My new book will be out by Halloween. It’s called Demonic Lancashire: Possession and Exorcism in the Red Rose County. Here’s the back blurb:
Seventeenth-century Lancashire was a divided and demon-haunted land.
Religious conflict, accusations of witchcraft and fear that the End Times were approaching created a world in which the Devil seemed frighteningly real.
The story of the Lancashire Witches is well known. Far less familiar is the extraordinary series of demonic possessions that swept through the county. Men, women and children fell into terrifying fits: frothing, convulsing, barking and howling, speaking in strange voices and vomiting impossible objects. Ministers, priests, physicians and cunning folk struggled to determine whether they were witnessing the work of Satan, witchcraft, fraud – or something they could not explain.
From the mass possession of the Lancashire Seven in the 1590s to Richard Dugdale, the celebrated Surey Demoniac and “Dancing Devil” a century later, Demonic Lancashire uncovers a remarkable lost history of possession, exorcism and the battle against the Devil in England’s Red Rose County.
Paul Weatherhead 