The Monster In My Bed: An Account of an Incubus Attack[1]

Introduction

This dossier is the result of an interview conducted by the author in May of 2019. It documents a series of incidents that occurred predominantly in the 1960’s through the 1970’s, at various locales within the State of Alabama. Names have been changed and personally identifiable information has been omitted out of respect for the interviewee’s privacy.

The interviewee is a Caucasian female, approximately seventy years of age at the time of the interview. She self-reported the following information as to the reliability of this account. She does not use illicit drugs or abuse prescription medications. She has never been diagnosed with a mental condition, nor has she been prescribed medication for any. The medications she takes regularly are not anticipated to have any influence on her lucidity or her ability to accurately recall events from memory. She has no substance abuse or dependency concerns.

During the interview she did not appear to exhibit any serious failings of memory or of her ability to express herself. She appeared lucid before, during, and after the interview. She provided complete, coherent responses to the questions posed. She was not paid, offered, or promised anything in return for relating this account. She requested her personal information remain confidential.

Witness Report

Allen and I were high school sweethearts. We met in the ninth grade. He was a gangly boy with apples for joints, too tall for his build and yet still growing. He had a mop of straw-colored hair and freckles, and bright eyes that twinkled when he smiled, which was often. This along with his easygoing manner made him everyone’s friend. There was an animal magnetism to him and he knew it, because he leveraged it to his advantage.

We had been going steady for a year before it became all too obvious that I was pregnant. I’d resorted to every means of hiding my pregnancy that an ingenious sixteen-year-old can come up with, but before long I realized I would have to face the music. Thinking it would soften the blow if I fessed up than if my parents found out themselves, I told them. 

Immediately, I regretted having been so candid.

When I broke the news, my mother and father just stared at me as though I wasn’t there. An awful silence filled our apartment. No one spoke, no one moved. The ticking of the wall clock in the kitchen was the only sign that we hadn’t been pulled into a parallel dimension where time stood still.

I opened my mouth to say something—anything, I hadn’t thought out what yet, but anything was better than this terrible quiet. Faster than I could react, the back of my dad’s hand came lashing out to sock me in the jaw. I spun halfway around, clutching my face as blood welled up between my lips. My horrified mother had hardly breathed a word in protest when my father sprang out of his chair and put his hands on me. He shoved her to the ground with a stiff-arm befitting of a veteran halfback. She knew better than to stand back up. With his other hand, my dad undid his belt.

My mom wept as my dad gave me forehands and backhands. I hadn’t been belted in so many years I’d forgotten what it felt like. It stung, to be sure, but not as much as the embarrassment. Belting was something parents did to little children, not to their teenage daughters. My dad was that angry.

When finally my dad got too winded to swing his belt any longer, he collapsed into his armchair. He was in no mood to talk. I could tell as much from how he hadn’t looped his belt back into his trousers. It was still in his hand, at the ready in case I said something foolish. I cut my losses and went to my bedroom in silence. 

I don’t want to give the impression my dad was an ogre, but he was stern. He had lived a hard life, and this had molded him into a tough man. He smoked, and he drank, and at least once he may have cheated on my mother, though I never knew for sure. It was understood that these things were not to be done except by him; nor were they to be spoken of. Under my father’s roof, the law was: “Do as I say, not as I do.” 

I’ve since forgiven him. Time has a way of softening the pains of yesterday. Despite his failings, he was virtuous in ways that I did not come to understand until after he died. In hindsight, I should have listened more to him than to my feelings.

The fact of my pregnancy was an open secret in school. Eventually, however, my parents were called in for a meeting with the principal. They returned home with a printed letter explaining that I needed to withdraw immediately, before my behavior scandalized the other girls in school. Otherwise, I would be expelled.

Realizing that I would not finish high school, my father secured employment for me at a local store. This was non-negotiable. I would either take the job to help pay for rearing the baby, or I would move out. Grudgingly, I obliged him. I was a mother now, and my own woman, capable of deciding my own future. I would make my own money—never mind that my father forced me to take the job with an ultimatum. I was sixteen and ready to take on the world.

The shop that employed me was within walking distance from home. After work on my first day Allen picked me up in his car to take me home, only, we did not go straight home. We drove aimlessly for an hour, buying us time to discuss our future.

Our school had given Allen’s parents the same ultimatum—drop out, or be expelled. While he never aspired to college, quitting school meant that he could not finish his course to become an auto mechanic. His parents did not take the news quite as well as mine had. His father kicked him out of their home. His parting gift—a shiner that pinched his left eye shut. Allen had slept in his car for a few days before meeting up with me.

Bless him; Allen tried to do the right thing. With all the combined wisdom befitting of two precocious teenagers, we decided upon eloping in three months’ time. Allen worked part-time at a car dealership. The man who owned the place was an alumnus of our school. Since Allen had shown interest in becoming a mechanic, the owner set him to work doing oil changes. Allen was on good terms with him, and so he was confident he could get extra work hours. In the meantime, I would work the job my father had gotten me. Together, we would save up for a place for us to live. Then, once the baby was born, I would stay home and care for him while Allen worked to support our family.

The plan was foolproof. Faced with no alternatives, I could not help but carry on with it. What is more, Allen’s selflessness appeared positively heroic to sixteen-year-old me. The dream of an idyllic family life held far more promise than working single motherhood.

We worked, and we saved every dime. Allen reconciled with his parents and they took him back into their home. Still, he was dead-set on moving out with me, although this remained a secret to everyone. 

Once the time had come to put our plan in action, we had saved enough for a down payment on our own apartment. Allen picked me up at the end of my shift that day and drove us to our new home. I moved out without my parents being the wiser. Excited as I was at our new life together, guilt panged inside me. Though I was still upset with my parents, they’d raised me better than to worry them needlessly. I could not just disappear without at least telling them I was all right else they think something awful befell me.

There was a payphone down the street from our apartment. My mother picked up halfway through the first ring. Without her saying so, I knew she was anxious. It was seven in the evening and I should have been home two hours ago. 

I stopped her short before she could give me an earful. I was my own woman now, and Allen was my man, regardless of whether my mother liked it or not. Putting it in those terms, I figured she would be more understanding of our decisions, seeing as she always deferred to my father and I deferred to my soon-to-be husband. It went over poorly.

“Gimme that,” I heard my father’s voice over the phone as he took the receiver from her.

What came next was a one-sided shouting contest, and my dad was winning. He called me all sorts of hurtful things—“ungrateful” being the tamest among them. I wasn’t of a mind to take that from him. As he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise, I hung up, thinking that would be the last I heard from him, good riddance, please and thank you. Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw him and mom waiting at my front door as Allen pulled up to the curb.

As it turned out, I wasn’t as difficult to find as I thought. Shortly after that call, my dad phoned my boss at the store, who told him where I’d moved to. I thought I had been clever in giving my boss my new address, thinking that if the boss needed to reach me he could do so there instead of at my parents’ apartment.

Things got ugly in a hurry. No sooner had dad and Allen set eyes on each other than they exchanged words, then blows. Dad was tough, but Allen was a younger man, and in better shape. Much as I thought I hated my father, it was sickening to watch Allen beat him into the pavement. Allen only stopped because I begged him to, though he would have gone on because my dad was goading him even while lying on the ground.

I pulled Allen off my dad. Mom helped dad to his feet. More terrible silence. Dad cut his eyes in my direction and told me to go hell; if ever he saw me again it’d be too soon. At this, Allen lunged at him with a fist cocked, but I held him back—little old hundred-pound heavily pregnant me. It’s a wonder what strength you can muster when most you need it.

That night, Allen and I lay in bed as husband and wife despite not actually being married. I was on my side, my back to him, and him with his arm around me. He wanted more than that, but I rebuffed his advances. Things just weren’t the same anymore after how he beat my father. I convinced myself he’d meant well, that he was defending me from my dad. Still, I could not see Allen in the same light as before. I didn’t want to share a bed with him, let alone speak or even look at him, but this was our home now. I no longer had anywhere else to go. 

Allen tried again, insinuating his desires with a nip at my earlobe. I elbowed him in the chest. With a huff, he got the message. Realizing that his efforts were getting him nowhere, he asked to talk things over. Against my better judgment, we did.

To his credit, Allen had a plan for everything. They didn’t always turn out well, but any time he felt things might go south, he was ready with a backup.

The first order of business was to get married. While at work one morning, I faked being ill to leave work early. I phoned Allen to pick me up, and he used my sudden illness as an excuse to duck out of work for the rest of the day. Unbeknown to everyone, we had prearranged to meet at the courthouse that afternoon to be wed. 

It was the simplest ceremony ever—me in my shop apron and Allen in his mechanic’s coveralls. No big dress, no tuxedo, no reception. We could not afford any of those things. What is more, the only people we might have thought to invite were our parents, and they would not have come anyway. Our honeymoon, if you could call it that, was a trip to the diner for milkshakes and pie. The next day, I phoned work to tell them I quit. Allen Junior was born two days afterward.

Now that I was no longer working, we were too broke for Allen to take time off to stay home with me and the baby. The best he could manage was a long weekend, and then it was right back to work. That meant I needed to figure out how to rear an infant by myself. I was tempted to phone my mother or my in-laws for help, but decided against it. There was too much friction between us. Reaching out to them would only complicate things.

We counted ourselves fortunate that, after I stopped working, Allen’s boss gave him extra hours to help us make ends meet. Allen was working upwards of sixty hours a week, and yet we were living paycheck to paycheck. He would come home sweaty and grease-stained from having worked on cars all day, then take a shower, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Some nights, he skipped dinner entirely and went straight to bed from how tired he was.

We hardly spoke anymore. When we did, there were safe topics of discussion and unsafe ones. Whenever I broached any of the safe ones, he would respond with a canned answer, or a grunt, or a glance that he was not in a mood for conversation. Discussing an unsafe topic netted me a dirty look that promised worse if I pressed him on the matter. Chief among the unsafe topics was money, mostly how I spent too much of what he earned.

It didn’t help things any that the baby cried at all hours of the day and night. This particularly irritated Allen, who insisted on getting a good night’s rest if he was to function at all the next day. Allen either didn’t know or didn’t care that I scarcely knew how to rear a child. The way he saw things, the baby was my responsibility, not his, and I had better figure it out quickly if I knew what was good for me. 

Before too long I became aware of how my life was changing. We had thought that having the baby would bring us closer together. It didn’t. We had thought that getting married would change things for the better. It didn’t. My relationship with Allen had become awkward. Allen had become just like my father. To say I resented him for that would be the understatement of the year.

Worse still, I resented our child. I didn’t know such a thing existed at the time, but in hindsight, I must have been suffering from an awful case of postpartum depression. Every waking hour was spent inside our four walls. I could not leave—Allen took the car to work. Besides, the baby could not be left alone, what with his constantly needing to be fed, or burped, or changed. Our home was a prison, and our child was the ball and chain shackled to my ankle. 

I resented having quit the job my father got me. I never cared for it, but at least it offered me a chance to leave the house for a while. Outside I could speak with people my age, and maybe keep away from our child’s crying long enough that the ringing in my ears would stop. Outside was a chance to earn my own money and spend it any way I desired. Outside, too, was a respite from a husband who was no better than a stranger.

One night, after Allen had gone to bed and I’d put the baby to sleep, I awoke with a terrible sense of foreboding. The house was deathly still. My heart pounded. I was restless. I felt like I needed to run away somewhere, anywhere, I just could not stay here. 

Quietly as I could, I slunk out of bed, making sure not to wake my husband, and peered into Junior’s crib. It was dark in our apartment, but by the light that came in through the blinds, I could tell the baby was fast asleep.

I walked to the kitchen and stood, barefoot and in the dark, in the middle of the linoleum floor. Something was not right, of that I was certain, but I could not hazard a guess as to what was causing my unease. Looking over my shoulder, I considered getting back into bed, but there was no sense in doing that. I was, at the same time, exhausted and energized; too tired to be of any use to anyone, and yet too jittery to rest.

I set my eyes forward. I was in the kitchen. 

Why was I in the kitchen? Because it was closer to the door than the bedroom. 

Why the door? Because the door was the way out of the misery my life had become. 

Where would I go? I was needed here.

But was I wanted here? And would anyone care if I just slipped away and never came back?

Before I was too sure of what I was doing, in my hand were the car keys I’d plucked from the wall hook. 

I froze, suddenly taking stock of where I was like a sleepwalker jostled awake. The dread I felt when I awoke minutes ago was still with me, except now I had the clarity to grasp that none of that internal colloquy had made any sense.

What had come over me? I’d never driven a car in my life. I wouldn’t even be able to get Allen’s three-speed into gear, let alone get as far as down the block.

What was the matter with me?

If there was something wrong with me, now was not the time to come to grips with it. Tomorrow would be a new day. I would face whatever it brought then. For now, the bed awaited, the bed and—ugh—Allen who lay snoring in it.

On the way back to the bedroom, I glanced into Junior’s crib. He was still asleep. Thank goodness for small blessings, I thought to myself. He’d not awoken since I put him to bed hours ago. By my reckoning, he was overdue to wake Allen and me. It made little difference that he did not wake us, though, because my nerves kept me from sleeping the rest of the night.

Allen’s alarm clock went off at just before sunup. He shuffled out of bed and into his work clothes. In between the front door opening and shutting, he muttered something about the car keys not being on the hook where he’d left them the evening prior. When finally the daylight coming in through the blinds was too strong to be ignored, I rose and made the bed.

I made myself breakfast and fixed Junior a bottle of milk, thinking he would be hungry when finally he did awaken. Two hours later, it was nine o’clock, and I started to worry.

I learned soon into motherhood that you should never wake a sleeping baby. Like in the army, you got to rest only when the opportunity arose. For a young mother, that meant sleeping for a few hours at a time while the baby napped. But for Allen Junior to have slept this soundly for this long was unlike him.

I went to his crib. Junior hadn’t stirred since last night, his little body still in the same posture as when I checked on him previously. Gently, I prodded his shoulder, but this got no reaction from him. I picked him up as the dread from last night began to settle once more into my breast.

Junior was dead.

The realization hit so hard I almost dropped him.

I set him back down onto the crib a little more brusquely than I would have liked, but I had to seek help fast. 

It took all of my self-control to keep from melting into a shuddering, weeping mess. I ran out of my apartment screaming as though the place were on fire. Our neighbor poked his head out and caught hold of me in the walk up to our building. I was a total wreck, and yet somehow he made sense of my histrionics and phoned for an ambulance. 

By the time the medics arrived, there was nothing to be done. Crib death had taken Junior. I didn’t think they made caskets so little, but the thought that coffins that small actually existed broke my heart all the more. My parents and my in-laws attended the funeral, though we gave each other a wide berth. Their presence was a well-meaning gesture, but we still weren’t on speaking terms. 

My relationship with Allen became frigid. Every morning he would go to work without so much as a good-bye. Upon returning, he would scarcely greet me with a hello. We didn’t speak much before Junior’s passing, but afterward, we made sure to stay out of each other’s way. We shared a bed out of necessity, because there was nowhere else in the apartment we could sleep. We had become two ghosts haunting the same house, neither aware of the other.

On days when Allen was at work, I would get out of bed late, sometimes well into the afternoon. I couldn’t find the energy to cook or clean. The only thing that drove me to act like a housewife was some guttering sense of duty to my spouse. Some days, even this was not enough to impel me into action. There was no point in warming a home for an ungrateful husband in a barren marriage.

There was no point to my existence at all.

I was always alone in the house, even when Allen was with me. When he wasn’t home, I could go nowhere—not that I had anywhere to be or was needed anywhere, for that matter. I spoke to no one. I had failed school, failed at being a daughter, and failed at being a wife. I couldn’t even raise a child right, and look where that got Junior.

Nothing I did amounted to anything. Therefore, no one would notice me missing.

I wanted to kill myself, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I figured I’d fail at that too.

A month after Junior’s passing, it dawned on Allen that the way he was going, he wouldn’t so much as win runner-up for the husband of the year. Something like a light switch was flicked on inside him. From one day to the next, he started acting like the boy I’d fallen in love with. He started gussying up again, slicking his hair and wearing cologne, things he hadn’t done since work consumed his life.

I appreciated the attention he paid me, especially in light of how much harder he was working. Some nights he’d come home well after I’d gone to bed. The sound of the car pulling up to the curb would wake me, but I’d remain under the covers, waiting for him. I could tell he’d entered our bedroom by the smell of his cologne. This was a small courtesy, but one I regarded fondly. Allen reeked of armpits after twelve hours in a sweltering auto repair bay. The cologne helped mask the smell. No doubt he had applied it after leaving work.

This, however, was short lived.

One evening, while we were sat down to eat dinner, Allen looked uneasy. It was plain on his face that something was bothering him, but he could not bring himself to say what it was. When at last he had had enough of my insisting, he blurted out, “I’ve found someone else.”

Suddenly, it all made sense. The gussying up, the cologne—that was not meant for me. His sweet talk and affection was a smokescreen for his late-night dalliances with some other woman.

I must really have looked furious, because Allen fidgeted under my gaze.

“I know you’re unhappy,” he stammered, “and there’s no point staying together now that Junior’s…”

Somehow I knew how he’d finish that sentence, but what I hadn’t counted on was my hand flying up to slap him nearly out of his chair.

How dare he! I wanted to break everything in the house that had so much as brushed up against one atom of his.

“There’s no use in getting angry,” he went on, rubbing his face. The palm print on his cheek reddened. “We’ll be out of here before month’s end anyway.”

I held back the inclination to slap him again so he could explain. Unknown to me, Allen had let our rent go into arrears. The money saved from not paying the rent had gone toward a down payment on some other place across town, where he and his mistress were to live. He intended to duck out on the landlord and leave me on the hook for two month’s back rent.

I leaned across the table and gave him one for all I was worth. Allen knew when to take his licks, and he caught this one full on the chin. His head spun to his opposite shoulder and he flopped over sideways to the floor.

Dressed solely in my nightgown, I walked up the block to the payphone and rang my parents. My dad picked me up at the street corner and drove me to his house. 

The ride home was awkward. Neither of us said anything. Much like the evening when I told my parents I was pregnant, the air was heavy with unspoken thoughts. Would I ever reconnect with my parents? Did I really want to? And how could I? We hadn’t seen each other in weeks, since Junior’s funeral service. Did we even have anything in common anymore?

We arrived minutes later. Without a word to either of my parents, I went to my old bedroom. It looked exactly as before I moved out. In a way, it felt good to come home, but I could not shake the troubling notion that my parents had left my room as-is because they placed no stock in my marriage to Allen. Time had proven them right. I just wasn’t in any mood to face the facts.

That night was the last time I saw Allen alive. 

I came to learn that Allen had maintained this fling for longer than I thought. Sometime after we split up, he let it slip that he was still married to me. His mistress did not take kindly to the news. When he didn’t show up to work for a few days, his boss had someone check in on him. The door to his apartment was found ajar. He was inside, dead for days, but his love interest was nowhere to be seen. They never found her, either.

I’ll admit, I cried at his funeral. Even with how he wronged me, Allen was the sort you couldn’t stay angry with. Deep down, he was good. If I could fault him anything, he just made poor choices, but could you really blame him? We were too young to get along in the world by ourselves; we just didn’t know it then.

Dad pulled some strings to get me my old job at the store. Before long I settled into a routine. Boring as that may sound, it did me good. It got my mind off Allen and the baby. It also made the next few years easier.

Now in my twenties, I still wasn’t anything special to look at but I was young; pretty, even, if I cared to doll myself up. Yet, none of the local boys showed interest in me.

I knew why.

Nobody dared to say it to my face, but I was damaged goods. 

I was a pretty young widow. Worse—depending on whom you asked—a black widow. Rumors spread of my having murdered Allen, and that I had purposefully killed my child. They were lies of course, but that made them sting all the more. If what people say about you is the truth, at least you can own up to it. You don’t have that option with lies.

Dad lent me some money to attend technical school. I became a typist. The work paid well back in the day, and was in demand. I signed a lease on an apartment in the city, betting on getting a job before my savings ran dry. My gamble paid off. After a week of pounding the streets, I was hired to work in an office building.

Once I had settled into my new home and new job, the next couple of months were uneventful. I was making more money than ever—not Rockefeller money by any stretch, but I had plenty left over after paying my expenses. I’d never experienced such freedom. All of a sudden I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to live my life, not my parents, not a husband. I also had no one I could rely upon to ensure household chores got done, but I was doing them by myself for myself now, so I took pride in keeping up with the needs of my home. 

Finding a husband was on my radar but not a priority. Allen was still too fresh on my mind. His funeral had not given me the closure I had expected it would. I still thought fondly of him. If he hadn’t died, I might even have gotten back together with him despite what he did to me.

What I appreciated more than the money or the freedom of living in the city was the sense that I had come out from under the shadow of those awful small-town rumors. Unless you’re a big shot, in the city you’re a nobody. That was fine by me. Anonymity beats unwarranted infamy any day of the week. 

Moving to the city gave me the chance to start again with a clean slate, and I took it for all it was worth. About this time, too, was when my past caught up to me in a way I never could have foreseen.

The job seldom offered overtime work but when it did, I was always the first to sign up. Unlike many of my co-workers, I didn’t have a family at home to look after once my shift was through. That meant that when work got really busy, I’d log as many as sixteen hours a day. Believe me, I’ve got the arthritis to show for it. 

One night, after a double shift at work, I arrived home feeling completely exhausted. I collapsed face down atop the bed. I hadn’t bothered taking off my work clothes because I’d need them soon enough, for my usual morning shift.

I wasn’t yet asleep when I heard a noise coming from my hall door. Tired as I was, that noise snapped me awake. I turned over in bed, onto my back, in time to see the hall door crack open. Whoever opened it must have had a set of keys that fit the lock. 

Fear paralyzed me. I wanted to run, to scream, but could do nothing except watch as the door opened.

There was someone in my apartment.

The intruder was backlit, or at least he seemed to be because I could not make out any of his features. What I saw enter was a walking shadow. 

Judging by his behavior, he was no stranger to my apartment. He did not act like a prowler breaking into someplace chosen at random. He did not scan the place for valuables and head straight to them, looking to make a quick score. No, instead, he seemed very much at home. 

He shut the hall door and then went to the refrigerator, pausing there to rummage through its contents. Nothing seemed to draw his interest, because he shut the refrigerator without removing anything from it.

As I watched him, I wondered if he was a tenant who had mistaken my apartment for his. I just as quickly dismissed this as an unbelievable coincidence, considering how his keys opened the door to my apartment. Might this be the landlord, then? I wanted to call out but hesitated, thinking that if I was wrong, I’d have attracted the attention of a potential murderer.

Somehow, in spite of my fear, I became aware of the tiniest details. The intruder smelled terrible, reeking of sweaty armpits, and engine oil, and—

Cologne.

Allen’s cologne.

When Allen was alive, he would come home smelling of sweat and car exhaust. Towards the end of his life, he would mask this smell with cologne—a particular cologne I knew so well, because he wore it not for me but for the woman with whom he had betrayed me.

The more I thought that somehow this was Allen back from the dead, the more this intruder—still only a shadow—seemed to take on Allen’s mannerisms. Allen had a peculiar way of carrying himself. He never quite slouched, but then again he was not so proud as to stand up straight with his chest puffed out. He had always been an easygoing soul, with arms that swung listlessly at his sides as he walked, reminiscent of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

The notion that this was Allen coming to visit me from beyond the grave frightened me, but not as much as an encounter a late-night intruder. Yes, Allen had wronged me; yes, I had witnessed Allen’s funeral; but I had put this all in the past. And yet, somehow, here was Allen as I remembered him. This familiarity comforted me.

He has still only a shadow as he approached the bedroom. In the light that entered from behind him, I watched him take off his mechanic’s coveralls. He—better put, his shadow—looked as though it were pantomiming taking off its clothes. The shadow itself did not wear visible clothing, but when it took off its coveralls, the clothes it removed from its body were shadowy like it was, and darker than my already dark bedroom. It flung the coveralls aside. They collapsed into a corner of the room with a rustle of fabric and metal fasteners. 

I want to make clear: Allen made no noise. His clothing did, after he had taken it off, when it hit the wall. When he flung his coveralls into the corner, they looked shadowy like he did. In hindsight I reasoned that must have been his coveralls by the sound they made and by how he appeared to undress.

Watching Allen move about my apartment was like watching a silent film. Despite that he stood in the doorframe looking in, I could not be certain of whether he was aware of my presence. 

“Helen?”

That word—my name—came as loud and sudden as a gunshot.

Unthinkingly, I answered, “Allen?”

His shadow advanced a step.

“Allen, is that really you?”

He did not answer. Instead, his shadow appeared to undo its shirt, then its pants, and fling them both into the corner where the coveralls lay. Again came the rustle of clothing fabrics tossed against the wall. When he was alive, he would do this in preparation for taking a shower, and afterward have dinner and go to bed. 

This time, however, things were different.

He lay down beside me on the bed. Putting his arms around me, he gave me a squeeze. His body was there and not there at the same time. His presence was undeniable, and yet the bedsprings did not so much as squeak, as though he were weightless. 

Down to the tips of my toes, my skin was all pins and needles. He was cold like unto death. This aside, he gave off what felt like electricity, like that prank we played as kids where you build up a static charge and zapped someone with a touch. 

He leaned in close, then hesitated. 

“Helen?” he whispered breathlessly. 

Maybe it was because he whispered into my ear, or maybe I was now settled enough to focus on his voice, but I noticed that his voice sounded strange. Without a doubt it was Allen’s voice. But, in ways that I could not put my finger on, it wasn’t Allen’s voice at all. It sounded like an impression, like someone passing himself off as Allen after having studied him intensely.

But it was still Allen—at least I wanted to believe it was. Death does things to a body. It wasn’t a stretch to believe death does things to one’s voice too.

His lips hovered at the nape of my neck, but I could neither feel nor hear his breath. I could smell it, though. The scent of his breath was very unlike Allen; it smelled inhuman. You know how your breath sometimes smells like what you ate? Allen’s breath smelled like nothing anyone would want to eat. It was positively rancid. It smelled like the breeze downwind of a county dump in the summer heat.

Then, like a minnow snapping at a piece of bread floating at the water’s surface, he nipped at my earlobe. My stomach leapt into my throat, and not just from his awful smell. I knew only too well what he wanted, and there was an indescribable wrongness to what he sought. 

Still, it was Allen, wasn’t it?

“Helen?” he insisted, nipping at my ear again.

I said nothing in response, but with my body, I assented to his desires.

The bed did not shift as he moved to straddle me, though I immediately felt his weight press upon my body. 

I removed my clothes.

We lay in bed as husband and wife despite our marriage having ended with his death.

The alarm clock sounded far too soon thereafter for my comfort, startling me awake. Arriving home from yesterday night’s late shift had afforded me less than six hours of sleep. I dragged myself out of bed and halted dead in place upon realizing I was naked.

I never slept naked.

My work clothes from the night before lay bunched up in a heap in the corner, the same corner into which Allen had flung his clothes upon arriving.

Allen.

Reflecting on the events of the previous evening shook me to the core. Had that really been Allen back from the dead? Or had I dreamt it all? I did not know for certain. Allen’s clothes were nowhere to be seen despite my clearly recalling he had thrown them into the corner where my clothes now lay.

And then I remembered: the cologne. His cologne was the biggest piece of evidence. Considering this, all the other pieces to this mystery fell into place. He spoke my name. He embraced me. He made love to me. How could this be anyone but Allen? I had never been with any other man.

Shocking as Allen’s visit had been at first, I couldn’t help but pick up on how romantic it was in retrospect. That we had been together for as long as either of us could recall only proved that we were soul mates. Sure, he’d made mistakes while alive, but who doesn’t? Nobody’s perfect. Having realized this, and that I was the only girl for him, Allen would not let death stand in the way of us being together. Love really does conquer all.

Recognizing this made me feel giddy. Allen was back, and I was thankful, but there was more to it than just this. I was special. Allen’s return would be our little secret. I could tell no one. No one would believe me anyway.

I got dressed and went to work. Despite having signed up for overtime, I asked to leave work early, feigning illness. When I got home, I spent the rest of the evening tidying up the house and fixing dinner. I hadn’t put as much effort into warming the home since I was a newlywed. Though I wasn’t sure whether Allen could actually eat the dinner I prepared, at least the home would smell nice on his arriving.

Allen did not show up that afternoon. I expected as much. The evening before, he got home late, just as he used to when he worked at the dealership. I stayed up until midnight before finally turning in. The alarm clock awoke me the following morning.

The apartment bore no sign that Allen had come home.

Just to make certain, I checked the bedroom and then the rest of the apartment. As far as I could tell, the place was in the same state it had been in the previous day.

I ducked out of working the late shift again, came home, made dinner, and waited for Allen to arrive. Again, nothing. The following morning, I was no longer as certain that his initial visit had been real. Now, with the benefit of a good night’s rest, I recognized that my encounter with Allen had been a nightmare brought on by overwork.

Still, doubts lingered. Allen had felt so real. It saddened me to think that what I experienced had all been in my head. I wanted it to be real. I missed Allen.

The next few weeks went without incident. I strove to put Allen out of my mind. I was too busy to think of anything but work, and too tired afterward to think of Allen.

Then, one morning, as I was headed out of my apartment to go to work, I noticed my keys were missing. I was certain I had left them on the wall hook upon returning home the night before, as was my routine. 

My thoughts flew to Allen. When we lived together, our apartment had a wall hook where he would hang up our keys. The keys would be gone by the time I rose from bed, as he always left for work early in the morning. 

I searched everywhere for those keys, but could not find them. By now I had already missed my bus to work. Not wanting to leave my apartment without a way of locking the door behind me, I phoned work to call in sick, and then resumed the search.

During the span of eight daylight hours, I turned my little apartment upside-down. I emptied all the drawers in the kitchen and bedroom. I even moved all the furniture to check behind and underneath for those keys, and still turned up nothing. When at last I had exhausted all my options, I sat down on a kitchen chair and cried into my hands. I was not so much upset that the keys were missing as I was frustrated that I had wasted a whole day searching for keys that I knew were on the hook the night before.

To lift my mood, I decided to treat myself to dinner. There was a diner within walking distance of my home. Although I was uncomfortable leaving the door to my apartment unlocked, I figured no one would know that unless they tried the door. My apartment door was identical to all the others in the hall, so what were the chances that someone would happen upon the one that had been left unlocked?

I was away for about an hour. Upon returning, I found my home in shambles. The kitchen drawers and their contents had been flung to the ground. The folding table and chairs that served as my dining room set were smashed. One chair had hit the wall so hard that it had knocked a hole in the plaster as big as my hand. My dresser had been toppled onto its side, its drawers hanging half-in, half-out of it like the guts on a road-killed opossum.

I got as far as my bedroom before realizing my apartment could not have gotten this way by itself. Someone had done this, and that someone could still be here. What if whoever had done this had meant to rape or kill me? Realizing this froze the blood in my veins. I ran out of there screaming, went to the neighbor’s door and begged them to open. My neighbors answered a moment later and found me a sobbing, hysterical mess.

They sat me down on their couch. I told them that my place had been broken into. The man of the house searched my apartment for any intruders while I stayed with his wife and child. He returned a few minutes later to say that whoever had been inside was gone. They walked me back to my apartment. Then, to make double-sure, he and I checked every corner of my apartment together.

I said good night and locked the hall door, then turned and slumped against it. My home was an irreparable mess. A glance at the wall clock told me it was too late to start getting things in order. It would be a few short hours before I’d have to head to work. I dreaded the thought of missing another day. Keys or no, I risked losing my job if I called out again.

I got into bed. In light of the day’s events, sleep did not come easy, though I was not asleep for long when a sharp noise at the hall door woke me. It sounded as though someone were in the hall, banging on my door to be let in. I was not going to open up to anyone at this late hour of night. Still, I went to the door for a look through the peephole. The knocking ceased when I pressed my face to the door. 

No one was outside.

I withdrew a step, struggling to make sense of what was happening. No sooner had I stepped back than the knocking resumed—furious knocking, like many people out in the hall pounding against my door with both hands.

I don’t know what came over me, but I yanked the door open as soon as the noise started back up.

The hall was empty.

I stuck my head out and looked one way, then the other. Then I stepped out into the middle of the hall and turned fully around in a circle. I waited a few moments to see if those responsible for this prank would show themselves. I was the only person there.

I wanted to scream. Was I losing my mind?

My heart pounding, I reentered my apartment and shut the door but the door burst open as though a stiff wind had buffeted it. Impossible, but it happened.

Understand, the apartment I shared with Allen was—I guess you could call it a row house. It was level to the street. We had neighbors on either side but nobody in front, in back, or above. The row homes went to the end of the block. Sometimes the wind outside could get pretty strong as it blew along the length of the houses.

My apartment in the city was different. It was a building with units on its inside. The door to my home opened into an enclosed hallway. The hall had the elevators on one end and a small window at the other, and nobody opened that window, ever. As well as I can remember, it might have been just a sheet of glass set into the wall.

There was nowhere for a gust that strong to have come in from outside.

The sweep of the door knocked me off balance. In the split second before the door went flying, I had raised my arms to cover my face, so that when I fell I landed sideways, my face to the floor. It was a miracle the door hadn’t hit my hands or my face, or else I’m certain it’d have broken some bones. Something hard and metallic struck me in the back of the head before landing on the ground beside me with a jangling noise.

Still on the ground, I crab-walked away from the door before standing up. I hesitated for a moment before rushing to the door and throwing the deadbolt. There was no way it could fly open into my face with an inch thick of steel anchoring it shut.

Leaning against the door for support, I breathed a sigh of relief. Was I going crazy? As I considered this, my eyes flitted to the object on the floor that had struck my head.

It was my keys.

I could not believe my eyes. After having gone missing for days, here they were. They hadn’t simply turned up—they’d been flung at me from someone standing out in the hall, except there had been no one out there.

Something like intuition prompted me to glance at the clock on the kitchen wall. No sooner did I shift my gaze than the clock chimed the hour—eleven o’clock at night.

Inexplicably, my mind flooded with memories of Allen. Didn’t he used to come home late when he was with that other woman? For some reason, eleven o’clock stood out in my mind as the time when he would arrive home. 

Had that been Allen just now, knocking on the door to be let in?

If it had been, had he taken the keys with him when he left?

And if he had the keys all along, why would he need to knock?

Over the course of several days, my thoughts lingered on Allen. I must have upset him; why else would he treat me so badly? Allen was never the type to lay hands on me, but this was not Allen—it was his ghost I was dealing with. Why hadn’t he crossed over in the first place? Was he suffering in the afterlife? If so, was this the reason he acted the way he did toward me?

I racked my brains for ways I might have offended Allen, and could come up with just one: I had forgotten about him since his funeral. Realizing this, I tried my best to make things right. 

Upon coming home from work, I would speak aloud to him. I had no way of knowing whether he was present or if he could hear me, but I did it anyway. Most nights, I would ask him how his day went. That seemed polite enough, considering I had no idea how ghosts spent their time. I even cooked his favorite meal in the hopes that if he couldn’t eat it, at least he could smell it and be reminded of our years together.

It paid off. Allen did not manifest himself for a string of weeks. I got the impression that he was satisfied with my efforts, because if he wasn’t then I could expect the abuse to resume. He mostly behaved himself. Seldom did he make his presence known. From time to time he might bump my shoulder to let me know he was nearby, or tug at the hem of my dress. On more than one occasion he grabbed my ankle in mid-stride, causing me to trip. No harm ever came of this, and so I chalked these events up to his being mischievous.

Sometimes, though, his attention gave me cause for concern. Once, he manifested visually as I drew aside the shower curtain to prepare for a bath. This frightened me out of my wits. 

I saw him as I had known him in life, except he was deathly pallid. All about him was a thin layer of black fog that made his extremities cloudy. That fog made Allen look like he wore a coat of wriggling black army ants. I could see his face, his torso—but edges of his face and the extremities of his body got lost in a churning black mist that was constantly billowing. 

His eyes were sunken into his face. Also, his features were sharper—meaner. You could cut your hand on his cheekbones from how sharp they were. He snickered briefly before vanishing from sight.

Allen mostly behaved himself. Even so, the circumstances made for a frigid home environment. Things weren’t optimal, but I wasn’t miserable, and I was thankful for that. It felt an awful lot like living with Allen when he was alive. 

One night, having come home late from a double shift, I was too tired to attend to my ghost husband. I stripped naked and got into the shower. I was in the middle of lathering up when I felt firm pressure squeeze my chest. It came on so suddenly I thought I was having a heart attack. Somehow, though, in the midst of this I got the impression that the pressure wasn’t coming from inside my chest, but from outside. It felt like a hand around my left breast.

I screamed and batted the hand away. My hand met nothing but empty air, yet the feeling of fingers squeezing my breast intensified. This was not the caress of a lover. It hurt like someone was trying to rip my breast off my chest.

“Allen! Stop it!” I cried out, but he ignored me. 

I yanked the shower curtain aside to run out of bathroom, but hadn’t gone two steps when I got spun around to face the way I had come. Allen had me tethered by the breast like a dog leashed to a tree. Every time I pulled away, I could feel the muscle start to tear on the inside.

“Stop! You’re hurting me!” I pleaded with him.

In response, I was struck under the right eye as though with the heel of a hand. I fell backward and hit my head against the floor. Sitting up, I scrabbled out of the bathroom on hands and knees, clawing away from where I figured Allen was. I was fairly certain he was gone despite having no way of knowing for sure.

I collapsed onto my side on the floor, cold and dripping wet. In the short time I had lain there, my face had puffed up from the blow to my eye. The swelling pinched it shut. I stood and went to the bathroom mirror to assess the damage.

I looked like death. A purplish-red blotch stretched across my cheek from beneath the orbit of my right eye. On my left breast was a bruise in the shape of a handprint. The four fingers and thumb were set out so clearly that the mark might as well have been branded onto me.

Much as these injuries smarted, what hurt all the more was reflecting upon the suffering Allen must have been going through, if it caused him to act out like this.

He was never this way.

My poor Allen.

Exhausted, I collapsed onto my bed, not bothering to put on my nightclothes first. That night, I found out why Allen was so upset with me.

I dreamt I was holding Junior in my arms, nursing him at my breast. It seemed so real that, in the moment, I felt I was reliving a memory, except that this memory could not have been real. Junior was bigger than I remembered, about as big as a one-year-old.

The sight of him lying contentedly in my arms brought me almost to tears. I wanted to squeeze him to my chest and tell him how much I missed him, and to apologize for failing as a mother, and for—

I could not bring myself to end that sentence, but the rest came anyway.

—for killing him.

All at once, an ocean of self-loathing welled up in me. It is true that the pain of losing a child stays with you for life, but I’d had enough time to reflect on how what happened to Junior wasn’t my fault. Crib death was not well understood back then. It was just something that happened in spite of your efforts to prevent it.

I’d scarcely considered this when a shooting pain lit up in my breast like a Roman candle. My arms clenched around Junior—mother’s instinct to keep from dropping him. I’d lost him once and would not lose him again at any cost. I pressed him to my body to keep him safe.

Then I realized: Junior was gnawing at me, at my left breast, the one Allen had gotten ahold of during my bath.

Suddenly, Junior threw his head back.

The face of the thing in my arms was not Junior’s. The whites of its eyes were golden. It glowered at me with predatory eyes; pupils that were diamond-shaped like a snake’s and burned red like the sun at dusk. Its mouth was crammed full of rusty ten-penny nails slick with my blood. The bite mark on my breast looked like rapid-fire pinpricks from an electric sewing machine—row upon row of needle sticks oozing red in tiny little globes.

The baby roared with the force of a hurricane. It could not have weighed more than twenty pounds. The noise it made sounded like the lion’s roar at the start of an MGM film, but so loud, so awfully loud. 

Fright slackened my arms. I dropped the baby. Like a cat, it rotated before hitting the ground and landed on all fours, looking no worse for the wear. Then it moved impossibly fast, skittering along the floor to the couch, where it flattened itself like a cockroach and disappeared beneath the furniture.

It did not come back out, and I was thankful for that.

All of a sudden I snapped awake and was met with intense disorientation. The nightmare had seemed so real that what was happening at present—me lying in bed—more closely resembled a dream than the dream itself. 

What happened next confused me all the more. 

I could not move.

I was on my back, naked from my bath. Somehow, the room was darker than usual. Black, cloudy things moved at the edges of my field of vision. I could not make out what they were, nor could I turn my head to look at them more closely.

As my vision adjusted to the darkness, I saw that I was not alone.

Something sat on top of me. It was humanlike in shape, its knees folded on the bed with its thighs straddling my hips. The way it sat, perpendicular to how I lay, I could see it had a head, a torso, and arms. It was made of that same churning black fog I saw earlier, but these were no mere clouds. The body was solid. It had weight. It exerted force. In its head, where its eyes should have been, were two golden lights that burned like twin candles on a sconce.

It descended onto me, planting its hands on my shoulders. Even in the light of its eyes, I could not make out its features. It was a constantly moving cloud of pitch black ashes in the shape of a man, but so heavy that its weight suffocated me. If I could not rise from the bed before, I certainly would not be able to get up from how forcefully this thing pinned me down. 

Its body was ice cold. The palms of its hands were as big around as dinner plates. I could feel the contours of each of its fingers on my shoulders. They were thick, like a workman’s fingers, but they were unnaturally long. When it clenched its grip with its palms on my chest, its fingers reached over my shoulders to my back.

The thing began raping me.

I wanted to run, to cry, to scream for—

“Allen!” I called out. “Allen, help me!”

It halted in place at the sound of that name.

Realizing this, I called out again. “Allen, please! Please!”

Please what? I remember thinking.

That voice in my head was not my own. It was coarse, and rude, and scornful.

“Please…” I spoke just above a whisper. “Please stop. Please, Allen. You’re hurting me.”

Allen—the thing—sat back onto his haunches. It didn’t look like Allen, and yet it must have been him, judging from how he responded when I called his name. I still could not move, not with him squatting atop my legs. 

He paused as though to reflect upon what I had just uttered. Then, in silence, he vanished. The murky clouds of black fog were gone.

I gulped down air in a long pull, not realizing until now that Allen had crushed the wind from my lungs.

“I’m sorry, Allen,” I wheezed. Then, sitting up in bed, I cried into my hands.

I had disappointed Allen immensely.

He had every right to be angry. He deserved better than me. This whole time I’d thought only of myself and never about him. And I thought I had it bad. My stupid act of sleeping with him when we were kids clapped the proverbial ball and chain around his ankle. I’d wrecked his career plans, his future. I was the reason he had to drop out of school. Because of me he worked upwards of sixty hours a week and never had anything left over to show for it. My stupid mistakes were what forced him to marry me, as plain a Jane as they come, when he could have had anybody. 

Anybody would have been better than me.

I’d failed at being his wife.

When he was alive and we were struggling to get by, I’d often rebuffed his advances for intimacy. Now, with him dead, I’d started down that same path.

If I’d been a better wife to him, he would not have strayed.

He’d still be alive, too.

I couldn’t even keep our son alive; that’s how badly I failed at the very basics of mothering.

I was the reason Allen was dead.

I’d killed him, and our son, his namesake.

I’d never meant to; I just never measured up to the task of doing right by him or Junior.

And now he was angry with me.

I deserve every last bit of his ire.

And I’ll bear it too, knowing that he’ll forgive me when he’s ready.

He was never the sort to hold a grudge.

Allen, I’m sorry.

I’m trying the best I can.

Things are different now, it’s true, but we can still be together, I promise.

I love you.

Please don’t hurt me anymore.

Analysis[2]

The circumstances contained in this dossier describe an incubus attack. The colloquial understanding of the incubus can be expressed as a “lewd male demon who pursues women for sex.”[3] Its female counterpart, the succubus, is thought of as a “demon who takes the form of a beautiful woman in order to seduce men.”[4] These definitions intersect in two important ways: that these creatures are demons, and that they exploit human sexuality. What they leave off, however, is how insidious these demons are.

Incubi and succubi are fallen angels. St. Augustine observes that “angel” denotes the creature’s office (what it does); whereas its essence (what the creature actually is) is spirit. By way of comparison: the office of a postman is that of a messenger, while his essence is that of a human being. Thus, regardless of whether it is holy or reprobate, an angel is a spirit with a mission.

What sets holy angels apart from reprobate demons is that the demons rebelled against God, thereby making themselves enemies of God. Because demons are finite creatures, they have no way to harm an infinite, omnipotent God. Thus, demons attempt to avenge themselves in two general ways: by detracting from God’s glory, and by bringing about the ruin of humanity, the creatures God loves most. This second method accomplishes both aims.

Like any angel, demons are disembodied intelligences.[5] They are personal beings, capable of articulating thoughts and desires. As such, they are similar to humanity in that they each possess an intellect and a will—a faculty by which they think and another by which they act. Indeed, these are the only faculties spirits are known to possess. Spirits were created without material bodies, and so there is not one atom of matter to be found in them. By default, they are imperceptible to the human senses.

Just because they are incorporeal by nature does not mean they are incapable of acting upon matter. Demons can manipulate physical objects, and by extension, people’s bodies. Demons can also assume physical bodies themselves,[6] although these bodies are not proper to them. A physical body is not something upon which their existence depends; rather, it is a tool they use when they see fit. This mode of existence is unlike that of humanity’s. A human being dies when its soul is separated from its body. In contrast, demons cannot die. When a demon assumes a physical body and the body no longer serves its purposes, it sheds the body like clothing and is no less what it was beforehand for having jettisoned it.

It is theorized that incubi and succubi tempt mankind to sin against chastity. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas agree that demons can adopt human forms. They also would agree that the form these demons take is capable of engaging, mechanically, in sexual relations with human beings. However, demons do not have a proper gender. Gender is proper to creatures that engage in sexual reproduction to propagate their species. Aquinas teaches that each spirit is the sole member of its unique species. Furthermore, no new spirits will ever come into existence. As a result, demons can neither impregnate nor become pregnant. With that said, Aquinas states that demons might assume human forms in order to gather the cells necessary for sexual reproduction to occur: 

If some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterward of a man.[7]

Thus, Aquinas concludes, if a human being were conceived following sexual contact with a demon, “the person born is not the child of a demon but of a man.[8]

Much of the scholarship on incubi is intertwined with research into the occult. In the fifteenth century, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, a handbook for the prosecution of male and female witches. These priests were inquisitors of the Dominican order; hence, they were exceptionally well-educated churchmen. In their view, no human being could perform seemingly miraculous works except with the assistance of demons who worked those feats at the witch’s request. Demons categorically hold the human race in low regard, and so they do not normally act at the behest of mankind. Therefore, an unholy alliance between a demon and a human client must be forged before a demon might consider granting the client’s wishes.

While the Malleus did not gain traction during its authors’ lifetimes, it influenced later theologians’ approach to demonology. Writing in the sixteenth century, a Franciscan friar named Girolamo Menghi delved further into the connection between incubi and witchcraft. He expounded upon the demonic pact, whereby a human witch pledged himself to one or more demons. To prove his fidelity to the demonic forces, a prospective witch engaged in sexual intercourse with a demon. Generally, an apparently-male[9] incubus would be assigned to a woman while an apparently-female succubus would be assigned to a man, but such opposite gender pairings were not always the case. Moreover, Menghi posited that these demons do not limit their attentions solely to willing initiates into the occult. They have been known to afflict people with no apparent link to occult practices whatsoever.

After Menghi comes Ludovico Maria Sinistrari. An exorcist and expert in demonology, he was instrumental in carrying out the Catholic Inquisition in seventeenth-century Europe. His treatise, Demoniality: Or, Incubi and Succubi, specifically discusses the sexual coupling between human beings and demons. In it, he documents an incubus attack he personally investigated. A woman of unimpeachable virtue was accosted by an incubus over an extended period of time. Despite that the woman was married, the demon insisted that she should be its lover, at times appearing in public as a handsome young man only she could see. 

This case differs from others which Sinistrari investigated because, to his knowledge, the woman had not intentionally invited the incubus into her life. Insofar as is known, she was an upright member of her community. She was not a witch. She had not sought a relationship with a demon. Instead, the demon approached her with the intent of making her contravene her marriage vows. 

The demon first spoke to her in a dream, asking whether she had enjoyed a certain cake it had arranged to be delivered to her. When she rebuffed its advances, it tormented her. The demon broke or stole personal effects of hers which she valued greatly. On another occasion it took away her child, whose disappearance caused her much grief, and then returned the child some while later. Other times the demon would beat her. Her body would exhibit bruises and other marks of its ill treatment. Yet another episode occurred while she was in public. While she was at church, the demon produced a mysterious gust of wind that blew off all her clothing, leaving her naked in public and thoroughly embarrassed.

Sinistrari’s account puts forth several key ideas. First, that demons exist. Second, that some demons possess specific talents or capabilities that make them better than others at inciting certain behaviors in human beings. Thus, demons specialized in provoking sins against chastity are called incubi or succubi. Third, that like other demons, incubi and succubi are evil. They are not harmlessly mischievous; they are not misunderstood; they are not to be sought out for companionship. These creatures are primordial enemies of mankind. To think otherwise of them is to invite disaster.

Because they turned away from God, demons lack the virtue of charity. Charity is defined as willing the good for another. Categorically, demons are incapable of charitable acts.nAny time a demon’s behavior might appear to be motivated by charity, it is not actual love that impels it but the selfish belief that the demon might further its wicked agenda. That agenda is the ruin of human beings. Demons are also liars. Thus, they will attempt to disguise something evil as good if it serves their purposes. In the case of incubi, they tend to focus on sexual immorality because that is the field in which they excel.

Sexual intercourse is good when it is done in the right context—a marriage between one man and one woman who give themselves to each other exclusively for life. Implicit in this relationship is the vow to be chaste (i.e., faithful) to each other. This is the virtue incubi pervert.

Illicit sexual intercourse can encompass a number of sins. The following three examples are most pertinent here. For an unmarried person, fornication is a transgression of the chastity required of single people.[10] For a person in wedlock, adultery is a violation of the chastity one spouse promised the other spouse.[11] A person who seeks sexual congress with a demon commits an act of infidelity to God on the level of spiritual adultery:

The soul that shall go aside after magicians, and soothsayers, and shall commit fornication with them, I will set my face against that soul, and destroy it out of the midst of its people…[12]

A man, or woman, in whom there is a pythonical or divining spirit, dying let them die: they shall stone them: their blood be upon them.[13]

Moreover, in a Catholic sacramental marriage, the vows are made not just between the spouses but to God. Because God is called upon to witness these vows, God expects the couple will keep these vows. Transgression of matrimonial vows is tantamount to having God to bear witness to a false oath.[14] While the goal of offending God fits the modus operandi of any demon, doing so by means of licentious sexual behavior is especially true of the incubus.

It is interesting that the individual written about in this dossier was accosted by the purported apparition of her deceased spouse. While it is true that the ghosts of the deceased have appeared to the living, these tend to be the souls of those in purgatory. Such souls are holy—they are guaranteed heaven after a time of purification. Because they are holy, they do not recoil as demons might when rebuked in the name of God. They tend to ask for prayers said for them, and thereafter are never seen on earth again. One thing they do not do is sin or tempt others to sin.

The evidence suggests that the entity that afflicted the witness was not the ghost of her spouse at all but an incubus demon disguised as him. Recall that in marriage, a man and a woman exchange rights to each other’s bodies. This exchange occurs regardless of whether the marriage ceremony is religious or secular. The spouses’ mutual grant of rights terminates with the death of a spouse, and concomitantly, the end of the marriage relationship.

The witness knew her spouse was deceased when she engaged the entity carnally. She should have known this entity could not have been her spouse. Alternatively, she should have known that the act which transpired between them was illicit because any rights to her body her deceased spouse enjoyed in life terminated with his death. Therefore, whether the witness knew it or not, sexual contact with this entity was inherently sinful. This sin may have been the act which invited greater demonic activity in her life.

In his discourse on authority, Aquinas teaches that the ultimate result of any sin is the sinner’s distancing himself from God. A more immediate effect is the sinner’s removing himself out from under the protection of God. This is expressed in the concept of the state of grace. Commission of just one mortal sin extinguishes the life of grace in a person. Such a person is spiritually dead from having chosen to turn his back on God. 

Here, two important considerations come to the fore.

First, spiritual warfare is a zero-sum game. There is no fence on which to sit. A person is either with God or he is against Him.[15]

Second, nature abhors a vacuum. The next most powerful entity after God is Satan. This is not to say they are equally matched. Satan is nothing compared to God, who is infinite. Even so, Satan should not be underestimated. He is cunning and powerful, “a roaring lion [who goes] about seeking whom he may devour.”[16] Not only is he individually formidable but Satan has command over all the angels who rebelled. As in any army, Satan has troops specialized in one form of combat or another, and so he is spoiled for choice when selecting the right demon for the task. 

All this is to say that a person who rebels against God’s authority cannot hope to benefit from it, in the same way that a thief whose ill-gotten property is stolen from him cannot use the justice system to have it returned. 

Thus, with each sin, a person throws his lot in with Satan all the more. A sinner thereby becomes Satan’s stolen property—each transgression of the law of God affords Satan greater rights over the sinner. This can manifest in spectacular ways, such as by extraordinary demonic activity, as documented in this report. 

On account of it being a demon, the incubus can be expected to behave similarly to other demons. In general, one can expect it will tempt its victim to commit sins. This task, temptation, is what experts call ordinary demonic activity. It is the default mode of demonic interaction with mankind.

Because the incubus specializes in sins against chastity, temptations of this sort may be expected, though this is not always the case. One cannot assume that because its abilities are focused in this area that the demon will limit itself to operating within this ambit. The demon has available the entire gamut of preternatural capabilities proper to a fallen angelic being. It will resort to any tool at its disposal it believes will best suit its task.

The loss of a person’s state of grace, along with the commission of subsequent grave sins, can serve as the doorway for extraordinary demonic activity. Activity of this kind can be summarized under three general headings: oppression, obsession, and possession. Put succinctly, these involve demonic interference in a person’s life to varying degrees leading up to the demon attempting to use the person’s body as if it were its own.

Possession of the body by a demon is the natural end result of any grave sin. That it does not happen immediately is an expression of God’s mercy. This becomes apparent from the account of humanity’s first parents in the Garden of Eden.

Death did not enter the world until Adam and Eve sinned.[17] When they sinned, they did so with their bodies—they ate of the tree they had been commanded not to.[18] Therefore it was natural that their bodies should suffer the ill effects of their choices.[19] This principle holds true as much in their day as in ours. Because turning away from God results in aligning oneself with demonic forces, the natural end result of any sin is an abusive demonic relationship. Unless corrective measures are taken, these relationships can only be expected to intensify.

As has been shown, the incubus is a peculiarly insidious demon. Its aim is neither to give nor to receive pleasure. It cannot actually derive any pleasure from the sexual act because it lacks a proper body and a proper gender. Nor can the demon love. Objectively speaking, the relationships incubi establish with humanity are abusive. While there is evidence of incubi conferring material advantages upon those whom they accost,[20] given enough time, the incubus will invariably leverage these to shortchange the victim out of his or her soul.

Footnotes

[1] The events reported in this dossier are presented as true; however, no guarantee is made as to their veracity. To the extent the facts appear to take on a supernatural nature, the reader is advised that supreme authority to discern facts of this kind rests with the Catholic Church.

[2] See: Firsthand Accounts of Incubi and Succubi Examined Through the Lens of Catholic Scripture and Holy Tradition (File Number: 04-216801).

[3] Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. “Incubus.” The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2009.

[4] Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. “Succubus.” The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2009.

[5] Summa Theologiae, I-I, Q. 51, Art. 1.

[6] Summa Theologiae, I-I, Q. 51, Art. 2; The Holy Bible: Douay-Rheims Version, Tobit 5:5-6.

[7] Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 51, Art. 3.

[8] Id.

[9] Gender is a quality of a material creature that engages in sexual reproduction. While spirits have been reported to engage in mechanical copulation, this act is not sexual reproduction as the term is properly understood. Spirits cannot reproduce sexually, and so they have no need for gender. They are, however, more correctly thought of as being male because they tend to exhibit male characteristics and fill typically male roles: i.e., they are powerful; they are fighters; they are heralds/ambassadors; holy angels serve as guardians; demons are ruthless; et cetera.

[10] Exodus 20:17. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house: neither shalt thou desire his wife, nor his servant, nor his handmaid…”

[11] Exodus 20:14. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

[12] Leviticus 20:6.

[13] Leviticus 20:27.

[14] Exodus 20:7. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain…”

[15] Revelation 3:16.

[16] 1 Peter 5:8.

[17] Genesis 2:17.

[18] Genesis 3:6.

[19] When God created Adam, He fashioned him from the dust of the earth (Genesis 3:19). He reveals this to Adam after Adam had sinned, with the context being that God is imposing a sentence upon Adam: “for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return…” (Id). The only way God’s pronouncement can be interpreted as a punishment for Adam’s sin is by considering that, had Adam had not sinned, he would never have had to suffer death. Otherwise, this pronouncement would be an empty threat, which does not comport with the nature of God.

[20] Jimoh, Shaykh Luqman. “The Yoruba Concept of Spirit Husband and the Islamic Belief in Intermarriage Between Jinn and Man: A Comparative Discourse.” International Conference on Humanities, Literature and Management (ICHLM’15) Jan. 9-10, 2015 Dubai (UAE), pp. 93-98.