Stay away from occultist aunts and ouija boards!
One of the Jesuits involved in the exorcism was our dorm chaplain at SLU. He told us that an angel appeared in the choir loft of the college church when the demon was cast out.
I stay far, far away from the occult. That stuff is dangerous. It’s deadly, most people don’t really know how deadly it can be. I have learned to shun All Hallows Eve.
My grandmother was a so called spiritualist, not sure things ended up so well for her soul.
To this day, I get spooky dreams and I am 51, soon to be 52.i am a man of the woods (slide:Had bigfoots chunk rocks at me, seen weird things in the sky, but the spirit stuff chills my bones.
The boy’s family lived in Cottage City, MD, between the DC line and the Anacostia River and between Bladensburg Road and Rhode Island Avenue. Bladensburg is directly across the river. Back in a more gracious era, it was a trolley line suburb, served by the Rhode Island Avenue Trolley that ran from DC up to Hyattsville and College Park.
The boy had been suspended from Bladensburg Junior High School for his odd behavior. The family was Lutheran. The father was a career government employee, back in the era of the civil service exams, so he was presumptively reasonably competent and had good medical coverage by the standards of the time. One of the unexplained oddities of the case is why the Lutheran pastor referred them to the local Catholic priest. Perhaps the pastor and priest were simply good friends. But this still strikes me as quite unLutheranlike behavior. “Hey, I’ve got a tough case here, so I’d better call the Catholics” is not the response I’d expect from a Lutheran pastor.
As I understand the story, the boy’s mother was the true believer that he had been possessed. The father was apparently never convinced. The Lutheran pastor may have also been unconvinced, but the priest saw it differently and started the process for exorcism.
It would be fascinating to know the details. This is not a case of Father O’Gullible out in the back of beyond trying to deal with something above his paygrade. This started in 1949 in a just-across-the-city-line suburb of Washington, DC. Catholic University with its phalanx of seminaries and theologians is 2.5 miles away. The boy had been suspended by the local school officials. In addition to the neighborhood pastor and priest, he was seen by doctors and psychiatrists. The exorcism was started in the Georgetown University Hospital, so he was seen by more docs and shrinks there. I don’t know how tight the Catholic protocols on authorizing exorcisms were in 1949, but big league expert resources were available.
The GU exorcism was halted after the boy yanked a coil spring out of his rollaway hospital bed and stabbed a priest. The mother then took him to St. Louis, where she had family. The point that intrigues me here is that this created a Team A/Team B situation. They go to St. Louis: a different archdiocese, different bishop, different priests, doctors, and psychiatrists. Team B concurred with Team A and continued the exorcism, which was very extended but ultimately successful.
One of my good friends is an argumentative agnostic tending towards atheism. He is a radical skeptic on such matters. He insists that the supposed “victims” either have some extreme psychiatric condition or are faking the symptoms for their own gratification/amusement. But in this case, the boy was 13 years old when it all started. There were a lot of adult eyes on him, many of them very sophisticated in different fields, with two independent teams reaching the same conclusion. What exactly were they seeing?
“Your momma sews socks that smell!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8dKnFU5LUE
A key warning is in this paragraph about the dangers of Ouija boards.
“His aunt from St. Louis introduced him to Spiritualism, the occult. After she died, he tried to contact her with a Ouija board. That is when strange things started to happen in his family’s home.”
Here is a man’s experience with Ouija boards and the dangers of them: Limit The Effects — When and why I quit using the Ouija Board. (1964-03) http://bswett.com/1964-03LimitEffects.html
I also recall a priest in college telling me that the story behind the Exorcist was real, as he knew the priests involved in it. He said that the movie put in things to ‘grab the audience’ that didn’t happen, but it was a true case of possession by a demon.
For anyone interested in digging a bit into the matter, focusing on Frs. Bowdern and Halloran, check out “Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism” by Thomas Allen. It’s taken from the diary accounts, is pretty well written, and quite interesting on a few levels. Interestingly, it also mentions some of the things folks here are talking about, i.e, the appearance of an angel at the possession’s end and the locked room in the chapel.
Thank you for posting this article about a very current and relevant topic.
I have seen his house outside DC.