Anneliese Michel

• 1. Introduction

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  Anneliese Michel weighed just 30 kilograms when she died at home in Bavaria on the 1st of July 1976. In the year before her death, priests had performed 67 Catholic exorcism rites over her. She was 23 years old. Her parents had stopped taking her to doctors, and a bishop had ordered the whole matter kept secret. Her story would later inspire films, songs and podcasts. At its centre are hard questions. What had doctors already found wrong with her? Why did a devout family come to believe that medicine had failed? Who gave the priests permission to proceed? And when a young woman died, who did a German court hold responsible?

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• 2. A Devout Girlhood

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  Leiblfing, in Bavaria, is where Anna Elisabeth Michel was born on the 21st of September 1952. West Germany was her country and Roman Catholicism her family's faith. She and her three sisters were raised by their parents, Joseph and Anna. Anneliese went to Mass twice a week. At 16 she suffered a severe convulsion, and doctors diagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy. In 1973 she enrolled at the University of Würzburg. Classmates later described her as "withdrawn and very religious."

  Her medical history ran alongside that devotion. In June 1970 she had a third seizure while staying at a psychiatric hospital. Doctors gave her anti-convulsion drugs for the first time, including Dilantin, but it did not relieve her condition. She also began to describe seeing "devil faces" at different hours of the day. That same month she was prescribed Aolept, a drug similar to chlorpromazine. It is used for psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia, disturbed behavior and delusions.

  By 1973 she was depressed. She hallucinated while praying, and voices told her she was "damned" and would "rot in hell." Over time her doctors recorded two diagnoses: epileptic psychosis linked to temporal lobe epilepsy, and manic depression, now called bipolar disorder. Hospital care and long-term medication brought no improvement. After five years of pharmaceutical treatment she was growing frustrated with her doctors. Soon the religious objects she had loved began to trouble her, and an Italian pilgrimage would make that plain.

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• 3. The Shrine at Piacenza

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  The unauthorized shrine of San Damiano, in Piacenza, Italy, is where Michel's symptoms first took on a religious meaning for the people around her. A family friend who regularly organized Christian pilgrimages to Italy took her there. This escort became convinced of demonic possession. Michel could not walk past a crucifix. She also refused to drink from a Christian holy spring.

  An account of the visit survives in the escort's own words. Michel approached the shrine with great hesitation and said the ground burned like fire. She circled it in a wide arc and tried to reach it from behind. Kneeling worshippers seemed to her to be gnashing their teeth as they prayed. A picture of Christ in the house chapel forced her to look away. Medals and pictures of saints, she said, sparkled so intensely that she could not bear to look at them.

  Her mother reported seeing stigmata on her daughter. Michel herself believed she could communicate with Mary, the mother of Jesus. Her family and community decided she was possessed and approached several priests for an exorcism. The priests refused. They urged her to continue medical treatment and explained that an exorcism required a bishop's permission.

  Church approval depends on strict criteria. The subject must be judged to be under demonic control, and intense dislike of religious objects is among the first signs. Meanwhile Michel got worse. She became aggressive and injured herself. She drank her own urine and ate insects. In November 1973 she began taking Tegretol, an anti-seizure drug that also steadies mood. Even on neuroleptic medication, she was heard growling obscenities and screaming guttural curses. One priest had still to be persuaded.

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• 4. Permission Granted

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  Adolf Rodewyk, an elderly Jesuit, was the first priest a family friend asked to visit Michel. He declined because of his age and referred the family to another Jesuit. The local priest who did visit was Father Ernst Alt. In September 1974 he remarked that she "didn't look like an epileptic," and he had never seen her have a seizure.

  Between July and August 1975 he changed his mind and came to believe in possession. He urged Bishop Josef Stangl of Würzburg to permit an exorcism. In a letter to him, Michel wrote, "I am nothing; everything about me is vanity. What should I do? I have to improve. You pray for me." She also told him, "I want to suffer for other people … but this is so cruel."

  In August 1975 Stangl allowed only the "small exorcism," Pope Leo XIII's Exorcism against Satan and the Apostate Angels. Any priest may recite that rite without a bishop's approval. The following month Rodewyk came to see Michel together with Alt. He sent Stangl a detailed report that was "unintelligible to third parties." It argued for genuine possession and pressed for the major rite.

  Stangl then authorized the Salvatorian priest Arnold Renz to carry out an exorcism under the Roman Ritual, or Rituale Romanum. He demanded total secrecy. Renz held the first session on the 24th of September.

  Michel began saying she was dying to atone for the wayward youth of the day and for the apostate priests of the modern church. At her request, her parents stopped consulting doctors and relied only on the rites. Sessions took place once or twice a week and lasted up to four hours each. They continued for roughly ten months across 1975 and 1976. Toward the end she began refusing food.

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• 5. The Last Months

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  Antipsychotic drugs were still part of her routine while the rites went on, and she took them often until shortly before she died. The autopsy report named malnutrition and dehydration as the cause of death. It described almost a year of near starvation during the exorcism rites.

  Her body showed other damage. Her knees were broken from the constant genuflections. She could not move without help, and she was reported to have pneumonia.

  An investigation by the state prosecutor reached a stark conclusion. Her death could have been prevented as late as one week before it happened. That finding set the stage for criminal charges against the people who had been closest to her.

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• 6. The Courtroom

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  In 1976 the state charged Michel's parents, together with the priests Ernst Alt and Arnold Renz, with negligent homicide. The parents hired Erich Schmidt-Leichner, a famed defense attorney from the Nuremberg trials. The church paid for the priests' lawyers. Prosecutors asked for no jail time at all. They sought fines for the priests and wanted the parents exempted from punishment because they had "suffered enough," a mitigating factor in German penal law under section 60 of the criminal code.

  On the 14th of July 1977, the New York Times reported that a prosecutor in Aschaffenburg had announced charges against two Roman Catholic priests over her death.

  The trial opened on the 30th of March 1978 in the district court and drew intense interest. Doctors testified that Michel was not possessed. In their view the signs of possession came from her strict religious upbringing and her epilepsy. Schmidt-Leichner countered that the exorcism was lawful, because the German constitution protects the free exercise of religion.

  The defense played tapes made during the sessions, including passages said to feature "demons arguing." Both priests claimed that six demons had named themselves as Lucifer, Cain, Judas Iscariot, Nero, Adolf Hitler and an evil priest called Fleischmann. They added that Michel was freed from possession just before she died.

  Bishop Stangl said he had not known how ill she was when he approved the rite. He did not testify. In April 1978 the parents and both priests were convicted of negligent homicide. Their sentences were suspended, and they were ordered to share the costs of the proceedings. Six months in jail was converted into three years of probation, along with a fine.

  The sentences were described as stiffer than the prosecutor had requested. The author John M. Duffey called the case a misidentification of mental illness. By approving an ancient rite, the Catholic Church had pulled itself into public and media attention.

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• 7. Afterlife of a Case

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  Michel's remains were moved on the 25th of February 1978. Her parents had asked permission to exhume her because she had been buried in haste in a cheap coffin. Almost two years after the burial, she was placed in a new oak coffin lined with tin. Official reports said the body showed signs consistent with decay for a body of that age. The family and the priests were discouraged from viewing the remains. Father Renz later said he had been prevented from entering the mortuary.

  Her grave has become a pilgrimage site. Small groups of Catholics revere her, believing she atoned for wayward priests and sinful youth. After the case, the number of officially sanctioned exorcisms in Germany fell.

  Joseph Michel died in 1999. In a 2006 interview, Anna Michel said she had no regrets. She told the interviewer, "I know we did the right thing because I saw the sign of Christ in her hands." On the 6th of June 2013, fire swept through the house where Michel had lived. Police ruled it arson, yet some locals blamed the exorcism case.

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• 8. Screen and Song

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  Three films are loosely based on Michel's story. The Exorcism of Emily Rose, released in 2005, centres on both the court case and the exorcism. Requiem followed in 2006, and Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes in 2011.

  Music has taken up the case too. First Issue, the debut album by the post-punk band Public Image Ltd, includes a song called "Annalisa" based on it. The Scottish band Hellripper wrote a song titled "Anneliese." Ice Nine Kills used recordings of Michel in the intro to "Communion of The Cursed," from the album Every Trick in the Book. The video game Faith: The Unholy Trinity goes further and uses audio from the exorcism tapes in a boss fight.

  Podcasters and video makers have retold it as well. Casefile True Crime Podcast covered it in March 2016 as Case 11: Anneliese Michel. My Favorite Murder discussed it in an episode titled "The Devil's Number." The Last Podcast on the Left gave it episodes 473 and 474. In November 2016, the fourth episode of the first season of BuzzFeed Unsolved: Supernatural examined the case and the theories around it.

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