The Planets Most Haunted!

By Eric T. Hansen Special to The Washington Post

BERLIN -- The first person to recognize that Anneliese Michel was possessed by demons was an older woman accompanying the girl on a pilgrimage. She noticed that Anneliese would not walk past a certain image of Jesus, refused to drink water from a holy spring and smelled bad -- hellishly bad. An exorcist in a nearby town examined Michel and returned a diagnosis of demonic possession. The bishop issued permission to perform the rite of exorcism according to the Roman ritual of 1614.Half a year and 67 rites of exorcism later, Michel was dead at 23.Anneliese Michel did not die in the Middle Ages, but in 1976, in the small town of Klingenberg, in the heart of one of the most civilized and advanced countries in Europe: Germany.  Though set in America in the present, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," which stars Tom Wilkinson as the priest who performed the exorcism and Laura Linney as his defense lawyer, is based on Michel's story and focuses not on the sensational exorcism itself but on the court case that followed.

Two years after Michel's death, a German court found her parents and the two priests involved guilty of negligent manslaughter and sentenced them to six months in prison, suspended with three years' probation. What shocked Germany most was the fact that it could happen in a country that prides itself on being highly rational -- and highly secularized. "The surprising thing was that the people connected to Michel were all completely convinced that she had really been possessed," says Franz Barthel, amazement still in his voice three decades after he covered the story for the regional daily paper Main-Post."Many years later, I visited the woman who first diagnosed the Devil," Barthel says. "She blessed my microphone with holy water because I was working for the radio then, and it was likely that the Devil was in control of the microphone." Michel was raised in a strict Catholic family in Bavaria, which rejected the reforms of Vatican II and flirted with religious fringe groups. While other kids her age were rebelling against authority and experimenting with sex, she tried to atone for the sins of wayward priests and drug addicts by sleeping on a bare floor in the middle of winter.According to court findings, she experienced her first epileptic attack in 1969, and by 1973 was suffering from depression and considering suicide. Soon she was seeing the faces of demons on the people and things around her, and voices told her she was damned....

By Norman A. Rubin

Belief in ghosts, demons and spirits has been deep-rooted in Japanese folklore throughout history. It is entwined with mythology and superstition derived from Japanese Shinto, as well as Buddhism and Taoism brought to Japan from China and India. Stories and legends, combined with mythology, have been collected over the years by various cultures of the world, both past and present. Folklore has evolved in order to explain or rationalize various natural events. Inexplicable phenomena arouse a fear in humankind, because there is no way for us to anticipate them or to understand their origins.

The mystery of death is a phenomena that does not offer a rational explanation to various cultures. Death is an intruder. Death is the change from one state to another, the reunion of body with earth, of soul with spirit. Humans, throughout the ages, have seldom been able to believe or to understand the finality of death. For this reason fables and legends have evolved around the spirits of the dead.

The Japanese believe that they are surrounded by spirits all the time. According to the Japanese Shinto faith, after death a human being becomes a spirit, sometimes a deity. It is believed that eight million deities inhabit the heavens and the earth - the mountains, the forests, the seas, and the very air that is breathed. Traditions tell us that these deities have two souls: one gentle (nigi-mi-tama), and the other violent (ara-mi-tama).

Buddhism, which was introduced into Japan in the sixth century CE, added a new dimension to the belief in spirits and other supernatural forces. The Buddhist belief in the world of the living, the world of the dead, and the ‘Pure Land of Buddha’ (Jodo)¹ achieved a new meaning. The way a man behaved during his lifetime determined whether he would go to the world of the dead or the ‘Pure Land’. Those driven to the nether-world found it to be a hell in all its vileness...

A woman in Texas was driven to leave the home she was renting due to a series of paranormal sightings of a little girl that in one session with a local investigator was claimed to be demonic in nature. "One woman says her familylived in fear.

She claims they heard voices and saw shadows in their home. The family was so scared they called a ghost hunter to find out what was going on. "My little girl would see a little girl with dark hair. She said she looked sad. Those were her words," the woman explains." View: Full Article | Source: KRGV.com

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has said that he saw a ghost 20 years ago at Wellington"s Courtney Place. He had woken up one morning to see the figure of a woman standing in his room that glided over andvanished through a wall."His sighting was in an apartment he and his wife had in Wellington"s Courtney Place opposite the St James Theatre, when they first met 20 years ago.

"I woke up one morning and there was a figure in the room, she was very scary, she had a screaming face, veryaccusatory, she was a lady about 50 years old," Jackson said."

View: Full Article | Source: Stuff.co.nz