Tucker Carlson Tells The Story of The Night He Was Attacked By a "Demon" in His Sleep

"Something Unseen...Left Claw Marks On My Sides...They Were Bleeding."

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There’s a new documentary called “Christianities?” coming out soon, though the release date has apparently not yet been announced.

A clip from the film was put up on YouTube today, and in it, Tucker Carlson tells the story of the night he was attacked by some unseen being in his sleep, which left bloody claw marks on his sides. The story is extraordinary, and best told by the video:

It reminds me of the stories of St. Jean Marie Vianney, the Cure d’Ars, who, it is said, was attacked viciously in his bed by Satan on a number of occasions. From Abbé Francis Trochu’s biography, The Cure D'Ars : St. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney:

Once resolved upon upsetting M. Vianney’s outward tranquility, the devil began with some rather trivial vexations. Every night the poor Curé heard the curtains of his bedstead being rent. In the beginning, he imagined that he had to do only with common rodents. He placed a pitchfork near the head of his bed. Useless precaution: the more he shook the curtains in order to frighten off the rats, the louder became the sounds of rending, and in the morning, when he expected to find them in shreds, the curtains were undamaged. This game lasted for quite a while.

[…]

Soon, in the silence of the night, blows were struck against doors, shouts were heard in the yard in front of the presbytery. Perhaps they were the act of thieves, who were after the rich offerings of the Vicomte d’Ars, which were kept in the large cupboard in the attic! M. Vianney boldly came downstairs, but saw nothing.

I took this image of Vianney’s bedchamber when I visited Ars in 1999:

A visiting missionary recounted a story of Vianney’s bed being set on fire while the priest was preparing for Mass:

The bed, the tester, the curtains of the bed, and everything near — everything had been consumed. The fire had only halted in front of the reliquary of St. Philomena, which had been placed on a chest of drawers. From that point it had drawn a line from top to bottom with geometrical accuracy, destroying everything on this side of the holy relic and sparing all on the other. As the fire had started without cause, so it died out in like manner, and it is very remarkable, and in some ways miraculous, that the flames had not spread from the heavy serge hangings to the floor of the upper storey, which was very low, old, and very dry, and which would have blazed like straw.

At noon, when M. le Curé came to see me at the Providence, we spoke of the event. I told him that it was universally looked upon as a bad joke of the devil, and I asked him whether he really thought that the evil one had something to do with it. He replied very positively and with the greatest composure: ‘Oh! my friend, that is plain enough. He is angry; that is a good sign; we shall see many sinners.’ As a matter of fact, there followed an extraordinary influx of people into Ars, which lasted for several days.”

I have my own stories about such things.

I don’t talk about it much, because I don’t really know the right way to approach it, but when I was in college, I accidentally walked into the world of the demonic, and it changed me forever.

I was working for the pastor (now deceased) of my rural norther Pennsylvania parish, doing groundskeeping and administrative work.

Father X, as I’ll call him, was the man who came to me after daily Mass one day in December of 1996, and told me that he needed to talk to me about something important, and asked if he could take me to breakfast.

I didn’t know Father X. He was new at the parish, the third pastor in the decade or so my family had been crossing the state line from Upstate New York to attend Mass there. I was home on Christmas break from my year of volunteer work with the Legionaries of Christ, which, at the time, was considered the fastest growing order in the Church, and had the very public favor of Pope John Paul II.

At breakfast, I told the priest about the work I’d been doing, and the vocational pressure I felt, and how it was just ramping up my anxiety. Multiple Legionaries had told me they knew I had a vocation to the priesthood, but everything in me wanted to get married and have a family, so I was resisting what I had begun to believe, resignedly and unhappily, was God’s will for me.

As I told him about this, a relieved smile crossed Father’s face.

“This is what I wanted to talk about with you!” he said, growing animated. He was a big man, not just tall, but very heavyset, and he had a deep voice and a serious demeanor. But the look that came over his face was innocent and kind, and I was surprised by it. “I don’t know how to explain it to people who are not in religious life, but I get these inspirations sometimes from God to talk to people, and as I was trying to leave Mass today he was telling me I needed to tell you that you need to get out of the Legion. I’m glad you brought it up, because I didn’t want to do that. I don’t really know you, and all I know is the little your parents have told me about your situation.”

I, too, felt flooded with relief. I had been agonizing over my vocation for months, and I was miserable. Every day, my stomach was in knots. I couldn’t accept the idea that I was supposed to be a priest, but I couldn’t let go of the fear that I was defying God, either. Father X’s intervention, at long last, gave me the courage to send a letter of resignation to my superior in the house of apostolate in Atlanta, where I’d been since the previous summer, to let him know I was really struggling with the pressure and had decided not to go back. (This communication initiated a public smear campaign against me within the Legion, through which they tried to alienate me from all my friends within the movement, and led to me fighting a years-long battle against their recruitment efforts when I eventually went to Franciscan University of Steubenville.)

Later, when I needed a summer job that paid more than the pizza shop I’d been working at during college, Father had offered to hire me to help out at the parish. He paid me two dollars more an hour, and gave me cash (in retrospect, likely out of his own personal funds) to offset my tax withholdings. His generosity made it possible for me to have an enjoyable semester abroad during my junior year.

One day, when I was mowing the lawn, I stopped to head inside the rectory for a drink of water. Father’s office was by the front door, and as I entered, I noticed that a woman was sitting in his office, in the chair across from his desk, so I attempted to hurry past and mind my own business. Whatever he was counseling her about, I didn’t need to know.

But then he called my name.

“Stephen,” he said, in a tone that I had never heard before from him, “can you please go to the living room and get me the bottle of holy water and the crucifix that are on the table near the TV?”

I looked in the office again. I took in the woman, sitting in a blue satin jacket, her body slumped, her head bowed, her hair hanging limply, hiding her face, and in that instant, I knew.

She’s possessed, I thought. I had never seen a person under the influence of demons, but somehow, without any additional context or information, it was crystal clear to me.

I quickly hurried to get the items he requested, and he asked me to stay and pray, telling me that it was actually helpful to have a witness and an assistant in case anything went wrong and we needed to call an ambulance.

I don’t remember much about the specifics of that day, but I was absolutely freaked out. She growled and snarled in a strange voice, and he commanded and blessed and prayed.

Later, after she had left, he told me that he had been approached several years earlier by the Pennsylvania State Police in Scranton about some satanic murders they were investigating. They wanted a spiritual consult. He told them he didn’t know anything about all that, but he was willing to do what he could. He began researching and looking into the subject on his own. He discovered that rural Pennsylvania had a surprising amount of cult activity, and that this woman had been referred to him at some point. She had been raised in some sort of coven, and every time he tried to free her from whatever spiritual entities were assailing her, she would slide back into it over time, and wind up right back where she started.

That summer, I spent a lot of time with Father, and I heard the blasphemous voice mail messages she would leave on his machine, and see the hexed letters she would send him in the mail. It deeply unnerved me, but Father was bemused, at most. “Oh, that’s very nice,” he would say, as he’d scroll through messages or open his mail, his tone jocular and sarcastic. As I said, he was a big man with a serious physical presence, and he was simply unflappable. He got more upset at stupid people doing stupid things than he did about facing down demons.

There was another session with that same woman in the church about a month later, at which I assisted again, despite my reticence. It was a knock down drag out battle, her destroying sacramentals, trying to throw herself off the choir loft, speaking in strange languages, and generally acting like you’d expect a possessed person to act. Afterwards, I couldn’t sleep for weeks. I’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling terrified, praying in my sleep. He finally had to lay hands on me and pray for my own deliverance from any residual evil I may have picked up merely by being in proximity, which helped.

I don’t know what happened to that woman, but I later brought a friend to him who I had discerned was also dealing with some kind of demonic possession or obsession. My experience working in his parish had made me much more sensitive to the symptoms. The evening before I took this person to go see Father X, they were attacked by demons they said they could physically see, and they reached out to touch me to see if I was still there, because they told me they couldn’t see me through the cloud of monsters that were swarming the room. When we arrived at the parish, Father answered the door, and there was a perfect impression of a crucifix right in the center of his forehead, like someone had taken a rosary crucifix and pressed it into clay. I asked if he’d fallen asleep with his rosary in his hand. He said, “No, I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table folding bulletins for this weekend.” He went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and laughed. “Huh! So you’re right!”

The friend I brought with me had an immediate, visible reaction to the sight of Father. They squirmed and looked like they were going to be sick. The battle began almost immediately. An hour or so later, so physically exhausted they could barely walk, they told me that whatever it was within them had wanted them to kill me for bringing them to see Father.

That friend required a number of sessions to be freed, and they converted to Catholicism during one of the sessions in the hopes that the sacraments would help keep the demons at bay. This was a person who had, I learned, always been spiritually sensitive. They saw ghosts and demons as a child, saw dolls in their house move around on their own, and later, even had some encounters with UAPs.

When I talked to my Catholic boss about what had happened, he told me that his young son was dealing with something like this. He would get beaten up in his room by something at night, and he didn’t know what to do. My friend and I together took that boy to see the priest, where he was able to finally get some relief.

These are very truncated and redacted stories. I have to be careful about personal details, because stories like this tend to make people think that those who have these experiences are crazy. I was a witness to these things, but I did not experience them directly in the way these others did. It is a very strange thing indeed to watch someone fighting an interior battle against an unseen enemy, or to see a person under spiritual attack so severe it makes them vomit, or to enter a church with them and have the whole building pop and creak like it’s being squeezed by giant, unseen hands.

In those days, I often perceived the presence of evil through feelings of cold, or spine-tingling shivers, or just a sense of impending dread. Often, those feelings would be corroborated without me saying anything at all by my friend, who would see or feel something almost immediately after I noticed it myself. I always was a skeptic, and tried to look for confirming data that would transcend the possibility of bias or expectation.

These experiences, now decades in my past, have remained with me. They are the primary reason why, even after losing my particular Catholic faith, I could never become an atheist or strict materialist. The supernatural realm is real, even if we don’t have a good grasp of what it contains.

These experiences raised more questions than answers for me, and showed me that the Church’s theological understanding of preternatural phenomena left a lot unexplained. My friend’s sensitivity waned over time, and they never did come to an understanding of why they could perceive these things that others could not. We had countless experiences together where they would perceive something creepy or evil, and there never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to most of it. The fact that Catholicism makes no provision for ghosts became a point of contention for me, because this individual often saw them, and in some cases, a return visit to the spot during daylight would turn up a small cross on the side of the road where someone had died, or an old civil war battlefield, or the like.

Even Father X told me a story once about how his secretary at a previous parish had seen the ghost of a priest in cassock and biretta sitting on the couch in the rectory reading the newspaper. They had gone through the centenary book of the diocese together and found a photo of the priest in question, who had been pastor at the parish many years previously. Father told me he had offered a Mass in the rectory for that priest, and the secretary never saw him again.

In my research of the UFO topic, I have often been frustrated by the knee-jerk response of many Christians, saying that UFOs and non-human intelligences can’t be real, because they violate their understanding of soteriology, so they must in fact be demons.

My rejoinder has always been to say that demons don’t need technical craft, don’t show up on radar and infrared, don’t engage with fighter jets, and don’t leave wreckage and bodies behind.

But there is crossover.

I resisted paying any attention to the events at Skinwalker Ranch for years, because I did not want to get into the weird crossover between the topic of UFOs and the supernatural realm. When I finally caved, I found that there was much going on there that seemed explicitly related to visible craft (though not always in the human-visible spectrum), but also a great deal that was creepy, nefarious, or similar to the “demonic.” The property has been the subject of government and private scientific and military investigations alike. After watching five seasons of the show and viewing off-site interviews with the scientists who work there, I am utterly convinced that something highly unusual is going on there.

But what?

In filmmaker James Fox’s 2022 documentary, Moment of Contact, about a 1996 mass UFO sighting in Varginha, Brazil, I came across additional parallels. If you’re unfamiliar, here is the trailer for the film:

Witnessed reported seeing beings escape from a crashed UFO that were described as “smelling like sulphur” and had an appearance often associated with demons. An artist made an image matching a witness description of the being they claim they saw:

Dark, oily skin. Red eyes. Protrusions around the crown of the head that looked like horns. Add in the overwhelming smell of ammonia or sulphur, and you have a being that could understandably be thought of as a classically-described demon.

Except these beings seemed to be scared, possibly hurt, and trying to escape.

The late John Keel, a journalist and the author The Mothman Prophecies, a book about a terrifying supernatural phenomenon that terrorized a small town in West Virginia in the 1990s, said in an interview that he had come to believe that whatever it is that is here, it manifests according to our particular beliefs:

Religious people will probably scoff at the idea, but I do wonder sometimes if the classical ideas of angels and demons are in fact not the spiritual entities that religion describes, but are in fact interdimensional or quasi-corporeal beings that have been interacting (and interfering) with the human race for a very long time. What if our religious descriptions are just an attempt to understand something for which we have no other categorization? It seems that every culture across the span of history has some idea of demons; many also have mythologies that incorporate something like angels. It is certainly possible that the religious descriptions are apt, and that these cultures were encountering something they lacked the theological foundation to describe, but it also seems possible to me that theological speculation grew up around something ancient and other that is not, strictly speaking, part of the Christian view of the supernatural.

I would never have entertained this thought as a believer, so I understand if believers take issue with the idea. Nevertheless, I do find myself wondering about such things.

In any case, I find Tucker’s revelation both surprising and helpful. How many people have bizarre experiences like this but never talk about them. My friend hates telling their stories, which is why I take pains to conceal identifying details. The number of experiences they’ve had while I was present with them, however, is not insignificant.

Whatever the true nature of these beings are, they lurk among us, and they clearly mean us harm.