Illustration by David Brinley
Every elevator in Saint Louis University’s library is cranking its way up to the third floor, and the wide staircase is packed three across, with students jogging up three flights past lumbering alumni and wheezing senior faculty. Every chair on the second floor and the third-floor mezzanine is taken; people stand against the walls, umbrellas dripping cold rain.
They’ve come to hear about the exorcism.
It’s October 29, 2013. SLU is marking the 40th anniversary of the movie The Exorcist, inspired by a real-life exorcism that took place a stone’s throw (or a hurled crucifix) away from the library.
Thomas Allen, the author of Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism—a more restrained and accurate account of the case—has flown from Maryland to speak. He’s introduced by the Rev. Paul Stark, SLU’s vice president for mission and ministry, who reads from the original Roman Catholic rite of exorcism. Its prayers ask God’s help to drive out the “reprobate dragon,” “beast,” “fallen and apostate tyrant,” “roaring lion,” and “noonday devil” otherwise known as Satan.
To the secular mind, the rite conjures a medieval boxing ring, with angels wafting around God to cool his brow while demons climb up the ropes and God’s ultimate adversary, the devil, taunts Him from the opposite corner. It’s an old fight and, for many, an outdated worldview.
Why do people still flock to hear about it?
*****
In late January 1949, a St. Louis woman died. She was a spiritualist, and she’d taught her favorite nephew, a 14-year-old boy living in Cottage City, Md., to use a Ouija board.
Two weeks before her death, strange things began happening to and around the boy—call him Robbie—back in Maryland. It started with something scratching in the walls and beneath the floorboards. Objects flew; his bed shook; a heavy chair tilted; a rug slid across the room. His body was raked with red scratches, which seemed to appear spontaneously and sometimes spell out words (or draw a devil’s face). Robbie’s mother had been born in St. Louis, and Robbie had been extremely close to his aunt in St. Louis. So when the word “Louis” seemed to appear in red welts on his chest, the family took it as a sign.
The family went to stay with the boy’s aunt and uncle in Bel-Nor, and his cousin sought help for him from one of her SLU professors, a Jesuit priest, the Rev. Raymond Bishop. He wound up assisting the Rev. William Bowdern, rector of St. Francis Xavier College Church at SLU, who performed the exorcism. Another Jesuit, the Rev. William Van Roo, assisted, and Bowdern also asked Walt Halloran, a tall, rugged young man who was studying to be a Jesuit, to help hold the boy down.
Only Archbishop Joseph Ritter and the head of the Jesuits’ Missouri Province knew what the men were doing. Each went about his day as routinely as possible, then went to the house in Bel-Nor or, later, the rectory of St. Francis Xavier College Church. Robbie’s reactions grew more violent (at one point he broke Halloran’s nose). “He writhed under the sprinkling of Holy Water,” Bishop wrote. “He fought and screamed in a diabolical, high-pitched voice.”
Sometimes he sang. On March 20, Bishop wrote, “the high point of the evening were urinations which really burned [Robbie], breaking wind through rectum three different times, and cursing the exorcists.” They tried confining him at Alexian Brothers Hospital. They even tried, in a surprising burst of optimism, sending him home to Maryland. He was soon back.
On Easter Monday in 1949, in a secluded room in the psych ward at Alexian Brothers, whatever was happening to Robbie built to a frenzy. “After seven or eight minutes of violence [Robbie], in a tone of complete relief said, ‘He’s gone!’” Bishop wrote. “Immediately [Robbie] came back to normal and said he felt fine.”
Bishop left his diary of the exorcism in a dresser drawer in the hospital room, which was sealed. The church’s report on the exorcism was sealed in archdiocesan and Jesuit archives.
*****
The crumbling College Church rectory was eventually demolished, but SLU students somehow decided that a small room on the fourth floor of Verhaegen Hall, formerly a Jesuit residence, was the exorcism site, and they climbed the creaky stairs to stand outside its locked door. One janitor furthered the legend, grumbling that every year, they had to repaint the room, because paint wouldn’t stick to the walls.
William Peter Blatty first learned about the exorcism from an article in The Washington Post. Bowdern begged him not to write about it. Blatty went ahead with his novel and screenplay, but he made a few concessions—like changing the child’s age, gender, and circumstances—and added a few flourishes, like pea-soup vomit and Linda Blair’s head spinning 360 degrees. (Robbie mainly spat and urinated.)
The film version of The Exorcist premiered in 1973 and was deemed the scariest movie ever made. People vomited and fainted during the possession scenes. The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards.
Five years later, when Alexian Brothers Hospital was demolished, a workman found Bishop’s diary of the real exorcism. The Rev. Halloran wound up with a copy. When Allen interviewed him, he said, almost casually, “Oh, by the way, there was a diary kept. Do you want a copy of it?”
“Father Halloran absolutely worshipped Bowdern,” Allen remarks. “Bowdern was a chaplain, so Halloran becomes a chaplain; Bowdern went to war, so Halloran went to war.” (He became a paratrooper, flying into war zones in Vietnam at age 49 and earning two Bronze Stars.) “I think he felt he was doing something Father Bowdern would have endorsed. He couldn’t release the diary, because he was obeying a promise to Archbishop Ritter and because there was great fear the boy would be identified. Father Halloran didn’t take the vow of secrecy. And he knew I would never identify the boy.”
Other reporters have. They’ve outed the boy (now 79) by name; traced his childhood home; tracked down the wrong home, where devil-hunters gathered for naught; found his uncle’s house in Bel-Nor.
Every time, it’s made headlines.
*****
The month after the SLU event, I visit the campus again to meet with the Rev. John Padberg. He holds a doctorate in the history of ideas from Harvard University and heads SLU’s Institute of Jesuit Sources.
At the panel in October, he had defined exorcism as “the act of driving out or driving away an evil spirit by adjuration, solemnly commanding that devil or evil spirit to leave, with repeated use of a holy name.” He’d described the Christian devil as “the supreme adversary of God who somehow fell from grace and is there to tempt us.” He’d said the usual trajectory is from “diabolic obsession, a hostile act besetting a person from the outside: things flying across a room, beds shaking,” to diabolic possession, in which the devil has somehow entered the person.
Yet he’d offered no conclusions.
Even now, Padberg does everything he can to avoid the subject. “Shall we join the others for coffee?” he asks. He introduces two visiting Jesuits. Finally, with time running out, I ask what they think of possession.
They circle the topic like it’s prey that might still be breathing.
When the coffeepot’s drained, Padberg sighs and guides me back to his office. “There’s always been an interest in so-called diabolism,” he says, handing me a book titled Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the 15th Century. “It’s the inevitable question: Why is there evil? And we say it’s the devil. That’s difficult to sustain in a world that’s disenchanted. In the late 15th century, there were spirits everywhere, good and bad spirits. The disenchantment began with the Enlightenment; science could tell us everything. But the world, however you disenchant it, still has mysteries that nobody’s been able to deal with.” He arches one eyebrow. “Notice how I approach it: academically. If the church says there is such an entity, I will accept that. But what further that entity is and how he works and what his real relationships are with the world—on that, I have a lot of questions.”
If the 1949 case wasn’t true possession, how could so many smart, rational eyewitnesses have insisted it was? “That does give pause,” he says. “Father Van Roo taught me senior Latin at SLU High. And if ever there was a man of sobriety and intellectualism, it was William Van Roo. He later taught systematic theology at the [Pontifical] Gregorian University in Rome. He refused to talk about the exorcism. Bowdern—he was intelligent, no question. He didn’t believe this at all when he started. But I think he was terribly, terribly convinced by the whole thing.”
*****
When I reach Thomas Allen in Bethesda, Md., he sounds wary. Two children have just been killed in nearby Germantown, Md., allegedly because they were “possessed.” He’s afraid I want him to comment.
I assure him that I do not. I just want to know why people of all ages and beliefs are still drawn to this story.
“You know, all this business of zombies and vampires is sort of in the same corner of things,” he says, “but exorcism is real—a real thing that defies reason. Of all the places in the world, the devil decides to get inside a 14-year-old kid?” We don’t deal well with ordinary evil, he remarks. We’d rather relegate it to the monsters of the past, like Adolf Hitler, than to something that might touch our own lives.
But we might sense its presence anyway—and wonder how to confront it.
“Exorcism brings you to a very fine, precise point,” Allen says. “There’s one kid, he’s in a bed, and it’s an evil event, and here’s a priest who’s going to end it.”
I ask whether Halloran believed Robbie was possessed, because in some interviews, he seemed to, and in others, he was skeptical. “It comes down to his spiritual mind fighting his rational mind,” Allen says. “He did say to me absolutely that he saw the mattress move while he was kneeling at the foot of the bed looking through the bars. He also said he saw a holy water bottle fly across the room, hit a wall, and not break. And he said he actually saw scratches advancing up the boy’s arm. But when we would talk about the exorcism itself, his rational mind would kick in, and we could discuss it as two people wondering about a phenomenon. I think he never really made up his mind.”
Allen sends mixed messages himself, even in his book’s conclusion. “I’ve always felt it was something we don’t yet understand about the way the body handles problems that have invaded it,” he says now. “I talked to a lot of psychiatrists. One told me about a patient who was under hypnosis, and while she was describing being bound, welts appeared on her wrists. I felt there had to be a rational explanation for what was causing that kid to be suffering.”
*****
If I had been there, my hunch is that I would not have seen the things they reported,” says Michael Cuneo, author of American Exorcism. “It is just a hunch, although it’s born of a lot of experience, because I don’t know anybody who’s attended as many exorcisms as I have. I was in a lot of situations in my research where people were seeing levitating bodies and spinning heads, all the demonic grotesqueries, and I was the only person not seeing this stuff. It’s almost a collective hypnosis.”
After watching dozens of exorcisms—some performed unofficially by charismatic Catholic priests and some by evangelical Protestants—Cuneo has decided they really can be therapeutic. Clergy members name the person’s problem, tell him it’s not his fault at all, and then take the problem away. The process has an emotional intensity our healthcare system lacks, and it’s cathartic, releasing pent-up anxiety, lust, and aggression. “You have a license to act out in any way that you want,” Cuneo explains. “People will simulate masturbation; they will rip their hair, shred their clothing, physically attack other people. It’s one of those rare occasions in life where whatever you do, it’s not held against you, because it’s really your demons acting out.” I nod, thinking of the punch that broke Halloran’s nose.
On the other hand, Pope Francis warns of psychologizing Satan’s work. And even hard-bitten reporters have asked Cuneo, with voices lowered, “Is it real? Did you see anything?”
“We live in a secular age, but we cling to the possibility of mystery,” he says. “We don’t want to think that all this banality exhausts life. There’s a real hankering for supernatural drama.” Talk of diabolical possession raged in the ’70s and ’80s. “It’s not at a high ebb now,” says Cuneo, “but it’s by no means extinct. You saw that at the library. And I get at least three to five media requests a week to talk about it.”
*****
I call Volney Gay, a supervising and training analyst at St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute and a professor of religion, psychiatry, and anthropology at Vanderbilt University. I describe Robbie at age 14, in the throes of possession. “His expressions were lowly and smacked of the abuse of sex,” Bishop wrote. Robbie was also crude, rebellious, and aggressive—the very behaviors that adults try to suppress. Several times, the red welts spelled out “no school.” He’d sing at top volume, in a high-pitched voice, garbled versions of “Swanee” or “Ol’ Man River.” He’d shout, bark, scream, and curse with no inhibition.
“Every human being has the experience of feeling divided against himself,” Gay says calmly. “Certainly adolescents, who struggle with sexuality and anger impulses they want to disown, will talk about something inside them working against them. But children do not create ideas of possession. Adults do.”
Gay traces the basic notion of demonic possession to folk religion and insists it’s universal. He describes possession as “hypersexual, and it’s about the sense of fantastic powers the body can bring upon itself. It’s that 90 percent of our mind which is not accessible to us through consciousness that can rise up as if it were a separate being, a separate personality telling us to do bad things—sexual, aggressive, violent, and scatological things. Everything the child is told not to do, the demon does.”
How did so many rational, intelligent people see the results of this kind of conflict as possession? (The church report was signed by 48 witnesses, a priest told Allen.)
“It seems to me very reasonable that people who are themselves believers are going to see something that fits their worldview,” says Gay. “They are honest, they are sincere, and they are adamant. Vision is an interactive process. We have—literally—a blind spot, and the brain is designed to complete the picture for us.”
He says an exorcism story “confirms our childhood sense that this is the way the world really is.” Our minds default to fantasy and folk belief, he explains; moving toward a more rational worldview is an uphill climb. “I have a lot of patients who talk about ghosts, and if they walk a block away from my office, they will walk by the morgue at Vanderbilt. It holds thousands of bodies every year, and there are no ghosts in the morgue. A graveyard at midnight, that’s where you see ghosts. Darkness is dangerous.”
And its opposite is light—personified in the white-robed archangel Michael, whom Robbie thought he saw in the moment that his possession ended. “Duality seems endemic to the way our brain is constructed,” Gay says. “The god of good and the god of evil, vying for the human—that’s a trope that shows up again and again. It’s Star Wars—it’s Darth, the dark father, versus the light father, who wears white just in case we missed it. Once you have spirits, you always have that duality: If there are good spirits, there will be bad spirits.”
Ah, but Gay’s thinking is exactly what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was worried about when he told a New York Times Magazine reporter, “In the Gospels, the devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore… It’s because he’s smart… What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him.”
When Stark opened SLU’s discussion, he quoted from Pope Francis’ homily two weeks earlier: “The presence of the devil is on the first page of the Bible, and the Bible ends as well with the presence of the devil, with the victory of God over the devil… On this point, there are no nuances. There is a battle, and a battle where salvation is at play, eternal salvation.”
Catholics say true cases of possession are rare, and the church is stringently cautious about authorizing the use of exorcism. “I frankly believe caution is very appropriate,” Stark says. “The devil doesn’t play around.”
Yet after the exorcism, Ritter appointed a Jesuit philosophy professor to investigate the case and interview the participants under oath. Another Jesuit who was familiar with this report told Allen its conclusion: Robbie was not the victim of diabolical possession. Perhaps it was a psychosomatic disorder, the report suggested, or some kind of kinetic activity.
Others have suggested a varied list of causes of “possession”: temporary psychotic episodes, pranks that spiraled out of control, Tourette syndrome, and sexual abuse (which Allen considered but could not substantiate).
He also quoted the Rev. Herbert Thurston, a scholar who’d researched the occult. “There may be something diabolical” in these forces we don’t understand, Thurston wrote, but “it’s also possible that there may be natural forces involved which are so far as little known to us as the latent forces of electricity were known to the Greeks. It is possibly the complication of these two elements which forms the heart of the mystery.”
