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

by Will Storr

  ‘In the name of Jesus!’ he shouts. ‘I bind you!’

  Denzel’s eyes get a little bigger. His hands begin to clench.

  ‘I bind you!’ the pastor cries again.

  Just on the edge of shot, Denzel’s mother picks up her Bible and starts reading a passage out loud.

  ‘In the name of Jesus!’ the pastor repeats. ‘I bind you!’

  Silently, the seven-year-old starts rocking at his waist, back and forth.

  ‘I bind you!’ shouts the holy man, louder now, over the rising chanting of Denzel’s mother.

  Denzel’s rocking gets more pronounced. He starts to make a sound. ‘De de de de de de de de de.’

  In the living room with Lou, the blue light of early dawn has turned to an overcast white. Bob sucks at the tobacco in his jaw, spits an oyster of brown juice out into an empty glass and says, ‘What are you making of this, Lou?’

  The demonologist shushes Bob as, on the screen, the boy struggles to get away from the pastor. With a sudden jerk, Denzel falls to the floor. The pastor goes with him, his heavy round knees banging on the ground. The camera shakes.

  ‘Grab his wrists!’ he shouts as Bob comes into shot and pulls the boy’s arms back. The pastor has his hefty, wobbling arms gripped around Denzel’s squirming legs. His mother is singing a hymn.

  ‘Come out!’ shouts the pastor. ‘Come out in Jesus’s name!’

  The mother’s lungs open up in full gospel fashion as she sings, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible tells me so.’

  It’s as if a storm has opened up in the middle of the room. In amongst the frilly upholstery, leafy plants and paintings of idyllic family scenes, there’s a chaos of shouting, fighting and praising the Lord. Down in the centre of this violent bedlam, the little boy is pinned to the floor by two heavy men. And he doesn’t make a sound. You can see his white trainers and his sticky-out ears and his blue denim jacket with a patch on the pocket. You can see him struggling on the clean carpet of his home, wordlessly.

  ‘Come out!’ the pastor shouts again. ‘Come out in Jesus’s name!’

  The mother interrupts her singing, briefly, to cry, ‘Jesus!’

  And then Denzel speaks. ‘You are a bad man,’ he says.

  In the room, Bob’s eyebrows raise up. Lou’s eyebrows scrunch down.

  ‘I love you!’ replies the pastor. He’s worked his way up to Denzel’s waist now. The back of his head is fat. ‘Jesus loves you!’ With his free hand, he’s opened a small pot of blessed oil and is trying to put some on the child’s head.

  ‘Mum! Mum!’ shouts Denzel. ‘Help me, Mum!’

  But Mum is busy, singing to Jesus.

  ‘You are not a doctor!’ shouts the boy. ‘You are not a doctor!’

  ‘I love you!’ the pastor shouts again. His stonewashed jeans are being pulled down in the struggle and his shirt is being pulled up.

  ‘I love you,’ he shouts. ‘Jesus loves you!’

  ‘Mum! Mum! Stop it! Stop!’

  ‘Jesus!’ shouts Mum.

  ‘I don’t want Jesus,’ Denzel cries.

  ‘You told me you loved Jesus!’ the pastor cries. There’s a menacing triumphalism in his voice and there are spots of spit on his lips. And there’s fear in there as well.

  ‘Shut up!’ Denzel shouts. He’s angry now. ‘Shut up!’

  In the back of shot, a man in a dark T-shirt is making coffee in the kitchenette. He appears entirely unconcerned at the bubble of hell that’s popped open on the living-room floor, just a few feet away from him.

  ‘The pastor’s a real nice guy,’ Bob tells us. ‘He knows his Bible real well.’

  ‘Motherfucker! Motherfucker!’ Denzel shouts.

  ‘Demon of profanity leave this child!’ the pastor shouts back.

  ‘Jesus died on the cross for Denzel,’ his mother announces, in between caterwauled verses.

  ‘Mother … fucker,’ says Denzel. His voice has changed. It’s crumpled and teary now. Defeated. ‘I don’t like you,’ he says.

  ‘Demon of attention deficit disorder, leave this child!’ says the pastor.

  ‘Shut up, motherfucker! You are a bad man!’ Denzel has got his shout back a little. He hisses as he struggles.

  ‘Hissing is extremely common in cases like this,’ Lou says.

  Then, the boy spits.

  ‘You see?’ says Bob. ‘There’s a sign right there. And the profanity … ’ He spits another glob of slippery brown tobaccy-juice into his glass.

  ‘Demon of I don’t love you,’ says the pastor, lying on the floor on top of the boy, ‘leave this child!’

  ‘I’m not playing with you, motherfucker,’ Denzel shouts from inside the knot of limbs that are holding him down.

  ‘Demon of retardation, leave this child! Demon of schizophrenia, leave this child! Demon of selfishness, leave this child! Demon of madness, leave this child! Demon of autism, leave this child!’

  ‘Motherfucker!’

  ‘Demon of profanity, in the name of Jesus Lord and Saviour, leave this child!’

  ‘Mum! Mum!’

  ‘Jesus loves me this I know! Because the Bible tells me so!’

  ‘Mum! Stop it!’

  ‘Watch his eyes,’ Bob says. ‘They turn black.’

  ‘Lou,’ I say, quietly. He looks at me, and I motion, with a small head-nod, towards the door that leads to the garden.

  ‘Do you mind if me and Will step outside and have a smoke?’ Lou says.

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Be my guest.’ He gets up and pauses the video in his dressing gown and white socks. ‘Anything you want, you just holler, you hear?’

  There’s a menacing quality to Bob’s razor etiquette. It makes me feel profoundly unsafe. Perhaps, I think, it’s just his down-home Deliverance twang. But, no – I think my discomfort comes from the instinctive feeling that the man who expends the most effort on the presentation of his personality is the man who’s got the most to hide. And when the manners are this pristine, you’ve got to wonder about the private realpolitik that they’re shielding. I smile at Bob as I step out of his French windows but I fail to manage eye contact.

  Outside the house the crickets have quietened. It’s almost as if they’ve been watching us, listening in on the guilty scene. They’ve been hushed by the horror.

  ‘Well, I’m not seeing any signs of supernatural strength there,’ says Lou. ‘Or any facial changes. The change in his personality was really something, though. And there was spitting. And hissing … ’

  ‘Lou!’ I say.

  ‘What?’ he says. ‘What did you make of that?’

  ‘Where I come from,’ I say, ‘that’s child abuse. Bob and that fucking pastor would be locked up if Social Services got hold of that video. It was horrific. That poor kid.’

  There’s a silence as I look at Lou and watch this sink slowly in. ‘Child abuse, huh?’ he says.

  ‘That kid was petrified. That’s why he was swearing! He didn’t know what the fuck was going on.’

  ‘These are all valid points you’re making,’ Lou says.

  ‘He’s not possessed,’ I say. ‘He’s autistic.’ There’s a pause.

  ‘All right, listen to me,’ he says. ‘You might be right. There may be nothing wrong with the kid. It might all be coming from the mother.’

  ‘What? You still think this case is paranormal?’

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Even the kid’s psychologist thinks it is. And he knew the name, Ogalegal. I’m telling you, man, something’s going on. And that house? It’s definitely haunted. When we go back in there, let me do the talking. All right?’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Fine.’

  Back inside, we’re presented with confusing breakfasts. There are sausages that are shaped like hamburgers, scrambled eggs with sugar in them and ‘biscuits’ that are actually scones.

  ‘Shall I put the tape back on?’ Bob says, settling down with a large oval plate on his lap.

  ‘How much longer is there?’

  ‘About,
I guess, another three hours.’

  I almost choke on my sweet eggs.

  ‘Actually, do you know what?’ Lou says. ‘I don’t want to see any more.’

  ‘So what do you make of it, Lou? Pretty nuts, huh?’

  ‘Well, I’d say that this is borderline spiritual warfare … ’

  I clear my throat, noisily and obviously.

  ‘ … borderline child abuse,’ he says.

  ‘Child abuse?’ Bob says, his fork in mid-air, his thin lips slack.

  ‘Be very careful who you show this tape to,’ Lou says. ‘As a friend, as a fellow ghosthunter, I’m telling you this should not have happened.’

  ‘Oh, Lou, don’t tell me that,’ says Bob.

  ‘I’m telling you, man,’ Lou says. ‘A judge would say this tape is child abuse. If I were you, I’d tell Denzel’s mom that this tape got lost. I wanna see that motherfucker burn. I want it melted.’

  At just gone 10 a.m. that morning, there’s a videotape barbecue on Bob’s patio. And when we finally arrive at Denzel’s house, his mom has a hard time believing Bob’s lie.

  ‘My kid just chewed it up,’ says Bob, shrugging limply.

  ‘How is that possible?’ she says.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ says Bob. ‘He destroyed the camera, too.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little bit strange?’

  ‘Mrs Clarke,’ Lou interrupts, ‘I have a whole battery of questions that I need to ask you and I want to get through them as fast as possible. Can we sit down?’

  We all move to the room where Denzel was sat upon. The day after the exorcism, Denzel had what Bob described as a ‘very bad episode’ at school. He ran out of his classroom and into the road. This was why he was sent to the institution. Of course, Denzel’s guardians think that it was the devil in him that made him act this way. It hasn’t occurred to them that the wailing chaos, the frightening and confusing and brutally weird scenes that happened around him and to him, for more than three hours, might have cracked his already brittle mental state.

  During Lou’s interview, Denzel’s mother tells us about the things that are in her house. There are rappings on the wall. There are footsteps. There are disembodied voices. There are white balls of light and streaks. There are times when ‘it gets really cold; it feels like a breeze is going by’. She sometimes feels prodded. And there are black shadow apparitions. She tells Lou that she believes in the devil. She says she ‘knows he exists because it’s a known fact that he exists’. She says that ‘faith is believing’. Then she admits that some time ago, she used a Ouija board with some friends. The planchette moved by itself, with nobody touching it.

  If Father Amorth were here, I think, as she speaks, he’d probably agree with Lou’s diagnosis. It’s the mother who’s infested. The kid’s just the patsy.

  Halfway through the interview, Denzel’s psychologist walks in. A middle-aged man with a tucked-in shirt and shiny leather shoes, he listens to the proceedings uncomfortably, his foot twitching irritably and his hands gripping the arms of his chair.

  When it’s his turn to speak, he tells Lou, ‘Denzel has been diagnosed with a disorder called Aspergers, which is similar to autism. Now, I have a lot of experience in this area. I started off working with kids with autism and autism-type disorders in nineteen seventy-five,’ he says, ‘and Denzel’s behaviour is consistent with the behaviour that these kids show.’

  ‘Let’s say,’ Lou says, ‘a situation was to arise where he was confronted, and constantly hammered with questions. Because of the autism, would he be on frequency overload and would he just, um, spaz out?’

  ‘He would have problems processing that and coping with it. He would become over-stimulated and the more over-stimulated he is, the more disinhibited he is, the more chaos he causes around him until the behaviour increasingly breaks down. If there is any kind of paranormal manifestation here, I would consider that as a stressor that would cause him to be disinhibited and act out. Denzel says these things are happening to him and I accept that. But I have not seen, from my conversations with him, anything that I could discern as a sign of any kind of evil in him. I just don’t see that in him. When Mrs Clarke talked to me about this before, my impression was that it was more connected to the house and not coming from him. But I have no experience in this area. I don’t know what is possible and what is not possible.’

  Lou looks at him and frowns. It appears that the demonologist has been misinformed about the psychologist’s opinions of Denzel.

  ‘So in other words,’ Lou says, ‘you’ve not seen any signs of supernatural powers in Denzel? You’ve not seen his eyes change colour?’

  I watch Lou earnestly quiz the psychologist and silently will him to stop. Suddenly, it’s excruciating.

  ‘You’ve not seen him display forbidden knowledge?’ he says. ‘Or talk in foreign languages?’

  The psychologist looks at him square in the face. ‘I’ve not seen any of that in him,’ he says.

  Despite this, Lou remains determined to rule Denzel out of his enquiries. So we climb back into his car for the two-hour journey to the institution.

  When we get there, we find the child’s mother sitting in a small empty social room, on a circle of chairs that surround a low nest of grey tables. Denzel is sitting at these tables, his legs curled on the floor underneath him. He’s drawing on a pad with a red felt tip. Mrs Clarke is determined to show us that her son is possessed, that he’s in such a state of manic demonic preoccupation that he speaks evil words and draws horned devils obsessively.

  ‘What’s that you’re drawing?’ says Lou.

  ‘A church,’ Denzel says, his head tucked into his drawing arm, his eyes solid with the concentration.

  ‘That’s a very detailed church.’

  ‘Well, thanks,’ he says.

  We watch Denzel draw a fat crucifix.

  ‘What’s the door like in your bedroom?’ says Lou.

  ‘It’s a creepy door,’ he says. Then, he stops drawing and asks us all, in turn, where we went to sleep last night. When he gets to me, I reply, ‘In Lou’s car.’

  He looks at me, sadly. ‘I went to sleep here,’ he says, before tearing the top sheet off his pad and starting a new picture. Then he looks at me again. Something has puzzled him.

  ‘Where do you live?’ he asks. And then I realise. It’s my accent.

  ‘Philadelphia,’ I say.

  ‘Philadelphia?’ asks Denzel, his mouth gaping with disbelief.

  There’s a silence.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  Thankfully, Denzel goes back down and continues with his drawing. Outside the door, two nurses stride past, their voices fading down the corridor. Through the small reinforced window, you can just see Bob, leaning against the wall, trying to peer in.

  Then, Denzel’s mother lurches towards her son and says, ‘Look at that! What are you drawing?’

  ‘Scary face,’ he says.

  ‘Why did you draw that?’ she asks. She’s excited now. Here comes the proof.

  ‘Scaaarrryyyy faaaacccceee,’ Denzel says.

  ‘Where did you see that?’ she asks, darting Lou a look.

  ‘Scooby Doo,’ says her son.

  She slumps back in her chair, temporarily defeated.

  ‘Do you get scared sometimes, like Shaggy?’ Lou asks.

  Denzel shakes his head.

  ‘You’re Mommy’s brave boy, aren’t you?’ says his mum.

  Denzel ignores her for a beat. Then he asks her, ‘What makes you brave?’

  ‘Jesus makes me brave,’ she says.

  ‘Jesus? Woaaahh! Jesus does?’ he says.

  ‘Oh!’ she says, firing off another look in Lou’s direction. ‘Doesn’t Jesus make you brave, too?’

  ‘Yep,’ he says.

  Lou moves to get up. ‘It was nice meeting you, Denzel,’ he says, rising from his seat.

  ‘It was?’ Denzel asks, his big eyes peering up from his drawing.

  As we walk out of the social room, I see B
ob leaning next to a sign by a set of grey swing doors. It says ‘Patients From This Unit Will Attempt To Elope Down Stairwell. Please Slam Door’.

  ‘I can’t take too much more of that,’ the demonologist says. Something in his voice makes me look at him. Lou is close to tears. ‘I feel like a fucking idiot,’ he says. ‘That kid’s not possessed.’ He pauses and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘But where did that name come from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s a coincidence.’

  There’s a tense silence, as the three of us pace down the strip-lit corridor.

  ‘No, there’s something going on here,’ Lou says. ‘I just haven’t figured it out yet. I don’t think she’s making stuff up about the house. I know there’s something in that house. I fucking know it.’

  ‘What the heck happened in there?’ says Bob, following behind us as we go.

  BACK AT BOB’S, we sleep. And when the sun goes down and the crickets strike up again, we prepare to return to Denzel’s house. Lou remains convinced that there’s something demonic prowling around in there. Before he left, he tells me, he put a pinch of blessed salt in front of the closet door that Denzel and his mother have seen a black shadow coming out of. Holy salt, I remember, is Father Amorth’s favoured method of dealing with a ‘possessed house’. If there actually is anything demonically up with Denzel’s mum, the theory goes that she’ll have a rabid aversion to the stuff. It’ll be like garlic to a vampire.

  Half an hour later, as Bob and Lou and I turn back onto the freeway, I find that the demonologist is getting slightly more into his conceit that I’m his ‘research assistant’ than I am entirely comfortable with. Lou’s leaning back in his driving seat and shouting to Bob in the back, ‘Skippy here will be spending time in the room tonight. By himself. With the door shut. Right, Skippy?’ he laughs as he drives.

  ‘Right,’ I say.

  ‘Will’s got the kid’s room. As a matter of fact, I might lock his ass in the closet.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ I say.

  ‘Ah, he knows I’m just bustin’ his ass,’ Lou shouts to Bob. ‘Dontcha, Skippy? But, seriously, you gotta remember my rules this time, Will,’ he says. ‘Believe me, you’re not going to see Casper the friendly fucking ghost walking down the hallway. Something is going to happen to somebody. And when that happens, you must not freak out. Try to compose yourself as best you can. There may be knockings and bangings. There may be voices. Somebody may well get attacked. I gotta warn you, I don’t think this is a ghosty ghost thing. This is definitely something along the lines of the demonic.’