Hostage to the Devil

Further Reading For Demonic Possession

Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Hauntings by Colin Wilson

Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans by Malachi Martin

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Demonic possession is one of those things, man. The skeptic in me wants to just outright dismiss it all as nonsense but every once in a while you see a case like Michael Taylor that makes you think. Like, sure, maybe that dude was mentally ill but how did he manage to go his entire life without displaying some kind of symptom of the illness that can commit that kind of violence and then one day tear his wife’s face off.

Demonic possession, if you’ve been hiding under a rock, is the belief that the human body is merely a vessel for a spiritual being to drive in the physical world and that at times, the attached human soul can be hijacked by a demonic force that acts like the host… until it doesn’t. We’ve been hearing about it since antiquity, too. Jesus was said to have exorcised a man possessed of a demon. And some of our biggest horror movie pop cultural touch stones, like The Exorcist, hinge on this belief.

Like, sure. Most of these stuff is just predatory Christians preying on the superstitions of their peers but some of these cases just sound like they need a real investigation.

Episode: 98

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