Demons From Hell – Mythical Beasts

Demons. Evil spirits straight from hell. Demons wanted to find a way to enter your body. Their mission, to possess you and damn you for all time. The most dangerous monster is the monster that you don't see. They can take any form. They can be made of air, be inhaled, picked up on food. And attack at any moment. People need to find a way of protecting themselves. Now, experts in science and archaeology investigate the truth behind the terrifying tales of demonic beings. How desperate do you think somebody really would be to open up their brain to this? And the witches and fairies in league with them. Their mission, to reveal why our ancestors were so convinced these evil spirits existed. This wasn't some superstitious belief. Demons were very, very real. In 16th century Europe, demons were thought to be everywhere. These evil spirits were sent by the devil. Their goal, to possess your body and damn your soul to hell. In the medieval world, there wasn't that greater distance between the physical world and the spiritual world. Evil spirits could inhabit this human body. If you want to understand how people felt about demons a long time ago, one of the best modern depictions is from the aliens films. Where a creature can lay an egg inside you that eventually grows and bursts out. So what did our ancestors think these demonic creatures actually were? According to the Bible, their story begins with the angel Lucifer, who was both beautiful and rebellious. He gathers an army of angels and starts a war with God. But Lucifer's legions are defeated and banished to the depths of hell. Lucifer becomes the devil and his army of fallen angels turn into demons. Damned for all eternity. Their sole objective is to corrupt God's beloved humans and make them join their ranks. In England, Professor Marian Gibson investigates what form these evil spirits were believed to take when they rose from hell and came to earth. People often think of demons as a kind of little goblin, but really they are more scary than that. To get inside you, demons transform themselves from a spirit into the most unlikely everyday objects. So a demon could be something like this, an apple. So you could eat the apple and you would be eating a demon, or you could eat the apple and there would be a demon on it and it could go into you. Not only could a demon be anything, he could also be anywhere. They can be inhaled, they are things that can be made of air. That mist you were walking through, that could be a demon. An incident 500 years ago reveals how people thought demons could possess your body and soul. A young girl called Anne Milner from Chester was walking through the meadows near her home, perhaps on a misty morning just like this one. On the 18th of October, 1563, Anne Milner was tending to the family counts as a demon lurked in the field. Unaware of the evil presence, Anne breathed in the demon. Back home, she felt the darkness taking hold of her and fell into a deep trance. She started having violent convulsions and threw grown men across the room. Anne Milner was now a woman possessed. In an age without understanding of science or the human body, symptoms such as fits or convulsions would have been terrifying, like watching The Exorcist or The Poltergeist. People would have believed that they were possessed and heading for eternal damnation. In the 16th century, angels and demons were considered very real and hell was a literal place to be avoided at all costs. So if an evil spirit took hold of someone, they needed to drive it out physically. At Cambridge University in England, bone expert Dr. Trish Byers has uncovered evidence of the extreme measures people took to rid their bodies of the demonic beings. Trepanation is actually the deliberate process of cutting a hole into the cranial cavity, exposing the brain. There is documented evidence that trepanation was actually used to release demons. This was quite common in medieval period, especially in Britain. Trish is using a high-powered microscope to examine a 2000-year-old skull of someone who underwent this gruesome procedure in the Bronze Age. What we can see is a series of cut marks. It looks like they were probably holding the person's head, but really working the bone with multiple types of tools. It's hard to imagine that anyone could survive such an invasive process hundreds of years ago. But remarkably, Trish has evidence of one person who did. This individual probably survived the trepanation process because we can actually see healing around the hole. The bone regenerates and it looks like it's actually growing. So this person probably lived for several years after the trepanation occurred. Over the centuries, trepanation was not just used to expel demons, but treat real-world medical conditions as well. Could this explain why this gruesome process was thought to cure symptoms once associated with demon possession? After the medieval period, trepanation became very much part of the standard medical practice. It was used for treatment for madness, treatment for epilepsy. It's people who were considered to be mentally unstable and is still now used today for modern cranial trauma. Releasing demons by drilling through a skull was no easy task. In the days before power tools, what did this process involve? Comparative anatomist Dr. Joy Reidenberg investigates. We're going to explore what it's like to have trepaning done. So we have a pig skull here and we're going to use this tool, which is a trepan, and we're going to put this in here and drill in to make that hole. But remember at this point, if this were a human, they would have had the skin removed out of the way, the fat, the muscle, anything that was in the way would have been flapped over to the side. So this is a very invasive procedure to get down to where the brain is. Joy works with a T-shaped tool, similar to those used in the 17th century. You can imagine what that would be like if you were the patient, having this done right in the middle of your forehead or the top of your head. Maybe they were drunk or maybe they're biting down on a piece of leather just to, you know, get all that tension from the pain. But this is going right into an area where there's a lot of sensory nerves. This grinding into the bone, this is actually really hard to do. I'm really pushing down with all of my weight on this to try and cut open this bone. This is going to be incredibly painful. I heard a crack. Wait, that's it? That crack was it? Look, there's the piece of bone. This is such an invasive and terrible procedure. How desperate do you think somebody really would be to have this done to them? To open up their brain to this? We have to understand demons within the context of what's going on at the time. You have civil wars, battles between Puritans and the Catholic Church. You have the spread of disease. Hysteria starts to grow. In the ever-growing war on demons, the church was on the front line. Archaeologist Matt Champion hunts for hidden clues in Norfolk, England. They could reveal how dangerous the Christian authorities believed these evil spirits to be. This place is absolutely packed full of evidence about just how seriously people considered the threat of demons. High in the church rafters is a series of wood carvings that have only just been rediscovered after 500 years. Well, what we've got up here is a carving of the Apostle John. And just above him is this amazing carving of a demon. And the demon sits behind him with his claws grabbing him, holding him tightly into the roof structure. These carvings were a warning to the parishioners below that not even the saints were safe from demon attack. According to the medieval church, demons were essentially dark angels. They were there to do the devil's bidding. And their ultimate aim was to take your soul. Once possessed by a demon, you were no longer yourself. You might speak in strange tongues, show superhuman strength, or fall into violent rages. How do you explain someone acting strangely or doing strange things? Attacking a neighbour, suddenly killing their own family? There must be these kind of creatures which can get into you and make you do the worst things. According to the church, there was only one sure way to get an evil spirit out. Exorcism. Exorcism is all about a battle between God and the devil. It's actually a quite gruelling and deliberate procedure to drive a demon out of you. Professor Marion Gibson investigates how an exorcism actually worked. An exorcism was undertaken by a religious person, but it would also have included the wider community. So a room would have been absolutely full of townspeople who were keen to see the demon expelled. An initial approach might be to try to force the demon out. Make the body an uncomfortable home for the demon. You might force the possessed person to drink a mixture of rue oil and vinegar. Another way to expel the demon was to create horrible odours that it wouldn't be able to stand. Feathers create a really unpleasant smell when they're set fire to. Anything to create stress, anything to drive the demon away. If physical methods didn't drive the demon out, then maybe spiritual powers would. If this were a Catholic exorcism, you might use something like holy water, which you would sprinkle over the victim, and you could brandish a cross against them. That would drive them out. A report from the 16th century describes the exorcism of Anne Milner, the English dairymaid possessed by a demon. The demon tormented Anne for 17 weeks before an exorcist was called in. He pinned down Anne's thrashing body and recited holy verses over and over. But the demon was too strong. The exorcist then called for vinegar and blew it into Anne's nose. This noxious fluid finally drove the demon out of the girl's body. Anne Milner was cured. It's possible the exorcism had kind of a placebo effect, that somebody who genuinely believed before that they were possessed by a demon after the exorcism felt that they were free and they were themselves again. In an age before medical science, malicious demons filled in the gaps in our understanding. Historian Lara Thorpe believes a dreaded disease may have also played a part in fueling the hysteria around demons. Plague was one of the most widely feared diseases in the 16th and 17th centuries. It would come on you quite suddenly. You might start vomiting. You would get a fever. You have accounts of people screaming with the pain. And it's a gruesome and horrific death. By the turn of the 17th century, doctors had come up with a theory about how this dreaded disease was spread. The most common explanation for plague was that it was caused by bad air, sort of seeping in through the pores of your skin. It was very similar with how people thought that demons could attack and enter their bodies. Religion and science weren't two separate things. They were inseparable. They were completely intertwined in the early modern mentality. What you saw and smell and tasted could affect your spiritual health through a demonic possession, but it could also affect your physical health through the contracting of a disease like plague. These early notions about infection reinforced the idea of contamination by evil spirits. To defend themselves from plague, people tried to counteract the bad smells they thought caused the disease. You had this mask and you stuffed the beak full of sweet smelling herbs, things like dried flower petals and nice smelling herbs like mint. And once you'd stuffed the beak, you would lift the beak over your head like this and then you'd be protected. But if good smells could protect you from the plague, what did people think could keep them safe from demons? Archaeologist Matt Champion searches for evidence hidden inside a parish church. Today we use the church as being quite plain, quite limewashed, but in the Middle Ages, these places were absolutely covered in early graffiti. Matt uses special lights that hit the stone at a precise angle to find what he's looking for. If I move the lights around here, you can see we have graffiti all over the surfaces. We've got medieval text. But perhaps the most spectacular is just up here where we have this rather wonderful pentangle. The pentangle. Today, it's the sign of the occult. What's it doing in a Christian church? The answer is etched into the stone in these barely visible lines. So if we use this, first of all, you've got our big, bogus eye over the top, all this nose around there, a big, gaping, open mouth, teeth coming in here, and then a big, lolling tongue. And then round here, we have an ear, another ear out there, and then you have a wonderful medieval. And then over the top of the whole thing, this big pentangle, literally pinning the demons. This symbol defended the medieval churchgoers against evil demons. Its power lay in the fact that it could be drawn in one continuous movement. Demons, if they saw a line, they had to follow it. In the case of an endless line, such as this pentangle, once they started to follow it, they'd continue and be trapped in that symbol forever. Graffiti is about what is important to people. It was demons that brought sudden illnesses. It was demons that caused your cattle to suddenly drop dead. Demons in the Middle Ages were very, very real. But how did the pentangle, or the pentagram, become a charm of protection against demons? Legend has it that when King Solomon builds his temple, a demon terrorizes his favorite worker. Solomon prays for help, and the archangel Michael comes to the rescue. He gives the king a magical ring, engraved with a pentagram. It gives Solomon the power to subdue the demon by branding it with the symbol. The king then commands the fiend to conjure up a whole army of demons so they can finish his temple for him. For centuries afterwards, the pentagram was a traditional Christian symbol of protection. But in the 16th century, people were so scared of demons, they wanted safeguards at home as well. In Southern England, archaeologist Natalie Cohen investigates a recent discovery made during the restoration of Knoll House. It reveals just how elaborate demon defense systems became. We're looking here at a series of what are called witch marks, or demon traps. They represent a form of ritual protection in this space, designed to protect the occupant of the room, in particular when they're in bed, which would have been behind me here. Natalie finds more vital evidence. We've got another kind of protective mark here on this first opening that you can see. These are called scorch marks. It was believed that by burning a mark into timber with a candle, you could ward off evil spirits. Now the interesting thing about a horizontal scorch mark is that it's not possible to burn that timber in that way when it's here. So what that tells us is when the carpenters were building this space, they knew exactly where this timber was going to lie. They marked it with this series of scorch marks. This is not the only place in the room where precautions against demons have been uncovered. Around the fireplace, we also have ritual protection marks, but these are in the form of what are called VV marks, or M's. So they're invoking the protection of the Virgin Mary. So the idea behind the ritual protection marks around the fireplace is that you're essentially creating a kind of virtual box beyond which, if anything bad comes down, it can't go past where the marks are. So why did people seek to protect the fireplace and hearth in particular? In the 16th century, people feared that demons would try to invade their homes. Closed windows and doors couldn't hold them back, as they could simply enter through the chimney. Once in the bedroom, the demon would attack. It would sit on the victim's chest and brutally assault them. Even if the sleeper woke up, they'd remain paralysed, unable to fend off the choking claws of the demon. We might now explain some of these demon attacks as a kind of sleep paralysis, when we are between being awake and being asleep. Five percent of the population, they will suffer it regularly. The person often feels that they are physically pinned to the bed and they cannot move. But when the demon traps were made at Knoll House, none of this was known. They believed sleep paralysis was a sign of being attacked by demons. Further research reveals there was a very special reason that the owner of this house, Thomas Sackville, was not taking any chances. We think that the reason that there is such a concentration of marks in this space is because Thomas Sackville was redesigning his house in anticipation of a visit from King James I. He was very excited about the possibility of royal patronage. And these spaces that we're in now were probably for either James himself or for members of his family or high status retainers. So important to protect this space. But demons didn't just damn your soul. They could corrupt you in devious and unexpected ways. In 17th century Europe, people became increasingly concerned about another terrifying problem. Witches. Witches were thought to be people who had made an unholy alliance with the devil and his hellish servants. But how do demons make someone a witch? It was thought that the devil and his demons hunted at night, looking for victims to lure into their evil circle. They mainly preyed on single women, seducing them into a demonic bargain. In exchange for sex, they turned them into witches with supernatural powers. But in return, the demon took their soul. And they had to join Satan's army for eternity. In the 1600s, this was where some suspected witches were imprisoned. Colchester Castle in Southeast England. Here, Professor Marion Gibson uncovers real life accounts of how demons supposedly seduced women into selling their souls. Disguised as an ordinary person, the demon would reel his victim in by offering to help with their grievances. A demon would approach her and perhaps say, I hear you've been having trouble with your neighbours. I know that farmer so-and-so has been mean to you. Would you like some help with your life? We've got an example of this here. This is Rebecca West, probably 17 or 18 years of age. The demon kissed her and he said that he would like to marry her. And then he came into her bedchamber. And so Rebecca became a witch. What supernatural powers did those in league with demons obtain? People believed that witches could cast evil spells on those they disliked. Curses could start small, like spoiling a neighbour's butter. But witches were also blamed for destroying whole crops, killing herds of precious farm animals, causing sickness and death, and even summoning deadly storms that could lay waste to an entire city. Fear of witches with demonic powers was not just the preserve of the uneducated. At the University of London, historian Dr Nick Barrett has uncovered evidence that the highest authority in the land considered them to be a real and present danger. This book is called Demonology. It was written in 1597 by King James VI of Scotland before he became King James I of England. The king firmly believed that witches and demons existed. He also believed they should be destroyed, swept from the face of the earth, and that it was important that he communicated that message to the wider population. King James personally believed witches were out to get him. In 1590, the king and his new wife, Anne of Denmark, were sailing to Scotland. A terrible storm hit their ship as it crossed the North Sea. Witchcraft was blamed for the disastrous failure of an earlier voyage. The journey seemed cursed with bad luck. When the royal couple finally got home, rumors of witchcraft gripped the country. Under torture, one woman confessed to raising the storm and trying to kill the king. From then on, King James persecuted witches in Scotland with extreme brutality. This wasn't some peasant superstitious belief. This was personal. He had the evidence. And this was his response. Demonology. Setting out all of the fears that he had so others could take the necessary steps to eradicate witches. Witch hunters arose to purge the land of these evil creatures in league with demons. People were so afraid of witches that commonly, they might even denounce their own family members and accuse their own sisters or daughters, even their own mothers. In order to eradicate them, witches had to be identified. The authorities believed there were physical signs that marked them out. If a woman made a pact with a demon, she grew a large wart on her body called a witch's teat. The witch used her teat to suckle demons in the form of animals, allowing them to drink her blood. Known as familiars, they were smart, but evil spirits that protected the witch and carried out magical tasks. People believed these demons could take many forms. From cats and dogs to toads, bats, rats, and even spiders. What real-world inspiration lies behind the idea of the witch's extra teat? At her lab, comparative anatomist Dr. Joy Reidenberg investigates. A witch hunter who is looking for a mark of the devil is going to look for anything out of the unusual. One of the most common things you can find are little skin tags, and that's what's shown right over here. This is just a little bit of skin that's sticking out, and it made a little lump, and if it was visible, it was a mark of the devil. Here's another thing that was often found. If you're looking at somebody's chest, and they normally have a nipple right over here, below it, there might be another nipple. That would be a third nipple. This is a really common thing. It happens in something like approximately 5% of the population. This nipple can be found anywhere on the milk line. The milk line is a line that goes roughly from the armpits, across the breast, down across either side of the belly button, and then down to the inner thighs. Genetically, that tissue is programmed to appear anywhere on that line, just a slight mutation, and out comes another breast. And if you see this, this is like the jackpot because it's something that a witch could use to nurse and suckle a demon or maybe one of their demonic familiars like a cat or a dog. But this wasn't the only way to identify someone who had made a pact with demons. Really, anything that you could find on someone could be a sign that they were a witch. We have here Sarah, who has volunteered to show us a birthmark. Can you tell us a little bit about your birthmark? Yes, so this is my portwine stain and I've had it since I was born. It's basically an abnormality of the blood vessels in the specific area on my face. Basically, they're much larger than a normal capillary would be, which leads to more blood flow in that area, which is why it appears red. The red color is actually very interesting because it reminds people of fire. So you can imagine in the day, they would look at that and they say, you've been burned. There's hellfire sign on you. The devil has touched you. You're a witch. And that actually could have happened not too long ago. Suspected witches were also subject to trials by ordeal. The gold standard was the swimming test. Those suspected of being in league with demons were bound and plunged into water. People believed that if they were a witch, they would float. But is there another explanation for who rose to the surface and who sank? At Imperial College London, physicist Scott Melville has designed an experiment to show how the test worked and why some people were more likely to fail. Most people have heard of witch-dunking or the swimming test, whereby you throw a supposed witch into some water and if they float, they're a witch. But if they sink, they're innocent. We want to know if there's any science behind this test. How well someone floats depends very much on what they're made of. In this tube, we have vegetable oil, which is roughly as dense as body fat. And in this tube, we have corn syrup, which is a little bit denser than your muscle, but roughly the same. The vegetable oil represents older women who typically have higher body fat and lower bone density. Corn syrup represents men who generally have greater muscle mass. So what we're going to do is see which ones float and which ones sink. Big bag of fat floats. Big bag of muscle. Oh, and it sinks like a stone. The thing to take away from this is that because men typically have more muscle per mass, women are better at floating. And so this whole witchcraft test is rigged and will disproportionately single out women as opposed to men. At the heart of the fear of witches is the fear of women. Witches were women who were assertive. They were intelligent. They knew how to do things. They are hated because they don't want to be kept in the traditional role. And that is something which is deeply fearful to men. The tests provided evidence, but before a witch could be hanged, the witch finder had to extract a confession. At Colchester Castle in Southeast England, Professor Marion Gibson investigates how this was done. In the 1600s, suspected witches were interrogated here by the witch finder general, a man named Matthew Hopkins. Matthew Hopkins was a young puritan gentleman who thought he could make a name for himself by hunting for witches in his locality. He would get them into some kind of cell like this one and shut them away from their community, from their friends and family. He would keep them awake. He would have a team of villagers working with him who would make sure that they kept moving during the whole time that they were imprisoned. And he would question them repeatedly about whether they were a witch, putting ideas into their heads. After hours of interrogation, many women could take no more. These are the classic techniques of modern torture. He ended up with people who were very compliant in deed and more than ready to say that they were a witch. Once you were accused, that was pretty much it. Nobody can resist torture forever and eventually you start confessing to the most crazy things. And once that was done, of course, you now were expected to give up the names of your family, of your best friends, and then the cycle would start again. For 300 years, a great wave of witch hunting has swept across Europe. Tens of thousands of women were accused. They were tortured into confessing that they were in league with demons. If found guilty, they were hanged or burned at the stake. Witch trials were really quite common. Europe tended to go really crazy. In Europe, a witch would be more likely to be burned than any place else. As knowledge and skepticism grew over the following centuries, belief in demonic possession and witchcraft subsided across England. Belief in possession by demons was an attempt to explain human behavior that we didn't really understand. So with the growth of psychology in modern science, that belief in demons starts to ebb away. But in Ireland, one particular demon wouldn't let go. And it took the form of a creature you would least expect. The fairy. These fairies are not like Tinkerbell. They are terrifying demons attacking you by taking what is most precious, your child. One of the interesting components to fairy stories is the changeling. Now the changeling is where someone's child was stolen by fairies. But not only that, it was replaced by an almost exact copy or duplicate. Myth has it that they snatch human babies and replace them with their own. First, the changeling goes unnoticed, but soon turns into a constantly crying nightmare. Fairy changelings are always hungry, but fail to grow and are slow to walk and talk. Desperate parents take desperate measures and put the changeling in harm's way. They hope this will force the fairy mother to run to the rescue and swap the babies back. The belief in the fairy lived on a bit longer in Ireland. You had more people that were still living out in nature that were still very much kind of affected by the seasons. So that belief in fairies is very much tied to a sense of the land. Cultural anthropologist Deborah Hyde investigates how beliefs about fairies impacted on people's lives. Now, our modern fairies can grant wishes. They might have tinkling little voices, but the traditional fairies were powerful and they were also potentially very dangerous. Although changelings were most often in practice thought to be children, in theory, they could also be adults. Deborah's come to County Tipperary to uncover a case of suspected fairy abduction. It took place just over 100 years ago. I'm here to investigate a murder. Now, this is a copy of a newspaper from 1895 and it reports that a man named Michael Cleary had killed his wife by burning her to death. The jury was free to convict him of murder, but they didn't. They convicted him of manslaughter because it became apparent that Michael Cleary truly believed that his wife was a fairy changeling. Why was Michael Cleary so convinced that his wife had been taken and replaced by a fairy? What made him kill her? Deborah hunts for clues at the site of an ancient Iron Age hillfort where fairies were once believed to live. Fairy folklore is full of incidences of people being kidnapped and taken off to fairy land. A place like this was potentially sinister and you wouldn't come up here by yourself. But in 1895, Michael Cleary's wife, Bridget, did just that with fatal consequences. Bridget Cleary was an independent woman. She had her own business and she was going to deliver some eggs up by the fairy fort. Unfortunately, the person she was delivering the eggs to or collecting the money from wasn't in that day. So she spent a lot of time out in the cold. The next day, Bridget became seriously ill with fevers and headaches. Suspicions were raised that because she passed by the old fort she was no longer herself but a fairy imposter. Bridget had visits from several people in her extended family including a visit from a man named Jack Dunn who was a distant cousin. He was a local fairy doctor. He used traditional methods to cure people. He said, that's not Bridget Cleary and that suggested very strongly to all around that she was now a changeling. What happened next took place at this very house. Wow, this is the room where it actually happened and this is the hearth where it actually happened. To get his wife back, Michael Cleary decided to hold Bridget over the fire. He believed doing this would trick the fairy into rescuing its loved one and returning his wife. Bridget Cleary was brought over here and the fire was accelerated because Michael Cleary doused her in lamp oil several times. Her whole family was here so it's worth remembering he wasn't alone and they mentioned that the blazes were so high that they traveled nearly across the room. This was a place where a group of people ended up killing one of their own. Bridget Cleary was the last in a long line of women to be burned in the British Isles as a result of the hysteria around demonic creatures that lasted for hundreds of years. The thing that I draw from all of this is that people aren't stupid, they really aren't but under certain circumstances, groups of people can behave in certain ways, even appalling ways. When people get scared over religious reasons, it's not unusual for them to start using that as a pretext for rounding up people and throwing them in prison and burning them at the stake. Demons, these sinister shape-shifting monsters have tormented mankind for centuries. From the lowliest peasant to the highest office in the land, they embodied our greatest fears about the human condition and fueled the persecution and murder of thousands of innocent lives. Experts have revealed that by inspiring so much terror in us, demons were the most dangerous mythical beasts of all.