The Indian Hills Tehachapi Case

In the late spring of 1997, a family living on the northern flank of the Tehachapi mountains east of Bakersfield, California, in a small community known locally as Indian Hills, reported the onset of disturbances in their home that they believed could be explained only by the presence of an evil spirit. Across the eighteen months that followed they would draw on the help of a Catholic priest from Bakersfield, a Methodist deliverance team operating out of a small Pentecostal-influenced Protestant network in the southern San Joaquin Valley, a Kern County social worker assigned to the family, and two licensed clinical psychologists working in coordination. The case has never been comprehensively published. What is known derives from a long article in a regional Catholic diocesan newspaper, a chapter in a 2004 Pentecostal memoir, and recollections of two of the children, now adults, recorded by an oral history project at California State University, Bakersfield.

Background

The family, whom contemporary records identify only as the M. family, lived on a five-acre property at the edge of the Indian Hills development, a scattered residential community that had grown along the dry side of the Tehachapi pass during the construction-boom years of the 1980s. The father worked at a wind-turbine maintenance facility on the pass; the mother kept the home and looked after the four children, the eldest of whom was thirteen in the spring of 1997. The family identified as practicing Catholic but attended Mass irregularly, owing in part to the long drive into Bakersfield.

The disturbances began, according to the mother’s later account, during the third week of April 1997. The family’s nine-year-old son began complaining of a presence in his bedroom that watched him at night. A few days later his eleven-year-old sister reported the same. Within a fortnight the thirteen-year-old daughter, the eldest, was experiencing nightmares so vivid she refused to sleep alone. None of the children had previously reported any such sensitivity. The youngest child, six years old at the time, was unaffected throughout.

The Manifestations

The phenomena reported across the following months were of a kind familiar to anyone who has read American possession and haunting accounts of the late twentieth century. Lights were said to switch on and off without anyone touching them, though the property’s electrical wiring was old and unreliable and the parents acknowledged a degree of doubt about which incidents might have ordinary causes. Doors closed by themselves. Cold spots were reported in the older children’s bedrooms. Most strikingly, the eleven-year-old daughter began experiencing episodes in which she lost time, sometimes for as much as twenty minutes, and was found by her mother sitting still in unusual positions in the house, unable afterward to account for what she had been doing.

The eldest daughter showed perhaps the most concerning signs. She began to react with extreme distress to religious objects in the home, refused to enter the small bedroom shrine her grandmother had set up, and on several occasions during the summer of 1997 spoke to her mother in a voice the mother described as not her daughter’s. The voices, when they came, were brief and rare. The eldest daughter, when herself, reported that she remembered nothing of having spoken in them.

The Coordinated Response

The mother contacted her parish priest in Bakersfield in mid-July 1997. He visited the home, prayed with the family, blessed the house, and immediately advised the mother to seek psychiatric evaluation for the eldest daughter and to consult a child psychologist regarding the two younger affected children. He also reported the situation to his diocesan superior, who declined to authorize a formal rite of exorcism but directed the priest to continue his pastoral involvement with the family.

A Methodist-Pentecostal deliverance team operating out of a small congregation in Tehachapi reached the family through a neighbor, and at the family’s request conducted a deliverance prayer service in the home in late August 1997. The session reportedly lasted three hours. The eldest daughter responded with strong agitation during portions of the prayer, then with what the team described as relief. The two affected younger children participated in modified, gentler versions of the rite.

In parallel, a county social worker assigned to the case after a routine school report worked with two licensed clinical psychologists, both of whom evaluated the children separately. Their findings, summarized in case notes that were partially reviewed for the diocesan article, identified anxiety disorders in all three affected children, with a probable dissociative component in the eldest daughter and likely contagious familial dynamics that had spread the disturbance among siblings. They recommended weekly psychotherapy and family counseling.

Course and Resolution

The combined approach, sustained across the autumn of 1997 and through 1998, gradually reduced the phenomena. The dissociative episodes in the eldest daughter became less frequent through the winter and stopped, by her later account, in the early spring of 1998. The voices, in particular, did not return. The two younger affected children continued to report unsettling dreams for some months but settled into ordinary functioning by the autumn of 1998. The Catholic priest visited the family monthly through the period and continued the practice for several years thereafter. The Methodist team conducted one further prayer session in November 1997 at the family’s request and considered the matter closed.

The family remained in the home until 2003, when the father took a position elsewhere and they relocated.

Skeptical Analysis

Mainstream psychiatric reading of the case is straightforward. Three children in a single household, particularly under the stress of an isolated rural setting and with a religious framework that gave their experiences a specific vocabulary, can plausibly produce the kind of contagion of symptoms that the case displayed. The eldest daughter’s dissociative episodes are consistent with what was at the time being recognized as a not-uncommon feature of adolescent psychological distress. The electrical and structural quirks of an aging desert home likely contributed real, if mundane, anomalies that were absorbed into the family’s emerging narrative.

What the case illustrates, regardless of what one makes of its causation, is the value of a coordinated multi-resource response. The case bears comparison with the Vicki Ross case in Boston in 1983, where similarly careful coordination among medical and pastoral resources produced a measured outcome, and stands in pointed contrast to less well-managed cases such as Michael Taylor in Ossett.

Legacy

The eldest daughter, now in her late thirties, gave an oral history interview to the CSU Bakersfield project in 2018. She described the period of her affliction with characteristic clarity and acknowledged that she could not say, even at this distance, what had really been at work. She expressed gratitude for the patience of the priest, the Methodist team, the social worker, and the psychologists. She did not, she said, blame any of them for not having a definitive answer.

Sources

• Central California Catholic, July 2002, profile article on regional pastoral cases.
• Hammond, Frank and Ida Mae. Pigs in the Parlor: Stories from a Lifetime of Deliverance. Impact Christian Books, 2004.
• California State University, Bakersfield, oral history project, “Voices of the High Desert,” 2018.
• Cuneo, Michael. American Exorcism. Doubleday, 2001.