Grown men writhing on the floor like snakes. Screams so loud the neighbours complain. The Mail investigates the unnerving world of the 21st century exorcists

By Jane Fryer
Last updated at 2:25 AM on 20th November 2010

Peter Lloyd’s entire body is shaking. His eyes roll back, his hands flap about like a couple of trapped birds and he lets out a gentle groaning sound. Two inches from his juddering face, a man in dark woolly jumper and smart corduroys is yelling at him. Or, ­perhaps more accurately, at something inside him.

‘Get out. Get out evil spirit and go to the pit,’ shouts Pastor Vincent. ‘GO TO THE PIT! Cowardly spirit, I sever you from Peter. Now GET OUT!’

And, with that, he peels back Peter’s right eyelid, glares into his glazed eye, jabs him hard in the stomach, bashes him on the head with a ­leatherbound copy of the Bible and starts shouting again.

‘Holy spirit, I ask for the full judgment of God to smite that evil spirit. Smite it. SMITE IT. Repeat after me, Peter: “In the name of Jesus, I break every curse before my father in Heaven.”

‘Now face me cowardly spirit and tell me your name. TELL ME YOUR NAME.’
Pastor Vincent is carrying out an ­exorcism or ‘inner healing and spirit deliverance’, as he likes to call it.

‘This is spirit warfare — exorcism ­literally means the expelling of evil ­spirits,’ he had told me three hours ­earlier, as he daubed Peter’s ­forehead in extra virgin olive oil, checked we’d turned our phones off and locked the door to a draughty office in St Paul’s Trust community centre in Margate.

‘Most people who come to me have been everywhere, tried everything and nothing has worked, but I get results.’

Until five years ago, Pastor Vincent ten Bouwhuis, who is originally from Holland, ran a small business ­refurbishing hotels.

But then he was born again, attended a five-week training course at the ­Spiritual Freedom Church at Phoenix, Arizona, launched his online Vincent Ministries and now conducts more than 100 ‘spirit ­deliverances’ a year.

He is one of thousands of ­charismatic modern-day exorcists who conduct exorcisms every day in the UK in return for offerings or donations (‘people are generous but, then again, their lives improve enormously’).

They advertise on the internet and in the Yellow Pages and are on ­Facebook and Twitter. Many, ­including Pastor Vincent, even offer online ­training courses — ‘it’s very good value at £50 a month’ — where aspiring ­exorcists can learn the ropes.

‘There’s been a massive rise in demand lately, so I’ve been incredibly busy,’ he says.

And it’s not just Pastor Vincent who’s busy.

Demand for exorcisms has shot up over recent decades. Just last week, more than a hundred Roman Catholic bishops and priests gathered in ­Baltimore, U.S., to discuss the ­staggering demand — and the ­shortage of priests properly qualified to carry them out.

As one Catholic priest puts it: ‘More people are dabbling in the occult, but then they get tangled and confused and come to us to unravel it all.’

Because, surprising though it seems, every Church of England and ­Catholic ­diocese still has at least one ­bishop-appointed exorcist upon whom parishioners can call in a ­paranormal emergency.

They don’t advertise their services — Catholic exorcists are forbidden to talk about their activities — but are busy behind the scenes to address ­paranormal ­referrals from parishioners, members of the police, the medical ­profession and the Samaritans.

Although their work mostly consists of offering reassurance, occasionally, they still conduct formal exorcisms.

They also operate under a strict set of guidelines and must have ­demonstrated themselves to be an ­exceptionally holy person.

‘It is a specialism that has always been regarded with an enormous sense of reverence and awe,’ says one priest, who cannot be named. ‘We’re talking about the salvation of a human soul here, not something casual.’

So why on earth did Peter Lloyd (who claims to be possessed by the spirit of his eight-year-old self) opt for someone like Pastor Vincent?

‘They had already prayed for me at church, but nothing really ­happened,’ says Peter. ‘So I found him on the ­internet and here I am.’

‘They come to me because I get results,’ says Pastor Vincent. ‘Or at least the Lord does, working through me. We go a lot deeper than the Church and we find every tiny hook that an evil spirit could have looped itself around.

‘Of course, it can get noisy. Some ­people vomit, some scream in a loud voice and some manifest on the floor like a snake, which can be dramatic — but it works.’

The Reverend Tom Willis is also an exorcist — but a rather more ­traditional one.

For 50 years, he has worked in the York diocese of the Church of ­England as a ­Minister of Deliverance (the church’s preferred term for an ­exorcist — although he claims he was once ­mistaken for the chaplain of a ­maternity hospital) and, until his retirement in 1996, he was the ­Archbishop of York’s special adviser on the occult.

Today he assists the Church, trains clerics in his art and is still called out at least twice a week to help with some type of ­paranormal ­disturbance or other.

‘I’m busier than ever — even the police call up for my help,’ he says. ‘No one wants to know about it, but it’s a fact we have to deal with.’

Reverend Willis has lost count of the number of times he has slipped silently, usually at night, into haunted houses, factories, hotels, DSS offices, doctors’ surgeries and police stations to exercise his duties in ‘the hidden ministry of the Church’.

And he’s seen an awful lot of ­inexplicable phenomena.

There was the time he was thrown to the floor by a massive bolt of power — ‘my head was whiplashed and my elbows and knees knocked together and every muscle tightened’.

And the flying objects — ‘video ­recorders, shampoo bottles, ­ornaments travelling through brick walls and doors opening and ­slamming shut. And ­sometimes I get a zig-zaggy feeling around my edges — a bit like an electric current — and lots of ­people shouting: “It’s behind you! It’s in the corner!”’

But he insists that actual demonic possessions are very, very rare.
‘In 50 years, I’ve only seen it for real three or four times — and, usually, it’s mental illness.

‘Anyone who claims they are ­possessed very rarely is. You don’t get possessed just walking to the ­supermarket — you have to have ­dabbled strongly with the occult and called evil in.’

The process by which the Church proves possession is strictly defined.

Until all criteria — an aversion to ­religious objects, speaking a language the person has never learned and ­demonstrating a supernatural power, such as extraordinary strength — are met, an exorcism cannot be approved.

Which begs the question: why does Pastor Vincent perform so many ­exorcisms? And where do all the demons come from?

‘Drug abuse, rejection, sexual abuse . . . there’s also a spirit behind homo­sexuality,’ he adds. ‘A good friend of mine was homosexual, he came to the Lord and now he’s ­married with a family.’

(Peter, the man I watched him ­exorcise, falls into several ­categories — he was a regular LSD and cocaine user, was rejected by his father as a child and had witnessed sexual abuse.)

Of course, many people would feel rather startled at homosexuality being mentioned in the same breath as demonic possession, but Trevor ­Newport — the head of a church called Life Changing Ministries and the man who performed Channel 4’s ­controversial ‘live’ exorcism in 2005 — has even more extreme views. He includes reading horoscopes, ­performing yoga, Harry Potter and practising martial arts as ­­demon-inviting activities.

‘I’ve even had to cast things out of my own children,’ he says. ‘They were generational things — you know, if your ancestors have been involved in witchcraft, it can still have effects on you, that sort of thing.’ Trevor is a born-again ­Christian who jets around the world casting demons out of ­people, ­talking at ­international conferences, giving seminars and raising money.

‘I pray for money all the time. My offerings are good — I get thousands all the time. I got £3,000 just this week from donations. And I only ever fly first or business class.

‘I’m very successful, but it’s tiring. I’ve had people charge at me with knives and women shouting in men’s voices. There’s often a physical ­manifestation when the spirit leaves — it might be a cough or a scream or an unnatural yawn. It’s an incredibly rewarding and interesting job and I love being able to help people.’

Perhaps not surprisingly, the rise of so-called ‘internet exorcists’ has caused some concern.

‘Some of these people decide to be a pastor, do a quick course in America, set up their own church and they’re off,’ says the unnamed priest.

‘I wouldn’t condemn them out of hand, but the danger is that they have no one they need to account to.

‘And if money’s involved, the whole thing can go quite bad quite quickly. Some of these other churches can jump in rather over-enthusiastically.’

The default position of the Church of England and the Catholic church towards those seeking to be ­exorcised is a healthy scepticism.

‘If someone comes in and says they’re possessed or they’re having visions of Our Lady, it’s safest to be sceptical and work back from that position,’ says the priest.

So how can you distinguish between p ossession and medical illnesses?

According to Pastor Vincent, he can help with both. ‘A lot of the trouble is ­disassociated identity,’ he says. ‘It is a ­fragmentation of the mind and things can only ­happen if you let God in.’

Trevor Newport is a bit clearer: ‘God shows me if someone needs medical help and if someone needs ­deliverance.

‘I can see it. I know when ­something is not demonic and just mental.’

One thing the old and new wave can agree on is how ridiculously busy they are. ‘This is a ­massive social problem that, due to image, marketing and people’s shyness is not recognised,’ says Rev Willis.

Apparently, it has been building up for half a century. Demonic ­possession and hauntings exploded in number following the repeal of the Witchcraft Bill in 1951 (for ­hundreds of years it had been illegal in Britain to consult a fortune-teller).

Such was the Vatican’s concern that, in 2000, it issued a new manual for exorcism rituals (replacing the 1614 version) encouraging priests to work with doctors to distinguish between demonic influence and mental illness.

And, just three years ago, the Pope ordered his bishops to set up ­‘exorcism squads’ — priests trained on special courses to tackle the rise of Satanism.

'I pray for money all the time. My offerings are good — I get thousands all the time. I got £3,000 just this week from donations. And I only ever fly first or business class.

Indeed, if you tap the word ­‘exorcist’ into the internet, you’ll find pages and pages of ­people ­offering ‘deliverance ministry’, ‘spirit release’ and all sorts — but not one mention of the Church.

As the Rev Willis puts it: ‘It’s not something we offer on Sunday mornings with coffee and biscuits, but it has always been part of the healing ministry of the church ­commanded by Jesus.

‘And it always will be.’

Back in the chilly office in Margate and after nearly three hours of shouting and groaning — and a complaint from the meeting room next door about all the noise — Peter and Pasteur Vincent are reaching a climax.
‘Get out. Get out. GET OUT!’

Finally, a grey-faced Peter ­collapses into his chair in tears. He looks utterly spent and broken, but insists he feels some sort of relief.
‘I feel like something has shifted. I don’t know what, but it feels ­better,’ says Peter.

‘Of course he does,’ adds Pasteur Vincent.

‘Praise be to God. Alleluia! ­Alleluia! Alleluia!’

Peter Lloyd’s name has been changed.

From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331405/21st-Century-exorcists-The-Mail-investigates-unnerving-world.html