A majority of Americans polled in October 2012 admitted that they believed that demons who could inhabit your body existed. Specifically, 56% of men said they believed in demons who could do this and 59% women said the same. However, among people between the ages of 18-29 that number was even higher. 63% of people in that age group stated that they believed that it was “possible for people to be possessed by demons”.

Statistically, belief in demon possession in the U.S. outpaces those who even say they are religious. Why? Below are nine first-hand accounts of alleged demonic possessions that explain why it’s hard to deny things you’ve seen with your own eyes.

1. Madness At The Boarding School

One of my teachers used to work at a boarding school and one night during a school movie night a student left to use the restroom and after a bit of time had gone by my teacher went to check on her to make sure she was okay.. She wasn’t.. She was huddled in the corner of a shower foaming at the mouth with bloodshot eyes. My teacher freaked out and called a couple others over and the chick started spewing out random incoherent things in a really deep voice and stuff. Eventually she snapped out of it and didn’t remember a thing. They went to her dorm room after and I guess she had things like “I <3 Satan” written on her bunk bed and stuff. Pretty creepy.

I just remember that my teacher said she was hissing at her. Small detail but I thought I’d throw it in.

After this incident the girl left the school.

2. Djinns Of Morocco

I’ve never told that story to anyone because 1) just talking about it freaks me out good and 2) I know 99% of people won’t believe me.

I am a 6’2, rather fit man. I practice Aikido and can bench press 240. My father and his brothers are pretty much as tall as I am, maybe less strong due to age although most of them have been in fighting sports for a while. One of my aunts is about 5’4, probably weighs like 110lbs at best. There was this time when she really went plain crazy. She would get INCREDIBLY angry/out of control at random times, spitting nonsense words, and there would be absolutely no way I, or my father, or both of us would be able to get her down. This felt like DBZ Yamcha trying to get Perfect Cell into an UFC submission. She had 10 times my strength. We needed to be 4 to actually pin her down and get her to stop moving until she calms down.

That was extremely scary. She could just pop off anytime and go crazy. Now I didn’t believe in the supernatural, but my grandmother, a rather traditional Moroccan woman, was convinced she was possessed. And… Honestly it really felt like it. For those who don’t know it, Morocco has a pretty big culture about supernatural/sorcery/possessed/exorcism shit. So most of the elders in the family firmly believe in it.

Fast forward a few months later when it was getting way too difficult for us to handle her. My uncle contacted a good friend in Morocco who has an “exorcist” in his family. The exorcist asked us to do one rather twisted thing. He asked my aunt if she could put a drip of her blood in a glass of water, and leave the glass somewhere in the apartment while she’s sleeping (not next to her). We were reluctant but my grandmother forced her to do it. On the morning, the glass was empty. I’m still convinced she probably just woke up at night and drank it, but the exorcist’s version was “she is possessed by a demon (commonly known in the Muslim culture as ‘jnon’ or ‘djinn’), giving him this blood just was a way for you to welcome him and calm him down temporarily, and she needs to see an exorcist asap”.

Now we were getting convinced he was right, seeing her often getting crazier and crazier. In desperate times… Sometimes you just chose to believe to a possible solution. So at this point I decided to believe in what he said and we had to go get a proof that he was right. We live in France, we decided to drive to Morocco (about 1500km driving + a 6-hour boat, + 500km in Morocco again). During the drive I’ve never been as scared as this day. I was sitting down behind, on the right, my father on the left, my aunt between us. She went crazy at some point. We couldn’t really hold her as she was trying to hit my uncle driving. We almost ran into a wall. My father had to – dangerously – choke her until she lost some strength.

Anyway. Here we are in Morocco. Getting to this village named “Sefrou”, known as one of the biggest places in the country were sorcery happens. Rather creepy place. And not in a conventional creepy way. What we know of creepy are just what horror movies picture, the African creepy is on another level. We get to meet this exorcist guy. He asks us to buy a sheep to “sacrifice”, and tells us we should bring him the sheep’s guts back to him for the exorcism to happen. My father and uncle take care of this. Me… I am FUCKING SCARED. As stated earlier I didn’t believe in that shit. I decided to because honestly the situation called it. But at this point, in a freaking spooky village in the middle of Morocco, where we are advised to never eat anything outside or accept anything from strangers who might try to “curse us”, where everything looks twisted af, I was really losing it and couldn’t wait to leave this place for ever.

On the following day we went to the exorcist’s, bringing him these guts. He puts them in a bowl, asks that if we are feeling strong enough we should stay with him as more people would make it easier to “exorcise” my aunt. Well… I really wanted to leave but seeing everybody staying, I stayed as well. My aunt is lying down in front of us, next to the bowl, we are sitting down around her holding hands and the exorcist starts saying stuff I can’t understand (it was traditional Arabic and not a Moroccan dialect). He gets sweaty as he talks faster, I see my aunt twitching in what looked like pain, the light went out (holy shit I think I peed my pants at this moment), the exorcist screams something, my aunt screams as well, then total silence. I think the silence was for about 30 seconds but it felt like HOURS. The exorcist’s assistant then comes in with a lamp and we see that both my aunt and him passed out, the bowl is on the floor and the guts next to it. The guts turned black. I am having goosebumps just writing that and re-picturing that. The assistant urges us not to touch the guts at any cost. Exorcist wakes up, goes put some water on his face, then tells us to follow him. We went to a nearby, empty hill, on top of it, and he asked us to burn the guts right there, as “the demon was now possessing the sheep and we could now get rid of it”. Done.

I have never seen my aunt showing any problem whatsoever since this day. Her crisis periods never happened again, she never went back to this “angry mode” and to this day that honestly still scare the crap out of me. Just seeing her now gives me the chills. And the worst is, her sons love me but I really have trouble staying around her as I am genuinely scared, and they obviously don’t know why.

I’m shaking on my keyboard right now. After this event I grew really interested in the whole Moroccan demon mythology and learned a lot about it. Now, I don’t believe they exist. I know they exist (and they don’t make much difference anyway aside from this kind of event). I actually talked more in detail with this same exorcist guy and holy shit. The world is big and deep and we don’t understand 1/10th of it.

3. The Maori Boy

My family used to own and run a real estate office. My grandfather owned it and was the boss, my mother managed the rent roll and clients and I worked there on weekends as a teenager.

We worked in a multicultural area, which I always loved, and there was a reasonable Maori/Islander community there, a lot of whom were very religious. In one particular property we managed, there was this one family who had two sons. One of them played football with my brother and the other is the subject of this incident.

So this kid was 11, I think, and, according to the family, began acting strangely. He’d have violent outbursts, say terrible things, stuff like that. Apparently he was really seriously out of control. The family called their (Baptist, I think) Minister and asked what they should do, was there even anything they could do? The minister told them that he was free one evening later that week and he’d bring the things needed for a Baptism. He said that he’d perform an exorcism for them and a good spiritual leader, good religious people and a Baptism could oust an evil spirit.

This particular evening arrived and the Minister got all set up. He got this deep tub which they all filled with water for the Baptism, he chose some passages from the Bible that’d help with the exorcism and got the whole family to gather around for support and prayer. Now, Islander families tend to be large; there were aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents. Everyone was there and willing to help this child. The parents are instructed to bring out the kid so the father goes in to get him.

The kid was a fucking mess. He was described as being like the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons, just all over the place. His dad put the boy over his shoulder and brought him down to where everyone was standing, the kid fighting it every step, but with his father being an absolutely enormous man, he didn’t stand a chance.

The Minister said for everyone to gather around and put their hands on the child and to pray for him. The father held him in the middle of the family group and everyone reached out their hands to touch the boy who was thrashing around like a wild thing. What I heard was that it seemed like the boy was totally out of control. Time comes for the Minister to say whatever it was he said and then for them to get him into the tub for the Baptism which was supposed to expel the demon they figured was possessing him. The father and an uncle or something were the ones who got him into the tub and the family stood around praying their hearts out, but the boy tried to escape the second his body hit the water. He put up a crazy fight and more family members came to get him into the water. Finally they got him in and they were able to hold him there.

And hold him.
And hold him.
And hold him.

They didn’t mean to do it, but they drowned him. He was an 11 year old boy who was on the cusp of puberty. Of course his behaviour was erratic, of course his attitude was fucking awful, of course he fought being held down by his own family. What did they think was going to happen?

The parents, uncle and Minister were all arrested. The uncle got off on an accessory charge, the parents got ten years but got out sooner and the Minister got 15 and was in just about the whole time because he was the leader. He should have known better. My mum had to go and talk to the police, be a character witness, talk about the family and the property and whatnot.

That certainly wasn’t the only awful thing that happened while I worked there but it was the most traumatic.

4. The Ouija Board Skeptic

When I was 14, me and my best friend at the time got a Ouija table and decided to play with it a bit. We got into a dark room at my place, did light some candles and started the bullshit.

Another friend of ours knocked the door as we tried to ‘contact the spirits’… we let her in and resumed. This third person kept mocking as we tried to get the “supernatural messages”, when, all of a sudden, she passed out.

We thought she was joking; but then she opened her eyes and started to talk with a voice that wasn’t hers.

It was damn scary, but we still thought she could be playing with us. Then she laughed (a horrible laughter) and started to say things that happened to me that I never had said to anyone… and same for my best friend.

Candles started flickering and the flames went a bit too high for my skeptical being not to shiver in spite of myself. My best friend ran out of my place straight to her neighbor, who was a candomblé’s mother-of-saint.

When the woman came to my place and saw our friend, she gasped and told us to help bringing the girl to her place.

We did so, but not before getting some scratches by not allowing her to get undressed in daylight, calling to some men that were looking at us as we marched towards the holy mother’s place. Once there, she locked herself with the girl in a room and told us to wait outside.

I don’t know what happened, but after a couple hours our friend came out… very tired and didn’t remember anything after we let her in and started to play with the Ouija table.

5. The Girl Who Spoke In Tongues

I have never known what to make of this. The high school I went to was a religious private school. Senior year, it was traditional for the entire senior class to go on a religious retreat up in this remote resort in the mountains with a few teachers. The point of the retreat was to grow closer to each other as a class and also to… find God? Experience spirituality? They took away our phones and forbade us from using any form of the internet or communication with the outside world; then they made us go through a series of soul-baring exercises and speeches and whatnot. Honestly pretty cheesy stuff, not that exciting.

On the third day of the retreat, however, the entire grade is in the main hall doing an “hour of silent prayer” that was pretty much like meditation, but we were supposed to be communicating with God. All of a sudden there’s a huge crash and everyone looks over to see a girl toppled over onto the floor. As everyone stares, she starts writhing around on the ground and screaming, but not screaming in, like, pain… The voice that she was screaming was in a really strange, deep voice and didn’t sound like her at all. Someone yelled, “She’s seizing!” I remember that because there was a girl in our class who was known to have epileptic seizures and would do it in assembly pretty frequently, but it wasn’t the same girl.

Then she stood up and started yelling in “tongues.” Her eyes were rolled up and her head kept twitching back and forth. She started to run all around the room, yelling in an unintelligible gibberish language, and every now and then she would run at the cross in the middle of the room and then run back, screaming and crying.

At first I honestly thought this was a dumb high school prank to freak everyone out, but if that was what it was, she took it way too far. The teachers tried to calm her down but she just kept screaming in this weird language. She started pulling on her hair so one of the teachers called an ambulance but we all knew it would take a while for them to get to this remote retreat. Another teacher tried to take her by the shoulders and she dug her nails into his arm really hard and just kept screaming. It took several more minutes to calm her down (the teachers actually evacuated us from the room) and then she just…went quiet.

They took that girl away that night (though I don’t know how, we were all kept in the cafeteria after that) and she never came back to school after the retreat was over. I wasn’t friends with her friends so I don’t know if they knew what really happened… Probably expelled for her “prank.” But maybe not! It went on way too long and convincingly for me to really tell myself that she’d fuck around in front of all the teachers like that. It was insane. I don’t know. None of the teachers were ever allowed to talk about it when we asked, afterward.

6. Tracking The Curse

So my friend is Mexican, just like me, so our families believe a lot of crazy shit. Well, my friend’s mom believed that someone had put a curse on her, seeing as how so many weird and unfortunate things had been happening to her lately. Also, her rapidly decreasing health. Since back in her village you’d hire a curandero or brujo for this stuff, she searched around and finally found a reputable one. Well he paid her a house visit and turns out that she had been cursed, according to him, a jealous ex-lover of her husband had put a pretty wicked one on her, he even said that she was lucky to still be walking.

Anyway, he said he was going to perform a ritual that night on her in order to disspel the evil, but she had to completely relax and close her eyes, because he was going to summon a great spirit who was not supposed to be seen by humans or something like that. Anyway the brujo goes an does all his business while her daughter (my friend) is there for support. Well the brujo starts chanting and the room she tells, became very heavy and loud, gradually then building up. She couldn’t see anything because her eyes were obviously closed, but she felt a presence in the room. Then she heard growling and howling and all sort of animalistic noises. Anyway, the brujo said he had found a willing wolf spirit to trace and get rid of the curse. My friend told me she pretty much shat herself hoping for it to be over. After a few hours the noises finally stopped and the room felt light again. The man then said that the spirit had done it’s job and that her mom was good to go. Which she did, which blew my mind since the next day she was healthy as an ox. Still gives me chills thinking about it.

7. The Owl

There was a weird episode in my village. Background- I am from a really backward place from India, in a really rural village, in a backward state, Arunachal Pradesh. It is near China and mostly jungle. To give you an idea how backward we are, the village got constant electric supply only 10 years ago.

My uncle (my fathers elder brother) once heard a owl hooting near our house one night (it was around 2 AM) Since we consider owls hooting a bad omen, my uncle took his gun and tried to shoot the bird down. He pointed his flashlight towards the sound and saw the owl but as soon as he pointed his gun at it, it flew away. Now, it so happened that after a week or so, we got the news that someone in village has been possessed. My uncle being one of the elders had to see what was happening and I tagged along with him.

So he went there to check on the person possessed. The person was writhing and twisting when my uncle arrived but as soon as he saw my uncle he jumped up. He started pointing at my uncle and saying that my uncle is not good and stuff. When asked why, he said he tried visiting my uncle as an owl but my uncle tried to shoot him so he flew away. I damn near soiled my pants then and there. The owl hooting was a very minor affair for our family and we didn’t tell anyone about it. No clue what happened. That was the first and last possession incident I went to. Although we have a few cases now and then I never had the nerve to go and watch.

8. The Delivery

My wife delivered a baby in 2004, and I was retold this when she returned home. During this delivery her patient (the mother) was possessed. The husband and doula were both present and a visiting nurse. What occurred during the delivery was the mother started speaking in tongue, and her face started contorting. The husband started getting worried and approached his wife and was thrown across the room, he was dazed but conscious. From what I was told there were many peculiar occurrences during this delivery, but the worst of all was the doula ( I am retelling the story so I was not a witness but three people swear to this) was lifted into the air and not by any physical means. After she came back down the baby was born and nothing strange occurred afterwards.