In 2014, I Landed my dream job. I didn’t realize it would involve desperate strangers asking me to save them from demonic oppression.
I grew up in Texas, but after high school I went to Hampshire, an experimental college in Massachusetts that will sadly close at the end of the year. Sometime during the cold New England winters, I fell in love with comparative religion. In an era before Google, reading sacred texts from Asia and the Middle East felt like discovering ancient secrets. As I moved from studying texts to studying people, I came to realize that religious worldviews can function like alternate realities: Two human beings may have a totally different understanding of how the universe works and what we’re supposed to be doing. Every summer, I returned to Texas for work, and people would ask me what my major was. Hampshire was the kind of school that didn’t have majors, but when I told them I was studying religion, they would sneer and ask, “What are you going to do with that?” High school friends, employers, nearly every Texan I talked to—they all knew that the academic study of religion was a big scam. To them, religion was a private matter, totally separated from politics, law, or economics. As such, studying it was a totally subjective, indulgent undertaking. Since I had fallen for the scam, that meant two things: 1) They were smarter than me, and 2) I was bound for a life of poverty.
9/11 happened during my final year of college. (Apparently nobody told al-Qaeda that religion is a private matter.) In the economic slump that followed, graduates who had studied engineering and computer science struggled to find jobs along with religious studies majors. I decided to enroll in the Program in Religion and Secondary Education at Harvard Divinity School, which trains teachers to promote social justice and religious literacy within the high school curriculum. If you don’t think religious literacy is a problem, consider that we live in a country where politicians lazily toss around nonsense phrases like Judeo-Christian heritage to support their agendas. The average American’s understanding of Islam, Buddhism, and other major religions is even worse.
I spent three years teaching “at-risk” high school students in Indianapolis and Atlanta. I have the usual war stories. Students giving birth in the bathroom, police gang units pointing guns in my students’ faces during their lunch break. I taught one young man who murdered his father while he slept. It was clear to me that No Child Left Behind and the carceral state were making these problems worse instead of better. I wanted to help, but I didn’t quite fit in: My Harvard degree sometimes made me come off as a white savior. I also found myself envying my friends who were pursuing PhDs. Teachers with PhDs were paid better anyway, so I put my teaching career on pause and went back to graduate school.
I returned to Massachusetts one last time and got a PhD from Boston University. After I graduated in 2012, the publisher ABC-CLIO asked me to edit an encyclopedia called Spirit Possession Around the World: Possession, Communion, and Demon Expulsion Across Cultures. A mentor from graduate school warned me in no uncertain terms that this was a silly project, unworthy of the type of career I was trying to build. But I had also been told for years that it was virtually impossible to get a tenure-track job in the humanities, so I wasn’t in the habit of saying no. I set to work contacting scholars to contribute articles about famous instances of exorcism (Clara Germana Cele, the Zulu woman who missionaries claimed floated five feet in the air; the fatal exorcisms of Anneliese Michel in 1976), local traditions of spirit possession (the zār cults of northern Africa, the Algonquian wendigo), and psychological interpretations of demoniacs (conversion disorder, dissociative identity disorder).
You learn a lot about a topic by editing an encyclopedia. While nearly every culture on Earth has some tradition of spirit possession, I was struck by Christianity’s unique assumption that possessing spirits always represent the forces of cosmic evil. In most cultures, spirits are ambiguous, and diagnosing possession involves determining what they want: For example, Japanese fox spirits (kitsune) may agree to vacate their host bodies if they are bribed with food.
Since I was an expert on demonology, she said, I must believe in demons.
My second discovery was that modernity has barely dented the frequency of spirit possession. It continues to be an almost daily occurrence in cultures around the world. In the United States, the popularity of exorcism and “deliverance ministry” is arguably at an all-time high. According to YouGov polls, 57 percent of Catholics and 67 percent of Protestants think that demons exist. Fifty-one percent of Americans believe in demonic possession, and 7 percent claim they have seen a demon. The Catholic Church does not disclose how many exorcisms it authorizes, but in 2013 exorcist Gabriele Amorth boasted that he had performed 160,000. Exorcism used to be an embarrassment for the church. Today, the website of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., recommends an app called Catholic Exorcism that directs users to online deliverance prayer sessions.
Although I remain agnostic about whether demons or spirits literally exist, I am convinced that human beings do not understand themselves. Powerful cultural forces—including the underlying assumptions of democracy and economics—have led us to assume we are autonomous, rational actors, pursuing our interests as dictated by a consistent set of beliefs and values. But the reality appears to be that our beliefs, behavior, and even sensory inputs are colored by a thousand invisible influences. Our selfhoods are fluid and interconnected, and possession is one way of talking about this fact.
In The Devils of Loudun, published in 1952, Aldous Huxley studied a famous case that had occurred in seventeenth-century Loudun, France, where an entire convent of nuns became possessed. He concluded that possession happens because we do not like being autonomous, rational actors. People “long to get out of themselves, to pass beyond the limits of that tiny island universe, within which every individual finds himself confined.” In Huxley’s view, many people escape the burden of being an autonomous individual through “downward self-transcendence,” losing themselves in drugs, sex, or a mob mentality—or, as at Loudun, through demonic possession.
Demons on the Line
As I was wrapping up the encyclopedia in 2014, I was offered a tenure-track position at Texas State University. The university wanted help creating a new major in religious studies. The first thing they wanted me to do was to design a course for the honors college that would “get butts in seats.” We needed to signal to students not only that Texas State offered religious studies but that religious studies wasn’t boring. Naturally, I pitched a course called Demonology, Possession, and Exorcism.
The course drew attention, just as it was meant to. I got invited to appear on the radio show Coast to Coast AM to discuss the class and the encyclopedia. Airing from midnight to 4 a.m. in Texas, Coast to Coast had been a staple of conspiracy theory culture in the 1990s, when it was hosted by Art Bell. The show still claims to have nearly three million weekly listeners, although as many of them are likely truck drivers and insomniacs as are true believers. On one segment, our first caller was someone with the thickest Appalachian accent I’ve ever heard. He said he could see that someone in his church had a demon and had asked the congregation to pray for him. The possessed man then murdered his wife with a shotgun before turning the weapon on himself. The community blamed the caller for the tragedy, he said, causing him to lose faith in the church. After the caller hung up, George Noory, the host, asked my opinion. I told him it was a rough way to start the show.
After my Coast to Coast appearance, a woman rang my office phone to tell me she had video footage of a demon. Since I was an expert on demonology, she said, I must believe in demons. I demurred that I worked for the government and it would violate the establishment clause to promote my personal beliefs. That didn’t seem to register. She proceeded to tell me that she had had to kick her grandson out of the house because he was in the Illuminati. After the call, I did look at her YouTube channel and watched some unimpressive footage of what appeared to be the shadow of a tree branch moving across a concrete driveway.
Sometime after this call, I was running behind due to a bad traffic accident that had snarled Interstate 35. The phone rang, and I answered it on the off chance it was a student calling to say they would be late to class. I should have known better: 90 percent of Gen Z have “telephobia” and are too anxious to ever call a professor, so now when my office phone rings, it’s always somebody with a demon.
The voice said, “Hi, uh, Joseph Laycock, I’m calling because I’m dealing with this presence in my house, and—”
I cut him off. “Look,” I said, “I’m trained as a historian. I’m not a theologian or a pastor, okay? I’ve got class in five minutes.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Then I felt bad, and added, “Listen, I have a feeling you’re going to be okay.”
That was the last time I answered my office phone. The calls kept coming, and my voicemail inbox started to fill up. My university converts all voicemails into MP3s that are sent as emails. Government emails can be accessed through the Freedom of Information Act, and so although these callers may want to discuss intimate experiences, they are putting their information into the public record. Most of the messages I’ve received are from people who think that they or a loved one has been demonically possessed. One used a pendulum to divine which herbs to buy. Another said he had seen an entity while tripping on mushrooms and had sex with it. Now these people feared they had invited a demon in. Some have called to tell me they uncovered repressed memories of satanic ritual abuse. Others believed themselves cursed because their ancestors had been Freemasons or hailed from Salem. One woman left a rambling message conveying that she didn’t know why she was calling me.
I came across you on Google and had some questions I was hoping you would help me with. And, um, but I’m not sure why I’m calling besides that. . . . Um, hopefully you have time to give me a call back and maybe help me on what I need help with, which I’m not completely clear on. But thank you.
I get emails as well as the voicemail MP3s. Many are eager to send photos and videos of alleged demons. Though I’m often confused about what exactly I’m looking at—usually a blurry mote of something flitting across the screen—none of it seems to be evidence of paranormal activity. One woman wrote me because some sex tapes she had made showed her ex-boyfriend shape-shifting:
I am going to be blunt. These videos are pornographic in nature, and I feel that THAT is the time when those demonic characteristics would manifest themselves in my ex-boyfriend. I have seen talons protruding from his foot. I have seen membranous wings unfurling from his back. Then there are the strange, bony-looking “objects” that are shaped like triangles that he “inserts” into me . . . and then you can see bony-looking spines emanating from my back, the precursor of my own membranous wings. And there is so much more. . . . If you’re interested in what I have told you thus far, please call me. I guarantee that I’m not insane.
I did not ask to see the sex tapes, possibly missing out on the greatest discovery in human history.
Warfare Maps and Crank Files
Having studied the history of exorcism, I know I’m not the first person to experience this. Father William O’Malley was a drama teacher at a Jesuit high school. He also played Father Joe Dyer in The Exorcist (1973). Afterward, he reported, “For a while the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. . . . They called looking for an instant fix—pleading with me to expel their own demons, their kids’ demons, even their cats’ demons.” Richard Woods was a Dominican friar who was teaching a course on “the occult” at Loyola University when Exorcist-mania swept America. He too was inundated with requests for exorcisms. “Several of these people seemed to want to be possessed,” he complained, “as if that could make sense out of their lives.”
The thing is, I’m not a priest. I haven’t even played one in a movie. So why are these people coming to me? Some messages are obviously pranks, like the voicemail I received from a woman claiming to be a seven-hundred-year-old vampire. (Ancient vampires sound a lot like stoned teenagers on the phone.) Other callers seem to be angling for a book or movie deal, like the stories depicted in the Conjuring franchise. One woman called to tell me that a psychic had scanned her house using remote viewing and judged it to have the strongest demonic presence she had ever seen. In the psychic’s opinion, the house was so haunted it deserved a movie. “I notice you’re not tenured,” the woman told me. “The research you could do related to this might put you over the top.”
But the majority of callers seemed truly desperate and frightened. One individual has called me on and off for years, leaving a dozen voicemails; in one message, he said it was a matter of life and death. Someone contacted me to say he had been possessed after being “tricked” into uttering a Latin prayer that turned out to be a demonic spell. “I understand how all of this works from a scientific and philosophical perspective but I can’t save myself,” he wrote. “This is torture sir. Please help me.”
Exorcism isn’t a private affair in Texas.
There are a lot of places in Texas these people could go for an exorcism besides a university professor. For years, Marion and Larry Pollard have offered deliverance sessions out of their suburban Dallas home. Another Dallas pastor, Vincent Bauhaus, boasts that he has performed twenty thousand deliverance ministry sessions and exorcisms. In San Antonio, Catholic priest Ed Hauf is an exorcist who attends national conferences on exorcism and deliverance ministry. Hauf has stated that many people become possessed because their families practiced Santería or other non-Christian traditions that unknowingly let the demons in.
In 2008, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of a church that was sued for false imprisonment, assault, battery, and child abuse after church members restrained and injured a seventeen-year-old girl during an exorcism. A jury awarded the victim $300,000 in damages, but in a 6–3 decision, the court dismissed the case and ruled that suing for religious activities would have a “chilling effect” on religious freedom by encouraging the church to abandon its religious beliefs.
In fact, exorcism isn’t a private affair in Texas. In 2010, a group called Repent Amarillo made national headlines for its aggressive tactics in battling territorial spirits—demons assigned by Satan to cities and nations. Led by David Grisham, Repent Amarillo described itself as “the special forces of spiritual warfare” and would show up to protest and pray wearing black hoodies and camouflage. Grisham was also a security guard in Panhandle, Texas, at the Pantex plant, the primary site in the country for the assembly and disassembly of nuclear weapons. The organization’s now-defunct website boasted a “Warfare Map” of Amarillo that featured target locations associated with demonic activity. The sound of gunshots played when you accessed the map. These targets included gay bars, an artist-friendly coffee house, and a nature preserve enjoyed by Wiccans, as well as a mosque, a Hindu temple, and progressive churches that the group deemed “compromised.” Although Repent Amarillo hasn’t made headlines lately, its view of culture war issues as manifestations of demonic evil has become endemic among Texas conservatives. At the 2024 Texas GOP convention in San Antonio, conspiracy theorist and GOP megadonor Steven Hotze called for spiritual warfare against the “demonic, satanic forces” of the left.
So, in a state awash in spiritual warfare, why do these people want to talk to a professor? I’ve realized that many of them either don’t trust churches or feel that these institutions have failed them. Some have already been turned down for exorcisms. A self-described agnostic emailed to complain, “I am not Catholic and because of that I get know [sic] help from any diocese.” Others expressed that their church’s deliverance practice wasn’t working. Still others have previously approached churches and been told they needed psychiatric help. Some are New Agers who believe in demons but not the power of Christianity to quell them. My callers and emailers are also distrustful of the medical establishment. One woman wrote to say her son had been possessed by a demon that was trying to make him murder her. The son was in a psychiatric ward, but she described this as a “temporary solution.” She wanted the demon cast out.
So what do I tell these people? The sad truth is, I almost never answer these messages. As Dr. Peter Venkman said in Ghostbusters, “I make it a rule never to get involved with possessed people.” It’s not that I’m heartless—it’s that I’m doubtful I can help. I am not qualified to give psychiatric advice or trained to address the issues of sexual abuse and drug addiction that are often intimated in these messages. As a religion scholar, I’m also reluctant to challenge people’s beliefs or tell them how they should make sense of their experiences. And if one of these people actually is demonically possessed, I’m not equipped to deal with that either.
I have responded when the messages describe physical abuse or imminent danger. One woman told me that her best friend and her best friend’s boyfriend had gone out to an overlook to gaze at the stars when the boyfriend started acting strangely. He had brought a hatchet with him, and later told his girlfriend that voices had been telling him to “stick the hatchet in her neck.” The woman thought he might be demonically possessed. The message was long and written more like a horror story than an account of domestic abuse, but on the chance it was serious, I wrote back with the numbers for domestic abuse hotlines in her state. I said it was the boyfriend’s problem to figure out why he was experiencing homicidal compulsions; her job was to help her best friend get to safety.
Another message seemed more plausible and, in a way, more frightening. The woman who got in touch wrote that she had picked up another woman that she found limping along the side of the road in a small Texas city. This woman appeared to have been beaten and kept speaking of seeing a man who didn’t age. Disturbing, cryptic statements like this had caused the woman who helped her to think she might need an exorcism. This time, I descended from my ivory tower and said what I really thought. I replied that deliverance ministry and exorcism are dangerous practices that can make things worse instead of better, especially for people who are already vulnerable and confused. I told her that there have been instances when people were accidentally killed during exorcisms. I directed her to a Sexual Assault and Abuse Free Environment House, which ran a shelter in her city, and instructed her to inform employees that although the woman didn’t seem mentally ill, her statements weren’t making sense and she needed help. She thanked me for my quick response and guidance.
Even when I don’t answer, I keep all the voicemails, messages, photos, videos, and physical mail in what I’ve started calling “the crank file.” The file also includes communications about aliens, letters from people who have discovered some new philosophy or religion they want to tell me about, and messages from one man who implored me to visit a website where he detailed his “quantum entanglement” with Donald Trump. I have no specific plans for the file. I guess I keep it to honor these people’s experiences, although I should probably come up with a better name for it.
Death by Religious Ignorance
In 2020, my department finally launched the major in religious studies. One of the hurdles we had to overcome was finding job listings in the state of Texas that specifically required applicants to have an undergraduate degree in that field. I didn’t like this for several reasons. First, this is not an accurate index of the economic value of a major. Data science is a highly sought-after skill, but if you look at job listings for data analysts on Monster.com, many don’t specify any degree as a requirement, let alone one in data science. Second, it reveals a hidden assumption about the nature and purpose of our institution: to train a workforce for the state of Texas. We may talk a big game in speeches and brochures about empowering students to think through “big questions” and equipping them to address the challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century, but this requirement suggested we were really just a trade school.
I keep all the voicemails, messages, photos, videos, and physical mail in what I’ve started calling “the crank file.”
We were able to overcome these hurdles, in part because our data showed that some of the wealthiest pastors in America live in Texas. I also tried to convey that religious literacy was necessary to conduct any sort of business or diplomacy on a global scale. (I noted that Secretary of State John Kerry had said in 2013 that he wished he had majored in comparative religion.) And then there was the massacre of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Described as “death by religious ignorance” by religion scholar Stephen Prothero, the Waco tragedy was initiated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives’ paramilitary raid against the group and worsened by the FBI’s dismissal of the Davidians’ beliefs during the following siege.
Currently, public universities in Texas are responding to political pressure over allegations of “liberal brainwashing” and “dangerous ideological movements.” AI is being used to scrub course catalogs of terms that smack of “wokeness.” Programs for women’s and gender studies have been closed. Colleagues have been fired. This anxiety that there is some conspiracy afoot to corrupt the youth reminds me of sixteenth-century Europe, a period remembered as “the Golden Age of the Demoniac.” Historians aren’t totally sure why witch burning and exorcism peaked during this time, but it seems that as the modern era began, people responded to the rapid changes overtaking Europe by blaming conspiracies of demons and witches. Then, as now, secular and religious powers found these fears useful for advancing political agendas.
The fearful have also found me, of course, and the crank file raises questions about what it might actually mean for a university to serve the state of Texas. It is striking that so many people called a professor when they felt other institutions had failed them. The messaging from the Texas legislature lately has been that professors should stop eliciting conversations about how society has changed or what kind of world we would like to live in and get back to what really matters: training a workforce. But the calls and emails demonstrate that—pranksters and those seeking movie options aside—lots of people are urgently wrestling with “big questions” about the nature of reality. They want help from an expert, and they still believe that a public university is where they might find one. I think many of them come to me because they are trying to escape a binary choice between either having their experiences medicalized as mental illness or deferring to whatever church wants to fold their story into its theology of spiritual warfare.
We still do not understand ourselves, and our institutions do not seem to be much help on this front. Aldous Huxley studied demonic possession because he thought that the same yearning for “downward self-transcendence” also led to the rise of fascist movements in the first half of the twentieth century. If Huxley was right, then we professors need to serve the public in all their messy, interconnected selves. We can do this not by telling people what they should think, as academics have been accused of doing. Instead, we can offer tools that help them interpret the world and make sense of themselves. I feel that’s actually what a lot of these people are intuitively looking for. Even if they don’t know how to articulate it, they want someone who, instead of explaining their experiences to them, will offer some framework instead that they can use to make sense of things themselves.
That, ultimately, should be the purpose of an education in the humanities: the ability to call on cultural knowledge and multiple modes of analysis when confronted with the unprecedented. Knowledge of religions from around the globe can make strange experiences less frightening because it reveals that people around the world have described similar encounters, and the ability to think critically grants people autonomy when institutions seek to exploit their fears. Job training is important too, but as a famous exorcist once told Satan, “Man shall not live on bread alone.”