u/sensamura

TLDR: My friend was terrorized by a demonic wolf as a child. Last summer it returned and caused a lot of seemingly supernatural occurrences, including potential digital haunting, auditory/visual/tactile hallucinations/apparitions, recurring nightmares, losing control of his body, paralysis, self-harm, xenoglossia, aversion to holy symbols, and a bizarre connection to Norse gods, eventually culminating in an amateur smudging and "exorcism."

A couple things to preface this post:

I will refer to my friend (M22) as T from here on out. A lot of this is not my firsthand experience, but I was present for and heavily involved in most of the latter half of this story. Furthermore, I am not going to claim that it was a possession as per the rules, nor do I think that it reached the point of full possession. I am Catholic, so I am familiar with the guidelines for what constitutes a possession and it is missing some key aspects. Personally, I would classify it as demonic oppression. That being said, some of those criteria are present, so I will leave it up to discussion. This is going to be long, but that's because there were a lot of events and context. I will do my best to be concise and format it neatly.

Context:

When T was younger, there was a long period of time where he was plagued every other night by the appearance of an entity in his bedroom. He would see a huge wolf head emerge from the shadows high on the wall of his room. Imagine a mounted hunting trophy, but still alive and animated. It had shaggy, jet black fur, glowing yellow eyes, and it acted as you would expect a real wolf to act, sniffing the air and looking around. The wolf almost always appeared in the same spot, just emerging as a head. There were, however, a couple times where it appeared closer to him or reached it's claws out, causing him to run out of his room.

The most alarming part is that it spoke to him. It would stare him down and project words into his mind as he laid there in bed, terrified. Often, it would ask him to do certain malicious things, promising boons in return. I don't think these ever reached the point of murder or anything at that level, but it influenced him to be cruel to the people around him. On several occasions, he actually would receive an unexplainable reward the day after he followed it's orders. Maybe he would ace a test he didn't study for and expected to fail, or he would suddenly be able to run much faster than normal.

Eventually, as he grew older, made friends, and adjusted a bit more, it happened less and less until he stopped seeing the wolf entirely. It became something of a legend within our friend group. He is a skeptical person and has never really given much thought to the paranormal, so he was never sure if it was actually some sort of demon, or maybe just a weird recurring dream or mental disorder. That was until last summer, when the main reason I'm making this post occurred.

The First Night

T and I were working together at a national park for a seasonal job, and there was one night that we were having a bit of a party with some friends. We had gone to a dispensary and gotten some micro dose mushroom tabs (God knows what was in them), and at some point in the night we took one each as well as a healthy amount of weed and alcohol. It's important to note that other than the events I'm about to describe, neither of us experienced any hallucinations from the tabs, nor did anyone else who took them. We felt high for a while, but it did not noticeably affect us beyond that.

At some point in the night, T and I got in a rather heated argument, which culminated in me leaving him alone in our room as I went to go find the rest of our friends. Over the next hour he called me and left voicemails a few times, which I did not notice until later, and he eventually came down and found me. At this point, he told me what happened.

From his recollection, he was laying in bed when suddenly the lights in the room turned off on their own (and I can confirm they were in fact turned off). The shadows coalesced into the top corner of the wall and ceiling next to the door, and the wolf emerged for the first time in 10 years. However, this time it didn't stop at its head. Its full body pulled itself out of the wall, so big that it had to contort itself to even fit in the room. It stared at him for a while before reaching its claws out and strangling him. It was during this time that he left me the voicemails, telling me the wolf was back and begging for help. I still have those recordings, but I don't think they really prove anything and it's pretty heartbreaking to listen to, so I don't intend to attach them. He was stuck like that for a bit until he came to the realization that it was his own arms choking him, and he managed to pull himself out of bed and flee the room.

One of the more unexplainable things happened later in the night after we tried to console him for a while and we eventually returned to our room, shaken up. At some point he opened his camera roll and freaked out after seeing that the three most recent images were AI generated "drawings" of what was very obviously the wolf he saw. It was very clearly a more dated model as they had the kind of dream-like oddity that older AI images have. He didn't have any idea or recollection as to how they came to be on his phone, but he does have a history of AI usage with D&D character concepts and things of that nature, so it was not completely out of the question that he somehow did it in that span of an hour without realizing. However, the weirdest detail was found in the metadata of the images. Apparently, the images were generated using an AI app he never had on his phone and were dated as having been created almost two weeks in the future. I still don't know how that would be possible. I would attach said images if I could find them, but I deleted them from my phone a while ago as looking at them made me feel ill, and I can't find them in any chat log I had with people I showed them to. As far as I know, they're lost, which is a shame as they provided something tangible to all this. AI images can also easily be faked though, so you'd have to take my word for it either way.

Supernatural Occurrences

After that night, things quickly went downhill, as the next couple of weeks he was plagued by physical illness and a variety of bizarre experiences. The first was a few days after the wolf first appeared. It was late in the evening, and T was making the long drive through the park back from town. He was about 20-30 minutes away from home in the middle of the woods when he suddenly had to stop, as a large black wolf walked out into the middle of the road. It was carrying a dead fox in its mouth, and it sat itself in front of T's car and stared at him for around a minute. During this time, T could feel something panting down the back of his neck, though he did not turn around as he was probably shitting his pants. Eventually, the wolf walked off into the woods and he promptly sped back home. There was no one else in the car to verify the objectivity of that experience, but it's worth noting that wolves are native to that area.

A few days later, we were hanging out in a friend's room when T started to feel and act off. He said that he kept hearing the sound of crows flying into the window and crushing themselves. It was unclear how he knew they were crows, but he said he could just tell. A bit later in the night we were planning on painting, so we had some paper and paint set out. All of a sudden, in what was very clearly not acting of his own accord, he grabbed a tube of black paint and squirted it all over a piece of paper. Like he was in a trance, he frenziedly smeared the paint around with his fingers until it formed a recognizable wolf head. Then just as quickly he came to, confused at what just happened until he looked down and saw what he did. He didn't have any recollection of doing it, and he couldn't bring himself to look at it for long. I believe they took it outside and burnt it.

We had a couple of friends who were interested in the occult and things of a spiritual nature, so they of course took interest in helping T and figuring out what was going on. At one point, while they were shopping at Walmart, the friend instructed T to smell a bundle of sage without telling him what it was or what it was supposed to do. Upon handling and smelling the sage, T felt extreme anxiety and panic. This only went away when he thought about violence and carnage, despite not wanting to think about those things. Make of that what you will.

Over the course of this period, T started having recurring nightmares about being violently eaten alive. In many of his other seemingly unrelated dreams, he would notice a menacing shadowy figure watching him and occasionally repeating a phrase in a foreign language. During this time, he told us that he felt like the name of the being was Gnaw, which would have relevance later. I haven't been able to find any references to that name, so I'm curious to see if it means something to anyone.

Norse Connection

All of this came to a head one night, maybe a week and a half later. T called in sick from work once again and I was closing. Around 10 PM, he began texting me nonstop, saying that he needed help and he couldn't move. I asked our friend to check on him before leaving work early. Once we calmed him down and got him in a more normal state of mind, he told us what happened. He said that a couple hours before he texted, he was lying in bed when he began to hear a horde of demonic sounding voices arguing over which parts of his body to devour first. As this was happening, he lost control of his limbs, leaving him paralyzed in his bed. His arms and legs moved out of his control and he felt nothing but pain in them. Eventually he fell asleep, and he dreamed of a crowd of hooded figures chanting that same phrase from his previous dreams. After a couple of hours of this, he managed to wake up and move enough to text me for help.

This time, however, he managed to make out and remember the phrase that was being chanted. He texted it to me as he didn't want to say it out loud.

"Fartoyet er nesten klart, fader Loke."

This phrase is Norwegian, and translates to "The vessel is almost ready, father Loki."

This obviously freaked both of us out. T has Scandinavian ancestry. Despite this, he does not know a lick of Norwegian, nor has he ever tried to learn it. Furthermore, when he texted it to me, he spelled it in a very specific way that was almost perfect to the Norwegian spelling. This was bizarre enough on its own, but upon doing more research I noticed a disturbing connection: in Norse mythology, Loki is the father of Fenrir, a monstrous wolf who is destined to bring about the apocalypse. Fenrir is often depicted as being large and black, with piercing yellow eyes. I really have no idea what to make of this, so any insight would be appreciated. That being said, I think the implications of the chant are pretty straightforward, and definitely didn't bode well.

The "Exorcism"

Later that night, our friends decided we should try and burn sage to drive the spirit away. As I said earlier, I'm Catholic, so I was really not excited about an amateur pagan ritual being performed in my bedroom. However, T is my best friend, so I didn't have much of a choice but to support him. They placed lines of salt by the window and door, drew crosses and "protection sigils" on pieces of paper around the room, and had T lie on his bed as they burned bundles of sage. At first, not much happened. However, T began to get agitated and uncomfortable after being exposed to the sage for a bit. At some point he seemed to lose control of his faculties, as he began struggling on the bed, attempting to bang his head against the wall, and trying to choke himself. We had to hold him down so he didn't get hurt. This continued for a while, during which time the fire on the sage continuously put itself out. At one point, T grabbed a handful of the paper crosses and ripped them up. He chanted that Norwegian phrase out loud for the first time, as well as quoting word for word the Book of Revelations: specifically Revelations 13:1, speaking about standing upon the sands of the sea and seeing a seven headed beast rise up out of the water. At one point, he began to make a strange animalistic noise that I can only describe as growling while drawing out the word "gnaw."

At some point, he calmed back down and that was kind of the end of it. I didn't get the impression that it left or was defeated, but since then T hasn't experienced anything of that nature. I had an experience where I saw the spirit a couple weeks later, but I was tripping at the time so I think many of you would probably disregard it. If anyone is interested however, I can expand on that.

As I said at the beginning, I do not think it reached the point of possession, though it seems that is where it was headed. I entirely recognize the possibility that it could have been caused by a dormant mental disorder that was reignited by him trying that mushroom tab. However, a lot of the details and events as well as some of the more unexplainable things like speaking Norwegian, quoting the Bible (which he hasn't read), and the weird AI pictures personally lead me to believe that it was demonic in nature. I am curious to see what you guys think, if anyone managed to make it to the end.