Beware the Night by Ralph Sarchie

summer. The reason, Ed explained, is that these objects draw the heat from the room and use it for negative energy. If you touch one of them, you’ll mix your aura with evil and open yourself to problems with the demonic. It’s to safeguard innocent people from diabolical assault that the Warrens keep this collection locked away in their home. It’s also visible evidence of the reality of evil—and its devastating impact on people’s lives. Should any of these objects be destroyed, Ed added, its cursed force might rebound back to the person who originally owned it, putting him or her in mortal jeopardy. Jen and I considered ourselves thoroughly warned and made sure to keep our hands safely at our sides.
    Each object had a story: There were human skulls that have served as “chalices of ecstasy” for black magic blood-drinking ceremonies, crucifixes melted or shattered by evil forces, handwritten pacts with the Devil, Ouija boards, mysterious amulets, a coffin a possessed man used to sleep in every night, and rocks that fell from the sky and pounded a family’s house like hail from Hell. Some of the items looked so innocent that they seemed strangely out of place in such a collection, such as a large Raggedy Ann doll seated in a wooden cabinet. Yet when you looked closer, the doll’s hands were arranged around a simple wooden crucifix.
    These same soft, mitten-shaped hands had once been animated by a demon—and made a bloody claw mark on a man’s chest, then tried to strangle him. When the Warrens subdued the doll with holy water and brought it to their home, it sometimes moved from one room to another, with Ed’s easy chair being its favorite resting spot. A few times the doll even brought a “friend” into the house—a black cat. No ordinary cat, this creature would prowl Ed’s office looking around carefully, as if it were spying on him, then slowly vanish. Unlike the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the body dematerialized until nothing remained but its grin, this cat faded away headfirst, leaving its sharp claws for last.
    Another deceptively harmless-looking toy was a plastic model of Godzilla. Having built such models as a kid, I wondered about its origin. It turned out that a possessed boy had built and played with it—a case the Warrens wrote about in their book The Devil in Connecticut. Although an inanimate object can’t be possessed, it can be manipulated by the demonic or give off evil energy. That’s just what happened to this toy: Although it wasn’t motorized, it began to walk across the boy’s room, and a voice spoke not from it but from somewhere around it. The following year I experienced the strange powers of this toy myself. One day as Ed and I were standing in the museum, discussing a case I was working on that had some parallels to that of the Connecticut boy, the model’s head exploded right in front of my eyes. With a loud pop, the reptile’s head was violently propelled right off the green plastic body. It shattered into two pieces that landed on the floor with a thump.
    Whenever you discuss a particular case, you give recognition to the demonic spirit connected with that case. At times, that can cause the satanic force to be drawn to you and reveal itself through strange phenomena. That’s exactly what happened the next day, when I had the first personal supernatural experience of my entire life. After I entered the Work, Joe had given me a St. Benedict medal—commemorating a saint who used the sign of the cross to perform many miracles and had tremendous power over the demonic. I have hundreds of these medals—which I get from the Benedictine Mission House in Nebraska, and use in all my cases—but this one was very special to me, because I wore it on my very first case and have never taken it off since. Among its many pious purposes are warding off dangers from the devil, protecting people who are tormented by evil spirits, and providing relief to