Wow
“The boy whose case inspired the portrayal of a demon-possessed child in the 1973 horror movie classic The Exorcist has been named.
The US magazine the Skeptical Inquirer named the then 14-year-old boy, previously known as Roland Doe, who underwent exorcisms in Cottage City, Maryland, and St Louis, Missouri, in 1949.
Ronald Edwin Hunkeler died last year, a month before his 86th birthday, after suffering a stroke at home in Marriottsville, Maryland.
In adult life, Hunkeler was a Nasa engineer whose work contributed to the Apollo space missions of the 1960s and who patented a technology that helped space shuttle panels withstand extreme heat.
One of his companions, a 29-year-old woman who asked not to be named, told the New York Post that Hunkeler was always on edge about his Nasa colleagues discovering that he was the inspiration for The Exorcist.
“On Halloween, we always left the house because he figured someone would come to his residence and know where he lived and never let him have peace,” she said. “He had a terrible life from worry, worry, worry,” she added.
Hunkeler eventually retired from Nasa in 2001 after working at the agency for nearly 40 years.
William Peter Blatty, who wrote the 1971 novel and the film based on the same name, first heard about Hunkeler’s apparent demonic possession when he was a senior at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
His professor, Eugene Gallager, who was also a priest at Georgetown, the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university founded in the US, told Blatty about Hunkeler’s reported possessions and subsequent exorcisms.
Born in 1935 and raised by a middle-class family in Cottage City, Hunkeler began experiencing paranormal activities at 14 when he reported hearing knocking and scratching sounds from behind his bedroom walls.
The Rev Luther Schulze, Hunkeler’s family minister, eventually wrote to the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, in North Carolina, in March 1949 and explained how “chairs moved with [Hunkeler] and one threw him out [of it.] His bed shook whenever he was in it.”
Schulze also explained how the family’s floors were “scarred from the sliding of heavy furniture” and how “a picture of Christ on the wall shook” whenever Hunkeler was nearby.
The family eventually sought the help of William Bowdern, a Jesuit who conducted more than 20 exorcism rituals on Hunkeler in the span of three months. Writing in his diary on 10 March 1949, Bowdern noted how Hunkeler entered a trance-like state as 14 witnesses watched during one of his exorcisms.
Born in 1935 and raised by a middle-class family in Cottage City, Hunkeler began experiencing paranormal activities at 14 when he reported hearing knocking and scratching sounds from behind his bedroom walls.
The Rev Luther Schulze, Hunkeler’s family minister, eventually wrote to the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, in North Carolina, in March 1949 and explained how “chairs moved with [Hunkeler] and one threw him out [of it.] His bed shook whenever he was in it.”
Schulze also explained how the family’s floors were “scarred from the sliding of heavy furniture” and how “a picture of Christ on the wall shook” whenever Hunkeler was nearby.
The family eventually sought the help of William Bowdern, a Jesuit who conducted more than 20 exorcism rituals on Hunkeler in the span of three months. Writing in his diary on 10 March 1949, Bowdern noted how Hunkeler entered a trance-like state as 14 witnesses watched during one of his exorcisms.
There was a “scratching which beat out a rhythm of marching soldiers. Second class relic of St Margaret Mary was thrown on the floor. The safety pin was opened but no human hand had touched the relic. R started up in fright when the relic was thrown down,” Bowdern wrote…”
Honestly, I feel really bad for him having to live in secrecy and worry most of his life.