but we’re leaving immediately.” Apparently satisfied by this information, the older man drove off without further conversation. A few minutes later, the Satanists left their apartment in such haste that the wife’s hair was a mess, and her clothing was disheveled. They didn’t return while we were there. After they left lights started flashing on and off in their apartment but not in the rest of the house.

As we were reading the ritual in the upstairs bedroom, I heard loud, scratching sounds from the corner of the room. “Did you hear that, Joe?” I asked.

Puzzled, he said he didn’t hear a thing. This isn’t unusual in demonically infested houses, where strange noises may be projected to one person but not heard by the rest. In other cases, one person will see a spectral manifestation while others in the room see nothing, a phenomenon called “telepathic hypnosis.”

Shrugging off the eerie sound of claws, I moved down to the first floor, so Joe and I could read the prayers at the bottom of the stairway that had been so dangerous to anyone who walked there. When I positioned myself, I suddenly had the overwhelming sensation that I was going to black out. Blood rushed in my ears and darkness began to close in around me. It started from my peripheral vision and moved around to the front of my eyes. The room was swimming. I asked Joe to “hit” me with some holy water, pronto. That helped, but I still felt shaky and sick to my stomach. When you are in a small or enclosed area during a house exorcism, psychic energy can build up and affect you in all sorts of extremely disagreeable ways. I recovered soon and continued with the ceremony.

We completed the rest of the house and left. When Rose and Chris told us what they’d seen, we went to the basement window to see if we could observe any other supernatural activity. We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but when we noticed that the window was slightly ajar, Joe threw several handfuls of blessed salt through the crack.
Those Satanists will have a nasty surprise when they get back!
I thought.