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"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."
Before Vivian became one of the Midwest's leading exorcists, he was the son of a night watchman and a nurse living at the corner of 25th Street and Myrtle. They were a Baptist family who attended the prescribed Sunday services and no more.
When he was 16, he and a friend visited a Pentecostal church out of curiosity. The congregation was dancing and screaming, and the two tried to slip out, but the preacher caught them before they could make it. He sat them down at a pew up in front and made them pray, screaming at them to seek forgiveness for their sins.
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