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You get the sense of them, the measure of them, by staying in their proximity for a few minutes, hours or days - the precise time varied from job to job, and from one ghostbuster to another - and then you did whatever it was that you did: the peculiar schtick that channelled your power. With me it was music, but everyone’s got their thing. If you do it right, then when you’ve finished the ghost is gone: permanently, irrevocably gone, and nobody (despite what they may tell you) has any idea where to.

Loup-garous are a bit more complicated.

When you’ve got a human spirit anchored in animal flesh - which is all a werewolf is at the end of the day - you can drive it out easily enough. You just set up an interference between the spirit and its host, so that the body expels the invading ghost and becomes its normal, animal self again. This isn’t the same as a straight exorcism, although we still call it that: the ghost isn’t permanently banished, it’s just temporarily evicted. If that sounds like a pussyfooting distinction, look at it this way: it’s the difference between what an assassin does and what a bailiff does.

Who would you prefer to get a visit from?

And demons - demons are different again, mostly because they know how to fight back. Demons are sensitised to exorcisms, to the point where even the preliminary rituals shrill out to them across enormous distances like a police siren. Probably there’s a Darwinian explanation for that: the deƒor eremons that lacked this sensitivity were the ones that went under.

The ones that are left, by contrast, have both a certain level of resistance to an exorcist’s patternings and a tendency to counter-attack: they’ve been known to back-navigate the psychic trail like a shark following a blood-spoor, until they find the exorcist and stop the spell in progress by, say, eating his brain.

But the other element in the mix here is the exorcist himself, and my feelings on the subject underwent a bit of a revision a while back. I started to wonder where it was the ghosts went to when we dispatched them so casually - a question I should maybe have been asking way back when I performed my first exorcism on my own sister.

Belatedly, my itchy trigger finger got a little bit arthritic, and I made a decision not to perform exorcisms on demand. I take each case on its own merits these days, as you’ve maybe seen. If a ghost is genuinely dangerous, I’ll bind it or even banish it and pocket the cheque.

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