The Exorcist in Love: Chapter 1

Story by Thomas French – Photographs by Cherie Diez

The exorcist contemplates the master plan, rides a hurricane and defies her mother.

When it started, the exorcist was still a child.

This was many years before she began talking to the dead and to those who were never alive. Before she figured out who she was and what she was and accepted that she did not fit.

It was also before she took her wedding vows and brought five children into the world and then stepped off the cliff at the edge of her life, before she opened herself to the visions, before she confronted the entities with no names and then cast them back into eternal darkness. Before she took dictation from another corner of the galaxy, before she brought her son to visit his grave from another lifetime, before she had any idea what to think about the face at the window or the dream of the baby in the woods, before she devoted years to pondering the mysteries of the universe, only to discover that there was nothing more mysterious than her own heart.

For Laura Knight, it started long before any of these things. It started several decades ago, when she was a child growing up on the west coast of Florida. Even then, she lived on curiosity. That is where it really began: with Laura’s monstrous, breathtaking, epic curiosity. From early on, she refused to believe in randomness. She was sure there were cosmic blueprints, an underlying grid of meaning, and she wanted in on it. She devoured libraries of books. She immersed herself in particle physics. She pored through Freud and Jung. She studied Greek to aid her reading of the New Testament. She longed to understand the matrix of the tides, the language of the periodic table, the seductive progression of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

But understanding these things was not enough. Laura hungered not just to comprehend, but to experience.

So one day she climbed into the storm.

It was 1966, and Hurricane Alma was spinning cartwheels in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, Laura was 14 years old and living with her family on a farm in northern Pasco County, outside Hudson, less than half a mile from the coast. She had heard on the radio that Alma was generating mountainous waves, and she wanted to behold their ferocity for herself. She asked her mother to take her to the beach, but the answer was no.

As Laura recalls it, she made her move late that afternoon. Her mother dozed off while working on a crossword puzzle — all these years later, Laura is still astonished that the woman actually labored over something so mundane in the middle of such a spectacular day — and Laura grabbed some binoculars and slipped outside. She was headed for her favorite tree, a towering camphor which she had often climbed to gaze out into the gulf; ideal for what she had in mind now. Slowly she fought her way toward the tree, leaning her body against the wind and the rain, walking drunkenly through a sea of mud and debris. Around her she could smell the unmistakable ozone perfume — earthy, pungent, almost sulfurous — of Alma, making her presence known.

When Laura finally made it to the tree, she climbed until she reached her usual vantage point, a three-branch fork that formed a natural cradle near the top, some 30 feet off the ground. Wedging herself in, she took her place in the heart of the maelstrom. The camphor pitched violently; the wind whistled and cried; the rain pounded into her, pushing against her eyelids and into her mouth. Peering westward through the rain-splattered binoculars, she could just make out the black, seething expanse of the gulf.

Inside, Laura willed herself into stillness. When she had stepped out of the house, a part of her was afraid. But now she had ascended to a place above fear. As the hurricane rocked her in her cradle, engulfing her and the rest of the visible world, she was transported into a heightened state of both perfect calm and absolute exhilaration. She had become the eye of the storm, the consciousness inside the chaos. She was not afraid to die.

In that moment, the questions of Laura’s life — questions that would run through all the years stretching before her — announced themselves once and for all. Was it brave of her to venture out into the hurricane? Or was it foolish? Was it proof of something wonderful inside her, or an early sign of something not quite right?

Laura had no time to contemplate such questions. She rode the storm in all its fury. She wiped the water from her eyes. She felt the ecstasy surging inside her. She turned her face to the dark skies, surrendering to the power and grace and glory of things beyond her control.

* * *Another question.

What happens to someone who is willing to ride the storm? Where does the wind take her? Does it tear her apart, or does it carry her someplace above the clouds? And what about the people who get close to her? Does the storm leave them untouched? Or are they swept away, too?

Laura has already found the answer. At least, she has found her answer. It is there in the details that make up the rest of her life. In the account I am about to share with you.

For the record, I have followed Laura, off and on, for five years. I met her in Clearwater, at a meeting of a group of people who are interested in UFOs and alien encounters. I had spent the bulk of my career doing the kinds of stories that reporters are expected to do, writing about lawyers and teachers and police officers. I had gone to the meeting looking for a change of pace. I wanted to follow another kind of person, someone unusual, someone different. Perhaps he or she would be there.

I had never heard of Laura. As it happened, she was there as a guest speaker. If I had gone to a different meeting, on a different afternoon, I would have never met her. I would call this a coincidence. Laura would not.

In front of the group, she laid out the basics of her story. She said she was a psychic, a channeler and a hypnotherapist who had worked with people who had possibly been abducted by aliens; in passing, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that she was also an exorcist. As if that weren’t enough, she said that she and her children had once seen two UFOs, gliding across the sky over their house in New Port Richey.

I sat in the audience, trying to fathom what I was hearing. To me, what stuck out the most was not her story but the woman herself. She was genuine, smart and funny, immensely likable. She did not claim to understand everything she was describing; she admitted, without a trace of defensiveness, that she was way, way out there. She told us she was not even sure what to believe and not believe.

“I have been, and will continue to be, a skeptic in these matters,” she told the audience. “Still, I feel we are on the right track.”

In the years since that day, I have interviewed Laura repeatedly, followed her to UFO conventions, attended some of the channeling sessions where she attempted to communicate with entities from another part of the galaxy. Yet I still do not know what to make of her. Much of what Laura claims has happened to her is jarring, strange, beyond disturbing. And while I myself have witnessed some of the scenes that follow, the bulk of this account relies by necessity on Laura’s memory, her word, her perceptions. Virtually all of it, as you will see, is open to debate and interpretation.

I have no idea if Laura is truly psychic. I cannot begin to prove one way or the other if she ever really confronted a demon or talked with extraterrestrial beings. In fact, I recognize that she could have made up many things she has told me about her life. Still, I don’t believe that to be the case. I have spent enough time with Laura to trust her sincerity. I do not know that she really saw two UFOs flying over her house. I am convinced she thinks she did.

To me, though, this story was never about the spirits of the dead or demons or UFOs. From the start, I saw it as an account of one woman, trying to come to terms with the unknowable, searching for something out of reach.

In our own way, many of us are on a similar quest. Physicists, for instance, labor to understand the origins of the cosmos. So far, the best they’ve come up with is that originally there was only a void, and then, in an instant, all the matter of the universe — all the matter that today makes up our bodies, our planet, our sun, every solar system and every galaxy in existence — suddenly sprang into being in a massive explosion. That’s their theory: One moment nothing, the next everything.

Personally, I find it to be far-fetched and deeply unsatisfying. That does not necessarily mean it isn’t true.

Millions of Americans go to church every Sunday and contemplate a story about a man who was born 2,000 years ago, the son of a divine father and a human mother. This man, according to the story, grew up to raise the dead and perform other miracles until, at age 33, he was tortured and killed and then rose from the tomb to rejoin his father in heaven. Ever since then, one of the most sacred rituals of this story’s adherents is to symbolically drink the blood and consume the body of this son of God.

I intend no disrespect to those who have faith in this particular story. I grew up inside that faith myself; during the catechism classes of my Catholic childhood, I was taught that Communion is not symbolic at all, that every Sunday at Mass we truly do eat the body of Christ.

By any measure, that is a wild story.

How much wilder are the possibilities that Laura has embraced? If you believe in the soul, how much more difficult is it to accept that spirits may roam among us? Knowing what we have learned about the evolution of life on Earth, how much of a leap is required to consider the notion of life springing up on other planets that revolve around other stars and that some of these life forms might actually wander into our neighborhoods?

Who can say.

All of us are drawn to the unknowable. Mysteries sustain us, just like food and water. They get us out of bed, give us something to do, provide our lives with depth, texture, meaning.

Obviously, Laura has taken this pursuit to a whole different level. Many people are willing to accept the possible existence of aliens; few would try, as Laura has, to chat with them during a makeshift seance in the living room.

Once I started spending time with her, I found myself wondering what her quest for answers meant for her and her family. Whatever was happening to her, whatever she was experiencing or thought she was experiencing, where would it lead?

Doubt the things Laura believes she has seen, if you want. Doubt her conclusions, her logic, her state of mind. But know that Laura herself is real. She has a driver’s license and pays taxes. She has a family. And like many of us, she is simply trying to make sense of herself, her life, her place in the world.

This is her story.

The story of what happened after the exorcist came down from the tree.

Read Chapter 2…