n 1949, a quiet neighborhood in St. Louis became the center of one of the most controversial religious cases in American history. A 13-year-old boy began exhibiting disturbing symptoms including violent outbursts, strange markings on his body, and other troubling episodes, leading Catholic priests to perform a series of secret exorcism rites. The case would later inspire The Exorcist, but the real story was far more complex than the film.
My guest is Troy Taylor, author of The Devil Came to St. Louis: The Uncensored True Story of the 1949 Exorcism, who takes a careful look at the case, its origins, and how fact, faith, and folklore became intertwined in one of America’s most enduring mysteries.
The interview transcript:
Erik: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Most Notorious podcast. I’m Erik Rivenes. I am very pleased to announce that Troy Taylor is back on the show. It’s always great to have him. He’s been on Most Notorious to talk about the Iroquois Theater Fire, the Donner Party tragedy, and the horrific murders of the Grime Sisters.
In this interview, we lean heavily into his knowledge of the supernatural, the paranormal, the all around unknown as we delve into his book. Published in 2006 called The Devil Came to St. Louis, the True Story of the 1949 Exorcism. Welcome back. Always great to have you on.
Troy: Well, thanks. Thanks. I always love coming on and you always seem to pick things that I really love talking about, so this is one of them.
Erik: Perfect. And we should mention that you have updated your book since 2006.
Troy: Yes. It’s in its fifth edition now. Because things just — it’s one of those stories that I started researching back in the mid nineties, and it’s one of those things that I published the first edition and I could only do so much because I had made some promises that names wouldn’t be used. Some things wouldn’t be revealed until the person at the center of all this had passed away. And so I kept that promise and eventually after he passed, I was able to really update this thing. But even then, I’ve still updated a few times since then because new things do, believe it or not, come up.
Sometimes you get a surprise. I got a call from the family of an Alexian monk who was present for the exorcism and wanted me to interview him. So I went to Milwaukee to do so and things get added in and you have to update things every once in a while.
Erik: So it’s kind of like its own living organism, right?
Troy: It is, it is. It is a little less living now than it was, because there’s literally no one left. There’s no one left who was directly involved. But even a lot of the extended family and things have passed. I mean it’s 75 years ago now that it happened. So you get a lot of things that change over time.
Erik: Right. So were you like many people who were first exposed to this story through the movie The Exorcist? Was that you too?
Troy: That was me. Well, I did love — I mean, horror, big horror movie buff. So I knew The Exorcist. I knew that there had been talk of it and even back in the seventies about how it was based on a true story.
A lot of the information, though there wasn’t much information, but what little there was used a variety of different names and a lot of information that no one really knew. So they just guessed, filled in the blanks. So you get some pretty wild stories. When I first started looking into this in the nineties, I moved down to the St. Louis area and knowing that this was based on a true story, I thought I’ve always been fascinated with the fictional version. So I would like to dig more into the true story. And the more I dug, the more I found just wild urban legends and crazy stories that were third and fourth hand, and I thought there’s gotta be a way to look into this a little bit more. And so I started digging.
Really, I started in the suburb where the boy who was possessed and the family lived. We can get into all that, but they came from Maryland. They were originally from St. Louis living in Maryland. Came back to St. Louis because of the strange things that were happening. I knew what town they had lived in. I knew the street they had lived on, didn’t even know the house at the time. So started digging into that and that’s when I found the names of his aunt and uncle.
And then knowing what town they were from, I went to Maryland. Things were different in the nineties. You couldn’t do all this online back then. So I went to Maryland to look through the records there, and found the family. The names of the family, the name of the boy — at that time it was not known because it had always been kept secret.
That was the whole point. They were trying to protect this boy’s identity. And in addition to that, they had been told by the archdiocese not to talk about the exorcism. But you know how secrets are — things did tend to spill out. A lot of the things that leaked out were just hints. Someone had asked a question of one of the priests involved and somebody took his reply and spun it into a bigger story.
So it was an interesting search, but I quickly found that a lot of the stories that had been going around for a while weren’t necessarily accurate.
Erik: Yeah, it’s kind of a strange evolution in this particular case, right? You have the actual events, then someone writes a book about them and does some embellishing and then that in turn becomes a movie, which is different than the book. Hugely popular.
Troy: Yeah. A lot of things from not only the book but from the film too got added into the real story because everyone assumed, well, it’s based on a true story, so this must be what really happened.
Unfortunately, that kind of leads people off on a different path of things that did and didn’t happen. People have the need to make real life as dramatic as fiction, and sometimes it’s just stranger. The truth is much stranger than fiction ever will be, but it’s a human tendency to embellish things and add onto the story, which is what happened a lot in this case.
It didn’t help that it took place in 1949 on practically opposite sides of the country. St. Louis is halfway across the country from Maryland. There were some pretty accurate records kept once he got to St. Louis, but the stuff in Maryland is a little messy, and so you only have what’s in the official record, what the family told the priests.
There were some things that some of the family members believed at the beginning of this that didn’t necessarily turn out to be accurate. And then there were a lot of people who just added things to the story because it was easy to do that about Maryland because there hadn’t been strict records kept, which is how it got started.
Ronald was his actual name, Ronald Hunkeler. The story that Ronald was using a Ouija board and that’s why he became possessed — that’s just taken out of the movie. Well out of the book too, but right out of the movie.
Since people thought the movie was based on a true story, that must have been what happened to Ronald. But that wasn’t what happened.
Stories got started that his aunt who lived in St. Louis had given him a Ouija board and that he’d been using it, and that’s how he became possessed. Unfortunately, there’s no accuracy to that at all. There’s no record of a Ouija board.
According to his cousin, his aunt’s daughter, his Aunt Tilly — Matilda — was not even interested in the occult or Ouija boards and didn’t give one to Ronnie. So the family says that’s not true, but it’s become part of the legend.
Another big mistake is that it’s claimed that an exorcism was performed before he ever got to St. Louis. That’s not true either. There was a Catholic priest who was contacted who never directly got involved in the story.
The only religious figure involved in Maryland was a Lutheran minister because the family was Lutheran at the time. They later converted to Catholicism. One side of the family was Catholic, one side Lutheran. Living in Maryland, they attended a Lutheran church.
The pastor there was the one they contacted because they thought their house was haunted or that Ronnie was haunted. He came over. He observed strange things happening. It started with scratching sounds, footsteps in the house, weird noises no one could explain. Then it graduated up to moving furniture, Ronnie’s moving bed, dishes flying around — typical poltergeist type things.
Keep in mind, this is 1949. That wasn’t a common thing for people to say at the time.
This minister got involved, but he never believed Ronnie was possessed. He always thought it was a poltergeist — activity centered around this young boy. RSPK activity that would cause these things to happen.
He even got J.B. Rhine involved in the case. He contacted Duke University. Rhine said this sounds like a poltergeist case.
Things escalated and eventually they would go to St. Louis.
Reverend Schultz never saw anything that happened in St. Louis. He only saw what happened in Maryland. That’s where we get confusion in the case. He never believed in possession. He was Lutheran. They don’t really do that. He could go with the ghost thing, but he was interested in psychic phenomena.
Once it was all over in August of ’49, he presented a paper to a parapsychology group in Washington, D.C., about what had happened — the things he’d witnessed — and added that the boy had gone to St. Louis where an exorcism had taken place.
That story got printed in the newspapers, and that’s how William Peter Blatty first found out about it.
Erik: You do offer some history at the beginning of your book on demonic possession. In some of the famous cases, historical events from the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the infamous 1949 event. You mentioned hysteria, you mentioned seizures, which has a connection to epilepsy. Can you talk a bit about this, about demonic possession in a more historical context for us?
Troy: Sure. Because it’s something that we’ve, as I said, it’s been around since the beginning of recorded time, people being possessed or infested by some sort of spirits, whether good or bad.
You can look back through history and find people who are possessed by something that is beneficial, so to speak, or helpful. Maybe it’s their religion. It’s a variety of things. But as far as demonic possession goes, most of us think about it in sort of a Christian slash Judeo-Christian framework, with Jesus casting out demons and his disciples casting out demons.
When you look back at a lot of those stories that come out of the Bible or from other records of the time, there were a lot of mental illnesses all the way through from Biblical times through the Middle Ages that probably were the reason why people believed in so many possessions. You heard a lot more about it back in those days. That’s when the Catholic Church was forced to put together actual rituals to cast out demons because there seemed to be a big demand for it.
As time changed, people began to look at things in different ways. Even the church has changed things up where they require mental health professionals or medical doctors to be involved. They’ll have someone who is an actual exorcist who goes through years of intensive study to learn how to safely expel what they consider demon spirits. Usually they need to be involved and make sure all the criteria are met.
I spent a big part of different editions of the book talking about a case that happened back in 1928 in Iowa, which also really influenced William Peter Blatty. He took the true story about Ronnie Hunkeler and turned it into an idea for a story, but he filled in the blanks because he didn’t have access to the real details either.
He filled in a lot of blanks from the case of a woman named Emma Schmidt, who underwent a 23-day exorcism in Iowa in 1928. You get a lot of the things reported in that case that show up in The Exorcist — levitation, vomiting, screaming, voices.
That case sort of sets a template for how we perceive demonic possession today because about seven years after it happened, several articles were written and the priest involved was profiled in Time Magazine. That was modern America’s first exposure to demonic possession in a major way.
Coming into 1949, this wasn’t mainstream pop culture material yet. There weren’t movies about possession before that. So if Ronnie were faking this, I don’t know where he would have gotten his ideas because there wasn’t much widely available.
That’s why what little leaked out about this story later became added to what we think of when we think of exorcism. By the 1970s, we still didn’t know many real details — just drama.
Erik: There were a lot of witnesses to many of these events who didn’t necessarily have any skin in the game. But back in Maryland, his desk at school was moving. I also find it interesting that during much of this time his parents believed it wasn’t a demon, but a ghost instead haunting him — possibly the spirit of his aunt.
Troy: Right. Ronnie’s aunt that he had been close with — the one who has been accused of giving him a Ouija board. You can thank the family for probably how that got started.
His mother and his grandmother didn’t like her. She was Ronnie’s favorite aunt. When they went back to visit St. Louis, he would stay with her and his uncle Gene. That’s where he usually was. They wrote letters, they called each other. He really liked her.
She would encourage Ronnie to get out, do things, have fun — which was not how his mother and grandmother were. They were strict. They were hovering. They really kept him from being a very social kid. That was something friends and neighbors later remembered. People I interviewed said he wasn’t very likable mostly because he never got to do anything. His mother and grandmother were so strict.
So when these things started happening, they didn’t think demon. They thought he was being haunted. His Aunt Tilly died about two weeks after these things started happening. That timing fed into it. His father didn’t argue much with them about it, but they were convinced it was her. Even after they came to St. Louis, they initially told the priests they thought it was his aunt. But they quickly changed their minds as things escalated.
Erik: At a certain point in St. Louis, didn’t some members of the family attempt to talk to what they believed was the ghost of his aunt, asking where she had hidden some money?
Troy: That was one of the stories. Back in Maryland, they had been trying to communicate and weren’t getting clear replies. They were getting knocking responses, but when they would ask if it was Tilly, they wouldn’t get a confirmation. Ronnie’s father blamed them for escalating the situation because of those attempts at communication. When they got to St. Louis, they were still trying to convince the family it was Tilly. Something during the knocking and tapping claimed it was her and that she had hidden money somewhere. All of that turned out to be false. It was more proof that it wasn’t Aunt Tilly that was bothering him.
Erik: There’s also some drama and conflict going on in St. Louis between the Jesuits and the Catholic Archdiocese, right?
Troy: Yeah. Once the family in St. Louis had endured four or five nights of horrific things going on — Ronnie waking up, everyone screaming in the house, the bed shaking, his cousin seeing things moving around the room — his older cousin, who was a student at St. Louis University, went to see her advisor, Father Bishop. Father Bishop got his friend Father William Bowdern involved, and they came to visit the house and saw things with their own eyes.
They went to the archbishop to talk to him about this. At that point, while Ronnie didn’t meet all the formal criteria and they hadn’t followed every rule about having an official exorcist investigate the case, they moved quickly. The archbishop gave the job to the two Jesuits who had never done an exorcism before. It was outside their normal duties. They had to learn quickly. They were also told everything had to be kept very quiet.
This wasn’t because the archbishop doubted what was happening. It was because in 1949 the Catholic Archdiocese in St. Louis was in the middle of desegregating its churches and schools. This was early civil rights conflict. There was a huge uproar — not just in the newspapers and among politicians, but within the church itself. The archbishop was already dealing with major controversy. It was better to keep this quiet than add more fuel to the fire. So Father Bishop and Father Bowdern were told to keep it secret. Anyone involved would be sworn to secrecy.
Father Halloran, who was not yet a priest but a scholastic, had to sneak off campus to assist them. He carried a letter in case he was caught. The exorcism was conducted at night, not because it was spooky, but because it was the only time they could do it. They had daily responsibilities. They would get to the house around nine or ten at night. It might go on until one or two in the morning. Then they would go back, sleep a few hours, and be up again at five or six to start their regular duties.
When it was over, they were told they couldn’t publicize it. They were disappointed. They believed it was authentic and thought people should know about it. The archbishop declared the whole thing inconclusive, put the files away, and said nobody could talk about it.
Twenty years later, when William Peter Blatty contacted Father Bowdern with questions, they exchanged letters. But Bowdern still couldn’t answer much because he was bound by that order of secrecy.
Erik: If you could give us some examples — what were some of the actual manifestations that convinced Bishop and Bowdern that this was truly supernatural? What were they physically trying to counter?
Troy: When the exorcism began, it started in the house in the suburbs. Almost right away they began to see Ronnie go into these fugue states where he acted like a completely different person than he normally was. He was constantly described as quiet, small, thin. Yet it would take four or five men to hold him down. He was incredibly strong.
He would scream, howl, bark, sing, say horrible things. Some of the things he said in different voices were so vile that Father Bishop refused to write them down.
There was vomiting, but more commonly spitting — accurate spitting with his eyes closed, eight or ten feet, large amounts of mucus. There was urinating — soaking through mattresses and box springs. There was a smell that came off him that was nothing like his normal scent.
When it was over the next day, he would be fine. When the exorcism wasn’t happening, he was normal and claimed he didn’t remember any of it.
At first these things happened only during the rituals, but as weeks went on — it lasted almost six weeks — things became more violent. Objects flew around. He hit people, scratched people, bit people, kicked people. When they moved him to Alexian Brothers Hospital, he had to be restrained.
Marks appeared on his body — scratches and cuts — sometimes under his clothing where he couldn’t have easily caused them himself. He would speak in different voices and make predictions. Most predictions didn’t happen, but they were unnerving.
He sometimes spoke in Latin. He had grown up Lutheran and had barely begun catechism, yet he could respond and understand Latin during rituals. At the end of the case, 48 people signed the official record stating they had witnessed events they could not explain and believed he had been genuinely possessed.
Erik: There were claims he spoke Hebrew or Aramaic as well.
Troy: There were claims of that happening in Maryland, but there’s no record of it. That was one of the stories that grew over time. There was never a rabbi involved. That was another dramatic addition that made the case harder to research.
Erik: So was the belief that in a demonic possession, the person was possessed by a low-level demon? Is that how it works?
Troy: When a possession begins, it usually begins as what they call an infestation. I’ve interviewed priests who are modern exorcists, and they say most of what they deal with is infestation. If that can be stopped, it doesn’t progress further.
An infestation usually starts with noises, scratching sounds, objects moving around — like a haunting. You may find religious objects damaged or moved. You might hear growls or voices. For something to be considered actual possession, there is a list of criteria.
There has to be physical objects moving around by unexplainable means. The person must be able to speak or understand a language previously unknown to them. They may demonstrate knowledge of future events or hidden information they should not know. If all of those criteria are met, it can be deemed a possible demonic possession.
Today, a medical doctor and mental health professional must be involved. Everything must be ruled out first. Things are much more careful now than they used to be. In 1949, mental health and medical science were different, but doctors had been involved and nothing was found physically or mentally wrong. I’ve run across other exorcism cases since then. Sometimes not enough is done to rule out mental illness, and in some tragic cases that has led to deaths — including the case of Anneliese Michel in Germany, which inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose. In her case, she had been diagnosed with both epilepsy and mental illness. I’ve never believed she was possessed. I think her parents’ intense religiosity contributed to what happened.
But the 1949 case is different in that Ronnie’s family initially believed it was a ghost, not a demon. He had little Catholic upbringing at that point. Yet the reported phenomena were happening. I think verification in 1949 was stronger than in earlier centuries. And today verification is stronger still, though exorcisms are still happening regularly — especially in Europe and Italy. In fact, at one point, demand for trained exorcists exceeded supply.
Erik: You write that an exorcism is broken up into various parts — the presence, the breakpoint, the voice, the clash, and the expulsion. Can you talk about that whole process?
Troy: Those are the textbook stages. If everything goes exactly as it’s supposed to, the exorcist begins by reading the ritual and demanding that the demon reveal its name and when it will leave. The goal is to gain control over the entity and expel it.
As things escalate, there is supposed to be a breakthrough where contact is made, control is established, and eventually expulsion occurs. That’s the textbook version. Hardly anything ever goes according to plan. Exorcists instruct assistants not to engage with the demon. Only the exorcist should address it, and only to give commands. In this case, there were voices making claims, predictions, threats. The entity would claim it would leave in ten days and then not do so. It would make marks on Ronnie’s body as supposed proof. There is no set timeline for how long each stage lasts. Every case is different.
Erik: There were people hurt during this, besides the boy.
Troy: Yes. Ronnie attacked several of the Alexian monks assisting during the rituals. Brother Greg, the Alexian monk whose family contacted me in 2014, described an incident firsthand. He was dying of cancer and wanted to tell the story. He believed the possession was real. He said Ronnie broke free of restraints and levitated about a foot off the bed.
I had a hard time with that. I’ve seen levitation reported in other cases, and I struggle with it. But Brother Greg was adamant. He had nothing to gain and was nearing death. He was sincere and firm in what he said he witnessed. Whether it happened exactly that way, I can’t say. But the witness believed it did.
Erik: Was there ever any attempt to determine whether he was causing the mysterious marks himself?
Troy: Yes. They were skeptical early on. The marks often appeared under his clothing, where he would have had to lift clothing and scratch without being seen. Many times he was under direct observation when marks appeared. Stress and psychosomatic reactions can produce physical effects, so that’s a possible explanation. I try to keep an open mind.
Reverend Schultz interpreted events as poltergeist activity. The priests interpreted them as demonic. Someone else might interpret them as psychological. My job has never been to tell people what to believe. I present what was witnessed and documented. Readers decide for themselves.
Erik: You mentioned that the boy was moved. Why was he moved?
Troy: He was moved several times. Initially, after the exorcism began in St. Louis and things escalated, Ronnie’s mother was completely exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed. Father Bowdern thought it would help to remove Ronnie from the house for a night so the family could rest. He was taken to Alexian Brothers Hospital and placed in a secure room in the psychiatric ward for one night. They returned to the house in Bel-Nor, but things immediately resumed.
He was then moved to the rectory at Father Bowdern’s church, Our Savior parish downtown. There he could be monitored more closely and assistance was nearby if needed. He stayed there about a week. Toward the end of that stay, things seemed to improve. They returned to the house again, thinking it might be winding down. Eventually the family decided to return to Maryland. Ronnie’s uncle told them it was time to go.
Father Bowdern went with them to try to find someone in the Washington, D.C. area willing to continue the exorcism. No one would take the case. After several days of rejection, he called the Alexian Brothers in St. Louis. They agreed to take Ronnie back. The family made the overnight train trip back to St. Louis.
Over the next two weeks, the exorcism came to its conclusion.
Erik: Was there a climactic battle like in the movie, or did it just fizzle out?
Troy: Things escalated over Easter weekend. Ronnie had been baptized, which Father Bowdern thought would help. Instead, the activity intensified. He attacked several of the Alexian brothers. The rituals went on for hours into Easter night.
Then there was a point where Ronnie’s voice changed completely. According to Brother Greg, the atmosphere in the room changed. Everything went silent. A voice claiming to be Saint Michael the Archangel came through. Ronnie later said he had a vision of Saint Michael driving the demon into a cave.
After that, he sat up and said it was over. Father Bowdern had been waiting for a sign. There was a loud booming sound that shook the building. They thought it might be the boiler exploding, but no cause was ever found.
That was it. Ronnie never experienced anything like it again.
He returned home, went to Catholic school, and his family converted to Catholicism. He later worked for NASA at the Greenbelt, Maryland facility until retiring in 2001. He lived a normal life and died in 2020 just before his 86th birthday.
Erik: In your communication with him, did you get the sense that he believed it was real?
Troy: He never had a firm opinion. He couldn’t remember the exorcism itself. That is common in possession cases — memory gaps during rituals. He remembered being in St. Louis and remembered the priests, but not the rituals. He described it as feeling like someone else’s life. While he was alive, I never used his name. I promised him I wouldn’t. After he passed, I released the updated edition with additional material.
Regardless of what someone believes about possession, the story shows that people stepped up to try to help someone in distress. That part is real.
Erik: One final question about the film. The head spinning scene and the spider walk down the stairs — were those based on the real case?
Troy: The head spinning was added by Blatty. The spider walk appears in earlier cases, including a 1905 South African case involving a girl described as moving that way. Blatty borrowed details from multiple historical accounts, especially the 1928 Iowa case and others. He used what material he could find.
Erik: This has been great. AmericanHauntingsInc.com — you’ve got a podcast, tours, books, a conference, and a museum.
Troy: I love what I do. It’s the only job I’ve ever had. The American Oddities Museum opened almost two years ago. If anyone is in the Alton area, there’s plenty to do.
Erik: Tickets are only $7. What a steal. Thanks again for your time. I always enjoy doing the show.
I’ve been speaking to Troy Taylor. His book is called The Devil Came to St. Louis, the True Story of the 1949 Exorcism. This has been another episode of the Most Notorious podcast, broadcasting to every darkened cobweb corner of the world. I am Erik R. and have a safe tomorrow.
