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THE HALLOWEEN HORROR

I hate Halloween. It wasn’t always this way: When I was a child, I liked to dress up and collect candy from the neighbors; and when I was a little older, I was one of those guys who would go out with eggs and shaving cream, ready for a night of nasty fun. After I became a cop, patrolling dangerous public housing projects, I saw another side of this holiday: Every pervert and nutjob in New York thinks it’s suddenly open season on kids. At the Forty-sixth Precinct in the South Bronx, where I work as a sergeant, the 911 calls start pouring in. We race from one crime scene to the next, our sirens screaming, locking up the animals who prey on children as fast as we can. But awful as the crimes of man can be—and in my sixteen years on the police force, I’ve seen more blood and gore than you could ever imagine—they’re not the only evil that intensifies on October 31.

Halloween has a malevolent history: According to two-thousand-year-old legends, it’s the night when spirits of the dead roam the world, intent on playing terrifying tricks. To appease ghosts, our ancestors used to leave food offerings outside their homes and sacrifice animals. Early Europeans feared that these marauding spirits had a much darker motive: They were hunting for live bodies to inhabit. To prevent possession, it became the custom to wear a mask or disguise on the Day of the Dead, as this holiday is known in some countries. The ancient dread of this date is rooted in more than just folklore or superstition, I discovered after I entered what I now call “the Work”–investigating haunted houses and demonic possession. Almost invariably, I get a sudden surge of cases around the end of October, either on Halloween itself or the day before, which, appropriately enough, is called Devil’s or Mischief Night.

One of my most harrowing supernatural investigations began on Halloween, 1991. My partner in the Work, Joe Forrester, was putting out candy for trick-or-treaters when he got a call about a haunted house. The caller was Father Hayes, the exorcist for a Catholic diocese in a nearby state. He wanted us to investigate a report of demonic activity in Westchester County, a wealthy county just north of New York City. While this priest had discerned some signs of a diabolical presence when he spoke to the family over the phone, he didn’t give Joe any specifics about the problems they were having. Since my partner and I knew Father Hayes from other investigations, we trusted that he wouldn’t send us out on a case unless it had merit.

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Like me, Joe comes from a law enforcement background, but he works on the other side of the fence, as a polygraph examiner for the Legal Aid Society. Although he looks like a middle-aged monk, with his round, untroubled face and his fringe of brown hair around a balding head, he’s actually an extremely adept demonologist. Not only is he a walking encyclopedia of the occult—definitely the man to call for a quick rundown on Nigerian crocodile cults or Brazilian black magic rituals—but as a decorated Vietnam vet, Joe has more than enough guts to face down supernatural terror. Combine that with the built-in bullshit meter he’s developed from years of administering lie detector tests to con men and crooks of every other description and to the wrongly accused, and you have an ace investigator.

When Joe and I handle cases as demonologists in our off-duty hours, we don’t charge a cent for our services. Helping people who have spiritual problems isn’t a career for us—it’s a calling. As devout Catholics, we take Jesus Christ’s biblical injunction to “cast out demons in My name” literally.

Before going out on a case, I put aside my gun and police badge and arm myself with holy water and a relic of the True Cross.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a religious fanatic and I’m anything but holy, as any of the guys who work with me at the Four-Six Precinct can tell you. I am a cop, and I would rather kick down doors and arrest ten armed robbers with my bare hands than take on the demonic. Plain and simple, the Devil frightens me much more than anything I’d ever seen on street patrol—and in all my years on the force, I’ve seen just about every horror one person can inflict on another: I’ve responded to countless shootings and stabbings; I’ve put the cuffs on people who commit rape or murder as if these crimes meant nothing at all.

I’ve had to tell people that their loved ones have died in car crashes or have been the victim of every terrible crime you could imagine. I’ve seen the broken bodies of little kids hurt in senseless accidents because their parents were too busy getting high to watch them. I’ve arrested drug dealers who turn their fellow human beings into the living dead with their poison—and a mother who sold her ten-year-old daughter for sex, all for a vial of crack. Recently I was called to a house where I found a woman stoned out her mind on drugs. That wouldn’t be particularly unusual in the places I patrol, except that she was stumbling around with a newborn baby dragging between her legs—still attached to its umbilical cord—and she didn’t even know she’d given birth. It turned out that this was her tenth kid: Child Protective Services had already taken all the others because of her crack addiction.

This has been my reality night after night. Dealing with the tragedy and devastation that crime causes has helped prepare me for the Work, to a certain degree. It’s certainly taught me to recognize evil when I see it. When cops I work with find out that I help with exorcisms and investigate demonic activity, a lot of them ask, “What gives an aggressive and sometimes nasty guy like you the right to do this pious stuff?” I tell them, “Don’t you see the beauty of God using a sinner like me to fight evil?” The truth is that I like to help people. When I joined the police force I took an oath to get bad guys off the street, and I have made over three hundred arrests to that end. As a committed Christian, I have a different mission: to bust the Devil and his demons.

I’ve never investigated cases officially for the Roman Catholic Church, but I have worked on official church cases for individual priests. Much of my work is with Bishop Robert McKenna, a Traditionalist Catholic priest and exorcist who has never shied away from doing battle with Satan and his forces of darkness. (Traditionalist churches use the Pre–Vatican II Latin mass.) From assisting him with nearly two dozen exorcisms over the past ten years, I’ve developed the utmost respect for this saintly man of God. If he ever needed me to walk into the depths of Hell with him, I’d go without a second thought.

Most major religions have ceremonies to expel evil spirits. The Roman Ritual of Exorcism dates back almost four hundred years. Years ago Catholic priests were given the minor order of Exorcist, and with the permission of their diocesan bishops were ready to undertake the tasks associated with that order. The problem today is that many priests, clergy of other faiths, and even bishops of the Catholic Church don’t believe in the Devil, even though Jesus Himself performed exorcisms....