The Exorcism of Roland Doe: The Haunted Boy Behind The Exorcist

He lived with his German Lutheran family at 3807 40th Avenue in Cottage City, Maryland. For decades he was known only as "Roland Doe", and the papers placed him in Mount Rainier. In 2021 Skeptical Inquirer named him as Ronald Edwin Hunkeler. His aunt in St. Louis was a spiritualist. She had taught him the Ouija board.

Around 15 January 1949, the boy and his grandmother heard a dripping noise in her bedroom, followed by "a very definite scratching sound under the floor boards" for ten days. After the aunt died in late January, the boy's mother asked aloud whether the noise was her, and "four distinct knocks were heard." "An orange and a pear flew across the entire room where R was standing." At school, his desk moved "similar to the plate on a Ouija board."

The night of 17 February, the Rev. Luther Miles Schulze kept the boy at his home. He saw a heavy armchair, with the boy in it, tilt slowly to one side and fall over. A pallet of blankets moved with the boy on it. Schulze wrote to the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine at Duke. "We have in our congregation a family who are being disturbed by poltergeist phenomena."

In March the family took him to relatives at 8435 Roanoke Drive in Bel-Nor, Missouri. On 9 March Fr. Raymond J. Bishop, SJ, of Saint Louis University arrived, joining five other adults who saw the bed shaking. Later, the coverlet stood up "as though held up with starch." A heavy bookcase swung from the wall to the bedside "in an arc of five or six feet."

Fr. William S. Bowdern joined on 11 March, and with Archbishop Joseph Ritter's permission the formal rite began on 16 March. Words appeared on the boy's skin, including "Louis" and "HELL." On 18 March it took three men to hold his arms, legs and head as he "fought and screamed in a diabolical, high-pitched voice." He broke the nose of the young Jesuit Walter Halloran. The rite moved between the house, a church rectory, a retreat house and the Alexian Brothers Hospital.

Easter Monday, 18 April 1949. About 10:45 pm at the hospital, a voice broke into the prayers. "Satan! Satan! I am Saint Michael, and I command you, Satan, and the other evil spirits to leave the body in the name of Dominus, immediately. Now! NOW! NOW!" After seven or eight minutes of violence, the boy said in a tone of complete relief, "He's gone!"

Bowdern is quoted as saying, "This was the real thing." Rhine saw it differently. The most likely normal explanation, he wrote, was a boy "led to create the effect of being the victim of mysterious agencies." An investigator for the archdiocese concluded that "Robbie was not the victim of diabolical possession." Halloran never made up his mind.

Mark Opsasnick interviewed 102 people for Strange Magazine. A neighbour recalled beds on wheels with wire springs. It was "not too hard at all to make the bed bounce and move." Opsasnick called the boy "a very clever trickster." In Skeptical Inquirer, Joe Nickell wrote: "Nothing that was reliably reported in the case was beyond the abilities of a teenager to produce."

In August 1949 a Georgetown student named William Peter Blatty read the story in The Washington Post. His novel The Exorcist appeared in 1971. William Friedkin's film followed in 1973. Hunkeler, later reported to have worked as a NASA engineer, died on 10 May 2020. The Bel-Nor house is now the only surviving building linked to the case.