I Thought I Was Possessed By The Devil. The Truth Shook My Deepest Beliefs. All of my praying and self-exorcisms couldn't save me from what was really happening. Guest Writer In 1975, when I was a fifth-grader at St. William Elementary, a Catholic school in Cincinnati, Ohio, the devil began visiting me — or at least so I thought. During these episodes, my brain felt as if it were vibrating and then turning to concrete from the inside out. I wouldn’t lose consciousness, but I would zone out, unable to speak. My reality was twisted in ways both nonsensical and scary. Most everything I saw either changed physically or registered as something else in my mind. For instance, a teacher would turn into an alligator, a pencil into a sword, a tree into a dinosaur.