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Dark Histories

The Exorcism of Anna Ecklund

Dark Histories

Ben Cutmore

History

4.82.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2018

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This weeks episode goes a bit more out there as we take a look at a historic exorcism that, despite being a well-documented case for the time, tends to fly under the radar. This is the story of Anna Ecklund, who found herself cursed and possessed by five demons and suffered months of exorcisms lasting for 23 days, in Earling, Iowa, way back in 1928. For extended show notes, including maps, links and scripts, head over to darkhistories.com Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories Connect with me on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast Or find me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories Or you can contact me directly via email at [email protected] Music was recorded by me © 2017 Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Then too, her whole body became so horribly disfigured that the regular contour of her body vanished.

0:06.8

Her pale death-like and emaciated head, often assuming the size of an inverted water pitcher, became as red as glowing embers.

0:16.0

Her eyes protruded out of their sockets.

0:18.7

Her lips swelled up to proportions equaling the size of hands and her thin emaciated body was bloated to such enormous size that the

0:26.6

pastor and some of the sisters drew back out of fright thinking that the woman will be torn to pieces and burst asunder.

0:35.0

At times her abdominal region extremities became as hard as iron and stone.

0:40.0

In such instances the weight of her body pressed into the iron bedstead so that the iron rods of the bed bent to the floor.

0:49.0

These were the words chronicled in begone Satan, a pamphlet written by Carl Vogel which documented

0:55.7

a prolonged exorcism carried out on a young girl named Anna Eklund in 1928, heavily documented at the time and later in Time magazine, it was alleged that she had been possessed

1:08.0

by several demons, including Beelzebub, Judas Iskaryat and Lucifer himself.

1:15.0

This is dark histories where the facts are worth some fiction. Hello and welcome season 2 episode 3 I'm Ben's Dark Histories. I'm pretty hyped about the episode we got coming out today. I haven't done a

1:36.1

paranormal or kind of spiritual out there episode in a while. So I really enjoyed writing this one this is the story of

1:45.7

the exorcism of Anna Eklund is not one for the faint of heart. At the time of its publication in 1935 it would have been quite a

2:05.6

terrifying and eye-opening education into the life and practices of one of

2:09.8

the Catholic Church's more extreme solutions to the troubles of demonic possession.

2:15.0

It is however also a tale that willfully obfuscates the history of its subject.

2:21.0

There are precious few facts that detail Anna Eklund's early life.

2:26.2

In fact, even now her name is not a 100% certainty. She has been named as Anna Eklund, Anna Schmidt, and many contemporary reports simply

2:36.1

called her a certain 40-year-old woman. Dramatic as her story was, her name was just one of the details repressed following the incidents of

2:45.4

1928 as a means of protection from the public who may very well not have taken kindly to being around

2:52.3

a person with such a strange and potentially

2:55.2

threatening past.

...

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