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On the surface, a courtroom seems like the last place you'd expect to find anything supernatural.

The business of law, with its stuffy procedure and pedantic detail, leaves little space for spirits.

It's a province of hard rules and objective fact, where perhaps more than anywhere else, the weight of verification matters.

Nonetheless, at times, the otherworldly

has fought its way into the legal sphere. The spiritual battle of the Salem witch trials was not

waged by religious leaders in the churches and chapels, but by magistrates in the town court.

The evidence of devilry was as much a matter of legality as religion.

Hundreds of years later, the devil was back on the stand

in the tragic case of Annalisa Mikhail,

as covered in unexplained season 7 episode 6,

Look Me in the Eye.

In 1976, Annalisa died from severe malnutrition, following a year-long course of starvation to exercise the demonic forces that her parents were convinced infested her.

Medical experts diagnosed the supposed possession as epilepsy, but the church backed the spiritual theory.

Annalisa's parents and two Catholic priests were charged and convicted of negligent homicide

in a landmark case that has reverberated in pop culture and Catholic doctrine.

In the Salem trials and the Annalisa Mikhail tragedy,

it was the threat of diabolic forces that came under legal interrogation.

But in other, even stranger cases, spectral evidence,

has actually been a tool of criminal prosecution.

Perhaps the most famous episode is the case of Zona Hester

...