A multicultural, interfaith family in early 1970s San Francisco reported a series of unexplained phenomena. Then a priest with a dark past stepped up, setting off one of the least known—but most well documented—“collective” exorcism cases on record in the Catholic Church.

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Author’s Note: 

In Catholic doctrine, “possession” indicates a spirit entering a person’s body. “Obsession” indicates a spirit or spirits attaching themselves outside the body. The following story is reported from accounts of witnesses and observers, and extensive records of multiple parapsychologists, medical professionals and clergy, including documents and footage previously believed to be lost. This is one of the only documented cases in which an archdiocese cleared a priest to complete an exorcism of an obsession, rather than a possession.

Some names in this story are pseudonyms for reasons of privacy.

July 1973: San Rafael, California

Outside the Carmelite Monastery of the Mother of God, Sister Dolores, the highest ranking nun, or prioress, had been approached by a distraught young mother. On the lawn, the woman’s husband held their toddler son, who laughed at the German shepherd that one of the younger nuns played with while others tended to the garden.

Thin with blue-grey eyes, Sister Dolores, 51, was soft-spoken yet self-assured. She listened to the woman recount the troubles that they’d endured at home. The prioress gave her stock answer to place faith in God. The woman replied that she needed more than that now — she needed God to help her. This grabbed Dolores’s attention.

“Please,” the woman said. “We need help.”

Secluded and sequestered behind monastery walls, it had been years since Sister Dolores had felt real fear. But a chill ran through the prioress caused by something in the woman’s words, something that revealed deep and genuine terror. The nun paused for a moment, measuring the young mother’s character along with her quiet plea for help. With the young couple waiting on her every word, Dolores told them to come back the next day for Mass. She said she knew someone who might be able to help.

The couple was right on time the next morning. The monastery looked like a typical house in the suburbs — except for the Byzantine cupola above the front entrance and the ornate cross that hung in the front door. Russian ikons filled the house, which included the rooms where the nuns slept on wooden beds covered with straw mattresses. Comfort and veniality were considered dangers; one had to live for God in order to help the world.

Sister Dolores watched as the man arrived whom she thought could help the couple. There was little chance of missing him — the man’s long black cassock seemed to flow in the windless chapel. He wore a large, silver pectoral cross around his neck. With a thick, long, dark beard, he looked absolutely serious. He enunciated at the altar with his thick Slavic accent, marking the Byzantine Rite, a service celebrated by Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christians.

At the end of service, Sister Dolores waved over the couple, whose names were Ana and David, to a private area. There the priest waited, his hands clenched in front. He was not tall, but was utterly commanding; his mannerisms were intimidating but not unkind.

“I want you to meet someone,” Dolores said to the couple.

“Father Karl Patzelt,” the priest introduced himself. “I think I can help you.”

14 Months Earlier: Pacifica, California

For Ana Posner, being a first-time mother led her to put the blame on herself for those strange feelings in the months after the birth of their baby. Ana had always been a cheerful extrovert, proud of being half Mexican and half Italian, who had enjoyed staying home with baby Mark after working as an office secretary. But then the changes started, seeming to gradually envelop their household. She hoped she was just experiencing the melancholy that evens out the joys of raising a child.

The peculiarities began on May 27, 1972. On that night, their duplex apartment filled with indistinct noises. Ana, 24, and David, 25, joked that they must be hallucinating from being so tired from waking up with an infant. To some degree, after all, new parents are sleep deprived, overwhelmed and usually feeling under assault.

But the odd incidents accumulated. The Posners would swear they had locked the front door, but then they would find it unlocked, slightly ajar or wide open. They would be sitting at the kitchen table when the bathroom faucet would run — churning, not dripping. They would shut it off, and then it would happen again. They considered contacting the landlord but were embarrassed to try to describe the problems.

The episodes shifted gears from odd to outright frightening. Ana began to hear a woman crying in the apartment. It was sustained sobbing — not a faint whimper that could be attributed to a breeze or faulty pipes. Her imagination? It had to be. Then, the sobbing restarted with the whole family in the apartment: Ana, David, Ana’s parents, David’s parents and David’s grandmother. They all heard the noise and all heard it at the same time.

Ana rushed around the apartment looking for its source. Finally she thought she saw the figure of a woman standing at the window of an upstairs room. Petrified, she asked her mother to look. Her mother reported seeing a sad-looking woman before the figure vanished. How could they explain that?

July 1972: San Bruno, California

Ana felt certain of one thing: something was wrong in that apartment. Her parents, who lived two miles away in San Bruno, offered to take them in. A new mother often lives with the silent fear that she will be inadequate to care for her child, and, for Ana, this fear had become a daily cloud over her as the peculiarities mounted. Ana prayed moving into her parents’ house would be a turning point.

The change of scenery was a relief but not for long. Ana and David collapsed into the bed, exhausted after the months of stress and worry caused by the unexplained events. As Ana was falling asleep, she felt a sudden pressure around her neck: a vise-like squeeze wrapping around her. She choked through shallow breaths. Her eyes darted back and forth as she scanned the moonlit room. She reached for David, who was sleeping with his back to her, but the grip around her neck seemed to tug her away. She opened her mouth to scream only to realize she had no air. It had to be a nightmare. Yet she could feel the sting and scrape against her skin.

She tensed her body from her back to her neck and tried to sit up, but, as she later recounted, that only made things worse. She felt herself yanked down from the bed, and she landed on the floor with a thump.

The force, as she would describe, kept pulling her across the floor, dragging her into the hallway. All of a sudden, the force, the presence, the thing — whatever it was that held her — seemed to release her and disappear into the dark house, casting a moving shadow and leaving behind a chill in the air. David and her parents had rushed after her into the hallway.

The next morning, Ana’s neck was sore to the touch, which seemed all the more evidence she didn’t hallucinate. During the bizarre nighttime incident, her black onyx wedding ring had vanished. After searching half the house for the ring, she found it in one of the spare rooms, resting on a pillow. She hadn’t been in that room for days.

At times like that it seemed that they were being toyed with: household objects like tissue boxes, diapers, baby bottles and even kitchen knives becoming missiles, flying across rooms where nobody could possibly have thrown them. A dinner guest who came over swore up and down that he witnessed plates whizzing past him in the kitchen. An egg launched out of the refrigerator into a glass door, at which point “one of the eggs hit the glass door [and] most of its contents ran down the outside of the glass although the shell and some of its contents stayed inside.”

Ana’s mother, 50, a nurse whose strong family values came from her Mexican-American upbringing, was frantic. Ana’s father, 53, a hardscrabble Italian-American who worked in a warehouse, was confused and overwhelmed. He drank coffee and smoked cigarettes while puzzling over the events. One day, it seemed Mark’s pacifier was tugged from his mouth a dozen times. Their hearts fell. Maybe the baby was just dropping his pacifier more than usual, or maybe the force was teasing that the baby was a target.

David Posner saw it as his responsibility to protect his family, and he would do what it took to live up to that duty. As an engineer, his training dictated that logical answers to problems could always be found by a trained eye. When their front door of their duplex had been mysteriously unlocking itself, David recruited his younger brother to hide with him at night in the bushes outside the apartment complex to spot a burglar or peeping Tom. Of course, they did not see anyone, and to his frustration, he had been unable to find explanations for any of the other incidents either.

David, whose heritage was Indian, Persian, and British, had emigrated at age 14 with his family to America from England, where he was raised Orthodox Jewish. After serving in the Air Force he now worked as a mechanic for United Airlines at the San Francisco International Airport.

Now that he was starting his own brood, he was eager to play his part in continuing to assimilate his family into America. David and Ana had agreed that they would raise their baby as a Catholic; the faith of Ana and her family. Having faith and family values meant more than a specific creed. But nothing had been easy since Mark came, and, since moving in with Ana’s parents, things got worse. Whatever they were experiencing, David was forced to conclude it was unnatural: “something like a ghost,” opined David’s immigrant grandmother, who carried with her spiritual traditions from her Indian and Iraqi bloodlines.

David felt powerless as his identity as the family provider was crumbling before his eyes. Not knowing where to turn, David began calling psychics and paranormal help lines, paying hundreds of dollars for consultations. Maybe they could give him some kind of explanation, even if it deviated from the types of logical principles to which he ascribed.

David spoke to a woman on the telephone who claimed to have psychic powers. Following her instructions, he cut a rope that hung in the garage and used it to make a circle around Mark’s crib. Ana put her cross and Bible inside the rope’s circle. The psychic said only an evil haunting would move the objects, but if it was simply a playful, harmless spirit, they would remain inside the circle. David went back on the phone to report that the objects hadn’t moved, but then saw Ana stumble backwards in shock: The cross and Bible had shot outside of the rope circle, and the Bible was burning.

After that, Ana wanted no part in tempting the occult, but David’s skeptical brother was willing to press his luck. David’s brother was described as “the last of the family to accept the reality of the phenomena.” He convinced David’s father, 50, to join them in an impromptu seance. They arranged pencils and paper on the kitchen table and called on the force to make itself known. As soon as they left the room, as the family would report, it did just that. The scribbled message was ominous: he, child, die, baby, back, baby, stay.

Eyewitness reports of what had been happening worked their way up to the highest strata of San Francisco Bay Area parapsychologists; a field devoted to using scientific methods to study the unexplained. Dr. Lee Sannella — a psychiatrist and ophthalmologist — had excelled at Yale Medical School, was a resident physician at Napa State Hospital and had a psychiatric clinic in Berkeley. After reviewing the Posners’ case and finding it urgent, Sannella also recruited psychologist Dr. Freda Morris, a former professor of medical psychology at University of California, Los Angeles who now had a private practice in Berkeley. The team of parapsychologists took turns spending nights with the family. They monitored the family.

Increasingly, the most helpless among them seemed to be in danger from the phenomena. Mark’s covers were discovered tightly wrapped around his head, and a pillow pushed itself against the face of David’s 79-year-old grandmother. The investigators could hardly understand her thick Indian accent as the usually even-keeled elderly woman tried to describe what happened.

One of Dr. Morris’s associates documented that, in a single night, he personally witnessed a telephone levitate above Ana’s nightstand and strike her with such force that she cried. Later, a Lysol can shot across the room and crashed into Ana. More terrifying than anything else were the fires. Small, quick bursts of flame would shoot up in random places — drapes, bedding, towels and even Ana’s skirt — without traceable causes, then just as quickly disappear with no traces of cigarettes or candles or any other source of fire. Eerily, a list of phone numbers of whom to call for help during these dangerous incidents, which were kept on top of a chest of drawers, also burned up. Dr. Sannella even suffered from burns himself while trying to put out one of the spontaneous conflagrations, as did David’s father. Sannella and Morris were both convinced very real and very dangerous phenomena were plaguing the family.

In Morris’s notes, some of which she would publish in Fate magazine, she concluded that the family suffered “a severe, prolonged, violent” form of “Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis,” a technical term used in the parapsychology community for unstable, unseen energy, also called a poltergeist. “Energy itself is neutral but once you establish connection with it, you’d better be careful,” Dr. Sannella observed. “It’s a force that must be dealt with. These people had no conscious connection but contact was made somehow.”

When it came to documentation and a catalog of evidence, it was seen as a breakthrough case in parapsychology, one the investigators could talk about at conferences and in trade journals for years. But they also had to admit the fact that they were coming up empty handed to help the four generations of this family suffering a crisis.

One day, Ana smelled smoke in Mark’s nursery. Rushing in, she found a sight no parent would dare imagine. Mark’s crib was in flames. Screaming, she pulled Mark out and ran into the next room while a stunned David smothered out the flames.

If parapsychology that was backed by elite degrees and college appointments couldn’t do anything to help, maybe religion could. The family reached out to their pastor at St. Andrew’s parish in Daly City, California.

Ana and her mother frequently prayed for help, and David would occasionally join them, despite their respective Catholic and Jewish religious backgrounds. But following appeals to God, there seemed to be escalations. The incidents also seemed to flare up after the baptism. The case files, as documented by the parapsychologist teams, also indicated that objects of religious and sentimental devotion were often at the center of the unexplained phenomena. At one point the family’s large crucifix had rotated on the wall, with Mark’s bassinet shifting to the same angle. A few crucifixes and statues of the Virgin Mary were found melted. David’s mezuzah, which he had kept on his night table in Ana’s parents’ house, was scorched. Ana’s decorative cross was hot to the touch, as though it might also combust. One evening when baby Mark’s mood went from content to panicked, the family found — to their horror — a crucifix necklace wrapped tightly around his genitalia.

The parish leadership dispatched an associate pastor and a deacon to the Posners’ vacated duplex apartment so the family could show them where the incidents had begun. While there, the deacon witnessed “a paper bearing the Star of David burning on the stove.” Instead of being persuaded by that evidence, the parish authorities contacted the police, insisting there had to be fraud involved, though they admitted they saw no signs of it being carried out. The duplex was placed under police surveillance. The family was told to stay with Ana’s parents, but Ana had to return to the apartment to retrieve some medicine. As had happened on prior occasions, the previously orderly rooms of the apartment were found to be in disarray — with religious icons and furniture moved around — though nobody had been inside. Ana, worried that she would be blamed, tidied up, inadvertently leaving her fingerprints later identified by the police.

Both the police and the parish ended their inquiry, insisting the family intentionally caused the problems. The Posners felt betrayed. When they needed spiritual support the most, they were blamed, isolated and threatened. They had better luck with the kind Presbyterian minister from the First Congregational Church, who came to the house and prayed with them. For a while, the gesture seemed to quiet the phenomena. The Posners even felt ready to move out of her parents’ house. Having given up on their duplex, they found a modest but comfortable three-bedroom and two-bath home in Daly City.

But the frightening phenomena soon began again in the spring of 1973, and it seemed to family and observers to be more twisted and personal. Tensions and friction inevitably grew between David and Ana as they tried to hold things together financially and emotionally running low on sleep and hope.

On more than one occasion, Ana had prepared dinner for the family — the table was set, the food was on the plates and the drinks were poured — and when she came back from greeting David at the door, the food had vanished. At one point in the new house, when David was standing with Mark on his chest, a fireplace poker flung from wall to wall, stabbing into the drywall, loosening, and then — though he knew it was impossible — he insisted he watched it fly across the room again. It was one thing to guard against a burglar or even a murderer. The Posners, on the other hand, were afraid to be in their own home, blindly battling an invisible enemy. They could not seem to outrun or hide from it.

The surge in activity led Ana and David to the Carmelite Monastery of the Mother of God, pleading for help to Sister Dolores. This small monastery was still new to Ana and David. They had begun there after their own parish treated them as pariahs. Sister Dolores showed great compassion toward their trauma while telling them about Father Karl Patzelt.

Then, as they waited on a fateful day to meet yet another person who would probably dismiss them, David nudged Ana when he first spotted Father Patzelt, with his stiff beard, graying hair and piercing eyes. The Posners told the imposing priest everything, knowing how it would sound: physical attacks all hours of the day and night; knives flying through the house; shadows coursing down the hall, leaving chilly trails in their wake; and the endless fires, random and white-hot, like a taunting that sooner or later, they would all go up in flames.

Father Patzelt did not dismiss them. He asked to visit their house for himself.

July 1973: Daly City, California

Father Patzelt, 56, entered the family’s quaint home and stood in the living room. Daly City was a quiet, middle-class area, and there was an early afternoon silence that permeated the neighborhood. He began with a solemn blessing, and then made the sign of the cross.

The priest was certain that this family thought they were experiencing something supernatural, but common sense and protocol dictated that he remain skeptical. A colleague described the priest as defined by “reason, reason, reason.” Yet Patzelt had to admit he felt something when he entered the threshold to this home. There was an unsettling presence.

“Show me,” he said, regarding the locales of the various phenomena.

He followed them to the master bedroom, where he documented black marks covering the walls and ceiling. The marks, according to the family’s accounts, were from shoes that would fly overhead, whether they were stored in the closet or not. Garbage bags were duct-taped around windows that had been shattered; he could feel faint specks of glass dust as he pulled his finger along the floorboard. If this was fraud, they had gone to lengths to contrive even the smallest details.

In both bathrooms, the wallpaper was scorched from towels that had caught fire. He peeled back the wallpaper at the corner, and the drywall beneath it was charred. Dents and divots pocked the walls in nearly every room of the house, reportedly the result of flying knives, boots and the fireplace poker. Ana showed the priest a pile of burned items: a rolled-up rug, curtains and clothing. As Father Patzelt soon would report, the pile included a “dress worn by the young woman [that] caught fire while she walked down the hall.”

David also revealed that the force harassed him while working at the airport; tools would disappear while he turned away for a moment. He could lose his coveted union job upon which they depended. Both Ana’s and David’s parents confirmed what the couple said. As stories about the experiences and exorcisms had begun to leak out, a psychiatrist who never met the Posners claimed they displayed “infectious paranoia and infectious psychosis.” In other words, one family member imagined occurrences, planting the seed for the next and the next to claim they imagined the same thing. The family insisted that the experiences were genuine and decried any notion that they had hoaxed anyone. The very idea was embarrassing to their two proud blue-collar families. What could they possibly gain from making this up?

At one point, as Patzelt spoke with them, David’s attention drifted, smelling something burning. He ran into the kitchen. Patzelt followed, witnessing David stomp a sudden fire that was burning a trash bin. The priest put a hand on the exasperated husband’s shoulder, suggesting that they go back into the living room to calm down.

Patzelt had a way of staying composed in crises and putting others’ nerves at ease. In his twenties, the Czech-born Patzelt was forced by conquering Germans into war; he and other seminary students joined the Red Cross to try to escape the Nazi’s cause. While serving in this capacity, he became a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union for four backbreaking years, during which he was malnourished and mistreated. Patzelt could have had grounds to be angry with God, but it had been a kind of spiritual test, his own personal journey through the desert. He joined a Jesuit seminary after his release. The Carmelite chapel in San Rafael, California was filled with parishioners who had fled persecution in the Soviet Union, as was the Russian Center where Patzelt invited people of all faiths who had suffered under those regimes.

The windows of the center were covered with heavy curtains that made it feel like night during the day. Visitors to the door would be met by the gardener who would open the door a sliver and peek through the opening to make sure that the center wasn’t being visited by the KGB. The organizers and patrons of the center were used to being on guard, with or without worries of supernatural torment.

At another point while Patzelt was at the Posner home, the priest’s questions were interrupted by Mark’s sharp crying. They all ran down the hall. They found that a rocking chair was inside Mark’s crib, pressing onto the child as it rocked on its own power, and poised to crush him. The boy huddled in the corner of the crib, shaking. Everybody present in the house had been with Patzelt in the living room. The priest had seen enough. If 99 out of 100 claims of malicious entities were mistaken or fraudulent, this was the 100th. He knew the shape of evil and believed in its presence here.

To have Patzelt believe them meant the world to the Posners. The experiences had been so confusing, especially given the fact that they continued to occur no matter where the family went, whether their own home, someone else’s, a hotel, or even sometimes their car or a supermarket. Patzelt’s faith in them helped them shake the feeling that other people would always see them as failures, as parents and as spouses who had succumbed to the stress of marriage and childrearing. They finally had the ally they needed.

Patzelt began to formulate an explanation derived from his mastery in Catholic theology and demonology. The Posners’ experiences did not fall into the classification of a possession, in which an entity was believed to enter an individual, but instead it was an example of the lesser-known category of an obsession, in which demonic forces surrounded and followed a person or, in this rarest of such cases, a group of people. The demonic entity had essentially attached itself to the family and now refused to let go. “The devil is not in the people,” the priest said, “but around the people.”

Catholic demonology and the occult presented ample candidates for the entities felt and observed around the Posners. Leviathan was the “leader of the heretics” who tempted worshippers away from faith in God. He was, in his own right, as powerful as Lucifer and Beelzebub. “Let those curse it who curse the day,” as it was written in the Book of Job, “who are prepared to rouse Leviathan.”

As the case history came together, key dates stood out and formed a striking pattern. The very first appearance of the phenomena had been on May 27, 1972, then after a respite, restarted on May 27 of the following year. The dates were symmetrical but that was not all. May 27 had a cruel significance to the cultures and religions of the Posners’ flourishing family tree with their Jewish, English and Indian branches.

On May 27, 1096, crusaders killed 600 Jews in Mainz, Germany who were being protected by the local bishops. On May 27, 1940, Axis soldiers massacred 99 British infantrymen who had surrendered. On May 27, 1971, Pakistani forces murdered more than 200 Bengali Hindus.

To take action against what Patzelt believed were malevolent forces would require a herculean effort. But this young family looked to him as their last hope, a category the former prisoner of war could understand as well as anyone. Over the years, the priest had left behind his actual family faraway, including four brothers who were in Sweden. For the priest, family transcended bloodline and nationality, undergirded by shared experiences at being cast out and abandoned.

Patzelt rushed out a report to the archbishop Joseph T. McGucken of San Francisco. A document titled “Report About a Case of Obsession in Daly City” compiled all Patzelt had learned and observed. McGucken read through the information that included events Patzelt witnessed with his own eyes. “The attacks grew worse, in numbers and severity,” read Patzelt’s report. “Often, [the couple was] knocked unconscious, their sleep was disturbed every night until about 4:00 a.m., and more things disappeared or were damaged.”

Archbishop McGucken had a difficult decision to make. The Catholic Church’s rite of exorcism was to be used only in the rarest of circumstances, when all other possibilities failed to provide information or relief.

Still, church doctrine was clear. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is an authoritative summary of Catholic beliefs, “evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God. The devil (dia-bolos) is the one who ‘throws himself across’ God’s plan and his work of salvation accomplished in Christ.” In other words, the devil was not merely a theological metaphor, but a real, cataclysmic force that had to be stopped when encountered. Pope Paul VI had reiterated that belief just months earlier, declaring the devil “a living, spiritual being that is perverted and that perverts others. It is a terrible reality, mysterious and frightening.”

The recurrence of May 27 in the Posner case was hard to ignore, evoking elements of sacred numerology, a recognition of the significance of patterns in numbers within the Bible. Three is essential in Catholicism — exemplified by the trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, Jesus was tempted three times by the devil; later, he was one of three who were crucified on the crosses at Calvary. Subsequently, Christians believed that Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day. Three to the power of three equalled 27, a kind of mathematical mockery or subversion of the power of the trinity, as perversions of the trinity were often seen as related to demonic forces. The date of May 27, or 5/27, also called to mind 5:27 (chapter five, verse 27), which in the gospel of Matthew begins the adultery section, ending with verse 32 (5 + 27). Through all the case’s documents, there was a strong sense that the experiences were pulling Ana and David’s marriage apart.

On April 16, 1973, the archbishop called in Patzelt that evening. McGucken, a by-the-book and slender 71-year-old, closed the door to his office.

McGucken knew Patzelt’s reputation as a tough-minded eccentric. A fellow Jesuit priest from the University of San Francisco called Patzelt “an intense, unemotional man.” Another priest called Patzelt a “man of steel. Just the right kind of man to perform exorcisms.”

In confronting darkness, Patzelt also saw a path to encouraging faith in others. “There is value in all of this if it brings out the reality of the Devil,” he would say. “If the Devil is real, then God must be.”

With a full review of the files, McGucken approved the exorcism. He handed Patzelt the Rituale Romanum, which contained the Latin and English versions of the exorcism rite. He instructed Patzelt to consult the addendum to the exorcism, inserted by Pope Leo XIII in 1890, entitled “Exorcism of Satan and the Fallen Angels.” The archbishop also gave him holy relics of the cross and blessed icons of saints, including St. John of Vianney, who was said to have battled the devil.

This would be one of the only cases in recent memory to receive authorization from the archbishop’s office. The two men prayed together.

August 1973: Daly City, California

On August 19, the day chosen for the first exorcism, thunderstorms crackled through the skies in the south across Imperial Valley. The chubasco was a notorious category of a storm that churned up dust and sand with 70 mile-an-hour winds.

The Posners went to a service that morning. Sister Dolores tried to reassure them. Dolores, like Patzelt, had been convinced by all she knew about the case, which was no easy task. The prioress had a scientific bent that surprised some. Having studied to be a cytotechnologist, she regularly donned a white coat over her habit to interpret laboratory tests to raise money for the congregation. The nun had once lived a more mainstream life, graduating from University of California, Berkeley and spending free time at movies and concerts. But she had craved more. “I chose this life,” she would say later, “because I love people so much I want to do all I can for them.” She promised the Posners that she and the other nuns would be praying for them.

That evening, Father Patzelt arrived in Daly City. He again blessed the house and asked the family to pray with him. He then told Ana to hold on tight to Mark.

The priest invoked divine protection with a foundational prayer: “St. Michael the Archangel, illustrious leader of the heavenly army, defend us in the battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of darkness and the spirit of wickedness in high places. Come to the rescue of mankind, whom God has made in His own image and likeness, and purchased from Satan’s tyranny at so great a price.”

Before he could finish the prayer, Ana felt what she would later describe as the nerves in her back squeezing — as if something had reached inside her skin and twisted her. She whimpered and had to hand off Mark to David. She was struggling but knew with Patzelt’s assistance she finally had a fighting chance.

Father Patzelt stared at her as he continued his prayer. He believed the devil would try to dissuade him. “The devil has a high intelligence,” he would say, “and he can play a thousand different tricks.” As difficult as it was to watch this poor woman suffer in front of him, Patzelt had to continue.

These demons — some observers suggested — may have targeted the Posners because of their mixed cultural and especially religious heritages:Catholic, Jewish, Hindu influences from the Indian branches of the family tree and Persian influences from an Iraqi branch. This interfaith kaleidoscope, proof that faith in God came in many equally strong forms, triggered malevolent forces to destabilize the family.

By this point in the exorcism, Ana felt her twisted nerves radiate across her back and then up and down her legs. She rolled off the couch onto the floor, which felt as if it were on fire — radiating a crackling heat that slashed her with an electric shock. Father Patzelt finished the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, and then, with one swoop, reached under his cassock and pulled out a relic of the holy cross, his secret weapon. He touched the cross to her knee, and Ana felt a cool wind flush through her body.

The rhythm of the evening alternated between pain and prayer. Ana and David would feel phantom hands choking them and their arms twisted behind their backs to the point where it felt as if the bones would shatter. Patzelt would recite Psalms with hushed breaths. Ana would later report she saw shadows recede into the wall during the rites. Then the house became quiet.

That night, the Posners slept better than they had in years.

In the morning, after breakfast, Father Patzelt called them on the phone. He said the feeling of calm that had set in for them was common. He explained it was an acknowledgement by the demon that it had an adversary, and their enemy was now regrouping. Patzelt urged them not to become complacent. Mark, he said, must be protected at all costs.

Father Patzelt’s warnings, the family would say, proved prescient. A towel burst into flames while David was in the shower. Shadows with indefinite shapes coursed through the house, as though massing for an assault. “One shadow was bigger than the others,” David said as he tried to make sense of it. “Possibly that was the leader.”

The most likely “leader” through a theological lens remained the beast and “chaos maker” Leviathan, often depicted as fire-breathing, enraged by the intermarriage and the baby who carried so many heritages and faiths. As for the army of shadows the family reported, demonology described Incubi demons who particularly target women, taking the form of an “almost doubtful, barely sensible shadow,” as described by Renaissance-era Franciscan priest Ludovico Maria Sinistrari. Their presence would appear as a “sort of black smoke” from which “it might be inferred that smoke or shadow had been the Devil himself.”

A succubus was a female spirit, which King James believed to be a different manifestation of the Incubi. According to ancient Jewish texts and tradition, long red-haired Lilith, one of the so-called queens of the demons, had failed to have children, and her seductive ways often ruptured marriages. Lilith was especially drawn to stealing very young male children, a depiction that could fit with the woman wandering the house weeping in the early months after Mark’s birth.

As had happened in the past, during the exorcisms Ana’s wedding ring, a sign of Ana and David’s union, would disappear. Other signs of disruption during the rites echoed their earlier experiences. A light fixture melted. A music-box figurine turned up smashed. The feet of Jesus broke off from a crucifix. A six inch steak knife rose from its holder, shot out of the kitchen, seemed to turn down the hallway and then stabbed into the wall, in one rapid, violent motion.

According to the family, the strangling attacks continued. The demons “would put a force around our necks and press until we couldn’t breathe,” David explained. “The harder we prayed, the harder we were hit.”

Father Patzelt said that the demons were angry. Exorcisms incensed them. As Mark had grown, past the time when lore indicated he was ripest for Lilith’s snares, believers would view the demon Leviathan as the primary predator. A deceitful demon who both literally and metaphorically tainted the air with smoke and shadows, his participation seemed to provide explanations for Ana’s overwhelming feeling of an unsettling presence and the family’s continued encounters with menacing dark shadows in the home.

“The devil,” Patzelt put it bluntly, “fought back.”

The Posners were ready to do the same with Patzelt’s help. David was determined not to back down, having accepted that he had to embrace a reality he could not fully understand. The exorcisms continued and intensified. During one session, the priest documented Ana being thrown to the floor in the kitchen. Her hands seemed frozen, raised to the sides of her head. Then her head began to bounce back onto the floor, as if someone were raising and smashing it back down. She had to be rushed to the hospital. “Impossible that you could move yourself with that force to your head,” Patzelt said.

Exorcisms were meant to be private rituals. But Patzelt came up with a novel idea as the situation became ever more dangerous. To save the Posners, he had to break the rules.

In addition to the prayer support by the Carmelite sisters nearby, Sister Dolores spread the request to other convents and monasteries far and wide. Scores of people around the country would be praying for the demon to be removed from their midst. Even a prison in the Midwest had arranged a group prayer for them. It was a needle to thread very carefully; they wanted to protect the Posners’ privacy while deploying the power of prayer in which they deeply believed.

Patzelt also solicited the direct assistance of his local parishioners. Unique in the annals of the church, it became a collective exorcism. Parishioners came to the family’s house, spread incense in the rooms and assisted in responding to the prayers from the Bible (it was neither allowed nor prudent for them to speak the specific rite of exorcism, which was considered too potent for lay persons). They acted as a kind of spiritual chorus. They would recite the Psalms as Father Patzelt made three trips around the house, stopping in each room during his blessings. He even asked a parishioner to make audio recordings to document the proceedings, and, if needed, to offer further evidence for the archbishop of what they were undertaking.

Bringing in the community was a double edged sword. It meant word spread wider than he could control and exposed Patzelt to blowback. Church allies backed away and could not protect Patzelt’s reputation from attacks.

“Dangerous nonsense,” one priest called Patzelt’s work with the Posners, insisting it was a cynical attempt to appeal to “supernatural prurient interest” that amounted to a “public scandal.” Patzelt could reflect on his youth in the 1930s and could question whether his joining the Red Cross to avoid conscriptment in Nazi forces had been sufficient; he had temporarily hidden from evil instead of fighting it. Since then, he had embraced tackling the right choice head-on, even if his standing suffered consequences. “My life seems to zigzag all over the place,” he said, “but it is really a straight line.”

There was a more immediate concern than his own future. With every passing day the risk grew that the archdiocese could bow under pressure and shut down his efforts. They had to keep making progress in the exorcisms.

Above all, Patzelt knew the fight ultimately had to be in the hands of Ana Posner. She told him that she “could hear both demons and the Blessed Virgin Mary” talking at the same time in the house — which, to believers, meant that the struggle for their fate happened at the highest level. Patzelt concluded each exorcism service with a choral recitation of the rosary. “This was done deliberately,” Patzelt would explain, “because of the prayer to the Mother of God has always been a powerful remedy against Satan.” It brought both comfort and strength to Ana and to her mother; the blessed mother was central to their Catholic faith, and in venerating her they felt protected.

Building up his strategies for their next, 13 session, Patzelt gathered 20 parishoners at the house on September 18th. Most of them were immigrants who had seen suffering, cruelty and death up close in far away lands; in their minds, they had seen the face of the devil and survived. If the malicious entities indeed sought to shatter an interfaith family because of its diverse cultures and backgrounds — empowered by history’s May 27 massacres — here was the most powerful counterpoint that could exist, a collective of people representing a range of heritages joined with multiple generations of a family with American, British, Iraqi and Indian blood, all standing as one.

Ana held Mark up to her body, and closed her hand around David’s. The three stood together in the bedroom. Father Patzelt chanted: “Carry our prayers up to God’s throne, that the mercy of the Lord may quickly come and lay hold of the beast, the serpent of old, Satan and his demons, casting him in chains into the abyss, so that he can no longer seduce the nations!”

According to eyewitnesses present, the house swelled with heat. It was evening, and only in the 60s outside, but those inside the house insisted it felt like an inferno. Sweat drenched those present. Ana held Mark as close as possible as darkness seemed to spread inside the house while Patzelt continued.

“In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, by the intercession of Mary, spotless Virgin and Mother of God, of St. Michael the Archangel, of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and of all the saints, and by the authority residing in our holy ministry, we steadfastly proceed to combat the onslaught of the wily enemy!” He slowly turned as if to confront the shadows around them.

The reason exorcisms worked, according to Patzelt’s belief, was that faith actually ran surprisingly deep in evil. It was just a perverted brand of it. He was a believer of the sentiment in James 2:19, rendered in the King James translation as: “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.”

The Book of Isaiah had foreseen a spiritual victory to those who brought divine power against demonic forces: “In that day the Lord will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, with His fierce and great and mighty sword.” (Those verses began chapter 27 of Isaiah, another echo of the May 27 dates in the case.)

The heat now became unbearable — they all thought that the house might explode in flames. At that moment, David would claim, he saw an illuminated female figure among them, her light creasing the dark shadows. David turned to Ana to tell her, but she was already looking that way.

Father Patzelt roared: “We cast you out, every unclean spirit, every satanic power, every onslaught of the infernal adversary, every legion, every diabolical group and sect, in the name and by the power of our Lord Jesus Christ!”

The shadows receded, and the heat sifted out the windows, leaving them together in the silent house.

After that most intense session, when everyone had gone home and the first few nights passed without incident, the family felt deep relief. “Suddenly,” as Patzelt told it, “there was peace.” David asked Father Patzelt a question: Why them? “It was a test of [your] faith in God,” the priest explained, “how much that faith would tolerate or break under the attacks of the devil. He was trying to bring [you] on his side by bringing all kinds of trouble and attacks.”

Ana wanted to get a special gift for “Father Karl,” as the family had come to call Patzelt, but they’d spent all of their money fixing their home. It was nearly in shambles from all that had happened. She went back to her secretarial work and David put in extra hours, all with renewed optimism in their family’s future.

The family never made a penny off the events and never allowed their names to be revealed. By contrast, two years later, a family in Amityville, Long Island, claimed to have experienced an “obsession” in their home, much shorter in duration and far less well-documented than the Posners’ and found international publicity and profit.

Behind the closed door of his dimly lit office, Father Patzelt would sometimes listen to the tapes made during the exorcisms. The screams, the smashing, the shaking: It was as if the otherwise normal suburban home was a battlefield. The tapes would raise questions even for him. He believed that God protected exorcists, but there were always moments of worry. It wasn’t about God’s love, but about how long the devil’s duplicitous fury might linger unseen for a family like the Posners or for those who helped the exorcisms. But Patzelt refused to abandon those he felt needed his help, soon beginning work on another exorcism case he called one of the strangest.

Father Patzelt stored the tapes of the exorcisms in a box at the parish. The archdiocese needed no convincing to just let the case files and tapes gather dust, out of sight. They wanted to put the incident behind them. Starting in 1986, Patzelt, suffering from Alzheimer’s, spent his final years at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos, California.

Back at the parish, with Patzelt gone, some claimed the church’s grounds took on a creepy aurora, with one theory connecting this to the tapes from the exorcisms in Daly City. Before reporting for the present article, neither the existence of the tapes, nor what ended up happening to them, were ever known. The tapes were found and burned. When asked today why the tapes were destroyed, officials explained their fear that the demons had possessed the tapes — that, if ever played, the terrors recorded on them could return.

NICK RIPATRAZONE has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and is the Cultural Editor for Image.