Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the winter of 1949 a Jesuit priest in St. Louis sat down every night and wrote in a diary. He was recording what happened in a hospital room where he and several other priests were performing the Roman Rite of exorcism on a boy of thirteen from Maryland. He wrote it plainly, without literary flourish, the way a man keeps a log. That diary exists. It sits in an archive, and for most of the last seventy-five years the Society of Jesus has declined to let anyone see it. A student at Georgetown named William Peter Blatty heard about the case in 1949 from a newspaper story and never forgot it. Twenty-two years later he published a novel about it. The film made from that novel sent people out of theaters into the street to be sick on the pavement, and it remains, by common consent, the most frightening thing ever committed to celluloid. But underneath the novel and the film and the industry there is a real boy, who was thirteen, and who is now an old man, and who has never spoken publi...

On the first day of July in 1976, in a small Bavarian town called Klingenberg am Main, a twenty-three-year-old university student named Anneliese Michel died in her own bed, in her parents' house, weighing sixty-eight pounds. Her knees were shattered from a year of kneeling and prostrating herself hundreds of times a day. Her tongue was bitten through. Her body bore the marks of restraints. The last words anyone recorded her saying were spoken to her mother: Mother, I'm afraid. In the ten months before she died she had undergone sixty-seven rites of exorcism, conducted by two Catholic priests with the written permission of their bishop. Everything that happened in that room was recorded on tape. More than forty hours of those recordings exist. You can hear them. That is what separates this case from every campfire story about possession you have ever been told, and it is why, half a century later, no one has been able to close the file. Four people went on trial for her death...