Tag Archives: demons

D Is For Demon: Our Five Favorite Fiends

We attended the Shooting Star Paracon in Minnesota last year and conducted a survey. What’s your favorite paranormal topic and we gave four choices…

  • Ghosts
  • Cryptids
  • UFOs
  • Demons

Much to our surprise, demons took second place right behind ghosts! Cryptids came in unexpectedly last and Nessie was inconsolable. So you demon-lovers, here are our five favorite demons and the episodes that we tackled them in!

1. Valek – The Demon From The Nun

The demon Valek comes straight out of the medieval spellbook, The Lesser Key of Solomon. Magicians would try to invoke his name to perform magic. They said they could do this and remain Christian because legend says that King Solomon used the name of God to force seventy-two demons help him build the First Temple in Jerusalem.

Valek was known as the President of Hell and his magickal specialty was commanding household spirits as well as controlling serpents. Hollywod used him the inspiration for the demon that’s haunting the Warrens in The Conjuring 2 and the follow-up, The Nun. John Carpenter also used him as the original vampire in his James Woods-cracks-jokes-and-stakes-bloodusuckers flick, Vampires.

But in the original description, this wicked creature is not an Evil Nun or a rockstar-looking vamp, he’s a winged baby flying a dragon. Might not be as badass, but still pretty cool.

2. Lillith – The Original Sex Demon

In Genesis, there are two competing versions of the creation of humanity. One has man and woman being created at the same time, the other has Eve being created later out of Adam’s rib. In order to reconcile the versions, medieval Rabbis decided that Adam had to have a first wife, and they called her Lillith, which was based on the Babylonian word for demon.

When she wouldn’t submit to Adam by laying under him when it came time to do the nasty, she was kicked out of the Garden of Eden and decided to mate with a demon, Azael instead. in mythology, she’s been blamed for everything from wet dreams (the original succubus) to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. She’s a seducer and baby-killer that visits in the night.

3. William Bührer, One Of The Demons Inside Carl Seige

When my sister Allison Jornlin was doing research on the famous Wisconsin exorcist, Theosophus Riesinger, she ran into a case of demonic possession in the Dairy State. Carl Seige was a German immigrant who moved with his family to Watertown, Wisconsin in the 1840s. He had been experiencing violent seizures since he was a boy and his family left the Old World so that they could escape what he claimed were the demons demons inside of him.

He exhibited at least three signs of possession. He correctly predicted when priests were coming to visit him, even though no one told him they were coming, they asked him questions in Latin that he correctly answered in German, and he reacted violently when they would show him a crucifix.

One day, during one of his worst seizures, he said he was possessed by William Bührer, who was a murderer in their German town before Carl was born. But he also said there were many other devils there as well. Carl was exorcised by a Lutheran minister, a psychic medium, an Indian medicine man, and finally by a trio of Catholic priests. While the trio finally succeeded in calming his seizures for a month, he had to be re-exorcised throughout the rest of his life to keep the evil phantasms like William Bührer at bay.

4. The Demon Who Manifested Himself to John Eagan

John Eagan was born a good Catholic boy in Brooklyn and grew up to be a special education teacher and bartender on the side. He said at the bar that he met a lot of lost souls who he would regularly pray for, since he believed no one else would. He’s still pretty religious (he even made a bust of Jesus out of wax candles that was featured in Ripley’s Believe it or Not!) and he thinks his prayers in the hope of saving those souls at the bar drew the attention of a demon.

His wife and son first started experiencing Poltergeist-like activity, but the real kicker is when John saw the demon in his living room. An evil face appeared to him surrounded by blue flames and said “No more.” John thinks the threat was about his prayers, because the Devil wanted their souls for himself. He tells the story in his own words for the episode.

5. Pazuzu from The Exorcist

Pazuzu is the Mesopotamian demon of the southeast wind that brings famine. He has the body of a winged man, talons of an eagle, the head of a dog, and the tail of a scorpion. His enemy was Lamashtu, who was the demon of hurting women and babies in childbirth (much like Lillith), people would wear amulets with Pazuzu’s image on it to protect their young families. So even though he was thought he was an evil spirit, they would wear his image because he was so nasty he would scare away other evil spirits.

So it’s a real legendary demon that William Peter Blatty used for his antagonist in The Exorcist. He had the title character, Father Merrin first meet the demon on an archaeological expedition in Iraq in the 1940s, which is on the site of the former Mesopotamia. Only later would he meet the demon again when it took over the poor soul of Regan Macneil to make her barf pea soup. In our memorial episode about William Peter Blatty, we talk all about the real inspirations that he used to write his most famous book.

Since demons are way more popular than we originally thought, who are some of our favorites? Maybe we can take on their legends in a future episode!

214 – Angels Sound Like Yoda: Channeling with Danielle Egnew

Danielle Egnew clearly remembers cuddling up into her aunt’s skirts when she was two years old, afraid of her big scary uncle Dominick who was looming over her.  She remembers how her aunt looked, she remembers the color of the skirt, she remembers the physical feeling. 

Danielle Egnew, when she ran for Billings, Montana mayor in 2017

When Danielle was seventeen, she shared that memory with her mother. But her mother told her that it wasn’t possible. Danielle’s aunt had already passed away at the time. So, who was in her memory? 

Danielle Egnew has been seeing spirits and listening to otherworldly voices from the wilds of Montana since she was a child. She could hear the tonal, musical sounds of the angels and feel the “blacker than black” shapes of demons in her teens. Her muse led her to form a band and she spent the late 90s and early 2000s performing and touring with her group, Pope Jane.

Make sure you watch this video to enjoy a pop-rock blast from the past. As someone who lived through the music and fashion scene of the late 90’s (and it’s unique sartorial choices), it was fun visiting (but not sure I’d want to live there again!)

In the mid-200s as the music industry was changing, Danielle decided to finally embrace the entities that had been speaking to her all her life and a chance reading for the Burbank Police Department in the case of a missing child put her on the path of becoming a professional psychic and angelic channel. So what does that mean?

She describes her work as more of a “translation service” than anything else. She can receive the messages that these angels and extra-dimensional creatures have for us and she shares them with her clients and audiences. While she continues to write and perform music, create art, and do personal readings for those looking for assistance from beyond, her latest project is the “Ascension Tour” where she is doing live translations of these mystical communications for audiences. 

If you’re interested in becoming more in tune with “whatever is out there”, then you’ll enjoy this episode. Danielle goes into detail with what it’s like to be a receiver, how the messages show up, what they sound like, and ways to make it easier to “hear what the universe has to say”. Some of the topics we cover in our conversation:

  • How angels “sound like Yoda” when they talk
  • What it’s like to grow up with a paranormal radio in your head
  • How all artists can be channels for the other side
  • Is there a Hell? Her answer might be a little different than you expect
  • What happens to pure souls with faulty biology (how some humans are broken robots)?
  • Her tips for getting in touch with your psychic side

Check out Danielle Egnew’s website to find out out how you can be part of the live Ascension tour and how you can get in touch with her.

I think that the most interesting thing that Danielle said to me is that human spirits are basically good, it’s the machinery of the body that’s broken. So there isn’t any Hell really. We have a second chance the next time around, even if we’re evil, even if we’re mentally ill. Even if there’s some kind of imbalance, we are capable of being forgiven. 

That reminds me of the legend of Tannhäuser, someone who the Pope said his staff had a better chance of growing new leaves than of God forgiving him. Well, what happens is that the staff ends up blooming, but it’s too late. No one is beyond redemption, no one is unworthy of forgiveness if they are penitent.

What does it mean if there is no Hell? What does it mean if the Universe doesn’t care about justice? What does that say about Free Will? Anyway, just some questions to ponder as you listen to our latest Sunspot track, “Bury It With Me”.

A polluted genealogy
colonized my head
And if vengeance isn’t mine
then anger has no end

a faulty biology
for this blood shed
and if karma is a lie
then you never can forget

Redemption is tears in the rain
sometime before sacred and after profane
So when the sleeper wakes up from the dream
a thousand years have disappeared in the land of the Faerie Queene

as the sinner begs his penance
these wet androids come to me
when there’s no one left to blame
then we’re just broken machines

Oh, bury it with me

209 – Between Love And Hate: The Devil Is Real with John Eagan

Before John Eagan had a paranormal experience, he was most famous for writing a how-to book on how to pick up ladies in a nightclub. That book, How to Pick Up Beautiful Women in Nightclubs or Any Other Place: Secrets Every Man Should Know got John onto talk shows all over the country in 1993, from Howard Stern to Geraldo.

And in this day and age of The Game, (Neil Strauss’ work on picking up ladies) where romance is achieved through insults (“negging”) and wearing outrageous clothing (“peacocking”), John Eagan’s advice to wear clean clothes and how to quickly get over your fear of rejections seems quaint and old-school. The fact that his book is less about getting laid and more about creating relationships makes John’s advice seem of a different era.

And that’s the point, John Eagan thinks that the world of this era is changing to something dangerous and he was given a warning from the depths of Hell itself. That’s why he’s written a new book, Between Love and Hate: The Devil Is Real. John was born a nice Catholic boy in New York City and moved to New Jersey as a young man.

He got married, had a family, became a special education teacher and was a bartender on the side. It was in that bar is where he interviewed the thousands of ladies that would form the basis for his romance self-help book, but it’s also where he met many lost souls. People who would pass away and John promised that he would pray for their souls to go to Heaven because they didn’t have anyone else who would.

John Eagan and his wife and the bust of Jesus he made from recycled candles

And it’s because of those daily prayers for wayward souls that John thinks that he might have caught the attention of an entity from Hell, a creature who subsists on perverting humans to do evil things and to swallow their souls for eternity. That’s what his experience entails and John gives us all the gruesome details of the Poltergeist-like experiences in his home that were witnessed by his wife and son, and how it culminated in the appearance of a demon surrounded by blue flames in his own home.

The demon in blue fire that came to John and said “No More”

For the song this week, we wanted to go with the New Jersey-theme and bust out a track inspired by the one of the greatest horror-punk bands of all,    The Misfits. So, here’s a Sunspot take on a Misfits track, based on John Eagan’s paranormal experience with a quote directly from the demon itself, “No More” 

A world of souls under attack
the Gerasene demoniac

unclean
obscene

You get caught between love and hate
we’re tempting you to seal your fate

straight down to Hell
the infidel

Swallow your soul, the Devil’s ready,
My name is Legion for we are many

I cry no more

You don’t need to be possessed.
to be banned from all the blessed

I’ve got a fever
for the unbeliever

All the dybbuks and the demons
love to watch you die screaming

in a useless prayer
to a god that doesn’t care

Swallow your soul, the Devil’s ready,
My name is Legion for we are many

I cry no more

A world of souls under attack
the Gerasene demoniac

unclean
obscene

You get caught between love and hate
we’re tempting you to seal your fate

straight down to Hell
the infidel

Swallow your soul, the Devil’s ready,
My name is Legion for we are many

I cry no more
I cry no more
I cry no more
I cry no more

until I watch you die screaming

I cry no more



192 – The Nightmare: Incubi, Succubi, and the Demons of Sleep Paralysis

If you’ve ever experienced sleep paralysis, you know it’s not a laughing matter. You wake up to find yourself with a pressure on your chest, surrounded by nightmare creatures, and you can’t move. Sleep paralysis can make you question reality, after all, your dreams are showing up in your waking life. They are having a physical effect on you. No wonder that for millennia they’ve showed up in cultures all over the world. It’s the kind of thing that you write songs about!

Canadian filmmaker Adam Grey was so terrified by his Old Hag experience that he made a movie on it with his brother called The Nightmare (and we interviewed them about their film back in episode 59). Dr. Martin Walsh was in Zanzibar when a legendary succubus-like creature known as the Popo Bawa was terrifying the African island back in the 1990s (and we interviewed him about that in episode 133). There have been dozens of names across cultures for the creatures they blame for causing nightmares.

In Mesopotamia and early Jewish writing, they were the Lillin. In Hmong culture, it is the tsog tsuam (which was killing men as recently as the 1980s.) The word “mare” in nightmare isn’t supposed to be a horse, but actually a little goblin that sits on your chest. In the Middle Ages, these night terrors were associated with sexual assault. The succubus would have sex with men while they slept while the incubus would attack women. Various demonologies of the time even suggested that since the spawn of the Devil couldn’t get you pregnant, the succubus could steal the semen of a man and have the incubus plant it in a woman to create an evil child.

One of the aliens from Communion

My own experience with sleep paralysis wasn’t sexual, but it certainly was a waking nightmare. It happened the same week I was going to start junior high school in 1989. I hadn’t seen the Communion move yet, but I’d been looking at the face of the grey alien in checkout lines at the grocery store for years at that point. I was young but I knew it had to do with alien abduction.

I had long experienced nightmares, night terrors, and some light sleepwalking. That’s one of the reasons that I was interested in lucid dreaming from a very young age (we talk about that as well as some lucid dreaming techniques in episode 2), I was hoping to conquer the demons that stalked my dreamworld. Plus, you had movies like Dreamscape telling you that if you die in a dream you die in real life. I knew I had to figure out a way to stop these guys.

That week I had checked out Communion from the local library, I wanted to see what the fuss was about for myself. It was an interesting enough book, not as scary as I thought it would be, but one of the things that he talks about is sleep paralysis. In the book, he mentions that waking up he could be trapped in a hypnopompic trance. Hypnopompia is the state when you move from dreaming to waking and sometimes you can experience a hallucination like you were still dreaming. Except your muscles are still paralyzed from being asleep.

I had never heard of that before and just the idea of it terrified me. Even if it was still just a dream, the idea that the monsters from my nightmare could visit me in  real life, like when Nancy pulls Freddy Krueger into the physical world in the original A Nightmare On Elm Street was a pants-pooping proposition.

So what happens? Two days before school starts, I’m reading in bed while a strange light fills my bedroom wall, filtered out by the curtain from the window. My room was the one that faced the street and I thought it might be a car backing up into our driveway and pulling out, but I don’t hear the car and we live in a rural area where cars very infrequently come by. And we had a long driveway, for the lights to get into the room, they’d have to come up a bit because they would have been blocked out by the woods between the street and the house. Anyway, both my parents were home so it wasn’t one of their cars. Who was it? I don’t know, by the time I got the courage to go to the window there wasn’t any car there. But it planted a seed in my head, as silly as I thought it was at the time, that it was like a spaceship was landing out there.

And that was it. I wasn’t really scared as much as I let my imagination run a little bit wild and thought that I was being ridiculous. So, I went to sleep, fully knowing that tonight was the night that I would need to get rest because you can never sleep before the first day of school.

I woke up a few hours later in my darkened room and I couldn’t move. When I opened my eyes I saw a group of white faces in a semi-circle around my bed and they were looking down at me. The faces were triangular with almond-shaped eyes just like on the cover of Communion. The feeling was sheer terror (something that I was used to after waking up from so many nightmares) and I knew that the light I saw really was an alien ship. They’ve come for me just like they came for Barney and Betty Hill and just like they came for Whitley Streiber and his son. After a few seconds until the faces disappeared and I could move again.  The fear subsided and I realized that I experienced exactly what Streiber was talking about in the book, a hypnopompic trance.

There wasn’t any other signs of abduction. I didn’t have any missing time and I didn’t feel any strange pains or anything. My familiarity with bad dreams made me realize that it was all in my head. I certainly wasn’t enchanted by the possibility that this could be a regular occurrence though, like my near daily nightmares.

However, I was lucky and it wasn’t regular. I don’t remember ever experiencing it to that extent again. Some people however, aren’t so lucky, and they experience these hypnogogic (while they’re falling asleep) or hypnopompic trances (while they’re waking up) several times a week.

Now, while I read a couple of classic prayers from the Middle Ages on the podcast meant to protect you from nightmares (in a completely horrible accent too!), there are a couple of modern devotions (written in the 21st Century!) about protecting yourself from sexual assault by an incubus or succubus. You might want to check out the “Prayer Against The Sexual Demons of the Night” or this guide to how to handle if you get attacked by a “lust demon” (or you just have a wet dream.)

But if you’re interested in something a little more reasonable, there’s been some scientific research in the past few years in how to handle sleep paralysis in a more modern way. In fact, they use phantom limb pain research to help understand why the brain feels what it feels. Dr. Baland Jalal has developed a technique called “Meditation-Relaxation Therapy” that is a practice designed to help regular sleep paralysis sufferers to get some kind of relief. You can read part of his scientific paper on it here, but also here are the four steps:

  1. Reappraisal of the meaning of the attack – Remember that you’re in bed, you’re still sleeping. You cannot die from a  nightmare, no matter what Dennis Quaid learned in Dreamscape.
  2. Psychological and emotional distancing – Try not to be afraid. It’s just your REM activity. Remember your dreams can’t hurt you.
  3. Inward focused-attention meditation – Go to your happy place. For real, conjure up a nice memory. It helps.
  4. Muscle relaxation -Don’t fight, don’t move, it only makes it worse. You’ll react poorly to being paralyzed and you’ll freak out (I did.)

Now, this isn’t something you’re going to remember every time something  like this happens to you, but for regular sufferers of sleep paralysis, this practice is a place to start. And it’s great that we’re doing something besides trying to make people pray for forgiveness because they used to like Bluegrass music!

 

the nightmare
Here’s a still from another movie called The Nightmare about sleep paralysis

One of the things we talk about in the podcast is the William Shatner movie called Incubus filmed in 1966 that’s completely shot in Esperanto (a universal language invented in the Nineteenth Century for proto-hippie peace and love reasons.) You can watch the whole thing on youTube (for now at least) right here:

For the song this week, we unearthed a Sunspot track inspired by a succubus. “Goodbye Good Guy” uses a little bit of the bedtime imagery to talk about what you have to do to get rid of someone who is ruining your life. Sometimes you have to change who you are to become who you want to be, and it’s not usually pretty.

Sometimes the strength in me builds up,
But fails me when you cry,
I’m not a heartless bastard,
But you’ve driven me to dispossession.

I wanted things this way,
That thought was never left unsaid.
But hey Pinocchio,
How your nose will grow,
When you scream at the back of my head.

Goodbye good guy,
Wipe the cobwebs from my eyes,
This time I’m doing it just for me.
Goodnight sleep tight,
I hope all the bed bugs bite,
I’m sick of cleaning up your debris.

You know I wanted this,
And I created this,
Well I made my bed I’ll lie in it.

I put my heart on hold,
Hoping that you’d hang up.
I’m in suspended animation,
Waiting on a give-up.

I wanted things this way,
That thought was never left unsaid.
But hey Pinocchio,
How your nose will grow,
When you scream at the back of my head.

Goodbye good guy,
Wipe the cobwebs from my eyes,
This time I’m doing it just for me.
Goodnight sleep tight,
I hope all the bed bugs bite,
I’m sick of cleaning up your debris.

You know I wanted this,
And I created this,
Well I made my bed I’ll lie in it.

I wanted things this way,
That thought was never left unsaid.
But hey Pinocchio,
How your nose will grow,
When you scream at the back of my head.

Goodbye good guy,
Wipe the cobwebs from my eyes,
This time I’m doing it just for me.
Goodnight sleep tight,
I hope all the bed bugs bite,
I’m sick of cleaning up your debris.

Goodbye good guy,
Wipe the cobwebs from my eyes,
This time I’m doing it just for me.
Goodnight sleep tight,
I hope all the bed bugs bite,
I’m sick of cleaning up your debris.

You know I wanted this,
And I created this,
Well I made my bed I’ll lie in it.

135 – Demonology 101: Dennis W. Carroll Vs Evil

Dennis W. Carroll, the co-founder the Carolina Society for Paranormal Research and Investigation had his first encounter with demonology as a teenager in church. The preacher had brought up a troubled man and the whole congregation prayed for him. While everyone’s eyes were closed and the were praying furiously for the man’s soul, Dennis saw three balls of what he describes as “dirty light” flee from the man’s body and disappear into the sky.

From that moment on, Dennis was a believer and has spent much of his life learning more about the invisible world of the supernatural and demonology. In addition to co-founding the CSPRI, he has also authored two books on investigation, Beyond The Shadows: A Field Guide to The Paranormal and The Road Unseen: A Paranormal Journey Into High Strangeness, as well as two collections of poetry influenced by his investigations, In Sunshine and In Shadow.

dennis w carroll demonologist
Dennis W. Carroll compelling some evil entity with the Power of Christ

Dennis has been on hundreds of investigations over the years and he shares what he’s learned as not only a “location exorcist” (i.e., a guy that blesses houses and buildings to drive out any negative energy) but a demonologist who has fought powers that are conspiring to bring down the human race in what Carroll claims is a highly organized ring of evil.

Dennis W Carroll Demonology Demonologist
Demonologist At Your Service

Also in this episode, we feature a quick preview of the latest feature from our friends at The Singular Fortean blog. It’s St, Patrick’s season so they’re featuring legends and folklore of The Emerald Isle all this month.

One of the ways that Dennis talks about opening yourself to demonic possession is by focusing too much on your negative emotions and very few things make people as negative as a bad breakup. This week’s song is all about indulging in those negative emotions and allowing yourself to fully hate your ex. Which might be good for singing songs, but not so much for defending against infernal influences, it’s called “Eat Out My Heart”.

I’ve been waiting so long for you to call,
but now you’re finally here and I’m a wreck.
Worked out a little, even did my hair,
but I’m not the man I used to be back there.

I hope you have an ugly boyfriend,
I hope you’re working at a carwash,
I hope your life went down the drain and everything is not okay,
I hope your best years passed you up.

I dodged a bullet,
One or two since then,
You’re not the only one who still calls me up.
I’m still the jerk who listens to your problems,
I never told you all the times,
I’d wished you died in a car crash.

I hope you have an ugly boyfriend,
I hope you’re working at a carwash,
I hope your life went down the drain and everything is not okay,
I hope your best years passed you up.

I’m eating out my heart.
I’m eating out my heart.

And I’m not happy for you,
That you’re a better person without me.
I’m so glad you decided to apologize,
When I’m too numb to care,
I’m just too numb to care.

I hope you have an ugly boyfriend,
I hope you’re working at a carwash,
I hope your life went down the drain and everything is not okay,
I hope your best years passed you up.

133 – Popobawa: Dr. Martin Walsh and The Idea Virus

Martin Walsh is a social anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge.  He has extensive field experience in East Africa including the Tanzanian archipelago of Zanzibar.

popobawa dr. martin walsh
Look at the red star to find Zanzibar

We first heard about Dr. Walsh in the Gray Brothers’ documentary about sleep paralysis, The Nightmare, (check out our interview here!) where he was the liaison between the people of Zanzibar and the filmmakers. They were exploring the mystery of Popobawa (literally translated to English as “bat-wing”), an evil shapeshifting spirit who would visit people in the night and poke them where the Sun don’t shine.

Of course, we’re being flippant, but that’s part of it. The very intimate nature of the violation is one of the reasons of the legend was so scary, funny, and fascinating to the Tanzanian people. As Dr. Walsh describes it, there was a period in 1995 where that’s all the people talked about, a national obsession.

popobawa dr. martin walsh
An artist’s rendition of Popobawa, often portrayed as a one-eyed demon with bat wings, in the real legend, it was a shapeshifter and appeared in many different forms.

Much like the Clown Hysteria hit in 2016 in the United States and it spread through the news and social media, stories of Popobawa’s nocturnal visits spread through word of mouth where people would tell personal stories of waking up paralyzed and seeing a terrifying shapeshifter pressing on their chest. In fact, the stories very often resemble alien abduction tales. In one of the wildest tales that Martin talks about in the interview, there’s a spinning dog with a police siren on its head. And of course, accompanied by a fetid stink (shades of Joshua Cutchin’s Brimstone Deceit?)

popbawa martin walsh the grey brothers
Dr. Martin Walsh with The Gray Brothers filiming “The Nightmare”

But this wasn’t just harmless sleep paralysis, the panic that spread through the community caused several deaths. Since Popobawa could appear as anyone, that means that anyone acting strangely or just a little unusual could be the evil spirit in human form. Some poor mentally ill folks ended up being mistaken for Popobawa and were killed by the mob.

Dr. Walsh wrote an academic paper about this phenomenon shortly after it all went down, you can even read it online (and I recommend it, it’s not stuffy or difficult and gets into some real fascinating detail.) Click here to check out “Killing Popobawa: collective panic and violence in Zanzibar”

popobawa dr. martin walsh
Dr. Martin Walsh

Dr. Walsh goes into several reasons as to why this idea virus might have spread so quickly and such a ridiculous legend became so popular in our discussion, but one of the things that he brought up really made me think about our interview with Jack Hunter, another British student of Anthropology.

One of the things Martin believes is important to the story is that the panic took place during the Islamic Holy Month of Ramadan, and that’s a month where everyone is fasting, they’re not sleeping as much, they’re praying more, etc… they’re engaging in rituals. One of the things that Jack is studying is how people across the world have used rituals to facilitate paranormal experiences.

popobawa dr. martin walsh
Dr. Martin Walsh on location in Tanzania

The inhabitants of Zanzibar were doing exactly that when Popobawa came for a visit. Whether or not people were really visited by a single-eyed bat demon with a penchant for you know what, Martin mentions that they could very well have been setting themselves up for being more likely to have a sleep paralysis experience.  Especially once the first one happens and people start hearing about it and you might manifest it in your own bed.

Martin, of course, is featured in The Nightmare (which you can watch above) but he also has some authors he can recommend if you’re interested in learning more about this topic:

And don’t forget that Dr. Walsh has lots of work available online where you can learn more about Popobawa and Tanzania!

Martin also works with Oxfam, an organization dedicated to poverty eradication, health, and human rights in some of the most vulnerable parts of the world. You can find more about their mission and his work right here.

This week’s song was inspired by a couple of the things Martin said in the interview. Number one, he talked about the “twilight zone” between waking and dreaming. Number two, the widespread panic that spread throughout his village one night that was probably started  by his night watchman who got scared and ran away. Nothing actually happened but the whole village was terrified. Those two things put together really reminded me of the classic Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”.

There’s a great line at the end of the episode where two aliens are talking to each other discussing how their simple mindgame of turning electricity on and off selectively down the street has made the formerly friendly neighbors turn on each other. ”

“They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find,” one of the aliens says, “and it’s themselves.” And in the end, he chillingly adds, “The world is full of Maple Streets.” The Popobawa panic was one of those instances. This song is titled after its inspiration, “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”.
What do we do
the switches won’t respond
point our fingers to
a 5th column from the vast beyond
who’s hiding what
another wild theory
Who can you trust
when we’re yelling in the streets
and behind every picket fence
you’ll find your own worst enemy.
the monsters are due on Maple Street.
A simple pattern
It’s always the same
When the unknown appears
We find someone to blame
A trigger in plain sight
Agitates the hive
It’s just a matter of time and
We’ll eat each other alive
What are you guilty of?
What are you waiting for?
Who’s the little green man
inside a meteor?
and behind every picket fence
you’ll find your own worst enemy.
the monsters are due on Maple Street.
Inside every closed door,
there lies a new conspiracy
the monsters are due on Maple Street.
And our world is full of Maple Streets.

122 – They’re Here: Hunting Poltergeists With Geoff Holder

Author and screenwriter Geoff Holder has written thirty-six books on the supernatural from haunted guides of Scottish cities to stone circles and zombies, but its his research into hundreds of poltergeist cases throughout history that we wanted to talk with him about. And Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts joins us again for this episode’s interview!

Poltergeist is just the German term for “noisy ghost”. The movie has nothing to do with any kind of poltergeist phenomena that really happens to people, that was more like a family fighting a supernatural war and it gave regular people (you know, non-weirdos who don’t pay enough attention to this stuff) the completely wrong idea about what poltergeist activity was all about.

A poltergeist is paranormal activity where people don’t see a ghost (usually, although Geoff Holder says that there is some visual element in about 15% of the cases he’s researched) but they hear knocking on doors and walls, objects move when no one is around, lights break, lamps are knocked off tables, etc… Poltergeists are troublemakers, but there’s not usually a haunting (i.e., story about a dead person) that accompanies the scene.

One of my parapsychological idols, Loyd Auerbach, discusses poltergeists at length in his awesome do-it-yourself paranormal investigation book ESP, Hauntings, and PoltergeistsAnd it seemed to me that the idea of a poltergeist being a spirit was a relic of a more superstitious time. After all, those peasants just didn’t understand psychokinesis (moving objects with your mind, think about Luke making the light saber fly to his hand in the Wampa cave).

I always thought that it was not a spirit or intelligent haunting but a manifestation of psychic energy coming from a pubescent girl. Her blossoming into womanhood also involves throwing a lot of plates around with her mind bullets. In fact, this is the explanation used in an episode of the totally sweet 80s show, Shadow Chasers,  and good God I loved that show when I was 8.

Make sure you listen to this awesome theme song, it’s like a paranormal Pointer Sisters.

But come to think about it, Auerbach uses the teenager poltergeist hypothesis in his book and he was a parapsychology adviser to the Shadow Chasers TV show, so of course they’re going to go with that narrative! And it’s been a popular trope in fiction over the years. Just think about how popular Carrie was. It just felt believable.

For some reason, the idea that we have the power in our minds to move objects through some kind of excess psychic force that happens when we’re in our wild hormonal years, seemed to be a much more reasonable explanation than someone coming back from the dead.

Contrary to the movie, if you see this guy, you’re not experiencing a Poltergeist, but you might be part of a pants-soiling contest.

And I didn’t even entertain other theories because they were all too ridiculous. Demons? Gimme a break. Faeries? Now I know you’re crazy. Bulgarian vampires? Get outta here! (Even thought you’re going to want to hear Holder’s great story on that one.)

But psychic teens? I’m with you. In fact, one time when I was on a bus tour of haunted sites, I heard a tour guide tell a woman that the poltergeist activity she was having in her house was a demon and that she should be wary.

I almost punched that guy. Number one, don’t scare the poor woman. Number two, poltergeists aren’t demons. They are manifestations of wild psychic energy. Duh.

Well flash forward a decade later and I’m glad I didn’t punch that guy (he only kinda deserved it), because Geoff Holder has opened my eyes to the idea that the psychic teenager is just the latest in a long line of explanations for these noisy ghosts. 

The first case he discovered was in the 5th century where of course the explanation is demons. Almost a millennium later,  Martin Luther (yes, the guy responsible for the Protestant Reformation) is the first person to use the term in print. He blamed the Roman Catholic Church for them and just thought it was the Devil messing around with him. (Being a really holy dude, he considered the Pope a much more formidable opponent than Satan.) So, yeah, people have been saying poltergeists are demons long before mediocre ghost tour guides.

Look closely at the demon in the center, he’s got a little demon face where his junk should be!

And not just demons, but fairies! This is where Geoff Holder blows my mind, because he talks about how what we think of as poltergeist activity, people used to attribute to fairies and they would even act in certain ways as to not upset the fairies (and of course many of the U.K.’s stone circles have faerie connections as well!) And this is where things get interesting.

Poltergeist behaviors in the hundreds of studies that Geoff has looked into, doesn’t seem to follow human behaviors. If it’s the spirit of a dead person, wouldn’t that person still have some of their humanity left? Why would they just rattle the chandelier, why would they be knocking on the wall? For the love of God, why would they make more work for everyone by breaking plates?!

Poltergeists act more like tricksters with an adolescent sense of humor (poop is often involved), their behavior is mercurial often causing havoc at the slightest or no provocation at all. Having a poltergeist in your house is like hanging out with the Joker from Batman or Joe Pesci from Goodfellas, you’re always on pins and needles because you don’t know what they’ll do next. They can be kind or cruel in equal measure and with no explanations why.

And that’s completely in character with fairies, they’re not all Tinkerbell and godmothers. Fairies in the old legends are scary, they’re not just inhuman, they’re ahuman. They’ll do something wonderful for you one day and they’ll steal your child the next and you’ll never understand why. The fey are so fundamentally different from us.

It’s similar to how we think of aliens. A 2012 National Geographic poll showed that a full seventy-seven percent of Americans believe that aliens have visited Earth, but you know that 77% of Americans do not believe in faeries. 

One thing Geoff Holder has showed is the context surrounding belief might change, but the paranormal behavior doesn’t. Whether it’s Bulgarian Vampires causing trouble or Teenage Drama Queens having a psychic blowout, poltergeists have an volatile and  unpredictable quality to their actions.

Humans have a particular set of needs and motivations, these phenomena, whether they’re aliens, faeries, or demons, they don’t have those needs. And they don’t care about ours. That inspired this week’s Sunspot song, “An Indifferent Universe”.

Visit Geoff’s website to check out his awesome books and scripts right here! 

who wears the twilight
walks in starfall
who wears the cold
walking through walls
something ancient
from the before
some kind of echo
knocking at the door

they can save us
they can destroy
every human
some kind of toy
explaining power
you can’t understand
the never knowing
will drive you mad

you
me
all reality

outside time
outside space
where infinity is a place

why
curse
an indifferent universe

outside time
outside space
where infinity is a place

And here’s an extra treat, Allison was so inspired by the conversation that she wrote a poem right after we finished the interview… check it out, a little bonus to enjoy after you listen to the episode!

Gone are the sacred stones,
Plowed under like lovely bones.
Dancing sylphs in circles meet,
Trample them beneath your feet.

Pebbles and peat fall from the sky,
You can’t be bothered to ask why.
Apples picked and washing done,
But still you’re not a happy one.

Bind her to the bedpost,
She’s up to no good now.
Is she Eve or is she fae?
You’ll never know her anyway.

Bind her to the bedpost,
She’s up to no good now.
Is she Eve or is she fae?
Doesn’t matter, you’ll have your way.

You fear she’s coming back,
Her playful smile,  a sneak attack.
Wrapped in moss,  draped in flowers,
Just can’t bear it unless it’s ours.
The daughter, the lover, the mother, the crone,
If she is all, what do you own?

Cupboards burst and dishes smash,
Worlds awaken, ideas clash.
Your homely house a hell,
She’s imprisoned in this shell.
She belongs in the wild wood,
Respected, misunderstood.

Bind her to the bedpost,
She’s up to no good now.
Is she Eve or is she fae?
You’ll never know her anyway.

Bind her to the bedpost,
She’s up to no good now.
Is she Eve or is she fae?
Doesn’t matter, you’ll have your way.

She’s setting fires with her mind,
You should know, you can’t trust her kind.

105 – Exorcism: Carl Seige and The Four Signs of Possession

Exorcism, it’s back baby! From scores of possessed Peruvian kids to the Catholic Church increasing the number of priests they train for exorcism, to a psychiatrist seriously discussing possession in the pages of The Washington Post, the word on the street is that people are getting possessed by demons and it’s gonna take some of that Power of Christ to compel them out of there!

One of our favorite paranormal experts, Allison Jornlin from Milwaukee Ghosts, has been researching cases of demonic possession and we brought her on to talk about a little known, but very influential exorcism case, that occurred in the Devilish Dairy State (that’s Wisconsin) in the 1860s.

watertown wisconsin carl siege exorcism
Watertown, WI in the 19th Century – this is the best they could do for aerial views, I guess.

It all begins with the Seige Family, who were living in Germany in the late 1840s. Carl’s little sister was playing outside when she found a duck egg with a pinhole in it. She brought it into show the family but the mother immediately said to get rid of it. However, before they could, the dog ate it. Soon after, the poor pooch passed on and the sister became violently ill. She suffered for a year with blindness and fits and then passed away. One side of Carl’s body shriveled and he became very sickly. Soon after the family emigrated to Watertown, Wisconsin because they knew that the Devil wouldn’t follow them to America (right? Right?!)

Not so, Carl continued to suffer from strange symptoms. Newspapers reported that he had a lizard (or some said a snake) in his stomach. He started acting crazy so his parents brought in a Native American doctor to help draw out the evil, but that didn’t seem to work. So, they finally called in the demon-cleansing professionals, the Catholic Church.

Now the Catholic Church says that there are four Signs of Possession:

  •  Knowing The Unknowable – This is where you possess knowledge that you can’t possible have known beforehand. People’s locations, things that they were doing, who they were with, secrets, etc… Basically psychic powers like you’re Professor X watching them through Cerebro.
  • Understanding Unlearned Languages – Being able to comprehend when people are speaking to you in a tongue with which you have no prior experience. This is especially useful when possessed people go on vacation.
  • Aversion to Sacred Objects – Crosses, holy water — all the kind of stuff that people try in vampire movies but never seems to work because they don’t have enough faith.
  •  Supernatural Strength – When little kids can throw a grown man across a room or a tiny middle-aged woman can bench press a sofa bed, that means they’ve probably been popping Satanic Steroids.

You don’t have to exhibit all the signs to be authentically demonically possessed, but it’s an important checklist because at least 3 out of the 4, you can’t really fake. (It’s easy to act freaked out around a cross, people do it in Dracula movies all the time. It’s a lot harder to answer someone speaking in Latin or deadlift a Mini-Cooper.)

In Carl’s case he exhibited three of the signs, number one, he met his would-be Exorcists, the Rev. John Gmeiner and another priest as they were arriving, even though no one told him when they were coming. Number two, the priests would ask him questions in Latin and he’d give the correct answer, responding in German, but showing that he understood the Latin nonetheless (even though he had no prior education in the language.) Number three, when he was deep in the throes of his possession, he reacted violently to the crucifix.

spirits of darkness carl seige exorcism
Father Gmeiner invented the “Horror Movie” font 30 years too early!

The priests exorcised Carl and were able to drive the demons out of him according to Father Gmeiner’s book, Spirits Of Darkness. But like herpes simplex, the demons never really go away, they just hide and come back in multiple outbreaks of possession throughout your life. Carl Seige had to be exorcised many times during his life to keep the Devil at bay.

In the present day, they recently held an Exorcist training seminar in Northern Illinois at Mundelein Seminary. Allison stopped by there last week to do some research and maybe catch a glimpse of some of those Catholic heroes who are learning the proper angles to spray Holy Water and the latest in projectile vomit-avoidance techniques. Our friend, Tea Krulos, wrote an article about it in the Milwaukee Record and called it “Exorcist-palooza”.

mundelein seminary carl seige exorcism
Excuse me guys, is this where all the Exorcists hang out?

There’s an new Exorcist TV show coming on FOX this season as well. William Peter Blatty’s book was famously based on a 1949 case, but there’s some connections that Allison has been researching that are less well known, and that’s a story for another podcast.

Self-harm is one of the cornerstones of demonic possession. There’s even a case in the Bible where Jesus encounters a possessed man cutting himself with stones. (Mark 5:5) This song, “Mercy of Myth” by our band Sunspot talks about how punishing yourself needlessly isn’t worth it, because not only does it make you feel bad, it also opens you up to being possessed!

There is a Hell we hold within,
you can’t forgive yourself for the things you did.
A hair shirt and a bottle,
won’t let you forget.

Consequently, rear entry
is all that we’re left with.
We camouflage our sabotage,
and lay at the mercy of myth.

And culpa’s even worse than Crack,
You don’t need a sheepskin to know that,
even after cutting, nailbiting, hair pulling and spiting.
All your shame is still toxic.

Consequently, rear entry
is all that we’re left with.
We camouflage our sabotage,
and lay at the mercy of myth.

I’ll abandon ship on this guilt trip,
and let it drown,
Need some clemency from self pity,
and burn it out.