The Possession Diaries Part XI
In 1976, a German Catholic woman died of malnutrition and dehydration after a series of sixty-seven exorcism rites.
Her name was Anna Elisabeth “Anneliese” Michel, born in Klingenberg, West Germany in September 1952.
In 1948, her mother Anna Furg was 28 and in disgrace for having a child out of wedlock (a daughter, named Martha). Anna’s highly religious Catholic parents were introduced to a man named Josef who was visiting their town, and they “gifted” their daughter Anna to him. The following year Josef and Anna got married and they settled in Klingenberg where Josef became head of his family’s sawmill enterprise.
Josef built them a house overlooking the cemetery and loved Martha like she was his own child. Anneliese was born in 1952 followed by her sisters Gertrude, Maria, and Barbara.
In 1956, 8-year-old Martha was discovered to have a tumour on her kidney that needed emergency surgery. Unfortunately, she didn’t survive the operation.
Anneliese and her three surviving sisters were raised in a strictly religious way, but since Martha’s death, Anna had higher expectations of Anneliese to be especially devout, perhaps seeing her as a way of doing penance to God for Anna’s conception of Martha. Anneliese took her first Communion aged 6 and went to Mass twice a week. As she entered her teenage years and wanted to learn dance at the local ballroom, Anna denied her permission to do so and said her place was at Mass to give thanks to the Mother of God. On some nights, Anneliese would even sleep on the floor to show humility.
In 1968, Maria first noticed an odd mental absence in Anneliese during class. That night, Anneliese had her first episode of something similar to sleep paralysis where she wet the bed in fright. She kept this to herself for a year, when the paralysis episode occurred again and she woke up the entire household with her screams.
She was taken to a neurologist, who found nothing wrong but gave her an EEG test, just in case. The EEG was all clear but a few weeks later Annaliese came down with tonsillitis, then phases of pleurisy and pneumonia. In February 1969, she had caught tuberculosis and had to go for treatment at Hochgebirgsklinik Sanatorium, which was a thousand feet up, near the northern tip of the Alps.
As the summer of 1969 came closer, Anneliese had another sleep paralysis / screaming episode in the sanatorium dormitory, but the next morning’s medical checkup showed nothing awry.
A few weeks later, she began to hallucinate and become trance-like and unresponsive at odd moments during the day, and in June 1969 another EEG showed something the matter with the pattern of her brainwaves. She was diagnosed with grand mal epilepsy and prescribed anticonvulsants.
A week later, she was alone in the dormitory and hallucinated a giant devil-face over the mountain peaks. However, when asked if she was suffering from any further troubles, she said no and was sent home – after 6 months – and deemed healthy.
Her sisters sensed a change in her since her absence.
In the spring of 1973, a gentle knocking started to happen on Anneliese’s bedroom door in the middle of the night, only there was nobody there doing the knocking. Her parents took her to the doctor again, thinking she was having more hallucinations, but it transpired that her sisters had all heard the knocking too. Sometimes it would be in the walls, or under the floorboards, and even sometimes inside Anneliese’s wardrobe.
One night, not witnessed by any of her family, Anneliese woke to a voice saying “Join us in Hell forever” repeatedly. By this point, she was 20 years old.
She said she kept seeing “devil faces” throughout the day. In the same month, she was prescribed a drug intended for psychoses including schizophrenia.
After taking pharmaceuticals for five years and having long-term treatment at the hospital, Anneliese was growing increasingly frustrated with her medical care. She was also becoming intolerant to Christian spaces and objects such as the crucifix.
She took a pilgrimage to the garden of Rosa Quattrini-Buzzini, a shrine in San Damiano village in Italy. Her father Josef took her — along with family friend Thea Hein, who concluded that she must be possessed after seeing her inability to approach a crucifix or drink water from a holy spring. Anneliese suffered a horrific pain in her feet whilst in the garden / shrine, and hallucinated the faces of the other pilgrims as being wide mouths with gnashing teeth. On the coach trip back home, she ripped a religious medallion from around Thea’s neck, and Josef apologised profusely on her behalf.
Anneliese returned to the neurologist a few days afterwards, claiming the Devil was inside her and that he was talking to her using demons. The neurologist didn’t know what to say in response. From that point onwards, she ceased trying to talk about her hallucinations or voices with anyone in the medical profession.
“…she was unable to enter the shrine. She approached it with the greatest hesitation, then said that the soil burned like fire and she simply could not stand it. She then walked around the shrine in a wide arc and tried to approach it from the back. She looked at the people who were kneeling in the area surrounding the little garden, and it seemed to her that while praying they were gnashing their teeth. She got as far as the edge of the little garden, then she had to turn back. Coming from the front again, she had to avert her glance from the picture of Christ [in the chapel of the house]. She made it several times to the garden, but could not get past it. She also noted that she could no longer look at medals or pictures of saints; they sparkled so immensely that she could not stand it.“
— Father Ernst Alt
In September 1973, Father Ernst Anton Alt first learned of Anneliese’s case. He was 35. Anneliese was then 21. He interviewed her along with Father Karl Roth, and the two priests privately agreed that she was possessed, but kept it to themselves for the time being and kept her under observation.
By November 1973, Anneliese was going to University in Wurzberg on a teacher-training course and was suffering with depression, hallucinations whenever she was trying to pray, and she kept hearing voices that said she was damned and would “rot in Hell”. She was having regular consultations with Father Alt and would have days of lethargy in her room, but on one of her better days she went to a dance in the evening and met Peter, who became her boyfriend.
One morning, Anneliese tried to make confession at the local church but the words wouldn’t emerge from her mouth. Her seizures and bad headaches came back, and the only thing that occasionally appeared to help pull her out of the lethargy was when Father Alt blessed her. Father Alt insisted she check in with the University doctor, who gave her more pills.
Peter was with her throughout her troubles and remained loyal, so she let him in on what had been happening in her psyche. He promised to stick by her.
In her second year of studies, Anneliese now had her own room and withdrew from her old group of friends, gravitating to more religious friends with whom she had prayer sessions. The seizures stopped for a while, the hallucinations abating by early 1975.
In late spring, Anneliese’s grandmother died in Klingenberg, and two of her sisters had left home. A few days after this, she began to hear things again and started destroying her religious belongings (her rosary beads, a picture of Jesus) and when she ran to church to pray, her legs wouldn’t let her enter the building. That night, the terror and voices telling her to go to Hell returned.
Next morning, she called for Father Alt and when he began to pray with her, she started screaming, while her mother Anna looked on. They called for Peter and Father Alt uttered the Solemn Blessing until she was somewhat calmer. Father Alt demanded the thing possessing her to speak. Anneliese looked up with an unrecognisable face contorted in rage, ripped her rosary into pieces and, when Peter arrived, screamed at him to get out in a guttural voice.
In mid-July, Anneliese was home from university and flicking between senselessness and lucidity. On a particularly bad day Josef, unable to get hold of Father Alt, called for Father Roth to come and help.
When Father Roth got there, she was screaming and there was a putrid smell as if something had been set alight. It was coming from the kitchen, where Anneliese was frozen stiff in the middle of it, in a trance. She suddenly ran towards Father Roth, stopped a metre away, looked at his face, then flung herself towards the opposite side of the room. He took out a crucifix and she descended into a fit of rage, screaming that they were tormenting her.
Anneliese’s mother claimed she had seen stigmata on her daughter’s hands, and Anneliese herself believed she could communicate with Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Anneliese’s condition deteriorated until she was behaving aggressively and doing things such as drinking her own urine and eating bugs. She was “growling, seeing demons, and throwing things” despite taking antipsychotic drugs and mood stabilisers.
Fathers Roth and Alt took their observations to the Bishop Josef Stangl who finally granted permission for an exorcism to be conducted.
On Sunday August 3rd, Fathers Roth and Alt did a small exorcism at the Michel’s family home. By then, Anneliese was 23, and she waited patiently as the two priests took a small black book containing the exorcism prayers of Pope Leo XIII and knelt. As they recited the words, she seemed to lose consciousness, then twist and moan and growl, then shrieked that it was causing her pain.
While waiting for the church to figure out what to do next, Josef and Anna kept using prayers and the rosary to try to keep Anneliese calm, but nothing seemed to be working. One morning, Anna woke to find Anneliese on the floor in her room face-down and struggling to breathe, as if something was shoving her down. When they tried to pull her upright, it set off a frightening choking fit.
As the weather became hotter, Anneliese tore off her clothes and ran through the house naked. By this point she had been moved into the attic, where she could be heard running around at night screaming. One morning, Anna observed Anneliese staring at a spider then stuffing it into her mouth whole and swallowing it. She kept sensing clouds of flies and strange, distorted creatures in the shadows.
Father Alt still being on leave, Father Rodewyk was called in. He found Anneliese on the kitchen floor in a trance with small wounds on her hands and feet. He asked her, “What is your name?” and she replied “I am Judas.”
Finally, the church agreed that a full exorcism should be done. The exorcism was done by Father Arnold Renz according to the Exorcism Rite of the Rituale Romanum. Father Alt was now living 100 kilometres away and unable to lead the ritual.
The first exorcism session was done on September the 24th at 4pm. It lasted 16 hours, and every time holy water was flicked at her she growled and thrashed and kept screaming for them to stop. In her more lucid moments, Anneliese had been talking more and more about “atoning” for the wayward youth of her day, and her parents had stopped seeking help from doctors at her request.
Over the next month, they performed eight exorcism rites, taking breaks for tea and cake every so often. Sometimes they had to tie her hands and feet to stop her from hurting herself. Anyone who tried to restrain her said they felt a huge weight pressing down on them if they drew near her. Father Alt, still present, questioned her in Dutch and Latin and every time, the voices emanating from her seemed to understand.
During one session, Anneliese developed the wounds on her hands and feet again, or stigmata as Father Renz called them.
After weeks of this, the priests finally discovered she was possessed by Nero, Cain, Lucifer, Hitler, and Judas Iscariot.
One afternoon, Father Alt was telling the family about a 16th century priest, Valentin Fleischmann, who once ran Alt’s parish and killed a man and beat a woman. Anneliese screamed and a sixth “demon” announced itself through her, saying it was Fleischmann, and it recounted details of his life that she couldn’t have known and would only be discoverable in Ettleben parish archives.
In-between all these exorcism rites, Anneliese was still studying for her end of term exams! Sometimes, her mother found her staring into the void, kicking the underside of her bed until her feet split open and bled.
In October, Anneliese hallucinated the voice of the Virgin Mary, telling her to be brave and that she had to suffer through this because of all the sin in the world, and that it would be over soon. On October the 29th, the voices said they would leave her body on October the 31st.
On Halloween, they did another exorcism rite, and grudgingly each entity growled “Hail Mary full of grace” before seeming to leave Anneliese… all except one.
The following week, she was well enough to go to Wurzberg to sit her theology exams. She kept going back and forth to Klingenberg and Wurzberg over the next few months, and when her friends asked about her absence, she merely said that she had been ill.
The remaining demon kept plaguing her, until in the New Year it revealed that its name was Lucifer. One evening in the dormitory, it told her to press her face into the floor until she couldn’t breathe any more, then get into one of her friends’ beds naked. She screamed and climbed shaking into her own bed, fully clothed, and shivered all night.
Terrified of people finding out about the hallcinations and voices, Anneliese told no doctors about them, afraid of being declared insane and losing the right to speak for herself. It wasn’t long since Hitler had signed the national euthanasia decree in 1939, and up to 100,000 Germans seen as physically or mentally “deficient” had been sent to their deaths (after being forcibly sterilised in the mass eugenics programme).
In March, Anneliese’s body prevented her from boarding the train to go home, so she stayed in her dormitory. When she tried to pray at the church, an invisible force threw her to her knees. Her younger sister Roswitha came to Wurzberg to look after her, because by then she had also stopped eating.
One morning Anneliese’s friends found her in her room staring, unmoving, with her arms contorted inhumanly in front of her. Roswitha refused to let them call a doctor, certain that things could be gotten under control.
Over the next month, Anneliese kept screaming at intervals and eventually, Father Alt was sent for. She had a short stay with him in which Roswitha was injured in an inexplicable fall, then Peter and Anneliese’s parents collected her and brought her home. She was emaciated but said the Virgin Mary had told her the suffering would end in July.
At home, the voices continued and Anneliese’s behaviour became more concerning. She would rub her face and bang her head against the wall until it bled. She asked her family to tie her up at night and sometimes in the day to stop the demons from making her do things. Father Renz continued the exorcisms, but during these the voices went quiet and she fell into violent rages. In one session, she threw herself onto her knees repeatedly — 600 times — until her knees split and bled. Her mother tried to comfort her by putting pillows and blankets under her legs but every time she hit the floor, she’d miss them.
Father Alt secretly persuaded a doctor to visit Anneliese during one of the rites, a Dr Richard Roth. The doctor was so shaken by what he witnessed that he said “There are no injections against the Devil” and hastened to leave.
A few days later, Father Alt noticed one of her teeth was chipped and there was a mouth-shaped dent in the wall, along with a glass panel missing from a door. Josef said Anneliese had run into it head-first.
Another five exorcisms were held in June, with the final one on the 30th. Anneliese had a fever of 38.9 degrees centigrade and barely had strength to lift her own body. There was a large, open sore on the bridge of her nose, an injury she suffered the week before. As Father Renz carried on with the rite, a gentle woman’s voice cried “Absolution,” from her mouth. Renz blessed her and they took Anneliese to her bed to sleep.
On her way to bed that night, Anna heard Anneliese call “Mama, I’m afraid.” She sat with her daughter until she fell asleep but at midnight Anneliese started screaming again, sending her father Josef running into the room, where he found her being thrown from her bed. He commanded the demons to desist, and in the early hours of July the 1st 1976, Anneliese was able to turn over and finally sleep. The planet Venus, which had been noticeably bright in the sky, faded. Josef checked on her at 7am before going to work, finding her sleeping deeply.
An hour later, his wife Anna phoned him to break the news that Anneliese had died.
She had been through 67 exorcism rites, one or two a week, over about ten months from 1975 to 1976.
By the time of death, Anneliese weighed 30 kilograms and had broken knees from continuous genuflecting, couldn’t move without aid, and had contracted pneumonia.
The autopsy found her inner organs were healthy, with no brain damage that could have caused epileptic fits. The cause of her passing was recorded as malnutrition and dehydration, and her pupils were strangely dilated. She was buried next to her sister Martha.
The state charged her parents and the priests with homicide by negligence.
The trial happened in March 1978, and drew a lot of interest. Doctors testified that Anneliese hadn’t been possessed and that her behaviour had been a result of her religious upbringing and her epilepsy.
The defense played recordings from the exorcism sessions of “demons arguing” to try to prove that Anneliese had been possessed. Both priests (Renz and Alt) claimed that she had been possessed by Lucifer, Cain, Judas Iscariot, Hitler, and Nero, and analysis of her responses on the recordings found that sometimes her voice was hitting two registers, as if two people were talking simultaneously.
Bishop Stangl said he hadn’t been made aware of Anneliese’s severe epilepsy and didn’t testify in court.
In April 1978, the Michels and the priests were found guilty. They were given suspended prison sentences and had to pay legal costs.
In a conference several years afterwards, German bishops retracted the claim that Anneliese had been possessed.
Almost two years after her burial, Anneliese’s body was exhumed and reinterred in a nicer coffin, and her grave became a pilgrimage site for some Catholics.
Her father Josef died in 1999.
In 2006, during an interview, Anneliese’s mother said “I know we did the right thing because I saw the sign of Christ in her hands”.
In 2013, the Michel’s house burned to the ground. Local police said that it was arson.
Three films have been based on Anneliese’s story: The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Requiem, and Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes.
Read more of The Possession Diaries:
Sources:
Unexplained: Supernatural stories for uncertain times by Richard Maclean Smith
Wikipedia
LVCIFER, “The Entire Case History of Annaliese Michel – The Real “Emily Rose” – Diabolical Confusions (https://diabolicalconfusions.wordpress.com/)
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