Catholic Church Establishes Exorcism Hotline

The Catholic Church has established an exorcist hotline in Milan, its biggest diocese, to cope with demand. Monsignor Angelo Mascheroni, the diocese’s chief exorcist since 1995, said the curia had also appointed twice as many exorcists to cope with a doubling in the number of requests for help over 15 years.

“We get many requests for names, addresses and phone numbers; that’s why we’ve set up a switchboard in the curia from Monday to Friday from 2.30pm to 5pm,” he told the chiesadimilano website.

“People in need can call and will be able to find a priest in the same area who doesn’t have to travel too far.” And to that end, the number of demon-busting priests on call has increased from six to 12.

The Monsignor said he knew of one exorcist who had been seeing up to 120 people a day. “But with so little time per client he was only able to offer a quick blessing. That’s not enough,” he said. ”There should be two to four appointments a day, no more, otherwise it’s too much.”

It’s not clear why the number of suspected possessions has risen so sharply. But Monsignor Mascheroni said that part of the increase might be explained by the rising numbers of parents having difficulty controlling disobedient teenagers.

“Usually the parents call [because they are] concerned about a child who won’t go to school or who’s taking drugs or rebelling. In reality it’s not a demon, but when they’re 18 years old young people don’t want to be told what to do.”

He warned that many worried and vulnerable people were at risk from charlatans. “Magicians demand money; we … give our time, give benediction … all for free. It couldn’t be any other way.”

The Monsignor said that all those who sought help were welcomed. But he added: “The real diabolical phenomena, at least in my experience, are very rare.” He said that “mental phenomena, mental and psychiatric disorders” were often to blame for unusual behaviour.

Not all Catholic exorcists take such a pragmatic approach, however. Father Gabriele Amorth, who was the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years, claims to have dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession.

Father Amorth said that sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church were proof that “the Devil is at work inside the Vatican”. He also claimed that satanic behaviour lay behind Vatican attempts to “cover up” the deaths of Alois Estermann, then commander of the Swiss Guard, his wife and another Swiss Guard, Corporal Cedric Tornay, in 1998.

Father Amorth also took a dim view of fantasy novels and yoga. Practising the latter, he once warned, was “satanic; it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter”.

The act of exorcism: Catholic practice

Defined by the Catholic Encyclopaedia as “the act of driving out, or warding off, demons, or evil spirits, from persons, places, or things which are believed to be possessed or infested by them, or are liable to become victims or instruments of their malice,” exorcism has been practised by the Church for centuries, but its use has increased dramatically over the last half century. - Independent

Deliver Us From Evil: A Guide To Spiritual Warfare And Exorcism

The Day Satan Called: A True Encounter with Demon Possession and Exorcism

Interview With an Exorcist

Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans

An Exorcist's Field Guide: to Blessings, Consecrations and the Banishment of Malevolant Entities

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The Legend of Big Liz

The following tale has been told in several forms, but I believe this version is close to the original:

The Master of a southern Maryland plantation was a firm supporter of the Confederate President and had committed to send as much food as he could to the Southern army. Things were going well at first, until the Yankees began attacking the Master's supply lines. The Master suspected a traitor among his slaves, and soon discovered that the Yankee spy was a slave-woman named Big Liz. She was a behemoth of a girl who could pick up two full-grown pigs, one under each arm, and cart them over to the slaughterhouse without assistance. If he confronted her directly and she fought back, she would take him to pieces.

So the Master came up with a different plan to rid himself of the spy. He approached the giant girl and asked her to assist him with a special task. He told her that President Jefferson Davis had entrusted him with a large chest full of gold. To keep it out of Yankee hands, he wanted to bury the chest where it would never be found. The girl's eyes gleamed when she heard this false report. The Master knew she was already planning to betray the existence of the chest to the Yankees.

The Master made Big Liz carry the heavy trunk several miles out into the swamp land and asked her to dig a deep hole for the trunk. He sat at his leisure while she worked and strained for hours against the muddy ground, which kept oozing back into the hole. When the slave girl was completely exhausted, the Master decreed the hole to be large enough for his war chest. Wearily, Big Liz dropped the shovel and pulled the heavy chest down until it lay at her feet. Then she started to climb out of the deep hole. But the Master barred her way, and Big Liz gazed up at him in sudden fear as he loomed over her. "Traitor! Yankee spy!" The Master hissed. "There is only one path open to a traitor."

The Master swung his sword at her, and the sharp edge of the blade cut cleaning through the slave girl's neck. Her head went rolling away into the tall grass as her body toppled across the chest. The Master heaped dirt over the chest and the body of slave girl who had betrayed him. Briefly, he considered finding her head and burying it in the pit with her body, but it was too dark to go wandering in the dangerous marshland, and he knew that scavengers would make short work of the head when they found it.

As the Master walked toward home through the dark swamp, he became aware of a prickling sensation at the back of his neck, as if someone were watching him. The Master walked faster as clouds obscured the light of the moon. The Master's teeth chattered as a breeze cut through him like the sharpened blade of the sword at his side, and his straining ears picked up the sound of footsteps on the path behind him.

The Master was filled with a terrible, superstitious dread of demons and witches and ghosts. He broke out into a panicked run, fleeing up the path as fast as his legs would carry him. To his relief, he saw the lights of his house rise before him, and knew he was home.

As he rounded the back corner of his house, he was confronted by a massive, dirt-encrusted figure that glowed with blue fire. The smell of rotting leaves and marsh grass filled his nostrils as his eyes raced up and up the tall creature, until they rested on the stump of its neck, where a head had resided only an hour before. Then he heard a chuckle from the creature's side, and he saw the phantom's head tucked under her arm.

The Master stumbled backward, gabbling desperately in fear as the ghost placed her head upon the ground with one hand and grabbed the collar of his shirt with the other. The murdered slave girl snapped the Master's neck in two and dropped his dead body to the ground beneath his bedroom window. Then Big Liz gathered up her severed head and vanished into the darkness.

They say that on the anniversary of her death, the ghost of Big Liz still may be seen roaming the swamp lands near her old home. Anyone foolish enough to walk near her grave will be driven away by the phantom, which to this day still defends the place where the Confederate chest is buried.

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Books Dictated From The Grave

It’s really hard to write a book; it’s even harder to sell one. Add a dead author into the mix (it’s pretty difficult to outline plot points and dictate precise punctuation from six feet under) and you’ve got a real publishing challenge. Enter the Ouija Board. Here are a few of the most famous instances of two frustrated creatives—one dead and one living—coming together to make literature happen.

1. The Sorry Tale: A Story of the Time of Christ (Classic Reprint)

Starting in the early 1910s, Pearl Lenore Curran and her friend Emily Grant Hutchings worked the Ouija board together twice a week, mostly to keep themselves amused while their husbands played pinochle. For almost a year, the planchette moved around the board but pointed to mostly random letters that didn’t form words, let alone sentences. Then, on July 8, 1913, Patience Worth made her presence known.

According to the frantic spelling across the Ouija board, Patience was born in either 1649 or 1694 “across the sea” and was killed in an Indian raid. Don’t ask which tribe, though. “Would ye with a blade at thy throat seek the [affiliation] of thine assassin?” she once responded to the question.

When really inspired, the Patience-Pearl duo could spell out about 1500 words an hour, which is how she came to be the author of books including The Sorry Tale and Hope Trueblood. Even spirits have their critics, though: Atlantic Monthly essayist Agnes Repplier declared the Worth pieces “as silly as they are dull.”

Curran may have hinted about the true origins of Patience Worth when she wrote a short story for The Saturday Evening Post in 1919 under her own name. The plot went something like this: A girl named Mayme believed she had a “spirit guide” named Rosa. After a bunch of hoopla about the whole supernatural affair, Mayme confessed to a friend that it had all been fabricated. “Oh Gwen, I love [Rosa]!” she admitted. “She’s everything I want to be. Didn’t I find her? It ain’t me. It’s what used to be me before the world buried it.”

“Patience Worth,” by the way, also happens to be the name of a character in a popular novel of the day that probably had some 1900s version of Fabio on the cover. Coincidence (or not): it was set in Colonial times. Pearl Curran said she hadn’t so much as flipped through the bodice-ripper before her own Patience started writing.

2. Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board; With an Introduction, the Coming of Jap Herron (Classic Reprint)

Emily Grant Hutchings, Pearl Curran’s bestie, also claimed to receive prose via spectral author. Unlike Curran, though, Hutchings’ ghostwriter already had a bunch of bestsellers under his belt. Hutchings, a one-time resident of Hannibal, Missouri, said that a spirit identified himself as “Sam L. Clemens, lazy Sam,” during a routine Ouija Board session, and requested help getting his final literary vision published so he could rest peacefully. “Every scribe here wants a pencil on earth,” Twain spelled out on the board. Not wanting to disappoint one of the greatest authors in history, Hutchings agreed. Throughout the course of writing Jap Herron, Twain offered his opinion on the homemade board (“That apostrophe is too far down. I am in danger of falling off the board every time I make a run for it”), the editing (“Will you two ladies stop speculating? I am going to take care of this story. Don’t try to dictate”), and the tobacco being used by Hutchings’ husband (“In the other world they don’t know Walter Raleigh’s weed and I have not found Walter yet to make complaint”).

Maybe being dead dulled Mr. Clemens’ gift for words and timing, because the end result was roundly panned. “If this is the best that ‘Mark Twain’ can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary,” The New York Times declared in 1917.

The “co-authored” book had another major critic: Clara Clemens, Samuel’s daughter and the executor of his estate. She sued and was successful in getting Hutchings to cease production of the books and destroy any remaining stock. That means you won’t find Jap Herron next to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in bookstores, but it is available under Hutchings’ byline. You can also read it online if you like.

3. God bless U, daughter,

Apparently unwilling to let his deceased status slow him down, Samuel Clemens allegedly contacted Mildred Swanson of Independence, Missouri, decades after his dictation to Hutchings. In the late 1960s, Swanson wrote a book called God Bless U, Daughter, a diary of her planchette conversations with Clemens. The title came from the way Clemens signed out of each session. The author, Swanson said, was able to accurately predict events like her mother getting injured in a fall and told her that authors Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Louis Stevenson were also watching over her.

4. The Seth Material: The Spiritual Teacher that Launched the New Age

In 1963, a “personality energy essence” calling itself “Seth” contacted Jane Roberts via the Ouija board, which she was using for research on a book about ESP. He wasn’t interested in parlor tricks or delivering messages from long-gone relatives, however. No, Seth preferred to divulge details about reincarnation, free will, telepathy, physical matter, anti-matter, and the subconscious.

As the sessions with Seth went on, Roberts became so comfortable with Seth’s thoughts that she no longer needed the Ouija Board and could simply dictate the messages he was sending through her brain. Together, Roberts and Seth developed enough material for 10 books from more than 1800 sessions.

5. Jane Roberts' A View From the Other Side

Jane Roberts died in 1984 at the age of 55. Naturally, she took it upon herself to channel her writings through someone else just as Seth had done through her. The result is Jane Roberts’ A View from the Other Side, a brief booklet about Jane’s own experiences since her death. Most of Jane’s fans denounce the work as utter fabrication, saying that not only does it not sound like her tone of voice, but it also expresses views that Jane never would have agreed with. - by Stacy Conradt - Mental Floss

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Crystals: Dealing With Thought-Form Entities and Attachments

Lightworkers and spirit rescuers who are open to metaphysical philosophy may wish to consider crystals in their relief work. For instance...external 'thought-form entities' are very difficult to remove. If you think you may require a bit of assistance, program a large piece of one of the crystals listed below and leave in a room to do its work:

Labradorite, Iolite, Clear Kunzite, Smoky Amethyst, Blue Selenite, Herkimer Diamond, Smoky Citrine, Brown Jasper, Citrine Herkimer

After a while the atmosphere may seem 'lighter', making your focus somewhat sharper.

Internal 'thought-form entities' can be dissolved with a crystal placed over the third eye as they tend to be stored in the brow chakra or just behind the ears. Use a Selenite Wand to detach them.

You can also use the following crystals for specific attachments:

Crystals for undue mental influence/attachments - Smoky Amethyst, Blue Halite, Yellow Phantom Quartz, Limonite, Pyrolusite, Aegerine

Crystals for entity attachment to the third eye - Larimar, Smoky Amethyst, Brandenberg Amethyst, Shattuckite, Pyroluscite, Smoky Phantom, Brandenberg Amethyst, Celestobarite, Laser Quartz, Petalite

Crystals for entities attached to places away from the body - Marcasite, Smoky Amethyst, Larimar

Before you attempt to use crystals in this manner, please be aware of crystal cleaning, charging and storing procedures. Negative energies that have been stored in the crystal from previous use or for other reasons can cause more damage than good. When storing a crystal, make a habit of solitary confinement in a cloth bag or wrapped in cloth. Keeping a Carnelian nearby can help keep the natural and charged energy intact in the crystal.

Photo above: A terminated Smoky Amethyst is a great crystal for overall removal of attached entities.

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THOUGHT FORMS - Judy Hall

In my experience, thought forms account for a high proportion of apparent spirit attachment. When people focus strongly upon something or have powerfully negative thoughts, they create a thought form. In addition to being the product of your own mind, thought forms can arise from other people’s perception or expectations, or from religious or other authoritarian dictates, and may also arise from books or films – many authors will tell you how their characters develop a life of their own and step off the page. Thought forms either lodge themselves in the mental part of the biomagnetic sheath, an internal thought form, or, as external thought forms, inhabit the lower astral realms - a place very close to the earth plane where most spirits first pass after death of the body.

External thought forms appear to have separate and distinct life and energy - and may interfere in the lives of human beings, typically by masquerading as a ‘guide’ who spouts rubbish rather than sound guidance or a figure who appears during meditation or quiet moments. Internal thought forms are usually experienced as a derogatory inner voice or obsessive thought.

How to recognise a thought form:

• It may resemble you but it doesn’t feel like you or have anything to do with what you really want or who you are inside.• It looks, talks or behaves exactly like a character from a film or book, especially a horror story.

• It has very little substance to it, seeming more like a caricature

• It gives you negative messages such as ‘that’s a bad thing to do’, ‘you’re not good enough’, ‘it’s all your fault’, ‘you’ll never be/get what you want’, ‘you don’t deserve’, ‘you’re too clever for your own good’.

• The guidance it gives is inappropriate and fallible. - judyhall.co.uk

Suggest Reading:

The Crystal Bible

Crystal Bible 2

101 Power Crystals: The Ultimate Guide to Magical Crystals, Gems, and Stones for Healing and Transformation

The Encyclopedia of Crystals

The Chakra Bible: The Definitive Guide to Chakra Energy - I highly recommend for newbies!

The Book of Stones: Who They Are & What They Teach

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A Peculiar Encounter

I received the following anecdote from a British reader:

One day, in the the eighties, I boarded a bus in Freshbrook with the intention of going to Swindon town centre. It was early evening and the bus was a single-decker. Sitting in the seat opposite the driver was a very odd looking person with his head down. He was dressed in dark, untidy clothing, disheveled in appearance. He did not look at me at all but there was something of a vibe emanating from him that made the hairs on my neck and arms stand up. I sat on the same side of the bus as him at least ten seats behind him. There were several other people between us and others also to the right hand side.

As I sat down in my seat I noticed a new pound note on the floor, I had placed my shoe inadvertently on it. Looking around I could tell that the other passengers nearby were ignoring me and not about to lay claim to it. I placed it in my pocket. No sooner had I done so than the strange looking man at the front of the bus sat upright and then stood up. He turned and made his way slowly up the bus, focusing on me. The other passengers ignored him as if he was not there. Stopping alongside me, he held out his hand..."I will have my pound note back now", he said. My hairs stood on end once more as I looked at him. He seemed dark in complexion and almost sub normal. How could he know I just found a pound note...he wasn't anywhere near...he was at the front of the bus and curled up...his head down...it didn't add up and felt eerie. Was he testing me in some way?

"What pound note is that, mate?" I found myself replying. He laughed to himself and returned to his seat at the front of the bus where he sat down again and lowered his head as if had all been a draining effort for him. He got off the bus in town and vanished, leaving me perplexed and confused at the silliness of it all.

The next day I was in the town centre once again and decided to go into the Paperback Parade bookshop, near the townhall to find an interesting book to read. As I worked around the shelves, taking my time (Thatcher's Britain...we were all unemployed). I was drawn to look out the window facing toward the College. There crossing the road and coming down toward the precinct was the same dark stranger dressed as he was the night before. Looking as if he was bypassing the bookshop, he made a sudden right turn and entered the Paperback Parade. My hairs stood on end once more as I watched him from the corner of my eye. He copied my movements around the shop until he was stood close to me on my left hand side. I pretended to ignore him,difficult as I felt cold and all my hairs on end. He leaned forward and spoke into my ear...telling me what was in my thoughts and in my mind. He laughed again and left the shop.

I never saw him again or told a soul what he spoke into my ear that moment. Certainly I was left in no doubt that this was an otherworldy encounter of the strangest kind. Later I was to come across stories of Men in Black and Trickster spirits who confuse their victims in this manner. Certainly the strangest of bus rides ever. - K

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