Sister of Darkness

by R. H. Stavis

  I don’t always hear from clients after they walk out of my Spirit Room, but I always maintain intense hope for them. If I didn’t, I couldn’t perform this job. I have to remain optimistic so I can keep myself in the healthy mind-state I’ve worked hard to reach. I want to make a difference in the world, so I have to keep going, and keep my spirit strong.

  Emergency Exorcisms

  Most of the people who know about my gift are sympathetic to the erratic schedule that comes with my odd side job. My best friends understand that even if we schedule dinner weeks in advance, I may have to duck out before dessert. And vacations? Those are usually last-minute trips alone to the mineral springs in California wine country so I can soak my exhaustion away in a thermal bath and drink wine in peace and quiet. Life and people tend to adjust to what I do. But that doesn’t make it any less awkward when I have to cancel an important meeting.

  “I’m so sorry,” I might say to a filmmaker whose script I’m writing, “but this superimportant actress, who’s in the middle of a crazy production schedule, has been having night terrors, and the director’s going to have to cancel the shoot if she doesn’t get some sleep.”

  “And . . . what does this have to do with me?” comes the reply.

  “Well, she’s got an entity, and I need to exorcise it during the time we were supposed to have a meeting.”

  Believe me, this kind of conversation has been met with total, you-could-hear-a-pin-drop silence on the other end of the line. But what can I do? Somebody in a do-or-die situation needs an exorcism, and I’m the only person who can help.

  There are only a few situations that’ll make me stop everything I’m doing and rush back to my Spirit Room. Most exorcisms aren’t emergencies, but a few are, and they typically don’t deal with the type of entity I’ll be battling, but instead the person who has it.

  As I mentioned before, I always consider a child an emergency. Children are the closest beings in the world to Spirit, which gives them unadulterated innocence. Seeing that purity disturbed isn’t just troubling, it’s downright wrong. Plus, kids are blank slates who are too young to process trauma, so it’s likely that they’ll be significantly more affected than older people by entities. It’s best to remove these forces as soon as possible.

  I’ve performed exorcisms on children as young as two and three. Trust me, what these entities did to these beautiful little people was terrible. Not only were they emotionally stunted—not talking, acting withdrawn, or behaving oddly—but some even experienced physical trauma from the entity, like the child I talked about in the introduction. I saw strange words written in a tattoo-like fashion on one little girl. I witnessed unexplained cuts on a small boy’s arms and legs, and bruises in private places on his body. Seeing these physical traumas upsets me deeply, and I always want to stop them immediately.

  My youngest exorcism was on a girl who hadn’t even turned two. Her parents were drug addicts, and her grandmother had taken custody of her when they were deemed by the court to be unfit. But before a formal transfer had taken place, the neglect was at its worst. Even with constant visits from her grandmother, who did her best to help a bad situation, the baby spent several months not being fed enough, sleeping in filthy conditions, and being ignored by her mom and dad. When the grandmother got custody, she took the baby to several doctors, but she still didn’t put on weight or sleep through the night, and she spent most days crying.

  “My neighbor said you might be able to help, so here we are,” the grandmother said when she brought the baby to me. “You’re my last hope.”

  We talked about what the girl had been going through, so her trauma was obvious. I didn’t need her Guides to tell me much. But when her exorcism began, I discovered something much more complex: a Wraith, connected to sexual abuse that had happened years before the girl was born to a relative of hers, had passed through her spiritual DNA and attached to her. I call that a lineage connection, and the pain the entity had caused was being amplified by a Clive. When I exorcised the Clive and cut the lineage connection, both entities dissipated into smoke before my eyes.

  The baby started sleeping through the night almost immediately. Within a month, she put on five pounds.

  If I get a call from an old person, I also drop everything I’m doing and tell them to come immediately. This is not because I’m some sort of dark sage; I’m not peering into my crystal ball visualizing their imminent death, and what will happen to these elderly folks if they pass away covered with entities. I treat the elderly as I do children because the way their bodies process a possession isn’t all that different. Think about how old people handle the teeniest, tiniest viruses like the common cold. They can get the sniffles, start to cough, go to bed feeling terrible, wake up with pneumonia, and then pass away quickly. It’s similar with entities.

  Most old people with entities have had them for years. I don’t mean five or ten years, either. I’m talking decades. By the time an old person seeks my help, they’re so used to the negative effects they don’t realize it’s possible to feel different. They may also suffer from physical ailments that they think are just the products of the passage of time. What they don’t know is that their aches, pains, and diseases are actually because of entities, or at least are being made worse due to their being plagued.

  The oldest client I ever exorcised was a ninety-five-year-old woman, and hers was a very complicated case. She was deeply depressed and had begun hearing voices. Her doctors were mystified; brain scans didn’t show anything like dementia or Alzheimer’s, which they assumed would cause these delusions. At the urging of her daughter, she finally decided that she didn’t want to live her few precious remaining years on this earth in such pain.

  “I’ve been through enough in ninety-five years,” she told me. “It’s time to try something new.”

  How could I dispute that? This lovely woman had an entity that was causing her health to decline steadily. It was taking too much out of her, and a medical doctor couldn’t fix that.

  When I brought her into my Spirit Room and asked her to lie down, I could see the site of her trauma with my own two eyes. What looked like ink blots lay at the base of her spine and deep in her core. Around them, I saw her entity. It was a Trickster, and it had clearly been attached to her for years and years because the feeling of malevolence surrounding it was much, much higher than your average Trickster.

  The placement of the trauma makes sense, I thought. The older a Trickster is and the longer you’ve had it, the more you stuff the trauma down, deep into your center.

  Like other Ancient Tricksters, it looked frail, decrepit, and almost paper-thin. It hovered outside the body but had tentacles that reached deep within my client. It had wispy hair and was ghostlike, like the figure in Munch’s The Scream.

  I could sense that it had kept my client in a cycle of self-deprecation. After losing many of her loved ones during childhood, and after living through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Iraq War—all of which had stolen away people she loved—she felt defeated. She no longer saw the value in being alive.

  She’s in need of love and nurturing, I realized. Understanding that my client was a devoted Catholic, I decided to call in the most motherly Higher Being I know: the Virgin Mary.

  With Mother Mary’s assistance, we removed the Trickster after an hour or so of hard work. Then my client looked at me happily.

  “I feel better already.”

  I told her and her daughter—who’d been waiting nervously in the next room—that her mother should take extraspecial care of herself for the next three days. I trust that she did so because I never heard from her again, and she promised to follow up if she had any issues. Even if she’s passed, I’m comforted that her last years on earth were probably better than the decades before.

  The last type of person I consider an emergency case is someone who’s on the brink of doing something negative or destructive that will hurt both themselves and the world. I’ve never had a client wh
o had his finger on the red button—or anything close to that—but I have seen musicians who had to perform the next day, but couldn’t remember a single note; actors who kept stumbling in rehearsals and needed to pull themselves together before a shoot; and politicians who had an upcoming debate and realized that they just couldn’t go through with it without my help.

  I have clients who are on the verge of injuring themselves or others, or committing suicide. Clients—or their friends or relatives—will call in desperation, and tell me through tears that “She’s going to kill herself tonight if she doesn’t get help.” The threat of that type of violence is the worst aspect of my job. I’m happy to face ten low-level entities for every one that’s pushing an angry person toward hitting their spouse, or making a depressed person contemplate putting themselves out of their misery. In that situation, no amount of love, care, or medicine is going to help them. The entity they have is pushing that person toward misery or a horrible decision, and as long as they’re willing, I’ll get involved right away.

  Remote Exorcisms

  I try to never perform remote exorcisms. I did my first real exorcism—if you can call it that since it was so amateur—when I was outside and my boyfriend was inside, and it barely worked. I decided after that experience that if I couldn’t see the blocks in a person with my own eyes, if I couldn’t physically be there to pull out the entity, it wasn’t worth my time—or my client’s.

  Now that I’m a little more seasoned, I do make exceptions. Remote exorcisms are extremely rare, and I’ve only done a handful of them because the circumstances surrounding them had to be extreme. My rule is: My future client doesn’t have to be on the verge of death, but they should be physically incapable of coming to me. They have to be sick, bedridden, or so possessed that leaving their space would be seriously dangerous to their health or the safety of others.

  The one thing that makes a remote exorcism easier is if I can get my hands on an object belonging to my client. And, it cannot be any random possession; it needs to be something that really speaks to and about the person, something deeply connected to their heart, mind, and spirit. I won’t work with a ratty old T-shirt, for example. I need their writings, precious photographs, wedding ring, beloved locket, or something near and dear to them.

  Just recently, I did a remote exorcism on someone who hadn’t left his house for months. He was middle-aged and otherwise healthy, but he’d become catatonic and confined to his bed after losing the ability to walk. He looked like he’d aged twenty years, and he had a cough that lingered no matter how much medicine he took. His health issues had spiraled out of control so fast that his loved ones worried that he was dying. Getting him out of his house just wasn’t in the cards, and there was no way I’d be able to talk face-to-face or on the phone with him.

  When his wife called me, I asked her whether he had a personal object that I could use for the exorcism.

  “It could be anything that’s important to him,” I said. “It just has to speak to who he is. It has to have him in it in some way.”

  “His artwork,” she said without even pausing.

  That was a perfect idea. My client had been a prolific artist all his life, and everything he drew seemed like it came straight from the heart. I realized I didn’t need the originals, so I picked up a handful of prints from his wife and returned with them to my Spirit Room. I set all my equipment up just as if he were there, and I even put his artwork on the same bed where I ask my clients to rest. Then I did what I always do: called in the Higher Beings, channeled the energy I could feel coming from the prints, mixed and burned herb blends, and circled the bed in very specific intervals of time.

  Believe me, it was a challenge, but eventually I felt the frequency of the room shift. I saw the blocks in my client’s paintings, and as I lifted my arms I sensed the entity’s low frequency close by, but not in my space. Pretty soon, I pulled the entity—a particularly potent female Wraith—into the room with me and noticed that she was attached to one print. Judging from how long my client had been sick and how old his paintings were, I knew the Wraith had been with him for about twenty years. Recently, she’d grown rapidly, becoming stronger and stronger as my client became sicker.

  The exorcism took over an hour, and I was exhausted by the end of it, but I got rid of the vicious entity. I saw her lift right out of my client’s painting, then dissipate in front of me.

  That night, I decided I needed to get rid of this man’s prints. It wasn’t that the entity was in them—I’d seen her destroyed—it was because the art was a portal for the entity, and they were a site of extreme low frequency because of it. They were as raw and open as my client was going to be for the next few days. I decided I should burn the prints in the fire pit in my backyard, so I gathered some firewood and newspaper, laid down some kindling, and built a proper bonfire. The flames were just getting going when I threw my client’s paintings on top of them.

  Within seconds, I heard a loud pop! It wasn’t like popcorn in a kettle, though; it was as if all the collective energy in the bonfire gathered together and decided to snap. I jumped back, just narrowly missing getting scorched. Here’s the crazy thing. The flames from my little bonfire were four or five feet long—and they had come at me horizontally, like a bullet train at high speed.

  “Oh my God! They’re like . . . hands,” said one of my friends, who’d decided to join me.

  Sure enough, the flames didn’t look like tongues of fire. They were massive mitts, and they clearly wanted to engulf me in a fiery hug.

  I wasn’t expecting to hear from my client’s wife ever again, but a few days after the exorcism, she called me.

  “He just left the house for a meeting,” she said. “It’s unbelievable. He actually looks healthy again. And he’s walking.”

  I didn’t tell her about the fire. All I cared about was that my client was well and back to his normal self, and that I’d done my job.

  CHAPTER 10

  Entities and Religion

  I’d be selling you—and this book—short if I didn’t offer more discussion on how what I do intersects with religion. After all, it’s a question I’m asked constantly.

  I’m not a religious scholar by any stretch, but I do know that almost all religions have notions of demons, and they talk about them in their texts. Religious exorcisms have been performed throughout history, and many have been successful. If you go back as far as ancient Sumer, you can read about entities. One of the four holy books of Hinduism, called the Atharva Veda, describes the means of exorcism, which involve rituals, series of utterances, and a recitation of names. In Islam, exorcisms are actually considered a branch of alternative medicine. In Judaism, a rabbi who’s mastered Kabbalah can perform an exorcism using ten men as helpers, reading Psalm 91 all together three times, and blowing a ram’s horn.

  I think this is wonderful. Like I said, I have absolutely nothing against any religion, and I actively seek guidance from all kinds of religious figures in so many of the exorcisms I do. But, honestly, I’ve never met a priest who sees entities the way I do. To clarify, I mean that while some Catholic priests have spent years training to do Catholic exorcisms—and then decades performing them—I don’t think they’ve actually seen an entity with their own two eyes.

  Why do I say this? Because a few years ago, a potential client asked me to be her wing woman while she visited a priest to discuss her possible exorcism, and I watched him dismiss her, even though she was clearly possessed.

  This woman wanted to cover all her bases, so she’d consulted with me, then decided to seek the counsel of the church. We were both allowed only a small window of time with the priest, but as we sat with him, he asked her a laundry list of questions about how she was feeling, and the things that had happened to her in the previous few months.

  His questions sounded like they were straight out of a manual called Possession 101. I can’t remember them exactly, but I recall that most were about whether she’d consulted with doct
ors and psychotherapists. They were purely diagnostic, and there was no creativity, no nuance, and nothing that was specific to her situation. The priest just checked off her symptoms, then announced that she didn’t meet the criteria for a church exorcism. He was 100 percent focused on whether or not my friend’s symptoms matched up with what the church considered a possession. Not only that, but it was as if he wanted her to prove her case.

  I didn’t need proof. I could see this woman’s Wraith as sure as the nose on her face. Nothing this priest did, said, or asked implied that he could, too. If he could sense entities—like I can—he wouldn’t need a checklist, would he?

  Religious Visitations

  I wasn’t raised religious, nor have I ever moved in circles where lots of people go to church or temple, talk about God, or even think about religion much at all. Because of that, I honestly wasn’t aware of who Jesus was till I was well into elementary school. I never realized he—or really any other religious figure—was a driving force in millions of people’s lives.

  I just knew there was a man named Jesus who visited me sometimes at night. He started coming to me around the same time entities did, and I realized, without a doubt, that he was good. He didn’t look like the white, bearded hippie with way-cool sandals you see in some paintings, though that’s how he appears to me now. Instead, he was this being with a high-frequency glow. I felt good around him. He was powerful, but in a positive way. I knew he had no intention of ever hurting me.

  Jesus wasn’t the only religious figure who visited me when I was a kid. I saw angels, Mary, Muhammad, prophets, gods and goddesses, and other Higher Beings from old and new religions around the world. They never stayed long—but it was clear they wanted me to know they were there. And it always felt nice. I immediately had an affinity for these beings, and each and every time they came to me, I felt blessed.

  I still do. Not only do these religious figures visit me during exorcisms, but I often see them in my bedroom at night, or while I’m writing in my Spirit Room. I know that they’re Higher Beings, and because of that, they’re inherently good. That’s why I don’t feel the slightest bit of inclination toward any religion. Each of them, via their figureheads, imparts positive ideas, so I could never choose one over the other. There’s no right and wrong with any of them.