36．Returning from Darkness: Testimonies of an Exorcist and Secret Societies

Some encounters leave the ordinary categories of belief and disbelief inadequate. My conversations with Holly, an American exorcist, led into a world of secret societies, ritual abuse, shadow beings, and the unsettling possibility that difficult truths may sometimes reappear as fiction.

Yet beneath these stories lay a more intimate question: what happens when fear and hidden power begin to claim authority over the inner life? Holly’s story taught me that the deepest form of protection may be the freedom to approach darkness without allowing it to take possession of one’s moral centre.

Contact in the Desert was held online that year. For several days, speakers appeared one after another in small, illuminated rectangles on my screen, discussing consciousness, anomalous experience, military secrecy, extraterrestrial life, and the unresolved questions that had gathered around the UFO field for decades. The format imposed a strange distance. Everyone was framed by their own room, their own time zone, and whatever private life lay just beyond the camera.

Yet when the formal sessions ended, another kind of conference began. People lingered in chat windows, exchanged links, or sent a private message before disappearing into the night. Some conversations ended after a few polite lines. Others opened into something unexpected.

That was how Holly entered my life.

She was an American exorcist, close to my own age. We began by exchanging messages through the conference network, then arranged calls when our schedules allowed. Her voice was steady and direct. She did not make her work sound mysterious for the sake of it.

The word exorcist had long carried a ready-made image for me: dark rooms, raised voices, frightened faces caught in theatrical light—the sort of scene that seemed to require candles even when electricity was available. Holly had none of that gravity about her. She spoke about difficult cases without turning them into performances. Then, just as the conversation grew heavy, she would find some absurdity in the situation and laugh—a quick, expansive laugh that seemed to clear the air around us.

“You have to keep your sense of humour,” she said. “Otherwise, fear gets to decide who you become.”

Her work had brought her close to suffering. It had not confined her to it. That was the first thing I understood about her: she was serious without being severe. She seemed to know that darkness could occupy too much space if one allowed it to become the only story worth telling.

As our conversations continued, I began to wonder how she had arrived at such work.

“How did you become an exorcist?” I was curious one evening.

For a moment, she looked down, as though deciding where a truthful answer could begin.

“It began with my father,” she said.

Her father had served in the military when he was young. Holly told me that, after leaving the service, he had been recruited into classified government work. In her account, some of that work involved investigating Freemasonry and other secret societies. She said he was asked to look beyond their public face—the ceremonies, charitable work, and official histories—towards allegations of hidden systems of allegiance, dark ritual, and influence that were rarely visible from outside.

I asked whether he had ever told her exactly what he had found.

“He never gave us the whole story,” she said.

That, she explained, was part of what shaped her childhood. Her father had not left behind an archive or a clear account that could be checked and placed in order. What remained were fragments: things he had said, things he had refused to say much about, the change in his manner after certain assignments, and the silence that seemed to settle over the house.

Holly said that, over time, her father came to believe that some material dismissed by outsiders as rumour or conspiracy reflected real practices. She said he had encountered accounts of Satanic ritual abuse, often called SRA, as well as allegations of ritual violence and disturbing ceremonial practices in which suffering itself seemed to take on the character of an offering. I had no independent basis for determining whether those claims described actual practices or how, if at all, they related to any particular organisation.

“They were part of the atmosphere I grew up in,” she said.

She believed that, once her father entered that world, part of it followed him home.

The change was hardly announced directly. Adult conversations stopped when a child entered the room. Her father sometimes sat quietly, alert to something no one else could see, and after dark the house itself seemed altered. Holly remembered ordinary rooms becoming unfamiliar at night. She knew the adults around her were troubled, though no one gave her words for what troubled them.

Children often understand a household through weather before language. They feel the pressure in a room, sense the warning in an adult’s silence, and learn which questions should remain unasked. Holly described that kind of childhood to me without self-pity. Her memory was precise. She could still recall the unease of walking down a hallway at night, the sense that school and family routine were only the surface of life, and that another world moved beneath it—hidden, fearful, and difficult to name.

“When you are young,” she said, “you know when something is wrong long before anyone tells you what it is.”

Her father’s work gave the hidden world its first outline. Holly’s own experiences would later give it a more intimate meaning.

She believed she had been spiritually sensitive from birth. Even during the unsettled years of her childhood, she sensed a protective presence near her. She spoke of it plainly, as something long familiar rather than a revelation she needed to embellish or defend.

Later, marks appeared on both of her hands. Holly told me it was stigmata, the wounds associated in Catholic tradition with Christ’s crucifixion. The marks had never become a claim to special status. In her own understanding, they confirmed a responsibility she had already begun to feel.

By adulthood, exorcism and spiritual cleansing had become her work.

People came to her after nightmares, panic, intrusive thoughts, histories of ritual abuse, or experiences they believed had left them spiritually exposed. Some had lived inside fear for so long that it had become part of how they understood themselves. Others had reached a point where ordinary reassurance no longer seemed to touch what troubled them.

Holly’s language returned repeatedly to release. She wanted people to recover a sense of safety and inner ground. She believed that terror could disorganise a person from within, drawing them towards confusion, dependency, and despair. Sometimes she spoke of trauma; sometimes she spoke of spiritual attack. She did not always treat those categories as separate.

“What matters,” she told me once, “is helping people come back to themselves.”

That sentence gave me a clearer sense of her work than the word exorcist ever had.

She also spoke about boundaries. Someone who entered another person’s fear without enough discipline, she believed, could be pulled into darkness. Prayer mattered to her. So did discernment, ordinary routines, and the ability to step back after a difficult exorcism case. Her humour belonged to that discipline. It kept the work from swallowing the rest of her life.

Over time, Holly began to notice a recurring pattern in the accounts people brought to her.

Many described waking in the middle of the night unable to move. Their minds felt alert, yet their bodies remained frozen. Some sensed a presence before they saw anything. Others recalled a figure near the bed, in the doorway, or standing silently at the far end of the room.

By the late 1990s, Holly had begun speaking publicly about what she called the Hat Man and the Shadow People.

The Hat Man was usually described as tall and still, marked by the outline of a brimmed hat. The Shadow People were less distinct. People described human-shaped forms that seemed to gather from darkness, their edges difficult to hold in view. Across many accounts, one detail returned with unusual force: the certainty that the figure was watching. Holly believed that the Hat Man and the Shadow Beings were interdimensional beings, real whether or not people accepted their existence. These beings could be drawn to people whose inner defences had been weakened by severe psychological or spiritual trauma or SRA. She also believed that a sudden descent into what she called a lower vibration could leave a person more exposed to their influence.

I asked Holly whether she thought every such experience pointed to an external presence.

She paused before answering. She did not dismiss sleep paralysis, trauma, anxiety, or the strange distortions of consciousness that can occur between sleep and waking. Yet she believed those explanations did not always exhaust what people were trying to describe.

“What stays with them is the fear after encountering these interdimensional beings,” she said. “They think no one else has ever seen what they saw.”

That was what concerned her most: the secrecy in which people endured these experiences. Some had never told anyone. They feared ridicule, diagnosis, religious condemnation, or the possibility that they were losing their minds. Others had first seen such figures as children and had spent decades trying to dismiss the memory.

Once Holly gave the experience a name, messages began arriving from people around the world. They did not always agree about what they had encountered. Some called the figures demons. Others spoke of alien abduction, psychic attack, inherited trauma, or nightmares too vivid to call dreams. What they shared was relief. They had found other people who did not immediately tell them that they were foolish, unstable, or alone.

A name could not settle what had happened in a darkened room. It could, however, give a frightened person somewhere to begin.

I began to understand why people trusted Holly. She was willing to listen to experiences that many had spent years trying to suppress. She did not force everyone into a single explanation. She gave them enough space to speak, then tried to help them find their footing.

In time, Holly began to notice echoes of these accounts in Hollywood films and supernatural dramas: broad-brimmed silhouettes, smoke-dark figures at the edge of a bed, silent presences standing in doorways. She wondered whether Hollywood had drawn, directly or indirectly, on the terms she had helped popularise—the Hat Man and the Shadow Beings.

Most viewers would have recognised familiar devices of horror. Holly saw a larger pattern. She believed that difficult realities were often reshaped as entertainment: fictionalised, stylised, and made easier for the public to absorb without feeling obliged to take them seriously.

She called this process soft disclosure.

“You know,” she added, “what happened to my father and me was eventually turned into an X-Files spin-off.”

I thought I had misheard her.

She told me that the series—which I prefer not to name—had run for three seasons in the 1990s, and that several episodes in its first season had drawn on experiences from her family’s life. Then she paused, letting the words sink in.

“Did you notice that the female lead has my exact full name?”

Before I could answer, a link appeared in the chat.

Over the following days, I briefly watched several episodes and noticed that the protagonist did bear Holly’s full name. The central premise also echoed the broad outline of her family life as she had described it: a father connected to hidden work, a family drawn into secrecy, and a daughter growing up under the pressure of forces she could not fully understand—yet finding the courage to investigate them and, in her own way, continue the work her father had begun.

The series had the familiar texture of a 1990s supernatural drama—ominous, stylised, and safely framed as fiction. Yet after speaking with Holly, that distance collapsed. The woman whose life seemed to animate the story was on the other side of the call, speaking to me in her own voice. From that point on, the series felt like nonfiction in disguise.

“That is soft disclosure,” she said.

The humour had left her voice. She remained calm, though she was speaking now with the careful emphasis of someone explaining an idea she had carried for years.

“People think they are watching science fiction. They do not realise they may be seeing real lives reframed as entertainment. Something in them recognises it, even while their conscious mind dismisses it as a story.”

She looked directly into the camera.

“They see it, and they do not believe. They hear it, and they do not understand. The truth can sit in front of them and remain invisible.”

For Holly, soft disclosure described a form of concealment. Material considered too disruptive, frightening, or politically dangerous to state openly could be broken apart and repackaged as fiction. Once it had been placed inside a thriller or science-fiction series, anyone who saw a resemblance could be told that they were confusing entertainment with reality.

I found myself agreeing with Holly. Again and again, I had the sense that events kept in the dark were quietly placed before the public in altered form. Truth put on the costume of entertainment—science fiction, fantasy, supernatural drama—and entered people’s imaginations before they had time to resist it.

I had seen versions of this pattern elsewhere. Events at a Brazilian healing centre I had visited later appeared, transformed for television, in the popular series Clinical Ward Thirteen. John DeSouza, a former FBI agent, has said that cases from his years with the FBI were broken apart, rearranged, and woven into the first season of The X-Files. Holly believed that something similar had happened to her own family: her father’s work and her childhood experiences recast in an X-Files spin-off that ran for three seasons.

On the surface, such material could be dismissed as creative inspiration. Yet the closer one looked, the more strongly reality seemed to press through the fiction.

I felt the same unease while watching Thunderbolts. Its world of covert experimentation, engineered operatives, and human beings shaped into assassins or human weapons echoed accounts I had heard for years in MILAB about alleged “super-soldier” programmes.

None of these parallels could establish a direct line from hidden events to a screenplay. Popular culture draws freely from rumour, historical trauma, private testimony, and the darker possibilities of human behaviour. Still, Holly’s idea remained with me. Fiction can make difficult material visible while sparing the audience the burden of belief. The truth is placed in plain sight, then protected by the assumption that it is only a story.

“If the purpose is disclosure,” I asked Holly, “why not say it plainly? Why leave people with fragments that can always be denied?”

For a moment, she said nothing. The image on my screen froze slightly, then corrected itself. She looked as though she were deciding how much of her own understanding could be put into words.

“I do not claim to understand all of it,” she said at last. “But I think it may be a way of reducing karmic debt at the lowest possible cost.”

She used the word karma with the seriousness of someone speaking about consequence rather than metaphor. In Holly’s view, people who possessed dangerous knowledge could not remain silent forever without bearing some moral responsibility for what followed. Soft disclosure offered a way to release fragments without accepting the burden of a full confession.

“They can say, ‘We showed you,’” she told me. “Then they can say that you chose to call it fiction.”

After the call, I wrote down the phrase that had stayed with me: at the lowest possible cost.

What troubled me was the moral arrangement hidden inside it. A warning could be issued without accountability. Those holding the information remained protected, while the people receiving it were given too little context to understand what they had seen. If the message was missed, the failure could be placed on the audience.

“That is the point,” Holly said when we returned to the subject later. “They do not have to take responsibility for whether you understood.”

Her explanation did not persuade me that every disturbing image in a film or television series had originated in some concealed event. Popular culture draws from history, rumour, folklore, private testimony, and the darker capacities of the human imagination. Yet I recognised the structure she was describing: power can reveal enough to protect itself while withholding enough to remain beyond challenge.

That question—who held power, and what they concealed—brought us back to Freemasonry.

Holly’s father, she told me, had spent years trying to understand what lay behind its public face. She accepted that many ordinary members entered with sincere intentions. They found fellowship, charitable work, ceremonial tradition, and a sense of belonging to something older than themselves. Holly believed that these visible aspects were real. They were simply not the whole story.

“The real secrets are not shared across the ranks,” she said.

She paused, then continued in a quieter voice.

According to Holly, some of those who reached the thirty-third degree were brought before a private and demanding test. Those who passed, she believed, were permitted to glimpse what lower-ranking members were never meant to see.

“What is most disturbing,” she said, “is that the authority at the top is not human.”

I did not know what to say at first.

Holly did not offer documents that could be independently examined, nor did she claim that such a hidden structure could be easily demonstrated. Her conviction had grown out of her father’s work and the larger spiritual map through which she understood her own life. In that map, some human institutions could be shaped by forces that did not ultimately answer to human conscience.

She placed Freemasonry within a wider network of secret societies, ritual knowledge, and concealed authority. The Order of the Eastern Star, she explained, stood close beside it. Holly loosely described it as a female counterpart to the Masonic world. The Order describes itself as a worldwide fraternal, non-profit, charitable service organisation associated with the Masonic family; its membership includes both women and men.

The Order uses a downward-pointing five-pointed star, a symbol that has attracted competing interpretations outside the organisation which may associate with alleged satanic imagery. The Order’s own history explains the five points through five biblical heroines and the virtues associated with them. Holly was also aware of fringe occult interpretations that linked the symbol to Satanic imagery. I treated those interpretations as interpretations, not evidence about the Order or its members.

Holly did not claim that the emblem alone proved anything. Yet she speculated that rituals within some esoteric circles might be connected to an unseen realm whose influence, in her view, did not serve humanity’s best interest. 

Holly did not insist that a symbol could have only one meaning.

“The symbol itself is not always the problem,” she said. “You have to ask what is behind it.”

She was especially troubled by the ambiguity she perceived in the Masonic requirement of belief in a “Supreme Being.” She wondered whether it was simply another name for divine light, or whether familiar religious language could conceal another kind of authority. Holly did not pretend to have resolved the question. She believed it was the question that mattered.

Her words followed me back to Palmelo, Brazil.

During one of my periods of healing work there, I became acquainted with a local man who was widely respected in the town. He was gentle and soft-spoken, with an almost old-fashioned courtesy. People spoke of his kindness. I saw him treat people around him with respect, including the local spiritual healers, and he seemed instinctively inclined to avoid conflict.

One afternoon, while several of us sat together over lunch, he mentioned that he had recently become a Freemason.

He spoke with quiet pride. To him, Freemasonry was a brotherhood of service. He valued the discipline it encouraged and the chance to contribute to the community. There was no trace of theatrical secrecy in the way he described it. He seemed genuinely grateful to have been welcomed into an older tradition.

I found myself moved by his openness.

He did not resemble the figure that appears in conventional conspiracy accounts of hidden orders and spiritual control. He seemed like a decent man who had joined a fellowship in good faith. Whatever lay beyond his level of access, if anything did, was far outside his view.

Later, I told Holly about him.

“He really is a good man,” I said. “He believes it is about community service.”

Holly listened for a moment before answering.

“Most people are sincere,” she said. “That is why these systems can continue. They do not really know what is happening at the top of the food chain.”

Her answer unsettled me, though it did not turn the man in Palmelo into a villain. It suggested that the same institution could look very different depending on where a person stood within it. A new member might encounter friendship, charity, and a code of conduct. From another vantage point, the same structure could appear shaped by hierarchy, secrecy, and concealed influence.

I could not decide where the truth lay. What stayed with me was Holly’s larger concern: the danger of surrendering one’s judgment to a system whose deeper purpose one does not understand.

In Palmelo, I also met Steve, a European man who had spent time in several esoteric circles before arriving in Brazil. He was well-read, sceptical by temperament, and seemed faintly amused by people who spoke too confidently about hidden knowledge.

One morning at breakfast, as steam rose from his coffee, he began talking about Freemasonry as though he were describing a former workplace.

“The ultimate secrets are held at the ninety-ninth level,” he said. “And that is no longer a human realm. Nonhuman beings govern the highest level of Freemasonry.” He did not explain the claim in detail.

I looked at him, unsure whether he was testing me. Ninety-nine levels struck me as an impressive amount of bureaucracy, even for a secret society.

Holly had spoken of the thirty-third degree; Steve spoke of a ninety-ninth level. The discrepancy made me more cautious. The Scottish Rite’s published structure recognises no degree above the thirty-third, so Steve’s “ninety-ninth level” did not correspond to that public degree system. Both speakers were describing hidden structures they believed existed, neither of which I could independently test.

Steve had once belonged to the Rosicrucians, another secret society long associated with alchemical symbols, old esoteric texts, and the outer reaches of conspiracy literature. When I asked him about it, he gave a short laugh.

“The Rosicrucians are real,” he said. “But I found very little of what I expected.”

He had entered hoping for serious esoteric knowledge. Instead, he found meetings, discussions, and the familiar human dynamics of any organisation. There was no great revelation, no hidden alchemy, no initiation that justified the mythology surrounding the name.

Eventually, he left.

His account opened another possibility: some groups might be far more ordinary than the stories told about them, their mystery enlarged by the human longing for hidden wisdom. Holly interpreted Steve’s experience differently.

When I told her about him, she smiled.

“Of course Rosicrucians are real,” she said. “They are simply more hidden than the Freemasons.”

I explained that Steve had joined a Rosicrucian group and had found little beyond an outer organisation studying esoteric traditions.

“That is probably what he was in,” Holly replied. “An outer group.”

In her view, public organisations might carry the Rosicrucian name and teach fragments of spiritual philosophy without belonging to what she considered the deeper order.

“The real Rosicrucians do not make themselves visible,” she said. “They find their own candidates.”

She then told me about an encounter that she believed confirmed this.

One afternoon, while walking alone, she was approached by two children, perhaps ten or eleven years old. Their manner struck her as unusually composed. One of them asked her a question that made no sense at first.

“Where did you hide the relic in your Egyptian lifetime?”

Holly stopped.

When she asked who they were, the children said they had been sent by the Rosicrucians. They claimed that their order had traced her soul through different incarnations and knew she had been reborn in America. In an earlier Egyptian life, they said, she had hidden a sacred object. They wanted to know where it was.

“They were very interested in that relic,” Holly told me. “I just smiled.”

She said she remembered nothing of such a life. Even if she had, she added, she would not have handed a sacred object to a secret order. Then she walked away.

I could not know who the children were, what they intended, or whether there was another explanation for the encounter. What remained with me was Holly’s response. She did not argue with them or try to prove anything. She simply refused to let their certainty become a claim over her.

For Holly, anything sacred carried an obligation. It was not something to display, trade, or use for influence.

That belief ran through much of what she told me. She drew a clear line between the search for wisdom and the desire for power. Again and again, her stories returned to the same question: could a person remain inwardly free when fear, secrecy, or the promise of hidden knowledge pressed upon them?

Holly’s refusal to surrender that inner freedom became the thread I kept returning to.

The more time I spent with Holly, the more I came to feel that some forms of spiritual work require a particular inner constitution. Faith may call a person towards such work, yet faith alone cannot carry them through it. To sit beside someone in terror or spiritual collapse, a person needs a mind that remains clear under pressure and a heart that does not close when confronted with suffering.

There are many ways of serving the light. Some ask primarily for gentleness and patience. Holly’s work led her into more difficult ground. She met people whose fear had become overwhelming, or whose past had left them unable to trust their own perception. Such work asks a person to enter another’s distress without losing the boundaries of their own self.

Holly seemed able to do that. She listened without recoiling, though she did not become absorbed by what she heard. She had a strong instinct for moral proportion. Darkness did not fascinate her, and she never appeared to use her work to make herself seem more important. That restraint mattered. Anyone who works close to fear can be tempted by the authority it brings: the role of the one who knows, or the one to whom frightened people turn. Holly’s humility protected her from that temptation.

Her humour was part of the same inner balance. When a conversation became too heavy, she could find a small point of absurdity and laugh. The laughter did not deny another person’s suffering. It gave the room some air. It reminded people that fear had not taken possession of the whole of life.

The work carried obvious costs. It invited suspicion and isolation while keeping Holly close to experiences that could unsettle ordinary ideas of reality. I began to understand why such spiritual work requires a corresponding inner structure. A sense of calling may open the door, yet endurance and discernment determine whether a person can remain on that path without being consumed by fear or hardened by what they witness.

Holly understood herself as a worker for the light. Her work led her towards people who had lost their inner freedom and could no longer find their way back alone. For her, the measure of that work was whether they emerged less afraid and better able to stand on their own ground.

What stayed with me was the kind of soul this work seemed to require: one with a strong centre, a disciplined mind, and enough warmth to keep another person from feeling sealed inside their own darkness.