Are Demons Real?

A Signpost Up Ahead. The Sign Says You are Entering The Wise Wolf Zone.

There is a question that civilized people are not supposed to ask anymore. The question is this. What if every culture on earth, across six thousand years of recorded history, separated by oceans and languages and gods nobody else worshipped, was describing the same thing?

Picture if you will a Sumerian priest, a Tibetan monk, a Roman augur, an Aztec sage, and a backwoods Appalachian grandma, all dropped into the same room. They have nothing in common. They cannot speak to each other. But ask them about the things in the dark and watch them nod in unison. Same descriptions. Same warnings. Same rules. (You do not invite them in. You do not say their names three times. You do not, under any circumstances, play with that board you bought at Toys R Us.)

The polite modern position is that all of these people were idiots, and that we, the moderns, with our antidepressants and our streaming services and our democratically elected officials who definitely don’t worship anything weird, are NOT idiots. The thing in the corner is sleep paralysis. The voice in the attic is the house settling. The shadow with the hat is just confabulation. Done. Solved. Pour yourself a chardonnay.

Except.

Except the Pentagon spent twenty two million dollars studying a ranch in Utah where the cows go missing in ways the cows are not technically supposed to. Except the British police filed reports about a haunting in Enfield that twenty seven adult witnesses, including the press, watched in real time. Except a captain in the Gary, Indiana police department, a man whose entire career is professional skepticism, signed a statement saying he watched a child walk backwards up a wall.

We are going to talk about four cases tonight. None of them happened in the Bronze Age. None of them involve Cotton Mather. All of them happened within the last fifty years, and all of them were documented by people who would much rather have been documenting literally anything else. Submitted for your approval.

The English Suburb Where The Furniture Got Opinions

In August of 1977, in a perfectly boring council house in Enfield, North London, an eleven year old girl named Janet Hodgson came downstairs and told her mother that her chest of drawers was moving. The chest of drawers, it turned out, did not stop moving for the next two years.

The Hodgson family did what any reasonable family would do. They called a priest. The priest declined. They called the police. A constable named Carolyn Heeps arrived expecting to find naughty children with a pulley system. Instead she watched a chair levitate across the room, signed a written statement saying so, and presumably reconsidered her career choices. Her statement is in the Metropolitan Police archives. You can look it up. (I will wait.)

Over the next two years, the Hodgson case attracted thirty plus witnesses including journalists from the Daily Mirror, photographers, BBC producers, and two investigators from the Society for Psychical Research who arrived skeptical and left, in one case, weeping. Furniture moved. Janet was thrown across rooms. She spoke in the voice of a deceased local man named Bill Wilkins, in a register an eleven year old’s vocal cords are not built to produce, and described in detail the location and circumstances of his death. (Bill’s adult son, alive at the time, confirmed every detail.)

Voice analysts brought in to debunk the recording said the recordings were genuinely produced by Janet, but that they could not explain HOW. Producing that voice, they noted, would have required false vocal cords, which Janet did not have, on account of being a child.

The skeptics’ best counter explanation was that Janet was an exceptionally talented eleven year old performance artist who had somehow recruited two dozen British professionals into a conspiracy of theatrical hysteria for two solid years. Occam, weeping quietly, asks for a different razor.

Gary, Indiana, Where The Children Walked Up The Walls

In 2011, a woman named Latoya Ammons moved her three children into a rental house in Gary, Indiana. Within months, the children were behaving in ways that get you, in modern America, immediately referred to a specialist. The specialist did not know what to do. Neither did the next specialist. Neither, eventually, did the family doctor at Hammond Regional Hospital, who watched the nine year old boy walk backwards up the wall and across the ceiling and signed a statement to that effect.

The Department of Child Services investigated. Their case worker, who had been investigating disturbed families in Indiana for years and had presumably seen everything she ever wanted to see, watched one of the children levitate above her bed and ran out of the house. She also signed an affidavit. (The state of Indiana has these on file. They are public record. The Indianapolis Star did a series on the case in 2014 that won awards.)

Captain Charles Austin of the Gary Police Department, twenty five year veteran, expressed his initial professional skepticism, and then took a recording device into the house and captured what sounded like growling. He has gone on the record, repeatedly, saying he believes something was very wrong with that house. He retired. He still believes it. The home was eventually purchased by a paranormal investigator and demolished. (Real estate listing description, presumably: “Has charm. Some pre existing conditions.”)

This is not folklore. This is in court documents.

The Ranch The Pentagon Bought Because Reality Stopped Working

Northeast Utah. The Uintah Basin. A 512 acre ranch the local Ute tribe had been warning people about for, by their reckoning, several hundred years. They called the place cursed and refused to set foot on it. A family named the Shermans bought the ranch in 1994 and proceeded to lose roughly half their cattle to phenomena that included, in their sworn statements, animals being found surgically mutilated with no blood, no tracks, and no predator capable of doing the work, and one cow that vanished while they were looking directly at it.

In 1996, billionaire Robert Bigelow bought the ranch through his National Institute for Discovery Science, staffed it with PhD scientists, and started recording. What they documented over the next decade included orange portals opening in midair, eight foot creatures walking on two legs that bullets did nothing to, electronics failing on cue, and one researcher’s wife reportedly developing a brain tumor in the exact location her instruments had been pointed at the anomaly. (The woman survived. The tumor was real. The report exists.)

In 2008, the Defense Intelligence Agency contracted Bigelow’s company for a Pentagon program called AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program. They spent twenty two million dollars of YOUR tax money studying Skinwalker Ranch. The unclassified portions of those reports describe phenomena that the lead investigator, Dr. James Lacatski, said in his published memoir crossed into the homes of the researchers studying them. Things followed people back to their houses. Researchers’ children began experiencing visitations. Lacatski’s book, coauthored with biochemist Colm Kelleher and shepherded into existence by the late Senator Harry Reid, is called Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. Three credentialed adults, one of them a sitting United States Senator, on the public record.

The Ute elders had a name for what lived there. The Bible, in Genesis 6, describes entities that interbred with humans and produced offspring the Hebrew calls Nephilim. The Sumerian tablets describe Anunnaki who descended from the sky. Jacques Vallée, French astronomer and computer scientist and the man Steven Spielberg based the Lacombe character on in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has spent forty years arguing that the modern UFO phenomenon and ancient demonology are the same phenomenon, simply wearing the costume of whatever century is observing it.

Costume, he calls it. Whatever is underneath, the costume changes. The behavior does not.

The Sci Fi Author Who Got Curious And Wished He Hadn’t

Whitley Strieber wrote a horror novel called The Wolfen and then a horror novel called The Hunger (the one Catherine Deneuve seduced you into watching), and his career was going fine until the night in December 1985 when he, by his account, was paralyzed in his bed at his upstate New York cabin and visited by entities he initially described as gray aliens. He wrote a book about it called Communion. The book sold two million copies and put a very disturbing painting of a gray on every airport bookstore shelf in America for about a decade.

Here is the part nobody mentions. Strieber, who is not a religious man, who started this saga firmly in the secular alien camp, has spent the last thirty years quietly revising his own conclusions. The entities, he has said in interview after interview, did not behave like extraterrestrials in any sense the word would suggest. They knew things they should not have known. They behaved with malice and theatricality. They came and went through walls. They demanded. They mocked. They lied. (Beings who had presumably arrived from a star system that figured out faster than light travel were apparently also down to lie about small stuff for fun.)

Strieber, in his recent work, has begun using the word demon to describe what visited him. He is still not religious. He has read his Vallée. He has read his Keel. He has reached the same conclusion as the cops in Enfield, the case worker in Gary, the scientists in Utah, the Ute elders, the Hebrew prophets, and the Sumerian priests.

Whatever this is, it is the same thing.

The Polite Conclusion Civilized People Are Not Supposed To Reach

There are three options.

Option one. Every witness in every case, across thousands of years, on every continent, in every profession including police, military, medicine, and science, is either lying or insane. (This requires believing that human reliability has been roughly zero, planetwide, since the invention of language. Sleep tight.)

Option two. The phenomenon is real but is some kind of natural process we do not yet understand. Plasma. Quantum something. Neutrinos in a bad mood. (This is the secular escape hatch. It requires the natural process to be conscious, deceptive, telepathic, capable of crossing solid matter, and personally interested in specific human beings. At which point, frankly, you have re invented demons and only spared yourself the awkwardness of saying the word.)

Option three. The ancients were right. Something else is here. It has been here a long time. It is intelligent. It hates us, or finds us amusing, which from its angle may be the same thing. The names change. The costumes change. The thing underneath does not.

The Wise Wolf is not telling you which option to pick. The Wise Wolf is pointing out that all three options are worse than the one you are currently using, which is “I do not think about it.”

Picture if you will, a country that lost the ability to perceive its own oldest enemy because a guy in a turtleneck on PBS told them it was sophisticated to be a skeptic. The lights are still on. The thermostat still works. The streaming services still stream. And in the corner of the bedroom, just past where the eye refuses to focus, something is patient.

It has all the time in the world.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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If you have made it this far without checking your closet, congratulations on your nerves. The Wise Wolf is independent journalism produced by two people. Wolf, who walked away from a tech finance gig that would have eventually involved owning a yacht and possibly opinions about wine, and Lily, who is twenty three and finishing her journalism degree from the bus, because Lily does not own a car. (The bus, Lily reports, has its own paranormal phenomena. They are mostly people clipping their toenails.)

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