On the eighteenth of August, 1928, in a quiet Franciscan convent on a low hillside above the Iowa cornfields at Earling, Iowa, a sixty-year-old German-American Capuchin friar from Wisconsin closed the convent chapel doors and began the longest documented Catholic exorcism in American history. It lasted, in three sessions, twenty-three days. It was witnessed and signed for by named priests, named nuns, and a sitting Catholic bishop. The published account is in the Library of Congress.

The subject was Anna Ecklund, a forty-six-year-old German-American Catholic laywoman who had first shown the documented symptoms at age fourteen in 1908. She had been exorcised once successfully by the same Capuchin friar in 1912 at Marathon, Wisconsin. The symptoms returned in 1927. Bishop Thomas Drumm of the Diocese of Des Moines personally authorised a second exorcism in 1928. The Franciscan Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration at Earling offered their convent. The exorcist was Father Theophilus Riesinger, Capuchin.

The exorcism took place in three sessions: the eighteenth to the twenty-sixth of August, the thirteenth to the twentieth of September, and the fifteenth to the twenty-third of December, 1928. The convent register names the witnesses: Father Joseph Steiger, parish priest of Earling; the Mother Superior of the convent and seven Franciscan sisters; Father Theophilus himself; and on three occasions Bishop Drumm. The witnesses signed sworn affidavits. By their account she spoke fluent Latin, ancient Greek, and Aramaic, none of which she had ever learned. Her body bloated to twice its size and rose from the bed. She vomited unnatural quantities daily despite refusing all food. Convent objects flew. The chapel altar candles burned in unusual colours. She named the demons inhabiting her: Beelzebub, and the spirits of her own deceased father and an aunt.

The exorcism concluded on the evening of the twenty-third of December, 1928, with what the witnesses recorded as the audible departure of the demons. Anna Ecklund recovered, returned to ordinary life, and died in Wisconsin in 1941, free of further symptoms. Father Steiger and Father Theophilus each signed sworn accounts. The convent diary is in the Franciscan Sisters' archive. Father Carl Vogl published the case in German in 1935 as Begone Satan! The original signed affidavits remain in the Diocese of Des Moines.

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