The exorcist

You describe your difficult search for an exorcist for Jersey. How hard is it to find an exorcist these days?

Damn near impossible. As my mentor, Malachi Martin, who kind of tricked me into being an exorcist by saying he couldn't do it himself, told me when I asked him to please refer me to a good exorcist, [in Irish brogue] "Really, it's not exactly like there's a directory of them!" And we unfortunately are in the same place today. This was 25 years ago.

Before your first exorcism, you have Jersey sign papers acknowledging the risks -- including death -- of her upcoming exorcism. How are patients at risk for death during exorcisms?

In the hands of responsible clergy or medical people I don't think that there is any risk. You hear about exorcisms where a patient dies, but usually it's been conducted by delusional people who don't know what they're doing. They beat the patient and so forth. Exorcism should be as dignified and gentle a procedure as possible. On the other hand, when you get a case of thorough possession, I'm not sure there's ever an exorcism in which the patient doesn't require some restraint. Jersey, over the course of four days, required only gentle restraint for one hour. Fascinatingly that was when the demon who was the supposed spirit of love and gentleness was present, an irony typical of the demonic. In Beccah's case, in a three-day exorcism, for two and a half days she required continual and massive restraint and she demonstrated almost superhuman strength.

Which brings us to our ideas of what kinds of creepy, head-spinning things happen during an exorcism. You write that the Roman Catholic Church's criteria for the diagnosis of possession include phenomena like levitation, knowledge of future events, speaking fluently in languages the patient has never been exposed to before, and psychokinesis. You argue that these criteria are unrealistically strict. But have you heard evidence that events such as levitation and psychokinesis do take place in some cases?

I suspect they are possible. There's a book by a reporter who went over the case which [William Peter] Blatty based his book "The Exorcist" on. He went over that case so thoroughly that it became obvious to me that it was a genuine case of possession. There were a lot of truly paranormal dramatic happenings. But in that case, Father Bowdern, the exorcist, did not have available the literature and teaching that I did later. The whole thing took about five weeks and Father Bowdern was operating in the dark; he had to figure out how to go about doing an exorcism on his own. I think there were paranormal events, but I think only because it was so long and prolonged. The boy went through great suffering. I think that it probably could have been accomplished in three or four days, but he didn't have any guidance from anybody else.

There were paranormal phenomena in my two cases; they were just more subtle.

Like Beccah taking on the appearance of a large coiled serpent?

Yes, well, there was one snake during the exorcism and then after the exorcism she took on the appearance of a different amphibian. Beccah was an unsuccessful case.

Yes, Beccah's case does not end well. Do you blame yourself?

No, I do not. Though I begin the final discussion of the case with the sentence that if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't have performed her exorcism. But I didn't know enough at the time. This is a real frontier that desperately needs to be scientifically investigated. People do not know much about it, so I didn't know what a patient needed. A patient needs a massive support system if they're going to do well after an exorcism. In a sense, if the demonic has been their friend for 20, 30, 40 years, you're not going to give up your relationship with such a friend that easily, unless you have a great deal of support from other sources, and Beccah did not. Beccah was alone in the world and for that reason alone, if I had it to do over again, I would have tried to work on getting her a support system. And if I couldn't, I wouldn't have attempted the exorcism.

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