The Indians believed that blood holds all the bad spirits, and once a month in ceremonies they would cut themselves to let the spirits go free.

I also read that in the Dark Ages people thought the paralysis was a demon or evil spirit sitting on your chest.

Chapter three: Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo treated patients outside of Kisumu, Kenya for AIDS, tuberculosis, infertility, mental illness, evil spirits.

Two of his wives were brought to him suffering from infertility and he cured them, three for evil spirits, one for an asthmatic condition and severe chest pain and two wives Ondijo claims he took for love, paying their families a total of 16 cows.

And I think that we will see that we will be able to chase more of these evil spirits out from the brain as time goes on, and the consequence of that, of course, will be that we will be able to help many more patients.

And the herbals, the botanical books of up to the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, are filled with prescriptions for causing convulsions to shake the evil spirits out.

This panic-inducing episode of coming face-to-face with the creatures from your nightmares can last anywhere from seconds to minutes and may involve visual or auditory hallucinations of an evil spirit or an out-of-body feeling like you're floating.

It may be easier to blame sleep paralysis on evil spirits because what's actually happening in your brain is much harder to explain.

Sometimes that means that I'm pretending to need an exorcism so I can get -- yes, that's right! -- so I can go to an exorcist and see if he's using gimmicks or psychological tricks to try to convince someone that they're possessed.

With her imagery of giant floating flowers, undulating landscapes, transplanted body parts and billowing clouds of demons, Kahlo has often been associated with Surrealism.