ST. LOUIS EXORCISM

Opening

In January 1949, in Cottage City, Maryland, a small working-class town just outside Washington, D.C., a thirteen-year-old boy and his family began to hear dripping water and scratching inside the walls that no plumber or exterminator could explain. The boy had recently been taught to use a Ouija board by an aunt with an interest in spiritualism, who had just died. Soon the family were reporting moving furniture, flying objects and a shaking picture of Christ.

Over the next three months the boy, known in Church records only as "Roland Doe", was taken to doctors, a Lutheran pastor and finally Jesuit priests in St. Louis, who performed the Catholic rite of exorcism on him dozens of times. A priest kept a diary of it. A Georgetown student named William Peter Blatty read about the case that summer and, twenty years later, turned it into The Exorcist. In 2021 the boy was identified as Ronald Hunkeler, who had grown up to be a NASA engineer.

Timeline

January 1949The aunt who introduced the boy to the Ouija board, named as Harriet in some accounts and Tillie in others, dies in St. Louis. Around 15 January the family begin hearing dripping and scratching sounds with no leak or rodents to account for them. A picture of Christ is said to shake on the wall, and the boy's grandmother hears the noises too.

The following weeksThe family report furniture moving and toppling, fruit and objects flying across rooms, and a Bible landing at the boy's feet. At Bladensburg Junior High, his desk reportedly shakes and slides across the classroom floor in front of other pupils, and he is taken out of school in the middle of eighth grade.

February 1949The family's Lutheran pastor, the Reverend Luther Miles Schulze, who is interested in parapsychology, has the boy stay a night at his house and later reports that the armchair the boy sat in tipped over and that a pallet he slept on moved across the floor. Schulze writes about the case to J. B. Rhine at Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory, then advises the family to see a Catholic priest. Rhine later wonders whether Schulze exaggerated what he saw.

February to March 1949The boy is examined at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington for about three and a half days. Tests find no ailment. According to the traditional account, a local priest, Father E. Albert Hughes, attempts an exorcism there, and the boy works a hand free, pulls a spring from the bed and slashes the priest's arm. Whether that attempt ever happened is disputed.

Early March 1949The family take the boy to relatives in Bel-Nor, a northern suburb of St. Louis. A cousin studying at Saint Louis University tells Father Raymond J. Bishop, a Jesuit in the university's education department.

9 March 1949Bishop visits the family. Two days later he returns with Father William S. Bowdern, the 52-year-old pastor of St. Francis Xavier College Church and a Second World War veteran. That night, Bishop records long scratches in the shape of crosses on the boy's body and objects moving in the room.

From 16 March 1949With the archbishop's permission, Bowdern begins the Roman Ritual of exorcism, assisted by Bishop, the young Jesuit Walter Halloran and Father William Van Roo. Over the next month the rite is performed an estimated twenty to thirty times, at the Bel-Nor house, at the College Church rectory and finally at the Alexian Brothers Hospital in south St. Louis. Bishop's diary records spitting, vomiting, urination, cursing in a deep voice, words in Latin, violent struggling and words such as "HELL" appearing as scratches on the boy's skin. On 18 March he writes of "physical strength beyond natural power".

During the ritesThe boy breaks Halloran's nose with a punch. On a visit to the White House Retreat, a Jesuit retreat house on a bluff above the Mississippi, he tries to break away towards the edge, and Halloran tackles him.

18 April 1949, Easter MondayThe final rite at the Alexian Brothers Hospital. Shortly before midnight, according to the diary, a voice speaking through the boy announces itself as Saint Michael and orders Satan to leave. The boy wakes and says "He's gone", and describes a dream in which Michael fought the demons. Some witnesses report a sound like a gunshot through that part of the hospital. The priests declare the exorcism a success.

August 1949Schulze speaks publicly about the case, and newspapers including the Washington Post report it anonymously, wrongly placing the boy in nearby Mount Rainier, Maryland. Blatty, then a student at Georgetown, reads the story.

1950 to 1954The boy, whose family have become Catholics, attends Gonzaga College High School in Washington.

1971 and 1973Blatty, who has since read Bishop's diary and corresponded with Bowdern, publishes The Exorcist, changing the boy to a girl. The 1973 film receives ten Academy Award nominations.

1983Bowdern dies, still a Jesuit, having never spoken publicly about the case.

1993Journalist Thomas B. Allen publishes Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism, built on Bishop's diary and interviews with Halloran. He concludes the boy was a deeply disturbed child and that nothing in the record requires the supernatural.

1999Mark Opsasnick publishes "The Haunted Boy of Cottage City" in Strange Magazine, after taping interviews with 102 people, including schoolmates and neighbours. He moves the story from Mount Rainier to the family's real house in Cottage City, questions whether Georgetown was really the family's first stop for treatment, finds no support for the Hughes bedspring attack, and argues that the boy was a troubled, attention-seeking child who mimicked the Latin he heard from the priests.

January 2001Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Inquirer ("Exorcism! Driving Out the Nonsense"), finds nothing reliably reported that a teenager could not have done.

2005Walter Halloran dies, the last of the priests who took part. In an interview not long before, asked to confirm the boy had been possessed, he declined.

2013Allen says publicly that definitive proof the boy was possessed is "unattainable", and that Halloran, one of the last eyewitnesses, had privately expressed scepticism about the paranormal side of the case.

10 May 2020Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, born 1 June 1935, dies in Maryland aged 84.

December 2021An article by JD Sword in Skeptical Inquirer identifies Hunkeler as the boy. He had become a NASA engineer whose work contributed to the Apollo programme, and he patented a technology that helped space shuttle panels withstand extreme heat.

Key figures

Ronald Hunkeler was the boy. He was the only child of a Lutheran family, with a mother and grandmother whom a childhood friend described as intensely religious. As an adult he married, worked for decades as an engineer and, according to a companion, lived in fear that his NASA colleagues would find out he was the boy behind The Exorcist. He is reported never to have spoken about it publicly.

Raymond Bishop kept the diary, the single most important document in the case. He later taught for more than twenty years at Creighton University. William Bowdern led the rite. Walter Halloran assisted and, decades later, became the voice of doubt from inside the room. He went on to serve as an army chaplain in Vietnam, winning two Bronze Stars.

Luther Miles Schulze was the Lutheran pastor who first took the case seriously and first made it public. Thomas Allen, Mark Opsasnick, Joe Nickell and JD Sword are the investigators who took it apart. William Peter Blatty gave it to the world as fiction.

Physical and documentary trail

The record is unusually rich for a possession case. Bishop's day-by-day diary survives and has been published and widely quoted; according to one account, a copy was found in a desk drawer when part of the Alexian Brothers Hospital was demolished in 1978. There is the formal report the Jesuits sent to the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Schulze's correspondence with Rhine, the newspaper coverage of 1949, Allen's interviews with Halloran, Opsasnick's 102 taped interviews, and the 2021 identification with its documentary record of Hunkeler's life.

What is missing: the boy's medical and psychiatric records from Georgetown in 1949, any record that the Hughes exorcism took place, and any physical evidence for the most dramatic claims (the flying objects, the moving bed, the Latin) beyond the testimony of people who were there and already believed. Neither the archdiocese nor the Jesuits ever spoke publicly about the case, to protect the boy.

No, I can't go on record. I never made an absolute statement about the things because I didn't feel I was qualified.

Things you might not know

• The newspapers got the town wrong. For fifty years the story was placed in Mount Rainier, Maryland. The family lived in Cottage City, at 3807 40th Avenue.
• The priest's nose was broken. Walter Halloran said the boy punched him and broke it.
• He nearly went over a cliff. At a Jesuit retreat house above the Mississippi, the boy tried to run for the bluff, and Halloran brought him down.
• The exorcism ended on Easter Monday. The final rite was on 18 April 1949, and the diary says the boy's own words at the end were "He's gone".
• The hospital has since closed. Alexian Brothers became South City Hospital, which closed in 2023.
• The boy helped send men to the Moon. Hunkeler's engineering work contributed to Apollo, and his heat-resistant technology was used on the space shuttle.
• The film changed nearly everything. Blatty made the boy a twelve-year-old girl in Georgetown and invented the famous scenes. The 2000 TV film Possessed follows Allen's book far more closely.

Competing explanations

A disturbed child and a frightened family. Allen's conclusion and the one most writers share. A boy grieving an aunt who had filled his head with spirits, in an intensely religious household, under escalating attention from doctors, a pastor and priests who all expected something extraordinary. Halloran's lifelong refusal to say it was real points the same way.

Mischief that got out of hand. Opsasnick's reading, from people who knew the boy. A childhood friend described him as an only child with tantrums and a cruel streak, shunned at school, who learned that strange behaviour got him attention and kept him out of class. A neighbour thought the moving bed was easy to explain on wire springs and wheels, and the Latin was what the boy heard the priests say every night.

Genuine possession. The conclusion of the priests at the time and of many Catholics since. It rests on Bishop's diary, written by a sincere witness night after night, and on the marks on the skin and the boy's strength. None of it was ever examined by anyone outside the circle of believers, and the diary itself records what the priests thought they were seeing.

Later life of the case

The Exorcist made the case the most famous exorcism in the world, while the facts stayed hidden for decades behind a pseudonym and the wrong town. Hunkeler's identification in 2021 closed the last big gap, and showed a man who had spent his life trying to leave fourteen behind. For a case where the rite ended in death, see Anneliese Michel.

Finding

A boy in Maryland went through a real crisis in 1949, and Jesuit priests performed a real exorcism on him, which one of them recorded in detail. The most dramatic claims rest only on the testimony of people inside the rite, and the investigators who went furthest, including Allen with the diary and Opsasnick with the neighbours, found a troubled child, not a demon. Even the priest who was injured in the room would not say it was real.

What still will not resolve: what the doctors at Georgetown found in 1949, since the boy's medical records have never been released and his own account died with him.