Otherworld - Episode 146: Slain in the Spirit

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

When Alli’s father, a New York pilot, is furloughed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, her family turns to a new Evangelical church in search of comfort and meaning. For pre-teen Alli, the sudden shift in faith and the strict new customs are disorienting as she is just trying to keep the peace and please her parents. But when a guest preacher comes into town to perform a "Slain in the Spirit" ceremony, Alli is forced to confront what she truly believes. ⁠Check out our Merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For business inquiries contact: [e-mail] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode features a type of story that is pretty unique. It's from a woman named Allie. She grew up with a relatively normal childhood, but life for her family was a little undone by 9-11. Her dad was a pilot, so for obvious reasons, that day impacted him and his family. in terms of just being rattled by it. But additionally, he was laid off, along with thousands of other commercial pilots

in the wake of that event. It was during that tumultuous time that Allie's parents started getting involved in a new church, a church that had some fairly unconventional practices and beliefs, and her family started going to this church multiple times a week. This is something that Allie went along with

to please her family, but did not really believe in herself. I think many people can relate to that experience, especially as a teenager. One night, Allie attended a service at this church that was very different than the usual. It involved a guest speaker, a traveling pastor,

who is in town that could supposedly slay in the spirit. This is something associated with certain Pentecostal and charismatic Christian circles, and it involves a pastor praying over a person who then collapses to the floor, sometimes speaking in tongues, crying uncontrollably, basically experiencing religious ecstasy. I'm sure many of you have seen videos of something like this. It's kind of something that you'd expect to see in one of those old-time tent revival-style churches. During this unexpected service,

Ali did her best to go along with it, but when she ended up getting called to the front of the church by this traveling pastor, things took a very strange turn. This episode is called Slain in the Spirit, and you're listening to Otherworld. Is this Bobby? Yeah, it is.

At its core, the science, you can't argue. It's not only, all of a science, up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. It's just looking at. It's just like, wrong.

Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them of it. I'm Ali. I'm 33 years old. I am a nurse in a CTICU. I live on Lott Island. I grew up on Lone Island. and yeah, pretty normal person. I feel like you never really know your hobbies, right?

Like, you know, I do the sourdough sometimes, and I like to be a little artsy every once in a while, hiking, walking, going to the gym, normal stuff. I guess you could say one of my hobbies is honestly researching and looking into, like, paranormal stuff because ever since I was a kid, I've been really exposed and I always like to try to find the answer. I don't go too far.

I just like to listen to people and, you know, find connection in that way because I've been trying to find people who have similar experiences to mine in general. My childhood was really awesome. I lived on like a cul-de-sac and we had a big group of kids and I was the oldest one and I was definitely like the leader. I used to make up games. we had like a really good pack and pretty much my entire childhood I was outside. I didn't watch TV. I was just from sunrise to sunset, you know, like just running around like a maniac all the time.

I had a great little childhood. And then I feel like 9-11 happened. And of course I'm in New York and also my dad is a pilot. For my dad, it was a huge turning point because he was a pilot. He was up in the air. We were really scared. We didn't know where he was for like. a couple of hours. He was actually flying in the air when that happened. He was working for

American. So the whole thing was super scary, really traumatic. And then he ended up getting furloughed. And basically he lost all of his seniority because, you know, there was a lot of mess going on. Now looking at it as an adult, I think my family needed something to hold on to. See my mom and dad go through this was really scary, very unstable. You don't know what's going to happen, you know, one minute my dad has a job, the next minute he doesn't. It was unstable. My dad and my mom have always been, like, religious in their own way. Like, my dad went to school, you know, to study religious studies. So it was always there, but it wasn't so intense. Like, we went to, like, an Episcopal church. We were never, like, Roman Catholic or anything. So I did

grow up in church, but it was never an intense thing. We go on Sunday. We go on Sunday. We go on Sunday. days, we see people, we have a little community and that's it. Then one of our really good family friends started going to this evangelical church, born-again Christian church, and she invited us to go. So I guess around 10 years old, we started to really get involved in this evangelical church. And I feel like I had to change my outlook on life and bring in all this really religious. stuff at 10 years old when I didn't grow up with that. So I wasn't used to, you know, having to, like, be really mindful of what movies I'm watching.

Because my dad is actually really into, like, sci-fi, but the church would be like, no, you can't watch Harry Potter. You can't watch, I don't know, whatever, like, sci-fi stuff. And so, you know, it's not, we, like, would kind of be playing around, like, okay, well, maybe we should stop that. But, you know, I really loved Halloween. And I'm like, oh, I can't celebrate Halloween. anymore. So there was a little bit of trying to figure out how intense we were going to be.

Like, okay, we would, one minute, it'd be like, okay, maybe we should stop doing that and then be like, okay, well, maybe with a few exceptions. Honestly, it was extremely confusing. It was a really confusing time in my life that I think a lot of my friends didn't even know I was going through, actually, because talking to a lot of my friends now, they were like, I had no idea that this was happening, you know, and my dad is. loves flying. Like, if you talk to him, the first thing he'll talk about is a plane, you know. So I think him losing his job and having to work at, like, a liquor store was really upsetting

and really affected our whole family. I never believed. Actually, I remember even when I was a kid, I have a very intense memory where I asked my mom, I'm like, what is life, basically? I'm like, this God actually exists. So I always thought that God, everyone telling us who this God was, was Santa Claus. So I always knew that, like, Santa Claus wasn't really real and something. So I kept being like, no, really, Mom, tell me what's really the answer.

Like, I'm old enough, just tell me. And she'd be like, no, this is the answer. There's God, there's Jesus, and, you know. And once I realized that people actually believed that, I was actually in shock. I just remember being so confused because I'd be like, okay, like I really have to believe in this. I always had a really hard time praying. I never, like, even to this day, I really don't, like, pray like that. So I would, like, try to pray.

And I never really bought into it. To sum it up, I never really bought into it. I kind of did it to make my parents happy. Like, I'm just going to, you know, go with the punches because it's kind of helping the family. It's a really modern church. like modern music, and they believe that you can be born again into, like, the religion. So, you know, it's kind of typical of, like, a Christian religion where God will forgive all your sins if you, like, pray and you believe in Jesus. So it's a lot of that. But there's a lot of, like,

baptizing, you know, there's, like, flag waving. There's a lot of lifting up your hands and talking in tongues and religious intensity is what I actually labeled it as. You know, when you were, you go to a concert and you could feel like that vibe of like, you know, everyone in the crowd, being really into something. So it was kind of like going to a concert, which was, you know, I guess it was cool, but I had a hard time fitting in. So that's why it was a little harder for me. And my sister really just kept to herself. She didn't want to fit in. And she was older. She's six years older. So she all of a sudden was thrown into this church and she had a little bit more. of an independence, so she kind of stood back a lot and just watched things happen.

I used to go like Sundays, and then I would go to a youth group. Then I ended up joining the dance team and like the outreach. And I guess I was going realistically two times a week. It would start really early. I remember it being like eight, and then we get home at like one or two. It was like a really long day of just worship and then talking, you know, the sermon and then, you know, talking to people afterwards. I'm pretty sure it was on a random, like Tuesday or something, that we decided to go in and like watch a guest speaker. I knew that we were going to the church and I remember being dark out, especially when we drove home.

So it was a little bit later. and I know that there was a guest speaker that wasn't going to be the usual pastor at the church and it was going to be a slain in the spirit ceremony. So apparently this guy had the ability to channel God, channel God's touch. And, you know, if you turn on the TV and you go to like a random religious channel,

you'll be able to see what I'm talking about. It's the people who like pray and they have their hands up and they're like yelling and they're talking in tons or whatever and then they touch the person's head or they hit them and then they fall down to the ground. And then maybe like a miracle will happen or they start acting funny speaking in tongues and stuff like that.

I think I did know that going into it that this guy apparently claimed that he could do this or something along the lines of that. But yet again, I'm 10 years old. I don't know what's going on and I really didn't quite buy into it in general. I'm pretty sure I didn't even know what that really meant. All I really knew, I guess, going into it was that it was just a guest speaker. You know, I think everyone was really excited to go. I've tried to actually now get the name of this guy and it's impossible. I don't think it was that significant to other people as it was to me. He was like in his 40s or 50s. He was older. He wasn't like a young guy. And basically it started like a typical church morning service where we had our people who were not guests go up and start playing the typical Christian music and everyone's like worshipping and staining.

And I was separated from my parents. So the way that the church is like laid out was there is a left side, obviously a right side and then a middle. My parents used to always sit in the middle on the right side, and the youth group that I was trying to be friends with, they were on the right side at the front. There would be like, I don't know, what, like seven, eight feet, and then there would be like a one-foot stage that would kind of stretch out throughout the whole church. And that's where the band would be. There would be like a drum set, and then on the left side the guitar. would be there and people would sing and worship. At this point, I was on the right side, like I was saying, and I was a couple of rows behind.

I think I was like row three from the actual stage. And, you know, we're worshiping, whatever, we're singing. But like I said, at this point, I'm really unamused. It's kind of annoying to have to go to church so much for me. So I remember being like, I don't know what's going on. I just was like trying to really focus on. on making friends at that point, but you have to remember that the girls, and the guys would kind of sit separately, and I was trying to be friends with the girl.

So I was sitting, like, kind of with the girl row, and they grew up in the church. They were babies in this church. So they were really into it. So they would actually be, like, dancing and worshiping. And I always felt like I was just trying to, like, kind of pretend in order to fit in. but I really didn't. Mentally, I didn't buy into it at all. So I remember the guy, like, talked.

Like, he did a usual sermon. And then he started praying. Then the music kind of started back up. And he asked all the youth from the side that I was sitting on to come up to the front. So I walked up to the front. And actually, at this point, I remember feeling really awkward because, you know, who likes me in the center of attention when you're like a preteen, right? I wasn't directly at the front.

I was behind people. So the guy could not physically be able to touch me. Like, if he was going to touch someone, it would have been someone in the front of the altar. And the guy came over and he started like praying for us and he's like, I want everyone to lift up their hands. So I raised my hand up. But at this point, I was feeling honestly just very embarrassed

because it was kind of like all eyes on the youth, right? Who were at the front of the altar at that point. He didn't ask anyone else to go to the front. So I was feeling a little embarrassed, and I put my hand up just to, like, follow the crowd. I remember him having his hand up, too, to, like, pray for us, like, his head down and, like, his hand out and, like, him moving his hand.

I don't remember what he said, though. All I remember is that, like, all of a sudden I got, extremely emotional and I just started to cry and now I'm really embarrassed because I don't really believe in this stuff and I don't know why I'm crying and I remember being like just it was a very overwhelming feeling and it made me cry. It was completely involuntary. I was truly like I don't know how to describe it but I was almost like watching myself being like what are you doing right now. I remember tears like falling down and being like, what am I doing right now? This is insane. The last thing I remember is wondering why I was crying and then everything went dark.

For me, everything went black and I go stiff as a board and luckily people were behind me so I wasn't falling onto the ground. My head never hit the floor, but they were able to pick me up a couple of people picked me up and brought me over to the other side of the church. The preacher after I fall and they carry me, he's still going, he's still praying. There are other people who are falling also. And the overall vibe of the church was excitement that, you know, God was in the room with us and touching people and giving them visions, doing whatever he was doing, working through the lives.

That's like the verbiage that they would normally use. And, you know, everyone seemed to really think this was an incredible event happening. I wasn't hearing anything, seeing anything. It completely went dark. It's a complete gap in time. Like, it doesn't feel like I exist. I'm not, like, blind death and can't speak. It's, like, it's just gone.

They could have done anything, and I wouldn't have known. If I didn't have witnesses, I would have no idea. But when I started to come to, I did start to slowly come back with my senses. The first sense that came back was my hearing. and that's when I heard the typical church music that they would play. And it was pretty normal sounding. It wasn't like I was in a tunnel or anything. It just kind of started to calm up and I was able to recognize and kind of slowly wake up like,

oh, the music's playing. And the second thing I felt was my body and my body was on the ground. and I remember hearing the music and feeling me on my back. Then the third thing that came back was, you know, still my body, but that my hand was stuck up in the air, kind of like my elbow to my side, and my hand was like sticking straight up. So I tried to move and I realized not only could I not move,

but it was extremely painful to move. And when I realized that my arm is stuck in, in the air. My number one instinct was to try to bring it down and get up. And that's when I realized that I was unable to open my eyes, move my face, put my arm down without feeling this extreme pain. It was just black and I was in so much pain. And then I started to like get really scared where I was like, I don't know what's happening to me right now. And this is not okay. I just felt like something was really wrong. This wasn't a beautiful feeling. This was very painful feeling and very scary because I had no control over my body or my eyes. Being awake in your body, but not having your body

listen to you is extremely frightening. And having to give into that or else you would feel more pain was this level of letting go that I had to do in order to stop feeling pain. So it's just overall loss of control and very vulnerable. All right. We'll be right back after this quick break. At this point, it's dark. I realize I'm paralyzed, and I've come to accept the fact that, like, I'm not going to be able to move or get out of this right away. And actually, there is, at this point, a little bit of a level of embarrassment because I knew that my whole family was there and people were definitely watching of what was happening. So I was really trying to get out of this darkness and this space,

but I cannot see. I cannot move. all I can really do is hear the church music and feel the needles and pins when I try to move any part of my body. I just was like, okay, well, eventually this is going to stop and I'm going to be able to move my arm, but just so much time was going by that I started to really freak out. at a certain point I do think to myself you know I'm unable to control my body

maybe what's happening to me is real maybe God is touching me so I start kind of going into that and you know it feels very empty but I start talking to the emptiness and just saying like you know just praying and singing along to the music

is mostly what I did because you know At that point, I'm not really even sure what I'd pray for. But nothing was working. And enough time passed where I was like, this is frightening, what is going on. From my point of view, what I thought was going to happen from what other people have told me in their experience was that I was supposed to have this revelation and talk to God. So I had someone at one point tell me that, oh, I got slain in the spirit.

And I felt Jesus holding me in his arms. And I was able to have a conversation with him. And I felt this like euphoria. And I felt this overwhelming sense of something bigger. And what was really frightening was that that is not what was happening to me. All that was happening to me was just complete emptiness and pain. And me just talking to the abyss was just me realizing. I was completely by myself in my own head.

It was just emptiness, acceptance, and pain. Very lonely feeling with a little touch of embarrassment because I realized that everyone was probably watching me still. At a certain point, I'm like trying to talk to God, I'm trying to get an answer, I'm trying to get an image, I'm trying to get anything, and once I realize that that's not going to happen, I kind of just give up and I go, you know, this is strange and painful, and I'm just laying there.

And it really felt like a long time. I really thought this whole entire experience was about an hour, but from what other people told me, it was only about 15 to 20 minutes, which is still a really long time to be paralyzed and not have consciousness. You know. after a while I remember because intermittently I would try to put my arm down and once I realized that I was able to slowly put my arm down and it wasn't automatic it wasn't like all of a sudden a light switch turned off and I was able to move my body I remember it was very gradual where like the pain wasn't so intense anymore so I was able to put my arm down but I still felt that needles of pins and then I realized I was able to slowly get access to my body and I realized I was able to slowly get access to my body and I was able to body again, and that's when I was able to open up my eyes. And the first thing I remember seeing

was that I was in a completely different place, and that shocked me. I was all the way on the right side of the church, and now all of a sudden I'm on the left. And that shocked me, because I realized at that point, I really had no control over my body. Then I was able to see that I was in front of the musician who was playing music and I was laying on a red velvet blanket, which I don't know where it came from. Then I look over to my left and I see a very overly emotional woman sitting there who was like staring at me and at that point I assumed praying for me. people were coming up to me, like that was the best experience that I'll ever have.

Like, they were like, you were touched by God. What did you see? Like, this is a miracle. Like, you know, they were acting like that was going to, like, leave such an impact on me, like, in a positive way. And, like, you know, that God touched me. And, like, I basically was witnessed and saw God. So all these people, yet again, I'm a kid,

coming up to me telling me, that, like, that was a beautiful thing that just happened to me. Meanwhile, I'm like, if that was God, I never want to meet him again. Like, I couldn't say that. So I just remember being like, okay, okay, like not saying anything. And then I was kind of taking, you know, inventory of the room where I realized majority of the church had left at that point. And that's when I finally turned around over my shoulder,

and I saw that my family was sitting there waiting for me to wake up so that they can go home. I was actually shocked when I got up and I realized that, like, oh, people aren't really here anymore. Anyone else who had an experience of being slain in the spirit had already gotten up and either prayed privately with the preacher or the pastor, and then gone with their families and left. When I saw that empty church, it was shock, again, embarrassment, because I realized that I really had been laying there for that long. And that really did happen to me.

Like, I really don't even remember having too many emotions besides embarrassment. And at that point, I was able to stand up, and I really wanted to go home. I was looking at my mom who, I remember just looking really worried and concerned, and looking at my dad who really didn't, I don't know, have that many emotions. My sister, I don't even remember making eye contact with her

from embarrassment. And we kind of just, like, filed into our minivan, and, you know, the door is closed, and it was extremely awkward. It almost felt like them picking me up from, like, like a surgery or, you know, just like very, like, you know, no words spoken, sterile. What do we say now? Elephant in the room or, you know, just awkward, very awkward.

And then finally, my dad said, you know, you're going to be. going to remember this for a long time and this is really going to make an impact on your life. And he wasn't wrong, just in a different sense. And after he said that, we did not talk about it for years up until my 30s when I got together with my husband and what kind of brought this out was that we were watching some movie and it was about like a false prophet who went into a church and he he asked a question along the lines of like do you think this would actually happen? And I was like, well, I do actually believe that because something weird happens to me. And I remember telling him the story and I like really haven't opened up about it before.

And he was like, that's not normal when he went through it. So then it kind of started my journey of like trying to figure out what happened. When I finally opened up to my sister about it and I was like, you know, I just want to like bring up this time that we were at church. And she remembers it very clearly and she said and she's really not a woo-woo person at all. I'm like the mystical thinker, quote, unquote, in my family. She really doesn't even have like a spiritual thing that I know of, honestly. She told me that that day when it happened, and I fell,

she said that she was really scared and she saw a black shadow go across the church. And she remembers being like, this isn't good. This feels evil. It was validating, but I wasn't, like, surprised and like, what? You saw a dark shadow on one of the worst days of my life, you know, I don't know. And then when I was talking to my friend Eileen, who was not sitting with the youth group, but she was my age, and she said that it was a lot shorter that I remembered, and that she just always assumed it was kind of a good thing. I didn't realize how much of an impact had on me. I never wanted to talk about it again because a mixture of things.

I think there was a little bit of shame, a little bit of confusion, because it was. supposed to be really good. I honestly didn't want to scare people. I did think it was kind of normal because I know a lot of people who have been slain in the spirit, but I never knew anyone who had a really bad reaction to it. I know people that got slain in spirit and they were like, Jesus was holding me like a baby and I was talking to him and he was telling me how like special I am. That was not my experience. So, like, it's hard. It's hard to, like, to tell people who really believe in the stuff that you had a much different experience that was, like, would probably scare people. Like, that's not a fun thing to go through. How could I bring that up in a

testimony? All these people have these testimonies, right? So, like, they go up to the front of the room and they're, like, I got touched by God and he came to me. me and he told me that I need to like stop drinking, smoking, watching porn, whatever it is. And then it's like, oh, I got slain in the spirit and I was in agony and I thought it was over an hour and it was only 20 minutes and God did not talk to me and, you know. I continued to be very involved in that church and I was there really up until like 1617. And once I got to that age, I think my parents, really my dad, couldn't make me go anymore. So I stopped attending.

I think that I personally saw the truth, which is that like there's really nothing. I don't know. I just remember being really confused. Was I drugs? Probably not. already kind of discussed that end of things with like my family and that one girl, Aileen, who I'm really good friends with to this day. And she told me we didn't take communion that day. And she remembered like that it wasn't like a normal service. So it's not like we all

drank like from this cooler or something, you know. It was really isolating because I had to kind of go through that by myself. Sorry, I'm trying to. to like cry. Because it affected my relationship with God so much. And like right now, let me just say, I'm 33 years old. I have been through this, but I have such a strong connection to, I don't want to say my God, but like I am extremely spiritual. And honestly, like, listening to other world has been really healing for me too. I feel like I've always known a little bit more of the world than like other people because of this and it's it always was like a little hard to connect to people at my church because they're so into it and it's just like I got a much different experience

in the real world than that and you know then it's hard to like connect to people who aren't part of a church because like if I I have this background and they're like I don't know what you're talking about what do you mean like spirits or this and that whatever I personally think what happened to me was obviously not God. How I connect to God is a much different thing than that. I personally did a lot of healing and I'm really confident that that wasn't God at this point. And, you know, but when I was a kid and people are telling you that's God, that's really frightening and extremely isolating and like, well, I don't want to pray then, and I don't want, like, I, when I tell you I pray, like, I do a different

type of praying. I feel like I don't, like, I've never, like, it was so hard for me to ever pray after that, because, like, why would I pray to that? Why would I pray to something that, like, gave me so much pain and, like, confusion? I don't know. I've been trying to figure out my. relationship with God ever since. Okay, thank you to Ali for sharing her story. This one was really insane to me. I think even if you're a person who believes in slaying in the spirit, it seems like

something went very wrong with Ali's experience of it. I have not had this done to me. I'm not sure what's supposed to happen, but I'm very confident it is not what Ali ended up going through. I don't think it's supposed to feel horrible and dark. I'm often interested in stories that come in like this one with a Christian element to them. I'm sure some people feel the exact opposite, but to me, 70% of Americans currently identify as Christian, which is a huge, huge chunk of the country. It's something that's just totally intertwined in American beliefs when it comes to spirits, the afterlife, possession, even the concept of good and evil itself. It's in the church where most Americans first learn about this type of stuff as kids. And it's also

a place where sometimes people have very unusual experiences like Ali did in this story. I did not know a lot about slaying in the spirit before this, at least outside of seeing videos of it. And I have to say from those videos, to me, it kind of looked like these church people were hardcore believers that were either pretending to have this happen to them or maybe psyching themselves into a frenzy in some sort of very extreme version of the placebo effect. Either way, I don't know. I didn't really take it seriously. And I believe that's pretty much exactly what critics of this practice say is happening to these people.

Which is interesting to me because Allie didn't seem to fall into the category of a person who wanted to believe or wanted this to happen. It seemed like she was just trying to do her best to go with the flow and not stick out in the strange church. Interestingly, criticism of slaying in the spirit doesn't just come from atheists and skeptics. Many Christian denominations say that this practice has no biblical precedent and that the practice could be satanic in origin, which is a little alarming considering the things that Allie was describing. Ali's sister even mentioned seeing a dark, shadowy figure flying across the room during all this. And I think it's also worth noting that Ali said herself, she did not take communion that day. There was nothing else she could have eaten or ingested that might have caused a reaction

like this, even though mine, mine didn't go there in the first place. This is my favorite type of thing to hear on Otherworld, something that I may be assumed was completely fake at first. Then, after hearing a person's experience, I end up thinking, maybe it could be sort of real, but not in the way it's supposed to be, if that makes sense. After hearing Allie's story,

it just really seems like something did happen to her that night in the church. But I don't think either of us fully know what that was. I thought this was such an unsettling, story and also such a uniquely American story for so many reasons. Also, it made me think of the album cover, Spiritual Healing by the band Death. The charismatic preacher is just such a specifically American character. And I think ultimately this is a story of how something healing to one person can be the complete opposite.

to another. Thank you again to Ali for sharing our story. This episode was called Slain in the Spirit, and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theo Schaefer, Theo Krantz, Haley Pearson, and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans and Juice Jackal. Our artwork is by Coltysak Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you could become a patron at patreon.com slash Otherworld. Our social media is at Otherworld Pod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, Leah Reese Dennis, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Eric Donnelly,

Kate Rose, Colin Gaynor, and Hillary Schuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld Now for free, on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, you could send us your stories at stories at otherworldpod.com.