The Earling Exorcism of Anna Ecklund (Emma Schmidt)

Published accounts call her Anna Ecklund. She was born Emma Schmidt in 1882, to German immigrants, and raised in Marathon, Wisconsin. Her troubles were said to begin at age 14. Fr. Theophilus Riesinger, a Capuchin friar based in Appleton, Wisconsin, had already exorcised her once, on 18 June 1912. Time later reported he had used the rite successfully "upon 19 prior occasions."

In 1928 Fr. Joseph Steiger, pastor of St. Joseph's in Earling, Iowa, and a friend of Riesinger, suggested the convent of the Franciscan Sisters. Bishop Thomas Drumm of Des Moines authorised the rite. On 17 August 1928 she was brought there. The next day, it began.

It ran in three sessions from 18 August to 23 December 1928, about 23 days in all. The clergy heard voices that "sounded bestial and most unnatural." The howling came every day, "as though a horde of lions and hyenas were let loose." She hissed like a cat.

Her pale head, they said, "became as red as glowing embers." Her lips swelled "to proportions equalling the size of hands."

She vomited ten to twenty times a day, though she had taken at most a teaspoonful of water. Once it was "a bowl full of matter resembling vomited macaroni." Food secretly sprinkled with holy water sent her into rages. Riesinger addressed the devil in English, German and Latin. The pamphlet says it "replied correctly in the very same tongues."

Then came the strangest moment of all. Then, "with lightning speed", she broke free, and "her body, carried through the air, landed high above the door of the room and clung to the wall with a tenacious grip."

The voices named Beelzebub, Judas Iscariot, Jacob, and Mina, whom they identified as Jacob's mistress and who, in Time's words, "murdered four little ones." Commentators note that the father "confessed" to unwanted sexual advances toward his daughter. Near a bridge over a deep ravine, Steiger said, a dense black cloud appeared before him, and his car crashed into the railing and hung on the iron trellis. It was told as a demonic attack. On 23 December 1928 she cried "My Jesus! Mercy! Praised be Jesus Christ!", and Riesinger declared the exorcism a success.

Riesinger never spoke of it publicly. He said only that he had sent his notes to the Vatican. The account the world knows came from Rev. Carl Vogl, drawing on the clergy present. Rev. Celestine Kapsner translated it into English in 1935 as Begone Satan!. In 1934 Jesuit Fr. Frederick J. Bunse wrote down Riesinger's own account, in which the exorcisms went on until 1934, amid "heavenly visitors", an Antichrist born in Palestine and Three Days of Darkness. Joseph Laycock published it in 2020.

No doctors, police or journalists were present, and the pamphlet's "many doctors" are never named. Bishop Drumm later said the pamphlet "contained inaccuracies and exaggerations." Some suspect undiagnosed mental illness, while others see a root of her distress in the alleged abuse. Of Bunse's prophecies, Jimmy Akin says "Every one of those prophecies failed." No one has ever alleged that Schmidt faked anything. In February 1974 Nick Lamberto of the Des Moines Register visited Earling, where Msgr. Michael W. Schwartze told him: "There never has been a formal investigation or report on this case."

The case runs through books by Martin Ebon, Colin Wilson and the historian Brian Levack. Francis Young calls it "integral" to the "American exorcism". It is often said to have inspired Blatty's The Exorcist. In 2025 it became the film The Ritual, with Al Pacino as Riesinger. The convent building no longer exists.