Little town Superstitions explain Electrical Shorts

CANNETO DI CARONIA, Sicily - - There are many ways for evil to arrive but perhaps only one way to get rid of it: exorcism.

That about sums up the collective psyche of this stone-filled village perched above the sea after a series of puzzling electrical shorts, unexplained fires and smoky outbursts that struck in nine houses, displacing 17 families.

First to explode was Nino Pezzino's television, two days before Christmas.

Fuse boxes then blew in houses all along the Via Mare. Air-conditioners erupted even when unplugged. Fires started spontaneously. Kitchen appliances went up in smoke. A roomful of wedding gifts was crisped. Computers jammed. Cellphones rang when no one was calling, and electronic door locks in empty cars went demonically up and down.

Before long, the mainly Roman Catholic populace professed to see the hand of the Devil at work, turning their postcard-perfect paradise into a place possessed of evil, embers and ash.

As Mr. Pezzino put it, "Whoever believes in the good believes in the bad."

He paused, wiped his brow and added: "I'm Catholic. I believe in the Devil. I don't know why the Devil is here."

On Feb. 9, after a particularly harrowing fire, 39 of the hamlet's 150 people evacuated their homes. In June, with fingers crossed, they returned.

The intervening months can be summed up like this: Enel, the country's electrical company, cut power to the village. Some scientists came. They studied things. They made declarations about the release of electromagnetic waves. The town replaced its wires and grounded them. Now, the weird phenomena seem to have stopped, but the scientists are at a loss to explain why.

"It is not certain that the fires are finished forever," said Tullio Martella, the head of Sicily's Civil Protection Agency. "They were episodic to begin with."

As a practical matter, the scientists took notes, mapped the strange occurrences, used Geiger counters and interviewed witnesses. But in the end officials from several agencies, including the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology and the National Research Center, were left with only hypotheses.

One was that high pressure from under the crust of this volcanic spit of land on Sicily's northern coast had caused underground shifts that released electrical energy that eventually found its way to the village.

The supercharged ions, once in contact with man-made electronic devices, may have caused sparks to fly, the scientists say, especially since the hamlet is near transmission lines and railroad tracks. But the fires could just as easily have been caused by some unexplainable problem in the atmosphere, Mr. Martella said.

"The cause of the fires seems to have been static electric charges," he said. "What we don't understand is why there were these static electric charges."

Even less definitive was Gianfranco Allegra, of the Italian Center for Electro-technical Experimentation, in Milan. "No one knows what the cause of these fires are," he said. "They are inexplicable."

In the absence of clear science, villagers say there is no question it is the Devil's work. The causes, they say, have more to do with superstitions in a land known on maps as Demon's Valley, a veritable cradle of vampire lore.

"Maybe the problem we're dealing with is technology," Mr. Pezzino said on the June day he and other villagers started trickling back to their homes. "But it's not earth-bound technology."

Then he added, "If it happens again, I'm bringing in the exorcist."

Standing around him, the town's mayor, Pedro Spinnato, 38, and an older man, Pippo Cicero, an olive farmer, burst out laughing. But Mr. Pezzino, a 43-year-old insurance company employee, looked dead serious.

"If we're going to do it, we have to do it right," he said. "In order to do it, you need a sacrifice for the immortal gods, like a black goat or a black sheep. You have to dig a hole into the ground, because this is serious."

Mr. Spinnato, an atheist, is not ready to call in an exorcist. But he did revoke his evacuation order and is now helping people settle back into their damaged, and still a little scary, houses.

In one, the story was told by a burned bathroom water heater and furniture pushed to the middle of the floor, away from electrical sockets. On a wall was a portrait of Padre Pio, the celebrated monk and mystic who died in 1968, at the age of 81, and who was credited with countless miracles and intercessions: healing incurable cancer, finding people jobs and ridding their apartments of mice.

In another, a second-floor bedroom held the soot-stained remains of Lucia Pezzino's wedding gifts: photos, clothes, silver, crystal and linens that her mother had made.

"What everyone here wants is a complete, scientific, official explanation of what happened, why it happened and could it happen again," Mr. Spinnato said. "Otherwise we will always be saying, 'I don't know.' ''

Just then, Ms. Pezzino drove up in a silver Fiat. Asked if she was happy to be back, she said, "But are we coming back?"

Another car lurched forward. Out popped Francesco Cuffari waving the two-page decree saying the houses were open again.

"For me, it's not even toilet paper," he said, laughing and thrusting the paper at the mayor. "Tomorrow, if something happens, what do we do? How are we going to defend ourselves?"

Mr. Cuffari pointed to a spot where flames had singed his car's hatchback.

"I've never done anything bad to anyone, so I knew no one did this to me," he said. "I never even called the wrong woman beautiful. And then this happened."