The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel

Anneliese Michel (September 21, 1952 – July 1, 1976) was a German Catholic woman who was said to be possessed by demons and subsequently underwent an exorcism. Two motion pictures, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Requiem, are loosely based on Michel's story.

Michel experienced what is recognized by medical professionals as severe psychiatric disturbances from the age of 16 to her death, at age 23 from malnutrition secondary to mental illness. She apparently intended her death by starvation to "atone for the wayward youth of the day and the apostate priests of the modern church".



After several years of ineffective psychiatric treatment, she refused medical treatment and requested an exorcism. Both priests who performed the exorcism and Michel's parents were convicted of negligent manslaughter because they did not seek medical treatment (for her refusal to eat) on her behalf and over her objections.


Early life

Anneliese Michel was born September 1952 in Klingenberg, Bavaria, Germany. Michel was raised in a strict Catholic family. A devout girl, she tried to make reparations for the sins of wayward priests and drug addicts by sleeping on a bare floor in the middle of winter.

In 1968, Anneliese was 16 and still in high school, she began to suffer from convulsions. Court findings have her experiencing her first epileptic attack in 1969. It was then that a neurologist at the Psychiatric Clinic Würzburg diagnosed her with grand mal epilepsy.



Psychiatric treatment and exorcism

Soon, Anneliese started experiencing devilish hallucinations while praying. She also began to hear voices, which told her that she was damned. By 1973 Anneliese was suffering from depression and considering suicide. Her behavior became increasingly bizarre: she tore off her clothes, ate coal, and licked up her own urine.

Being admitted to an unnamed psychiatric hospital did not improve Michel's health. Moreover, her depression began to deepen. She grew increasingly frustrated with medical intervention as it did not improve her condition. Long-term medical treatment proved unsuccessful; her condition, including her depression, worsened with time.



Having centered her life around devout Catholic faith, Michel began to attribute her condition to demonic possession. Michel became intolerant of sacred places and objects, such as the crucifix, which she attributed to her own demonic possession. Throughout the course of the religious rites Michel underwent, she was prescribed antipsychotic drugs, which she may or may not have stopped taking.

In June 1970, Michel suffered a third seizure at the psychiatric hospital she had been staying in and was prescribed anticonvulsants for the first time. The name of this drug is not known, and it did not bring about immediate alleviation of Michel's symptoms.

She also continued talking about what she called "devil faces", seen by her during various times of the day. Michel became convinced that conventional medicine was of no help. Growing increasingly adamant that her illness was of a spiritual kind, she appealed to the Church to perform an exorcism on her.



That same month, she was prescribed another drug, Aolept (pericyazine), which is a phenothiazine with general properties similar to those of chlorpromazine: pericyazine is used in the treatment of various psychoses, including schizophrenia and disturbed behavior.

In November 1973, Michel started her treatment with Tegretol (carbamazepine), which is an antiepileptic drug. Michel took this medicine frequently, until shortly before her death.


Exorcism and death

In 1975, when Anneliese was 23 years old, an older woman who accompanied Anneliese Michel on a pilgrimage concluded that Anneliese was suffering from demonic possession because Michel was unable to walk past a certain icon of Jesus Christ and refused to drink the water of a holy spring.

An exorcist in a nearby town examined Michel and returned a diagnosis of demonic possession.[1] The bishop issued permission to perform the rite of exorcism according to the Rituale Romanum of 1614.

She and her parents were convinced that she was possessed. After years of unsuccessful psychiatric treatments, they gave up on medical treatment and chose to rely solely on the exorcisms for healing. The rites of exorcism were performed over the course of about ten months in 1976. A total of sixty-seven exorcism sessions were held, one or two each week, some lasting up to four hours. Michel at this time was refusing medical care, refusing to eat, and talking about her death being a form of atonement for other people's sins.

On July 1, 1976, Anneliese Michel died in her sleep. The autopsy report stated that her death resulted from the malnutrition and dehydration due to almost a year of semi-starvation during which time the rites of exorcism were also performed.