An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

The Dark Side – Negative Spiritual Experiences
There are experiences which indicate evil as well as good. Indications of 
a darker side to the spiritual have been investigated by Marete Jakobsen 

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
140
in her Occasional Paper 
Negative Spiritual Experiences: Encounters with 
Evil
. She cites examples from the RERC archives of experiences of intense 
evil, which have terrified people. Many, even non-Christians, have found 
themselves making the sign of the cross or calling on God or Jesus to 
deliver them, which seems to have been effective in most cases.
A year and a half ago I was asleep in the night, and woke very suddenly 
and felt quite alert. I felt surrounded and threatened by the most 
terrifying and powerful presence of Evil. It seemed to be localized 
within the room. It seemed almost physical and in a curious way it 
‘crackled’, though not audibly. It was also extremely ‘black’ and I felt 
overwhelmed with terror. I stayed rigid in my bed for several minutes, 
wondering how to combat this blackness. I felt it was a manifestation 
directed very personally at me, by a Power of Darkness. I was over-
whelmed by despair and a desire to go out and kill myself by jumping 
in the Thames nearby, but I knew that I must withstand this.
(He gets a crucifix and commands it to go away. He is shaking with 
fear and calls a friend and leaves the building.)
I hasten to say that although I am a sensitive and sometimes 
emotional person I am usually sceptical about abstract phenomena! 
I have not told many people of these experiences because of their ‘melo-
dramatic’ sides. I have been as objective as I can in describing them. 
[003191].
116
I awoke in the night with a terrible feeling of oppression in the 
room and my heart seemed to stop beating when I saw hovering near 
the ceiling in a far corner a luminous, grinning gargoyle-like face, not 
static but pulsating. I was instantly wide awake and filed with terrible 
fear and anger that this thing should come and manifest itself to me. 
I remember picking up anything within reach and flinging it at the 
grinning evil face and like a flash it darted to within inches of my face. 
I was petrified and felt as if I was suffocating in a blanket of evil. 
I remember praying and saying aloud, ‘God help me’ and with this 
spoken word it vanished and a fresh ice cold air filled the room and it 
seemed sweet and pure. [002739]
117
Here an analysis turns into an experience:
I then became increasingly aware of the two forces upon which our 
universe is based. The two forces which scientists call positive and neg-
ative, and which philosophers call good and evil. The feeling 
climaxed until for one split second I was aware of the meaning of the 

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Types of Spiritual Experience
141
universe with its many horrors and that I, as a human being, was totally 
at the mercy of the two universal powers. [002743]
118
This account shows how fear can be transformed:
I was living in an old Regency house divided into flats which felt very 
gloomy. An exorcist came and cleared it, and it then felt much better.
Before he came, I was in bed one night, and felt that there was a pres-
ence of some kind in or near the fireplace. It seemed unpleasant, threat-
ening perhaps, and I was a little scared.
After a while I found that I said to myself that if I wasn’t frightened 
of it, it wouldn’t harm me. I then stopped feeling scared, and it changed 
and became not exactly friendly, but no longer threatening – neutral.
I realized that the fear was of my own making, that it was destruc-
tive, or rather that the opposite of fear gave me strength. It wasn’t so 
much that I had found strength to overcome fear, but more that the 
realization that I didn’t have to be afraid gave me a kind of strength, a 
good, calm feeling. 
I wish I could follow this advice more often. It was a revelation, 
though I didn’t realize at the time how important it was. I have since 
realized that ‘facing up to’ fear is not fighting it, but rather overcoming 
it with something not quite opposite, but completely different – a kind 
of strong calmness. [005456]
People seem even more reluctant to admit to negative spiritual experi-
ences than to positive, perhaps because of a feeling of having done some-
thing wrong to deserve such an event, or even of being an evil influence 
on others. However a small percentage of the accounts in the RERC 
archive do admit of such experiences.