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Thumbnail for February 22, 2002: Open Lines - Entity Attacks

February 22, 2002: Open Lines - Entity Attacks

Feb 22, 2002
2h 28m
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell dedicates Friday night open lines to reports of entity attacks, a subject that has generated an overwhelming response since a previous broadcast and his recent interview with Robert Bruce. Callers flood the lines with accounts of shadow people, psychic vampires, and physical assaults by unseen forces. A truck driver near Albany, Georgia describes a muscular, hairless creature running on all fours at 60 miles per hour across a highway, matching no known animal. A Pennsylvania man recounts a woman materializing in front of his car who began vibrating rapidly before vanishing entirely.

One caller describes a gorgeous woman in a Los Angeles restaurant who appeared to drain his life force from across the room, leaving him visibly pale and slumped over. Another shares how an entity impersonated his doctor in a hospital room, instructing him to walk on a freshly operated leg in an apparent attempt to rupture his stitches. A Canadian listener reports a shadow figure that paralyzed him in bed and burned his neck, only retreating when he mentally confronted it with determination rather than fear.

Art weaves in breaking news throughout the night, including a 5.2 magnitude earthquake near San Diego, the approaching seismic window predicted weeks earlier, and a Nature journal article warning that disrupted ocean currents could plunge Europe into an ice age.

Key Moments

  1. Art opens entity attack night: Art frames the open-lines premise: he's been flooded with email since the last entity-attack show, has spoken with several practicing exorcists, and won't bother with a dedicated line - the whole night is a special subject. Anyone wishing to report an entity attack is invited to call.

  2. The Greyhound bus seductress that vanished into his chest: A caller dozing on a near-empty Greyhound bus to Georgia describes dreaming awake to find two black-haired, black-eyed teenage girls perched on the seats around him. One sat down on his legs and, the moment her body touched his, jumped up, spun in midair, and disappeared into his chest - at which point he woke.

  3. An exorcist psychiatrist's 75/25 split: Art relays what an exorcist who is also a practicing psychiatrist told him earlier: about 75% of what gets exorcised from people you'd have to call unfriendly or evil - and the other 25%, while not evil, are still affecting your life, your destiny, your decisions.

  4. Sleep paralysis: relax - and that's the hardest thing in the world: A lifelong sleep-paralysis sufferer, raised Baptist but unbaptized, tells Art he initially feared he was being possessed. After years of episodes he found the only thing that worked was to relax - which Art agrees is exactly right and also the biggest understatement, because relaxing while terrified is one of the hardest things in the world.

  5. The failed succubus attack - he cuddled it instead: A caller raised with dogs and cats describes feeling a weight press down on him in bed, two nights running. Conditioned to cuddle anything that touched him in his sleep, he simply put his arms around the entity. Both times it 'oozed away' beside him with what felt like cartoon question marks above its head; a friend on a newsgroup later told him it was a failed succubus attack.