Exorcisms

[EgoDeath]

During my time in the Catholic church and at Catholic school exorcism was sort of glossed over.  We didn't talk about that any more than we talked about pedophile priests.

The difference between demons and pedophile priests is that the former doesn't exist.

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Interestingly it is usually kids (teenagers) who are behind ghost prankings, like the boy who inspired the movie "The Exorcist". It was non other than two teenage girls, Fox sisters, who launched modern Spiritualism back in the 19th century and they did it by doing trickery of poltergeist-like disturbances. They began their shenanigans to their mother, who was very easily frightened and who did not suspect her daughters of being capable of a trick. The schoolgirls threw slippers at a disliked brother-in-law, shook the dinner table, and produced noises by bumping the floor with an apple on a string and by knocking on the bedstead. They later admitted it were all just their tricks, but they nevertheless became very popular mediums.

The Fox sisters were followed in 1854 by the Davenport brothers who started with tricks around family's kitchen table which launched and maintained their careers as two of the world's best-known Spiritualistic mediums. One of the brothers later in life admitted to Harry Houdini that it was all trickery and they had been caught in deceptions many times.
These were not isolated examples, so you can imagine a teenage boy in 1949 doing tricks on his grandmother only to revive exorcism mania in 20th century, possibly even satanic panic.

The Satanic Panic is an interesting phenomenon, especially considering that tales of Satanic ritual abuse have been completely debunked by many sources over the years, including the FBI themselves, if I'm not mistaken.

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/31/us/pr...al%20abuse