Tucker Carlson is a very strange man, espousing all manner of hateful ideas and conspiracies. But his latest admission really takes his absurdity to a whole new level. He said that about a year and a half ago, while asleep one night he was attacked by a demon that left claw marks on his body.

No, really.

When I first read this news item yesterday, I thought that this was some kind of childish prank because the previous day was Halloween and that he would later admit that it was his idea of a joke. But no, this is something he said in a documentary about to be released.

Watch the clip where he talks about this.

Tucker Carlson, the former CNN and Fox News political chat host, has said he was “physically mauled” by a demon a year and a half ago, in an assault that he says left him bleeding and with scars from “claw marks”.

Carlson made the claim while speaking in an upcoming documentary, Christianities? In a preview clip on YouTube, Carlson is asked by John Heers of the non-profit First Things Foundation if he believed that “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good”.

“That’s what happened to me. I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.

Asked if he was referring to journalism, Carlson responded: “No, in my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

Carlson, who said he still bears the scars, said his assailant was a “demon”. He added: “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”

He said at the time of the attack, he was asleep in bed. I was “totally confused, I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going to suffocate”, he said.

“I walked around outside and then I walked in and my wife and dogs had not woken up. And they’re very light sleepers. And then I had these terrible pains on my rib cage and on my shoulder, and I was just in my boxer shorts and I went and flipped on the light in the bathroom, and I had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they’re bleeding.”

He added that he explained the encounter to an assistant, an evangelical Christian, who told him: “That happens, people are attacked in their bed by demons.”

Carlson, who lives in the woods of Maine, did not say where the attack occurred, but called it a “transformative experience” that left him “seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible”.

He says that his four dogs who were asleep in the same bed as him, continued to sleep while this vicious assault was going on that resulted in him bleeding from the claw marks.

Carlson insisted the claw marks were “still there,” though Heers didn’t ask him to lift his shirt and show the camera. Heers asked if Carlson’s wife was “terrified” at the attack, but the far-right social media personality deflected and said he woke up and “couldn’t breathe,” then walked around outside before going back into his home. He added that both his wife and his dogs were still fast asleep, which he found odd as they were all “very light sleepers.”

I have noticed that when people say that they had a religious or supernatural experience, listeners tend to not ask obvious follow-up questions or probe too deeply however preposterous the claim, perhaps because they think that to do so would be to sound skeptical about someone’s faith or even their sanity. In this case, the interlocutor could have asked Carlson to show the scars. Or he could have asked what his wife said when she saw the scars the next day. Or whether he yelled to wake up his wife and dogs. Or whether he went to a doctor. Or whether he got a tetanus shot. Or who the assistant was who casually proffered the explanation that the attack was by a demon. But he did none of that and just let the claim go, even though, as Linus famously said, “The theological implications alone are staggering.”

It is the behavior of his dogs that give away the fact that this story is nuts. Carlson and his interlocutor would have known this if they had recalled the famous Sherlock Holmes short story Silver Blaze in which a police officer asks Holmes for guidance in solving a murder.

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night- time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night- time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Since dogs bark when unexpected events occur in the night, particularly the appearance of a stranger, Holmes draws a strong inference from a dog that did not bark in the night that nothing unusual had happened. But here we have not just one but four dogs asleep in Carlson’s bed who do not stir at all when he is viciously attacked, so badly that he had claw marks on both sides of his body and there was blood on the sheets.

That he believes in the existence of demons who can take tangible form and attack people is astounding. We can conclude that either his dogs also hate him and were quite happy to have him be attacked by a demon, or that it was the dogs (or his wife) that attacked him, or that Carlson is seriously delusional. None of these explanations reflect well on him.