The Spirit of Sister Alix de Télieux and the Exorcism of Antoinette de Grolée, Lyon

The Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre stood on what is now the Place des Terreaux in Lyon. Its buildings survive as the Palais Saint-Pierre, home of the Musée des Beaux-Arts. But the abbey was rebuilt between 1659 and 1687. The rooms of the 1520s are gone.

One of its sisters was Alix de Télieux, the sacristan. She left the convent, by expulsion in 1513 or after the reform of 1516, depending on the source. Andrew Lang wrote that she "fled with some of the jewels, lived a 'gay' life, and died wretchedly in 1524." Another account says she died abandoned in a field.

Antoinette de Grolée was a young nun from a noble family of the Dauphiné. Lang called her "a girl of eighteen." One night she woke as a hand drew back her bed-curtains. Then "the sign of the cross was made on her brow, and a kiss impressed on her lips." She was astonished, not frightened, and told no one.

When she rose, she heard small blows struck as if beneath her feet. Lang describes rappings "as if at the depth of four inches underground." From then on, the spirit followed her everywhere. The abbess ordered it to give a set number of knocks. That number was heard.

Adrien de Montalembert, almoner to Francis I, was called in with the Bishop of Lyon to question it. The spirit answered by rapping yes or no. Montalembert wrote that it told him things "qui ne pourroient estre cogneus de mortelle créature," things no mortal could know. He said he heard the rappings many a time.

The spirit said it was the soul of Alix. It asked pardon of the Church and of the nuns, to be freed from thirty-three years of purgatory. It needed a proper burial. Alix's body was exhumed and reburied with honour inside the convent, and absolution was given. The exorcisms were reportedly public, and one historian cites a crowd of more than 4,000 people.

21 March. The spirit "struck thirty-three great strokes on the refectory of her convent, 'mighty and marvellous'." Then a bright light appeared, scarcely endurable. It remained for some eight minutes. The nuns went to the chapel and sang a Te Deum.

The dates remain tangled. French Wikipedia places the spirit's farewell at about 9 p.m. on 20 March 1526. The exorcism is dated Friday 22 February 1526 in one source and 17 February 1527 in another. Montalembert's account was finished in Paris on 15 October 1528, its title placing the events "en l'année 1527."

The doubters were not slow. Cornelius Agrippa, a contemporary, dismissed the account and called Montalembert an impostor. In the eighteenth century Pernetti suggested a "fraude pieuse," a pious fraud staged to frighten the nuns into keeping their rule. The Abbé Gachet d'Artigny blamed instead a zealous author eager to defend purgatory against the Lutherans. Modern historians, among them Closson and Busson, read the case as an early use of possession in Catholic argument.

Lang saw in it one of "our earliest examples of a 'medium,' and of communications by raps," and set it beside Cock Lane. Cracking knee-joints, he argued, "hardly covers" the loud noise or the light. Popular retellings have since added a floating nun and a black dog with eyes full of flames. The early sources mention neither.