October 27, 2021 • 40 mins
The 1973 horror film “The Exorcist” was inspired by a 1949 alleged possession case in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Roland Doe’s story is more tame than the fiction version, and looking at it is really an examination of psychology and lore.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson, and we're
going to get into our usual uh story du jour,
but before we do, we have a little bit of housekeeping.
(00:23):
We do are I don't even know if I would
call it a sibling podcast or in any case are
related podcasts. It started out as a sibling and then
it became its own thing. It's now it's more like
a cousin in a gateway. Um. This day in History
Class is back with new episodes. If you had ever
listened to it and then stopped because you were only
(00:43):
getting repeats, fear not. There's a new host, Gabriel Lousier,
and he is a researcher and he is taking up
the reins of that. So there is new stuff coming
out right now. Yeah. Gabe used to work as the
lead researcher and a frequent guest on Part Time Genie.
He's also been on Ridiculous History a lot, and he's
picked up this podcast with brand new stuff. So yes,
(01:06):
So if you are are aching for that that little
hit of history, every day that you maybe had before
and haven't had in a bit, go right back to it.
Happy Holidays, almost happy October with new this day in
history class, which I think might have actually started back
with new episodes in September, but still it's October now. Yes,
(01:27):
welcome on him. It'll be one. If you celebrate Thanksgiving,
that's the thing you can be thankful for, uh, which
is kind of a fun thing versus what we're talking
about today. We're right in the thick of Halloween season.
This is this is it. So I thought this might
finally be the time to pull out an episode that
I have been tap dancing around for about five years.
(01:50):
So if you have never seen the nineteen seventy three
horror film The Exorcist one, I'm so sorry. It's so
good too. Though you probably know what it is and
you've almost certainly seen images from it. It's so popular
that it ends up being spoofed on things all the time.
It is, of course a horror classic, uh. And it
won Academy Awards for Screenplay and for Sound. For sound
(02:12):
in particular who good sound design. And it was inspired
by reports of a possession and exorcism that started in
the Washington, d C. Area in nine and I say
started because it travels a little bit, as you'll hear,
and this story really, as we kind of unravel, it
becomes as much an examination of psychology and lore as
(02:34):
it is of relaying of historical events, and even the
veracity of accounts of those events is always in question. Uh.
This is kind of one of those things where you
people either believe it or don't, and there's much argument
about it, but it does make for great Halloween discussions.
So I wanted to point out there are a couple
of things that make this story really difficult to pin
(02:54):
down in terms of details. One, it was kept largely
secret by the Jesuit race who were involved, in order
to protect the identities of the family members who were
part of it. And to this was never a legal case,
so there are no government records of it filed in
any municipality that people can consult, kind of squirreling around
for information wherever they can. And as a consequence of
(03:17):
those two things, details have been added, omitted, or just
playing relayed incorrectly over the years. And there's also the
fact that the fictional version of it, both the book
The Exorcist and the movie of the same name have
become so ingrained in horror pop culture that when people
think about possession, the imagery from that fiction is often
what's foremost in their minds. But the real story is
(03:39):
a little bit more tame. So if you saw this
and are hoping for details like vomiting pea soup or
heads turning three sixty degrees, I'll just tell you now,
you're going to be disappointed. It's not quite any of that.
We're also not really going to relay all of the
nitty gritty here in terms of like what played out
during the exorcism and you know, various specific injuries and
(04:02):
things that were said. Uh, the focus on this one
is really kind of how it all began, how it's
been conveyed to the public, and how people have perceived
that case in the years since it happened. So, the
person in this story who was said to have been
possessed was a child at the time, was fourteen years old,
although that's also reported inconsistently. He was probably thirteen at
(04:23):
the time, and accounts that were published during these events,
he was referred to by a pseudonym that was Roland Doe,
and you may also see him referred to by the
name Robbie Mannheim, which was a name that was used
in the book on this subject written by Thomas B. Allen.
Alan noted in the text that this was a pseudonym,
(04:45):
but there seems to have been some confusion over the years,
because there are some sites that claimed that Mannheim was
the real name and not a pseudonym that Alan was using. Regardless,
at this point, the person at the center of this
story would be in his mid to late eighties today,
so we're just going to stick with calling him roland Do.
(05:06):
And one thing to note about the priest's diary in
this story, which is considered to be the primary source document,
is that in many instances that diary is a recording
of certain events as relayed in accounts given by the family,
so it's not always necessarily a diary of direct observations,
but also notes on the memories of others. This diary
(05:28):
also does not note who relayed any of that information,
whether it was amalgamated from talking with multiple family members
at a time, etcetera. So even though this one document
is often held up as the evidence of everything that
happened in this case, that is not an infallible document,
and because it has its own more about where the
alleged few copies of it have been kept over the years,
(05:51):
and who has and hasn't seen it. Even the version
that is readily available to the public, which was published
as an addendum chapter in that book by Thomas Allen
written in he subsequently republished it with the diary attached.
That's not something we can really verify. We just do
not have access to touch that document and ensure that
(06:13):
it is a real thing. So we're gonna reference that account,
but keep in mind that we are not claiming it
is fact, and we can't speak to the veracity of it.
One other element of the story that often shifts from
one account to another is the location where Roland Doe
and his family lived. Sometimes it's listed as being in
the DC suburb of Mount Rainier, Maryland, and other times
(06:34):
it's Cottage City, Maryland. It's easy to see why there
might be some discrepancy here. Those two places are really
close together, a five minute car ride or, according to
Google Maps, the twenty four minute walk. In the late
nineteen nineties, writer Mark ups Asnick wrote an article that
appeared in Strange magazine and He detailed his efforts to
track down the truth regarding a vacant lot in Mount
(06:57):
Rainier that was often said to be the site of
Roland family home. That he did some cross referencing and
old phone directories and information on a street renumbering that
happened in two and he was slowly able to piece
things together. And when he figured out who had been
living in the house that had been on the vacant
lot in the many people claimed was the exorcism house,
(07:21):
it turned out that the person who had lived there
at the time was a widower with no children, definitely
not a family with a teenage boy, and the lot
being vacant was because that house had been burned down
in nineteen sixty two as part of a firefighter training exercise,
long after its resident had died, and the dwelling had
fallen into disrepair. So pretty normal in boring circumstances, nothing supernatural.
(07:46):
After that, up Sasnic discovered again just through looking through
public records and kind of connecting dots, that Cottage City
was the correct location. Up Sasnick mentions two articles from
the nineteen eighties that both placed the family home in
ount Rainier and specifically listing the address of the empty lot,
but Mount Rainier was mentioned as early as August nineteen
(08:07):
forty nine in newspaper articles that talked about the exorcism.
An article in the New York Daily News dated August one,
ninety nine reads quote the boy lives with his parents,
non Catholics, at Mount Rainier, Maryland, near Washington. Mark ups
Asnik said that he identified the family, but as other
writers have done, he did not divulge that information publicly,
(08:30):
and he also stated in that writing that he believed
that the priests involved had probably changed the location to
add another layer of anonymity for the family, but that
false information plus that empty lot had led to people
to build a lore that was shared both in the
oral relay of the story and at times even in
the press. So Roland was the son of a federal
(08:50):
government worker and the family on his mother's side was
fairly close knit. Roland was an only child. His grandmother
lived with them and his aunt Tilly. Again, that's a
pseudonym visited pretty frequently from St. Louis. Tilly is often
referred to as Harriet. Tilly is the name that was
used in the priest's diary of the events. We're going
(09:11):
to relay those events as they've been laid out by
people who say they had access to the diary. So
according to all of this, it's Tilly who is credited
with getting Roland interested in the Wigia board game. She
is generally described as being interested in spiritualism and as
having shared those ideas in lively discussions with her nephew.
(09:33):
It is unclear reading some of these descriptions today, if
this is a case of family members kind of playing
by indulging in discussions of ghosts and spirits for fun,
as a curiosity or just an exploration of possibility, or
if this aunt truly believed that spirits could and would
communicate or pass from one realm to another. Sometimes she's
(09:53):
characterized as like, yes, she believes she was teaching him this.
In other times it's like, well, they were kind of playing.
On January, Aunt Tilly died of complications of multiple sclerosis,
and in the days leading up to her death, the
family in Maryland reported hearing odd scratching noises in the house.
Roland's father attributed this to a rat or a mouse
(10:16):
and one of the walls. There was also a strange
water drip. They could hear in the grandmother's room, both
of which the family said stopped the day that Tilly died,
Roland kept playing with the Wigia board. His mother believed
he was trying to reach Chilly in the afterlife. As
this possession story became public, the interpretation of the situation
(10:37):
quickly became for many people that Roland had tried to
reach out to his aunt with the wigia board but
instead had contacted a demon. If this was what Roland's
mother believed, though, that's a little inconsistent with her behavior.
She often asks whatever she thinks might be manifesting, if
this is Tilly, Yeah, it's a strange thing where it
(10:59):
kind of goes back and forth in a lot of
the accounts that she thinks there might be some sort
of devil situation, and also keeps going Tilly, is that
you um, which maybe is indicative of how she perceived
her sister, but I don't think so. So Rowland told
his family that he had started hearing this sound of footsteps,
specifically squeaky shoes in his room at night, and so
(11:23):
one night, Roland's mother and grandmother went to lie down
with him in his room, and while they both said
that they did not hear it on the night in question.
They later both said that they did actually hear the
squeaky shoe noise. Both women later conveyed that they had
pretended not to hear it to avoid scaring Roland or
each other when they asked if it was Tilly and
(11:43):
to knock first three times and then four times a
separate time to confirm that it was her. Each time
they heard the requested number of knocks and felt what
was described as a sense of pressure upon them. Then
when they asked for those four knocks and heard them,
there were are also scratching sounds on the bed. That night,
(12:04):
the bed also shook, and the covers were described as
standing up, stiff and straight around the edges of the bed,
as though defying gravity, and then once they were touched,
they fell back into a normal position. Roland also experienced
a strange event at school not long after this, when
his desk started shaking. His teacher told him to stop it,
(12:25):
but he insisted he wasn't doing it. More strange, but
fairly small events were reported by the does, things like
hangers flying out of the closets or fruit floating across
the room, and even a Bible, moving out of a
bookshelf allegedly on its own, and falling at his feet.
Strange things also happened when the family went to other
(12:45):
people's homes, including one instance where the chair Roland sitting
on starting to spin. Roland always maintained that it was
not him doing these things, although initially his parents thought
he might have learned some kind of sleight of hand
from a magic book and to sided to trick them all.
A doctor and a psychologist who were consulted determined that
Roland was a normal kid. They could not find anything unusual.
(13:09):
Coming up. We're gonna talk about how things unfolded once
Roland's family consulted their pastor about what was happening, But
first we are going to take a sponsor break. On February,
Reverend Luther Miles Shultz of the St. Stephen's Evangelical Lutheran
(13:32):
Church in Washington, d C. Became involved in Roland's case.
Roland's mother had turned to their minister for help, and
the accounts that the Doe family gave him of increasing
severity of the strange phenomena in their house led the
pastor to determine that the does should get a psychiatrist
more deeply involved in Rowland's case. While Schultz prayed with
(13:54):
the family over the matter, he didn't seem to think
this was a possession, but more likely a young man
in need treatment. He did not immediately share with the
family that he thought this may be a scenario not
of demonic possession, but one perhaps involving psychokinesis rooted in
some sort of psychological issue. The does told the minister
that a psychiatrist had already seen their son, and that
(14:16):
that doctor had said, as we said, he was a
normal kid. On the night of February seventeenth nine, Reverend
Schultz had Roland stay with him overnight so he could
observe the boy. Schultz's wife stayed in another room of
the house that night. Doe stayed at the Reverence parsonage
for twelve hours, and the minister said he witnessed various
(14:37):
phenomena that were the same as what the Doe family
had reported. The bed that Roland was trying to sleep
on shook. There were scratching noises. When Roland moved to
a chair, it started moving on its own, and it
tipped over when he was moved to the floor. The
palette of blankets that he was trying to sleep on
moved around the room. The following week, claw marks started
(14:58):
appearing on Roland's body. Reverend Schultz was convinced that this
was not just a psychological event, and also that he
was not equipped to handle the situation, and so he
suggested to Roland's mother that they consult a Catholic priest,
and that was when they reached out to Father Albert
Hughes of Saint James Catholic Church. Father Hughes was a
young priest in his late twenties. Hughes was pretty surprised
(15:21):
to have a Lutheran family asking him for help, and
at first he offered some holy water and blessed candles
to the Does so that they could use them at home.
They did, and Mrs Doe reported back to the priest
that the bottle of holy water had flown across the
room and when she tried to light the blessed candles,
things around them started to move violently. Father Hughes decided
(15:45):
to visit the Dough home himself to see what was
really happening, and this is the first instance when Roland
is said to have spoken in Latin. He said, quote,
old priest of Christ, you know I am the devil?
Why do you keep bothering me? So Huse at this point,
believing he might be dealing with a demonic possession, took
the case to the most Reverend Patrick A. Oh Boyle,
(16:06):
Archbishop of Washington. Oh Boyle was sort of unique for
a man in his position because he had not actually
ever served as a pastor in a church. He had
risen through the ranks of the church kind of from
a more administrative side, So he did not certainly have
a lot of specialized knowledge in possession, and we should
point out that most priests did not. Uh. He told
Hughes to perform the exorcism himself, which was surprising given
(16:30):
how young Father Hughes was and how inexperienced he would
have been in such matters. And he also told Hughes
not to write any of this down so that it
would remain secret. One of the measures that Father Hughes
took was to have Roland checked into a hospital where
he could be restrained. Various episodes and phenomena were happening
with increasing severity and frequency, so Roland was admitted to
(16:55):
Georgetown Hospital in late February or early March. The admittant
appears to have been done in secrecy, so the exact
details of this are hard to pin down, right, there's
no paper trail. Equally difficult to sift out are the
exact details of what happened once Roland was strapped down
and Father Hughes began his exorcism attempt. Accounts Very most
(17:18):
of those accounts were given after this took place, and
we still haven't gotten to the point where the priest's
diary was being used to record events as they were happening,
so again, everything is kind of after the fact. There
is a long persistent detail of the story that Roland
was able to get one of his hands free, pull
a spring from the bed that he was on, and
(17:38):
use it to cut Father Hughes. That detail has been
debated and contested. It has also even been attributed to
a different part of the timeline, But interviews with students
who saw Father Hughes each day in school because he
worked at a Catholic school, suggest that no one saw
him with any kind of arm injury during this time.
Uh that's particularly pertinent because he taught physical education, so
(18:01):
it wasn't like he could have hidden something like it.
Um and Hughes never said that the injury happened, but
that attempted exorcism was abandoned. It ended, and Roland went home.
Shortly after this, Roland's mother said that she saw words
form in blood on her son's skin. This is something
that none of the clergy or doctors ever corroborated, although
(18:24):
they did witness some strange rashes on his body. According
to Mrs Doe's account, during the time right after Georgetown,
when she and her husband were discussing taking Roland to St.
Louis for help, that was a place where they both
had family, the words Louis Saturday and three and a
half weeks appeared on his abdomen, hip and chest, respectively.
(18:47):
Pastor Schultz discouraged this St. Louis trip and wanted the
does to check Roland into a hospital so he could
be cared for by a doctor he had selected who
had been fully briefed on the boy's condition. The Doze
opted against this, and they left for St. Louis on
March five. There is actually a letter that exists in
an archive of Pastor Schultz writing to someone and saying
(19:10):
like I really wish they would just do what I'm
asking them to, because I really think this kid needs
a doctor that is sympathetic to this case and some
psychological help. And instead they're like, Nope, We're gonna go
to St. Louis. That seems like the right move, and
you can hear his frustration in that letter. According to
the Does, they stayed first with one set of relatives
and then another kind of debating what to do, and
(19:32):
Roland continued to have words appear on his skin, often
according to Mrs Doe answers to questions that she posed.
For example, when she suggested to her son that they
might enroll him in school in St. Louis with his cousin,
the words no school are said to have appeared on
his chest. There is no official record of this or evidence.
(19:54):
It was in St. Louis that another cousin of Roland's,
who was enrolled at St. Louis University, cont acted a
Jesuit priest at the school that was Father Raymond J. Bishop.
In turn, Father Bishop consulted with Father Lawrence J. Kenney,
who suggested that they also loop in the school's president,
Father Paul Reiner. Reiner told Bishop to go to the
(20:16):
home where Roland was staying, give a blessing and observe
the situation. He made this visit to the home of
Roland's uncle where the family was staying on the night
of March nine. After meeting with the family and Roland
and hearing their accounts of what had happened since January,
Bishop blessed each room of the house, and he pinned
what's called a second class relic, meaning something that a
(20:37):
saint had touched of Saint Margaret Mary, to a pillow
on the bed in the room Roland was staying in.
After the boy went to bed, the bed started moving,
banging around. Father Bishop saw this and later said that
the boy was perfectly still during all of this, indicating
that he was not in some way causing this movement.
The priest sprinkled holy water on the bed, and then
(20:59):
zigzags scratches were said to have appeared on Rowland's abdomen. Eventually,
the motion of the bed stopped and the family was
able to settle down for the night. The next day,
Father Bishop reached out to fifty two year old father
William S. Bowdern of the St. Francis Xavier Church. Two
nights after Bishop's first visit, to the home. He returned,
this time with Father Bowdern, who brought with him another
(21:21):
holy relic. This was a fragment of bone from the
arm of Saint Francis Xavier. Father Bowdern also started a
dossier style study of Roland and his family. The incidents
with Roland continued, and when the priests were there, they
would pray over him until the situation subsided. In some cases,
the family reported large furniture moving, sometimes blocking the door
(21:44):
to the room where Roland was. But Father's Bishop and
Bowdern came to the determination that they needed to go
to the Archbishop of St. Louis, Father Joseph Ritter, to
make the case that an exorcism was needed. Neither of
them felt qualified to perform the ritual, so they were
asking the archbishop to also select an exorcist. So we
(22:05):
should be clear that this kind of request to the
archbishop has some layers. For one acquiescing to such a
request would likely meet with a great deal of skepticism
from the community and church members, who believed that the
idea of possession with something from centuries gone by, before
humans had made strides and understanding things like mental illness.
It could very easily damage the reputation of the church.
(22:29):
For another, if it was a case of mental illness,
attempting an exorcism would likely only make the situation worse
for a person who should be getting treatment from a
medical professional. And then there was just a possibility that,
regardless of whether this was some sort of psychological issue
or on the outside chance it was something supernatural, approving
an exorcism just automatically put a priest in jeopardy for
(22:52):
like literal violence. Ritter is said to have given approval
for the exorcism, but named Bowdern as the one to perform,
insisting that the matter be discussed with no one else.
So a note on the attribution of the priest's diary here.
Sometimes it's attributed to Father Bowdern, but credit is sometimes
given to Father Bishop. Father Bishop did conduct interviews with
(23:16):
the family and he took notes, but Bowdern started the
file on the Doe family and Rowland's case. Bowder later stated, though,
that because he had found sotal information on dealing with
possession cases, that he asked Bishop to record everything that
happened so that any future cases might have some sort
of literature to access. Bowder did involve one more person though,
(23:39):
despite being asked to not discuss it with anyone, and
that was Walter Hallerin. Hallerin is often mentioned as a
priest when the story is relayed, but though he was
a Jesuit starting in nineteen forty one, he was not
ordained as a priest until the mid nineteen fifties, so
he was not a priest at this time. Initially, Father
powder And told the twenty six year old Halloran, who
(23:59):
was a friend and a former student, that he needed
a ride to a house uh and it was not
until they arrived at the home of Roland's relatives that
he was told that they were performing an exorcism, and
then Hallerin would need to help hold the boy involved down.
Their arrival there, which was March sixteen, was also the
first time that the family was told that an exorcism
(24:20):
was planned. Coming up, we'll talk about the exorcism itself
and how this story made its way into the press.
But first we're going to take a break, and here
from the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going.
(24:41):
The exorcism started with prayers said by the entire family,
including Roland and then Father Bowdern began to read from
the Roman Ritual that's the book that contains all of
the service as a priest may be called to perform.
Every priest has one as bower, and spoke the prayers
of the ritual. Roland's body began to react, according to
the diary account, with words appearing on his skin, including
(25:03):
the words hell and go. So at this point other
people did say they saw them, and from there that
night spiraled into stages of Roland having sort of fitful
sleep and then having violent outbursts which required two minute
a time to hold him down. That's of note because
Roland was always described as a very slight boy who
was physically worn down from weeks of lack of sleep.
(25:25):
He also sang garbled renditions of Old Man River and
Swanny while he slept. Later on some other songs made
it into the repertoire, and then at seven thirty in
the morning he fell into what is described as a
quote natural sleep. For the next month, things played out
similarly every night, and they escalated in intensity. At times
(25:46):
he would urinate or use foul language, or spit or
exhibit what was called quote violence and demonical fighting. And
that was how it was described in the diary. After
five nights of this, the decision was made to move
Roland to the Alexian Brothers Hospital in a room as
far as possible from their patients, so that his family
(26:06):
could have some peace. The sleeplessness and strain were really
taking a toll at this point. That only lasted one night, though,
as it really scared the child to be there when
he was in his more you know, typical or normal,
non violent state, and he spent another night at his
uncle's house and then moved to the rectory at College Church,
(26:26):
where he stayed for several nights. During these nights, the
rights of exorcism continued with similar violent reactions. During this time,
he was also given lessons about Catholicism with the intent
that he would be baptized. Yeah, the hope was that
if they baptized him as a Catholic, everything was going
to work a little bit better. So for several days
(26:47):
things were actually calm with no incidents. They had a
little ray of hope, but once again the pattern began.
In April, first Father Bowdern hastily baptized Roland with an
abbreviated version of the normal ceremony because Roland was in
and out of possessed episodes. So like the some of
the responses that he had to give verbally, he wasn't himself,
(27:08):
for lack of a better phrase, long enough to be
able to do them. So that's why they did a
very short version. The following morning, Roland received communion with
great resistance. Father Bishop and another priest, Father O'Flaherty, assisted
Father Bowdern, and afterwards they drove Roland back to his
uncle's house. While they were driving, Roland attacked O'Flaherty, who
(27:28):
was driving on the way. He had to be forcefully
pulled away so they could safely finish the trip. This
is one of those things was This is the least
of the questions associated with all of this. But does
does a diary or any other documents say anything about
whether his parents had given permission for him to be baptized? Uh?
(27:49):
The family appeared to have agreed to it. Yes, this
is a question that occurred to me, and at the
same time I was like, this is an interesting question
to be the one question that has arisen in my
mind at this moment. If you read any of the
accounts by that point, Uh, they and his mother in particular,
were so desperate they probably would have gone along with
(28:10):
any plan so long as someone was offering to help them,
because they felt like they had been asking for help
and getting told like, no, he's normal the whole time.
Uh So to have someone actually like, we're going to
figure this out, they were like, okay, whatever you say.
So these episodes they still persisted. The exorcism was not
considered complete, but the Doe family returned to the Washington,
(28:30):
d C. Area on April four, and Father Bowdern and
a father, van Rue accompanied them there. The reason for
this travel was so Roland's father could go back to work.
The train trip was uneventful. Once Father Bowdern was in Maryland,
he connected with Father Hughes, and the two priests attempted
to find a d C area hospital they would take Roland,
(28:52):
but none would for various reasons, including the fact that
the request to keep an admittance of a minor off
the books for secrets was deeply problematic. On April nine,
Roland was taken back to St. Louis and admitted once
again to Alexei and Brothers hospital. Travel was once again peaceful,
and once he was settled back in the hospital, the
(29:13):
priests began repeating the exorcism ritual as the boy exhibited
the same reactions we've been talking about already in varying degrees.
On the night of April eighteen, one day after Easter Sunday,
things were in a state of extremes. Roland was intent
on praying whenever he wasn't in the middle of an episode.
But these episodes, which were sometimes being described as seizures,
(29:35):
and the priest's notes, were particularly intense and violent, and
he lashed out at them. Then, just before eleven PM,
there was a vocalization from the boy that stated that
it was St. Michael commanding Satan to leave. Then there
was a particularly violent convulsion that lasted between seven and
eight minutes, which is an extraordinarily long time. When that
(29:58):
was over, Roland's stated He's gone. He then described an
angel appearing to him in a blinding light and confronting
the devil, and the devil and multiple minions retreating into
a pit. The next morning, Roland felt normal when he
was awake, he went to Mass for the first time,
and then just shy of two weeks later, he went
(30:19):
back to Maryland and resumed his life in an addendum
note in the diary, it is written that Roland's parents
also converted to Catholicism. That didn't happen until December nine.
I cannot imagine like watching a child having this for
that long, for that long, that's so long, that would
(30:41):
break me. I'm not a kids person, and that would
break me. Yeah, I have various questions. Once a priest
gave a lecture at the Mount Pleasant Library in Washington,
d c. To the Society of Parapsychology, in which he
told the story of Roland's alleged possession. When that happened,
it started getting press coverage. From the start of these
(31:02):
details being shared with the public, though, things were really inconsistent.
While some of the details could be considered inconsequential, like
descriptions of the Doe home, uh, those were all over
the place. Those inconsistencies indicate some problematic coverage of the case.
While some details were purposefully obscured to try to keep
(31:22):
the family's identity private, that meant that journalists sometimes filled
in details based on presumption or conjecture, and as different
journalists covered the story, more and more of it became
harder to pin down. Yeah. At the time. Uh the
condition of that priest giving that that lecture was that
(31:43):
he not be named. Eventually it came out that it
was Father Schultz Um. The Catholic Church never made an
official statement regarding the nature of what happened to Roland
Dome Walter Halloran said later in his life, quote, I
should never feel comfortable or capable of making an absolute statement.
And one detail that often comes up as an unanswered
question in this case is that Roland was said to
(32:05):
have spoken Latin to the priest during the exorcism. We
mentioned it earlier in the episode, and that's the language
he had never studied or had prior knowledge of. But
Halloran gave an account that kind of counters that. He
said that he thought the boy was just repeating phrases
that he had already heard the father say in the
exorcism ritual. When writer William Peter Bladdie reached out to
(32:26):
Father Bowder in twenty years after the incidents into the diary,
he was clear that he wanted to write a book
about what had happened. Bladdie had been a student at
Georgetown University when the exorcism had appeared in the papers,
and he was hoping to get a first hand account
from the priest, and while Bowdern wrote back to Bladdie
that he and a colleague had kept a detailed diary
(32:48):
of everything that happened, he also said he had been
instructed by church officials to keep the case out of
the public eye and that he could not share those materials.
As we've already mentioned, they were intent did as research
only for the eyes of other religious figures who might
face the demon possession case. He was also worried about
the young man involved in the events and maintaining his
(33:10):
privacy and safety. So even though he didn't have an
account from bowder and Bladdie of course wrote the book anyway.
He did change the possessed child in his story to
a girl instead of a boy, and shifted some other
details and turned up the dramatic aspects of it considerably.
One of the things that often comes up is those
changes in voice that are very striking in the film,
(33:31):
when Reagan suddenly speaks in a completely different and demonic voice.
Those were never part of Roland's case, for example, and
when the book was published in nineteen seventy one, it
was an instant sensation. In nineteen seventy four, after the
movie had come out, remember it came out in seventy three,
Bladdie published the book William Peter Bladdie on the Exorcist
From Novel to Film, and in that he includes drafts
(33:53):
of the script for the film, as well as the
background story on his interactions with clergy involved and his
decision to change the main character to a girl as
part of his his desire to meet with their request
to maintain an ananymity Now. He says in that book
that there are five copies of the diary that was
kept by Bowdern and Bishop Uh, and that two of
(34:16):
those copies were in different archdiocese, two were held by
people who had been involved in the case, and that
one was in the hospital where Rolando had been cared for.
Those numbers don't add up with how many copies of
this diary show up around around the world later or
people claimed to have seen Uh. So there are apparently
other copies, but at that time those were all that
(34:36):
Bladdie knew about. As for Roland Doe's life after the exorcism,
When writer and investigator Mark ups as Nick started looking
into this story in the nineteen nineties, he interviewed a
man named Dean Landolt, who had been friends with father Hughes.
Landolt said that the priest had told him that Rolando
graduated from Gonzaga High School and quote turned out fine up.
(35:01):
Sasnik also interviewed people he had tracked down from Roland's neighborhood,
bost of whom described the boy as a bratty troublemaker. Yeah,
there are all kinds of stories you'll hear about what
happened to him later in his life, and uh, including
like maybe that he worked for NASA, which is kind
of funny to me, But maybe he did. I don't know.
(35:21):
But they're all over the place because nobody can verify them,
so nobody can say, no, you're wrong. Uh. What is
less commonly mentioned in articles about Rolando's story is the
interest in it that followed in the summer of ninety
on the part of parapsychologists. In August, the story that
a teenage boy had been freed from demonic possession was
reported in several papers in the u S with headlines
(35:44):
like case of haunted boy baffling to scientists. This is
all kind of related to that lecture that was given
by an at the time unnamed priest about this case.
At that point, the president of the Society of Parapsychology,
Richard C. Are Now relay the information that aligned with
Father Schultze's Night of Observations of Roland situation at the
(36:06):
Lutheran Rectory. But it seems as though the Society of
Parapsychology did not publish any additional conclusions about the case,
although I did find an article not long after that
about Richard C. Darnell and how he's the person you
want to call if you have any sort of paranormal
thing going on, which makes me go, how that worked
out for you? But we don't have any any of
(36:28):
the scientific research that was sort of not promised but
suggested might be coming so well. And I feel like
we should also just point out that even though paras
psychology sounds like psychology, which is a medical field that's
now a paras psychology is it's like the study of alleged,
(36:52):
not necessarily substantiated phenomena. Yeah, it's basically anything that happens
in the realm of mental I'm gonna that can't be
explained by what would be considered orthodox scientific psychology, Right, So,
had they published findings, it would not necessarily have been
findings that came about from like the scientific methods, right,
(37:15):
not like we did an m r I and found
something they would explain some strange behavior. Nothing like that happened.
To the best of our knowledge. This is such a
fascinating thing, and I will talk in our are behind
the scenes about how the I associate this entire story
with my childhood for a variety of reasons, one being
(37:35):
that this was a very popular topic of discussion at
my house growing up. But since that is a strange
and many question marks kind of thing, I thought we
should end, since we are in Halloween season talking about
something delicious and fun in our listener mail. So this
(37:57):
is an email from our listener who just signs it
with the letter A, who said I had your podcast
recommended to me by a friend after mentioning that I
listened to stuff. You should know. I've been listening ever
since and find your deep dives into different topics to
be fascinating and a lot of fun to listen to you.
This morning, I listened to the episode you did about
the history of waffles and wanted to take time to
email you guys and thank you for the episode. I
(38:18):
had no idea that they go back so far, nor
had any idea about their origins. I found it quite
interesting that what we know as Belgian waffles are actually
quite younger than I thought they were. My partner and
I have Liege waffles, the ones with the pearl sugar,
and they are made in Belgium every week after our
drinking night as a hangover breakfast, either regular or chocolate chip.
We have them warm toasted between the plates of our
(38:40):
sandwich toaster. She has them with raspberry jam, and I
have them with BlackBerry or raspberry jam and natural peanut butter.
That might sound strange, but believe me, it goes perfect
with coffee, although I have had them straight out of
the pack before and they are just as good that
way too. I live in Australia, so waffles are seen
more as a dessert item here, though you can also
find them for breakfast in some restaurants. As such, they
(39:01):
are rarely, if ever served all a chicken and waffles style,
but usually with fruit syrup, butter and or ice cream.
Thanks for your podcast. It keeps you both entertained and
informed in my little corner of the world, which is
purse on my almost daily walks and commutes. I love
to learn things about history, even if it's obscure or
just reminding me of something I already knew about. I
look forward to listening to more episodes in your archives
(39:22):
as time goes on. Thank you so much for this email.
I love talking about waffles. UM, I believe that waffles
with jam and peanut butter would be amazing as a breakfast.
To it, I'm into it. Let's do it, um, and
I'm glad you're with us and listening, and hopefully we'll
have more fun food things that delight you. Now. I
want waffles really bad. I had chicken and waffles quite recently. Um.
(39:47):
You would like to write to us, you could do
so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You
can also find us on social media as Missed in History,
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You can do that on the I heart Radio app.
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(40:09):
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson, and we're
going to get into our usual uh story du jour,
but before we do, we have a little bit of housekeeping.
(00:23):
We do are I don't even know if I would
call it a sibling podcast or in any case are
related podcasts. It started out as a sibling and then
it became its own thing. It's now it's more like
a cousin in a gateway. Um. This day in History
Class is back with new episodes. If you had ever
listened to it and then stopped because you were only
(00:43):
getting repeats, fear not. There's a new host, Gabriel Lousier,
and he is a researcher and he is taking up
the reins of that. So there is new stuff coming
out right now. Yeah. Gabe used to work as the
lead researcher and a frequent guest on Part Time Genie.
He's also been on Ridiculous History a lot, and he's
picked up this podcast with brand new stuff. So yes,
(01:06):
So if you are are aching for that that little
hit of history, every day that you maybe had before
and haven't had in a bit, go right back to it.
Happy Holidays, almost happy October with new this day in
history class, which I think might have actually started back
with new episodes in September, but still it's October now. Yes,
(01:27):
welcome on him. It'll be one. If you celebrate Thanksgiving,
that's the thing you can be thankful for, uh, which
is kind of a fun thing versus what we're talking
about today. We're right in the thick of Halloween season.
This is this is it. So I thought this might
finally be the time to pull out an episode that
I have been tap dancing around for about five years.
(01:50):
So if you have never seen the nineteen seventy three
horror film The Exorcist one, I'm so sorry. It's so
good too. Though you probably know what it is and
you've almost certainly seen images from it. It's so popular
that it ends up being spoofed on things all the time.
It is, of course a horror classic, uh. And it
won Academy Awards for Screenplay and for Sound. For sound
(02:12):
in particular who good sound design. And it was inspired
by reports of a possession and exorcism that started in
the Washington, d C. Area in nine and I say
started because it travels a little bit, as you'll hear,
and this story really, as we kind of unravel, it
becomes as much an examination of psychology and lore as
(02:34):
it is of relaying of historical events, and even the
veracity of accounts of those events is always in question. Uh.
This is kind of one of those things where you
people either believe it or don't, and there's much argument
about it, but it does make for great Halloween discussions.
So I wanted to point out there are a couple
of things that make this story really difficult to pin
(02:54):
down in terms of details. One, it was kept largely
secret by the Jesuit race who were involved, in order
to protect the identities of the family members who were
part of it. And to this was never a legal case,
so there are no government records of it filed in
any municipality that people can consult, kind of squirreling around
for information wherever they can. And as a consequence of
(03:17):
those two things, details have been added, omitted, or just
playing relayed incorrectly over the years. And there's also the
fact that the fictional version of it, both the book
The Exorcist and the movie of the same name have
become so ingrained in horror pop culture that when people
think about possession, the imagery from that fiction is often
what's foremost in their minds. But the real story is
(03:39):
a little bit more tame. So if you saw this
and are hoping for details like vomiting pea soup or
heads turning three sixty degrees, I'll just tell you now,
you're going to be disappointed. It's not quite any of that.
We're also not really going to relay all of the
nitty gritty here in terms of like what played out
during the exorcism and you know, various specific injuries and
(04:02):
things that were said. Uh, the focus on this one
is really kind of how it all began, how it's
been conveyed to the public, and how people have perceived
that case in the years since it happened. So, the
person in this story who was said to have been
possessed was a child at the time, was fourteen years old,
although that's also reported inconsistently. He was probably thirteen at
(04:23):
the time, and accounts that were published during these events,
he was referred to by a pseudonym that was Roland Doe,
and you may also see him referred to by the
name Robbie Mannheim, which was a name that was used
in the book on this subject written by Thomas B. Allen.
Alan noted in the text that this was a pseudonym,
(04:45):
but there seems to have been some confusion over the years,
because there are some sites that claimed that Mannheim was
the real name and not a pseudonym that Alan was using. Regardless,
at this point, the person at the center of this
story would be in his mid to late eighties today,
so we're just going to stick with calling him roland Do.
(05:06):
And one thing to note about the priest's diary in
this story, which is considered to be the primary source document,
is that in many instances that diary is a recording
of certain events as relayed in accounts given by the family,
so it's not always necessarily a diary of direct observations,
but also notes on the memories of others. This diary
(05:28):
also does not note who relayed any of that information,
whether it was amalgamated from talking with multiple family members
at a time, etcetera. So even though this one document
is often held up as the evidence of everything that
happened in this case, that is not an infallible document,
and because it has its own more about where the
alleged few copies of it have been kept over the years,
(05:51):
and who has and hasn't seen it. Even the version
that is readily available to the public, which was published
as an addendum chapter in that book by Thomas Allen
written in he subsequently republished it with the diary attached.
That's not something we can really verify. We just do
not have access to touch that document and ensure that
(06:13):
it is a real thing. So we're gonna reference that account,
but keep in mind that we are not claiming it
is fact, and we can't speak to the veracity of it.
One other element of the story that often shifts from
one account to another is the location where Roland Doe
and his family lived. Sometimes it's listed as being in
the DC suburb of Mount Rainier, Maryland, and other times
(06:34):
it's Cottage City, Maryland. It's easy to see why there
might be some discrepancy here. Those two places are really
close together, a five minute car ride or, according to
Google Maps, the twenty four minute walk. In the late
nineteen nineties, writer Mark ups Asnick wrote an article that
appeared in Strange magazine and He detailed his efforts to
track down the truth regarding a vacant lot in Mount
(06:57):
Rainier that was often said to be the site of
Roland family home. That he did some cross referencing and
old phone directories and information on a street renumbering that
happened in two and he was slowly able to piece
things together. And when he figured out who had been
living in the house that had been on the vacant
lot in the many people claimed was the exorcism house,
(07:21):
it turned out that the person who had lived there
at the time was a widower with no children, definitely
not a family with a teenage boy, and the lot
being vacant was because that house had been burned down
in nineteen sixty two as part of a firefighter training exercise,
long after its resident had died, and the dwelling had
fallen into disrepair. So pretty normal in boring circumstances, nothing supernatural.
(07:46):
After that, up Sasnic discovered again just through looking through
public records and kind of connecting dots, that Cottage City
was the correct location. Up Sasnick mentions two articles from
the nineteen eighties that both placed the family home in
ount Rainier and specifically listing the address of the empty lot,
but Mount Rainier was mentioned as early as August nineteen
(08:07):
forty nine in newspaper articles that talked about the exorcism.
An article in the New York Daily News dated August one,
ninety nine reads quote the boy lives with his parents,
non Catholics, at Mount Rainier, Maryland, near Washington. Mark ups
Asnik said that he identified the family, but as other
writers have done, he did not divulge that information publicly,
(08:30):
and he also stated in that writing that he believed
that the priests involved had probably changed the location to
add another layer of anonymity for the family, but that
false information plus that empty lot had led to people
to build a lore that was shared both in the
oral relay of the story and at times even in
the press. So Roland was the son of a federal
(08:50):
government worker and the family on his mother's side was
fairly close knit. Roland was an only child. His grandmother
lived with them and his aunt Tilly. Again, that's a
pseudonym visited pretty frequently from St. Louis. Tilly is often
referred to as Harriet. Tilly is the name that was
used in the priest's diary of the events. We're going
(09:11):
to relay those events as they've been laid out by
people who say they had access to the diary. So
according to all of this, it's Tilly who is credited
with getting Roland interested in the Wigia board game. She
is generally described as being interested in spiritualism and as
having shared those ideas in lively discussions with her nephew.
(09:33):
It is unclear reading some of these descriptions today, if
this is a case of family members kind of playing
by indulging in discussions of ghosts and spirits for fun,
as a curiosity or just an exploration of possibility, or
if this aunt truly believed that spirits could and would
communicate or pass from one realm to another. Sometimes she's
(09:53):
characterized as like, yes, she believes she was teaching him this.
In other times it's like, well, they were kind of playing.
On January, Aunt Tilly died of complications of multiple sclerosis,
and in the days leading up to her death, the
family in Maryland reported hearing odd scratching noises in the house.
Roland's father attributed this to a rat or a mouse
(10:16):
and one of the walls. There was also a strange
water drip. They could hear in the grandmother's room, both
of which the family said stopped the day that Tilly died,
Roland kept playing with the Wigia board. His mother believed
he was trying to reach Chilly in the afterlife. As
this possession story became public, the interpretation of the situation
(10:37):
quickly became for many people that Roland had tried to
reach out to his aunt with the wigia board but
instead had contacted a demon. If this was what Roland's
mother believed, though, that's a little inconsistent with her behavior.
She often asks whatever she thinks might be manifesting, if
this is Tilly, Yeah, it's a strange thing where it
(10:59):
kind of goes back and forth in a lot of
the accounts that she thinks there might be some sort
of devil situation, and also keeps going Tilly, is that
you um, which maybe is indicative of how she perceived
her sister, but I don't think so. So Rowland told
his family that he had started hearing this sound of footsteps,
specifically squeaky shoes in his room at night, and so
(11:23):
one night, Roland's mother and grandmother went to lie down
with him in his room, and while they both said
that they did not hear it on the night in question.
They later both said that they did actually hear the
squeaky shoe noise. Both women later conveyed that they had
pretended not to hear it to avoid scaring Roland or
each other when they asked if it was Tilly and
(11:43):
to knock first three times and then four times a
separate time to confirm that it was her. Each time
they heard the requested number of knocks and felt what
was described as a sense of pressure upon them. Then
when they asked for those four knocks and heard them,
there were are also scratching sounds on the bed. That night,
(12:04):
the bed also shook, and the covers were described as
standing up, stiff and straight around the edges of the bed,
as though defying gravity, and then once they were touched,
they fell back into a normal position. Roland also experienced
a strange event at school not long after this, when
his desk started shaking. His teacher told him to stop it,
(12:25):
but he insisted he wasn't doing it. More strange, but
fairly small events were reported by the does, things like
hangers flying out of the closets or fruit floating across
the room, and even a Bible, moving out of a
bookshelf allegedly on its own, and falling at his feet.
Strange things also happened when the family went to other
(12:45):
people's homes, including one instance where the chair Roland sitting
on starting to spin. Roland always maintained that it was
not him doing these things, although initially his parents thought
he might have learned some kind of sleight of hand
from a magic book and to sided to trick them all.
A doctor and a psychologist who were consulted determined that
Roland was a normal kid. They could not find anything unusual.
(13:09):
Coming up. We're gonna talk about how things unfolded once
Roland's family consulted their pastor about what was happening, But
first we are going to take a sponsor break. On February,
Reverend Luther Miles Shultz of the St. Stephen's Evangelical Lutheran
(13:32):
Church in Washington, d C. Became involved in Roland's case.
Roland's mother had turned to their minister for help, and
the accounts that the Doe family gave him of increasing
severity of the strange phenomena in their house led the
pastor to determine that the does should get a psychiatrist
more deeply involved in Rowland's case. While Schultz prayed with
(13:54):
the family over the matter, he didn't seem to think
this was a possession, but more likely a young man
in need treatment. He did not immediately share with the
family that he thought this may be a scenario not
of demonic possession, but one perhaps involving psychokinesis rooted in
some sort of psychological issue. The does told the minister
that a psychiatrist had already seen their son, and that
(14:16):
that doctor had said, as we said, he was a
normal kid. On the night of February seventeenth nine, Reverend
Schultz had Roland stay with him overnight so he could
observe the boy. Schultz's wife stayed in another room of
the house that night. Doe stayed at the Reverence parsonage
for twelve hours, and the minister said he witnessed various
(14:37):
phenomena that were the same as what the Doe family
had reported. The bed that Roland was trying to sleep
on shook. There were scratching noises. When Roland moved to
a chair, it started moving on its own, and it
tipped over when he was moved to the floor. The
palette of blankets that he was trying to sleep on
moved around the room. The following week, claw marks started
(14:58):
appearing on Roland's body. Reverend Schultz was convinced that this
was not just a psychological event, and also that he
was not equipped to handle the situation, and so he
suggested to Roland's mother that they consult a Catholic priest,
and that was when they reached out to Father Albert
Hughes of Saint James Catholic Church. Father Hughes was a
young priest in his late twenties. Hughes was pretty surprised
(15:21):
to have a Lutheran family asking him for help, and
at first he offered some holy water and blessed candles
to the Does so that they could use them at home.
They did, and Mrs Doe reported back to the priest
that the bottle of holy water had flown across the
room and when she tried to light the blessed candles,
things around them started to move violently. Father Hughes decided
(15:45):
to visit the Dough home himself to see what was
really happening, and this is the first instance when Roland
is said to have spoken in Latin. He said, quote,
old priest of Christ, you know I am the devil?
Why do you keep bothering me? So Huse at this point,
believing he might be dealing with a demonic possession, took
the case to the most Reverend Patrick A. Oh Boyle,
(16:06):
Archbishop of Washington. Oh Boyle was sort of unique for
a man in his position because he had not actually
ever served as a pastor in a church. He had
risen through the ranks of the church kind of from
a more administrative side, So he did not certainly have
a lot of specialized knowledge in possession, and we should
point out that most priests did not. Uh. He told
Hughes to perform the exorcism himself, which was surprising given
(16:30):
how young Father Hughes was and how inexperienced he would
have been in such matters. And he also told Hughes
not to write any of this down so that it
would remain secret. One of the measures that Father Hughes
took was to have Roland checked into a hospital where
he could be restrained. Various episodes and phenomena were happening
with increasing severity and frequency, so Roland was admitted to
(16:55):
Georgetown Hospital in late February or early March. The admittant
appears to have been done in secrecy, so the exact
details of this are hard to pin down, right, there's
no paper trail. Equally difficult to sift out are the
exact details of what happened once Roland was strapped down
and Father Hughes began his exorcism attempt. Accounts Very most
(17:18):
of those accounts were given after this took place, and
we still haven't gotten to the point where the priest's
diary was being used to record events as they were happening,
so again, everything is kind of after the fact. There
is a long persistent detail of the story that Roland
was able to get one of his hands free, pull
a spring from the bed that he was on, and
(17:38):
use it to cut Father Hughes. That detail has been
debated and contested. It has also even been attributed to
a different part of the timeline, But interviews with students
who saw Father Hughes each day in school because he
worked at a Catholic school, suggest that no one saw
him with any kind of arm injury during this time.
Uh that's particularly pertinent because he taught physical education, so
(18:01):
it wasn't like he could have hidden something like it.
Um and Hughes never said that the injury happened, but
that attempted exorcism was abandoned. It ended, and Roland went home.
Shortly after this, Roland's mother said that she saw words
form in blood on her son's skin. This is something
that none of the clergy or doctors ever corroborated, although
(18:24):
they did witness some strange rashes on his body. According
to Mrs Doe's account, during the time right after Georgetown,
when she and her husband were discussing taking Roland to St.
Louis for help, that was a place where they both
had family, the words Louis Saturday and three and a
half weeks appeared on his abdomen, hip and chest, respectively.
(18:47):
Pastor Schultz discouraged this St. Louis trip and wanted the
does to check Roland into a hospital so he could
be cared for by a doctor he had selected who
had been fully briefed on the boy's condition. The Doze
opted against this, and they left for St. Louis on
March five. There is actually a letter that exists in
an archive of Pastor Schultz writing to someone and saying
(19:10):
like I really wish they would just do what I'm
asking them to, because I really think this kid needs
a doctor that is sympathetic to this case and some
psychological help. And instead they're like, Nope, We're gonna go
to St. Louis. That seems like the right move, and
you can hear his frustration in that letter. According to
the Does, they stayed first with one set of relatives
and then another kind of debating what to do, and
(19:32):
Roland continued to have words appear on his skin, often
according to Mrs Doe answers to questions that she posed.
For example, when she suggested to her son that they
might enroll him in school in St. Louis with his cousin,
the words no school are said to have appeared on
his chest. There is no official record of this or evidence.
(19:54):
It was in St. Louis that another cousin of Roland's,
who was enrolled at St. Louis University, cont acted a
Jesuit priest at the school that was Father Raymond J. Bishop.
In turn, Father Bishop consulted with Father Lawrence J. Kenney,
who suggested that they also loop in the school's president,
Father Paul Reiner. Reiner told Bishop to go to the
(20:16):
home where Roland was staying, give a blessing and observe
the situation. He made this visit to the home of
Roland's uncle where the family was staying on the night
of March nine. After meeting with the family and Roland
and hearing their accounts of what had happened since January,
Bishop blessed each room of the house, and he pinned
what's called a second class relic, meaning something that a
(20:37):
saint had touched of Saint Margaret Mary, to a pillow
on the bed in the room Roland was staying in.
After the boy went to bed, the bed started moving,
banging around. Father Bishop saw this and later said that
the boy was perfectly still during all of this, indicating
that he was not in some way causing this movement.
The priest sprinkled holy water on the bed, and then
(20:59):
zigzags scratches were said to have appeared on Rowland's abdomen. Eventually,
the motion of the bed stopped and the family was
able to settle down for the night. The next day,
Father Bishop reached out to fifty two year old father
William S. Bowdern of the St. Francis Xavier Church. Two
nights after Bishop's first visit, to the home. He returned,
this time with Father Bowdern, who brought with him another
(21:21):
holy relic. This was a fragment of bone from the
arm of Saint Francis Xavier. Father Bowdern also started a
dossier style study of Roland and his family. The incidents
with Roland continued, and when the priests were there, they
would pray over him until the situation subsided. In some cases,
the family reported large furniture moving, sometimes blocking the door
(21:44):
to the room where Roland was. But Father's Bishop and
Bowdern came to the determination that they needed to go
to the Archbishop of St. Louis, Father Joseph Ritter, to
make the case that an exorcism was needed. Neither of
them felt qualified to perform the ritual, so they were
asking the archbishop to also select an exorcist. So we
(22:05):
should be clear that this kind of request to the
archbishop has some layers. For one acquiescing to such a
request would likely meet with a great deal of skepticism
from the community and church members, who believed that the
idea of possession with something from centuries gone by, before
humans had made strides and understanding things like mental illness.
It could very easily damage the reputation of the church.
(22:29):
For another, if it was a case of mental illness,
attempting an exorcism would likely only make the situation worse
for a person who should be getting treatment from a
medical professional. And then there was just a possibility that,
regardless of whether this was some sort of psychological issue
or on the outside chance it was something supernatural, approving
an exorcism just automatically put a priest in jeopardy for
(22:52):
like literal violence. Ritter is said to have given approval
for the exorcism, but named Bowdern as the one to perform,
insisting that the matter be discussed with no one else.
So a note on the attribution of the priest's diary here.
Sometimes it's attributed to Father Bowdern, but credit is sometimes
given to Father Bishop. Father Bishop did conduct interviews with
(23:16):
the family and he took notes, but Bowdern started the
file on the Doe family and Rowland's case. Bowder later stated, though,
that because he had found sotal information on dealing with
possession cases, that he asked Bishop to record everything that
happened so that any future cases might have some sort
of literature to access. Bowder did involve one more person though,
(23:39):
despite being asked to not discuss it with anyone, and
that was Walter Hallerin. Hallerin is often mentioned as a
priest when the story is relayed, but though he was
a Jesuit starting in nineteen forty one, he was not
ordained as a priest until the mid nineteen fifties, so
he was not a priest at this time. Initially, Father
powder And told the twenty six year old Halloran, who
(23:59):
was a friend and a former student, that he needed
a ride to a house uh and it was not
until they arrived at the home of Roland's relatives that
he was told that they were performing an exorcism, and
then Hallerin would need to help hold the boy involved down.
Their arrival there, which was March sixteen, was also the
first time that the family was told that an exorcism
(24:20):
was planned. Coming up, we'll talk about the exorcism itself
and how this story made its way into the press.
But first we're going to take a break, and here
from the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going.
(24:41):
The exorcism started with prayers said by the entire family,
including Roland and then Father Bowdern began to read from
the Roman Ritual that's the book that contains all of
the service as a priest may be called to perform.
Every priest has one as bower, and spoke the prayers
of the ritual. Roland's body began to react, according to
the diary account, with words appearing on his skin, including
(25:03):
the words hell and go. So at this point other
people did say they saw them, and from there that
night spiraled into stages of Roland having sort of fitful
sleep and then having violent outbursts which required two minute
a time to hold him down. That's of note because
Roland was always described as a very slight boy who
was physically worn down from weeks of lack of sleep.
(25:25):
He also sang garbled renditions of Old Man River and
Swanny while he slept. Later on some other songs made
it into the repertoire, and then at seven thirty in
the morning he fell into what is described as a
quote natural sleep. For the next month, things played out
similarly every night, and they escalated in intensity. At times
(25:46):
he would urinate or use foul language, or spit or
exhibit what was called quote violence and demonical fighting. And
that was how it was described in the diary. After
five nights of this, the decision was made to move
Roland to the Alexian Brothers Hospital in a room as
far as possible from their patients, so that his family
(26:06):
could have some peace. The sleeplessness and strain were really
taking a toll at this point. That only lasted one night, though,
as it really scared the child to be there when
he was in his more you know, typical or normal,
non violent state, and he spent another night at his
uncle's house and then moved to the rectory at College Church,
(26:26):
where he stayed for several nights. During these nights, the
rights of exorcism continued with similar violent reactions. During this time,
he was also given lessons about Catholicism with the intent
that he would be baptized. Yeah, the hope was that
if they baptized him as a Catholic, everything was going
to work a little bit better. So for several days
(26:47):
things were actually calm with no incidents. They had a
little ray of hope, but once again the pattern began.
In April, first Father Bowdern hastily baptized Roland with an
abbreviated version of the normal ceremony because Roland was in
and out of possessed episodes. So like the some of
the responses that he had to give verbally, he wasn't himself,
(27:08):
for lack of a better phrase, long enough to be
able to do them. So that's why they did a
very short version. The following morning, Roland received communion with
great resistance. Father Bishop and another priest, Father O'Flaherty, assisted
Father Bowdern, and afterwards they drove Roland back to his
uncle's house. While they were driving, Roland attacked O'Flaherty, who
(27:28):
was driving on the way. He had to be forcefully
pulled away so they could safely finish the trip. This
is one of those things was This is the least
of the questions associated with all of this. But does
does a diary or any other documents say anything about
whether his parents had given permission for him to be baptized? Uh?
(27:49):
The family appeared to have agreed to it. Yes, this
is a question that occurred to me, and at the
same time I was like, this is an interesting question
to be the one question that has arisen in my
mind at this moment. If you read any of the
accounts by that point, Uh, they and his mother in particular,
were so desperate they probably would have gone along with
(28:10):
any plan so long as someone was offering to help them,
because they felt like they had been asking for help
and getting told like, no, he's normal the whole time.
Uh So to have someone actually like, we're going to
figure this out, they were like, okay, whatever you say.
So these episodes they still persisted. The exorcism was not
considered complete, but the Doe family returned to the Washington,
(28:30):
d C. Area on April four, and Father Bowdern and
a father, van Rue accompanied them there. The reason for
this travel was so Roland's father could go back to work.
The train trip was uneventful. Once Father Bowdern was in Maryland,
he connected with Father Hughes, and the two priests attempted
to find a d C area hospital they would take Roland,
(28:52):
but none would for various reasons, including the fact that
the request to keep an admittance of a minor off
the books for secrets was deeply problematic. On April nine,
Roland was taken back to St. Louis and admitted once
again to Alexei and Brothers hospital. Travel was once again peaceful,
and once he was settled back in the hospital, the
(29:13):
priests began repeating the exorcism ritual as the boy exhibited
the same reactions we've been talking about already in varying degrees.
On the night of April eighteen, one day after Easter Sunday,
things were in a state of extremes. Roland was intent
on praying whenever he wasn't in the middle of an episode.
But these episodes, which were sometimes being described as seizures,
(29:35):
and the priest's notes, were particularly intense and violent, and
he lashed out at them. Then, just before eleven PM,
there was a vocalization from the boy that stated that
it was St. Michael commanding Satan to leave. Then there
was a particularly violent convulsion that lasted between seven and
eight minutes, which is an extraordinarily long time. When that
(29:58):
was over, Roland's stated He's gone. He then described an
angel appearing to him in a blinding light and confronting
the devil, and the devil and multiple minions retreating into
a pit. The next morning, Roland felt normal when he
was awake, he went to Mass for the first time,
and then just shy of two weeks later, he went
(30:19):
back to Maryland and resumed his life in an addendum
note in the diary, it is written that Roland's parents
also converted to Catholicism. That didn't happen until December nine.
I cannot imagine like watching a child having this for
that long, for that long, that's so long, that would
(30:41):
break me. I'm not a kids person, and that would
break me. Yeah, I have various questions. Once a priest
gave a lecture at the Mount Pleasant Library in Washington,
d c. To the Society of Parapsychology, in which he
told the story of Roland's alleged possession. When that happened,
it started getting press coverage. From the start of these
(31:02):
details being shared with the public, though, things were really inconsistent.
While some of the details could be considered inconsequential, like
descriptions of the Doe home, uh, those were all over
the place. Those inconsistencies indicate some problematic coverage of the case.
While some details were purposefully obscured to try to keep
(31:22):
the family's identity private, that meant that journalists sometimes filled
in details based on presumption or conjecture, and as different
journalists covered the story, more and more of it became
harder to pin down. Yeah. At the time. Uh the
condition of that priest giving that that lecture was that
(31:43):
he not be named. Eventually it came out that it
was Father Schultz Um. The Catholic Church never made an
official statement regarding the nature of what happened to Roland
Dome Walter Halloran said later in his life, quote, I
should never feel comfortable or capable of making an absolute statement.
And one detail that often comes up as an unanswered
question in this case is that Roland was said to
(32:05):
have spoken Latin to the priest during the exorcism. We
mentioned it earlier in the episode, and that's the language
he had never studied or had prior knowledge of. But
Halloran gave an account that kind of counters that. He
said that he thought the boy was just repeating phrases
that he had already heard the father say in the
exorcism ritual. When writer William Peter Bladdie reached out to
(32:26):
Father Bowder in twenty years after the incidents into the diary,
he was clear that he wanted to write a book
about what had happened. Bladdie had been a student at
Georgetown University when the exorcism had appeared in the papers,
and he was hoping to get a first hand account
from the priest, and while Bowdern wrote back to Bladdie
that he and a colleague had kept a detailed diary
(32:48):
of everything that happened, he also said he had been
instructed by church officials to keep the case out of
the public eye and that he could not share those materials.
As we've already mentioned, they were intent did as research
only for the eyes of other religious figures who might
face the demon possession case. He was also worried about
the young man involved in the events and maintaining his
(33:10):
privacy and safety. So even though he didn't have an
account from bowder and Bladdie of course wrote the book anyway.
He did change the possessed child in his story to
a girl instead of a boy, and shifted some other
details and turned up the dramatic aspects of it considerably.
One of the things that often comes up is those
changes in voice that are very striking in the film,
(33:31):
when Reagan suddenly speaks in a completely different and demonic voice.
Those were never part of Roland's case, for example, and
when the book was published in nineteen seventy one, it
was an instant sensation. In nineteen seventy four, after the
movie had come out, remember it came out in seventy three,
Bladdie published the book William Peter Bladdie on the Exorcist
From Novel to Film, and in that he includes drafts
(33:53):
of the script for the film, as well as the
background story on his interactions with clergy involved and his
decision to change the main character to a girl as
part of his his desire to meet with their request
to maintain an ananymity Now. He says in that book
that there are five copies of the diary that was
kept by Bowdern and Bishop Uh, and that two of
(34:16):
those copies were in different archdiocese, two were held by
people who had been involved in the case, and that
one was in the hospital where Rolando had been cared for.
Those numbers don't add up with how many copies of
this diary show up around around the world later or
people claimed to have seen Uh. So there are apparently
other copies, but at that time those were all that
(34:36):
Bladdie knew about. As for Roland Doe's life after the exorcism,
When writer and investigator Mark ups as Nick started looking
into this story in the nineteen nineties, he interviewed a
man named Dean Landolt, who had been friends with father Hughes.
Landolt said that the priest had told him that Rolando
graduated from Gonzaga High School and quote turned out fine up.
(35:01):
Sasnik also interviewed people he had tracked down from Roland's neighborhood,
bost of whom described the boy as a bratty troublemaker. Yeah,
there are all kinds of stories you'll hear about what
happened to him later in his life, and uh, including
like maybe that he worked for NASA, which is kind
of funny to me, But maybe he did. I don't know.
(35:21):
But they're all over the place because nobody can verify them,
so nobody can say, no, you're wrong. Uh. What is
less commonly mentioned in articles about Rolando's story is the
interest in it that followed in the summer of ninety
on the part of parapsychologists. In August, the story that
a teenage boy had been freed from demonic possession was
reported in several papers in the u S with headlines
(35:44):
like case of haunted boy baffling to scientists. This is
all kind of related to that lecture that was given
by an at the time unnamed priest about this case.
At that point, the president of the Society of Parapsychology,
Richard C. Are Now relay the information that aligned with
Father Schultze's Night of Observations of Roland situation at the
(36:06):
Lutheran Rectory. But it seems as though the Society of
Parapsychology did not publish any additional conclusions about the case,
although I did find an article not long after that
about Richard C. Darnell and how he's the person you
want to call if you have any sort of paranormal
thing going on, which makes me go, how that worked
out for you? But we don't have any any of
(36:28):
the scientific research that was sort of not promised but
suggested might be coming so well. And I feel like
we should also just point out that even though paras
psychology sounds like psychology, which is a medical field that's
now a paras psychology is it's like the study of alleged,
(36:52):
not necessarily substantiated phenomena. Yeah, it's basically anything that happens
in the realm of mental I'm gonna that can't be
explained by what would be considered orthodox scientific psychology, Right, So,
had they published findings, it would not necessarily have been
findings that came about from like the scientific methods, right,
(37:15):
not like we did an m r I and found
something they would explain some strange behavior. Nothing like that happened.
To the best of our knowledge. This is such a
fascinating thing, and I will talk in our are behind
the scenes about how the I associate this entire story
with my childhood for a variety of reasons, one being
(37:35):
that this was a very popular topic of discussion at
my house growing up. But since that is a strange
and many question marks kind of thing, I thought we
should end, since we are in Halloween season talking about
something delicious and fun in our listener mail. So this
(37:57):
is an email from our listener who just signs it
with the letter A, who said I had your podcast
recommended to me by a friend after mentioning that I
listened to stuff. You should know. I've been listening ever
since and find your deep dives into different topics to
be fascinating and a lot of fun to listen to you.
This morning, I listened to the episode you did about
the history of waffles and wanted to take time to
email you guys and thank you for the episode. I
(38:18):
had no idea that they go back so far, nor
had any idea about their origins. I found it quite
interesting that what we know as Belgian waffles are actually
quite younger than I thought they were. My partner and
I have Liege waffles, the ones with the pearl sugar,
and they are made in Belgium every week after our
drinking night as a hangover breakfast, either regular or chocolate chip.
We have them warm toasted between the plates of our
(38:40):
sandwich toaster. She has them with raspberry jam, and I
have them with BlackBerry or raspberry jam and natural peanut butter.
That might sound strange, but believe me, it goes perfect
with coffee, although I have had them straight out of
the pack before and they are just as good that
way too. I live in Australia, so waffles are seen
more as a dessert item here, though you can also
find them for breakfast in some restaurants. As such, they
(39:01):
are rarely, if ever served all a chicken and waffles style,
but usually with fruit syrup, butter and or ice cream.
Thanks for your podcast. It keeps you both entertained and
informed in my little corner of the world, which is
purse on my almost daily walks and commutes. I love
to learn things about history, even if it's obscure or
just reminding me of something I already knew about. I
look forward to listening to more episodes in your archives
(39:22):
as time goes on. Thank you so much for this email.
I love talking about waffles. UM, I believe that waffles
with jam and peanut butter would be amazing as a breakfast.
To it, I'm into it. Let's do it, um, and
I'm glad you're with us and listening, and hopefully we'll
have more fun food things that delight you. Now. I
want waffles really bad. I had chicken and waffles quite recently. Um.
(39:47):
You would like to write to us, you could do
so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You
can also find us on social media as Missed in History,
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You can do that on the I heart Radio app.
Where where it is you listen stuff you missed in History.
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
(40:09):
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
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