Case: GG-2026-043
Status: Historic
Documentation rating: B
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
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…
https://gothic.black/Case-Files/id/50