Demons at death's door: A COVID survivor's chilling ICU visions



Brian McLendon has a COVID horror story you can’t even begin to imagine. A friend of BlazeTV host Rick Burgess, Brian was attacked by more than just the virus during the pandemic. On a recent episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick’s podcast on biblical spiritual warfare, Brian shared stories from the hospital that will change the way you see the demonic forever.

When COVID Delta, the most severe of the variants, ripped through the nation in the summer of 2021, Brian was busy celebrating reconciling with his wife, Emily. They headed to the beach with plans to renew their vows on their wedding anniversary, elated that their contentious marriage was finally healing.

But disaster was lurking around the corner. When they arrived at the beach, Brian started feeling ill. He made it through the vow renewal but was bedridden by the time they got back home. His illness landed him in the hospital, where he found out he had contracted a bad case of COVID.

Over several days, Brian’s oxygen levels began to tank in tandem with his spirits. “The isolation as a patient in those hospital rooms — I mean, you were treated like somebody with leprosy,” he says, noting that he was treated extra poorly by hospital staff because he had chosen not to take the COVID vaccine.

Eventually, Brian was admitted to the ICU, where his condition only worsened. At his request, doctors put him on a ventilator — a sign that death was likely looming.

But something else was also looming. In this state of medically induced sedation, Brian found himself in a purgatory-like place — “a different realm that also included that [ICU] room,” as he describes it.

A partially open door suddenly appeared to him. Behind it was a “dark figure” who wanted in. “I kept telling [Emily], ‘You got to close that door over there,’ and she's like, ‘There is no door,”’ Brian recalls.

The demonic entity told Brian that if it couldn’t get through the door, it would “kill [his] wife and kids.”

Brian also recalls seeing a female-like demon, possibly a witch, offering glowing blue pills to everyone in the unit. The next day, Brian woke up and discovered that the same people he’d seen take the blue pills had died in real life.

His most disturbing vision, however, came next.

“I was strapped to a tree — like lumber that had been cut down. It's laying down, and I'm literally chained to it, and there's this device that — it looks like it's going to try to grind up that log … with me on it,” he tells Rick.

He then saw another female-like demon. “She was attractive but … she had grasshopper legs,” Brian recounts.

The demon became enraged when she found out she was not allowed to kill Brian. An angel, who Brian says resembled someone he knew, unchained him and told him he was free to go.

After miraculously recovering from what looked to be a death sentence, Brian realized why the demon had been unable to harm him: “I'm a Christian. I'm a child of God,” he says.

To hear Brian’s firsthand account, watch the full episode above.

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A witch sent a demon to attack her; now she’s arming Christians for spiritual battle



Dana Free is the author of “What Every Christian Needs to Know About Spiritual Warfare” – a practical, biblical approach to combatting demonic forces.

But like many accomplishments, this book was born through the fire. On a recent episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick Burgess interviewed Dana about the wild circumstances that led her to author such a book.

Dana was raised with a “full gospel understanding of the power of the Holy Spirit” outlined in Acts and 1 Corinthians, but when she got married, she didn’t realize the journey ahead of her would require her to step into the spiritual gifts in ways she never imagined.

Her husband became a meth addict, but because Dana viewed marriage as “covenant, not contract,” she stayed and asked the Lord for guidance. He faithfully led her to “the right places, the right people, the right books, [and] the right sermons” that taught her how to “fight back spiritually.”

She realized that her husband’s drug problem was a spiritual problem. Substance abuse at its root, she explains, is really about “abandonment or rejection or depression.” “The enemy just uses the drugs to keep [people] bound and destroy their life.”

But once she started fighting back with spiritual weapons, the opposition got stronger. “The enemy did not like what I was doing to stand and fight against generations of these problems where they had had a good foothold ... so they threw everything they could at me to try to get me to leave him and write him off,” she tells Rick. “I saw almost everything that can come against a marriage happen.”

“When you were dealing with these demons, did they ever present themselves to you?” Rick asks.

While Dana never saw a physical manifestation of a demon, she was physically assaulted by one. Once, when someone was performing witchcraft against her and her husband, a spirit attacked her in her home.

“I did have that spirit come in my room and press me down in the bed and try to choke me where I couldn't say the name of the Lord Jesus,” she recounts, but “once I said his name, it lifted and then I tore into it.” When she told her husband, he thought she was crazy, but shortly after, the spirit returned and did the same to him.

Many Christians mistakenly believe that spells, brews, and incantations that have been so absorbed into mainstream witch lore are just fictional. But they’re not. The forces of darkness have real power, just as God’s forces have real power.

“[Christians] have this power of the Spirit and that gets counterfeited by the enemy and the occult into witchcraft,” says Dana, noting that the witch behind the spirit who attacked her and her husband was “reading tarot cards,” which is “divination.”

“The New Age and the white witchcraft,” which involves “crystals ... the third eye, yoga, meditation — all these things that people really don't understand” — are luring people, but especially “the youth,” into darkness, she warns. “The enemy doesn't care. He will take whatever open door he can get.”

This seemingly benign witchcraft is extremely successful at snaring the secular, who are “drawn to the supernature,” but it’s also snaring Christians who either mistakenly write it off as silly, or become drawn to it themselves because “they're not seeing [the power of the Spirit] in church,” Dana says.

“What do you think is the biggest mistake that people of faith are making when it comes to spiritual warfare?” Rick asks.

“Ignorance” is Dana’s answer.

“That's why I wrote the book,” she says, “because when I talk to your average Christian, they're clueless.”

To hear more about Dana’s book and the story behind her husband’s hard-won deliverance, watch the episode above.

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Dad tells story of how his 9-year-old daughter was attacked by a demon: 'What I was looking at was not my baby girl'



Rick Burgess just launched a new podcast called “Strange Encounters.” The show aims to educate viewers about the reality of spiritual warfare and equip them with the tools needed to live well in this world that is inhabited by both angels and demons.

In this episode, Rick is joined by Blake Prime, who tells a tale equal parts harrowing and incredible about how the name of Jesus saved his daughter, who was suffering from a demonic attack.

After the death of a family member, Prime’s 9-year-old daughter, Lane, started experiencing “crippling” anxiety attacks. When her older sister was then diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, the fear worsened.

“I started noticing that there was something very dark in just the conversations that I was having with her around this topic of anxiety,” Prime tells Rick, noting that Lane was saying things like “it’s like it’s not me” when she was crushed with anxious thoughts.

Prime’s suspicion that this issue was spiritual in nature was confirmed when one day Lane said, “When I'm at school and I'm on the playground, it's like I look out and all my friends are in the light and I'm stuck in the dark."

One day, Prime was driving her to school when a “12 out of 10” panic attack hit.

“We're in the the truck driving to school, and she is hysterical. … Then all of a sudden, she puts one hand on the console, one hand on the door, and it's like something takes over her body, and she pushes back into the seat and her eyes are looking up, and they essentially roll in the back of her head, and she starts screaming, ‘Why is God abandoning me?"’ Prime recounts. “What I was looking at was not my baby girl.”

“So I just started speaking scripture over her. I was reciting Joshua 1:9 over and over again. I was speaking life, and I was not jokingly saying, ‘Not today, Satan,”’ he continues.

But it wasn’t working. Lane’s hysteria continued, as she screamed, “God doesn’t love me.”

“I said, ‘I rebuke you evil spirit from this car; leave my daughter right now; she is no child of yours; she is a child of the King; she's a child of Jesus, and he is in control of this situation, not you. You have no authority here,’ and it was in that instant that it went from hurricane gale force wind to complete calm,” says Prime. “It was like a movie scene. She sat straight up, and she looked at me. She said, ‘Are we going to school?"’

“All of it was gone. She was breathing normally; the tears stopped; her heart rate calmed down; and she was speaking to me like she had just been resting,” he adds, noting that Lane seemed to have no recollection of the exorcism that had just occurred

Today, she still struggles with anxiety, but the name of Jesus continues to be a shield.

“It's not that the anxiety has gone away. It's just that we know how to battle it now,” says Price.

To hear more, check out the episode above.

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