Fighting Satan's minions wasn't part of Gallagher's career plan while he was studying medicine at Yale. He knew about biblical accounts of demonic possession but thought they were an ancient culture's attempt to grapple with mental disorders like epilepsy.
He proudly calls himself a "man of science. Yet today, Gallagher has become something else: the go-to guy for a sprawling network of exorcists in the United States. He says demonic possession is real.
He's seen the evidence: victims suddenly speaking perfect Latin; sacred objects flying off shelves; people displaying "hidden knowledge" or secrets about people that they could not have possibly have known. She threw a Lutheran deacon who was about pounds across the room," he says.
That's beyond psychiatry. Gallagher calls himself a "consultant" on demonic possessions. For the past 25 years, he has helped clergy distinguish between mental illness and what he calls "the real thing. Gary Thomas, one of the most famous exorcists in the United States.
The movie "The Rite" was based on Thomas' work. Gallagher is a big man -- 6-foot-5 -- who once played semipro basketball in Europe. He has a gruff, no-nonsense demeanor. When he talks about possession, it sounds as if he's describing the growth of algae; his tone is dry, clinical, matter-of-fact.
Possession, he says, is rare -- but real. Some critics, though, say Gallagher has become possessed by his own delusions. They say all he's witnessed are cheap parlor tricks by people who might need therapy but certainly not exorcism. And, they argue, there's no empirical evidence that proves possession is real. Still, one of the biggest mysteries about Gallagher's work isn't what he's seen. It's how he's evolved. How does a "man of science" get pulled into the world of demonic possession?
His short answer: He met a queen of Satan. A 'creepy' encounter with evil. She was a middle-age woman who wore flowing dark clothes and black eye shadow. She could be charming and engaging. She was also part of a satanic cult. She called herself the queen of the cult, but Gallagher would refer to her as "Julia," the pseudonym he gave her. The woman had approached her local priest, convinced she was being attacked by a demon.
The priest referred her to an exorcist, who reached out to Gallagher for a mental health evaluation. Why, though, would a devil worshipper want to be free of the devil? She ended up relieving Gallagher of his doubts.
It was one of the first cases he took, and it changed him. Gallagher helped assemble an exorcism team that met Julia in the chapel of a house. Objects would fly off shelves around her.
She somehow knew personal details about Gallagher's life: how his mother had died of ovarian cancer; the fact that two cats in his house went berserk fighting each other the night before one of her sessions. Julia found a way to reach him even when she wasn't with him, he says. He was talking on the phone with Julia's priest one night, he says, when both men heard one of the demonic voices that came from Julia during her trances -- even though she was nowhere near a phone and thousands of miles away.
He says he was never afraid. How a scientist believes in demons. He also insists that he's on the side of science. He says he's a stickler for the scientific method, that it teaches people to follow the facts wherever they may lead.
Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family in Long Island, he didn't think much about stories of possession. But when he kept seeing cases like Julia's as a professional, he says, his views had to evolve. Some priests say those who dabble in the occult are opening doorways to the demonic. Being Catholic, though, may help. Gallagher grew up in a home where faith was taken seriously.
His younger brother, Mark, says Gallagher was an academic prodigy with a photographic memory who wanted to use his faith to help people. He taught us to give back. Gallagher's two ways of giving back -- helping the mentally ill as well as the possessed -- may seem at odds. But not necessarily for those in the Catholic Church. Contemporary Catholicism doesn't see faith and science as contradictory. Its leaders insist that possession, miracles and angels exist.
But global warming is real, so is evolution, and miracles must be documented with scientific rigor. More from 'The Other Side'. The Pope writes that "there can never be a true divergence between faith and reason, since the same God who reveals the mysteries and bestows the gift of faith has also placed in the human spirit the light of reason.
The church's emphasis on faith and reason can even been seen in the birth of its exorcism ritual. The Rite of Exorcism was first published in by Pope Paul V to quell a trend of laypeople and priests hastily performing exorcisms on people they presumed were possessed, such as victims of the bubonic plague, says the Rev.
It said the exorcist should not have anything to do with medicine. Leave that to the doctors. Learn about the true story that inspired the movie "The Exorcist". Doctors, perhaps, like Gallagher. On Wednesday, police raided the community, located in a jungle region in north-west Panama some km miles from the capital Panama City.
In that ritual, there were people being held against their will, being mistreated," said Mr Baloyes. Inside the makeshift church, officers found a naked woman, machetes, knives and a ritually sacrificed goat, Mr Baloyes said. The site was controlled by a religious sect called the New Light of God, believed to have been operating in the region for about three months. According to Mr Baloyes, the kidnapping and torture started last Saturday after one of the members claimed to have received "a message from God".
The victims were then kidnapped from their homes, beaten and killed. The suspects, who include a minor, are expected to appear in court on Friday or Saturday. One of them is the father of the pregnant woman found in the grave, located some 2km from the makeshift church. Those rescued had bodily injuries and reportedly included at least two pregnant women and some children.
Exorcism is a religious or spiritual ritual carried out to supposedly cure people of demonic possession. It remains controversial, in part due to its depiction in popular culture and horror films. In an article about exorcism for The Conversation academic website , Helen Hall, a lecturer at Nottingham Law School, says the practice "signifies freeing a place, person or even object from some form of negative spiritual influence".
The second doorway—an interest in the occult—might offer at least a partial explanation. Most of the exorcists I interviewed said they believed that demonic possession was becoming more common—and they cited a resurgence in magic, divination, witchcraft, and attempts to communicate with the dead as a primary cause.
According to Catholic teaching, engaging with the occult involves accessing parts of the spiritual realm that may be inhabited by demonic forces. In recent years, journalists and academics have documented a renewed interest in magic, astrology, and witchcraft, primarily among Millennials. After listening to the priests and poring over news articles, I started to wonder whether the two trends—belief in the occult and the rising demand for Catholic exorcisms —might have the same underlying cause.
So many modern social ills feel dark and menacing and beyond human control: the opioid epidemic, the permanent loss of blue-collar jobs, blighted communities that breed alienation and dread.
Maybe these crises have led people to believe that other, more preternatural, forces are at work. But when I floated this theory with historians of religion, they offered different explanations. But more described how, during periods when the influence of organized religions ebbs, people seek spiritual fulfillment through the occult. Adam Jortner, an expert on American religious history at Auburn University, agreed. But just after my visit to Tacoma in March, I spoke by phone with Steven, with whom Louisa had recently reconciled, and he told me that she had been suffering for years from daytime episodes, too.
The incidents in the middle of the night frightened Louisa more and felt, to her, more supernatural, but Steven found these daytime experiences much harder to explain. One of these episodes occurred on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in Louisa had followed the instructions of the priest at Saint James Cathedral, throwing out her Ouija board and some healing crystals.
She and Steven had moved back to Washington State with their two children, hoping that proximity to family and friends would do her good. They settled into a routine—Steven worked at a nearby warehouse; Louisa looked after the children—and for a while, Louisa all but forgot the nighttime incidents in Orlando. She came home in the early evening and spent some time upstairs in her bedroom.
She eventually returned to the living room and spoke briefly with Steven. Then she fell silent. When she began talking again, a new persona emerged. Normally an affable, meandering conversationalist, Louisa assumed a slow, measured tone. Recognizing the signs of what was happening, he told me, he grabbed his tablet and began filming. The footage is dark and the sound quality poor. The camera is pointed directly at Louisa. The video lasts for about 20 minutes.
I have all the time in the world. Halfway through the video, Louisa leans toward Steven and freezes, her face just a few inches from his. As I watched, I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. All I could settle on, though, was that the camera had captured Louisa in some kind of dissociative state in which her emergent identity believed itself to be inhuman.
When Steven first started witnessing these episodes, he assumed they were symptoms of a psychiatric disorder. Louisa certainly had had her share of struggles: In addition to these unexplained incidents, she also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had a history of alcohol abuse. Wynonna Gehrke, who became close friends with Louisa at Washington State University, recalls witnessing something similar.
The emergent identity told them it was a demon that wanted to hurt Louisa. It creeped me out so bad. She gave Louisa her bed that night, and she slept on the couch. It was Palm Sunday, and parishioners began pouring in long before the start of the Mass.
I found a seat in one of the back pews and waited for Louisa. Midway through the service, I felt a hand brush my shoulder. It was Louisa. A few minutes later I slipped out to join them. Louisa pushed the baby back and forth in a stroller while her eyes strained toward the altar. In his first session with Louisa, in early , White began by encouraging her to discuss the problems she was experiencing.
He then left for a few minutes, returning with the purple stole around his neck that priests wear for both confessions and exorcisms. At that point the session took on the more structured feel of a Christian ritual. But when he gave Louisa a piece of paper with renunciation prayers to recite, she froze. Struggling to read the words in front of her, she began moaning and then dry-heaving.
Moments later, she slipped into guttural babbling. White remembers her appearing as though she was in agony. At one point while he was praying aloud, she broke out in hysterical laughter. After the first session, White considered starting the discernment protocol for an exorcism.
He invited Louisa back for a second session, which went more smoothly. The two talked and prayed, and Louisa read the renunciation prayers without a problem. She would not have an exorcism.
Her mother eventually remarried and settled with Louisa and her older brother in Fife, a small city just east of Tacoma. She still has nightmares about the experience. With her other hand, Louisa dabbed her eyes. To this day, specific triggers—including certain music genres and foods—will send her into a gale of rage and despair.
Hamburger Helper, too, has permanently absorbed some residue of her abuse: She thinks her abuser must have made it shortly before or after a molestation episode.
Some abused children are subjected to such agonizing experiences that they adopt a coping mechanism in which they force themselves into a kind of out-of-body experience. As they mature, this extreme psychological measure develops into a disorder that may manifest unpredictably. In certain countries, including the U. The DSM-5 is not saying that possession is a scientifically verifiable phenomenon, but rather is acknowledging that many people around the world understand their abnormal mental experiences and behaviors through a spiritual framework.
Pore over these spiritual and psychiatric frameworks long enough, and the lines begin to blur. Psychiatry has only given us models through which to understand these symptoms, new cultural contexts to replace the old ones.
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