The Exorcist

On August 20, 1949, the Washington Post put a story on its front page under the headline "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip." It said a 14-year-old from the Maryland suburbs had been freed of demonic possession after a Jesuit read the rite of exorcism over him 20 to 30 times, and that the boy had screamed, cursed and spoken Latin he had never been taught.

A Georgetown undergraduate named William Peter Blatty read it. In 1971 he published The Exorcist, and in 1973 the film opened on 30 screens and had theaters keeping ambulances on call.

As spooky season gets underway, Disturbing History is running a series on the true history behind some of the most famous and beloved horror movies of all time, and sometimes the true story is more disturbing than anything Hollywood cooked up. The series opens with The Exorcist, and this episode takes Regan MacNeil out of the picture and goes back to the boy. He was 13 years old and lived at 3807 40th Avenue in Cottage City, a mile or so from the town the Post named.

The rite ended on April 18, a month earlier than the paper reported. And the diary kept by Father Raymond Bishop, one of the Jesuits in the room, says he never once answered the priests in Latin. Brian follows the case in the order it happened, beginning with scratching under the floorboards on January 15, 1949, and an exterminator whose chemicals changed nothing. The family had a spiritualist aunt in St. Louis who had shown the boy a Ouija board. Their Lutheran pastor, Luther Miles Schulze, took the boy home for a night, watched a chair tip over, and later told the story to a parapsychology society for laughs.

A physician found a healthy child and a psychiatrist said he did not believe any of it. Words came up on the boy's skin, and they said Louis and Saturday. A Maryland priest, Father E. Albert Hughes, is supposed to have had his arm slashed during a first exorcism at Georgetown University Hospital, a story that rests on a 1972 newspaper interview and one dinner conversation, while his parishioners remembered him pitching batting practice that same spring.

The center of the episode is the diary itself, night by night, from March 16 to April 18, 1949. Father William Bowdern read the Roman Ritual in a suburban bedroom with the light on while red welts, the word HELL and a devil figure came up on the boy's skin. It took three and four men to hold a 13-year-old to a mattress, and he broke Walter Halloran's nose with his eyes shut.