“What do you mean, strange?” I asked. My curiosity and concern were starting to peak.
He paused. I could hear him sigh over the phone.
“Well, sometimes at night, she locks herself in our closet for hours. She sits on the floor and moans and rocks back and forth. Her voice changes from low growling sounds to high pitched squeals.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“For about a month now.”
“Jared, I’ve never seen her act this way. I am beyond worried.”
“Yeah, I think you should be. How was she before all of this?"
He paused for a few seconds, and then began to unfold the story.
“Until this point she was just really depressed. There would be times that she would walk around the house with a dazed look in her eyes. Well…not just dazed…but sort of…sort of…evil.”
“What do you mean, evil?”
“I don’t know man. Dark…distant…hollow…not herself.”
“Then the fits of rage started. She would get uncontrollable. So much so that I couldn’t contain her.”
This was saying something since this man was a very big, strong man.
“She would threaten me. She even called the cops on me…”
We both paused for a minute. Then I asked him, “Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” he continued. “Many times after these episodes, she has no memory of them.”
“Jared, what is going on? This seems very demonic.”
I agreed with him. “Let me ask you a few more questions.”
“Sure man, go ahead.” He replied.
“Was your wife ever involved with the occult or witchcraft or anything like that?”
“Yes, she was involved with Wicca, and has recently been engaged in all this New Age stuff.”
I put the phone down and then ran my hands through my hair. I couldn’t believe I was actually hearing all this. My heart broke. This was my first real life encounter with the a case of potential demonic possession.
I picked the phone back up. “Anything else I need to know?”
“Yeah, sometimes I hear things moving around at night. I hear noises that I’ve never heard in this house before. I get up to go check it out, and I can’t find anything, or the noises just stop.”
“Okay man, here is what we need to do. There is definitely demonic activity going on in your house. I am not sure if your wife is possessed or just severely oppressed. I won’t know until I can talk to her. For now, we need to fast and pray. You need to pray over your house and pray over your wife in the name of Jesus. Y’all need to talk, and if she is open, we all three need to get together. But she has to want this stuff to stop. She has to forsake it and repent.”
At the end of our conversation, he agreed to talk with her. He said he would fast and pray with me, and that he would call me back in a few days and let me know her response.
After a few days, I hear back from both of them. They wanted this to end. She wanted this to stop. So, we set up a time for me to come over.
When I walked into the house, it was like you could feel the darkness. The atmosphere was noticeably different, and I could sense the hate. Something did not want me there.
“Jared, she is having another one of her episodes. When I told her you were coming over in a little while, she freaked out and went and locked herself in the closet and started all that moaning and stuff again. I was finally able to get her out. She fought me for a while and then just stopped and went and got in the bed. She is laying in there now.”
“Well, let’s go in and see what happens. But before we do, let’s pray.”
After we prayed, we walked into the bed room. There, lying on the bed, was a woman whose reflection was white as a ghost. She looked like death. She looked exhausted.
“Susan (name changed for privacy purposes), can you hear me?”
No response. I glanced at the husband. He looked back at me and shrugged his shoulders.
“Susan, I am going to place my hand on your head and pray.”
Still no response.
I placed my right hand on her forehead, and began to pray. As soon as I did this. She started to contort and grab at the sheets. She started to go for my hand.
The Holy Spirit impressed upon me to say this: “In the name of Jesus, I bind you, you demonic spirit, from touching me. You will not use your strength and you will stay right there in that bed.”
She put her hand down. She stayed in that bed the rest of the time I prayed over her.
“You unclean spirit, I command you to come out of this woman in the name of Jesus.”
Her eyes started rolled back in her head and she started to shake.
After a few more minutes of rebuking and praying. She all the sudden went limp and fell asleep.
At that point, the husband and I prayed over every room in the house, and got rid of all of the new age stuff that we could find.
“It’s up to her now. She needs to repent and put her faith in Christ. If not, this was all in vain.”
The following is a summary of several conversations I have had with a friend:
“Jared, you know I’ve seen my brother's ghost?”
“No, man, I didn’t know that. When?”
‘It was months after the car accident. Things were starting to settle down for us, and I was home alone.”
“What did he look like?”
“It was just like a color being. But I knew it was him. I could feel it. It felt just like his presence.”
“Have you seen anything like that since then?”
“No, not like that.”
“Wow man. Let’s talk about this more when we can hang out again.”
These instances are just two examples of the personal experiences and testimonies that I have heard from others about the supernatural and paranormal. And I am not alone. In their book, “Paranormal America,” sociologists Christopher Bader and F. Carson Mencken of Baylor University and Joseph Baker of East Tennessee State University report that more than 2/3 or Americans have paranormal beliefs. The website livescience put their findings in a chart (see below).
Notice that 71% of people have reported that they have had a paranormal experience. Yet this trend is just not American. According to the Telegraph, a UK news website, reporter Jasper Copping states in his article, “Who you gonna call? Belief in ghost rising,” that according to a UK survey, “more than half of those taking part (52 per cent) said they believed in the supernatural, a marked increase on the two previous comparable studies, in 2009 and 2005, which both found a level of around 40 per cent. The survey also found that one in five claimed to have had some sort of paranormal experience.”
This belief is also evident when we look at the entertainment industry.
When I was growing up, it was really hard to find a good movie on the supernatural. Now, movies and tv shows that deal with ghost, hauntings, demon possession, and other elements of the supernatural are a dime a dozen. What has happened? Why, in the past twenty years, have shows and movies dealing with these things become so popular? The Paranormal Activity franchise has earned hundreds and millions of dollars at the box office. Shows about ghost hunting can be found on many networks such as the Travel Channel, A&E, Discovery, etc. The increase of interest is simply staggering.
The cause? It could be that people just like being scared. However, I think it goes much deeper. I find it interesting that as much as militant atheism tries to stomp the supernatural flavor out of our society, interest and belief in things unseen continues to flourish. The reason atheism will never win is because human beings are created in the image of God. This means that humanity craves to be in relation to the divine. This means that the fascination and curiosity will always be prevalent.
The fall has marred and cracked the image of God within us. The interest and pursuit of ghost, demons, and things supernatural is a broken expression of the image of God. We crave the supernatural because we were created with the capacity to be related to God. Sin has entered and distorted that view, but it has not killed it. Every attempt by naturalistic and atheistic philosophy to discredit the existence of the supernatural has failed, and will continue to fail.
The interest in our culture of these things also stems from a rejection of modernism, and an embracing of postmodernism. Indeed, postmodernism has its dangers, but one thing about it that the Church should be thankful for is that it has opened people back up to things spiritual.
We’ve talked about the supernatural and the paranormal, but what about the psychic? Research into psychic phenomenon started to become prevalent in America because of a man by the name of J.B. Rhine. He founded the world famous parapsychology lab at Duke University in the 1930's, and is considered to be the father of the modern parapsychology movement.
Psychic ability also become popularized in our culture through the novels of Stephen King. His books such as Carrie and Firestarter featured young female characters who had the gifts of telekinesis. In looking at the previous chart published by livescience, you can see that 41% of people believe in ESP (Extra Sensory Perception).
Up until this point, I have just been throwing around the words “supernatural”, “paranormal”, and “parapsychology”. But what do they mean? Well, it depends on who you ask. For our purposes, I want to tell you how I am going to define them.
Supernatural:
This word can be defined as a power or being outside the scientific understanding of nature. That is a pretty broad definition. For our purposes, I am going to use it to refer to any non-human entity such as God, angels, and demons.
Paranormal:
Some people define this word as just referring to psychic experiences such as ESP and ghost. Others include aliens, UFO’s, Bigfoot, and everything else unexplainable. For our purposes, I am going to use this term to refer to ghosts, hauntings, and the experiences that are related to them.
Parapsychology:
Basically, parapsychology is the study of mental phenomena that cannot be explained by natural causes. These phenomena would be ESP related things such as telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, astral projection, etc. This is exactly how I will be using this term. I will also use the phrase “psychic experience” or “psi experience” to refer to them as well.
As this series unfolds, we will explore all these phenomena, and talk about their relation to Christianity, and eventually the superiority of Christ and his gospel over all things malevolent. Now, with our terms defined, our next study will bring us into the world of the supernatural.