The Poltergeist Boy: Between Ghosts and Demons Part 4

The school authorities feared losing control of the school and therefore they could not run the school effectively and consequently the entire system was beginning to break down.

And that was due to this diagnosed outbreak of mass hysteria by the school psychiatrist.

The school GP had other ideas about this.

He was an Asian doctor and was actually very good at his job and he knew that the approach that was being taken was wrong because this is not how you would deal with a jinn or difficult spirit or whatever in India.

And therefore his take on what was going on was very different. But he was overruled by the school psychiatrist who had the ear of the school authorities and it also gave the school what they wanted carte blanche to do what they considered necessary.

So this started off with Sergeant Majoring, bullying, discipline and then drugs and so on. But they realized after a while that this approach wasn't working.

The voice you just heard was Kieran Farrell, who over the last few episodes has been sharing his own personal accounts of his experiences following a haunted holiday.

By this stage, we have learnt how the entities at this haunted holiday followed him back home and later to his school.

The school at this point have tried discipline,

medication and psychological explanations.

Nothing appeared to stop the reports of apparitions,

shared dreams and disturbing experiences.

If you're just joining us,

now is the perfect time to catch up on Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this conversation.

Part 3 ended with perhaps the most disturbing chapter yet.

Following increasingly controversial medical treatment,

Kieran described being heavily sedated during an experimental session that left him fighting for his life.

According to his account,

his breathing and heart activity ceased,

while those present later debated exactly what had happened.

Throughout the ordeal, Kieran says an apparition he knew as Susan appeared once again not as a threatening presence,

but as a protector.

He believes Susan shielded him and ultimately helped him survive an incident that fundamentally changed the way the school viewed the phenomena surrounding him.

The reports,

recordings and medical data from that incident were later sent to Ed and Lorraine Warren.

Yet their interpretation differed dramatically from that of others.

While witnesses reported seeing Susan,

the Warrens maintained that the events were demonic in origin,

attributing them to the influence of Bathsheba Sherman rather than the protective figure Kieran and others believed they had witnessed that day.

In this concluding chapter,

Kieran reflects on the Warrens investigation,

their rituals,

the controversies that followed,

and why he believes their conclusion differed so profoundly from those who had witnessed the events firsthand.

So Kieran,

Ed and Lorraine Warren probably remain two of the most recognisable figures in modern paranormal investigation.

Before we look at some specific incidents in terms of how they were involved in your particular case.

Do you want to just explain what your first impressions of the Warrens were when they became involved and what their initial thoughts were when they did become involved? In looking at your case,

the Warrens

also stated that the reason for Bathsheba's particular forceful intervention was the conduct of black magic rituals which empowered her and she was inspired by the devil.

And that I was acting as a conduit for these demonic and devilish influences.

This coincided with the opinion of the CARE staff member P who believed that I was basically spawn of the devil along with Susan.

She was being spawn of the spawn, as it were,

my creation.

Someone or something that I had in some way invoked or created through some sort of unholy alliance with the demonic, with the devil himself.

The Warrens were sent a full copy of the reports of that particular incident.

So that's the ECG traces, the EE traces, the lie detector traces,

the typescript of my of the session and the audio recording. So they had all the data,

plus some other notes and the doctor's report.

They didn't actually make any comment about it, but they said that they would send this on to various experts in the field.

The school heard nothing from any of those experts.

But the Warrens still maintained that the whole thing was demonic.

And the reason for the demonic activity was, as I have stated, that Bathsheba Shervin was involved. And Bathsheba could cross continents because she was just a husked, a hollowed out shell for the demonic, a front for the demonic, nothing more, nothing less.

Though everyone who had been involved in that particular incident knew very well what they'd seen.

They had seen an apparition of Susan, a young woman with blonde hair and strikingly green emerald eyes, dressed in modern, though,

you know, slightly old fashioned clothing. They did not see the image of Bathsheba Sherman. They knew that Bathsheba Sherman was not involved.

And I always felt that Bathsheba Sherman,

from what I could pick up from her,

was not as described. She was just an ordinary woman who'd led basically an ordinary life and died in old age, which in fact turns out to be true.

Another aspect of this incident was that there was a very large mirror in the medical examination room which was cracked from side to side slightly on the diagonal, but right across it.

This had various implications.

The first one obviously was that it was damaged and would have to be replaced.

The next was, of course, the implications. The implications of this being that one of the techniques that was used within the school was to ask boys to go to the mirror.

By this they meant that you were to look at yourself in the mirror, examine your conscience in the mirror on the basis of setting up some sort of biopsychofeedback loop.

You look at yourself,

you see your reflection.

Does your reflection correspond to the person you know, like, and so on?

And if there's something that you think that you haven't done right or you've got a guilty conscience about psychologically,

that would manifest itself in some way somehow.

The headteacher's wife was a great believer in this,

although it is a dodgy technique psychologically.

But one of the things that was thought to give it credence was that boys would actually sort of fall in the spirit, as it were. You become disorientated as a result of this fight feedback loop.

There was some boys that did actually kind of have that falling experience. They'd literally lose their balance and fall over.

Sometimes members of staff would get in on the act by claiming that something had happened, or that they would flick a towel at you or something like that and claim that they had not done so.

And this was part of your guilty conscience, and so on and so forth.

So this test, if it really was a test, it was rather questionable if it was,

could easily be faked or whatever, because while you're watching yourself in the mirror, you're not looking behind you in the mirror to see if anyone's sneaking up on you. Sometimes these tests tended to be supervised by staff who could either do them in a relatively fair and objective way,

or they could interfere.

Now,

the important point here is the Warrens believe that not in this biopsychosocial feedback, in the same way they believed that a demon would manifest itself if you stared at yourself long enough.

And that was a point of theology in the sense that the demon or the devil is not supposed to abide its own reflection. Not quite sure why that would be.

But if it's inhabiting a human being, then maybe the differences between the human and the demon might be visible or become visible with hard study, or could be seen by another person observing you while you stared at yourself in the mirror.

The Warren's version of it, though, assumes that the demon is going to have some sort of conscience of its own, a bit like Darth Vader in the sense that there might be some good within it,

or him or her. Or perhaps it was a question of they thought they hadn't succeeded because they hadn't been horrible enough.

But anyway, whatever the truth of that matter,

Is the Warrens considered that demons would become physically visible or they would make their presence known if the person stared into the mirror for long enough.

Not a psychological test, a theological test.

The Warrens also believed, and you can see this in some of the newspaper reports,

believed that a leopard skin could be used in the same way.

And this was staring into the eyes of the leopard skin,

you know,

the leopard skull. Now, just a simple point of taxidermy that obviously what is preserved is not the eyes of the leopard or,

you know, a tiger skin or any other big cat. It is the eyes of glass.

So, of course you're going to have to look at a sophisticated psychological or.

Or theological arguments, get around this because again, it's the reflection in the eyes, in the glass eyes of the tiger which is important.

And the reason for this is that tiger is a hunter.

And therefore,

do you have two, essentially two scenarios. Either you run away, in which case you're scared, and what are you scared of? Or you fight,

in which case, what are you fighting?

Either way,

there is opportunity to interpret what's going on in either deep psychological terms or in theological terms,

casting, you know, the flight or flight mechanism, in terms of the demonic.

Neither was the case when this happened to me with this mirror sessions, because what occurred was that there was a kind of symbiotic link between myself and Susan and one or two other of the ghosts or poltergeists that tended to come out.

And I was trying to block it a lot of the time,

but it tended to come out. And therefore these sort of poltergeists or whatever ghost spirits tended to manifest and that caused a problem. And that was part of why my case was seen as being demonic or alternatively psychological in the sense that these were manifestations of my subconscious.

So the mirror cracking from side to side had implications.

Either these techniques were simply unworthy, or it was a question of whose mirror cracked from side to side. Was it the Warren's mirror? Was it the school's mirror? Was this me shattering the mirror through my subconscious because the school, the Warrens or whoever was getting too close to the truth?

Or was it a question of a plague on all your houses?

And I'm not going to play your game?

So this was a point of great debate.

So the Warrens lost a great deal of face over this business of the mirror revealing the demonic, partly because the score's opinion was thoroughly set in psychological concrete,

and also partly because of this business with Bathsheba.

Now, Bathsheba, of course, where did she come from? There was no mention of her before the Warrens appeared on the scene and they said that she had come onto the scene because I had called her, which was not true.

But how on earth can you prove that one way or the other?

So they lost face over that and they lost face over this incident because clearly the person who was seen, the apparition that was seen, was that of Susan, who the school knew,

because she'd been around there right the way from the beginning and she had been a major feature on the haunted holiday. So there was continuity there. Nobody had seen a Bathsheba Sherman,

so they lost face over that and they lost face over the mirror business because they were seen as being charlatans.

That's not to say that in some ways the school weren't charlatans, trust the same reasons in terms, simply because they preferred a peculiar psychological argument as opposed to a theological one.

But some of the practitioners within the school,

for example, the school GP, thought the whole business was nonsense, that is the psychological aspect of the mirror, mirror gazing.

He thought that it was a biopsychological feedback mechanism and he'd already had some experience with it,

so he did not like either alternative and therefore I preferred his alternative because he preferred mine.

So at least I had a friend to a certain extent in the school gp.

So all in all,

this incident ended badly in many different ways.

It ended badly because, of course I nearly died and that wasn't recognized,

but I was told to keep my mouth shut and that it wasn't as bad as that because the traces showed that there was still some brain activity, therefore I couldn't have died.

The school, for obvious reasons, did not want to consult more widely about this and therefore they did so in a slightly vicarious way and were told the obvious,

which was, if this has happened to anyone, well, they're not, certainly not capable of getting up and walking around.

So there was a big question mark about to what extent Susan in her spirit form had helped me,

had assisted me to recover from a very considerable drug overdose,

as the drugs used are central nervous system presence, and if you give someone too much of them, they stop breathing, which is exactly what happened to me. And it can also affect the brain and cause a reduction of brain activity, again, which happened to me.

No respiration, no pulse and so on and so forth, no activity, no heart activity. So really, for most intensive purposes,

I was dead. Even if clinically you couldn't actually say that to any great.

You know,

we couldn't really say that,

but it did mean that there was a bit of a change because the school had to start to admit that they were dealing with a series of poltergeists and therefore discarnate entities of deceased human beings.

The other alternative being either these were manifestations of my subconscious or the Warren's alternative, which was it was all demonic.

It's a shame in the sense that the SPR declined those reports on the basis that they were sort of a way, a two way out, experimental medical technique which they didn't want to get involved in.

I can quite understand that.

But had they actually put them in front of these various reports, in front of various people at the time,

then I think things would have been a bit easier for me and it would have meant that the school would have had a better ally in the SPR than actually turned out to be the case,

because the SBIR needed evidence and that could have been it. But they decided that they weren't going to get involved to a certain extent, wisely, I think.

So the incident ended with the school thinking, right, well we've got to take another look at this.

This is not Kieran's subconscious.

Therefore the school psychiatrist also lost face and lost ground.

So out of this kind of came the idea, the notion, the strategy, that I would be taken under the wing of the school Bursa, who had seen various things and had various experiences when he was in the army out in India and so on, and maintained an open mind.

He had not had a university education, but he was a very educated man and he used to go to various different places, including the British Library, to research various things to do with this.

So that was a very good move and it certainly saved myself and the school from. I don't quite know what would have occurred, but it would have been horrendous.

So the conclusion of this is that it did lead to a change of approach.

So, Kieran, could you provide some more detail then maybe about the rituals the Warrens were reported as carrying out?

Yes,

this began when Ed and Lorraine and also Judith Penny were staying at the school and they were investigating the case and they weren't getting anywhere very particular,

partly because of what I've just mentioned, this division between the school's opinion and the Warren's opinion. And also the third opinion involved being that of the school psychiatrist and the medical authorities,

although the medical authorities opinion was split because the school GP and the school nurse tended to stick together and they considered that what was being done within the school was horrendous and they wanted to see it stopped and they wanted me to actually be taken out of that school and placed in another completely different setting,

a hospital possibly, or some sort of care home or an alternative institution where, you know, the school itself could settle down without me hopefully, and that I could receive the necessary care of a spiritual and medical nature.

The thing about this was that the Warrens didn't really know what they were doing and they claimed that one of the reasons why things had gone quiet was because it was the calm before the storm.

However,

they didn't sort of elaborate on that.

Now I'm going to make what might appear to be a bit of an aside in a moment.

The Warren's actual knowledge of black magic or rituals or the occult was not very great.

And the reason for that was that essentially they claimed a special relationship and dispensation from God to use in their work. And these things, things like tarot cards or whatever other rituals that would have been conducted,

anything to do with the occult or black magic, were basically devices of the devil and demonic and therefore they shouldn't be messed with in any way,

shape or form.

And therefore they didn't need to know what they were specifically or how they operated.

All they needed to know was whether they were present or not. Because if they were, that was clear evidence of the demonic.

Now the aside,

at the school there was a large telegraph pole just outside, it carried the phone lines and there was a little nest towards the top of it which was occupied by two blackbirds, a pair of blackbirds.

They were the counterpart of two long eared owls who used to nest in the trees next to the school during the day and into the.

The owls would rest in their nest. They come out at night and there were some poplar trees around the drive of the school and they would perch there and they would hunt.

The blackbirds tended to come out during the day and sometimes, you know, us boys, occasionally members of staff will put some food down for them.

This was against the rules, but it was nice to see the birds come down and pick up the food and so on, although they had to contend with the seagulls.

Now the not so nice part of all this,

a little while later,

after the Warrens had been told, look, you're not coming up with anything, you're not giving us anything new.

So you know,

we think you ought to leave and we'll send you some reports or whatever, we'll keep you informed. But the school wanted them out.

Then something peculiar happened.

There was this thing that used to flap about at night, black winged thing,

and Judith Penny used to chase it and it was said that it was a vampire bat, which seemed rather incredible to all concerned.

She said that she had to capture it because it was evil and had to be placed in a cage.

And only Ed and Lorraine knew what to do to save the school from this demonic vampire bat.

The vampire bat turned out to be none other, unfortunately,

than one of the injured blackbirds. Its wings had been broken or partly broken, and it was unable to fly properly.

It had been released at some stage into the upper corridor of the school, which was the one that contained the dormitories,

and it was flapping about and so on. Some of the boys tried to try to help it. Maybe they thought that, you know, if they took it to the window it would be able to fly away.

But unfortunately its wings were too badly injured for that to happen.

So that was captured by Judith Penney, who took it back to her room and did put it in a cage. Now, where that cage had come from I don't know.

Don't know where they found it.

It was little gold cage. But this is, to a certain extent,

sort of an aside,

because that's all I knew. And I knew that there were rows which I'd seen between Judith, Ed and Lorraine and between Ed and Lorraine.

So the various comments that have been made about the relationships involved. Yes, I'd seen that firsthand.

So nothing happened particularly,

and in the sense that it was the same old thing,

you know, Susan's apparition by my bed. She'd follow me around. There were poltergeist disturbances and so on, but nothing specifically out of the inordinate, out of the ordinary.

Until one day after lunch,

the head teacher came into my dorm, round into my dormitory or, you know, shouting at me, asking me what the hell, where I was, what the hell I was doing, and so on and so forth.

So I sort of said,

I'm here, sir, you know, blah, blah, blah, what's the matter?

Don't give me what's the matter, you know, what's the matter, blah, blah, blah.

So he started to push me around,

shouting and screaming at me, and then literally pushed me onto the floor, pick me up, throw me around and so on, telling me that I had something to tell him.

I didn't know what he was talking about,

I really didn't.

So he said he was going to take me to the office to sort this thing out.

Now, let me come back to this vampire bat thing, because one of the things that had scared a lot of the boys and perhaps some of the staff because of the Lawrence was that if this thing had bitten somebody that they were supposed to turn into a vampire or a werewolf.

Now, some of the school staff just laughed at this and thought, well,

you know,

this is, you know, crazy people doing crazy stuff. Yeah. You know, the school authorities are right to get rid of these people.

However,

as the head teacher knocked me about and tried to extract some sort of confession from me for the goings on and for, you know, certain things,

Susan came in,

came, and she said to me the same thing. She blocked him and stood in his way, preventing him from attacking me.

And he said, don't hide behind her. You know, you've got to learn to fight your own battles. You've got to learn to stand up for yourself as a man. And that means admitting when you're wrong, that admitting when you've behaved badly and, you know, brought the school and myself into disrepute and all the rest of it conspiring against the school with those other people.

He meant the Warrens. I didn't. I literally didn't know what he was talking about. He pushed me around the top corridor and down the main stairs, tumbling down the stairs and so on and so forth.

Now, I expected to be taken into the office and receive a beating, which was what normally occurred, but he didn't. He took me out of the front door and around corner.

Now, I need to explain some of the geometry of the building, the geography of the school.

If you stood facing the school from the driveway, you would see an outbuilding on the right hand side of the main building.

This contained a garage.

Outside of the garage there was a small store or workshop, sometimes referred to as the boiler house. Although the boiler house wasn't there, it was located downstairs, further along the passage between the garage and the main building.

So he took me there and what then happened was that I could see Susan standing there at a distance behind distance down this sort of alleyway,

and she was standing in front of something, but I didn't know what she was standing in front of.

And again she said to me,

you have to pray. You have to ask God to give me the power to protect you.

I didn't know what was coming.

I think she did.

So I said no.

And then what happened was the headteacher pushed me down this alleyway and told me to have a look at something. This was whatever was behind Susan because he knew he had the evidence and he was going to make me admit to my crimes.

I didn't know what he was talking about.

However,

the member of care staff P had been waiting so he joined in this. He joined in with this.

So they pinned me down, they grabbed hold of me, and then they pinned me down and put me down onto the sort of asphalt path. And there was a marking.

The marking was of a pentacle, and that was marked out in the blue purplish chalk, which I didn't have access to, but that member of care staff did.

And then it was a question of, look,

look what you've did, look what you've done,

you know, and so on.

Now,

what might appear to be another aside,

after the incident with the vampire bat, or supposed vampire bat, there were these little pentacles that went up in various different places. And the school had conducted an investigation, but nobody was talking.

Even despite the fact that boys were being seriously questioned, fiercely questioned, slapped around and so on, nobody had anything to say. Nobody knew who was doing this, although there's some hints and suggestions that it was an adult, not a boy,

and it was the guests and which case, you know, it was a question of. The only guests that were involved were the Warrens,

some of those.

That graffiti was in Blanchett marker, and the only place you could get those in that school was in the classrooms.

So that was very serious because it was.

It wasn't just graffiti. It was stealing as well, because you had to steal the pen in order. In order to make the pentagrams or whatever, markings on the walls.

And that has been what had occurred. A number of places occurred in the gym, in the shower room, and a couple of other places as well.

So the school were absolutely livid about this.

They thought I was responsible, although nobody had named me. So there was this big pentacle,

and there was something else as well.

There was some. There were some feathers and there was some blood.

Now,

to cut a long story short, my nose was rubbed into this,

and that created some gravel rash and so on, on my hands, elbows, face.

My nose was knocked out of joint, so my nose was bleeding,

and I was held down by the head teacher. And the member of care staff literally kicked me,

kicked my bottom.

This was extremely hard, very, very hard. And he would have done this repeatedly. And it was at that point that I decided I was not going to be able to talk my way out of whatever the hell was going on.

So I asked for Susan's help.

She had been watching what was going on,

and she had been sobbing and begging me to pray.

I did.

And then what happened was the member of care staff was literally projected back against a wall and pinned there for a period of time. The headteacher was thrown back, thrown up and back and against another wall.

Now, they decided that they weren't going to take no for an answer. And what they did was to charge at me, bowling me over and again.

Susan,

actually, she pushed me back and I crashed in against the railings of the stairs,

where you go down to the boiler house. And she prevented them from attacking me,

pushing them back and flipping them over.

She could see that this was not going to prevent them from carrying out what was going on.

You know, she's not going to stop this.

So there was a small outside toilet, which was part of the sort of like the workshed.

And what she did was she ripped the door off that toilet. It was an external wooden door. She ripped it off and she put it in that alleyway,

barring them from getting at me.

Obviously, they could try and pull this thing as it was wedged between the two sides of the alleyway, the brickwork,

or they could crawl under it, but she refused to allow them to do so.

It was at that point when, when there was this standoff,

that the bursa appeared at the other, at the drive end of the alleyway and asked what the hell was going on. And his intervention stopped the incident becoming any more serious as far as I was concerned.

Although both members of staff were also pulling up and not wanting to continue the confrontation because the headteacher was now against the wall and sliding down it because there was something physically wrong with him.

And the member of care staff also was experiencing problems. He was severely out of breath and then slumped down against the wall.

So they were incapacitated.

I was fairly incapacitated, but managed to get up and answer the bursa from behind the barrier of the toilet door. He said that he required the other two members of staff to give him their word that whatever was going on,

they would stop their assault on me and that we would talk this through. There would be no more, no further violence.

I accepted that if they did, because all I wanted to do was basically run away.

Having sorted that out and got that agreement,

then I met the other two by crawling underneath the door.

While this had been going on, there had been occasional bangs and thumps, not only on the wall, but on the door of the workshed.

And Susan was there. So Susan was in between us, in between two members of staff and the bersa.

She continually banged on this door and she pointed to the window and a small red cord that hung down from the inside of the sash windows and was slightly on, came through under the window frame.

I saw the significance but there again, I knew what was going on because now a series of images has flown through my mind, and this has been prompted by Susan, who was telling me what she.

She wanted me to do.

So I said to them, you've got to look at this door, at this other door. You've got to think about what's happened in there, because only in there will we find the answer to this.

And they were prepared to listen to me because of Susan banging on the door and basically threatening them. And they backed away from her as she did so. And therefore it was apparent that no further physical confrontation against me could proceed because she was being too protective.

And both the men were, for various reasons, in rather physical poor shape as the result of her throwing them against walls and so on.

So they argued with me initially that there was no reason to see anything or do anything with that door that was the workshed, because that belonged, in a sense,

to the member of care staff who doubled as a sort of a janitor and handyman. He wasn't very good at it, but anyway,

so he didn't want anyone going in there because that was his private property as he saw it. But there was the banging on the door.

And then Susan knocked one of the small window panes out.

And we tried,

or rather they tried to open the door,

but nothing happened. You couldn't move the door. And it was said that, oh, well, Susan had burnt out. I didn't believe that. And I said, no, she's trying to tell us something.

She's trying to tell us something. Soon she's knocked out the small. One of the small window panes. And I said, there, there, that's what she's telling us.

It's the window in relation to the door, because that's how they got out. It wasn't how they got in. And the reason she could rip the door off.

But what Susan is trying to tell us is that she can't open it in the normal way, even though it's locked, because the bolts are on it from the inside.

And that's what she's trying to tell us, which he's trying to tell us. We need to go in there.

So there was an argument about this, but eventually they decided that the only way of resolving the issue with a very angry Susan was to do as she demanded. And as I said.

So the thing being that at the moment we couldn't open the door because it was wedged.

So basically the incident was left in the sense that I was taken to hospital and I had an argument with the people in the hospital because all that was stated was that I had slipped on a bar of soap.

This was a standard thing in these circumstances because after the time I'd been through then, I didn't want a repeat of that, even if Susan was going to protect me.

Consequently, I said what I was told.

I had an argument with the psychiatrist in the hospital because he accused me of doing this. It was all self inflicted. And I said to him, that's absolute rubbish because how could I have kicked myself so hard up the backside that I,

you know, displaced by coccyx, which is not possible.

It's, you know. And he sort of said, you know, oh, well, it's just as possible as you slipped on a bar of soap because you've got gravel rash on your face, you know, what kind of shower has that?

You know, it's asphalt,

you know, which is what his colleagues had really discovered anyway.

So I said, can't you see that? I'm just saying what I've been told to say because look at me, look at the state I'm in,

right?

The reason I'm saying what I've been told to say is because I don't want any more of this.

What you've got to do is you've got to ask those two,

the staff from the school, about this because those are the people who are involved. You've got to ask the versa.

So he refused to do that. So I demanded to see the social worker, school social worker, because she knew what was going on.

She wasn't available. But I did get to see the social worker for the hospital social worker,

who then said she would contact the school social worker. And I was put under a special watch, which was exactly what I wanted to happen because it would keep them off me and prevent any further physical harm.

The head teacher,

the medical staff, thought he'd had a heart attack or something, or some. Or a stroke or something due to the ECG and EEG and so on. He laughed this off.

He just said, oh, I'm getting a bit, I'm getting on a bit and so on. But he thought that this really was connected with his altercation with Susan when she had flipped him across,

flipped him over several times and knocked him against walls and that had knocked the breath out of him. The member of care staff P had always had a bit of a bad back and his back was paining him considerably, but there was some mouldy and there were mouldy handprints under his shirt and there were also mouldy Handprints on the,

you know, on the headteacher's chest, under his shirt.

So evidence, physical evidence of the paranormal there.

So what happened after that, then, Kieran?

So I didn't stay the night in the hospital. I was taken back to the boarding school and basically put to bed. Although I couldn't rest, it took me quite a considerable time to be able to sit down rather than lie down.

Some days later we gathered, that's myself, the headteacher, the member of CARE staff and the bursa gathered round the little workshop.

The headteacher had already ensured that the door, the other door that had been ripped off the external toilet had been replaced, had been put back.

So a new frame was required,

a new lock and the door had to be patched up. That's considerable violence. And there was no way that any person, however strong,

could have ripped that door off because you would have had to have put your hands through the brickwork in order to be able to grab the door from the inside.

There were those self same blue gray mouldy handprints on the inside. Those handprints were of a teenage girl,

not a mature man.

So again, physical evidence of the paranormal.

When we gathered around the door of the workshop,

what occurred was that we found it impossible to be able to move the door. That's because of the bolts on the inside and it was also wedged as well.

So we looked for some other way in and I said what I'd been trying to say previously, which was the cord and the broken window. Susan had broken one of the window panes to draw attention to this.

But it became obvious that what you should do is you should actually use the red cord that had been left in order to be able to unlock the sash window and therefore move up the window and climb in when that was done.

Inside that little sort of storage place,

there was a workbench and there was another pentacle.

There was also on the workbench a book,

but I'll come to the book in a minute. The pentacle also contained some blood and feathers and there was the second blackbird in the middle of the pentacle.

The book was a book on magic and ritual and that contained the diagrams, the pentagrams that had been chalked up and the ones that had appeared on the graffiti.

The book had been borrowed from the local library and it had been borrowed on the ticket of the member of care staff.

Therefore, this clearly marked out both the warrants and that member of care staff implicating them and what had been going on.

Member Of Clairstaff said it was nothing to do with him and blamed the Warrens. The Warrens blamed him.

However, I was off the hook.

But what that shows was that the Warrens, even with assistance or perhaps take Don by somebody else,

were quite capable of carrying out this sort of operation.

I was also blamed because under pressure I had said several things. I sort of pointed out where the blackbirds were because they were nice, you know, and I liked looking at them and that the.

That there was a sort of like a net for a ball.

Balls were kept in these sort of. These net.

Sort of net bags in the gym.

And I pointed out that that's what was the case because it become apparent that one of those net bags had been used to trap the blackbirds.

And it was there and blood and feather stained.

So I was let off the hook on that one. But the school had some sorting out to do. I don't quite know what happened, but I know that, you know, the Warrens left for a little while and they did come back,

but there we are. That was one of the incidents and it showed several things. Partly the violence of the school, partly the reaction the school had, and also the way in which the Warrens tended to behave in that they would organize the facts to suit their theories.

They would not construct theories from out of the facts. And that was something that was held against them because at least the SBIR and the other psychical research organizations were attempting to write, try and understand what was going on through interpreting the facts and reports that had been presented to them and also the testimony from myself and from various people within the school.

So the Warrens were seen as people that were not desirable and were causing trouble and commotion within the school. And therefore they were seen as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

So what did Ed and Lorraine tell you of their backgrounds? I mean,

it strikes me that you might have had something in common, as Ed reportedly grew up in a haunted house.

Yes,

that's a very good point.

Come to Lorraine first. Lorraine considered that her background and having a precognition of a tree which she saw when she was at school,

that the tree had become mature in her mind's eye and that this meant that her psychic gifts were superior to mine. Even though I'd spent a long time in experimenting with ghosts directly in haunted houses and so on and so forth, I didn't never thought she was as sensitive as I was.

And she certainly didn't have the same background or experience with ghosts, mind you, what I did was all the sorts of things that people tell you never to do. So I was walking around in haunted buildings, podding and poking ghosts and so on and so forth.

And that's one of the incidents,

walking within the ethereal body of the ghost that I've sort of explained,

which he had no knowledge of.

In terms of Ed,

yes,

he said that he had grown up in a haunted house, but there were differences because everything had been okay.

And he used to play outside when he was a small boy,

as boys do, you know, on a little bicycle, tricycle, whatever.

And there was used to be this old woman that used to shout at him.

Now, this was supposedly his auntie. And she had lived in the house originally in their house and then moved next door or whatever. And Ed had grown up in the neighboring house.

So after she died,

he would see her in a wardrobe in his house and he became very scared of her.

He wasn't allowed to be able to express his concerns about this because his father, being a cop, just sort of basically said, ah, there's a logical explanation for everything, you know, you're imagining it.

Now, the interesting point about this was again,

Ed and Lorraine were looking for evidence of the demonic and therefore knowledge that I could not possibly have from any normal source.

But of course,

you look at the other side of this spiritualist side, the spiritualism side, then spirits are meant to be able to know and understand things that we, the living, do not, or cannot, and be able to contact perhaps other deceased persons.

So it is a rather difficult differential diagnosis to make in terms of is someone dealing with a very active, attached spirit in the form of a poltergeist, or is this indeed demonic?

The subtleties of this bypassed the warrants, but the school saw them.

So I was pressured into carrying out an experiment with Ed and Lorraine, or Ed principally, where he told me of this incident that had occurred in his life.

And he was trying to make out that what he'd experienced was far worse than what I'd experienced, when in fact the reverse was true.

So he demanded that I try to reproduce this.

And I said, well, what for? How? I don't understand.

But he said, look,

I'm going to talk to P about you.

You're not cooperating.

This is demonic.

I want you to prove to us that it's not.

So he said to me, what I want you to do is I want you to call Susan and I want you to ask her about this person.

Tell me what you know of this person, this auntie of mine.

Just do it.

Don't Argue.

And what I'll do is I'll see what happens.

And if you can, I'll see what happens in my mind's eye and so on. So I said, well, look, what if what you're asking me to do, Mr. Warren, is to say, right,

this lady that you saw, your auntie, used to appear from a wardrobe.

Do you want me to ask Susan to see if she can ask your auntie to appear in a wardrobe here?

Say, for example, that wardrobe over there?

Ah, Kieran, Yes.

Now you're getting the idea.

We want to find out how bad this demonic infestation is. Yes. Can you do that for me?

And he then laughed. He said, I bet you can't.

No, no, no, you can't. You're not a psychic. You're not this, you're not that. You're just some stupid boy that's got taken over by a demon.

You don't have any powers at all. You don't have any talent at all.

So that stung me, and it shouldn't have done. I should have ignored it.

And I said, okay.

So I did what he asked. I called Susan. And he was scared of her.

So again, he couldn't understand what I was saying because a lot of this is telepathic communication. So I spoke what I was saying out loud,

and he said, yeah, okay.

So at first it was just sort of some images that were coming into his mind and my mind,

because I asked Susan, can, you know, I said to Ed, can you? Look,

what you're going to need to do is you're going to have to open your mind to me and therefore to Susan, because she needs to know and understand who it is that you want me to contact through her.

So he said, no, I don't want to do that. No, no, no, no, no.

That's too difficult. That's too scary. I said, look,

you asked me to do this.

You said you wanted to find out,

you know, what powers I have and what powers belong to Susan or a demon or whatever. Now you're backing out of the experiment.

So he said, oh, you're challenging me? Then I said, yeah, yeah, I am. Yeah.

So he said, okay. And in his mind's eye, he started to. I could feel that he was starting to think of some of those incidents and the sort of discussions he had with his father.

And from that, I was able to get an idea of who that person was, what she looked like. And that's what Susan wanted, because it was a question of, can I visualize that person?

Can I ask Susan can you find this person?

Because obviously I need to have an outline, you know, a picture of her in my mind and say, well, this is the person here.

And Susan said, I think so.

So I concentrated on relating to Susan and relating to Susan, Ed and the wardrobe and it, I found it very exhausting task but sat down on the, on the bed because it was.

We're in the dormitory and Ed was sitting on a chair and he got out his sketch pad. Now Ed used to do a lot of sketching with his left hand upside, so the picture will be upside down.

So he started drawing,

which was partly from, you know, what was in his mind's eye, what was his, in his mind from his memory.

But I said, no, no, no, there's more than that happening here. No, no, no, no, there's not, there's not, there's not. I'm just drawing from, I'm just, I'm drawing from memory and so on.

I said, it's more than that.

And by which time Lorraine plus the bursar and the head teacher come back into the room because they only left us for a few minutes and they could sense and see Susan's presence between myself and Ed and that Susan then started pointing at the wardrobe And I said, yes,

yes,

she's there.

Ed couldn't see the entire picture he was drawing.

And when he explained what was going on, he did part of the explanation, so did I. And I could see that the head teacher and the bursa were tutting and sort of like, look, this is exactly the sort of thing we do not want,

we don't want to encourage this, we want to get rid of this.

So you know, Mr. Warren,

why are you bullying Kieran to actually get involved in this sort of experiment which would actually, if it's successful, manifest yet another flipping ghost. No, we don't want this. No, no, no, no, no, no, stop this immediately.

And I just looked at them and I sort of said, well, some things once started a bit more difficult to stop. In fact, I don't know how to stop this.

Susan was then pointing at them, pointing at the,

at the wardrobe. It's a full apparitional figure.

And Ed started sketching away quite rapidly. Lorraine comes up beside him and she says,

oh,

oh,

that's my mother in law. Is it my auntie? No,

what are you doing, Ed? Because we hadn't actually said, given a name or anything like that. So we didn't know. He didn't know the bursar and the headteacher didn't know.

And I Said,

turn the page around so you can see it properly.

And turned it.

And there was the picture of this of Ed's auntie. Now, Lorraine knew it because of. From Ed's description and because of other drawings Ed had made of this auntie figure.

And she's. Oh, my God, it's her.

It's her, isn't it? Isn't it, Ed?

And Ed then looks at the page and oh,

no, no, no, no, she's not. She's not here. She's not here. She's not in my mind. And I said, no, she's not in because she's over there in the wardrobe.

Just as you asked me to ask me to do this, Mr. Warren, she's there.

No, no, no, no.

And I then just asked Susan to ask her to come forward.

And then I thought, what. What am I doing? Just communicate with her directly. So that's what I did. Please, you know,

I don't know.

Sorry, I don't know who you are. My name's Kieran.

You know,

I'm sorry I had to bring you here, but I brought you here at the request of Mr. Warren over there and so on.

The figure steps forward and she then turns.

This is the auntie involved. She turns and she goes straight, points straight to Ed Warren and she says,

how dare you make such noise outside my window?

And Ed is now shaking in fear.

Lorraine has gone white and she's about to faint. And the head teacher and the bursa are sort of saying, kieran, stop this, stop it, stop it now. And I'm saying, I don't know how.

All I can do is ask Susan.

And therefore I had to then concentrate and relate to Susan and sort of say, can you. Can you thank her?

And just say to her, thank you very much for coming and apologize to her and say, please, could you go home now?

And I had to repeat this a number of occasions and a number of times. And I had to ask the lady herself, please, you know, thank you for coming, please, would you.

Please, would you go away now? And so on and so forth. After a period of time,

her figure seemed to sort of dissolve slightly and she sort of went back into the wardrobe and her presence dissipated after that. There were no, you know, further sort of express sort of further incidents.

And again, the Warrens lost a lot of faith out of this because they'd asked me to do something, bullied me into doing it. I was capable of doing it. But whether or not this was a mediumistic thing remained an open question.

But certainly it was a question of if I was conjuring up spirits or demonic husks or whatever, then quite clearly the Warrens were playing with fire that they did not know how to control.

And therefore the safest thing to do was to prevent me from getting involved in carrying out any further experiments with or without Susan's help.

I was absolutely adamant that I could not have done this on my own. And it was only because of the three way, you know, three way link myself. Well, four way link, really.

Myself and Ed and Susan and myself, Ed, Susan and Ed's auntie. Because without being able to formulate an image of the auntie in my mind in relation to Ed, I could not have asked Susan to try and find that spirit, which he did.

So again, that's a remarkable incident in its own right.

But what it shows is that essentially they did not know what they were doing.

They were experimenting. One of the things is,

you know, C.S. lewis, the sort of magician's apprentice, they knew half the story, but they didn't know the whole story.

So it was the whole business.

I always felt about this, that I had learnt quite a lot from it because I had learned how to relate to Susan in a slightly different way. And I'd also learned that what I had figured out, which is the relation between spirits,

maybe they can call each other if you have someone, a spirit or,

you know, that was sufficiently strong to be able to do this. So the spirit themselves can act to a certain extent like a medium.

And that's one of the things that came out of this for me,

plus Susan's obvious abilities.

And she was a very powerful spirit. And that's why sometimes I refer to her as a poltergeist because of the power that she had.

How much of that power stemmed directly from prayer to God and God's intervention, I don't know. I've never known, and it's always been a mystery in my life about that.

But certainly these were extremely potent incidents.

And I've tried to see if I can research and find anything like that,

you know, in the psychical research literature, but basically I haven't.

So sort of pioneering, breaking new ground, although I didn't realize it at the time.

One of the things that came out of that, of course, was the Warren's inexperience.

And despite my own inexperience, I had a greater idea and understanding of what was going on and a better perspective on it because I was able to relate to Susan and able to relate some of the experiences I was having and try and formulate Some thoughts and opinions about that,

despite the fact I was very young.

So, Kieran, what was your assessment then of the Warren's handling of your case and the way that they related to each other and the school authorities?

Well,

the first thing is that both Ed and Lorraine Warren claimed they were doing God's work. They claimed that they were responsible to a higher power and that God had given them special guidance and a special disposition to carry out his work,

which was difficult to challenge and it was difficult to query.

And that put them on a pedestal to a certain extent.

So that was the first thing, this sort of spiritual and moral superiority which meant in effect, that neither they nor their methods could be or should be questioned. The next thing really is that they were dangerously out of their depths in the whole business and tried to make up for it with this sort of.

They have a special status, they have special knowledge, they have a special understanding.

But they lost more and more ground through these various incidents which showed that they were incompetent at best and they weren't prepared to acknowledge they were dealing with forces, issues and phenomena that they really could not understand and could not control.

And therefore they were no better than any of the other people that were involved who frankly admitted that at an early stage,

although they did say that they would do see what they could do to help, although they were out of their depth.

But the impression I got from the Warrens was that they were very definitely out of their depths.

So there was that aspect to it.

Then there was this issue of financial gain in that they would come and investigate a case, as with my case,

on the basis of no upfront money or fees.

But then there would be other things and a whole lot of other charges involved and goods in kind. Staying at the school rent free, full built on lodging and so on and so forth,

that they wanted office facilities and so on and so forth, and they wanted things done for them.

And they were very keen to sort of capitalize on the whole business about wanting to write books or get film rights or whatever from me and trying to get me to sign contracts for this and so on and so forth.

Ed actually was good, you know, to be fair to him, he was quite a good artist. And he did do a sketch and then a painting of the school which he wanted to sell to the school for quite a bit of money.

Had he been more reasonable about his fee, then I think he would have got a sale. But that's perhaps another question.

The basic thing was that the Warrants saw everything in very black and White and simplistic terms,

it was demonic. It was demonic because they said so. And the reason that they said so was because they had this special gift, special insight and special guidance from God.

But if you then now start to contrast this with what happened to me, with my experiences, which is Susan asking me to pray to God for help to protect me so that she would protect me, then you immediately see that there's a clash of who God works for, if you want to put it that way,

who has God's ear?

What is God doing about this?

And if this is down to the demonic, how on earth could God be working through a ghost or a poltergeist on behalf of a young boy?

For some people later in my life, clerics and so on,

that it would be seen. Well, this is too much to ask.

And we come back to this sort of, who is Kieran? Is he some kind of Joan of Arc? No, I never thought so. Never believed that.

I just wanted the whole thing to go away and be like all of the other boys.

But this made me special.

I didn't want to be special.

But since I had no choice,

then it was a question of, you know, who do you believe?

Do you believe the reluctant hero, Kieran?

Or do you believe these people, these sort of. Who would take the approach that they were the sort of the superheroes that would come in and would manage to swipe victory from the jaws of disaster or whatever?

The Warrens were not interested in some of the physical evidence which there was. There were things. There was permanent marking on the lino where Susan habitually would stood over my bed.

And there were other things like magnetic evidence around the apparition in that particular location.

They weren't interested in modern methods at that time and they weren't interested in sort of EVP evidence or whatever which was starting to become available there. You do various sessions,

EVP type sessions that was done through other people.

And the Warrens didn't like that.

And the reason they didn't like it is because they didn't know enough about it. And therefore they said, oh, well, we're not going to engage with that because this is only another avenue through which the demonic can manifest.

Yet what they did was to manufacture evidence and produce, therefore a line of argument that said that everything was demonic when it was far more complicated than that. So. So my general impression of the Warrens was that they were vastly out of their depth, that the approach that they took was over simplistic and that they were out essentially for financial gain and that really is the worst possible combination if you're going to be a paranormal investigator.

So my judgment on them is the, you know, the least charitable, I suppose, of a great many people who've criticized the Warrens for their work and their approach.

Although this was relatively early in their careers. I think they should have been more willing to listen and more willing to see the phenomena in an open minded way. Which they were not.

Because they were determined to see it as proof of the demonic no matter what it was.

And poor old Bathsheba Sherman got a lot of blame for things that she wasn't involved with and didn't do. And that was again something that I always found unacceptable.

As well as the manufacturing of evidence. Because it wasn't just the incidents I've related.

There were other instances in which they manufactured evidence and fake phenomena. In the end, the Warrens were sort of told never to come back to the school after what was known as the altercation.

That was a series of physical conflicts which occurred one night with which they were involved one way or another.

And matters were reported to the police.

And the police gave the Warrens basically an ultimatum. You go away and leave that school alone as the school have requested, or we will be taking action against you. But the point being is,

it was at that point that the Warrens decided that they had better do as they were told rather than seek to come back yet again and try everybody's patience.

It was because I felt that they were treated unfairly as a result of this that I decided to unwisely have contact with them some years later. But that may be another story.

The thing being is these are only a few of the incidents that occurred at the boarding school. There were a great many very serious incidents.

And the whole approach that was taken would require a lot of time to go into.

It was an extremely difficult period of my life and one which I have not wanted to talk about. I've talked about isolated incidents here and there,

but not the whole thing.

And it was not as if when I left the boarding school that things just stopped. They didn't.

And there were other instances when I was involved with Ed and Lorraine Warren. And those instances did not go well.

But one of the things that I felt always about the Warrens was that they were basically conviction driven. And that was the cause of all the rest of the problems.

I think what I've learned in all these years is to be open minded and to always think that there may be more than one explanation for something.

Of course that leads you into a sort of a limbo, because you then end up not being able to choose between different explanations.

But sometimes life is like that. You never know completely what it's all about.

And maybe, I suppose, we shouldn't. Perhaps technology might prove one day to be the answer to that. I don't know.

But one of the things that was very clear to me was that Susan was trying to help me. She was my companion,

even though she scared me.

And eventually I have had to accept her.

And she's now more my guide,

more in the manner of a spiritualist guide than what she was back then.

It's been a very strange life.

I've been through these very strange times.

And even if I were to listen to this podcast, if I'd not had those experiences, I would thinking,

who is this guy? Did that really happen?

Oh, yes, it did happen.

I wish it hadn't, but it did.

What I've done with all these experiences, I don't know, I'm still coming to terms with them rather, you know, rather than shutting them away.

But this has given me the first opportunity to talk about some of these things and to raise some of these issues, and I'm very grateful for that opportunity. And thank you.

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keep your eyes open and your mind curious.