The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Episode 207 - Personal Possessions

June 7, 2016·41 min·4 clips

Jessica Weldon describes biting her mother and tasting blood during a demonic episode at age twelve.

Jessica Weldon finally wants to talk. Alex Regan goes back to the exorcism tape where she saw four large men lifted off the ground by a twelve-year-old girl. Strand still says it was faked. Father Peter Vincent's fourth exorcism moves back to the center of the story, but Jessica is no longer just a figure on tape. She is thirty-five now, working in HR for a mining company in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and she had ignored the show's earlier messages. Then people started calling. Someone pointed her to the Black Tape, and she found out her name had been used on the podcast. Her first reaction is not wonder. She tells Alex that being known around here as the exorcism girl has been horrifying, not fascinating. Alex apologizes, badly timed and uncomfortable. Jessica's anger gives the episode its weight: these cases stop being tidy stories when the person at the center still has to live with them. The spectacle shifts. What Alex treated as a strange recording, Jessica describes as an awful stretch of her life dragged into public view. She wants pieces put back where they belong. The interview turns away from proof and toward control, and asks who gets to tell an awful story once it becomes a Black Tape. Alex asks about possession carefully. Jessica rejects the word and says she believes she was brainwashed, which opens a new problem without solving the old one. Strand's claim of fakery still sits there, but Jessica makes simple debunking feel too small. By the end, the case has widened toward Howard Strand, Amalia Tchenkova, the Order of the Cenefists, and a road trip to Canada with Nick.

As heard by us

A measured return to Jessica Weldon's story that gives her room to push back.

This episode works best when Jessica Weldon gets to answer for herself. Alex listens, apologizes, and the hurt of being pulled into public view feels real.

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Why you'd press play

Hear Jessica Weldon step back in and reclaim the story that made her the exorcism girl.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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