Shawn Ryan says he went through four exorcisms after a psychedelic vision of hell

If podcasting has a jump scare, it is a former Navy SEAL telling a bishop that the smoke alarms, the nightmares, and the picture frames are not metaphor. Shawn Ryan says a psychedelic trip made him think he saw hell, and that he has since gone through four exorcisms with two priests.

That is the searchable payload here. Not “faith journey,” not “spiritual awakening,” not the soft-focus celebrity version where a famous man discovers prayer and better sleep. Ryan’s story is much weirder and much more volatile: an earlier psychedelic experience, he says, helped him quit alcohol four and a half years ago. A recent one, by contrast, seems to have turned his life into Catholic horror cinema.

ولم يكن هناك شيء. لم يكن هناك إحساس بالله أو المسيح أو أي شيء جيد. كان مكاناً خالياً.

Ryan describes the vision as absence, not fire. No pitchforks. No heavy-metal album cover. Just emptiness, fear, and anxiety that lasted about an hour and a half. The interesting, and very 2020s, part is how quickly the wellness language curdles. One psychedelic trip is medicine. Another becomes an opening.

لقد خضعت لأربع عمليات طرد أرواح شريرة مع كاهنين مختلفين. الأمر لا يزول.

A self-improvement story becomes a possession story

The Shawn Ryan Show usually lives in the land of operators, trauma, geopolitics, guns, gear, and men calmly explaining terrible things under studio lights. This episode turns preparedness into a theological category. Ryan talks about demonic entities, white-noise machines speaking, smoke alarms going off around 12:45, vivid nightmares about his family being torn apart, and picture frames flying off the wall.

You do not have to buy the demonology to recognize the shape of the testimony. Ryan sounds rattled, and he also sounds convinced that fear is functioning as confirmation. That is the hinge. The very thing he wants to stop is also, in his telling, proof that he is supposed to keep going.

As evidence, the episode is thin. As a document of belief forming in real time, it is hard to look away from. Psychedelic experiences can produce realities that feel more real than real, which is exactly why people come back from them with new diets, new gods, new divorces, and sometimes all three. Ryan has come back with exorcism.

Strickland gives the haunting a Catholic operating system

Bishop Joseph Strickland does not treat Ryan’s account like a man needing a cold towel and less internet. He plugs it directly into Catholicism: the devil attacks truth, the family is a favorite target, and the sacraments are not symbols but weapons.

الشيطان يكره بشدة أي شخص ينقل الحقيقة للآخرين، وبالطبع الكتاب المقدس هو الحقيقة كلها.

This is where the episode becomes less about whether Ryan’s house is haunted and more about what kind of map you use when life gets unrecognizable. A therapist might hear a crisis after an intense drug experience. A skeptic might hear a viral clip being born in a studio that knows exactly how to title it. Strickland hears war.

الإجابة الوحيدة هي المثابرة. نفس العملية ، الاستمرار في المسار ، خوض المعركة الصالحة ، البقاء على الطريق، الحفاظ على الإيمان

The oddest comedy beat, because podcasts are podcasts, is that a conversation about hell, possession, and Catholic sacraments briefly makes room for an ad read about tourniquets. The flesh is weak, the blood loss is preventable, and promo codes wait for no demon.

Still, the claim has teeth because Ryan is not telling a tidy conversion story. He is telling a story in which a tool he once credits with healing him became, or at least felt like, a doorway to terror. That is why this clip travels. It hits the current American pressure point between psychedelics as therapy and psychedelics as a spiritual casino. Sometimes the house wins.

لم أطلب من جمهوري أبداً أن يفعلوا أي شيء لي شخصياً، لكنني سأطلب منهم اليوم أن يصلوا من أجلي ومن أجل عائلتي وفريقي ومن أجلك.