The Exorcist is often called the most frightening film ever made, and William Peter Blatty, who wrote both the 1971 novel and the screenplay, always maintained that it grew from a real case. It did, though almost nothing about the film’s surface matches it. Blatty was a student at Georgetown in the summer of 1949 when the Washington Post carried a front-page story by Bill Brinkley under the headline “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip”. He noticed the Jesuit connection, kept the story, and two decades later moved it to Georgetown and changed the child to a girl. The boy at the centre of it was thirteen, he did not live in Mount Rainier, and the rituals that made him famous were performed more than eight hundred miles away in St Louis. For seventy-two years he was known only by the pseudonyms the Church and the press used for him, Roland Doe and Robbie Mannheim.
The story as his family told it, and as it reached the priests, began in January 1949 at the family home in Cottage City, a small Maryland community next to Mount Rainier. A favourite aunt, a spiritualist, had shown him how to use a Ouija board; she died that same month, and the disturbances in the house were afterwards understood as having followed from that. Scratching and dripping sounds came from inside the walls. Furniture was said to move. His bed shook. Marks appeared on his skin, and one of them was read as the word LOUIS, which the family took as an instruction to go to their relatives in Missouri. Every element of that sequence reaches us through the family, through a diary the priests compiled from their own and each other’s recollections, and through four decades of retelling on top of both. No independent record confirms any of it, and the investigator who later went through the case in most detail found much of what is repeated as fact to be hearsay.
The Horror
Doctors and psychiatrists found nothing physically wrong with the boy. The family’s Lutheran pastor, Luther Miles Schulze, who had a long-standing interest in parapsychology, could not help either, and they turned to the Catholic Church. In the version of events told for decades, Father E. Albert Hughes of St James in Mount Rainier attempted an exorcism at Georgetown University Hospital in late February, heard the boy address him in Latin, and was injured in the process. That episode is the part of the story that has held up worst. Mark Opsasnick, working through parish records, press accounts and surviving neighbours, found no evidence that Hughes ever visited the house, arranged a hospital admission, or was hurt.
What is documented is what happened in Missouri. On 16 March 1949 Archbishop Joseph Ritter gave Father William Bowdern permission to perform the rite, and for more than a month the sessions ran almost nightly. They moved between a relative’s house in the northwestern suburbs, the old rectory of St Francis Xavier College Church on the Saint Louis University campus, where the boy was received into the Catholic Church on 1 April, and a locked room at the Alexian Brothers Hospital in the south of the city, chosen for its discretion. Father Raymond Bishop kept the diary. Walter Halloran, then a young Jesuit in training, drove the party and held the boy down.
The diary records a violently shaking bed, marks appearing on the skin, objects in motion, cursing in a voice the priests found unlike the child’s, and spitting and vomiting at the men praying over him. The one physical detail confirmed outside the diary by a participant is the plainest one: the boy broke Halloran’s nose. Halloran, who was in the room more often than almost anyone, spent the rest of his life declining to say what it meant. Asked directly whether he would state that the boy had been possessed, he answered that he could not go on record, that he had never made an absolute statement about any of it, because he did not feel qualified to. The claim that the boy answered fluently in ancient languages he had never studied is not supported by the priests’ own written account, and the sceptical reading of the case, argued most fully by Joe Nickell and by Thomas Allen himself, is that nothing reliably reported was beyond what a distressed and clever teenager could produce.
It ended on Easter Monday, 18 April 1949. Bishop’s diary closes the matter in a flat clerical sentence: since Monday at eleven at night, there had been no indication of the presence of the devil. The boy went home, and the Jesuits, who kept in touch for several years, recorded that nothing came back. He married around 1970 and had three children. He joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in February 1962, worked in its spacecraft technology division on heat-resistant ceramic compounds, appeared in a 1964 Goddard newsletter for that work, and retired in 2001 after nearly forty years. Press accounts crediting him with the Apollo heat shields put it more loosely than the record supports. He never spoke publicly about 1949. A colleague later said he left his house every Halloween, in case anyone worked out where he lived. He died at home in Maryland on 10 May 2020, aged eighty-four, after a stroke.
The Modern Relic
The relic is the paperwork, because the buildings have gone. The rectory was pulled down in 1966 and the hospital wing that held the locked room was razed in 1978. What survived is Bishop’s diary, guarded closely for decades and then, from 1993, the spine of Thomas B. Allen’s book Possessed, which remains the source everyone else works from. Allen’s own conclusion, after all of it, was that the boy had been deeply disturbed and nothing more. Against that sits Opsasnick’s twenty-six-page investigation for Strange Magazine, “The Haunted Boy of Cottage City”, which established that the famous Mount Rainier house had nothing to do with the case, that the family lived in Cottage City all along, and that the neighbours who remembered the boy described a clever and difficult child who frightened his mother on purpose.
The last part of the record to open was his name. In December 2021, a year after his death, an investigator published it in Skeptical Inquirer, and the mainstream press carried it. It is not set down here. He spent seventy years making certain nobody could do what has now been done, he left three children behind him, and nothing in this story is better understood for knowing what he was called. The most quoted line attributed to him is not a confession of anything supernatural in any case. According to an account given by a long-term companion — traceable, in what could be retrieved here, only to a volunteer-compiled memorial page, so weak evidence — what he said about the whole affair, long afterwards, was that he had just been a bad boy.
