That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not dramatic.
I’m much more likely to turn up and say, “Hi, I’m Jason – I’ve been sent to sort the leak in the temporal timeframe, if you could just show me where it is.”
Like a gas engineer, but for paranormal activity.
As well as being an Anglican priest and the dean of Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff, I am a “deliverance minister” dealing with poltergeist activity, houses that are “haunted” and things that go bump in the night, as well as people who believe they are possessed.
There are some misconceptions about how the Anglican Church deals with the supernatural. The fact that every diocese in England and Wales has a team of people like me shows that the Church is more open to these things than people assume.
In my diocese, we deal with about a dozen incidents a year. Despite what people often think, it’s no worse on Halloween.
My own experience of the paranormal started in the house I lived in as a newly-ordained minister in South Wales that I believe was, for lack of a better word, haunted. This was 27 years ago.
My wife and I had a newborn son, and there was a cold spot – a sudden, localised area of low temperature that some people believe indicates the presence of a ghost – around his cot. I went away for the weekend and when I came back my wife, who is incredibly sensible, said his room felt like stepping into a freezer.
Not long after, I went to the bathroom one night and felt a presence on the other side of the door. I got a clear mental picture of what it looked like: it was a man, about my height, wearing a mask, with piercing grey eyes, staring at me with unbridled hostility.
When I came out of the bathroom in a panic, my wife said, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I replied, “Well, I haven’t seen one, but I might as well have.”
Enough was enough. I called the vicar, who came over and said some prayers in Latin and sprinkled holy water in the house. To this day, I don’t know what he said, and he’s since died so I can’t ask.
But I do know the atmosphere completely changed. Friends who came over afterwards commented on how much warmer and more inviting the house felt – those who didn’t know what had happened just assumed we had redecorated.
Whatever presence had been in the house was banished for good.
A few days later, I had a conversation with the church warden, who asked how we were finding the house. I replied that yes, it’s a nice place to live – as by that point, it genuinely was.
There was no way he would have known about what had gone on there. “Interesting,” he said. “When they built that house, they disturbed a Roman burial ground.”
And he left it at that.
Had something been disturbed when the house was built? I have no idea. That’s the nature of this job: you can’t verify anything.
But I had been spooked enough by the incident to be convinced it might have been.
In that parish, I had a couple of call-outs about suspected paranormal activity, so when the bishop offered for me to go on a Church of England training course on how to complete exorcisms myself, I accepted. That’s how most people get into this line of work, I think. They have an experience of it themselves or have been called out to deal with it.
Now, I get called out to people’s homes, offices and even shops.
Occasionally people see things – for want of a better word, ghosts – and I am asked to investigate.
Sometimes that’s someone who was in their life and keeps reappearing, or sometimes it’s what I call a “place memory” of something that happened historically; for example, the spectre of Roman soldiers marching through a house in York.
In another case I dealt with, a family would walk over a “person” at the bottom of the staircase who’d fallen and broken his neck. People would just step over him, which was a bit weird, but he wasn’t trying to communicate with them – occasionally he would just appear, lying there.
Sometimes, however, this can be very scary. I had one case where someone kept seeing a deceased relative appear in a jump scare on the other side of the curtain when they were showering.
For some reason, poltergeist activity – physical disturbances or movements – seems more often than not to involve shoes being thrown across a room. I have no idea why. I believe it really happens, but also thatit’s a phenomenon caused by the person, rather than any sort of ghost. It can also be part of astress reaction
: when someone has been in significant pain or is suffering from a serious illness, almost like static electricity has built up. The person is not aware of their part in it.
We also deal with people who fall into two categories. Some have called us as they are oppressed by something they can’t explain. Then there are those who believe they are possessed by a demon but, in my experience, if they have the self-insight to seek help from the Church, they usually aren’t.
I am yet to come across someone in need of a dramatic exorcism like the kind you see in a film.
While I’m open to the idea that there are cases like this, I believe they’re exceedingly rare.
There is quite a lot of overlap with mental health conditions, including schizophrenia, which is why we work closely with medical professionals.
There are three signs that people really are possessed: preternatural strength; preternatural knowledge; and knowledge of languages they never learnt to speak.
So, if you were called to a stranger who knew your deepest darkest secrets, attempted to throw the dining table at you, and then suddenly spoke in, say, Arabic, there would be a good chance.
That’s the only time you would perform a major exorcism, using a special prayer handed to us by the bishop.
We always work in pairs. Wherever possible, I take the local vicar along with me to deal with a report of paranormal activity. I have a phone conversation with the person who has reported it.
Then we visit in person.
Almost always, I bless holy water, sprinkle it on the walls, and say a prayer for God’s presence to come into the building. Then we say the Lord’s prayer together. Usually that works.
I’m not in the business of trying to explain the unexplainable, but I have seen enough to be open to the idea that places really can be haunted.
My job is to pray, and always to reassure people. It’s not like a scientific experiment where you can control the variables; you just have to deal with situations as you find them.
I have come across buildings that have changed dramatically once the “exorcism” is complete: you could feel the temperature rising, like someone was turning the lights up. It was just astonishing.
In other cases, it’s more of a psychological effect – people feel reassured and freed from whatever it was that was haunting them.
There is a lot of evil in our world, but I fully believe that good will triumph eventually.