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Sunday, February 12, 2023

Videos Of Demon Possession

Cameron Bertuzzi recently interviewed Richard Gallagher, a psychiatrist who's worked on a lot of what he believes to be cases of demonic possession or something closely related (e.g., demonic oppression). The issue of video footage was brought up by somebody in the audience. Go here to watch the relevant segment. Gallagher says that he's seen some videos, but that they're "generally" not "unequivocal" in terms of their evidential value. I haven't done much research on videos of alleged demon possession, but I've seen some, and none of the ones I've seen have the sort of evidential significance that I'd expect to change the mind of the typical critic. However, I'm more familiar with video footage of some other types of paranormal phenomena. See the cases discussed in a post I wrote a few years ago, which includes links to where the videos can be viewed for free online.

I want to expand on some of the other comments Gallagher made. I'll begin with something he said in the context of video footage, then move on to something else.

He brought up the issue of seemingly paranormal interference with video equipment. And it isn't just a hypothetical. We have good evidence for that kind of scenario happening. I've done a lot of work on the Enfield Poltergeist, and that case involved a large amount of apparently paranormal interference with recording equipment. See the article here that discusses some examples. Go here to listen to a segment of a documentary featuring two professional camera operators who visited the house in question when the poltergeist was active. They went to the house on different occasions, and they're referring to different incidents involving different pieces of equipment, but both refer to what happened to their cameras as "impossible". The second individual, Ron Denney, even adds the qualifier "absolutely" - "absolutely impossible" - and goes on to refer to a second malfunction of his equipment at the house as having only a "one in a million" chance of occurring under normal circumstances. The larger context of his visits to the house is also noteworthy. The poltergeist had been highly active just before and just after each of the multiple occasions when Denney and his team visited, but, aside from making the camera equipment malfunction, the poltergeist was inactive while they were there. In fact, it was only about one minute before they arrived for one of their visits when one of the more famous incidents in the case occurred. The chief investigator, Maurice Grosse, saw a teapot in the kitchen moving without anybody else in the room. The poltergeist was highly active in significantly evidential ways both just before and just after the visits of Denney and his team, but was inactive when they were there aside from some camera malfunctions that he described as "absolutely impossible" and "one in a million". That's substantial evidence of a paranormal entity not wanting to be filmed and doing some things to interfere with efforts to film it.

I don't think poltergeists are inherently or even primarily demonic. I suspect they're primarily human (involving living humans, deceased ones, or both), though demons could be involved in some lesser way. See the section titled "Concealment" here for a discussion of potential psychological and mechanical reasons a poltergeist could have for doing something like trying to avoid being filmed. Though a demon isn't a human, there could be, and probably is, some overlap between the potential motives of a human and those of a demon. So, my comments in that article have some relevance to what Gallagher was discussing regarding video footage of demon possession.

There were a few successful efforts at filming the poltergeist in the Enfield case. Only one of those videos is extant, as far as I know, which you can view here. And see here for a discussion I had with the reporter in that video, Stewart Lamont. That post discusses some problems with skeptical reactions to the video and explains why the knocking phenomena that occurred during the video probably were paranormal. Skeptics aren't just unreasonable in how they evaluate the allegedly paranormal aspects of the video, but also are unreasonable in how they handle the mundane aspects of it. As Richard Wiseman, a prominent skeptic of the paranormal, acknowledges at 11:26 in the audio here, most skepticism of the case boils down to a hypothesis of trickery on the part of the Hodgson girls. I've heard from and interacted with many Enfield critics over the years. I can't think of a single one I've ever encountered who even attempts to explain the knocking phenomena in Lamont's video. The girls were sitting on a couch, on camera, at the time, and the knocking was occurring elsewhere in the house. Every one of the Hodgson children was accounted for at the time. (The girls were being filmed at a significant distance from the knocking, Billy was being monitored by Lamont's team, and Johnny was away at boarding school.) Skeptics could expand their hypothesis so as to have one or more individuals other than the Hodgson children also involved in faking the case, but I don't remember ever seeing any skeptic attempt to explain the video in question that way. Typically, they just single out the portions of the video they (incompetently) think they can successfully criticize and ignore the rest. They don't even expand their fraud hypothesis beyond the Hodgson girls, much less do they name anybody they'd add to the list of perpetrators, even when they have video evidence that their hypothesis is false. These are the same people who claim to be so interested in video evidence and act as if they'd be persuaded by it.

Even if Enfield didn't involve demons, it involved spirits of some type and some possession or possession-related phenomena. The phenomena were sometimes similar to what Gallagher cited in his interview with Bertuzzi (e.g., unusual strength on the part of the possessed individual, throwing or levitation incidents). You can read my article here for a discussion of the evidence. For example:

One doctor's emergency visit to the Hodgsons' house was recorded on tape by both Grosse and Playfair. It was on November 26, 1977, the night when Janet received an injection of Valium and was thrown across the room by the poltergeist while apparently unconscious under the effects of that injection. I've discussed that event elsewhere. Graham Morris, who was at the house that night, has referred to how the doctor who administered the Valium said that it was enough to "put a horse or an elephant out". Unfortunately, you can't hear much of what the doctor says on Grosse's recording. But Playfair's recording seems to have been done in another room of the house after the injection had been administered. And on Playfair's recording, the doctor's comments are much more discernable. He has a foreign accent, though, and sometimes talks quietly and is hard to understand. Grosse asks the doctor what he thought of the condition of Janet's eyes after looking at them, apparently referring to the doctor's examination of Janet prior to the Valium injection. The doctor says that Janet's "pupils were dilated and not reacting to light" (GP12B, 36:08). At 36:31, there's a conversation between the doctor and Grosse. The doctor seems to have referred to Janet's condition or the larger situation as "very strange". Regardless of whether the doctor made that comment, Grosse goes on to say "It's a very strange thing, of course. This is like we used to call 'possession.'" The doctor then says "Yeah." He later seems to say that Janet received a "full dose" of Valium (38:59). For whatever it's worth, Playfair commented elsewhere that the syringe with the Valium in it was completely filled (GP39B, 3:03). He was in the room at the time and writes in his book that "We all saw this [the injection] go in" (88). The doctor is asked how long the Valium's effects should last, and he says "six to eight hours" (GP12B, 39:08). While Grosse's recording doesn't pick up much of what the doctor said, it does pick up a lot of details about Janet's state. At 11:56 on tape MG25B, Grosse announces that the injection is being administered. Janet is screaming loudly at the time, and she had just done something to John Burcombe that caused him some pain, which you can hear him reacting to (10:10). So, she was still highly active in her trance state at the time when the injection was given. Within five minutes, she's much more subdued, so the Valium had made a big difference that early. Playfair's book tells us that the doctor's report listed the time as 11:10 P.M. (88), and Playfair says that the throwing incident happened at 11:55 P.M. (89) At 28:21 on tape MG25B, Grosse refers to how Janet is quieting down in response to the injection, and he says that the current time is 11:25. He had referred to the injection occurring at 11 minutes and 56 seconds into the tape, so Grosse's comments line up closely with the doctor's report. The injection happened at or close to 11:10 P.M. So, it looks like there was a span of about forty-five minutes between the time of the injection and the throwing incident. Given that the injection had such a big impact on Janet within five minutes, she shouldn't have been in a condition to have faked the throwing incident around forty minutes later.

You can read the rest of the article for other examples of the evidence for the genuineness of these episodes. Asking for videos doesn't explain the many, diverse, and unrefuted lines of non-video evidence we have. And many of these skeptics probably would ignore or irrationally dismiss any videos of demon possession they'd be given, much as they've done that with videos of other paranormal phenomena. One of the commenters below the video of Bertuzzi's interview of Gallagher wrote, "Funny how the frequency of Xtian miracles and exorcisms plummeted after the invention of cameras, then skyrocketed after the invention of Photoshop." He offers no documentation of his claims about miracle reports "plummeting" and "skyrocketing" at the points in time he mentions, and he makes no effort to interact with the evidence to the contrary (e.g., Craig Keener's documentation of widespread miracle reports over the past several decades). This skeptic doesn't offer any explanation of the video evidence we have for miracles, gives us no reason to think non-video evidence isn't sufficient in other cases, and doesn't address the fact that any video evidence has to be accompanied by non-video evidence (e.g., making judgments about the context of a video; evaluating testimonial evidence pertaining to the video's chain of custody and whether the video has been edited in a misleading way). It's not videos all the way down, and it can't be videos all the way down. The nature of life requires us to rely on non-video evidence in many contexts, including when evaluating miracle claims and making judgments about other important issues.

See here for a recent example of a skeptic (a Christian skeptic of modern miracle claims in this case) having to be unreasonable to dismiss non-video evidence for some healings. Asking for video evidence wouldn't change the fact that the non-video evidence is so good. People often ask for more evidence when the evidence they already have is sufficient.

And there isn't just one reason for that. Different people have different motives, and sometimes an individual's motives are multifaceted. For example, people often try to avoid doing more work, sometimes to the point of laziness. And it's become common in our culture for people to act as if preferences are needs. They "need" to act on their sexual desires rather than exercising more self-control, they "need" to be irresponsible with their finances rather than exercising more self-control, they "need" information given to them in the form of a video rather than text, they "need" the videos to be short, etc.

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