Deliver Us from Evil (25 page)

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.

We found out later that while we were in the house, doing the exorcism, Nina actually suffered a heart attack. Were she not in a hospital at the time, she never would have made it. Rose spoke to her after she got out of the hospital, and Nina was happy to report that the house had a different feel to it. There was no longer a sinister sense of foreboding. No more feeling of terror on the stairs. Nor were any more family possessions broken or destroyed. She even put the chandelier back up.

But even though we were able to bring the case to a close and the Satanist family was evicted from the house, a few months later Nina lost her battle against the demonically induced disease that had ravaged her heart. Upon hearing the grim news that she'd passed on to her final reward, I bent my head and prayed.
Rest in peace, Nina, where no demon can ever touch you.

*   *   *

I thought this was the end of my Work in this Queens neighborhood, but I was wrong. A few months later I got a frantic call from one of my investigators, Phil. A friend of his was in terrifying trouble, and once again Satanists were on the scene. To my amazement, the new case was only a few blocks from where Nina's family lived, but it was in a different type of building—a six-family apartment house—and involved a
very
different coven from the one I'd encountered before.

This unsavory group weren't stylish professionals trying to hide their diabolical bent; instead, they flaunted it in the most garish manner imaginable. They looked like gangbangers. Their heads were shaved and they sported satanic tattoos. Each member wore an inverted cross around his neck, and scared the hell out of everyone else in the building, including Phil's unfortunate friend. If the group's appearance wasn't alarming enough, these characters were actually seen catching stray cats around the neighborhood to sacrifice to the Devil. Such behavior marked them as “dabblers” rather than serious Satanists, but made them no less dangerous.

Their activities weren't news to me: I was all too familiar with these particular perpetrators. So were the local cops, who suspected them of spray-painting “666” and satanic slogans on several buildings in the area and of other offenses, ranging from drug dealing to armed robbery. The delegation of tenants from the Satanists' building who had summoned me and Joe also accused them of black magic. To help us handle what sounded like a rather dangerous case, we brought three investigators: Scott, Phil, and Chris.

What made this otherwise quiet neighborhood such a hotbed of satanic infestation? What most people don't realize, until they're threatened by it themselves, is how common Satanism really is. By some estimates there are over eight thousand satanic covens in this country. In just about every American city, black masses are now available on a weekly basis, in a choice of locations; some covens have become so specialized that they limit their membership to pedophiles from the clergy or lesbian ex-nuns.
The Satanic Bible
, by Anton LaVey, has sold over a million copies, and urges those who buy the book to “hold Satan as a symbolic personal savior, who takes care of mundane, fleshy, carnal things.” Such messages are finding a ready audience in schools, since most of them now have at least a few self-professed witches among the student body, whether practitioners of white or black magic. Wearing satanic emblems has almost become a fad among today's disaffected youth. No wonder demonic possession is on the rise!

The problem, ironic as it sounds, is the current
lack
of belief in satanic spirits. As Father Martin says, “the belief that [the Devil] doesn't exist at all is an enormous advantage that he has never enjoyed to such a great degree. It is the ultimate camouflage.” As priests and ministers are toning down sermons about fire and brimstone, the Devil is quick to capitalize on this situation, by drawing in dabblers who truly have no idea what they're letting themselves in for.

Whether you believe in black magic or not makes no difference to those who seek to use it against us. In fact, the less you believe, the more likely that you won't know how to protect yourself if you're attacked this way. This situation is all the more to the liking of the legions of sorcerers, black magicians, witches, warlocks, Satanists, and other practitioners of the occult.

Or, if you are curious about the dark arts yourself and are tempted to try a spell or two, be warned: The Devil
doesn't
protect his own, since his relentless hatred for humanity extends even to those who profess to serve him. Full of guile and perversity, he and his demons simply bide their time, then swoop down to destroy these people without a second thought.

*   *   *

Like the Salvatores before them, these victims of the second satanic coven also had learned to dread the stairs in their building. The downstairs neighbor heard her three-year-old scream with terror one afternoon while he was playing on the building's steps. “Mommy, he won't let me go,” the boy yelled from the second floor. When she ran to help, the child was drenched in sweat, trembling from head to toe, and crying that he'd seen a ghost with big teeth, dressed in a black hooded cloak. “It had no nose,” he added—a clue I quickly picked up on, since, as I've said, the demonic, unlike ordinary ghosts, often have some oddity of appearance when they manifest themselves to humans.

While the mother initially dismissed the incident as the product of an overactive imagination, she took it more seriously when her three-year-old spit at a picture of Jesus a few days later. Meanwhile, other tenants were complaining that the building's basement gave them the creeps and stopped using it for storage. A woman on the third floor saw an eerie black shadow float up the stairs at midnight; another tenant woke up in the middle of the night to find a man with a goatee sitting on her sofa and staring at her.

“I was stunned and rubbing my eyes to see if I was still asleep,” she told me. “I turned around, and when I looked back he was gone. I went psycho and ran around my apartment saying, ‘Whoever you are, go away and stop scaring me!' When I told my neighbor about it to see if I was losing my mind, she said I was describing a man who'd died in the apartment over ten years ago. The next day I put crosses in every room.”

After seeing the floating black shadow, the third-floor tenant found herself shaking with fear every time she had to use the stairs to her walk-up at night. “When I go up, I have my back to the wall and cling to the banister, then creep up because you get a feeling that something is right behind you. When I turn around, I don't see anything, but I'm petrified that someone is going to push me down the stairs. There's such a strong presence of evil that my friends tell me that they also go up the stairs with their backs to the wall and feel like something dreadful is lurking there. Some of them won't come over anymore; they're that scared.”

To rid the building of its inhuman inhabitants, five of us went over to exorcise its three floors. Cases like this are dangerous because we don't know exactly what kind of black magic we're up against—or how we might be attacked. Even if we were able to clear the building of the things that are there, they won't stay gone, because the Satanists will invite them back. We still wanted to help these people, so we split up and went to different locations around the building to perform our rituals.

I was in the apartment across from where the devil-worshippers lived. Just then the Satanists' leader, a man named Lewis Williams, came up the stairs. Someone had tipped him off to what we were doing, because the daughters of one of these families hung out with these guys. I was purifying the apartment across the hall from his with blessed incense when I heard conversation in the hall. Someone with a heavy New York accent was asking “Who are these people? What denomination are they?”