Stories about demons have been with us for thousands of years. If we check out the definition of demon we find it is an evil spirit or devil, especially one thought to possess a person or act as a tormentor in hell. There are those who believe there are no demons and these were just characters made up to scare people and yet there are many who even in this day and age claim to have had interactions with demons. What many don’t realize is there are actual lists of the names of demons and the lists contain hundreds of them. They reflect demons who are referred to in just about every different religion and ethnocentricity. Just to give you an idea of what I am talking about I will give you a couple of names of demons starting with the letter A. Aamon also known as Amon is spoken about in Christian demonology. Abezethibou is mentioned in Jewish demonology. Ala is a demon in Slavic mythology and Allu is one from Akkadian mythology.

One has to wonder why just about every religion and race spoke about demons. Could it be all of us needed something to blame bad luck and mental illness on, or were there truly evil beings trying to corrupt us? To this day not only the Catholic Church, but other religious organizations believe demons exist and the proof is in the performance of exorcisms. An exorcism is the expulsion or attempted expulsion of an evil spirit or demon from a person or place. There have been some incredible exorcisms which were performed in front of several witnesses at a time in which many cite as proof these demons exist. Some of the people who are having exorcisms performed on them levitated into the air, twisted their heads around and spoke in different voices. Even for those who don’t believe in demons it is hard to explain what transpired. Is the fact people speak in unknown tongues the proof demons are within them? I think not as I personally know someone who was hit in the head with a heavy screen which fell out of a window several stories up. He was brought to the hospital and began to speak in foreign languages which he had never know. He’s back to normal now, but the episode could never be explained. These were actual languages not just gibberish.

We know there are many stories of people who was said to have battled demons hundreds of years ago. There were also stories in modern times of people being plagued by demons. One of those people was Padre Pio who died in 1968. Padre Pio was declared a saint by the Catholic Church after his death. He had been one of the leading exorcists and was plagued by demons who are out to destroy him. It is said he suffered attacks by demons his whole life. “The devil would appear to him as an ugly black cat, or in the shape of a truly repugnant animal. The obvious intent was to fill him with terror. Other times demons came as young girls, nude and provocative, performing obscene dances, to test the young priest’s chastity. But Padre Pio sensed his greatest danger when the devil tried to deceive him by taking on the form of one of his superiors (his provincial superior or his spiritual director) or in a sacred form (the Lord, the Virgin, or St. Francis).”

It is said demons do not always attack the clergy and many times they go after what we would consider an ordinary person and even occupy someone’s home. People who believe in the paranormal believe that demons are completely different from a spirit haunting a home. When a demon is found haunting a home it is called demonic haunting by many not just a haunting. It is said they can manifest themselves in harmful and terrifying ways. Many believe they are far more powerful than just a spirit. One of the big differences is those who believe in the paranormal believe a spirit is just what’s left of a human who has lost their way, but a demon is a devil which was never human to start with. There is a list of signs which are said to be able to alert you to the fact a demon is in your home. They are strange sounds and sights, strange feelings and smells, reoccurring nightmares, feeling you are being held down in bed and find you have bruises when you wake up, a feeling of discomfort and dread, increasing negativity between family members and friends, your child playing with imaginary friends, religious objects being destroyed and writing appearing on your walls. Those who believe in the paranormal say most hauntings are just that and the spirit has no intention of hurting anyone, but this is not true in the case of a demonic haunting.

One famous case was the demonic haunting of Clara Germana Cele. She was a Christian student at St. Michael’s Mission in Natal, South Africa. It is said she had made a pact with the devil when she was sixteen years old and immediately after that she had very strange impulses. She was repulsed by religious items such as a crucifix and gained instant knowledge of how to speak several languages which she never knew before. It is also said she also became clairvoyant and was able to read the thoughts of those people who were near her. Nuns were sent to try and help and they reported she would make terrible animalistic sounds and sometimes they would find her levitated as high as five feet in the air. This prompted the church to send two priests to perform an exorcism. When they got to her room she grabbed one of them and tried to strangle him, but didn’t succeed. When the exorcism was performed there were over one hundred seventy witnesses and they saw her levitate into the air as the priest was reading Scripture over her. It took two days of exorcisms, but the demons were finally driven out of her body.

Skeptics will never believe in demons and spirits even if we had the best proof in the world. Others who have actually seen these events have had their lives completely changed. The question is are they are actually demons or does the human mind allow the body to do some incredible things? Might it be possible our minds are far more powerful than science suspects and is creating these things or are there really demons and spirits in our world?