Demonic & Possession Cases

Demonic cases are the most frightening, and most controversial, end of the paranormal: claims that an evil, non-human entity is tormenting a family or has taken possession of a person. Many of the best-known stories come from the 20th-century United States – the 1949 exorcism of the boy known as Roland Doe, which inspired William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel and the 1973 film The Exorcist; the Amityville house; and the cases of the investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, retold in the Conjuring films. Exorcism is a real rite in the Catholic Church and in other faiths, and the Church’s modern guidelines call for medical and psychiatric causes to be ruled out first.

Skeptics and many psychiatrists see possession as a cultural script through which real distress is expressed – dissociative states, epilepsy, psychosis, severe anxiety, or the pressure of an intense religious setting – and they warn that it can be dangerous. The death of Anneliese Michel in Bavaria in 1976, after months of exorcisms while she was suffering from epilepsy and mental illness, led to her parents and two priests being convicted of negligent homicide in 1978. Several famous cases have also been undercut by evidence of exaggeration or invention, as when the lawyer who had helped the Lutz family shape the Amityville story – Ronald DeFeo’s defence attorney, William Weber – later called it a hoax.

Our files on these cases set out what was claimed, who made the claims, and what the records show. We describe the people involved with dignity, and we never present possession as fact.