Anneliese Michel: The Exorcism Death Behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Somewhere in a Bavarian farmhouse in 1975, a twenty-three-year-old woman is refusing food, snarling in voices her family does not recognize, and telling two priests she is inhabited by Lucifer, Cain, Judas, Nero, and Hitler. Her name is Anneliese Michel, and the recordings the priests make of these sessions still exist. So do her medical records, and the two accounts do not agree.

Michel was a devout Catholic student in Klingenberg who began having seizures in 1968. Doctors diagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy and later depression, and she spent years on anticonvulsants and antipsychotics with little relief. As the medication failed, her symptoms turned religious: she could not bear the sight of crucifixes, she believed she was damned, she heard voices telling her she would rot in hell. By her early twenties she and her family had concluded that the problem was not neurological but spiritual.

From clinic to ritual

In 1975 the Bishop of Wurzburg authorized an exorcism under the old Rituale Romanum. Fathers Arnold Renz and Ernst Alt conducted sessions across roughly ten months — some sixty-seven in all, one or two a week. Michel stopped eating, injured her knees genuflecting hundreds of times a day, and grew steadily weaker. She died on July 1, 1976, of malnutrition and dehydration. She weighed around thirty kilograms.

The court that followed did not litigate demons. It litigated negligence. In 1978 Michel's parents and both priests were convicted of negligent homicide for withdrawing medical care and food from a dying woman. The judges accepted that everyone involved believed sincerely in the possession; sincerity was not the question. The question was that a treatable, starving patient had been prayed over instead of hospitalized.

Two languages for one death

The clinical reading is coherent. Temporal lobe epilepsy can produce exactly the cluster Michel showed: convulsions, hyper-religiosity, hallucinations, a sense of external control. Add years of ineffective drugs, a deeply religious upbringing, and a family that framed her decline as demonic, and you have a self-reinforcing spiral that folie a deux describes well. The horror is ordinary and preventable, which is its own kind of horror.

The religious reading did not die with the verdict. Renz maintained to the end of his life that Michel was genuinely possessed and that the tapes proved it. Some who have heard the recordings describe voices and languages they find hard to attribute to a starving epileptic; skeptics counter that distress, suggestion, and role are powerful and that xenoglossy claims rarely survive scrutiny. What is not in dispute is that a young woman convinced she was fighting Satan starved to death while people who loved her held rosaries.

Hollywood took the outline and made it franchise. The Exorcism of Emily Rose in 2005 moved the story to America and turned the courtroom into the drama, and Requiem the same year stayed closer to the German original. Both borrow the residue the verdict could not resolve.

Readers have posted their own accounts below of what looked like possession in someone they knew, and they mark each case True, Fake, or Not sure. Weigh the medicine against the tapes and add your judgment.