Twelve men on a boat are besieged by a storm. Suddenly they see, amongst the lightning, a spectral shape. Hundreds of years earlier, a king throws a party that’s interrupted by some thing that’s not on the guest list: a ghostly hand that scrawls a haunting message on the palace wall. Generations before that, another king with a tragic backstory sneaks into a darkened tent to inquire of the dead, not his parents, or his wife, but the very prophet who doomed his royal house. What are the scariest ghost stories in the Bible, and why?

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This holiday season, when people celebrate either evil or the Reformation, it may help to remember Martin Luther’s reminder that “Even the devil is God’s devil.” And yet Satan is still prowling the Earth, looking for souls to steal. We know people don’t think the Devil exists, yet even some Christians act as “functional materialists” who ignore the threat of demonic deception. Marian Jacobs, author of that forthcoming book about fictional magic versus real magic, rejoins us to engage today’s real threats from real witchcraft.