The Documented Case The Exorcist was Based On

It was decided to exorcise the boy. For 35 days, three Jesuit priests and an Episcopal priest and a Lutheran minister performed at least twenty exorcisms.

Douglass' body would jerk violently. He had supernatural strength and spat in the exorcists' eyes. The attacks abated and, after he returned home, they disappeared.

Father Walter Halloran, a Jesuit Priest and the last living exorcist who performed the rite on Douglass, died on March 9th of this year. According to what he said during an interview, Father William S. Bowden asked him to help with the exorcism. It was performed at Alexian Brothers Hospital. The boy would get violent and the elder priest needed someone strong to help him. One day, Douglass, in a violent fit, broker Father Halloran's nose.

According to Wilson, the boy replied to the rite of exorcism in Latin. This could have happened. I have not read this in other accounts. It is Wilson's reasoning as to why the boy could speak in Latin that I have a problem with. According to this author, Douglass could have unconsciously picked up the language at "mass" at church. He wrote that the parents appealed to their Lutheran minister for help. Lutherans do not have mass and they do not and did not, in 1949, conduct services in Latin. According to all accounts I have read, the boy was Lutheran.

Schultz contacted J. B. Rhine was the director of the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. Rhine and his wife, Louisa, also a parapsychologist drove to Washington to talk to Schultz about the case. By this time, the phenomena had ceased, so the Rhines could not make personal evaluations.

The Deens, the Rev. Schultz and the exorcists were convinced Douglass was possessed. Rhine differed. He believed that the boy was expressing his unconscious ability to affect matter, PK, psychokinesis, the ability of the mind to affect matter which is the phenomena that occurs in poltergeist cases.

It is possible that Douglass could have been a human agent poltergeist. The second and third stages of possession, infestation and obsession are poltergeist activity.

The trances, coughing up of phlegm and drooling are characteristic of possession. And, if Wilson is correct about the boy speaking in Latin, speaking in unknown languages is also characteristic of possession.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen, The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. ISBN: 0-8160-2846-X

Wilson, Colin, Poltergeist. ISBN: 0-87542-883-5.

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