Francisco — Tom Stiles of Francisco is an exorcist, but not like an exorcist you see in the movies.
Like most ministers, he conducts weddings and gives spiritual advice. Specifically, Stiles is a “spiritual warfare counselor,” ordained as a non-denominational Protestant pastor through Glory River International Ministry.
He is a lifetime member of the American Association of Exorcists (americanexorcist.com) and has completed hours of training and classes, and is always interested in learning more.
“Exorcism and deliverance ministry is what I do,” the 33-year-old said.
His wife Cortney Stiles, 34, says she was saved with Tom’s help, but not Tom alone.
“Jesus is the reason why I’m saved,” Cortney says.
Tom and Cortney are very open about their story, and have received international attention.
“In general, people who have not had some kind of experience, where they can relate to it, don’t believe it at all,” Tom said.
“They think that you’re nuts for saying it. They say, ‘only in America,’” Cortney said.
“I’m not going to say it doesn’t bother me at times that people think I’m nuts, but getting the story out there to try to help others is worth it,” Cortney said, “I don’t want anybody to have to go through what I went through.”
Attacked by adversaries
Cortney, originally of the Longview, Washington area, says she started dealing with what they call “attacks” when she was a teenager.
“It started happening almost every day. It happened at night for a year, every single night in my dreams. You know when you’re dreaming and you feel half awake? It was like that. And then it started happening during the day, and consistently started happening in the day, for six to eight years. I didn’t know why it was happening, because I always believed I was a Christian,” Cortney recalled, “I could feel them touching me.”
“God had to use the attacks for me to question my belief and eventually get out of there to find out why I was being attacked. Because I probably would have never left,” she said earnestly. Although she would say Jesus’ name with the belief that the demon would leave her, it didn’t leave until after she “denounced” the group she had been in.
Before she met Stiles, Cortney talked to her family and friends about the attacks she was experiencing. (Many Christians believe that calling on Jesus’ name protects them from demonic activity.)
“My Dad tried to help me—he would put his hands on my head and he would pray,” she said. But despite the healing attempts from her father and from the men of the congregation she grew up in, Cortney was still suffering.
“And it would get worse, and he would just tell me it was because of my unbelief, because I didn’t believe in Jesus enough,” she said.
Sometimes she would see shadows. She left her father’s church, but still believed in what it taught. She barely maintained a rocky relationship with her parents. And she always felt alone.
“I started to get into new age stuff, and all these kinds of things, because nothing was working,” Cortney said. She even put salt around her house in an attempt to stop her attacks.
“I would actually feel (the demons) touching me, I could hear them at times.” Cortney began to accept that God had a reason for the attacks—a reason she couldn’t understand. It didn’t help that she has a family history of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
“Everybody thought I was just nuts, they didn’t believe me, but I knew that wasn’t true,” Cortney said.
So, Cortney put her stories online via the anonymous Experience Project, looking for help. That’s how she met Tom, who has an internet footprint in spiritual warfare that’s hard to miss. He’s been a Christian since he was a child. Both his parents are pastors, and his grandfathers on both sides are pastors. His uncle is a missionary, as are his cousins, to China, Kazhakstan and Ecuador.
Today, he and his wife attend First Baptist Church in Princeton.
“He listened to me, he didn’t think I was crazy—that was the first one,” she said. “Then we started talking on the phone...he knew soon after that (the attacks were) because of my religion but he was very, very careful of presenting it to me like that. It took a lot of teaching me and being patient with me, it took me almost two years to finally realize that’s what it was, because I didn’t want to let it go. There’s a confusion from it. When you’re in some type of demonic hold, grip, they like to confuse you, they like to do half-truths like Satan would do and make it seem like it’s right.”
Finding peace and a guardian
Tom wasn’t afraid to reach out to Cortney.
“As a Christian, when you’re saved, you have the Holy Spirit in you, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t share his house with demons...if anyone is genuinely saved, they cannot be possessed,” Tom said. “They could be tempted or harassed or things of that nature.”
The attacks would stop when they were in the same room or talking online, they said.
They spoke for nine months through Skype and by phone.
“God was leading me into it,” she said. “He was telling me to come up here, be with this man.”
“I felt such peace when I was around him, so I said, ‘OK, I’m sticking with this guy,” Cortney said.
“It was because of his patience and diligence with me, and of course the Holy Spirit, that’s how I got out of it,” she said. “I thought I was saved, and I realized through all the research I did, that I wasn’t really saved.”
“I didn’t have to do a special prayer or something,” Stiles said.
“It’s because he was a real Christian,” Cortney said, “the first true Christian that I encountered.”
Tom visited her for a week, then she moved to Indiana with him and they married.
“I don’t marry everyone that I help,” Tom jokes.
Together they went to the Healing Rooms in Columbus, Indiana, where fellow believers prayed for Cortney for 16 hours.
“If it wasn’t for God and my faith in Him, I probably would have committed suicide because I was so miserable...but I knew that if I died, hell would be so much worse,” Cortney said.
Stiles recalled when someone contacted him for help too late. “They actually killed themselves a week after they first talked to me,” Stiles said. “Something is wrong when someone gets anti-depressants and they don’t get better...if I was having a lot of itching and went and got allergy medicine and it didn’t help, I would say, ‘well gee, it must not be allergies.’ It’s pretty obvious. But with the field of psychology that’s not the case. If the medicine doesn’t work they have people take two or three medicines or very high dosages of medicines.”
The brunt of spiritual warfare cannot be cured with earthly medicine, the Stiles say. Even children can be harassed by Satan’s helpers.
“Things happened to me as a child, where I didn’t identify it as a demon but looking back it was,” Cortney said, recalling being temporarily possessed.
“When they’re around you, there’s nothing but dread, there’s no hope, nothing but the most negative feelings you could ever feel...the fear is indescribable.”
But she also knows how it feels to become unshackled from that dread. Cortney says she saw a vision of how she became free:
“I had chains around my wrists and my feet and they fell off of me, and I finally found free. A few days later, I felt a demon come around me, and I said Jesus’ name, and it left.”
Relearning Christianity
Tom has also seen the transformation in Cortney, and it’s made him very happy.
“Part of it was a gradual change,” he said, “but some of it was an overnight change, like moving into a new house.”
Today, the couple has two sons, Joshua, 2, and Jacob, 9 months. She’s a stay-at-home mom, and they plan to homeschool.
They live in a house near the historic Wheeling covered bridge. “My grandpa built this one room at a time,” Stiles said.
Cortney believes she was part of something that wasn’t Christian, and that’s why she was being attacked.
“God doesn’t hide things that are important,” she said. “The Bible is what Christianity is,” she explained. “A lot of people don’t want to hear that, they say ‘it’s just a religious thing’ but it IS a religious thing.”
“A lot of people who are in cults don’t know they’re in cults,” Tom said.
“I didn’t leave one cult to go to another,” Cortney said.
Cortney says she’s relearning Christianity.
“I still question, am I really saved, am I really saved? Because I thought I was saved then,” she said.
Catalysts for demonic activity
Despite Tom’s work in spiritual warfare, they don’t have “cult books” around their house, he said. Instead he learns from source materials that use them.
If he had to read another doctrine or cult book, “I would probably read it and get rid of it, I wouldn’t want to have it around the house,” Tom said.
Ouija boards are the best-selling game after Monopoly, and can be the catalyst for demonic activity, Stiles says.
“I think a lot of people have them because they think it’s a joke and they never use them, they just own them,” he said.
Drugs and drunkeness can especially open the door to troubling spirits, Stiles said. “There’s nothing wrong with drinking, but getting drunk, the Bible forbids that,” Cortney explained.
It’s possible to die from demonic possession or oppression, Stiles said. Drugs are often involved in demonic cases. “What it does, is it shuts off your higher brain function so you don’t have self control,” he said.
Participating in Wicca, New Age spirituality “fads” like tarot cards, mediums, horoscopes and palm reading can all be triggers, he said.
“People say, ‘that’s only bad because you see it as bad,’” he said. “College-age kids are probably the ones that have the most problems because they experiment and try new things, and people do things they shouldn’t and get in trouble.”
Stiles offers counseling sessions as a part of his ministry. He also has a Facebook page: visit Facebook.com/IndianaExorcists or search for “EPI Exorcism and Paranormal Investigation.”
What others say about exorcism
“To some degree Satan has control of everybody,” First Baptist Church pastor George Prinzing said.
The Bible says all people are sinners, and the only way to get that sinful influence off everybody’s life is for them to be saved, he explained. When someone is led to Christ, he doesn’t have to sin anymore.
Exorcisms occurred in the Bible for sure, he said, and many scholars believe that in Jesus’ time, and when the gospels and books of the Bible were written, there were a flurry of miracles for that time, he said.
“Generally speaking, I think exorcisms occur when a person gets saved,” Prinzing said.
Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church pastor, Father Tony Ernst, says that a priest trained in the ministry of exorcism is able to help people find healing and understand their needs.
Exorcisms must be done a certain way, he said.
“There is actually a ritual to follow when there is an exorcism,” Ernst said via email, “It is also important to know that exorcisms in the Catholic Church can only be performed by a bishop or a priest who has been delegated by the bishop to fulfill this ministry. The reason for this is that a priest must be trained to serve in this particular capacity.”
Is it possible that some people are more susceptible to demonic activity than others?
“This is a complicated question,” Ernst said, “It is possible that some are more susceptible to demonic activity because they are placing themselves in situations for these things to occur. It is also possible that a very innocent person could come in contact with demonic forces and not understand its source. Some of these things can occur subtly.”
But, Ernst says, exorcisms are out of the ordinary.
“In fact, I heard a priest, who is an official exorcist, state that the need for an actual exorcism is extremely rare,” Ernst said. “This does not mean that people are not going through spiritual warfare with Satan. As humans, we all go through different trials and tribulations against Satan. However, being possessed and needing an exorcism is a different level.”
Expulsion of evil
“I don’t automatically tell someone I can help them, because I have to hear what’s going on first. You can’t necessarily help everybody,” Stiles said. “There’s different kinds of possession, there’s different stages, and most commonly people have oppression where people are being attacked and harassed, but nothing’s in them trying to control their actions,” Tom said.
Sometimes when you get into the cause of people’s problems, they don’t want to hear it, he said.
“If I tell them that’s what’s causing their problems, they don’t want to hear that,” he said. “That’s a situation where you can give them the information, but if they don’t want to use that information to do anything about it...
“I’ll talk to the person through email or over the phone. I would talk to people in person but people talk to me from places like the UK and I can’t exactly walk right over,” he said. He interviews them to find out what they’ve experienced, finds out religious background and family history, what things they’ve been around or have been exposed to.
“Based on what we discover I usually can find pretty definitively what is causing their problems. I’ve only ever had to do a full-blown exorcism once—there wasn’t any stuff flying through the air, but it was a confrontation. That’s just not generally how to go.”
Tom doesn’t call the demon’s name. “I don’t care what it’s name is, I just want to get rid of it. I don’t try to identify what species of wasp it is, either, I just smash it.”
“There’s no holy water,” Cortney said.
“It’s really great when a breakthrough happens,” Tom said.