Can't get a Catholic exorcism in Kansas City? James Vivian is here to help

The way Summers remembers it, he was just starting to preach when he heard screams coming from halfway through the rows of wooden pews. The black-haired woman he would come to know as Katrina was shaking her head and rocking back and forth — "goddamn it! Damn! Goddamn!"

Every head in the congregation turned to watch the woman in the black dress.

"I knew right away what it was because I was 13 when I had a problem, and my daddy had to help me," Summers tells The Pitch. He has a practical view of the problem. "I don't go around looking for devils, but when they show up, well, I'm not going to run from them. That's just how I am with the devil."

Katrina had a history of uncontrollable swearing and striking herself hard enough to leave black eyes.

A year before she met Summers, Katrina says, she told a co-worker that she was hearing voices ordering her not to read the Bible and to ignore Jesus. Katrina says the co-worker called the Missouri Department of Social Services to report her, and her 8-year-old daughter, Cheyenne, was sent to a foster home while she was placed under psychiatric care. The doctors diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and put her on medication, but nothing changed. Her aunt had taken her to five churches before Summers' church, but none had helped.

Summers walked toward Katrina, Bible in hand. "I want you all to pray," he told his frightened congregation. They stayed in their seats and filled the church with whispered prayers. Katrina started screaming louder.

"This is my wife!" Katrina yelled.

"You don't have a wife," Summers said. Then he tried to expel the demon.

This went on for close to an hour, with Katrina writhing and yelling and slapping herself in the pew and Summers praying over her. Eventually, she quieted down. When they were finished, Summers asked her if she'd let him come to her home, where he and his wife, Nancy, could continue the deliverance.

For six months, they put holy water on her, prayed over her and tried to rid her of the demon. Nothing worked.

"We told her it wouldn't hurt her to visit with a Ph.D. or a man like that, too, and she did," Summers says. "The doctors didn't find any problems."

Then one night, Nancy saw Larson preaching on cable television. She and Summers called the ministry the next day and were directed to James Vivian. Vivian arrived in Poplar Bluff in June 2007.

Though they'd asked for his help, Nancy was apprehensive — especially when it was decided that Vivian would preach in their church. "I thought he'd get all these bad spirits jumping up in our church, and then he'd be gone and we'd have to deal with it," she says. "Then it wasn't like that. He didn't point anyone in our church out or cause any disturbances. I'm thankful for that."

The first few minutes that Vivian met with Katrina, things were calm. He asked her to fill out a personal history, and he started to work with the Summerses behind him.

Then, Summers recalls, "All hell broke loose. She was convulsing and screaming. She started declaring herself a fallen angel. I can't remember everything she said, but it was bad stuff. Then she vomited, and whatever that was smelled horrible."

It took three continuous days for Vivian to finish. The final diagnosis wasn't demonic. Based on Katrina's answers to Vivian's survey and the things she'd said when she was having a fit, he determined that her boss was a warlock.

Once diagnosed, this made sense to Katrina. "I used to see people driving past my house and throwing up hands at me," she tells The Pitch. "Now I know what that was about. It was trying to put curses on me."

The way Summers and Vivian see it, witches and warlocks are just as responsible for creating misery as Lucifer is, and the hills of Missouri are filled with people who work regular jobs, then go home, shut the door and start murmuring curses with images of their victims in mind. They are impossible to tell from Christians on sight. Some of them are even priests.

"Warlocks are more devious, and that's your problem, more or less," Summers says. "I give Vivian credit. Seeing her [Katrina] now is like the difference between night and day."