32.20 - MU Podcast - The Exorcist Files
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Welcome to Mysterious Universe, Season 32, Episode 20. Coming up on this show, we've got the surprise Hollywater powering up your homunculus and the demonically irresistible bank teller. I'm your host, Benjamin Grundy. Flying solo on this episode. I've put together a little hasty setup here at home. Got a bit of a, well, sad news. Aaron can't join the show, obviously. He's had a bit of a medical emergency. It's been kind of building up during the week. Uh,

I don't want to go into too many details, but it sounds like low blood pressure stuff. Like he's been getting dizzy in the office and he was a little bit dizzy on Tuesday and he was saying that his hands were feeling numb. To me, it all sounds like blood pressure. And he messaged me about midday today and said on the way, after he dropped his kids off at school, he nearly passed out in the car.

So obviously, yeah, he had to go get checked out. Sounds like everything's all right, but he's just playing it safe at the moment and he's resting up at home. They've given him something to take. So yeah, we'll just have to keep an eye on it and think positively about our pal and see how he goes. Hopefully he'll be back on Tuesday. He can give his version of events later.

But yeah, it's a little bit of a last minute situation for me just to put all this together today. I've been working on this segment for a while.

And what I think I'll do is we'll just make this a plus show. I don't think I put out a free show today. So this will just be a plus exclusive this episode. But I do have some good stuff coming up. I have had my eye on this book from a father, Carlos Martins. It's called The Exorcist Files. It just came out a couple of days ago. True stories about the reality of evil and how to defeat it. So this guy is an exorcist, a Canadian exorcist. And he's

he was an atheist years ago. He converted to Christianity during his undergraduate in Ottawa, I believe. And it's full of the kind of wild stories that you would expect. You can find him at fathercarlosmartins.com

He's got a very popular podcast called The Exorcist Files, and I think this is the first book he's put out. And it's just wild story after wild story. So we're going to spend a bit of time on this episode going through some of the more extreme cases he's had to deal with. And one of the first encounters he describes, it's shortly after his ordination as a priest.

a woman's home had been destroyed by fire. So she had moved begrudgingly into her uncle's house while he was deployed in Afghanistan. And before long, he explained that she started hearing voices calling her from adjacent rooms and all the typical, you know, poltergeist-like stuff, scratches on the walls, weird sounds at night, footsteps and all sorts of stuff, appliances turning on and off by themselves, and

And it started to terrify her, obviously. Now, he said when he stepped inside the house, he felt an unmistakable tension. There was clearly some thickness in the air. It's hard to put into words, he said. And he described it as almost like playing hide and seek with a child. You know they're there.

There's that feeling that they're there, but you just got to discover them. They can jump out at any moment. He said, I had the intense feeling of being watched by something that didn't want me there. Even the air felt like it was against me. I was being warned, get out or else. Now, this feeling, he said, just made him want to help this woman more. It made him more determined. And he describes this thing where he walked into the living room and the ceiling fan just switched on by itself. There's no one near the switch.

and started spinning, but it started spinning so fast that it was beyond the, you know, the manufacturer's setting. It was like a blur. You couldn't even see the blades. It looked like it was going to go flying off. Then he said it just stopped on a dime, just defied the laws of physics, just stopped. He's like, what the hell is that? It starts going in the opposite direction again, as fast as you can imagine, just spinning, spinning, spinning. So

He gets ready to do his exorcist thing. He gets out his holy water, you know, puts all his stuff on the table. And he gets started with these prayers for the house and he starts hearing this music box playing. This little tinkling of a music box that's coming from upstairs. Now, the woman living in the house who's been going through all these issues, she said, that's it again, that damn music box.

Now, he said when requesting my help, the woman had mentioned a music box as the creepiest of all disturbances. It was in her uncle's bedroom and chimed randomly day and night, even though no one was winding it. Now, she tried removing it from the house, but she said it was on top of a dresser. And when she tried to remove it, it was like stuck there with superglue. She could not budge it with all her strength is just fused there.

Now, she even removed the winding key from the side of the box so it would stop going off all the time, but that didn't help. It would still play this annoying music all the time. Now, Father Carlos, he gets on with his work and he starts doing his thing with holy water, sprinkling it around the home. And he eventually got to the uncle's room and he sees the music box. And again, it starts playing. It just starts chiming by itself.

He said, as soon as my hands touched it, it stopped chiming. And he was able to actually move it. He could lift it off the dresser.

And he shows it to her. She's like, he's like, look, I managed to get it. He opens the box. There's nothing in there. And when I say nothing in there, I mean, it was just a wooden box. There was no metal moving parts. There was no chimes. There was nothing in there at all. No mechanism, no batteries. It wasn't electronic. It was just an empty little wooden box. So

He managed to resolve all her issues with the holy water and the prayers. He claims this was a very simple case. He was able to deal with it very simply and directly. The weirdest thing was the fan and the holy water or the music box, but all the activity for this woman stopped. Now, he wrote, I never expected to be successful the day I walked into this woman's house because

But he said, I also never expected to be an exorcist. After I sprinkled the box with holy water, she never experienced diabolical phenomena again and lived peacefully within her uncle's home. So the fact that he's sprinkling the holy water on the music box, you've got to wonder, was that the source of all the activity? Was it some kind of dybbuk music box?

So he goes on to explain, again, his background, how he got involved in the church, how he converted from atheism. I won't spend too much time on that. I really want to focus on some of these stories because there's some really good ones in here. The first one he mentions after that introduction is Mark and Cheryl. And they met in college, started dating just a week after meeting.

And a year later, they were married, both 22 years old. And their relationship, unfortunately, became strained as the years went on. Both of them were eager for children, but for some reason, Cheryl couldn't get pregnant. And they both got medically checked out. They passed with flying colors. You know, everything was physiologically fine, but she just couldn't get pregnant.

Now, obviously this depressed her. They both really wanted children. So she kind of spiraled into this depression where it started to affect the rest of her life. Like she couldn't really focus on work and eventually her performance got so bad at work, she got fired. She lost her job. Now, economically, the impact was minimal because Mark, he was a college professor. He had a good salary. He could support the two of them.

But what he was worried about is that without the focus of the work, his wife Cheryl would fall into even worse depression. And that's exactly what happened. She was in a dark period for a year, he said, basically lived as a shut-in inside the house. Then there were some new developments. And Father Carlos says that Cheryl started to buy baby clothes.

And not just baby clothes, she started to buy formula, bibs, little outfits, baby toys. She even bought a expensive crib with like electronic monitoring system. Any kind of baby thing, she bought it. Now, Mark knew that this was her way of dealing with it, dealing with the

you know, the disappointment of not being able to have a child. Maybe she thought that if the environment was created for the child, that the child would come, that this would help. And, you know, it's sad, but maybe this was just her way of dealing with it. But then things got really strange. Cheryl started collecting dead insects and she would go out every morning and she would come back with a box full of

whatever she could find. Dead crickets, dead grasshoppers, you know, hornets, moths, butterflies, whatever she could find out there. And she would put them in this spare room they had, which had all the material she'd been buying for the baby. So it's starting to get a little creepy. She would have all the windowsills would be lined with like the corpses of dead insects. And

When she ran out of surfaces, she started putting them in the rest of the house. Now, Mark knew she was psychologically fragile. Father Carlos writes he could understand the baby clothes, he could understand the crib, but the dead insects, it's getting a little bit strange. So he confronted her one night. He asked her and said, look, honey, what are all the insects for? And she said, oh, someone told me they would help me get pregnant.

And he's like, how? How would they help you get pregnant? Well, she says, when they die, their spirits hang around their bodies and they look for a place to find new life. Death releases life energy, she says. I want that energy to make a baby happen inside my womb. He's like, who told you to do this? And she just goes, oh, a friend doesn't elaborate.

So that's why I had in the headline, she's making a homunculus. She's making some kind of amalgamated spirit entity with these dead insects. Who is telling her this? This is insane. So about two weeks later, Mark returned home from work and he was getting out of his car. The neighbor's cat approached him and the neighbor's cat really liked him. It would often bring him gifts. And you know how sometimes a cat will bring you like something dead that it's caught as a gift.

and it had this dead squirrel in its mouth. So it lays it at Mark's feet, and he's like, oh, good cat, thank you very much. The cat goes off, and he just drops the dead squirrel in the garbage. And he goes into the house. Cheryl's somewhere else. He doesn't know where she is, so he just lays down for a nap after work. Anyway, he wakes up after about an hour, and he hears Cheryl making dinner. She's in the kitchen. And he leaves the bedroom, and he peeks inside the baby room,

And the squirrel is on top of the changing table. The dead squirrel he had thrown in the garbage is now back in the house on the baby's changing table. He's like, Cheryl, what the hell? Why is there a dead squirrel in here? Why is it in the house? And she starts saying, oh, it's much bigger than an insect. It'll give off more life energy. Now, this is where he kind of, enough's enough. He says, look, Cheryl,

This has gotten out of hand. This dead animal is going to stink up the house. All this dead stuff has to go. Get rid of it. All the insects, everything. I've had enough. And she's like, no, no, I want to get pregnant. I want to get pregnant. These things are going to get me pregnant. I'm going to have a baby. They're going to help me have a baby.

And he goes to grab the squirrel and he said she threw the pot she'd been making their dinner in across the room and it hit the refrigerator. The food goes everywhere, but she threw it with such force, he was taken aback. And then she starts to yell at him and she's like, you leave them alone.

You leave them alone like this. And I'm not being hyperbolic. This is how he describes it in the book. It was not her voice that came out of her mouth. The scream sounded like that of a burly man. Deep and low, it resonated off the cupboards and off the wall of the kitchen. The most resounding voice he had ever heard. So now obviously Mark is freaked out.

He doesn't continue the argument. He just leaves the house, gets in his car and drives. He needs to clear his head. Now, Cheryl's never made an outburst like this before, and he says it's not in her personality to do so. So he's driving around thinking about this and he finally calms down. He decides to just go and pick up some takeout, get some dinner for the both of them, and he heads back home.

And he planned to call their family doctor in the morning and ask him to recommend a psychiatrist, which I think is a pretty smart move. She's obviously at the limit and something needs to be done. So her behavior became even stranger in the week following the incident in the kitchen.

Mark found a dead bird on the living room windowsill. And six times Mark heard Cheryl speaking baby talk in the nursery. And not just little phrases, like full-on conversations with like a tulpa baby or something in there. Conversations lasting five to ten minutes.

Now, Cheryl also started to make cash withdrawals from their checking account. And he had an app, of course, which would let him know when money was being withdrawn. And he noticed that their credit card kept on getting these Uber charges. Now, he thought, you know, that's fine because they only had one car and he was taking it to work. So she needs to go somewhere. She calls an Uber, big deal. But there was more than them than you would expect. They were starting to rack up.

So Mark wanted to confront her about this, but he was actually scared because of the whole dark burly man voice that came out of his wife. So what he decides to do is one day he goes to work just as normal and he decides to park at the end of the street and kind of just lay low a bit and keep an eye on the house. And after about 30 minutes, a vehicle pulls into his driveway. It's an Uber vehicle. And Cheryl gets into the car and obviously drives off.

Now, he follows, and the driver dropped her off at the bank. She went inside, and he saw the $200 withdrawal from his app, and she came outside. She got back in the Uber, and it pulled away. Again, Mark followed. Now, the car headed downtown, and he said it stopped in front of an old house with a large sign over the front door, and the sign said, Psychic Healer. So, he realizes that's where my money's been going.

this psychic healer. And it had added up. It was like $1,200 just that week. So he watches her go inside and she's in there for about an hour and another car arrives in front of the house. And obviously it's another Uber. She's called another Uber. Cheryl comes out of the psychic parlor. She gets in the car and it pulls away. He follows again. The car stops at a pet store

And Cheryl obviously goes inside. Ten minutes later, she walks out with a paper bag and the Uber drives her home. What do you think's in the paper bag? Free design consultation. Free, free, free.

Now, he has to confront her about this, but he's obviously a bit worried about what he's going to see. He goes in anyway. He goes in the side door that leads to the kitchen, so there's no time for her to stop whatever she's doing when she hears the front door opening.

And he walks in and she's like shocked that he's there in the middle of the day. And on top of the kitchen are two dead bloody rats. A third one is on the kitchen counter in the process of painfully dying. Like it is, it's got a bloodied snout and blood oozing from its head and it's twitching. Cheryl's holding like a kitchen mallet in her hand that's covered in blood. And he's like, Cheryl, what the hell are you doing?

You picked up rats at the pet store and now you're killing them in our kitchen? Get those filthy things off the table. What are you doing? And Mark hears the deepest voice he's ever heard in his life. Just this, you keep the fuck away from the rats. And again, the voice is supernatural in its intensity. It is making the entire kitchen shake. The cabinets are vibrating from its velocity.

Mark had never heard Cheryl use a crude word before, let alone swear like that. And he takes a step forward. And again, it's just fuck off. She takes a step closer to him and raises the mallet with threat. So this isn't where it stops, though. It's not just this booming, horrible voice coming out of her.

He said suddenly Cheryl seemed significantly larger and broader than he'd ever seen her before. Her face was also not her own. She seemed to take on the appearance of a man, a large man at that. Mark knew that it was not his wife speaking. It could not be. He was interacting with something else. He immediately grabbed his keys. He got into the car. All he could think of to do was to drive to a Methodist church that was a couple of blocks away, which they'd been to before. Now,

He goes to see the priest. The priest says, sorry, Mark, we don't do that devil stuff here. Scares the hell out of me. Scares the wits out of me, he says. And this minister, he said, he explains that he had spent time in South America with the Peace Corps when he was young. And he didn't really believe in this stuff until he saw it manifesting wild demonic manifestations, he said, on that trip.

And he, it's terrified him ever since. He wants nothing to do with it. He actually told Mark, listen, you need to go to the Catholics for help. They're the only ones that can handle this kind of thing. And so later that day, Mark called a Catholic church requesting help for this situation. The pastor that took the call referred him to Father Carlos. And turned out Mark's house was five miles from where he was on that particular Monday. And he was

in the process of helping a friend to clean out his garage. And so he gets the call and he thought, oh, I'm pretty close. I should help this guy. So he agrees to meet Mark in a nearby coffee shop later in the day. And he gets the details about Cheryl and they decide to go to Mark's house together so they can meet her. Now, because he's just been, you know, hanging out with his friend, Father Carlos isn't in his usual getup. He's just wearing a t-shirt and jeans. And so he

He walks into the house and Cheryl has no idea who he is, obviously. Walks into the house wearing these ordinary clothes and she's sitting on the couch. She sees him walk in and immediately springs up from the couch. And again, in that horrible voice, bellows out, why did you bring that bastard priest? And Father Carlos is like, oh, who are you? You know who I am, priest.

All right. These demons need to be a little bit more subtle, don't you think? So obviously Mark knew that when he was looking at his wife, something else was in control. And Father Carlos knew, like, how could she know that he was a priest? You know, Mark didn't give any indication that he was going to the church at all.

So, the fact that this entity recognized a priest walking in was obviously telling. Something more than mere depression was afflicting her. Whatever it was, it was evil, Mark realized. For the first time in his life, he began to believe that the devil might be real. So, Father Carlos says, look, it was clear I was dealing with a case of possession. He said I arranged for her first exorcism session about a week later, once I had time to learn about her from Mark.

He said during the session, the demon inside Cheryl revealed he had gained access to her. He had gained the right to possess her from a pact she made with the fortune teller. Cheryl felt tortured by not being able to conceive. It affected her so acutely she despaired of ever being happy. And they go through a little bit of her background. Like her family was very big and

And she had a very large extended family as well. And she was always told, and this was always the family motto, that the greatest blessing is having lots of children. And, you know, she talks about an aunt who in the family had a misfortune of only being able to have one child. And everyone just thought, oh, my poor aunt, she's so miserable. She only had one child.

And so this became like this infatuation. She associated having a child with happiness, obviously. And by not having a child, she could never be complete. She could never be happy. That's what she felt deep within her. And Father Carlos says she required eight exorcism sessions for liberation. But before she could heal, she had to heal this familial wound.

She had to get over this notion that she absolutely had to have children or everything would be a disaster. And his message to her was that God had a different plan for her and she had to accept it. It was acceptance in her position and her situation. She needed to have acceptance. She saw a psychologist as well, and that helped kind of root out these problems.

childhood notions that formed over time and some of the these family issues and then she was able to abandon this obsession so it's it's not like a i mean it's a hollywood setup but it's not a hollywood conclusion it's not like he's thrusting a cross into her head and she goes flying across the room or anything like that like it's it's a pretty um

drawn out, you know, healing session. She heals from this and moves on and trusts that God will bring her happiness in some other way. Ultimately, a good conclusion. But there is some Hollywood diabolical standoffs in the later stories. But after this one, he makes the case, like, from the physical power of this entity's voice that was within her,

He says, people ask me what it's like to battle the devil. He says, my opponent is hatred itself. He hates priests with all his being. He will do anything to avoid being cast out, including using violence. And he tells these little stories throughout the entire book, not full-length case histories, but just little anecdotes of what he's experienced over the years. He said on one occasion when an exorcism of a middle-aged woman was about to begin, he

She locked arms with a man whose job it was to restrain her. And this guy, he said, was six feet tall, weighed 300 pounds. This woman flipped him over her head like he was a rag doll. And this guy went flying through the air, apparently landed 10 feet in front of them. And then the woman pointed her finger at the nearest light switch and they watched as the

One of the screws that held the plate in came flying out and she caught it in her hand and then started to gouge her veins with it. Later in the same session, he said, she struck me in the face with such force that I needed two surgeries to repair the damage I sustained to my skull. The devil is real, he says.