The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren (28 page)

There are about a hundred items in the collection so far, and almost every item has a story attached to it. There’s a string of pearls that when worn around the neck, strangles the wearer. There’s the long black spike a satanic witch used long ago to murder her newborn infant as a sacrifice to the devil. There is the large plaster doll dressed in Victorian clothing that not only took on the features of the old lady who once owned it, but became animated and behaved like a human being for over twenty years. There are the crania of human skulls that have been used as “chalices of ecstasy” for drinking human blood during witchcraft rituals. There’s the coffin in which a possessed man slept each night for his whole adult life. There are stones—some quite sizeable—that fell out of the sky onto homes under diabolical siege. There are crucifixes that have actually been
exploded
by demonic spirits and still others that Satanists have defiled with urine and excrement. There are written pacts with the devil, crystal balls, ceremonial swords, and sacrificial daggers. There are the black candles and conjuring book from the Foster case, and by the door to Ed’s office is hung the conjuring mirror taken from Steven Zellner’s house in New Jersey. The planchette and burned picture frames from the Beckford case are displayed on a table not far from a wooden cabinet in which Annabelle, the Raggedy Ann doll, now sits holding a plain wood crucifix in her little cloth hands.

And finally, there is the black lace veil.

The veil figured in a case of possession where an inhuman spirit delivered a pointed message to Ed Warren. The possessing entity’s voice was clearly recorded on tape. The Warrens, sitting together on an overstuffed sofa in the Occult Museum, now explain the strange case of the young woman—bizarre in her own right—who had one day been brought to Ed’s office with other spirit-related problems.

“Ed and I had been lecturing to a college audience,” Lorraine begins. “It was an otherwise normal lecture, except that I could sense there was a negative presence in the auditorium, and for the life of me I couldn’t pick it out. When we speak to groups of people, I can usually tell who’s there. Clergymen, for instance, often come wearing turtlenecks or sport shirts, but I can see they’re clergy by the light-beige aura that surrounds the ordained. Satanists and black witchcraft groups often show up at our lectures dressed like everyone else, but their auras stand out too. On this occasion, however, I just couldn’t localize the source of the negative vibrations.

“When the question session was over, people from the audience came forward as usual; a dozen people surrounded Ed, and a dozen people surrounded me. After about fifteen minutes, I looked over and saw that Ed was speaking with a young male student. Next to the boy stood a girl who, for some reason, was seething with rage. I promptly excused myself from the group around me and went over to be with Ed.”

“Jimmy, the boy who’d been talking to me,” says Ed, “brought his girlfriend, Kendra, to our lecture because he suspected that she’d been overtaken by some occult influence. He told me that when his girlfriend became angry, she would fill up with intense hate and rage; her features would change into something resembling a ‘wolf’; and then the voice of a different ‘person’ would speak from inside her.

“When Lorraine came over to me, the girl experienced an episode of instantaneous possession right there on the stage. She lurched out and actually tried to
kill
Lorraine. The incident not only scared Lorraine, it also scared the wits out of everyone else around us, who quickly moved away. We ended the audience chat session right there. I took Kendra and her boyfriend to an offstage room. In the meantime, Lorraine waited out in the hall while I spoke with these two.

“In the backstage room, the girl was fully under possession. She was breathing heavily, while the entity possessing her was completely overtaken with an intense violent hatred. Her facial features were also somewhat transformed into the wolflike appearance the boy had talked about The off-pitch voice projected by the entity later proved to be dissimilar to that of the girl. I didn’t have a tape recorder with me at the time, but it hardly mattered, because the thing possessing the girl was simply caught up in a snarling, accusatory rage.

“After about ten minutes, the possession passed. Then the girl seemed to be all right—at least if I didn’t crowd her, which seemed to reinstigate possession. So to avoid trouble, I sat on the opposite side of the room. When I felt she could be spoken to, I told her about the incident I had just witnessed. She told me she had some slight awareness of her condition, though what she complained about was a loss of memory that made her think she was losing her mind. She couldn’t account for hours, and even whole days, in her life. Over the course of the previous three months, she explained, this had been getting worse. I told her that loss of memory went hand in hand with possession, because there was nothing
for
her to remember. The gaps in time represented episodes of possession—where life was being experienced not by her, but by the possessing entity. Yet before anything could be done for the girl, the real question that had to be answered was
why
had she been experiencing possession at all?

“Kendra, I found out, was a well-to-do—perhaps even spoiled—young lady who was wealthy enough to buy anything she wanted. About a year earlier, however, there came a point in her life when she encountered something money couldn’t buy. That ‘something’ was the young man sitting next to her. Jimmy was a Nordic type, enrolled at an Ivy League school in a nearby state. Kendra had met him in her home town the summer before, and apparently they went out on a few dates. By the end of the summer, though, the boy had no feelings for Kendra and ignored her subsequent approaches.

“She, on the other hand, had seized on this guy passionately and couldn’t rest until she made him her own. In essence, she saw Jimmy as a desirable commodity, not as a human being. This
de
humanization of a person got noticed. I say this because the girl tried every possible method to gain the boy’s affection—from writing him enticing letters, to sending him money for travel tickets so he could visit her at school. But none of the tactics worked. At least, not until she hit upon ritual witchcraft, which is where the black lace veil comes in. To get Jimmy in her clutches, she turned to the occult. Kendra went out to a store and found herself a book on the black arts, the title of which I won’t mention. Kendra took the book home and later that week, privately performed a ritual for acquiring lovers—an old ritual that has gotten people in trouble for ages.”

The Warrens are often reluctant to give precise details, such as the names of conjuring books, the specific ritual of witchcraft an individual used, or the name of spirits responsible for particular demonic attacks. Why?

“I don’t mention the names of spirits,” says Ed, “because knowing a particular demonic name is to give recognition to that entity; if you give it recognition, no matter how small, you’re giving it fuel to manifest. As for specifics, let me put it this way. If you give someone a loaded gun, they’d be liable to fire it. If you give them a loaded gun with the firing pin taken out, then there is no danger of it going off. That’s what I do: I take the firing pin out of my statements. That’s what has to be done with such material. People who really want to know how to perform satanic rituals can walk down to the local library and find out. But
I’m
not going to be the one who told these people how to travel down the road of no return. My job is just the opposite: to help people who have already gone too far; and to tell those who may want to dabble in the occult:
don't!”

Ed then resumes. “The essence of black witchcraft is a pact with the devil, and women who make such pacts become, in effect, brides of the devil on earth. Now insofar as the devil is called the Prince of the Earth, the devil’s bride need only ask her ‘husband’ for earthly pleasures, and supposedly they are hers. The only hitch is that before any of these benefits come to the witch, she’s got to give her soul willingly to the devil. Kendra was mercenary enough to go through with such a pact. Part of the paraphernalia was the black lace mantilla, which she wore as a perverse ‘wedding veil,’ on top of which she placed a crown of goat horns. Next, she married herself into evil by renouncing God and her baptism and swearing allegiance to Satan. She finalized the ritual by washing down the vow with a cup of animal blood. The cup,” says Ed, pointing to the oak table in the middle of the Occult Museum, “is there by the veil and goat horns.

“About a month after Kendra performed the ritual, the girl explained that Jimmy started to take an interest in her. He began calling on the phone and eventually started visiting her on weekends. For Kendra, things were hunky-dory. What she hadn’t counted on, however, was that she was in debt to the demonic. By performing the witchcraft ritual, Kendra had given permission for the demonic to enter her life. Ordinarily, the witchcraft formula she used would have attracted either Incubus, the sexual oppressor of women, or Succubus, the sexual oppressor of men; but in her case it drew a lesser demonic spirit. Nevertheless, this entity went forward and oppressed her sexually just the same, apparently because this was her point of greatest vulnerability. The spirit inflamed her passions again and again until she was reduced to being a servant of impulse. At that juncture, the oppressing spirit was able to possess Kendra at will, which was when she began to experience memory gaps.

“Having spent well over an hour interviewing this couple—and I should mention the boyfriend wasn’t too pleased with what he’d heard—I knew that for the girl’s own safety, I had to arrange for an immediate exorcism. Otherwise the entity, knowing that
I
knew it was possessing the girl, might take her over one last time and bring about a suicide situation.

“With that in mind, I went out in the hall and explained the problem to Lorraine, and told her to take the rented car back to the hotel for the night. The three of us then drove in Jimmy’s car to Kendra’s apartment. I spent the night watching old movies on television with Jimmy, while she slept in her bedroom with the door open and a light on.

“The next morning I put a call through to a local Protestant exorcist in whom I had great faith. I couldn’t call on a Catholic exorcist at the time, because their clergy has to follow Vatican policy and undergo a three-day period of prayer and fasting before conducting
any
exorcism of the possessed.

“The exorcist and his assistant, both Protestant clergymen, arrived about an hour later. Both were capable men, and I explained the background of the case to them. Of course, they’d heard it all before. Then Kendra was brought into the room. Up to this point, the clergymen had not witnessed the possession, nor had the girl been possessed since the night before. What I had to do first, therefore, was to prove to them that possession was in fact taking place.

“One of the many tests for possession is to discreetly place a crucifix behind the head of the possessed. So in this case, the exorcist instructed the girl to close her eyes and slowly count to twenty. His assistant, already standing behind the girl, then placed a cross six inches behind her head. The entity possessing the girl suddenly let go with wild, violent screaming: ‘ Take it away! It burns! Take it away!’

“Using the cross provoked the possessing entity to reveal itself, at which time we were able to intellectually confront the entity that had taken over the girl. The spirit, the same one that had possessed her the night before, admitted it was alone in the seizure of the girl’s body. When the exorcist told it to identify itself, it responded by declaring: ‘I am a servant of Diane.’ Diane is a sexual-oppressing spirit, by the way, known as ‘the goddess of the hunt’ in mythology. We got very little else out of the spirit. For the most part, it went off on binges of screaming, cursing, and howling.

“Ordinarily, before an exorcism is allowed to take place, a formal investigation is conducted to prove possession has occurred in an individual. At the time, though, it was incontrovertible that the girl was possessed. Therefore, the exorcist decided it would be best to perform the deliverance ritual right then and there.

“In this case, the exorcist had the upper hand right from the beginning because the thing was so fearful of any mention of God or of being in the presence of a cross or holy water. Still, the possessing entity was quite resistant during the reading of the ritual, which took about one hour to perform. During the ritual it kept screaming, ‘She’s mine, she’s mine. Her soul is mine,’ in reference to Kendra. In time, the spirit was exorcised from the girl that day, but just before it departed, the thing vowed it would ‘return to another.’

“None of us present had any idea what the spirit had in mind. Later, I would be the one to find out.”

*
At the Medulla oblongata. For a fuller explanation, see
Autobiography of a Yogi,
by Paramahansa Yogananda. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1946.

XII
The Entity Returns

“After the exorcism was over and Kendra was freed from bondage to this spirit,” Ed continues, “the girl turned the black lace veil, the goat horns, the cup, and the conjuring book over to me, lest she be tempted, or oppressed, to use them again. Lorraine then picked me up at the girl’s apartment, and later that day, as is my custom, I brought these articles home with me for safekeeping.

“Right from the very beginning, the witchcraft paraphernalia caused me trouble,” recalls Ed. “A presence followed me everywhere. Then, the following night, after sunset, a psychic cold filled the office and Occult Museum where I’d put the objects. Sensing the change in temperature, I got up from my desk and looked out into the museum. There, by the veil and horns, I saw a dark gray cloudlike mass about the size of a man building into a dense black form. To prevent the thing from manifesting, I used holy water to drive it back into invisibility. Still, it was evident that the entity which possessed Kendra had traveled along with the profane objects.