Latest / CelinaSpookyBoo / THE TRUTH ABOUT EXORCISMS

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THE TRUTH ABOUT EXORCISMS · CelinaSpookyBoo

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I'm Selina Myers, and guess what? It's spooky season, baby!
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Which means we're jumping into some spookier stuff, and we're
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: gonna add a REM pod because we're talking about exorcisms. Adam?
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Ask it to step away. Adam, it's not supposed to
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: be haunted in the studio! Goddammit. I would like to
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: speak about exorcisms. Can you step away from the REM pod?
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Are you... Tonight, we are opening a door that humankind
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: has tried to keep shut for thousands of years. Cue
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: the demon. Okay, moving on. We are stepping into a
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: room where people whisper instead of speak, where a glass
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: of water becomes holy by hope alone, and where prayer
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: can feel like a weapon and a name can feel
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: like a trap. From ancient rituals to today's headlines and
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: familiar names, tonight we are talking about exorcisms, their history,
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: their legends, their rituals, their failures, and the questions we
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: refuse to stop asking. Is possession real? Is it spiritual, psychological,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: or Or something in between the cracks? Why are exorcisms
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: still performed today? And how did the media, the movies,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: and myth turn private right into global obsession? If you
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: think exorcism begins with a sweating priest and Latin chants,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: that is only the newest layer to this. The older
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: story is deeper, stranger, and very human. Long before anyone said,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: The power of Christ compels you! Why? Why when I
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: said that? Can you stop? Step away! They're sassy. I
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: want to know what they want to talk about. Every
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: time I say Christ, Price, it goes off. Christ. Christ.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. The power of Christ comes through. Let me
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: get through a paragraph. Thank you. People were already trying
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: to persuade the unseen to leave the living alone. Picture
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: the world before modern hospital, before neurology textbooks, before sterile
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: rooms and careful charts. Picture a clay tablet on a
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: low fire, a priest physician tracing a symbol you do
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: not understand. In ancient Mesopotamia, nearly 4,000 years ago, sickness
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: was not just inside you. It was someone, something, on you,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: inside you. Evil spirits clung to the body like burrs
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: to wool. If you woke with a fever, your child
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: coughed at night. If the goat stopped eating, people looked
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: to the spirits to blame. and use rituals to remove them.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Real talk, growing up, I had a neighbor down the street,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: and my brother was friends with their son, and he
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: was over for dinner, and their dad was a priest.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: Fast forward, my brother sneezed. He sneezed at the dinner table,
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: and everybody joined hands, started praying, because I said that
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: the devil was inside my brother because he had a cold. Oh, God. Stop! Adam!
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: I respect you. Okay, so... Are you gonna be offended
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: if I turn the REM pod off? Okay, you're gonna
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: be chill. This is your last chance. I know, like,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: I put it on to have you around, but you're, like,
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: very hard out there right now. Thank you. Even back then,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: they recited incantations, burned resins, and the air tasted sweet
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: and bitter all at once. They molded little figures of
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: clay as decoys, bodies that were not your body, prison cells,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: meant to lure and trap the invisible thing causing you pain.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: This figure would be buried, broken, or burned. And if
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: you recovered, this spirit must have moved on. And if
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: you didn't, another spirit must have come across. The Egyptians
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: stitched medicine to magic, like two halves of the same cloth.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: The Greeks and the Romans added rhythm. They believed that
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: harmony itself had purifying power, and that certain sounds could
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: comb knots out of the soul. Imagine lying on a
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: woven mat while a circle of robed figures chant in
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: tempo that never really quite resolves. Beating small drums that
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: vibrate your ribs, asking the darkness to leave you in peace.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: And the request is simple, the stakes are not. Far
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: from the Mediterranean, shamans carried drums the way that surgeons
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: carry scalpels. In Siberia, in the Amazon, in the high
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: plateaus and the low deserts, healers entered daily. trances, bargained
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: with spirits, or chased them through the underworlds, returning with
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: breathless stories and scratched skin. They burned herbs that cracked blue.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: They shook rattles made of bone. They spoke to ancestors,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: to animal guides, to anything that would listen. The methods changed,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: but the beliefs did not. Something could get into you
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: that was not you. Something could be asked, commanded, coaxed, bribed,
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  Speaker 1: sung out. This is one of the oldest layers of history, exorcisms.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: The world is more crowded than it ever looks now,
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: and the body is not always alone. When Christianity swept
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: across late Roman world, it did not erase that belief.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: It focused it. The New Testament contained scenes where Jesus
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: confronts spirits as they flee, sometimes shrieking, sometimes bargaining, sometimes
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: naming themselves with an arrogance that feels almost modern. For
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Christians living in the world where demons had many names already,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: these stories were not just novelties. They were proof of jurisdiction.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Your God can tell them to go. Your God can
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: make them listen. The power of Christ compels you to
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: stop making noise. All good vibes, thought that'd be fun,
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: but you got a lot to talk about. I'll give
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: you your stage one time, but we'll have a whole session,
• 5:27
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• 5:30
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• 5:32
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• 6:38
  Speaker 1: part of your day. Back to the show. By the
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: 4th century, the church had formalized exorcists as a role.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: It was not a glamour job, but it was a calling.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Not every priest was trained to do it, and not
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: every bishop proved it. The church saw a danger in
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: turning the terror into a stage. Exorcism would become a spectacle.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: A spectacle that would cause harm. Over the centuries, the
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: Catholic ritual was gathered into a book, the Ritual Romanum
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: of 1614, a dense, sober manual that reads less like
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: a script and more like a map. What to say,
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: what not to say, what to do, what to avoid,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: and most of all, how to protect the person at
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: the center of it all. Holy water to bless and
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: to signal. A crucifix, not as a prop, but as
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: an anchor. Prayer is not designed to impress an audience,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: but to hold the line. The church insisted on rules
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: because without rules, the rite becomes chaos, and the chaos
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: gives terror more rooms to hide in. Permission from a bishop,
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: medical evaluation first, no improvisation that feeds the spectacle, no
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: whispering to the demon like it's a celebrity who needs
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: a microphone. You are not interviewing, you are intervening. Of course,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: history does not move through rules alone. It moves through
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: people and particular tragedies. And a few cases became loud
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: enough to echo through decades. First, we have Roland Doe. Now,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: this one's interesting. It was a pseudonym given to protect
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: a boy in 1949 who heard scratching in the walls
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: and the scrape of furniture when nobody was near. A
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: boy whose skin bore marks that seemed to rise from underneath.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Words scratched by no hand that anyone could see. The
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: story traveled quickly. From Maryland, to the press, to the Jesuits,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: who were called to help. During the rituals, witnesses said
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: that they would later see his eyes change. His voice deepened,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: objects moved, a mattress buckled, a frame cracked. The case
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: would form the spine of a novel, and then a film.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: And the film would change everything. But first, there was
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: only a boy who frightened the men who came to
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: save him. And then, perhaps freed them all by making
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: the prayers stop failing. Annalise Michael was real and human
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: and young. She lived in 1970s Germany, where the modern
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: and the medieval still brush sleeves. She had a diagnosis, epilepsy,
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: but she also had a faith that spoke about spirits
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: as if they were neighbors that might knock at any hour.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: She begged for an exorcism. Priests agreed quietly, over time
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: with permission and with the hope that they were not
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: doing more harm. Across many months, recordings captured a voice
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  Speaker 1: that does not sound like the voice of a young woman.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Words that tangle themselves into growls and accusations. The names
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: of old villains with shoulders made from rumor and fear.
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  Speaker 1: She stopped eating, and she died waiting less than anyone should.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Her parents and the priests were tried for literal negligence.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: They were found guilty, given suspended sentences. Her grave became
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: a site for people who believed, and a warning for
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: those who did not. Whether you see her as possessed
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: or as a patient failed by everyone, you have to
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: say her name softly. She is not a point. She
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: is a person. The history of exorcism is littered with
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: people who were not given that courtesy. Centuries earlier, in Loudon, France,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: a covenant of earth-line nuns began to convulse and accuse.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Their voices dipped into registers meant for men. They swore
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: in ways that churches pretended women could not. They named
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: a local priest, Urbain Grandier. as the one who lured
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  Speaker 1: them into the arms of demons. The ritual was theater
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  Speaker 1: and theology at once. Politics braided itself into piety until
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  Speaker 1: the rope burned both hands that tried to hold it.
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  Speaker 1: Grandier was executed. Later, historians would argue that the possessions
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: were hysteria, revenge, manipulation, mass psychological illness. Whatever they were,
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  Speaker 1: they were believed by enough people to kill a man.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: And that is the one true cold fact at the
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: center of exorcism's history. Belief can save you, but belief
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: can burn you too. There are other stories. The Smurl
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: family in the United States telling investigators that things moved
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: through walls, through them, that it invaded even the most
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: private parts of their lives. Cases in South America where
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: prayer meetings became a wrestling match between a pastor with
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: a hand on a forehead and a voice that calls
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: itself something it isn't. A mother in the Philippines carrying
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: a child into a parish with eyes like a storm.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Thousands of small reports that never become novels or films,
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: but live quietly in parish logs and family memories as
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: two sentences. We asked for help. We think we got it.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: If you listen long enough, one question starts scratching at
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: the door. Are these possessions? Or are they our oldest
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: words for illness or injury of the mind? Psychology is
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: not just the enemy of mystery. It is the friend
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: who keeps you from wandering into the woods without a map.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Many of the classic signs of possessions have clinical siblings.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Convulsions belong to seizures. Hearing voices belongs to psychosis, to trauma.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: To grief that grew teeth. Switching between different identities can
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  Speaker 1: belong to dissociative disorders. Saying shocking things doesn't require a demon.
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  Speaker 1: It requires pain. Or the suggestion. Or a brain trying
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: to dislodge itself from itself. Not everything is that simple.
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  Speaker 1: There are moments witnesses keep returning to in a low voice.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: A spoken language. The person never studied. Not fluently. Not fully.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: But with enough rhythm to feel borrowed. Knowledge is about
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  Speaker 1: hidden things. A secret sin. A private object tucked into
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: the floorboard. that the possessed shouldn't know about, and yet
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: somehow does. Strength that makes four adults feel like rope.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: Sometimes those can be explained by coincidence, by prior exposure,
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: by the mind's uncanny ability to surprise us when it
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: really needs to be believed. Sometimes the explanations feel thin,
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: like a sheet held up against the storm. church has
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: spent centuries trying to be careful here. Before an exorcism
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: is approved, the person is supposed to be evaluated by physicians,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: by psychiatrists, by people trained to hear the difference between
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: a voice and a symptom. The church published a revised
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: rite in the discernment, caution, humility, and the reality that
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: many who ask for an exorcism need other kinds of care.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: It may feel strange to say this, but the history
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: of exorcisms include a lot of no, no, we're not
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: doing this. No, this is not for that. No, this
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: person needs a doctor, not a demonologist. The rite survives
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: because the church has told itself no as often as
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: it's said yes. And still, exorcisms are performed today in
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: numbers that would surprise you. Some priests say their phones
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: never stop buzzing. Dioceses in many countries have appointed official exorcists. Again,
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: after decades where the job seemed like a relic. Why?
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Some of it is, honestly, spiritual hunger. In a world
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: that feels both hyper-connected and deeply lonely, people want an
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: answer that cares about their pain. A doctor might manage
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: your symptoms. A ritual might tell the story of your
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: suffering and give you a part to play in its end.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: Some of it is simply just fear. When the news
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: feeds you a steady diet of wars and strange illnesses
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: and crimes with motives that look like mere images of
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: your own anxieties, a demon can feel like a name
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: that tidies a mess. Some of it is culture. Migration
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: moves rights from one continent to another. A community brings
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: its prayer with it in suitcases. Some of it is
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: the internet, which turns singular cases into viral templates. If
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: a teenager in one country performs an exorcism on TikTok
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: and a million people watch, the next person in distress
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: already knows what to do with their voice when it
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: drops an octave. And then there is the media that
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: set the mold long before social platforms learned to count
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: our seconds. The movie The Exorcist premiered in 1973 and
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: rewired the global imagination. Audiences fainted, vomited, staggered into lobbies,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: clutched by strangers. My mom told me when she went
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: and saw The Exorcist, they actually had ambulances parked outside
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: because of the reactions people were having. and this was
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: in a town that had like 17,000 people, so think
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: of that, mass hysteria. It was hard to overstate what
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: that film had done to public's expectation. Before it, Possession
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: had a thousand forms. After it, many people thought they
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: knew exactly what it looked like. A child, a bed restrained,
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: pea green sickness, profanity as performance art, Latin, like a razor.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: A priest who looks like he has not slept since
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: God was a boy. The movie was inspired by the
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Roland Doe case, but it also inspired people back. Victims
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: began to perform possession in a way that the movie
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: taught them. Clergy began to expect certain theatrics. Reporters began
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: to write about exorcisms as if they were using a checklist.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: The art informed the ritual that informed the art again.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: It's a loop. and it still turns. The truth is
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: that I have been to an exorcism, and it wasn't
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: like the movies. But some of the moments did match.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: There was a change of voice. The language the woman
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: didn't know. Truly, the smells are what shocked me the most.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: There were temperature changes. But this all did stem from
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: a life-altering moment that started a huge shift in her
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: mental health. I truly do believe that good cannot exist
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: without evil. I believe in good and evil. And one
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: thing that I know for a fact is that the
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: next day, after her exorcism, she was a different person.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: The pain that had manifested and grew inside her was gone.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: It was cast out. It was insane. And that is
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: why I will never stop speaking about these subjects. About
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: the balance between the dramatics and the truth. The balance
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: between truth... and fiction now let's talk about other films
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: that followed the exorcist some sober some gaudy all of
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: them stitching tropes into us the conjuring rooted in case
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: files of real investigation puts exorcism in a farmhouse reminds
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: us that the domestic can be a battlefield the exorcism
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: of emily rose turns the courtroom into a chapel of
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: doubt and grief the devil and father amor A documentary
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: by William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, shows a
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: real Italian exorcist at work and leaves viewers arguing about
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: what they saw. Hyperventilation and the suggestion of something older
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: than both. Beyond cinema, famous names sometimes brush up against
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: the world in ways that feel eerie because fame does
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: not immunize anyone from fear. A pope lays his hands
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: on a man in St. Peter's Square. A camera captures
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: a brief, intense prayer, and experts debate later. Deliverance, exorcism,
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: or a pastor's quick mercy when a soul is clearly struggling.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: A well-known actor researches a role by visiting priests who
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: do this work, not for the screen, but for the parish,
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: and later talks soberly about what he heard and felt.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: Not sensationalizing it, just paying attention. A director sits in
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: a room with a priest and a woman, and watches
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: her voice change, her body brace against nothing, and returns
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: to his editing bay confused. quieter than he left. These
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: brushes don't prove anything. They simply remind us that even
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: people with names on billboards are human in the face
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: of whatever this is. If I had to boil the
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: influence of media on exorcism into a simple sentence, it
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: would be this. The camera gave possession a costume. In
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: many rooms around the world, suffering has started wearing it.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: That's not always malicious. Sometimes it is the only language
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: that people have been taught for their distress. Why are
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: exorcisms still performed today? Because people still suffer in ways
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: that feel occupied. Because some who receive the rites support
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: relief that cannot be easily dismissed. A quieting, a loosening,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: a return of appetite for sleep or laughter. Because for some,
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: the ritual is the story of their healing, their needs,
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: the choreography that makes sense in the chaos. Because in
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: communities where faith is the strongest thread, the idea that
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: evil can be named and expelled is not a superstition.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: It's a survival skill. Because perhaps most painfully, exorcisms sometimes
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: functions as a last resort when all other care is inaccessible, unaffordable,
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: or untrusted. I get that. Placebo? Not placebo? Depends on
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: what you believe in. We are on a ball of rock,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: flying through the frickin' space so fast, and you're in
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: a meat sack, and you care about what they said
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: ten years ago? No, that didn't make sense! That didn't
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: make sense! Oh god, I'm feeling really aware right now.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: I'll dissociate it out of... I don't even exist. Do
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: you exist? Oh shit. Guys, we also have to admit
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: that there are darker reasons exorcisms can be misused. They
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: become a theater that re-traumatizes the person in the center
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: of it all. An exercise in power where the loudest
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: voice in the room is not always the holiest, but
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: is always the most certain. Ego people. People have been
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: harmed when their illness was treated only as an infestation.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: People have been shamed when their pain was used as proof.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: of someone else's authority. Part of taking the history of
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: exorcism seriously is refusing to romanticize the right. It has
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: helped some, absolutely, we can't take that away. And it
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: has hurt others, also, can't take that away. The ledger
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: is complicated. And so we circle the burning question again,
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: are possessions real? Now let's look at a case real quick.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: In April 2025, a tragic and deeply disturbing case unfolded
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: in Fort Pierce, Florida, when a six-year-old boy named Ramil
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: was found dead inside his home. The discovery came only
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: after school authorities had reported that he had been absent
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: for more than two weeks. So, of course, that prompted
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: a giant welfare check by authorities. When deputies arrived, they
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: were met by the boy's mother, Rhonda, who calmly led
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: them into a bedroom where Ramil's life's body lay tucked
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: under a blanket, as if he were simply asleep. But
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: what she told investigators would shock the nation. She believed
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: that her son had been possessed by demons and that
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: she had been instructed by God to perform an exorcism
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: to save him. According to police reports, Rhonda admitted to
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: placing her hands over Ramil's mouth and attempting to cast
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: out the evil spirits that she had believed were inside
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: the little boy. boy. When he stopped moving, she said
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: she finally believed that the demons had left his body
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: and that he would come back to life in time.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Rather than just calling 911, she wrapped his little body
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: in his favorite blanket and moved him to another bed
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: and waited for days, for almost weeks. This tragic incident
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: raises impossible questions. Is there a line between religious belief
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: and mental illness? At what point does spiritual conviction become dangerous?
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: And how do we as a society intervene before belief
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: turns deadly? While it's easy to paint the story as
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: an anomaly, it is not the first time something like
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: this has happened. Across the world, there are documented cases
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: of exorcism that end in injury or death, particularly when
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: mental illness goes untreated or religious fervor overrides medical intervention.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: In Ramal's case, no neighbors called the police. No family
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: members stepped in. The only reason he was found at
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: all was because school employees refused to let his absence
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: go unnoticed. And it blows my mind to think of
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: how many absences go unnoticed and they just don't care
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: now in those days. Damn. The horror of this story
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: lies not just in the act itself, but in the
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: silence that surrounded it. Ramal died slowly, quietly, in the
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: place that should have been the safest. And his mother,
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: perhaps suffering from psychosis or spiritual delusion, believed that she
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: was doing the right thing. It's a chilling reminder that
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: real horror doesn't come from monsters or strangers. Sometimes it
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: comes from a love twisted by belief, from desperation shaped
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: by fear. And in the end, a child lost his life.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: And his mother, whether a killer, a victim of her
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: own mind, or both, now faces the rest of her
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: life behind bars, still convinced she was just trying to
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: save him. So what do you think? Some of you
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: already have your answer. Some of you have a story
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: that you were told in a kitchen at midnight. A
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: story that made everyone lean in and no one laugh.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: If you want the spookiest answer, it's this. Exorcisms have endured,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: not because we're gullible, but because something keeps answering when
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: we speak to it. Maybe some of the voices are real.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: Maybe some of them are not. Before we close, let's
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: walk briefly, but seriously, through the faces of the famous
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: who have brushed this world. Because the gravity of their
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: names often remind us that fear is not a class
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: that you can graduate from. There are directors and actors
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: who often speak differently afterward. William Friedkin, who gave the
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: world The Exorcist. later filmed Father Gabriel Amorth, Rome's longtime exorcist,
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: and showed us a ritual that looks awkward and unscripted, messy,
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: and therefore more human than any polished reenactment, the audience
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: was split. Skeptics heard hyperventilation, others heard something older than breath.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: The point is not what you decide. The point is
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: that a man who built the most famous demon on
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: film went looking for something real and returned soberly without
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: the need to wink. Writers, too, confess that while researching Possession,
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: they found themselves praying more. Not because the research proved anything,
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: but because the stories made them feel gazed at. That
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: is one of Possession's strangest qualities across history. It generates
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: a sensation of being watched. Do you feel it now?
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: Even if there is nothing there, it is feeling and
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: it is fact. I remember actually when I read the
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: book The Demonologist by Ed and Lorraine Warren. Pause! ADHD moment!
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: I read the book The Demonologist by Ed and Lorraine Warren,
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: which I find... Really interesting book. I think it was,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: it's a ghostwritten book. It was by someone else, but
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: it was kind of about their cases. I found myself
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: feeling watched. I found myself afraid. I found myself walking
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: in a forest and like needing to leave because I
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: felt so creeped out. So where does all of this
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: leave all of us? With the history that stretches from
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: clay dolls pressed into feverish ribs. Talatin whispered into the
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: cotton of a hospital pillow, from drums that make a
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: body dance itself clean, to quiet rooms where a psychiatrist
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: and a priest both sit, and both take notes, and
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: neither feels threatened by the other's pen. With two names
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: you asked to hear about. Roland Doe and Annalise Michael,
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: standing at opposite ends of a bridge that thousands of
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: people have tried to cross without falling. How do we
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: help the afflicted without becoming what afflicts them, with a
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: world map full of rituals? The history of exorcism is
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: not only at its core a history of demons alone,
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: it is a history of us and our terror of
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: how fragile our control can be, and our audacity to
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: talk back to anything hiding in the dark, of our
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: creativity in crafting rituals that make fear move. It tells
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: you that we believe in the soul so fiercely that
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: we invented a hundred ways to defend it. Are possessions real?
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: I think the more honest question is, what would you
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: do if you believed they were? Most people who performed
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: exorcisms did not do it for headline. They did it
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: because someone was in front of them, eyes desperate, voice breaking,
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: begging for anything that might make the noise stop. In
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: that moment, the choice was less philosophical than pastoral. If
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: you ask me for my headline tonight, here it is.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: The history of exorcism is the story of how far
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: love will go to try to get somebody back. If
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: you found this deep dive into the history of exorcisms compelling,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: there are other corridors that we can walk together. Cursed objects.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Haunted hallways. The psychology of fear. Folklore. And the things
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: that built the monsters in our closets. But for now,
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: I'm going to close this door gently. The room behind
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: it is still occupied. Not necessarily by demons. But by
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: all the questions we haven't finished asking. This has been
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: The Haunted Estate, and if you want more, you want
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: true stories, the argued ones, the ones that end in
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: a miracle, the ones that end in a courtroom, stay
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: with me. Subscribe. And if you haven't, bring a friend
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: next time. Light a light if you must. But make
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: sure you bring an open mind either way. And if
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: something knocks tonight, remember that you are allowed to ignore it. Okay,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: sleep well. Or at least sleep with your covers pulled up. Night,
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: Boo Crew. As if they were using a checklist. The infart.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: The infart. Over the centuries, the Catholic ritual was gathered
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: into a book. The ritual... Help? Oh! Before an exorcism...
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: I gotta sneeze. He sneezed at the dinner table and
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: everybody joined hands. Started praying because I said that the
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: devil was inside my brother. The devil and the father amorth.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: The devil and... Amorth. Amorth. Amorth. Indigenous traditions are dizzyingly
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: div- dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Fuck off.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: I have such a bad itch on my foot. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly. Dizzyingly.