Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Hello all. Welcome back to another episode of Southern Demonology. As always, I'm your host, JJ. Today I bring you an enthralling interview with Victoria, aka the Demon Folklorist. Not only does she have a frightening tale of how she was possessed, she's also an academic who used that experience along with her degree in folklore to create an entirely new classification system to examine the demonic. Stick around for that, as I know you'll learn a good bit from her. This past week has been a roller coaster.
Not only was my mom admitted to the hospital for a few days, thank God she's recovering and back home. But I also had a rebound case of COVID, one of those unfortunate side effects of taking the new antiviral drug, along with having the most horrible taste in my mouth. But I can't complain as the rebound was much milder in comparison. Think of having a slight cold as opposed to a really bad case of the flu. What this means for you is that you once again have to deal with my recovering voice, for which I, as always, apologize. I also have a new listener inbox feature story to share with you.
This one comes from Liv 133 from our Discord server. Shared with her permission, of course. Liv writes, I have an experience that stands out to me after learning about this kind of stuff. Although it happened when I was quite young, maybe nine or ten. One night my older sister and I were driving home. She was driving, of course. We were about one minute away from our house when we came across a crossroad intersection. I noticed a girl standing on the opposite street from us, which took my attention because she was standing directly under the streetlight on the road.
I didn't really react at first because we were so close to home, and I knew the street, so I wasn't startled, just curious what she was doing. I thought, was she waiting for a friend? Or looking for something she dropped? As I examined, I noticed it looked like she was in an oversized-looking white t-shirt. I assumed her pajamas. But as I scanned further down, I got two. Her back was facing to me. I know, because I could see the hair on the back of her head and the way her shoulders rested. But her feet and legs were facing toward us.
I got an initial deer-the-headlight reaction before I snapped out of it and blurred to my sister. Did you see that? To which she said no. And told me to not startle her when she was driving. I don't know why, but I always pushed that experience to the back of my mind until now. Everything about it seems wrong and unreasonable. I don't know what to interpret that as. Whether it was just my imagination or something of significance. Just thought I'd share regardless. Thank you so much for that. If you'd like to share your own experience, you can do so at the website Southern Demonology.
com or on our Discord server, otherwise known as the nicest paranormal community on the internet. Speaking of Discord, our movie night Wednesdays continue on August 10th at 9 p.m. Eastern with the movie The Vigil. Come join us for a free movie and group discussion afterwards. The tool I use for comments and feedback, gallows.fm, just received an update where you can get notifications whenever someone replies to your comment. Something I do for everyone that's posted. You can find the link in the show notes to try it for yourself.
Lastly, I want to point out that you may have heard an audio quality improvement as I recently purchased a Rodcaster Pro 2 audio console. I'm still dialing in the settings, but I think it will allow me to create better sounding content a lot faster. With all that said, sit back, relax, and enjoy my enlightening conversation with Victoria, the demon folklorist. I am here with a very special guest, Victoria, who is the demon folklorist. I ran across her on Twitter, looked at her website, fell in love with the content there, and knew that I had to speak with her.
So I am very lucky to be able to bring her here today. Victoria, how are you doing?
I'm good and thank you for having me.
Oh, it's my pleasure. I really appreciate you agreeing to join to be here today. If you wouldn't mind, would you give us a little background and intro to yourself?
Sure. I am actually a supernatural folklorist. I specialize in demonic experiences, narratives, and phenomena. I got my master's at Utah State University in man, how long ago was that? Uh 2021, I think. And my thesis went online, I believe, around May. People, I guess, have been enjoying it. And then I decided to start a website, demonfolklorist.com. And I've also been getting into like horror writing. So that's what I do now.
That is wonderful. What exactly was your your master's degree in, if you don't mind me asking?
It was a master's of science, which was actually like kind of weird. It just had to do with the fact that I didn't want to take an extra language class of folklore.
Wow.
What exact degree is it's technically an MA, it just doesn't have that title. It's it was weird.
Oh no, that that's that's beautiful. Because uh yeah, I in your degree is much more recent than mine. I got mine back in 2000. That's an MTS. So yeah, I love talking to people from different perspectives, but especially in dealing with folklore. That I've never met someone who has ever majored in folklore before. So that is a a really interesting topic. What drew you into that particular uh pathway of study?
So I went to University of Wyoming, which is where I am right now. I majored in anthropology because I was really interested in culture. And then it just didn't really do it for me. I didn't want to continue. And I stumbled upon like mythology and folklore tracks. And I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. Although I was leaning more towards mythology. And then I came across USU's website and it talked about how it does have a focus on supernatural folklore. And I've always been fascinated by the supernatural because um me and my mom are psychic.
And I I know that like when people say that, it's like kind of like TV psychics. We just have psychic abilities, and the supernatural seems to find us. So we never looked for it. And then um, I went to USU because of that. I read the books that these professors had put out, and I was like, yes, I have to go here. This is the coolest thing I've ever heard, and I just fell in love.
Don't you love it when the thing that is kind of purpose built for you just kind of finds you uh or your interest ignites in such a way that it just draws you to something which you would naturally choose to begin with?
Oh, I love it. I love when that happens.
I have said it many a time, but my program of study was, you know, I I found it in a really weird roundabout way, but it jived so perfectly with my entire background that I, you know, I it I should have chosen it if it if I had like a spare thought in my head, but instead I allowed circumstance to lead me there uh to the point where it's almost where I require fate to take me by the nose and say, nope, nope, nope, this is what you really should be doing.
So that is real.
So I I have to ask you, because I uh you know, I know that you're not going down the the Long Island medium route, but what type of psychic activities have you and your or mom experienced? And you know, how do how do things find you? Because I'm really fascinated by that idea.
Oh yeah, definitely. So I guess we can start honestly in utero, because my mom had psychic abilities since she was about 17. And actually, no, before that, but that's when they really like bloomed for her. She had something tell her when she was a little girl, don't go into the road. Probably as her, I'd have to get some clarification on that story, but that's when she sort of like took notice. So we are clairudient. We hear messages from spirit that way as our own voices in our heads. So it's not like things are happening outside of us, although that happens too.
When we're going to sleep, apparently that's when we are the most open. And um, spirits like to try and talk to us, which is creepy when it happens. And then you're just like, leave me alone. Like, I'm not, I'm not open to this right now, but we're never open to it anyway, because we don't really want to talk to the dead. Let's see where else I'm just sort of going off in my, I have what I call a tree brain, way too many branches, and they all lead back, but yeah, it's a mess. I also am clear cognizant, so clear knowing.
Sometimes when I watch paranormal TV, I will see certain celebrities and I sort of grew up with them because we all kind of did watching these shows and watching them progress over the years. And then now I haven't watched him in a while, but when I looked at one particular person, I was like, ooh, he has weird stuff around him. Because my clear cognizance, actually, it's also clear sentence sentience too, which is clear feeling. So I could feel it so intensely that it was like I could see it around him, even though sight is not one of my gifts. That my mom has that, but I don't.
Anyway, I completely skipped over the utero story. When I was in utero with my mom, I actually had started to mess with her abilities. So it's like, even I guess at conception, I was a psychic because I was able to mess with hers. So that was cool when she told me that story.
Like uh mess how, if you don't mind me asking.
They were just off, and nothing she had previously been able to do or divine was working. It was just all like messed up, I guess, by my frequency coming into the world. Okay. We in my family have almost died a couple times. We are Christian, but I don't really follow Christian ideology. I just I believe in God. We've had a few instances with angels where something saved each of us. I was still in utero with my mom when something stopped her from going forward and a car would have hit her had she gone forward. Oh gosh.
Yeah. So that happened. Uh my dad almost fell down the stairs, but someone turned on the light. It wasn't any of us. My sister was jerked back from falling into the road by something invisible, stuff like that.
Wow.
I guess you don't hear that one often.
No, I I really don't. I mean, I I have, for example, in our Discord server, we do have people that have had psychic, whether they have low-grade psychic encounters or uh, you know, they have some ability themselves, but I have never heard of that unique combination, or to be able to pinpoint and say these things happen because of Exxon. That is truly fascinating.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why we're so chosen. That sounds like such a conceited word to use, but it's like, why do these things happen to us? I embraced my gifts pretty early, even though they kind of freaked me out a little bit, because I had that support system of my mom telling me, you know what, I have this too. It's okay. They're gifts, they're not something to be afraid of. And then over time, I just stopped being as afraid because I had seen worse things. And we believe that our gifts keep us safe, like with the Guardian Angel stories.
We'll get a feeling about somebody who's not quite right, who later turns out to do something violent, things like that. I also have um, I think it's called psychometry, where you can get information from an object. But for me, it's specifically from photographs. I can look at something and tell whether it's cursed or if there's like dark stuff going on there, or if it is the real object that they're talking about. Because have you ever seen paranormal blogs? Sometimes they'll use a recreation of the actual doll or the actual house or you know, whatever.
I can tell whether it's the real one because I'm like, I'm not getting anything from this, and then I'll read it and I'll be like, oh, that's why it's not the real one.
Oh, really? So let me ask you this, because uh curses endlessly fascinate me, and it's not just because one of my favorite movies happens to be called Nodoy or the Cursed. Do you have any particular theories about how an object can become cursed?
I do. So I think that our existence here comes with energy. So when we do something particularly evil, that energy can become attached to things. Like, have you ever walked into a house and you know something bad happened there? Yep.
Like that to a particular object, perhaps it could be something as obvious as blood spatter onto that thing. Maybe it even attracted something demonic because of the evil of that action to come and hang out because your soul feels dark enough for them. Or it could just be that maybe that feeling or that darkness got concentrated, and maybe that object was living in the room with it for so long that it absorbed some of it. I also think that there is such a thing as uh dark practitioners of magic using things as conduits to curse other people without them knowing.
I have, you know, I've ran across the unintentional curse concept quite a bit. In fact, the last person I interviewed, Anna Maria Manello, that's kind of the one of the things that she talked about a good bit, especially in her book Haunted Heirlooms. But I haven't really ran across too much of the intentional cursing by either ritual or magic. Have you ran across anything that that felt like it was done in that kind of fashion?
Yes. I believe that it happened to me. So the reason that I got into demons is so like we'll actually have to start this story. Um I was originally interested in horror movies and fairy tales. I had contacted an expert at my school, and I had a very difficult time with this person, and I did not want to work with them because they it was like they were trying to make me feel like I was stupid. And I almost like I left almost in tears, and I realized I was not gonna work with her and I was not gonna do this subject. Oh God.
So I was like, okay, what else do you know about? What else do you kind of have like a Niche knowledge of. And I was like, oh, duh, demons. Has that ever been done before? And then it started from there. But the reason I had that knowledge is because I had an experience in 2014. I was psychologically vulnerable because I had had my heart broken. And a lot of crazy stuff had happened, not just to me, but to family members around me. And I was broken down through oppression. Because I think demons were involved, but I think what ultimately possessed me was a Dybboc.
Just because it was cruel and it was smug, but it was not evil. So that separated it from being demonic for me.
For those who are not familiar with that term, would you mind giving just a brief uh definition of it?
Of course. So a Dybok is from Jewish folklore. It is a human spirit that has been barred from heaven and hell. So it wanders and it looks for people to possess because it wants to be alive again. Thank you.
Mm-hmm. I realized that though through my research. So I did my thesis on demonic phenomena and classifying it through published narratives. So I would read these books and then like highlight any time a demon made something happen. And I didn't use possession at all because that felt like a different classification. So I looked at encroachment. So when a demon's starting to like trying to find a foothold in someone else's world, because they can't just come in. That seems to be a theme. They have to follow rules.
And then so we have encroachment, infestation, when they do, they're already in and they're starting to do crazy stuff. Throw things, levitate, negative miracles abound. And then oppression phenomena. So when it starts to single out a person to break them down. So possession is different though, because when you have encroachment, infestation, and oppression, it is happening around you. When someone is possessed, it this phenomena now emits from them. So it's it felt like a different classification. And personally, I'm not as interested in possession.
You think I would be, being that I was possessed for three days of my life. I don't remember them. But yeah.
No memory at all.
No memory. Well, okay, that's not true. So what happened is I had walked into the street, somebody called the cops, but and it I ended up being taken to a mental hospital because they thought I, well, first a hospital hospital because they thought I was on drugs. This was in Vegas. So it makes sense why they thought that. And I woke up after being heavily, heavily sedated. My mom said the nurse told her they had to give me three times the amount for my weight just to put me to sleep. Oh gosh.
I'm not sure what's what was really happening there. It might have been my adrenaline was so strong or it was already in. But I woke up after being sedated to, and my parents were there and they were looking at me, and I felt I could not control what I was saying. I was just sort of sitting there, I was dormant while this thing spoke through me and said something awful about like they said something about my blood type, and it said something like, Oh, well, I guess I'm not your kid then because our blood types don't match. And my parents were just like, What?
And I was also inwardly like, What? You don't even know enough about like blood types, me personally, to say anything about it. I remember learning about it in science, but I didn't have the actual knowledge to say anything like that. And um, yeah, it's it felt very smug and very cruel. And then I went to sleep and I didn't wake up for three days. At least me. When I woke up, I was outside and I had a cigarette in my hand and I was smoking, which I've never done in my life, and I never did since, and I had to figure out where I was. I didn't even know where I was.
That's how black me being asleep was. It was just no memory.
I could not even begin to imagine that experience.
Yeah, it was pretty awful.
When you were so before the the memory completely cut out, you said that you were dormant. Do you remember feeling like you know you should be resisting, or was this such a unique experience that it didn't fathom or you couldn't?
Uh I was more in a state of being like I was so dormant that I was more curious. Like, what what's happening? What uh I I didn't feel resistance, but I just felt I was just there for a s for a little bit, and then I wasn't. But yeah, that's a good question. I've never been asked that.
Okay, and what do you think actually broke this type of possession?
So I hadn't invited it. I hadn't invited anything, I hadn't done any of the things they say not to do when it comes to inviting demons into your life or, you know, other spirits. For all I know, it had just been sort of hanging around me, waiting for the right moment. But I personally think uh what happened because I do believe in God, I think God cast it out for me because I did not deserve it, and what happened went against the rules of what demons, spirits, all that stuff are meant to do, or able to do, rather.
So that that brings up a ton of questions for me, and I'm not trying to overwhelm you with embedding any stretch of the imagination, but there's this entire concept of free will, and that almost seems to fly in the face of, you know, if that is the quote unquote rule set that we are abiding by, then that seems to kind of call a good bit of that into question. And I'm I'm just curious as to what you think about that.
Yeah, so I have thought about that extensively. I can imagine free will is one of those things, you know, that humans are basically famous for. That's what we have over other things, right? I think that our free will is also to be stupid and to do things that are sick and twisted. And we end up calling demons either unknowingly or knowingly and not realizing the consequences. So some of the ways that demons come into people's lives, the law of invitation. So if you open the door and like, hey, what's up? Come on in, they can choose to come in. That doesn't mean they'll do it for everybody.
One of the ways that it that's thought to happen is through a Ouija board, which I think Ouija boards get a little bit of a bad rap because I don't think a demon's always sitting there waiting for you to play it. And I don't think that it is always like there are safe ways to use it, supposedly, because some people never have a negative experience with it. And it's like, how is that explained if they're all evil? Which is also kind of like a Christian narrative that's put out there that never touch one.
But I personally wouldn't touch one because I've had so many experiences where something was trying to reach me anyway, that it's like maybe it's just not a good idea to open the door. But that's me. I'm not gonna speak for someone else.
No, I I'm there with you on that one. And I I've said it uh quite a quite a few times. It's not that everything that you can contact is is out to ruin you. However, it's the more you open the door, the greater your chances are. And if you don't know how to close the door, then you know you never know what's going to walk through. I guess you can't.
Exactly. Yeah, I feel that way too. Because really, with anything, if you don't know what you're doing, it's dangerous anyway.
Yep. And I'm there with you on the whole stupid part as well. I I completely agree with you on that one.
I know, like, even when people do know the risks and they don't know what they're doing, sometimes they'll do it anyway. And it's like, okay, okay.
Exactly.
Enough of my advice now because you're not even gonna listen to me. I think when we do things like that and we don't know what we're doing, or we start to do things that are sick and twisted because the other way that they come in is because it's the law of attraction. So they become attracted to your soul because it's so dark, because what you're doing is so sick and against your own humanity. Personally, I believe when people molest children or are serial killers or those types of things, they they can call something into the voids that maybe they didn't realize they were calling.
And a demon could be like, hey, I like you. I think I'm gonna hang out around you because you are so messed up.
Yeah, and honestly, you know, if their end goal is to absolutely corrupt, then if the person's already good two-thirds down the path, then hey, it's an easy job, right?
Right, exactly. Another way that they can come in is something I call already inhabited. So that means that a demon was already living in that beautiful house you came across, or maybe in your apartment building, or something like that. It means you are now encroaching on their territory, so that whole stage can be erased and they just move in.
Yeah, there you go. I mean, at least and I'm speaking from a Catholic perspective here. That's why there are two different rights for exorcism. Uh possession of well, exorcism of place and exorcism of person.
So Yep. And then there's also when somebody who is using demonic magic sends something after a person, usually for purposes of revenge. So people who are demon worshippers are called demonolitors, and it's thought that for a short time they can command that demon to do whatever they would like them to do. But it's also thought that demons aren't really fair when it comes to making deals. So they'll probably collect when you least expect it and sooner than you thought.
Yeah, I actually did an entire episode of uh called Demonic Gateways, where the entire central premise was you can try to make a deal, but honestly, why would they even need to? If they can trick you into doing whatever they want and collect and have to owe nothing in return, then hey, it's a win-win-win all the way across. Thank you for listening to Southern Demonology. Find us online at Southern Demonology.com where you can find all of our social and podcasting links. Also, if you have a moment, please feel free to rate this podcast and leave any encouraging feedbacks that you may have.
As always, I am JJ, and it has been a pleasure getting to talk to you today.