What happened
The woman known by the pseudonym Anna Ecklund – most likely Emma Schmidt of Wisconsin – reportedly felt revulsion towards holy things from the age of fourteen and could not enter a church. She had already been exorcised in 1912 by the Capuchin Father Theophilus Riesinger. In 1928, aged 46, she was brought to Earling, Iowa, where with the permission of the Bishop of Des Moines, Father Riesinger and the local pastor, Father Joseph Steiger, began new exorcisms at the Franciscan convent. They ran, with breaks, from 18 August to 23 December. According to the accounts she howled in an inhuman voice, understood languages she did not know, vomited, and once seemed to cling to the wall high above the door. The nuns complained of stench and noises, and the pastor reportedly survived a car crash that the “demons” had predicted. On 23 December the exorcist declared her free.
Witnesses
Father Theophilus Riesinger, Father Joseph Steiger, the Franciscan sisters; the account was written by Father Carl Vogl.
Explanations and hypotheses
The case was popularised by Father Carl Vogl’s pamphlet “Begone Satan!” (1935), and in 1936 Time magazine wrote about it. Many of its spectacular elements – levitation, knowledge of foreign languages, prophecies – come solely from this devotional account written years later. Even the woman’s identity is uncertain: sources give conflicting details about her family and origins. Doctors would link her symptoms to mental illness; for believers the case remains one of the most extensively described possessions of the 20th century.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
Sources
- Carl Vogl, Begone Satan! A Soul-Stirring Account of Diabolical Possession, trans. Celestine Kapsner (St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, 1935)
- Time – Religion: Exorcist & Energumen (1936)
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