In the winter of 1939 a young Italian girl named Maria Talarico and her grandmother were walking across the small bridge that joined theirs and their neighbour’s farms to the town of Catanzaro. Halfway across the bridge Maria suddenly stopped, her face went blank and she stared motionless into the creek below. Despite her grandmother shaking her she stayed like this for several minutes before falling unconscious on the road. This moment in history was the beginning of one of the most infamous and confounding cases of possession worldwide. Introducing the entity Giuseppe Veraldi…The entity Giuseppe Veraldi’s story begins in 1936, three years earlier at the end of Giuseppe’s time amongst the living. His lifeless body was found on the banks of the creek below that same bridge where Maria Talarico had gone into a trance like state. After an intensive investigation, the authorities ruled out fowl play declaring the death a suicide. The flesh on his head was torn away in large chunks in various places where his skull had been bludgeoned and fractured, but this, it was determined, was from impact with the rocks below when he threw himself from the bridge. There were a lot of aspects within the investigation which the community did not accept. For a start, the creek itself was mostly mud at this time of year, and the bridge was only 7 feet above. None the less Giuseppe’s suicide was all but in the past three years later when Maria had her episode on the bridge. On that winter day in 1939 Maria Talarico and her grandmother were picked up by a passing neighbour while Maria was still unconscious. When she came to on the ride back to the farm she immediately spoke in the gruff voice of a full grown man and while glaring at the grandmother who coddled her and stated: You are not my mother. My mother lives in the wooden cottage, and her name is Catarina Veraldi. I am Pepe. Once they had gotten home the entity began insisting that a bottle of wine be brought, some cigarettes, and a pack of cards. Fearing demonic possession the local priest was called upon and he began initial investigations into Maria’s state, first of which was to have her write her name – she quickly wrote out “Giuseppe Veraldi”. What’s more startling is that this writing would later be analysed and found to match Giuseppe’s perfectly. By this time a number of the community had gathered at the Talarico farm, including Giuseppe’s mother. Upon hearing his mother’s voice the entity within Maria Talarico began to cry and stated: My friends murdered me. They threw me into the river-bed and then, as I lay there, they battered my head with an iron bar and tried to make the whole thing look like suicide. These quotes are of course translations as the original statements were made in Italian.Following this statement Maria, or the entity controlling her body jumped up and ran back to the bridge, climbed the parapet and leaped into the river bed. She feel a minimum of thirty feet into the mud below and sustained multiple injuries. When the others arrived Maria was laying in the river bed crying for help as though being attacked, and then she simply woke up. Giuseppe Veraldi’s presence having seemingly vanished from Maria. Maria Talarico Nine years later a letter arrived at the home of Giuseppe’s mother, Catarina Veraldi. It was signed by Luigi Marchete, one of Giuseppe’s good friends who had by this time immigrated to Argentina and was on his death bed due to illness. The letter was a confession to the murder of Giuseppe Veraldi and it described almost exactly the details told by Maria Talarico while possessed. Thanks to the details given in the letter the investigation was reopened and two residents of Catanzaro were arrested and convicted for the murder of Giuseppe Veraldi. The Possession of Maria Talarico is confounding on so many levels, some paranormal experts refuse to even refer to it as a possession at all stating instead that Maria may have been an exceptionally gifted medium, but such a level of cooperation or joining between clairvoyant and spirit has not once been witnessed other than this. The church of course places this as a possession, but not by Giuseppe Veraldi, instead declaring that the entity was demonic and the tale told was meant only as trickery to gain sympathy, either way we will never know. Whether or not Maria Talarico’s is a case of possession, or extreme clairvoyance the fact remains that the episode began in the very specific place where Giuseppe Veraldi met his end, and could it happen again?
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 01:45:01 +0000
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