It seemed like a scene from the sci-fi movie "Ghostbusters." The only difference was that the "ghosts" that apparently showed up at the official residence of Brazilian President Michel Temer seemed scary enough to force the president and his family to leave the Alvorada Palace in Brasilia.
Speaking to Vega magazine, the 76-year-old Temer said he believes the palace is haunted. The former vice president and his family moved to the palace after he succeeded President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached last year.
"I felt something strange there. I wasn't able to sleep right from the first night. The energy wasn't good," Temer, who is a Catholic, said.
"Marcela felt the same thing," he said of his 33-year-old wife, who is a former beauty queen. "Only Michelzinho [his seven-year-old son], who went running from one end to the other, liked it," he added.
"We even started to wonder: could there be ghosts?" he said.
The president even asked a priest to perform exorcism rites on the palace to drive out the "evil spirits," but the unnamed exorcist apparently failed to do so.
Temer and his family have since moved back to their former home, the official residence of the vice-president, where they had been living since 2011.
Temer could have called for the intercession of a fellow Latin American in his attempt to rid the Brazilian presidential palace of "evil spirits."
In a previous report, 80-year-old Mexican priest Fr. Francisco Lopez Sedano said he had successfully performed over 6,000 exorcisms, adding that he can confidently say that the devil is afraid of him.
Sedano pointed out that the devil is afraid of him not because of his track record but because God is on his side.
The priest said the devil often speaks to him through possessed people. He always responds with this statement: "I am nobody, but I come from Christ, your Lord and God and you leave right now – I command you in His name that you go. Out!"
Sedano said in his 40 years as an exorcist, he has learned that the devil is a person and not a thing. So when talking with a demon, he said people should remember "one isn't talking with a thing, one is talking with a person."
The priest said being an exorcist is a divine mandate. "A fellow priest who was involved in it made me see that fighting the Evil One was an obligation. He said to me, 'You have to enter into this by the command of the Lord.' The three mandates are to carry the word of God, heal the sick and cast out demons," he said.
