The following is an excerpt taken from The Exorcism Files: True Stories of Demonic Possession by Adam Blai.

A child featured on a show about kids with supposed psychic abilities became one of my cases. The little girl had had negative experiences with what she thought were spirits most of her life. She participated in the show, and in the process she was coached to open up more to spirits and their manifestations — including negative ones. Her family is Protestant Christian, but psychic sensitivity seemed to run in the family and was normal to them.
On the night that her episode aired, the whole extended family was there to watch and celebrate her being on TV. During the show, however, she collapsed on the floor, started contorting, and spoke foul language and blasphemies in a male voice. Her family was shocked and terrified.

The child’s mother contacted me and asked if I would come and try to help her. The daughter also said she wanted help. They had asked their local Catholic parish, but the pastor was not comfortable coming to the house. The minister of their own denomination was the girl’s grandfather, but he was uncomfortable praying with her after what he saw. After making sure they had taken her to her doctor to be checked out, I agreed to come and to talk with her and the family.

When I arrived, several members of the extended family were there. The child explained her previous life experiences, what doing the show was like, and that she blacked out sometime during the airing of the episode. She said that since then, she was seeing black shadowy figures, hearing blaspheming voices, and being told to kill her mother. She also had periods of lost time, after which she returned to her senses in a different room, or outdoors, or in someone else’s house.

After asking a lot of questions and hearing the whole story, I asked her grandfather, their minister, if he wanted to pray over her. He said no, that he would rather I do that. I explained that I’m only a layperson, but they insisted, and the girl was happy to be prayed for. I suggested that we start by blessing the house thoroughly, since it had not been blessed in the past. The mother took me around the house while everyone else stayed in the living room. The daughter’s room was in the poorly lit basement with dark paneling. While there with her mother, I took holy oil and made several small crosses on the walls, ceiling, and hidden under the bed and behind the nightstand. In total, there were sixteen crosses.

We then went back to the living room to rejoin the family. The daughter looked different. She was staring hard at me with hatred in her eyes. She leaned back into the couch and then arched her back upward, like a suspicious cat. Her hands were clawed and digging into the cloth of the couch. I sat down next to her, with her mother on the other side, and gently started praying the Litany of the Saints while touching her shoulder. She started making odd noises and whispering, “no,” over and over. After about fifteen minutes of prayer, she suddenly went limp and silent; when she came to, she seemed better. She said that things were quiet and she felt peaceful. We prayed a bit more, and there was no more reaction. I packed up and started the long drive home.

A week later, the mother called me. Her daughter was struggling again and had started speaking in this other voice more often. She had not gone back into her room since my last visit, saying in an angry voice that she wouldn’t go “in the box of sixteen crosses.” She asked if I could come back, since she was not sure she could physically control her small daughter much longer. I agreed to come the next day.

This time, fewer members of the family were there, and the mother sat on the other side of the kitchen table from her daughter. As I prayed the Litany, the spirit fully manifested again and started to say mean things to me and to her mother. Her mother yelled for it to get out of her daughter. At one point, this male voice said something like, “Fine, if you don’t want me!” and the daughter went limp. She came to her senses, and again she said things were quiet. This time, she was able to return to her bedroom, and she had no further manifestations in the subsequent years. All of her “psychic” abilities also disappeared when the demon left.

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The Exorcism Files: True Stories of Demonic Possession is available now from Sophia Institute Press.

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