A still from a video of Maria’s exorcism
This is part four of a true series of stories about a surreal and unsettling medical experiment in Mexico City in 2017. You can read the other parts here in case you missed them:
03: A murder ignored
DR. MOSSO’S EXPERIMENT WAS CLEAR IN HIS MIND. He wanted to find a person who was possessed by a demon.
He wanted to bring that person for assessment by specialists in exorcism, in psychiatry and in various facets of physiology. And then he wanted to bring the group to a giant hospital MRI machine.
As the patient was pulled entirely into the scanner, a priest would begin the exorcism rites, and the same specialists would observe and note what happened. His aim was to see inside the human brain in the grip of evil, and to banish that evil, and to watch it all in real time. To see God at work.
He was aware that it was not traditional science. But half of his family were shamans, who lived in the mountains and barely spoke Spanish. His aunt could leave her body and possess others. “She did it with me,” he says. “She did a series of things to me that, well, I think now is not the time to go into it. But she awakened in me the study of those areas that humans can’t explain yet.”
Dr. Mosso assembled a team of specialists: the medical director of a psychiatric hospital in Mexico City; a priest, Father Cuitlahuac, who performed exorcisms at Rectoría del Espíritu Santo, an old yellow church in the east of Mexico City; a neurosurgeon; and a gynecologist.
They began to search for the perfect subject, a person who was, according to the Catholic Church, definitively possessed. It was complicated by the fact that many people, usually young women, in Mexico claim to be possessed. It has the effect of getting fathers and brothers, and the mothers who fear them, to listen. The devil has a power that overcomes the word “hysterical.”
They found Maria in 2016. She was 29 and pretty, with short, black curly hair. For her whole life, her family had seen her as difficult. Troubled. They prayed for her. If only Maria could get it together. So much potential.
The team conducted tests and quickly ruled out “anatomical and functional defects of the central nervous system.” So they commissioned a psychological profile — functionally, a long conversation in which they listened to Maria’s story — in December 2016.
She was an only child, they discovered. Her family seemed highly dysfunctional. Her father, 60, was a doctor. He had rejected his daughter at first and was described as a heavy drinker, intolerant, abusive and unfaithful. He, and the other men in the family, Maria’s uncles, were hardcore Freemasons who believed in ancient rituals. Her mother, 56, a secretary and floral designer, was submissive. Scared. She had been beaten by Maria’s father as Maria watched, powerless and distraught.
When Maria was 13 or so, she was treated for sleep disorders and a lack of energy. She suffered hallucinations, mostly of dead people. Once she saw “a ghost with the head of a bull and horns with the torso of an animal.”
Her first significant teenage boyfriend came from a family like hers, linked with ancient ceremonies and curses. She fell pregnant by accident and had a secret abortion. The couple split up, but he had continued to harass her.
Her family suspected that he had set evil spirits on her. So her father and his friends had built a circle of fire, and the whole family — father, mother and daughter — had been placed in the middle while a rite was conducted to ward those spirits off.
It had not worked. When she was 20, she awoke one night because she felt she was suffocating. That is when the possession, and its gruesome and unsettling episodes or attacks, began.
First, her body started to distort, to make strange and strained shapes of itself. She sensed an entity inside her, one that knew the future, that treated her body with violence, that raped her. Sometimes the entity spoke, often with a dark and male voice. He often called her a bitch.
After that, it became physically painful to pray. Her bones thundered and throbbed when she tried, and she got a pressure headache that ran along her jaws and neck. It felt like her head was becoming encased in marble. She took the powerful benzodiazepine Klonopin, but it only helped slightly.
She tried to study medicine, like her father, but dropped out. She then tried to study communications, film and finally, when Dr. Mosso’s team found her, photography. She blamed herself for the possession. She felt it was punishment for the abortion. For having multiple sexual partners. For giving up college. “I believe that demons come from one’s sins or from one’s ancestors,” she told the team. She had tried to kill herself with pills.
She had undergone five exorcisms between 2014 and 2016. They were conducted according to strict rites that have been revised only once by the Catholic Church in nearly 500 years. It begins with the priest intoning a blend of Latin and Spanish. Usually, the demon will deny itself at first. Pretend it is just the victim. That there is no demon.
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This must be overcome by calling on the saints and on the power of Jesus Christ until the demon reveals itself in an orgy of evil, fear and abuse. The voice of the possessed changes to a disturbing torrent that must be silenced. The exorcist is then locked in a battle of wills until the power of God prevails.
Maria’s exorcisms had each taken eight grueling hours. The first time, according to an account in the study, she made no sound and merely writhed uncontrollably, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The second was also silent, and the priest felt exhausted. On the third occasion, the demon finally revealed itself. It spoke in a strange language, and those present heard drums in the room and the sound of a waterfall. When the demon spoke, it sounded Cuban or Brazilian and named itself as Satan. On the fourth and fifth occasions, the demon named itself as Alencaster, though later it also used the name Olito.
Her parents had been present each time. They had seen the demon. The entity that possesses Maria, in their recollections, speaks both English and “an ancient and strange language.” Maria’s ears move. She sticks out her tongue to an alarming degree, and the pupils of her eyes become vertical, like those of a reptile. She moves like an animal. Large black flies often appear at the times of possession and won’t leave. On the occasion of one possession, a fresh loaf of bread was found to be full of worms.
Dr. Mosso and his team obtained a video of the most recent exorcism. It shows Maria and her mother sitting at a polished glass table. Her father sits just off camera, next to her mother.
The table’s reflection of the ceiling and the people around it makes it hard to get one’s bearings, to know up from down. A male voice firmly intones a prayer to Santo Benito, then Santo Rosa de Lima. (Saint Benedict was known as a wily opponent of the devil. Saint Rose of Lima was a beautiful young woman who tortured and disfigured herself in a search for better obedience to God.)
Maria began retching violently. Her mother and father tried to comfort her, but she spasmed and knocked the camera as she fell to the floor. As the thrashing, retching and screaming escalated out of our sight, we see a bottle of water on the table, full and still, a ladder, and a statue of Jesus reaching beatifically for the ceiling.
Dr. Mosso sent it to a colleague on the experiment, the director of the psychiatric hospital. He watched it at his desk at work. The next day, the computer he had watched it on was dead. He called the IT engineers, who tried to fix it, as the sun set outside the office windows and filled the hospital with dusk. No matter what they did, the computer would only play the video on a loop, over and over. Thrashing. Retching. Screaming. Santo Benito, Santo Rosa de Lima.
They scheduled the experiment for April 6, 2017. ⸭
RAVI SOMAIYA is the founder of Bungalow. You can email him here.