The Exorcist
00:01Some stories were never meant to be told.Others were buried on purpose.This podcast digs them all up.Disturbing history peels back the layers of the pastto uncover the strange, the sinister,and the stories that were never supposed to survive.From shadowy presidential secrets to government experimentsthat sound more like fiction than fact,
00:23this is history they hoped you'd forget.I'm Brian, investigator, author,and your guide through the dark cornerof our collective memory.Each week I'll narrate some of the most chillingand little-known tales from historythat will make you question everythingyou thought you knew.
00:41And here's the twist.Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us.And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself,just to get to the truth.If you like your facts with the side of fear,if you're not afraid to pull at threads,others leave alone.You're in the right place.
00:58History isn't just written by the victors.victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by The Disturbed. We're getting into the spooky season,and over the next several episodes, I'm doing a series on the true, disturbing history behindsome of the most famous and beloved horror movies of all time. Sometimes the true story iseven more disturbing than what Hollywood cooks up. The series starts with The Exorcist. On the 20thof August in 1949, the Washington Post ran a story on its front page under the headline,priest frees Mount Rainier boy reported held in devil's grip.The reporter, Bill Brinkley, wrote that a 14-year-old from the Maryland suburbs had been freed
01:49of possession by the devil after a Jesuit priest read the right of exorcism over himbetween 20 and 30 times, and that the boy had screamed and cursed and spoken Latin phrases,though he'd never been taught the language.Brinkley's sources were unnamed Catholics, and he printed no name for the boy, the priest, or the family.A Georgetown University student named William Peter Bladdy read that story, and 22 years later,he published a novel built on it. And two years after that, the novel became a film that hadtheaters keeping ambulances on call. The boy in the post story was 13 years old and had never livedin Mount Rainier. The write ended in April, and the paper said May. And the priest's own diary,
02:33which sat in a desk drawer in a locked hospital room in St. Louis for close to 30 years,records that he never once answered them in Latin.The story reached the newspapers through a Lutheran minister who told it for laughs.On the 9th of August, 1949, the Society of Parapsychology met at the Mount PleasantBranch Library in Washington, and a local pastor stood up and described what had beengoing on since January in the home of a family from his congregation.He described scratching inside the walls, a bed that shook with a 13-year-old boy lying in it,and fruit and pictures that jumped to the floor when the boy was in the room.
03:12The Washington Post ran Bill Brinkley's account of the talk the next morning,and Brinkley wrote it with one eyebrow up.The pastor called himself a skeptic.He said he'd had the boy stay overnight at the parsonage on the 17th of February,and that in the dark he heard the bed vibrating and something scratching at the wall.He said he watched a heavy armchair tip over with the boy sitting in itand saw a pallet of blankets slide around the floor with the boy lying on top.Brinkley noted that the minister laughed while he told it.
03:43The pastor said he'd finally told the boy that this was enoughand had called in the family doctor who prescribed phenobarbital for the entire household.Phenobarbital was most of what a family doctor had to offer in 1949.The first of the modern antipsychotic drugs was still five years from an American pharmacy.The state mental hospitals held more than half a million.people. A Hollywood picture called the Snake Pit had just shown moviegoers the inside of one.And that fall, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to the Portuguese neurologist who developedthe lobotomy. A family with a child who was behaving strangely had good reason to keep it
04:21quiet. And this family had kept it quiet for seven months. The evening star ran its ownversion that same afternoon. The star called the family Mr. and Mrs. John Doe and called their son Roland.and that invented name has been attached to him ever since.The star added that the boy had made two trips to a mental hygiene clinicand that on a trip to the Midwest, he had been put through three separate rights of exorcismby clergy of three faiths, Episcopal, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic.The paper quoted the president of the Parapsychology Society,who said that J.B. Rhine, the Duke University professor,
04:58famous for his experiments with extrasensory perception,had called it the most impressive poltergeist case he had heard of.The Times Herald followed a day later with something neither of the others had.The parents said messages had appeared on the boy's skin, written in what looked like a rash.The reporter took that to the minister, and the minister said that when he looked,he could make out nothing more than an ordinary rash.Up to that point, it was a ghost story with a chuckling pastor in it.Nine days later, the evening star reported that church sources were saying,
05:31Catholic priest had freed the boy from possession by the devil, and on the 20th, Brinkley put it onthe front page of the post. His second story had no jokes in it. It said the boy had been studiedat Georgetown University Hospital and at St. Louis University, both Jesuit institutions,and that both had reported they couldn't cure him by natural means. It said a Jesuit in his 50shad taken on the exorcism, had stayed with the boy for two months, had ridden the train with himbetween St. Louis and Washington and had personally seen the boy's bed move across a room.It said that each time the priest reached the words commanding the devil out,the boy erupted in screaming and profanity and Latin.
06:13It said that in the end, the boy saw a vision of St. Michael and went quiet and stayed quiet.A priest told Brinkley it was probably the first time in at least a century that the ritualhad been used in the Washington area.That was close to the experience of most American Catholic.There were something over 25 million of them in 1949.They heard mass in Latin every Sunday, and almost none of them had ever met a priest who hadperformed an exorcism.The ride came out of the Roman ritual of 1614.
06:45A priest needed his bishop's permission to use it, and the ritual told him what to look forbefore he asked.It listed a person speaking or understanding a language he had never learned, a person knowingthings he had no natural way to know, and a person showing strong.strength beyond his age and condition. The best-known American case before this one had been inErling, Iowa in 1928, and what most people knew of Erling came from a pamphlet. Brinkley, who wenton to write best-selling novels, had an exorcism in the suburbs of the capital with priestsvouching for it, and the post gave it the front page. One of the people who read it was William
07:23Peter Blattie, the son of Lebanese immigrants, raised poor in New York, and attending Georgetown on a fullscholarship. He wrote later that he saw Brinkley's story that August. One of his Jesuit teachers,Father Eugene Gallagher, talked about the case in class, and Gallagher had heard there was a diary.Bladdy told Washingtonian magazine in 2015 what he remembered thinking at the time, which wasthat a case of possession, properly investigated and verified, would be a great thing for believers.Nobody authenticated it in 1949. The Catholic sources never gave thetheir names. The post never ran the boys, and the priest who had read the right was under ordersfrom his Archbishop to say nothing to anyone. The house was at 380740th Avenue in Cottage City, Maryland,
08:12about a mile past the northeast line of the District of Columbia. Cottage City was a few hundredone-story cottages laid out along a handful of streets, a town of tradesmen and government workers,who mostly knew one another. A writer named Mark Obsasnick tracked down the address and theneighbors in the late 1990s, and the man who gave him the gentlest description of the boywas a dentist named Alvin Cagey, who grew up in town and was a year ahead of him at CottageCity Elementary. Kagee remembered a quiet kid, something of a loner, not interested in sports,with parents who were quiet in the same way. The families knew each other through cards.Canasta was the game then, and four couples from the neighborhood played it on Saturday nights,
08:56rotating from house to house and bringing the children along.He was his parents' only child.The household was the boy, his mother and father,and his German grandmother, who spoke very little English.The Jesuit diary opens with a few lines on the family's religion.The boy had been baptized Lutheran at six months,and his mother was Lutheran.His father had been baptized Catholic and never practiced,
09:20and his mother's mother had been a practicing Catholic until she was 14.There was also an aunt in St. Louis.The diary blacks out her name, and later writers have called her Tilly or Harriet, depending on the book.The diary says she believes strongly in spiritualism and consulted spiritualists often,and the accounts built from the diary says she was the one who showed the boy how to use a Ouija board.In the usual telling, she died and the trouble began.The diary's dates run the other way.Steve Erdman, who worked from a copy of it for Fate Magazine in 19,
09:54She was in St. Louis on the 26th of January, and the diary puts the first noises on the 15th, 11 days earlier.That first night was a Saturday, and the boy's parents were out.He and his grandmother were in her bedroom upstairs when they heard something dripping.A picture of Christ on the wall shook as though the wall behind it had been bumped.By the time his parents got home, there was a scratching sound under the floorboards near the grandmother's bed.It came back every night at about seven and went on until midnight.The family did what anybody would do and decided they had a rat.They called an exterminator who put chemicals under the floorboards and the scratching kept on
10:38and got louder when somebody stamped on the floor.After 10 nights, it stopped and the family figured the animal had died.The boy said he could still hear it.Three days later, everybody could hear something again and it had moved downstairs to his bedroom.room. The diary describes it as a sound like squeaking shoes traveling along his bed and says itit came only at night and only once he was in it. On the sixth night of that, his mother and grandmotherwere lying on the bed with him. All three heard what the diary compares to marching feet anddrums, moving down the length of the mattress and back. His mother asked out loud whether it was
11:16the aunt. Then she told it to knock three times if it was, and the diary says they felt waves of airand heard three knocks on the floor.She asked for four to be sure, and she got four,and then something clawed at the mattress.From there, the list gets long,and nearly all of it reached the priests later from the mother.The mattress shook whenever she and the grandmother ignored the scratching.An orange and a pair flew across a room.
11:44The kitchen table went over.Milk and food came off the table and the stove,and a coat sailed across the room on its hanger.On a visit to friends in Boonesboro, a rocking chair spun all the way around with the boy sitting in it.At Bladenburg Jr. High, his desk moved around the classroom floor, and the diary says he stopped going to school out of embarrassment.The diary counts 14 witnesses to one thing or another by this point, and it also lists the ordinary explanations the family went looking for.A physician gave the boy a complete examination and found him healthy, if a little high, strong.A psychiatrist saw him, said flatly that he didn't believe any of the reported events,
12:24and pronounced him normal.The diary adds that the boy was irritated by the questions.The family brought in a spiritualist who tried his own formulas for clearing a house and got nowhere.And they went to their pastor.He was the Reverend Luther Miles Schultz of St. Stephen's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Washington,and he was the man who would be laughing at the library in August.Schultz had an interest in parapsychology, and he prayed with the family at their home before he took the boy for the night.The Diary's version of that night differs from the one Schultz gave Brinkley on small points.
12:59It has the minister and the boy in one bed, where the post has twin beds, and it has the boy tied to the chair that tipped.Both versions have the clawing sounds, the chair, and Schultz's prayers making no difference.Schulte wrote to J.B. Ryan at Duke about what he'd seen.Ryan never laid eyes on any of it.His biographer, Dennis Bryan, reported that Ryan privately wondered whether the minister hadunconsciously exaggerated some of the facts.The endorsement in the evening star had come secondhand.On Saturday, the 26th February, scratches started appearing on the boy's body, and they came
13:36four nights running.After the fourth night, the diary says, the scratches formed printed words.Two days into that, on the Monday,He was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital.A source close to the case gave Absaznik the dates,in on the morning of the 28th of February, and discharged at noon on the 3rd of March.The post would later say both Jesuit hospitals had studied him exhaustively and found no natural cure.No report from that stay has ever been made public,
14:06and I can't say what the doctors at Georgetown concluded, or whether they concluded anything.The words on his skin, meanwhile, were about travel.His mother had grown up in St. Louis and had been thinking of taking him there to get away from the house.The diary says the word Lewis appeared across his ribs in deep red.When the family wondered about when to leave, the word Saturday appeared on his hip.When they wondered how long to stay, his chest read three and a half weeks.The diary says his mother was watching him closely and that the printing came with no movement of his handsand that once it appeared on his back.
14:43It is also the mother's account, taken down weeks afterward by a priest who had not yet met her.The one outsider known to have looked at those marks at the time was Schultz, who saw a rash.A Catholic priest was already involved before the family left Maryland, and what he did or didn't dohas been told two very different ways.Stay tuned for more disturbing history.We'll be back after these messages.The priest was Father Edward Albert Hughes, a 30-year-old assistant.pastor at St. James and Mount Rainier, the next town over. In the version most people know,
15:22Hughes visits the boy, has him admitted to Georgetown University Hospital, and strapped to a bed,and begins the right of exorcism there. Partway through, the boy works a hand loose,snaps off a piece of bedspring, and slashes the priest's arm with it. Hughes drops out of sight,has a breakdown, and for the remainder of his career can lift the host at mass with only one arm.Thomas Allen told it roughly that way in his 1993 book Possessed,and from there it went into the documentaries.The paper trail behind it is short.The slashed arm first shows up in print in November of 1972,
15:5823 years after the fact,in a Washington newspaper interview with a priest who was working as technical advisor on the film,and that priest gave no name.The name Hughes was attached to it in 1981 by a suburban weekly,on the strength of one dinner conversation Hughes had with his assistant pastor four days before Hughes died of a heart attack.The diary handles Hughes in a few sentences.It says the mother asked his advice and he suggested blessed candles, holy water, and particular prayers.It says he didn't meet the boy in person.
16:31It says he was seeking his bishop's permission for an exorcism at about the time the family left for St. Louis,and so couldn't go ahead with his plan.Hughes's later assistant, Father Frank Bober,Told Absaznik, the mother had brought the boy to the rectory, so even that small point has twoversions. Neither one puts Hughes at the house.Obsasnik went looking for anyone who remembered an injured priest.A boy who was in eighth grade at St. James that spring remembered Father Hughes coaching theparish baseball team and pitching to them, and remembered nothing wrong with him.
17:04A girl in the same class said he taught their physical education and never missed a day.The local paper's neighborhood columns have him speaking.at a Knights of Columbus seminar on the 7th of March, saying Mass at a day of recollection on the 20th,and marrying couples in April and June.When he was transferred in 1960, the same paper totted up his 12 years at St. James, whichcame to 2,712 baptisms and 486 weddings.I don't think the Georgetown exorcism happened the way it's told.A priest cut badly enough to need his arm stitched leaves a trail.
17:41A doctor, a bandage, a few missed masses, a parishioner who asked about the sling.Obsasnik found a man throwing batting practice.Something may well have passed between Hughes and that family in the last days of February,and the evening stars line about three rites by three faiths suggests somebody tried something.The diary kept by the men who finished the job says Hughes never got his permission in time.The mother carried Hughes's holy water home regardless.The diary says she sprinkled it through the rooms and set the bottle on a shelf, and the bottle flewacross the room and landed unbroken. It says that when she held a lit, blessed candle beside the
18:21boy's bed, the bed swayed back and forth with both of them on it. In the first week of March, she tookhim to St. Louis. They stayed with her relatives in the suburbs outside the city, and on the first night,a Monday, five or six of the family sat down at a porcelain kitchen table and tried to talk to whateverwas. They wrote out the alphabet on paper and marked letters according to how the table moved,and they came away satisfied that the spirit was the dead aunt and had no connection to the devil.The diary says a heavy bed moved two or three feet that night with nobody near it, and thatwriting came up on the boy's skin through his clothes while he was reading a comic book.The next night, he was moved to the home of another aunt and uncle, where a cousin slept in
19:06the room with him. One of the cousins in that family was a student at St.Louis University and had a class with a Jesuit named Raymond Bishop who was 43 and ran theuniversity's Department of Education. The cousin asked Bishop whether he could do anything. Bishop talked itover with the president of the university and went out to the house on Wednesday the 9th of March.He blessed the house and the boys' room and pinned a relic of St. Margaret Mary to the corner of the pillow.Then he stood with the mother, an aunt, an uncle, the cousin, and a family friend and watched the boybed. The diary, which Bishop wrote, says the mattress began moving back and forth toward thebedposts, no more than about three inches each way, in fits, for a quarter of an hour, while the
19:51boy lay still. It says the movement stopped when Bishop sprinkled holy water on the bed in the shapeof a cross, and started again when he stepped out of the room. During that quarter hour, the boycried out and grabbed his stomach, and his mother pulled back the covers and lifted his pajama topon zigzag scratches in red.That is the first night in the whole case with a priest as an eyewitness.Everything in the diary before it is what Bishop was told.Two nights later, Bishop came back with Father William Baudern,the pastor of St. Francis Xavier,
20:24the big stone church on the university campus.Boutern was 52, and he brought a relic of his church's patron,a sliver of bone from the saint's forearm,and a crucifix with more relics set into it,and he blessed the boy and pinned the crucifix under the pillow.The priests and the family went downstairs to go over the history.A crash came from the room overhead.The diary says they found the bottle of holy water thrown from a table.
20:50A bookcase turned around to face the door.A dressing stool moved to the bedside and the crucifix down at the foot of the bed.The relic of St. Margaret Mary was gone.The bed started shaking and the family did what they'd done at the kitchen tableand began asking questions.That night's questions were about money.The aunt was supposed to have hidden some cash before she died,and by yes and no,
21:14they worked out that there was a map to a metal strong box in an atticand that only the boy's father could find it.When they wanted the shaking to stop, the diary says,they called the aunt's name and told her to stop,and the bed stopped.Bishop wrote all this up and sent a reportto the Archbishop of St. Louis, Joseph Ritter.In 1960, a young gentleman,
21:35Jesuit named Henry Ansgar Kelly, who was living in the St. Louis University community andresearching a book on demonology, sat down with Baudern and two of the priests who had helped him.Kelly kept the interview confidential at Baudern's request until after the film came out.Boutern told Kelly that the Archbishop read Bishops' report and decided, without any furtherinvestigation, that the case called for exorcism. Ritter wanted a Jesuit to do it. Boutern, as aparish pastor was the one Jesuit who answered directly to the archbishop, so the job landed on him.Kelly wrote that the order caught Baudern completely off guard. He had never performed anexorcism. Kelly asked him what signs of possession had convinced the church to act.
22:20Boutern's answer, as Kelly recorded it, was that before the exorcisms began, there hadn't beenany. There were noises, moving furniture, and marks on the skin, the things people call a poltergeist.There were no seizures, no trances, and no strange voices.The diary says the same in its own words.Looking back from the fourth night, Bishop wrote that the boy had never once been violent until the right began.Permission came through on Wednesday, the 16th of March.Baudern, Bishop, and a Jesuit scholastic in his 20s named Walter Halloran got to the house between a quarter past 10 and half-past that night.The boy was sent up to bed.
23:01Baudern went in alone first.and helped him examine his conscience and make an act of contrition.And then the others came in with the mother, the aunt, and the uncle.And everybody knelt by the bed and said the opening prayers together.The boy said the prayers along with them.Bowdern put on his surplus and stole and began to read.The overhead light stayed on,and the diary makes a point of saying the boy was awake
23:25and that he kept his hands outside the covers.The rite has a passage where the priest commands the spiritto give its name and the day and hour it will leave.The diary says that the first time Bowdoin reached it,three parallel scratches came up across the boy's stomach.Over the next hours, at the names of Jesus and Mary and St. Michael,Moore came up on his legs, thighs, stomach, back, chest, face, and throat.Bishop wrote that they rose above the skin like light lacerations
23:57and that some drew a little blood.The boy told them some felt like Thorne,and some felt like brands, and that the brands were worse.He doubled over each time, and Bishop counted more than 25 times that night.Bishop described two of that night's marks in more detail than the others.The diary says an image of the devil appeared in red on the boy's right leg,with its arms raised over its head and webbed like a bat's,and that the word hell appeared on his chest,
24:27lettered so that he could look down and read it.Bishop wrote that everyone in the room agreed the two couldn't be taken for anything else.There was also an X, which the priest decided might be the Roman numeral 10.Then the scratching stopped, and he seemed to fall asleep.And when the priest reached the prayer to St. Michael, he started swinging.He punched the headboard and the pillow.They brought him around with Holy Water and asked what he'd been doing,and he said he was fighting a huge red devil, slimy to the touch,
24:57who was keeping him from getting out through iron gates at the top of a pit about 200 feet deep.He said it was very hot down there and that he thought he could beat him.From midnight on, it took two men to pin him to the mattress.He shouted threats at them and spat at them,and the diary notes that he used no dirty language that night.Toward five in the morning, the fighting eased and he began to sing,loudly, in a high voice, with big arm gestures.Bishop names the songs, Swanee and Old Man River.
25:29At about half past seven, he dropped into ordinary sleep.He woke at one in the afternoon, ate a normal meal, and played the game of Monopoly.His father flew in from Maryland that day.That night, the father and the uncle did the holding, and the boy spat in his parents' faces with his eyes squeezed shut.Bishop wrote that his aim was good.The third night is the first time it looked as if it had worked.Three men were holding his arms, legs, and head.He bit them, and he snapped at Baudern's hand when it came near to bless him.
26:02Around midnight, he got to his feet on the bed, then dropped to his knees and bowed forwardseveral times, saying a prayer to Our Lady of Fatima.He pulled off his undershirt and made motions like a person trying to bring something upfrom his stomach to his throat.He asked for the window to be opened.Then, in what Bishop calls a sweet voice, he said that he was going.going, and then there he went. He went limp and came around smiling. The family knelt at thebedside and gave thanks, and the diary says the mother was beside herself. He told the priest he'd seen a
26:38figure in a black robe and cowl walk away into a cloud. He put on his bathrobe and saw them tothe door. They left at half past one. Before morning, he was calling out that it was coming back,and Baudern's telephone rang at a quarter past three.The priests drove out again and read until daylight.Through the first week, the nights followed that pattern and lasted five and six hours.On the fourth, the diary records barking and a snapping of teeth,and the boy wetting the bed each time the command was red and waking up crying that it burned.He sang again that night, the blue Danube and the old rugged cross,
27:17and Bishop wrote that he sang them beautifully.like a trained voice.When the boy was awake,Bishop hummed the waltz back to him,and he couldn't carry it,and said he didn't know the song.That was also the night the swearing started.He called one of the priests over in a pleasant voice,
27:35again and again,and when nobody answered,he told the priest that he stank.Then he told all of them where to go and what they were.By the Monday, the family was worn down.Nobody had slept,and the mother had to be taken to a doctor.The Alexian brothers ran a hospital on South Broadway with a psychiatric wing,
27:55and they agreed to give Baudern a room on the fifth floor,away from the other patients, where a boy could scream.The room had a barred window, a door with no knob on the inside, and a bed with straps.The diary says the boy was terrified of it.Boutern read the right there that night, and nothing happened at all.The priest stepped out, and for half an hour the boy's father read prayers over him by himself,then slept on a couch in the room.In the morning, they took him home.
28:23Baudern tried the rectory of his own church next.The boy and his father shared a room on an upper floor,and during the days, another Jesuit began giving him instruction in the Catholic faith.On the first night there, it took three men to hold him.With his eyes shut, he broke Walter Halloran's noseand bludied the nose of a fourth Jesuit, William Van Rue.He told one of the priests that he had met him in hell,and that the year was 1957.
28:51His language changed that week,and Bishop wrote a good deal of it downwith dashes where the words had been.It was about his own body and about the bodies of the priests,and he pulled the towel off his waist and danced to go with it.Awake, he told them that the men down there used filthy language.On the next night, four men were holding him.He made up rhymes on the name of the rectory workman who was helping.
29:16He called one of the Jesuits an ox.and he told Baudern, with a curse attached, to quit the Latin.Around two in the morning, he noticed nobody was leaving,and he remarked that they seemed to like staying with him, and that he liked it too.The 10th night was quieter, and the priests remembered the X.For five days after it, there was nothing,and Baudern went out and blessed the relative's house.On the last night of March, the boy came downstairs at half-past eleven,
29:45saying his feet felt cold and then hot.The bed started shaking once he was back in it, and he began tracing words on the sheet with his finger and said he was reading them off a blackboard, and his cousin wrote down what he called out.It would stay ten days and come back after four.If he stayed and became a Catholic, it would stay away.Anyone who interfered with him would die badly.Stay tuned for more disturbing history.We'll be back after these messages.Baudern and Van Rue got there at one in the morning and started the right, and at the command,
30:21the boy asked for a pencil.He wrote on the white cloth covering the headboarduntil the family ran out of roomand tacked up sheets of wrapping paper.He wrote that he was the devil in personand that he would answer to the name, spite.Baudern ordered him in Latin to give his name in Latin,and he wrote back, with a spelling mistake,
30:40that he spoke the language of the person he was in.Ordered to give a sign in Latin,he made marks that weren't letters.He also drew a map with 2,000 feet written on itand said out loud that this was what he'd gotten on the Ouija board.The next evening, the family set out for the church to have him baptized a Catholic.In the car, he laughed at the idea that baptism or communion would drive anything out,and he grabbed the steering wheel.
31:06His uncle pulled to the curb.They wrestled him into the back seat,where his father and uncle held him while his aunt drove,and he lunged forward at her anyway.At the rectory, three men could barely get him through the door.he ended up on a parlor floor having cold water thrown on it.They carried him to the third floor.The workman stood in as his sponsor,
31:27and each time Baudern asked whether he renounced Satan,the boy went under before he could answer.It took three or four tries.He fought hardest at the moment of the baptism itself,and Boutern finished it anyway.The following morning was meant to be his first communion.He spat the host out five times onto the linen cloth held under his chin.After two hours, the priest stopped and set a rosary, tried once more, and he swallowed.
31:54That night, he ran upstairs, went straight for a reliquary on the table, missed it because apriest caught his wrist, and instead ripped four pages out of Baudern's copy of the ritual.He repeated the Latin commands back in a jumble and laughed.At a quarter past one, he was sitting in a chair with his hand shaking, and he begged hisfather to take him home to Washington on Sunday.He told them he couldn't stand any more of it and was afraid he was going crazy.Sunday afternoon, he was playing catch in the yard with his father, two uncles, and a cousinwhen he staggered, shut his eyes, and took off at a dead run across the neighbor's lawns.
32:31Three men caught him and carried him back.That evening, he chanted at a small cousin over and over for about ten minutes that the child would die that night.Bishop wrote that it was hard to quiet him by any means except a pillow over his face.After midnight, they taped his arms and put gloves on his hands.He complained that the tape hurt and the gloves were hot.They took them off and it started again.On Monday the 4th of April, Baudern and Van Rue took him and his parents to Washington by train.His father had missed weeks of work and the St. Louis relatives were worn out.
33:08Boutern's idea was to hand the case to the church and the board.boy's own diocese. Father Hughes met him and had arranged for Baudern's authority to carry over.That was the extent of the help. St. James had no room to keep a boy. The Washington hospitalswouldn't take him. Boutern and Hughes drove to an institution in Baltimore where the nuns werewilling and the doctors refused, on the grounds that the case wasn't psychiatric and the hospitalwould have to account to the state for whatever treatment it gave. Boutern told Kelly years laterthat he'd been driven from pillar to post.The boy spent those days at home in Cottage City.
33:46He turned over some ground with the spade and cut the lawn.Both nights, the sessions ran five hours.On the Thursday, the diary lists at least 20 brands,one of them a clear numeral four.In the same entry, Bishop wrote that the boy printed the wordsHell and Christ on his own body,in capital letters, with his fingernail.Baudern telephoned the Alexian brothers,
34:09and they took the boy back.He was in the fifth floor room again by Sunday the 10th of April.A brother named Emmett gave him chores on the ward during the dayand made friends with him.On the Monday night, the word exit came up on his chestand again on other parts of his body, once with an arrow.The word hell showed on his chest and thigh.He cried that it hurt to urinate.
34:33On Wednesday, the brothers drove him out to a Jesuit retreat houseto see the outdoor stations of the cross,and at the 14th station, he had to be carried back to the car.That night, he announced that God had ordered it out at 11 o'clock.As the hour came, he began making the sound of a big church bell,holding the end of each bomb.Eleven passed, and he laughed at them.Bishop wrote that night that the boy still had not answered in Latin a single time.
35:01Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy Week were completely quiet.The boy listened to the Good Friday service on the radio.On Saturday, the brother in charge of the house bought a small painted statue of St. Michael theArchangel and set it in the boy's room. Easter was bad from a quarter to seven in the morningwhen he tore a prayer book out of a brother's hands and stamped on the man's scapular. That evening,he fought Brother Emmett in a basement corridor until other brothers heard the shouting. On Monday morning,he woke up kicking. He threw a bottle of holy water at the ceiling and a glass at the wall,and when the brothers brought him a plate of chipped beef,
35:38he backed to the window with it balanced on his palmand dared them to come closer.One brother crawled under the bed to get at his feet.The plate hit the far wall.That morning, the voice had told the priest at his bedsidethat the boy still had one word left to say,a big one, and that he never would.The priests changed their approach that night.
36:00They had been reading about other possession casesand they decided to ask for answers in English.to leave the metals around his neck no matter what he said about them,and to put a crucifix in his hand.Between spells, one of the Jesuits taught him the first half of the Hail Mary in Latin,which he picked up in about 15 minutes,and told him the story of Our Lady of Fatima.He asked for a schoolbook and sat in bed balancing it on his knees, and then on his head.
36:27At a quarter to 11, he was lying still with his eyes closed.Bishop wrote that a clear, commanding voice broke into the prayers.It called on Satan twice by name, announced itself as St. Michael, and ordered Satan and the other evil spirits out of the body in the name of Dominus immediately.It finished by shouting the word now three times.He fought harder for the next seven or eight minutes than he had on any night since the 16th of March.Then he said, he's gone and told him he felt fine.He told them what he'd seen.A beautiful man with wavy hair stood in a white light.
37:05in a white robe that looked like scales, holding up a fiery sword and pointing down at a cave.The devil stood in the cave laughing.The angel smiled at the boy and spoke, and the boy caught a single word of it, which wasdominus.Then the devil and about ten others ran back into the fire, and he felt something snap in hisstomach.He led the rosary himself after midnight.In the morning, he went to Mass in the hospital chapel and took communion at the rail
37:34without any trouble. By my count from the diary, the Wright had been read over him on something more than20 nights across five weeks. Bishop dated his finished report the 25th of April. Four days later,he sent a copy to the brother who ran the hospital, with a covering letter saying the chanceryhad twice ordered that the case was not to be publicized and that he was afraid word had alreadygotten around the city. The family went home to Maryland. The boy went back to Bladensburg Jr. High that fall,and repeated the eighth grade.The leak, when it came, came from Washington.The pastor gave his talk at the library on the 9th of August.
38:13The Catholic sources answered within 10 days, and St. Louis stayed silent.The diary has a postscript added by the brothers.On the 19th of August, 1951, the boy and his parents came back to the hospital to visit.He was 16, and the entry speaks well of him.His mother and father had become Catholics, too,and had made their first communion on Christmas Day of 1950.The room on the fifth floor was locked and kept locked.Thomas Allen wrote that the hospital staff passed the reason along to one another for years.
38:47When that wing came down in 1978,a workman found a stack of typed pages in the drawer of a desk in the locked roomand handed them to his boss.A copy made its way to Walter Halloran, who by then was a priest,and Halloran gave it to Allen.That copy is the main reason anybody outside the Society of Jesusknows what happened on Roanoke Drive and South Broadway.Nobody can say for certain how many pages the original ran.
39:15Erdman's copy was 16 pages, and Allen's was 26.Absasnik asked Halloran in the late 90s what had become of his,and Halloran said, I burned it.I'm not a psychiatrist,and no doctor who has offered an opinion about this boy in print ever examined him.16 years of police work taught me to start with any report by asking who wrote it and what he saw for himself.Everything in the diary before the 9th of March is the family's word, and Bishop rarely says which relatives saw which event.Obsaznick made that point in 1999 and added another.
39:51Nowhere in the diary does anyone arrange to watch the boy when he believes he's alone.The three signs in the Roman ritual fare badly in the priest's own accounts.The diary's own verdict on Latin is that he imitated it clearly and never answered in it.Boutern told Kelly the boy spoke exactly one Latin word, Dominus, which a priest says out louda dozen times in any mass. Kelly had heard a story going around the Jesuit community that theconsecrated host used to fly out of Baudern's fingers and circle the room. He put it to Bauder,who told him the boy had spat it out. Kelly's notes from that interview say there was nolevitation, no knowledge of hidden things, and no strength beyond the ordinary. On strength,
40:34the diary disagrees with its own exorcist, since Bishop wrote several times that the boy's blowswent past his natural power. Absassnik put the same list to Halloran on that telephone call.Halloran told him the boy's voice never really changed, that he thought the Latin was mimicry,and that the punch that broke his nose was nothing special. He remembered spitting and couldn'trecall any vomiting. He wouldn't say whether the boy had been possessed, on the grounds that hehad never felt qualified to judge. The marks on his skin are harder to dismiss. Bishop wrote that theycame up while the boy's hands were in plain view, and Halloran said the same 50 years later.Halloran also said the marks looked more like lipstick than like wounds, and that it was hard to tell
41:19whether they made letters. Absaznik asked whether anyone had checked the boy's fingernails.Halloran was quiet for a moment and said no, they hadn't.That question is the one any patrol officer would have asked on the first night.And the diary itself, on the 7th of April, says he wrote two words on his chest with a fingernail.The skeptic Joe Nickel pointed out that after the one early report of writing on his back,the messages only ever turned up where a boy could reach.Van Rue, the Jesuit with the bloodied nose, gave Kelly a name for it.He called it dermatography, skin that welts up along any line traced on it, and he said the
41:58welts could be brought on by hysteria.Blattie knew about that too, and put the same explanation in his novel.Van Rue went on to teach theology at the Gregorian University in Rome.He told Kelly that nothing he saw in those rooms justified calling it possession.He said the boy's eyes gave away each lunge before it came, and that what he saw was a sick child.He kept that opinion to himself for years, so as not to hurt Bowdern.Kelly's own conclusion was about sequence.Before the 16th of March, there was a boy at the center of noises and moving furniture.
42:33From the first reading of the right, there were convulsions, voices, visions of a pit, and obscenities.And Kelly argued that the exorcism had produced the very symptoms it was meant to cure.He called it a counterfeit possession, brought on by suggestion.He also recorded that in 35,000,five days, no physician examined the child. The diary supports him more than I expected. The devilshows up in the boy's mouth after three priests kneel by his bed and tell him the devil is in him.The talk about turning Catholic comes after a week of catechism lessons. A statue of St. Michaelgoes into his room on Saturday, and on Monday night, St. Michael speaks. The voice says in the morning
43:14that the boy has one word left to say. The word the angel gives him that night is Dominus.the one Latin word Boudron said he knew.Trickery is the other reading, and Opsaznik is its strongest witness,because he's the only investigator who ever knocked on doors in Cottage City.He taped 102 interviews.Two brothers who grew up down the street talked to him on condition he used only their initials.The younger had been the boy's closest friend since they were three.He described a spoiled only child with a mean streak,
43:47who used to telephone other kids to come over and then turn a biting stray dog loose on them,and who would call afterward laughing.He was in the classroom the day of the desk.What he saw was a chair with a riding arm shaking very fast,a teacher yelling to cut it out,and his friend yelling back that he wasn't doing it.He told Absaznik he had never been able to settle in his own mind what was shaking that desk.The older brother said he'd been in the house while it was building up.
44:15He said the two boys had taught themselves to spit through their teeth and could hit a target at 10 feet,and that the bed in that room sat on wheels with wire springs under it and was harder to keep still than to bounce.He told Absaznik he believed it was psychological.He thought the grandmother was at the center of it, with her old country religion,and that the mother got swept along while the father kept to the background.Other people close to the family told Absaznik the father never believed his son was possessed.Obsaznik's verdict was that a disturbed, unhappy boy wanted out of Bladensburg Jr. Highand wanted to go to St. Louis and discovered that tantrums got him both.
44:55Nickel went further and said nothing reliably reported in the case was beyond what a teenagercould stage. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.I think Obsaznick is closer than Nickel, and I think Kelly is closer than either.A deliberate hoax doesn't account for a 13-year-old,shaking in a chair at one in the morning and telling his father he's afraid he's losing his mind.A boy who started something in January and got carried somewhere he couldn't steer by Marchfits that entry a good deal better. Baudern told Kelly that nearly everything he witnessed could beexplained and that the word hell rising on the boy's chest could not and that it was proof enough for
45:39him. Halloran, doubts and all, said he saw a bottle slide off a dresser with nobody near it and felt thebed move while he was leaning his own weight on it. Bishop had six adults watching a mattress onthe 9th of March. They were educated men, and Bishop put the lawn mowing and the monopoly game in thesame report as the devil on the boy's leg. And in my experience, a witness who is shading a storyleaves that kind of detail out. Baudern also told Kelly he had caught his own memory improvingthe story. If he didn't record a session as soon as it was over, he found the details shifting in hismemory and growing more impressive.I heard the same admission, in plainer words, from a good many witnesses over 16 years.
46:24Kelly's own notes show it happening to him.In 1960, Bauder described the message that sent the family West as the words go,St. Louis, found on the boy's thigh by both of his parents.The diary, written 11 years earlier, has the single word, Lewis, on his ribs with his motherwatching.Blattie carried the story for 20 years without writing it.He made his living as a comic novelist and a screenwriter,and he had a hit with a Pink Panther picture.
46:53In 1968, he saw Rosemary's Baby,decided he could write a better ending for the devil than that,and went looking for the exorcist from the newspaper.He found Baudern and wrote to him.Boutern answered that the archbishop had bound him to silenceand that he could give no details.He confirmed that a diary existed and declined to show.it. And he told Blattie that the case he had been involved in was the real thing, that he'd had
47:19no doubt of it then and had none now. Bladdy wrote that he wanted to ease the old priest's mindabout the family being found. So, the boy from the Maryland suburbs became Reagan McNeil,the 12-year-old daughter of a film actress renting a house in Georgetown. Bladdy got hold ofthe diary anyway. He wrote in 1974 that he had read it and never said how.Erdman's fate article offers a possible route.Father Gallagher at Georgetown had obtained a 16-page copy from a Washington psychiatrist in the fall of1949 and lent it to a dean.And what came back to Gallagher was nine carbon pages.
47:59A good deal of the first third of the novel can be set beside Bishop's pages.Scratching comes from overhead, and the mother assumes rats and calls about an exterminator.There's a Ouija board and a bed that shakes.A child urinates in front of company and curses at the adults.Words rise on her stomach and they spell, Help Me, where the diaries spelled hell.The mother goes through physicians and psychiatrists before she ever goes near a priest.Blattie made up most of what remains.The demon is Pizzou, an Assyrian wind spirit, and the book opens at an archaeological dig in Iraq.
48:36Blattie had met the British archaeologist who excavated the Dead Sea Scroll caves while he was in Beirut.He gave that man's middle name to Father Lancaster Marin.Father Carus, the psychiatrist priest who has lost his faith, has no counterpart in St. Louis.In the novel, a film director goes out the bedroom window with his head turned backward.The girl speaks English in reverse.The room turns cold enough to see breath, and both priests die.In the diary, nobody died, and nobody left the ground.The worst injury was Walter Halloran's nose.
49:09Blatty went back and forth for the rest of his life on how much was reported and how much was invented.Kelly logged him telling Merv Griffin's audience in February of 1974 that, so far as he had been able to learn,all of the film's paranormal events happened in the 1949 case.Newsweek quoted him that same month, saying he'd taken few liberties,apart from borrowing the turning head from other exorcism stories.Decades later, he was describing the novel as poetic license.And The Washington Post, looking back in 2023, reported that he said most of it came out of his own imagination.The novel itself hedges more than Bladdy did on television.
49:50He had Karras run down a natural explanation for every symptom, case by case.And Kelly, who thought the real possession was no possession at all, praised the book for it.The jacket of the first edition asked the reader whether Reagan was possessed and left room for a no.He wrote it in about 10 months on a $25,000 advance, working 16-hour days in Encino.Harper and Roe published it in May of 1971, and it sat in the stores.Then, Bladdy got a seat on the Dick Cavett show and talked about whether the devil exists.The book went to the top of the New York Times list, and Warner Brothers bought the film rights for $641,000.Blattie produced the film himself and insisted on William Friedkin, who,
50:36had just won the Academy Award for the French Connection. Shooting began on the 14th of August1972. It was scheduled for 85 days and ran past 200 and a budget that started a little over$4 million, finished at 12. A lot went wrong on that shoot. Early on, a bird got into a circuitbreaker at the New York studio and started a fire that burned every interior set of the McNeilhouse except the girl's bedroom. The fire cost the production. The fire cost the production.six weeks. A sprinkler system later ruined another set. The 10-foot statue of the demon was shippedto Hong Kong when it was supposed to go to Iraq. Ellen Burstyn was thrown backward in the take that's in thefilm and fractured her tailbone. Linda Blair fractured her lower spine when the straps on the mechanical
51:24bed were too loose. A carpenter lost a thumb and a lighting man lost a toe. Jack McGowan, who playedthe director, died a week after finishing his scenes, and the Greek actress who playedthe priest's mother died before the release.Published accounts of the production also count a night watchman,the man who ran the refrigeration unit for the bedroom set,an assistant cameraman's newborn child,Linda Blair's grandfather,and Max von Seidow's brother.
51:52Friedkin talked about it to a horror magazinewhile the film was still in production.He told the magazine that the shoot had left him believing demonic possession was real,and that odd trouble had followed the production since its first days.He asked Father Thomas Birmingham, a Jesuit who was advising on the picture and playing a small part, to exercise the set.Birmingham thought a real exorcism would only frighten people worse and gave the cast and crew a blessing.Bladdy never believed in any curse.He told the critic Mark Kermode that Friedkin had started the talk himself by blaming devils for the delays,
52:27and that any production running a full year will have its injuries and its funerals.The film historian Sarah Crowther has argued the studio was happy to help the story along.Most of the injuries traced to decisions Friedkin made.He chilled the bedroom set to 20 below zero and kept a child and a nightgown in it.He fired a gun loaded with blanks behind his actors to make them jump.He slapped a real priest across the face before a take to get the shaking he wanted.One man connected to the film did end up in a courtroom.Paul Bateson, a hospital technician Friedkin put on camera doing his
53:02own job in the scene where the girl has a needle put in her neck, was convicted in1979 of murdering a film journalist. The Exorcist opened the day after Christmasof 1973 on 30 screens. Warner Brothers hadn't shown it to critics and didn'texpect much. In New York, people stood in line in six-degree cold and the firstweek took in nearly two million dollars. Theaters reported people fainting andgetting sick in the aisles. In Toronto, a managertold a newspaper he had a plumber in the building more or less full time. Some houses kept anambulance on call. Blattie used to stand at the back and watch who left, and he said the
53:42scene that emptied the most seats was the medical one, the needle and the blood, with the possessionscenes coming second. A psychiatrist published four case histories in a medical journal in1975 under the term cinematic neurosis. Some of what was reported about those audiences has no bettersourcing than the Bedspring story. A woman in New York was said to have miscarried during a showing.Billy Graham told the National Enquirer that the devil was present all the way through the film,and within a few years, that had been retold as Graham claiming the reels themselves were possessed.Boston tried to ban it, and a court stopped the city. In Hattiesburg, Mississippi,Mississippi, police arrested a projectionist and a theater manager after the first showing.
54:28In Britain, it was pulled from video stores for 11 years.It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won two.One of them, Bladdies, for the screenplay.The film sent people to their parish priests.A Loyola University priest named Richard Woods told the New York Times that his telephonewas ringing with people asking for exorcisms.Most of them lapsed Catholics.Birmingham got requests by the hundreds. Woods had already traced a number of supposed possessions
54:57to people who had simply read the novel, and he had predicted more once the film came out.Kelly noted in 1974 that the prediction had held. It also sent people looking for the house.Two articles in a Prince George's County weekly in 1981 and 1983 pointed readers to a vacant lotat 3210 Bunker Hill Road in Mount Rainier as the place where the possessed boy was,boy had lived. The post repeated the address in 1985. For years afterward, teenagers drove outto that corner at night to drink beer, put up wooden crosses, and scream until the police ran them off.Nobody in Mount Rainier's oldest families could tell Absaznik the boy's name, because no such boyhad ever lived there. His closest friend from Cottage City told Absaznik about being driven past that
55:46lot by a buddy and shown where the exorcist happened. He told Absaznick,that he acted surprised.St. Louis grew a version, too.St. Louis Magazine has reported that students at the universitysettled on a small, locked room on the fourth floor of a Jesuit residence hall as the siteand climbed the stairs to stand outside it.The rectory where Halloran's nose was broken had already been torn down.The boy graduated from Gonzaga High School in Washington in 1954.
56:16Father Hughes used to tell friends in Mount Rainier two things about him,that he had lived in Cottage City and that he turned out fine.He went to work for the Space Agency and stayed about 40 years,most of it at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.The Guardian reported that his work contributed to the Apollo missionsand that he held a patent on a technology for making space shuttle panels resistant to extreme heat.He retired in 2001.Thomas Allen said the Jesuits and the Alexian brothers kept quiet track of him over the years
56:48and that he married around 1970 and had children.Bishop died in 1978 and Baudern in 1983,and neither ever spoke publicly about him.Halloran went through paratrooper training at 48and served in Vietnam as an army chaplain,and he used to say he'd seen more evil over therethan in that hospital bed.He died in 2005.
57:11He had told a reporter that after the right,the boy went on to lead a rather ordinary life.Alan wrote to him twice while researching his book.Absaznik, at the end of his investigation,got a telephone number from someone in Cottage City and dialed it,and the man himself picked up.Obsasnick described a deep, gravelly voice.The man acknowledged that he grew up in Cottage City
57:35and had never lived in Mount Rainier.He said he'd seen the movie and offered no opinion of it.He would not confirm that he was the person Obsaznick was writing about.He said there would be no cooperation of any kind,and he told Absaznik never to call again.He died at home in Marriottesville, Maryland, on the 10th of May 2020,three weeks short of his 85th birthday, after a stroke.The following year, a writer for the skeptical inquirer,
58:03working from Absasnik's research, published his name.The Guardian and the New York Post printed it within weeks.The Post found a woman who had been his companion,and she spoke without giving her own name.She said he had lived in dread that the people,he worked with at Goddard would find out. She said that a few days before he died, a Catholicpriest came to the house without anyone having sent for him as far as she knew and gave him the lastrights. She also said he never believed he'd been possessed. He told her the whole business had been
58:35concocted. His words, as she gave them to the post, were, I was just a bad boy. The recordleaves two versions standing. In one, three Jesuits and a house full of relatives sawthings in the spring of 1949 that nobody has explained. And a novelist and a director added aspinning head and a dead priest to an event that was already beyond nature. In the other, a lonely13-year-old with a talent for mischief got the attention of every adult around him. A write writtenin 1614 told him each night what was expected next, and two men in California turned him intothe most famous possession case of the century while he was at a desk in Maryland working forthe space program. Bowdern, who was in the room, went to his grave holding the first. Van Rue,
59:22who was in the same room, held something much closer to the second. So, that's the story behindthe Exorcist. This was the first episode in the series I'm doing through the spooky seasonon the true history behind some of the most famous horror movies ever made. And there are more on theway. If you got something out of this one, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a minute to rate and reviewdisturbing history wherever you're listening.It doesn't take long,and it's one of the main waysnew listeners find the show.
59:53And if you know somebody who loves that movieor somebody who's surethey already know what happenedto that boy in 1949,send this episode their way.For our child is out.
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