By Michael Ashcraft –
Famous YouTube personality Hayden Pedersen was doing backwards donuts on the freeway – in the middle of traffic.
“It was literally like there was a puppet master. It was so demonic,” Hayden says on a Deliverance Down Under video on YouTube. “Then I ran into oncoming traffic. I believed I needed to kill myself in order to save humanity.”
Hayden says he got possessed by demons through Hindu and Buddhist meditation.
He was born in Annapolis, but his parents moved to Warragul, Australia after 9/11, the town where his father grew up. America seemed dangerous, they thought.
However, Hayden got bullied in Australian primary school because he was an American. He felt like an outsider and longed to be accepted and validated.
When he made a video for a school assembly that got a positive response, he found his calling. Hayden began making YouTube videos that got millions of views. Photography videos became his niche.
He went from despised outsider to local hero in Warragul, a town of 20,000 near Melbourne. He was in his 20s and began to soak up “being put on a pedestal.”
But one day at a night club, he reflected on his growing pride. “I remember catching myself feeling like I’m better than others,” he observes. He was worried. “How do I get rid of this monster I have become?”
Through self-help literature, he sought humility. First he tried to get rid of ego. Then he started meditation. It gave him a peace – a temporary peace.
He delved deeper into Buddhism and then Hinduism. He sampled chakra meditation and third eye meditation. The fame of YouTube videos took a back seat while he sought peace via Hinduism.
In his research, he stumbled across the Kundalini spirit, which promised enlightenment. He sought it, but the peace was always temporary.
“I honestly thought I was becoming like God,” he says. “I thought I was becoming very wise.”
In his attempt at getting rid of pride over his worldly success, a new sense of superiority invaded his heart: he was on a higher level of consciousness than others, he thought.
He felt new surges of energy – sometimes too much energy; he worried he might have a heart attack. It was an unexpected side effect. By seeking peace, he found more trouble.
Hayden researched how to deal with the energy overload. The answer, the internet told him, was more meditation. So he did more Third Eye meditation.
One night something unusual happened.
“At 2:00 a.m., a demon came into me,” he says. “If you’ve ever seen Harry Potter, the main bad guy Voldemort cast a spell into the clouds, and there’s this demonic looking face. That’s what it looked like.”
For a split second, he felt an intense pleasure. Then it vanished.
“I actually thought I was the devil,” he says.
He was shaking. Something was very wrong. He had become possessed by a demonic entity.
He asked his mom to rush him to the hospital, where after his incoherent attempt to explain his urgent need, they put him under 24-hour observation. The next day when his mom came to visit, he attacked her. “These voices were telling me to kill my mom,” he explains.
Hospital personnel rushed into the room to subdue him. He was sent to a psych ward for 10 weeks and given gobs of psych meds. Since nothing else worked, he remembered his Catholic and Anglican upbringing and started to pray to Jesus, even though he didn’t really know how to pray.
Toward the end of that 10-week period, doctors slowly weened him off the psych meds and he was released. But not all was well. He still had bouts of anxiety and times he felt he would die.
One day Hayden was following a friend on the freeway when he slumped over the steering wheel and crashed into the rear of his friend’s car. His friend got out, ran over, opened the door for Hayden.
“What are you doing?” his friend yelled.
That’s when the demonic “puppet master” took over and provoked Hayden do backwards donuts on the freeway in traffic. After smashing into a another car, he got out, jumped over the center median, and ran into oncoming traffic on the other side of the freeway.
The demon twisted his thinking. “I thought I needed to sacrifice myself to save the world,” he recalls.
His friend and an ex-cop subdued him and prevented Hayden from killing himself in oncoming traffic.
Paramedics rushed him to the hospital, and he was transferred again to the psych ward. A random stranger told him, “I think you have the Holy Spirit in you, but I can’t tell.”
It was a weird comment, but it caused Hayden to consider God instead of Easter meditation. Maybe I should start taking this Jesus guy more seriously, he thought.
He searched for deliverance prayers online. “The Lord is my refuge and strength, a present help in trouble,” he repeated.
The demon didn’t like to hear him recite the Word of God. “The Kundalini spirit started moving inside of me,” he says.
When he was released a second time from the psych ward, he began to pray more determinedly. But the devil didn’t give up easily and tempted him to keep trying meditation.
It was spiritual warfare, a battle for his mind.
After continued manifestations, he stumbled across prayers of deliverance and renounced witchcraft, Kundalini and yoga “by the blood of Jesus,” he says. He listed off all the portals he had opened.
He felt nauseous.
His friend took him to church. After accepting Jesus, he got baptized and improved drastically. He attended a deliverance seminar and the demons were cast out in a session that lasted several hours, he says.
“It wasn’t just one demon. It was many demons,” he says.
The final phrase of prayer that the intercessors repeated was “Jesus loves Hayden.” The final malignant spirit left, he says. “It felt like every fiber of my being was alive,” Hayden says. “With the kundalini thing, it felt like every fiber of my being was dead.”
Hayden no longer seeks validation from others. He knows he’s loved by God. “I am a child of God,” he says.
“We have this idea that eastern meditation is a beautiful thing where you achieve this level of happiness and bliss,” Hayden says. “But it brought me to a pit, to a black hole.”
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.
About these writer: Michael Ashcraft reported from Los Angeles where he pastors a church in the San Fernando Valley.
