A 13-Year-Old American Boy Underwent 30 Catholic Exorcism Rituals In A Locked St Louis Hospital Room In 1949. The Jesuits Who Performed It Kept A 26-Page Diary. The Diary Survives. The Case Inspired The Exorcist.
On Easter Monday, the eighteenth of April, 1949, in a locked fifth-floor isolation room of the Catholic Alexian Brothers Hospital in St Louis, Missouri, three American Catholic Jesuit priests, Father William Bowdern, Father Walter Halloran, and Father Raymond Bishop, performed for the thirtieth time in six weeks the Roman Catholic Rite of Exorcism on a thirteen-year-old American boy lying on an iron-framed Catholic hospital bed. This time, the rite ended the case.
The boy was known publicly only by the pseudonym Roland Doe. He was a thirteen-year-old American Lutheran from Cottage City, Maryland, near Washington D.C. In January 1949 he had begun reporting loud noises, furniture sliding across the floor, scratches appearing on his body, his bed lifting from the floor, and Catholic Latin phrases he had never been taught.
His family called Lutheran ministers, who referred them to a Catholic priest. Father Edward Hughes of the Catholic parish of Saint James in Mount Rainier, Maryland attempted the first Catholic exorcism at Georgetown University Hospital in late February 1949. According to Father Hughes's account, a section of bedspring snapped free during the rite and slashed his arm. The exorcism was abandoned. The boy was moved to relatives in St Louis.
In St Louis, the case passed to the Catholic Jesuits Father William Bowdern, Father Walter Halloran, and Father Raymond Bishop of the Society of Jesus. Over six weeks they performed approximately thirty separate exorcism rituals on the boy in a locked fifth-floor isolation room of the Alexian Brothers Hospital. Father Bishop typed a twenty-six-page contemporaneous diary. The diary records the boy's bed sliding across the floor, vials of Catholic holy water shattering, and the word LOUIS appearing in raised red abrasions on the boy's skin.
On Easter Monday the boy reported a vision of Saint Michael the Archangel. The case ended that night. The boy graduated from a Jesuit high school, married, and worked his entire career at NASA. He died in May 2020. Only then was his real name released: Ronald Hunkeler. The diary survives at the Maryland Province Jesuit Archives. William Peter Blatty, then a Georgetown student, used the case twenty-two years later as the basis for The Exorcist.
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