The Exorcist House

In 1949, a fourteen-year-old boy underwent weeks of exorcism rites at this Bel-Nor house and later at Alexian Brothers Hospital, with forty-eight witnesses signing ecclesiastical documents. The case directly inspired William Peter Blatty's novel and the 1973 film The Exorcist.

The word "LOUIS" appeared scratched into a fourteen-year-old boy's chest in February 1949. His mother took it as a message. Within days, the family packed up their Maryland home and drove to a relative's house in Bel-Nor, Missouri, a quiet suburb just north of St. Louis. That house, a two-story brick place on Roanoke Drive, would become the setting for the most documented exorcism in American history, and the direct inspiration for The Exorcist.

The boy's real name was Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, though his identity stayed hidden under the pseudonym "Roland Doe" until after his death in May 2020. The trouble started in Cottage City, Maryland, after his Aunt Harriet died. Harriet was a spiritualist who'd taught him to use a Ouija board. When he tried to contact her after her death, something answered. Scratching sounds came from inside the walls. Furniture moved on its own. A picture of Jesus shook on the wall while the family watched.

His parents tried everything. A doctor found nothing wrong. A psychiatrist at Georgetown came up empty. Their Lutheran pastor, Reverend Luther Miles Schulze, spent a night at the house and watched the boy's bed shake and objects slide across the floor. Schulze had no explanation.

Once the family arrived in Bel-Nor, Roland's cousin contacted a professor at Saint Louis University, who brought the situation to Father William S. Bowdern at the College Church. Bowdern and Father Raymond Bishop visited the Roanoke Drive house together. What they described in their written accounts sounds almost absurd: a bed vibrating violently, objects launching across the room, the boy speaking in a deep guttural voice and recoiling from anything sacred. Father Walter Halloran, a young Jesuit scholastic who assisted Bowdern, later gave multiple interviews confirming he'd witnessed the bed shaking. He also got his nose broken when Roland punched him during one session.

Archbishop Joseph Ritter authorized a formal Rite of Exorcism. The proceedings moved from the Bel-Nor house to the Alexian Brothers Hospital psychiatric wing in South St. Louis, where the sessions ran nightly through late March and April. Bishop kept a diary. His March 18, 1949 entry describes the boy's strength as "beyond natural power," requiring three men to hold his limbs. Words like "EVIL" and "HELL" appeared on Roland's skin. During the Litany of the Saints, the mattress shook. At one point, Roland broke a bedspring loose and slashed Halloran's arm, leaving a wound that needed stitches.

Nine Jesuit priests participated. Thirty-nine other people signed the final ecclesiastical documents attesting to what they'd witnessed. That's an unusual level of institutional commitment for a case the Church could have easily kept quiet.

It ended on Easter Monday, April 18, 1949. According to the diary, a different voice came from Roland, deeper and commanding: "Satan! Satan! I am St. Michael, and I command you, Satan, and the other evil spirits to leave the body in the name of Dominus. Now! NOW! NOW!" The boy woke up and said, simply, "He's gone." Witnesses in the hospital reported hearing a sound like a gunshot.

Roland went home, married, had children, and worked for NASA. He never experienced anything like it again. He never talked about it publicly. He lived until 2020.

William Peter Blatty, a Georgetown student who read about the case in a 1949 Washington Post article, turned it into his 1971 novel The Exorcist. The 1973 film won two Academy Awards. The Bel-Nor house is still a private residence. In 2015, Destination America broadcast "Exorcism: Live!" from inside the home, featuring the Tennessee Wraith Chasers and Eileen Dreyer, Father Bowdern's great-niece. Nothing happened on camera, which tells you something about the difference between 1949 and modern reality television.

The skeptics have reasonable points. Author Thomas B. Allen, who wrote Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism in 1993, concluded Roland was "just a deeply disturbed boy, nothing supernatural about him." Investigator Mark Opsasnick found no evidence supporting several key claims. But the diary exists. The signed documents exist. Forty-eight people put their names on paper, and not one ever recanted. The house on Roanoke Drive earned its reputation the hard way.