Possession

  • 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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  • 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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  • We have always told stories to understand fear. Around ancient fires, in the flickering torchlight of castles, and later in the dim glow of movie theaters, humanity shaped its deepest anxieties into creatures. We gave our fears teeth and claws, wings and fangs, scales and shadows. We called them monsters, but really, they were always…

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  • Nightmares are not fiction. They are truths that bleed through our dreams, warnings we cannot always name. Glow begins there, in the still hours of the night, where fear has no shape until it presses its weight on your chest. Sleep paralysis, shadow figures, the demon crouched at the edge of your bed. Science gives…

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  • Seventeen years ago my book The Uninvited was released into the world. At the time, my son Elliot looked at me and asked a question that has stayed with me ever since: “Who would want to read about our lives?” It was honest, simple, and impossible for me to answer back then. What I did…

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  • I Remember You

    I remember the first time I saw you.You passed my doorwaywith a smile.Then walked through a wall—and vanished. I remember seeing youin my dreams.Same smile,as if you were knowing.Knowing what?I am not sure. I see the bloodrunning down your face.Your eyes glowing red.Then you’re gone again. Demon,some will tell me.Ghost,others might say. My imagination?Maybe.But you…

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