CASE No.6| THE PRINCE OF HELL: The Moffitt Family Horror
In the late 1980s, in the pristine hills of suburban California, an ancient evil set its sights on an unsuspecting family, literally leaving its diabolical mark on everything in its ruthless path. This is one of the most shocking and terrifying stories of the supernatural ever told: the story of the demon called “Mr. Entity.” It’s a story nearly impossible to comprehend—and impossible to forget.
Transcript of podcast narration:
Just south of the rolling foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and Angeles National Forest lies the beautiful city of Rancho Cucamonga, California. Majestic peaks rise over the town, a place that has grown from vineyards and orchards into the home of some of the world’s biggest corporations. With its pleasant streets and homes and lush natural beauty, it’s a great place to raise a family—for most people. But it was here, from 1987 to 1992, that one of the most horrifying and relentless known cases of paranormal attack played out.
The story has been known for years to researchers interested in ghosts, hauntings and other “spontaneous phenomena, but it was earlier this year that interest in the case “went viral” as they say. In March, the Huff Post published an article by a California writer and artist named Jessica Moffitt, who told of a force of horror that plagued her family when she was a child.
Blumhouse, the production company known for its horror films, quickly snatched up the rights to create a film version of the story, which is reportedly in the works as of this writing in December of 2023.
The events began in (not one, but) three houses owned by the husband and in-laws of Deborah Moffitt, Jessica’s mother, and Deborah chronicled them in a book called Unwelcomed, which Jessica illustrated. Jessica is now writing her own book about the events, though she was too young remember any of the saga when it unfolded.
A NEW FAMILY, AN OLD FAMILY
Deborah and her husband, Bill, Jr., met in the early 1980s. At first they were kind of “pen pals” living in different parts of the country who sent VHS tapes to each other, recording shows that the other couldn’t get on their local channels. It wasn’t long before Deborah learned that her new love had something of a shady background: his family had ties to the Sicilian mob. She would also learn from Bill’s mother, Lee, that the latter had been well aware of the family’s involvement with the mafia, saying she knew where more than one body was buried, and that she carried guilt and remorse about the awareness.
It was Lee that would become the main target of a force that Deborah would eventually call “Mr. Entity.”
After they married, Deborah moved to California and took her place in the family, which owned a large lot with three houses on it, situated next to each other in a quiet part of Rancho Cucamonga. Around 1985, the Moffitts decided to hire a caregiver to look after Lee’s mother, Dominica, who was well advanced in age. They found a Guatemalan immigrant named Juanita in the area, who moved in shortly after.
Despite the good relationship between the two women, age overtook the elder, and she knew that her time on Earth was coming to an end. Dominica took Juanita aside and told her she should start to look for other work, as she knew her death was coming soon.
Deborah came to believe that this was the beginning of the family’s troubles.
The Moffitts would soon discover that Juanita was a practitioner of Santeria, a Cuban-based type of voodoo that meshed Catholicism and spiritism. They would later learn that Juanita, fearing for her livelihood, attempted to extend the old woman’s life through occult rituals.
But it backfired.The night Dominica died, Juanita returned to the house. In the wee hours, she called Deborah, frantic. Deborah and her husband flew from the house to see what the commotion was about, but as they crossed the lawn to head next door, Juanita came running out of the house, screaming for help. Her panic was so great that she fell down the stairs.
The Moffitts were frozen in their tracks. They watched what they described as a ball of energy following behind Juanita, as if chasing her. As the woman fled the house, a cloud of light flew up into the sky and dissolved.
Juanita collapsed. Still in shock and trembling, she later told Lee: Don’t ever go back to that house again.
A few weeks later, Lee—despite the warnings—went next door to clean in preparation to rent out the house. There, she found candles, blood, feathers and—to Catholic Lee’s deep distress—a scattering of broken rosaries.
IT BEGINS
After their wedding, Deborah and her husband had lived in Bill, Jr.’s house, the third of the family’s three adjacent homes. They decided shortly after to move into his parents’ home, as Bill, Jr. had a serious medical condition, and the family wanted to be together. After the move, they found a tenant, Monty, for the former home, but soon things began to happen around this house and this tenant as well.
At first, it was the tenant’s belongings. His personal items would inexplicably appear in the middle house, where the Moffitts were all now living. Baffled, the Moffitts felt unable to even return them. How could they explain being in possession of them?
The Moffitts had leased the house with the understanding that the tenant had the run of the place—with one exception. Deborah’s husband kept a room in the house for his sports memorabilia—a prized collection. He kept the door locked but occasionally visited the room after the tenant moved in. One day, he and Deborah visited, and Bill, Jr. unlocked the door to find that a large number of his bobblehead figures had been formed into a huge triangle on the floor. The door had been locked, as usual, and only Bill Jr. had a key.
Of course, the Moffitts assumed the tenant had done it, but when confronted he vehemently denied it.
Not longer after, the tenant began telling the Moffitts he was uncomfortable in the house. He said he felt something was trying to contact him, and he admitted to using a Ouija board to attempt that. Then, one day, he said he was moving out—and was gone without another word.
In the vacated house, the Moffitts found symbols scratched into the walls. Triangles, crosses, Xs and other unknown inscriptions. Again they thought the tenant was behind this esoteric vandalism. In the memorabilia room—still locked—they found all of Bill Jr.’s memorabilia facing backwards.
At the same time, things were escalating in the main family house.
Deborah told the late radio host Art Bell that, during this time, the phenomenon wasn’t threatening.
“It was amazing.”
Things would disappear from one room and appear in other rooms in the literal blink of an eye. Furniture, lamps, etc. moved with, seemingly, a will of their own. Sometimes an entire roomful of furniture would be switched with that of another. But there still didn’t seem to be an intelligence, let alone a hateful one.
Except for one thing.
Lee found that someone or something had placed a pair of men’s briefs over the head of the statue of Jesus on her bedside shrine. Suspecting one of the family, she let it go.
Confident that whatever this was was now focused on the main house, the Moffitts cleaned the husband’s old house and decided to rent it again.
The new tenants were a quiet man named Tom and his girlfriend, Michelle. Though the man seemed initially nice and kind, it wasn’t long before the girl began telling Deborah that the boyfriend was changing. The man who had been loving and sweet was now hostile and physically abusive. On one occasion, she tried to explain away a black eye, and Deborah told her she’d better get out before something worse happened.
Then the girl disappeared.
Deborah assumed the young woman had taken her advice and gone to a shelter or sought refuge with family or friends. She was glad she was gone, hopefully to safety and future peace, and hoped things would be resolved.
Then, without a word, Tom—the tenant--was gone, too.
They never heard from either of them again.
A few weeks later, there was a man who came around, knocking at the door, asking about Tom. Deborah told her he’d left without saying anything, and after a moment of silence, he asked, “Did you hear what happened to Michelle?” The visitor told Deborah that police had found her body, wrapped in a rug in a landfill.
Mostly because of the family connections to the mafia, the Moffitts never went to the police about the visitor’s story. It seemed bogus, or so they told themselves. Surely the visitor was lying or crazy. But when they cleaned the vacated house, one of the rugs was missing.
A NEW START
Events continued to escalate on the Moffitt property, among the three houses, and eventually the family decided to sell the houses and move. On their last day on the lot, they were packing up the last boxes in the main house when they heard what sounded like a bomb had hit the kitchen. Rushing down to investigate, they found the cabinets had been ripped off the walls. While staring, dumbfounded, at the remains, a huge crash ripped through the upstairs. Running back up, they found the bedroom windows blown out as if by a hurricane.
That night, with the cars full of boxes, the Moffitts left the family dog at the house to collect in the morning, but when they returned, the dog had been pulled halfway through one of the four-inch-wide spaces in the wrought iron fence.
It was dead.
The damage prolonged their total departure from the houses where everything had begun, but when the Moffitts were finally settled in the new house, it was like paradise. Bill, Jr.’s mother and father lived upstairs in a beautiful suite of their own, and downstairs Deborah and her husband enjoyed their own space.
About three weeks after the move, a picture of Lee’s sister was found turned backwards. Lee said maybe it was her dead sister, saying hello.
But they all knew the thing had followed them.
It was after the move that the poltergeist activity started. Bangings, screaming, knockings—all became part of daily life in the new house. The mysterious symbols they’d seen at the tenant’s house also began to mark every part of the house and every one of their belongings. Xs, crosses, wheels and other marks were scratched into the plaster and the molding, cut into the bedding and clothing. In particular, one symbol appeared more and more often:
A triangle with a squiggly tail.
One day, they found the symbol had been cut out of a 14-foot-long rug. On another it was carved out of one of the mattresses. Later, it would be scratched into the family car.
One night, soon after the move, the family was serenaded by what sounded like Native American drumming. BUM-bum-bum-bum bum! BUM-bum-bum-bum-bum! for hours through the night.
Then the messages started.
They found the first of them one afternoon, written in soap on the bathroom mirror.
“Talk to me,” it said.
AN UNCANNY CHANNEL
At first, the entity pretended to be Lee’s deceased sister, as Lee had hoped it was when she’d seen the picture turned around. The thing used the dead sister’s nickname of Nee-Nee to convince Lee of the truth of the claim, but they all knew from the start it was lying.
At first, of course, every person in the family thought one of the others was responsible, but all denied it.
And so, to test their suspicion of one another, the four of them would write a question on the mirror, then shut the door and ask a question. They’d open the door after, and there would be writing.
Exasperated and in awe of what was happening, they finally asked of the writer:
“What is your name?” writing it, again, in soap on the mirror.
Then they filed outside the bathroom, closed the door, and waited.
When they opened the door, the entity had answered. On the mirror, in soap, was written:
“Prince.”
TARGET
Scores of messages later, the family knew that one message encompassed all of them:
“I hate Lee.”
It was Lee who was the target of this thing. Over and over the thing, through the writing, said it hated her, was going to kill her.
That she was going to die.
The thing tormented her day and night. It cut the arms out of her clothes, bleached her clothing hanging in the closet, cut up her wallet and money and I.D. cards. Over and over, it pulled off the heads and left arms of her religious figures, including that statue of Jesus. Knives would be found on Lee’s chair, in her bed, and stuck deep in the walls of her room.
At the beginning there was little writing and a lot of destruction. Though it focused on Lee, no part of the house was safe from its wrath. The thing decimated every room in the house, gouging its symbol into the walls, floors and doors, until everywhere was marked with its symbol.
It used baby powder, Vaseline and grease to draw it on the carpets, the furniture and even the car.
A triangle with a squiggly tail.
On one occasion, Deborah walked into the small master bedroom, and the four-poster bed—too large to turn without taking it apart—was standing on end, on a single leg. It hovered there long enough for her to take a picture.
On one occasion, a detailed, elaborate wheel was drawn on the mirror, with a variety of names etched with soap within the spokes. At the bottom was the name, “Baal.”
Lee, a Catholic who had not been to church for many years but prayed at a bedside shrine each night, believed she was being punished for her sins. Ashamed, she long rebuked the family when they talked about bringing someone in to help. Finally, however, she relented.
SHIP OF FOOLS
The first person they called was a priest.
When he arrived, he stood in the foyer and wouldn’t go any further into the house. He flicked holy water into the parlor and muttered some prayers. Even Deborah, not Catholic or religious at all, said, “Aren’t you supposed to go from room to room?” He said no, that it was fine.
Then he said, “I have to go.”
Lee tried to explain that they desperately needed help, more help than this. She began to tell him the horrifying details of their situation. He turned to Deborah, made the “crazy” sign with a finger to his temple, and ran out.
No one could get rid of it.
The Moffitts began bringing in every kind of “help” they could think of in an effort to drive out the thing Deborah now called “Mr. Entity,” refusing to call it by its stated name of “Prince.”
After each left, the entity would critique them with soap writing, saying “This one was a joke” or “This one had no power.”
Mr. Entity also repeatedly wrote, simply, “fools.” Deborah knew that one was meant not only for their string of visitors, but for the Moffitts themselves.
Mr. Entity took to bringing up things from the past, often shameful things the family members had done. And it began making predictions about the future, and about things that had happened far away that no one could have known.
A few days after the famed parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo came to the house to investigate, the entity wrote, “Scott Rogo is dead” on the mirror. Deborah erased it and pressed for more information. Mr. Entity replied that he’d been murdered. The news that night confirmed it was true. A still unknown assailant had stabbed Rogo to death in his home.
Mr. Entity seemed to speak all languages, and often wrote in a variety of them on the mirror. Its repertoire included an obscure dialect from Sicily—Tobresh--that only Lee and Bill, Jr. could understand. They would speak to one another in Tobresh, thinking Mr. Entity couldn’t understand them, and the thing would comment on their conversation—in Tobresh.
Ed and Lorraine Warren came in the winter of 1989. They stayed a long time. Lorraine, a self-proclaimed “light trance medium” said there was a very ancient, very intelligent and very evil being in the Moffitt house--one of the most powerful she’d ever encountered.
Deborah would later remember Lorraine turning to her husband, sitting next to her and saying:
“This is bad, Ed.”
After an initial investigation, the couple returned to do a “rite of provocation” designed to force the thing to show itself. When Ed began the rite, Bill, Sr. began to change. His arm curled up to his chest, and his body became hunched over. Ed held what he said was a relic of the True Cross on which Jesus had been crucified. Later, Deborah would believe that Mr. Entity had entered the old man to speak through him.
Ed said, “God protects me. Christ protects me.” He told the thing that the piece of wood he held would shield him from any harm.
In response, the old man said he would bite off Ed’s hand, chew the relic to pieces and spit the pieces in his face.
The Warrens arranged for an Episcopalian priest to come to the house to exorcise it. At first the family all agreed to the visit, but then Bill, Sr. told Lee that she could be excommunicated from the Catholic Church for agreeing to this visit from a foreign priest. When the priest arrived, his entry was barred, and the exorcism never happened.
After the Warrens’ visit failed to bring relief, the Moffitts continued to bring in every manner of occultist to try and rid their lives of Mr. Entity. They brought a Native American shaman, who said he put the spirit into the family dog. After the dog became ill and died, the events began again. They brought in a witch from a nearby occult shop, who performed a ritual in the house and announced that Bill, Jr.’s illness had created a sort of tangible negativity that was now tormenting him. The talismans she left behind were found in the swimming pool a few hours after she left. Two local women came in, promising to get the thing to show itself so they could banish it. Deborah recalled later that it was the only time she ever heard the voice of Mr. Entity. Its sinister laugh could be heard thundering through the house as they went from room to room, and it slammed the doors behind and in front of them until they fled. A magician came and placed eggs around the parlor, chanting something in Spanish. When the eggs started pelting him with violent force, he quickly made his exit. A voodoo priestess came from Louisiana, and—in desperation—the family allowed another practitioner of Santeria, hoping the cause might also hold the cure.
Then, the Moffitts turned to science for help, reaching out to Thelma Moss, founder of the parapsychology lab at UCLA. The famed parapsychologist Kerry Gaynor arrived to investigate, but the investigation included a séance, in which a psychic medium supposedly revealed the “truth” behind the family’s affliction. She said the spirit in the house was that of Deborah’s uncle, who’d been accidentally drowned by her grandfather as a child. The torment of Deborah’s family was his revenge.
They called Loyd Auerbach, another well known parapsychologist, who came to investigate, but left baffled.
By the time Evelyn Paglini arrived, the thing had taken over the entire upstairs suite where Bill, Sr. and Lee had been living. The whole family, now with babies in tow, slept in the downstairs master bedroom together. Paglini, a witch from Chicago, wasone of the most anticipated of all who came to the Moffitt house to offer help. Paglini was held in high esteem by people like Art Bell. She definitely “put a spell” on people with her intelligence and charisma. Mr. Entity was extremely comfortable with Paglini. The thing would write to her in symbols on the mirror, and she would respond in kind, with symbols of her own. She claimed that the entity was one of the seven princes of Hell.
Paglini announced that someone in the house was giving the thing permission to stay, and so she couldn’t get it to go.
She performed a ritual to disclose who it was. That night, Bill Sr. woke up choking, unable to breathe. After a minute, with the family gathered around thinking he would die, he swiftly stopped and fell back asleep.
“It’s him,” Paglini said the next morning.
Before leaving, Paglini made a last-ditch suggestion to Deborah: give Mr. Entity a room of its own, and it will leave the rest of the house alone.
But Deborah refused.
What Paglini said, however, made more and more sense the more Deborah pondered it.
Earlier on, after those first months of threatening, hateful messages toward Lee, Deborah had finally asked Mr. Entity why it was targeting her mother-in-law, a sweet little old lady. In a detailed response, so long that for a good half hour Deborah had to keep erasing the writing to give the thing more space, the entity spun the most detailed of its many convoluted tales. Hundreds of years ago, it claimed, Lee had—in a former life, of course—been a nun at a monastery in Europe. At the monastery were monks who worshipped Satan, and they had prepared a blood ritual to sacrifice Lee to this particular demon: Mr. Entity. But something had gone wrong, and the girl had escaped.
The entity had been cheated. Lee belonged to it, and the thing had come to collect his due.
The family began to believe that Bill, Sr. had warmed up to the entity’s plan to destroy Lee. There was talk later about the wealth Lee had inherited, and about the fact that the couple had no shared bank account. The money was all hers and would only be his if she died. Though the entire odyssey, Deborah observed that Lee’s husband made no effort to protect her and seemed nonplussed by the entity—totally unafraid--,while the rest of the famiy lived in terror of it. Deborah first began to suspect something when Bill began to go into the bathroom and write on the mirror, alone. A few minutes later, he’d go back in and erase what the thing had written back.
And then, in the messages, Mr. Entity began to encourage Bill to kill his wife.
After weeks of chiding, it even provided a weapon.
TOO FAR
One day, a long iron spear appeared next to Bill, Sr.
On the mirror appeared the message:
“I want a blood ritual.”
The Moffitts took the spear to the Los Angeles history museum. There, experts—intrigued and baffled—declared it to be from the Belgian Congo in Africa. It was some two hundred years old, they insisted, but looked like it had been forged yesterday.
Back at home, the Moffitts asked Mr. Entity where the spear had come from.
“The Congo, “ it answered.
When Deobrah made it clear there would be no blood ritual, the thing blew out all of the upstairs windows.
It had now been six years since Mr. Entity’s torments had begun.
Deborah and Bill, Jr. finally convinced Lee that she had to force her husband to leave the house, but the activity kept on.
One of the last to come to help was Brian Hurst, a self-described “medium” who brought a young investigator named Gary with him. Mr. Entity seemed to hate Gary almost as much as Lee, and Gary was in awe of the thing’s power, even after it took to ripping out Gary’s hair. Despite the abuse, Gary began to think of inviting the entity to possess him—and to come with him to England, where he would soon be moving. Down on his luck, he thought Mr. Entity, with its tremendous power, might grant him some kind of power of his own and help change his life.
At first the thing wrote on the mirror in response to Gary’s invitation, refusing to go and calling him an “inferior being.”
Then it changed its mind.
Mr. Entity agreed to go with Gary. It wrote, “You are now my servant,”
After Gary had packed up and gone, the Moffitts found a final message on the bathroom mirror:
“Good-bye, my family.”
Several weeks later, Gary told Deborah that the thing had carved its symbol into the door of his new apartment.
Then they never heard from him again.
ROOTS … AND A RESURRECTION
Deborah still lives in the house in Rancho Cucamonga. Twenty-five years have passed since Mr. Entity left that last message to her bedraggled clan. Her children, too young at the time to remember all that had transpired, grew up knowing nothing of what had happened.
During the turmoil, visiting “helpers” had repeatedly told Deborah to destroy the thousands of photographs the Moffitts had taken of the destruction—the symbols, the mirror writing, the mess—, believing the photos were “giving power” to the thing. Deborah got rid of them all.
Years later, after Bill Jr.’s death, she found that he had kept copies of hundreds of the images. With everyone else dead who had witnessed the family horror, she decided to break her promise of secrecy and finally tell the story.
Many have tried to deduce just who or what Mr. Entity was. A popular claim is that it was a “djinn.” A djinn is a mythical Muslim or Arabian entity, a “trickster” spirit that’s supposedly lower than a fallen angel (demon). Some searched through occult books to find an identity behind the thing’s signature sign, including a self-described “light worker” from Carson, California, David Zubrinsky. He showed Deborah an old book with the familiar symbol in it, and the words, “Demon of Destruction.” One caller to the Art Bell show said that he had seen that symbol while serving in Afghanistan, and that it was the symbol of a powerful djinn that was the “head of the devils.”
Djinn, fairies, sylphs, nymphs . . . none of these “spirits” are actual separate beings. They are all demons: fallen angels. Over millennia, these fallen angels have appeared in many forms in many cultures, adopting various guises and, of course, inspiring entire systems of folk beliefs and leading people to believe that there is an extensive taxonomy of spiritual beings. They think it’s hilarious that we have bought into these beliefs for so long, and they consider these beliefs a huge victory over humanity: we love our little paintings of fairies and gnomes, and we love talking about “protector spirits” and “evil spirits” as well.
There isn’t a taxonomy.Mr. Entity wasn’t a “djinn.”
Mr. Entity was a demon.
God help and bless this family. I pray for them and thank God for delivering them. What I’m about to say has no ill will in it. What I’m about to say I only know from personal experience in my own life, so I mean no judgment.
There were many things gravely wrong with the family’s response to this demonic attack. Deborah said that communication was everything to the demon. It insisted that the family talk to it. If they didn’t write responses on the mirror, it would destroy the house. It also encouraged the family to get a Ouija board to talk to it.
We talked about this just last week when we discussed EVP: never, ever talk to a spirit. Any exorcist will tell you that it simply isn’t done. Even St. Michael the Archangel doesn’t rebuke the devil: he asks God to do it.
A big reason we don’t talk to the devil is that he lies. I don’t think I need to tell any of you that this whole goofy story spun by the demon—including the “past life” of Lee, the blood sacrifice gone awry, etc.—was a heaping pile of garbage. Trying to get information about a demon’s identity is a pointless exercise by anyone but a sanctioned Catholic exorcist. Demons love to play with us, invent things and generally addle our minds.
When the Church let them down, it’s unsurprising that the Moffitts turned to other spiritual means of help. I am not at all condemning the family for this; they had tried to go the right route, and the Church had failed them. They were living in, literally, a nightmare from Hell.
That said, bringing in this parade of occultists was insane. Like I always say in these cases, if there wasn’t something there before, there was after these witches, voodoo priestesses, shamans, Santeria practitioners, mediums and magicians paid their visits.
One of the things that was most disturbing to me in examining this case was the fact that the family, especially Deborah, was so impressed by Evelyn Paglini. Paglini was from my Chicago, and I’m very familiar with her. She was a witch. She was also a satanist who broke off from Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan because LaVeyan satanism doesn’t actually believe in the devil. LaVey’s “satanism” was an atheistic religion of pure hedonism. Paglini believed in the person of Satan, and she wanted her religion to be one that actually worshipped the devil.
Deborah said of her, “She was awesome.” Art Bell, in his interview with Deborah, agreed, the two practically gushing over Paglini.
Paglini was not awesome. She was a satanist. Apparently the demon recognized her as one of its own. They even communicated in sigils or demonic symbols. Deborah said the demon “hated” Paglini. Of course it did. She was onto him.
Most importantly, the Catholic Church’s response to the situation was gravely at fault. I fell actual shame and embarrassment and profound anger about the response. This family needed an exorcist. The priest that came was obviously not an exorcist and seemed to have been one of many who (especially at this particular time in history) didn’t believe in the devil. Paglini, in this regard, actually was more qualified to deal with this thing, because at least she believed in the reality of Satan and his angels. The priest should have gone to his bishop and requested that an exorcist be assigned to the case, but he didn’t. Even if he had, the bishop may very well have shut him down.
Aside from all of these issues, the real trouble began with the family—not one aspect of it, but many. It was a perfect storm that created the ideal environment for what was without a doubt some level of demonic presence in the family and their home: infestation, obsession, vexation or possession. The fact that no one in the family practiced their faith was a big problem. Deborah said she had been raised Lutheran but didn’t practice her faith. That might have helped. Lee was “a devout Catholic” but “didn’t go to church.” Those are opposite statements and can’t both be true. A Catholic is bound to attend Mass at least on Sundays and receive the Sacraments. I know from deeply painful personal experience what happens when a Catholic stops receiving the Sacraments. It’s not good.
An old friend of mine is Ralph Sarchie, former New York City police sergeant on whose life the film, “Deliver us from Evil” is based. Sarchie was an apprentice of the Warrens and of late Jesuit exorcist Malachi Martin. When I asked Ralph to help with a case where a demonic presence seemed to be involved, he said he couldn’t help anyone who wasn’t Catholic and wasn’t receiving the Sacraments.
This may sound shocking and suspect to anyone who follows some of the popular exorcists who appear on various YouTube channels the past few years, during the explosion of interest in such things. For example, Fr. Vincent Lampert has gone on record saying that people must appeal to “their own faith tradition” for help with possession. This is outright heresy, but it’s something that I, too, found myself advising before I came to my senses. I would tell people that they had to use the tools and rituals of their own faith to deal with paranormal problems. Big mistake, and I’m gravely sorry and apologize to anyone who took this advice. Only the Christian God can rebuke the devil, and the sanctioned exorcist is the only one who can stand “in personae Christi” to take charge of the situation and bring it to an end.
The Moffitt family ties to the mafia almost certainly also contributed to the powerlessness of the family against this demon and probably also attracted it. For a Christian, unconfessed sin is not only a magnet for demons but also a weapon that can be used against the sinner. Lee’s admission that she “knew where the bodies were buried” and bore guilt over it was a good example of something other members of the family were likely burdened with. In addition, at least one visiting “helper,”—Brian Hurst—believed that Bill, Sr. and the caregiver, Juanita, were involved in a romantic relationship, and that the rituals the latter performed were connected to that (I learned of this belief in his Amazon review of the book, A Deadly Haunting.)
The illness of Bill, Jr. may also have contributed to an environment that lacked the protective power of the “head of the house” Christians name as crucial for the strength of a family against the devil. Yes, Deborah was a strong head of the home, a one-woman army against the demon. But, according to the Christian faith, this should have been her husband’s role. He was too sick to take it. Similarly, Bill, Sr. seemed uncaring of the family, especially his wife—and quite possibly even hostile towards them. Not a good situation for anyone involved.
Finally, the practice of Santeria in the grandmother’s home was about the worst thing that could have been done in a situation so full of illness, shady history and lack of religious practice.
I feel so deeply for this family, and I can only image the terror of living through this. Still, I fear that the worst move of all was just made.
In once again resurrecting this tragedy, Deborah and her daughter are choosing to reopen a box of evil that plagued their family for six years. This often happens after exorcisms. The person or family misses the excitement, the specialness, the wonder, and they do things to invite back the vanquished entity. They usually don’t mean to, but it doesn’t matter.
I understand why they are doing it. I can’t imagine keeping secret an experience like that, and certainly Deborah wants people to know that these things are real. The two books about it are out of print. I know firsthand the frustration of that. And her daughter wants to be a part of thi, her family’s incredible story. I understand that too.
I know that Deborah wants people to know these things are true. That’s a noble purpose to be sure. But Deborah told her story. In not one but two books. Now, her daughter—who doesn’t even remember the events--is enchanted by the story and wants to write her own book. And the rights to the story will result in a film that will almost certainly lead to many, many people trying to conjure the demon that tormented the Moffitts. Because that’s what, in this strange world of evil, people do.
Glance at Reddit to find that a whole generation of young people has been trying to conjure the demon known as King Paimon popularized in the film, “Heredity,” and for decades others have been trying to invoke the demon Pazuzu, after learning about the thing in “The Exorcist.” A whole cult operates around the demon “LAM” famously conjured by Aleister Crowley a century ago.
Many people are so spiritually lost. I have a feeling that resurrecting “Mr. Entity” isn’t going to go well.