Blurry Creatures - EP: 156 The Exorcist Files with Father Carlos Martins

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Over the last decade, the Catholic Church has recorded an alarming increase in exorcisms performed. One priest is often summoned for some of the most disturbing and vicious cases of possession. With almost two decades in ministry, renowned priest Father Carlos Martins has encountered evil in nearly every way imaginable. From Ouija boards and curses to witches and demonic pacts, Father Martins has battled the ancient serpent in many forms. The Exorcist Files are his stories. Father Martins joins Blurry Creatures with his co-host Ryan Bethea to discuss how these stories can help us better understand modern-day paranormal encounters and creatures. support the show! blurrycreatures.com/members Guests: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-the-exorcist-files-107227777/ Intro song: Dreamkid83 contact: [e-mail] blurrycreatures.com Socials instagram.com/blurrycreatures facebook.com/blurrycreatures twitter.com/blurrycreatures Music Kyle Monroe: tinytaperoom.com Aaron Green: https://www.instagram.com/aaronkgreen/ Mastering: ironwingstudios.com Outro Song: TimeCop1983: timecop1983.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luke's so often, people email us, and they have this story, they're out in their woods, and they're looking in the bushes, and they go, what's that? And when you are pouring your dog food and your dog's bowl, that's the last thing you want to say, what is that? What is the stuff coming out of this bag? You know, I don't think a lot of us think about maybe what we feed our dogs, and that's why we partner with rough greens. Most of us would love to have our dogs, you know, live as long as possible. I just lost my dog in December. And I would have just, I would have loved more time with Carl. And one of the things you, can do to get more time with your dog is to feed them better. Dog owners don't usually realize that

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That's RUFFF greens.com discount code blurry. Rough Greens makes any dog food better. Listen, Luke, we know that we live in a world where everything is fake, fake food, fake clouds, fake news, everything's fake. And you know what? You get tired of it. And you're just like, if I want to buy a shirt or something nice, can I just, please give me something real. Quinn's is an amazing company that does high quality everyday essentials. So we're moving in. We're in spring here. We're moving into summer. Maybe you need to refresh that wardrobe so you're ready for the summer, t-shirts, shorts. These are everyday essentials made from premium materials. Here's a chance to refer. your wardrobe for the summer at the price that's 50 to 60% less than similar brands. And you know, we always ask how do they do this, Nate? And it's because they work directly with ethical factories, cut out middlemen. So you're paying for the quality, not the brand markup and everything is designed to last and

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Now available in Canada. You're in America's hat. You want the goods. You can get it now. Go to Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash blurry for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quins.com slash blurry. In the Catholic Church, we have a manual. We have a right, a ritual called the right of exercise. And the exorcist is free to use it or not use it. It's a tool. But within that ritual, there is something called the Pranotanda or the kind of the guidelines, if you will. And it lists the three phenomena that indicate the presence of the devil.

Right. So one would be superhuman strength. Another one is knowledge of the unknown. So this voice that is now speaking out of your Aunt Susan. is able to tell you with perfect accuracy what you did last week, what you did on that camping trip when you were 19, when you were with your friends, and there was a lot of sin going on, and can recite the sins and the number of times the sins have, even stuff that you've forgotten about. That's not natural. And a third would be an ability, a facility to speak in languages that they've never been taught. So not talking about one or two or even five or maybe even 20 words in a

certain language, but I mean speaking in whole paragraphs with perfect grammar. Whole paragraphs with perfect grammar. The history of our earth is so different from what we can imagine. The Smithsonian that if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere was to go get it. assume at least one person is right. Because if one person's right, it bust the paradigm. It all goes back to the fallen chair. And the problem with the modern day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop is just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Hermon event. And this guy defects from the kingdom. That's a big deal. Hey, welcome to blurry creatures. We are a paranormal podcast and we aren't afraid of the Bible.

when we get into the Christian story a lot on our show, if this is your first time listening to our podcast. Thank you for being here. Today we have Father Carlos Martin on the show, one of the leading exorcists in the Catholic Church and with his friend and co-hosts of their podcast, Ryan Bethay. We had a great conversation with him. We talk about a lot of the things we hear on our show.

And if you're here for the first time, thanks for being here with us. And if you've been here a long time and you want to sponsor the show and help us produce more content, go to blurrycreatures.com slash members, become a member of the show. You get access to tickets. We just sold out our first trip to Peru with Tim Albarino. Members were able to buy those tickets first. And we also sold out our conference, which is 80s themed.

You can kind of hear hearing the music and some of the memes and stuff we do. If you're not a member of the show, you're missing out on all kinds of opportunities. We've got more trips planned in the future. We are working on the blurry verse trying to make this place. Just a cool community for everybody out there. So many ways to get involved. but that will help you basically get involved and hear first all the things we're doing. So bluriercreatures.com slash members. Let's get father Carlos. Martin on this one, thank you so much for listening to our podcast,

sharing it around and just being awesome. Yeah, welcome, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to blurry creatures, home of all things weird. We talk about creatures on our podcast, whether that's ancient giants or modern day, Bigfoot sightings, everything in between, even the blurious creatures,

which we talk to, a lot of people about, which just can be demons and their historical roots. We get into a lot of the Nephilim talk on our show as well. But welcome to the show, Ryan and Father Carlos. Ryan, your last name is Bethia, right? So close. I know it's a bit blurry, but it's Bethleh, and don't worry, it was misspelled on a national radio show yesterday, too. So I'm, and Father was Mr. Martins for a quick minute before they fixed it. So we have many names, but it's Bethay. Bethay. Well, Ryan, you can, obviously you can tell, Ryan, you have a podcast. You have a great podcasting voice, and you host the podcast, I Win Camping Show. And you guys are starting a brand new show

together, the Exorcist Files, which just sounds very blurry, and that's what we love. And that's why you brought you guys on the show today. Talk about that. It's going to be out on IHeart Radio. And I appreciate you guys coming on the show. And like Luke said on the before the pre-roll, we asked ask everyone, what are your thoughts on Bigfoot? There's no right or wrong answer. What do you guys think? Father Carlos Martin. All right.

Welcome to the show. I want to go out to the priest. Yes. Well, I'm going to start from left field. It's a great place to start. And then it'll be, I'll zero in on the big foot, on the specific question you asked. So years ago, a friend of mine, a friend who, as a. a young adult became a Christian. As a young adult,

discovered the Lord, converted, became baptized. At the time, he was, gosh, in his mid to late 20s. And he had not been raised with any kind of faith in his life. And after his conversion, we were talking one day and we were walking in town. We're both from the same hometown. And he talked to him. He said, you know, we're not far from a place right now where we're standing where I had some something really strange occur. And so this was about 10 years prior to his conversion.

So he was in his late teens. And he said, I was walking with a friend and we were walking in between two houses going into a backyard, which would then lead into a park, which would then we were going to traverse in order to like go hang out somewhere. And we look up in the sky and there's an enormous spaceship. like enormous. So it would be the size of many football fields with lights from it like straight out of a movie. It was hovering there.

It would have been like our city block, he said, could have fit beneath it. No problem. Like it would cover us all. It would cover the entire block if it were if it were to touch down. It's like independence day. And then all of a sudden. in like one one hundredth of a second. It just disappeared at such a speed that nothing manmade,

no engine, not 300,000 engines could propel a thing that big, that quickly across the sky. So I saw it, he said, and my friend saw it. And to this day, he said, My friend will not talk about that.

It's so frightened him. So what is it that they saw? They did not see a spacecraft in the sky, although they saw an image of a spacecraft in the sky. I mean, that's what they saw. They saw something that looked like, but it's not what they saw because, I mean, my goodness, we were in a city at that time that consisted of over 300,000 people. There were no sightings of that other than these two individuals, right? So objectively speaking, speaking with our rationality, there was not a spacecraft that was

ginormous floating in the sky, although that is precisely what they saw. So how now do we reconcile this? And, you know, I allowed him to explain it. So he now had a Christian faith. And he said, you know, what that did to me at the time was it made me aware that we are insignificant. It made me aware that there are other life forms and that were part of this enormous cosmos. And the stories that we've been told, the creation of the, the creation of the, stories in our religions here on earth, especially in the Christian creation story, there's

nothing special about them. They are merely mythologies. And that we are part of a giant organic system, our existence is insignificant. That was the affected hat on him. Once he had his Christian faith, he was able to look at that and say, you know what? No, no, no, this was wrong. This was not of God. This was a manifestation of evil that was getting into my head. Now, I thought that that was a great insight. And that's exactly what I think is happening when a lot of these people who are, Rational people who are not crazy. They're not not bars who claim that they have seen extraterrestrials, that they've seen floating spacecrafts and so forth. But that is a manifestation of evil. The devil manifesting himself in this form in order to affect our worldview.

Case in point. Friends, we only have had UFO sightings. once humans reached the space age. Prior to that, nobody mentioned about spacecrafts. You don't find them in the history books. You don't find there's no reference to lights being in the sky with beings with pointy heads or elongated heads coming and, you know, that are a little over three feet tall and so forth and making contact with humans. We don't, we don't hear about any of that. It was only when we reached the space age and we had the intellectual apparatus to be able to process this that the devil now takes on that form.

In the past, what you heard about, pixies, leprechauns, tooth fairies, lots of those sightings. Well, as soon as we hit the space age, all of that ended. You have the awed bigfoot sighting, the odd. And not very many of them, to be honest. not very many. So I think that's what's going on, that the enemy is allowed to manifest himself. And I say is allowed because the devil cannot do anything without God's permission.

The devil is always on a leash. He is a very minor reality. I mean, the devil makes up a large part of my life, but he is a minor reality. And God is the reality. He keeps the enemy on a leash. only permits him to manifest when and how he desires. But those are my takes on that.

Interesting. Yeah. I appreciate that. Nate, it reminds me actually that that thought reminds me, though, of early on our show, Father and Ryan, we talked to Duke. We talked about Duke this last week, Nate. And what I think is fascinating about what you just said in terms of Bigfoot is he made this one-off statement.

And if you remember, we can go back and do a rewind on this. he basically said that people that have encounters with Bigfoot, there's like a high percentage of these people that get saved. Do you remember them talking about this, Nate? I don't know if it was on the podcast or was on a discussion. But it's a similar sort of situation to what you're saying. And I think there's some definite some validity to that, that people have these encounters.

And he's in a Bigfoot community. He's a Bigfoot researcher. And we started out talking about Bigfoot as we talked about pre-roll here. But he basically said that in this community, when people have these terrifying encounters with this, this creature, a high percentage gets saved, which is interesting, at the very least. It's anecdotal, but it's interesting because... Well, it shifts their paradigm.

Yeah. They go from unbelief to belief in lots of things. You know, it's not just creatures. It's like everything I've been told, the weird stuff, the woo. It's true. It's out there. And they shift their paradigm, and they can accept all the things they haven't heard. And I didn't know if you were done, Luke, but...

No, this is cool. I was just, I just, that was the thought I had, which I thought was an interesting because I love how Father's like, yeah, out of left field. It's like, yeah, that's about right and center field for us. No, I love, I love that opinion, father. And I will say that, that is kind of the opinion I had before I started this podcast. That was roughly where my mind was. But after three years of hearing so much stuff in this vein, I've evolved some of those

thoughts that, you know, I still believe it's all part of the darkness. but it seems as though there have been sightings that have gone back a long time. And people did write it down and all kinds of sightings of things. There was actually a famous one over Nuremberg in the 1500s, and they wrote it down, and this guy painted this whole mural about it because they were seeing things. So it's strange, and we even interviewed Dr. Diana Posulka, who wrote a book called American Cosmic,

and she said she went into the Vatican, and there's a whole wing devoted to UFOs and writings about them. Sometimes it feels like when you get that phone bill, it's like the crash site document. You can't read it. There's a bunch of numbers, random fees, vague language, stuff's blacked out. You're like, what am I actually paying for? I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. I like to be simple.

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Because the moment you think you've figured it out It just gets weirder and harder to understand, but that's why we bring on so many different types of people to help shed light on because some people, the stories they tell you. I mean, they're hard to believe, but these people are looking you in the eye and they're as honest as can be and the things they've seen and experience. So a lot of people just suggest that maybe these UFOs are just good angels and bad angels. That's how they travel. That's how they get from point A to point B. It seems so silly to say that, but if you think about it, it could be as simple as that, right? I don't know. We don't know,

but we love to talk about it and people have a lot of encounters with the technology and it's just weird that it's, it almost looks like something to human. I can certainly comment on that last statement you said. So maybe that's how they travel, how they get from point A to point B. Angels don't travel. They have no need to try. They have no need to travel. Why? Because they're immaterial beings. So, and so we, we, because we're wired and constructed the way that we are, we imagine an angel as, as a thing with a shape and with space around him. And, and because we move from point A to point B as needed, we imagine an angel to have to do that as well. An immaterial being is not limited by time and space.

he is not located in time and space. Your angel, your guardian angel, is just as present to you as he is to Pluto as he is to the farthest recess of the universe right now. So he doesn't move to go from one point to the other. All of those points are equally available to him right now. There's no movement needed. This is why, this is why in my field, you know, the devil will, will often in those that he possesses, start reaming off their sins with an uncanny accuracy

and start revealing about their life because every action that you do is observable to the angels. And because they're immaterial, they never forget. There's no parts within them to break down. And there's no parts that slowed down the processing of anything. So everything that is in their memory is there forever. We have to work to we have to we have to work when we reason and we come to a conclusion. You know, we work something out in our minds. They don't have to work anything out. They're immaterial. So the answer to the largest mathematical problem ever created would be an instantaneous answer that they blurred out. They don't have to work through it like you and I do. Right, like that's the working through is the byproduct of a material creature.

But an immaterial creature is not hampered by any of that. So whatever if, if those things in the sky over Nuremberg, over my hometown with my friend or whatever, if if they were manifestations of evil, let's say, of angels, either good or bad, those manifestations were not. in and of themselves the angels because they're immaterial and they have no shape. So whatever it is that they saw was not the angels, although it may have been the work of the angels. It's impossible to see an angel. The angel is pure skin. Yeah, I mean, it's difficult. We bring a lot of people on, talk about Genesis 6 and how angels and humans procreated and created the giants, the whole race of giants in the Old Testament.

I'm sure we could spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about. angelic human dimensions and space and time. But, you know, I would love to do all that. But I definitely feel like, you know, you probably want to talk about your guys' podcasts and the Exorcist Files and get into that because, yeah, we love talking about that stuff. And I appreciate those thoughts. And I don't want to sound like, I just, I think sometimes we hear things that make sense and sometimes it doesn't make sense.

And we're always trying to understand. the blurry verse. But we'd love to talk about the Exorcist Files and maybe some, give us some real life, you know, manifestations of the demons and what that looks like and versus, you know, just a regular someone who has this, is having a psych episode. And maybe just get into some of the craziest, the craziest stories and what you've learned over the years. I do want to say at some point, too, Senator, I am happy to comment on the Bigfoot situation as well. not to be omitted. I have my own thoughts on Bigfoot, if that's part of it.

But we can also... I didn't know. I didn't know. I love it. You have Bigfoot in one of your, like, your logo for your show. As someone who employs Yeties and his branding, I may have compromised judgment on this. But I do want to say, too, is I think one of things I think makes our show so interesting, too, is that, you know, we have, like, Father and I get to come at this from different, uh,

angles and I love like getting into these topics. And one of the things that I think is really interesting and you'll find out from the show, right, is just to father's point, people will swear they have seen things. And I am, you know, I have to go back and listen to the show. One thing that fascinates me right now is I have several friends in the military who all have colleagues who are, you know, being like, we have seen these bizarre manifestations in the sky. And I just go, bad. Something there's like, that's one thing we want to, you know, I think communicate with this too, is that, you know, if anyone tries to corner you and isolate and ostracize and say, how can you believe this? It's like, just like Father said, I know people who claim to have

seen that, actually, that story that Father just shared about the, like, spaceship, the size of a municipality, I have a good friend who says he saw that too, and he is as, he's of sounder mind than I am. And so it is, I absolutely believe that. When it comes to Bigfoot, though, I have a, I like to hold things in tension. I'm not 100% on anything. And so I'm like, you know, I'm like 99% sure the Christian narrative is the true one. I'm one percent sure we're living in a Elon Musk engineered simulation, but I'm way more heavy on the Christian narrative. But with Bigfoot in particular, actually, so I stole this like most good theories.

I stole this from someone smarter than me who actually did a research project up in the Emerald Triangle up there investigating a bunch of triple homicide, a particular triple homicide murder up there. And he would talk to people and they would say, oh yeah, Bigfoot's real, et cetera. And he goes, he's like, look, how come then on finding Bigfoot or those reality shows, they're on season eight? He's like, at what point to the producers give up funding this? And he joked, he's like, you know, season one, they're in the forest looking. It's like, what's that behind the tree? And then season eight, they're like in a Walmart parking lot being like, looks, there's a thing of hair. They've run out of places like Bigfoot's like on a yacht

somewhere in the Caribbean. But one of his colleagues' theories was that there were a lot of these bear attacks up there. And I, heard a theory from them, which I'm not on board with yet, but I thought it's a different narrative put out there about Sasquatch. And again, I'm not a Sasquatch scholar. So if this is actually more common, please forgive me. But I heard this and I thought, that's crazy enough. I'll put a few chips on that one. I'm with father in this one, a manifestation of evil. It could be, he believed that there were some occult practices and some warlocks and witches who were warging, if that's the correct term and using spells to control bears to actually assault people and that they were seeing

bears stand up on their legs and the ones who survived it was dark etc and so the Sasquatch was actually just a bear being channeled by a dark wizard or warlord or warlock and I thought that's that's gnarly was that a who there was a Hulu documentary that is David um gosh I'm blanking on his name he's actually I shouldn't, like I was saying, I had him on my show. He's fantastic. He gave a great, a great interview. But no, I thought that was an interesting perspective, was that there were bears. And then, you know, the other part, too, is the scientist in me wants to say that, you know how they always find new creatures at the bottom of the ocean? I was like, is there actually a Sasquatch that, like, is there some Neanderthal-esque creature that, like, lived? And everyone's just encountering it. And there's so much, like, drugs happening that we don't know. It just personifies. So, I don't know.

I keep that, but I'm kind of father's camp on this, too. It's like, it's generally not a pleasant experience. From what I've heard, it's not a, I met Bigfoot and I was affirmed and edified and I went home. It was like, if it's terrifying, I don't know. It sounds like maybe it's in the camp of evil. Yeah, it's weird. The Bigfoot does a lot of different stuff. And I think one of the things we sail on our show is all the above, right? I think, I think we, Luke and I, the weirder it gets, the more classification we get. I think there are multiple types of angels. I think there, I think demons are a specific being, historically speaking. And so, you know, you have the cherubs and the seraphim and angels. Maybe those are all different creatures that God created

that we don't understand, right? We're limited. So we just throw angels and demons on things. But, you know, Sasquatch has many different forms. And sometimes he's nice. Sometimes he saves kids. There's many people who've said they've been out in the woods and some being, some hairy creature took, took care of this little child for multiple days. A lot of weird things, but sometimes people say, you know, Sasquatch ripped the cabin apart, scared everyone out, and then they took off running and they never went back, frightens hunters. It seems like all the above happens on our show.

Like, you think you understand something, and then someone finds, like, a physical craft, and they're like, how does this make sense if it's a spiritual manifestation? I shouldn't have this piece of technology that we discovered, and the government's, like, re-engineering it. It's just, it makes you scratch your head. I think sometimes all the above is happening. Like, all these things are going on at once. And I think the Bible does give us a lot of framework for it,

but it doesn't give you the electrical and the insulation and the drywall all the time. So you have to sort of figure it all out. But I appreciate that. I'm glad you have thoughts on good for. I didn't want to be left out of that important distinction, you know, whatever. But I'll say, I'll give a quick plug for our show and then actually, honestly, as cool as I think I am and the dozens of followers. who listen to my show, I think we should obviously turn it over to our resident demonologist.

And as we call them in the show, the demon disciplinarian, father obviously knows this subject better than anyone. But no, so the actresses files is essentially we're trying to coin, if it hasn't been coined already, a docucasting. So a podcast that features docudrama elements. So we take father selected about a little over a dozen stories that each one has a particularly exemplary illustration of how a doorway was opened for a demonic harassment in someone's life. The stories are, you're probably the two people who might find them not as exciting as everyone else given the guests you have on the show, but these stories are fascinating, and we do dramatic reenactments, actually, to try and bring this to life in 3D binary audio. It's a serious subject.

In all seriousness, we do not want to glorify this, et cetera, because for what we try to, one thing is, she's a producer, I want people to take away from this. This is for all the horror and the conjuring and our culture's fascination with horror stuff, these are victims in these cases. These are not people who want to be in these situations. These are terrible. I mean, Father, you know, if we had multiple hours, I'm sure Father could share some stories of just like things he wish he had not seen and can't unsee at this point. And I think, you know, we want to encourage people that this is, you know, almost like a PSA. Like, whether you believe or don't believe in this, these are stories. hand accounts from father's actual case files and colleagues he's worked with and individuals.

And these stories are a warning to not dabble in some of this stuff. And so I think people will get a lot out of it. And hopefully it strikes a optimistic note too that, you know, should you ever encounter any of these manifestations, you know, we won't put father's cell number out there, but we'll find a way to get you help. And we would refer you to the professionals on this one. Do not, that's my final take-on message on this. If you are having any problems, do not try and handle this yourself. Make sure you get a professional. Ryan, that's a great transition too because one of the questions I had just to start this,

father, is like, first off, how do you get into exorcism, number one? And then if you could talk about how the protocol, right? Because I think when people have doubts about this, right? And this is not, this present company is included here. but like people will say oh well it's mental illness or it's schizophrenia or you're having a you know you're having a mental break or i would love for you to break down because i know that you that this is there's the actual protocol and process to this to essentially working your way down to a demonic oppression or possession or whatever it is so just for our listeners to understand that like there's this is a very serious thing um the way that you classify and then and then qualify is super important so to

part question. I would love to understand, like, how do you know, how do you get into exorcism to start out, you know, and then when you are beginning to evaluate someone, as Ryan just pointed out, like when someone believes they have, they're afflicted, and maybe, you know, whatever the terminology, you know, told me better than I do, but whatever it is, and how do you work through to the point where you're saying, okay, now we need an exorcism. Now we need, you know, in the Protestant side, it's deliverance, right? So I'd love it to also talk about that at some point, but let's just start with those two things. Yeah. So, I mean, on the Catholic side, we use both terms, deliverance and exercise. we generally apply the term deliverance to anything short of possession, to anything short of ownership of the individual's body by a demon, at least in terms of periods of time, where when you're interacting with Frank's body and it's obvious that Frank is not there at all, that the demon is the one manifesting, speaking, and performing the actions. But we use, you know, both terms. So deliverance is anything short of that. But generally speaking, somebody comes forward and states that they have some kind of affliction, that they are experiencing something, that they're experiencing a lack of freedom in an area where people are normally free.

In extreme cases, it could be the family members of them that bring them forward and say, hey, you know, our son or our daughter is in trouble. and in fact it seems like they're no longer here, that for most of the time, there's this other entity that is speaking and acting through them. And it is the case that some mental illnesses can resemble that, that there's a kind of a takeover, if you will,

where the individual who was normally well is now inaccessible. So we rule out mental illness as a matter of course. In other words, we presume that mental illness is the cause of the affliction. And only if mental illness or any other kind of medical illness cannot account for the phenomena, do we then start looking into the supernatural realm? This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking,

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So as people come in, you know, the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to pray. And as people, if they come to me and they express some kind of, having some kind of affliction, I'm going to ask the obvious questions. When did it start? Tell me what you experience. Father, whenever anything holy comes around, I see a holy image or I hear some kind of Christian music.

I get very angry and I black out. Okay. Do you black out in any other context? No. Okay. That kind of gets interesting because if it's mental illness, you would expect that people would black out not just during Christian music. but you know what? Certain kinds of schizophrenia.

You know, schizophrenia is a terrible disease whereby it affects the part of the brain that interprets and manages, if you will, religious experience. So they may be fine. A schizophrenic may be fine in every other context. Introduce something religious. And now there's a, quote, manifestation. So you've got to rule that out, right?

You've got to rule that out. And so in the Catholic Church, we have a manual. We have a right, a ritual called the right of exorcism. And the exorcist is free to use it or not use it. It's a tool. It's a tool. But within that ritual, there is something called the preno tonda or the kind of the guidelines, if you will. And it lists the three phenomena that indicate the presence of the devil.

Right. So one would be superhuman strength. All right. So, you know, your aunt, Susan, weighs 120 pounds. Her husband, your uncle Charlie, weighs 320 pounds. If she picks him up and is able to throw him clear across the room, we've left the realm of the natural. That's not natural. You have to have something else that accounts for that. So something along those lines would be what the church would call an example of superhuman strength. Another one is knowledge of the unknown. So a knowledge where, so this voice that is now speaking out of your Aunt Susan is able to tell you with perfect accuracy what you did last week. what you did on that camping trip when you were 19, when you were with your friends, and there was a lot of sin going on, and can recite the sins and the number of times the sins have,

even stuff that you've forgotten about. That's not natural. Your aunt wasn't there. And a third would be knowledge of an ability, a facility to speak in languages that they've never been taught. So I'm not talking about one or two or even five or maybe even 20 words in a certain language, but I mean speaking in whole paragraphs with perfect grammar, with a complete facility. Right. And at times, I will, in an exorcism, kick into a different language and start interrogating the demon in that language.

Maybe perhaps when I'm in a situation where I don't want the family members of the person who is possessed to know what I'm saying, what I'm asking, the kind of information that I want for whatever reason. But it has a certain layer of confidentiality that I want to ensure. And so I'll command the demon to speak in a different language that I understand, but the family doesn't. So when you have those three situations there, like even one of them is sufficient to establish possession, now you have something that is clearly not mental illness. And yet, there can also still be mental illness in the individual, right? So they're not mutually exclusive things.

As an exorcist, I have to be aware of them. I have to look for mental illness. If and when I've discovered it, it doesn't rule out the demonic and vice versa. So the presence of a mental illness, it doesn't change my strategy as to what I do. I'm looking for the spiritual. I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. I'm not a physician of any sort. So with regard to mental illness,

illness, all I can do is just refer people. But with regard to the spiritual illness, that I'm very interested in, and I don't take my instructions there from a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a physician. I'm the expert in that area. So I'm going to look for the presence of the supernatural. Father, if I get just real quick, you have a great, we won't give it all away because everyone has to download the Exorcist files, of course, to learn all the tips and tricks here. But you have a fun, one of the first stories you told me is you have a, given your fluency in Latin, you have a fun little hack that you will sometimes employ to determine if someone is authentically manifesting or experiencing demonic harassment. Yeah, I do. So, okay, so people with

mental illness or people who are fakers, right? Like, you don't necessarily, You don't need a mental illness to be possessed. And you need neither a demon nor a mental illness to be possessed. You can just play the part if you want. If that's what turns your crank, so to speak. And we have those occasionally. Some people experience a great solace or even like a kind of high when there's people fussing with them.

And they, you know, people think they're possess. Oh, that poor soul, that poor man is ensnared. and it just brings them a consolation. So if you come out in the case of those people, or in the case of perhaps someone with a certain kind of mental illness, if I come out with a crucifix and I hold the crucifix right up to their face, I take the holy water and I put it right on, they're going to play the part.

They're going to start growling. The mental illness may cause them to growl because they can't distinguish between a mental reality and a physical reality. So in other words, they play the part. And somebody who's fake does the same. Just, okay, well, I'm supposed to right now manifest. And so that's what I'm going to do. So what I do as one of my tests, one of my diagnosis, is I just say to somebody,

okay, well, look, I'm going to pray a little bit right now. You're not going to know what I'm saying because it's going to be in Latin. But I just want you to sit there. And I want you to just sit still, just be at peace. Just allow me to do this. And so I start reading, Pauca Significant, Celebrandum, Sati Sukut, Kuwait. So what I just tauntum precipitus artibus,

instrumentis et ingredientibus, massum cuparum, pro libet co-qualabit. So what I just said is this. Few things symbolize celebration quite like the cupcake. With only a few basic skills, tools, and ingredients, you can whip up a batch of cupcakes for each and every occasion that's a cause for celebration. I got that from betty crocker.com.

And so then I have, they have a recipe on the website there. They have many, but I took one of them. And I just rendered it all into Latin. Right. So when you have, you know, the word for cupcake, it doesn't exist in Latin. So I just took cup and cake and just took each of those words. So it's it's poculum crustum. But when you say cruistum, it's very close to Christo, right, which is Christ.

So as I'm saying it quickly, if there's somebody who's faking and is listening to see, you know, what this guy is saying, he's hearing the word Christ and what I'm really saying is cake. So if they're reacting when I'm saying this, we have either a mental illness or somebody faking. But in the midst of this, I'll take a paragraph of an actual prayer and put in here and start praying that. If there's a reaction on that point in time, now we have something interesting going. And I alternate. So then I'll go back to the cupcake thing. Does the previous behavior continue or does it stop? So you're weeding out.

It's a very rational enterprise of weeding out alternative causes to, a person's manifestation. And then if I'm seeing an increase in a demonic manifestation or a manifestation against the spiritual prayers, the actual prayers that I mutterate, well now, so I'm going to increase them. And I'm going to start, I'm going to go into them deeper. And what you're going to see if the devil is present is a ramping up of the distress. And eventually you're going to see an outward reaction, either a verbal outward or a physical one. They may stand up and say, that's it, I'm leaving. They may strike me.

They may start out with a plethora of expletives. But that's generally how the demonic works. And they all speak Latin. The demons speak every language, right? They're immaterial beings. So for them, if you were to invent a language, you know, or the course of two weeks. They would learn it in an instant.

It would be no work like it is for us. So how often, father, do you get a response in Latin? Do you get a, does elicit some, you know? How often? In Vino Veritas. I was thinking about Tombstone. That's the only Latin I can think of. How, gosh, that's a good question.

I wouldn't say very often. They don't, they don't generally choose to speak in another language as a response. However, there are some demons that just habitually function in a specific language, a language that I won't know. It might be an ancient one. It might be just a really, ring, an Asian language. I was visiting an exorcist. So I was a guest staying in the church rectory. And so I woke up in the afternoon from a nap and there was a room down the hall where they conducted their exorcisms. It was just, it had to be one of the strangest, if not the strangest language being spoken. And it sounded, it sounded East Asian.

I couldn't tell you what it was. But it was definitely a language. And there was a definite repetition in it. There were definite words within it. I couldn't tell you what they were. In that case, I don't want them to speak in that language to me. I want them to speak in a language that I know. And so you you force them to do that, although your desire to get them to do that is sometimes futile.

There are some that, for whatever reason, and ultimately it's God's decision, you cannot get them to speak in a language that you know. They speak what they do or they're mute spirits. They don't speak at all. And so in that case, you have to communicate them with science. if the answer is yes raise your right hand this high if the answer is no raise your right hand to your left hand that high something of that nature I hate those because it's so agonizingly time consuming and then they play games right so then they raise neither hand well you didn't say that that the hand had to be raised now is that kind of like the same sort of thing that happens

with like a Ouija board something like that where it's it's like not communicating audibly, but it's sort of... In one sense. But what's different about a Ouija board is you are seeking contact. In the case of an exorcism, I'm forcing them to communicate. I'm forcing them to get answers.

Yeah, you just don't hear like the Ouija board start talking to you. That's not the stories that you hear from people. And maybe some just nuts and bolts. Like, what do you think demons are? You know, because we have a lot of guys come on our show and give specific theories of what these things. are that are in people? They're fallen angels. So they're fallen angels and, you know, the human body,

the human person, sorry, so let's define a human person. You are a body that is insouled. You are not a soul with a body. That's not what you are. It's not what I am. You are an unsold body. So that unity of the body and soul that you are right now, that is what God created you to be. and it was never part of his plan that there would be a separation between these two, these two parts, right? These two, which they're parts only artificially, because they were meant to exist together for eternity. So, but at the same time,

we know from the language of St. Paul, he describes the Christian as a member of the body of Christ, as a limb, as a body part. and and why he says because we share the same spirit of Christ so because we share the same spirit of Christ that is why and how we share his body so you can have within your body more than one spirit you can have Christ which was in you you were intended to possess that to have that along with your own but guess what you can have a demonic one as well because the the engineering or the The plumbing is roughed in for that, so to speak.

And so that's what they're going for. And why do demons do this? I mean, why do they even bother with humans, right? Well, first of all, they hate God. They're in a permanent act of rebellion. And because of that, they hate everything that God loves. God loves humans, loves man, gave up his life for them. And so they're going to prove God wrong by afflicting them.

They're going to prove to God that he was wrong. wrong in taking delight in this worthless creature. And so, so that's kind of the, that's the M.O. reason, their modus operandi. But, but the other, the other one for them personally is the fact that in a way of mystery, and scripture informs us of this, when they possess, when they inhabit, whether a person or, say, an animal, or even an inanimate object, like, say, a room, there's some comfort brought to them from their state of misery. They don't feel their pain as acutely. They don't feel their pain as a key. And in an exorcism, when you're getting to the end of an exorcism, like, no, the average exorcism, the average exorcism requires multiple sessions. On average, I mean, with me, I've

asked a lot of my colleagues to, the average exorcism lasts about a year and a half. And that's with a session happening every week. So let's say, seven. 75 sessions would be the average. Average. So it's not like the movies where you're like, you're the head spinning around and just toss it out. It's not a one time. If it's a one time thing,

it was a very low level demonic affliction, right? There were very few rights, the demon home. But we, so you have a year and a half. So you have a peeling off of the layers. So it isn't kind of an all or nothing. You're constantly removed. moving rights. And when you get to the end, you will often have, not always, but you'll often have the demon trying to make a negotiation. All right. If you leave me here, then, you know, I won't

afflict the person as much, or I'll leave him alone for just about all of his day kind of thing, right? I mean, these are stupid negotiations, but it's the desperation that the demon will feel because when he's cast out, he's going to experience a tremendous amount of pain. And you can see that manifesting on the face of the victim. You see that demon's pain. Please don't make me go back there. Please don't make me go back there. They will beat the hell out of me if I sent back to hell and I lose this case. Is that why Christ puts them into the pigs? I was thinking of the man at the tombs. And they're just like, well, can we at least go in these bodies? That's a really, I, so I have a

theory on that. I think what happened in the case of the pigs is so you have the garrisoned demoniac who's afflicted horrifically. And the garrisoned demoniac,

nobody can, you know, nobody's able to stop him. He breaks all of his chains and so forth. When Christ comes, the demon in him knows this is my end. Right. This, this, so there's already been a discussion, if you will, in the demonic world, right, that this Jesus, we can't control. Right. And who knows what in heaven's name he's capable of. So at that point in the scripture, the demon, the devil is kind of still feeling out Christ. What is he truly capable of? But he's already gotten the devil's attention. I don't want to take this guy on head on. So he says, if you cast us out, right? This is after he's already begged not to be tortured.

But if you cast us out, cast us out into the pigs. And so that's what Christ does. Demons go into the pigs, the pigs go into water and so forth. Why did that happen? Well, I think the presence of the water speaks to it. Water in the ancient world, and the ancient mindset of the Jews, large bodies of water were portholes where demons would come, would ascend and descent from the nether world to the upper world and so forth. When you have Peter walking on the water, Christ had commanded him to, and guess what? He starts walking on the water. But the water is agitated.

He's not scared until he begins to sink. But what's the problem, Peter? You already know how to swim. We know that. I mean, for crying out loud, he was a fisherman. You had to go into the water and get his nets. And John tells us in his gospel, Peter swam to the shore. So what does it matter that you've begun to sink?

You're not standing on the water anymore, Peter. Because the water was agitated, Peter was afraid of the demonic. The demons were beneath the water, shaking the water. And in that mindset, he's close to evil and he doesn't want any point. part of it. In Christ sending the pigs into the, into the lake, into the sea of Ganesir, and them drowning, the demons are able to have a soft landing and they're able to recede into hell relatively, well, in the most painless way possible. Now, why in heaven's name would Christ be nice to the demons? The soldiers that crucified Christ, they were part of a

certain legion. And on their shields, every legion would have their symbol. The symbol of that legion was the pig. In a sense, in a way of allegory, Christ is being kind to the one that is going to kill him. So, and that's, that's a, that's a bearing out or a proving true of course. Christ's words, you don't take my life from me. I freely lay it down. What do you think about people who can see angels and demons and Christians who say they can see these things all the time? I don't have a kind of one or two sentence opinion on that. I can't answer that question, but I will say this, speaking generally in terms of just general thoughts. I don't think that's the case for the vast majority of people.

I don't think, and with that, I'm not denying that they see things, right? I'm not denying, just like I don't deny that my friend, whom I trust, saw that spaceship in the sky. But I don't think what they're seeing is what they think they are seeing. I have a priest friend, really, really good friend, whom I would trust with my life. I mean, I've worked with him as an exorcist. Gosh, he's just an amazing man. I trust him completely. He one day told me that he had these certain gifts, and one of them was,

now, this is more relevant back in the day when you had kind of wrote landline phones, not so much cell phones, but you know, but you guys, you're of age, you remember them. Did you ever have the experience of picking up a phone and you're going to dial somebody and there's somebody already on the other line. Like, you picked up the phone before it rang. They were calling you. And like, do you remember that experience? Yeah, sure.

He could, he had this ability to go to the phone, pick it up, say hello, and there was somebody there. He could pick it up before the ring would happen. Right? Okay. So there was that. And when somebody in his family was about to die, or on say during the night, on the night that they passed away, he would have a dream about somebody either lying in a coffin or kind of the funeral itself,

the funeral rights, or the visitation in a funeral home. Occasionally, he would even be in the coffin with the person. In other words, at an angle where he was lying down and he could turn his head and see them lying in the coffin. And he referred to those abilities as gifts. And I said, well, gifts from whom? And he said, well, of God. I said, okay, well, if it's of God, then there's going to be a utility to them, right? There's going to be some goodness to them.

He says, yeah. So in you being able to go and pick up the phone at that precise moment before it rings, and yet there's somebody on the line, what does that? achieve and he had no answer. And I said, okay, and in you dreaming about somebody dying. So in other words, he's not, he's not necessarily seeing the individual who dies, he is seeing a dead body. Well, that would be largely indistinct, right? Like he couldn't recognize who it is.

Like it's not Rick or whoever. Yeah, it may not be Rick, may not be Selma. Or it might actually be somebody that he recognizes. Okay, fine, right? Whatever. Either or. I said, what do you think that achieves? What good effect is brought about from that?

You said, well, I guess I pray for the person. I mean, we Catholics, we do pray for the dead. We pray for the deceased. But even if that person, let's say, you're dreaming about Anselma dead. you don't know if she actually is dead. As far as you know, she was alive last evening. So there could be a prompting to pray for this person who has not yet died. All right?

So I asked him, but when these happen, do you pray? And he said, actually, you know what? No. I said, then, Father, these phenomena are not from God. And so we kept talking. We kept talking. And he was an Irish priest, Irish man, came from an Irish family. In his family, along his mother's side, his great aunts, a couple of them, they worked as mediums.

They worked as sorceresses, the witches of some kind of variety. But, but, I mean, a true witch would not be Christian. This was a syncretistic kind of thing where they mixed some Christianity, some of the old religion, some Picks kind of mythology in with it. And so I just said to him, all right, look, why don't we just say a prayer together right now? And we'll just ask the Lord, if these phenomena that you experience, if they're from him, we'll ask him to strengthen them, to clarify them, purify them. But if they're not from him, we're going to ask him to remove them. Right. Deal?

So we're going to leave the decision to God. And so we did that, he never experienced them again. Interesting. Never experienced them again. So people who see things, I don't know what they're seeing. I don't know who they're seeing. I don't know the cause of it. There could be a number of different causes.

But people who see angels habitually, I think the vast majority of them, it's not a phenomenon that's coming from God. And who am I to say that this is not possible at all? I would never say that. I mean, there have been mystics, saints, people that prophets that God has entrusted with extraordinary abilities in history. But you know what? When we read about those biblically, they kind of know what they're doing those people, right? They're not going around saying, hey, I, you know, I see things like, what does this mean? There's an empowerment that God gives with a gift as well. So when that empowerment is not there, I am highly suspicious. I, guys, I thought it might be interesting too.

Just so, you know, coming at it from a, you know, outside a Catholic angle that I found really interesting in research for this show is I was gifted a book that contains some first-hand accounts from the saints, which obviously in Protestant, you know, Christianity, they're not emphasized and they're probably not read as much. But the manifestations in particular of which they attributed to the devil were very varied and very just all over the place. I mean, some of these accounts, the devil appeared to them as wild animals. Their houses would shake. There was a saint I was reading about this morning that had claimed to have being beaten by invisible hands. And so I, interesting, it's a father's point there.

It's in the saints from the church, I'm going to go out in a limb and say these are probably honest people in their accounts of what's happening. There's a wide variety that I mean, and well-known saints too. There was St. Bernard, and there were some that I was, I was fairly shocked about that were very open and almost read like a diary. Like, I was out walking and then someone appeared. They started asking where I was going. I told them I was going to preach the gospel. They let out a cackle, turned into a wolf, and disappeared, and just then moved on. And so, I mean, Father, right, this is, is this in your experience and obviously better knowledge of the saints? It's their, the devil would appear to them in many, many shapes and forms, right?

Yeah, and often in an animal form. And when the devil rages in anger, an animal-like form is often a manifestation. And this is the irony, right? So you have God who is the supreme being. You have man who is his beloved creature. And in between those two, you have the angels who are higher, beings than man objectively. They're, they're less lesser beings than God. But when the devil does his thing, when he, when he reacts out of, out of anger, out of spite, when he manifests himself

in full throttle, he becomes something even less than man. He becomes an animal-like being. A roaring, doesn't the Bible say he's like a roaring lion, right? Like seeking to devour. It's interesting. Well, I've never seen the devil become a lion. And that image is what Christ is one of the image of the line of Judah. But to be a pig, to be a dog, to be a cat, a snake, like I've prayed over people and good God in heaven, they slide out of their chair and they slide along the floor. Like just in a way that in a way that just leaves you your jaw drops because it looks like as if. their bones are no longer solid. Hey, this is getting to where I wanted to get, too.

I know that you guys have the extras files and you've got, you've picked out these specific encounters and, and exorcisms that you've done. But we'd love something, some of your crazier stories, maybe they didn't make the cut, just so we could, just to share with the audience, some of the things that,

you know, because I don't want to, Ryan, Ryan and, and Father, I don't want to, you know, we don't want to, we don't want to, do any spoilers for the show.

But, I mean, you've, you've been doing this for, for quite some time. You want our second tier exorcism stories? Is that what you're saying? Give us the JV team. What do you got?

Father, if I might make a recommendation, the music box is always a crowd. Unless you have another personal one, you'd rather, that's always a crowd pleaser for lack of a better. Sure. Yeah, no, that's fine. And that was one of my first cases. So I got a call one day from a woman. She wanted her house blessed. The house was actually her uncles.

But he was deployed in Afghanistan at the time. and so he wasn't using his house. Hers had burned down. So to help her out, he offered her its use. And he was going to be gone for over three years. So that was going to give her plenty of time to get back on her feet, get her own home. But as soon as she had started moving in, there was just a tremendous amount of phenomena that would happen, such as objects that were safely sitting on a tabletop or on a countertop would suddenly fall under the floor and break. there was the sensation she had at different times of being watched in the house.

So just all of a sudden it feels like 10,000 eyes are on you. I think we've all had kind of that feeling at some time or other that, hey, wait a minute, I'm in a room right now. I should be alone. There's no one else here. But I feel like I'm not alone and that there's something watching me and I can't see it kind of thing. Anyway, so there was that. But the most appliances would turn on and off by themselves.

But the most, the creepiest thing was there was a music box in her uncle's room that would chime in at random times. She had been in the house a couple or three months or so by the time she called me. And in that time, that music box would go off at random times daily. She had gone and tried to remove it from the house, but she couldn't physically pick it up off the dresser. It's like the two refused. The only thing she could do and she did was the winding key that was in the side of it. She removed it. And she figured, you know, somehow she knew that no one was coming in the place and winding it.

But is there some way in which somehow it's being wound? So she took the key. Well, that had no effect. And so when I went into the house, so what I saw as soon as I entered in was the ceiling fan began turning slightly, ever so slowly. And then all of a sudden it started spinning so fast. I mean, faster, like it would be like an airplane propeller where it was just the fins were just a blur if they were that. And then all of a sudden, like a stop, but not a stop on a dime. It was no more, like all the momentum was pulled from it immediately.

And then it would start spinning backwards, slowly, and then super fast, change direction without any slowdown in the momentum and any pickup in the momentum. It just kind of games. So I put down my bag. I pulled out everything I needed to bless the place. I told her to go to the sink and get in filibouli. with water that I was going to make into the holy water. And so that's what I did. I said the prayers made into the holy water. And then I began the prayers of an exorcism of the place. And I started

going around and putting holy water once I was done those prayers into kind of all of the rooms on the main floor, every corner of the room, every window, every door, every major object that's in the room, putting holy water. And when I was done the first floor, I moved up to the second. And I did every room leaving her uncle's room to be the last one. And so when I entered into that room, so actually, let me back up, as I was doing the prayers to make the holy water, the music box starts chiming. So I go upstairs, there's the music box, it's chiming away, sitting there on the dresser, and it looks like just like a typical music box. Normally a music box only chimes though when you open the lid. This one was chiming with the lid closed. So I put down, I reach for it to pick this thing up,

and I pick it up with no problem. I mean, it was just like a, I mean, there was nothing special about it. It was a, I just picked up a music box off a dresser and had the experience of doing that like you would expect to do with any music box. When I touched it, it immediately stopped chimed. I opened up the lid. There was nothing but empty space. inside this box. There were no mechanical parts. There was nothing. I could see the hole where the winding key would go in,

and there was nothing that that key would be connected to. This is an empty box. There was nothing, nothing but empty space. And there was no sign that it ever held anything. So I have no idea what that man was into. It's safe to bet that it wasn't good. Now, she never experienced any more phenomena in the house again. And the reason why I, the reason why for that is her uncle had given her permission to use his home.

So in the realm, in the legal realm, if you will, demons are legal entities. They're the most legalistic entities in the universe. Well, he gave her permission to be in the home. so right for the time that she's there, it's her home. So I got the authority I needed to cast out the devil from her. And that was an authority that she could give. If he had not allowed her to stay there, I wouldn't have even tried it. Because first of all, the devil is not going to leave.

And second of all, I'm going to whack him and he's going to be peed off. and he's going to come after her even more, right? Because he has every right to be there. He has every right. But when the uncle gave her the right to live there, then she had to write to evict the devil, at least from her the areas in which she would live. And so that was the authority that I used to go do what I did.

We hear that a lot on our show. So we've talked a lot about authority and giving that up. And I like that out how much it plays in from previous episodes on our show. It seems like there is a courtroom scene in heaven and everything, there is no chaos involved. Everything has ruling order even down here. And I think that's where humans get it from, right? We got it from somewhere. Our need for justice, we want justice.

Where do we get that from? Where does that come from? And rules. You also invite an interesting question that I think comes up through the research for this. And, you know, Father, obviously can eloquently state that it is better than I can. But, you know, Father, I'm curious, you know, there's a weird way too, right, where God is in control, according to the Christian narrative, right, God is somehow in control. And would you go as far to say, Father, that he, like, that can Satan and his minions be used as pawns in God's overall strategic plan for humanity. And I was thinking back to, I think you're referring

to Dr. Heiser and his courtrooms of heaven. But it does seem that throughout scripture at various points that the devil seems to request permission to do, obviously in the story of Job, et cetera. So God is somehow, and this is, I guess, one of the theological mysteries, which is how are we as humans morally culpable for our decisions? Yet God is also sovereign and also responsible for the order of things. So, Father, I know that's been worked out for years, but if you want to settle that theology for us. Yeah. So like I said before, the devil is a very minor reality. He is dangerous, but he is a minor reality. And so being on a leash, he has to ask the Lord for permission to do what he does. But the Lord does give him permission to act. He allows him. And that's straight out

of scripture. When you hear about in the book of Job, the devil was approached the Lord in heaven and asked for permission to afflict Job. Guess what? God gave him that permission. So why would God do that? Well, the only thing that would make sense, right, because we believe in a rational God. Our God is not capricious. He's not schizophrenic. He's not foolish. He's not mad. The only reason why he would is an order to bring forth greater good. Even the devil has his place in creation. And God is bringing about his will in spite of the devil. And no matter how much the devil rages, how much he rebels,

how much he strikes against that which God loves, the devil is helping to bring about God's will. Yeah, it's about knowing the beginning and end. Yeah. And that is a thing. It causes him to rage. I remember bringing that up in an exorcism. And, you know, that you're, you're just helping God.

At the end of the day, you're just helping. And I brought up examples that, you know, you did this, you did this. You put the Son of God on the cross. You killed him. You crucified him. And all you did was solidify the vanquishing of your kingdom. And he stopped his manifestation. He stopped his struggle.

And he turned to me. you know, I was at his side and he said, I don't need any effing reminding of that is what he said. Wow. So he's well aware. He's well aware. I mean, I think you made a good point that we've talked about on the show before, too, Father, where, you know, you talked about at the tombs and them not knowing exactly what they had in Jesus, right? It's the tempting of temptation of Christ or he's quoting scripture and saying, if you throw yourself off here because your angels will hold you up in your foot, won't strike the rock.

You know, we've gone down that path on the show and talking about how, you know, the darkness didn't really know if Jesus could be killed. You know, there was a lot of like sussing out. Like, God is omniscient. He knows the beginning in the end, but he is the only omniscient being there is. And so I find it fascinating. It's just like the God can take, can use all things for the good, for good, right? He can turn all these things for good for those who put their trust in him.

And I think it's fascinating when you look at it from a macro standpoint. You're looking at the whole board in realizing that in all this rebellion, darkness and evil has meant for, as John 10 says, to steal, kill, and destroy, that ultimately God's purposes cannot be stopped and won't be stopped. And all these things that he's attempting, the end darkness and the enemy is attempting to do will actually be turned to good. And that's a mindbender, right? It is.

It is a mind. You could live in that space forever, I think, and just try to ruminate on how that is and how that works. Because there's so much bad stuff, right? And then so I had a question about what we're talking about there where, yes, legally speaking, the person has to be granted. Do we give permission when we sin? Yeah. Is that us giving permission to. Yeah, I mean, nobody is going to say to the devil, hey, devil, I hereby give you permission to possess.

Well, some might if they want guitar skills. We have those stories or fiddle skills. The devil went down to Georgia, right? So, I mean, maybe for that. And maybe, but those are rare, rare occasions. And put it this way, I've been an exorcist for almost two decades. I've never encountered that. I've never encountered somebody who explicitly gave the devil permission.

What I encounter is, you know, poor souls who made stupid, foolish decisions, moral decisions. And guess what? There was something else that came along with that. And so now they're stuck. Right. So, yeah, when you sin, when you, and we're talking about a serious sin, right? We're not talking about you, you know, you, you cussed, you know, when, when you hit your, when you slam the door on your thumb, you know, we're not talking about smoking a cigarette behind that, behind the shed. Right. We're talking about something serious, right? A serious violation of the Ten Commandments,

right? Like, something that is, puts you in direct opposition with the will of God. And where you've consciously chosen to do that. Nobody's forcing you to do that. Nobody has a gun to your head to your head and saying, okay, we want you to go rob this bank. But you're doing it of your own volition. You have the knowledge that it's wrong and you have chosen to do the action, right? So that's what, by definition, that's what Catholics would call a mortal sin, a sin that is deadly, right, to use the language from the New Testament. So one of the, one, is grants sufficient rights for the devil to possess because you are his property and possession at that point. You've renounced your faith.

I mean, James is very clear that we can have a Christian faith that is unable to save us. We can be in such a sinful state that our faith can't save us. And as a proof, he says, even the demons believe in God and they tremble. So you are a son of God if you believe in him and you're ready to do his will. And if you don't, if you don't, then you're not one of God's children. I mean, you're in rebellion. You're in rebellion. Yeah. You know, it reminds me a lot of these creatures encounters, they ask permission. We had the blackhead children, they show up at your door, they knock on your door,

and they say, can we come in, right? You hear a lot of stories of these things asking permission before they do something. But I want to talk a little bit about, it sounds like there are some manifestations that are, for lack of better words, just on a scale, they're like a one out of ten. And then it sounds like there's some ten out of tens. And I've heard stories of the person performing the exorcism was like never the same again. It was almost like they went through so much trauma. trauma themselves just trying to get this thing to leave.

Is that true? It can be true, right? So, I mean, and then there could, so that reality, there might be a lot of different reasons for that reality. So first of all, there's the man himself who's the exorcist. Well, you know, what, what stuff is he made out of? You know, exorcism is not everybody's cup of tea, right? It just, it just is surgery.

I couldn't stand to be, and I can't watch a surgery, being done on TV on somebody's body. I worked for six years when I was in college. I worked in a slaughterhouse. I dismembered pigs. I can cut open and I mean, I'm a hunter and I come from a family of hunters, right? I can, I can got.

Dude, the hunting exorcist who worked in the slaughterhouse. This is a, this is a film of itself, Ryan. It's right in development. But every time I went hunting, who I was really looking for was Bigfoot. No, I'm kidding. Yeah. That's the biggest, that's the most dangerous game, right? Yeah, if you're smoking a cigarette out by the shed, then Bigfoot gets you.

That's what happens. There you go. That's why you're not supposed to do that. So I can, I can do that, no problem. But I can't, I can gut an animal, and cut up an animal. No problem. I can't watch a surgery being done on a human being. I can't go play paintball because I'm a hunter.

I look down the barrel of a gun and I'm looking at a prey that I'm going to kill. I can't look down a paintball gun. at a human being. I just can't do that. I psychologically can't cross that barrier, even though I know, okay, it's a game. He's not, I just can't, I just don't go there. So with regard to exorcism, it's not everybody's cup of tea, but you are getting into a battle and the demon is going to attack you. He will certainly try to attack you physically, and I have been attacked. I was hit once so hard in the head that I needed two surgeries to repair my skull. Wow. But, Worse than that, he will try to get into your head mentally. He will make you try to feel

unworthy of what you're doing. He will make you try, like, you know, you come back from an exorcism or you have an exorcism coming up in two weeks. And every personal relationship in your life seems to fall apart during those times, right? You just feel like crap. You feel like a loser that, you know, hey, I was rude to, even to Mrs. Shephouse, I was rude. You know, I saw her walk away and avoid me kind of thing. So you go through this, like at the end of the day, every exercise, you're a human being. And the devil will, will try to make your life a hell. He will do that. Yeah. It's the, it's the same, it's the same tricks he uses on everyone else, right? It's shame.

It's, uh, it's unworthiness. You're not good enough. Misunderstanding. Never good enough. And even even, even there was no misunderstanding, but in your, in your mind, there's a scruple that he's put in there. Well, wait a minute. Did I, gosh. Did I tick off that person and saying that? Like, oh, gosh, I better call them up. And then you call them up and you seem to make things worse. And it just, yeah. So at the end of the day, you know, for me, I just resolve like, look, Lord, I'm, I'm here to serve you.

I'll take whatever comes my way, I'll take it is coming from your hand. So if you want me to be embarrassed, if you want me to suffer a bit, hey, you know what? If that's what you want, sign me up. I'm game for it. like it, but if that's what you want, that's what we're going to have for lunch today. So you've been doing this a while. What's the one story that sort of rattled your cage the most, the one that you can't forget? There is no one. There is no one. Okay. So if you can pick one. Probably in your mind, what's behind that question is you're asking about probably

phenomena or what did you see in the room that was kind of just, whoa, it was. It was something. so out of control. It was so scary. It was so loud. It was so wild. Those kinds of things are the least. Those, you know, the devil, the devil manifests in order to try to put a fear in you. But for me, I met at this so long. He doesn't manifest anymore. You know, like what he, he doesn't waste his energy because he is. It's not going to scare. Like, so look, if you walked in a room and you saw. a chair lift up off the floor and into the air and just hover there, three, four feet. That might scare the lights out of you. It might not.

But it would at least, you would find it weird. You would stare at it for more than a half a second, right? Right. Yeah, it's a little bit. Yeah. So what about the 22nd time that you see that? What about the 220 second time that you see that? Would it produce the same effect in you?

Oh, it's the old chair floating in the air trial. The old chair in the air. Is there any soda left there in the bottle, Frank? Like, you don't care at that point. That's like doing this podcast. We hear the weirdest stuff. And eventually it's like, oh, you saw Grays? Okay.

A typical Bigfoot sightings. Okay. Whatever. You saw Bigfoot. Yeah. That's how we feel sometimes. So I get it. So that's not, I mean, the phenomena stuff wears off very quickly.

You know, there is phenomena. They're spitting. There's vomiting. There's displays of power that are huge. I've seen levitation. I've seen where the temperature changes in the room where part of the room is boiling hot, like hot, like 110 degrees. And then you move four feet over and it's frigid cold. And there's nothing in between.

There's just air. But again, they're just, they're few and far between. The longer you're in this ministry, the less of that you see. What is much more interesting is how the devil ensnared the person and what machinations are in place to keep this person ensnared. So those are interesting. And those involve a lot of prayer, but they also involve, in a lot of cases, there's an intellectual component to them. So you have to unravel the ball of yarn.

So you need to be on your feet in terms of your brain. Right. So so and and and it helps. I like to work always with another exorcist. If I can help it, it's not always possible. But I like for two of us to be there and then we debrief things. You know,

so let's just talk out loud. You know, here's what I saw. Here's what I'm thinking and here's what my gut tells me. Does that mesh with it? It's kind of like a forensics, you know, you're walking into a crime. It's very forensic. That's right. You're unraveling a legality. And at sometimes, you know, there can be layers of contracts with the devil. And you have to go back and like, what would be the first contract? Because all of the others are going to be addenda onto that first one. So if I can

eliminate that first one, I can eliminate all of them in one shot. Rather, start it. I love it. So a lot of entities on our show, they just communicate right to you. They don't, they don't even use words. They just put right in your mind. They call it mind speak. Does that ever happen? Where they're trying to communicate right into your brain? No. I mean, in my brain, no. I mean, I can hear something. I can hear something, for example, without there being an audible sound. Right. So, but that's not mind speak. You're still hearing something external, right? So because I'm speaking to you right now, you're hearing that sound externally coming from you. Like in other words, I'm not speaking in your head. If you take away the sound, it's still possible to speak for an angel it is, for a demon, a fallen angel. It's still possible to speak to you without sound. That doesn't mean that that sound. is in your head. You're hearing it with the apparatus of your mind that hears, but right now your faculty of physical hearing is not operative, and it doesn't need to be on. So that's just a, that's a smoke and mirror trick. That's all it is. That's all it is. I think that startles a lot of people on our show. They just, they're walking through the woods and all of a sudden something

comes into their mind that they, they don't understand, they can't figure out where it's coming from, and it's just an intense fear and then they'll hear things. And I just didn't know if they, if they probably don't have to, like you said, they communicate in all kinds of different ways. You're masters of that. You know, people, one of the ways, it's really one of the cruel ways that the devil has gone after people that, that, that, that, that, that, that I have helped is, you know, you have a grieving person that who, I'm thinking of one person who lost her sister.

Her sister was murdered. And she felt a great guilt because of this because her she was supposed to pick while her sister got off of work early and called her and asked her for a ride. And she wouldn't give her a ride. And so her sister never made it home. She was kidnapped. She was assaulted. And then she was murdered that evening. And so this grieving sister after several months decided to go and contact a medium to see if she could reach her sister.

sister. And she did. This medium, all of a sudden is speaking in the voice of her sister. And not only that, the, the perfume her sister would wear would, would permeate the room. It smelled like her sister is right here. Well, she was hook line and sinker. Hook line and sinker. You know, you're grieving so much for your dead grandmother and you go to the medium and all of a sudden, you can smell your grandmother's kitchen. And it's unmistakable. See, the demons, they know exactly what your grandmother's kitchen smell like, smells like, and they can produce that. They can replicate it. I mean, it's easy for that. We would need a whole crew. We would need a movie crew.

We would need, you know, odor specialists. We'd need professionals. Grandma. We need grandma. Okay. But it's not a grandma. Okay. I know my last question is, to rephrase what she said,

What's the weirdest way someone has been possessed? And that's not an easy question to answer. I mean, I could name case by case. And each time you would say, okay, yeah, that definitely is weird. It's weirder than the last one. And then I could just keep going, I think. In one case, yeah, this is going to open up a can of worms. And I really don't want to talk about this case very much.

But it was a person born into a satanic cult. And so the person was consecrated to evil from the time that she was, well, literally in the womb. So she had no choice in the matter. So at a certain point, when she was an adult, she repudiated it and had to physically leave the cult. And this is no small matter, right? So when you're talking about a religious cult, you're talking about something that's secret. it. You're talking about they're not interested in making new members. They raise the members that form part of the cult. So cults, so I'm talking about satanic and witchcraft cults, they will have

a team of breeders that breed babies for the cult, especially satanic cults. And the, the kiddie porn that's out of it, the child pornography, the vast majority of it is produced by satanic cults because the children they have are off the grid. They're not registered births. Nobody knows that they exist. Right. And so you will hear about at times, you will hear about the police discovering a cash of child pornography and they make arrests of different users of that pornography. You hear about 110 people were arrested in this ring. Three of them were judges, 18 were teachers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you hear about that periodically. But one thing you've never heard, you've never heard, is the child actors being discovered. Because once that

pornography is produced, once it's released out there, those children don't exist anymore. They've been sacrificed. So they can never be found. Right. So, So when I say that she left the cult, I'm saying she escaped the cult. And it began a very, very, very long, multiple year process of her exorcism, her deliverance. Yeah, we just had an SRA victim come on our show in a disguise her voice. And they call them survivors. And we understand now how heavy that is. and it's not fun.

I mean, that's not something that we wanted to talk about when we were talking about Bigfoot. You know, we didn't want to get into that stuff. But it's very real. Right. It's very real. And it helps us put together a lot of clues, Father. Thank you.

Because we talk about everything from like, how did Nimrod do these sexual occult practices, become something else? And then, you know, to modern day, like you're saying, when you sin, you're doing something, you're giving access. And it makes a lot of sense

of all the things we hear about on our show that you're giving legal right when you do things. And sometimes humans were so clueless of what's going on around us that we don't even realize. But it just answers a lot of questions from satanic ritual abuse to weird things that happen to people in certain parts of certain places. And in this one spot, all this weird stuff happens. It's like, why is it just always in these weird places? And what happened there? Was there some sort of, was that land or that area defiled in some way. So a lot of people, you know, they're skeptical of these things.

So I appreciate your opinions and your stories because it helps give validity to a lot of the weird stuff we hear on our show. So we can't say thanks enough guys for coming on and dropping. Just more clues of how to make sense of all these things. Should we end on an optimistic? I know it's a bit of a heavy. Yeah, that was a heavy ending. We dropped it there.

That was pretty big. It was like 787. just landing the, you know, we gotta land that plane. Yeah. But the actresses, yeah, it's like, the Exorcist Files is available on the IHart Radio app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So as soon as you're done listening to this podcast, going over and subscribe, each episode will be a case of Father Martins that is brought to you in 3D binaral audio.

The 3D sound is really trippy. It's, there's a couple recreations of some manifestations in the room and you'll hear the voice 360s surround you. So we often joke that when we were thinking about potential sponsors and partners that should we get an underwear company in case it's so scary that someone should spoil themselves. But no partner exists for that. But on an optimistic note, I think one thing to consider is I want everyone to listen to and make up their own mind. I mean, that's the whole point. We are not, I mean, these are the experiences of a father. These are also the experiences of individuals that we've researched. And one thing I will say,

and trying to be, I'm not a journalist, but I try to, since I co-hosted, I try to bring in outside opinions and reconcile. We do have other experts we bring on. We have a neuroscientist, we have a prominent psychiatrist who will all attest in their own experience of walks that they have firsthand experience with stories that corroborate, corroborate fathers' own experience. And one thing I found absolutely fascinating was I mentioned reading some of the accounts of the early church fathers and the saints, but also in the Protestant delivery ministry, there's a well-known Protestant delivery minister and professor named Charles Kraft who wrote on, he actually created a theology, and he came up with a system to try and rate the level of harassing spirits.

But one thing I found, and obviously he is outside the Catholic faith, but he, in his experiences, in his first in his accounts and his journals, so many of his stories lined up with exactly exactly what Father was saying. And I appreciated this ecumenical approach that there is a reality across the spectrum for many, many cultures and many people across the world that evil is real and that it exists in a personified form

that is out there wreaking havoc. And so we want people to be aware of this. We want people to listen these stories and entertain but also educate. And yeah, and should you ever face some troubles? Should you ever have a music box or a Dyson fan goes astray on you, we'll get you in touch with Father Martins and we'll get you, we'll get you the help you need. So it's, but the one thing I will say about a lot of these

stories is they end, you know, many times the people, their condition is far better at the end. And they are, I don't know, Father, would you say, do any of them, are they grateful for, I wouldn't maybe say that word, but many find a hope at the end and a different life. Should be. Not grateful, meaning like going through what they had, they wouldn't have wanted that. but they like the end result of their lives as a result of being liberated. Oh, definitely. Sure.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they experience God's power in their life, right? I mean, it would be kind of like, you know, somebody who was kidnapped and tortured for several years in a shack in a dark part of the woods. Once they're free, I mean, you know, if you were to ask them, well, do you wish that this never would have happened to you? All of them, I think, would say yes. but at the same time they would say that my faith is stronger now, I encountered God and I've witnessed his power and his love for me.

Well, and I will say that we had one individual asked me, they had some apparitions happening. And so it's funny. Now that my friends now I'm doing this show, I get all the calls when something weird happens at the house. In one case, the manifestation turned out to be chipmunks in the walls. So that case, thankfully, was not an actual demon. harassment. But an individual said, you know, I got to, I'm Ryan, I think I'm having these issues. I'm going to go burn some sage. And I said, well, you know, I don't know what's going on in your house. But if what is happening is related to the stuff that we're talking about, you know,

I'm just going to go on a limb and say sage is probably not the answer. You know, it might smell nice. And I enjoy sage and my chicken. But I don't know if that's the answer to what you're looking for. And she, I remember she said, I'm so scared. I don't want this to be true. And I remember thinking, well, it can be scary to think about, but, you know, I think the take-home message, too, is that if what we're saying in this podcast, if you, you know, if you find it to be credible and it is true, then if this stuff is real, then how much more real is the upside and the and the God that orchestrated all of this? So there's a weird connection between it. So, yeah, if the demons and critters or these scary things are real, the hope is even that much more

real. And so I hope people will walk away with that, that message. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, we serve a God in the business of redemption, man. He's in the business of redemption. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And speaking of, you were talking earlier in the podcast about kind of coincidences of picking up the phone. We had someone email us this morning asking to get you on, Father. Really? Yeah. This morning of all days. And it wasn't Ryan. Wow. It wasn't Ryan. No, there you go. It wasn't Ryan.

The folds there. By the way, a shout out to David Holt House. I'm sorry I forgot your name, buddy. You were on our show. He bit the Sasquatch documentary on Hulu. So, sorry I forgot your name, David. No, but I love it. I love how, you know, we're all trying to expose the darkness, really.

Expose it, you know. Don't celebrate it. And it does encourage people. I like that, what you said, Ryan. It does encourage people. We've got a lot of emails from people saying the same thing. Like, I didn't expect podcasts about this stuff would, wouldn't invigorate my faith, but it has. And that's all Luke and I.

We're just two dummies we say, just asking questions, trying to figure out what's going on in the world. Thank you guys. You guys are much smarter than us coming on our show and saying, just, yeah, appreciate it. You very welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it, y'all. Yeah.

All right, guys. Ryan, look at me up. Good luck with the show. Hey, thank you so much, guys. It will. we'll definitely, yeah, we'll definitely look you up. I'm out in Franklin all the time, and Father's got to represent in Detroit, you know.

So we've got to come up with a cool MC rap name for Father out there. Right now, we're working on the notorious FRC for Father Carlos. There you go. Done and done. Well, everyone out there. End game. Don't even, you try any longer. Go subscribe to the Exorcist Files.

Thank you guys so much for coming on Blurdy Creatures. And if anything strange happens, you want to come back on the show, you're always welcome. Right. If you have some, if you want to do part, part two. And chair in the air, right? Doesn't bother us.

We'll get a hotline going here, you know. So who are you going to call? DRC. D. All right. Thanks so much. I bless you all. Thank you.

All right. Thanks guys. Good night. Thank you.