TRAINING  &  COACHING  for  MANAGERS & LEADERS

Case Histories

Demon

© David J. Marsden 2002

The topics explored by David Marsden can bring mystery and magic back into lives made sterile by a fascination with technology. Visiting a fortune teller may seem like harmless fun. At a psychic fair you can buy cheap crystals, aromas and symbols etc allegedly offering you protection against supernatural agencies. Doctors and psychiatrists provide psychoactive drugs to manage symptoms, and criticize "alternative" approaches to life. Religious organizations may condemn New Age organizations and alternative therapy, yet provide exorcists to kick out the demons or Satanic spirits that they do not believe in. Martyn Carruthers

Demon

I was a psychotherapist for most of my adult life, and a fairly good one by all accounts. During those years I specialized in too many things to be called a specialist. And throughout that time I pursued my casual interest in occult phenomena. I was always fascinated when clients described events that are normally called "magical", or at least weird. Since retiring, I have become a ghost researcher.

There is a dark side, of course. Such interests can become obsessive and at times I lose my ability to discern between my objective world and subjective imagined worlds. And some phenomena seem to bridge these two worlds. Ghosts for example ... and demons.

Ghost-hunting has become my pastime and I have many "personal" ghost stories ... and a few that I do not wish to repeat. Demons are different. Demons were never "living human beings", and can possess people and cause people to do horrible things. This is about demon possession.

Halloween

In Canada, Halloween is a time for foolish parties and mostly-harmless pranks. In Central Europe, Walpurgis Eve is the "Day of the Dead". This day is devoted to visiting graveyards and placing candles and flowers on the graves of family members - who hopefully rest in peace. Forget accomplishing anything else on that day in much of Central Europe.

Halloween is a pre-Christian festival that was practiced by Celtic and Slavic tribes. The doors to the world of the dead are supposed to open, and the living can communicate with the dead - and complete any outstanding or unfinished business. But (there is always a but) other entities can cross over too - even entities that never lived and so cannot be called dead. Undead perhaps?

I do not subscribe to most concepts of good and evil. I have prejudged events too many times and seen good intentions produce disgusting evil and evil things do great good - and what is the road to Hell paved with? Yet some entities seem to exist to hurt - to torment - to cause suffering.

Poland

This story started with an invitation from a colleague, Martyn Carruthers, whose consulting business sometimes takes him into "Iron Curtain" countries. Martyn was in Warsaw, Poland and he suggested that I visit him for Halloween. He said that he would enjoy walking with me around some places that might more than satisfy my need for ghost stories. Well - why not?

Warsaw is a haunted city. The atrocities by Russian and German troops are almost beyond telling. Warsaw seems to have many spirits that cannot rest in peace. The old city of Warsaw was flattened by German troops at the end of world war two, and was replaced by grey socialist apartment buildings.

Over the weekend we toured the old town, some monuments of the once-Jewish ghetto and the Russian Cytadel. We walked through the beautiful Kampinowska Park, the lungs of Warsaw, which hides a Nazi killing ground. And we walked around a cemetery near the center of town.

I have NEVER seen such a busy cemetery. People in their thousands - or perhaps in their tens of thousands - were leaving candles and flowers by the ton. Seen from the outside, a dense black smoke hung over the cemetery like a bizarre Hollywood special effect. Later, the cemeteries had so many burning candles that they were probably brighter than during the day.

Ghosts? Perhaps at the Umschlagplatz memorial - where Warsaw Jews were loaded onto cattle trains, for the Treblinka extermination camp. We went there after dark, when it was dark, cold and deserted. I felt an echo of the terror of the many people condemned to die because of their race, and I recalled the similar attempted genocide of North American Indians.

Martyn asked if I would like to witness a session the next day. He said that the client thought that he might be possessed - and that he (Martyn) had delayed the appointment until I was in Poland. What a friend! We walked to my hotel near Saski Park, and enjoyed Polish Zubrowka vodka - flavored with bison grass - a friendly spirit, Martyn called it.

Therapist vs The Rapist

Martyn's client (let's call him Jan) arrived the next morning. Jan looked like he was about sixty, and he spoke good English with a south England accent. He seemed well-educated and worked as a lawyer in the city of Poznan. He had visited Toronto, and we discussed why Canadians like baseball.

Jan's voice became quieter and I leaned forward to hear him better. Then his face and posture changed abruptly. He leaned forward with squinting eyes and spoke in a hissing voice: "You know why your wife died? She hated your work ... and you should have never married a patient."

My hair stand up on my neck ... NOBODY knew that story! Not even Martyn. But ...

Jan was looking at me. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Did I say something ...?"

Martyn asked Jan some rather ordinary questions about his history. Jan mentioned that he had been raised by his mother who had died the previous year. He said that his maternal grandfather was brutally murdered by Germans during the second world war and that he knew nothing about his father's parents.

He added that he had a problem that he would like to get rid of. He said that many people have asked him to stop frightening them - and many people avoid him.

I was shaken by Jan's hurtful comments. Short, sharp, and designed to cause suffering. And true. But how could he have known?

Suddenly Jan was hissing something about Martyn's son ... I was surprised that Martyn had told Jan about his (Martyn's) personal life, and perhaps Martyn had told Jan something he had heard or guessed about my personal life. I felt angry.

But Jan was again friendly and intelligent. I asked Jan how often he had met Martyn - Jan said that this was the first actual meeting, although they had made three or four brief telephone calls. I asked Jan what he knew about me - Jan said that he had expected to meet a therapist from Canada - nothing else.

What was going on? I signaled to Martyn that I wanted to talk outside the room. Martyn offered to make more tea and I immediately asked what was happening. "I have no idea", Martyn replied, "Interesting isn't it? I don't know how he knew so much about my son. Was he right about you too?"

"Spot on", I murmured. We returned to Jan with black tea and lemon pieces. "No vodka?" Jan joked, "This is Poland, you know".

Jan's story was peculiar. People were avoiding him and usually not saying why. Some would become really angry and twice recently he had even been struck - physically hurt - by strangers. Jan said that an angry woman called him a "straszny demon cierpienia" - a horrible demon of suffering. Even Jan's ex-wife would not meet Jan, saying that she had been hurt enough by Jan's cruelty.

It had started during the summer with a visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp, a Nazi museum in southern Poland. Jan had taken some Canadian relatives there, and he had sat near an alleged gas chamber while his relatives wandered around. Jan had been there before - as a child on a school trip. He said he despised the place and wished it destroyed. Jan said that on this last trip, he found a place to sit in the sun and wait. He said that he went to sleep while sitting there.

Jan said that he might have slept there for a half hour, and that he dreamed that he was touring - or even inspecting - the Auschwitz death camp at the height of its human destruction in 1944. Jan said that in his dream, he not only witnessed but participated in atrocities. He said that he awoke with a feeling of coldness to his bones, although it was a warm and sunny day. He dismissed the dream as brought on by the surroundings.

Since that day Jan said that he could deeply offend people without knowing how he did it. He said that would "blank out" just for a second, as he had done here twice. Jan's doctor called it "fatigue", Jan said, and told Jan to learn to control the stress of his work.

I am a competent hypnotist. Martyn asked Jan if he would care to explore that dream in Auschwitz. Jan nodded and sighed. "Yes", he said, "perhaps it's time". Martyn invited him to sit in a large comfortable chair and gestured for me to begin a hypnotic induction. I asked him to close his eyes and relax his body - and gently recall that visit - and that's when the trouble began.

At first Jan relaxed, but then his face contorted. His tongue seemed to str-e-tch and curl around while he made hissing sounds. I could feel chicken skin on my arms and back. Martyn continued.

"Jan - remember - you are in Auschwitz - you are waiting for your friends - you are sleeping in warm sun..." And so on, with suggestions for remembering the last summer. "You go to sleep - and you start to dream ... and what happens in that dream?"

Jan convulsed in his chair. His tongue seemed to stretch even longer and then retracted. "Nein" Jan said, "Er ist meine - meine!". Martyn said a few words in German to Jan and then switched to English again. "Jan - you are dreaming a strange dream - what is happening?"

"Destruction" said Jan, with his eyes closed. "Angels of death are here. They love this place. They feed here."

"Describe what you see" I asked ... Jan's face distorted soundlessly.

"No ... it sees me ... it's coming ... it is inside me ... NO!!!"

I was softly panting by this time. I have interviewed many patients and heard endless strange stories - and some of the stories were very weird - and some of the patients were diagnosed as psychotic. But who can get used to this?

"Jan - what is happening?" I continued "Jan? ... What's going on?"

Jan swore - perhaps in Polish or German. Then he spoke in English - something like "It's inside me ... and it's hungry ... it feeds on suffering ... death is an end ... it wants life ... my life"

"Why you?" asked Martyn, rather reasonably. Auschwitz could be a feast for such an entity. But why should it jump into a small cup of soup like Jan?

Jan screamed again, and I wondered if Martyn's neighbors might call the police. "My father is German" said Jan. "Nobody knows! He raped my mother! My mother killed him! Nobody knew! But this thing knows everything!"

Exorcize Your Options

Martyn looked at me strangely. THAT was not on his list of questions.

"G-g-g-g-old?" sputtered Jan.

"Yes" I said quickly, before Martyn interfered. "The gold hidden by the Nazis before the Russians captured Breslau in 1944."

Before coming to Poland I had read about Polish ghosts. Every castle was polluted with them of course, if you believe tourist literature. I don't. But my research pointed again and again to the German province of Silesia - now the Polish province of Slask. Although this may be one of the most haunted places in Europe, not much is available about it in English. It is the borderland between Germany, Poland and Czech Republic - with a long history of both wealth and violence.

The Polish city of Wroclaw was for a time the German city of Breslau. Before the war Breslau had been a rich city. There had been centuries of gold mining in Silesia. Yet little of it's wealth had been found - unless it had been secretly spirited off to Berlin or Moscow. There are many stories of hidden treasures in the Sowety mountains of Silesia - the same area where the Nazis made nerve gas and tried to build an atomic bomb in underground factories.

"Y-y-yes" whispered Jan, hissing a word that sounded like "Bireeser".

"Is Bireeser a place or a person?" asked Martyn gently.

"Yes ... no! ... Bireeser! ... no! ... yes" mumbled Jan, "no! ... yesss ... but not my father ... not my father! Nein! Gruss Gott in Himmel! Not my father!!" Jan started hyperventilating.

But I was already bringing Jan out of trance, suggesting that he feel forgetful and relaxed. We drank our now-cold tea in an exhausted silence, until Martyn made an appointment to meet Jan on the next day.

We drove into the old town of Warsaw for dinner, discussing what Jan had told us. I was bursting with excitement that a famous ghost story might be solved under my nose. Martyn wondered if Jan was at least partially identified with his dead father. And just who or what or where was Bireeser?

The Golden Rule

Bireeser ... Martyn phoned a Polish friend and asked what bireeser meant. Well, it didn't mean anything in Polish. He asked a German friend and received the same answer. After dinner we went to the Warsaw post office, and scanned telephone directories for southwest Poland. No Bireeser - no Breese - no Bewiese. No nothing.

We checked an online atlas in an internet cafe ... there was no Bireeser in Poland. Perhaps it was a German place name for a village that is now Polish, or more likely we were chasing a wild goose.

But this goose might lay a golden egg.

To be continued ...

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David J. Marsden is a retired psychotherapist living near Toronto, Canada. He investigates ghost stories. You can email him:

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