Troubled journey included exorcism
After son’s suicide, family questions local monastery’s decision to perform rare rite
On the final day of his life, Max Ledwidge boarded a flight from Houston to Las Vegas, rented a car and headed east. He took out his phone and began recording.
The 26-year-old calmly detailed how the Bible’s Book of Revelation, foretelling a holy war and the apocalypse, seemed to be playing out. He emailed the 40 minutes of audio to his family, along with a last will and testament.
“This world is evil. And I want to be gone from it,” Ledwidge wrote. “Jesus and the devil are one and the same. Following both are paths to destruction.”
Four hours out of Las Vegas, Ledwidge arrived at the Grand Canyon. His final moments that evening were captured on security video and later described to Ledwidge’s father by a police official who had viewed the footage.
Ledwidge walked to the canyon’s edge, looked over and walked back. He took off his shoes, deposited his phone and keys in them — and jumped.
He left the phone unlocked, providing a digital record of his tumultuous final year. Seventeen months earlier, Ledwidge had been a successful young software
sales executive in Boston. Close friends said he appeared at that point to be the same kind and brilliant person they’d known.
The story of his mental unraveling combines several elements: the disruptions and isolation brought on by the COVID -19 pandemic; a descent into the netherworld of online conspiracy theories; and a cross-country spiritual odyssey that led him to the sleepy college town of Cobleskill, where a little-known religious order decided Ledwidge needed to undergo a rite that survives in some corners of the Christian world: an exorcism.
It happened at the St. John of San Francisco Orthodox Monastery, located about 45 minutes west of Albany, outside of town at the end of a steep dirt road. Ledwidge spent a troubled winter there in 2020, immersing himself in a small, deeply conservative religious group, the Genuine Orthodox Christians of America.
Amid sloping green hills, the modest grounds include several rectangular living quarters, a pond and a small church. By the time the sun rises each morning, the blackcloaked, bearded monks have spent hours praying in near-darkness, repeating: “Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
To Ledwidge’s parents, the crucial event of their son’s decline occurred at the end of his two-month stay, when church leadership determined he had become possessed by a demon. They performed at least two exorcisms, seeking to expel what the church viewed as an invading evil.
The leader of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of America, His Eminence Metropolitan Demetrius, lives in the Cobleskill monastery. He authorized the exorcism prayers and conducted them, but never advised Ledwidge to seek mental health treatment.
“They’re such zealots, they probably thought they were doing the right thing by him,” said Max’s father, Tom Ledwidge. “When it was probably the worst possible thing they could have done: He was already suffering from some form of mental illness.”
After the exorcisms, Demetrius indicated to Ledwidge that the prayers had not fully worked — he remained “literally possessed.”
In an email responding to the Times Union’s questions, Demetrius said that in sacred settings, including church services, Ledwidge often demonstrated “obvious signs of agitation and discomfort,” including “trembling, writhing on the ground” and “abnormal distortions of the face and eyes.” There was also “cursing, yelling, shouting, shrieking or speaking with multiple voices simultaneously.”
“Maximos never manifested these behaviors in a secular context” — such as on the monastery grounds — where he could “interact with others in a perfectly normal manner,” Demetrius said.
Ledwidge died seven months after the exorcisms, and by that time had disavowed Christianity. Demetrius said he sympathizes with Ledwidge’s parents but was not responsible for their son’s death. Faced with suicide, parents are often “haunted by temptations to relive the past” and conduct an “endless search for a meaningful explanation,” he said.
Proof of Ledwidge’s alleged strange behavior at the monastery remains elusive. The Times Union reviewed videos of its prayer services, which are livestreamed on YouTube and then archived, and did not observe any shouting or shrieking during Ledwidge’s two months there.
‘Orthodox fanatics’
The 1973 horror film “The Exorcist” brought a previously obscure remnant of Roman Catholicism to public attention. Since then, various forms of the rite have gained popularity.
Exorcism prayers are a centuries-old practice within Roman Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox Church. In his 2001 book “American Exorcism,” author Michael Cuneo noted that — regardless of one’s belief in the supernatural — exorcism may have psychotherapeutic value for certain subjects, bringing hope of improvement. But in other instances, exorcism has proven dangerous.
In the 1990s, a psychiatrist diagnosed a Wisconsin woman with demonic possession and having 126 separate personalities, including Satan. The psychiatrist attempted to carry out an exorcism himself, and Nadean Cool subsequently attempted suicide by slashing her abdomen; she spent five days in a coma. Cool later explained, “I couldn’t stand the thought that I had Satan inside my body.”
In 1999, the Roman Catholic Church amended its rules for exorcism for the first time since 1614: A person who claims to be possessed must now be evaluated by doctors “to rule out a mental or physical illness.” Before an exorcism is approved, other possibilities must be exhausted.
The Eastern Orthodox Church lacks the same centralization. And the breakaway group Ledwidge joined, the Genuine Orthodox Christians (GOC), has consciously removed itself further from the mainstream and modernity.
“They have become what you would call ‘Orthodox fanatics,’” said George Demacopoulos, chair of Orthodox Christian Studies at Fordham University. “The Orthodox Church is not nearly as developed anyway, and a fringe group like this is going to have even less checks and balances than the mainstream.”
Demetrius confirmed exorcism remains “fairly common” in the GOC, at least relative to its use in contemporary Westernized churches.
Within mainstream Orthodox Christianity, Genuine Orthodox Christians are considered fringe, Demacopoulos said. Members of the GOC, meanwhile, consider mainstream Orthodox leadership to be heretical. The schism began in 1924, when the Church of Greece adopted a revised calendar that shifted important religious dates and sparked a breakaway “old calendarist” movement and the GOC.
The GOC came to the United States in the 1950s; in North and South America, there are 58 parishes and missions and six men’s monasteries and “sketes,” or small settlements of monks. The GOC rejects Westernized churches, seeking to emulate Christ’s early followers, practicing penance, and seeing life on Earth as a prelude to heaven.
There is reference to the Book of Revelation, the Bible’s final chapter predicting the coming of the Antichrist, a chief agent of Satan who forges a one-world government, then is defeated in the battle of Armageddon.
“Of course the Antichrist is coming,” Demetrius said in a May 2020 sermon. “And when he comes, many people won’t recognize him, because he is the spirit of deception, illusion.”
Told about Ledwidge’s case, Demacopoulos said that presenting this kind of environment “to a young man who was struggling — a vision of a world and Christianity that is very, very black and white — in this instance appears to have been psychologically devastating.”
“It was incumbent upon spiritual elders to, first and foremost, put the well-being first of a kid that was struggling — and not to be abusive of that authority,” he said.
Maximos
As a freshman at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Logan Koerner was himself struggling. Unlike other freshmen, he hadn’t previously gone to school with new classmates. He ate lunch alone.
Ledwidge, a fellow freshman, had many friends. Yet he soon made a point of inviting Koerner to eat lunch with his group, and to Friday evening basketball games at the Ledwidge home.
“He was always the person who made you feel important,” Koerner said. “In the darkest times, when I felt the most alienated, Max was always the person making me feel I had a friend.”
After Ledwidge died, Koerner spoke at a “celebration of life” ceremony, telling mourners: “If you have the opportunity, you should try to be someone’s Max.”
Ledwidge was a straight-A student without much effort and notched a near-perfect SAT score, his parents said. Though he never demonstrated serious mental health issues, he could be sensitive, burdened at times by his own high expectations.
Ledwidge attended Roman Catholic Mass regularly with his parents, as well as Catholic schools. He enrolled at
Notre Dame University, though his best friend and roommate, Aiden Dore, said Ledwidge was not especially religious or political on campus.
“The running joke was that he was so relaxed and calm all the time,” Dore said. “He knew he was smart, and that things were going to be OK because he was a smart, good dude. I never got a whiff of mental illness or conspiracy theories.”
But Ledwidge left after his freshman year. According to his parents, the departure was partially due to his disgust with the Roman Catholic Church’s priest sex abuse scandal. (He also hated the bitter winters.) He transferred to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, and earned a degree in economics.
In 2019, he moved to Boston for a job at Oracle and began attending a mainstream Greek Orthodox Church, making friends easily within his new faith.
Soon before COVID -19 struck, Ledwidge spent the weekend in New York City with Dore. He seemed his normal self, Dore recalled. They went to bars and talked about hip-hop music.
Ledwidge’s best friend since middle school, Robert Wolfe, last saw him back home in Florida for Christmas 2019. “It felt like old times,” Wolfe said. As the pandemic arrived in March 2020, they talked on the phone, and Ledwidge still seemed his normal self — politically conservative but not especially political or religious.
“He was always curious, not accepting that things had to be a certain way,” Wolfe said. “This conspiracy stuff never came up. The only aspect that sort of makes sense is that his curiosity somehow led him in that direction.”
Ledwidge had just left
Oracle for another tech firm in Boston. According to his parents, he grew to hate working remotely at the new job due to the lack of human connection.
A voracious reader, he dove into religion — and began having misgivings about the mainstream Orthodox church, feeling it was “very uncomfortable” distinguishing itself from Roman Catholicism.
On YouTube, Ledwidge came across a 2007 talk given by a Genuine Orthodox Christian bishop.
“As I was watching, I just felt like my whole world had been turned upside down,” Ledwidge would recall in a video interview later in 2020. “It was all problems that I had noticed in the church and the Greek Archdiocese. And I couldn’t argue with them, basically.”
His fascination with religion would become an obsession. In May 2020, Ledwidge quit his job and moved to rural Virginia, where he could attend a GOC church and potentially pursue an interest in farming. His priest encouraged Ledwidge to consider enrolling in St. Photios Orthodox Theological Seminary in Etna, Calif. In August 2020, Ledwidge called his parents and said he’d moved again and enrolled at the school, possibly to become a priest.
In October 2020, Ledwidge spoke for 20 minutes in a video interview conducted by the GOC seminary, explaining the reasons for his new calling.
“There’s good and bad in the world. Each person experiences both, and the church provides us with many ways to deal with these wounds and these sicknesses,” Ledwidge said. “It can be very chaotic
and confusing outside of the church.”
Ledwidge explained that life was supposed to be “one long sacrifice to God. You should try to lose all the parts of yourself that don’t help you along that path.” He was given a new name: Maximos, after a sainted early monk.
Ledwidge’s parents point to the contrast between Max in that video — appearing calm and collected — and the one that emerged several months later.
Ledwidge was supposed to cultivate humility and show deference to spiritual mentors. But while friends knew him for an uncritical nature toward people, he proved a defiant skeptic about religion.
In October 2020, Ledwidge was assigned to write a paper and solicited advice from the seminary’s leader, Bishop Auxentios. Ledwidge wanted to write about how the Bible’s story of human creation was correct; Auxentios responded that the topic was contentious. The paper was intended as nothing more than a basic test of writing skills.
According to Auxentios, Ledwidge took the advice as an affront: He wrote
the paper, and instead of submitting it to his instructor, scattered copies through the seminary and in townspeople’s mailboxes. He then abruptly left the California seminary without telling anyone.
In a Facebook message to a friend, Ledwidge said he’d apologized to Auxentios for his abrupt departure. He hadn’t been ready for the seminary and needed to “work out” himself first.
Auxentios, who leads the GOC’s diocese in the western United States and Canada, conferred with Demetrius, the religion’s leader in North and South America. They encouraged Ledwidge to reflect in the quiet of Cobleskill.
‘Mark of the devil’
In the light of a December late afternoon, the prayer service began. By the time the hour passed, the chapel was dark, lit only by candles casting a red hue. Paintings of angels, brightly illuminated in daylight, turned to black, winged shadows.
The service concluded with biblical passages denouncing those pursuing material things instead of spiritual sustenance: “He that trusteth in
wealth shall fall.”
Ledwidge had been in Cobleskill for about six weeks. In conversations with his parents, he expressed newfound guilt — some of it related to his comfortable existence growing up.
“He began to think that money was the mark of the devil,” recalled his mother, Sanci Ledwidge.
Ledwidge became critical of his father, who over decades had built a successful Miami-area insurance practice.
“He felt like I’d spent my entire life just seeking richness — and that I needed to seek God,” his father recalled. “I said, ‘Max, you can do both.’ And he said, ‘No, you can’t. … You can’t serve two masters.’ ”
In college, Ledwidge’s parents were involved in Greek life, and at Vanderbilt, Ledwidge was in a fraternity. Now, Ledwidge expressed serious concern, both for his own soul and those of his parents.
The GOC staunchly opposes freemasonry, a movement of fraternal organizations tracing their origins to the 13th century, historically regarded as a secret society. Conspiracy theorists allege they aim for world domination.
Ledwidge had learned that some fraternity rituals had ties to freemasonry; he seemed obsessed with the belief that some rituals included satanic symbols. Had he and his family unwittingly received the “mark of the beast” signaling allegiance to Satan?
Each weekday, the monks rose before 3:30 a.m. and held a prayer service lasting three hours in a darkened church. There was a second shorter service in the afternoon, then a third hourlong service in the early evening. According to Ledwidge’s parents, he additionally worked six hours a day making candles. Quiet hours began at 7 p.m.
Around Christmas, Ledwidge called his parents and apologized for being a “bad child.”
“He said was going to spend the rest of his life in the eternity of hell,” his mother recalled. “And we were trying to say, ‘No, you were a good son, you never gave us any trouble. Max, you’re not making any sense.’ And then, within a few days, they do this exorcism on him.”
‘Possessed’
Unlike Ledwidge, Demetrius was steeped in the church: Born in Toronto to a father who was a monk, Demetrius entered a monastery at age 20. In 2014, he was elected Metropolitan of America at 40.
Demetrius said Ledwidge was the first person to bring up “the idea of possession.” The church leader was “not initially receptive to the idea,” he said, but Ledwidge persisted.
“I came to my conclusions only after multiple private and confessional conversations with Maximos, a period of observation, and my own prayerful reflection,” Demetrius said.
Demetrius has no formal training in psychological diagnosis. Nonetheless, he is critical of the Roman Catholic Church policy requiring professional psychological evaluation before exorcism can be considered. That shift, according to Demetrius, has caused exorcism prayers to take on “melodramatic and frightening connotations.”
If he’d seen signs of mental health problems, Demetrius said, he’d have sought help from a professional — adding he has “several spiritual children under such care, with my encouragement.”
On at least two occasions near the end of 2020, Demetrius stood and read exorcism prayers over Ledwidge, whose head was bowed. One was by Basil the Great, asking for God to “drive away every operation of the Devil, all magic, sorcery, idolatry, divination by stars, astrology, necromancy, divination from birds, voluptuousness, eroticism, avarice, drunkenness, fornication, adultery, licentiousness, shamelessness, anger, contentiousness, instability, and every wicked fancy.”
As the prayers were read, Ledwidge showed more intense manifestations than ever, Demetrius said, adding that the symptoms were “seen by many witnesses.”
David Frankfurter, a professor of religion at Boston University and an exorcism expert, said if a person believes they’re possessed, the subject could easily mimic popular depictions like those in “The Exorcist.”
“The person who is cast as the possessed person has a role to play,” Frankfurter said. “They have to act like a crazy demon, they have to growl, they
have to convulse. It’s spontaneous but it’s also willed; it’s also scripted. It’s a role that’s in our culture.”
In Cobleskill, as in California, Ledwidge had picked a fight with a spiritual leader, demanding Demetrius forbid his faithful from receiving the new COVID -19 vaccine, arguing its development relied on using “aborted fetuses.” Demetrius refused.
That rebelliousness could have contributed to the belief that Ledwidge was possessed, Frankfurter said.
“You have a person staying within a religious system — submitting himself — but also getting into disputes,” Frankfurter said. “One way of making sense of this impulse inside him is through demonic possession.” (Demetrius said the quarrel did not contribute to his diagnosis.)
After the exorcisms, Ledwidge abruptly left the monastery. In an email on Jan. 2, 2021, he told Demetrius that the vaccine dispute was the reason.
“Rather than addressing that here,” Demetrius responded, “and reasoning with unreasonable demons (which are in your mind), I offer the real reason you left. … I always say, ‘If we don’t work on expelling our demons, we will be expelled together with the demon,’” Demetrius wrote. “In your case, it’s worse, because you are literally possessed.”
Ledwidge’s parents began calling the monastery, worried about their son. They got a call back from a priest, Hieromonk Joachim, who told them an exorcism had taken place.
Joachim explained that
beforehand, the monks conducted a test: One sneaked up behind Ledwidge with a crucifix and Ledwidge allegedly started spontaneously shaking, screaming and foaming at the mouth.
“We were just kind of speechless,” his mother recalled. “We said, ‘Why wouldn’t you get him help with his mental health?’ And he said, ‘No. Max showed a spiritual affliction.’”
Ledwidge’s parents were incredulous that their son had exhibited those behaviors; Joachim said an audiotape of an exorcism existed, asking if they wanted a copy. Shaken, they declined.
Reached by phone by the Times Union, Joachim declined to comment. Demetrius said the priest had made the recording without permission — and that when Demetrius found out, he asked Joachim to discard it.
On YouTube, meanwhile, there remain more than 100 hours of footage of prayer services from Ledwidge’s two months in Cobleskill.
Asked to cite an instance within those videos of Ledwidge screaming or cursing, Demetrius did not. He said disturbances were quickly moved out of the church, and that Ledwidge did not display the “worst sort of vocal disturbance at every service.”
‘A dark sleep’
Tom Ledwidge had bought a plane ticket to New York, wanting to see what was happening to his son. But Max had left Cobleskill and was soon en route to Kyiv, Ukraine.
For Ledwidge’s parents, the following months were among the darkest of their lives. Their son was distant. He confirmed to them that an exorcism had taken place, but wouldn’t discuss it further.
Ledwidge frequented Reddit forums detailing conspiracies about COVID vaccines. His parents begged him to fly home, but that required a COVID test. Ledwidge now believed the swabs held microorganisms that could penetrate one’s
brain.
“He was isolated and depressed, and just feeling really horrible about himself,” his father said. “And he just had so much time to read.”
In a March 2021 Facebook message, Ledwidge stated he was “mentally unwell and having trouble sleeping.”
Kyiv is the site of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a preeminent center of the Orthodox religion in Eastern Europe. Ledwidge made appointments to talk to Ukrainian bishops, telling one he was researching a historical schism in the GOC.
He continued to fear hell. In a notebook entry, he wrote: “How could God be good if he’s constantly witnessing the eternal torture of his own children forever without end?”
After four months, Ledwidge suddenly returned to the United States, flying to Houston because it was the cheapest flight. For five weeks, he seemed better. In phone calls with his parents, he was no longer talking about conspiracies or religion, though he discouraged them from visiting Houston.
In early July, Ledwidge went to Paraguay for two weeks, telling one friend the reason was lighter COVID restrictions. He returned to the United States, and on July 19 had an appointment in Houston with a renowned specialist for a painful jaw condition from which Ledwidge had suffered since college.
Ledwidge never showed up. He was on the road, for the last time.
In the recording on his way to the Grand Canyon, Ledwidge spoke about a cabal of powerful people who ran the world, folding the COVID vaccine into a theory of global dominion. They were likely putting out signs mimicking the Book of Revelations, but the prophecy might well not be real. In fact, he no longer believed in Christianity.
“So it seems to me like this, all this stuff — this apocalypse stuff, the Antichrist stuff — is just to get a small group of people who are absolutely, maniacally devoted to this Jesus Christ,” he said.
Ledwidge hoped he was going to another universe, one where organisms didn’t have to kill one another to survive.
“And if they aren’t out there, then I guess that’s just the end of life — and I’m OK with that,” Ledwidge said. “I would rather just be in a dark sleep than have to live in this world anymore.”
With that, the recording ended.
Seven weeks after Ledwidge’s death, Demetrius delivered a sermon titled “The Devil Can Manipulate Our Thoughts.”
He spoke of the danger posed to a person who believes they are always “right.” Ledwidge was not mentioned and Demetrius told the Times Union the remarks were about Christians generally.
In the sermon, Demetrius spoke of God calling an unnamed person to Christian life, “someone who was in the world, someone who was a servant of the devil.”
“And instead of seeing the great gifts that the Lord has given to the person … he sees the light as darkness, he sees the darkness as light,” Demetrius said. “And it’s because the devil has manipulated everything in such a way that the end result of his thinking — of his train of thoughts — would be that he is correct and that those who know more are not. Even the Holy Fathers.”
In Fort Lauderdale, two areas of the Ledwidge home remain littered with photographs of Max. His mother still spends some days crying, looking at the photos.
In an early March interview at their home, Sanci Ledwidge’s voice shook as she described the unjustness of her son’s death.
“He was a good person,” she said. “He wasn’t a person that did drugs or did bad things.”
“We spent months crying, feeling like we missed all these signs,” Tom Ledwidge said. “I had just been like, ‘Oh, the Greek Orthodox Church — it’s like the Catholic Church.’”
Mental health problems sometimes don’t emerge until a person’s mid-20s. Tom Ledwidge believes his son had an undiagnosed issue that might have been resolvable if he had been steered into professional treatment. Instead, Max was prescribed exorcism.
“Ultimately, it led to his decision to take his own life,” Tom Ledwidge said. “I have no doubt about that.”