Roland Doe, 1949: The Boy Whose Exorcism Became The Exorcist
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...