By JILLIAN KRISTINA
For this very special installment of PIERCING THE VEIL, I had the immense honor of speaking with someone who has lived most of her life riding the hedge and communing with the other side. In fact, she does it for a living. Her connection to the spirit realm wasn’t something she sought. It sought her – actively – and it didn’t stop screaming until she decided to fully embrace her gifts and start using them, not just for her own peace but for anyone whose suffering she could help alleviate.
“It can be really draining. It can be really exhausting. it can be very terrifying at times. I’ve definitely put myself in dangerous predicaments. I’ve definitely overextended in a lot of ways for other people, and I still wouldn’t take it back because, at the end of the day, you are changing people’s lives. I’ve been doing this long enough that I think I can confidently say that.”
Meet Rachel Stavis, otherwise known as the “Hollywood Exorcist.” Stavis is the non-denominational exorcist whom Hollywood A-listers run to when they need to deal with paranormal circumstances privately and discreetly. Her most well-known friend and client (whose name I can share) is none other than writer-producer Glen Mazzara, best known for his work on The Walking Dead. “Glen is so great because me and Glen love each other, but also, he’s someone who’s experienced the work – he’s let me work on him,” Stavis shares. “He’s been public about that. Like, I’m not outing him. He has outed himself, so I think it’s okay to talk about, but he’s, like, ‘this has definitely changed my life,’ and he’s a very grounded person.”
The idea of exorcism can be a lot for some people. The word conjures images of priests and spinning heads and green vomit. We think of, as Stavis interjects, “The same story about a priest and a girl on a farm.” We think of the way Hollywood has painted this very real phenomenon, and in Stavis’ experience, that’s just not the whole (or even true) picture.
“I feel like what’s lacking sometimes when we keep doing the same thing that way – when we’re introducing a priest all the time or we’re introducing a religious family who’s victimized by this – it takes away from the scare factor because it’s so many degrees away from most people,” Stavis explains. “So you go to the movies and say, ‘Well, that’s scary for them, but that would never happen to me because I’m not religious.’ What’s real about how my work is that you don’t have to be any of those things; You can literally be anybody affected by this, so I think it brings that back into the fear of, ‘Oh my God! That could happen to someone. I can just be minding my own business and it could happen?’”
Flipping the script on Hollywood’s portrayal of the exorcism is important to Stavis. In her 2018 memoir, Sister of Darkness: The Chronicles of a Modern Exorcist, Stavis dives deep into her past to explain how she began interacting with Spirit at a young age, including the different types of entities she’s witnessed and their impacts on the people they attached to. She remembers the first exorcism she ever performed on an old boyfriend and the night-and-day change she saw in him, but most importantly, the change he felt in himself – a change that she continues to witness throughout her work, thousands of exorcisms later. “It’s incredible to see the difference, even with someone whose work only takes 45 minutes. It’s really not a hard thing for me, but the difference in their face from when they laid down in this room to when they stand up again – 45 minutes. It’s like a thousand weights off. I would never, due to client privacy, but I wish I could take a picture of the before and after because it’s that big of a difference. It’s like, did they get a facelift? Did they just get back from Morocco? Like what happened to them?”
Stavis’s work might not be conventional, but according to her clients, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it works. When talking about the one client she can be candid about, Stavis laughs as she relays Glen Mazzara’s mental process as he’s tried to intellectualize his way through any possibilities that her work couldn’t actually work. “When we first met,” Stavis reflects, “and he’ll tell anybody this, he was like, ‘I keep trying to poke holes in it because I want to mess it up, but I can’t.’ When you’re navigating storytelling … the tighter your mythos, the better the storytelling is. So, he, for the sake of story, keeps trying to find where it’s wrong, and it’s just not because this is reality. This is just how it works,” she states. “So it’s great to work with someone who believes it, has experienced it, is capable of articulating that to people as well, and to be able to formulate a plan to be able to create a show around it as well.”
What she’s talking about is the upcoming series adaptation of Sister Darkness, with Mazarra at the helm. “We are just now in the beginning initial stages of developing, so we’re baby steps at the moment, but I think once we figure out all the fine details of what we want to make, it’s gonna be fast. We’ll be rolling,” she beams. “I’m hoping that we might have something by the first half of next year. That’s my goal. That’s my hope.”
But that’s not all. “Next week, we’re taking the journals out to everyone for features, and I’m really excited about that because each one will be its own story and that way, people can see what exorcism really looks like.”
That’s right. Journals. For years, Stavis has been making detailed notes in composition books (technology tends not to cooperate with her, as is the problem for most highly empathic and intuitive folks, yours truly included), tracking the details of all of her cases. Recently, she’s been revisiting and reliving these experiences – for better or worse. “These are very specific accounts of things, and some of them you kind of want to forget, but you’re like, ‘That’s right, that’s right. That’s what that felt like.'”
RUE MORGUE was fortunate enough to get an example of one of the scripted features, based on Stavis’ journals, that she is sending out for consideration.
I once had to exorcize a banya – a Russian bathhouse – that had been in a wooded property for dozens of years. Many suicides and murders happened there, and in every photo I’d seen of its heyday, it was clear that anyone who stepped inside came out changed. The light in the eyes. The grins. Turns out, the place was on sacred land that had once been used for sacrifices. Until the Rosewood, that had been my hardest cleansing, because a child was involved. Many hours passed, with a demon fighting inside a tiny, terrified boy. He’d had that crazy light in his eyes, that truly awful rictus. But in the end, I could take it out, and the entity’s power was snuffed. The deceased people trapped in the bathhouse were all released, the spell of the demon broken.
But this – this was far worse. Because this madness was like nothing I’d seen before. It was a violent infection. And I didn’t even know what kind of demon this sickness was.
They moved toward me, and I swear I could feel the heat and the flames. They were fighting back, and that meant it was working.
I broke through the circle as acrid hands and bony fingers tried to grab me and keep me there. Their touch actually burned, but there was nothing on my skin. I decided I was going to bolt through the rest of the inn.
I pushed my way inside a guest room, where one man was brutally stabbing another. They turned to me. Reflective eyes. “She showed me how I’d die,” the victim said. He laughed as he bled, the knife shredding his torso. His assailant, eyes on his job, said, “She showed me how I’d murder.”
This is Stavis’ life. Can you imagine walking into these real-life horror movie scenarios, day in and day out? That’s real purpose, and that’s exactly why Stavis does what she does. “A lot of people don’t like the idea of exorcism in general, right? And they don’t want to believe there’s something paranormal going on in these spaces. But the reality is, the more you embrace the fact that that could be true, the better off that we all are because if you just let me get in there and do my work, whether you believe it or you don’t, what’s the harm? It doesn’t harm anything. If anything, you’re surprised it could help.”
There’s so much that we don’t know, so much that we can’t see. And yet, there’s so much that we do know, so much that we can see. That’s horrifying enough to process. Answers are waiting to be discovered – felt – through the mists of the veil, and it’s people like Stavis who are at the frontlines of these material and ethereal frontiers, waiting to act as psychopomps in the name of healing not just those who seek their help but the world at large.
“I think the best thing that we can do right now because, obviously, there’s a lot of stuff going on, and there’s spiritual warfare – I mean we’re seeing it, literally, and you can just imagine what you’re not seeing in the spiritual realm – the best thing that we can do, and it’s so simple, we need to be empathic,” Stavis says. “Have empathy. We need to have empathy for ourselves first because that’s where all this pain comes from. We have to watch our self-talk; We have to watch how we’re treating ourselves [and] how difficult we are on ourselves. Whether we’re giving ourselves breaks. Whether we’re allowing ourselves opportunities to rest and to fail and to be fuck-ups if we need to – and whatever that is. And also, projecting that out to others, just doing one act of kindness for somebody a day. That’s it. That’s all you have to do, and if everyone did it, the world would be 100% different. It’s simple. People make things complicated.”
Stay up to date with all of Stavis’ upcoming projects on Instagram @rhstavis and at rhstavis.com.
