Police officers and other law enforcement personnel are in an undoubtedly dangerous line of work. In their everyday lives they are faced with threats and dangers that most of us can’t even imagine, and doubtlessly come across their fair share of strange or frightening experiences and stories. Yet standing out from all of this are the tales from cops of encountering things they have not been prepared for, and from which all of their training and weapons offer little protection. At times it seems that they come across threats that are beyond the human criminals they face, something from the world of the supernatural. I have covered this topic here on Mysterious Universe with paranormal police encounters, and here we will look at a type of such report that show that police have come face to face with demonic forces from beyond our understanding as well.
A classic manifestation of demons reported from throughout the world is that of demonic possession, and besides priests there are some reports of startled law enforcement personnel seemingly encountering this while on duty. One is a story from a police officer on a Reddit thread about police experiences with the paranormal, who claimed to have once picked up a strange woman who he suspected may have been actually possessed. He claims that while out on patrol he happened across a woman who was just standing in the middle of the road in a trance or daze. The concerned officer slowed down and asked her if she needed help, but the woman was completely unresponsive, at first anyway, but things would take a sharp turn into the weird. The witness tells of what happened next thus:
During my whole time with her she never uttered a word, I was left in a weird situation. She had done nothing, clearly needed help but medically nothing seemed wrong. As I am pondering what on earth I should do the girl suddenly starts spinning. Now spinning is not illegal and I’m starting to think this girl is one of those protesters that wind up police (I’ve dealt with troll station before) so I think crack on, spin to your hearts content. Then she loses her balance and falls whacking her head on the side of the police car! Great. So I call an ambulance but she seems fine. Still not talking but she is looking up at the sky. It’s a nice day so fine enjoy the sun. I do some writing and look back at her now bright red face and watering eyes and realise she is trying to damage her retinas by forcing herself to look directly at the sun. That’s a new one on me so now I’m holding a book or something above her to shield her eyes… ambulance arrives and we get to hospital and now she has forgotten how to walk. Now I’m 99% sure she is a wind up merchant but I get her a wheelchair. In the wheelchair she strikes up a ‘I’m a little teapot pose’ and keeps this up for the next hour, zero movement just frozen with her arms out.
Although it would later be pointed out in replies to the post that she may have just been suffering some severe mental problems, catatonic schizophrenia, or just been on some potent drugs, the witness strongly believed that she may have been possessed by a demon or spirit. To illustrate his point, he claimed that a week later he called the hospital to check up on her and was informed that she was still in a bizarre frozen state. Maybe she needs an exorcist rather than a psychiatrist or doctor.
Possessed people have been allegedly encountered by law enforcement in various other cases as well. In an account posted at the Occult Museum website, a witness claims to have been a 911 operator when she got the strangest call of her life. At around 3AM on a chilly winter morning a call came in from a man who seemed to be in utter hysterics, blathering away nonsensically about his sister being possessed by a demon that had tried to cut his heart out. The screaming, inconsolable man said that he was at the moment locked in his bathroom but that the demon was still out there and trying to get in. The operator said of the call:
I ask him a series of questions trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Every time he tried to answer I heard what sounded like scratching and banging on the bathroom door. He whispered “There is a demon in my sister’s body, it has been battling me for days. It got free from the chains…” I swear what I heard next chilled me to the core. This unearthly voice began taunting my caller through the door. It didn’t sound like a 20-something woman. It was low and guttural, like she had gargled razor blades before speaking. She continued to growl and speak in a strange sounding language until police arrived. She let out a terrifying scream when the officers broke in, then dead end.
The witness claimed that her and her supervisor, who had also heard the call, were speechless and scared. When she contacted the officer who had responded to the call he painted an eery and frightening picture of what he had encountered. She said:
Apparently, when my caller said his sister got out of her chains, he wasn’t joking around. She still had a chain tied to a bloody handcuff when the officers came in. Her whole body was covered in self-inflicted scratches, her one eye had popped a blood vessel and was bright red. Most of what she was wearing was also shredded and her skin looked like she had been drained of her blood. She was taken in for a psych consult and as you probably guessed, stayed there for a long time. The brother was okay except for deep gouges in his chest. His sister literally tried to dig out his heart. There was some talk about arresting the brother but nothing ever came of it. I still can vividly remember that voice, it still makes my blood run cold.
More well-known is a case of demonic possession that made it all over national news in 2012, and which was encountered by baffled authorities in in Gary, Indiana, in the United States. The case revolves around a mother of 3 young children named Latoya Ammons, who moved into a home there with her kids and mother in 2011 only to almost immediately begin experiencing paranormal activity. It began with disembodied footsteps heard in the basement, and would quickly intensify and graduate to involve the children, ranging from 8 to 12 years old, being seemingly attacked and possessed by demonic forces. Ammons claims that her children were often pushed, thrown, or even strangled by invisible forces, that objects would fly across rooms, doors would be pounded on or slammed open, lights would turn on and off by themselves, and that a plethora of other strange phenomena plagued them, such as oil dripping from the walls and shadowy figures stalking the halls.
At times the children were said to go into trances or fits, where their eyes would bulge from their heads and they would utter deep, animalistic grunts and growls, and at other times they were witnessed to actually levitate off of the ground. It supposedly got to the point where they were missing school most days. Most of this evil force haunting them seemed to emanate from the basement, and when a clairvoyant was brought in by Ammons to take a look it was revealed that no fewer than 200 demons were entering from there to infest the home. An altar was erected at the entrance to the basement and the family prayed, but this did little good, and the terror continued unabated.
During this time the police were first notified of these events by the Department of Child Protection Services, who were concerned not about demons, but rather the increasing amount of school the kids were missing and the numerous hospital visits for minor injuries caused by the “demonic attacks.” Gary Indiana police captain Charles Austin, a 37-year veteran of the force, told the MailOnline of this:
The sergeant told me that the children had been missing school and there was talk of satanic goings on. He was very leery of it. I contacted some people, high-ranking officers; we decided to take a look. I walked in there thinking this was nothing but a hoax, a concocted story. I was skeptical. I was leading the pack through the house. We walked in and the first thing we see is in the living room there’s a candle burning and a bible and a little altar with a crucifix – same in every room in the house. There was a drawing on the refrigerator done by one of the boys that was Jesus on the cross but behind him there looked like demonic figures.
His mind would change over the course of their investigation. Police and also a Catholic priest Father Michael Maginot who arrived at the house immediately began experiencing strange phenomena for themselves. In the days of the investigation there were also shadowy figures seen lurking about and objects moved seemingly of their own volition, strange oil that appeared from walls which in at least one case caused blisters to the touch, and Austin would claim to have an incident when his car inexplicably lurched forward and then backward on its own. He would say of this frightening experience:
The electric door to my garage would not open. It had been fine before. I pressed the keypad it must have been 10 times then gave up. I exited the vehicle and went to flip the main power in the garage but that didn’t work, then the house and finally that worked. But when I went back to my car the drivers seat was just moving backwards and forwards by itself. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. When I took the car to the shop to get it looked into they said if I hadn’t brought it in it could have caused an accident and I could have been killed because for some reason the seat was about to collapse.
He also claims that after taking pictures of the scene with his smartphone the device went on the fritz and wouldn’t work right from then on. According to reports even the police were spooked to go to the home after dark, and the basement was apparently the worst, holding what looked like ritualistic paraphernalia and belching out a deep sense of dread and unease. The basement also produced a recording of what appears to be a demonic voice warning them away. Austin told MailOnline of this:
All of a sudden this growling voice came from my AM/FM radio. It said, “YOU OUTTA HERE” Then a lot of garbled other stuff and static. I’m thinking something is seriously wrong here. Everyone of us who was there that day in the basement and who saw what we saw, went through what we went through after…we all think the same, we all call it the same. That bit of dirt is a portal to hell.
Father Maginot, who was also skeptical of the claims when first arriving on the scene, also changed his mind when he had his own strange experiences, such as being thrown from his bicycle and being pushed down by an unseen force while in the house, as well as objects moving and footprints appearing from nowhere, and he became convinced that the family was being possessed. He would end up conducting one minor and three major exorcisms on Ammons, who he believed to be the main target, none of which worked until he claimed he was able to find their weakness, which he says was researching and finding out their real names. He would say of this:
It’s a very personal thing. Once you have their name, it’s as though you have them caught. They like to work in mystery and darkness. Once you shine a light you show their limitations and they don’t like that.
He was eventually successful, and to this day both Maginot and Austin believe that this was likely a genuine case of demonic invasion. The Ammons case has drawn a lot of debate, speculation, and skepticism, but as for captain Austin, he gives his final thoughts on the matter thus:
It shook me, everything to do with this. It shook me. This was a situation that was so out of my normal habitat. Did it shake me? Yes to a certain degree it did. You tell me. What do you think happened?
Another police officer who changed his mind on such supernatural occurrences to the point that he made a whole career of it is the retired NYPD Sergeant Ralph Sarchie. During his 18 years on the police force in the South Bronx precinct, Sarchie spent his spare time looking into paranormal phenomena, specifically demonic occurrences and exorcisms. He would eventually quit his work as a police man to pursue this full-time as a Catholic demonologist, assisting in exorcisms and lending his expertise on investigations into the supernatural and accompanying such renowned paranormal researchers as Ed and Lorraine Warren on their various weird cases.
He says that very real evil is rising in society, and that demonic possession is real. He indicates that the signs of demonic possession include unnatural strength, speaking in different languages, having knowledge of events that one would have no way of knowing, a woman speaking in a man’s voice and people making animalistic sounds, as well as a look in the eyes that is different from a normal murderous criminal. He also believes that the growing evil in society is being literally caused by demons. He warned in an interview with The Blaze magazine:
As society pushes God out, no one can deny that that’s happening. There’s a good portion of society that just cannot stomach Jesus Christ and when I see that, I have to wonder where that hatred comes from. I’m not a ghost-hunter, I’m not a paranormal investigator, I’m a demonologist. I’m a religious demonologist. I approach this from a religious point of view. I’m not looking to entertain you, I’m looking to help you.
Sarchie claims to have witnessed exorcisms, paranormal activity, and possessed people on the streets on more than one occasion, and has written a book on his experiences with the supernatural called Beware the Night. His exploits have become so well-known that a movie was also made based on Sarchie’s career, called Deliver Us from Evil. Describing what it is like to have an encounter with the possessed he said in his interview with The Blaze thus:
I’ve been a cop for a long time. I dealt with a lot of emotionally disturbed persons [and] I’ve arrested some pretty bad people and I have never, never in my life in the street seen anything like that. A murderer’s look from a person is nothing like a person who is under possession. Evil isn’t trying to steal your property, it’s trying to steal your very essence, your soul.
In a another very frightening case outlined on the Ghost Theory website in an article by Xavier Ortega, police in Vallecas, in Madrid, Spain, came across a whole house that seems to have been under siege by demonic forces. According to the report, on November 27th, 1990 police were called by the home of a Máximo and Concepcion Gutierrez, who frantically claimed that their home was being invaded by supernatural forces that came in the form of hulking shadow people. Police inspector José Negri was skeptical to say the least, but the voice on the phone had displayed very real terror, and so he went out there with a squad of officers to see what was going on. They were apparently about to get more than they bargained for.
When they arrived at the condominium where the couple lived they found Mr. and Mrs. Gutierrez cowering outside of their home out on the street, and they claimed that it was too dangerous to go inside as the demons were on the rampage. Mrs. Gutierrez was in a panic, and told the officers that she had just been physically attacked by one of the shadowy entities, that it had grabbed her and tried to strangle her. The police went in and found everything to be calm and normal, with no signs of a ruckus and no evidence that anyone had broken into the home or ransacked it in any way. If anything the residence was almost too quiet.
The police fanned out through the home even as they began to think that this was all a hoax, but as they inspected the master bedroom the first of many strange occurrences would come when there was a loud bang out on the balcony, followed by what sounded like a large boulder rolling across it, yet when an officer took a wary peek outside there was nothing there at all and no sign of anything that could have made that noise. The bathroom was also examined, and was inexplicably much colder than the surrounding home. When Negri himself went into the bathroom he reported feeling a deep chill and sense of dread, and the couple would later confirm that this room was indeed a very paranormally active part of the house.
The officers in the bedroom went back to the living room to meet up with the others, and as they discussed what they had seen a large door purportedly came flying open to barely miss one of the policemen. The suddenly very alert officers did a full sweep of the living room but could find no sign of how that door could have possibly slammed open. They were now officially spooked, and two of the officers reportedly went back outside, refusing to stay in that forsaken home.
A puzzled Negri called in the couple to question them further, and a very bizarre story began to form. The couple explained that they had had a teenage daughter named Estefania, who had died several years before under mysterious circumstances after her and some friends had used a Ouija board at school. A teacher had apparently caught them in the act and had furiously ripped apart the board, and at that moment both the kids and the teacher had supposedly seen a wisp of smoke come up out of the broken glass planchette to be inhaled accidentally by Estefania. From that day on, Estefania had allegedly become pale and sickly, and began to complain of seeing shadow figures lurking about the home and that was when everything had started.
At this moment in the story, Negri, who had been merely listening speechless and enthralled, was broken from his concentration by loud bangs and thumps coming from the dead girl’s room. The sudden noise jolted all present, and the officers were led to the room by the girl’s father. Beyond the closed door it sounded as if a wild animal was tearing through, and the police drew their firearms and prepared to burst in, not exactly sure at this moment of what they could expect to encounter in there. When they entered the room there was no one there to be seen, but a crucifix had been knocked from the wall and a poster shredded as if by an animal’s claws. Oddly, a photograph of the girl was found tossed upon the floor and appeared to have been partially burnt, yet with the frame and glass cover still completely intact.
Searching the room, the door to the balcony, which was the only other way in or out, was found to be locked and there seemed to be no way anyone could have escaped the room without them noticing. There was then a loud thumping noise that seemed to come from the room itself, but the source of which could not be determined. Back in the living room, it turned out a strange reddish slimy substance had appeared on some of the furniture as they had been in the bedroom. This was enough weirdness for the police, and they left soon after with no explanation for what they had witnessed. It is unclear what happened to this case after this, but it is a rather frightening and ominous account.
Another account of a house possibly infested with demons was told on a Reddit thread on law enforcement and paranormal experiences. The account seems to involve a demonic presence in a home, and the witness claims that he and his partner went to answer a 911 call from an elderly lady about a domestic dispute. At this point it was a fairly routine call, and the officers involved were not expecting anything too out of the ordinary, but this would change when they arrived at the scene. The cops asked her if she was alone, and she gave the puzzling answer that she was, making them wonder just who the dispute was with. The witness would say:
We say who are you having a dispute with? She says, “oh just this spirit in one of my rooms” immediately me and partner look at each other and give the ole “she’s elderly, it’s prob dementia or something along those line” As we’re talking to her, she’s explaining how sometimes a “bad” spirit comes around. She states that he’s in the back room and (of course) the lights don’t work. We try to tell her that spirits probably aren’t in her house and we have to get to another 911 call. She insists we check it out. So we do. Now, the house, they way she was speaking about spirits, made me believe something was there. When we got the room and she opened the door, seeing a ghost wouldn’t have shocked me. She did say that it’s usually in the corner up on the ceiling. Well, that corner was dark and had the freakiest shadow that legitimately was terrifying. My partner and I shine our flashlights on the whole room and Thankfully, nothing was there. We told the lady, nope, your good, nothing going on here. I said to her “if you feel there’s a spirit there the NYPD cannot help you, go to a local church religious institution of your choosing and best of luck”. We got the fuck outta there.
In addition to possessed houses and demons are lesser defined supernatural phenomena that seem to point to evil spirits and possibly Voodoo magic. In the same Reddit thread a poster claiming to be in the U.S. Coast Guard says he had a very odd experience off the coast of Florida in 2008. They had purportedly been involved in a counter drug/migrant interdiction patrol when they came across a ramshackle boat loaded with Dominicans and Haitians illegally headed for Florida. After ferrying off the people for detention in a makeshift camp aboard their vessel, the Coast Guard went about tending to them and searching through the items that they had seized from the boat, and this was where things would get weird. The witness would explain what happened next thus:
The area that we were inspecting the bags and other stuff was directly under the flight deck, which partially over-hanged the fantail (if you google reliance class cutter you can see what I mean). Well, my LTJG that was going through this little dufflebag pulls out what looks to us as a brick of marijuana or cocaine; wrapped nice and tight in some kind of burlap material and cellophane. Upon unwrapping it we found this shitty old leather-bound book with weird symbols and shit in it as well as a few weird looking wooden statues and other weird little trinkets. Well, as soon as we opened the book and started inspecting these stupid looking wooden statues we hear this blood-curdling shriek almost directly above us.
We dart out from under the overhang and look up on the flight deck to see this older-looking woman absolutely losing her shit – screaming, flailing around, wide-eyed. I thought she was having a seizure but she was apparently yelling out in creole, something to the effect of ‘the spirit has been disturbed’ and that we need to contain it lest death sweep through our ship. Our security guys are having a hell of time getting this lady to chill and can’t even pick her up to remove her from the flight deck. The corpsman comes over to evaluate her and my LTJG and I go back to looking through all the shit we found on the boat. We get a final chuckle out of the weird shit from the dufflebag mentioned earlier and he closes the book, puts everything back in the little bundle it came in, and wrapped the burlap material back around it.
Almost instantly the wailing and panicked shrieks above us stops. I look up at my LTJG with a look of relief but as I make eye-contact with him he glances down at this burlap bundle, walks over to one of the stanchions, and says “fuck this” as he hurls the burlap overboard. According to our corpsman, the woman returned to normal once she calmed down and had no recollection of her manic episode.
I’m not really sure what happened that day but it is certainly one of my top ‘what the fuck’ moments.
Here we have seen just a few of the cases of law enforcement allegedly coming across things beyond their understanding and for which their training has not really prepared them for. What have these officers of the law witnessed and experienced? Is there anything to these tales? If these stories are to be believed, then it seems that as they do their jobs to serve and protect, human enemies are not the only threat that faces officers of the law.
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