Maricica Irina Cornici And The ‘Tanacu Exorcism’
Cinex/FacebookMaricica Irina Cornici was 23 years old when she died during an exorcism.
Born in Romania in 1982, Maricica Irina Cornici suffered a great deal before her fatal real-life exorcism.
After her father died by suicide, her mother, who lived with alcohol dependency, abandoned her at the Barlad Children’s Home in rural Vaslui County. There, she was routinely abused by its administrators. After a few short years as an adult, she became possessed.
At least, that was the contention of her exorcists, while many others felt she was mentally ill. Released from the orphanage in 2001, she spent a few years as a housekeeper and hoped to move to Germany with a friend.
In 2005, she visited her friend at the Holy Trinity Monastery in the town of Tanacu to convince her to emigrate to Germany. She would never get there. By the end of June 2005, she was dead.
Cornici hadn’t planned on staying long, but she found herself moving into the isolated hilltop convent. Within months, local doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia. But the nuns and priest blamed Satan.
RADU ANECULAESI/AFP/Getty ImagesFather Corogeanu (front) was defrocked and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Even her brother said he had witnessed when the Devil “went into her” and taunted her by calling her “girl” and girly” during her first communion at Holy Trinity. She had become so violent that she received two weeks of treatment at the local hospital but was ultimately remitted back into the convent’s care.
There, Father Daniel Petre Corogeanu and four nuns shackled Cornici to a makeshift cross. She was bound and gagged while they tried to exorcise Satan from her body. They prayed and poured holy water on her lips, shoving a towel into her mouth, and planned to carry her into the church to anoint her wrists with oil.
After three days, however, she was so weak that they decided to call an ambulance. The initial coroner’s report said that Cornici died of dehydration en route to the hospital. Her aunt, Anisoara Antohi, recalled that “she was disfigured, she had marks on her hands, her ankles and her stomach.”
Corogeanu was defrocked and sentenced to 14 years in prison. Three of the nuns were given five-year sentences, while the fourth was sentenced to eight years.
After learning about nine of the most terrifying real-life exorcisms in modern history, read the true stories behind Hollywood’s scariest horror movies. Then, learn about the real “Amityville Horror” house, where murder and alleged hauntings took place in the 1970s.
