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When I looked in the mirror, I saw the number of the Beast—666—written on my arm in huge red welts.”
    Why the bride-to-be became the focal person is rather puzzling: Her two teenaged sisters both said she was the strong one, their beautiful, high-spirited, and rather willful leader. Yet, in the Work, I’ve found there’s no predictable pattern that explains why one family member is singled out for diabolical abuse, except that people are attacked through weaknesses the demonic are quick to exploit. Very often the focal person is a child, since these bullying spirits love to pick on kids. It’s a cruel but effective tactic: While the evil spirit was clearly out to get the mother, what better way to break down a parent’s will—and reduce her resistance to possession—than by brutalizing her child?
    Although the dark power could have accomplished the same thing by going after any of Gabby’s four children, I had a theory why Luciana bore the brunt of the abuse. Since the force of doom was posing as a pitiful ghost of a woman who was murdered on her wedding day, it may have reasoned, with perverse logic, that a mother would be most empathetic with its alleged anguish if her daughter, a genuine bride-to-be, was also suffering.
    If so, the plan worked: Gabby immediately asked “Virginia” what other spirits were in the house. Naturally, the demon had an answer: “She said there were two poltergeists in the house,” Gabby reported. “One was good, and the other poltergeist was very nasty and dangerous.”
    Joe winced. We both hate this term, which has become popular with parapsychologists, at least the ones who believe in spirits—and some don’t. They explain away cases of infestation, oppression, or actual possession as the work of “poltergeists,” a German term for “noisy or mischievous spirits.” (Others claim they are the result of natural phenomena like electromagnetic energy or underground springs—anything but the demonic.) That makes diabolical powers sound like a bunch of pranksters who are just out for some spooky fun. It’s like saying rapists and muggers are simply socially challenged party animals, not a very real menace to society.
    I don’t care if you don’t believe in the Devil—I just pray you and your family never feel his wrath and undying hatred yourself. What I do object to is parapsychologists who “investigate” hauntings from the scientific point of view, going in with their cameras and gaussmeters instead of holy water and relics. They take their readings, snap some pretty pictures of spirit energy, and go on their merry way, while the family is left in a nightmare. How the demonic must delight at this! What better spin to put on their mission to destroy humanity than to claim it’s just the harmless mischief of so-called poltergeists?
    My partner didn’t let this go by. “The game here is good cop/bad cop, or good poltergeist/bad poltergeist—except that there’s no such thing as a ‘good poltergeist’ because this is just a euphemism some people use for the demonic. Make no mistake about it: The only spirits in your home are evil spirits, bad guys.”
    After scaring Gabby with its ominous pronouncement about the nasty poltergeist, the demon moved into phase two of the con game—volunteering to “help” the family with the very problem it had inflicted on them. This reminded me of human criminals who surreptitiously break a store’s front window, then show up a few hours later to offer the unsuspecting shopkeeper their overpriced repair services.
    The malignant force didn’t stop there. That same day it sent yet another “ghost” to vouch for its kindly intentions. “I saw my father, who died a couple of years ago, standing in front of me,” Gabby explained. “He called Virginia ‘the lady’ and said she was a