The Demonic Trial: The True Story Behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose

In this spine-chilling episode of the PIC True Crime Podcast, we delve into the harrowing true story that inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Join Mike, Bree, and Heather as they explore the terrifying journey of Annaliese Michel, a sweet, devout young woman whose life spiraled into a nightmare of medical mysteries, demonic possession, and legal battles. From her unusual childhood, her unexplained seizures, and haunting visions to the growing divide between science and faith, Annaliese’s tragic ordeal left a chilling legacy. Discover the events that movies didn’t show, where the lines between reality, supernatural forces, and mental illness blur in ways that defy explanation. Tune in for the first part of this eerie and heartbreaking true crime saga—just in time for Halloween.

Transcript

Annaliese Michel Part One (00:00)
If you haven't seen the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose, you really should. In the oversaturated niche of demonic possession movies, this one really stands out.

And like the original movie that sparked the slew of possession tropes, this one was based in true events. That's probably why it's so much more impactful than the rest.

And also like The Exorcist starring Linda Blair, the actual events are even worse than the shortened movie version, if you can believe it.

In real life, Emily Rose was called Annaliese Michel. Sweet, religious, and loved by her family. But her life was about to take a dark turn, a turn that would lead Annaliese and her family and the people called in to help down years-long journey straight through hell and back. And just when they thought it was finally over, the police and the judicial system took over and the torture and misery would start again.

Despite the years worth of spiritual and legal warfare, Annaliese's story did reach the world. Millions of people saw it play out on the big screen when it was adapted into one of the 2000s most iconic horror flicks.

It seems that all of her years worth of suffering, Annaliese's ordeal was brought to every single corner of the world, just like she'd prophesied. And now let's delve into the world of demons, exorcisms, and courtroom drama that the world's never seen before.

For all you listeners that's been here before, welcome back. And for all of you that are joining us for the first time, welcome to the PIC True Crime Podcast. I'm Mike.

I'm Bree

And I'm Heather. I hope you guys are excited for this one. It's come just in time for Halloween.

I can tell you this much, I really love this movie.

The reality is even scarier. Let's jump right into it, shall we? We'll take it away,

Annaliese Michel Part One (02:14)
To understand the multitude of exorcisms that Annaliese was put through and the court cases that followed, we need to go back to the beginning. Annaliese's unusual childhood and ill health is pivotal to understanding why this played out the way that it did.

The movie was good and scary and all that, but we got a summarized version of the events that took years and years to transpire. So let's rewind to the very start.

Anna Elizabeth Michel was born in 1952 on the 21st of September to Josef and Anna Michel.

Her father, Josef came from a very religious background. Three of his sisters became nuns and he ventured into theological studies with the hopes of becoming a priest. But he struggled with Latin and the various foreign and ancient languages that came with the workload, so he dropped out.

Josef was described as a good student, he just didn't have the knack for languages, and he was very, very disappointed that he didn't make the cut. So was his mother, but Josef's father really wanted him to take over the family's carpentry business.

Things were going well until World War II broke out and Josef was drafted into the army. He managed to make it out alive despite fighting on one of the most violent fronts of the war and being held captive at one point.

When he returned, he passed his trade exam and began working for his father's sawmill. That's where he met his future wife, Anna.

Her father also owned a sawmill that was situated in Leiblfing West Germany.

She worked for the family business and already had a daughter named Martha. It's a little unclear who's the baby father was, and it's assumed that she was born out of wedlock.

That must have been scandalous in the late 40s.

Josef staunchly religious upbringing probably thought this was absolutely unacceptable. Anna was even forced to wear a black veil on her wedding day.

She

couldn't wear white because she wasn't considered pure. What a horrible way to shame a young mother.

Well, it was common practice at the time and it's an important part of the story. Understanding Annaliese's upbringing is going to be brought into question a lot.

Did the influences and beliefs of her family play any part in what would eventually transpire? There's no question that Anna was a little obsessive about the need to repent for her sins, so the Bible, God, and sin was constantly part of the discussion in the home.

Both sets of parents were staunch Catholics. The family attended mass twice a week and the girls took part in any classes that the church offered.

It looks like the couple moved to Anna's Neck of the Woods in West Germany where Josef opened his own sawmill.

Annaliese was born when her older sister was four and sadly when Martha was eight she died during a surgery to remove a tumor from her kidney. Annaliese was just four years old at the time

and little Annaliese would soon be the older sister of Gertrude, Maria, and Rose. The family was considered upper middle class for the time.

They weren't living it up in luxury or anything, but they owned a three-bedroom house and Josefs business was doing well

Anna placed a lot of pressure on her girls to keep up appearances. The Michel daughters were all well behaved, did well in school, and they kept company of other children from the church.

which were most of the town's 3,000 residents. Almost all of them were Catholic. Annaliese was a very bright student, but due to a number of illnesses that plagued her throughout her childhood, she needed to be kept back a year. She suffered from scarlet fever, mumps, and measles. I guess vaccines weren't too popular in the 50s and 60s. Yep, and all these illnesses took a toll on her.

She was on the frail side and quite shy and withdrawn.

Her academic prowess did not take a hit at all, despite her illnesses and being kept back a year. There was also a minor incident when Annaliese was 11, she got a bump on her head and suffered a mild concussion.

Other than that, she had many friends. The sisters played various instruments and their father loved them dearly. He took them on long car rides where they sang together. Don't get it wrong, the Michels were religious and strict, but they loved each other very much and the family was a happy one. Annaliese's brilliance was undeniable. She aced every exam and even mastered learning Latin, unlike her father.

Her parents were very excited about the prospect of sending their daughter to college, a very rare opportunity for women in those days, and one reserved only for the very brightest girls. So Annaliese began working toward her dream of becoming a teacher one day. The first sign that something was amiss came when she was 15 years old. One day during class, Annaliese blacked out. A friend next to her saw it happen. She said Annaliese became unresponsive.

slack mouth and her eyes glassed over.

The friend shook her and called her name, but Annaliese only snapped back to reality after a minute or so. They wrote it off as being tired and thought nothing of it.

But later that night, Annaliese woke up to an intense pressure on her stomach, like something heavy was sitting on her.

She couldn't move her legs or any part of her body. And she was so frightened that she lost control of her bladder. Somewhere in the house, the clock chimed for midnight and Annaliese could suddenly move again. But she was so weak that she barely had the strength to change her wet sheets and night clothes.

At first I wanted to say it sounds like sleep paralysis, but given her episode earlier that day and the weakness that came over her after the episode that night, it sounds more like a mild seizure to me. And that's exactly where this was heading toward. Epilepsy. But not for another year. Annaliese went about her life as usual.

Then just before her 17th birthday in 1969, the previous year played out almost exactly as it did before.

She had a brief dissociative episode during the day and then at night she had what can only be described as sleep paralysis.

Anna took her daughter to the family doctor after the second incident.

He couldn't find anything wrong with Annaliese but he referred them to a neurologist anyway, just because the symptoms sounded like a neurological problem to him.

The neurologist agreed that it did sound like some form of epilepsy, but his examinations and scans showed no abnormalities, and since the episodes were a whole year apart he did not want to be too hasty with treatment options.

No medication or further interference was prescribed until her condition changed or became more frequent. The safest option was to wait and see how things progressed. Unfortunately, 1969 was a rough year for Annaliese health-wise.

First she got tonsillitis and had to get her tonsils removed. Then she got an infection in her lungs and shortly after that was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which turned into pneumonia.

It got so bad that Annaliese was almost completely bedridden for most of her 17th year. She was moved to a children's hospital that specialized in lung-related illnesses to try and figure out why on earth she kept coming down with illnesses, each one worse than the next.

They discovered that Annaliese had some circulatory issues that required her to stay at the hospital for months. Here, the already unhappy and homesick Annaliese withdrew herself. She prayed, read the Bible, and wrote obsessively to her family.

Annaliese decided that if she couldn't make it to her final exams to go to teaching college, then she would go to some kind of seminary school for women to learn how to teach scripture to others.

So Annaliese was outwardly happy and respectful to those around her, but the year of getting progressively sicker, being separated from her close-knit family, and the general uncertainty with her health was obviously starting to take a toll on the teenager. Turning to her faith was seen as a positive way to cope with it all, but some could argue that she was becoming obsessive.

desperately seeking answers to her lonely and uncertain predicament.

In early 1970, Annaliese had her third episode. Again, it started with a blackout during the day and ended in that paralyzed state that night. Only this time the nurses were able to rush to her side.

Before the paralysis set in, Annaliese managed to get out of scream to alert them. They saw her body go rigid and that she'd wet the bed again. After Annaliese snapped back, they changed her bedding and clothes and put her back to bed. A few days later, the hallucination started. Annaliese was sitting by the window.

inside the ward where the other sick girls were too. The hills and the sun outside suddenly became a psychedelic landscape filled with gold and bright hues of purple and blue. If it weren't for the other patients screaming in the room, Annaliese would have stared at the strange yet hauntingly beautiful display of dancing colors in front of her all day.

She came back to reality again, only to find her roommates in an absolute state.

They said that Annaliese's hands gripped the rosary and her hands like claws and that her usually blue eyes had turned black. Annaliese looked down to the rosary and the cross was shining with the same bright gold that she'd seen outside. In the mirror her eyes were not black, but their regular blue, and for the first time in months, Annaliese's cheeks were rosy and her lips were red.

Gone was the pale and sickly looking stranger that stared out at her for nearly a year. Annaliese took this as a divine vision. She believed that the Virgin Mary came to comfort her in her time of need, assuring her that her faith was still pure and her prayers had been heard.

But the girls in the room felt differently. Even though Annaliese hadn't made a sound or moved an inch in that brief moment, her clutching claws and black eyes looked like a beast had overtaken her for an instant, and they were deeply frightened by the experience.

After more EKGs and various stress tests that all came back normal, Annaliese was sent to another facility, this time one that specialized in conditions surrounding the brain.

If she weren't being subjected to tests, Annaliese held a vigil in front of the window with her rosary in hand, praying for the Virgin Mary to come back to comfort her. But instead, the next vision, if you can call it that, was not a kaleidoscope of vibrant colors. In the view of the window formed by the clouds and the shadows came a demon.

While she was praying, Annaliese said the face of some unearthly demonic being formed outside and every time after that when she prayed, she'd see the demon's face somewhere.

She stopped going to the window, but it appeared in the beveling of the wall beside her bed. So she closed her eyes to pray, but the face would flash from the darkness of her closed eyelids. No matter what she did, if she dared to pray, the demon face would make an appearance. Annaliese would serve that there was something inside of her, living there and stopping her from praying.

After six months away from home and repeated normal results from the various tests, Annaliese was finally allowed to return home to her family in August of that year after being prescribed a mild anti-convulsion medicine.

But the Michels got a very detached and melancholy young woman back. Gone was the smiling, happy teenager who doted on her sisters. Annaliese was distant and cold. When her sisters asked her why she didn't love them anymore, Annaliese apologized for being distracted and said that she was too tired and weak to feel much of anything anymore.

The vision of the demon progressed the month before she went back to school. Now it was accompanied by the smell of burning feces. But she said nothing of this to anyone around her. Instead, Annaliese went back to school, now placed two more years back because she'd gotten so far behind. More Devout and withdrawn than ever. Her old friends tried to welcome her back.

but she would talk about nothing but scripture and theology.

They began avoiding her whenever they could, because on the rare occasion that Annaliese did talk, it was always something about God. She went for checkups for her lung conditions, and her chest seemed to have recovered completely.

Another neurologist gave her a once over too and prescribed another anticonvulsant. It was still a mild dosage but a little stronger than what she'd been taking since being discharged. For the whole of 1971, Annaliese was dragged from one doctor to the next. Predictably the once brilliant student barely scraping by with her grades.

but she did not blame this on missing school so much. Annaliese complained of brain fog and finding it hard to concentrate. She said that she was so detached that she found all social interactions and her surroundings uninteresting and bland. But still, her mother pushed for Annaliese to take the end-of-year exams, hoping that at least one daughter

would go on to get a higher education. Anna was sure that Annaliese's dreams of becoming a teacher just needed to be reinvigorated, that it would bring back her spark.

Before we get to the end of the year tests and the quick progression of Annaliese's condition, let's take a look at her medical history and how it ties into seizures first. Almost all of her previous illnesses and injuries can lead to seizure conditions later in life. Measles, mumps, and TB can all cause seizures years later.

Measles especially has a habit of affecting the nervous system and the brain. The concussion she got when she was 11, if she hit her head at exactly the right place, then it could also lead to brain damage. Her issues with circulation can't cause seizures on its own, but it can worsen an existing condition.

I have a question. If epilepsy or seizure conditions aren't treated properly, can it cause hallucinations? Yeah. And we have to understand what a seizure is here too, because it's not necessarily falling to the ground and twitching like a marionette. It's not all bodies twisting into unnatural positions from muscle contractions and foaming at the mouth. Those are called grand mal seizures. Some seizures cause a dissociative effect.

Like when she got all slack-jawed and immobile?

Exactly. It's easy to mistake it for sleep paralysis if you're in bed. There are a few ways that hallucinations can occur. One, if your brain is misfiring and you can't move, it tries to make sense of what's happening and it begins to fill in the blanks with whatever is at its disposal.

That's why people with sleep paralysis often refer or report seeing ghosts in apparitions. They aren't crazy and they don't have schizophrenia. Their brains are just panicking in the moment. And then it also depends on where in the brain the seizure takes place. If it's in or near the parts of the brain that process sensory information like smell, touch, taste, sound, well, you can imagine that things go a little haywire in that moment.

So it's not just hallucinating what you see, but also your smell and sounds and even what your skin is feeling? You got it. And if it's not managed or least lessened in severity, these parts of the brain can be permanently damaged. If the seizures also cross over to the logical part of the brain, then it can cause delusions or make you at least susceptible to them. So what's the difference between a hallucination

or a delusion

A hallucination is seeing something that's not there, but a delusion is believing it's real. Most people suffering from schizophrenia, for instance, are perfectly aware what they're seeing and hearing is false. But when you start believing it's true, that's when it becomes a delusion. Most of the time, the two go hand in hand, so it's hard to separate them.

But the point is that just because you see little green men running around on the ceiling doesn't mean you're crazy. It's believing they're really there that makes you mentally ill. And to complicate matters, delusions don't have to be because there's a structural abnormality in the brain. It can be because of a psychological condition. Ex-cult members believing the end is coming, Stockholm syndrome,

And even severe depression and anxiety can lead people to think that everyone hates them.

Okay, I can see why we need to understand this if this is going to go to court. Where do you draw the line between what's real and what's not, or even what is BELIEVED to be real or false? So this is the perfect storm, Annaliese was having seizures and it wasn't being properly treated, and she truly believes that there's a demonic spirit inside of her that's causing all of this to happen.

Things are about to get weird.

The lines between the supernatural and reality become blurred for the family. We're going to have to get back together at the end and make out our decisions then.

Back to the 70s, Annaliese was now 19 years old and about to turn 20, ready to start her final term in high school, which means that her final exam was approaching too. If she were going to go to college at all, she needed to get exceptional marks.

After a brief spate of more catatonic seizures that left her weak and exhausted for days afterward and more medication changes, Annaliese seemed to go into a remission of sorts. Anna feared that the new term would bring more stress and therefore more seizures. But that didn't stop her from pushing Annaliese to study as hard as she could now that she was finally getting better. That's really harsh. Give the girl a

break it's been more than 3 years of this already.

I don't think anyone was entirely aware of the hallucinations, or at least they didn't know how severe they were. Annaliese was deeply religious, had always been, so her spiritual convictions weren't out of the ordinary. And now that things were finally looking better, why not focus on the positives?

I don't think it was wise to push her so hard, but I believe that her parents wanted what was best for her and they believed that they were doing right by her.

Even though Annaliese hadn't had a seizure in more than a month, she was taken to the neurologist again. voiced concerns that the stress could bring the seizures back. So, Annaliese was prescribed Zentropil,

the first serious anticonvulsant that she had was prescribed that she had to take twice a day.

Zentropil has some wicked side effects, nausea, dizziness, rapid eye movements. It can affect balance, coordination, and impact concentration. Why was she given this heavy drug when things were obviously getting better is very alarming. It's implied that Anna asked for something stronger, fully believing that the seizures were going to come back and they needed to get ahead of the problem before it even showed up.

I can understand a worried mother maybe doing a stupid thing, even if she meant well. But the doctor was supposed to know better. Why the hell treat something that's obviously getting better?

Blame the times or the doctors' incompetence. Either way, Annaliese was sent on her way to prepare for exams that would determine whether or not she could get to college and a pair of parents who were desperate for their daughter to succeed.

In September, the seizures came back along with the demon faces. She'd go stiff, her body unable to move, and then she'd lose control of her bladder.

It's not clear if she was still seeing the demon face when she was praying. If that was the case, it didn't stop Annaliese from praying. She was still as devout as ever. But by November, a new symptom became apparent, though she didn't tell anyone about it at the time, not even the neurologist that she was still seeing every few weeks. Annaliese was starting to hear scratching and knocking from inside her bedroom walls.

And here's where Annaliese's strange reality began to spill over into the rest of the household.

Even though she hadn't told anyone about the noises, believing it to be another divine test on her faith, her siblings began to hear it too.

They said that sometimes there would be knocks inside the walls, their closets, and in the ceiling. Other times it sounded like chairs were being knocked over or furniture was being moved around. And remember, before this, the family always attributed Annaliese's condition to a medical problem. Only Annaliese was convinced that there was a demon inside her and that the Virgin Mary had paid her a visit that one time.

And she wasn't exactly telling people this, so the younger girls didn't have any reason to become victims to mass hysteria. When the girls complained about the noises, Annaliese finally admitted that she'd been hearing it for weeks. Josef thought that the younger girls were just looking for attention because Annaliese's illnesses took up so much of her parents' time.

Anna took her to an ear specialist and the neurologist again. And like every other one of the hundreds of EKGs and stress tests and whatnot that this poor girl went through in the past, her ears were perfectly normal. Nothing out of the ordinary. And here's where Anna began to suspect that it might be something other than a medical issue.

Because Annaliese told her about the demon faces and that she wasn't just hearing knocking.

Sometimes the demons talked and conspired, or they laughed and mocked her from the shadows. She said that she was seeing them all the time now, and that the noises and the visions were with her almost every second of the day. Anna found her daughter in the living room one day, staring at a picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall. She recalled that Annaliese's face was contorted in rage, her hands were clenched in unclenching-like claws.

She said that they weren't just contorted and stiff like claws. Her hands had visibly thickened and her nails were longer.

They were physically changed into animal talons. There was such hate in Annaliese's expression that Anna thought for a moment that she looked like a maddened animal. and her eyes had gone pure black.

Anna told Joseph all of this and he believed the stress of the past few years was getting to all of them.

One day, a doctor would find the answer, and until then, all they could do was stay calm and strong and pray for relief. And the medication was making the seizures less severe. At least she was just zoning out for a few seconds at a time. So wasn't like the meds and the doctors weren't helping at all. I had begged to differ on that.

When Annaliese turned 20, she came down with rubella, also known as German measles.

Can't this poor girl get a break? She pulled through and despite the demon faces, the sickening smells and the constant knocking and seizures, Annaliese managed to pass her end of the year exams. I can't believe she still managed to accomplish that. It's actually kind of amazing. Well, there were no celebrations for Annaliese. After half a decade of suffering this

and the demonic voices now almost taunting her. She considered taking her own life. This was hell and there was no relief from it here on earth. If it weren't for her deep religious convictions, she probably would have ended her suffering. But the Catholic Church considers taking your own life as a one-way ticket to the underworld.

Mike, can you walk us through San Damiano?

Annaliese Michel Part One (27:58)
Sure, that summer after her final term of high school was a dark one. Annaliese lost every ounce of joy and lust for life. She lived only for the sake of living. Whether it was the medication making her listless or apathetic or the sights and sounds haunting her daily, Annaliese was no longer Annaliese.

Even Josef, who'd always looked for solutions, reasons to be hopeful, was afraid for her. Annaliese was a shell of her former self.

Hoping to make her feel better, he drove her to San Damiano in Italy. She'd wanted to visit the village since she was a little girl. Josef had told her about it and the place fascinated her. He visited the village back when he wanted to study to become a priest, as many in the clergy do.

San Damiano has a bit of a history with miracles and divine visions in the Catholic Church that makes it a holy place, and

one that many devout Catholics make a pilgrimage to.

we're not talking about ancient history here. Even in the early 1900s, there was a priest, Father Pio, who performed healings and came down with stigmata during his sermons.

For those of you who don't know, stigmata is when the wounds of Christ spontaneously make a physical appearance on a person's body, bleeding palms and feet, stab wounds on the ribs, and that sort of thing.

Father Pio is a good example for the kind of things that San Damiano was famous for. He too suffered many child illnesses and visions during his younger years.

He decided to devote his life to the church by the time he was five years old. But Pio's visions had more in common with Annaliese's than just seeing funny things. During his prayers, it said that he had feigning spells and bouts of dissociation when he seemed to drift off into another world for hours at a time.

And he too had headaches, extreme exhaustion, and periods where he couldn't keep food down. All the same symptoms that Annaliese had experienced, or at least were beginning to.

And most importantly of all, he was plagued by evil spirits and demons that tested and tormented him long before he entered the priesthood.

Now Pio wasn't in the village, he died in September of 1968 of old age and the connection between him and Annaliese was made almost instantly. Just to put the cherry on the cake, Annaliese had her first seizure in September of 1968, the same year and month that Father Pio passed away.

Look, Father Pio is a whole can of worms on its own.

He was a very famous figure in Catholicism during his time on earth. And it's almost certain that a religious family like the Michels would have heard of him at least in passing. The guy performed miracles and made prophecies left and right, and everyone who had met him believed he was the real deal

I see where this is going.

I was all for the mantle of sainthood being passed on to Annaliese.

Poor, pious, and devout Annaliese would've been the perfect candidate. But given her possible epileptic condition, continuously declining health, and probably obsessive nature, it seems like the perfect storm. A story that subconsciously embedded itself into a very sick and very confused child. Is that where this is all going?

You hit the nail on the head there.

But again, things progress in such a way that first it looks like a case of a deluded and sickly girl making up a reality in her mind to cope with it all. And then it twists itself into something else and you're not sure what's real anymore. When they arrived in the village known for healing the sick and miracles,

Feel like taking a trip to Italy for those migraines you keep having, Mom?

Annaliese Michel Part One (31:56)
Joke all you want, but there's even photographic evidence that's pretty convincing that's come from there. Lights in the sky, trees blooming out of season. It's a special place. Or a dangerous one, depending on your state of mind.

we should make a holiday out of it. I'd love to visit it. Josef and Annaliese met with a priest who took them onto the shrine.

At the shrine was that pear tree that bloomed out of season, a well of sacred water, and a statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by a little garden.

but Annaliese could not go in. When she got close to the entrance, she said that the ground beneath her feet burned like fire, and the pictures and medals of the saints surrounding the shrine sparkled so brightly that it burned her eyes.

religious pendant around her neck that her father bought her before they arrived burned her skin too and she said that she couldn't breathe because it was so heavy on her chest. Annaliese tried several times to enter through the gates of the shrine but no matter which way she tried to approach it from the pain in her eyes and feet just wouldn't let her get close enough to pray.

So Father Ernst offered Annaliese some water from the sacred well, but for her it smelled like something rotten and she couldn't even drink it.

Everything about the Holy Shrine caused Annaliese great pain or discomfort, and this was witnessed by many people who visited the shrine that day. Annaliese and her father got back on the bus to leave disheartened.

Whatever help or hope they were looking to find in San Damiano, they didn't get it.

But the bus ride back was not nearly as calm as it was going there. Annaliese began shouting profanities at a woman that she knew from her hometown in Germany.

Thea Hein was a bit of a snoop and a town gossip, and she was already aware of at least some of Annaliese's troubles. Gone was the soft-spoken, even shy girl. Instead, the voice that boomed from her lips was deep, guttural, and it alternated between curses and mocking the older woman that was the object of Annaliese's verbal assault.

The passengers on the bus were terrified. Josef could not control his daughter or whatever the hell was in possession of her for the life of him. They later reported that the sound coming from Annaliese could not possibly have been her. And there was a smell of burning feces emanating from her that was so strong that people were hanging their heads out the window to get away from it.

The altercation ended with Annaliese launching herself at the woman and ripping a medallion of the saint off her chest. Now the cat was out of the bag. Thea Hein made sure that everyone back home knew that the oldest Michel girl was demon possessed. Instead of taking a backseat and letting Annaliese recover her strength and her senses, Anna was determined that her daughter was to start college.

Annaliese had a shot at a higher education and after all that she had been through and the work that she had put in, Anna was not going to allow it to go to waste.

I really wanted to have sympathy for Anna, but here's where she loses me. I think that in the wake of Annalieses outburst on the bus and the sudden wave of gossip and suspicion directed at the family, Anna, who'd always been very concerned about appearances, was desperate to make things look like they were going well.

like they were perfect and the daughter she had always bragged about was going to be great after all. After the next check at the neurologist and another string of normal test results, Anna finally turned to the church.

She claims that the doctor told her to seek spiritual intervention. The doctor says he did no such thing. He did not believe that Annaliese was fit to go to college and even prescribed her a new medication, an antipsychotic drug.

But whether or not he believed that Annaliese was mentally ill was not noted in his files. It's possible that he thought that the hallucinations were a result of the epilepsy. The combination is not unusual for someone suffering from seizures to have a hallucination.

That doesn't mean that they're mentally ill,

But the fact that he doesn't make a note or he doesn't refer them to a psychiatrist tells me that he did not think that Annaliese was insane. But it does prove that he knew about the hallucinations. There's no doubt about that.

Annaliese did something out of character too. Outside of the bus attack, mean. For the first time in all these years and through all the treatments and tests, Annaliese spoke up about what she wanted.

She did not feel up to going to college. She told her parents that she was too exhausted and that the constant haunting and demon faces and whispers behind her was too much. She could not, would not be able to focus on her studies. But Anna was not going to let that happen. Annalieses bags were packed and her place at the school was reserved. She was going to the city to become a teacher. Come hell.

or high water.

If anyone's to blame, so far it's Anna. What the hell is she thinking?

After the bus incident, things were obviously getting to unmanageable levels. Making Annaliese go through the motions now is torture on its own. I honestly don't even know how this poor girl was still hanging on. Was it to convince the town that everything was perfect or to convince herself that everything was okay? It's cruel to send her to school in the state that she's in.

Maybe it was a bit of both, but now, Annaliese was being thrown to the wolves. She was no longer under supervision. She'd be sleeping in a dorm, away from doctors and her parents.

Whatever Anna had convinced herself was going to happen, absolutely did not. The bus ride was the beginning of the end for Annaliese and now she was completely alone and at the mercy of her demons, real or imagined. damn, she's doomed.

And this is where the movie kicks off. It showed a very vanilla version of Annaliese's life.

In the film, she's called Emily, and none of Annaliese's earlier medical and suspected possessions or seizures were shown. Just a religious girl who got a scholarship to go to college. If anything, the movie makes it look like her parents didn't want her to go, when the reality was quite the opposite.

Before Anna Lees left for college, the family sought out priests to help them. Some of them believed that she was just ill and that doctors just hadn't discovered what was making her sick yet. Others believed that she was possessed.

It looks to me like Anna was shopping for a priest who believed them. Sort of like parents with Munchausen's shop for doctors until they get a new diagnosis.

After all these years they were probably desperate and with the bus incident and the siblings hearing the bangs and knocks inside the walls too, I wouldn't be surprised if they completely believed Annaliese when she said the demons were inside of her. And in the five years of medical professionals not giving her any answers or relief, where else were they going to go to?

One of the priests who believed them was Father Rodewyk an expert and published author in the field of possession.

He was in his geriatric years, however, so he directed the family to another priest, Father Herman Herman at least showed some sense when it came to a diagnosis. He took Anneliese through ten meetings where he spoke to her, questioned her, and discreetly tested her for any adverse reactions that would indicate demonic possession. The family had told him about her

aversion to religious artifacts like the medallions and her visions that came especially when she prayed. But, Annaliese never showed any of these behaviorisms when they prayed together over rosaries. He never smelled the awful smell that the family and the passengers on the bus reported. And when he asked her to describe these demonic faces to him, Annaliese couldn't provide him with a description.

Two other priests who'd heard of Annaliese through their colleagues requested to talk to the family.

One of them was Father Alt and he was, shall we say, a character. He claimed to have powers. Visions, premonitions, the power of dowsing, and that he saw and experienced what Annaliese was going through from great distances away.

One night he saw the family in a vision before he'd ever met them, and his room was filled with the stench of burning feces.

He couldn't sleep, even with the help of sleeping pills. He also said that he was physically pushed by whatever was tormenting Annaliese one day while preaching at the altar. I swear this guy sounds a little crazy to me.

Others thought so too. One doctor tried to diagnose him as a schizophrenic early in his career, so his reputation definitely wasn't all that great.

He studied paranormal phenomena, though in the 70s that wasn't out of the ordinary. Actually, that's been pretty common for the Catholic Church since its early history. They've been studying unusual occurrences for hundreds, if not thousands of years now. But the priests who worked in the same parish as Alt believed him. When he told them of his experiences involving this suffering girl so far away, all of the priests in the room were

overwhelmed with the same horrendous smell, even though the windows were open.

Whether or not you believe that Alt was crazy, one thing's certain. He was predisposed to believe Annaliese's claim that demons were to blame for her conditions. Alt and another priest, Father Roth, met with Annaliese.

Roth didn't have the colorful claims that Alt did, but both agreed that Annaliese was very intelligent, serious, and unusually devout for woman so young. She told them that she was desperate for someone to finally believe her, and they had many conversations, both sitting down together and by writing to each other. The priests did not openly state that Annaliese was possessed, and they

certainly did not witness any strange behavior or smells while they were with her, but they did not dismiss her claims like the other priests or doctors did.

Seemingly the new anti-psychotics that the neurologist prescribed was helping, not for the hallucinations, she was still seeing, hearing, and smelling things all the time. But her seizures were becoming less frequent and by the time that Annaliese arrived at college, she hadn't had a dissociative episode or sleep paralysis type episode in more than a month.

There was color in her cheeks and even though she was still listless and emotionally distant and lacking in any outward emotion, outwardly at least, Anna-Lise was definitely doing better.

It's not like Anna and Joseph stopped taking her to doctors. They were definitely still going to every neurologist and psychiatrist they could locate. And every time the results were the same. There was nothing medically wrong with her.

Her bleak behavior was described perfectly during a session with a psychiatrist. She said, have no willpower. I simply float and I do not know what I want anymore. Like her father feared, Annaliese had lost her spark.

Do you blame her though? Five years is a long time living in fear and uncertainty. College must have felt like hell for her. Even if she wasn't having seizures anymore, she still had to find the will to focus through seeing monsters in every corner. She probably had to study through the putrid smell and the demon voices in the background. I can't believe she was still holding it together after all this time.

I'm not leaning toward an insane individual at all or even a deluded one. Even the most stable person in the world would have had a nervous breakdown after all this. A person can only go so long living in constant fear. Never mind the weakness and the sleep she was probably losing and all the rest. The fear constantly being terrified. It'll eat at your soul.

Annaliese did meet a boy at a dance at the college. Nothing like a little romance to heal a broken spirit. Don't get too excited, Romeo. She almost scared the poor boy off. As soon as it even looked like he was interested, she told him that she suffered from depression and that her bouts of melancholy made her emotionally numb. Well, I'll hold on to my hope then. She didn't tell him that there were demons talking to her.

Let's hope he sticks around. Well, maybe the Freudian psychiatrist she went to next might have helped. This guy was convinced that Annaliese held resentment toward her mother for not letting her have any boyfriends and that she secretly hated her father for not understanding her emotional turmoil.

The sarcasm is so tangible our listeners are going to hear your eyes roll. Well, he did redeem himself somewhat from his outdated beliefs by suggesting another neurologist. Hasn't she seen like a hundred already? How's this one supposed to be any better? Well, this one had the sense to put it together that Annaliese usually had her major seizures when she went to bed.

or at least when her body relaxed. So she monitored the brain waves during a sleep study. The EEG was normal, but there were some minor unusual discharges from the left temporal lobe of the brain. The temporal lobe is responsible for all the senses. Like strange stenches and visions? Yep. So she switched her from dilantin that she was on to Tegretol.

But the dilantin was working much better. Why take her off of it?

Thus far, Annaliese was given very light dosages for epilepsy in the form of many medications. Dilantin was the first serious epileptic drug that she was given.

If this neurologist, Dr. Schleip was right, that's why it worked better, because she actually had epilepsy, but not as mildly as everyone thought. Dilantin was suppressing it somewhat, but it wasn't sufficient to completely manage the condition. Tegretol was stronger, much stronger, and if the doctor was right, then Annaliese should see a decrease in her sensory hallucinations. If she was having them all day every day,

then Annaliese was having multiple misfires up in her brain a day. Then her condition wasn't a mild case of epilepsy at all. It was much more serious than previously thought.

And did it work? Not even one bit. But it's the first time that any professional did more than just a cursory exam and wasn't dismissive about her claims. Annaliese was becoming afraid of telling the doctors about all of her symptoms.

The psychiatrist kept pointing towards sexual frustrations and parental resentment, and Dr. Schleip was sure that her diagnosis was correct. But Annaliese did confide in the boy she'd met at the dance, Peter. And Romeo is vindicated.

Well, Romeo, Peter definitely listened to Annaliese without judgment, and he was aware that the medication was having no effect. Actually, things were getting worse. Annaliese had left behind any remaining notion that the demons were hallucinations. They were as real as the floor beneath her feet, as real as her parents, and as real as Peter. Even if the doctors and her parents were convinced they were hallucinations.

But now decision making was becoming hard for her. Annaliese described to Peter that it felt like her will was being dampened. The human right to make decisions, even simple ones, was being taken from her. And the voices and the faces were involved in the process. She couldn't even decide whether or not to stand up or sit down anymore.

Soon she said that decisions on simple day-to-day matters were being made for her too. Peter, to his credit, encouraged Annaliese to make intentional decisions. Simple things like, decide to pick up that cup in front of you, to bring back a sense of power, of self to Annaliese. Headaches also plagued her now and then. The next year was a roller coaster. Yes, her symptoms were coming and going.

But with the help of Peter and her constant meetings and letters back and forth with Father Alt, Annaliese was holding up for the most part.

It's not like she was acing her classes, but she was keeping her head up at least. But every time that she was under pressure, things got worse.

During the good times, she even socialized a little and made two solid girlfriends, who were also good Catholic girls, and together with Peter, they attended mass. Annaliese enjoyed the piano again and even played a little tennis.

But come a practical exam or an upcoming social event, an Annaliese would get worse again. And it wasn't dramatics.

Schleip observed during these times that her reflexes got slow and her eyes were unusually dilated. Her scans also did not appear to be getting better. The activity in the temporal lobe was not lessening with a new drug. Schleip later testified that she must not have been consistently taking them as she should have, but Peter and everyone in her

her life for that matter, vehemently denies this. Annaliese was taking her pills and everyone saw her taking them.

The only thing that seemed to work was meeting with Father Alt Together they prayed and within minutes, Annaliese's pupils would go back to normal and the color would return to her cheeks.

This is a lot like a seesaw. Things look up and then they go down. But how much of it is in her head and how much of it is it medical? Don't get me wrong, the scans, the reflexes, that can be proven. I believe the hallucinations and voices too.

but how much of it was exasperated by her state of mind. Stress can definitely make underlying medical issues worse. That's a proven fact.

And that's why this gets so complicated later, separating the true condition from the believed one. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Let's go on before we get sidetracked.

Despite constant sensory hallucinations, she wasn't having grand mal seizures or having those paralyzing episodes anymore. So it was more manageable at least. Even if she was exhausted, distracted, and emotionally distant, after a particularly bad few weeks where Annaliese could barely stand and the raging and the laughter from her demons got particularly bad, she said that her willpower

was failing to the point where she couldn't even eat anymore. Annaliese was already a petite girl, so the weight loss was immediately noticeable.

Father Alt was becoming very concerned with her mental health. Not that she was going mad, always maintained that he was certain that Annaliese was not insane. And he began to develop a theory that she had something called circumcessio. It's sort of a mild form of demonic activity around a person where demons aren't necessarily inhabiting someone, but are instead constantly around them launching spiritual attacks.

And here, Father Alt first officially requests an exorcism of any kind, though he definitely wanted to broach the subject since he'd met Annaliese. It's also where we're going to cut this off for today,

because after this point, doctors and medical intervention are discarded and every aspect of this war becomes a spiritual one. And unfortunately, we'll have to get to that next week.

Definitely. So how long are the Michels going to insist on trying to keep Annaliese in school? How long before the demons or the seizures or whatever they are finally whittles Annaliese and her family down enough to admit defeat that she can't finish her degree?

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