Our little team of three experts were called out some time back by a farmer who was demanding an exorcism on his property. He said that no animal would go to one end of the big barn and all the animals would bunch together in the other corner. This gave an uneasy feel to the building and would give people the shudders.

I confess I immediately thought, "Oh, here we go, an eccentric old farmer".

But people who have lived all their lives outdoors do develop certain intuitive skills that we rarely see in city folk and this hard working but illiterate broken-toothed old man was absolutely right about an unwelcome spirit creature inhabiting the downward end to his barn.

During two world wars the British government put extreme pressure on British farmers to feed the country and farmers were well treated, but now that it is cheaper to import food from abroad through the E. E. C, the government has been starving them out, as it needs the land for building to house all the newcomers to our shores over these past few years.

The farming community has always been a superstitious one, but this old chap spoke a lot of sense and after some preliminary investigation we decided we had a small mischievous sprite, so we baited and caught the little chap and conjured him into a jar and twisted this top on tight, to release him later in a wood or forest.

The delighted farmer loaded up our car with bags of potatoes and other veg, All good natural produce, he said, no insecticide or crap sprays on that lot !

He said his son and another worker would not go near that end to the barn until it was cleared out.

No problems over the months that followed until last night when all hell broke loose.

It was a hot close night when eventually an electrical storm broke and this is the atmosphere that is conducive to activate certain spirit categories.

I was uneasy and could not sleep as there were noises in the bedroom, mainly scraping sounds around the skirtings but there was nothing in the room that could have made the metallic noises that went on intermittently through the night. I concluded they were "projected in".

There were deep low vibrational rumblings downstairs, with continual flashes of dark movement out of the corner of the eye and the periodic closing in of the aura that accompany unintelligent realms of spirit disturbances. Plus a small, dark, creature kept trying to come up behind me and look at me as I lay in bed. This did not make me that fearful but the overriding impression was not comfortable.

I thrn got up and came down stairs and watched T.V for an hour or so to check if the spirit animal was room based or person based in its focus.

My little house cat would not use her indoor dirt box and had been distressed for a couple of days, over what I did not know.

When I returned to bed the minor phenomena began again. I got up before the alarm feeling wacked after no sleep and went straight to the garden shed and was relieved it was still padlocked, but when I went inside to check the three jars that had held the three sprites captured over a fair period, I discovered one had been knocked to the floor and broken.

A piece of the wood slats that held the shed together had gone and I figured the cat, whom I had seen going in, had knocked over and broken the jar, releasing the creature into my home.

I had been housing a friend's lad who needed a room while studying at a local college and he said he had been afraid at night recently and had been sleeping with the light on in his room.

Originally a sprite was an early misspelling of spirit, but it has since come to represent a separate, minor, inner world category.

On the scale of various categories of incorporeal life, sprites rate pretty low among experts for excitement or phenomena, but they can be a nuisance. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME

Experienced spirit hunters fall into two schools of thought:

There are those who say any spirit animal or being out of its proper place must be exorcised no matter what, then there are those who say, particularly regarding deceased humans, that only as a last resort must they be sent on. For some people, when dead, take longer to want to leave the familiar surroundings than others.

My feeling regarding these sprites, and this is not a universal opinion, is that they are not a suitable companion for people’s homes, as they move possessions about, steal and make people subconsciously uneasy, especially at night.

So when I was in my teens and learning in the field from two great experts, in what was then called "apprenticing", I was taught that these little beasts should be captured and kept in a damp jar in a place out of direct sunlight, before being released into woods or forests.

The great expert, the Rev. Montague Summers, was said by Dennis Wheatley to keep several of these as house pets. I sincerely advise against this.

Alex Sanders, the deceased king of the Witches, told me he was able to tame and even control them and witness’s claimed he would do tricks at parties with them - again not advisable.

In the words of Rollo Ahmed, one of Dennis Wheatley’s star pupils: "Those who walk with serpents must expect to be bitten by them".

Further reading

Conversations with Tree Spirits - T Stokes
The Geography of Witchcraft - Rev Montague Sommers
30 Years Among the Dead - Dr. Carl Wickland
They Used Dark Forces - Dennis Wheatley
The Key of Solomon - S. Macgregor Mathers
The Exorcist and the Possessed - Christopher Neil-Smith
Magic, White and Black - Franz Hartmann M.D
Exorcising Devils - Petitpierre
Handling Minor Demons - J. Hopkins
Psychic Self Defence - Dion Fortune

Copyright © 2006

Author Terry Stokes is also a lecturer and broadcaster in paranormal studies who welcomes feedback from readers.
Palms also read by email via: palmist@fsmail.net

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