The Planets Most Haunted!

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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Ghosts are generally associated with family castles, predominantly in Great Britain. However, our reporters found out that there are many ghosts in Russia. Capitals have the majority of them, however, there are also many ghosts in Russian province, local legends and people say.

Моscow: Little remained from ancient Moscow, except for the Kremlin. Ghosts love the Kremlin.  From time to time, a red spot appears on the walls of Konstantino-Eleninskaya tower where a torture chamber was located in XVII century. A pale uncombed lady holding a gun in her hands, lives in Komendantskaya tower. This is famous Fanny Kaplan who attempted to kill Lenin and who was executed by shooting by Kremlin’s superintendent Malkov. A terrifying shadow of Ivan the Terrible is walking on the bell tower named after Ivan the Great. Czar Dmitry Pretender appears on the Kremlin’s wall. Last time he was seen there in August 1991. The might-have-been czar was gesticulating and giving some signs to people. The prophecy was understood only in the morning, after a coup happened and the plotters read their address on the radio. And the ghost of Stalin’s special services chief Ezhov is not interested in politics. He just walks around the Patriarch Chambers where his apartments were located before. Even in the corridors of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses one can encounter semi-transparent figures dressed in shrouds.  Don’t think that they are deputies who were exhausted to death at the boring Congresses! At one point, there was a cemetery here, and the souls of the dead people are indignant about the sacrilege.

St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg is a mystical city, ghosts can frequently be encountered there. A little invisible lady lives on the Troitskaya Square near Peter the Great’s house. In Mikhailovsky Castle, there is a ghost of the murdered emperor Pavel I. The ghost of the first director of the Academy of Arts, architect Kokorin is wondering around the Academy’s corridors...

Two photographs taken at different times during tours at Edinburgh"s Mary King"s Close seem to show a familiar extra. Staff at one of Edinburgh’s spookiest tourist attractions have been left mystified after a ghostly figure showed up in the photographs of two separatetourists.

Both photos appear to show one person more than expected and staff believe that on close inspection, the ghostly figure appears to be the same woman.

View: Full article | Source: STV

A security worker has taken a photograph of a possible apparition in an old house in southern Romania. Manuela Chirosca, a local security worker was guarding an old building, no. 29 on Ana Aslan Street, constructed in late 19th century. “I was going for the window of a room whichwas probably a bedroom or something like that.

I approached the window and then I saw a tall feminine shape that seemed wreathed in a white veil. My first reaction was to get back and run away as fast as I can!”

View: Full article | Source: Astigan.com