The Priest's Tale

From: Mushmouth (thelickofmyspoon@hotmail.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Northern England
Source: Form Submission
Date submitted: Fri May 25 10:23:45 2007

I've marked this as a ghost story but to be honest there's not really a category for it. This is the story my father told me when I asked my parents about what happened to the ghosts that used to haunt our house when I was a kid. My mother told me about the priest they flew over from England to clear the spirits from the house, apparently this priest was a great believer in there being 'a living Evil'. This is the story of when he last saw my father, the story that made him a believer and why the this priest offered to help them.

Altogether, this story takes place about fifty years ago in the North of England. The priest who I will refer to as 'Father H' was about thirty years old at the time and he was having a drink with my father who was a young man and unmarried at the time. They were having a theological discussion and Father H was trying to convince my future father that there was such a thing as a living breathing evil and offered to prove it to him.

He brought my father to an asylum where he would often go to and then brought him to a ward where everybody was locked up behind cage doors. Father H took a brown paper bag from his coat pocket and gave it to my father to hold, he instructed him not to look inside the bag. Father H then walked slowly up the hallway, past all the cell doors and back again, nothing happened. He then took the bag off my father, put it in his coat pocket and walked back down the hall. The people inside the cells all rushed frantically at the doors, my father told me their eyes were popping out of their heads, their bodies were contorting to try and grab Father H to the point where they were spewing blood and breaking their bones. They were screaming in many different languages, my father told me he recognized one of them saying the most terrifying curses in Latin he ever heard. Father H slowly turned back down the hall and took my father by the arm and left the ward.

When they were outside, Father H took the brown bag out of his pocket and handed it to my father. Father H told him to look inside it. My father told me it was full of the host, the bread given out during holy Communion. Father H told him this was what made him a believer in there being 'a living Evil'.