If you like the horror genre, you must have seen many movies about exorcism. One of them, the 2005 movie The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, is based on a true story. In the 1970s, a young girl named Anneliese Michel truly believed she was haunted by the devil. The exorcisms performed for Anneliese Michel did not end well.
Anneliese Michel is not the only person who died during exorcism rituals, but she is known to the whole world because her experiences are also recorded in court records. Unfortunately, some bigoted Christians consider this young girl a saint who died fighting the devil, but it doesn’t look like that. Let’s take a closer look at the tragic events of Anneliese Michel.
A pious young girl on her own; Anneliese Michel
Anneliese Michel was born in 1952 to a Catholic family in Klingenberg, Bavaria, Germany. She was brought up as a devout Catholic who went to church twice a week, in keeping with her family’s traditions. The life of the young girl, who lived a life of her own, began to change at the age of 16.
One day, Anneliese Michel suddenly fainted at school and wandered around for a while in a daze. When he came to, he did not remember the incident. According to her friends and family, the young girl seemed to have gone into a kind of trance. A year later, the same thing happened again. This time, Anneliese Michel wet the bed and had a fit of shivering, experiencing convulsions that shook her entire body. What happened was only the beginning.
A medical diagnosis was made but medication was insufficient:
After the devastating effects of the second seizure, her family took Anneliese Michel to a doctor. The neurologist who examined the young girl diagnosed him with temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition caused by irregularity in brain cells. Anneliese Michel started at the University of Würzburg in 1973 while regularly drinking doctor-prescribed medications.
The young girl drank the medications prescribed by the doctor regularly, but it is not known whether the diagnosis was wrong or the medications were insufficient; her attacks kept coming, she was getting stronger. Anneliese Michel, who is already a religious person, is much more than a medical problem; She began to think she was infested with a demon.
Visual and auditory hallucinations begin:
As Anneliese Michel’s attacks got stronger, different symptoms began to appear. Everywhere she went, she saw the face of the devil, struggling with visual and auditory hallucinations as she prayed, the devil whispered in her ear and told her she would rot in hell. The young girl decided to seek help.
Unfortunately, Anneliese Michel started to visit priests instead of getting this help from scientists. Fortunately, some sane clergy told him that he needed medical attention. In any case, this kind of exorcism was not performed without the permission of the bishop. Therefore, the young girl’s first efforts were insufficient.
The sequel came because Anneliese Michel once believed she was possessed by the devil. The young girl was tearing her clothes off, kneeling hundreds of times a day in prayer. Anneliese Michel even crawled for two days, barked like a dog, ate spiders, ate coal, bit the head of a dead bird, and even licked her own urine on the ground.
Exorcism rituals begin:
Anneliese Michel both because her psychology is broken and to harm the demon she thinks has possessed her He continued his strange movements. In the process, the young girl’s family found a priest named Ernst Alt. Ernst Alt sought permission from the local bishop, claiming that the young girl did not appear to be epileptic and that a demon must have possessed her, and the exorcisms began.
Ernst Alt, taking with him another priest named Arnold Renz, began exorcisms with Anneliese Michel’s parents, with permission provided that they were kept completely secret from the bishop. Alt and Renz performed a total of 67 exorcisms on Anneliese Michel, lasting up to 4 hours each.
During the exorcisms, Anneliese Michel defied the priests and spoke to them in a raspy voice as the demon within. During the rituals, they decided that the young girl was possessed by six demons: Lucifer, Cain, Judas Iscariot, Adolf Hitler, Nero, and Fleischmann.
Why did Anneliese Michel die?
Anneliese Michel was already ill. No one thought to show him to a doctor, as he was treated with demons during exorcisms. From kneeling and praying hundreds of times a day, his knee bones were broken and all his tendons were torn. But that didn’t kill him.
The priests said that the young girl had to fast for the demons inside her to come out. This was not like fasting as we know it. The young girl fasted for a long time, starving and thirsty. When he died on July 1, 1976 at the age of only 23, the cause of death was malnutrition and thirst. The last words of the young girl were “Mom, I’m scared.” it happened.
Priests and family appear before a judge:
After hearing of death, Ernst Alt, Arnold Renz, Anneliese’s mother Anna and father Josef; They were arrested for negligent manslaughter. The event turned into a sensation in the country. The two priests were sentenced to 6 months in prison, but this sentence was delayed. The young girl’s parents were not punished for having suffered enough. So Anneliese Michel is left dead.
Thoughts on Anneliese Michel:
- The Exorcism Of Emily Rose
We are sure that this young girl named Anneliese Michel His experience has shown many sane people the horror of focusing on the perversions of religion rather than its beauties. But a group of bigots fell in love with their own heresy rather than even respecting Anneliese Michel’s dead body.
Two years after the young girl died, an old nun dreamed that Anneliese Michel’s body had not decomposed, and the young girl’s grave was opened under the pretext of changing the coffin. No abnormality was observed in the body of the young girl. Even weirder, buses of Catholics still come to Anneliese Michel’s grave today, treating her like a saint who died fighting the devil. However, she is just a young girl killed in the prime of her life.
Anneliese Michel’s life was also the subject of the 2005 movie The Exorcism Of Emily Rose. It is possible to see references to the experiences of the young girl in many productions describing such exorcism rites. The Exorcism Of Emily Rose and similar productions were both praised for showing the bad side of exorcisms and criticized for promoting them.
We talked about the tragic story of Anneliese Michel, a young girl who lost her life as a result of a real exorcism, and told you the details you need to know about what happened to her. You can share your thoughts about Anneliese Michel and such rituals in the comments.
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