Originally Posted by Contra_Mundum

shelly,
we don't mind praying for you here. but the person in the best position to address the needs of the situation--you are already speaking to him, the pastor, which is the right move. we are almost as likely to give you bad information specific to your situation, as we are good.

i will address the one question, regarding what could be going on with your sister's mind. one thing i do not think, and that is that she is receiving communications from dead people. nor do i think that she ever lived in a haunted house, whatever weird stuff happened there. as reformed believers, it is not as though we ignore the spirit-world. but we realize that with Jesus having sat down to reign, that satan and his ilk have LESS, not MORE power and freedom since the resurrection. we are "informed skeptics" on the subject of demonology and angelology, and we seldom run to such explanations for the inexplicable, prefering to say "i don't know," rather appealing to demons out of ignorance.

i can think of a few possibilities and combinations of factors which could explain why your sister seems to hear things. The following list is far from exhaustive:
1) she is imagining things.

2) she has an organically-caused problem in her brain.

3) she is hallucinating; there can be many causes for this, from simple sleep deprivation all the way to overdosing/misusing drugs.

4) she is suffering from acute hearing. ordinarily we utilize methods we developed naturally in infancy to filter our hearing. later we overlay that natural development with environmental filters. changes in our circumstances can cause us to develop new environmental filters, as our cognitive faculty attempts to process raw auditory data according to our pre-conditioned categories. the retraining of the mind can even affect our instinctively developed filters. but the bottom line, we can convince ourselves of what we are hearing based on deeper-level concepts. as christians, we are supposed to be strengthening our deepest concepts on the "sure foundation" of revelation. the truly sad thing is today, people are setting up the basis for their thinking on concepts derived from science fiction, from tv shows like "ghost whisperer", etc. this is no different from the way that paganism developed. and satan continues to use people's false thinking and broken minds/brains to exploit their weaknesses. possibly your sister's wrong thinking precipitated her wrong hearing, which may have led her to this very confused place where the physical reality she occupies has become an unfamiliar, scary place, uninterpretable to her.

that is why i dare not say that your sister is NOT suffering from true spiritual oppression. i just don't know how direct or indirect it might be, if there is a real (and not imaginary) influence. the way to help her is:
1) get medical help if there is a physical problem.
2) get spiritual help (and i personally do not recommend modern, evolutionary, unbelieving mental-health types); continue getting it from your pastor.
3) get the Holy Spirit's help, by praying for his aid upon her; if she needs conversion first, he has to do that before he helps her any other way; then He will cast out/away any demons (if there are any)--that's not a human's job. and He will also work through His revelation (both natural and special) to reorder her mind and body back to its natural function--proper hearing, mental stabilbity, etc.

i pray you and your loved ones all run to God, who is the One who truly heals. i realize this "help" is mostly theory, and not so practical, but you need a firm theoretical foundation on which to operate and move forward and make your practical decisions. don't get distracted with excorcisms and rituals and all that nonsense. what your sister needs is to get reconnected to the real world, to God's world, and most importantly to God himself.

blessings