Anneliese Michel

these exorcism sessions were actually recorded. There is audio of the priests as they were trying to drive out the evil spirits that they believed were possessing Analise Michelle and full transparency here. I know little to nothing about exorcisms, especially being agnostic, so looking at this as a case is just feels so far removed from reality for me personally. And we will analyze some of that today as we talk with Father Carlos Martin's director of the Treasures of

the Church ministry and an official exorcist. We'll talk about what really happened to Analise Michelle and how this exorcism led to her death. But first our producer Trevor is going to walk us through today's case.

first seizure. The next year, she had yet another and was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, a chronic nerve system disorder in which recurrent seizures take place, usually lasting a couple of minutes. Shortly after this, she was diagnosed with depression and psychosis and was treated at a psychiatric facility. At the facility, she had another seizure and was prescribed the anti convulsant dilantin, after which she began describing seeing

quote devil faces frequently. However, the medications did not help with her seizures or her strange visions. In nineteen seventy three, she went to the University of Wurtzburg, where her classmates described her as quote withdrawn and very religious. Some classmates described one occasion where they found her in a trance like state with her arms outstretched dramatically. But she also began hearing more menacing voices telling her she was damned

and that she would quote rotten Hell. Around this time, she said someone else was manipulating her and that her will was not her own. She also became intolerant of cruise fixes and other sacred Christian objects and places. She told a family friend that she was unable to enter a Christian shrine during a religious pilgrimage the two took together to Italy, and that the soil around the place quote burned like fire when she attempted to walk on it.

The friend concluded that Annalise was suffering from demonic possession. Annalise and her family were convinced of this as well, and at first priests refused her pleas for an exorcism,

recommending that she instead continue her psychiatric treatment. They also said they needed the bishop's permission to perform an exorcism, but her condition worsened, and in September of nineteen seventy five, Bishop Joseph Stongel granted Father ernst Alt and Father Arnold Wrens permission to perform an exorcism on Annalise, but they were ordered to total secrecy. Over the next ten months, the two priests performed sixty seven exorcism sessions at the

rate of about two twice a week. Each lasted about four hours, and forty two of these sessions were recorded. Annalise had to be tied down for many of the sessions as she tried to bite and harm the men. In the last few months of the exorcisms, she refused food and rapidly lost weight. On June thirtieth, nineteen seventy six, Father Wrens performed the final exorcism. By now she was severely emaciated, had pneumonia, and was running a high fever.

Her final words to the priest were quote request for absolution, end quote, but her final words to her mother were quote, mother, I'm afraid. On July first, nineteen seventy six, Annalise Michel died. The cause of death was malnutrition and dehydration. Father Alt and Father Wrens believed her exorcism was successful because she died after the demons were driven out of her. Later that year, the priests and parents were charged with negligent homicide.

The trial was a massive media sensation, and the priests were eventually convicted, but only given suspended prison sentences. And so, what happened to Annalise Michelle? Who was responsible for her death? And what does the story tell us about the complicated intersection between religious and medical approaches to mental illness.

a priest about six years later. And when I was assigned to the first church that I was placed in, the priests that were on staff there were the diocesan exorcists, and they were just so busy with oppression and possession cases with individuals that when something of a lesser nature would come in, like the infestation of a house, demonic phenomena happening within a place, they just turned to me

and said, Deacon, go get rid of the devil. So I didn't have any training at that point, and so I would not advise this to be the normal course of affairs for someone to be thrown in a situation, but that was my situation. And what I knew, though, is that if the devil is in a place, then there's going to be signs that reveal that presence. So there's going to be proof, if you will, and if the devil is in a place, and we can determine

that through proof, then he's there for a reason. In other words, a door was opened to him, and so that door has to be closed. What I preach on all the time, what I've developed some notoriety for saying, is this, the job of the exorcist is not to cast out the devil. The job of the exorcist is to find out why is the devil there? What rights has he obtained, And it's the exorcist job to then, knowing, once those rights are known, to work with the victim

to rescind those rights. Once the rights are rescinded, then the devil must leave. Then the devil ca can be cast out. But until that is done, the devil has every right to stay. He's obtained the rights to stay. So most people in their mind understand exorcism falsely to be an enterprise where on the one side you have a demon or demons, and on the other side you have a priest and they kind of do battle with one another, and whoever's the most powerful wins. And that

is nowhere near what the case is. One has to find out which was the doorway by which the devil entered where he is. Then that doorway has to be closed and then he can be evicted.

just give O pome wit cut ye blessings. But with all of that being said, I would love to know more, what's the history of exorcism? Does it go as far back as when the Bible was first written? I would love to know the history of it.

There appear to be people whose task it is or who are willing to take on a foreign spirit manifested as a different, a radically different personality that is all of a sudden inhabiting somebody who is known, and that typically that inhabitation is marked by a certain number of characteristics, which all of all of which are are out of

the character of the person. So a particular violence, an aversion to any goodness, to truth, to beauty to goodness, a knowledge of hidden things, a knowledge of occult realities or the occult, the meaning of occult being the most broad meeting meaning that which is hidden, that that which they couldn't possibly know. And included with that would be a speaking of a language or language, is that they

were never taught. So there clearly is something different that is not from the individual himself or herself that is now present. A foreign spirit is now present. And so there are different ways in which different cultures, and I mean all of them, Japanese culture, Chinese culture, the different African cultures and so forth, that they would deal with that.

I mean you mentioned your own. In the Hawaiian culture, you have exactly so you have a copuona that would come over and would conduct some ritual, the intention of which would be to clean the place, to clean someone wary place. Right, So that is ingrained in the human nature that hey, we've we have these enemies that are not physical, they're spiritual, and yet we we want to combat them. So this drama is very much a part

of the human story. It's it's been there from the beginning and it continues.

with whom I'm friends. They're smart individuals, they have great insights, they're hard working, and they're committed people who love the Lord and equally they love the victims, the people who are ensnared. So those people need to be loved, and we're doing this as an effort to rescue them and

to aid them. And these people have been tormented and tortured, and often people regard them and sometimes even their own family members, as people who are crazy, who are daft, who shouldn't be believed because they're just not connected with reality. And so mental illness is absolutely a thing. And I'm not competent to diagnose mental illness. I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a dog. However, I can diagnose the presence of evil, and they're going to be very

different manifestations than a physical or mental illness. That being said, That being said, it is not an either or situation. One can have mental illness and can be demonically oppressed. So because someone is diagnosed with mental illness, it does not mean that, oh, because of that, the devil's not interested in them. That's in fact, he's going to be more interested in them because like an animal that is sick, just as the pack of lions goes after that animal,

why because that animal is the easiest to catch. The animals already wounded. So the animal is already a target by that fact, so that love of the individual is what gives the motive and all of the other things that are needed to the exorcists the patients for example, because sometimes the process of gathering information and making a diagnosis is painstaking. It's not a quick thing. It's not an effort of kind of telepathy, you know, with just

through a straight mental knowledge. Okay, eye into it. The devil is in front of me, not at all. There have to be signs. Those signs are objective that anybody with a rational mind will have to conclude that nothing in the natural realm could cause this. And they are specific criteria that we follow.

means in Latin outside the natural. One is knowledge of the hidden, so within the victim, within the person who is being diagnosed, a knowledge of facts that he or she could not possibly know, such as, for example, if that person all of a sudden started to recite facts of your life, what happened on your eleventh birthday, conversation that you had with your best friend last night in Seattle,

Washington before you flew to wherever you are here. So there's no way in the natural realm that this individual on the spot could come up with that knowledge. A Secondly, the facility, the ability to speak in foreign languages with ease. We're talking about speaking with facility, with perfect grammar, the ability to answer and to ask questions. Thirdly, is superhuman strength, strength that is beyond the ability of the natural and anything else that might be related to that. So, for example,

something we might call possessed gravity. Whereas a petite individual such as whom we're going to talk about, Annalise Michelle, who weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe one hundred and thirty one hundred and forty pounds that her stout boyfriend at one point and a priest could not lift her. They couldn't budget her. So there was all of a sudden a weight to her body that was absolutely extraordinary. So we're talking about signs that are impossible in nature.

There have to be signs that the natural realm cannot account for.

that has had this. So we have a Canoni saint, Saint Mary of Jesus Crucified, who was a Palestinian nun. She was born in Bethlehem. She is called a holy demoniac. She was possessed not because of a particular sin that she had done a particular action, but she was possessed for the sake of undergoing a suffering that would benefit the Universal Church to benefit others. And the proof of it is in the fact is that the demons didn't

want to be inside her. The demons described as the one whom we serve, right, they never want to name God. They don't even want to say the word, and they absolutely will never say Jesus Christ. They will refer to the one whom you serve, or the carpenter from Nazareth or something like that. With regard to bless Saint Mary of Jesus. Crucified the demons over and over repeated that they wanted to leave, but the One whom you serve will not let me. The same thing is in Analie's Michelle.

The demons at first talked about them bringing her to hell. They talked about them having a plan for her. They enjoy, they love torturing her, and they would brag about yesterday, we made her do this for three hours, in other words, chasing her tail, going kind of on a nervous wild goose chase within her room. So she's pacing the room

for hours with horrendous anxiety. They would brag about this, But as the exorcisms went on, that changed, so yes, Annalie's Michelle had symptoms that were consistent with seizures, and this is what kind of began her medical treatment. And that's what began her parents taking her to the doctor, first the family doctor, and then a neurologist. And she saw several neurologists, and she had at least seven EEGs in her life. All of them except one, proved to

be normal. One showed a slight abnormality in the left lobe that might be consistent with normalcy, it might not be. In other words, it was inconclusive. The diagnosis of epilepsy was never one that was hard and fast. The doctor at her trial who insisted that that's what she had, he never saw her, so he's going by statements of other people. He's not going by direct, firsthand knowledge. So whether or not Annelie's Michelle had epileptie, I don't know.

I can't tell you. Her symptoms were consistent initially with seizures, but that was quickly I'm not going to say replaced. But alongside those things that the seizures themselves, at a certain point, nobody would talk about them because they didn't appear to be evident. But what was evident was some of those preternatural signs, not even some an abundance of preternatural signs that that was impossible for the cause of

which to be from the natural. For example, she would know the exact time and place that her friend Thea would be praying for her. She accurately predicted when a priest, Father Roth was going to come and visit her, although no one told her and even her family didn't know. And this is one of the things that demons do.

It's quite common socially vicually an act that is threatening for them, like a priest is on his way right here, right now, and they will make a reference to it, and they will usually attach something derogatory to it, right they'll call him by some type of expletive, some type of scandalous word, and that's the manifestation of the threat

that they feel. She as I mentioned already, the evidence of the superhuman strength when she was in the gravity of possession, when she was in the hospital and Peter and the priest couldn't lift her, but she had at times the strength of a bear. So her friend Thea identified this that she was throwing around men like they were rag dolls. And so this is a petitue girl. I mean, this is when she was already very close to her death. So this is a person who wouldn't

have the strength to do such a thing. And then, of course she had knowledge of unknown languages, so she at one point corrected the priest's Latin. He missed pronounced something, and the demon stopped, you've mispronounced that, you idiot, this is how you say it. And then he spoke to her in Dutch. Now her native language is German. He spoke to her in Dutch, and she answered back in Dutch fluently. Now Dutch and German they're different languages, but

there's a lot of similarities. And she you know, if you live in Germany, you live close to Holland. So okay, fair enough. But that priest was a missionary priest. He had lived in China, so he spoke to her in Chinese and she answered in perfect Chinese. So again, you know, exorcism entails its own science, a science of diagnosis. It's

a hard diagnosis. It's one that we don't take lightly, and it's a diagnosis that any rational human being, even an atheist, who is in the room and observes the phenomena, would have to conclude the same way that we do thing. Otherwise it would be foreign to what our craft, our and our nature, our science is.

then being on drugs. I mean, do you think that that could have contributed as well, you know, to her mental health.

the seizures. Yeah, an anti epilepsy medication. But those things do have effects on the mind. For one, they made her depressed, They made her slow, tired, and withdrawn, and it does that to anybody. But the point being that these drugs had absolutely no effect on the preternatural occurrence. And this is something that occurs all the time. If possession is an act by a preternatural enemy, why in Heaven's name would it matter what drugs, what sedatives would

be inside the victim's body. And in fact, I have a good friend of mine, Adam Bli, who is a demonologist and who is the bishop's expert on demonology and exorcism for the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. He used to work in a prison and when an inmate becomes violent, egregiously violent, what they will do is inject thorizine into him to make him start. Ten minutes after he's received an injection of thorisine, he's on the floor drooling into

his shoe. In prison, thorizine is called break fluid. It just stops a human being.

mental health issue. We can give them any number of tranquilizer sedatives thorazine for example, and force feed them. In the case of demonic possession, force feeding somebody is not necessarily an option you can try. Now in this case, it wasn't tried because they regarded And so I mean the two priests, both parents, all you know, her three sisters none and including her boyfriend, Peter, her friend Thea, Maria Klog her friend, and Anna Lippert. So nine individuals,

pardon me, eleven individuals. None of them believed that she was close today. So there is one more fact to look at, and that has to be thrown on the scale in the midst of all of this. That annales when she was herself predicted, in other words, during in states where the demon was not possessing, that she was going to be freed in July of that year, July of nineteen seventy six.

She died. She was diagnosed as having died of malnutrition. I believe that medical diagnosis. It's not up to me to question that. I take that at face value. Would I have continued with the exorcisms if her health was in danger?

EEGs that others did which showed nothing anyway. So the fact that the medical profession, multiple doctors, had a crack at Annales, but we're never able to provide a diagnosis that we're able to explain all of the facts and phenomena that came from her that were seen by numerous people, then I think we have to go somewhere else that good science demands that we go to another explanation on.

are attracted to the person of Annely's Michelle. That there is all the signs that the Holy Spirit has instilled within people and instinct, that she lived a saintly life, and that she is with the Lord in heaven.

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