Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

by Will Storr

  ‘Well, three is a sign of the demonic,’ he says. ‘But if that’s the only thing that showed any sign of something demonic, there ain’t nothing there. It’s got to be a coincidence. It just has to be. At the beginning of a haunting, if you get three knocks or something three starts to show up and continues to show up, then that’s a different story. But with the Carvens there was nothing really there that showed a sign of being demonic.’

  ‘Did they win their court case?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lou says. ‘I kinda stay out of the legal thing because, you see, when you get involved with a case and it becomes legal, people want you down there at a specific time and if you can’t make it, you’re an asshole. But they were happy with my analysis. I didn’t try to blow smoke up their ass. I’m not a big proponent of orbs and globules. But when you see, which you saw, that globule follow her up her stairs, what can you do?’

  ‘I emailed a parapsychologist about that,’ I say, ‘and he said it was just insects.’

  ‘There were no bugs in that house,’ says Lou. There’s a silence. ‘Well, there could’ve been. But what are the odds that a bug, out of focus, is going to follow Mrs Carven up the stairs, and then, when she turns, you see it go towards the haunted room? It wasn’t insects. It wasn’t pollen. It wasn’t dust. There was something in that house.’

  ‘And in Kathy’s house there were so many of them,’ I say. ‘And I looked in the kitchen on the night. There wasn’t a swarm of insects there.’

  Outside the car, the Kentucky night is clearing. Inside, I’m becoming restless. The gallons of truck-stop black coffee that I’ve drunk to saturate my jet-lag have drained their way downwards. The feeling is heavy and insistent and uncomfortable.

  ‘Could we stop for a minute?’ I ask Lou. ‘I have to piss.’

  ‘Sure,’ he says.

  He indicates in the empty road and pulls onto a verge. As soon as the engine stops, I hear the sound again. It’s incredible. But, stepping out into it, it’s also unnerving. You see, you can’t find its source. All you can tell is that it’s coming from a multitude of beings. Their presence is invisible, and yet it commands the landscape. The people who live out here, the folk of the sparse settlements of Bible-belt America, hear it all the time. But to me, as I stand by the cooling, ticking car, pissing into the long grass, it’s startling. I have to remind myself that I have nothing to be scared of. After all, it’s just insects. Crickets, to be precise. Swarms of swarms of them. Nothing weird or unexplained. In this part of America, their chirruping, two-tone hymn fills the air every night. It’s a suitable soundtrack for the stars, the panoply of galaxies that glimmer above my head. I look up. Now up there, there is something weird and unexplained. The bright, distant universes are incredible, unbelievable. But, as unbelievable as they are, they’re a fact. And only because they’re plainly visible up through the night sky, our widescreen windscreen out into the universe. If you couldn’t see it, you wouldn’t believe it for a minute. And if I couldn’t hear the crickets, I’d never think I was surrounded.

  ‘You ought to be careful,’ Lou says as I get back in, positioning my feet around the rubble of snacks and Pepsi cans that I’ve dropped around my feet.

  ‘That place you heard the breathing in?’ he says. ‘That place is obviously totally demonically infestated.’

  ‘Well, I’m OK,’ I say, as he turns the ignition and curls his fingers over the gear stick. ‘Amorth gave me a once-over. I’m not possessed. Nothing followed me home. And ghosts can’t kill you, can they?’

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if objects can be thrown about or levitated, what’s stopping a knife, or an object that’s pointy, from flying out and hitting you in the jugular vein, causing catastrophic injuries resulting in death?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ I say.

  I look out of my window for a while and my thoughts drift. We roll on in silence for ten miles, twenty …

  ‘I was thinking about that demon you saw,’ I say, eventually, ‘and I met this other guy, David Vee … ’

  ‘Who?’ says Lou.

  ‘Um … ’ I reflect for a second. ‘No, actually – don’t worry … ’

  We turn a sharp corner around a dark hillside and, as we clear it, the road ahead shows itself in all its length and grandeur. It stretches out languorously and turns and climbs for miles, all lit up and empty. We are now ten hours into our drive, to an outbreak of the ‘battle’ that both the demonologist and the exorcist talk about that has erupted in a family home right in the heart of holy America.

  ‘When you’re dealing with demons and devils,’ Lou says, as we reach cruise speed, ‘and you have somebody that asks you, “Hey, what does this name mean?” a lot of times, the name makes absolutely no sense. But when you have a situation that arises, like the one we’re on our way to, where you have a kid, and his mother asks him, “Who are you?” and the kid utters the name Ogalegal … well, it’s very rare.’

  ‘Ogalegal?’ I say. ‘Is that the name of the demon?’

  ‘Well, Og is the name of an Israelite devil that’s connected with breaking faith. But I was stumped when I heard “alegal”. I thought, OK, a kid saying Ogalegal doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Then I thought, let’s do this another way. What’s this kid’s birthday? It’s the eighteenth of October. Now, every day has a specific demonic energy, at least, according to the old texts. So I looked up the eighteenth of October. What do you think I found?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Egibiel. Og is the devil. Egibiel is the demon. Now, I saw this, and I thought, OK, say this name real fast. Ogebeable. Same thing. So don’t be surprised if some very strange things wind up happening over the course of the next seventy-two hours. Because this right here,’ Lou says, hitting the top of his steering wheel with his outstretched finger, ‘is very, very rare.’

  ‘How rare, exactly?’ I ask.

  Lou takes his hand off the wheel, for a second, to rub his rose. ‘Man, it’s rare to even find something close to a name that somebody repeats. A lot of people call me up and go, “Oh, yeah, I got Leviathan.” Yeah, OK. Whatever. Yeah, sure you got Leviathan in your basement. Is it possible? There’s a one in sixty-million chance that that would happen. In my lifetime, I may never encounter a true demon in the upper hierarchy.’

  ‘So, this kid is definitely possessed?’ I say.

  ‘There’s a lot of research gone into this. There’s a lot of pieces of the puzzle fitting together. I’ve covered all the bases,’ he says. ‘I’ve spoken to the pastor. I have a psychological evaluation of this kid that’s already been performed. I have a meeting, tomorrow morning, with the actual psychologist of this kid, and the mother. And we’re going to be seeing him for two hours, at the institution.’

  ‘Institution?’

  ‘Yeah, the kid had to be locked up for his own safety. Now, there’s got to be a reason for that happening.’

  ‘Do you mean that there’s a paranormal reason behind the kid being locked up?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes. There just has to be a reason for it. You see, when evil manifests itself, there’s always something good trying to sneak its way in to the situation. Good always tries to overwhelm it.’

  ‘And that’s God?’ I say.

  ‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘It’s divine intervention. You know, God is not an old man with a beard hanging out on the Planet Neptune. God is a positive energy source. An extremely powerful energy source – a human being cannot be in the presence of God without being destroyed. And sometimes, God intervenes. I’ve been on cases when things have been just about ready to go bad and this encompassing light that you can’t describe – I call it white, but it’s not white – it comes into a situation and it releases everything.’

  ‘So the fact that the kid’s been locked up,’ I say. ‘That’s God? That’s divine intervention?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And there’s definitely nothing else wrong with the kid?’ I say. ‘Nothing
medical, psychological?’

  ‘No,’ says Lou. There’s a silence. ‘Apart from the autism, nothing at all.’

  ‘He’s autistic?’ I say. ‘But … Lou!’

  ‘Will,’ Lou says and looks at me, ‘listen. If what I’ve been told is correct, even the kid’s psychologist says this case is paranormal.’

  As I’m absorbing this, I remember Father Amorth telling me that psychologists and doctors sometimes refer patients to him – and that he’s cured them. Like the epileptic boy who, after his exorcism, never had another fit. Just then, we pull off the road, into another petrol station. It’s almost four-thirty in the morning. I’ve been awake for a day and a half.

  ‘Will,’ says Lou, ‘can you pay for the gas? Go up to the counter and ask for thirty bucks on pump five.’

  I step out of the car onto the warm tarmac. The crickets are reaching the dramatic climax of their nocturnal opera. Up above me, traffic lights hang from wires. There’s an articulated lorry parked at the side of the complex with curtains pulled over its windscreen. Blue and black flashes of a TV glow up onto the other side of the thin material, evidence of a world within a world that I don’t want to know about.

  I walk up to the counter.

  ‘Can I have thirty bucks on pump five, please?’ I say, to the woman sitting behind it.

  ‘Wha’?’

  ‘Can I have thirty bucks on pump five, please?’

  ‘Eeerrr.’ She pauses and looks at me. ‘Wha’?’

  ‘Thirty bucks,’ I say, ‘on pump five.’

  ‘Yaw goin’ a haff ta repeat that reeeaaal slow,’ she says.

  Lou walks up behind me. ‘Thirty bucks on pump five,’ he says.

  Behind us, there’s a man speaking loudly into his mobile phone. From the content of his conversation, it’s become apparent that’s he talking about a woman who has recently sold him some sex. He’s describing her anatomy in a way that suggests that the person on the other end of the phone is also a customer. And a happy one, at that. The man on the phone is wearing nothing but a pair of jeans. They are slung half an inch below the level of his hairy arse-crack. He is bald and enormous and appears as if God has shaped him roughly out of a huge lump of clay, with two careless squeezes. In the passenger seat of his car sits his girlfriend. She’s drunk and hawwing sloppily into a mobile. As the man approaches the counter, it becomes clear that he is also drunk. He walks like a marionette. At this moment, I am so scared of this man it feels as though I’m in danger of liquidising on the spot and trickling into a nearby gutter.

  As he fumbles with his dollars, I slip into the toilets around the back. I stand at the urinal and exhale and watch the entrance. After I hear his door slam and the car drive off, my bladder allows itself to release, and my attention is taken by a sticker on a condom machine. It contains the official small print, amongst which is this caveat: ‘Condoms do not offer 100% protection from HIV/Aids. The only guaranteed protection is a loving, heterosexual relationship.’ Somebody has underlined the word ‘heterosexual’ so deeply that the plastic sticker has split open, and the paint underneath it is scratched to the metal.

  ‘We’re dealing with Baptists all weekend,’ Lou tells me as we drive off.

  ‘Lou,’ I say, ‘you know you said that –’

  ‘You’re still worrying about the autism thing, aren’t you?’ Lou says. ‘Well, listen. Before moving into this house, Denzel was a completely different person to who he is today. He was still autistic. But the way these kids are, they’re predictable. Their attitude, their constitution, their whole mental psyche is usually one way. You can expect how they’re going to react to certain things. It’s always the same. But when they moved into this house, Denzel started to say that he would see somebody coming out of the closet. He would always want to sleep with his mother. She would go, OK, he’s just a kid, it’s no problem. But after a while, it became old. So, finally, the mother slept in there with him, and she saw what appeared to be a black shadow. Well, she ran out of there and started screaming the Bible.

  ‘After this, Denzel started to become very violent. He started to draw pictures of what looked to be some kind of monster. Then, the mother would hear as though somebody was literally walking on top of the rafters in the middle of the night. All the while, Denzel’s mother was talking to the psychologist and he couldn’t figure out why this kid started displaying signs of spiritual-slash-physical torment. So she went to her pastor and he did an exorcism over him and Denzel starts freaking out. He started spitting and cursing and saying a lot of things that were not befitting a kid of his age. He came out with information that he didn’t know and that’s a sign, right there, that we’re dealing with something demonic. And, anyway, this local paranormal investigator that was called in by the mother – he was only there for three hours, and he saw black shadows, he heard things and saw things moving around. That’s when he called me in. And it’s his house we’re going to first.’

  As the pale-blue dawn begins to glow down the telegraph poles and the road signs, huge rectangular buildings emerge from the black shadow of night. There’s a drive-thru McDonald’s with a huge neon ‘M’, a drive-thru pawn shop with a huge neon dollar sign and a drive-thru ‘First Baptist Church’ with a huge neon crucifix.

  ‘What’s the investigator’s name?’ I ask.

  ‘Bob. But before we get to his place, I gotta warn you. My investigations into this situation have given me reason to believe that it’s actually the mother that’s possessed. She could be drawing attention to the kid so the spirit isn’t detected inside her, if that makes sense.’

  ‘So, the kid’s the patsy?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Lou. ‘Exactly. And there’s one other thing. You can’t tell these people what it is you’re doing. You have to tell them you’re my research assistant who’s present only to document, you know, stuff for legal purposes. If I tell them that you’re doing your own thing, it complicates matters. It gets people nervous. So, do not give them an inkling that you’re from the UK.’

  ‘But, Lou – what about my accent?’

  ‘I know it’s going to be hard, but … here we are.’

  The demonologist pulls up next to a black pick-up that’s parked outside a modest bungalow on the end of a small-town street. The lovingly waxed vehicle has two bumper stickers. One has the words ‘Marriage = . The other says, simply, ‘Proud American’.

  Bob is thin, pale and buzz-cutted. He greets us in his dressing grown, the sticky fug of deep sleep still clamming up his face and slugging his movements. Bob yawns, apologises and shows us into his living room. He promises us that his wife will be up to make us ‘a real good country home-cooked breakfast’ once he’s shown us his home movie of an autistic seven-year-old having a violent exorcism. It’s the events of this film that convinced the people around Denzel that he was demonically possessed and led Bob to call Lou in.

  ‘The local pastor that’s been praying over Denzel – he’s a real good guy,’ he tells Lou after we’ve introduced ourselves and sat down heavily on his sofa.

  Bob leaves the room for a moment, then returns, wheeling with him a small portable TV that’s attached by wires to a DV camera. He parks it in front of us and bends over, the belt of his towelling dressing gown touching the carpet. Then, he presses the fiddly play button. The static blinks off and the screen shows us a pretty late-thirties African-American woman sitting on a flowery sofa in a tidy lounge.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like to add?’ a male voice says to her.

  The lady smiles, joyfully and with teeth. She says, ‘God is awesome.’

  Bob nods his head in reverent agreement, opens a tin of chewing tobacco, takes a pinch and pushes it down between his left gum and cheek. The room around him is sparsely furnished. There’s nothing much to see, except a bookcase full of videos, a leather three-piece suite and a picture of Jesus and Mary in a frame on the mantelpiece. It’s painted in soft, pastel colours and their eyes are big and round and dewy and Disney. I try to
relax, to loosen the sinewy apprehension out of my shoulders.

  The pastor is a great, grim silverback of a man. His shoulders sag with the weight of his arms and the fly part of his trousers is stretched tight over his stomach’s swell. He looks like a bigger, more monstrous incarnation of the drunken mountain man at the garage earlier on. We watch him on the screen as he sits on a stool in front of Denzel. Spills of excess backside gloop over the small circular seat. With a black leather-bound Bible open on his pudgy palm, he reads out favourite passages, before asking the boy, ‘What does that mean to you, Denzel?’

  I’m captivated by the child. He has a bad squint and a sad countenance. His big dark eyes look up at the pastor. He doesn’t speak. He just looks away, towards his mother.

  ‘What does that mean to you, Denzel?’ the pastor says again.

  The child shrugs his shoulders and puts a finger in his mouth.

  ‘Does it mean that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Saviour?’

  Denzel looks at his mother again.

  Lou’s watching all this with a studious frown, his legs crossed expansively, his hand clutching his chin. He says to me, ‘Notice how he keeps looking to the mother for permission to speak?’

  ‘Denzel?’ says the pastor. ‘Do you recognise Jesus Christ as your one Lord and Saviour?’

  ‘Jesus?’ he says. He looks mystified and slightly afraid. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be saying.

  ‘He’s reacting too quick,’ Bob says.

  I don’t understand. I look at Bob, then back at the television.

  ‘Denzel? Listen to me,’ the pastor says. The holy man has a crop of black stubble for a haircut. His fringe is a straight line that runs low above his piggy eyes. ‘Do you recognise Jesus Christ as your one Lord and Saviour?’

  ‘Jesus?’ Denzel says again, quieter this time.

  ‘I’m going to say some prayers of deliverance,’ the pastor tells Denzel’s mother.

  ‘I’m real curious to know what you’re going to make of this, Lou,’ says Bob, in the room.

  The pastor puts his slab, white hand on Denzel’s dark forehead. His thick raw-sausage fingers curl weightily over the boy’s small skull.