"
By Eric T. Hansen Special to The Washington Post
BERLIN -- The first person to recognize that Anneliese Michel was possessed
by demons was an older woman accompanying the girl on a pilgrimage. She noticed
that Anneliese would not walk past a certain image of Jesus, refused to drink
water ..."
By Eric T. Hansen Special to The Washington Post
BERLIN -- The first person to recognize that Anneliese Michel was possessed
by demons was an older woman accompanying the girl on a pilgrimage. She noticed
that Anneliese would not walk past a certain image of Jesus, refused to drink
water from a holy spring and smelled bad -- hellishly bad. An exorcist in a
nearby town examined Michel and returned a diagnosis of demonic possession. The
bishop issued permission to perform the rite of exorcism according to the Roman
ritual of 1614.Half a year and 67 rites of exorcism later, Michel was dead at 23.Anneliese Michel did not die in the Middle Ages, but in 1976, in the small
town of Klingenberg, in the heart of one of the most civilized and advanced
countries in Europe: Germany. Though
set in America in the present, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," which stars Tom
Wilkinson as the priest who performed the exorcism and Laura Linney as his
defense lawyer, is based on Michel's story and focuses not on the sensational
exorcism itself but on the court case that followed.
Two years after Michel's death, a German court found her parents and the two
priests involved guilty of negligent manslaughter and sentenced them to six
months in prison, suspended with three years' probation. What shocked Germany most was the fact that it could happen in a country that
prides itself on being highly rational -- and highly secularized. "The surprising thing was that the people connected to Michel were all
completely convinced that she had really been possessed," says Franz Barthel,
amazement still in his voice three decades after he covered the story for the
regional daily paper Main-Post."Many years later, I visited the woman who first diagnosed the Devil," Barthel says. "She blessed my microphone with holy water because I was working
for the radio then, and it was likely that the Devil was in control of the
microphone." Michel was raised in a strict Catholic family in Bavaria, which rejected the
reforms of Vatican II and flirted with religious fringe groups. While other kids
her age were rebelling against authority and experimenting with sex, she tried
to atone for the sins of wayward priests and drug addicts by sleeping on a bare
floor in the middle of winter.According to court findings, she experienced her first epileptic attack in
1969, and by 1973 was suffering from depression and considering suicide. Soon
she was seeing the faces of demons on the people and things around her, and
voices told her she was damned....
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By Eric T. Hansen Special to The Washington Post
Exorcisms in big demand
A look at spirit possession
US supreme court may hear exorcism case
Autistic Boy Dies During 'Exorcism'
