The Klingenberg Exorcism: The Death of Anneliese Michel

Anneliese Michel was born on 21 September 1952 in Leiblfing, Bavaria. Her family home was in Klingenberg am Main, where her father Josef owned a sawmill. In September 1968, at 16, she suffered her first severe convulsion. Epilepsy was diagnosed in August 1969.

At the University of Würzburg she grew depressed. She saw "devil faces". Voices told her she was "damned" and would "rot in hell". On a pilgrimage to San Damiano in Italy she could not approach the shrine. "The soil burned like fire," she said.

September 1974. The local pastor, Fr Ernst Alt, first visited. He said she "didn't look like an epileptic". A year later the Jesuit Fr Adolf Rodewyk assessed her and reported to the bishop. On 16 September 1975 Bishop Josef Stangl of Würzburg authorised the Rituale Romanum exorcism by Fr Arnold Renz, "with total secrecy".

24 September 1975. The first major exorcism. Sessions followed once or twice a week, lasting up to about four hours, and about 40 tapes preserve them. Time described the recordings: "growling obscenities, screaming guttural curses and raving wildly". Six names emerged: Lucifer, Cain, Judas Iscariot, Nero, Adolf Hitler and Fleischmann. Renz said Hitler "used to shout 'Heil!' through Anneliese's voice".

Family and priests watched her change. Accounts say she "crawled under a table and barked like a dog for two days" and "ate flies, spiders, and coal". She could not tolerate crucifixes or pictures of saints. She broke teeth biting walls. Skeptoid describes "hundreds of genuflections, dropping to her knees until the ligaments were permanently debilitated". Her mother later said: "I saw the sign of Christ in her hands."

On Ash Wednesday, 3 March 1976, Anneliese stopped eating. The voices, she said, forbade it. She spoke of dying "to atone for the wayward youth of the day and the apostate priests". The last session came on the night of 30 June. On 1 July 1976 she died at home. She was 23.

The autopsy gave the cause of death as "malnutrition and dehydration". She weighed about 30 kilograms. Prosecutors in Aschaffenburg concluded her death could have been prevented up to about a week before it happened. In February 1978 her body was exhumed. A Carmelite nun had reported a vision that it was incorrupt. Official reports found normal decay.

On 30 March 1978 the trial opened at the Landgericht Aschaffenburg on a charge of negligent homicide by omission. The defence played the tapes and argued freedom of religion. Court psychiatrists diagnosed "paranoid-hallucinatory psychosis with epilepsy complicated by severe eating disorder (anorexia nervosa)". On 21 April 1978 Josef and Anna Michel, Alt and Renz were convicted. Time reported six-month suspended sentences for all four, though later accounts disagree.

Doctors testified she was not possessed. Court experts attributed her condition to epilepsy with psychosis. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid suggested dissociative identity disorder, noting that she "didn't die until she stopped all medical treatment". The anthropologist Felicitas D. Goodman argued in 1981 for a real possession experience. Her work is widely seen as unscholarly. The parents stayed convinced to the end.

After the trial the German bishops ruled that no more exorcisms would be permitted unless a doctor was called in. A revised rite of 1999 must stop if the subject refuses a medical examination. Small traditionalist groups treat her grave in Klingenberg as a pilgrimage site. Films such as Requiem and The Exorcism of Emily Rose carried the story further. In June 2013 fire destroyed the Michel sawmill. Arson was suspected.