Priest breaks hip — now Canada apparently wants him dead



Rev. Lawrence Holland fell in his bathroom on Christmas Day and suffered a hip fracture. While the 79-year-old Catholic priest went to a nearby hospital in search of help, health care workers at the facility apparently had a final solution in mind: state-facilitated suicide.

Since the Canadian federal government under ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau legalized medically assisted suicide nationwide in 2016, the so-called Medical Assistance in Dying program has been grossly liberalized.

'The moment you lose hope, the devil comes in.'

Initially, MAID applicants had to be 18 or older and suffering from a "grievous and irremediable medical condition" causing "enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable" to them. Now, persons struggling with anxiety, autism, depression, economic hardship, PTSD, and other survivable issues appear to be fair game.

Next year, persons suffering solely from a mental illness will also be eligible.

MAID — which Canada's Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer boasted in October 2020 would, with expanded access, "result in a net reduction in health care costs for the provincial governments" — is now among the leading causes of death in Canada, accounting for over 5% of all deaths in Canada in 2024.

"It's a false compassion," Rev. Holland told the B.C. Catholic, the Archdiocese of Vancouver's biweekly publication.

The hobbled priest claimed that a doctor and a nurse at Vancouver General Hospital, directly affiliated with the British Columbia Ministry of Health, offered him MAID while he was recovering from his hip fracture, which is hardly a terminal condition. The priest further claimed that both medical professionals knew he is a Catholic priest.

"I think I was very shocked," said Holland. "It is such a sensitive subject."

Rev. Larry Lynn, pro-life chaplain for the Archdiocese of Vancouver, said, "This must surely be among the most appalling examples of Canada’s coercive and insensitive euthanasia regime."

RELATED: Euthanasia and the lie of the 'good death'

Mininyx Doodle/Getty Images

Although he was left "kind of silent" for a moment when the topic of assisted suicide was first apparently broached, Rev. Holland emphasized to the doctor that he, a Catholic priest, was morally opposed to the practice.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that direct euthanasia is "morally unacceptable"; that such actions constitute "a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator; and that "even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted."

The Catholic Church has long campaigned against assisted suicide.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops noted in 2023, for instance, that "euthanasia and assisted suicide (MAID) have always been, and will always be, morally unacceptable because they are affronts to human dignity and violations of natural and divine law."

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has similarly and repeatedly condemned the practice, affirming that "we are dealing here with 'a violation of the divine law, an offense against the dignity of the human person, a crime against life, and an attack on humanity.'"

Just last month, Catholic bishops in New York published a guidebook reiterating the church's moral teaching "that this practice is objectively immoral and must be avoided, despite the false veil of compassion with which it is sold." The state was apparently in need of a reminder given its recent adoption of a law legalizing doctor-assisted suicide.

Even when dealing with a patient from a "faith community" that's opposed to MAID, the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers still recommends that Canadian health care professionals make the pitch for assisted suicide.

After informing his doctor that he was opposed to assisted suicide, Rev. Holland recalled the doctor explaining that he "just wanted to make sure that, if a [terminal] diagnosis came up or not ... I knew the different services I had access to."

Rev. Holland told the B.C. Catholic that weeks later, a nurse also raised the matter of MAID with him.

A spokesman for Vancouver Coastal Health, which runs the hospital, told the B.C. Catholic that "staff may consider bringing up MAID based on their clinical judgment, provided they possess the necessary knowledge and skills to do so."

Staff are also "responsible for answering questions when patients bring up the topic of MAID," added the spokesman.

Rev. Ronald Sequeria, the Catholic chaplain serving at Vancouver General Hospital, suggested there was something demonic about how MAID-pushers prey on suffering patients' despair — especially when suffering can be redemptive.

"The moment you lose hope, the devil comes in, in different personalities, and says, 'Do you want MAID? I don’t want people to suffer,'" said Rev. Sequeira.

"God makes us more pure, more strong, through the suffering when we offer it up," said the chaplain. "So we give hope — help them not to lose hope."

Rev. Holland drove home this point, stressing that enduring pain "can encourage growth."

"It can motivate you, it can open up new worlds, new vistas, new opportunities," added the priest.

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Parents: Your Teen’s Fiction Book Might be Demonic Porn | Ep 1319
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Parents: Your Teen’s Fiction Book Might be Demonic Porn | Ep 1319

Allie Beth Stuckey blasts Paris Fashion Week as ‘demonic’ spectacle



BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is sounding off on what she sees as a deeply unsettling turn in high fashion, criticizing Paris Fashion Week for embracing what she describes as “demonic” and grotesque aesthetics over beauty.

“The theme is clearly to be demonic. And I don’t know what kind of statement they’re trying to make, if it’s some kind of critique of society or if they are just the demonic people themselves, but pretty scary. Obviously, not about beauty,” Stuckey says.

And those who attend the shows and praise the designers aren’t much better.

“I think that they’re all thinking about being seen, and how the world is interpreting them, and what kind of statement they’re making, and what kind of opportunity or attention this is going to get them,” Stuckey says, mocking, “‘Do people think I’m edgy finally? Oh, I bet I’m going to be the strangest, most bizarre, most, you know, edgiest person there.’”


“I think they’re all thinking about themselves. I don’t think that they are there to enjoy the art or to enjoy the spectacle. I think they are there to be the art and to be the spectacle,” she adds.

Designer Kei Ninomiya’s collection was described as “gloom” made “tangible” by Vogue Runway. The collection featured gothic horror elements of bondage and morbid animal sculptures.

“Because all of us are like, ‘How can I get my hands on some gloom?’” Stuckey comments.

“The soundtrack for the collection was labeled ‘the aural equivalent of a nervous breakdown,’” she says. “Again, I have always wanted my nervous breakdowns to become an aura that I could just kind of swim through.”

The brand Enfants Riches Déprimés, whose French name translates to ‘Depressed Rich Kids,’ also made an appearance.

“His show featured a model chained to a statue of a man’s head. ... The brand’s inspiration comes from fellow child elites the designer met in rehab as a young man,” Stuckey explains.

The designer, Henri Alexander Levy, is quoted as once saying, “If you were going to kill yourself, wouldn’t you want to do it with a $7,000 cashmere noose?”

“I think people underestimate how many people in Hollywood, the fashion world, movie industry, are truly just disturbed people who are working out their trauma and demonic possession through entertainment and fashion,” Stuckey says.

Another brand, Matières Fécales — which is French for “Fecal Matter” — claims that its collection is a critique of “wealth, power, corruption, and inequality.”

“Somehow, I just don’t feel like that’s what it’s accomplishing,” Stuckey says.

“There is something just very dark about the glorification of the demonic that we see among a lot of people in Hollywood and in the music industry,” she adds.

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Aliens or shape-shifting demons? BlazeTV producer shares chilling personal evidence



Can demons shape-shift to appear like aliens?

According to BlazeTV writer and producer Josh Jennings, yes. When he was a young teenager, he says, he was visited by an alien-like entity that terrified him so deeply that it took years for him to recover.

On this episode of “Strange Encounters” with BlazeTV host Rick Burgess, Josh shares his harrowing experience.

When he was 14 years old, Josh’s family moved into a “fixer-upper” he describes as having had “some strange stuff done in it.”

“The lower half had been a house; the upper part had been a boarding house. … And in one of the rooms upstairs, there was a room where there was all kinds of satanic imagery written on the walls,” he says.

Even though his parents kept the sinister room a secret from Josh and his siblings, “painted over” the dark symbolism, and “[prayed] for any demonic spirits to go away,” evil still had a foothold in the home.

For a time, life in the house seemed normal, but then one night when Josh was asleep in his room, the peaceful facade shattered.

“So I'm dreaming about baseball, and in my dream, somebody hits, like, a pop fly. And I hear the crack of the bat, and it instantly wakes me up and I'm fully alert,” he recounts.

“I'm looking at my window, and then something catches in the corner of my eye and I look up at my closet. And there, floating in the air, was a head. It was just a human head, except this thing was not human. It had very thin green skin, and it kind of had an inner glow. And it had short, cropped black hair, and when I looked at it, it bared its teeth at me.”

It’s been 27 years since this event occurred, and the sinister entity’s teeth are still the detail Josh remembers with the most clarity.

“Every tooth in its mouth was about an inch long, and it had, like, a pearly iridescence to it,” he recalls.

“This thing snarled at me, and it was between me and my door, so there was no way to get away from it. And so I did what any self-respecting 14-year-old boy would do, and I threw the covers over my head and turned my face to the wall and began just to pray, just to pray that God would make it go away. And when I eventually got the courage to look again, it was gone.”

But the alien-like entity isn’t even the wildest part of Josh’s story.

Later in life, he discovered that these types of encounters had been happening to people in his family for at least “two generations” before him. Both his parents and grandmother had experienced similar demonic run-ins that disrupted their sleep.

“That incident had a profound effect on my life,” says Josh, noting that he developed a “drinking problem that spanned about a decade" because it became so difficult to sleep at night.

“I would lie awake at night, afraid to close my eyes and afraid to open my eyes. So whichever state they were in, I was afraid to do the opposite of that,” he tells Rick.

A few years later, however, Josh had another supernatural encounter, but this time, he believes the entity was an angel that may have been protecting him from another demon-alien encounter.

To hear the story, watch the episode above.

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Ex-Victoria's Secret owner now claiming Epstein 'conned' him once suggested he was demonically possessed



Former Victoria's Secret CEO and Bath & Body Works co-founder Leslie Wexner was questioned at his Ohio home on Wednesday by Democrat members of the House Oversight Committee over his relationship to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The 88-year-old billionaire said in a prepared statement that he has "been the subject of outrageous untrue statements and hurtful rumor, innuendo, and speculation," adding that he was "naive, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein."

Although he has not been charged with any crime, Wexner was identified in the newly released Epstein files — both in a 2019 FBI document and an FBI email — as a possible co-conspirator in Epstein's sex-trafficking case.

Denial

Wexner, whose net worth is presently estimated to be $10.8 billion, told lawmakers that he was introduced to Epstein in the 1980s by Bob Meister, the former vice chairman of the insurance giant Aon.

'Taunting and poking him with impatience, that little demon he really loves.'

After allegedly receiving references for Epstein from two of the pedophile's former superiors at Bear Stearns and Élie de Rothschild of the Rothschild family banking dynasty, Wexner developed a relationship with Epstein, then ultimately hired him to manage his personal finances.

The New York Times reported that during the time he managed Wexner's personal finances, Epstein not only became extraordinarily rich but came into the possession of a New York mansion, a private plane, and a luxury estate in Ohio, altogether valued at roughly $100 million and all previously owned by Wexner or one of his companies. Wexner told lawmakers on Wednesday that Epstein purchased the New York property from him for what he "was told was the appraised value."

Wexner noted in his prepared statement that Epstein "was clever, diabolical, and a master manipulator" — a deceiver living a "double life" who "carefully used his acquaintance with important individuals to curate an aura of legitimacy that he then used to expand his network of acquaintances, and apparent credibility, even farther."

The billionaire claims that he was only personally acquainted with the one side of Epstein — the "sophisticated financial guru," not the "side of Epstein's life for which he is now infamous."

Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre alleged in court documents that she had been trafficked to Wexner, according to multiple outlets. Wexner, however, claimed both that he has never been unfaithful to Abigail, his wife of 33 years, and that he completely severed ties with Epstein around the time of the pedophile's guilty plea in 2008 for solicitation of a minor for prostitution.

RELATED: 'I wasn't his girlfriend': Whoopi Goldberg breaks silence on her presence in the Epstein files

Photo by Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Wexner claimed in 2019 that he had severed ties with the sex offender a year earlier, in 2007.

Wexner stressed in his statement to lawmakers that while he was "conned," he has "done nothing wrong."

Following the deposition, Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, stated, "There was no one more involved in providing Jeffrey Epstein with the wealth and financial support he needed to commit his crimes than Les Wexner. There would be no Epstein Island, no Epstein plane, and no money to traffic women and girls without the wealth of Les Wexner."

"And yet, with all this evidence, Mr. Wexner admitted that the FBI and DOJ never questioned him," continued Garcia. "That’s outrageous and unforgivable."

A Wexner spokesperson said in a statement obtained by Politico that the billionaire "honestly answered every question put to him today by the Committee" and that "Wexner reiterated that he has no knowledge of, and did not participate in, Epstein’s illegal conduct."

Another malicious spirit

Epstein may not have been the first "master manipulator" to exert influence on Wexner.

In an interview that served as the basis for Julie Baumgold's August 1985 profile in New York Magazine, Wexner discussed "his dybbuk, which pokes and prods and gives him the itchiness of soul that he calls shpilkes."

According to Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is an evil human spirit whose past sins preclude it from finding peace. These spirits are believed to seek refuge in the bodies of living human beings whom they cling to and/or possess.

Rabbi Julian Sinclair, writing for the Jewish Chronicle, noted that "Kabbalistic works, at least from the 16th century onwards, sometimes contain instructions and protocols for the exorcism of dybbuks, ceremonies to drive them out of the bodies they have colonised."

Baumgold wrote that when Wexner was a boy, his father called the dybbuk "tummel, a churning, so he feels 'molten' and unformed, pricked by these spiritual pins and needles."

"[Wexner] met this demon again when he was 40 and already worth half a billion," continued Baumgold, "when he climbed the mountain in front of his house in Vail and almost froze to death and decided to change his life. This demon he calls 'terminal shpilkes,' which makes him wander from house to house, repeating the pattern of his childhood on a luxurious scale, wanting more, swallowing companies larger than his own. It is precisely the reason that Wexner has a billion and didn't stop at, say, 5 million and a new Mercedes every other year and what he calls 'normal life.'"

The profile concludes with:

Lex Wexner picks up his heavy black case and flies off in his Challenger, with his dybbuk sitting next to him, taunting and poking him with impatience, that little demon he really loves. The dybbuk turns his face. What does he look like? "Me," says Les Wexner.

Journalist Whitney Webb suggested that while "one may interpret this use of shpilkes, literally 'pins' or 'spikes' in Yiddish and often used to describe nervous energy, impatience, or anxiety, as Wexner merely personifying his anxiety," his decision to use the word "dybbuk" was "significant."

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AI Christian songs are topping charts — but is ‘soulless’ music a demonic trap for believers?



In late 2025, two songs by "Christian artist" Solomon Ray — "Find Your Rest" and "Goodbye Temptation" — topped Billboard's gospel digital song sales chart and iTunes' Christian music songs chart, reaching the No. 1 and No. 2 spots.

Christians across the globe deeply resonate with Ray’s Southern revival style and emotive, biblically solid lyrics. In just a matter of weeks, Ray’s music has amassed hundreds of thousands of monthly Spotify listeners, millions of streams, and significant YouTube views.

There’s only one problem: Solomon Ray isn’t a real person. It’s an AI generation.

Despite their popularity, Ray’s songs have sparked intense ethical and theological debate in the Christian music community — drawing criticism from artists like Forrest Frank over issues of authenticity, the absence of the Holy Spirit, and whether AI can truly convey genuine faith or soul in worship music.

On this episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick Burgess addresses the controversy.

Rick acknowledges that while there’s certainly room to disagree on this issue, “something about it in my spirit … doesn't seem right.”

“The first thing that we have to consider,” he says, “is that Solomon Ray has no soul; he has no spirit; he isn't real. The pictures we see of him are not real. They're like watching an animation of someone.”

Even though Rick gives credit where it’s due — “they’re good songs,” he admits — he nonetheless feels that Christians who engage with this music are flirting with something sinister.

Many proponents of Ray’s music, however, argue that because the songs were allegedly written by Christopher "Topher" Townsend, the conservative Christian hip-hop artist who created Solomon Ray, it shouldn’t matter who — or what — sings the lyrics. AI, they contend, is simply the next “evolutionary step in music.”

But Rick disagrees.

“It may be true [that AI is the next evolutionary step in music], but there's something that's also kind of dishonest about it,” he says, “because when you read [the] Spotify profile, Solomon Ray is a ‘Mississippi-made soul singer carrying a Southern soul revival into the present.’”

“No, he's not,” he says bluntly.

“We're starting to blur the lines of reality and truth.”

Rick quotes popular Christian music artist Forrest Frank, who echoed these concerns when he said, “At minimum, AI does not have the Holy Spirit inside of it. So I think that it's really weird to be opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.”

If artificial intelligence and Christendom continue to intersect — and they almost certainly will — Rick is concerned about what else our spirits will be subjected to.

“How many sermons are we going to start hearing that no longer feature[] a man of God sitting down with the word of God, praying for the Holy Spirit to inspire him for his next message, as opposed to getting down to the computer, saying, ‘Here's what I need to speak on Sunday. Crank me out a sermon’?” he wonders.

He cites a recent book by Pastor Todd Korpi titled “AI Goes to Church: Pastoral Wisdom for Artificial Intelligence”: “The biggest threat to creation at the hands of AI is in how it continues to feed our appetite for consumption and progress. AI-generated music is faster, easier to produce than a studio album that requires real musicians, songwriters, audio engineers, the relational part of making music. … AI might continue this trend of disconnection and preference for the convenience of a disembodied interaction that has shaped the last decade.”

Rick agrees with Korpi’s warning. When it comes to AI music, “we're dealing with something that's disembodied. That feels demonic to me,” he says.

“The adversary and his demons love to manipulate scripture,” he reminds us, referring to the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden and Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

“The apostle Paul warned Timothy that these days were coming — that people would begin to look for pastors — and I would say musicians and singers — that tickle their ears and satisfy their desires, as opposed to being rebuked by scripture, to being convicted, to being drawn into the holiness of God for praise and worship,” says Rick.

“I'm just concerned that disembodied AI-generated messages and music may not bring me into the awe-ness of God and how awesome He is because it's those spirit-inspired things about God that always bring me into worship … and it just seems like if I want to manipulate scripture and manipulate theology, AI sure does give me an easy path in.”

To hear more of Rick’s analysis, watch the full episode above.

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Children’s book sells abortion to 5-year-olds; calls it a ‘tool’ for building lives



If you haven’t finished Christmas shopping yet, BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales has an excellent suggestion for you to avoid giving your little ones: a new book titled “Abortion Is Everything.”

The book was created by left-wing group Shout Your Abortion and is being marketed for 5-to-8-year-olds.

The back cover reads, “What is an abortion? With accessible, inclusive language, ‘Abortion Is Everything’ speaks directly to 5 to 8 year olds about what abortion is and why people have them. Abortion is a tool that helps human beings build the lives we imagine for ourselves, and the whole world around us has been shaped by abortion.”


Like Gonzales, BlazeTV contributor Grant Stinchfield is extremely disturbed.

“You see how selfish that is? Like, it’s not even funny. Like, ‘It shapes the world around [us] for the lives we imagine for ourselves,’ but not the child in the mother’s womb. It’s just so selfish. And why does a 5-to-8-year-old need to learn about any of this?” Stinchfield asks.

“It’s demonic,” Gonzales says.

“That’s child abuse. You want to teach a 5-year-old, a 5-year-old, ‘Well, you could have had a big brother or a sister, but Mommy decided to kill them instead. So, now you’re an only child.’ Like, what? That’s so damaging,” she says.

“Well, at least they’re being honest about the fact that they want to go after the kids,” BlazeTV contributor Matthew Marsden chimes in. “I mean, we’ve been saying it for years.”

“The fact that they’re going after the innocence of children disgusts me. ... It’s evil, is what it is,” he adds.

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Porn-fueled fetish culture is driving surge of transgenders among young men



The rise of transgenderism among young girls was studied intensely and deemed a social contagion by Abigail Shrier in her incredible book “Irreversible Damage,” and BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey believes it's a similar story for young men — though the catalyst is different.

“It’s not true today that most of the boys and men who identify as the opposite sex do so because they have gender dysphoria that they were born with or that they developed as a child. But today it is, I believe, mostly due to pornography,” she explains.

“It is due to a sexual fetish that they have developed over time, that there is now a very real algorithmic pipeline via Pornhub and other porn sites that push young men to seek more and more exciting dopamine hits,” she continues.

Stuckey recalls the editor of Reduxx magazine, Genevieve Gluck, finding a link between pornography and the rise of transgenderism, which Stuckey describes as the “fetish of wanting to be feminized as a man, wanting to be submissive as a man.”


“So it’s true that these men who want to go into girls' locker rooms, who want to go into girls' bathrooms, are not doing so because they really think that they were born in the wrong body, but because they’re perverts. Those are the exact opposite kind of men that you want infiltrating women’s spaces,” she continues.

“Of course, you don’t want any man doing that, but especially not a man who is a sexual deviant in every way and who actually gets off on humiliation — humiliation for themselves and humiliation for women and girls. This kind of sissification porn actually depicts women as objects and depicts women as just things to be degraded and humiliated,” she adds.

While transgenders and their enablers will claim it’s about feeling uncomfortable in their own skin and slap the label of “gender dysphoria” on these men, it has nothing to do with biological sex at all — and everything to do with sexual fetish.

One subset of hardcore fetish pornography is “furry porn,” which oddly appears to have been a favorite of both Trump’s would-be assassin and Charlie Kirk’s assassin.

“I do not think it’s a coincidence that both of these men who are suspected as the killers of these top, you know, conservative, one politician and one activist, were also allegedly addicted to this kind of pornography and obsessed with transgenderism,” Stuckey says.

Trump’s would-be assassin was allegedly using they/them pronouns online and had an account on Deviantart — where he seemed especially drawn to scantily clad images of muscular male-looking bodies with female heads.

“So right away, this should sound the alarms for you of something satanic,” Stuckey says.

“I think about Mark 5 when Jesus heals a man with a demon, and this person goes by the name of Legion, or the demons go by the name of Legion … and when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him, out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit,” she explains.

When Jesus spoke to the unclean spirit, he asked him, “What is your name?” And the spirit replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

“Even though he is one in this body, goes by a multiple pronoun, goes by we. Now, I’m not saying that this Legion is necessarily possessing all of these people who go by they/them. I am saying unapologetically that it is demonic,” Stuckey says.

“That you cannot be a they, that you cannot be a them, that you cannot be a we. Subverting reality is demonic. Denying biological truth is demonic. Satan loves it. Why?” Stuckey asks, answering, “Because he is the father of lies.”

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'Carrie' and the monster who raised me



The devil and his minions have haunted me all my life.

As far back as I can remember, I've been visited by the unquiet dead, the hungry ghosts, and even Old Scratch himself in my dreams. Perhaps these nighttime visitations were spiritual attacks, perhaps they were the predictable manifestation of the violence and instability of my upbringing.

Like Piper Laurie in 'Carrie,' my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. 'Humble yourself before me!' she shrieked. 'GodDAMN you, humble yourself!'

Maybe they were both; maybe the kind of moral derangement that afflicted my parents was a kind of demonic possession.

The devil I know

I'm not sure I believe in God, but I'm getting closer to believing in the devil. That's a confused position, admittedly, but that's what you get from a guy who believed as a child until it was punished out of him and then spent too many years as an obnoxious "new atheist" adult.

Whatever the answer may be, I've been terrified and fascinated by the supernatural, the uncanny, and the grotesque all my life. The kinds of spooky stories that gripped me were the type you find in Victorian English ghost story anthologies. Authors like E.F. Benson, M.R. James, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

If you like these too, no one reads them better than English podcaster Tony Walker. His "Classic Ghost Stories Podcast" is one of the few I find so good that I voluntarily pay for it. This is no amateur sideshow; Walker's narration is professional grade. Why he's not rich reading books for Audible, I'll never know.

Weeping and wailing women in veils who glide down hallways. Rain-bedraggled brides hitchhiking on the side of the road who disappear from their ride's passenger seat as he drives past Resurrection Cemetery. Fingerprints that appear on the windows of automobiles that cross the railroad tracks where a locomotive hit a school bus long ago killing the children on board. Their spirit fingers gently push your car along to make sure you don't meet their sad and untimely fate.

In search of ... belief

Like many kids of the 1970s and 1980s, I grew up watching shows like the cryptid/aliens/spook-filled "In Search Of," narrated by Leonard Nimoy. My library card was full many times over with every book on Bigfoot, extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, poltergeists, and the Bermuda Triangle.

Have you heard about the moving coffins of Barbados? That's top-quality spine tingles. As the story goes, a wealthy family living on the Caribbean island built a family vault in the cemetery. Every time a member died, the crypt was opened to accept a new coffin. And every time the crypt was opened, the coffins that were already there were tossed about helter-skelter.

Maybe it was flood waters. Except that there was no evidence of water incursion. Maybe pranksters did it. But the family sealed the stone door and sprinkled sand on the floor, and there was never a footprint betraying a (living) human presence.

For a proper classic haunting, you can't beat the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall. Nearly everyone with a passing familiarity with the spirit world of 20th-century popular culture has seen the photograph of this long dead woman, a translucent, begowned figure descending the grand staircase of the palatial home in Norfolk, England, built during the reign of James I in 1620.

According to two photographers who were documenting the inside of the estate in 1936, as they were setting up a shot, they looked up at the stairs in astonishment. A veiled specter was float-walking silently down the stair treads, and they had just enough time to open the shutter on their plate camera and capture the most famous ghost photograph of all time.

Was she the shade of Lady Dorothy Walpole? Lady Walpole was said to have been immured in a room in Raynham Hall for the rest of her life at the hands of her husband, Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, who was angered by her unfaithful dalliances.

Or was this just the first and best example of trick-ghost photography, a double-exposed photographic plate? In the early days of photography, the public was not wise to the trickery available to a skilled image-maker. Long before Photoshop and AI, the public believed the camera never lies.

I want to believe. There's something magnetic, romantic, and almost erotic about the possibility that a curtain separates us from the realm of the dead and that it thins at certain times, like now. As a child, I delighted in being scared so badly I didn't dare turn off the flashlight under the covers I used for my clandestine and very-much-not-allowed post-bedtime reading.

Joy interrupted

Yet the possibility of an ethereal realm where the dead who refuse to acknowledge their condition "live," a plane where real devil cavorts are not merely fun and games. If that plane exists, and if it's populated by any of the henchmen attributed to Satan, then the other side is very serious business indeed. I'm not so sure I want to believe, in that case, but I'm also not so sure that I don't.

When I was 8 years old, my family took a rare trip to a sit-down restaurant on Christmas Eve. We were poor, and a night out at Demicelli's Italian Restaurant was so special that Christmas would have been joyful even if we didn't get a single present. As we walked toward Placentia Boulevard in Fullerton, California, I looked at the night sky and saw the brightest star I'd ever seen.

"Mommy, look!" I said, tugging at my mother's sleeve. I pulled on her cigarette hand, which annoyed her. "It's the star of Jesus, Mommy. It's the star that guided the Wise Men to the baby Jesus!"

It was wondrous. It made me feel light-headed with a joy I'd never felt.

My mother made a derisive sniggering noise as she blew out smoke. "Oh, no it isn't, Josh," she mocked. "It's just a star. Probably Venus."

My face went red with embarrassment, and I stayed quiet the rest of the night. I felt stupid. Unsophisticated. Dumb. Childlike. Naive. And substandard. This was a problem that repeated itself over the years. My mother was the resentful "victim" type, and she was at war with God.

I convinced her to take us to the Presbyterian church where I'd been (to her reluctance, as she recalled it) baptized as an infant for Christmas Eve services in 1986. Mother spent the walk home railing about those "Goddamned hypocritical Christians! Where were they for this single mother when I needed a little help to put food on the table?"

I can't repeat the rest of what she said in a respectable publication.

Maternal monster

It wasn't until my 40s that I realized why I had been captivated to the point of obsession with certain dark characters in disturbing films like 1976's "Carrie." This was an adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel of the same name, a book that still ranks among his finest work. It's only nominally about a teen girl with telekinesis, the psychic ability to move objects with her mind. The story is really about a frightened girl who grew up with a maternal monster.

If you've seen the movie, you remember Piper Laurie's almost kabuki performance as Margaret White, a religious fanatic tormented by her own sense of failure and sin. Seeing herself as a fallen woman who fornicated with a man, she uses extreme interpretations of scripture to berate and subjugate the result of that union, her daughter, Carrie. Just as Margaret believes she can never be forgiven, she can never forgive her daughter for being born, for embodying her mother's sin in too-real flesh.

So she screams at Carrie, beats her, forces her to confess sins the girl has never committed (they were Margaret's sins), and worst of all, locks her in a "prayer closet." The scene that terrified me the most was the vignette in the dining room when Margaret forces Carrie to her knees as she intones about how God had loosed the raven on the world, and the raven was called sin.

"Say it, woman! Say it!" Margaret screams. "Eve was weak. Eve was weak!"

She drags Carrie to the prayer closet, a black cloak whirling about her like the wings of the raven, and babbles insanely while her daughter screams for mercy. Lighting a candle in the dark, Carrie looks up to a figure of St. Sebastian on the wall, a grotesque effigy with agonized eyes reflecting the pain of his arrow wounds.

Fascinated by fear

Margaret White obviously had a severe condition called Borderline Personality Disorder, which also afflicted my mother. While my mother was not a religious fanatic, she treated me the way Margaret White treats Carrie. Just as in the movie's dining room scene, my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. "Humble yourself before me!" she shrieked. "GodDAMN you, humble yourself!"

My mother did not want what she claimed she wanted: respect and filial piety. She wanted to be worshiped. My mother created herself God in her own image.

So I prayed to God to be delivered from my mother's prison, but I never got an answer, or one I recognized. I was more certain that the world was full of angry entities, though, and to say I felt haunted wouldn't go far enough.

That which terrorizes also fascinates. Over my life, I've tasted and re-tasted the fear through movies like "Carrie" and "Mommie Dearest." Fictional versions of my real-life horror were a poison candy; they hurt so good, like the compulsion to thrust the tongue repeatedly into a canker sore that won't heal.

I still don't know what I believe about God, the soul, heaven, or hell.

I knew what I saw

No Halloween story would be complete without a personal anecdote of an encounter with the unexplained. This is the first time I've told this story to anyone, let alone in print. Like I do myself, you may doubt me. I admit that I was halfway to drunk when it happened. But in the moment, I knew what I saw and heard, I knew I was only buzzed on three beers, not falling-down drunk. I wasn't hallucinating pink elephants or anything else.

It was 1992. I was 18 years old and sharing an apartment with my best friend, Lisa. It was movie night in the living room, and it was my turn to fetch fresh Molson Goldens from the refrigerator. I put the sweating bottles on a round cocktail tray with a rubber no-slip bottom I'd brought home from the restaurant I worked at.

I was a skilled waiter who could hold a tray with four entrees and several cocktails without spilling. And though I'd had a few beers, I was not drunk. In the hallway as I was about to enter the living room, one of the standing beer bottles on the tray violently flipped over to the horizontal with a thud. It wasn't the kind of soft thud that happens when something tips over. It was a THUD, as if someone had thrown the bottle into the tray.

Remember, it was a rubberized tray. It was actually difficult for a glass on such a tray to slide, let alone tip over. I had not tilted the tray; I was not weaving drunkenly as I walked. The other beer bottle didn't tip over. The two mugs on the same tray didn't move. More, the same thing happened a few minutes later in the living room. My (replaced) beer bottle on the side table, three feet from reach, loudly tipped over on a perfectly level table and made a loud rap.

I remember so clearly stopping still as the blood drained from my head. Did I really just see what I thought I saw? I did. And I felt it, too.

In that moment in the hall, I said this in my head: "What you just saw and heard really happened. You're not drunk, and you're not hallucinating. But no one will believe you, and over time, you will not believe you either. Your memory will soften, and you will convince yourself that you were drunk and that you somehow caused these bottles to tip over in apparent defiance of the laws of physics and friction."

That's exactly what happened. As I tell you this story, I doubt myself. At the same time, I remember the warning I spoke to myself in my head about doubt there, in the moment, and I know I wasn't crazy.

Happy Halloween.

Halloween triggers psychiatric disturbances — especially in alleged satanic ritual abuse survivors



Halloween may be marketed as a harmless night of costumes and candy — but mental health experts have been warning for decades that the holiday can unleash very real psychological trauma.

“We need to understand that Halloween can actually amplify some of the psychiatric disturbances of people who were either victims of satanic ritual abuse or who were just traumatized by the fear and the just depravity that some people like to showcase on Halloween,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey explains.

A 1991 Washington Post article documents how Halloween has historically triggered emotional breakdowns, suicidal episodes, and violent behavior among patients suffering from multiple personality disorder (now classified as dissociative identity disorder).

Many of those patients linked their trauma to childhood abuse — and in some highly disturbing cases, alleged satanic ritual activity.


“Patients with multiple personality disorder (MPD) exhibit bizarre behavior in which personalities with distinct histories and voices — called ‘alters’ — emerge from a ‘host’ personality under the influence of severe stresses. The illness is believed to arise most often as a defense against child abuse that is typically sexual and physically painful,” the article reads.

“Of the 12 patients in the hospital today, six are having trouble with memories related to Halloween," said Bruce Leonard, a psychiatrist who treats child abuse victims at the Columbine Psychiatric Center outside Denver, the article continues.

In the article, Leonard explained that a former patient of his was flying to Colorado from her home in Michigan to spend Halloween in the hospital, after “physically threatening her psychiatrist in Michigan” for the weeks leading up to it.

Another psychiatrist, Bennett G. Braun, told the Washington Post that “patients become increasingly suicidal, increasingly agitated” around Halloween.

Five of Braun’s hospitalized patients were “reliving Halloween trauma,” while one of his patients “with a history of satanic cult abuse” was being kept in the hospital until the holiday was over.

Another patient of his attempted suicide on Halloween the year prior and claimed to have been a childhood participant in “rites involving human sacrifice.”

“About 20% of MPD patients ... claim that their childhood abuse involved organized satanic rites. Although few psychiatrists treating these patients today deny that their patients have a history of child abuse, there is great debate about whether the ‘satanic’ events actually occurred or are fantasy grafted onto recollections of more conventional abuse,” the article reads.

“So we don’t actually know if they actually endured satanic ritual abuse or if it had something directly to do with Halloween, although some of them seem to be able to cite specifically what happened to them on Halloween, or if this is a symptom of their psychiatric problems,” Stuckey says.

“But I think it’s an interesting phenomenon, and I do think that we should give more weight to presenting very scary, gruesome, morbid things to children before they have the ability to be able to understand it,” she continues.

“I don’t think it’s lighthearted to scare children and to present them with things that celebrate death and darkness and fear. I do think that you are setting them up for some kind of trauma. ... And I think we do need to take that seriously,” she adds.

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