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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

The Exorcist





While he was a student at Georgetown University, William Peter Blatty saw an August 1949 article in The Washington Post, “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip” by Bill Brinkley. He stopped to read the article on what we now call the exorcist stairs. In mid-1949, several local newspapers in Washington and Maryland had published anonymous reports (probably written by the family's pastor, Luther Miles Schulze) of possession and exorcism happing in Prince George County in Maryland.

The feature in the Washington Post was a more detailed account of the exorcism that was performed on a fourteen-year-old boy from Cottage City, Maryland (3807 40th Avenue) named Roland Hunkeler. According to the story, the boy’s family, the Hunkeler family, started hearing strange rapping and scratching noises from his bedroom walls, objects would fly across the room, and his bed moved while he was asleep.

The boy’s mother, somewhat of a hysteric, had convinced herself that all of these things were the work of her recently deceased Aunt, Mathilda Hendricks, who was a spiritualist and had taught the boy, Ronald Hunkeler, how to communicate with spirits through a Ouija board.

She sought the help of a Protestant minister but when he proved ineffective, she turned to the Jesuit communities of Washington, D.C., and St. Louis. A priest and a lay scholar in church history visited Roland where they allegedly saw a shaking bed, flying objects, and the boy speaking in a guttural voice and exhibiting an aversion to anything sacred. Based on that report the local Archbishop granted permission for an exorcism. However, the Jesuits insisted that before they became involved that they wanted the boy subjected to medical and psychiatric examinations, all of which failed to find anything abnormal that might explain the allegedly paranormal phenomena.

The Jesuits assigned Father William Bowdern to perform an exorcism (He would conduct twenty exorcisms in all) on March 9, 1949. Assisting him was Father Bowdern Father Walter, Father Raymond Bishop who would later publish his twenty-nine-page diary of the incident.

The last member of the team was Father Walter Halloran.

Halloran was 26 years old when received the assignment. He was then, and remained, the most skeptical member of the exorcist team, doubting that Roland was possessed. Halloran was Minnesota, the oldest of nine children. A high school and college football star, he was ordained in 1956. A volunteer chaplain in the United States Army, he received paratrooper training and took duty in Vietnam where, he said later, he saw more evil in a day than in the entire Roland Hunkeler exorcism case. Halloran was awarded two Bronze Stars for heroism while under fire.






When asked by a church historian in an interview on whether the boy had been possessed, Halloran said "No, I can’t go on record, I never made an absolute statement about the things because I didn’t feel I was qualified." However, friends recalled that he "expressed his skepticism about potential paranormal events before his death."

Almost all of the exorcisms were conducted at Georgetown University Hospital, a Jesuit-owned hospital. During the exorcism, because of his wild behavior, Roland was bound in restraints, which he slipped out of and used, broke a bedspring from under the mattress, and used it to slash one of the priests' arms. According to Father Halloran, during the exorcism, various marks appeared on Roland’s. Another priest reported that during the Litany of the Saints, Roland’s mattress began to shake and that at a later point, Roland broke Halloran's nose. But Halloran never heard the boy's voice change, and he thought had the ability to suddenly speak Latin, but rather Roland merely mimicked Latin words he heard the clergymen say during prayers. As to the odd marks were found on the boy's body, Halloran later made a point that he failed to check the boy's fingernails to see if he had made the marks himself.

Author Mark Opsasnick, who did an extensive study of the case, including interviews with Roland’s neighbors and friends, concluded that "the boy had been a very clever trickster, who had pulled pranks to frighten his mother and to fool children in the neighborhood" and suggested that Roland was simply a spoiled, disturbed bully who threw deliberate tantrums to get attention or to get out of school.

Furthermore, almost all of the commonly accepted information about this story is based on hearsay, is not documented, and was never fact-checked. Opsasnick also questioned the story of Hughes' attempts to exorcise the boy and his subsequent injury, saying he could find no evidence that such an episode had actually occurred. In fact, most of the symptoms of possession were "childishly simple" to fake.

A serious investigation into the case by author Thomas B. Allen wrote that "the consensus of today's experts" that "Robbie was just a deeply disturbed boy, nothing supernatural about him".

The medical community seemed to agree.

A psychiatric team that reviewed the case stated that Roland more than likely suffered from mental illness. And (Meaning the Priests in the exorcism and the Peter Blatty) “Those involved saw what they were trained to see. Each purported to look at the facts but just the opposite was true — in actuality, they manipulated the facts and emphasized information that fit their own agendas”

Another psychiatrist who reviewed the case wrote “Nothing that was reliably reported in the case was beyond the abilities of a teenager to produce. The tantrums, "trances", moved furniture, hurled objects, automatic writing, superficial scratches, and other phenomena were just the kinds of things someone of Roland’s age could accomplish, just as others have done before and since. Indeed, the elements of "poltergeist phenomena", suggest nothing so much as role-playing involving trickery.

The Doctor also dismissed stories of the boy's prodigious strength, saying he showed "nothing more than what could be summoned by an agitated teenager" and criticized popular accounts of the exorcism for what he termed a "stereotypical storybook portrayal" of the Devil.

Father Halloran died in 2005 and was the last of the exorcist team to survive. Ronald Hunkeler died on May 10, 2020. According to Father Halloran, Ronald Hunkeler. went on to lead "a rather ordinary life."

Roland (As a high school senior)