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.
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."
