“I always felt someone was watching me, and sometimes, I’d see him. He was a man in a dark suit,” said Kate Whalen of Denver’s Highland neighborhood.

“One night my, grandson was in the living room and I was in my bedroom down the hall. My grandson said, ‘Grandma, someone is standing next to me,’ and it was him. I could see him, too.”

So Whalen, a small-business owner, reached out to Antanas (Tony) Bulota, a Colorado exorcist, for help.

Bulota, whose business card says that he provides Energy Worker Protection Services, is a self-described, non-denominational exorcist. In Bulota’s world, that means “shifting energy in places to create a safe environment.”

Vanquishing the man in the dark suit (Bulota favors an all-black wardrobe himself) wasn’t the first time Whalen had enlisted Bulota’s talents. When she opened Mile High Holistics on West Colfax Avenue in a space formerly used as a euphemistically called massage parlor, Whalen said there was a darkness to the shop. It had been raided and shut down several times, and had a palpable sadness and depression to it, Whalen related, in a spirited interview.

She hired Bulota to vanquish the bad feelings, a feat he accomplished by “clearing the energy fields” and “enchanting the front area,” Whalen said. One employee, unaware of Bulota’s work, came in the day following it and noted “something different.” Whalen was sold.

Another of Bulota’s clients, Meghan Rubinstein, “creator and community maker” at Denver’s Sakala Community, said, “We often get feedback that the energy at Sakala is amazing – that as soon as people step through the door, they feel peaceful and calm. Many have asked how we keep the energy so pure and light. The answer is Tony Bulota. He gets rid of all the gunk left behind from the amazing healing work done at Sakala.

“He also sends any entities on their way that may have latched on to people who attend events or sessions and then decided to stay.”

Exorcisms worldwide are on the rise. Atlantic magazine reported that the number of Catholic exorcists in the U.S. has grown from 15 just a few years ago to about 100 now. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops now calls exorcism merely a specific form of prayer that the Church uses against the power of the devil.

R. Andrew Chesnut, a professor and religious studies coordinator at Virginia Commonwealth University, asserts that the great majority of exorcisms are not Catholic. And when it comes to the devil, surveys show that nearly 60% of Americans believe in hell and the devil (more if they have received repeated calls about their car’s warranty).

Science is more skeptical. Mark Neyrinck, Ph.D., an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Denver, said that if an exorcist’s mechanism of cleansing isn’t measurable, to believe in the process would require controlled trials – a large sample of situations where an exorcist is at work in one instance, and a placebo in another. “I’m not sure what the exorcist (or non-exorcist) would do differently for it to be merely an apparent exorcism,” he said.

“It’s a shame if there are factors that make some parapsychological theory or exorcism impossible to test scientifically,” Neyrinck said. “As an example, I can imagine that the exorcist has to believe it’s an exorcism, and if they didn’t, that would come across to others. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be worthwhile to think about and even do exorcisms. If the exorcist and his clients derive value from the procedure, that’s great. But I’m personally skeptical and probably wouldn’t use them.”

Bulota, 47, came to exorcism slowly. He “saw stuff when I was a kid, but was told it was my imagination.” Later, an experience with a Ouija board – it spelled his name correctly — motivated him to become more interested in the unseen world.

One evening, he and his wife and friends were in a park in suburban Denver where “lots of negative stuff lived.” At one point, his wife became overwhelmed with a sense of sadness, grief, loss and fear, for no apparent reason. Bulota “grabbed a whole lot of energy through the ground and made it into a white fiery ball and released it. It burned everything within a half-mile radius. After that, I started testing out my abilities to move energy around and interact with the unseen world.”

Bulota and his five colleagues at Quietus, Ltd. — “The Metaphysical Men In Black,” according to its website — do their work free of specific regulations or statutes. (Because possession is nine-tenths of the law.) Its homepage reads: “There are things that go bump in the night. We bump back.”

Bulota likens the paranormal to the forest. There are benign creatures there, but there are also wolves. And just as you would prepare yourself for a camping trip, so you should prepare yourself for an environment where some of the entities are not so nice.