A Successful Requiem Mass For A Haunted Home

Excerpt From Bray, Jason. Deliverance. Coronet, 2022. Chapter 4

 I went to it and began the Requiem Mass, which is a pared down version of the service you will find in parish churches across the world every Sunday: obviously there were no hymns, and only a short reading from one of the Gospels, and then the rite of the blessing of holy water with the sprinkling of the house.

‘My son asks if you can give the back bedroom a good go, because he says it’s always been a bit creepy in there,’ whispered Lucy.

When I conduct a rite of deliverance, or when I am taking a service in church, I am usually so ‘into’ what I am doing that it’s almost like entering a different zone. And despite the fact that I felt rather self-conscious to begin with, this case was no different. Eventually we arrived back at the living room where we had begun, and the Eucharist continued, again just like church on a Sunday morning, except with an explicit intention of the repose of the souls of the dead.

As part of the central Eucharistic prayer, after I said the words of Jesus over the bread – ‘Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you: do this to remember me’ – as always, I lifted the ‘host’ (communion wafer) high so that they could all see it, and placed it carefully back down, kneeling in front of it for a few moments, before taking up the chalice of wine, and continuing with the prayer.

We then said the Lord’s Prayer together, and we all received the Communion of the bread and wine (I knew that they had all been confirmed like good Anglicans, even if only one of them went to church with any regularity), and then there was a final blessing.

‘It feels different,’ said Lucy, ‘lighter, somehow.’

I shrugged – I was unaware of this, but didn’t disbelieve her.

Later on, she rang me to say that her son was thrilled as the creepiness had gone, and since then she has never reported any untoward happenings. 

That wasn’t, however, quite the end of the story. I found myself talking to Lucy’s mother Pat a week or so later, and she said, ‘As you know, Frank sometimes sees things.’

I was aware that he might be what you could call a psychic, and we had had the occasional chat about it. 

“Well,’ she continued, ‘when you were doing that house blessing, Frank says he saw something. Maybe you might have a chat with him about it.’

It was all a bit mysterious, so I tracked Frank down and asked him about it. ‘It was really strange,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see a ghost or anything, but while you were doing the service, I was aware that there was a mist that was gathering just in front of you in the living room. It was like swirling mist, and seemed to be getting darker, and then it suddenly vanished like it had been sucked up the chimney while you were doing that long prayer.’

‘The Eucharistic prayer?’ I asked.

He looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Is that the one with the bread and the wine?’ 

‘Yes, that’s the one.”

Frank nodded.

‘Just as a matter of interest, can you remember exactly when the mist left?’ 

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it was when you picked up the bread.’

‘At the beginning, the middle or the end?’

‘You said something about it being Jesus’ body, and then you lifted it up high, and that was when the mist disappeared.’

I was stunned. It’s one thing learning about the semi-supernatural parts of Christian practice, things like the traditional belief that Jesus becomes present when the words are said over the bread and when it is lifted up, but it is something completely different having these ideas confirmed. If there was any moment when a mediaeval theologian might have said that a spirit of the dead might be freed from the earth, it would be this one! I was, as I said, stunned, but also just a little disappointed, not that the ritual seemed to have worked, but that I had missed it.