Beware the Night (21 page)

A couple of hours later Joe called. “Ralph, you wouldn’t believe the call I got a little while ago. This guy was on his car phone, calling from somewhere on the Long Island Expressway. He was in a real panic. He has strange seizures that terrify him and his family—and had just had one right there on the highway! He said he’d almost crashed his car before pulling off the road to call me. Then he told me that things are so bad he can’t live like this any longer.”

Joe managed to calm the near-suicidal caller and offered to contact the man’s wife, Lucinda. He was just about to dial her number when
she
called him. Although she didn’t know about her husband’s terrifying attack on the freeway, she wasn’t at all surprised to hear about it. “That’s why I’m calling you, Mr. Forrester,” she said. “Greg—that’s my husband—has been having these fits for almost twenty-five years.”

Like my mother, Lucinda Morton was a beautician who cut people’s hair in her home to earn extra cash. Earlier that day, when she was between appointments, she flicked on the TV and happened to see
The Richard Bey Show.
Her jaw dropped when the Warrens discussed Bill Ramsey’s case, because it had such astonishing parallels to her husband’s problems. She immediately called her husband at work to give him Joe’s and my phone numbers, then decided to call my partner herself. “I know this may sound really far-fetched,” she told him, “but I think Greg might be a werewolf, like that guy your friends were talking about on TV.”

Given Greg’s desperate frame of mind, Joe made an appointment for us to meet with the Mortons that very night. Right off we noticed something peculiar when we parked at the couple’s Long Island home. Although the driveway was relatively new, the asphalt was oddly scarred in several places, as if someone had attacked it with a rake. The house itself was a very attractive white stucco Tudor, with red roses growing on a trellis around the front door.

Lucinda, who was about fifty, was holding a small, yapping poodle in her arms when she opened the door. She was living proof that some people grow to look like their dogs, because both she and her pet had big puffs of fluffy black hair on their heads. The beautician’s hair was teased and sprayed into a gravity-defying beehive that resembled black cotton candy and her full mouth was generously coated with glossy purple lipstick. She wore a turquoise pants suit and several pieces of chunky gold jewelry. I liked her immediately. Despite a rather anxious, fluttering manner, she was very friendly and seemed delighted to see us. She led us into a well-lit living room decorated in flowery patterns, where her husband was waiting.

There was absolutely nothing wolfish about Greg Morton’s appearance, by day or night. Far from being abnormally hairy, he was actually bald, with a bland, moon-shaped face, and he wore thick glasses to correct his nearsightedness. Oddly enough, when I met Bill Ramsey, he was also balding, clean-shaven, and looked like a million other middle-aged men. If you passed either of these guys on the street, you wouldn’t give him a second glance.

Since Joe had already heard part of the Mortons’ amazing story from the beautician, he took charge of the interview. “Lucinda, why don’t you tell Ralph what you told me on the phone?”

Running her long, manicured fingernails through the poodle’s fluffy fur as she spoke, she said, “Well, this is going to sound really peculiar. For many years, Greg has been having these spells where he acts like an animal.”

“You’re not speaking figuratively, are you?” my partner asked.

“Not at all. It started one night when we were in bed, sleeping. All of sudden, my husband sat bolt upright in the middle of the night. I woke up and asked what was wrong, but he didn’t answer. His eyes were open, but he didn’t even blink. He was just staring off into space, like he was in a trance. Then he let out a loud growl that didn’t sound human at all.”

“Did it sound like a wolf?” I wondered, thinking of the Ramsey case, which Joe had helped the Warrens investigate a few years before I got involved in the Work.

“No,” she said. “It was more like a large cat or a tiger. It didn’t sound like it was coming from his lips but from deep inside his body, kind of a rumbling roar that scared me half to death. I kept screaming my husband’s name, but he couldn’t hear me. I felt like a stranger was in our bed, because he didn’t seem like himself at all. It was as if someone else had taken over his body. Then he started talking in a different voice, ranting and raving in a language I’d never heard before! I almost had a heart attack, I was so frightened!”

“Had anything unusual happened in Greg’s life before this episode?” Joe queried.

Both Mortons shook their heads. “No, everything was normal,” Greg said. “A few years before that I’d started my contracting company and was working hard to build up my business. We didn’t have that much money then, but we were happy.”

Greg’s experiences had eerie similarities to the Ramsey case, except that Bill’s first attack took place when he was a nine-year-old boy in England, his native country. He describes it in his book by asking “Have you ever walked into a meat locker right after you’ve been outside on a hot day? That’s what this was like. I was playing and … it felt like my body temperature dropped a good twenty degrees. Sweat froze on me. And my whole body started shaking. It was as if I’d opened this door and stepped inside to another dimension.”

A very violent dimension, he soon discovered. Although the uncanny chill—and an incredibly rank odor that accompanied it—faded away later in the day, he felt irrevocably marked with “a coldness at his very center” that set him apart from other children. As he hurried toward his house to have dinner, he stubbed his toe on a fence post and flew into a frenzied rage. Like Greg, young Bill let out terrible growls that rose from deep inside his body. Filled with supernatural strength far beyond that of any normal nine-year-old, he ripped the offending fence post right out of the ground and swung it overhead like a baseball bat—with its wires still attached. Although his maniacal rage soon subsided, the experience transformed him. “Something had entered my soul … something that didn’t belong there,” Bill recalled years later.

Greg, on the other hand, had no memory at all of his nighttime fit. Just as suddenly as the spell came over him, it left him, and he lay back down, fast asleep, leaving Lucinda to stare at him in horror all night long.
Who was this man she’d married? Had he gone insane? Or was he just in the throes of a bizarre nightmare?
Her peacefully snoring husband had no answers, either that night or the next morning. When he woke, he refused to believe the incident had actually happened.

“He said it was probably just my imagination—or a dream
I’d
had,” Lucinda said. “I knew it wasn’t.” She found herself fearing her usually mild-mannered husband. Days went by, and Greg acted just like his old self, heading off to his renovation business at 8:00
A.M
. as always and returning at the stroke of 5:00
P.M
.

Here again was an odd echo of Bill’s story, since he also behaved completely normally after his strange frenzy. In fact, Bill did nothing out of the ordinary for nearly two decades, as he grew up, got married, and, like Greg, entered the building trade, as a carpenter. Like his American counterpart, he had three children—and some very peculiar problems in the bedroom. First, he began having a recurring nightmare where he’d call his wife’s name, and when she turned to look at him, she’d recoil in horror, as if she’d seen a monster. One night he suddenly sat up in bed, just as the Long Island contractor did, and let out a ghastly growl. That’s when his nightmare came true: Just as he’d so often dreamed, his wife opened her eyes in real life, took one look at him—and screamed.

Greg’s wife had almost convinced herself that the peculiar incident was some strange fluke when her husband had a second spell, also in the middle of the night. This time he got out of bed and walked on all fours, like a wild animal, growling that deep growl. He moved with a catlike grace, similar to that of a large predatory panther. Clutching the sheets to her chest in abject terror, his wife watched him claw savagely at the wood paneling in their bedroom, ripping it apart with his bare, bleeding hands. Again he flopped back down on the bed, slept like a dead man all night long, and woke with no memory of his berserk frenzy.

Lucinda, however, now had tangible proof of his nighttime rampages—and showed him the hole in their bedroom wall. The otherwise inexplicable injuries to his hands also testified to the truth of her words, although Greg still found it hard to believe he’d behaved this way. At his wife’s urging, he consulted their family doctor the next day. After a complete physical, the M.D. found no evidence of epilepsy or a seizure disorder of any kind. Nor did the tests show any other physical ailment. Except for his scratched-up hands—and two peculiar fits—Greg was the picture of health.

“The doctor prescribed tranquilizers,” Greg explained. “That didn’t help at all.”

Naturally, the next stop was a therapist. The shrink also did a battery of tests, but found no signs of mental illness in this hard-working businessman who, rather ironically in view of his propensity to destroy his home, repaired other people’s houses. During the day, Greg behaved completely normally: He was a perfect father to his three kids. You might say he was a loving family man who happened to have one bad habit: From time to time, at totally unpredictable intervals, he turned into a beast and tore his home apart.

Over the years, the pattern changed, Greg told us. For a while, the attacks lessened, and his business thrived. “Then the fits of madness, or whatever you want to call them, started happening in the daytime, when I was awake. I could actually feel the frenzy coming on. It was like a roaring in my brain. For the safety of my family, I’d lock myself in the bathroom when I felt this way, because after this force took hold of me, I’d lose all control.”

With an embarrassed expression, he told us that during these episodes, he’d dig at the bathroom tiles until his fingers bled. The fits became so frequent that he’d sometimes go completely berserk and run from his house to rip up the asphalt driveway, leaving the marks we’d observed when we parked. Understandably, he went back to the psychiatrist, but once again, the doctor was no help. Greg was simply sent home with a stronger prescription for tranquilizers that did nothing to tame his rages.

Greg and his wife were now haunted by horrifying questions:
What if he attacked his family—or someone else? Just how dangerous was he? Could he kill someone during one of these episodes? And what was the cause of his terrifying affliction?

I could understand his fear, given what happened to Bill Ramsey: Roaring in the night led to horrifying daytime rampages. In the throes of one seizure, Bill brutalized a nurse, tearing at her arm with his teeth and drinking her blood. Police found him on all fours, his face contorted into a hideous, bestial expression, growling with inhuman fury. The officers wrestled him into a straitjacket and took “the wolfman,” as the British press later dubbed him, to a mental hospital. When Bill came to his senses later that day, he had no memory of his behavior but told the psychiatrists he felt there was a beast inside him. After his release from the hospital, he went on to attack several other people, including a prostitute and an entire police station full of cops.

Having met Bill Ramsey myself and spoken to him at length about these events, I was particularly struck by how both he and several witnesses said that he really had taken on some physical traits of a wolf during these seizures, mainly in his facial expressions, body movements, and especially his clenched, clawlike hands. He also told me he’d feel drawn to the window when there was a full moon outside, to howl at it like a wolf. In demonological terms, we call this “lycanthropy”, from the Greek
lykoi
(wolf) and
anthropos
(man).

I’m not saying that either Bill or Greg was a werewolf, because if I did it would be pure b.s. The truth is that both men were possessed by demons with some of the
characteristics
of a beast, whether a wolf, a panther, or another fierce predator. Making Bill howl at the moon was a
ploy
the evil spirit used to conceal its nature and create confusion. Think about it: Anyone who knows anything about wolves knows they really don’t howl at the moon. That’s just legend. They howl to communicate with each other, whether the moon is full or not. So Bill wasn’t acting like a wolf at all: He was being attacked in a way that fit his notion of lupine behavior, leading him to conclude that he’d turned into a werewolf.

Through his involvement with the Ramsey case, my partner Joe has studied lycanthropy, a fascinating condition that’s inspired strange legends all over the world. The ancient Romans believed that certain magic spells or herbs could transform a human into a wolf, while the Greeks of antiquity had a wolf cult that held an annual orgy of human sacrifice and cannibalism. During the Middle Ages, people who were suspected of being werewolves were actually burned at the stake. Among the Gypsies, the view is that shape-shifters, or werewolves, are under a curse. Father Martin felt there may be some truth to this, as he knew of cases where lycanthropy was passed down from generation to generation, like a family curse. But with God’s grace this hellish cycle of possession could be broken. Navajo shamans hold that evil witches called “brujas” can change themselves into coyotes, while Japanese folklore speaks of people who turn into foxes. In India and China, legend has it that humans can shift their shape to that of the most dangerous beast in that part of the world, the tiger. A Nigerian priest reports that some tribes in his area have crocodile or leopard cults, where the members are said to become transfigured into these much-dreaded creatures through magic rituals. And, of course, the Devil is often pictured as half-man, half-beast, with cloven hooves, a long barbed tail, and a pair of horns.

What do Joe and I think about all this? We think a lot of it is superstition. What legends leave out is the role of the demonic. From my personal experience in the Work, I know that diabolical forces definitely have the power to induce grotesque visions in humans through a process called “telepathic hypnosis.” Such fiendishly inspired hallucinations could certainly account for the centuries-old tales of werewolves and other shape-shifters, since demonic possession has been with us since God created humanity. Or it may be that some demons really can cause animalistic changes in the people whose bodies they inhabit, though I’ve never seen such a thing myself. As Father Martin once said, “Confusion, it would seem, is a prime weapon of evil.” And what could be more confusing than a man who changes into a beast, and back?