Mason Winfield’s Twilight on the Western Door
The Spiritual, Supernatural and Paranormal
ELEGY FOR AN EXORCIST
In Memoriam: Father Alphonsus Trabold (1925-2005)
© 2015 Mason Winfield
It’s ten years since he went from us, ten years this month, and how many of us remember we ever had him? Even his leave-taking seemed by design, two days after that of world-beloved Pope John Paul II, as if this local holy man thought that way to slip off from us with few of us catching it. Maybe it worked. But not so fast, Father. I can’t let you go without one more mention.
Western New York has lost one of its most intriguing residents, and the world has lost one of its luminaries in a rare and esoteric study. I refer to the Rochester-born professor and Franciscan friar Father Alphonsus Trabold.
“Father Al,” as he liked to be called, was a legend – try as he might to avoid it – on the St. Bonaventure University campus. “Spooks,” as they called it, his lively course on parapsychology and religion, had a waiting list, and five decades of Bonny grads remember him with real affection. A less connected group of people in the Southern Tier still reveres him for his work as a counselor and priest. But few of them knew what a star he was, and most other Western New Yorkers who didn’t know him personally never even knew who he was.
In the inner circles of both Church and parapsychology, Father Alphonsus was famous for his study of psychic phenomena, and for a more dramatic specialty in particular. “Father Al” was an exorcist. A real one.
Demonic possession may strike us as something out of the Middle Ages; out of Gothic fiction and film; or, too sadly, out of TV-style ghost hunting and sensationalism. The matter is indeed far from the daily work of the Church; but on those rare occasions that someone calls for help with a problem that might be supernatural, someone is needed to sort things out, to tell the psychological from the psychic, and the ordinarily psychic from that which is… serious. A holy person can be needed to deal with the unholy. For Western New York, Father Alphonsus was the one.
You’d suspect a man on call as the dispeller of demons might be imposing, arrogant, intimidating, and even sinister, an impatient sufferer of fools at the least. Slight, unassuming, and soft-spoken, Father Alphonsus was very much the reverse. He used the most direct words, and the fewest of them, in his speech. He distilled hails of details into drops of sense and made the difficult seem simple. There was no mumbo-jumbo about him, either, except perhaps for those brown Franciscan robes. Among those who came to him were people who thought they were targeted by disembodied entities. Most of them, he felt, were victims of much more explainable complaints. When his intercession was needed he worked through short, simple prayers and the force of some ethereal current that, I have little doubt, ran through him to a rare degree.
We live in a material world. Physical realities are as common and solid as the table on which your elbows rest as you read this. Psychic events have to be considered merely as occasions. An immaterial component to the human organism – a soul, a spirit, or an extrasensory talent – is suggested by some of the events we observe in the world, but it is far from proved and farther from being understood. Even then, it’s hard for objective thinkers – I try to be one – to have complete belief.
Doubt melted away when you were with Father Alphonsus. In his presence and for a long time afterward, you were pretty sure, too. It was impressive. He wasn’t a proselytizer. He convinced with nothing but his own belief. He didn’t just believe; he knew. But Father Alphonsus was a man of more than just faith; he was a man of clear thought and hard reasoning. He had witnessed instances of psychic phenomena, and he had studied parapsychology. An academic defender of the spirit, he was a rare breed these days.
There’s a pop resurgence of interest in many paranormal subjects. When the media profile potentially psychic cases – miracles, ghosts, ESP – they often interview local advocates or TV personalities and, if they do try to provide balance, they bring in eloquent Ph. D. doubters to give us the other side. Balance is good, of course; but the real opposite of educated disbelief is educated belief. Father Alphonsus was one of the standard-bearers.
His viewpoint may have been out of academic fashion, but Father Alphonsus was hardly obscure, at least not where it counts. A popular lecturer often interviewed by upstate papers and radio, Father Alphonsus had his moments on the national stage. He appeared as an expert on psychic phenomena on major-network television in the mid-1970s, a spell when the subjects of ESP and Satanic cults were hot. In the inner circles of psychical research, Father Al’s prominence never wavered. Little wonder. His perspective was unique.
Father Alphonsus was familiar with centuries of the most sensitive cases in Church history. The information, as you might gather, is classified. Father Al understood Church philosophy from the inside. He also knew parapsychology. He knew famous cases, test results, terminology, and philosophy. As an official field reporter for the Psychical Research Foundation, he saw many potentially psychic cases firsthand. Others were brought to him by the Church. Some of the most interesting came to him on their own. Father Alphonsus was a magnet for people whose griefs, they thought, were supernatural.
The subject of demonic possession – one of the few in which Church and paranormal get faintly close – is of major popular interest. Someone who knew it from the inside could make shock waves by telling tales. I admit that, as I drove to my first interview with Father Alphonsus, I was halfway hoping that he might spill forth such a catalog of colorful cases. It seemed like it would make a hell of a chapter, if not a whole book.
It was not happening with Father Al. I saw that in the first minute.
I had read a few articles about him that did not do him justice. I was expecting him to be a flamboyant, self-absorbed character. What I found was a man of immense seriousness and deep compassion.
It did not surprise me that Father Alphonsus would never betray a confidence. It did take me awhile to understand why he was so guarded about old cases. The Church, it seems, keeps a lot of things close to the vest, not always to its advantage. Cases of suspected possession are also intensely personal to families, even after things settle. It’s not hard to see why. Your kid may apply to law school someday; it won’t help his chances at Cornell if people find out that at 13 he was channeling for Azathoth.
That first interview with Father Alphonsus was remarkable for other reasons. He talked in depth about a handful of cases, including Amityville and Hinsdale in New York State, and the Georgetown (D.C.) matter that had become the subject of the 1973 film The Exorcist. I remember finding it curious at the time that he was as open as he was. But each of those cases, I reflect, had already gone public. Many others had ducked the radar, and those… I doubt the Inquisition could have gotten them out of him.
We did talk quite a bit about general subjects, and I took notes the whole time. I figured this would be fair game for my first book. I had plenty for a fine article about him and his specialty, and I was building a chapter around it.
Months later, Father Al called me around one in the morning to be sure I knew nothing he’d said – nothing – was for publication. It was days before the due date of a hefty manuscript. It was as if he had the psychic sense that he would reach me, and that it was high time.
The situation put me out. One in the morning. I’m usually up that late. That wasn’t the problem. I was more worried about the backup to the publication process. I had worked for days on that piece. If I had to cut it, I’d have to rearrange the whole design. In a weekend.
If he hadn’t heard me tell him I was writing an article, I asked, why did he think I was thumping on the laptop? He displayed no more of an understanding of publication than someone from the Middle Ages would have.
Why, I asked, did he wait so long to tell me? He had been trying to call me for months, he said, but he never caught me at home. As I reflected on that, it, too, made a bit of sense. My caller ID had been registering a series of hangup calls from a phone system that had the same first six digits. I thought it was either a clever stalker or Robocop. That explained it. A number of lines must have gone through the St. Bonaventure system, or else the friary had a cluster of pay phones. And he didn’t know how to use an answering machine! He didn’t know what to do at the beep.
The situation really put me out. I knew I could legally have run the piece, and that most journalists would have. I didn’t give a thought to it. I gained so much in the long run by his trust. Our relationship developed. From him I gained not so much information as understanding, which is much more to be praised. Understanding equips you to learn more.
If Father Al had features that were unlikely in a man of our era, he had some quirks that seemed just as odd in a man of the friary. In his youth he had been a black belt in some kind of martial art, possibly judo. One thing everyone remembers about him was that abashed little laugh he had, almost a “Tee-hee.” He smiled when he prayed, as if sharing an in-joke with the Maker of all things. And no one who had seen his apartment could forget it. It was basically a college dorm room in which he spent much of his life. There were a heck of a lot of weapons there!
The room was ringed with sort of a high shelf, and on it every few feet rested some kind of close-quarters persuader. In this small space, Father Al was never more than an arm’s length from a forbidding implement of self-defense. I spotted a number of historic blades I recognized. The World War II Japanese bayonet was too easy. It was conspicuous for its swordlike length, and we’ve seen it in a lot of movies. I also remember a hafty, recurved chopper – a morph of a boomerang and a Bowie knife – called the kukri. It was the unmistakeable utility weapon of the world-renowned Gurkha, the Nepalese fighting-class later recruited as special forces by the British Empire. Surely, Father Al was just a collector; but his polished edges gave one the impression that if any of Satan’s minions – or the Alien – would ever be foolish enough to trouble his sleep, a surprise was waiting. Even in pitch darkness, all Father Al had to do was get to a wall and stretch an arm up.
As a scholar and as a person, Father Alphonsus was one of the “authentics.” People gravitate to folks like this. Some who’d like to be thought more authentic themselves try to get a bigger piece of them to augment their own credentials. Sometimes they go too far.
In the 1970s Father Alphonsus was summoned to an alarming situation at a Southern Tier hotel. A husband-and-wife team of traveling “psychic investigators” from New England had given a talk at a nearby college in which they had profiled themselves as the conquerors of demons. A troubled local family took them up on it. Possibly thinking that it might provide fodder for a book or a springboard for a TV program, the couple met a fragile girl and attempted to “deliver,” if not “exorcise” her. Things didn’t go smoothly. In fact, they took a terrifying turn. The pair realized they were out of their depth. They called for help.
Father Al arrived and managed to calm things down. He had experience in psychology as well as parapsychology. The relieved pair of lecturers conveyed their thanks, but soon started promoting themselves as Father Alphonsus’ routine collaborators, even fellow-exorcists. From this bandwagon they went on to get themselves and others into more trouble. Of these two Father Alphonsus said the worst thing I think he could say of anyone: “I had to ask them to stop using my name.”
Buffalo isn’t just the nucleus of a region known for alternative visionaries and spiritual energy (Spiritualism, the Mormons, Roycroft, Handsome Lake, Mordecai Noah, and plenty more); it’s also the home base of skepticism, host to our world-famous Center for Inquiry representing the CSICOPS – the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Father Al agreed with them on so many points. He, too, was an advocate of analysis. He readily acknowledged the presence of suggestion, delusion, and fakery in the world. “Only when all material factors are ruled out should you begin to consider paranormal causes,” he said as a mantra. His only quibble with the CSICOPS and other materialists was over that fraction of cases that aren’t so clear. “They’re limited by what they consider possible,” he said to me once. Theirs was just a different way of seeing the same world.
Father Alphonsus consulted on many celebrated cases, and found many – like that of the “Amityville Horror” – lacking. He had his doubts about even the haunting of Devereaux Hall on his own St. Bonaventure campus. He investigated the explosive mid-1970s Cattaraugus County case of the Dandy/Miller family at Hinsdale that has been popularized in a number of TV and book adaptations as one of spirit possession. Father Alphonsus disagreed. He thought the house was probably haunted and that the people believed what they were saying, but he did not think anyone had been taken over by an external entity and refused to perform the exorcism service. As a matter of fact, in all his years Father Al never did a “solemn” exorcism, as he called it, in Western New York. He had never encountered what he judged to be an real case of possession.
Make no mistake, though, he believed: in the occasional validity of psychic phenomena, in a Source – he gave it a name – of love at the root of this world, in another world to come, and in a disruptive something at work among us, with a legion of subtle agents who declare themselves only when overcome. I wish I had asked him more directly than I ever did if he personified this power and gave it a name.
And he was good. I never met anyone who knew him who didn’t sense it, usually instantly. Selfishness and self-consciousness had evaporated off of him, distilling his emotions into nothing but concern for others and service to a higher purpose in the world. Father Alphonsus spent endless hours counseling people with needs of all types, even those he thought were mistaken in believing their troubles came from beyond this world. I interviewed him for a documentary in 2003 (The Phantom Tour) and, as we parted, the film crew from Full Circle Studios were so overcome with feeling for him that they rushed in to embrace him. I had never seen anything like it. I’d worked with them for weeks, and they’d been classic wise guys. They still are. The fact that someone could impress them with holiness in 30 minutes still takes my breath away.
I turned to Father Al for advice on a number of occasions. “I’ll pray for you,” he said to me once when I had encountered a true dilemma, and things looked instantly brighter. It honestly did feel possible that I had someone pulling for me whose influence might just reach up and out of this world and tug on the ear of the Universe.
By the fall of 2004 Father Alphonsus could never plan anything too far ahead. He had good days and bad ones. He was through traveling for talks or meetings. We agreed to aim for a dinner in Olean over the winter, but things got busy at my end, and that last one never happened. I advise all who have aging friends not to wait.
The Church takes a beating in some quarters these days because of a few bad priests and some shortsighted stonewalling that might have worked in the Middle Ages. Maybe the populist Pope we have today will tone the process down. Maybe those who hate the Church can use its crises to deal it a toppling blow. That would be a loss. There are many fine people in the Church, men and women who want nothing but to do good for others. Father Alphonsus was one of them. I remember Chaucer’s line about his loyal Parson: “I think there never was a better priest.” I think of Pope John Paul II’s reported last words – something like, “All my life I have sought you, and now you have come to me” – and wonder if, in his last hours, Father Alphonsus might have seen gathering for him the miraculous presences he had tried so long to understand.
“Requiescat…” they’ve wished him in the formal way: “Rest in peace.” It’s a nice thing to say. But peace he always had. Rest I wish him, too, but just a short one, and with sunny dreams that soothed all memories of the body’s wrack. What I wish more is new learning for that energetic mind and new students for the lifelong teacher. Goodbye again, Father. I don’t think you wanted this, but it’s the only time I went against you. As you always said, look to the heart to judge. And there’s work to do! Be there, as you were here, for the troubled, for the newly-crossed.