If recent films such as The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It are any indication, there’s no shortage of fascination with movies about demons and demonic possession. Perhaps looking to follow up on the success of their Insidious film franchise, last year Blumhouse Studio announced it would be teaming up with Morgan Creek Entertainment to produce a reboot of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, The Exorcist. Based on a novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist has developed quite a reputation over the years not just for the film itself supposedly being cursed (that’s a whole other story; see, for example, “Hollywood Curse Legends” in the November/December 2017 SI) but for notably being “based on a true story.”
Joe Nickell did a thorough job exploding many of the myths and misconceptions around the “true story” in his article “Exorcism! Driving Out the Nonsense” from the January/February 2001 Skeptical Inquirer. Not surprisingly, though, many continue to uncritically treat The Exorcist as though the true story were a supernatural mystery. An article from movieweb.com asks, “Should The Exorcist Reboot Follow the Chilling True Story That Inspired the Classic?” In the two decades since Joe Nickell’s article, new information has come to light regarding the case, which, evidently, many choose to ignore.
The short story is that, while he was a student at Georgetown University, Blatty saw an August 1949 article in The Washington Post, “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip” by Bill Brinkley, about an exorcism performed on a fourteen-year-old boy from Mount Rainier, Maryland. As the story goes, the family of this boy, referred to pseudonymously as “Roland Doe” or “Robbie Mannheim,” started hearing strange rapping and scratching noises from his bedroom walls, objects would fly across the room, and allegedly Roland’s bed moved while he was asleep—classic poltergeist phenomena. The family (or at least the mother) believed these goings-on were the work of Roland’s recently deceased “Aunt Tillie,” who was a spiritualist and had taught the young boy how to communicate with spirits through a Ouija board. Initially, the family sought the help of a Protestant minister, Reverend Luther Schulze, but when things grew worse, they turned to the Jesuit communities of Washington, D.C., and St. Louis. Roland was subjected to medical and psychiatric examinations, which failed to find anything abnormal that might explain the allegedly paranormal phenomena. After that, a Jesuit priest, Father William Bowdern, was brought in to perform more than twenty exorcisms on Roland over a period of two months, finally freeing him of the demonic influence. Father Bowdern was assisted by fellow priests Father Walter Halloran, Father Hughes, and Father Raymond Bishop. Bishop kept a diary of events that Blatty would base his novel on and would be reprinted later in Thomas Allen’s book Possessed.
I began exploring the story while researching for my podcast, The Devil in the Details, and found that folks such as investigative journalist Mark Opsasnick, blogger Mike Madonna, and Dr. Sergio A. Rueda had already thoroughly researched the case and cast doubt on many of its claims, as well as having deduced the real identity of Roland Doe. Opsasnick determined the family wasn’t from Mt. Rainier at all but were in fact from Cottage City, Maryland. Opsasnick spoke to Mt. Rainier resident Dean Landolt, who stated he was “very good friends with Father Hughes, the priest involved in the case. … Father Hughes told me two things: one was that the boy lived in Cottage City, and the other is that he went on to graduate from Gonzaga High and turned out fine” (Opsasnick 1999).
Consulting an article for Fate magazine from January 1975, Opsasnick confirmed that the boy’s date of birth was given in the article as June 1, 1935. From that date, Opsasnick estimated Roland’s graduation year would likely be 1954. After obtaining a copy of the 1954 Gonzaga High School yearbook, Opsasnick checked for any graduates who were both members of St. James Church in Mt. Rainier (the church to which Father Hughes belonged) and either lived in Mt. Rainier or Cottage City. He found only five students who fit those criteria. Checking Maryland records for their birth dates, Opsasnick narrowed the list down to only one student who lived in Cottage City and had been born on June 1, 1935: Ronald E. Hunkeler. Further confirmation came from Opsasnick speaking to T. Weston Scott Jr., who had lived in Cottage City since 1919 and was a lifelong member of the Cottage City-Colmar Manor Fire Department. When asked about the exorcism, Scott confirmed “The boy involved was [Rob Doe] and he lived at 3807 40th Avenue.”
In his 1999 Strange magazine article, Opsasnick chose not to reveal Ronald’s identity, “for a number of legal reasons” as he explained to me. However, knowing the address made it possible to deduce Ronald’s identity. As author Kyle T. Cobb explained to me, “TW Scott confirmed the address without naming the boy. The address confirmed the last name and parents. The school annuals and interviews with classmates verified the timeline and identity.” In addition, since the publication of the article in Strange, more than just the full twenty-nine-page diary of Father Bishop had become public knowledge. In his book Diabolical Possession and the Case behind the Exorcist, Sergio Rueda interviewed Rev. Schulze on July 25, 1990, and asked him, “Was the name of the family, the Hunkeler family?” to which Schulze replied, “Yes” (Rueda 2018).
Not wanting to believe everything I read online, I knew I had to find some evidence corroborating the claims that Ronald Hunkeler was, indeed, Roland Doe. For starters, the yearbook photos circulating on the internet do in fact match the yearbook photo that Opsasnick included in his original article, though he blurred out the face to protect Ronald’s identity.
More important, the yearbook photo confirms the address of 3807 40th Street, Cottage City. In addition, the house at 3807 40th Street matches the description from the original Washington Post article of a “suburban Maryland home,” something that the house at 3210 Bunker Hill Road, Mount Rainier—often claimed to be Roland Doe’s house—does not. Finally, with the help of colleague Kenny Biddle, Ancestry.com information for Ronald Hunkeler reveals his parents were Edwin Hunkeler and Odell Coppage. This matched the description from Fr. Bishop’s diary of “Roland Doe. Son of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Doe, middle class Washington suburban development” (Erdmann 1975). Furthermore, Edwin Hunkeler had a sister, Mathilda Hendricks, who would be the “Aunt Tillie” mentioned. Ancestry.com confirmed that Ronald Hunkeler was indeed born June 1, 1935, and died just last year on May 10, 2020.
Finally, the last two pieces of evidence, which are perhaps the most compelling of all, come from Mark Opsasnick and Father Raymond Bishop. When I asked Opsasnick if he now felt comfortable confirming whether his investigation had uncovered that Ronald Hunkeler was in fact Roland Doe, because Ronald had since died, he replied, “The Haunted Boy is Ronald Hunkeler. That’s a fact.” The last piece of evidence was a cover letter Father Bishop submitted along with his diary account of the exorcism, which was given to the Rector of the Alexian Brothers Hospital. Although Father Bishop was careful to conceal the identity of Ronald and the Hunkeler family in the diary itself, in the letter he refers to both “the Hunkeler family” and “Ronald.” I found a copy of the letter on CampionForever.org, a newsletter dedicated to the Campion Jesuit High School, which closed in 1975. Father Bowdern was the school’s president, and Father Halloran was a student. Although I have not seen a physical copy of the letter that has not been redacted, the majority of the letter on the Campion website is an exact match for a physical copy of a redacted version of the letter found on the website biblicalcatholic.com.
While we’ll never know all the details or be able to definitively prove that nothing supernatural or diabolical took place in 1949, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest the sensational account of the exorcism of Roland Doe, a.k.a. Ronald Hunkeler, is more fantasy than fact. For one thing, Father Raymond Bishop was not involved with the case from the very beginning but was brought on once the decision had been made to perform the exorcism on March 9, 1949. Therefore, in writing the Background of the Case, Father Bishop would have had to rely on someone else’s account of the events from January 15 until March 9. This calls into question the accuracy of secondhand information as well as the reliability of the primary sources. So should a reboot of The Exorcist follow the “chilling true story?” My answer is “No,” because the true story is neither chilling nor likely true.
References
Erdmann, Steve. 1975. The truth behind “The Exorcist.” Fate 298 (January): 28–31.
Opsasnick, Mark. 1999. The haunted boy of Cottage City, the cold hard facts behind the story that Inspired The Exorcist. Strange Magazine 20. Available online at http://www.strangemag.com/exorcistpage1.html.
Rueda, Sergio. 2018. Diabolical Possession and the Case Behind the Exorcist: An Overview of Scientific Research with Interviews with Witnesses and Experts. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.