entities are credited with will and intellect that are directed toward evil as they exert their malevolent powers. When it serves their purpose, they may assume the form of a lovely woman or a handsome man to seduce a confused human (art by Dan Wolfman Allen).
By now many readers are saying to themselves that they have certainly heard of demented people who claim that demonic voices told them to commit murder. Bu these individuals are sick. Demons are not real. These human monsters are insane, but they are not actually possessed. Demon possession in this day and age? That kind of thinking is a superstitious throwback to the Middle Ages.
Here is what Dr. Morton Kelsey, an Episcopal priest and noted Norte Dame emeritus professor of theology, has to say about that old “superstitious” belief: “Most people in the modern world consider themselves too sophisticated and too intelligent to be concerned with demons. But in thirty years of study, I have seen the effect of demons upon humans.”
Dr. Kelsey maintains that demons are real and can invade the minds of humans. Demons are not the figment of the imagination, but are negative, destructive spiritual forces that seek to destroy the possessed host body and everyone with whom that person comes into contact.
All right, you say, but Dr. Kelsey is a priest, a theologian. He’s supposed to believe in demons.
Then take into serious consideration the comments of Dr. Ralph Allison, retired senior psychiatrist at the California state prison in San Luis Obispo:
My conclusion after thirty years of observing over one thousand disturbed patients is that some of them act in a bizarre fashion due to possession by spirits. The spirit may be that of a human being who died. Or it may be a spirit entity that has never been a human being and sometimes identifies itself as a demon, an agent of evil.
Dr. Wilson Van Dusen (1923–2005), a university professor who served as chief psychologist at Mendocino State Hospital, boldly stated his opinion that many patients in mental hospitals are possessed by demons: “I am totally convinced that there are entities that can possess our minds and our bodies,” he said. “I have even been able to speak directly to demons. I have heard their own guttural, other-world voices.”
And all too often, those hellish guttural voices commanded their possessed hosts to kill, to offer human sacrifice to Satan.
In a report released by the American Psychological Evaluation Corporation, Dr. Andrew Blankley, a sociologist, issued alarming statements about the rise in contemporary sacrificial cults, warning that society at large might expect a “serious menace” to come. According to Dr. Blankley, human sacrifice constitutes an alarming trend in new religious cults: “Desperate people are seeking dramatic revelation and simplistic answers to complex social problems. They are attracted to fringe groups who provide the ritualistic irrationality that they crave. In the last ten years, fringe rituals often include the sacrifice of a human being.”
Need more proof than a sociologist’s alarming report?
A Gallup Poll taken in 2001 stated that 41 percent of North Americans believed in demons. In 2007, the Pew Poll found that the number of those who recognized the power of demons had risen to 68 percent and that many individuals surveyed claimed an actual encounter with such an entity.
Dr. Al Carlisle of the Utah State Prison System estimated that between 40,000 and 60,000 humans are killed through ritual homicides in the United States every year. In the Las Vegas area alone, Dr. Carlisle asserts, as many as 600 people may die in demon-inspired ceremonies each year. Mutilated bodies of hitchhikers and transients are being found in forested regions, beside lonely desert road, and alongside river banks—their hearts and lungs removed, strips of flesh slashed from their bodies.
Devil-worshipping rites are being held in our state and national parks. Blood is mixed with beer and drunk by all participants.
Devil-worshipping rites are being held in our state and national parks. Blood is mixed with beer and drunk by all participants. Human bone fragments, teeth, and pieces of flesh are discovered in the ashes of campfires.
Bikers, arrested on other charges, confess to being part of a nationwide kidnapping ring that captures virginal young men and women for sale to satanic cults both here and in Europe. The youthful victims are marked for human sacrifice.
The terrible power that drives and compels those obsessed with sacrificial murders is something so much more insidiously evil and complex than can be created by the distortion of creeds, ecclesiasticisms, or belief structures. The monstrous voices that command men and women to kill others are not those of mortals.
Demon voices—whether you prefer to identify them as symbolical of some strain of psychopathology or as literal perverse and evil entities—can utter the command to kill to a quiet, conventionally-reared individual just as readily as to a disheveled disciple of the iconoclastic. However one wishes to identify these Parasites of the Spirit, they have the ability to sense and to seize the moments of vulnerability in the strongest of men and women. They possess the uncanny power of knowing the precise moments when even the most righteous can be tempted, when even the most devout can be led astray, when the most disciplined moralist may be seduced. Here are a number of cases of men and women possessed by demons and commanded to kill:
On January 5, 1990, authorities searching an Ohio farm commune found the slain bodies of a family of five—all victims of human sacrifice. Jeffrey Lunden, a self-declared prophet of a new religion, had decreed the sacrifices necessary to persuade the “forces” to present the cult with a magical golden sword.
Daniel Rakowitz couldn’t quite understand whether or not the voices said that he was actually Jesus reborn, but he knew that they were insistent that he was a messiah. The voices also told him to form a new religion to be named the Church of 966. To ensure his messiahship, in September of 1989, he sacrificed his girlfriend.
Once they had accepted Satan as their savior, heavy metal, grass, and sex parties just weren’t enough. Soon the demon voices ordered Terry Belcher, the young high priest of the cult, to sacrifice Theresa, one of his followers, in January 1988.
The Devil’s Dossier on the U.S. Presidency is a frightening one:
When John Wilkes was but an infant in his crib, Asia Booth had a horrid vision of her son being one day transformed into a monster—but it is unlikely her prophecy revealed that he would assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.
On the morning of July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau could no longer resist the demon voices that commanded him to kill President James Garfield. The President clung to life through the agony of a long summer before yielding to the assassin’s bullet in his back. Guiteau was relieved that he had fulfilled his mission. He went to the gallows confident that the demon he hailed as “Lordy” would take care of him in the afterlife.
Lee Harvey Oswald was obsessed with his fears that “devilmen” would usurp all earthly governments. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy served as a kind of sacrifice to keep them at bay.
Sirhan Sirhan’s legal defense in his trial for the murder of Robert Kennedy strongly considered arguing that he had been possessed by the fanatical spirit of a dead Arab nationalist.
Squeaky Fromme, one of Charles Manson’s family, received mental instructions from
