THE Archbishop of York has spoken of how he helped a girl who was terrified she would be made a human sacrifice after visiting a witches’ coven where a goat was killed.

Dr John Sentamu, speaking during a debate in the House of Lords on an amendment of an NHS bill, called for the NHS to cater for spiritual as well as physical needs.

He said when he first became a vicar of a parish in south London, he was invited into a home where somebody had said there was a “presence.”

He said he found a young girl there who had not been able to move for nearly three weeks. “The GP, a psychiatrist and a psychologist had visited the house,” he said.

“Sometimes the girl shouted a lot in the middle of the night. I went into the house and asked how the girl had got into that difficult state. “Somebody said that they had been to a witches’ coven that night where a goat had been sacrificed and the young girl was absolutely petrified that she would be sacrificed next.

Dr Sentamu said: “She could not speak apart from shouting. All that I could do was to say a prayer in that little house, anoint the girl with oil and light a candle. I left and received a telephone call later to say that the young girl was no longer terrified and had started to speak. That was not mental or physical illness; there was something in her spirit that needed to be set free.”

Calling for spiritual health to be part of the Government’s agenda for health, Dr Sentamu said humans were “psychosomatic spiritual entities”.

A spokeswoman for the Archbishop said it should be emphasised that the incident happened in the course of the “ordinary and not untypical work of a parish priest in a South London parish’.