The Exorcist Files - The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Help Make Father Martins a New York Time Best Seller by Pre-Ordering Now!- Https://Fathercarlosmartins.comWant More Content? Sign up for "The Vault" HereRocket Money- Do an exorcism of your own finances and find hundreds of dollars of savings. Click Here- Check out the award winning game studio SOMA GAMES and their newest release. Soma makes incredible biblically inspired video games. Click here.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Do you crave more Exorcist Files content? Do you want to go deeper into theology and spiritual warfare? Well, you're going to want to subscribe to The Vault, our new premium subscriber program. The Vault is our way of ensuring we bring you content all year long. Subscribers will get access to exclusive once a month, Ask Me Anything episodes with Father Martins, where you can submit questions and vote on the ones you want him to answer most. You'll also get access to a very special case behind the case series,

where we relisten to past episodes and cases, and Father reflects back on insights and anecdotes he just didn't have time to get into in the podcast. To subscribe, head on over to Exorcistfiles.tv and sign up, or just click the link in the show notes. Again, that's exorcistfiles.tv to get access to the vault. Welcome back to the Exorcist Files, the show, where we tell demons, they just got to go.

As promised to our loyal Kickstarter backers, we wanted to bring you a season two bonus episode that will have you levitating out of your chair and not in a way requiring theological assistance. Today we take a plunge into the incredible story of the exorcism of Annalise Michelle, or, as some of you might know it, the last exorcism of Emily Rose, popularized in the hit film by Scott Derrickson. The case chronicles a young girl's battle against a series of bizarre manifestations and symptoms and a lengthy series of intense exorcisms that unfortunately,

did not have the desired effect. This case is notable for many reasons, and has fascinated fans of the paranormal for years, in no small part because there actually are tape recordings of the young girl in the throes of her alleged manifestation. Yet, what I find so interesting about this case is that for almost every piece of evidence for the supernatural, there is some accompanying natural explanation

that could, at least in theory, account for the strange manifestations. For some, this case represents a simple, tragedy, a young girl with significant mental illness who unfortunately didn't respond to treatment and paid the price as those around her let her just waste away. For others, it is a clear case of spiritual oppression, a legitimate demonic attack that was used to highlight attention to the world of spiritual warfare, and Annalise died a martyr of sorts. With us today to parse through this evidence is a special guest, Dr. Candy Gunther Brown, a religious studies scholar, friend of the podcast, and wife to our resident Exorcist Files Neuroscience contributor from

Season 1, Dr. Joshua Brown. Now, you will want to listen to the end because Father Martins will be weighing in with what he thinks happened to conclude this episode. Don't worry. We do have more dramatic episodes coming for you. We're just bringing you these while we produce and work on them. Father Martins is out finishing his tour with the relic of St. Jude that comes to an end in December. Lastly, if you haven't signed up for the vault, there are some awesome bonus episodes available, including our monthly Ask Father Anything. These are 90-minute Q&As that have Father Martin's addressing every question you can think of. Head on over to exorcistfiles.tv, and you can get access to the case behind the case series, Q&As, and so much more. Or you can

just click the link in the notes. With that, let's bring on Dr. Brown to get into the exorcism of Annalise Michelle. My name is Candy Gunther Brown. I am a professor of religious studies at Indiana University. I did my undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard University. And for the past 20 years, I have been studying healing, exorcism, and deliverance. For those who remember Dr. Joshua Brown, you know that this family takes both the intellectual and supernatural very seriously. While the Brown's work is focused mostly on miracles and healings through their Global Medical Research Institute, they also have some experience with deliverance. It started off some 20 years ago when my husband, Dr. Joshua Brown, who has been a guest on the Exorcist Files before, when he had a seizure and was diagnosed with a brain tumor and ended up getting a lot of deliverance ministry. So then I started doing academic research into the subject.

And that's taken me in a variety of directions. But most recently, I have been writing a biography of a Catholic charismatic by the name of Francis McNutt. And it was actually through that project that I found a connection to a particular case in the 1970s that had an impact on his practice of doing deliverance. So it was really through a few twists and turns that I came to today's subject. Father Francis McNutt was a Dominican priest known best for his work in the charismatic Catholic renewal on the topic of the supernatural.

He notably wrote, Only when we are able to free the oppressed and heal those suffering from the curse of sickness, can we really preach Christ's basic message. The kingdom of God is at hand, and the kingdom of Satan is being destroyed. Father McNutt helped increase awareness of the reality of spiritual warfare, its successes, and missteps during his life and ministry. Now, moving on to this case,

I wanted to get a take on what made Dr. Brown study this case and why it was so significant for her. One of the things that causes this case to stand out is that there is an unusual level of documentation surrounding it. The priest exorcists made cassette tapes that were then entered into evidence in a court case. And then an anthropologist and a linguist wrote about those records and published a book on it. The story then has been made into at least three movies. But partly what catches people's attention is that she died in the course of the exorcism.

And so this raises all kinds of questions about was this a success? Was it a failure? Was this actually a case of demonic possession? Or was this a case of medical and psychiatric problems? This is one of the most highly publicized modern exorcisms. There was a 23-year-old woman by the name of Annalisa Michel in the German state of Bavaria, who had been undergoing a series of exorcisms over a 10-month period. Two priests conducted some 67 exorcism sessions, each of them several hours in length.

And the case ended in her death from what doctors diagnosed as starvation and over-exertion. At the time of her death, she weighed only 66 pounds. This actually became a court case, and the German courts convicted the girls' parents and the two priests for negligent homicide in April of 1978, and they were sentenced to suspended jail terms and to pay court costs. And so that then raises the questions about what happened. Why did this take so long, and why was the outcome death? Amongst Christians, this is a heavily debated topic due to the massive amount of publicity and the aforementioned documentation surrounding this case.

Although we will not be making the final call on the success or failure of this exorcism, it is important to note that there is disagreement even within the church on what actually happened here and whether it contributed to a diminished confidence in exorcism as a whole. Let's get into some of those details now. So this young woman grew up in a lower middle class Catholic family in, a rural area. Her family, who was a devout Catholic family, they enjoyed saying the rosary together every night. Her mother was actually quite religiously strict, didn't want her daughters to spend time in the presence of boys or go to dances. They were a serious kind of religious family.

She had siblings, and she had a few more kind of bouts of childhood disease than her siblings did. She got measles and mumps and scarlet fever, but she entered school. She got good grades. She had the goal of becoming a school teacher. And it was only when she was 16 years old that some things started to happen. There was a day that she was in school and she blacked out briefly and then recovered. Around midnight, she felt this force pin her down in her bed and she started to panic. She couldn't move, she couldn't speak. But then she recovered from this. And it wasn't until a year later that a similar set of episodes occurred. Once again, in the middle of the day, she blacked out briefly, and then that night she had this strange kind of paralysis. Things pretty much went back as normal,

but then she did have some more just physical problems. She got tonsillitis, she got pneumonia. She ended up having to drop out of school and go into a hospital that specializes in lung diseases and spend some time there. And once she returned home from that illness, people did notice a difference in her. She seemed more quiet and serious. She wanted to talk more about religion. Her grades weren't as good as they had been before. And she didn't feel as well. She became more depressed, even suicidal. But she still only had a few of these episodes until several years later. And so really, it would have just seemed like she had a few health issues, including mental health struggles, along with physical health struggles, until things started to intensify. Given the cascading number of ailments this young girl started to experience, one can't help but wonder, at what point do you say, okay, doctors, nice try, but we need the great physician to give it a shot.

Of course, the two don't have to be mutually exclusive, but given the sheer number of problems she experienced and their seemingly rapid onset, it's hard to understand why they didn't just seek out spiritual help sooner. Initially, their approach to her struggles was purely a medical one. They sent her to a series of doctors to neurologists and eventually psychiatrists. And initially, when they did EEGs and other medical tests, there was nothing unusual. And still, the doctor started to suggest that she might have epilepsy or even that she had some kind of depressive psychosis. And eventually she did have an EEG that had a kind of irregular pattern on it. And so they prescribed her a series of anti-convulsant medications, which the doctors thought were helping, but she thought that they just made her more tired and apathetic.

So she took the medicines, but she wasn't very convinced that. these were helping her. Meanwhile, Annalisa started to have some more, in her view, kind of unusual and troubling, religious and spiritual experiences. So she began to have visions in which she saw faces in her mind's eye that seemed, they seemed cruel, they were grimacing, they almost seemed hellish. And she couldn't really describe them very well, or at least she didn't want to. But she felt like they kept her from praying. She heard voices that were telling her that she was condemned forever to hell. She found it hard to enter a shrine to the Virgin Mary or to look at medals of saints. She started smelling this horrible stench of something like dung or burning and hearing this knocking.

At first, she was the only person who could smell or hear these things, but then her family started to smell and to hear. And so they, did start to call in some priests. And at first, they were only doing just really prayers of blessing or a kind of a small exorcism, not the formal right of exorcism. But even if they were doing that, she started to complain that it was burning when the people prayed for her. And even if people prayed silently, she ordered them to stop because it was bothering her. And then her family and her friends started to see just odd things in her behavior. Her eyes started to look like they were black. Her face had this expression of hatred on it. She looked like she was stiff, and her hands were twitching,

and they looked almost like paws with claws on them while she was praying the rosary or while she was looking at a statue of the virgin. She started to disrespect sacred objects, so she tore a rosary. And some thought that she had superhuman strength. Three men were holding her down when they finally did get to the point of praying for exorcisms. And still, she was violent in reacting to them. And she had trouble with holy water. No problem with regular water. But if it was holy water, she reacted strongly to it.

And when they got to the exorcisms, she could understand them, even if the priests were speaking in Chinese or French or Dutch or Latin. And she said that she was fully conscious during all of this, but it was like her will was being taken over. She felt like there were devils in her, and she was being molested by satanic beings. And so it was really Annalisa who was pleading to have exorcisms. And it took some seven years before she was able to get people's attention and permission for this to take place. So it was all the way from 1968 when she first had these. symptoms of the blackout and the paralysis all the way up until September 24th of 1975, that

finally a bishop gave permission for two exorcists, two priests, to perform exorcism. Hearing everything that happened to this girl, you do have to wonder how a family that prayed the rosary every night together didn't seek out the church's help sooner. Plus, if you've been receiving medical treatment to no avail for almost a decade, It seems even more incredible that you wouldn't want to try almost anything to get better. Now, as our listeners know, by the time a formal exorcism is approved by a bishop, there has to be the evidence of its need. Bishops do not take this lightly. So clearly, the church thought there was enough there to warrant an exorcism.

Sadly, though, this case would take a tragic turn and play out in a John Grisham-esque legal thriller. As soon as she died, her father tried to get a death certificate. But when a medical examiner came, he wasn't able to attest that she had died of natural causes. She looked terrible. She had bruises all over. She was extremely thin. And so they did an autopsy. And that autopsy found that she had starved to death and very strenuous exertions that exacerbated the lack of food and even lack of water.

And so at that point, the question was raised, well, why didn't someone do something to keep that from happening? And initially, the courts wanted to know, well, was someone telling her she wasn't allowed to eat? And what seems to be the case in the evidence is that her family tried to get her to eat. The priest tried to get her to eat, but she felt that she was being compelled not to. And as late as the day before her death, she refused to have a medical doctor come in. So as late as June the 30th with her dying on July the 1st, she refused medical care. But then the question was, was she mentally and medically competent to refuse medical treatment? And if she was insane or if she was just medically compromised, then the responsibility,

course of action would have been to force feed her, forced hydration. Doctors suggested some kind of just forcible intervention might have been an order. Maybe even electric shock therapy wouldn't have been ruled out. And so that's why the finding of the court was that this was negligent homicide. The responsibility of her parents and the priests was to notice that she was wasting down to nothing, 66 pounds, and yet they did nothing to stop that. The courts even had the two priests analyzed psychiatrically, and they found that one of them thought had a kind of psychosis himself based on his reports of having religious experiences

quite parallel to Annalises, but they weren't sure that he wasn't schizophrenic. The other priests, they didn't find any evidence of psychiatric problems, but, But they found some calcification in his brain. And strangely, in their evaluation, he lost his critical evaluation skills when it came to exorcism, although he seemed normal in other respects. And so, really what part of what this court case suggests is that there's a real conflict between religious and secular outlooks that were really quite a larger scale phenomenon in post-World War II German Catholicism. There were some interesting kinds of contested features of the case. One of Annalisa's doctors allegedly told her parents that they should take her to a Jesuit priest,

although the doctor later denied it. And that's kind of a strange recommendation in and of itself because most German as well as U.S. Jesuits were leading in an attack against exorcism in the 1960s. There was one particular German Jesuit by the name of Adolf Rodwick who had begun practicing exorcism during the Second World War. He'd even written some books on it. And early on in the case, a family friend had contacted this priest. He wasn't able to take on the case himself. He referred it out to two other priests.

But he did come and visit Annalisa at one point. And it was his diagnosis that she was possessed. Amen. Father Martin's here. I want to do a quick plug for one of the most powerful tools I've seen for breaking free and growing closer to Christ. Exodus 90. The Exodus 90 challenge begins this year on January 20th. But this isn't just a 90-day program. Exodus 90 is a spirituality for modern men that is built on three ancient pillars. Prayer, self-sacrifice, and fraternity. We all long for something more. We long to be the men God created us to be, sons of a loving father. It's time to turn away from our idols.

It's time to break free from the pharaohs that hold us in bondage. If you're ready to make a fresh start and embark on a journey to uncommon freedom in Jesus Christ, then download the Exodus 90 app today. This is your chance to break free, refocus,

and rediscover who God is calling you to be in the new year. It starts January 20th. So go to Exodus 90.com slash X-Files to learn more about Exodus 90. That's Exodus 90.com slash X-Files to join tens of thousands of men from all over the world for Exodus 90. Again, it begins Monday, January 20th. God bless you. Importantly, the evidence for Annalise's possession was attested to by more than just the Catholic Church. Her suffering was well documented by family and physicians.

I think the only thing to really speculate on is that in general, there was a divide between secular government authorities and church authorities. And so there was not a sharing in the widespread Catholic worldview by those who were bringing the case forward. They thought this all should just be a straight medical case. And it's a problem to have had priests come in to start with. It was more of a problem because it ended in death. There was an objection to even having an exorcist come in when what seemed obvious from one perspective would be that you need to have psychiatrists, you need to have medical doctors, and when you start talking about exorcism, that's just going to make everything worse by confirming delusional

beliefs that there is a religious source. And so you can see public servants wanting to do a service to society to disabuse people of superstition and protect other people from dying unnecessarily because of these pre-modern religious superstitions. It's understandable that for the public servants trying this case, if they have no framework for spiritual warfare, then it would seem to be pretty clear that an exorcism is not only unhelpful, but potentially dangerous, as it would reinforce an already strange mental psychosis. For the prosecution, their position was simply that the family should have intervened and forced her into eating, treatment, etc. Now, one thing I did want to get some clarity on, many people wrongly assume that the exorcism was in direct conflict with her treatment,

that somehow the priest wanted her to not do any medical treatment. But that's actually not clear from the evidence. It's not clear from the record that the priest discouraged her from taking medications or even that her family did. And they insisted, and even Annalisa insisted, that she was taking her medications pretty far into the actual. exorcism treatments. And there's not really clear evidence I've seen that the priests or the family recommended against medication. It was just a matter of she didn't want it. She didn't want doctors called in.

She was very afraid of being taken to a mental institution. And she didn't feel like the medicine was doing her any good. So the evidence I've seen suggests that the, that really the only anti-medical person in this case was Annalisa herself, not her parents or the priests who are involved. But where this really became a point of contention was what happens when she's becoming so weak and she's injuring herself so badly with this constant kind of forceful genuflections, putting her face against the floor, not eating, losing weight, at what. What point in her self-harm refusal did someone need to intervene? And maybe the medical personnel couldn't cure her, but they could prevent her death by at least

forcing her to eat and by sedating her so that she wouldn't be able to continue to harm herself. And then at that point, they could arguably have resumed the religious treatments. But that is what they failed to do, is they did not. not intervene, albeit against her will, but that's the question. Was she competent medically or mentally to make that call to refuse medical care? The prosecution was arguing that the exorcism was making the religious delusions worse. She kind of produced a kind of psychosis by her own auto suggestion, right? So if she had temporal lobe epilepsy and that

epilepsy caused hallucinations, but then those hallucinations really just kind of drove her to this kind of sense of reality that was out of touch with how other people perceived reality. Then the exorcist just confirmed those out of touch with reality attitudes, and that's what made things worse. And I think that does get us back to the larger issue, that there was a divide between a kind of secular worldview that demons aren't real. Exorcism isn't ever helpful. And the sense that at least in rare cases, there is possession. And the only way to address that is a religious one. In support of their claim, the defense was able to provide audio from their exorcism with Annalise. These tapes contain audio of the alleged demons arguing with each other and the apparent torment

that Annalise suffered. These tapes are available online. Now, we get out of the alleged demons arguing with each other. Now, we get asked all the time in this show, why are there not more tapes, more evidence, etc. We've addressed this. It's primarily a privacy issue, but this case illustrated a key component, even if there were tapes, videos, etc. In today's age, would that be enough? If someone produced a tape, people would say it's probably doctored. If someone showed you an iPhone video of someone levitating, people might ask, how do I know that's not just VFX or some really crafty editing? It begs the question, what evidence would someone accept? up today. The priest did produce these tapes, and in fact, it wasn't just in the court of law.

They played them on publicly until they were told they had to stop doing that, and including by the diocese. This is another aspect of this, is that after the trial, the church backed away from the priests. Initially, it was the church provided a defense attorney, and that's the attorney who ended up turning over materials to a scholar who wrote this all up. But then the bishop and the rest of the church really backed away. And even just weeks afterwards, the bishop issued a statement that at least downplayed the reality of a literal devil. He kind of argued, well, the point of the Bible's teaching on demons is that God is more powerful than evil. And he was worried about statements made about the devil that seemed to be him false. They contradicted the whole spirit of the

New Testament and the ecclesiastical tradition. He said that he was never going to authorize another exorcism, at least without a physician present, all the way through it. And initially, the bishop was brought under charges himself. Those were dropped, but he was so troubled by this whole affair that the bishop resigned and soon afterwards, he had a stroke and he died just a year later with ever regaining his own power of speech. And so after this case, there was really a backing away from exorcism, certainly in Germany. And on a global scale, the church was much stricter about allowing even deliverance practices. I mean, this is how I came across the case, was I realized that it was just two months after the trial judgment that this deliverance minister,

or a priest, Francis McNutt, who was doing not formal exorcism, but deliverance, he was called to the Vatican and was ordered to stop looking people in the eye and commanding demons because even that counted as an exorcism and required permission of a bishop. And so there was this backing away from even kind of lower level deliverance practices in the wake of this case. There was also the calling of a bishop's Commission in Germany that looked into the case and they concluded that really this was just mental illness. And in 1984, they took a petition and sent it to Rome asking for a revision of the right of exorcism. The new right of exorcism sought to assist priests and faithful Christians in distinguishing between mental illness and demonic possession. The updated right

also provided new prayers for the exorcism of places and things. Although these changes were not made until many years following the exorcism of Annalise, some scholars view this case as a catalyst for the church to look closely at the right. Distinguishing mental illness from possession takes a keen eye, wisdom, and the help of the Holy Spirit. To add more questions to the case today, Dr. Brown shared that Annalise herself believed she was possessed. There were these 42 cassette tapes that were made during the actual exorcism events. And there were also diary and and letters that Annalisa left and records of things written to her. So there's actually quite a lot of record of what was taking place at the time. And from her perspective, she was having these

religiously troubling experiences. So she saw these terrible faces. She felt unable to pray. She heard condemning voices. She couldn't go to a shrine. She couldn't look at metals of saints. She smelled this horrible scent. She heard these knockings. She felt tormented, like this burning sensation when people would pray for her. So that's her perspective. But this wasn't just her perspective. Other people also saw these behaviors that were just quite troubling and uncharacteristic. She starts speaking obscenities. Her eyes look black. Her hands look like they're curled into claws. She's stronger than she should have been based on what they knew of her previously. She reacted violently to Holy Water.

Somehow she understood other languages. She did study some Latin in school, but she didn't study Chinese. So there were things that other people observed about her. And then there's also what happened when the priests were conducting the exorcisms. There were these long conversations that took place. between the priests, their perception was that there were these demons who identified themselves by name and who provided explanations of what to have placed. There were six demons identified. They were named Lucifer, Judas, who betrayed Christ, Nero, who slaughtered Christians. Hitler, whose own rise to

power had been in that very area of Bavaria. Kane, who killed his brother way back in the beginning of history, and then a priest by the name of Fleischman who had fallen into all kinds of sins. And these demons claimed that she had not been born yet when there was a neighbor woman, envious of her mother, who had cursed her. And that was the explanation for what took place. And so the right of exorcism says that the priests should ask certain questions of the demons, including what their name is and how they got in and when they were going to leave. In practice, the priests had a lot more extensive conversations. And some of the content of those seemed to exceed what she would have known.

The priest had made mention of this Fleischman, so that wasn't entirely unexplainable how she would have heard of him. But the priest didn't go into the details that she disclosed about this priest. She might have studied something about Niro in her schooling, but she was able to have some quite extensive conversations in the voices and in the characters of these figures. And there were just a lot of screams and obscenities that she was, again, very uncharacteristically uttering in the course of these exorcisms. She seemed really, really troubled. And so every time the priests would start the exorcism, these violent kinds of reactions would take place. But then she would have lucid moments in between the exorcisms, which again, also,

suggested to them that there was something more than mental illness going on here. In addition to the mental illness and the physical health effects, there were some strange injuries and marks that appeared on Annalise, which begged the question of whether she was intentionally hurting herself. These marks, along with some alleged apparitions, helped cement the religious significance of this case. Another kind of phenomenon that was observed was she had these oval wounds that appeared on her feet and then later some wounds on her hands that people around her and she herself interpreted as stigmata. She claimed that this wasn't a place where she had been injuring herself. And then after her death, there were other people

who reported that they were being possessed by her and they heard kind of post-mortem messages that they should exhume her body and it would be undecayed. And so the family did request that her body be dug up on the grounds that they were so rushed that they put it into an inexpensive coffin and they wanted to have a new coffin. And so they thought that they were going to be able to examine her body when they transferred it. As it turned out, the authorities wouldn't allow them to the priests claim that they weren't allowed in either. So there's not really clear evidence in terms of non-secular eyewitnesses as to whether the body was decayed. But then there were also some other kind of claims during the exorcisms that weren't just that she was hearing from demons

or she somehow could respond to priests when they spoke in these other languages. But she claimed that she was getting messages from the Virgin Mary and that Jesus was appearing to her, that this local woman who had been venerated for her holiness by the name of Barbara Vigand appeared to her, that there were other departed spirits that appeared. And so she started to claim, even she admitted she wasn't entirely sure whether these were demons or whether it was really the virgin. But she started hearing messages that that really the explanation of this possession wasn't that she had done anything, but that it was a penance possession or a kind of even demonic martyrdom. And so the virgin asked her, was she willing to do penance to suffer to save other souls from their sins? And so she claimed to agree to accept this punishment for the sins of others so that souls would not be lost.

And she offered herself as a sacrificial victim for Germany, for the youth, and even for priests. And of her own free will, she agreed to continue her sufferings and offer them for the benefit of others. She predicted that her suffering was going to get worse and then it would end at the beginning of July. She didn't seem to know that that meant she was going to die, but she made that prediction even before she did die. And this interpretation has been agreed with by at least some interpreters in the church that this was good, triumphing over evil, that God achieved his goal. She completed the mission of Barbara Beigand. She maybe even should become a saint. God permitted sufferings that were brought by demons, and this provides a kind of explanation that she got free by the end of her life.

It was not a failure of an exorcism, but in the same way that Christ's death might be seen as a failure by the world, it might actually be seen as a success in the eyes of God. And so she entered into heaven as a martyr and possibly even as a saint. It's important to note that Annalise Michelle has not been beatified or canonized. Although some locals and Catholics view her with great reverence, no formal Catholic statement has been made regarding this case. Given the abundance of seemingly explainable phenomena that occurred during this case, I asked Dr. Brown to argue the case from a natural standpoint, that this was in fact just a bizarre series of events that took on a spiritual tone.

I mean, really the number one naturalistic explanation is there is, there is, clear clinical evidence in the literature that temporal lobe epilepsy can cause religiously kind of laden hallucinations and even the smelling of unpleasant odors. There was a predisposition to look for exorcism as a solution because of the impact of the film The Exorcist. Five out of the six demons named, strangely, had human names. So only Lucifer, was a demonic name, but Judas, Nero, Hitler, Kane, Fleischman, these were all humans. And not just any humans, Hitler started on his road to power in Bavaria. And so in a sense, he was a literal expression of Germany's metaphorical exorcism of Hitler. The demons had traits

of the physicians that she had been trying to rid herself of. Her father was emotionally distant. her mother was religiously strict. And so perhaps her obscenities, her hatred of religious objects, those were just her consciously or subconsciously reacting against just these years of being pressed down by her parents. Now, what the naturalists have more trouble explaining is her understanding of other languages. And so maybe she did study Latin.

There is evidence she studied Latin. Maybe she knew French and Dutch. that's not all that uncommon for someone in Germany. Chinese is a harder one to explain, but perhaps she did some reading on her own. And just because she seemed diverse to religious objects or she had religious images, that's not really hard evidence that there's something supernatural taking place. And even if others heard knocking or smelled odors, perhaps they were psychologically conditioned to do so because they really wanted to believe that there was a religious solution to a problem that they had not been able to solve through medical measures.

Dr. Brown raises some important points. As Father Martens has mentioned numerous times on the show, religious aversion to objects does not constitute one of the classic signs that the church looks for when evaluating someone for exorcism. Certainly, genuine demonization can and often does lead to an aversion to religious objects or practices. But this type of behavior can easily be manufactured and part of a self-fulfilling prophecy if one believes they are the victim of a demonic attack. As Dr. Brown points out, we can't rule out that people often want it to be a spiritual issue. When medicine is failed, it's not hard to envision a victim or their loved ones in the throes of desperation, hoping that the cause might be demonic, so that healing becomes a matter of simply

identifying the assailing spirit and removing it. It's very clear from the evidence that this is a young woman who had health problems. She had physical, biological health problems from the time she was a child. And there seems to be fairly strong psychiatric evidence that she wasn't a completely happy young woman. She felt a lot of pressure from her. her parents and pressure to do well in school, pressure not to become involved in activities that might go against their religion. So there were clearly things that made her life difficult. There also is that irregular EEG reading that would be grounds for some kind of medication.

And blacking out in the middle of the day and then having an experience after that, it's plausible that these were seizures. But it is complicated because there is often a tendency, and I think this sometimes happens in both the medical and the religious world, to treat things as all or nothing. A case is either medical or it's demonic, one might argue, that there are multiple things going on and multiple treatments can be in order. So if a physical problem has a spiritual cause, it may be helpful to use physical methods, as well as spiritual methods to treat the problem. If Annalisa had epileptic seizures, there's a real question, did demons cause the epilepsy?

Did epilepsy cause religious delusions? Is there some combination of those two? If she was mentally ill, was she thinking that she was demonized because she was mentally ill? or was she more easily demonized because she was mentally ill? And in this sense, you might think of demons as bacteria that feed on open wounds. And so it seems plausible to me that she had physical problems. The cause may have been demonic, but there still could be a reason to have medical help, but then also spiritual help. It's striking to me that the first sign of trouble was in 1916. And so on the one hand, you can argue this, they did everything they could medically before they took a religious course of action.

But one might actually argue that there should have been more of a religious course of action taken sooner before she just got much worse. So maybe deliverance was in order before there was need for a full on exorcism and more could have been done in terms of praying for her early on. I think sometimes it can be very easy to try and rationalize an outcome rather than entertain a possibility that something was missed or something was done wrong. There's different approaches of dealing with both deliverance and of exorcism. Even according to the right of exorcism, the priest went far beyond the kinds of asking of questions that was prescribed. It doesn't seem that they did a lot of binding the demons and talking to Annalisa. They did a lot of provoking the demons and had very long conversations, some of which ended up being kind of joking, kind of jovial conversations with the demons, rather than just very

kind of serious issuing of very short questions and very stern demands. I've looked through the trial documents and the kind of collection of the evidence that was put together by the linguist and the anthropologist Felicitus Goodman, it seems one might actually point to a number of things that could have been open doors in this case. I wasn't there, but these things kind of stood out to me in looking at the record. So the demons claimed, or these voices claiming to be demons claimed, that there was a curse by a jealous neighbor. And so it's not clear to me how much was done by the priests to break the curse and the permission for that curse. There is evidence. in the record that Annalisa's mother had a pre-marital affair that led to the birth of Annalisa's

older sibling who then died in early childhood. And so that could, from a religious kind of framework, be a generational sin to break off. There's evidence that Annalisa had a boyfriend, Peter, with whom she tried to have a sexual relationship. She struggled with it, but she tried. And so that could be an open door of a sexual relationship outside of the context of marriage. It's not clear that there was any breaking of soul ties from either the mother's affair or from Annalisa's. It's not clear that the priest led her to forgive her father for emotional distance or forgive her mother for being controlling or forgive her doctors who bothered her a lot in this for not believing her. And it's not clear that they led her in any repenting of occult activities, which were actually quite common in German folk patholicism. And what really stood out to me in looking at the evidence is that one of the two priests,

this was Father Ernst Alt, admitted to being very interested in parapsychology and study of the occult, he claimed to be great at dowsing or using what might be argued as occult means to find hidden. water sources. He was interested in extrasensory perception. And so when he first interacted with Annalisa, he claimed to have this sense of a stench of burning, unlearned knowledge about the family. He thought Annalisa was possessed because he sensed a kind of radiation coming from her. He heard a thumping in his own room. He felt pressed down in bed. These are the pseudo-hulucinations in the language of the psychiatrists who evaluated him in the courtroom that caused them to diagnose him as having psychosis of a schizophrenic type. But from a theological perspective, one might argue that he had opened doors in his own life.

And so how can a priest who has wide open doors effectively engage in exorcism? And so it may be the case that efforts to try and explain how this wasn't a failure, but actually a success could be counterproductive and make it harder for people who need exorcism to get it and obscure some of the common open doors that if closed can make exorcisms more effective in the future. And I think part of what kind of argues in favor of that set of concerns is the set of high-profile influential movies that has been made of this case. So it's not only the Exorcism of Emily Rose. There was another German-language film Requiem, which came out the

following year in 2006. Emily Rose was produced in 2005. But then even more recently, there was a film, Annalisa, The Exorcist tapes, released in 2011, which is a mockumentary. And it's really just ridiculing the very idea of Exorcism. It's mocking the priests for refusing medical care. But if there is a recognition, rather, that maybe the priests were missing something here. Maybe it shouldn't have taken 67 multi-hour sessions over 10 months. Maybe that wasn't actually God's will for her to die and for this to take so long. But maybe the priests were missing something.

Their approach was wrong. There were open doors in her life, the lives of her family. even the priest's lives that if addressed could have led to a much smoother, quicker in which she was freed and grew up to be a school teacher and a strong Christian who could bring freedom into other people's lives. This for me is one of the most difficult aspects of this case, 67 exorcisms over the course of almost a year. While Father Martins has shared that many of his cases do take lengthy periods of time

to achieve liberation. For someone in Annalisa's position, it was still hard for me to wrap my head around the sheer number of exorcisms, multiple hours long while she was just wasting away. To try to reconcile this, we have to remember we simply don't have all the information. From a spiritual perspective, we have no idea what was going on between the priests and God and Elise and God, and can only judge from the limited evidence we do have. It's also possible that given the lack of success, she may have just had a medical issue, In which case, exorcism probably wouldn't have been of much use. I think it is the case that we need to have a humility, that we don't have all of the information.

And yes, of course, God is sovereign. But this is where I want to, for just a moment, put on my hat as someone who has personally had ministry for deliverance in my life, in my husband's life. I've been ministering deliverance for two decades. I've seen people healed. I've seen people die. I've seen people set free from demonization. I've seen them not set free. I think it can be very comforting to say at the end of the day, I don't know there was information. I'll never know. God is sovereign. But I actually want to resist that. explanation, at least for a moment here, to say sometimes the answer to why someone dies, whether it is from a physical condition or in this case from starving to death through a religious kind of exorcism

that didn't kind of lead to her, at least being freed obviously, I don't know that the answer is that this was God's sovereign will. I think it's important to entertain the possibility that the priests missed it. Their approach wasn't the best one. They missed open doors. They could have done something more effective, especially since there is material in the record.

Okay, you've made it to the end. Now let's hear Father Martin's take on what he thinks really happened. Hey, friends, Father Carlos Martins here. I wanted to give you my two cents on the case of Annelese Michelle, which is a tragic case of a young woman dying in a tragic manner. Still, the circumstances of her life and death make her case compelling and interesting. For that reason, there have been at least three feature films about her possession that have been produced.

Do I believe that Annalise Michelle was diabolically possessed? Absolutely. Yes. I believe it based on the testimony offered by the exorcist priests, by her family members, and her closest friends. Nevertheless, I will say from the outset, the family and the priest should have stopped the exorcisms and subjected Annalise to force feeding to avert starvation. The fact that Annalise weighed only 66 pounds at her death is alarming. refusing to have her force-fed was a failure on the part of her family and the ministering priest. The doctors who treated Annalise believed her symptoms to be caused by an illness. Medical doctors and psychologists investigate medically testable conditions. But it must be stated that these tests they administer cannot reveal whether someone is possessed.

This is not a criticism, but merely. a fact. It is outside the competence of physicians and psychologists to diagnose possession. What test could there be for that? All they can do as physicians and psychologists is diagnose a medical illness and then judge whether the symptoms that some believe are diabolical possession can be produced by that illness. The doctors who treated Analy's administered a battery of tests, including seven electroencephalograms, or EEGs. An EEG measures electrical activity in the brain, and it's one of the main tests used to diagnose epilepsy, brain tumors, stroke, and brain inflammation. Anneliese's first five EEGs revealed nothing abnormal. The six did. It showed irregular patterns

in the brain's left temporal area, and this is significant because some person, with temporal lobe epilepsy experience religiously themed hallucinations and the sensation of smelling unpleasant odors. Many doctors concluded that Annalise Michelle's possession symptoms were only that, symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. They were 100% wrong. Even if Annalise suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, That diagnosis alone fails to account for the objective phenomena experienced by the people around her.

For example, multiple persons, including the members of her family, Father Alt, who was one of the exorcists, and even the family housekeeper, would hear disembodied footsteps walking up and down the stairs of the house when Annalise was inside, doors slamming by themselves, and disembodied knocks, knocking on the doors. people could smell terrible odors. Sometimes the odor would be like a feces smell. At other times, just a different grotesque smell. And it would envelop the entire dwelling. It would fill the whole house.

But it would occur even when she wasn't in the house. For example, she and her father at one time rode with a busload of pilgrims to visit a shrine in San Damiano. And she exuded such a foul odor. and the odor came from her that everyone on the bus smelled, right, enveloped the entire vehicle. And so in some, Annelese repeatedly, repeatedly manifested at least two of the three classic signs of diabolical possession, right? So she demonstrated over and over again occult knowledge.

Thea Hine, one of her closest friends, often prayed for Annalise. And Annalise could tell her the exact time and place that she would be mentioned in Thea's prayers. Two other friends, Maria and Anna reported the same. When they were talking to her on one occasion, she suddenly told them to stop praying, even though neither one of them was praying out loud. One of the exorcists, Father Alt, visited Annalise and prayed a rosary with her during his visit.

And at one point during the rosary, he prayed the exorcism prayers of the ritual but silently to himself. Annalise shot up as if to defend herself and ripped up her rosary. She once predicted the visit of a priest when no one knew he would do so. Annalise demonstrated a knowledge of languages in which she had no training. One of the exorcists, Father Wrenz, read the Latin prayers of exorcism from his ritual. On one occasion, he prayed them freely without using his book. He prayed them from memory.

Annalise immediately pointed out an error he made in his Latin and said that his Latin was poor. She also responded immediately when questions were posed to her in Dutch and Chinese, responding in both of those languages. Now, there was another sign, and that is one reported by her boyfriend Peter, that which is sometimes called possessed gravity. Peter one time could not pick her up from a church pew even though he exerted all his strength in doing so. It was as if all of a sudden Annelies weighed over a thousand pounds. So temporal lobe epilepsy, even if Annalise had that, which it appears she did, that was a medically diagnosed condition.

But it cannot explain these external manifestations. and the only way that Annalise, in my opinion, could not be possessed is if all of these people in her life lied about these things they said they saw. But that would mean that both her parents, all of her siblings, her boyfriend Peter, her best friends, and the exorcist priests were all lying or were terribly mistaken about what they observed. And that friends just is not rational. Every one of these persons to this day, or at least to his or her dying day, if the person in question is already deceased, kept the same story until the end. And Annelies, until the day she died, was clear thinking and made clear judgments.

Four weeks before her death, for example, she even completed and turned in her thesis. So this was not a person who was disconnected from reality. One of the other criticisms sometimes made by people against Annelies being possessed is the fact that five out of the six demons had human names. This establishes nothing. Demons can identify themselves by any name they want at any given time. There is no rule that they have to use a particular name. Secondly, it's widely experienced by Exorcists, myself included. that damned human souls can accompany a demon in possession.

In other words, her possession was both by demons and damned human souls who happened to be attached to those demons. So none of that presents a criticism, theological or otherwise, against the fact that she was possessed. Annalise's case is a tragic case, and it is interesting. It's interesting from many perspectives. I will say that I am highly critical of the manner in which the priests approached the demons in letting them talk about esoteric things, things that were outside the scope of her possession and outside the effort to deliver her. I never, ever allow a demon to flap his gums to talk about this or that or that other thing.

You are there in a case to perform a task. You ought never to allow the demon to have a microphone to make declarations about anything else other than how and when he is going to be delivered from his victim. To do that, it actually strengthens the demonic hold because you're giving him a relationship. You know, if you're letting him speak, then you're giving him the right to be there. None of us want that. And the fact that these priests did it, I don't think they did it intentionally. I think it was it was just a poor training that they had and just a lack of a wherewithal.

But I think the case went on much longer than what it needed to, given the fact that they just allow the demons to have a microphone. So those are my thoughts on the tragic case of Andalese-Michelle.