Exorcism

  • Easter Monday

    Easter Monday

    The 1949 St. Louis exorcism is one of the most documented and debated cases of possession in American history. It is the case that inspired The Exorcist, but most of what people think they know comes from film, not from the actual accounts. When you go back to Father Bishop’s diary and read what was…

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  • Twenty Years Later

    Twenty Years Later

    “He turns; I can see his frontal torso in the light. It’s covered in blood. Is he looking at me? The room begins to spin. The sound of his desperation matches the tempo of his hands scrubbing his body. The room keeps spinning and spinning. I still feel his eyes on me. I can’t breathe.…

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  • A Haunting Disease

    A Haunting Disease

    I heard a quote once that described a haunted house as one that had gone insane. That made a strange kind of sense to me. The idea that a house could harbor something hidden inside it, a kind of internal system that carries something through its walls and floors like a disease. That is what…

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  • 25 Years

    25 Years

    Twenty five years ago I stepped into a haunted house. Back then it was just my home. My family and I were living there and trying to figure out what was happening around us. Those were frightening months. Anyone who has lived through something like that knows how it gets into your head. Even when…

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  • Bookends

    Bookends

    Every once in a while I stop and look at two books sitting on my shelf. The Uninvited and The Architecture of Shadows. They were written many years apart, but in a strange way they belong to the same story. The Uninvited was the beginning of everything for me. It tells the story of what…

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  • The Architecture of Shadows

    When I wrote The Uninvited about the Screaming House, I wanted to reach the people who might be living through something similar. I wanted them to know they were not alone. I have been doing this work for a long time. But I have never gathered what I have learned into one place before. For…

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  • Protection Is Not Projection: Staying Grounded

    A question that comes up often is how to protect yourself from negative paranormal energy. This deserves a thoughtful answer, not a dramatic one. I do not start from the assumption that something is “negative paranormal energy.” That does not mean I dismiss people’s experiences. It means I begin with discernment instead of fear. A…

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  • Reflections on 25 Years in the Paranormal

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that I’ve been doing this work for twenty-five years now. That number landed on me in a way I didn’t expect. Not as a milestone. Not as something to celebrate. Just as a quiet realization that a large part of my life has been spent sitting…

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  • I’m Wondering

    How many places do we touch in an average day that once held meaning for the living? How many rooms have we slept in where someone took their last breath? You might think that sounds strange, but is it really? How many hotel beds, how many houses, how many quiet corners have absorbed a final…

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  • Writing has always been my way of making sense of things. I never set out to be an author, but after everything that happened at the Union Screaming House, I couldn’t keep it inside. The nightmares, the questions, the lingering fear—it all had to go somewhere. One night, I sat down and started writing, and…

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