When Faith Turns Deadly: The Brutal Side of Modern Exorcism

By Joe Durwin; in: Haunted Times, Issue 3, Summer 2006

At least since William Peter Blatty came on the scene with his gripping novel and the subsequent film adaptation of The Exorcism, Americans have had a salacious and reoccurring interest in the practice of exorcism. While many merely enjoy film portrayals of occult happenings, relegating it to the realm of fiction, belief in actual demonic possession among Americans polled hovers around 40%. The actual practice of exorcism has been on the rise in the U.S. and around the world in recent decades. In 1990, there was only one officially recognized Roman Catholic exorcist in the U.S., a number which had increased to 10 by 2001. The latter years of John Paul IIs papacy saw an increasingly open attitude toward the ritual. In 2003, a task force was established in Genoa, consisting of 3 priests, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a neurologist, to evaluate exorcism requests, and Benedict XVI has expressed public encouragement of a new exorcism instruction course offered at a Vatican sponsored university. Despite the more favorable attitude in the upper echelons of the Roman Catholic religion, many American Bishops remain reluctant to discuss or approve exorcisms. In general, belief in demonic possession is lower among American Catholics (37%) than Protestants (47%), and by far the majority of these rituals are conducted under looser denominational auspices. Fordham University sociologist Michael Cuneo estimates that there are anywhere from 500 to 1000 evangelical exorcism ministries doing business in the U.S. Generally, exorcisms are secretive, local affairs, with little or no information about the incident provided to the media, and therefore the exact extent, nature, and results of modern exorcisms are hard to gauge. The kinds of exorcisms that do become known to the public at large, mainly, are those in which someone was killed. Theres no shortage of these exorcism fatalities in modern times. 1995 and 1996 saw two similar deaths of Korean women in California, Kyung-A Ha and Kyung Jae Chung, who were beaten to death in the process of exorcisms at Evangelical and Methodist churches in San Francisco and Glendale, respectively. In 1998, Charity Miranda, a seventeen year old cheerleader in Sayville, New York, was suffocated with a plastic bag by her mother, after her attempts to exorcise perceived demons from the girls body failed. In 2003, an 8 year old autistic boy, suffocated while being wrapped in sheets and held down in an exorcism at the Faith Temple Church of the Apostolic Faith in Milwaukee. Exorcism deaths dont just happen in remote, backwater countries like the United States. Over the course of four nightmarish days in May of 1994, a New Zealand woman terrorized her family with batch of home-baked exorcism. A year before, 33 year old Janice Gibson had converted to a fundamentalist Apostolic Church in the small North Island town of Inglewood, after a faith healing session cured her chronic back pain. On May 16, she ordered her husband Lindsay to stay home from work, because demons would get him. By this time, Janice had evolved a new belief system in which Janice was God, and they were embattled by evil forces, and had converted her husband to this reality. The following day, their 17 year old daughter Darlene fled the house for a

When Faith Turns Deadly: The Brutal Side of Modern Exorcism

By Joe Durwin; in: Haunted Times, Issue 3, Summer 2006
friends house, complaining in tears that her mother had made her hold her two year old sister Emily down while Janice hit her repeatedly in the face to beat the devil out of her. When Lindsay didnt return to work the following day, a co-worker and eventually his boss visited the house to check on him, stumbling onto mad scenes of the family vomiting in buckets at Janices direction, to purge themselves of sin, interspersed with outbursts of other kinds of physical and mental violence. Police arrived that night, accompanied by a doctor, psychologist and social worker. They urged the doctor to provide a medical certificate allowing Janice to be detained, but he refused, saying she was merely a religious fanatic. They confiscated some guns from the house and left. The following day, Janice, convinced they were now totally hemmed in by demonic forces, let loose an all out maelstrom of exorcismic fury. With the help of her husband, 12 year old son Dane, Emily, and another five year old, smashed all the dishes and glass, burned furniture, and threw clothing and other possessions out of the house. Lindsay took the possessed pet mice outside, tore their heads off and buried them. Janice cooked a meal, then ordered them to vomit everything up and urinate on themselves. She threw a half naked Dane out into the cold evening darkness, but the evil she began to see in him didnt go away, and she told Lindsay to hold him. Danes wrist broke first, then was forgotten as Janice began striking her son repeatedly in the face with a concrete block. With his last breath, he pleaded that he believed and wanted to be saved, but she continued to strike him, believing the devil would flee and he would be resurrected as a beautiful person. When the police and ambulance arrived, Janice hollered Hes already dead. We killed him, you stupid man, just like the first Jesus. More recently, three major exorcism death cases made headlines in 2005. In Romania, a radical Greek Orthodox monk and a convent of nuns were held responsible for the asphyxiation/dehydration death of Marcica Cornicici, a diagnosed schizophrenic who was strapped to a cross and left for three days without food or water. In Penjamo, in western Mexico, 8 family members were committed for 40 year sentences after the parents, with help from aunts and grandparents, mutilated and murdered their 7 month old daughter and stoned her 13 year old sister after failed exorcism attempts. The family members said that they saw the faces of animals and demons in the girls, and had to kill them to save themselves. And in Guyana this past September, a woman was convicted to ten years in prison after beating her 34 year old friend to death in an exorcism ritual concocted out of self-styled African and Hindu spirit beliefs, proving that this phenomenon is not a purely Christian one. The Roman Catholic church rarely can be tied to exorcism deaths in modern times, but one notable exception has proved fascinating to the public for thirty years. In 1976, 24 year old Anneliese Michel whose tragic death in 1976 and subsequent story has fascinated society for 30 years, is one of the best-known accounts in the world. In 2005, it became the basis of the film The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Unfortunately, we all know more exist and it is just a matter of time before these skeletons become too large to hide in the closet.