The Exorcist was just re-released in the theaters nationally with some new material added to bring more people in. Innumerable critics and writers have restated many of the myths of the case in their articles and puff pieces about the movie.

The Exorcist re-release has received a good deal of attention and is number four at the box office as I write this (October 17, 2000). The low-tech effects were stressed in reviews, as were the few added shots. William Friedkin was heavily criticized for his attempt to show the "face" of the demon more often, something most critics felt was better left unshown.

Blatty and Friedkin had been feuding for decades but buried the hatchet long enough to wring a few more bucks from The Exorcist. In a Fangoria article by fan Mark Kermode entitled "Re-Possessing The Exorcist," Blatty and Friedkin talk about about how great a masterpiece the new version is. Billed as "The Version You've Never Seen Before," the film includes around 11 minutes of restored footage from the first cut.

It will be interesting to see what effect, if any, The Exorcist re-release and the renewed attention to demonic possession and the Haunted Boy case will have. Will we see a spate of homemade exorcisms like we saw after the first film? Exorcists around the world are much better prepared to deal with an onslaught of exorcism requests than they were when The Exorcist was first released 25 years ago -- exorcism has been a growth business in the two and a half decades since the film's release. In Italy, for example, there were 20 exorcists in 1986. Today there are 300.

As I write this article I await a copy of the new version of Thomas B. Allen's Possessed. Allen tells us that the new edition includes Raymond J. Bishop's controversial "diary" of the St. Louis, Missouri, exorcisms. According to Allen, the diary has been sanitized to the extent that he removed the boy's name and address. It remains to be seen if there are other types of cuts as well, and the only way to determine if the document has not been changed is to compare it to another copy of the manuscript.

The diary has a jaded history. Blatty does not say where he got his copy of the diary, only that he has read it. In his book Blatty claims that he can "attest that the diary kept by the exorcist is in part, and beyond any doubt, the thoroughly meticulous, reliable, even cautiously understated -- eyewitness report of paranormal phenomena." How can he possibly attest to this?

Thomas Allen's copy, upon which he based the book Possessed, came from Fr. Halloran. In addition to Blatty and Allen, Steve Erdmann of St. Louis, Missouri claimed to have had a copy in his possession, and there are numerous and various claims that the diary has been seen in hospital, archdiocese, and university files.

Recently this author has been offered a copy of the diary that supposedly came from the hospital in St. Louis in which the boy stayed for part of his stay in that city. I have also heard of other copies circulating -- how many copies of this supposedly closely held diary are there? Now that Allen has made the decision to publish his copy, we expect some of the others to surface. And just in time -- some Exorcist case afficionados were beginning to wonder if the diary was a hoax like the Hitler or Joseph Smith diaries. We don't have any reason to think that the diary is a hoax per se or that it does not exist. We do look forward to going over it closely to see what claims are made and what the context was for the events.

We still have to wonder why Allen would say that the address was the Bunker Hill address in Mount Rainier, as opposed to the actual Cottage City location if the real location was found in the diary. With possession of the diary, Allen would have had the boy's real name. Why didn't he try to contact any of the boy's friends and neighbors who were around at the time of the exorcisms?

Exorcist author/screenwriter/producer William Peter Blatty has always claimed that the book and film were based on a true case of possession that he had no doubt was factual. He did his best to make the public believe that the events in the film can and have happened. Did Blatty give any thought to the possible effects of his work? Did he just want the big paycheck or did he see himself as creating a work about good and evil that just happened to have a lot of juicy scenes perfect for a director like, say, William Friedkin to turn into a horror show that would give some people nightmares to this day.

By bringing his dramatization of the Haunted Boy's case to the masses through his book and film and the publicity surrounding them, Blatty was performing a dangerous cultural experiment on a grand scale. He was transplanting belief in a ritual from 1617 into the latter 20th century. Blatty was realizing the most fantastic elements of it through prose, film and the press, and bringing it to untold millions of people. There is no way of knowing how many people around the world have read the book and/or seen the movie. Or suffered through an exorcism attempt by a well-meaning relative who saw the film and decided to take a stab at it.

What was the result of Blatty's bold experiment? Lots of people were entertained. Belief in the devil went up. Blatty got rich. It is arguable that the sleaze level of our culture went up a notch or two as little Regan's language and actions went quite a bit beyond anything that was out there in the popular culture at the time. Blatty and Friedkin got their shocks in and the public was introduced to the ritual of exorcism and demonic possession. Blatty and Friedkin, two experts at mass-manipulation, were very good at getting people to believe that possession is real and that exorcism is the cure for it. The publicity department at Warner Brothers made certain that few people in the U.S. had not heard of The Exorcist when it was released. On February 11, 1974, Newsweek reported that a Catholic center in downtown Boston was getting daily requests for exorcisms since the film's release.

Without looking into the reality of the events portrayed in newspaper articles and The Diary/Report, he took the most provocative details and amplified them, exploiting them for maximum effect. Furthermore, he portrayed the troubled boy as an unambiguously possessed, innocent victim -- amd the priests as unequivocal heroes who fought the devil, and "won."

"From the outset I was biased by training and religion in favor of belief in genuine possession," explains Blatty in William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist From Novel to Film.

Blatty read an article and a report on the exorcism that included lots of secondhand information, none of it dealt with critically. He was already a believer, so why doubt information that supported his belief system?

Blatty appeared on the September 24, 2000, The O'Reilly Factor Fox News Cable talk show. For the first time ever, the author referred to the case as "the haunted boy of Cottage City." This was the name of our article on the subject. Additionally, Blatty had never referred to Cottage City in the past, only Mount Rainier. In fact, in his book William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist..., he repeatedly described the case as being in Mount Rainier.

Had Blatty read our article on the Exorcist case? We supposed so, and our suspicions were confirmed when Blatty was interviewed by Washington Times reporter Larry Witham.

"I tossed the magazine into the circular file," Blatty is quoted as saying in the October 12, 2000, Washington Times article by Witham entitled "'Exorcist' Story Based on Saga of Local Boy." "Maybe the case wasn't genuine. I wasn't there." Is this the same Blatty who claimed that he could attest that the diary was "beyond any doubt, the thoroughly meticulous, reliable -- even cautiously understated -- eyewitness report of paranormal phenomena"? Since Witham also interviewed Mark Opsasnick and took Mark's off-the-record comments out of context, we cannot be certain that same thing wasn't done with Blatty. In the Washington Times article Blatty goes on to say that "...the [Opsasnick] explanations are more incredible than the reported paranormal phenomena."

"There is nothing incredible about the stuff I uncovered," retorts Opsasnick. "It was factual information from eyewitnesses who were there at the time. I took my information from public documents and eyewitness testimony. I simply presented plausible explanations for the phenomena, all of which were suggested by information from interviews and research."

Well, the article might or might not have ended up in the trash, but we suspect that it is still lurking around Blatty's Santa Barbara mansion somewhere.

Blatty was almost singlehandedly responsible for the resurgence of popular belief in possession and exorcism over the past quarter-century. To my mind, this was not a good thing. The Exorcist was the cultural trigger for lots of real-world nastiness. Perhaps when Blatty wrote and produced The Exorcist he had no idea that it would inspire many attempts at exorcism that were much more horrifying than anything in the movie. Knowing the carnage left in the wake of the film after its first theatrical release, didn't he have any qualms about re-releasing it on a grand scale, with attendant publicity? I might have been one of those who laughed at parts of the movie, but there is no doubt that The Exorcist had a serious, negative cultural effect that could be tracked over the last 25 years.

The manifestation of supernatural occurrences is the primary feature supposedly distinguishing between someone who is really possessed and someone who just thinks that they are possessed or is acting like they are. Since priests are not magicians, they are not qualified to determine whether or not the occurrences are the result of trickery or the supernatural. A number of Exorcist case afficionados felt that Mark Opsasnick's article addressed and explained most or all of the supposed paranormal phenomena that were said to have occurred during the period when Rob Doe was "possessed," with the exception of the apparent movement of some objects. Firstly, if we have eliminated all of the other alleged phenomena and are down to claims of moving objects, then we are no longer dealing with a possession case. Moving objects do not a possession make.

There are many ways to "levitate" a bedstand without bringing the devil into the equation. A clever teenager could fool any adult into thinking that strange phenomena is occurring, as evinced by innumerable poltergeist cases in which teenagers were found to be the direct, physical cause of strange sounds and the moving and "disappearing" objects.

The only two living priests who were at the St. Louis exorcisms, Rev. Van Roo and Fr. Halloran, were not willing to go on record stating that they believe that the boy was possessed. Halloran, you may recall, told both Mark Opsasnick and Tom Allen that he saw nothing supernatural occur at any time.

Asked by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch if he thought it was a case of demonic possession, Rev. Van Roo said: "I'd rather not commit myself on that. I went into this without any previous knowledge."

In fact, none of the three exorcists had any prior experience with exorcism. How can we trust their perceptions if they had no experience with anything like this before? They were not experts on psychological disorders, not experts at fakery, not even experts in determining demonic possession.

In an October 7, 2000 article in Canada's National Post, "The Devil in Ontario," reporter Marina Jimenez looked into exorcism in that region. Jimenez noted that there is no scholarly survey of exorcism cases available for study, and that the experts she interviewed told her that what they considered to be "real cases" were exceedingly rare. Jimenez writes that "Monsignor Michel Parent, Chancellor of the Montreal Archdiocese, says that in the diocese's 157 years, there has never been cause for an exorcism. It has always been a case of a person in need of spiritual direction or a psychological disturbance."

If experts in exorcism like Monsignor Parent have never found what they concluded was a single case of genuine demonic possession, how were Fr. Bowdern and his assistants, with no background whatsoever, in any position to ascertain whether the Exorcist case met the church's criteria for determining demonic possession and the need for an exorcism? The short answer is that they were in no position to do so.

Fr. Cuschieri, a consultant to the Toronto Archdiocese, was quoted in the National Post article. "I advise caution because there are a lot of zealous idiots who see the devil everywhere," he says. "We do not deny the principle of diabolical possession. But in practice, it is tremendously difficult to reach that conclusion."

There are three major criteria that the church uses to determine if someone is possessed, none of which were demonstrated in the Exorcist case, which is being widely touted as the only documented exorcism in the United States by Showtime in their ads for Possessed and at iUniverse.com in the banner ad for Allen's new version of the book Possessed.

The Catholic Church has never officially commented on the 1949 Rob Doe exorcisms. How can they? None of the three major criteria were met:

1). The possessed person is expected to foretell the future -- to reveal hidden knowledge. The "haunted boy" never did this.

2). The possessed person is expected to speak intelligently in languages other than his own. Even Blatty admits that there is no evidence that the boy did anything but parrot the priests' Latin phrases. In his book William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist..., Blatty wrote "I cannot vouch for what may have happened prior to the exorcist's appearance on the scene; but certainly no intelligent dialogue in Latin was ever in evidence thereafter...." Fr. Halloran, who took part in the St. Louis exorcisms, told Mark Opsasnick that the boy "only mimicked us."

3). The third supposed attribute of one who is supposedly possessed is prodigious strength. Despite rumors to the contrary, the boy did not exhibit any anomalous displays of strength. When Opsasnick asked Halloran about the reports of tremendous strength, the priest laughed and answered, "He was no Mike Tyson."

And, according to the National Post article, Dr. George Fraser, director of the anxiety disorders clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, points out that most of the bizarre behavior that may appear to be a result of possession, including "superhuman strength, immunity from pain and unusual mental feats" are in fact symptoms of certain psychological disorders.

If the boy was not possessed, as the results of our investigation suggest, then it is not hard to imagine a boy cursing, screaming, and trying like the devil to break loose of his restraints while Priests yelled at him in Latin and threw water on him, hour after hour. One person's exorcism is another's abuse. As soon as you remove the devil from the equation, the exorcisms take on a whole new light. The thought of a 20th century boy from post-WWII Cottage City, Maryland finding himself suddenly transported to the 1600s, for all intents and purposes, is frightening. The details of the many homemade exorcism attempts in the Washington, D.C./Maryland-area alone inspired by The Exorcist read like historical accounts from the inquisition. (See sidebar "The Devil Made Them Do It" at right.)

There have always been people who think that they are exorcising demons from others, and this will not stop anytime soon. But there was an explosive growth in the number of such cases after the release of The Exorcist. Were the heroic priests portrayed by Blatty and Friedkin actually shackling and performing ancient rituals on a teenage boy against his will? A boy who may have been faking the phenomena, may have had some psychological problems, or both? If this is the case, as one might logically extrapolate from Mark Opsasnick's article, then it is apparent that the diary/report on the case may have been written in the most sensationalistic way to justify the exorcisms.

An ugly thought -- what if the boy started out "normal" but badly behaved and wanting to get out of school, and, finding a credulous audience among his aunt and mother, and the various priests that were involved, worked up some bits that went over extremely well? Rob Doe's audiences were eager to believe -- the priests have said that they did nothing to try to figure out how Rob Doe might have done any of the things he did, and in fact they did not even perform the simplest, most obvious tests to see if the boy was faking. Quite the opposite -- they made a big deal out of everything that happened, even if there may have been a simple conventional explanation. Additionally, many of the really supernatural sounding events had no witnesses who can corroborate them. What if Rob's act got him a get-out-of-school-free card for some time, but the whole thing got tiresome at about the same time that the "exorcists" were getting really serious about casting out whatever demon was getting Rob to spit, move his bed around, and repeat their Latin phrases?

If Rob wanted out and suddenly found himself imprisoned against his will, it is not hard to imagine some major league cursing coming from the young man. If this was in fact the scenario, then the more the priests hassled the boy, the madder and more abusive he would have become.

Was the boy's anti-social behavior magnified by the bizarre situation that he was in? Did he ever crack from the pressure, the isolation, the exorcism sessions, the restraints, the boredom, an overbearing true-believer mother, causing him to believe, even temporarily, in the world of his captors? Did he become the demon that they expected? Did he become a character in a play that he was no longer writing and that took on a life of its own? The haunted boy isn't talking so we may never know the answer to these questions, questions that no one has ever asked, since no one previously had access to the massive amount of new information that Mark Opsasnick amassed in his investigation.

The spitting, the bed moving, the speaking in tongues, the skin-writing, the anti-social behavior -- these are all explained by Mark Opsasnick in his article in Strange 20. Anyone who has read Mark's article knows that he learned the mechanism behind all of these occurrences through interviews with the haunted boy's friends and others, including Father Halloran. Curiously, when the rest of the media interviews Halloran they include only the most provocative-sounding phenomena. The reporters who interviewed Halloran asked certain questions to get responses that suited the articles that they were writing. They didn't ask questions to get at the truth, but to perpetuate the more exciting myth.

In recent months I have agreed to join Mark Opsasnick in his Exorcist case investigation. I will be following new leads, analyzing the newly published "diary," and expanding the investigation to include the St. Louis exorcisms. Watch the strangemag.com website and future online issues of Strange Magazine for future updates. New information on this case is coming in constantly. We feel that this is one of the most important cases of the last century, one whose ramifications continue to be felt in the decades ahead. Our work may not stop the myth from growing -- it now has a life of its own, but we will continue to do our part to shed some light on this fascinating and influential case.

The film's impact on public consciousness was tremendous, with the number of attempted exorcisms increasing drastically during the '70s and into the '80s. In a large number of national and local murder and assault cases, defendants told of their attempts to drive out demons from their victims. Locally, the Washington, D.C. region played host to some twisted cases in the wake of The Exorcist. Among the most notorious are:

THE NORRIS MURDER -- On Monday, April 11, 1976, at the home of 28-year-old Joyce Pope of 7348 Damascus Road, Gaithersburg, Maryland, Melissa Vera Norris killed her three-month-old son Demiko Lee Norris by beating the child to death during an exorcism attempt. Pope testified that Norris began referring to the baby as if it were Satan before shaking the child and pounding the infant on its chest, stomach and area below the stomach until the child died. At Norris' September 14, 1976 trial, the judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney all agreed that Melissa Norris was insane at the time of the exorcism, which meant she could not be convicted of murder. Incredibly, Judge John J. Mitchell then ruled that Norris was sane at the time of the trial and therefore could not be sent to a mental institution. She was freed.

THE BOOTH EXORCISM -- On Tuesday, July 24, 1979, 23-year-old Camillia Booth of Annapolis, Maryland attempted to exorcise the devil out of two male infants and was subsequently charged with assault and battery. Performing the exorcism on the two boys in front of their mother, 23-year-old Darlene Smith, Booth doused the children with salt water, tied their hands together with cords, beat them with a bible (leaving the two-year-old with a black eye) and scraped a broken glass across the 11-month-old's buttocks. Booth told authorities she modeled the exorcism after the movie The Exorcist after she witnessed one of the children levitating above the bathtub.

HORROR ON REDWING LANE -- On the night of Sunday, December 23, 1979, 31-year-old Robert Joseph Fogler stabbed his 31-year-old wife Miriam Fogler to death in the kitchen of their home at 8411 Redwing Lane, Lanham, Maryland, as their two children slept upstairs. Fogler told detectives he was attempting to exorcise demons that were possessing his wife. He was sent to Clifton T. Perkins Hospital, but in the late '80s was found to be sane and was released.

THE FIVE FOLD EXORCISM -- On Monday October 28, 1985, 30-year-old Daniel R. Kfoury killed his 27-year-old housemate and fellow Five Fold Ministry church member Robert C. Bloom in the basement of Bloom's parents' home at 4907 N. Washington Blvd., Arlington, Virginia. According to an affidavit filed by police in court, Kfoury was attempting to exorcise a "legion of demons" from Bloom when he pressed his knees against Bloom's head and hit him with his fists around the spine from 2:30 P.M. until 10 P.M. Kfoury insisted he was conducting an exorcism, but was sentenced to ten years for involuntary manslaughter.

THE HINES BUTTERKNIFE ATTACK -- On Thursday, December 31, 1987, 40-year-old David Ellsworth Hines stabbed his five-year-old daughter Danielle Dachar Hines eight times with a butterknife in their home at 14508 Marlborough Circle, Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Charged with five counts including attempted murder, Hines' attorneys claimed that it was an attempted exorcism and that the father was stabbing at what he thought were demons in the girl's body. The child survived the attack, but suffered a puncture wound in the abdomen and a fractured rib. Hines claimed he saw welts materialize on his daughter's body which he believed to be demons and testified he began stabbing at the welts to "destroy evil spirits." Acquitted of the murder attempt, he received a 12-year child abuse sentence, with all but five years suspended.

-- Mark Opsasnick