While some victims of hostile paranormal presences find themselves moving or simply dealing with the entity on their own terms, a growing number of people seek assistance from a trained exorcist or medium to rid their home of ghostly or demonic energy.
While he wishes to maintain his anonymity, a friend forwarded me to the home of one such family in southern Illinois to share the details of their harrowing spiritual encounter. Charlie and Tess wished simply to share their first names and their experiences with me so they could begin the long process of forgetting the terrible incident that befell their household.
It all started sometime in mid 2005 when the family’s youngest daughter began talking of seeing an imaginary friend. The friend appeared to her once in the doorway as she was coloring in the family’s living room. As it introduced itself, the entity she described was very similar to her in appearance, almost like a mirror image according to her description. And yet the entity had a vastly different personality. It seemed ages beyond its years, with a cunning and vocabulary the young girl would have not been able to have acquired at her young age. The peculiar situation soon became overwhelmingly intense as the little girl was no longer the only one suspicious that there was someone else living in the home with them.
It began with little things. All alarm clocks in rooms throughout the entire house would suddenly go off, being reset at different stages of the day, and usually preceding an unfortunate incident to happen to or around the home. The family knew that when Harold, the name the little ghost girl was going by made the alarms sound it was a warning that she was displeased. Glasses would fall off shelves, the power would flicker, and a mysterious black dog would be seen staggering as if drunk throughout the field surrounding the family’s house.
And so when a friend of the family, a long time school mate and psychic adviser to Tess appeared at the house one day, she had decidedly made up her mind about the entity. Charlie recounts how she removed the entity in one night after several minutes of chanting and what she described as “energy work.” When they were allowed back in the house the power was again off, and their psychic savior was on the couch resting. Jokingly, she quoted the film “Poltergeist” as she saw Tess standing silhouetted in the front door, “This house… is clean.”
The account was incredible, but no amount of prodding or convincing would bring the family to make their names public. Though the emotion conveyed in their story leads me to believe they are convinced something happened, it’s difficult to tell just how much of their story was true. Perhaps the most troubling moment for me was toward the end of the interview when Tess looked up and pointed out a dog standing at the edge of the park staring at us. The silence that followed held an eerie weight to it.