In my experience, they most certainly do. When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, my brother and I got a ouiji board as a gift. My Mom, being from the old country, had no idea what it was and so had no idea how terrible it was for us to have. Needless to say, we started playing with it with startling results. A few nights later, and right before bed, my brother ran into our bedroom rather terror stricken. He said that while in the bathroom brushing his teeth, the drinking cup moved from one end of the sink to the other–all by itself. He wouldn’t go back in unless I went with him. We walked into the bathroom together where I half-expected to see a pool of water that perhaps the cup was “riding” on. The sink counter was dry and so was the cup. A few moments after we shut the door, a shoe-horn we had under the sink banged on the sink pipe so loudly that it really sounded deliberate. We were both very scared at that point and ran out. Over the next few months, things became very strange. The door to the garage would open and slam shut in the middle of the night. My Mom would go to see who it might be at such a strange hour only to find no one there. In the kitchen, I once saw the dishes, and nothing else, rattle so violently that I thought they would break. No rattling windows, like in an earthquake. No loose hinges creaking anywhere else. Just the dishes. It once again felt very deliberate. After a few months, my very devout Grandmother, who prayed the rosary every day in front of her large and beautiful statue of the Blessed Virgin, moved in. A few days after that, another strange event occurred. The screen door to the backyard was on the ground with the screen shredded, by what were obviously claw marks. Sure, it could have been a cat or a raccoon that knocked the door off and destroyed it, but I had the distinct feeling when I saw it that day that something was trying to get out of the house. There hadn’t been another strange incident since.

Reading Father Gabrielle Amorth’s excellent book on the subject many years later; An exorcist: more stories, he related in one passage how he took a couple of very skeptical biologists from the local Italian University to a house he diagnosed as having been infested with a demonic presence. Despite the fact that the house was hooked up to the municipal water supply, what came out of the tap looked very much like human blood. Both scientists scoffed at the idea, and took samples back with them to the university to test. Both scientists were terrified when the results came back positive for human blood. Father Amorth asked them to return, but both absolutely refused out of fear. Father Amorth explained that what the devils did here was only what they did for Pharaoh’s priests, in imitating the sea of blood when Moses dipped his staff in the water. What the devils did in that house was inadvertently confirm the miracles of the Exodus in a very real way.

I feel God sometimes allows the devils to give these kind of testimonies of their existence of a sort, because sometimes that’s the only testimony some people will listen to. Some just don’t take to the ‘lightness and sweetness’ of God thing, thinking that it’s just too saccharin a belief to be true. The whole economy of salvation, for some, must begin with Hell.