It’s been almost a month, and they’ve come back again with stories that made The Wild Hunt‘s editors stop, reread the headline, and mutter, “Wait… what?”
Like we wrote before: Sometimes the Hounds are simply confused. Sometimes they sniff the trail, tilt their heads, and decide it isn’t worth chasing. And then there are those other times—they sniff and, well… pee on it.
Here’s your new episode of What the Hounds?
Nurse performs exorcism in nursing home. Seriously?
EASTON, Pa. — An alleged attempt by a nurse to perform an exorcism on an elderly nursing-home resident triggered a grand-jury investigation that ultimately uncovered broader concerns about resident safety, staffing and management at a county-run Pennsylvania facility.
According to a 71-page grand-jury report released September 10, agency nurse Octavia Robinson entered the room of an elderly, medically vulnerable resident at Gracedale Nursing Home shortly before 3 a.m. on June 23, 2025. Robinson allegedly put her fingers into the resident’s mouth, forced clothing or towels into her mouth or throat, and repeatedly struck her back while saying that the woman had demons inside her that needed to come out.
The resident’s roommates repeatedly called 911 seeking help. Police did not reach the room for more than 30 minutes. When officers arrived, body-camera footage reviewed by the grand jury reportedly showed Robinson standing over the resident with her fingers in the woman’s mouth. Blood was visible on the resident, bedding, and nearby clothing or towels.
Robinson was taken for psychiatric evaluation and subsequently charged with abuse of a care-dependent person and simple assault. She is scheduled to stand trial in October.
The incident became the catalyst for a much broader investigation of Gracedale. The grand jury identified concerns involving chronic staffing shortages, extensive reliance on agency nurses, security and emergency-response failures, resident elopements, assaults, failures to provide prescribed care, and food-sanitation problems. Federal inspectors issued 14 deficiency citations in 2025, compared with three in 2023 and two in 2024.
Northampton County Executive Tara Zrinski has announced an action plan that includes strengthening oversight and quality assurance, reducing reliance on agency staffing, reviewing security and emergency-response procedures, and pursuing longer-term modernization of the facility.
The extraordinary circumstances also raise questions about religious conduct, consent and professional responsibility. Exorcism exists as a religious rite within several traditions and can be practiced consensually within religious communities. The alleged conduct at Gracedale, however, involved imposing such beliefs upon a dependent resident who had not consented to the rite, while allegedly physically assaulting her.
Whatever Robinson believed was occurring spiritually, the resident was entitled to medical care, personal safety and religious autonomy.
Baalshit
“The Slaughter of the Prophets of Baal” by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
WASHINGTON — Plans for a U.S. exhibit celebrating the American West at next year’s international exposition in Belgrade, Serbia, reportedly hit an unexpected obstacle at the State Department: concerns that a golden bull might evoke the ancient god Baal.
Axios reports that Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau raised concerns about plans to feature a statue of a bucking bull at the U.S. pavilion for Expo 2027 Belgrade. The State Department has long planned U.S. participation in the exposition, which runs May 15 through Aug. 15, 2027.
In an Aug. 19 email obtained by Axios, Landau told staff that he remained concerned about the proposed “Golden Bull imagery,” noting that the biblical Golden Calf is sometimes depicted as a bull. He also included material connecting bull symbolism with Baal, the ancient Canaanite deity, and discussed modern comparisons between golden-bull imagery, idolatry and materialism.
The concerns reportedly put the proposed statue on hold while State Department officials considered how to retain the Western theme without creating unwanted religious associations. Several unnamed officials quoted by Axios expressed bewilderment at the discussion, with one comparing the situation to an episode of Veep. Landau declined to comment through a department spokesperson.
The episode comes amid a recent resurgence of Baal imagery in online conspiracy theories. Earlier this year, social-media posts falsely claimed that Jeffrey Epstein maintained a bank account named “Baal”; a Yahoo fact-check reported that the supposed reference resulted from an AI document-scanning error. Baal imagery has also appeared in Iranian propaganda and in online discussions connecting the ancient deity with allegations of child sacrifice and Satanism.
Historically, Baal is more complicated. The word baʿal means “lord” or “master” in Northwest Semitic languages and could function as a title for several deities. The best-known Baal from surviving Canaanite sources is Baal Hadad, a storm and fertility deity associated particularly with rain, thunder and agricultural abundance. Bulls and bull imagery were widespread symbols of divine strength and fertility throughout the ancient Near East and were not unique to Baal.
The fate of the American bull remains unresolved.
One State Department official, however, assured Axios that officials expect to have the matter settled before the exposition opens: “We’ll have the bull sorted out by then.”
Gort, Klaatu barada U OK?
Actual site photo with FBI Lab graphic overlay depicting eyewitness reports of an apparent bronze, ellipsoid object (130–195 feet long) materializing from a bright light in the sky before disappearing instantaneously in September 2023. Credit: Pentagon/UFO
WILMINGTON, N.C. — Here’s a question to keep you up at night: does Superman shave?
Apparently, this is a debate: Are extraterrestrials actually demons? Despite some recent headlines, that is not quite what religious studies scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka is arguing. Instead, she says accounts of encounters with extraterrestrial beings sometimes bear striking similarities to much older descriptions of encounters with demons, spirits, and other supernatural entities.
Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, discussed the similarities during an appearance on That UFO Podcast. Her research examines UFO culture as a religious and cultural phenomenon rather than attempting to establish whether extraterrestrial visitors actually exist.
Pasulka pointed to recurring features in modern UFO reports, including beings that appear able to know a person’s thoughts, communicate without moving their mouths, or understand languages they seemingly should not know. Some witnesses also report phenomena resembling traditional accounts of hauntings or poltergeist activity, including unexplained knocking and objects moving without an apparent cause.
Those characteristics, Pasulka argues, did not begin with the modern UFO era. Similar experiences appear throughout older religious and supernatural literature, where people interpreted them using concepts such as demons, angels, spirits, or other nonhuman intelligences. Modern observers, encountering similarly inexplicable experiences, may instead understand them through the culturally familiar language of extraterrestrials and advanced technology.
The overlap between occultism and UFO culture also has a long history. The IBTimes report notes connections involving occultist and rocket engineer Jack Parsons and artist and occult practitioner Marjorie Cameron, as well as earlier religious interpretations of UFO phenomena. Some Christian writers have explicitly argued that supposed extraterrestrials are demonic beings, although Pasulka’s comparative analysis does not make that claim.
Her argument instead raises a question familiar to scholars of religion and folklore: whether different generations and cultures use different frameworks to describe anomalous experiences that share common characteristics.
To be clear: are aliens really demons? YMMV, but Pasulka isn’t saying so.
Rather, she suggests that today’s stories about encounters with extraterrestrials may sometimes resemble stories people once told about encounters with spirits, demons, and other supernatural beings.
The Hounds’ verdict: The vocabulary changes. The weirdness remains.
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