What Happened to Bryan Kohberger? Part 8: “All of the Demons in My Head Mocking Me”
[Note: This part will make more sense if you read the earlier parts of this series, available here.]
Was His Use of the Term “Demons” Purely Metaphorical — or Not?
The quote in this story’s title comes from a line in Kohberger’s longest Tapatalk forum post:
It is as if the ringing in my ears and the fuzz in my vision is simply all of the demons in my head mocking me. I fall asleep, but I wake up quickly to bloody screams. Is any of this here?
Anthony William (aka the Medical Medium) does say in Brain Saver that toxic heavy metals combine to form alloys in the brain that can create unusual traits, and also that “alloy brains have created serial killers” — but he doesn’t elaborate on exactly how this happens.
And in Brain Saver’s chapter on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which Medical Medium explains is another condition caused by toxic heavy metals interfering with electrical signals in the brain, he writes:
Even when serious mental disorders have led to horrible crimes, some of those crimes have been packaged up as “These individuals have OCD” as the cause. The individuals who commit such atrocities do not have OCD. They have other mental conditions that caused them to commit diabolical crimes [emphasis added].
What exactly are these “other mental conditions”? If OCD and the alloy brain creating serial killers are both caused by toxic heavy metals in the brain, what else could possibly be going on in the diabolical person’s head?
While Medical Medium channels a benevolent spirit, he doesn’t talk about malevolent spirits. But I have to wonder if he used the word “diabolical” in that last passage for a reason. I wonder if one of the “other mental conditions” he’s referring to could include the presence of a spiritual entity with malicious intent.
Did a Negative Entity Replace His Soul?
There are different kinds of spiritual entities with different intentions, from benevolent angels to wise ascended masters to discarnate souls (souls of people who died so suddenly that they don’t know how to leave the Earth plane, so they attach to living people) to demons. For simplicity I’ll refer to the ones with varying degrees of malicious intent as negative entities.
Here’s my own theory about how heavy metals can create conditions for the kind of behavior we associate with evil:
First, as I covered in the previous part, heavy metals can disrupt the soul’s connection to emotional centers of the brain, removing an important check on behavior. Ever noticed how common it is for people to call violent criminals “soulless”? That’s because, consciously or subconsciously, we know that the human soul is inherently good and acts as our conscience.
But if the soul is disconnected from those important emotional centers, it seems that would leave some kind of spiritual vacuum in a person’s brain — a void that perhaps could be filled with a whole separate form of consciousness.
That might explain how someone who was depersonalized and lacks normal emotion (through heavy metal toxicity) like Kohberger could perform violent acts that sure seem to be backed by an emotion like anger — but maybe because it’s not human emotion that’s driving them at all.
Instead, the part of their brain missing the soul might be under the influence of a negative entity seeking to harm people and who uses a human host to accomplish that goal.
At least one conventionally-trained, board-certified psychiatrist with nearly three decades of experience takes this subject very seriously.
How Negative Entities Influence People
This psychiatrist is Dr. Richard Gallagher. He studied at Princeton, trained at Yale, and teaches at New York Medical College and Columbia University. He also is a member of the International Association of Exorcists, where he serves as a consultant. How can someone so prestigiously credentialed involve himself in what sounds like horror-film fodder? Because, he asserts, demonic influence on human behavior is real — and he’s seen it in person.
He recounts his experiences in his 2020 book, Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attacks, and the Paranormal. His story has been covered in mainstream media including The Washington Post and CNN, and in podcasts such as this one.
Gallagher first became involved in exorcisms when a Catholic priest asked him to evaluate a person the priest suspected was demonically possessed. While there is a long history of the church mistaking mental illness for possession, modern exorcists are much more careful and will often first consult psychiatrists to rule out a legitimate mental illness diagnosis.
Since then, Gallagher has consulted on hundreds of cases and has witnessed people displaying supernatural abilities that could only have been assisted by paranormal force.
Examples include: a 90-pound woman hurling a 200-pound man across a room, people spontaneously speaking fluent Latin or other languages they had never studied, and a woman knowing things she shouldn’t have been able to — such as the fact that Gallagher’s mother died of ovarian cancer or what an off-duty priest was doing and wearing hundreds of miles away that she couldn’t see or hear.
Gallagher distinguishes between two types of demonic influence: 1) possession, where a person’s body is fully inhabited by a demon, thus enabling supernatural ability, 2) and oppression, where the person feels tormented by a demon — with evidence such as bruises appearing on their body not attributable to any medical condition.
He emphasizes that demonic oppression is extremely rare, and possession even more so — and they almost always involve the subject deliberately inviting the entity in. The vast majority of cases he consults for he rules as mental illness rather than demonic interference of any kind.
Gallagher doesn’t seem interested in exploring the possibility of other, less extreme forms of negative entity influence on people. I can understand why he would be reluctant; this field of study is an easy target for dismissal and ridicule by the mainstream — so it makes sense to focus only on obvious displays of superhuman phenomena that science can’t explain.
But I wonder if in doing so, he and other researchers might be missing some more subtle ways in which negative entity influence can occur, that might apply to many of the cases he decides are mental illness. Demonic possession and oppression are real, but they are extremely rare. Are there other forms of negative entity interference in human behavior that are less obvious but more common?
Ask any legitimate shaman trained in an indigenous tradition and they will say yes — and share their experiences dealing with a wide variety of entities in everyday people who showed no obvious signs of possession or oppression. (I share my own experience in this story.)
Foreign Substances in the Brain Could Attract Negative Entity Presence
The New York Times reports that Kohberger started using heroin the year he graduated from high school. His habit grew into an addiction that sent him to rehab multiple times but that eventually he was able to end for good.
Turning to drug use is common among people trying to escape whatever feels unbearable in their lives. In Kohberger’s case that could be his physical and psychological symptoms, and also his sense of social isolation. As a former friend of his recalled, “‘honestly, I feel he was looking for validation, and that’s why he fell into . . . the whole drug scene.’”
The Catholic church has long held that recreational drug use makes people vulnerable to interference by evil forces. Father John, a Catholic priest and experienced exorcist, mentions this in a podcast interview.
But it’s not only Catholic clergy who believe that consciousness-altering substances come with this danger: Indigenous cultures that consume psychedelic medicines for spiritual learning and healing purposes (such as the Shipibo of the Amazon rainforest in Peru who use ayahuasca) traditionally employ shamans during that use to keep participants protected from psychic attack by negative entities.
Of course, recreational drug use in modern cultures pretty much never involves shamans or other psychic protection measures, and most of those drugs aren’t meant for spiritual learning/healing purposes, anyway. It’s possible that Kohberger’s heroin use invited additional negative entity influence into his life — but he didn’t start using the drug until about two years after his final Tapatalk posts in which he implied a malevolent presence was already overtaking his mind.
So this is the question I have: If recreational drugs and indigenous psychedelic medicines can both invite negative entity interference, then what about brain-targeting pharmaceuticals, such as the migraine medications Kohberger took for his visual snow? Or the right types and levels of toxic heavy metals in the brain? It’s obvious that something prior to his heroin use had attracted an animate presence into his head that he found unwelcome and troubling. The only foreign substances he was exposed to at that point were dietary and environmental toxins, and heavy doses of pharmaceuticals. Our culture accepts these as normal but they are not necessarily as benign as we think.
Just to be clear, I’m not bringing up negative entities to make readers fearful; dispassionate awareness of the subject is all that’s necessary here. (As Dr. Gallagher noted in an interview with Esquire, “the famous Christian writers said, ‘Demons are happy that we don’t believe in them, and they’re also happy that we become over-preoccupied with them.’”) Exploring unusual angles like this is useful when it expands our perspectives and encourages further investigation so we can better understand and fix what ails humanity.
Note: I’m not sponsored by or affiliated with Medical Medium in any way. I simply feel compelled to share his information because it has massively improved my own health and that of so many others.
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