It’s NYPD-boo!
Cop-turned-demonologist Chris DeFlorio is dishing for the first time about how he rid his former haunt – the 32nd Precinct in Harlem – of a malevolent spirit that had been tormenting officers for years.
DeFlorio, 54, has been slaying the supernatural full-time with his wife, Harmony, since leaving the force in 2021. But one of his final missions in uniform resembled something out of “Ghostbusters” after a rookie cop reported a terrifying encounter inside the precinct’s fourth-floor bunk room.
“The officer in question was working a midnight shift. He’d just finished his shift and instead of going home, he wanted to go upstairs and take a break. He was sleeping in the bunkroom … and at that time, he felt there was something walking behind him,” recalled DeFlorio, who spent 20 years with the boys in blue.
“He jumped up, he looked around, but there was no one in the room. He tried to forget it, went back to sleep, and not too long after, he felt gripping on his legs. Something was holding him down, and it was bouncing on the couch that he was laying on.”
After escaping the alleged spirit’s grasp, the cop hit the lights and “didn’t see anybody in the room,” DeFlorio said. “But when he looked towards the door, he saw a shadow of a person walking out.”
Word of the hair-raising, May 8, 2020, encounter spread fast through the station house, according to DeFlorio and Byron Pena, another retired officer who’d had his own eerie run-in years earlier.
Pena, 58, said he felt “relieved” to hear about the spooky, alleged incident – and that something would finally be done about the malicious spirit.
“After that officer had his experience, I stopped him in the stairwell and I asked him about what happened, and he told me the story,” Pena told The Post. “Back in the last blackout we had in the early 2000s, I slept in the dorm room upstairs, and I tossed and turned all night – I couldn’t sleep.
“I just had an eerie feeling. I kept looking at the door, I kept looking at the window – it was just so uncomfortable. It was just a weird feeling that I couldn’t explain, and I never mentioned it to anybody. … But there was a presence there.”
Petrified from that night, Pena never stepped foot in the bunk room again during his 28 years at the precinct – even after DeFlorio was called on by administrators to perform an exorcism in the wee hours of May 10, 2020.
That morning, DeFlorio faced the demon.
“When I walked into that bunk room, this was something that you couldn’t sense with your five senses,” he recounted.
“You had that feeling when you were in the presence of evil, and that was it. So I knew right then, that this officer was not over-exaggerating. … I didn’t know if I was going to come out alive.”
He doused the room in holy water, lit frankincense and read an ancient Catholic prayer used in exorcisms.
An hour later, “you could walk directly into that room and it felt like a different room. There was a light feeling to it,” DeFlorio said.
“When you’re fighting something demonic, you’ve gotta come in with something good from God,” he added.
Since then, he hasn’t heard another whisper — or screams and howls for that matter — from the 32nd Precinct.
“It was successful,” he said.
The post NYC cop-turned-ghostbuster tells all about ‘evil’ spirit at NYPD precinct: ‘Didn’t know if I was gonna come out alive’ appeared first on New York Post.
