Summary
In the winter and spring of 1949, Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, born 1 June 1935, was the subject of a Catholic exorcism that ran from his family’s house in Cottage City, Maryland, to relatives in St. Louis and ended at Alexian Brothers Hospital. Jesuit priests kept a diary. On 18 April the boy said, “He is gone.” The Washington Post told the story on 20 August 1949 without his name, and placed him in Mount Rainier. William Peter Blatty, then a Georgetown student, used that article and the diary for The Exorcist (1971) and the film released on 26 December 1973. Hunkeler later worked as an engineer at NASA and died on 10 May 2020.
Background
The Post’s “Mount Rainier boy” lived at 3807 40th Avenue, Cottage City, a small town just outside Washington. The family was Lutheran. His father was Edwin Hunkeler. Edwin’s sister Mathilda, called Aunt Tillie, was a spiritualist and had shown the boy a Ouija board. She died of multiple sclerosis on 26 January 1949, at 54.
The diary’s background, written later from the mother’s account, starts earlier than her death. On 15 January the boy and his grandmother heard dripping in her bedroom, a picture of Christ shook, and scratching began under the floor, night after night. After Tillie died, the mother asked the noises to knock if they were Tillie, and the family counted the knocks they wanted. From 26 February, scratches and then words appeared on his skin. The diary notes that the mother was the one present when the marks came. The family read one of the words as Louis, and that is the reason given for taking him to relatives in St. Louis.
On the night of 17 February, Lutheran minister Luther Schulze had the boy at his parsonage. He reported scratching, a shaking bed, a chair that tipped, and a pallet of blankets that moved. The family had already talked to doctors. A three-and-a-half-day stay at Georgetown University Hospital is in that same secondhand background. Father E. Albert Hughes, assistant pastor at St. James in Mount Rainier, was consulted and is said to have told them to use blessed candles, holy water, and prayers. The story that Hughes began an exorcism at Georgetown, and that the boy tore out a bedspring and slashed his arm, is not in that diary. It surfaces in a newspaper in 1972. Mark Opsasnick, who worked the Cottage City records, found no evidence Hughes admitted the boy to Georgetown or was injured by him.
The boy was taken to an aunt’s house in the Normandy area of St. Louis County in the first week of March. Father Raymond J. Bishop of Saint Louis University came on 9 March and wrote that he saw scratching on the body and a mattress move. Father William S. Bowdern, pastor of St. Francis Xavier, came on 11 March. On 16 March, Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter authorized the formal rite. That night Bowdern began the Roman Ritual, with Bishop and Walter H. Halloran, then a Jesuit scholastic studying at the university, not yet a priest. Over the next month the sessions moved among the relative’s house, a nearby rectory, and a room at Alexian Brothers Hospital in south St. Louis. Bishop kept the diary.
The diary records cursing, vomiting, thrashing, and what the writers took for Latin. Halloran, who was in the room, later said the Latin was the boy mimicking the priests, that the voice did not change into something else, and that a blow the boy landed on him was not a show of unusual strength. Asked to say the boy had been possessed, Halloran said he could not go on record. He had reported what he saw, and he did not think he was the one to judge it.
On the night of 18 April, Bowdern had the boy hold a crucifix and wear a chain of medals. The diary says the boy asked what some of the Latin meant, then screamed, and then in a deeper voice recited a command that he was Saint Michael and that Satan was to leave. He spasmed once more and said, “He is gone.” He told Bowdern he had seen Saint Michael with a flaming sword. About twelve days later he went home to Maryland. He finished at Gonzaga High School and, by the account of people who knew Hughes, turned out fine. The diary’s early weeks are the mother’s report, copied in after Bishop was called. The St. Louis rite is what the priests logged while they were there.
Research notes
Historical research: The rite is in the diary & secrecy
What can be checked is that a 13-year-old from Cottage City was taken to St. Louis, that Archbishop Ritter authorized a formal exorcism on 16 March 1949, and that Bowdern, Bishop, and Halloran carried it through to 18 April at Alexian Brothers Hospital. Bishop wrote it down. The Post had it, without a name, on 20 August.
The January noises, the knocks for Tillie, and the words on the skin come from the mother, entered in the diary after 9 March, when Bishop first saw the boy. Halloran would not turn his own notes into a finding of possession. He said the Latin was mimicry and the voice was the boy’s. The Georgetown stabbing, the house on Bunker Hill Road in Mount Rainier, and a priest nearly killed with a bedspring are later tellings. Opsasnick’s 1999 search put the family on 40th Avenue in Cottage City and found no hospital exorcism for Hughes.
The name was withheld on purpose. Opsasnick had Ronald E. Hunkeler from the Gonzaga yearbook, a Cottage City birth date of 1 June 1935, and neighbors, and he did not print it. Schulze, asked in 1990, said the family was the Hunkelers. Bishop’s cover letter to the hospital already used “Ronald” and “Hunkeler.” Skeptical Inquirer published the identification in its November/December 2021 issue, after Hunkeler’s death on 10 May 2020.
Blatty’s novel and Friedkin’s film are a third layer. They start from a Georgetown student reading the Post, and from a diary of a rite. They are not the diary.