In ancient Babylonia, it was believed that ghosts walked through the night like the living walked through the day. They weren’t the incorporeal spirits that we think of today when someone mentions ghosts. Back then, it was thought that ghosts could possess the bodies of living animals and that the ghosts of the world’s demons had a particular affinity for possessing the bodies of birds. Evil spirits possessed wild dogs and lions, which were driven to hunt—and to occasionally hunt humans—because of the ghosts within them.

By the time she was just fourteen years-old, a girl from Earling, Iowa named Anna Ecklund began showing signs of demonic possession. The girl had been raised a devout Catholic, however her father and aunt, who practiced witchcraft, allegedly cursed the girl routinely and used herbs to taint her food. Soon, she could not tolerate religious artifacts, became sexually depraved, and could not enter a church. In 1912, the girl underwent a successful exorcism, but after being "cured" of her possession, her father and aunt prayed to Satan for her to suffer even more, and within a year the girl had become possessed by multiple entities, many of whom are said to be the same spirits who possessed Annaliese Michel.

George Lukins, also known as the Yatton daemoniac,was an individual famous for his alleged demonic possession and the subsequent exorcism that occurred in 1788 when he was aged forty-four; his case occasioned great controversy in England