VOICEOVER: The iconic blockbuster movie The Exorcist
terrified audiences in the 1970s.
Some say the movie may have helped unleash
a series of events we now call 'satanic panic.'
GUSTAVO BENEJAM: The Exorcist, The Omen.
If you look at movies that were satanic, possessed,
and kind of black magic,
kids, they're influenced by that.
ROB MORPHY: It wasn't just pop culture.
It was the beginning of the satanic panic that would grip America.
Tarot cards, spirit boards and black magic sprang into popularity.
Suddenly, strange things started happening.
It comes to a big, like, explosion of paranormal activity.
Hysteria broke out.
A Miami hospital flooded with thousands of people
claiming to be possessed by demons.
ROB: Law enforcement agencies throughout the nation were dealing with occult activities,
sacrifices, reports of hauntings, possessions,
dealings with demonic entities were on the rise.
The devil was everywhere.
And then, in the fall of 1979,
police were called to break up a riot at a Miami high school
where kids reported being possessed by the devil.
FRANK: Several of them had mentioned Satan.
They told terrifying stories
of students throwing themselves out windows, screaming and writhing on the floor.
A girl levitating, and a boy transforming into pure evil.
Eyes bulging, and head turning around, like The Exorcist.
I know this is a paranormal event...
..because of the eyewitness testimony.
Could an entire school become possessed by dark forces,
turning children into demons?
There was something that was scaring these kids. They were frightened.
Shocking revelations from former students,
speaking out for the first time,
shed light on the day hell broke loose
and turned a high school into... the Devil's Academy.
This is, beyond a doubt,
the most significant paranormal event in US history.
(SCHOOL BELL RINGING)
(CLASS RECITING PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE)
V/O: A week before Halloween,
at a Miami military academy in Florida,
it appears to be a normal school day.
Students at this institution are called cadets,
and this morning the cadets are in class,
doing what most other high-schoolers are doing.
Studying, daydreaming,
wondering what the weekend holds.
Until suddenly, everything changes.
It goes terribly wrong.
(GIRL SCREAMING)
One student stands up and runs out of the door.
Several classmates jump up and follow her
down the hall to the girls' bathroom
to make sure she's OK.
ROB: Her friends surround her.
They're rooted with terror.
They're watching, trying to figure out what's going on.
She's spitting and mumbling,
and finally they make out these terrible words.
'The devil is inside of me.'
GIRL: The devil is inside of me!
She starts manifesting full-on signs of demonic possession.
Right before her classmates' eyes,
the young woman seems to levitate.
(CLASSMATES SCREAMING)
That's when everyone knows that something very terrible has begun.
All of the other students that were in the girls' bathroom with her were terrified.
They didn't know what was happening.
ROB: Her friends have no idea what to do.
Some are trying to comfort her,
others are beginning to show signs of being possessed themselves.
It's like an infection that's spreading
from one student to the next.
V/O: Back in the classroom, the teacher hears mysterious cries
coming from the girls' room.
(PANICKED SOBBING)
(GUTTURAL GROWLING)
Unnerved, she goes to investigate.
(SCREAMING AND WHIMPERING)
Something seems to have unleashed a malevolent force
that floods the entire school.
It struck. And when it struck, it struck hard.
It hit the students like a tidal wave.
In another classroom, the students have no idea
what horrors have just transpired in the girls' room.
But they say two cadets suddenly erupt
into unprovoked, violent battle.
(CLASSROOM UPROAR)
They're tussling between the desks, sending things scattering and flying.
And then, the unthinkable.
One of the boys crashes through a glass window,
slamming down onto the pavement two stories below.
The students run to the windows, looking on in horror,
expecting to see their classmate's bloodied, lifeless body on the ground.
LYNNE BROOKS: People observed that the kid got right up
and had red eyes, and was growling.
A school official races to help,
but gets a shocking response
from the unbelievably uninjured boy.
Eyewitnesses say he was wild-eyed, animalistic,
he has the strength of... God knows how many people.
He has superhuman strength.
The student body, shocked by what they are seeing,
now explodes into unfettered paranormal chaos.
(SCREAMING)
We have a situation that is absolutely out of control.
People are tearing doors off the hinges,
papers flying everywhere.
Some kids are convulsing on the floor, others are screaming in terror.
Overwhelmingly, the students have undergone
a horrifying physical transformation.
Some of these students describe making eye contact
with something that was very, very evil.
Some of them describe seeing eyes. Bad eyes, evil eyes.
Looking into the face of people, it was not them looking back.
Something looking out of a friend that they knew
that was in their body that wasn't there before.
They are acting with preternatural strength and an absolute, chaotic energy
to destroy the building that was once a calm institution of learning.
(PHONE RINGING)
In an all-out war with their demons,
the school administration urgently sends an SOS to Miami law enforcement.
FRANK ROLLASON: On October 25, 1979,
this was a particularly strange call.
I could listen to the lieutenant talking to the alarm office.
It was just chaos there. Kids are running everywhere.
(APPROACHING SIRENS)
When I arrived, the children were still running around.
They were frightened, and were screaming. It was very chaotic.
They would get together in little groups and yell and scream
and then split up and go in different directions.
It appeared that they were, like, afraid of something.
V/O: Many students, terrified of their own classmates,
seemed to have morphed into monsters.
GUSTAVO: We saw a number of reactions
that were either fighting, destroying property,
going crazy, or some people just having a nervous breakdown.
The school was being destroyed.
It was chaos, and it was utterly terrifying.
Police try everything to calm the students,
asking them, 'Who started the riot?'
Several of them had mentioned the devil.
LYNN: The students were saying that the devil was there,
or they were possessed.
But what they've witnessed at the high school
leaves officials extremely shaken.
FRANK: This type of an incident is very unusual.
And certainly, this situation is the only one I have seen
during my 40 years with the fire department.
The aftermath of the melee
leaves some students injured and hospitalised,
but also raises terrifying questions
about what exactly took possession of these teenagers.
In my opinion, there is no doubt
that what happened at the Miami Aerospace Academy
definitely has the earmarks of something both terrifying and paranormal.
What took place, as far as I can tell,
is the largest spiritual contagion,
of this kind of mass possession,
that has ever occurred in American history.
If what happened at the Miami Aerospace Academy
on that October day really was a mass possession,
it happened for a reason.
What could have provoked a demonic takeover of the school
and its students?
BILL: When October 25 came around,
they already had the demons inside of them.
And that's what caused all hell to break loose.
What could possibly explain a mass possession of high-school students
at the Miami Aerospace Academy
on that shocking day in 1979?
The levitating girl,
claiming to be possessed by Satan...
The boy who crashed through a second-storey window and landed on concrete,
only to walk away without a scratch...
The terrifying displays of superhuman strength...
..leaves everyone asking why.
Why did it happen?
It happened because children that felt marginalised and oppressed
were not given the kind of supervision required.
They let these demons in and they didn't know what to do,
and the worst-case scenario literally took place.
Scratching the surface of daily life at this school,
it suddenly becomes plausible
how something as inconceivable as a demonic attack
could have occurred during the onset of the satanic panic.
The situation at the school was unique.
These children were already oppressed.
The devil was already at work
before it ever showed up in possession.
It may have been using the staff...
..and 'El General'...
to help further its cause
so it can take full possession.
'El General' is what the school's founder calls himself.
His real name is Evaristo Marina.
Marina was a bastard, pure and simple. He was likely corrupt.
The kids really believed he was evil. But they didn't know the half of it.
Marina, he came over during, I believe it was, the first exile community,
which was when my parents came over.
And he had to reinvent himself,
just as almost every other Cuban that came here had to do.
The revolution in Cuba had just basically taken effect,
what, maybe 10, 12 years prior.
Everybody basically lost everything there.
You had attorneys, doctors that couldn't work as such here cos they didn't have the licence.
So they had to work in restaurants, hotels,
and find a way to come up back as they were in Cuba.
Marina was no exception.
Marina came from a high-power situation in Cuba.
He came here, he worked as a busboy,
but yet he would join the high-level society when he finished his shift, cos he felt he was part of that.
He needed to be there. That's where he belonged.
Marina had been a military official in pre-revolutionary Cuba
before Castro exiled him.
He had political aspirations in Cuba,
so he had to capture some of that prestige that he had.
SERGIO: What better way to do that than to have a bunch of kids
line up, salute you, and call you 'El General'?
That was, like... That was his schtick.
SERGIO: And he loved being called that.
V/O: Marina reclaims his power
by opening the Miami Aerospace Academy
in the late 1960s.
ARCHIVE: The school's credo, academics through discipline and character-building.
The dyed-in-the-wool Republican general
says he himself is the role model for the 350 students.
Then they see in me the example.
And that's very good, because it's not telling them,
'Do as I say, and not as I do.'
I tell them, 'Do as I say and I also do',
so in me they see their second father.
ROB: What's incredible is that he never reached the rank of general,
either here or in Cuba.
He kept awarding himself these stars.
FRANK: I understand he achieved a certain rank
and then he started adding stars.
That's what conmen do.
It just became this, 'Oh, look at me, look at me,
look at what a wonderful person I've been my entire life',
and, 'How good I can be for the community', and all that.
ARCHIVE: In this man, parents have instilled an almost God-like quality.
ARCHIVE: All of us parents have choose this school...
..for the discipline that exists in it...
..the competence of the staff...
and the clean life its general has had.
This is a guy who is trying to make his way through life
by being something that he isn't.
I think this guy had demons himself.
V/O: El General's demons
manifested in the form of power and punishment.
Mr Marina was a man so focused on power and control
that the people he hired to run this school
were often thought of as his henchmen.
SERGIO: One of my teachers, he'd have a briefcase.
He'd have his book in the briefcase
and he'd have a .45 calibre handgun right next to him.
When you have a group of students
who are living in such fear from their teachers,
the people supposedly there to protect them,
these are children who did not feel safe, on a day-to-day basis.
The reason that Marina probably didn't hire accredited teachers
is because he could have more control over them, and control
over the information that would come out of Miami Aerospace Academy.
That way, people wouldn't know what was going on inside the school.
V/O: And what's going on inside the school
is the constant threat of abuse...
..doled out by strict disciplinarians like Major McKently,
who appears to revel in his crushing power over the students.
FRANK: Major McKently, he would walk around jingling his keys
and snapping his paddle on his leg.
SERGIO: I remember that paddle. FRANK: Yeah, 'Big Ben.'
With a nice strap handle, and drilled holes through it.
McKently had a nice technique whenever he had to dispense some discipline.
And that's when he would swing for the fences and make that cricket paddle whistle.
TANNOY: 'Mr Silva, please have Cadet Smith
report to the general's office.'
SERGIO: Sometimes you would get called to the general's office or the 'commandant's' office,
and it was nerve-wracking.
(THWACK)
(CADET CRIES OUT)
V/O: Life at the academy
is a never-ending cycle of fear.
A perfect breeding ground for negative forces to fester.
It was sometimes a fight for survival. Every day.
There were kids that were really terrible.
They had gotten kicked out of other schools,
their parents were at the end of the rope with them.
And then there were the kids like myself
who we thought we might want to make the military,
in some form, a career.
I attended eight years at Miami Aerospace Academy.
The kids that worked in the MAA, we all came from middle-class working families.
I myself, you know, I needed some structure.
I could have perhaps behaved better.
I was just a bad influence.
So, you had just regular kids
that didn't know that they were being thrown in with the wolves.
V/O: Having a few bad apples in the student body
gives El General an excuse to impose his own brand of martial law,
where students are forced to be silent, obedient,
and subservient at all times.
(OFFICER YELLS PARADE GROUND COMMANDS)
They made them wear military uniforms,
they had them marching.
It was a pretty strict environment.
ROB: These are classic techniques of mind control and brainwashing.
In order to control the mind you break down the body,
physically, through exercise, through discipline, through marching.
Breaking them down emotionally and physically,
it's exactly what they did at the academy.
V/O: Dissent in any form is not tolerated,
and leads to harsh corporal punishment.
If they were having a bad day, or you in some way slighted them,
then, yeah, they were gonna build demerits against you,
to where if you had so many, then that was, 'All right,
you're getting too out of control, we're gonna paddle you.'
So there was that constant threat.
They would swiftly hand out
maybe two, three paddles with the cricket paddle.
REV. LARSON: It was abusive control.
How do you fight against that?
Are you just gonna find a gun and shoot the guy? Probably not.
But is there another way to get back at him?
If he's evil, well...
find a more powerful evil to get back at the evil.
On October 25th, 1979,
a more powerful evil shows up on campus
to settle the score.
(GIRLS SCREAMING)
The terrifying events at the Miami Aerospace Academy
took place in 1979.
A 'satanic panic' was on the rise.
When you look at the '70s cinema alone,
from The Exorcist to Carrie,
they had a huge effect on the psyche of those coming of age during that period.
But it wasn't just pop culture.
It was the beginning of the satanic panic that would grip America.
Law enforcement agencies throughout the nation
were dealing with reports of hauntings, possessions.
The devil was everywhere.
ARCHIVE: During the past several years,
the occult has become big business.
Suddenly, the advice and comments
of the astrologer and tarot card reader are highly sought after.
For the disempowered teenagers at the academy,
the dark arts become appealing.
Magic could be seen as the answer to so many problems.
Very often it involves revenge, it involves spells,
it involves getting even with people.
One of the popular forms of magic involves Santeria,
rooted in African religious practices.
It spread to Cuba via the slave trade,
and eventually arrived in Miami.
Santeria comprises a religion that worships different deities called Orishas
and a supreme god called Olodumare.
Through its rituals, its initiations, its ceremonies,
it's about the healing of the body, of the mind,
and of bringing together people culturally as well.
Santeria has many rituals.
One involves animal sacrifice.
FRANK ROLLASON: Santeria was pretty common.
You'd get called out for decapitated animals.
People would call, and they'd send a rescue because there was blood,
and they didn't know if there was a person involved, or whatever.
And you'd get there, and it'd been a santeria ritual that had taken place.
At the academy, subjugated students begin experimenting,
apparently with a dark form of Santeria mixed with the occult
in a desperate bid to escape their daily misery.
You can't blame these kids getting into this
when they're facing a reality that's so overpowering
that there's no hope it's gonna change.
Their parents are turning their backs on them.
They just say, 'I have to look for a way out.
It's a matter of survival.'
FRANK LOPEZ DEL RINCON: Some dark sciences have that allure.
It has that attraction to some people.
But it's something that's very dangerous,
something that could be very, very, erm...hazardous, let's say,
to themselves and to others.
In place of homework,
sessions with tarot cards and spirit boards
become daily practice at school.
Tarot cards can be a harmless game. Someone asks a question,
someone lays down the cards to give them an answer.
MICHAEL: Tarot cards are an occult device
used to tell the person
a little bit about themselves,
what they're going through, and their future.
ROB: As the cards are placed, they begin to tell a story of what's to come.
Some outcomes are positive.
Some can be very negative.
They can predict anguish,
death, or the toxic unknown.
But the reason tarot cards can predict the future
is the same reason they are said to be potentially dangerous.
I do not recommend the use of tarot cards.
It is considered spirit communication.
The person using the cards
is asking the spirit to manipulate the cards
to try and predict something that may happen in the future.
Demons are always waiting for an invitation to communicate,
some way to influence your decisions,
some way to affect you.
And when you make that invitation,
like, 'What is in store for me?',
they're willing and ready to jump right in there.
And once you make that invitation,
it's hard to pull it back.
With any kind of dark energy, demons, spirits,
you don't have control over it.
You may feel like you have control over it
and you think you know what you're doing,
but you're really being controlled by them.
Of all the dark secrets at the academy, one that's shocking
is that the teachers and staff were also in on the occult practices.
ROB: The staff were the ones that showed the kids
how to use the spirit board and play with tarot cards.
But after the 25th, they all denied it.
After all, who would want to admit
that they showed their children how to talk to the dead during class time?
BILL: These boards are basically just a communication device.
People use them to try to talk to the spirit and get an answer from them.
MICHAEL: And the spirit can guide that planchette
using the person's energy that is holding the planchette.
Sometimes you will get zero responses.
And sometimes the responses can be immediate.
BILL: When you're using a spirit board and you connect to somebody
and you start talking to them,
that allows the invitation in.
They knew they were playing with fire,
but yet they proceeded without any oversight,
without any permission, without any authorisation.
Everyone knows what you're trying to conjure up.
There's rules in the spirit world. They need an invitation to affect your life,
to try and possess you.
It may not act right then.
It'll wait for you to be at your weakest.
The teachers at the academy assure their students
these are just harmless games,
never once suggesting this might be a dangerous pastime.
It's one thing for the teachers to bring up the subject of demonic, of the paranormal.
It's quite another not to give it some warnings. Apparently that didn't happen.
At the academy,
practising the occult may not be part of the curriculum,
but for some it quickly becomes the most popular subject on campus.
Once out of class, every opportunity that comes their way, every chance they get,
these kids are trying to hone their skills.
They are practising these occult rituals.
But these aren't typical students.
These cadets have been relentlessly subjected to
harsh discipline and corporal punishment on a daily basis
with no relief in sight.
Their pent-up collective anger is explosive.
These students were a victim of mind control.
And in the midst of that mind control,
the occult and forms of the evil supernatural were introduced to them.
BILL: These kids were already being oppressed by the academy.
That allows them to be very open
and susceptible to a demonic presence and attack.
Could the students collectively summon evil entities
and weaponise them against their oppressors?
I think that is what led to this terrible tragedy.
It's impossible to separate the horrific events at the academy...
..from the city where they took place.
For tourists, Miami might be a tropical paradise,
but all that sunshine masks a dark and brutal past.
There's a lot of bad juju around Miami.
You can go back 400 years to when the conquistadors slaughtered the natives.
A lot of these malignant forces and evil spirits linger to this day.
In 1974,
a Florida newspaper reported that a Miami hospital
treated an astonishing 700 demonic possessions a month.
It seems the bloody history has seeped deep into the soil.
ROB: There's also a legend that the devil lives beneath Miami
near an underground river.
And others say that there's a demonic force known as La Llorona
who feeds on the fear of children.
Unchecked over decades and centuries,
that can create a lot of bad energy.
The accumulation of bad energy
swirls around the academy campus
and invites negativity into its doors,
even welcoming a murderer into its student body.
And no-one knew, except Marina.
If I did wrong, I accept responsibility.
The boy never create a problem
and the boy was doing well,
so I was talking to the boy often
and I said, 'If you make one single mistake, you go back over there.'
Scandals rock the academy,
but Marina deflects any problems
at the school he rules with an iron fist.
ARCHIVE: Marina maintains he is being blackmailed,
that he is a victim of what he calls 'a campaign of defamation.'
You are asking me questions in which I am not prepared.
ARCHIVE: Marina maintains, as president and founder of this military academy,
sometimes he has to keep secrets to protect youngsters here.
How many other scandalous secrets is Mr Marina still guarding?
There's more than one deep, dark secret
Marina might be guarding.
And there were rumours
that Marina was practising the dark side of Santeria.
I do remember him mentioning something about Santeria.
ARCHIVE: Earlier this month, a number of goats, chickens and pigeons
were found sacrificed in south-west Dade County.
The kids found different signs of Santeria throughout the campus.
The signs include burnt pennies,
which can mean someone is casting a spell.
Santeria is a form of religion
if you take it in the pure form.
They talk about good Santeria and bad Santeria.
White and black Santeria.
There are people that have twisted it
to support other means and endeavours
which don't work within the framework of the religion.
And there's other evidence to suspect Marina
of practising the dark magic at school.
If you see dead chickens or chicken bones,
that means there has been a blood sacrifice.
That raises to another level of seriousness.
It means something was actually sacrificed
and the blood was used in a ritual.
This is not white magic.
This is bad magic. Casting spells.
This is all about curses.
It's all about summoning the powers of darkness.
If the students at the academy
think their general is practising black magic,
how far would they go to protect themselves?
Here's Marina, an all-powerful figure. 'El General', the general.
He's running the show,
so it wouldn't be far-fetched for these kids to believe that
Marina was involved in some kind of Santeria
that had these special powers.
I was of the opinion that Marina would be capable of anything.
Now some of the students were starting to
experiment with the dark arts on their own.
Some were just curious.
Others were looking for an escape from their harsh reality.
These are teenagers.
And cognitive abilities,
to think about the consequences of actions, isn't there yet.
That's just the kids, without any supervision, any guardrails,
were playing with a fire
that is about to spread out of control.
If students at the academy learn about the occult from their teachers,
and power of Santeria from Marina,
then the real lesson may be
how to invite a massive demonic attack.
Satan is very clever. In the beginning,
when he offers people certain powers,
he doesn't tell you what
the consequences of those powers will do to you and to other people.
Suddenly, all the things these kids have been doing,
the seances, the tarot cards, the spirit boards, all of this...
..is converging like the perfect storm.
V/O: What's been called the biggest mass demonic possession in history
happens when many factors converge at the same time.
And one major factor is the time of year.
Halloween week is when paranormal activity is at its peak.
This goes back to the belief of the Celts
that thought that the veil between our world and the netherworld
was at its thinnest during this time of year,
and when the souls of the departed can return to the living.
So the cadets, like the Celts,
were pretty busy summoning spirits.
But unfortunately for them, it was the wrong ones.
It's the night of October 24th, 1979,
only hours before evil lays siege to the academy campus.
As the story goes,
some of the students gather for a party.
Strongly bonded by their shared trauma at the military school,
the kids find refuge in each other's company.
When you're that age, your friends, your peers, are your whole universe.
So when you have a community that is that tightly knit,
there is this belief that, 'It's us against them, and I'm part of this world.'
But what looks like a typical teenage house party
turns out to be an unexpected game-changer.
ROB: On that night, for the first time,
the students of the Miami Aerospace Academy gather in a larger group.
And those that were practising the occult in smaller groups
finally came together in what was a supercharged mass event.
The dark-magic games the kids have been playing in school
are now being played in the same place at the same time.
Because you have a concentrated group of people
that you have different areas, somebody doing hypnosis,
somebody using a spirit board,
it's definitely creating an increased paranormal activity in the area.
For kids that have been abused and forgotten
and stripped of their identities,
reclaiming their power through the occult
is nothing short of exhilarating.
When we talk about involvement in the occult,
the risk is that when kids go beyond exploration
and this becomes life,
this becomes their religion, this becomes their power,
and they're drawn too far into it.
You're gonna reach out for supernatural power, and I think that's what these kids did.
That feeling of empowerment
might come at a cost these students could never foresee.
When you reach out and do that,
you say to the demons, 'Here I am. You give me power.'
They don't know it, but that night the academy students may be creating
a gateway to hell.
Everything going on in one concentrated place
definitely allows a portal to open up.
A portal is considered an open door to the spirit world.
Another dimension where demons are said to dwell.
There are disagreements about how and when a portal can open.
But most would agree that
a concentrated amount of occult activity
would be enough to rend it asunder.
Some people believe that a portal can open in the blink of an eye,
while others are convinced that a mirror, something found in every home,
can serve as a portal to allow in creatures not of our world.
In fact, a mirror is the focal point
of one of the occult games the students play.
Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.
It's been around for a long time.
So the idea is you stare into a mirror.
You look right at your own eyes,
and you chant 'Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.'
It's a dare, it's a thrill,
but it actually is an invitation to dark forces.
They say 'Bloody Mary' three times
and that serves an an invocation
for a diabolical spirit known as 'Bloody Mary'
to manifest herself.
That night, three girls from the academy
lock themselves in a bathroom to try to summon Bloody Mary.
Now if they don't know what they're doing
they can easily open something up like that because it is inviting something in.
And the spirit comes in and says, 'Yes, this is who I am.'
Bloody Mary.
V/O: No-one really expects anything to happen...
Bloody Mary.
Over and over. And then you watch to see what happens.
..until it does.
Bloody Mary.
The girls are so freaked out they immediately stop the Bloody Mary game.
But it's too late.
ROB: First they're communicating with the dead,
now they're opening portals to the unknown.
This is when things take a turn towards the worse,
because what they don't know is that they aren't just unlocking these doors.
They're pushing them wide open.
BILL: The kids start acting out
because the demons can take over their body
and make them do crazy things.
By all accounts, the mood at the party instantly turns dark.
Personalities suddenly change,
becoming menacing and aggressive.
Two boys, always close friends,
are now at each other's throats
without any provocation.
ROB: Why would this be?
Because demonic entities may have influenced them
to act in violent ways that would have ordinarily been against their nature.
The problem with any kind of dark energy, demons, spirits,
is you don't have control over it.
You may feel you have control over it and know what you're doing,
but you're really being controlled by them.
ROB: By playing these games,
they didn't realise that the infestation had already begun
and that demonic forces were at play,
influencing how they behave, how they perceive the world.
The Halloween party goes from fun to frightening in a heartbeat.
The students, desperate to escape the bad energy at school,
have just stirred the paranormal pot.
It's a very dangerous thing, because what happens is
Satan can concentrate his focus on this one single group
and look for something that sparks the fire
of the contagion of mass possession.
It's now gonna take over. You're not calling the shots any more.
By the morning of October 25th,
all the ingredients are in place
for a massive demonic attack on the academy.
Demoralised kids with damaged psyches...
..a collective obsession with the occult...
..and constant contact with the spirit realm
where evil entities lie ready to pounce on unwitting victims.
At the Halloween party the night before,
it's clear that something dark and powerful
is taking hold of the troubled cadets.
The pressure was building and building and building
amongst the students.
And on that day, October 25th,
they simultaneously reached a breaking point.
The fuse was lit,
and what happens in class sets off the explosion.
ROB: As I heard it,
some students that were at the party the night before were actually in this class
with a teacher who was one of the ones
who taught them about the occult.
The kids haven't been able to shake off
the disturbing events that took place at the party.
Bloody Mary.
The next day in school, they're all still talking about it.
They're all still a little freaked out about it,
and one of the teachers picks up on it.
And she wants to try... and help the kids.
The teacher's idea to help settle the kids down?
Hypnosis.
What is hypnosis? Hypnosis is really a state of focused attention.
The word 'hypnosis' is from the Greek word for 'sleep',
and it's been practised as far back as the ancient Egyptians.
For a licensed and trained therapist,
it can be a safe and effective therapeutic tool.
But in the wrong hands,
dangerous.
Hypnosis is a clinical tool you have to be careful with
when you have these kids under this state of anxiety and suggestibility.
MICHAEL: The teacher, being a novice hypnotist,
tried to do a regression session.
The problem with doing that and being a novice
is you never know what's gonna come out
during a regression session.
The students, now at their breaking point
from all the abuses by Marina and the staff,
cling to their last shred of willpower -
the very thing hypnosis will free them of.
I have no idea
what type of hypnosis this is.
But mind-control hypnosis, it's a very dangerous thing.
And you start messing with that level of consciousness with people
and you don't know what you're doing,
it could be very, very dangerous.
One of the students
is the one traumatised at the party the night before
playing 'Bloody Mary.'
Bloody Mary.
The teacher insists the girl undergo hypnosis
right then and there,
but the girl tries to resist the teacher's strange request.
Her insistence sent this poor child spinning off the edge,
and in so doing basically unlocks a key.
But could there be a more sinister reason
the student resists being put under?
MICHAEL: Did the demon inside of her
know that if she got put in regressive hypnosis
it would be exposed?
Maybe that's why she didn't want to be involved in it.
The relentless teacher keeps pushing.
The student knows the consequences for not obeying teachers' orders.
Finally, she gives in.
The risks involved with an amateur hypnotist
trying to probe into a delicate young mind,
especially one that has already suffered a traumatic incident
as recently as the night before, are myriad.
There are all sorts of things that can go wrong.
The powder keg of paranormal instability
ignites a flame from hell.
It goes TERRIBLY wrong.
The little girl panics. She's overwhelmed with horror...
She felt something was attacking her.
..until the kid finally snapped.
It hit her hard, and she just bolted.
The girl flees down the hallway to the restroom,
followed by worried friends.
She collapses on the floor
and makes a terrifying confession.
Next thing you know, she's levitating.
(GIRL SCREAMS)
A classic sign of demonic possession.
Whatever dark force that's taken hold of the girl
also seems to be seizing control of her friends.
The students who have been using dark magic
to gain freedom and liberation from school oppression
are about to come under all-out spiritual assault.
Truth is, they opened the door.
And when they opened that door,
these things saw their opportunity and they came through it.
And not just one came through it.
A bunch of them came through it.
V/O: At the Miami Aerospace Academy,
the devil has entered the building.
It's almost as if the gates of hell have opened up.
Something was tapped into there that was probably better left alone.
They seem to have released some energy there
that was negative, very negative.
And it had to be building for a long, long time.
The stage has been set
for a catastrophic mass demonic possession.
ROB: Possessions exist in the mythology of nearly every culture.
And for thousands of years, people have reported the phenomenon of demonic hauntings.
MICHAEL: In the spirit realm, demons are fallen angels.
They are inhuman spirits.
And they've never walked the Earth as a human being.
Demonic hauntings in homes are very oppressive,
and are usually accompanied with foul odours
and smells such as rotting meat and sulphur.
It's very identifiable.
It's almost like you're walking through the gates of hell...
..except it's in your home.
Or your school.
And it's terrifying.
Demons have the ability to cause physical harm.
People have reported being scratched, bitten, or even pushed down the stairs.
MICHAEL: But the most devastating is when
a demon enters a human body
and possesses that body.
It's very rare, and the conditions have to be just right.
And the conditions were just right.
In 1973,
the whole world becomes aware of demonic possession.
That's the year The Exorcist is released,
with its terrifying special effects
designed to strike primal fear into the hearts of moviegoers.
Real-life possessions have been going on for centuries.
Not like it is in the movies,
where they're throwing up pea soup and their head is spinning around,
but their faces change.
Their demeanour changes.
They end up doing things
that they would never do.
Those who have studied the phenomenon
report that demonic possession occurs in three stages.
The three stages of possession are infestation...
..then oppression...
and then full possession.
Infestation is when it is just starting.
It's when it is introducing itself
to the person that it has chosen.
When it announces its presence,
it will usually do it with three knocks...
(THREE FORCEFUL KNOCKS)
..which mocks the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And that's where the spirit really tries to break you down.
Bad things start to happen.
Your finances could fall apart.
Accidents could happen.
All kinds of negative things start happening with oppression.
Once it's broken you down to the point where you just can't take any more,
it takes full control.
And then you're at the mercy of that demon.
Finally comes the possession itself...
..where a human being is inhabited by an intelligence of evil nature
that is not their own.
At the academy, the kids have already gone through
a couple of phases of possession.
They've opened up the portals by inviting them in.
Playing with a spirit board,
playing with tarot cards.
And the second part is oppression.
Oppression is where the spirits and the demons
try to break them down mentally and physically.
Satan tries to possess somebody...
..in a situation where there's some type of
trauma, deprivation, punishment.
And the staff has done that to the kids already.
(CADET WEEPING BROKENLY)
By the time the troubled girl runs to the restroom,
a full-scale demonic possession is under way.
She's collapsed onto the floor.
She's claiming that the devil himself is inside of her.
(VOICE ECHOING) The devil is inside me.
Her friends surround her. They're rooted in horror.
And that's when something happens that none of them will ever forget.
The girls are shocked to see their friend shake
and her eyes roll back in her head.
They think she's having a seizure, but no.
It's far worse than anything they can imagine.
(GIRLS SCREAMING)
Levitation is one of the devil's tools
to show you that you are completely powerless, a puppet in his hands.
He uses it to take full control of your body,
and in so doing to show you and all around you that he is the one
completely in control.
The young witnesses watch in abject horror
as the girl's body appears to lift off the floor on its own
and hover miraculously in mid-air.
A demon will use levitation almost like a shock-and-awe.
It shocks anybody that sees it.
It almost stuns you, because it's so against the rules of science and physics.
Back in the classroom, the teacher who triggered the incident
hears mysterious cries coming from the girls' room.
Unnerved, she goes to investigate.
ROB: The teacher sprinted out of the lavatory
and was never seen again.
Later it was reported that this teacher absolutely denied
that she had ever performed hypnosis on that student.
The girl who was possessed, what she was experiencing was overwhelmingly horrifying.
An utter loss of control, combined with the fact that
you know something evil has gained control of the vessel that is you.
The terrifying display of demonic power
leaves the girl's classmates in shocked disbelief.
But what none of these students can fully understand
is that this is ground zero of a diabolical infection.
The levitation in the girls' room
is just a demonic taste
of the horror yet to come.
Once that girl was levitated...
..it opened the floodgates.
and the demonic activity flooded through that school.
The amount of occult activity that was being practised in that school
by not just the students but the faculty...
..it just opened everything wide.
It made it so that this was
an easy, easy entrance into this world and to these children.
They had everything they needed. It was the perfect storm.
ROB: Everything came together.
The portal was open.
The fear, the anger, the oppression had unleashed the demons.
Bloody Mary.
The demonic force that manifested in the girls' room
starts to spread throughout the school.
The devil invaded.
Room by room, floor by floor,
through the stairwells...
..through the whole building.
Simultaneously, in a classroom upstairs,
an air of menace seeps in, permeates the room,
and slowly begins to take them over.
These students had no idea what happened in the bathroom.
But still, something had shifted.
Something was there.
Without any provocation,
two boys start throwing punches at each other,
escalating into an all-out brawl.
ROB: It seemed to affect two of the cadets,
and they started to fight.
They didn't realise that the infestation had already begun
and that demonic forces were at play,
influencing how they behave, how they perceive the world.
They weren't themselves. They were infected by the devil.
They were possessed.
That demonic force that came into that school,
it just started going through the two boys
like a force nobody's ever seen.
The superhuman strength of these two high-schoolers is shocking,
as one is picked up and hurled across the classroom.
Next thing you know, one of the boys had actually been thrown through the window.
This boy falls from a two-storey building,
lands unhurt, pops up.
Mr McKently comes over.
He is unable to subdue this smaller boy.
Unbelievable strength is one of the classic signs of demonic possession.
I've had instances of doing an exorcism on a 95-pound woman
that took six or eight men to control.
I've seen violent, abnormal strength.
Having witnessed these horrific demonic events,
the students are infected with evil.
All hell breaks loose,
and the mass possession ignites.
Once the spark was lit,
once this fire started to spread,
then what happens?
Mass possession.
(GIRL SCREAMS)
ROB: Possession was like a virus.
It spread through the school, fast.
Chaos is literally rippling down the hallways.
Kids were suddenly acting like wild animals.
Weird sounds, wild eyes, acting crazy.
(GIRL SCREAMS)
The minute a demon starts to present itself in a person, the eyes change...
..in numbers of ways. The colours may change. The dilation may change.
Sometimes they widen beyond a human ability.
There are different reports on what it feels like to be possessed.
Some people remember everything.
Some people remember nothing.
They remember that they no longer had control of their faculties.
The worst feeling is that instant loss of control.
You feel like you're a stranger in your own body.
You do things you never would do,
you say things you would never say.
Demonic possession is the ultimate loss of control
to something very dark, very malicious,
and extremely dangerous.
MICHAEL: There's no doubt these students were possessed.
And the ones that weren't possessed were running for their lives.
These kids saw their classmates
change their personalities, change shape,
become something else entirely.
They were possessed by something demonic.
Some of the kids were shredding doors right from the walls.
That is a show of demonic strength.
I have had instances where I have seen people in an exorcism
actually rip a door off its hinges.
That's possible. That was described.
There are too many things being described here
that just aren't normal.
It's paranormal. It is demonic.
(SIRENS WAILING)
When law enforcement officials finally arrive,
they find a school embroiled in paranormal pandemonium,
with kids pleading for protection from their possessed classmates.
The first responders could look up and see that the kids were still in the school.
They were banging on windows, trying to get out.
Our initial thought was to find somebody in charge of the campus
and try to get a handle on exactly what the incident was
or what caused the chaos that we were viewing.
The one person they think could help is the demagogue general Evaristo Marina,
who rules his students with an iron fist.
But where has the powerful general been
while the devil lays waste to his academy
and endangers his kids?
The first responders go searching for answers.
FRANK ROLLASON: We were directed to the office. We went there.
There was nobody there.
The devil was summoned for the reckoning...
..and the general disappeared.
V/O: Chaos, confusion and fear.
That's what first responders find when they finally arrive
at The Devil's Academy.
FRANK ROLLASON: On October 25th, 1979,
my position with the fire department at that time
was a rescue operations officer.
It was just chaos there. Kids were running everywhere.
And so that's why I responded.
Officers see students raging out of control.
Bizarre, animalistic behaviour.
Screaming, gnashing,
some afraid for their lives.
They were scared of something and that's what we tried to find out,
what was making them act
in the behaviour that they were in.
Through the hysteria, a dark, evil force
becomes the curator of this chaos.
Several of them had mentioned the devil.
The students said that they were possessed,
or there was a demon present...
..and that they had been learning about the occult.
First responders search everywhere
for the school's infamously evil general, Evaristo Marina.
He's nowhere to be found.
He and his sycophant staff disappear.
FRANK ROLLASON: We walked the entire campus
trying to find somebody that knew what was happening,
and it was odd that there wasn't anybody there,
especially on a school day.
When the hellfire exploded,
the fearsome militarian forces abandoned their post.
Where were the enforcers? Where were they?
They had left the scene.
We found it very odd that we couldn't locate anybody at the site
that was...tacitly in charge.
Finally, the students come out of their trance.
By noon, it was over. Whatever had taken over the building had left.
But something had been there.
The next day, the event hits the local news.
ROB: The headlines were clear as to what the kids thought happened.
'Hypnosis unleashes demons.'
The story of the possession was picked up by the Associated Press
and went around the country.
It was even picked up by The New York Times.
After learning the horrific details of the supernatural riot,
parents are enraged.
ROB: There was immediate fallout. At least one teacher quit on the spot,
and other parents just pulled their kids out of school.
But oddly, the bizarre story of the high school's mass possession
quickly fades from the headlines.
ROB: People wanted to sweep it under the rug,
and the authorities involved wanna sweep it under the rug as quickly as possible
so that it doesn't harm their reputation.
It's as if everybody forgot what happened
the day Satan showed up at the school.
For his part, Marina calls the whole story a smear campaign.
Marina had an excuse for everything.
Marina maintained that it was his enemies trying to do him in that day.
The question is,
were the general's enemies real, or conjured?
As the years go by,
Marina's academy continues to be at the centre of sordid scandals.
In the mid-'80s, charges of sexual misconduct and rape
are levelled at some of its cadets.
ARCHIVE: Miami police detectives converged on campus
because they had many unanswered questions.
Not long after,
a young female cadet becomes pregnant
while living in the school's dormitory.
As the '80s wore on, the scandals started to have some effect.
ARCHIVE: This is the day Evaristo Marina promised to explain everything,
and he left the media still hungry for answers at his news conference today.
The academy lost students
and later the faith of the parents.
Eventually, the building altogether.
They had to move into a hotel
that was later deemed 'deplorable' by city officials.
Finally, the Miami Aerospace Academy closed in 1988.
Marina dies in 2009,
and for a time it seems like the legend of the mass possession
might die with him.
SERGIO: The story of what happened in '79,
during my time, had been sort of lost in the wind.
ROB: I think there's a lot of students
that are reluctant to talk about these things,
because the social stigma that is associated with experiencing the paranormal,
it runs deep in our society.
It can cut off opportunities.
It can label you as having experienced this, then no one sees anything else about you.
Which is tragic, because you should be able to come forward
when you have a paranormal event and be honest about it.
But perhaps there's another, more chilling reason
why this dark chapter in demonic history
has gone largely untold.
When those kids were taken over by demons,
it ended on its own.
However...
that doesn't mean it's over.
Those demons could return at any time.
V/O: At Miami Aerospace Academy,
the constant threat of harsh corporal punishment,
combined with a culture of dark occult rituals,
takes a lasting toll on many of its students.
A common saying among former cadets
is that your best day at Aerospace is your last.
Former students remember how they made their escapes.
FRANK LOPEZ DEL RINCON: I attended eight years at Miami Aerospace Academy.
It seems the general felt I was a bad influence.
He called me in with my mother
after I had finished my junior year,
and informed us that I was not gonna be allowed to graduate from his school.
And I could just leave, any time I felt I should leave.
And he said, 'You're not coming back here,
you're not gonna graduate from my school, you're a bad influence.'
And that was the best day of my life. I was so happy, I could have kissed him.
I said, 'You don't know what you're doing. You are giving me my wish.'
V/O: But not all departures were so peaceful.
For some students,
the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the school
pushed them into violent confrontations with the staff.
SERGIO: I was called to the office for something.
I don't know why, but I got into an argument with Marina
over I don't know what.
But at some point, it turned from just an argument
to shouting,
to then me calling him out
to go fist-fight out in the street.
And I'm just, 'Come on, old man! Come outside!
Come on, I'm waiting for you! Come on!'
And that was my last day at Aerospace.
V/O: If the school's toxic atmosphere could push its top students over the edge,
it's no wonder that the entire institution
could be infected by evil.
That was just what the school was.
That was the whole thing about the school, that everything was aggressive, and... It was.
And there was the threat of violence
from the staff as well as from the students in the school.
It was. It was a big power play there,
all the way from the general down to his brother, his nephew,
and his enforcers.
Normally when children are placed in a high-discipline environment,
parents most of the times have given up.
They don't wanna hear about it.
We didn't feel that we had a voice in anything,
or that we were exaggerating if we told our parents.
Or that they wouldn't believe
that somebody who ran a school could do this,
and therefore, you know, you're just a kid. You don't know.
It's, 'It'll be fine', you know? 'You'll see.' That sort of thing.
So we didn't really say anything.
Sometimes you'd get hit with a ping-pong paddle, they'd use a little wooden paddle.
But man, when they brought in a cricket paddle with a strapped handle... Yeah.
..and drilled, you know, holes through it,
I said, 'We're in a whole 'nother ball game here.'
They'd hit you on the half-beat,
so they'd take the paddle and they'd go, 'Here it comes',
and then they would act like they were gonna do it
and you'd tense up,
and then right as you're like, 'What's going on?' and then you relax,
BAM! That's when they would hit
and then you would hear the godawful scream.
(CADET SCREAMS)
But there was no offence that we did
that was suitable for that level of punishment at all.
And there was one kid, I'll never forget him, Ernie.
Ernie was, you know, toughest kid I ever known.
He was around same grade as me,
maybe, you know, pre-teen, going into a teenager,
and Ernie would take the paddles.
And Ernie would never, ever give them the satisfaction
of crying, or moving, or flinching.
Ernie would take the beating,
and he'd look at him and say, 'Are you done?'
Like that. And that would make him even more inflamed.
There was definitely a control thing,
and the only form of control or power
that we held was taking it
and showing that you were...
you were strong enough to do that and to not be messed with.
You have the harsh discipline, the beatings,
the constant monitoring, the forced haircuts, the marching.
Everything about this place
is crushing the... the vibrant, rebellious nature inherent to teens
down to dust.
And this becomes the fertile ground in which
demons can make their purchase.
SERGIO: And that was normal for us.
There was normalcy to this lunacy
that we went through.
And you couldn't speak out against it,
because then, you know, you were the odd person out. So...
Had you even been believed.
Our parents wouldn't believe us if we said half the stuff that went on there.
I would have given anything to get to public school.
I would have loved to go to public school. I was the same way.
Back then, fighting was just a part of life.
And you got into a fight, let's say, they'd break you up.
They took you to the gym. You both put on gloves,
and you fought, in the gym.
One day I went to jump the fence, and the chain was a little loose on the gate,
and the gate kicked back.
And the chain went with it, and I fell over and I broke my ankle.
And I'm laying there, and I try to get up.
And I couldn't put any weight on it, so I went back down.
And here comes the commandant, walking.
He unlocks the gate, looks at me, he says, 'What happened?'
I said, 'I think I broke my leg.'
He says, 'Well, that's what you get for trying to skip school.'
And he closes the gate, and he walks in the building.
And he left me there. Yeah. Yeah.
V/O: Many alumni refuse to speak of their time at the Miami Aerospace Academy.
Especially the day when all hell broke loose.
It was very bizarre, a very bizarre incident. Very scary.
To me, it doesn't surprise me in the least bit that that's what happened.
Something happened that day, and everybody just lost their minds.
Yeah, it just blew the top right off of whatever was compressed.
A lot of pressure was building up there. A lot. Yeah.
I'm just... I'm happy that we made it out alive,
because it wasn't easy.
V/O: As for what may have caused
the events of October 25th, 1979,
El General gave his answer to the press.
He claimed that the entire incident was a scam
invented to damage him politically.
From the 1970s to the 2000s,
Marina ran for office multiple times,
going for commissioner, mayor and senator.
SERGIO: He would run for everything.
The Water Commission, the Agriculture Commission.
Hell, he would run for dog catcher.
He's what I would term a serial political candidate.
Marina maintained that it was his enemies trying to do him in that day.
He blamed it on politics.
SERGIO: And so that's something that would seem plausible.
'Oh, I'm running for office,
so it's the other candidate that's playing dirty.'
It's worthy of note that with nine attempts,
he never found a major seat in city hall.
V/O: But if dirty politics weren't the cause
of what happened that day at Miami Aerospace Academy,
what was?
There hasn't been much written about this event.
It's sort of been lost to history and paranormal history.
V/O: But those who were there will never be able to forget it.
SERGIO: There was a lot of things that went on.
I talk about them to people, and people almost don't believe me.
You had to have lived it. You had to have experienced it.
ROB: Because there wasn't much written about this event
and not a lot of people choose to talk about it,
we really don't have the clearest picture of this episode.
I had 40 years with the fire department.
And, er, you have a few incidents that just stick in your mind
that are very weird or very unusual.
And this is certainly one of those that you remember.
V/O: Could satanic panic,
which some say was unleashed by films of the time like The Exorcist,
have been a factor in the event?
The cult was running rampant.
It was in movies, it was in everyday life.
There was higher crime,
there was more satanic rituals being done.
The satanic panic had infused itself into everyday society.
ROB: Some people say it wasn't demonic,
but just a simple episode of mass hysteria.
That's when the panic of the moment, the suggestion, takes over,
makes people believe that something is happening that isn't.
And that spreads like an insidious fear
and makes people act in ways they ordinarily never would.
You had several factors that are classic
in a mass-hysteria situation.
You had high-level stress
and a cohesive group. They're united.
They're united by their common enemy. They're united by the occult.
They're united because they're peers.
And these kids were in fear constantly. All the time.
SERGIO: When the kids took control in the '79 incident,
I think it was just a way for them to...
..to finally say, 'Enough. Enough is enough.'
KATE: What we saw is a collective uprising
of their psychological distress
take the form of these spiritual practices,
these demonic possessions, all of this acting out,
as a way of saying, 'We're done. We can't handle any more.
We have to take back our power.'
Some people say it was just a hoax perpetrated by the students.
A way to get back at Marina and the rest of the faculty for their oppressive regime...
..driven by the anger that they were harbouring towards this institution.
'If I hate this institution, I hate the teachers, I hate Marina,
I'm gonna go against what's tangible.
The walls. The door. The school.
The tangible parts of the school represent them. I'm gonna hit 'em hard.'
These kids weren't organised
to pull off a hoax like this.
There was...
way too many physical manifestations
of paranormal events.
Dismissing this does no justice to the eyewitnesses that were on the ground.
Those that saw people do things human beings simply can't do.
Things that cannot be explained through normal means.
Things that truly have to be paranormal in nature,
and likely of a diabolical origin.
V/O: If it wasn't mass hysteria,
and it wasn't a hoax,
then what was it?
Many occult experts insist that this was a paranormal event.
One of the biggest mass possessions in United States history.
There's no way that this was anything but
a demonic attack.
I'm convinced that there was actual possession taking place,
so there was a kind of mass possession.
ROB: The pandemonium in the hallway
is a full-blown paranormal event.
One that scholars have called
one of the strangest incidents in the history of American academia.
That that paranormal occurred there,
it seems to have been building up over years.
And I think the kids could feel the fear,
and I think it built up over years.
I think that anxiety, and that whole power trip that they were on.
ROB: It seems like what happened at MAA is impossible,
but I know from my research and my podcast that things like this happen all of the time.
In 2014, there was a mass possession in a Japanese high school...
..where one girl stood up and started screaming,
and it just multiplied to all the female students.
These kinds of things occur in little pockets throughout the world.
And they all seem to be of diabolical origin.
V/O: If mass possessions have happened before,
they can happen again.
For the students of Miami Aerospace Academy,
they'll never forget the day
the devil took over the school.
This stuff happens. Cos these things have been around forever.
Time means nothing to them.
But they know sooner or later, you're gonna be weak.
And that's when it will come after you.
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