Almost everyone has seen the 1973 film “The Exorcist” at least once in his or her life. Those who haven’t are at least familiar with the premise of the movie, but what they may not know is it was actually based on true events from 1949. Many individuals still believed that there was a presence haunting the house, making it a popular topic in urban legends around St. Louis. Last Halloween, 66 years after the real-life incident, a group of paranormal investigators decided to capitalize on this and broadcast a live exorcism of the famous house. While they may have concluded their actions cleansed the house for good, viewers were, for the most part, not very impressed.
To perform this outrageous feat of exorcising a house -OK….take a moment to let that soak in before continuing. They went to exercise a building, presumably one made of wood, cinder blocks, paint and probably some other construction materials. How can a demon even possess something that doesn’t have the capacity to live in the first place? If they could, why would they ever possess people? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to just take over cars, boats, planes, etc. and wreck havoc? Or, are demons just that stupid? Anyways, back to the story…apparently, this group of ghost hunters included the Tennessee Wraith Chasers (who have a show “Ghost Asylum on the same network), psychic Chip Coffey, and Bishop James Long of the Old Catholic Church (in no way affiliated with the religion headquartered in the Vatican). The idea was to go in there with all those stereotypical ghost hunting tools and exercise the unclean spirits.
While the idea of a live exorcism might have seemed novel, they likely didn’t account for the fact there was no way to pull their usual tricks without being transparent. As a result, there were no scares, no special events, no sightings, no mysterious furniture moving or glasses being knocked over — well, you get the picture. Instead, the participants constantly would describe how it felt “difficult to breathe” or how they “feel an evil presence.” In other words, there was no measurable evidence of a spirit (wow, who would have thought?). If you were watching the event while checking out twitter at the time, you would have likely found some interesting reactions to this, most of them very much trolling the show.
Whether you believe in paranormal creatures like demons or not, the real question that is important is not whether they exist (after all, if you don’t believe demons exist, then obviously you don’t believe they were there), but whether there were any demons possessing the house in the first place. Just because people constantly hoax about demons and spirits and make horrible entertainment spectacles like this, that doesn’t mean they never exist. The original events of this house are a bit unsettling, and the Roman Catholic Church did send out an exorcist to handle a boy who lived at this infamous home. Keep in mind, the church is very secretive about exorcisms and doesn’t like to bring attention to them, so it’s never a matter of publicity for them. After all, they don’t even like to reveal the identity of their exorcists to the public.