Anneliese Michel, A Young Girl Possessed By Demons
Anneliese Michel/FacebookAnneliese Michel during college.
The bone-chilling story Anneliese Michel has terrified people for decades and even served as the inspiration for the 2005 movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose and ranks her as one of history’s weirdest people.
Anneliese Michel was born in the 1960s in Bavaria, West Germany. She was deeply religious and a devout Catholic who attended mass twice a week. Her normal life was flipped upside down when she was 16. Anneliese blacked out at school and began to walk around in dazed state.
She experienced a similar episode the following year and also had a series of body compulsions. She was taken to the doctor who diagnosed her with temporal lobe epilepsy. The disorder is marked by seizures, loss of memory, hallucinations, and can also cause Geschwind syndrome which can lead to hyperreligiosity.
Michel took a series of medications to keep her epilepsy at bay, but they did not help. She later began to see and hear the devil, and heard demons telling her that she was “damned” and would “rot in hell.”
Michel was convinced that she was possessed by demons and sought out priests for help. They initially refused her but finally, priest Ernst Alt believed her story and got a local bishop to consent to exorcisms.
Over the next ten months, Alt and a local priest conducted 67 exorcisms on Michel. In the sessions, Michel claimed that she was possessed by the demons Lucifer, Cain, Judas Iscariot, Adolf Hitler, and Nero.
Anneliese Michel/FacebookAnneliese Michel being restrained by her mother during the exorcism.
During this ten-month period, Michel’s body began to physically deteriorate. She broke the bones in her knees from excessive prayer and slowly stopped eating. She eventually died on July 1, 1976, from malnutrition and dehydration.
Michel’s parents and the priests were charged with negligent homicide for her death. They all were found guilty but escaped prison time.
No one knows for sure why Michel’s life came to a tragically short end but some people believe that something much weirder, and more human than supernatural, caused her death.
