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. And as always, I am your host, JJ. What drew you into horror or ghost stories or the paranormal or the occult? There is usually a formative experience or a handful of them that got you into that world. And that is absolutely true for me. I grew up surrounded by ghost stories and had a few experiences of my own. So even in elementary school, I would regale my classmates with all of these different stories, whether they wanted to hear them or not.
Later in life, once I had gotten my first adult apartment, I happened to watch the remake of Dawn of the Dead. And it scared the bejesus out of me. To the point where I would open up my front door slowly and look around to ensure there wasn't a humanoid form that was going to bum rush me and try to devour my flesh for at least a good two weeks after seeing that movie. That's how much it got to me. But there was another more powerful experience, and it happened in college.
As part of a religion class I was taking from one of my favorite professors, we were assigned to read Malachi Martin's Hostage to the Devil. And that book shook me to my course. If you truly believe that there are demons that exist, that whether all or some portion of them want to take over a human's will and body, reading that book inflicted nightmares upon me that lasted for at least six months, but more importantly, instilled within me a fascination that has lasted to this day and will continue to last for probably quite a while longer. On the vein, I have a very special treat today.
Back in early December, I was contacted by Victor, who sent me an audio message. First time I've ever gotten one of those. Where he introduced himself and then began to go over some of the experiences that he has had with the perfectly possessed. And if you're not familiar with that term, let me back up and explain just a little bit.
A normal possession is usually a demon through some method of selection, no idea what that is, will target a particular human and either through trickery or some other means will then insert themselves into the free will of that person, minimize it, and then begin to take over. And in those cases where a person was successfully freed from that kind of coercion, they have reported to have large swaths of their memory just erased. They don't remember a lot of time, and that can go for a day, it can go for weeks, it can go for months.
However, with the perfectly possessed, there is no trickery involved. This person freely admits that pertinatural being into their lives, and it becomes a symbiotic relationship at that point. Uh Father Martin wrote about this particular type of event, and he he noted that there are some striking physical characteristics that this type of individual uh assumes. Their face is normally wrinkle-free. It's almost like a plastic mask. The skin is just stretched taunt. There could be some disturbing harmonics about their voice or their eyes.
Just looking at their eyes can inst inspire fear or hatred or some other strong emotion in the viewer. There's always a sense that you are dealing with otherness. Well, Victor has three tales that he has encountered while he was working as a nurse in the Houston area, and they really remind me of the feeling I got when I read Father Martin's Hostage to the Devil. They are frightened. But I wanted to share them with you because cases of demonic possession are rare enough to encounter. But to hear about not just one, but three separate cases of the perfectly possessed is much rarer still.
Victor and I talked over the weekend and we had quite a long conversation. So I'm only going to be able to fit one tell per episode. So this is the first one. So sit back, relax, and enjoy. I will say that I have actually stepped up my sound auditing skills. And of course, I say that and people are immediately going to say, Oh, it's still trash. But uh, I actually switched to a different audio program, and this this particular episode has taken me probably four times as long to uh to edit just because I'm getting used to it.
But I I actually found a DSer that works much better than what I was using before, and uh hopefully this will sound just so much better than my previous episodes. And uh for those who have stuck around for this long, um, even given my horrible sound production skills, uh I truly appreciate your listenership uh and your uh willingness to uh to to hear my not so great voice. But anyway, uh I hope you enjoy these tales from Victor. Hello everyone. I am here with Victor.
He contacted me and had some phenomenal conversations, and I honestly wanted to bring his word to you because they are perhaps some of the most terrifying things that I have read in an extremely long time. But before we get ahead of ourselves, uh Victor, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure. Um, my name is Victor. I was born in uh deep rural Louisiana. Um, probably don't sound like I was born in deep rural Louisiana. And the reason for that is when I was about five, I decided that I would pattern my speech after Walter Cronkite, uh, because I like the way he talked. So I made a conscious effort to try to talk like Walter Cronkite.
Anyway, uh I wish I had that foresight when I was a kid. I honestly had no idea I even had an accent until I went away to debate camp, and suddenly people started accusing me of speaking like boss hog. No, like an accent. What?
I thought everybody talked like this. Um now you if I get tired or if I you'll start to hear the Louisiana, the Louisiana accent come through. And I I speak way too fast, so slow me down if you need to. In the the mid-80s, I found myself in Houston during the huge economic downturn where suddenly Houston was an oil town and there were no oil jobs, huge whole neighborhoods have just abandoned their homes. And uh, so the question is what can I learn that will give me a job?
And so I decided I would go study nursing, and that was a good thing to study because no matter what, no matter how the economy vacillates, uh people can get jobs. So uh now I have switched careers numerous times since then. I became uh an architect and then I became kind of a simulationist mathematician. I just keep moving around about every 10 years or so I get bored. But the fun parts of nursing are working in the emergency department, uh critical care areas, these highly acute places. And that was the only place I really like to work. So that's where I gravitated.
And the the stories that I sent to JJ come from experiences that I had while I was working there. They are, as I told JJ, things that I've almost never told anybody about. Um, which I think was probably a mistake because I think that gave them more power in my mind than they deserve. When I saw JJ's show, which is you know, approaching the world from a different standpoint, I thought, well, let me write these things down and send them to him, see what he can make of them. And so JJ was kind enough to invite me on his show. That is awesome.
And I uh I understand that you are uh going to have an upcoming podcast tentatively entitled Trailer Trash Genius. Can you uh tell us what that's going to be about and when do you expect to actually uh have that up and going?
I would say it will be up and going in the next two to three weeks. Um Trailer Trash Genius is my idea about how to bring together all of the ideas that you see on these various podcasts. Um so, for instance, let's go into the paranormal realm. I don't care which podcast you turn to, you will hear the same exact people, the same exact stories, the same exact repetition over and over again.
You'll have people who are certain these things are true, you'll have people who couldn't even begin to think they were true, but you don't seem to have any talk about, okay, how do I what are the tools I can use to try to bring myself to some level of confidence in these stories? So the show is gonna be about trailer trash epistemology. I love it. You know, how do you how does the how does the common man who respects his mind and respects knowledge and respects the minds of others come to the conclusion of what do I know? What do I not know? What can I not know?
I don't think it's a poly I haven't seen a podcast like that, so I'm gonna give it a go.
I I love it and I will be one of the first people to listen to it. I'll tell you that much right now. I mean, I I grew up in a trailer, I love epistemology, so I think it will be right up my alley. Well, I grew up in a trailer too. So actually, the first house we lived in was a 200-year-old log cabin that then we built a uh a double white trailer right in the back, and uh that's what I lived in from eighth grade on. So and still live in when I go back to visit my family.
You were in you're in Tennessee, right?
Yep, sure.
I I lived in Nashville for a while, um, but never in deep, deep rural Tennessee.
Nashville has come a long way. Uh I actually used to live in the suburb of Nashville once I bought a house. Um, but yeah, that has been some time ago, though. You know, I I've tried to compartmentalize some of these some of these things that you wrote about, and it's it's very hard to do. You know, we all live in our own bubble. And for most of us, we stay at a certain strata, and that is certainly true for me.
Uh, you know, we surround ourselves with like-minded people, and while we encounter strangers all the time, going to the grocery store, um, you know, hanging out in big box retail, whatever it may be, uh, rarely is that a meaningful act. These people come in, they go out, and that's really the end of the day. But yet, your nursing career let you see all swaths of humanity and perhaps some terrifying glimpses into things that might not be human. So I I would love to turn the floor over to you and share some of these experiences that you had.
One of the first things that a successful ER nurse has to learn is that you are not going to like or enjoy being around many of your patients. It is not your job to like or enjoy being around. It's your job to take care of that body and that mind and to the degree that you can, that soul, while they are there. That's that's the limit of your job. You develop those skills necessary to do those things. Most of the time, you are dealing with people who are in crisis, people who are in great pain, people who are very, very afraid, people don't behave their best under those circumstances.
Occasionally you run into people who don't seem to fit into that standard human trauma category. I have many stories about that, but I put together my thoughts about three of them. They were all happened within a five-year time frame or so. Uh, the first one that I sent to JJ, I gave a fictional name to the little girl involved in the story of Gloria. I believe Gloria was nine, uh, she may have been 10, uh, little Hispanic girl, big brown eyes, long brown hair. And she came into the ER by EMT uh with her father, who and her father had been badly injured.
He had broken teeth, he had a broken nose, he had uh one of his arms. I think his right arm was I'm not sure it was broken, but I think the shoulder was dislocated. And he got those injuries by rescuing his daughter from a neighbor who somehow came to have possession of Gloria and had molested, abused, deeply psychologically damaged, and I think was probably planning on killing Gloria. So when you find yourself placed in this position of okay, that's what's happening, I've got to put all that out of my mind. I've got to make sure that Gloria's IV is running properly.
I've got to make sure that her blood pressure doesn't fall too far down. I've got to make sure that she's as psychologically calm as she can be. Right. And so once you focus on those things, they're they're very calming. They're like a mantra. This is you know, this is what I do. Manage this IV, manage these medications. I can't fix the fact that Gloria has gone through this, but I can keep her alive for the next hour. So anyway, we're in that process, and Gloria's mother comes to the hospital.
She was tall, very tall, um, taller than the father, very beautifully uh dressed, very patrician, very uh very much in charge. Now, this is why I mean we we first use the term perfect possession coming out of the Malachi Martin books and a little bit out of the M. Scott Peck books. But when you're in the presence of someone like Gloria's mother, all the rules of how do I perceive this person seem to go out the window. So she comes in the room.
I was standing, you know, imagine Gloria lying on her back, laying on her back, I was to her right, and Gloria's dad was to her to her left, doing his best to comfort her. Uh the mother comes in and she's she comes directly to the side of in front of Gloria's dad. And immediately the ProFootball is back, and so are the predictions.
The feeling in the room changed from one of stress-filled purpose to one of, and I'm going to use the term that seemed to work in my mind. Uh, I use the term insect nihility. It seemed to be infused now with a set of emotions that I couldn't place anywhere as human. Okay, I don't believe that what I was uh seeing or feeling coming from Gloria's mother was human. I think it was absolutely non-human, had never been human, couldn't possibly be human. When she came to the bed, you immediately saw Gloria bolt up, get as close to her father as she could.
And the mother was there was no statement of, you know, oh my God, Gloria, are you okay? How can I help you? Gosh, I love you so much. You know, please come let me hold you, let me let me help you, let me wipe your tears. Right. There wasn't there were no tears on the mother's part. It was a look of uh disgust, a look of how could you possibly have failed me like that? And I think the first thing that I heard her say was, You're not pretty enough anymore. Uh oh, you're and you're broken. I can't I can't use you anymore. It's gonna take years to get back to where we were.
Uh at some point when she would say these things, you would see Gloria, uh, sorry, look like she wanted to, I don't know, compress her body down to be as small and insignificant as she possibly could. She wanted nothing to do with that one. I don't know how she, if this is the woman that raised her, I don't know how she uh got to the point of being a normal looking nine or ten-year-old little girl. Because she did look physically normal other than being horribly injured. Right. The uh this continues.
Um the father is kind of in there, you know, he says something like, you know, get the hell away from her. And then the the mother looks at him once again with this look of contempt. Now, why did this seem to me to be something other than just a dysfunctional family? Well, man, it's hard to talk about this stuff. Oh, take your time. I I I I can't even begin to imagine. So she like I say, she looks at the father as being um totally insignificant and and something uh for whom she feels nothing but utter contempt. And uh then I'm gonna talk about some commonalities in these in these things.
So then the first thing I noticed about her face was it seemed to be like a um a mask. There was uh virtually no there were no wrinkles, there was just this bizarre plastic smoothness. And uh when she would move her lips and move her eyes, your brain didn't really immediately understand what was happening. So that gives you a very uncomfortable feeling. And at some point, uh she looked at me and she her eyes brightened. It's like she seemed to be aware that I was aware that something was not right. I had no idea what it was that it was not right. I had never heard of uh perfect possession.
I had seen the actresses when I was much younger. I don't believe at that point I had read Malachi Martin. I I had no idea what was going on with her. It was just something was not right. Right. And so she looks at me and she says, And JJ, I'm sorry, I can't, I'm giving you the best verbatim words that I can. But it's been a long time. She said something like, like, oh, you can see. And then the look was one of like, oh, this is interesting. And then I think she said, You're gonna learn. Yeah, you'll learn. And that was kind of the sound of her voice.
This is where many of your audience members will start saying, you know, what an idiot. She pursed her lips and she blew directly into my face. And I could smell her breath. Okay. And I mean, the the movies would make it sulfur or they'd make it uh rotting flesh or something like that. But what I smelled was a smell from my childhood that I found very distressing. We lived in a trailer, and the behind the trailer was a a chemical waste dump. And the smell that I had from her blowing on me was the smell of that chemical. Waste on.
Which of course which of course my mother had told me many, many, many times. Don't you go to that, you know, over there, that fence? Never ever climbed that fence. Well, what do seven-year-olds do when they're told not to climb a fence? Exactly. You know, you know, they go climb that fence. So the mother at that point, I did something. I did anything I could figure out to do. How do I break this insect feeling? This uh, and so I just was like, okay, patient, patient, patient, deal with the patient. So I go over, look at Gloria's IV. I think it was okay, but it it wasn't the best IV.
It'd been put in by MT, and it was, you know, not a not a very large gauge catheter. And so I asked the doctor, and I'm not gonna say the doctor's name, but you know, look, um, this is not a great IV. Can I put a large bore needle in, or can you put a pick in, or you know, can we get anesthesia down here to do something? And just that at taking some human control over that situation seemed to bring it at least back to the point where I could deal with it. And so when I had focused again on Gloria, the mother didn't seem as interested in me, for which I was extremely grateful.
And then I had also the fear that, well, gosh, is she gonna turn back on Gloria, I guess? But she didn't. She mainly turned back on the father, and and it it was it was almost as if she she knew exactly what the father had done to help Gloria, and she also knew what had been done to Gloria. And there were policemen around. I didn't see any policemen talking to her. She didn't go to talk to a policeman, she seemed to have zero concern about Gloria. So then she's talking to her husband, and it's berating him.
Things like, Well, I always clean things up, but you know, you broke his damn nose, but there wasn't that kind of anger in it. It was just it was just this monotone, you broke his nose. He's probably going to sue us. He will go to prison. It'll be a lot of trouble. But is she worth it? Speaking about Gloria. Now, here are the things that other things I noticed being around her. When she would talk, and I this is the best I can describe it, it was like there was a a harmonic of her voice, and that harmonic hurt, it hurt my ears to hear it.
I would look around the room trying to see are other people feeling this. And I don't believe they did, JJ. I I really don't. The other thing I noticed with all three of these situations is that when there's that feeling of insect nihility, the the regular rules of the world kind of fall away. Okay. Um, that wasn't the standard procedure. I mean, Gloria should have been essentially placed in a code category. Okay, she's coming in all these traumatic injuries.
It should have been a situation where, you know, people would say to her father, listen, I know you want to be here, but we need to keep this girl alive. Please stay here with the chaplain. Please stay here with the social worker. We'll keep you informed 100%. Right. That didn't happen. That didn't happen. You know, the mother should not have been strolling in there in her, I don't know, Gucci shoes and Gucci suit and talking to the girl without somebody being there to escort her. I shouldn't have been the only person concerned about her IV.
There, it was it was almost as if the people around, it's like their their normal mental faculties were somehow deadened by being in this environment. Later on that evening, I would try to talk to people about Gloria, and it was almost like they just didn't remember her. Oh, yeah, that little girl. Oh, well, she's up in ICU now, or we sent her to um, you know, child to children's hospital or something along those lines. But finally, Gloria's mother kind of glides out the door.
And I look, I'm not talking about her gliding off the floor, but there was this astounding smoothness in her movements. She left the room, she you know, closed the door, and within a few seconds, it felt like a normal, although very painful, human situation again. That feeling of being in the insect world went away. And I was able to get back to my work.
I was able to, you know, get the doctor to say, okay, let's do this, let's do these tests, let's do these x-rays, let's do somebody make sure that you know, we get a urine specimen, make sure there's no blood on your urine, this kind of thing. So once that happens, there's a a feeling of great relief. But I'm the kind of person that can be very, very, very good in a crisis. Nothing happens to me at all during a crisis. But when the crisis is over, I kind of fall apart. And so at some point, I just I had done the work I had to do.
I went to the bathroom, threw up, sat there and trembled for maybe 10 minutes, and then tried to get back into the swing of things, which I really was not able to do that whole night. Challenge for me to even write my notes. I think I think I think I told JJ that I found myself just scribbling on a piece of paper, another term that had come up earlier earlier in my life. But I finally got things done. And I have no idea what happened to to Gloria long term. There was a the only mention in the papers was something along the lines of neighbor arrested for abducting young girl.
And I don't remember ever saying another thing about it. I don't know what happened to Gloria, I don't know what happened to her dad. And I tried to file that memory away into some part of my mind where it made sense and just wasn't able to do so. Wow.
Now you you uh you mentioned the the term um insect nihility a few times, but what exactly do you mean by that? Like you felt like you were in uh like in a vacuum where morals just simply didn't exist, or that you were prey, or both, or something like both.
Do you remember the movie The Fly? Yeah, uh with with Jeff Globalloom. Well, when he's starting to turn into the fly more than he is human, he looks at his girlfriend, whatever that woman's name, Gina Davis, and says something, you need to leave, I'll hurt you. And and there's no remorse in the fact that he's going to hurt her, it's just I'm a fly, that's what flies do. But it when I say insect nihility, when I it felt insect.
Another thing that I've always thought about was the the smile that some of these people had was I mean, the best I could come up with was if a praying mantis smiled, that would be the smile that you saw. And the term nihility in my mind simply means that they're the whole concept of human morality didn't apply. It just it just was not part of what was happening there. Whatever they were going through, whatever they were, they were either not subject to or willing to accept the the moral limitations that humans normally take upon themselves.
Uh so at what point did you actually learn about perfect possession and did this situation like immediately spring to mind of, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I encountered?
Well, it it came it came about some years later. I heard M. Scott Peck on one of the radio stations in Houston, and he had a book called People of the Lie. And he was pretty interesting. Uh so I went out and bought the book and read it, and then you know, kind of realized, uh, this reminds me somewhat of Gloria's mother. But Gloria was much worse than these people. Gloria's mother was much worse than these people.
And then in I had a very brilliant friend in Houston who was, excuse me, very interested interested in these kind of things and had read Hostage to the Devil and started in that book. He talks about perfect possession. And he does definitely talk about some of the things that I that I noticed. Kind of the strange smooth skin, kind of the absolutely indifferent demeanor, uh the fact you know, the fact that they could easily move through the world with no one noticing anything at all.
You know, there was there were no there was nothing about that person, if you were standing three feet away, that you would that would make you think there's something non-human here. Now, the insect Nihility, is that something they can turn on and turn off? I don't know. It was all I know when was when I was with these people, it was a feeling of this is what I am, and this is what I would kind of like the entire world to be.
You know, if if you know, as as my as I have grown older, where some people feel less and less certain of the existence of God, my faith is has grown pretty strongly as my age has advanced. But there is nothing of God, there's nothing of humanity in someone like Gloria's mother.
And why do you think that you were actually able to perceive something as being wrong? Have you ever thought about that? Do you have any answers?
Um, I came from a very abusive household um when I was young, and I developed extreme awareness, hyper-vigilance of people's emotions, sounds of people's voices, body postures. When was something about to happen? Uh sometimes I would be able to head it off of the path. I'd be able to do something, distract people. And it became critically important for my survival that I'd be able to read people like that. And I never turned it off. If I would go to school, someone would come up and talk to me.
You know, within a few seconds, my brain was telling me happy, sad, scared, exhausted, hopeless, you know, loving, hating, you know, whatever they were. I could pretty quickly perceive the emotions of others just through very minimal changes in their face or changes in their voice or changes in their posture. Right. I can only assume that that gave me a leg up on noticing that something was wrong with Gloria's mother.
I also think that for some reason Gloria's mother kind of wanted me to know whether that was to frighten me, uh, to make it to where Gloria felt she had no allies, to make it to where I'd be so frightened I'd just flee the room. Those are the only answers I can give you. I I I don't know other than that.
Wow. You know, our lizard brain, we recognize danger on you know, instinctive level, but but yeah, I I think that there are times in which even that can, you know, of course we drown that out with oh, things like that can't happen. You know, we we're all rational, we're all good to go. But even more, I think that there are just situations in which that can be so overwhelmed that I mean you're not even left with an option of flight or fright, whatever that is. It's more of a you're just kind of stuck with whatever you got.
Yeah, flight, flight was not an option. I mean, if I were to say, hey, look, I'm out of here, uh, that would greatly diminish my my obligation to Gloria or greatly diminish my meeting, my obligations to Gloria. Oh, absolutely. It would not be professionally proper. And even though you you can't let yourself with most patients get into this deep emotional connection to them, okay, I'll I'll use the word. There there is a type of, I don't know how the Greeks would say it, but there's a type of love necessary to render the best care that you can to someone who is not very lovable.
Now, certainly there's nothing unlovable, unlovable about Gloria, but as soon as you see this little girl, you're putting yourself in the state of mind of, okay, I'll give everything I can to try and heal what is what I'm presented with. To me, that's that's what the job is about. You just don't ever expect something like Gloria's mom to be injected into that situation.
In the interest of time, I'm going to cut the conversation here. And in upcoming episodes, we'll go over the rest of them. But there are two other episodes that are fantastically amazing to hear. Uh, we not only go into those two other experiences, but we also cover the nature of free will, uh, the origins of free will, my interest in actually delving into that much more. So I hope you stay tuned. Thank you for listening, and as always, we'll be back with more. 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.