The Truth Behind the Exorcism of Anneliese Michel

NOVEMBER 1, 2019- Since 1973's landmark horror film The Exorcist, possessed people and the priests who try to help them have been such a common trope in movies and TV it's easy to forget exorcism is a real practice that continues to be performed on real people to this day It's not just a thing from horror movies, and it's not just a thing from the Middle Ages. As you read this, someone is probably being exorcised somewhere in the world at this very moment. 

A stark reminder of this harrowing real-life tale of Anneliese Michel, a young woman who died in the throes of an unholy number of exorcisms. This didn't happen in some pre-Enlightenment era or in some third would country. It happened in 1976 in German, a country considered one of the more rational and advanced countries in Europe. The story of how this could happen and the sensational aftermath serve as a chilling reminder of just how real the practice of exorcism remains. 

Although the story of Anneliese Michel sounds like the kind of terrifying thing that occurred regularly in pre-modern eras like the burn-at-the-stake-happy Middle Ages, the fact is this horrifying scenario took place less than 50 years ago. Anneliese Michel was born in the small town of Klingenberg, Bavaria, in Western Germany in 1952 and met her tragic end at age 23 in 1976.

Michel was born into an extremely devout Catholic family. As Michel's mother told The Telegraph in 2005, the mother had a child out of wedlock in 1948, bringing such shame on her family that she was made to wear black on her wedding day. The mother tried so hard to atone for her sin that she went to great extremes with her piety by the time Anneliese was born, rejecting the reforms the Catholic church brought on with Vatican II. Additionally, her father had considered becoming a priest and three of her aunts were nuns. As a result, Anneliese, a naturally sensitive girl, felt pressured to atone for the sins of others around her, including sleeping on the floor as penance for drug addicts who themselves slept on the ground at the train stations or elsewhere. This family setting would only serve as a launchpad for a real-life nightmare by the time Anneliese was diagnosed with both physical and mental disorders as a teenager. 

Anneliese began experiencing blackouts at the age of 16 in 1968. At first, she would walk around in a trance, unaware of what she was doing, or wet the bed. Soon she was experiencing convulsions. A neurologist diagnosed her with temporal lobe epilepsy, which causes seizures, memory loss, and hallucinations. Furthermore, it can cause a disorder known as Geschwind syndrome, which causes one to act in an excessively religious manner. She began to take medication for her epilepsy and enrolled in the University of Wurzburg in 1973. However, despite the treatment she was receiving, her condition worsened and she fell into a deep depression and considered suicide. She heard voices telling her she was damned and saw the face of the devil all around her. IT was then she became convinced she was possessed by a demon. 

got considerably worse than just not being able to walk past a picture of Jesus or hearing voices. Soon Anneliese was compulsively doing hundreds of squats and genuflections a day- 400 to 600 by most accounts- until she eventually ruptured the ligaments in her knees. At one point she crawled under a table and stayed there, barking like a dog, for two days. She ate spiders and coal, and bit the head off of a dead bird. Her screaming could be heard for hours at a stretch through the walls, and she also known to urinate on the floor then lick it. None of this seemed like normal teenage behavior, and Anneliese's family wanted to seek further psychiatric treatment for their daughter, but Anneliese refused, begging for religious intercession. Perhaps influenced by the hugely successful then-new film The Exorcist, Anneliese demanded an exorcism of her own. 

In 1975, she got her wish. The local bishop, Josef Stangl, approved Anneliese's third request after she received support from a priest named Ernest Alt who believed her condition was more than just epilepsy and hallucinations. The bishop assigned Pastor Arnold Renz to work together with Father Alt to perform an exorcism rite from 1614 under the condition they did so in total secret. 

The rite of exorcism was performed on Anneliese Michel for the first- but by no means the last-time by Father Renz on September 24, 1975. Over the course of her various sessions with the priest, Annelise revealed the names of many of the more notable demons who possessed her. As it turns out, her body was something like a VIP section for the damned. Souls you would probably have thought of as evil-doing humans rather than proper demons, contended for dominance within her. According to The Washington Post, Anneliese served as a host to the souls of history's greatest villains; Cain, Judas, Nero, Lucifer, and Hitler, among others. These dark souls would speak through Anneliese, intoning evil wisdom and even dunking on each other, Hitler-who, according to Anneliese's mother, would speak with an appropriately Austrian accent- would declare that people are stupid as pigs, which does seem consistent with his philosophy. Meanwhile, Judas would retort Hitler was not actually a big deal in Hell but just talked a big game. No word on whether Judas spoke with an Aramaic accent, but it does make sense he would not be impressed with Hitler's antisemitism. 

Furthermore, Buzzfeed claims one of Annelieses's demons was excommunicated priest Valentin Fleischmann, and even though Anneliese should not have known anything about him, she was able to provide accurate details of the naughty behavior that got him booted from the church. 

Over the course of nine months, sessions lasting up to four hours were held once or twice a week in an attempt to drive Judas and company out of Anneliese Michel. All told, as the Washington Post explains, Anneliese was subjected to a total of 67 exorcisms. This, by any metric is a lot. Father Renz allowed some of the sessions to be recorded, and some 42 hours of audio of the exorcism of Anneliese Michel still exists, and what those tapes contain is horrifying. 

Michel's voice on the recordings is unhuman and demon-like. She gurgles, growls, hisses, and spits obscenities in between sessions of Judas and Hitler arguing and explicating the terrors of Hell. The Post notes that Michel's voice on these tapes sounds remarkably like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist, but your mileage may vary on that. During these sessions, even as Anneliese wasted away physically, she exhibited what witnesses described as superhuman strength, and her behavior would become so violent that she would have to be held down, chained to her chair, or otherwise restrained so that the priests would be able to continue performing their rites. It was around this time that Anneliese broke all the bones and ripped all the tendons in her knees from kneeling so much. Honestly, being chained down might have been the preferable alternative to all that. 

sacrificing her own life on behalf of the rebellious youth and sinful priests she considered to be plaguing the modern era. By this point she had requested not to be medically treated for her epilepsy any longer, relying fully on the priests' exorcisms, and had stopped eating all together, planning to starve herself to death to atone for the sins of others. 

The Telegraph says by the spring of 1976, Anneliese was emaciated and had contracted pneumonia. Exhausted from the brutal exorcism sessions, suffering from a fever, and weakened from not eating. Anneliese Michel died of starvation and dehydration on July 1, 1976, weighing a mere 68 pounds, at just 23 years of age. The end of Anneliese's life, however, was hardly the end of the story. 

If you find yourself feeling angry Anneliese's parents and the priests would be so irresponsible as to let a young woman slowly starve to death in front of their eyes for basically no reason, don't worry: you're not alone. As Skeptoid explains, Annaliese's parents and both Father Alt and Father Renz were arrested and charged with negligent homicide for failing to get Anneliese the necessary medical care in her final days. While it was recognized Anneliese's organ failure was inevitable towards the end, experts found Anneliese could have been saved even a week before her death with the most basic medical care. However, the prosecution recognized the Michels had pursued practically every possible avenue to help their daughter and asked the court to charge the priests a find and find the parents guilty but give them no punishment as they had suffered enough. 

To give this already sensational trial an even more lurid edge, the Michels had Anneliese's body exhumed before the trial because a nun had told them she had had a vision. Anneliese's body was incorrupt in the grave. If this turned out to be true, it would be evidence something supernatural truly was afoot and the exorcism was warranted. Suffice it to say, the body turned out to have followed the natural course of decomposition. 

In the Anneliese Michel trial, more was at stake than merely the guilt of two parents and two priests. As The Washington Post explains, the trial also served as a referendum of sorts on the issue of science and reason versus religion. In comparison to some other European nations, Germany is considered highly rational and secular. For example, in Italy nearly half a million exorcisms are performed each year, and about one fifth of the world's practicing exorcists live in France. By comparison, Germany has only two or three practicing exorcists, who perform in secret under the bishop's approval. Even among baptized Christians in Germany, about one third of Catholics and half of Protestants don't believe in life after death. 

As such, as a country that prides itself on secularism, German officials didn't want to be seen going on the record as considering the presence of the Devil as a legitimate defense. At the same time, the Church has a vested interest in maintaining Satan is real; if demons don't exist and priests can't exhibit control over them in the name of Christ, elements of the Bible come into doubt, which could lead an already secular nation into questioning religion even more. While the court did hear the arguments in favor of Anneliese's possession, in general the case was handled in a way that downplayed the existence of the Devil.