Help! My House Is Haunted: 'The Curse Of The Jinn' - Series 4, Episode 2 Review

September 30, 2022 1:00 AM ‐ Television • Paranormal • Long Reads

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Help! My House Is Haunted: The Curse Of The Jinn

Photo: © Discovery+

'Help! My House Is Haunted' Team Enlist The Help Of An Islamic Exorcist To Deal With The Curse Of A Jinn

The 'Help! My House Is Haunted' team embark on their most terrifying case yet, as ordained exorcist Ian Lawman, paranormal historian Jayne Harris, and technical expert Barri Ghai tackle a dark entity that's reluctant to leave a family home in the East Midlands.

In the season's second episode entitled 'The Curse Of The Jinn', the team head to a modern three-bedroom house in Derby, which Jayne says is quite a unique city. She explains, "it's the only city in England to be named by the vikings." The unassuming house has been home to Asha for the last four yers.

She's called in the team due to escalating paranormal activity, that she feels has followed the family from their previous home. Asha has awoken in the night to see a dark cloaked figures stood in the corner of her bedroom, heard loud unexplained knocks, and is the victim of sudden painful rashes on her body.

She confessed in the episode, "it just makes me feel really uncomfortable, and I just get very shaken and frightened." Asha also reports feeling constantly lethargic, tiered and drained. She says she's hoping the 'Help!' team can find out what it is, adding "offer me protection or a prayer, or even get rid of whatever is happening to us."

More From 'Help! My House Is Haunted'

You can read more and the team's investigations on our 'Help! My House Is Haunted' hub, where you'll find detailed reviews of each episode, trivia quizzes and news on future episodes.

Ian's Psychic Sweep

Photo: © Discovery+

As the show's resident psychic medium, Ian knows nothing about the investigation in advance, but before he even arrived at the property he told his teammates that he was aware of the sign of the cross. He explained, "it's indicating to me that we're going to have to have our faith today for some reason." He added, "so we're going into something that is quite serious."

Ian said, "I haven't even stepped foot in the property, but already I feel we are dealing with something very dark." But moments later Ian was forced to step foot inside... alone. As always, Ian is the first to enter the house to allow him to conduct his initial psychic sweep.

As soon as he entered the house he glanced up the stairs and became aware of a door on the landing. He said, "the landing door has just opened. Why has that door opened?" He headed upstairs after seeing a shadow moving on the landing, but he didn't actually get a chance to investigate, because as soon as he got to the top of the stairs he suddenly felt breathless. He said, "it's almost as if something's punched me in the stomach and winded me."

In the master bedroom, Ian once again felt uncomfortable. He felt a pressure again on his stomach and said, "it's pushing on to my heart as well, it's almost as if I feel I'm having a heart attack, the pain is immense." Moments later, while sat on the bed, Ian said someone was shouting in his ear "I cast you, I cast you."

Later, Ian said the negative energy had followed him downstairs. He took a particular dislike to a seat in the living room. He said, "when I sit here, I just see black. It's almost as if something's taken control and clear my memories or my mind. Something is wanting me to leave this property."

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Barri Finds Out More About The Family's Experiences

To find out more about the case and get a better perspective of the experiences the family have had in the house, Barri headed into Derby to meet Asha's daughter, to find out about the activity firsthand. They met in a pub where Zarya told Barri, "for the moment I walk into that house, it's the energy, it's so intense. I feel like something is with me straight away."

Zarya reported feeling as if she's been physically touched and seen a witch-like figure with black wavy hair in the house. She added, "I think it's a dark entity, something that wants my mum to live alone." When asked where she thought this dark energy had come from, Zarya said, "I feel like someone has cast a spell maybe," could this be a curse that ties in with the phrase "cast you" that Ian picked up on?

Zarya summed it up by saying, "I believe it's a jinn that's been sent to attack my family." Barri explained that a jinn is a dark entity found in some cultures, that are similar to demons. They are in fact found in Islamic culture. Barri says, "they can cause mischief, mayhem, pain, suffering."

Meanwhile, Jayne had gone to meet with Mohammed Ahmed, an exorcist and jinn expert in the hopes that he might give her some insight into what the team will need to do to help Asha. Mohammed tells Jayne, "a jinn is a being, a creature, made from smokeless fire." He says that jinns can enter the body and possess someone, their goal is to make their host suffer. Mohammed says a person affected by a jinn might feel tired, want to be alone and isolated, and have pains or scratches. These are all things that Asha has reported. The exorcist also confirms that a sorcerer or magician can conjure a jinn and send it to torment someone, just like in Asha's case.

Spirit Trigger Experiment

Photo: © Discovery+

The team came together to share the findings from their initial investigations, before meeting with Asha and Zarya. They invite the mother and daughter to take part in a spirit trigger experiment with them. They hope that their familiar presence might encourage the jinn to interact.

They began in the living room using a Spirit Box, a ghost hunting device which rapidly scans through radio frequencies. It's believed that spirits can manipulate the white noise in these frequency ranges to form words and sentences. They're also using a digital audio recorder in an attempt to capture evidence of ghosts in the form of recordings known as EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomena.

They get several short responses through the device, but decide to move the investigation upstairs and split up. Ian and Asha went into one bedroom where Ian called out, Jayne was in another bedroom with the others listening to the output of a Spirit Box. Even though she couldn't hear Ian she heard the response "Asha" through the device when Ian asked "can you name somebody in this house?"

Lockdown

With the house rigged with static cameras, Asha and Zarya left and the team were locked down inside. Barri began by placing a REM-Pod on the stairs to detect movement while they called out from the living room. A REM-Pod radiates its own electrostatic field and if anything enters this field, the device will alert them by emitting a beeping sound.

They recorded the session on a digital audio recorder, which captured some very strange sounds. One sounded like something running, the others the team thought sounded like voices saying "jinn" and "demon". Moments later, the REM-Pod alerted them to a disturbance at the top of the stairs.

They felt like they were being drawn upstairs, so Jayne went to the master bedroom alone. She was using an app called Necrophonic, an app that is pre-loaded with partial words, reverse audio, and the phonetic sounds that make up words. The app randomly spews out these sounds and it's believed that spirits can affect the random nature of this app in order to form the words they are trying to communicate.

After hearing "demon" and "jinn" through the devices several more times, the team felt like they were dealing with human spirits rather than the jinn. They concluded that this meant the jinn must still be attached to Asha and therefore not in the house.

So they called Asha back, along with Zarya. The team also called in the exorcist, Mohammed. Of course, normally Ian as an ordained exorcist would conduct this ritual, but Ian works with the Bible. Since a jinn is part of the Islamic faith, Mohammed performs a more fitting ritual by reading text from the Quran. Mohammed conducts the ritual with Asha and Zarya present, while the 'Help!' team watch on from their mobile nerve centre.

When the jinn seems to be showing some resistance to Mohammed's attempts to free Asha from its clutches, the team come back in to assist. Ian talks Asha through the process while Barri uses an SLS camera in an attempt to capture visual evidence of the jinn. This is a special type of camera that uses 3D mapping technology to detect human shapes and highlights them on its screen in the form of a stick figure. Before long, Barri saw a figure near the window on the device's screen.

After a gruelling ritual, Asha felt that the jinn had passed and her home was free of the evil. Speaking afterwards she said, "I just feel like a different person, I feel happy, light, like something really heavy has lifted." Clearly, a job well done and an interesting multi-faith investigation.

She added, "I just cannot thank you enough that you have given me my life back, it's amazing."

Conclusion

Early in the episode Barri asks Ian, "do you think this is a demonic case?" Ian replied, "most definitely," a response that is sure to infuriate some critics, many of whom feel paranormal reality shows have become overrun by demons, but Jayne tells us in the episode, "we rarely deal with demonic attachments, and this case is like nothing we've ever had before."

Jayne is right. What makes this case different is firstly that it's a jinn, which is arguably slightly different to a demon. A large chunk of the episode revolved around the exorcism carried out by the Muslim exorcist. This was very different for a paranormal reality show and showed a real willingness to explore different beliefs and cultures rather than just slamming a demon label on everything as is the case in some other television shows. Although this was undermined a little at one point when Ian used his holy water and Barri is seen holding a cross. This seemed a little insensitive during an Islamic exorcism. If this was a Catholic exorcism and someone pulled out the Quran it would seem equally as inappropriate.

Although Jayne says these cases are rare, it might seem like attachments occur fairly often in the series, after all the team do encounter potential evidence of demons quite frequently, like in the first series when they battled with a demon called Zepar, plus Barri felt there was "compelling evidence" of the presence of a demon at the Cage in Essex. But the difference here is that the demon is believed to be attached to a person and not the property or land. We know this because Asha tells us in the episode that the entity followed her from her previous home in Birmingham. Having said this, in last week's episode, the first in series four, Ian was convinced that a demon was attached to homeowner, Kevin. Ian told us, "the only way to remove Kevin's demonic attachment is to let it take him over."

The physical evidence obtained in this episode isn't as strong as last weeks, but that can be forgiven given the nature of this very unique case, which includes many really fascinating, interesting and different methods used to help the homeowner.

One potential bit of tangible evidence came from Barri's SLS camera when he captured a figure near the window. The figure promptly vanished, but Asha who had an awareness of where the jinn was, said it moved to the fireplace and then the front door. Sadly it seems Barri's camera didn't detect the figure in these two other locations, if it had this would have been really good validation.

Another possible piece of evidence that was missed was when Ian first entered the house and said he saw a door upstairs open. Of course, this could be a result of the change in air pressure caused by him opening the front door. It would have been nice to see Ian try to validate this sighting by attempting to debunk it.

Moments later Ian said he saw a shadow moving on the landing, but suspected that it could be a curtain blowing in a breeze. We didn't get any resolve on the potential curtain or open window either, this could have also explained the door opening.

You can watch the first episode of the fourth season of 'Help! My House Is Haunted' right now on Discovery+, with a new episode dropping next Friday.

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