St. Louis University Expert Talks About Exorcism On Campus

By Pat McGonigle KSDK St Louis MO Oct 29, 2012
Many consider the 1973 film “The Exorcist” the scariest movie of all time. If the mere thought of the famous flick gives you the chills, consider this: It’s directly based on a true incident that happened here in St. Louis.

“I mean there are witnesses,” said John Waide, archivist at Saint Louis University. “At least unwittingly became 40 different people over the months that this occurred who said, yes, those things did happen.”

The real story that inspired the famous book and movie happened in 1949. It began in Maryland, ended in St. Louis, and involved several Jesuits from Saint Louis University. [Click here to read more of the article from KSDK St. Louis]

Commentary:  The unidentified male juvenile who is now known to the world as Roland or sometimes Robbie Doe [1] unwittingly became the inspiration for the book and screen play: The Exorcist.  The details of this case have been argued and skeptics have even tried to debunk the case, so as to give credibility to their claim that demonic possession does not exist.  Admittedly motion pictures such as the Exorcist do overly dramatize events, however there has been countless testimonies given by educated, objective professionals that indicate that possession does happen and bizarre seemingly unbelievable events do actually take place.

[Click here to read the PDF of a diary a Priest involved kept of the Exorcism that inspired Blatty to write the Exorcist]

The exorcism of Roland Doe refers to events surrounding the supposed possessed status and exorcism of an anonymous American boy, which occurred in the late 1940s. Roland Doe (born circa 1936) is the pseudonym assigned to the exorcized boy by the Catholic Church. Later the pseudonym was changed by author Thomas B. Allen to “Robbie Mannheim”. The events reported in the media of the time and the subsequent supernatural claims surrounding those events went on to inspire the 1971 novel The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty and the 1973 film of the same name, as well as Thomas B. Allen’s 1993 historical account Possessed, a second edition of it in 1999, and the 2000 film by the same name, based on Allen’s book. (from Exorcism of Roland Doe, Wikipedia.)