The Devil has decided to show himself. But he will have to contend with the Gary chief of police.

http://newsok.com/haunting-in-indian...rticle/3928095

Speaking loudly is always the best way to get foreigners to understand you.

Ok, there's no way it happened then.

Interesting ... I wonder how you would get the police and child protective services all to corroborate the story?

I like how the landlord called the police to have them stop driving by the house and scaring the current tenants.

The most obvious answer is that they actually believe they saw what they claim to have seen.

Ya almost certainly this.

There is sort of two sides to this story. First, there is the kids acting all possessed. Second, there is the observers of the kids who don't just observe the kids making claims about killing others, but ALSO claim to have seen them doing physics defying things. I'll just take it at face value that both the kids and observers are being entirely genuine about what they believe they experienced.

There was a thread a while back about david blaine the magician and balducci levitation came up. Key for our purposes here is the observed tendency for people - when presented with an amazing experience - to further exaggerate that experience and to genuinely believe the exaggerated version. Balducci levitations makes you appear to float a few inches above the ground, but it is so shocking that many will insist that they saw you floating a foot above the ground. My guess is that something similar to this explains the observers being able to be convinced. Think about how shocking it must be to see these kids acting like that, and remember, the hypothesis here is the kids are being genuine as well so they are going to act in an entirely convincing way.

As for the kids, given their mother we can probably presume they are well primed for the experience. They know what being possessed is, the kinds of things a possessed person would do and how they would act, and that if they are feeling certain ways that could be explained by being possessed. There are all sorts of other examples (like speaking in tongues) where people seem very genuine about having various such experiences, but the way the experiences manifest is highly dependent on their local culture.

Obviously one could try and dig quite a bit deeper on the armchair psychology than that, but I am quite happy to say everyone is being truthful* here and that it is more than possible there is an entirely benign naturalistic explanation.

*truthful in that they think they are telling the truth, not that they are correct in portraying what happened.

I'm not disagreeing with any of this, but it should be added that the mother herself probably actually believes her children are possessed. That is, she's not setting up a scene with the intention of being deceitful (like a magic trick), but because she actually thinks what's happening is real. Similarly, the children are probably also not acting deceitfully, but they probably also believe that what they are experience is real. So that in your last paragraph:

Everyone actually means everyone, and not just the authorities.

I stop short of making the suggestion that they are not accurately representing reality. I'm not surprised that you do, and I don't think that you would be that surprised to find out that I don't.

There's a fairly significant level of corroboration of the events by persons who have no particular vested interest in a "supernatural" conclusion (multiple individuals with multiple types of backgrounds with different presuppositions entering into the multiple documented experiences), and I don't believe that it's a fair-minded approach to presume that they are all coincidentally falling victim to the same type of "cognitive failure" (for lack of a better term) that leads to them to all conclude something that is contrary to reality.

In today's world, you would think someone would pull out the smartphone and start making a video ...

You might think so, but the fact that someone didn't doesn't mean anything in particular. Nurses, for example, when seeing a form a distress in a patient under their care may not have as their first impulse to stand back and make a video of it. Similarly, law enforcement officials are likely trained to NOT use their personal devices for recording things on the job.

Obviously this whole thing about demonic possession is a cover-up for a group of disguised aliens that are infecting humans with superhuman powers to prepare for a largescale ground invasion.

And yes I am joking, but I am making a serious point.

Yes of course, when I said everyone I did in fact mean everyone, very much including the mother (indeed, as I suggested it would be precisely her genuine belief in exorcisms that would have led the kids to know what was expected and how to act, etc)

Ya, my but "arm chair psychoanalysis" or whatever was obviously an exercise in methodological naturalism. When faced with seemingly supernatural, or just unknown, phenomena, one aims to see if there seems to be a reasonable explanation (ignoring the "someone is lying" explanation) that doesn't require a supernatural intervention. In this case, while on the surface it might seem compelling that something supernatural happened, it seems there does appear to be a quite reasonable natural explanation (or at least up to my admittedly rather limited knowledge of psychology).

As for coincidence, that isn't the word I would use. Obviously it takes quite a confluence of factors for this to occur, but rare events (like 27o beating AA) isn't a coincidence. My "argument" was to suggest that there is some basis for suggesting that some of the factors (like priming, like the comparison to observers of balducci levication) are ones with purely natural precedents.

Any particular rare event is not a coincidence. But the coinciding of multiple rare events is. 27o beating AA on two consecutive hands is just a coincidence and not evidence of something being rigged. (Okay, maybe those are too rare and is sufficient to make an accusation of rigging. I'm not going to bother trying to estimate the probability of it happening because the idea is at least more clear as a result of the example.)

Since we're talking about independent observers making independent observational "errors" of independent events, coincidence seems to be the appropriate word choice.

I think this is all pretty good.

One of the best to watch for this type of thing is Derren Brown, particularly his Seance in which he gets a group of people to engage in a lot of "paranormal" activities. If people aren't familiar with him, then his whole shtick is that he does tricks like like clairvoyance, mind reading, all from the premise that he is no way psychic (as a stage act but also as an exercise in scepticism).

The most important thing in these stories is that the witnesses are susceptible to belief. Not that they're liars or charlatans, but that they will lose some level of critical thought.

I've even heard of ex-believers who report having had the experience of speaking in tongues. Those that do it often genuinely believe they're having some experience of speaking an unknown language even when all attempts to analyse the consistency of it as linguistic as opposed to random garbling shows up negative.

A mother who is convinced that her children are possessed. Just another charming side effect of religion. Make another entry in the Con column.

Invite James Randi to the house? Grab a cool million? Profit???

Seriously, I don't get it. In the past years, with cell phones and cameras being everywhere, I have seen it all on sites like liveleak, youtube etc.
I have seen earthquakes, tornados, lightning hitting people, people dying in car accidents, war, freak accidents, all kinds of natural disasters, people doing crazy stuff...you get the point. Things that are happening in this world are documented.

Yet I have never seen any credible footage of supernatural events, like people levitating, crawling up walls, ghosts or demons speaking. Nothing.
When people have a weird/crazy look on their face and speak "in tongues" with a funny voice, how is that supernatural?
I don't believe any of it unless I see it with my own eyes.

I wish David created a poll. Not only do we have multiple witnesses of supernatural events, but this is to have occurred in modern times. Do we believe it? What's more likely? That all these eye witnesses are wrong, or that the events as described really happened?

False dichotomy time.

i remember reading about this before, there's a pic of the mother of these kids somewhere on google and she looks like a certified nutbox.

however i do think the balducci levitation analogy is a tad insulting. i would like to think i'd know the difference between a kid walking backwards up a wall and, say, a kid not walking backwards up a wall.

but w/e, it's probably a load of cobblers, but who knows.

Not sure which is harder to believe, that this never happened, or that: Latoya Ammons,3 children, the grandmother, 2 "clairvoyants", Dr. Geoffrey Onyeukwu, medical staff, DCS family case manager Valerie Washington, registered nurse Willie Lee Walker, Rev. Michael Maginot, 3 police officers, and police captain Gary Austin made this whole story up.

It's far easier for me to believe that they are all one or a combination of lying, exaggerating, or mistaken than to believe that not one of them had a camera phone.

Sod holy water, if you want to 100% guarantee you won't get bothered by demons (or angels) just having a HD camera recording you 24/7.

We should probably keep demons out of the women's changing rooms as well.

Of course they made it all up. The things people will believe when in groups borders on insanity. Take religion for example.

"Made it all up" implies intent to do so, which probably isn't the case.

I cannot speak to what their intent was just the result. At some point they got into a group think, and came to the conclusion that a supernatural force was at work.

I do believe that they believe in what they are saying, but then again people believe in all kinds of stupid crap.

would you be more inclined to believe it happened if only one person made the claim? And that one person was to all intents and purposes apparently reliable?