Why This Journalist Digs Deep Into Stories of Darkness
A recurring swarm of black flies. The sound of footsteps climbing the basement stairs and the door between the basement and kitchen opening—with no one there. A child levitating above her bed, unconscious. And that wasn’t all.
Their story made the news in Indiana, across the country and even across the ocean. A Gary, Indiana, mother; her three children and her mother were renting a house. Almost immediately after they moved in, the trouble began.
“Strange things were happening,” Billy Hallowell, longtime journalist and now director of communications and content for pureflix.com, tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of Greenelines on the Charisma Podcast network. The sometimes-hidden and certainly underreported spiritual background behind stories like this one drew him to write his most recent book, Playing With Fire.
The Indiana mother took her children for a doctor’s examination, Hallowell says, claiming something spiritual was happening. “And long story short, the kids are acting so erratic at the doctor’s office that they call 911. The police get involved, the kids are taken to a hospital, Child Protective Services comes in. And that case shook me at the time when I first covered it at The Blaze.”
When he studied the case further for his book, he found even more corroboration for the story, Hallowell says, including the CPS worker’s report that the little boy from the home walked up a wall.
Hallowell says the church needs to do a better job of discussing the spiritual side of stories like these and offering solutions in Christ. “When it comes to spiritual warfare and the demonic, there’s either the perspective of there’s a demon under every rock, or there’s the perspective of on the other side, we’re not going to talk about this at all; we don’t need to address it at all,” he says. “It’s not something we need to talk about. And I would argue that there isn’t a topic discussed more in Scripture and less in some churches than this particular subject.”
For more from Billy Hallowell on the biblical and spiritual aspects of stories of demons, exorcism and ghosts, listen to the entire episode of the Greenelines podcast, and subscribe to Greenelines on your favorite podcast platform. Find Playing With Fire wherever fine books are sold. {eoa}
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