Try the Spirits

My father's story

I spent most of my adult life treating the occult as fiction. Ghost hunting, witchcraft, sorcery — I grew up on Dungeons and Dragons and every occult game I could find, and I assumed the whole category was made up.

Two things changed that. The first was reading the Sermon on the Mount properly, and understanding that I was damned. The second was digging into the strange seriously, and finding out it was not fiction either. The darkness is real. And instead of frightening me off, that sealed it — because a Bible honest about a real enemy is a Bible I can trust about a real Saviour.

Then my father spent a weekend on a ventilator, and I was two days from having to decide whether to withdraw support. I prayed one thing: take this decision away from me. The next morning he came back, and he told me what he had been shown.

Listen to the whole story

2 MIN · IN MY OWN VOICE

I write as Doulos. It is not my name, and that is deliberate — but the story is true, and it was never mine to keep.

Illustration: a son sits at his father's bedside in a darkened intensive care room at night. The father lies on a ventilator; the monitor beside the bed glows with a single figure.

He Was Sedated for 5 Days. So How Did He See Me Praying?

Read the full entry →

Near-death

An overhead view of a dim operating theatre at night. A figure lies still on the table, and a translucent form of soft light rises away from it into a shaft of dawn-gold light falling from above.

A Man Says He Was Dead for 45 Minutes. Stephen Never Came Back to Tell Us — But He Told Us Anyway.

The haunting films

Illustration: a boy horizontal off a hospital wall, his hand still gripped in his grandmother's, her arm forced up over her own head.

The Gary Indiana Demon House: What Police Actually Saw

Illustration: a small clapboard house on a corner lot at night in winter, seen from across the road behind a chain-link fence, snow on the ground, one downstairs window lit gold and every other window dark.

He Bought the Demon House Over the Phone

Illustration: a wood-panelled 1980s living room at night, rain falling from the ceiling out of the open air and spraying sideways across the room, a woman in a quilted coat caught in it with one arm raised, a floral sofa and a lit lamp behind her.

Police Watched It Rain Inside a House. Then the Chief Ordered Them to Keep Quiet.

Illustration: two children seen from behind on an overgrown path in dense summer woods, a boy in a green T-shirt and his older sister in a striped top holding a branch aside, both looking toward a boarded, rotting wooden shack half hidden in the trees.

He Read It Out Loud at Twelve. It Stayed Nine Years.

Essay

An abstract dark disc dissolving into rising golden light.

Are UFOs demonic?

Reports

A wheel within a wheel the colour of beryl, holding formless light — a hand-drawn illustration of the vision described in Ezekiel chapter 1.

Pentagon UFO Files, Drop #1: What's Actually in the PURSUE Releases

Illustration: a helicopter at night with two glowing orange orbs alongside it

It Came Within Ten Feet of Their Helicopter

If you are frightened

Something brought you here, and it may be that you are not reading out of curiosity tonight. Slow down for a moment. You are not foolish, you are not losing your mind, and you are not beyond help.

First, the plain things

Most of what frightens people at night has an ordinary cause: exhaustion, grief, sleep paralysis, carbon monoxide, an old house, a medication recently changed, or a mind under too much for too long. The first questions worth asking are the checkable ones. Have you slept? Have you eaten? Has anything changed in the last month?

If it is a house, get a carbon monoxide detector. It is a genuine cause of fear, dread and figures seen at the edge of vision.

If you are in danger

If you are being hurt, or you are thinking about hurting yourself, contact your local emergency services. In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or call 911.

Find a person, not a page

Talk to somebody who can be in the room with you. A pastor at a nearby church is a good place to start, and you do not need to have been a member. A doctor is also a good beginning, and there is no shame in it.

We are a publication. We are not counselors, a deliverance ministry, or a crisis service. We cannot take your case, and we will not pretend we can.

Written by Doulos