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Did you catch my interview the other day with Matt Baglio, author of "The Rite," the new book out that follows an American priest in Rome as he trains to be an exorcist? Word now comes that the book is going to be a Hollywood feature film. Congratulations to Matt -- and I hope he's managed to maintain a significant amount of creative control over the film, because the story he tells in his book is an important one, one that could easily be ruined by Hollywood, which will have to strain mightily against its own instincts to see this tale as nothing more than pea-soup vomit and ooga-booga.

Matt Baglio is a young American journalist living in Rome. When he heard of a California priest who had been sent to Rome by his bishop to learn how to be an exorcist, Baglio became intrigued. Why does the Catholic Church still exorcise people? Is this stuff for real?

He writes about his journey into the world of contemporary exorcism in "The Rite", which has just been published. Over the course of his reporting, Baglio returned to Catholicism, in part by being confronted with the reality of the demonic -- of disembodied intelligent evil, and the power of Jesus Christ in the Church to deal effectively with it.

I conducted an e-mail interview with Baglio, from Rome. In it, he discusses what exorcism is, and is not, the presence of supernatural evil in the contemporary world, and a strange but joyful mystical experience that happened to him, and just might have been a sign of the presence of the Virgin Mary. The entire interview is below the jump.

Well, it's Halloween. Share stories you have of personal encounters with ghosts, demons or the supernatural.

Here's an account from the early 1990s of a time I went with an exorcist and his helpers to a haunted house north of New Orleans, and saw strange things. Excerpt:

"It's here. This is the place. This is it," she tells the Rev. Mario Termini, the official exorcist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge, who awaits her directions. Father Termini and his two other assistants, Florence Delapasse and Mike Dupre, will perform a Mass of deliverance to free the land from what they believe is demonic oppression. "It's here. This is the place. This is it," she tells the Rev. Mario Termini, the official exorcist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge, who awaits her directions. Father Termini and his two other assistants, Florence Delapasse and Mike Dupre, will perform a Mass of deliverance to free the land from what they believe is demonic oppression.

(N.B., I got one fact wrong: the late Fr. Termini was not the official exorcist)

A plantation house in my hometown makes Time magazine's list of Top 10 Most Haunted Places. I once talked to Puddin' Bankston, a friend of my dad's, who grew up in that house. She said that as a girl, she'd be upstairs in bed, and would hear sounds of a party going on downstairs in the ballroom -- laughter, talking, glasses tinkling, etc. But of course nothing was there. There are lots of people with similar stories about that house. The last time I was there, as I stood in the dining room, a vase toppled over with no one anywhere near the mantle. FWIW.

Anyway, I know a lot of you have had close encounters with the supernatural and paranormal. I'd like this thread to be about storytelling, mostly, not arguing, so let's keep it in that, uh, spirit.

UPDATE: OK, here's a personal story about feeling watched...

Details magazine has a lengthy profile of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Whatever else he is, the man is not an underachiever. Excerpt:

As an undergrad at Brown, Jindal interned for Jim McCrery, a Republican congressman from Shreveport, Louisiana. One week into the job, Jindal asked if he could have something substantive to work on. Annoyed, McCrery asked him to formulate a solution to a problem considered intractable by those on Capitol Hill: Medicare. "He just grinned," McCrery recalls. "I expected never to see him again." Two weeks later, Jindal plopped a thick manuscript on McCrery's desk: Medicare, solved (at least to Jindal's thinking). Jindal's analysis, McCrery says, "was excellent." Especially from a 20-year-old.

By 1994, Jindal had been to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and had taken a lucrative job as a consultant in Washington, D.C. But he was already restless. He called McCrery to recommend himself for Louisiana's secretary of health and hospitals, a cabinet-level position involving oversight of 40 percent of the state budget. "Remember," McCrery says, "Bobby was like 23 years old. So I asked if he'd consider a deputy position." Jindal said no. A year later, McCrery got Jindal an audience with Republican governor Mike Foster. "When they told me he was 24, I wasn't very interested," Foster says. But in person Jindal won him over and Foster hired him on the spot. "Most people who border on genius," Foster says, "they're not too personable. But he's personable."

That combustible mixture--high-caliber smarts and higher-caliber ambition--combined with a smooth, polished demeanor, has fueled Jindal's rocket-ship rise through Louisiana politics. Jindal calls himself a "policy wonk at heart"; ask him about an issue and you'll hear all 31 points of a 31-point plan. Yet his wonkiness is decidedly (Bill) Clintonesque: suffused with the gleam of personality and devoid of lecture-hall drone. "I want to be the most boring but most effective governor," he says. "My wife says I have the boring part down."

If Jindal has a future in national politics, he's going to have a tough time explaining the writing in the 1990s he did about his encounter with the demonic. (A truncated version of that story is here, but you have to purchase the whole thing.) The Details piece mentions it, but TPM offers more quotes.

I applaud Jindal's courage in talking publicly about the things he witnessed. I believe him, too. None of this hurts him, obviously, as governor of Louisiana, nor will it be a big deal in the South in general, should he run on a national ticket. But he's going to get clobbered by it elsewhere.

Or will he? Americans are a religious people, and tend toward superstition, like most people on the planet. According to a Harris poll, one in four believes in astrology. Only one in four rejects belief in the Devil. Jindal's experience will be fodder for the media and the late-night comedians, but I'd guess that most Americans wouldn't find it unbelievable or beyond the pale. I certainly wouldn't -- but longtime readers know that.

I'll tell another ghost story.

I have a friend I'll call Alice. A few years ago, Alice and some friends went to see a psychic, just for kicks. The psychic was doing a reading on one of the women (not Alice), and said she saw in the room a man. She described the way the man looked, and said he was wearing a military uniform, which she described in detail. It didn't make sense to any of the women.

But on the way home, it hit them: their high school classmate "Jack" had been killed in a car wreck a few years after graduation, and had been buried in his military uniform. Could that have been Jack? It seemed so from her description.

Alice told me shortly after that she began having dreams in which Jack would come visit her. He was wearing his uniform. He wouldn't speak to her, but she understood somehow that the purpose of his visit was to convey the information that he was in a good place now. Alice thought she was merely having a dream based on her visit to the psychic, and that it was an expression of her desire that Jack's soul be at peace. Then one day, she got together with "Becky," one of the women who'd gone along with her to the psychic, and Becky told her over coffee that she'd been having recurring dreams of Jack. Becky's dreams were the same as Alice's. Interestingly, Jack had dated them both in high school, and was in love with Alice when she married her husband. Jack begged her not to marry the guy, but she told him that she was in love with someone else, and that was that.

Then Alice had a dream in which Jack led her to an old barn on property where they all used to party in high school. Jack climbed up onto a rafter, sat in the middle with his legs dangling, smiling, and pointed down to the ground, at a particular spot. When Alice woke up, she called Becky to tell her about the dream. After some time, they decided to sneak onto the property where the barn sits, and see if they could find a clue.

So, they get to the barn, and they call out, "Jack, we're here because we think you want us to be here. If you can hear us, show us what you want us to find." They walked around looking for anything unusual. Alice told me the barn had been out of use for a long time. Then, she said, she remembered Jack pointing to a particular spot on the ground. She walked over to that rafter, then put her foot down on the spot.

The ground gave way slightly.

Alice shrieked and drew back her foot. Something had clearly been buried there. Alice told me she and Becky began to dig with their hands, but they became overawed by fright, and ran away.

That was several years ago. She's never recovered the nerve to go back. I've visited her since first hearing this story, and tried to convince her to take me to the barn with a video camera and a shovel. She won't let me do that. She says that she and Becky are afraid they'll get caught trespassing, but personally, judging by her deep anxiety in talking about this whole thing, I think she's too frightened of what might be buried in that barn.

What do you think is buried in that barn?