This is part five 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
EXORCISMS WORK BEST, ACCORDING TO TRADITION, if they are a surprise. Like interventions.
Dr. Mosso was fully aware that his experiment was already hazy around the edges. That his fellow scientists would laugh at the idea of conducting an exorcism under laboratory conditions to try and see good, or God, or whatever we call it, defeat evil.
It was too much of an additional risk to let Maria in on his planned experiment, lest he prepare the demon inside her for what was to come and skew it further. So he told her that he wanted her to undergo a normal MRI scan, without telling her what for, and set the date for April 6, 2017.
On that day, with the approval of Maria’s parents, he gathered his team at a specialist cancer hospital, in a small private room dominated by a large General Electric MRI scanner — essentially a mechanized gurney and a mechanical tube in the midst of a magnet assembly just big enough to contain a person.
The machine would use magnetic fields and radio waves to produce a detailed picture of Maria’s soft tissue. Specifically, her brain. It was linked to a control room on the other side of a glass partition window. Lights and cameras poked through a tile ceiling to illuminate and capture the scene.
More than a dozen people tried to find space around the machine and in the control room. They included the original team that designed the experiment: Mosso, Dr. Castaneda and a gynecologist. A neuropsychologist, a neurosurgeon, a diagnostic radiology physician and two radiology technicians would administer the scan and interpret its results. Maria’s parents and an aunt wanted to observe. And hidden nearby was Father Cuitlahuac, ready to begin the exorcism as soon as Maria was securely inside the machine. They waited.
Subscribers get every piece of every quarterly series, full access to the Bungalow archive, and a free trial, so you can start with a full series and cancel any time.
RAVI SOMAIYA is the founder of Bungalow. You can email him here.