] Not a Halloween goes by that I don’t think about my old friend the Rev. Mario S. Termini, who died a couple of years ago. Fr. Termini was an exorcist who lived and worked on the bayous of south Louisiana. Here’s a 1992 Washington Times story I did, which relates events surrounding a kind of exorcism of a haunted house near New Orleans, to which I was a witness. I read the story today for the first time since it was published. The thing that jumped out in my memory today from my reporting experience on this story was hearing Fr. Termini tell me that Satanist groups would go out on pagan feast days, especially Halloween, into the south Louisiana swamps and perform human sacrifices. I thought he was exaggerating. Then I called the head occult crimes investigator for the Baton Rouge police department. He was unwilling to share details with me, but he told me (and he’s quoted saying so in the story) that Fr. Termini was right — and that the ritual occultism that actually goes on are so “far-fetched” that it’s hard to get people to believe them.