One of the greatest horror movies of all time is based on true events. That thought should give everyone a moment's pause.
The Exorcist, both William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel and William Friedkin's 1973 movie, came a time in our history when people had stopped believing in the existence of the devil. A great time for the devil, a scary time for us.
Have you ever wondered how much is Hollywood and how much is real?
Spoiler ... It's a lot more reality than Hollywood.
Here's the true story behind The Exorcist, taken from the notes of the exorcists priests, the eyewitnesses, the neighbors, friends, classmates, and the newspapers.
You will find that truth is much stranger than fiction ...
This is a chapter in a larger book I wrote on the subject: True Catholic Exorcisms. Now, also an audiobook, narrated by BBC-veteran Alan Turton.
Roland Doe,[1] 1949
The exorcism which re-captured the nation’s imagination – this is the exorcism which inspired William Peter Blatty’s 1971 horror novel turned movie, The Exorcist. Blatty, himself, heard rumors of the exorcism from the Jesuits priests of Georgetown University, while a student there as a member of the class of 1950.
Between 1950 and 1971, many priests had begun dismissing the reality of the demonic, including many Jesuits. Merely metaphorical or social evil was preached from the pulpit. The Devil was just a personification of the evil within us. Demons did not exist. Psychologists and academics, even to this day, dismissed all supernatural phenomena as superstitious nonsense.
This is why The Exorcist re-captured the nation’s imagination. The Devil had succeeded, for a time, in convincing the world he did not exist.
Michael Cuneo discusses The Exorcist case at length in the opening chapter of his book American Exorcism. Cuneo points out that the case was sensationalized. Some of the story’s most basic details were changed. For example, the possessed child was a boy who lived in Mount Rainier, not a girl living in an upscale Georgetown neighborhood.
The Georgetown setting was due to the author’s personal encounter with the story while attending Georgetown University. Blatty’s time at Georgetown clearly made a lifelong impact: “Those years at Georgetown were probably the best years of my life,” Blatty said in a 2015 interview. “Until then, I’d never had a home.”[2]
Projectile pea soup vomit and spinning heads were just literary embellishments. Once you hear the true story, however, you will wonder why any embellishment was needed in the first place.
Note: Unfortunately, the ridiculous quantities of green, projectile vomit were not merely embellishments. Check out the chapter in True Catholic Exorcisms detailing the exorcism of Emma Schmidt.
The Impact of The
Exorcist
The Exorcist case is important not only because of the extreme supernatural phenomenon on display. It’s important for the impact it had on the American psyche. It is the single most familiar exorcism to the wider American public, whether or not people realize it was based on a true story.[3]
The Exorcist left an indelible impression on the world’s imagination more so than any other case of possession ever has. This is because it was thrust upon the world after several decades of mounting disbelief in the existence of Satan.
Although The Exeter Report showed that fear of Satan was already on the rise in England, exorcisms in America had declined precipitously. The United States had fallen into a deep sleep after its victory over evil during World War II. Even the Pentecostals had tried to dampen their more charismatic deliverances.[4]
The launch of The Exorcist in movie theaters all over America released a flood of repressed fears. It had been simple enough for the Devil to recede into the background of a world faced with nuclear annihilation and extinction. Then came the The Exorcist, and an ancient history of satanic awareness surged to the foreground. Many people found themselves unable to cope with the sudden jolt of religious revival, or at least the reminder of supernatural realities.
This resurgence in satanic awareness resulted in thousands of people suddenly fearing that they or a loved one was possessed. Father Tom Bermingham, one of the film’s minor actors and a researcher for Blatty’s book, suddenly found himself swarmed by hundreds of requests from individuals seeking an exorcism.[5] Exorcism and possession suddenly became mainstream, and the devil who had benefitted from being ignored and forgotten, now was suddenly benefitting from being a celebrity.
Not Mount Rainier
For one thirteen-year-old boy,[6] Satan had been a reality, long before the sale of the movie rights.
First off, let’s get the location right.
Roland Doe, the pseudonym used for the possessed boy, is commonly described as being a resident of Mount Rainier, Maryland. At the time of the first exorcisms in 1949, Mount Rainier was a small, working-class community of nearly 8,000 residents quietly tucked away in Victorian homes and bungalows on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.
Ever since the early 1980s and the release of (the first) Exorcist movie, local teens have been flocking to a then-vacant lot at the corner of Bunker Hill Road and 33rd Street in the residential heart of Mount Rainier.[7] An urban legend, spawned by local newspapers, holds that this was the former site of the house of Roland Doe.[8] Prince George’s County teens have long delighted in roaming the lot at all hours of the night, drinking beer, conducting initiations, erecting wooden crosses on the property, and yelling and screaming until local police are forced to come and chase them away.
Along with several other sources, Dean Landolt, a lifelong Mount Rainier resident of over seventy years, informed researchers that, “I was very good friends with Father Hughes, the priest involved in that case, as was my brother Herbert. Father Hughes told me two things: one was that the boy lived in Cottage City, and the other is that he went on to graduate from Gonzaga High and turned out fine.”[9]
It’s easy to understand the confusion. Cottage City is an even smaller, semi-isolated community just a short distance from Mount Rainier. Cottage City is nestled between the towns of Colmar Manor and Brentwood.
DO NOT use Ouija Boards. Terrible idea.
Don’t Play With Ouija Boards
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January 15, 1949—A dripping
noise was heard in his grandmother’s bedroom by the boy and his grandmother. A
picture of Christ on the wall shook and scratching noises were heard under the
floor boards. From that night on scratching was heard every night from 7 p.m.
until midnight. This continued for ten consecutive days. After three days of
silence, the boy heard nighttime “squeaking shoes” on his bed that continued
for six consecutive nights.
And in another description: [12]
For some time prior to the
exorcism [...] the unidentified boy had been tormented by a battery of bizarre
phenomena: There were scratchings and rappings on his bedroom walls, pieces of
fruit and other objects were sent flying in his presence, and his bed
mysteriously gyrated across the floor while he tried to sleep.
Roland Doe was born into a German Lutheran family and was his parent’s only child. Since there were no other children in the family, Roland looked to his parents and other adults in his household for playmates. The boy spent much of his time with his Aunt Tillie.[13] Tillie was reportedly a “spiritualist”, which seems to indicate that she dabbled in witchcraft and other occult interests. She introduced Roland to the Ouija board.[14] This is when the trouble began.
A very detailed diary was kept by one of the priests that would later exorcise Roland. Under the heading January 26, 1949, the diary records the following concerning Aunt Tillie:[15]
“Aunt Tillie,” who had a deep
interest in spiritualism and had introduced Roland to the Ouija Board, died of
multiple sclerosis at the age of 54. Mrs. Doe suspected there may have been
some connection between her death and the seemingly strange events that
continued to take place. At one point during the manifestations Mrs. Doe asked,
“If you are Tillie, knock three times.” Waves of air began striking the
grandmother, Mrs. Doe, and Roland and three knocks were heard on the floor.
Mrs. Doe again queried, “If you are Tillie, tell me positively by knocking four
times.” Four knocks were heard, followed by claw scratchings on Roland’s
mattress.
Mrs. Doe also recounted using blessed candles when a comb flew across the room and extinguished them.[16] Other observations include fruit flying across the room, a kitchen table turning over, milk and food moving off a table, a coat and hanger flying across the room, a Bible landing at Roland’s feet, and a rocker spinning around while Roland was sitting in it. Roland was also removed from school after his desk moved around the classroom floor on its own.[17]
The desk event left an indelible impression on one eyewitness. Roland’s best childhood friend also recounted this event in detail in a 1998 interview with Mark Opsasnick:
One thing happened regarding all of this and I have a hard
time clearing it in my mind. We were in eighth grade, it was the ’48-’49 school
year and we were in a class together at Bladensburg Junior High. He was sitting
in a chair and it was one of those deals with one arm attached and it looked
like he was shaking the desk—the desk was shaking and vibrating extremely fast
and I remember the teacher yelling at him to stop it and I remember he kind of
yelled “I’m not doing it” and they took him out of class and that was the last
I ever saw of him in school. The desk certainly did not move around the room
like that book [Possessed] said, it
was just shaking. I don’t know if he was doing it or what was doing it because
I just can’t clear it in my mind.
The diary also describes Mrs. Doe taking a bottle of holy water and sprinkling its contents throughout the house. When she returned the bottle to its shelf, it flew across the room on its own but did not break.[18]
Another night, while holding a lit blessed candle at
Roland’s bedside, Mrs. Doe experienced the whole bed rocking back and forth.
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| The Tools of the Catholic Exorcist: Holy Water, Blessed Salt, and the Rosary |
The Need for a Priest
We cannot improvise an exorcism. To assign such a task to any priest is like demanding that someone perform surgery after reading a textbook on the subject. Many, too many, things are not written in a text but are learned only through experience.[23]
I am convinced that allowing the ministry of exorcism to die is an unforgiveable deficiency to be laid squarely at the door of bishops… Today the exorcist is seen as a rarity, almost impossible to find… The Catholic hierarchy must say a forceful mea culpa. As a result of this negligence, we now have lost what once was the school; in the past, a practicing exorcist would instruct a novice.[24]
The First Exorcist: Father Edward Hughes
Father Edward Albert Hughes (1918-1980) was a Catholic priest who served as an assistant pastor from June 16, 1948 to June 18, 1960 at St. James Church in Mt. Rainier, Maryland. Father Hughes performed the first round of exorcisms on Roland Doe.
Just as Mrs. Doe had before him, Father Hughes is described as experiencing supernatural events concerning blessed objects:[25]
Hughes reported giving a bottle of holy water and candles to Roland’s parents to give to Roland before he went to sleep. The parents said the telephone table on which the holy water sat smashed into hundreds of pieces while the candle flamed up, torching the ceiling.
Shortly thereafter, it is recorded that Father Hughes received permission to exorcise the boy and the ritual was undertaken first and unsuccessfully at Georgetown University Hospital.
As discussed before, it is imperative that the
local Bishop grant permission and authority to the presiding priest. It is not
certain whether Father Hughes received such permission. This may be the reason
Father Hughes was ultimately unsuccessful in exorcising Roland Doe. Father
Hughes also only had a short time with the boy, and may have only attempted an
abbreviated or informal exorcism.
The next attempt at exorcism would occur when the Doe family left Maryland for Missouri.
The Exorcisms
When a natural cure wasn’t found for his affliction, [...] and the bizarre symptoms threatened to rage completely out of control, it was decided to pursue a more drastic course of action. A Jesuit priest in his fifties was assigned to the case, and over the next several weeks [...] he performed more than twenty exorcisms on the boy. In all but the last of these, [according to an article in the Post] the boy broke into a violent tantrum of screaming, cursing and voicing of Latin phrases—a language he had never studied—whenever the priest reached those climactic points of the 27-page [exorcism] ritual in which commanded the demon to depart. It was the last of the exorcisms, after two nerve-jangling months, that finally did the trick. Following its completion, the strange symptoms disappeared entirely, and the boy was restored to full health.[27]
Figure 8:
The Exorcist movie still, "...
an old priest and a young priest", as potrayed by Max Von Sydow and Jason
Miller, respectively
The Second Round of Exorcisms: An Old Priest & a Young Priest
Father William Bowdern
After only a short time had passed, a loud noise was heard in Roland’s room and the five relatives present rushed back to the boy’s bedroom. They discovered that a large book case had moved, a bench had been turned over, and the crucifix had been moved to the edge of the bed. The shaking of Roland’s mattress had also resumed and only came to a halt after family members yelled, “Aunt Tillie, stop!”
The exorcism began on March 16 after Father Bowdern received the permission of the local bishop, Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter, to begin the formal rite of exorcism.
That night Father Bowdern was again accompanied by Father Bishop, as well as a Jesuit scholastic,[34] Walter Halloran. A series of exorcisms would occur over the next months and into April. During this time, the ritual was performed at various locations including the boy’s aunt’s house in Normandy, Missouri,[35] the nearby rectory (likely of St. Francis Xavier parish), and the Alexian Brothers Hospital in the southern section of St. Louis.[36]
Father Walter Halloran, then just a Jesuit Scholastic and not yet a priest
He Is Gone
Satan! Satan! I am St. Michael! I command you, Satan, and the other evil spirits to leave this body, in the name of Dominus, immediately! Now! Now! Now!
Happily Ever After: Roland Doe's Yearbook Picture
graduating senior class 1954, Gonzaga High School
Footnotes: The True Story Behind The Exorcist Movie: The Exorcism of Roland Doe
[1] Ronald
Edwin Hunkeler was given the pseudonym, Roland Doe, by the original Washington,
DC newspaper accounts of the possession in 1949. In December 2021, The Skeptical Inquirer (JD Sword. "Demoniac: Who Is Roland Doe, the Boy Who Inspired The Exorcist?" Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2021. Vol. 45, no. 6) and The Guardian (Maya Yang, 2021-12-20, "Boy whose case inspired The Exorcist is named by US magazine," The Guardian) reported the purported true identity of Roland Doe/Robbie Mannheim as Ronald Edwin Hunkeler (June 1, 1935 - May 10, 2020).
[2] “William
Peter Blatty, Author of ‘The Exorcist’, Dies at 89,” The Washington Post, January 13, 2017.
[3] Jamie
H. Parsons, The Manifest Darkness:
Exorcism and Possession in the Christian Tradition, 2012, 64-68.
[4] W.
Scott Poole, Satan in America, 112.
[5] Michael
Cuneo, American Exorcism: Expelling
Demons in the Land of Plenty, 12.
[6]
Roland Doe is often described as being fourteen; however, his birthdate has
been confirmed as June 1, 1935 making him thirteen at the time of the first
exorcism. Also, it is interesting that both Roland Doe and Emma Schmidt first
suffered possession at approximately the same age.
[7]
Though 3210 Bunker Hill Road is commonly listed as the home of the Doe family,
research conducted by Mark Opsasnick of Strange
Magazine concluded that the family’s actual address was 3807 40th Avenue,
Cottage City, Maryland. Opsasnick found that the yearbook entries for the
graduating seniors of Gonzaga High School listed their home addresses. Based on
the convergence of other clues including the boy’s birthdate, Opsasnick
believes he found the correct entry for Roland Doe. A copy of the yearbook page
is provided at the end of this chapter.
[8]
Mark Opsasnick, “The Haunted Boy of Cottage City: The Cold Hard Facts Behind
the Story That Inspired ‘The Exorcist’”, Strange
Magazine, Issue 20 (1999).
[9]
Opsasnick, ibid.
[10]
Steve Erdmann, “The Truth Behind The Exorcist,” Fate Magazine, January 1975; “Aunt Tillie” referred to elsewhere as
“Aunt Harriet”.
[11] The
diary was entitled “Case Study by Jesuit Priests.” Erdmann describes the origin
and chain of title for this diary: during
the fall of 1949 an unnamed Georgetown University student, whose father was a
psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. and may have been
involved in the case, told Georgetown faculty member Father Eugene B.
Gallagher, S.J., of the existence of the mysterious diary. Father Gallagher
obtained from the psychiatrist a 16-page diary-like document written as a guide
for future exorcisms. Mark Opsasnick states in his piece for Strange Magazine, referenced many times
herein, that the diary was kept and written by Father Bishop.
[12] Michael
Cuneo, American Exorcism: Expelling
Demons in the Land of Plenty (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 5.
[13]
Steve Erdmann, “The Truth Behind The Exorcist,” Fate Magazine, January 1975; “Aunt Tillie” referred to elsewhere as
“Aunt Harriet”.
[14] Thomas
B. Allen, Possessed: The True Story of an
Exorcism, Book Country, 11 November 2013.
[15]
Erdmann, ibid.
[16]
Erdmann, ibid.
[17]
Erdmann, ibid.
[18]
Erdmann, ibid.
[19]
Allen, ibid.
[20] The Washington
Post, August 10, 1949.
[21] The Evening Star, another Washington,
D.C. paper, wrote a story of its own on the incident, which was published on
the same date, August 10, 1949. This article originally named the boy’s parents
“Mr. and Mrs. John Doe” and the boy, “Roland”.
[22]
Allen, ibid.
[23]
Gabriele Amorth, An Exorcist Tell His
Story, Ignatius Press, 1999, 68.
[24]
Amorth, 55.
[25]
Allen, ibid.
[26] “Minister
Tells Parapsychologists Noisy ‘Ghost’ Plagued Family,” The Evening Star, August 10, 1949.
[27] Cuneo,
6.
[28]
Cuneo, 7.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Troy
Taylor, The Devil Came to St. Louis: The
True Story of the 1949 Exorcism, Whitechapel Productions Press: 2006.
[31]
Steven A. LaChance, Confrontation with
Evil: An In-Depth Review of the 1949 Possession that Inspired The Exorcist, Llewellyn Worldwide: 2017.
[32]
Opsasnick, ibid.
[33]
This particular relic was a piece of bone from the forearm of St. Francis Xavier.
[34] A
scholastic is the stage in a Jesuit’s career after novice, i.e. after they have
graduated from the novitiate. Scholastics are not yet ordained priests. A
Jesuit seminarian typically attends university as a scholastic, and this occurs
in the third through fifth or sixth year of being a Jesuit.
[35]
This is a different aunt from Roland Doe’s Aunt Harriet or “Tillie”.
[36]
Erdmann describes that on one occasion Roland got his hand on a bedspring,
broke it off, and jabbed it into a priest’s arm. It is uncertain whether
[37]
Opsasnick, ibid.
[38]
Opsasnick uncovered this detail in his interviews of the Does’ neighbors in
Cottage City. Alvin Kagey, a childhood friend of Roland and now a dentist in
Southern Virginia, provided this detail.
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