The True Story Behind "The Exorcist"

 “The Exorcist”, one of the scariest movies ever made was based on a real life exorcism that took place in St. Louis in 1949. Supernatural historian Troy Taylor investigated the actual exorcism. This included him speaking with eye witnesses to the harrowing events that took place, the possessed child himself, and the priests who exorcised the demon from him. Troy reveals all in his interview with Stan Mallow on Paranormal Yakker.

Chapters

• 0:00 Troy Taylor Interview On Paranormal Yakker
• 0:55 Origins Of The Exorcist
• 4:24 The Demon Who Possessed Ronald Hunkeler
• 10:02 Moving The Possessed Child From Negative Environment
• 11:06 Demon Remains With Possessed Child
• 14:43 Exorcism Rituals
• 17:13 The Truth of Disturbing Scenes in The Exorcist Movie
• 19:57 The Exorcist – Separating Fact From Fiction
• 24:17 Life After Exorcism of A Demon
• 26:02 Where to Buy The Devil Came to St Louis

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone, I'm Stan Mallow. Welcome to Paranormal Yakker. My guest today is best-selling author Troy Taylor& he's also the founder of American Hauntings Ink, which offers books, events, & ghost tours, owns the American Oddities Museum in Alton, Illinois,& is a writer& co-host of the American Hauntings Podcast. I'll be talking with Troy about his book, The Devil Came to St Louis, which is the uncensored true story of a 1949 exorcism that took place in St Louis & made worldwide headlines. It's currently under option to be turned into a film by a major production company. I wish you luck on that. Troy Taylor, welcome to Paranormal Yakker. Thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to it. The movie The Exorcist was based on the book with the same title written by William Peter Blatty. To this day it's considered one of the scariest movies ever made. Your book, The Devil Came to St Louis, explores in detail the real life case that inspired the book& the movie. You, Troy, are a supernatural historian& researched the demonic possession of the child you write about for over 20 years. What was there about the case that so enthralled you that it resulted in you devoting such an incredible amount of your time& energy to it? I've been fascinated with The Exorcist anyway. It's a great film & I'd read the book when I was quite young, younger than I probably should have, but I have always enjoyed it so much. I live right across the river from St Louis in Illinois where I didn't grow up here but I've been here quite a while. When I started to find that there was a real story that had happened in St Louis, it didn't start out there. It started out in Maryland, actually a suburb of DC called Cottage City. That's where it started, but the family was from St Louis. All their relatives were in St Louis. & I got interested in the story knowing that it had happened there & really just sort of went on a little my own guided tour of some of the places that were still around & including the home where relatives of the family had lived. This is where they came to stay when they left Maryland& decided maybe going to St Louis might help with some of the problems they were running into& they thought, Well, let's try St Louis where we're from. So I went to the house. It was empty at the time& I started to find that had been sort of common thing for a number of years. There hadn't been a lot of people living in it. The last person who had lived in it before I had gone there had only lived there for a month before they moved out. These are the kind of breadcrumbs you like about a story. So I started digging into the history of that house really found the family's name. This would have been back in the late 90s. This was before anybody had any idea what his name was or anything like that. He'd always just been called Roland Doe. That was the name that the Catholic Church had given him to hide his identity & by finding out that the family that lived in that home, their name was Hunkeler. It wasn't hard for me to go to Cottage City, Maryland& find the Hunkeler home & find out the name of the boy who had been allegedly possessed back in 1949. So I just kind of went with the idea that I wanted to make sure that his privacy was protected.& eventually when I did an interview with him that was on the condition that it would continue to be protected as long as he was alive. The reason I use it now is because he passed away from a stroke in May of 2020. So it's been almost 5 years now. I put up a new edition of the book that could put in all the things that I couldn't put in before. I just got started out of curiosity honestly. That's what drew me to the story in the first place& I just kind of went from there & it took on a life of its own. While the actual exorcism of the demon who possessed Ronald Hunkeler. How do I say his last name again? Hunkeler? Hunkeler, yes. Hunkeler, yeah. Close to Hunkeler. The young boy who is the central figure in your book took place in St Louis, Missouri. The events that led up to it has its roots that you just said in a house he lived in, Cottage City, Maryland. Can you, Troy, tell me about some of those events that happened in the Maryland home? It was started out January 15, 1949. The family were able to nail it down to that's kind of when things began & that was with just kind of odds & ends noises, tapping strange sounds, scratching noises. Originally Ronnie's father, Edwin, thought that it maybe they had a mice infestation or something. Brough in an exterminator, couldn't find anything & then things sort of progressed from there & they all seem to kind of center around Ronald. The noises seem to be in his room under his floor. The sheets were being pulled off his bed. His bed was moving by itself, rocking, banging against the wall would roll out across the middle of the floor. Things started happening to school around the house& these were things that were witnessed by not just the immediate family but also Ronald lived there with his father, his mother,& his grandmother& they were seeing these things but so were friends, neighbors, relatives who were visiting. They were seeing these same things happening. It wasn't isolated to just the family& then when it happened at school with a desk one day that just sort of moved across the floor by itself, you know teachers became upset thinking that it was Ronald playing a prank. One of his friends that I interviewed who was there in the class that day swore to me that Ronald's feet were not even on the floor. He saw the desk move. Well the family not knowing what else to do decided to contact their minister who was a Lutheran. Edwin, & this gets complicated a bit. Edwin was a Catholic. The family had all been Catholics but Ronald's grandmother Anna had converted to Lutheran to be a Lutheran many years before & had raised Ronald's mother that way & had raised Ronald that way. So they contacted their Lutheran minister, explained to him what was going on. He didn't really take it very seriously because he just assumed that it was probably Ronnie playing pranks on his family. He did ask that Ronnie be checked out by mental health& physical health specialists, make sure there's nothing wrong with him& he was there at the house. He witnessed some of the things that were going on but even then he still wasn't convinced so he invited, took, taken Ronnie kind of out of his comfort zone, took him over to his house for the night & actually saw not only the bed move but saw a chair move that Ronnie was sitting in, that Ronnie couldn't have moved & even saw a pallet that Ronnie was lying on on the floor move all the way across the room while Ronnie was asleep. So he never did believe that it was something demonic. He never thought it was a possession or even an infestation. He thought that it was simply poltergeist activity, that it was being caused by Ronnie. In fact he had a correspondence with JB Rhine at Duke University who at that point was really specializing in testing for ESP & for psychokinesis & he believed he had a genuine case for him to examine but by the time Dr Rhine was able to get to Cottage City the family was already in St Louis but it would be Reverend Schultz that was his name, the Lutheran minister. It would be him that plays a major part in the story because even though he never believed in the possession he did believe that it was a poltergeist event & he wrote a paper on it & presented it to a group in Washington DC in August of ‘49 & mentioned that the boy had gone to St Louis for an exorcism that had been successful & the exorcism part is what really got the attention of the reporters that were there & so they wrote it up in the paper & for the next several days every paper in DC had a story about a poltergeist & an exorcism even though no one knew anything because no one was talking& it had been kept secret but it was those newspaper clippings that William Peter Blatty had picked up. He was a seminary student at Georgetown at the time & when he saw it he went to his advisor & asked him about it & his advisor said oh yeah you know I'd heard about this but I can't tell you any details because it's all kept very quiet & that's what would later 20 years later spur his interest in writing The Exorcist. So, those events in Maryland while not what I would call part of the I guess the beginning stages of what became a possession not as important as what happened in St Louis but without it we probably wouldn't be telling the story that we are but the family then did decide to pack up & go to St Louis after an incident occurred in the house one night when Ronald was in bed his mother was in the kitchen at a house on the opposite side of the house talking to a friend& explaining that they were thinking about going to see relatives in St Louis & at the same time they were having this discussion according to the family there were scratched lines that appeared on Ronnie's body. Now, this had happened before but in this particular case the lines of words had spelled out Louis& so they took that as a sign& that's how they ended up in St Louis. In an effort to remove her son from the negative environment that was manifesting itself in Maryland in their Maryland home Ronald's mother Odell moved the family to St Louis as you had said. Were any other places considered or St Louis was the place she wanted to take her son? I think St Louis that's where her & Edwin had met that's where her parents were from all their family was there. Aunt's, uncle's, everybody was in St Louis & so it wasn't so much that they thought well we could get help in St Louis it was that maybe we could leave this behind & go somewhere where because at this point while unnerving it wasn't anything particularly scary or violent it was just very strange I mean it wouldn't start to get more frightening until they got to St Louis& were staying with Edwin's brother & sister-in-law Leonard & Doris Hunkeler right in a kind of a suburb of St Louis & once they got there things started to get worse instead of better. Whatever demon possessed Ronald in Maryland remained with him when his family's move to St Louis I've already seen his mother realize that moving her son to a different location did not change anything he was still being possessed by a negative entity. The activity that was going on at the time really didn't qualify for an exorcism you know technically it couldn't have been a possession at that point because Ronnie a lot of the things that are needed for an official exorcism had not happened yet they eventually most of them would but I think what happened is that the family was getting very scared because things were moving around banging around at night Ronald was having these terrible nightmares were terrifying the entire family with all the screams& it was a lot of stuff that priests today who specialize in exorcisms would call an infestation. In other words it was something there following Ronald around trying to get inside of him & their thought most likely was to try& stop this again initially when the family got frightened one of the oldest daughter Ronnie's cousin Janice went to see her advisor at St Louis University& his name is Father Raymond Bishop. He was a Jesuit priest & he had come out to the house to pray with Ronnie to bless Ronnie & to see what was going on& then he witnessed the bed shaking on its own & it only stopped after he splashed it with holy water & I think that here's a guy it's 1949 St Louis Missouri Jesuit priest but with zero experience when it came to possession or exorcism or anything else. I don't really know that he had any idea of what to do. He went to see a friend of his slightly older or more of a mentor who was William Bowden who was another Jesuit priest & they went back together& then what they saw they went to the Archbishop to tell them what they'd seen. Again, not enough to qualify for an exorcism but certainly to invoke ritual prayers to get rid of this infestation even though neither man had any experience whatsoever in exorcisms or possessions or with demons or anything else they had to do kind of a crash course so that they could take care of this & try to handle this & which had to be again without much information to go by at the time pretty frightening. They were also told they have to keep it a secret because well it wasn't because the church was embarrassed or while it might have brought upset to the family they wanted to do it because at that particular moment St Louis was in the middle of a real kind of political upheaval involving the church. They were trying to desegregate all of the Catholic churches& schools in the city& they've taken a lot of flack for this. So, Archbishop Joseph Ritter was concerned that this would look bad to the enemies of the church. They're in the middle of doing a medieval ritual because should we be trusting these people with modern ideas about civil rights if they're doing things with medieval rituals so they decided to keep the whole thing very very quiet. They couldn't talk about where they were, what was happening. One of the reasons they chose to use the name Roland Doe to hide Ronnies & his family's identity the actual exorcism began March 16th of 1949 & things got progressively worse from there. What were some of the procedures & rituals performed on Ronald to exorcise the demon that was possessing him? It was fairly standard as far as I mean there is a ritual that is used for exorcism a specific prayer found in the ritual Romananum & so they would come & each night& again they had to do it at night not for anything spooky it's just that's the only time that the 2 priests & their assistant a man who would named Walter Halloran who at that time was just a kind of a student priest they brought him along he was a big strong guy who they thought they might need help to hold Ronnie down because they knew things could be violent sometimes & they would come each night& they would conduct the exorcism& sometimes things would go smoothly. Most the time they wouldn't once the exorcism began Ronnie would begin to act out& that was everything from violent contortions to seizures to screaming, howling, singing, barking like a dog saying horrible things using different voices. There's a reason that you see all these things in the movies is because it really happened & now they're adapting that for film because a lot of the things that that you see in a movie like The Exorcist did happen. Not all of it was quite so dramatic but there were reports even of levitations, nothing like up to the ceiling but Ronnie's body leaving the bed& the throws of the exorcism things like that & a lot of it just was very difficult to explain. Their assistant Walt Halloran I interviewed him toward the end of his life it quite got to know him spent quite a lot of time with them & he really filled in a lot of holes for me on the things that were happening because Father Bishop was hoping to write kind of a book or a manual about how to do an exorcism because there hadn't been any recent material so he wrote everything down in a diary, but he just made notes & it was he was going to flesh it out later into a book which he never did. Having Father Halloran there to be able to fill in some of the holes& plus there were things that Father Bishop didn't want to write down because they were just so vile & so obscene that they're not in writing. It's hard to know exactly what happened without talking to the witnesses& unfortunately there's none left I interviewed every living witness to the exorcism& there just aren't any more they're all gone now. In the movie The Exorcist there were a number of disturbing scenes which you spoke about this included the head of the possessed child, spinning, bed shaking, levitation which you said it happened, vomiting a green pea like slime on a priest& a crucifix stabbing. Did any of that really happened in the actual exorcism case you researched? There's a little it those things for the movie were exaggerated a little bit for film but this isn't the only case that Blatty used as an inspiration. There was one that had taken place back in the 1920s in Iowa which was even wilder. The accounts are even are not nearly as thorough but they're much wilder& it's lots of stuff of vomiting all kinds of things. Now, in Ronald's case there was the screaming, there was the violence, there were there was the objects moving the bed levitating off the moving off the floor. Several people spoke of that. I had a witness who was an Alexian monk who was there toward the end of the exorcism when they were at the Alexian Brothers Hospital in St Louis & he swore to me repeatedly that he saw Ronald levitate 12 inches off the bed swore to me I can't find any reason why he'd lie so an Alexian brother who'd spent his entire life just in service of other people who wanted to tell his story of what he'd seen. I wouldn't call it vomiting as much as I would call it the spitting but it wasn't just spit it was more of like a thick bile but according to Father Halloran they would do everything they could to try to prevent Ronnie from spitting it at father Bowdern as he was reading the exorcism ritual which seemed to be his target& yet from 6, 7, 8, 10 feet away he had amazing accuracy. I mean, they would hold up towels to try to protect him to try to shield him, somehow Ronnie could get around it & according to Father Halloran the most shocking part of all that was the fact that Ronald was doing it with his eyes closed. Now, he couldn't figure that one out how he just was able to sense where Father Bowden was. Yes, some of the things that you see in the book or in the movie did allegedly occur. That as far as all the records say they happen a lot of it was show business but there was enough there that I think that probably this was an exhausting & very frightening thing that these guys were doing & it lasted for 6 weeks & it's a pretty awful way to spend every night for 6 weeks for Ronnie aim for the priests. In your research for The Devil Came to St Louis how Troy did you go about separating fact from fiction deciding who is telling you the truth from those who embellished what they witnessed & those who said outright lies about what happened because they wanted their 5 or 10 minutes of fame? The biggest problem I had was a story from it actually happened in Maryland that claimed that a Catholic priest there actually carried out the first exorcism & was injured & all these terrible things that had happened. The more I dug into it the more research I did & it sounded off because for one thing you can't just show up somewhere & do an exorcism without permission& then it turned out that once I actually did a little research got into the diaries that Father Bishop left behind he mentioned that this Catholic priest about whom this story had been told never even met Ronnie Hunkeler. They never actually met so he couldn't have done it& couldn't have been injured or anything else& I even went to the church where he had been posted at the time & spoke to the current pastor there & he & I went through the records that showed that while he was supposedly injured && getting medical& psychiatric treatment that he'd been busy at the church the entire time, he'd never taken a break, he'd done something like 52 baptisms& funerals & christenings during a time when he was supposed to have been in a mental hospital. Well, it turned out that that story got started after he passed away by one of his old assistant pastors who saw his chance for 15 minutes of fame of telling the story & so moving forward a lot of it I had to depend on the written records that I had. Luckily I had some & I had the names & were able to connect with the witnesses who were still alive who had actually been there & while sometimes with some witnesses you have to be careful you got to take it with a grain of salt even by that time I'd been doing it long enough to know who makes a decent witness & who doesn't so I didn't get a lot of chain like a you know my leg being pulled by priests I have run into some a few let's just say religiously affiliated individuals who like to tell you stories of what they heard on campus or what they heard around that isn't necessarily true but so far all of them have been great when I've said well here's the thing here here's the record& here's what this priest who was actually there says& they usually all get a oh okay well I guess we've been you know hearing the wrong thing so you do run into that & it is a lot of separating fact from fiction because back in the 70s when hints started to come around after the movie came out that this was based on a real case it was very difficult to get solid information so people did tend to just sort of make things up & embellish whatever they could. You have to take a lot of that stuff from the mid 70s & look at it with a really critical eye & talk to the people & it helps when you can talk to people who were actually there & who were actually alive. The worst person I probably interviewed was Ronnie himself only because & this was something that was going on during the exorcism when they would go through the rituals at night & Ronnie would turn into this monster during the day he was fine. He actually for the most part until the end acted normal & didn't remember what had happened to him the night before. Now, I don't know if it was his brain shielding him from something or if there was something God shielding him from I don't know but he had very little memory even when I spoke to him he knew he'd spent his whole life as The Exorcist boy when he graduated college he went to work for NASA & he worked for NASA until he retired in 2001 & he was always afraid that his co-workers were going to find out that he was the kid that inspired The Exorcist but they never did. He had plenty of stories to tell he just couldn't give me a lot of firsthand story about what happened during the exorcism because he just didn't remember most of it. How Troy did the possessed boy Ronald live out his life after having the demon that possessed him released & what effect did the ordeal be endured as a child have on him as an adult? That's a good question. I will tell you that while the exorcism was going on Ronald was studying the catechism & was baptized. He did convert to becoming a Catholic not surprisingly when this was over in fact his entire family returned to Catholicism so he remained a Catholic his entire life he went to Catholic high school, he graduated from college, he had a degree in engineering & one in psychology interesting enough he said he did go to work for NASA that was his entire career. He got a patent for a insulating material they use on rockets they still use to this day that keeps them from burning up when they come back into the earth's atmosphere but for the most part he stayed out of the limelight no he knew who he'd been, he knew the reputation but he kind of always later told me that when Halloween came he would always leave home because he was always afraid like a news crew or something would show up at his house & he didn't really worry about it too much until the internet came along& then when his name started to leak out there a little bit he did get a little concerned. No one ever really confronted him I said I did an interview with him & you know he was great, a really nice guy there just wasn't a whole lot he could tell me other than things that he remembered as far as what his life had been like after The Exorcism which was honestly pretty normal & married had kids, grandkids just a pretty ordinary guy with this weird incident in his past. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker want to purchase your book The Devil Came to St Louis, learn about other books you've authored, your American Oddities Museum Alton Hauntings & Ghost Tours& the American Hauntings Podcast you co-host, how Troy, can they do that? Best way to do it is just go to AmericanHauntings.net & that'll get you everywhere you need to go. Great, I'm sure a lot of people be going on that. Troy Taylor I thank you for you my guest on Paranormal Yakker, it was great yakking with you & I look forward to interviewing you in the future about your ghost tours & museum. Sounds great yeah thanks a lot thanks for having me.