Family flee ‘Satan’ home!
By Dave Mullins.
A family have fled from their north Dublin home after weird paranormal events involving mystery fires and a child’s ‘vision of Satan’. A priest was called to the terrified family’s flat at Coultry Road, Ballymun, in the early hours of Friday morning to sprinkle holy water around the rooms after a series of terrifying happenings. The young couple who occupied the flat fled with their children, convinced that there are ‘evil forces’ in the apartment.
Their departure on Friday followed a night of horror during which their four-year-old daughter shrieked in her bed, claiming a man kept jumping over the wardrobe at her. At first they didn’t believe her but so strong was her reaction that they took the blue-eyed toddler into bed with them, leaving her brother asleep in the room. But at 1.30a.m. on Friday morning last the father heard strange banging noises coming from the room and went to investigate. It was at this point that their scepticism about what their daughter was saying to them for over one week entered the world of fear and disbelief. For when the father of the family opened the bedroom door he found three holy statues on top of the wardrobe in a blaze of fire.
He immediately grabbed his 2 1/2 year old son who was still asleep and rushed the child into another room. He went back into the bedroom and tried to extinguish the fire with tap water but was unable to do so. His wife then handed him some holy water which he used to douse the fire successfully. They are completely baffled as to why the statues caught fire. Said the father: “Nothing else caught fire except the statues . There is no electrical fault and they are out of reach of the children. I have to believe that a ‘deomon’ [sic] is responsible.”
The parents do not wish to be named, for fear of ridicule, but the mother who is three months pregnant on their fourth child told Sunday World: “Sometimes my daughter does not behave like a child who has only just turned four years of age when she talks about the ‘man’ in her room.” [sic] The little girl described the man as having black hair and black eyes with long black fingernails and a lump on his nose. She has often spoken of him to her parents and grandparents and has used the name Benzon and Aydeen to describe him.
As far as her parents can make out, she first encountered what her grandmother describes as Satan 12 days ago when he appeared over a wardrobe recently moved into her bedroom. He visits her only at night time when, in her words, he jumps over the wardrobe and begins to hit her and she hits him back. She frequently tells her parents that Aydeen has no feet. “She became frightened of Aydeen when he clapped once and pointed to her stomach and she became violently ill, vomiting on her quilt,” recalls her mother.
In the early hours of last Friday morning, a priest was brought to the home on Coultry Road, Ballymun. He sprinkled holy water about the place and blessed the children aged from four to eight months. Shortly before that the little girl told her parents “Aydeen is very angry with you because you mixed holy water with his blood and he is going to get you.” She added: “I can see Aydeen and you can see him too, if only he would let you but he won’t let you.”
The girl’s mother told Sunday World that there had been other strange happenings in the child’s bedroom before the events of Thursday night and Friday morning. “Things started to become strange when we moved the wardrobe into the bedroom. I think a lot of the trouble comes from the wardrobe. Sometimes it moves to the middle of the floor and we know the children can’t be responsible because it is too heavy for them to budge.”
When Sunday World visited the home which is situated on the top of a high-rise block of flats, the charred statues of the Child of Prague and St Martha and St Martin were still on top of the wardrobe. Said the mother: “We may never get to the bottom of what’s going on in this home… only half an hour ago my daughter gave me numbers which she said Aydeen had told her to remember… they are 1, 3, 5, 6, and 18. I am keeping all the information she comes out with.” The woman, who is 22 years old and who vows never to allow her family back to their home, added: “I decided to go to Sunday World with this story because I want to warn other mothers to listen to their children carefully and not to dismiss everything they say as fantasy.”
Sunday World (Dublin), 11th June 1989.
The Coultry Road flats looked pretty grim and have now been demolished.