Hello and welcome to Psychic Teachers. I'm your host Samantha Fey.

And I'm Deb Bowen.

And today we're going to be continuing the Spooky October month with our discussion on exorcisms.

We're going to dive deep into two particular cases that we think you'll find both Spooky and kind of informative in terms of what hauntings and this type of possession can teach us about life, faith and the world of good and evil.

Deb, would you like to start us off with our story?

We have gotten over the past few weeks several emails and Facebook messages of folks saying you are going to do spooky stories in October.

Aren't you? And I have responded with yes, we are.

Yes, and I'd like to personally thank those listeners for emailing them because I think Deb wonders if I'm making it up when I tell her people.

I don't think you're making it up. Of course, I don't, but go away. You know, I just I'm okay. Whatever. Here we go. Okay. So let me tell folks about these two amazing stories that I'm going to be focusing on.

They're really terrible in many ways. And I'll talk about why I feel that way. One of which is based on the novel that many folks of course know about when we think of exorcisms, we think of this book, the exorcist by William Peter Blattie, which was published in 1971.

So one of the cases is based on the bet book is based on that case, as is the movie, the exorcist. So let's get started with that one first.

In the late 1940s in the United States, Catholic priest performed a series of exorcisms on an anonymous boy. It was documented. The case was documented under the pseudonyms Roland Doe or Robbie Mannheim.

The 14 year old boy was born around 1935 and the events surrounding this exorcism process were recorded by the attending priest whose name was Raymond J. Bishop. In mid 1949, several newspaper articles printed anonymous reports of this alleged possession and exorcism.

The source for these reports is thought to be the family's former pastor whose name was Luther Miles Schulti, according to one account, a total of 48 people witnessed this exorcism.

Nine of them, Jesuit priest, this boy Roland will call him was born into a German Lutheran family. And during the 1940s, the family lived in Cottage City, Maryland.

But at some point they moved to South Africa and I never could quite get the timeline worked out on how he ended up back in the States, but they did. And so according to Alan, he was an only rolling was an only child and basically depended on the adults in his household for playmates, primarily his aunt Harriet, who was a spiritualist.

And she introduced Roland to the Ouija board where he experienced a great interest in it. According to Thomas B. Allen and we'll talk about him more in a minute. After Aunt Harriet's death, the family experienced strange noises, furniture moving on its own and ordinary objects such as flower vases, flying or levitating whenever the little boy was nearby.

And he finally turned to their Lutheran pastor Luther Miles Schulti for help. He was interested in parapsychology and he arranged for the boy to spend a night in his home in order to observe him when parapsychologist J.B. Rine found the famous Ryan Institute at Duke University, learned that Schulti claimed he witnessed household objects and furniture, seemingly moving by themselves.

And quote here, wondered if Schulti unconsciously exaggerated some of the facts, Schulti advised the boys parents to see a Catholic priest. So this is a Lutheran minister suggesting that the family call in the Catholics.

And of course, the experts in exorcism. So according to this traditional story, this young boy went through a number of exorcisms, priest Edward Hughes conducted an exorcism on Roland at Georgetown University Hospital, which is a Jesuit institution. During the exorcism, the boy allegedly slipped one of his fans out of the restraints, broke a bed spring from under the mattress, and used the bed spring.

As a weapon, slashing the priest arms, which calls the priest to stop the exorcism. The family then went to St. Louis, where Roland's cousin contacted one of the professors at St. Louis University, who in turn spoke to William S. Bowden, who was an associate of college church together, both of these priests visited Roland in his relative's home, where they allegedly observed a shaking bed, flying objects.

The boy speaking in a gutteral voice and exhibiting any aversion to anything sacred. Bowden was granted permission from the Archbitch to perform another exorcism. And I'm not sure about this, but my guess is that this scenario that I've just described is probably the basis for what most of us remember from the book and from the movie.

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