By Jackson Mefford–
Suddenly, the woman in the back of the car altered into a deep, unearthly, guttural voice.
“You stupid monkey priest,” she snarled at the driver. “You think the changing locations will help you? She’s mine. Mine. Your mumbo jumbo prayers fail just like they always do.”
Dr. Richard Gallagher, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University, was startled. He was sitting in the passenger’s seat. How and why did her voice change? Why was she mocking the priest whom she had asked to perform an exorcism?
His heart raced.
As an academic in one of America’s most renowned institutions of higher learning, Gallagher has for 25 years pursued a scientific line of inquiry: Are demons real?
If there are no demons, what accounts for the striking aberrations in human behavior? Why are there Mr. Hydes?
Julia* was a Ms. Hyde who sought freedom from episodes of “demon possession.” She had gotten involved with some Satanists when she was a teenager. She liked the supernatural powers it gave her. She didn’t like when the demons took over.
A petite figure, Julia once overpowered a layman Catholic exorcist and threw the 200-pound man across the church hall, injuring him seriously, Gallagher says.
But the priest couldn’t cast the demons out either, Gallagher observes, because she refused to stop going to the Satanic group – she liked the power Satan gave her. “You can’t have it both ways,” he said. Either quit demons or be possessed.
(Catholics separate exorcists into two groups: qualified ones, usually priests, and inexperienced laymen exorcists. Pentecostal Protestants, on the other hand, teach that every believer has authority in Jesus over demons, and anyone can cast them out.)
Gallagher has studied hundreds of cases of suspected demonic possession and compared them to thousands of cases of mental illness. “Mental illness and possession are very, very different things and they need to be distinguished,” he says.
Multiple personality disordering, hallucinating, going into a trance or hearing voices of demons do not necessarily signify possession, he says. The telltale signs of possession may be if the person starts speaking a foreign language they never knew, if they exhibit super human strength or contort their bodies into impossible positions.
Julia later informed Gallagher that she had terminal cancer a year later.
Gallagher says he pursued the inquiry into demons because he, as a physician, wanted to help people. He also wasn’t afraid of the sneers he would get from colleagues and skeptics.
“There are plenty of people who have audio-taped, or even videotaped,possessions and exorcisms,” Gallagher says. “A lot of the people who call for that sort of evidence, either they’re
not convinced by the evidence that’s out there, which is sometimes quite equivocal, or they
don’t understand that evil spirits are not performers.”
*Not her real name. Related content: Reiki healing brought influencer demons, dog men chased her in her terrifying dreams, the power of Etsy witches.
