Michel’s gravesite, which became a place of pilgrimage. Credit: Offenbacherjung - CC BY-SA 3.0
Anneliese Michel weighed 31 kilograms when she was found dead in her bed in Klingenberg am Main on 1 July 1976. She was 23 years old and 1.66 metres tall. Between September 1975 and June 1976 priests had led 67 exorcism sessions with her under the Roman Ritual, with the permission of the Bishop of Würzburg, and the last one took place the day before she died. The autopsy recorded severe malnutrition, with pneumonia in her final phase.
Father Arnold Renz ran a tape recorder from the second session onward, and recordings of the sessions still circulate online.
Excerpt from a circulating recording of the Anneliese Michel exorcism sessions, Klingenberg am Main, 1975 to 1976. The audio contains screaming and may disturb some listeners:
Accounts put their number at more than forty. On them, several voices give their names as Lucifer, Cain, Judas, Nero, Hitler and Fleischmann, a priest of the 16th century. Some listeners hear something that cannot be human. Others hear a person in severe distress. This article traces the belief behind those sessions to its earliest written sources, then checks the best known cases against the records and against what medicine now says.
Michel had a seizure diagnosis six years before the first exorcism
Her first seizure came in September 1968, when she was 16. After another in August 1969, an EEG led to a diagnosis of a seizure disorder, later described as temporal lobe epilepsy with psychosis. From autumn 1970 she was prescribed anticonvulsants, including carbamazepine, although it is unclear how regularly she took them. Accounts of her illness describe demonic faces appearing while she prayed and an inability to bear sacred objects.
Equipment used to monitor and record EEG and electro-oculographic (EOG) activity during astronauts’ sleep. NASA, 1970.
Her parents first asked Bishop Josef Stangl of Würzburg for an exorcism in 1973, and he declined. In August 1975 he allowed Father Ernst Alt to perform a minor exorcism. On 16 September 1975 he ordered the full rite, which Father Renz began on 24 September.
During the sessions Michel stopped eating and made repeated genuflections until her knees gave way. Reports describe her drinking her own urine and eating insects. From mid-April 1976 she could not leave her bed. No doctor was called, and the court later found that one should have been.
On 21 April 1978 the regional court in Aschaffenburg convicted her parents and both priests of negligent homicide. Each received a six-month sentence, suspended for three years. Proceedings against the bishop had been dropped in July 1977. Her grave in Klingenberg is still visited by pilgrims.
The rest of this article follows the belief back to a Babylonian tablet and a late Egyptian stela, then checks Loudun, the Maryland boy and the Gary case against the records and against what medicine says today. The full article is for paid subscribers.
