November 7, 2025 • 34 mins
When a young woman in a small New Zealand town begins to act strangely, her family becomes convinced that something evil has taken hold of her.
What follows is a chilling descent into fear and faith...
Written by Richard MacLean Smith and James Connor Patterson
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
One of the most continually surprising aspects of spiritual belief
is just how many common features are shared by religions
separated by vast distances language and cultural mores. Before it
was possible for the average person to engage in intercontinental travel,
and well before the advent of instant communication, faith was
(00:33):
restricted to whatever was passed down within one's own immediate environment.
And yet, despite some obvious differences, there are certain aspects
which are shared by virtually all of the world's religions.
Each employees designated sites of worship, whether it be something
rudimentary like a tree or an altar stone, to more
(00:55):
sophisticated structures like synagogues and mosques. Many have a fit
bigger who stands for the ultimate personification of good, as
well as a corresponding evil force that must be fought
against or resisted in order to achieve salvation, and each
of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and the Abrahamic traditions at least
(01:18):
involve the story of a messianic figure with special fealty
to whatever supreme being the respective religions advocate worshiping. Perhaps
one of the most insidious common features shared by every
major religion is the idea that we are vulnerable to
possession by evil. From the sukimono of Japanese Shinto to
(01:41):
the jin of Islam, the notion of the malevolent, otherworldly
papeteer has been present in our understanding of the universe
for millennia. Very often these are supposed phantoms motivated by
vengeance or a will to power, who seek to conduct
their business using people as their vessels. Like parasites, they
(02:04):
feed on the negative emotions of their host and use
up all of their resources until their charges life force
is spent, or else they seek to compel their host
to commit a terrible sin, thereby condemning their soul to
damnation for all eternity. In Christianity, the most well known
(02:25):
biblical example of demonic possession features in Mark five, Matthew eight,
and Lucate of the New Testament, where Jesus is depicted
forcing a collective malignant entity calling itself Legion, from the
body of a man and into a herd of pigs.
It is a troubling story. Then Jesus asked him, what
(02:51):
is your name? My name is Legion, he replied, for
we are many, And he begged Jesus again and again
not to send them out. A large herd of pigs
was seen feeding on a nearby hillside, so the demons
begged Jesus send us among the pigs, allow us to
(03:13):
go into them. He gave them permission, and the impure
spirits came out and went into the pigs. Moments later,
the herd, about two thousand in number, rushed straight down
the steep bank and into a nearby lake, where they
all drown. For many who are religiously minded, the Universes
(03:54):
dictated by a Venetian style dualism, in which the forces
of light and dark, good versus evil are continually in battle.
For them, religion offers a safeguard against this darkness. The
great fear, however, is that should they at any point
let their guard down, evil is always lurking, ready to
(04:17):
pounce and worm its way inside them. In Maori culture,
this belief is a little more nuanced. The idea of
possession doesn't take the form of a demon invading the body. Rather,
it's understood through something called marcutu, a kind of spiritual pollution,
a curse that seeps into the world when the balance
(04:40):
between people, ancestors and the land is broken. It isn't
about good and evil in a dualistic sense. It's about
harmony and disruption. To be afflicted by marcutu is to
be caught in a web of unseen forces, ancestral wrongs,
broke can tarpou, the sacred laws that keep the world
(05:03):
in spiritual balance, and the lingering residue of guilt or shame. Traditionally,
a tohunga, a ritual expert, would lift the markutu with karakia,
incantations and chants and water to help restore order to
the world. It's a ritual of reconciliation, not combat, meant
(05:26):
to heal a relationship with the unseen world, rather than
to drive out an evil being. It's a powerful idea,
to say the least. In the case of one family
living on the outskirts of Wellington, New Zealand, it was
one that for a brief period in October two thousand
and seven, became terrifyingly real. You're listening to Unexplained and
(05:50):
I'm Richard McLean Smith. One unusually stormy evening on Saturday
sixth of October two thousand and seven, twenty two year
ould Janet Moses was slumped in an arm chair in
(06:10):
the front bar of the Palliser Hotel. The suburb of
Wainoia Marta was sleepy and close knit, and family engagements
like this one were a regular occurrence. Though she'd been
feeling tired, Janet felt it was important to make an
appearance because her beloved sister was finally turning twenty one.
(06:31):
To Janet, the age gap of a year may as
well have been decades. Unlike her sister, who was still
relatively carefree and unburdened by the adult world, Janet was
more or less a single mother to two young girls.
Her long term partner, Shane, who she'd been with for
nine years, was almost never at home. Janet had even
(06:53):
heard whispers about a possible infidelity, but she felt so
tired of it all she couldn't find the strength to
confront him about it. On this night, however, she tried
to put on a show for her sister. The whole
family was in attendance, and they would notice if she
was feeling down. They did everything together, often eating and
(07:14):
spending time together. They even had their own sports team,
with the family emblem of a white lion emblazoned on
their crest, Janet sipped at her glass of beer and
eventually allowed it to go flat and warm. She couldn't
stop thinking about her maternal grandmother, who'd recently passed away,
(07:35):
how much she would have loved to have been there
with everyone that night. Nearby, Janet's uncle John was concerned.
He'd spotted Janet from across the room staring blankly at
the wall. When he asked her what was wrong, Janet
explained that she wasn't feeling great and asked John if
he'd seen her aunt, Glennis anywhere, who'd promised to give
(07:57):
her a lift home. When Glennis eventually caught up with her,
she was shocked at just how drawn out Janet looked.
She could have passed for a woman in her fifties,
she thought, instead of the dynamic young woman of twenty
two she knew her to be. Without a second thought,
Glennis suggested that Janet and her kids crash at her
(08:18):
house for the night, where she could keep an eye
on her and help with the kids while Janet tried
to get some rest. With any luck, she thought Janet
would be back to her usual self in no time.
(08:43):
The following morning, Glennis awoke to what seemed like the
distant sound of chattering on the street outside her bedroom window.
When she checked on Janet's girls next door, she found
them snoring under the first rays of sun that were
now streaming through the curtains. But when she went into
Janet's bedroom, she was puzzled to find the bed neatly made,
(09:06):
with no sign of her niece having slept in it
at all. Janet, she called out, there was only a
deafening silence in reply. At the front of the house,
the main door gaped open, the thin mesh of the
screen door drawn across the frame. She reached out, unhooked it,
(09:28):
and stepped out onto the lawn of her front garden
into the balmy heat of what was shaping up to
be a scorching day. When Glennis walked to the edge
of her pathway, she saw a figure in a billowing
white robe up ahead in the middle distance. It was Janet,
still wearing her pajamas, walking confusedly up the middle of
(09:50):
the road in bare feet. As Glennis drew closer to her,
she could hear her muttering something under her breath. What's that,
Glennis asked softly. Janet's facial expression didn't change, and she
seemed not to notice Glennis at all. Instead, her eyes
(10:11):
remained fixed on the hills that rose above the estate
as she continued muttering the same apparent phrase over and
over again. It sounded like a prayer. Janet, please come inside.
You're going to hurt yourself out here. Just then Janet
stopped and fixed Glennys with a blank stare. To Glennis,
(10:36):
it seemed as though her irises had disappeared, leaving her
eyes appearing almost entirely all consumingly black. The young woman
opened her mouth to speak, but the words that Janet
croaked out did not seem to be coming from her
own vocal chords at all. They're coming, she said to
(10:57):
her aunt, with a gaze that seemed then to Glennis
to be not of this world. They're coming. It was
just after one pm when Glennis arrived with Janet and
the girls in tow. Uncle John had been expecting them,
(11:21):
and not just because Sunday was normally when the family
sat down for their weekly meeting. Glennis had phoned John
first thing and explained everything that was going on. He
couldn't help feeling that his poor young niece had finally
been driven to the brink by the demands of parenting
and her bad relationship, John resolved to sort it out
(11:43):
once and for all. Since his mother had died, he'd
taken on his role as head of the family with Gusto,
and it both heartened and terrified him to be looked
upon with so much responsibility. By then, other family members
had already arrived and were all around the living room
drinking coffee. Over the course of the next few hours,
(12:05):
members of Janet's family took it in turns to reassure
her that they loved her, perhaps hoping that that might
be enough to bring her out of her stupor. All
the while, despite the heat, Janet simply sat stock still
in her jacket and remained silently staring at the ground.
When the family meeting was over, Glennis took Janet to
(12:28):
convalesce at the former home of her grandmother, where her
mother now lived, who was waiting for her. When she arrived,
Janet seemed exhausted. A bed was set up for her
in a spare room next to a large stone statue
of a lion. The lion had been acquired a few
weeks before by her sister from the grounds at the
(12:49):
Gray Town hotel located about an hour's drive away. Because
the lion was seen as a natural talisman of the family,
her sister thought it would bring good ffe fortune to
their house. It was around one o'clock the following morning
when a horrific scream ripped through the silence of the house.
Janet's mother rushed into Janet's room to find her daughter
(13:13):
in hysterics, claiming that the spirit of the statue was
tormenting her and scratching her from the inside out. She
was sweating so much from her forehead it looked as
though she'd just come out of the shower. Janet's mother
did her best to calm her down and soothed her
back to sleep, but the following day her mood seemed
(13:33):
to have grown worse. Things only deteriorated further from there.
It wasn't clear who said it first, but soon the
family began to wonder if Janet was succumbing to mark utu.
Barely able to lift herself from bed with an ever
growing sense of paranoia, it was clear that Janet was
(13:54):
in severe trouble and it was time to seek help.
It was early on the morning of Monday, eighth of
October when Timmy Rahi arrived at Janet's mother's home. In
his back was a leather bound copy of the Bible
(14:14):
and a bottle of holy water. Timmy was renowned within
the local married community as a cowmatur or spiritual adviser,
and had even worked as a cultural attache to New
Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark on matters pertaining to native spirituality.
From Timmy's perspective, human beings were composed of both physical
(14:37):
and spiritual elements, and it was his belief that the
spiritual was vulnerable to influence from both good and bad
other worldly beings. On his arrival, John quickly ushered Timmy
into the house where countless other members of Janet's extended
family were also gathered, and in the middle of them
(14:58):
all was a completely unresponsive Janet. Timmy couldn't help being
deeply concerned by Janet's exhausted state and the distant look
in her eyes, though he couldn't be sure what was
wrong exactly. After reciting some prayers but getting nothing in response,
he suggested the best option would be to conduct the
(15:19):
mark Utu lifting as ceremony to rid any potentially disruptive
energies in case things got worse. At this stage, it
merely involved blessing Janet with water and saying special cohens
paradoxical riddles designed to break patterns of thought over her
prone body in an effort to ward off the perceived evil.
(15:42):
But as the afternoon progressed, something strange occurred. Timmy claimed
to have a vision of three claws ripping into Janet.
It was the stone Lion from the hotel, he said.
The implication was clear. It wasn't a negative, essays that
Janet was struggling with some kind of malignant demonic entity
(16:05):
had got into her. As it turned out, the stone
and statue was actually part of a pair. The way
Timmy saw it, the pair had been together for over
one hundred years, so when Janet's sister stole one of them,
the other's protective spirits had become angry and placed a
curse on Janet's family. A shudder of fear passed between
(16:28):
all those present. Were they all in danger nowt they wondered,
Not wanting to take any chances, Janet's uncle John immediately
sprang into action and ordered the statue to be taken
back to the hotel without delay, the statue was dragged
from the house and placed in the back of a
truck and driven away from the house at speed. A
(16:51):
convoy of eight further vehicles containing nearly forty members of
Janet's family, many who'd called off sick from work a school,
art the statue back to the Gray Town Hotel. Inside
one of the cars, Janet became restless, seeming to suddenly
snap out of her otherwise placid state. She began to
(17:13):
spit and rail at the people around her, and even
threatened to kill her paternal grandmother when she tried to
calm her down. With no time to spare, the family
finally arrived at the hotel, Several people jumped out and
hurriedly pulled the heavy stone lion from the back of
the truck, then dragged it back to the exact spot
(17:35):
from where it had been taken. Once back in place,
the relief among them all was palpable to be sure
it had done the trick. Timmy Rahi conducted a short
service to formalize the statue's return and pray for forgiveness.
(17:58):
Back at Janet's mother's house, the family had dinner together, then,
on the advice of Timmy Rahi, now hopeful that all
would soon return to normal. Janet was ordered to try
and get some rest, but Rahi was unsettled despite everything,
Returning the statue had not fixed the problem. As he
(18:19):
explained to John, the lion's return had only removed two
of the claws from his vision. He could still see
one clinging on to Janet. The mark utu was still there,
and it was now somehow linked to Janet's partner Shane.
On Wednesday, tenth of October, the family gathered again at
(18:40):
Janet's mother's home. Though he didn't know exactly how it
was done, Uncle John decided to continue the markutu lifting.
He began by ordering the family to surround Janet. Just
then someone pointed out the bone necklace around her neck,
a gift for Shane. It was promptly cut off and
(19:02):
thrown away. Then together, under John's guidance, the family began
to chant blessings as they passed around a cup of water,
taking it in turns to sip from it. They began
to stomp in unison as though they might somehow stamp
the markoutu out of her. Outside, unsettled neighbors listened with
(19:25):
increasing concern to the deafening sounds of chanting and stomping
coming from inside the property. While inside, as the temperature
rose ever higher, hitting forty degrees celsius, the family took
to splashing themselves with cupfuls of water to help cool
down as they continued to stamp and shout for the
(19:46):
Markoutu to leave Janet. At some point, Janet's paternal relatives
began to wonder if she might be better off going
to hospital, but their concerns were waved away. Instead, with
nothing seeming to work, Janet was poured into the shower,
fully clothed and sprayed with cold water, in the belief
(20:08):
that subjecting her to cold temperatures would make the mark
utu that still clung to her uncomfortable. When this also
didn't work, Janet was led back to the living room,
where the lifting continued with ever more gusto. By Thursday,
(20:35):
eleventh of October, the heat which enveloped Wellington had become
virtually unbearable. That morning, Janet's mother, along with some younger
members of the family, arrived at the house where Janet
was being kept. What they found there shocked them to
the core. Numerous members of the family sat about in
(20:55):
various states of lucidity. Clearly having been up all night,
Uncle John hadn't changed his clothes for days, and he
was babbling incoherently about something evil in Janet's eyes, while
all about the house was completely flooded. Worst of all, Janet,
who veered from restless sleep to lugubrious bouts of wakefulness,
(21:19):
was no better than the last time her mother had
seen her. With her mother's arrival and Janet seemingly subdued
for the moment, John took the opportunity to try and
get some rest, but no sooner had he closed his eyes,
Janet started screaming, They're coming. She growled, They're coming. Several
(21:42):
family members shot up and began shadow boxing around her,
as if they were fighting off invisible entities. At some point,
John noticed that some of the children had begun to
act strangely too. Some were staring blankly off into the distance,
seemingly in a trance, while others seemed to be muttering
(22:04):
incoherently to themselves. It was the thing they'd feared the most,
the Markkutu was spreading hurriedly. The children were all made
to vomit in order to purge any evil that was
thought to be inside them. Anything solid that came up
was swiftly stamped on by the others in an effort
(22:25):
to obliterate any evil spirit that it might contain. From
that point on, everyone was banned from looking Janet in
the eyes lest they also succumbed to the malignant curse.
At some point, perhaps growing increasingly terrified by the ritual's
(22:49):
inability to expunge the mark Utu from Janet, the family
decided to take things up a notch, believing the purifying
qualities of water held the key to her salvation. Janet
was held down while water was poured into her eyes
and her mouth in the hope it might finally purge
(23:09):
the evil from her. When she closed her eyes to
shield them from the deluge, others reached out and pride
them open. Some believed when they did so they could
see the demons swimming about inside them. When Janet closed
her mouth, unable to hold any more water in her throat,
(23:30):
again came the frantic hands to pull her mouth apart.
As Janet's eyes grew progressively scratched and red, and she
struggled for breath under the onslaught the young woman grew
increasingly distressed. Clearly the family thought it was finally working.
Janet's struggling, they reasoned, was simply her struggling to free
(23:53):
herself from the demon possessing her, and so, despite her
increasingly desperate protestantatients, the family held firm and continued the treatment.
When Janet's jaw locked, nobody present understood that she was
in fact drowning. Moments later, she was unresponsive, with no
(24:15):
desire to call the authorities and no one on hand
able to perform CPR. It was sometime around eight a m.
On Friday, October twelfth when Janet's heart stopped beating, and
yet even then the markouto lifting was not complete. Janet
(24:35):
now dead, it seemed to many present that whatever had
been stalking her had somehow wormed its way into her
fourteen year old niece. She too, was held down and
dowsed with water. Fingers clawed at her eyes to keep
them open, as the supposedly purifying liquid was repeatedly thrown
(24:56):
onto her face, until eventually she passed out. Just then
a neighbor appeared at the front door. He told everyone
to stop immediately. He claimed he'd received a message in
a dream from Janet's deceased grandmother that the demon was
now gone, and that with Janet's death, the evil had
(25:18):
been dispersed. He said that the grandmother's spirit was angry
that the younger family members had been subjected to all
the madness. Then he blessed Janet's body and advised that
the emergency services be called the lifting was over. In
(25:44):
the days following Janet Moses's death, numerous members of her
family were taken into custody and quizzed about their involvement.
In the end, nine people were charged with manslaughter and
cruelty to a child. No intoxicants were found in any
of the participants of the ritual, while several experts in
(26:05):
Maori culture testified that they had never heard of an
exorcism being conducted with water. As it turned out, the
lion ornaments that had apparently been revealed to spiritual adviser
Timmy Rahi in a vision to be over one hundred
years old were in fact nothing of the sort. Instead,
(26:26):
they were simply mundane objects purchased recently from an everyday
garden center. In June two thousand and nine, five of
the nine family members were found guilty of manslaughter, including
Janet's uncle John and four of her aunts. However, not
(26:47):
one received a jail sentence, but were instead sentenced to
community service and to undertake cultural sensitivity training, which may
seem odd given the severity of the crime, because here's
the thing, whether or not Janet was ever truly possessed,
there is absolutely no denying that her family were only
(27:08):
acting with the very best of intentions according to how
they saw the world, despite their abstract beliefs, leading to
the very real physical consequence of Janet's death. It feels
almost cruel to condemn them for it, given the sincerity,
even purity, of their conviction. It is perhaps a little
(27:30):
hollow given the tragic consequences of their actions, But this
single detail raises some vital and uncomfortable notions about the
world we share with each other. In China Meaval's novel
(27:50):
The City and the City, the plot unfolds effectively in
two locations, the cities of Betzel and ol Coma, that,
in a remarkable and brilliant conceit, in fact occupy the
same physical space. Their inhabitants have been conditioned from birth
to unsee and unhear one another, thereby enabling them to
(28:14):
live side by side despite inhabiting entirely separate perceptual realities.
Each population moves through the same streets and buildings, but
perceives only its own city's architecture, people, and culture. Mentally
erasing anything belonging to the other. To notice or acknowledge
(28:36):
the other side is a crime called breach, punishable by
a mysterious quasi supernatural force. Mieval uses this strange surreal
set up to explore how societies construct and maintain invisible
boundaries political, cultural, psychological, and how they allow people to
(29:00):
coexist in the same reality while living entirely separate lives.
But crucially, for the most part, those who have to
live in this reality do not do so out of
animosity or hatred to the others outside. It is simply
a consequence of their innocently and organically acquired beliefs. And
(29:23):
that is a complicated truth at the center of all this,
and one that bears repeating that whatever others may believe,
and however wrong we might think those beliefs to be,
it is often not hatred or a calculated rejection of
our beliefs that drives them. Janet Moses' family did what
(29:45):
they thought was right. They believed they were trying to
save her, and yes, that ill informed belief killed her.
But here's the thing. It might be easy for some
to look at Janet's family and see some things strange, alien,
even a relic perhaps of less enlightened and more superstitious times.
(30:08):
But the truth is we all live like this. Each
of us are court inside abstract systems of belief, be
they political, cultural, spiritual, that tell us who we are,
what is right, and who to fear. A lot of
the time those beliefs rub quietly against each other, but
(30:30):
often they collide in devastating ways, and when they do,
we're reminded how fragile our sense of the world really is.
In truth, our world has never been one thing. It
has always been a series of overlapping realities, each coexisting
(30:50):
with the other, sometimes helpfully, other times less so. But
the danger, in many ways comes not from belief itself,
but from the moment we stop looking across the divide,
the moment we no longer see the other city, because
that's when belief hardens into something colder, and that is
(31:13):
how the world fractures, not for the most part through malice,
but through conviction through the seductive fallacy that only one
version of the world is correct or indeed is needed.
(31:34):
This episode was written by Richard McLain Smith and James
Connor Patterson. Thank you as ever for listening. Unexplained is
an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLain Smith.
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are
also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book
(31:55):
and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can
purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
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the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or a story
(32:15):
of your own you'd like to share. You can find
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Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast
One of the most continually surprising aspects of spiritual belief
is just how many common features are shared by religions
separated by vast distances language and cultural mores. Before it
was possible for the average person to engage in intercontinental travel,
and well before the advent of instant communication, faith was
(00:33):
restricted to whatever was passed down within one's own immediate environment.
And yet, despite some obvious differences, there are certain aspects
which are shared by virtually all of the world's religions.
Each employees designated sites of worship, whether it be something
rudimentary like a tree or an altar stone, to more
(00:55):
sophisticated structures like synagogues and mosques. Many have a fit
bigger who stands for the ultimate personification of good, as
well as a corresponding evil force that must be fought
against or resisted in order to achieve salvation, and each
of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and the Abrahamic traditions at least
(01:18):
involve the story of a messianic figure with special fealty
to whatever supreme being the respective religions advocate worshiping. Perhaps
one of the most insidious common features shared by every
major religion is the idea that we are vulnerable to
possession by evil. From the sukimono of Japanese Shinto to
(01:41):
the jin of Islam, the notion of the malevolent, otherworldly
papeteer has been present in our understanding of the universe
for millennia. Very often these are supposed phantoms motivated by
vengeance or a will to power, who seek to conduct
their business using people as their vessels. Like parasites, they
(02:04):
feed on the negative emotions of their host and use
up all of their resources until their charges life force
is spent, or else they seek to compel their host
to commit a terrible sin, thereby condemning their soul to
damnation for all eternity. In Christianity, the most well known
(02:25):
biblical example of demonic possession features in Mark five, Matthew eight,
and Lucate of the New Testament, where Jesus is depicted
forcing a collective malignant entity calling itself Legion, from the
body of a man and into a herd of pigs.
It is a troubling story. Then Jesus asked him, what
(02:51):
is your name? My name is Legion, he replied, for
we are many, And he begged Jesus again and again
not to send them out. A large herd of pigs
was seen feeding on a nearby hillside, so the demons
begged Jesus send us among the pigs, allow us to
(03:13):
go into them. He gave them permission, and the impure
spirits came out and went into the pigs. Moments later,
the herd, about two thousand in number, rushed straight down
the steep bank and into a nearby lake, where they
all drown. For many who are religiously minded, the Universes
(03:54):
dictated by a Venetian style dualism, in which the forces
of light and dark, good versus evil are continually in battle.
For them, religion offers a safeguard against this darkness. The
great fear, however, is that should they at any point
let their guard down, evil is always lurking, ready to
(04:17):
pounce and worm its way inside them. In Maori culture,
this belief is a little more nuanced. The idea of
possession doesn't take the form of a demon invading the body. Rather,
it's understood through something called marcutu, a kind of spiritual pollution,
a curse that seeps into the world when the balance
(04:40):
between people, ancestors and the land is broken. It isn't
about good and evil in a dualistic sense. It's about
harmony and disruption. To be afflicted by marcutu is to
be caught in a web of unseen forces, ancestral wrongs,
broke can tarpou, the sacred laws that keep the world
(05:03):
in spiritual balance, and the lingering residue of guilt or shame. Traditionally,
a tohunga, a ritual expert, would lift the markutu with karakia,
incantations and chants and water to help restore order to
the world. It's a ritual of reconciliation, not combat, meant
(05:26):
to heal a relationship with the unseen world, rather than
to drive out an evil being. It's a powerful idea,
to say the least. In the case of one family
living on the outskirts of Wellington, New Zealand, it was
one that for a brief period in October two thousand
and seven, became terrifyingly real. You're listening to Unexplained and
(05:50):
I'm Richard McLean Smith. One unusually stormy evening on Saturday
sixth of October two thousand and seven, twenty two year
ould Janet Moses was slumped in an arm chair in
(06:10):
the front bar of the Palliser Hotel. The suburb of
Wainoia Marta was sleepy and close knit, and family engagements
like this one were a regular occurrence. Though she'd been
feeling tired, Janet felt it was important to make an
appearance because her beloved sister was finally turning twenty one.
(06:31):
To Janet, the age gap of a year may as
well have been decades. Unlike her sister, who was still
relatively carefree and unburdened by the adult world, Janet was
more or less a single mother to two young girls.
Her long term partner, Shane, who she'd been with for
nine years, was almost never at home. Janet had even
(06:53):
heard whispers about a possible infidelity, but she felt so
tired of it all she couldn't find the strength to
confront him about it. On this night, however, she tried
to put on a show for her sister. The whole
family was in attendance, and they would notice if she
was feeling down. They did everything together, often eating and
(07:14):
spending time together. They even had their own sports team,
with the family emblem of a white lion emblazoned on
their crest, Janet sipped at her glass of beer and
eventually allowed it to go flat and warm. She couldn't
stop thinking about her maternal grandmother, who'd recently passed away,
(07:35):
how much she would have loved to have been there
with everyone that night. Nearby, Janet's uncle John was concerned.
He'd spotted Janet from across the room staring blankly at
the wall. When he asked her what was wrong, Janet
explained that she wasn't feeling great and asked John if
he'd seen her aunt, Glennis anywhere, who'd promised to give
(07:57):
her a lift home. When Glennis eventually caught up with her,
she was shocked at just how drawn out Janet looked.
She could have passed for a woman in her fifties,
she thought, instead of the dynamic young woman of twenty
two she knew her to be. Without a second thought,
Glennis suggested that Janet and her kids crash at her
(08:18):
house for the night, where she could keep an eye
on her and help with the kids while Janet tried
to get some rest. With any luck, she thought Janet
would be back to her usual self in no time.
(08:43):
The following morning, Glennis awoke to what seemed like the
distant sound of chattering on the street outside her bedroom window.
When she checked on Janet's girls next door, she found
them snoring under the first rays of sun that were
now streaming through the curtains. But when she went into
Janet's bedroom, she was puzzled to find the bed neatly made,
(09:06):
with no sign of her niece having slept in it
at all. Janet, she called out, there was only a
deafening silence in reply. At the front of the house,
the main door gaped open, the thin mesh of the
screen door drawn across the frame. She reached out, unhooked it,
(09:28):
and stepped out onto the lawn of her front garden
into the balmy heat of what was shaping up to
be a scorching day. When Glennis walked to the edge
of her pathway, she saw a figure in a billowing
white robe up ahead in the middle distance. It was Janet,
still wearing her pajamas, walking confusedly up the middle of
(09:50):
the road in bare feet. As Glennis drew closer to her,
she could hear her muttering something under her breath. What's that,
Glennis asked softly. Janet's facial expression didn't change, and she
seemed not to notice Glennis at all. Instead, her eyes
(10:11):
remained fixed on the hills that rose above the estate
as she continued muttering the same apparent phrase over and
over again. It sounded like a prayer. Janet, please come inside.
You're going to hurt yourself out here. Just then Janet
stopped and fixed Glennys with a blank stare. To Glennis,
(10:36):
it seemed as though her irises had disappeared, leaving her
eyes appearing almost entirely all consumingly black. The young woman
opened her mouth to speak, but the words that Janet
croaked out did not seem to be coming from her
own vocal chords at all. They're coming, she said to
(10:57):
her aunt, with a gaze that seemed then to Glennis
to be not of this world. They're coming. It was
just after one pm when Glennis arrived with Janet and
the girls in tow. Uncle John had been expecting them,
(11:21):
and not just because Sunday was normally when the family
sat down for their weekly meeting. Glennis had phoned John
first thing and explained everything that was going on. He
couldn't help feeling that his poor young niece had finally
been driven to the brink by the demands of parenting
and her bad relationship, John resolved to sort it out
(11:43):
once and for all. Since his mother had died, he'd
taken on his role as head of the family with Gusto,
and it both heartened and terrified him to be looked
upon with so much responsibility. By then, other family members
had already arrived and were all around the living room
drinking coffee. Over the course of the next few hours,
(12:05):
members of Janet's family took it in turns to reassure
her that they loved her, perhaps hoping that that might
be enough to bring her out of her stupor. All
the while, despite the heat, Janet simply sat stock still
in her jacket and remained silently staring at the ground.
When the family meeting was over, Glennis took Janet to
(12:28):
convalesce at the former home of her grandmother, where her
mother now lived, who was waiting for her. When she arrived,
Janet seemed exhausted. A bed was set up for her
in a spare room next to a large stone statue
of a lion. The lion had been acquired a few
weeks before by her sister from the grounds at the
(12:49):
Gray Town hotel located about an hour's drive away. Because
the lion was seen as a natural talisman of the family,
her sister thought it would bring good ffe fortune to
their house. It was around one o'clock the following morning
when a horrific scream ripped through the silence of the house.
Janet's mother rushed into Janet's room to find her daughter
(13:13):
in hysterics, claiming that the spirit of the statue was
tormenting her and scratching her from the inside out. She
was sweating so much from her forehead it looked as
though she'd just come out of the shower. Janet's mother
did her best to calm her down and soothed her
back to sleep, but the following day her mood seemed
(13:33):
to have grown worse. Things only deteriorated further from there.
It wasn't clear who said it first, but soon the
family began to wonder if Janet was succumbing to mark utu.
Barely able to lift herself from bed with an ever
growing sense of paranoia, it was clear that Janet was
(13:54):
in severe trouble and it was time to seek help.
It was early on the morning of Monday, eighth of
October when Timmy Rahi arrived at Janet's mother's home. In
his back was a leather bound copy of the Bible
(14:14):
and a bottle of holy water. Timmy was renowned within
the local married community as a cowmatur or spiritual adviser,
and had even worked as a cultural attache to New
Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark on matters pertaining to native spirituality.
From Timmy's perspective, human beings were composed of both physical
(14:37):
and spiritual elements, and it was his belief that the
spiritual was vulnerable to influence from both good and bad
other worldly beings. On his arrival, John quickly ushered Timmy
into the house where countless other members of Janet's extended
family were also gathered, and in the middle of them
(14:58):
all was a completely unresponsive Janet. Timmy couldn't help being
deeply concerned by Janet's exhausted state and the distant look
in her eyes, though he couldn't be sure what was
wrong exactly. After reciting some prayers but getting nothing in response,
he suggested the best option would be to conduct the
(15:19):
mark Utu lifting as ceremony to rid any potentially disruptive
energies in case things got worse. At this stage, it
merely involved blessing Janet with water and saying special cohens
paradoxical riddles designed to break patterns of thought over her
prone body in an effort to ward off the perceived evil.
(15:42):
But as the afternoon progressed, something strange occurred. Timmy claimed
to have a vision of three claws ripping into Janet.
It was the stone Lion from the hotel, he said.
The implication was clear. It wasn't a negative, essays that
Janet was struggling with some kind of malignant demonic entity
(16:05):
had got into her. As it turned out, the stone
and statue was actually part of a pair. The way
Timmy saw it, the pair had been together for over
one hundred years, so when Janet's sister stole one of them,
the other's protective spirits had become angry and placed a
curse on Janet's family. A shudder of fear passed between
(16:28):
all those present. Were they all in danger nowt they wondered,
Not wanting to take any chances, Janet's uncle John immediately
sprang into action and ordered the statue to be taken
back to the hotel without delay, the statue was dragged
from the house and placed in the back of a
truck and driven away from the house at speed. A
(16:51):
convoy of eight further vehicles containing nearly forty members of
Janet's family, many who'd called off sick from work a school,
art the statue back to the Gray Town Hotel. Inside
one of the cars, Janet became restless, seeming to suddenly
snap out of her otherwise placid state. She began to
(17:13):
spit and rail at the people around her, and even
threatened to kill her paternal grandmother when she tried to
calm her down. With no time to spare, the family
finally arrived at the hotel, Several people jumped out and
hurriedly pulled the heavy stone lion from the back of
the truck, then dragged it back to the exact spot
(17:35):
from where it had been taken. Once back in place,
the relief among them all was palpable to be sure
it had done the trick. Timmy Rahi conducted a short
service to formalize the statue's return and pray for forgiveness.
(17:58):
Back at Janet's mother's house, the family had dinner together, then,
on the advice of Timmy Rahi, now hopeful that all
would soon return to normal. Janet was ordered to try
and get some rest, but Rahi was unsettled despite everything,
Returning the statue had not fixed the problem. As he
(18:19):
explained to John, the lion's return had only removed two
of the claws from his vision. He could still see
one clinging on to Janet. The mark utu was still there,
and it was now somehow linked to Janet's partner Shane.
On Wednesday, tenth of October, the family gathered again at
(18:40):
Janet's mother's home. Though he didn't know exactly how it
was done, Uncle John decided to continue the markutu lifting.
He began by ordering the family to surround Janet. Just
then someone pointed out the bone necklace around her neck,
a gift for Shane. It was promptly cut off and
(19:02):
thrown away. Then together, under John's guidance, the family began
to chant blessings as they passed around a cup of water,
taking it in turns to sip from it. They began
to stomp in unison as though they might somehow stamp
the markoutu out of her. Outside, unsettled neighbors listened with
(19:25):
increasing concern to the deafening sounds of chanting and stomping
coming from inside the property. While inside, as the temperature
rose ever higher, hitting forty degrees celsius, the family took
to splashing themselves with cupfuls of water to help cool
down as they continued to stamp and shout for the
(19:46):
Markoutu to leave Janet. At some point, Janet's paternal relatives
began to wonder if she might be better off going
to hospital, but their concerns were waved away. Instead, with
nothing seeming to work, Janet was poured into the shower,
fully clothed and sprayed with cold water, in the belief
(20:08):
that subjecting her to cold temperatures would make the mark
utu that still clung to her uncomfortable. When this also
didn't work, Janet was led back to the living room,
where the lifting continued with ever more gusto. By Thursday,
(20:35):
eleventh of October, the heat which enveloped Wellington had become
virtually unbearable. That morning, Janet's mother, along with some younger
members of the family, arrived at the house where Janet
was being kept. What they found there shocked them to
the core. Numerous members of the family sat about in
(20:55):
various states of lucidity. Clearly having been up all night,
Uncle John hadn't changed his clothes for days, and he
was babbling incoherently about something evil in Janet's eyes, while
all about the house was completely flooded. Worst of all, Janet,
who veered from restless sleep to lugubrious bouts of wakefulness,
(21:19):
was no better than the last time her mother had
seen her. With her mother's arrival and Janet seemingly subdued
for the moment, John took the opportunity to try and
get some rest, but no sooner had he closed his eyes,
Janet started screaming, They're coming. She growled, They're coming. Several
(21:42):
family members shot up and began shadow boxing around her,
as if they were fighting off invisible entities. At some point,
John noticed that some of the children had begun to
act strangely too. Some were staring blankly off into the distance,
seemingly in a trance, while others seemed to be muttering
(22:04):
incoherently to themselves. It was the thing they'd feared the most,
the Markkutu was spreading hurriedly. The children were all made
to vomit in order to purge any evil that was
thought to be inside them. Anything solid that came up
was swiftly stamped on by the others in an effort
(22:25):
to obliterate any evil spirit that it might contain. From
that point on, everyone was banned from looking Janet in
the eyes lest they also succumbed to the malignant curse.
At some point, perhaps growing increasingly terrified by the ritual's
(22:49):
inability to expunge the mark Utu from Janet, the family
decided to take things up a notch, believing the purifying
qualities of water held the key to her salvation. Janet
was held down while water was poured into her eyes
and her mouth in the hope it might finally purge
(23:09):
the evil from her. When she closed her eyes to
shield them from the deluge, others reached out and pride
them open. Some believed when they did so they could
see the demons swimming about inside them. When Janet closed
her mouth, unable to hold any more water in her throat,
(23:30):
again came the frantic hands to pull her mouth apart.
As Janet's eyes grew progressively scratched and red, and she
struggled for breath under the onslaught the young woman grew
increasingly distressed. Clearly the family thought it was finally working.
Janet's struggling, they reasoned, was simply her struggling to free
(23:53):
herself from the demon possessing her, and so, despite her
increasingly desperate protestantatients, the family held firm and continued the treatment.
When Janet's jaw locked, nobody present understood that she was
in fact drowning. Moments later, she was unresponsive, with no
(24:15):
desire to call the authorities and no one on hand
able to perform CPR. It was sometime around eight a m.
On Friday, October twelfth when Janet's heart stopped beating, and
yet even then the markouto lifting was not complete. Janet
(24:35):
now dead, it seemed to many present that whatever had
been stalking her had somehow wormed its way into her
fourteen year old niece. She too, was held down and
dowsed with water. Fingers clawed at her eyes to keep
them open, as the supposedly purifying liquid was repeatedly thrown
(24:56):
onto her face, until eventually she passed out. Just then
a neighbor appeared at the front door. He told everyone
to stop immediately. He claimed he'd received a message in
a dream from Janet's deceased grandmother that the demon was
now gone, and that with Janet's death, the evil had
(25:18):
been dispersed. He said that the grandmother's spirit was angry
that the younger family members had been subjected to all
the madness. Then he blessed Janet's body and advised that
the emergency services be called the lifting was over. In
(25:44):
the days following Janet Moses's death, numerous members of her
family were taken into custody and quizzed about their involvement.
In the end, nine people were charged with manslaughter and
cruelty to a child. No intoxicants were found in any
of the participants of the ritual, while several experts in
(26:05):
Maori culture testified that they had never heard of an
exorcism being conducted with water. As it turned out, the
lion ornaments that had apparently been revealed to spiritual adviser
Timmy Rahi in a vision to be over one hundred
years old were in fact nothing of the sort. Instead,
(26:26):
they were simply mundane objects purchased recently from an everyday
garden center. In June two thousand and nine, five of
the nine family members were found guilty of manslaughter, including
Janet's uncle John and four of her aunts. However, not
(26:47):
one received a jail sentence, but were instead sentenced to
community service and to undertake cultural sensitivity training, which may
seem odd given the severity of the crime, because here's
the thing, whether or not Janet was ever truly possessed,
there is absolutely no denying that her family were only
(27:08):
acting with the very best of intentions according to how
they saw the world, despite their abstract beliefs, leading to
the very real physical consequence of Janet's death. It feels
almost cruel to condemn them for it, given the sincerity,
even purity, of their conviction. It is perhaps a little
(27:30):
hollow given the tragic consequences of their actions, But this
single detail raises some vital and uncomfortable notions about the
world we share with each other. In China Meaval's novel
(27:50):
The City and the City, the plot unfolds effectively in
two locations, the cities of Betzel and ol Coma, that,
in a remarkable and brilliant conceit, in fact occupy the
same physical space. Their inhabitants have been conditioned from birth
to unsee and unhear one another, thereby enabling them to
(28:14):
live side by side despite inhabiting entirely separate perceptual realities.
Each population moves through the same streets and buildings, but
perceives only its own city's architecture, people, and culture. Mentally
erasing anything belonging to the other. To notice or acknowledge
(28:36):
the other side is a crime called breach, punishable by
a mysterious quasi supernatural force. Mieval uses this strange surreal
set up to explore how societies construct and maintain invisible
boundaries political, cultural, psychological, and how they allow people to
(29:00):
coexist in the same reality while living entirely separate lives.
But crucially, for the most part, those who have to
live in this reality do not do so out of
animosity or hatred to the others outside. It is simply
a consequence of their innocently and organically acquired beliefs. And
(29:23):
that is a complicated truth at the center of all this,
and one that bears repeating that whatever others may believe,
and however wrong we might think those beliefs to be,
it is often not hatred or a calculated rejection of
our beliefs that drives them. Janet Moses' family did what
(29:45):
they thought was right. They believed they were trying to
save her, and yes, that ill informed belief killed her.
But here's the thing. It might be easy for some
to look at Janet's family and see some things strange, alien,
even a relic perhaps of less enlightened and more superstitious times.
(30:08):
But the truth is we all live like this. Each
of us are court inside abstract systems of belief, be
they political, cultural, spiritual, that tell us who we are,
what is right, and who to fear. A lot of
the time those beliefs rub quietly against each other, but
(30:30):
often they collide in devastating ways, and when they do,
we're reminded how fragile our sense of the world really is.
In truth, our world has never been one thing. It
has always been a series of overlapping realities, each coexisting
(30:50):
with the other, sometimes helpfully, other times less so. But
the danger, in many ways comes not from belief itself,
but from the moment we stop looking across the divide,
the moment we no longer see the other city, because
that's when belief hardens into something colder, and that is
(31:13):
how the world fractures, not for the most part through malice,
but through conviction through the seductive fallacy that only one
version of the world is correct or indeed is needed.
(31:34):
This episode was written by Richard McLain Smith and James
Connor Patterson. Thank you as ever for listening. Unexplained is
an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLain Smith.
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are
also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book
(31:55):
and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can
purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with
any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or a story
(32:15):
of your own you'd like to share. You can find
out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us
online through x and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod and
Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast
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