Secret Mystery Channel

Exorcism

(See also DEMONOLOGY, DEMONIACS, EXORCIST, POSSESSION.)

Exorcism is (1) the act of driving out, or warding off, demons, or evil spirits, from persons, places, or things, which are believed to be possessed or infested by them, or are liable to become victims or instruments of their malice; (2) the means employed for this purpose, especially the solemn and authoritative adjuration of the demon, in the name of God, or any of the higher power in which he is subject.

The word, which is not itself biblical, is derived from exorkizo, which is used in the Septuagint (Genesis 24:3 = cause to swear; III(I) Kings 22:16 = adjure), and in Matthew 26:63, by the high priest to Christ, "I adjure thee by the living God. . ." The non-intensive horkizo and the noun exorkistes (exorcist) occur in Acts 19:13, where the latter (in the plural) is applied to certain strolling Jews who professed to be able to cast out demons. Expulsion by adjuration is, therefore, the primary meaning of exorcism, and when, as in Christian usage, this adjuration is in the name of God or of Christ, exorcism is a strictly religious act or rite. But in ethnic religions, and even among the Jews from the time when there is evidence of its being vogue, exorcism as an act of religion is largely replaced by the use of mere magical and superstitious means, to which non-Catholic writers at the present day sometimes quite unfairly assimilate Christian exorcism. Superstition ought not to be confounded with religion, however much their history may be interwoven, nor magic, however white it may be, with a legitimate religious rite.

In ethnic religions

The use of protective means against the real, or supposed, molestations of evil spirits naturally follows from the belief in their existence, and is, and has been always, a feature of ethnic religions, savage and civilized. In this connection only two of the religions of antiquity, the Egyptian and Babylonian, call for notice; but it is no easy task, even in the case of these two, to isolate what bears strictly on our subject, from the mass of mere magic in which it is embedded. The Egyptians ascribed certain diseases and various other evils to demons, and believed in the efficacy of magical charms and incantations for banishing or dispelling them. The dead more particularly needed to be well fortified with magic in order to be able to accomplish in safely their perilous journey to the underworld (see Budge, Egyptian Magic, London, 1899). But of exorcism, in the strict sense, there is hardly any trace in the Egyptian records.

In the famous case where a demon was expelled from the daughter of the Prince of Bekhten, human ministry was unavailing, and the god Khonsu himself had to be sent the whole way from Thebes for the purpose. The demon gracefully retired when confronted with the god, and was allowed by the latter to be treated at a grand banquet before departing "to his own place" (op. cit. p. 206 sq.).

Babylonian magic was largely bound up with medicine, certain diseases being attributed to some kind of demoniacal possession, and exorcism being considered easiest, if not the only, way of curing them (Sayce, Hibbert Lect. 1887, 310). For this purpose certain formulæ of adjuration were employed, in which some god or goddess, or some group of deities, was invoked to conjure away the evil one and repair the mischief he had caused. The following example (from Sayce, op. cit., 441 seq.) may be quoted: "The (possessing) demon which seizes a man, the demon (ekimmu) which seizes a man; The (seizing) demon which works mischief, the evil demon, Conjure, O spirit of heaven; conjure, O spirit of earth." For further examples see King, Babylonian Magic and Sorcery (London, 1896).

Among the Jews

There is no instance in the Old Testament of demons being expelled by men. In Tobias 8:3, is the angel who "took the devil and bound him in the desert of upper Egypt"; and the instruction previously given to young Tobias (6:18-19), to roast the fish's heart in the bridal chamber, would seem to have been merely part of the angel's plan for concealing his own identity. But in extra-canonical Jewish literature there are incantations for exorcising demons, examples of which may be seen in Talmud (Schabbath, xiv, 3; Aboda Zara, xii, 2; Sanhedrin, x, 1). These were sometimes inscribed on the interior surface of earthen bowls, a collection of which (estimated to be from the seventh century A.D) is preserved in the Royal Museum in Berlin; and inscriptions from the collection have been published, translated by Wohlstein in the "Zeitschrift für Assyriologie" (December, 1893; April, 1894).

The chief characteristics of these Jewish exorcisms is their naming of names believed to be efficacious, i.e., names of good angels, which are used either alone or in combination with El (=God); indeed reliance on mere names had long before become a superstition with the Jews, and it was considered most important that the appropriate names, which varied for different times and occasions, should be used. It was this superstitious belief, no doubt, that prompted the sons of Sceva, who had witnessed St. Paul's successful exorcisms in the name of Jesus, to try on their own account the formula, "I conjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth", with results disastrous to their credit (Acts 19:13). It was a popular Jewish belief, accepted even by a learned cosmopolitan like Josephus, that Solomon had received the power of expelling demons, and that he had composed and transmitted certain formulæ that were efficacious for that purpose. The Jewish historian records how a certain Eleazar, in the presence of the Emperor Vespasian and his officers, succeeded, by means of a magical ring applied to the nose of a possessed person, in drawing out the demon through the nostrils — the virtue of the ring being due to the fact that it enclosed a certain rare root indicated in the formulaæ of Solomon, and which it was exceedingly difficult to obtain (Ant. Jud, VIII, ii, 5; cf. Bell. Jud. VII, vi, 3).

But superstition and magic apart, it is implied in Christ's answers to the Pharisees, who accused Him of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub, that some Jews in His time successfully exorcised demons in God's name: "and if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out?" (Matthew 12:27). It does not seem reasonable to understand this reply as mere irony, or as a mere argumentum ad hominem implying no admission of the fact; all the more so, as elsewhere (Mark 9:37-38) we have an account of a person who was not a disciple casting out demons in Christ's name, and whose action Christ refused to reprehend or forbid.

Exorcism in the New Testament

Assuming the reality of demoniac possession, for which the authority of Christ is pledged, it is to be observed that Jesus appealed to His power over demons as one of the recognised signs of Messiahship (Matthew 12:23, 28; Luke 11:20). He cast out demons, He declared, by the finger or spirit of God, not, as His adversaries alleged, by collusion with the prince of demons (Matthew 12:24, 27; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15, 19); and that He exercised no mere delegated power, but a personal authority that was properly His own, is clear from the direct and imperative way in which He commands the demon to depart (Mark 9:24; cf. 1:25 etc.): "He cast out the spirits with his word, and he healed all that were sick" (Matthew 8:16). Sometimes, as with the daughter of the Canaanean woman, the exorcism took place from a distance (Matthew 15:22 sqq.; Mark 7:25). Sometimes again the spirits expelled were allowed to express their recognition of Jesus as "the Holy One of God" (Mark 1:24) and to complain that He had come to torment them "before the time", i.e the time of their punishment (Matthew 8:29 sqq; Luke 8:28 sqq.). If demoniac possession was generally accompanied by some disease, yet the two were not confounded by Christ, or the Evangelists. In Luke 13:32, for example, the Master Himself expressly distinguishes between the expulsion of evil spirits and the curing of disease.

Christ also empowered the Apostles and Disciples to cast out demons in His name while He Himself was still on earth (Matthew 10:1 and 8; Mark 6:7; Luke 9:1; 10:17), and to believers generally He promised the same power (Mark 16:17). But the efficacy of this delegated power was conditional, as we see from the fact that the Apostles themselves were not always successful in their exorcisms: certain kinds of spirits, as Christ explained, could only be cast out by prayer and fasting (Matthew 17:15, 20; Mark 9:27-28; Luke 9:40). In other words the success of exorcism by Christians, in Christ's name, is subject to the same general conditions on which both the efficacy of prayer and the use of charismatic power depend. Yet conspicuous success was promised (Mark 16:17). St. Paul (Acts 16:18; 19:12), and, no doubt, the other Apostles and Disciples, made use of regularly, as occasion arose, of their exorcising power, and the Church has continued to do so uninterruptedly to the present day.

Ecclesiastical exorcisms

Besides exorcism in the strictest sense — i.e. for driving out demons from the possessed — Catholic ritual, following early traditions, has retained various other exorcisms, and these also call for notice here.

Exorcism of the possessed

We have it on the authority of all early writers who refer to the subject at all that in the first centuries not only the clergy, but lay Christians also were able by the power of Christ to deliver demoniacs or energumens, and their success was appealed to by the early Apologists as a strong argument for the Divinity of the Christian religion (Justin Martyr, First Apology 6; Dialogue with Trypho 30 and 85; Minutius Felix, Octavius 27; Origen, Against Celsus I.25; VII.4; VII.67; Tertullian, Apology 22, 23; etc.). As is clear from testimonies referred to, no magical or superstitious means were employed, but in those early centuries, as in later times, a simple and authoritative adjuration addressed to the demon in the name of God, and more especially in the name of Christ crucified, was the usual form of exorcism.

But sometimes in addition to words some symbolic action was employed, such as breathing (insufflatio), or laying of hands on the subject, or making the sign of cross. St. Justin speaks of demons flying from "the touch and breathing of Christians" (Second Apology 6) as from a flame that burns them, adds St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechetical Lectures 20.3). Origen mentions the laying of hands, and St. Ambrose (Paulinus, Vit. Ambr., n. 28, 43, P.L, XIV, 36, 42), St. Ephraem Syrus (Gregory of Nyssa, De Vit. Ephr., P.G., XLVI, 848) and others used this ceremony in exorcising. The sign of the cross, that briefest and simplest way of expressing one's faith in the Crucified and invoking His Divine power, is extolled by many Fathers for its efficacy against all kinds of demoniac molestation (Lactantius, Divine Institutes IV.27; Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 47; Basil, In Isai., XI, 249, P.G., XXX, 557, Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 13.3; Gregory Nazianzen, Carm. Adv. iram, v, 415 sq.; P.G., XXXVII, 842). The Fathers further recommend that the adjuration and accompanying prayers should be couched in the words of Holy Writ (Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis 9; Athanasius, Ad Marcell., n. 33, P.G., XXVII, 45). The present rite of exorcism as given in the Roman Ritual fully agrees with patristic teaching and is a proof of the continuity of Catholic tradition in this matter.

Baptismal exorcism

At an early age the practice was introduced into the Church of exorcising catechumens as a preparation for the Sacrament of Baptism. This did not imply that they were considered to be obsessed, like demoniacs, but merely that they were, in consequence of original sin (and of personal sins in case of adults), subject more or less to the power of the devil, whose "works" or "pomps" they were called upon to renounce, and from whose dominion the grace of baptism was about to deliver them.

Exorcism in this connection is a symbolical anticipation of one of the chief effects of the sacrament of regeneration; and since it was used in the case of children who had no personal sins, St. Augustine could appeal to it against the Pelagians as implying clearly the doctrine of original sin (Ep. cxciv, n. 46. P.L., XXXIII, 890; C. Jul. III, 8; P.L., XXXIV, 705, and elsewhere). St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Procatechesis 14) gives a detailed description of baptismal exorcism, from which it appears that anointing with exorcised oil formed a part of this exorcism in the East. The only early Western witness which treats unction as part of the baptismal exorcism is that of the Arabic Canons of Hippolytus (n. 19, 29). The Exsufflatio, or out-breathing of the demon by the candidate, which was sometimes part of the ceremony, symbolized the renunciation of his works and pomps, while the Insufflatio, or in-breathing of the Holy Ghost, by ministers and assistants, symbolised the infusion of sanctifying grace by the sacrament. Most of these ancient ceremonies have been retained by the Church to this day in her rite for solemn baptism.

Other exorcisms

According to Catholic belief demons or fallen angels retain their natural power, as intelligent beings, of acting on the material universe, and using material objects and directing material forces for their own wicked ends; and this power, which is in itself limited, and is subject, of course, to the control of Divine providence, is believed to have been allowed a wider scope for its activity in the consequence of the sin of mankind. Hence places and things as well as persons are naturally liable to diabolical infestation, within limits permitted by God, and exorcism in regard to them is nothing more that a prayer to God, in the name of His Church, to restrain this diabolical power supernaturally, and a profession of faith in His willingness to do so on behalf of His servants on earth.

The chief things formally exorcised in blessing are water, salt, oil, and these in turn are used in personal exorcisms, and in blessing or consecrating places (e.g. churches) and objects (e.g. altars, sacred vessels, church bells) connected with public worship, or intended for private devotion. Holy water, the sacramental with which the ordinary faithful are most familiar, is a mixture of exorcised water and exorcised salt; and in the prayer of blessing, God is besought to endow these material elements with a supernatural power of protecting those who use them with faith against all the attacks of the devil. This kind of indirect exorcism by means of exorcised objects is an extension of the original idea; but it introduces no new principle, and it has been used in the Church from the earliest ages.

Does a sea serpent-like creature live in New York’s Lake Champlain?

champ

The Iroquis told tales of a giant serpent

CASE DETAILS
Tales of a giant serpent living in Lake Champlain date back to the time when Native Americans lived in the area. But over the years, many have come to believe the creature is real. There have been hundreds of reported sightings. The locals have even given it a name, Champ.

Sandra Mansi grew up near Lake Champlain. When she was a child, her grandfather teased her with scary tales of the legendary sea creature:

Sandra saw Champ

“Grandfather told us all about Champ, and when we would go fishing, he would say to us, if you don’t sit down and behave in the boat, I’m going to throw you over and Champ’s going to eat you. Of course, we didn’t believe a word of it.

Then in July of 1977, Sandra, her two children, and her fiancé, Tony, were on vacation near Lake Champlain:

“We stopped at this one place and the children were down further on the beach, having a great time, and Tony decided to go back to the car and get the camera. And I’m looking out at the lake, and the lake started churning. My first thought was scuba divers. But then it’s too much, it would be too big of a group of scuba divers. But then fish, there’s some very large sturgeon and big walleyes in Champlain, so I thought well, it’s a very, very large school of fish. Then the head and the neck came up out of the water, and then the back.  And I watched it turn its head and neck, and look around. When it first came up, its mouth was open and I could see water coming out of the mouth, and I’m feeling like I shouldn’t be there. Because to me, this thing should have been extinct thirty million years ago. But I’m not frightened. I’m in total awe and very calm. Then Tony came back and he saw it and he got all panicky, screaming and hollering at the kids to get out of the water. He helped me up the bank, and when he did, he handed me the camera, and I turned around, and it’s still there. And I picked up the camera and took one shot.”

The photograph was studied

When Sandra saw the picture she’d taken, she was certain it was Champ. She was equally certain that no one would believe her, so she threw away the negative and kept the photo hidden. Finally, Sandra had the snapshot blown up into an 8 x 10 inch print.  She contacted Joe Zarzynsky, who’d written a book about Champ. Joe sent the print to the University of Arizona to be analyzed. Cryptozoologist Richard Greenwell:

“We digitized it and ran all sorts of computer enhancement techniques. We were looking for pulleys or ropes or anything like that, superimpositions, but we found no evidence of hoaxing, and we concluded that the object, whatever it is, was there in the lake, at that estimated distance. It wasn’t any sort of superimposition.”

When the photograph was released, it caused a media sensation. The New York Times and Life Magazine carried the story. Was it really a sea monster? Richard Greenwell wondered if Champ was a prehistoric animal that had somehow managed to survive:

“The object in the Mansi photograph resembled a plesiosaur, which is an aquatic reptile from the Cretaceous, about 60-70 million years ago.  Long neck and flippers.  It resembles that, but that’s a long time to have survived.”

Could Champ be prehistoric?

Another idea was that Champ might be a zeuglodon, a snake-like whale extinct for twenty million years. Or perhaps Champ was simply a lake sturgeon, which have been known to reach seven feet in length. No matter what it was, ever since the Mansi photograph went public, dozens of eyewitnesses have reported sightings of Champ.

On July 7, 1988, Walter Tappan, his wife Sandi, and their daughter Heidi, went out on Lake Champlain with a camcorder. They were sure they’d seen “Champ” the previous evening. Walter hoped lightning would strike twice in the same place:

“It was a quiet night, just as still as glass, like the first night had been, and I was full of anticipation and excitement, but also, not necessarily expecting anything. Then they spotted one not far from the boat. At the most, 50 or 60 feet from the boat.  And then began shooting footage for about twenty or thirty seconds of these humps gliding along, first two, then three, then four, then suddenly five, all in a row, stretching out about twenty feet.” 

Walter’s wife described what she saw:

“I had probably, I would say, seven different sightings of them. So I decided to climb up and stand on the sundeck and I just scanned the water like that, and lo and behold, I saw one of those bull humps coming along the water, and then all of a sudden, the neck and the head came up and it looked right at me. I will never forget it. And I was screaming with excitement, which I wish I wasn’t doing, because it went down more rapidly. Came back and then very gracefully, very slowly went back down into the water just like that.”

Walter said he had no doubt about what he, Sandi, and his daughter had witnessed:

“There was no time for me to get the camera and refocus. I’d give anything now to have that on footage, because what Sandi saw was, of course, an astounding thing. This creature looking at us and lifting its head out of the water. And what it did was to confirm, absolutely for all of us, that what we had seen was Champ.”

Scientific opinion is varied, but at least one expert believes that what Walter Tappan photographed was nothing more than a school of fish. But who can explain the Mansi photograph or the hundreds of eyewitness accounts recorded through the centuries?    
For Sandra Mansi, it can be only one thing:

“Do I believe Champ exists? You’ll never convince me of anything else. You can call it Champ, you can call it a monster, you can call it a zeuglodon, you can call it a plesiosaur, you can call it anything you want.  I’m telling you, in that lake, there is something extraordinary.”

Bigfoot sightings are rampant in the Pacific Northwest.

Artist’s rendering of Bigfoot

Alleged Bigfoot footprint

CASE DETAILS 

Peter Byrne

Many believe Bigfoot is the missing link between ape and human.  For Peter Byrne, head of the Oregon-based Bigfoot Research Project, finding Bigfoot is a matter of scientific discovery:

“We don’t want to capture it.  We don’t want to shoot it.  The ultimate find, as far as we’re concerned, would be to do something like what Jane Goodall did, in other words, to find one, see if we can communicate, have it lead us to others, and then bring in the right people.  Totally responsible people.  Bring in scientists, and show them what we’ve found and document the whole thing, of course.” 

Until now, the evidence for Bigfoot has consisted of amateur photographs, plaster casts of large, humanoid footprints and home movies that supposedly show the creature in the wild. But if Bigfoot is real, the one type of evidence that must always be considered is eyewitness accounts.

Todd Neiss is a sergeant in the Army National Guard.  In 1993, he was on demolition maneuvers with his unit when a distant movement caught his eye:

Oregon wilderness

“I could distinctly see three large black figures. I would estimate the largest one to be between eight or nine feet. I could very plainly see they were upright on two legs and…during that entire time, all three of them were standing on two legs. Another sergeant walked up to me and said, ‘Neiss, did you see what I saw down at that second rock port?’ And, not to be a fool, I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, what’d you see?’ He followed with, ‘Well lack for a better word, what I saw were three, large, hair-covered, big feet.’”
Peter Byrne believes the creatures are nocturnal:

“When they’re seen in the daytime, it’s the result of disturbance of some kind.  In this case, there was a National Guard exercise with explosions, and immediately after the explosion, three of these things were seen.”
  
When Elmer Frombach, a part-time prospector from Seattle, Washington, took his family on an outing near the Canadian border, he came home with one of the most amazing Bigfoot sightings on record.    

Elmer had just begun taking ore samples on a trail near a hillside, when he suddenly realized he was not alone: 

“I saw a big black hairy mass.  And at that time I kept thinking in my mind I’ve got to find a way to scare it, and I fired a shot above its head, and it turned just slightly, and then proceeded to walk down the trail as though I wasn’t even there.  And as it walked away from me, it took perfect, human-like strides, down the trail, only like a giant man. This thing had crouched down at the end of the trail and it picked up a rock, the size of a basketball, and was using it to bang against the other rocks that again made a slight-sideways turn, just enough to see me out of the corner of it’s eye.  I was scared and I wanted to get out of there.  I kept running down the hillside and the thing was in hot pursuit the whole way.”

Elmer is confident the creature he saw was Bigfoot:

“What I saw there was a living creature and not some figment in my imagination.  Modern science hasn’t absolutely proven…that this thing exists.  But I tell you, quite frankly, I’ve seen one.  I know it exists.  And there is no doubt in my mind.”

However, eyewitness accounts like Elmer’s are not enough evidence to convince skeptics.

Daris Swindler, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, wants to see tangible proof of Bigfoot’s existence:

“I’m amazed that through all the years various people that have been hunting Sasquatch through the years, have not really found any, what we call bone or dental evidence of the creature.  That to me would be very satisfying.”

Is the Pacific Northwest home to a colony of ape-like creatures?  Eyewitness like Todd Neiss and Elmer Frombach are convinced Bigfoot is real.  There only hope is that the scientific community will soon take notice.

Two explorers believe they’ve located the remnants of Noah’s ark in the mountains of Turkey.

Artists rendering of Noah’s ark

Mt. Ararat, Turkey

 CASE DETAILS 

Mount Ararat: according to the Bible, it’s the area where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the great storm. It’s a desolate terrain rising above the headwaters of the Tigris River. In recent years, several expeditions have explored the Ararat Mountains. Incredibly, two separate teams believe they may have found the ark, in two different locations, 17 miles apart.

Ark research team

One of the sites is on Mount Ararat’s northeast side under a permanent 23-square-mile glacier. A Turkish businessman named George Hagobian said that when he was a young boy in 1906, he saw Noah's Ark wedged in a melted part of the glacier. Hagobian described the vessel to archaeological illustrator Elfred Lee:

“He said it looked like a long box. It was rectangular and the corners were kind of rounded a little bit. The sides sloped in slightly. The roof, he said, was basically flat with just a slight pitch to it, and there was a stair kind of an apparatus at one end. His uncle hoisted him up onto this ladder, and he walked on up onto the roof. And there, all the way down the middle of the roof, he saw these holes, and he stuck his head in, and it was dark. He shouted, and his voice echoed and re-echoed inside. It was hollow. Hagobian went back a couple years later, saw the same thing, but ice and snow were beginning to cover it up again.”

Seventeen years later, Elfred Lee met Ed Davis, who, in 1943, was stationed in Iran with the U.S. Army. According to Lee, Davis also said he had seen the ark:

 “When Ed Davis started talking, the hair on the back of my head just stood up, because I could hear an echo of George Hagobian from years before.”

Artist rendering of possible ark

Ed Davis' sighting occurred in roughly the same area as George Hagobian's. However, Davis said when he saw what he thought was the ark, it had broken in two:

“We waited a while, and the fog kind of lifted, and it shone through in the end. You could see in the end of it. And we saw both parts. You stand there with your mouth wide open.”

Elfred Lee recalled his conversation with Davis:

“Ed Davis described three decks inside and large cages on the bottom deck, smaller cages on the second deck, and on the roof, a venting system with many holes on it, so you could see how the light and ventilation could go clear to the bottom deck.”
Although Hagobian and Davis weren’t able to pinpoint the exact locations, their stories intrigued Don Shockey, an amateur archaeologist:

“I can't think of anything more exciting that I could be doing in my lifetime than having a small part in seeing this, whatever it is, verified. And we have good reason to believe there's something there. We’ve got to prove it.”

A second theory

Don Shockey launched an expedition to Mount Ararat after studying classified U.S. satellite photos. Don said that for three days, he and his guides climbed up the mountain’s south side:

“Our whole goal was to get to this spot, over the top, down the glaciers, to this particular location and verify what the satellite information had told us.”

The Turkish government prevented them from traveling to the north side, so Ahmet, a Turkish guide, continued on by himself. 

Ahmet crested Mt. Ararat and started down the north slope. At an elevation of nearly 16,000 feet, he spotted something half-buried in the snow. From a distance of 300 yards, he took a photograph, which seemed to show the end of a rectangular object with a peaked roof: Don Shockey recalled:

“He came back, and I said, ‘Is anything showing?’ He said, ‘A coop, a coop. Like a chicken coop. It had a pointed top.’ And he said that you could see the outline of it. He said in all of his years, he had never seen anything like it. He said, ‘There's some artifact there.’"

Don Shockey believed that Ahmet might have glimpsed the remains of Noah's Ark.  Shockey returned to the States and took the photograph to forensic anthropologist Dr. Jim Ebert:

“It certainly does not look natural. It looks very strikingly man-made to me. What I see when I look at this is something that stands out from the rest of the terrain, and that is what looks like a solid structure. You'll never know until you get up there and can see it and stand next to it.”

Shockey returned to Mt. Ararat and studied the mountain from the air. Unfortunately, the site was now covered by snow.  Shockey stopped his search but remained convinced that he might have found the resting place of Noah's Ark. Others, like author and ark researcher David Fasold, disagreed:

“We've been told for years that Noah's Ark is on top of Mt. Ararat because that's what the Bible says. And that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat, that word is in the plural.”

David Fasold was a former merchant marine officer and merchant salvage expert. He believed that the ark was buried a full 17 miles south of Mt. Ararat. Fasold said his team searched the site and discovered traces of iron, which don’t appear to be natural deposits:

“Every 20-30 inches, approximately, we have the remains of an iron fitting or iron pin of sorts that are still there in the soil and discernible.”

Fasold’s team brought back one of the iron fittings, one of 5,400 he said they found:

“It’s been cut in half by a diamond saw, scanned by electron microscopes at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and this particular iron fitting is 94.84% man-made wrought iron.”

Looking at the mound from above, the iron deposits form a distinct pattern of intersecting lines, which Fasold believes is the framework of the ark. Fasold said the boat’s length is 515 feet and the width averages 85 feet, the same measurements recorded in the Bible:

“Given the shape of the thing and the size of the thing and where they found it, I mean, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, until somebody finds something else, what else could it possibly be but Noah's Ark?”

Some have suggested that David Fasold found the remains of an ancient Mongol fort. Others say it’s a geological formation. However, the Turkish government has declared the mound the official site where Noah's Ark rests. Fasold said he’s certain of his find:

“The man who was in charge, Professor Sali Barrak Tutam, who is also a geologist, he says it's Noah's Ark, 200%. It is not a geological anomaly. It's a man-made structure.”

Has one of mankind's greatest mysteries finally been solved on a remote mountain range?  It’s obvious that there needs to be more exploration before we’ll know the answer.

Residents around Canada’s Lake Okanagan believe a creature called Ogo Pogo lurks in its waters.

Witnesses claim they saw Ogo Pogo

There was a media frenzy

CASE DETAILS

The creature had a long snake-like body

“We were facing the lake at the time, and there’s this head of something or other swimming around out there and we were all convinced that it was the Ogo Pogo.”

Another witness, Beverly Harder, described Ogo Pogo as:

“Very big.  It was very scary.” 
Ernest Girou says he got a good look at the creature:

“About two feet out of the water came the head. The head itself was round, and then a kind of a neck part went down into the water and it had a great big long tail.”

Hundreds of sightings of Ogo Pogo have been reported. But no film footage was captured until 1968. That year, Art Folden and his wife were driving next to the lake when they noticed something strange:

“We saw something in the lake near the shore, and I said, ‘Hey, look!’ Just jokingly.  ‘There’s Ogo Pogo.’  I said, ‘I want to stop and see if I can get a picture.’ I stopped filming every time it dove under the water. And as it reappeared I began filming again. The film shows a dark object diving, reappearing, in a sequence of moves that indicates that it’s moving out from shallow water into deeper water.”

The creature is estimated to be forty feet long

The dark mass in Art’s film is estimated to be forty feet long.
In 1980, twelve years after the Folden film was made, a group of vacationers thought they, too, had seen Ogo Pogo. One of them, Larry Thal, had a home movie camera:

“I was taking pictures of the kids and the wife, and bingo!  All of a sudden the Ogo Pogo, supposedly, whatever it may have been, appeared on Lake Okanagan, and I was right there with my camera. It was a strange sight in the water.”

According to Arlene Gaal, an Ogo Pogo author and researcher, Larry’s footage revealed intriguing details:

“Larry’s film shows how the animal swims. It shows the speed and the massive waves that it creates. It actually shows that it has some sort of appendage that seems to pop up every now and then. But the interesting thing is that the animal that Art Folden shot and the animal that Larry Thal shot, they’re basically the same size. They’re very large creatures. And in Larry’s film, we’re seeing a creature at least 40 to sixty feet from head to tail. No doubt. No doubt.”

Witnesses said the creature had an appendage

Nine years later, on July 18th, 1989, 78-year-old Clem Chaplin showed his son, Ken, an inlet where he thought he had seen Ogo Pogo. Ken took his video camera and staked out the area. It paid off. What Ken taped was a creature that appeared to be hairless, greenish in color, spotted, and about fifteen feet long, less than half the size measured in the Folden and Thal films. Ken is clear about what he saw:

“I saw its features as being snake or lizard-like. No fur or hair. And you can see the body thrashing behind it. And then it brought its tail section out of the water. Dad and I were stunned into silence. And then Dad turned to me and he said, ‘You know if that tail hit a man it’d probably kill him.’ And I agreed. That was our impression as to size. He had appeared swimming parallel to the shore and swam right past us, at maybe sixty to seventy five feet away.”

Ken’s video made headlines. Time Magazine and many newspapers carried the story of what appeared to be a new “Loch Ness-type” monster.  Experts were called in to analyze the video. One of them was regional wildlife biologist Robert Lincoln:

“It was not a hoax. There was nothing in there that gave us the impression this was fabricated in any way. It was a live, living animal. The discussion revolved around the two species most likely, and that is a river otter and a beaver. Ogo Pogo could exist elsewhere in Okanagan Lake, but in our view, this particular video was of a beaver.”

Ken Chaplin says the creature he saw was too large to be a beaver:

“The largest recorded beaver in the interior is four and a half feet long. Now at seventy five to a hundred feet away, I just can’t see Dad and I being very impressed.”

Robert Lincoln compared a video frame from Ken’s Ogo Pogo footage, with a photograph of a beaver about to slap its tail on the surface of the water. He contends that they are mirror images of each other.  Ken disagrees. He says the creature he saw was fifteen feet long, not four feet like a beaver.

“I’ve asked myself thousands of times, ‘Is there a possibility I could be mistaken?’ And I just can’t see where I could be.”

Ogo Pogo researcher, Arlene Gaal, responds to the naysayers: 

“For those who want to call it a beaver? I’ll say, no way.  An otter? I can’t buy it.  A miniature Ogo Pogo? In all probability.”

Experts may disagree about Ken’s footage, but there’s still no explanation for the 40-foot-long creature seen in Art Folden’s film, or the similar one churning up a wake in the Larry Thal footage. And hundreds of other sightings attest to the presence of something unusual in Lake Okanagan. Robert Lincoln offered some advice for would-be Ogo Pogo hunters:

“I would be delighted to find that Ogo Pogo really existed in Okanagan Lake. And I would encourage everybody to keep, not only their minds open, but their eyes open, when they’re in the Okanagan. Who knows what really exciting wildlife encounter that they may enjoy?”

Is Ogo Pogo real?  The Canadian Government seems to think so. They’ve issued a postage stamp depicting an artist’s rendition of Ogo Pogo.

Does a creature called the Yeti prowl the Himalayas? 

Does the Yeti really exist?

Himalayan Mountains

CASE DETAILS

The Himalayas are home to the world’s highest mountain and one of its most intriguing mysteries. For centuries, the Sherpa people, native to the Himalayas, have told frightening tales of a strange half-man, half-ape called the Yeti.

A footprint 13” long & 8” wide … made by Yeti?

Yeti is also known as the abominable snowman.  To the Sherpas, Yeti has always been very real and very much alive.  Some Western explorers have found convincing evidence that the Sherpas may be right.

Several expeditions have uncovered mystifying stories of strange human-like creatures who live in the Himalayas.  In 1951, Eric Shipton, a world-famous mountaineer, came across a curious set of tracks.  This was the first clear evidence that the Yeti might, in fact, be real.

Author Loren Coleman comments on the photograph Shipton took of the tracks:

“The photograph … is a very big peace of evidence because it showed toes, individual toes.  It showed a squat, square footprint, which a lot of the other expeditions had found, but not had good photographic equipment with them.”
The footprint was 13 inches long and 8 inches wide.  It didn’t look like it was made by a man or an ape.

Plaster mockup of footprint

In 1957, a Texas oilman named Tom Slick and explorer Peter Byrne set off for the Arun Valley in northeastern Nepal in search of Yeti.

Peter Byrne tells how he came to believe the Yeti are real:

“Tom Slick’s interest in the beginning was to find out if the Yeti were really there, and that’s the reason he came on the first reconnaissance.  I had been hearing about the Yeti for years, ever since I was a child.  But I think that what eventually convinced me that they were there, was meeting with the Sherpas and talk with them face to face. The Sherpas viewed the Yeti as a real living creature.  Not as a mythical creature.  They called him “hairy man” that lived out there separate from them. On the first expeditions we took along with us 8 by 10 pictures of a chimpanzee, a gorilla, primitive man and so on. And they used to point to the primitive man and say, that’s the Yeti. In fact, they thought we had a picture of the Yeti when they saw that. The Sherpas described the Yeti to us always as being man-like in form, and about 5-foot-6, 5-foot-7, 5-foot-8, not very large and covered with hair, totally covered with hair, walking upright. The face was bare of hair, the palms of the hands, that sort of thing.”
Slick and Byrne decided to split up to cover a wider search area.  As Peter Byrne tells it, each made his own startling discovery:

“We’d started out from our camp in the early morning and we simply chose a mountain and I came across a line of footprints.”

Byrne took pictures of the tracks.

In another part of the valley, Tom Slick and his Sherpa guides discovered a similar set of tracks. Peter Byrne thinks the tracks are important:

“The significance of the prints that Tom Slick found was is that they were in mud, and whereas snow will distort with heat and with wind and so on, mud will not. He only saw two or three because it’s very hard to track in that stuff, in fact he was lucky to find them.”

A plaster cast of the footprint was shipped to the United States to be analyzed.  The print measured 10 inches long and 7 inches wide. 

According to anthropologist Dr. George Agogino, it was similar to the footprint discovered by Eric Shipton six years earlier:

Sherpa drawing of Yeti

“It was a short, squat, almost square type of footprint.  And I sent it to the various physical anthropology experts around the country and usually the terminology that came back was, ‘Unique, but we don’t know what it is.’”

In February of 1958, Peter Byrne embarked on another expedition.  On this trip, he met a Buddhist monk who had an amazing story to tell:

“He liked Scotch, this old man.  And one evening while we were sitting there having a drink and talking, he said to me, he whispered, he said, ‘You know that up in the temple, we have a hand. Would you like to see it?’  And I said yes. So we went back up to the temple.  We went into the top part of the temple and he showed me this hand about the size of a human hand, cut off at the wrist.  I considered it very significant and I took some pictures of it immediately, some flash pictures.  I asked the lama, of course, could I have it and he said no, he said it must never leave the temple here. If it leaves the temple various calamities will befall the temple and the community and so on.  I asked him if I could have a part of it and he said no.”

The photographs of the Yeti hand were unlike anything scientists had seen before.  Was it human?  Was it ape?  Or was it an entirely new species?  They needed the actual hand, or at least a piece of it, to find out.

The next year, Peter Byrne returned to the monastery with another bottle of Scotch for the monk and an outrageous plan:

“I cut the finger off and I replaced it with the human finger.  It took quite a long time to wire the whole thing together and put it all back together and put it back in the box.  And nobody ever knew anything about it.  And everything, everybody actually was perfectly happy.  They still had the hand, it still had its fingers.”

The finger was brought back to London and sent to Dr. George Agogino for examination:

“I sent it to 20 experts which I thought should look at the hand, and they were about equally divided whether it was human or whether it was some type of primate known or unknown.”

Dr. Agogino put a tissue sample from the bone fragment in an envelope in his desk.  It remained there for more than thirty years.

When Unsolved Mysteries learned of the bone fragment in Dr. Agogino’s desk drawer, we asked the University of California to analyze it.  The results were inconclusive, but seemed to indicate that the tissue probably came from a human hand.

Professor of Nuclear Medicine Dr. Jerry Lowenstein analyzed the fragment:

“The problem with something as vague as the Yeti is that almost any result you have can be fitted into the theory.  So I’m sure that most believers will say, ‘Well this is great, this proves that the Yeti is some sort of sub-human species.’”

Peter Byrne says the results confirm his own suspicions:

“I think that’s what we’ve always thought, that it wasn’t an animal, that it wasn’t an upright walking ape, because apes don’t’ walk upright anywhere. That it was a hominid.  A human form of some kind.”

Meanwhile, the sightings of Yeti continued.

Photographer Kurt Fritler shares his own unnerving encounter:

“I had made camp at 16,500 feet, when out of the darkness a very loud piercing call began that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before.  It moved around.  It circled our campsite, it would get closer, it would get farther away.  It would call intermittently and the call was always very loud and very piercing and very frightening.”

Reinhold Messner says he got a good look at the creature from about 30 feet away:

“It was my impression it’s bigger than me.  It was quite hairy and strong with short legs.  The body was quite dark, dark brown, black hair, long, long hairs.  And has quite a lot of hairs on the head.”

Dr. George Agogino is still split over whether the Yeti exists:

“I have to leave it open that I do not know what the abominable snowman is.  But I feel there is a very good chance, probably 50/50, that something resembling the thing they are looking for does exist.”

Perhaps the Himalayas are home to an elusive, half-human species.  Or perhaps Yeti is just a myth.  Either way, it’s important to remember that a new species is discovered almost every year.

Homes built on top of a cemetery may be cursed.

The Black Hope Cemetery

Human remains were found in the backyard

CASE DETAILS 

Just outside of Houston, Texas, is a neighborhood filled with upscale homes and manicured lawns. In the early 1980s, Sam and Judith Haney settled in at the far western edge of the development. Sam described it as their dream home:

“When we bought the house in Newport, it was the house that we had always been looking for. So, it was the house that we intended to stay at for a long period of time.”

The Haneys re-buried the remains

But there was a morbid secret about the Haney’s perfect home, one that soon turned their lives into a never-ending nightmare. Sam said it all began when a mysterious old man showed up at their door with an ominous warning:

“This elderly man told me that he had noticed that we were putting a swimming pool in our backyard and that there was something about our backyard that I needed to know about.  So I followed him around to my backyard and he pointed at the ground and said that there are some graves right here. And he marked a spot on the ground where they were. And I really didn’t know how to react to that. I didn’t know if he was just joking. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to joke about something like that.”

Using a backhoe, Sam decided to see if the man’s alarming claims were true. Sam says it wasn’t long before he hit something:

“And at that point, we stopped with the backhoe and we got down into the hole and continued digging by hand. There were pine boards. When we lifted up the first board, we could see an indentation of a skeleton form. It didn’t take long to figure out that it was  actual human remains.”
Sam immediately called the Sheriff and county coroner who conducted an official exhumation.  Most of the bones had turned to powder.  But 25 fragments were found, some so brittle that they disintegrated when touched.

The Williams’ discovered they had graves too

A second coffin, located alongside the first, hadn’t been disturbed. Inside, two wedding rings were discovered on the frail index finger of the exposed skeleton. Judith Haney was mortified by the discovery:

“They handed me the rings and it was sickening to think that I had desecrated somebody’s grave.”

Wanting desperately to do the right thing, the Haneys decided to find out whose remains were buried in their backyard.  The search led them to a longtime resident named Jasper Norton. 

Years earlier, Norton had dug several graves in the area. He told the Haneys that their home and a dozen others were built on top of an old African American cemetery called Black Hope. The deceased were mainly former slaves. The last burial was in 1939, and as many as 60 people were interred there in paupers’ graves.
The two people buried in the Haney’s backyard were Betty and Charlie Thomas. They died during the 1930s and their graves were eventually forgotten.

Judith and Sam Haney made an extraordinary decision.  They reburied Betty and Charlie in their yard, and prayed their spirits would rest in peace.  But, according to Judith, peace was not forthcoming:

“There was a clock in my bedroom and one night it started sparking and putting out a sort of blue glow.”

Jean decided to dig for the bodies

When Judith checked the clock, she found that it was unplugged. That was only the beginning of the Haneys’ ordeal. On another evening, Sam went to work the night shift, leaving Judith alone:

“I heard the sliding glass door open and I heard what I thought was Sam saying, ‘What you doing?’ Everything was quiet, the sliding glass doors were locked, and I thought, ‘Well, you know, you must be losing your mind.  This really must be getting to you.’ But much to my amazement that’s not where the story ended. In the morning I awoke, went in my closet to get my red shoes, and I could not find them anywhere.”

Sam backed up Judith’s story:

“So, of course, I started looking for them and went through all of her closets where she normally puts things. And we just couldn’t find them. We had walked just a short distance from where the gravesites were and I could see something on the grave. And they were both side-by-side like someone had just picked them up and carried them over and laid them down on the gravesite.”

Even more disturbing to Sam was the realization that this was Betty Thomas’ birthday:

“And I kinda got the feeling that it was like Charlie was giving Betty a birthday present.”

Judith felt she knew what was going on:

“I began to come to the realization that this was not all in my mind and that this had to have some relationship to Betty and Charlie’s graves being disturbed. Their spirits were saying, ‘This isn’t right.’”

The Haneys were not alone. A dozen of their neighbors also reported lights, televisions and water faucets turning on and off, and unearthly sounds and supernatural apparitions. Worse, these bizarre events were becoming malicious.

Like the Haneys, Ben and Jean Williams thought that they had found their suburban paradise when they moved into the same neighborhood. But Jean said she never felt at peace in the house:

“After we moved, in everything changed. When I tried to plant new plants, they just would not live no matter what I did. You know, fertilizer or whatever, they still would not live.  And I constantly had a foreboding feeling, a feeling of things are not right or something bad is about to happen.”

The Williams said that near their flowerbed, sinkholes appeared in the unmistakable shape of a coffin. The Williams would fill them in, only to have them reappear a few days later.  The Williams also felt their ideal home was being invaded by a menacing presence. Random shadows slid along the walls, followed by whispered words and a putrid smell. 

At the time, the Williams’ granddaughter, Carli, lived with the couple. During the blazing heat of summer, Carli said she would stumble into bone-chilling pockets of ice-cold air:

“It would be very, very chilly and you’d have this feeling of foreboding, or just, you know, like something wasn’t right. Anywhere in the house you’d have a feeling that you were not alone. Somebody was watching you. It terrified me to be in the house by myself. The toilets used to flush on their own. As the water went down I could hear, it was almost like conversations. You could hear people murmuring to themselves. It was a presence or spirit or something there. Something that wanted to be heard. Wanted me to know that it was there.”

Jean Williams had no doubt as to the source of the disturbances:

“I absolutely believe that all of these things happened to us because we were on the graveyard, and that we were simply going to be tormented until we left there.”

Ben said he and Jean debated what to do next:

“Me and Jean, we talked it over. And she said, ‘Well what can we do? Walk off and leave it?’  She said, ‘We ain’t got enough money to pay down on another home.’  I said, ‘We’ve always been fighters. We’re gonna stay right here and fight it and try to beat it.’”

According to Ben, it wasn’t long before he got his chance:

“I came home from work around ten after twelve from the midnight shift, and I walked straight to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and that’s when I seen these two ghostly figures.  And they went straight backwards into the den.  And then they started heading right down the hall to Jean’s. And it was standing right about a foot and a half from the end of the bed. The only thing I really thought of was, ‘They ain’t messing with me wife.’  As I dove through it, I felt a sticky cold sensation in my body.”

Down the street at the Haney’s, Judith said the disturbances caused her life to unravel:

“I was crying all the time. I was frightened. I was scared of doing my daily routine in my own home.”

The Haneys decided to fight back in court. They sued the builder for not disclosing that their home was built over a cemetery, in part, so that everyone would know what was happening at their subdivision. A jury awarded them $142,000 for mental anguish. But a reversal ruled on legal grounds that the developers were not liable. The verdict was thrown out and the Haneys were ordered to pay $50,000 in court costs. Sam Haney recounted the total cost of their ordeal:  
  
“At that point we decided to file bankruptcy. All in all, we ended up losing the case, losing the money, losing the house.”

The Williams also explored legal recourse. But they say that they were told that without definitive proof of a cemetery on their property, nothing could be done. It was then that Jean made a decision that she will forever regret: 

“That was the last straw. You want a body? I’ll show you a body. So, I thought to myself, I can dig about two feet a day and I knew I would reach a body.”

But soon after she started digging, Jean felt ill. Her adult daughter, Tina, volunteered to finish the job. After digging for a half hour, Tina also fell ill. Carli Karluk was there that day:

“I remember her saying that she was, that she felt funny. She was getting dizzy as well. She put the shovel down and she went back inside. And she just laid down on the couch.  She’s like mom, daddy, I don’t feel right. There’s something wrong. The last thing I remember her saying was, ‘Mommy, take care of my baby, take care of my baby.’ And she looked so scared.”

While waiting for paramedics to arrive, Jean tried to keep her daughter conscious:

“Almost immediately her eyes started glazing over. And I was talking to her, trying to talk her out of dying.  ‘Please Tina, talk to me.’  And all this time her eyes were changing until they got to the point where I knew that she wasn’t responding at all.”
  
Tina had suffered a massive heart attack. Two days later she died.  Jean burdened the blame:

“I realize that I had desecrated another grave and now I’m paying. I told Ben, ‘We have to get out of here. It doesn’t matter what we lose, what we had.’ And I knew that if we didn’t, that I was not going to make it, because my fight was gone. I could fight no more.”

The Williams escaped to Montana and later moved back to another house and another neighborhood in Texas. Today they are a happily growing family, no longer plagued by mysterious noises, horrific apparitions or heart-breaking tragedies.

Back in their old neighborhood, none of the current residents have reported any paranormal activity.  No one has ever been able to explain what happened to the Williams or the Haneys.