Strange Death Of Anneliese

In the late 1960s, a normal young woman named Anneliese Michel began to show weird behavior. That bizarre behavior was a result of sinister possession. A possession that finally led to her death. 

Anneliese came into the world an active baby girl on September 21, 1952. Growing up with her parents and her three sisters, Anneliese did not have an easy life. Her family was tough Catholic, flirting with some of the more serious aspects of the religion. To the Michel family, the reformations of Vatican II were to be dismissed; there was no simple atonement for guilt, and one could not get by on atonement for their errors alone. Anneliese would spend the winters sleeping on cold rigid floors wishing that God would take her sacrifice as penance for drug addicts who had lost their belief.

In 1969, Anneliese would endure her first attack. Doctors would warn her family that Anneliese suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, which could result in, among a long list of side effects, switches in mood, illusions, and loss of understanding. It was then that a neurologist at the Psychiatric Clinic Wurzburg analyzed her with Grand Mal epilepsy. She was diagnosed with epileptic madness (temporal lobe epilepsy). 

Over the next few years, Anneliese would endure more attacks, still, scans for her brain didn’t indicate any severe signs. In the early 1970s Anneliese would begin to listen knocking in her bedroom, her sisters also heard the knocks. Anneliese began experiencing vicious illusions while praying. She also started to hear voices, which said her that she was sentenced.

The first unofficial diagnosis was made by an older woman who attended Anneliese on a journey. She saw that Anneliese avoided stepping past a special image of Jesus and that she declined to drink water from a holy spring. The woman also declared that Anneliese sensed hellishly bad. 

Doctors tried to place Anneliese on anti-seizure medication, but that had zero reaction on Anneliese’s seizures. 

It was noted that Anneliese’s parents would discover her staring at a memorial of Mother Mary for hours, her eyes ‘jet black’. Her parents would also note that Anneliese appeared to have ‘superhuman power’, throwing her sister across the cabin ‘like a rag doll’. Anneliese carried out several highly alarming activities. She tasted her urine off the floor. She ate flies, spiders, and coal. She ate the head of a dead bird. In one example, she sneaked under a table and cried like a dog for two days. She could frequently be heard crying through the walls for hours. Tearing off her clothes and urinating on the floor became a normal occurrence

As the spring of 1976 came on, Anneliese’s attacks deepened. She started to assault family members, biting and scraping them. When she couldn’t get her hands on any of her sisters, Anneliese would hurt herself.

She declined to eat, telling that the devils wouldn’t allow her. She would fall to her knees and rise back up shortly, only to repeat the action hundreds of times each day, breaking her kneecaps in the cycle. Anneliese thought she was possessed as well.

Still, her parents believed in the church and did not want medical support. In her lucid moments, Anneliese would say to anyone ready to listen that she was ready to die to atone for the “wayward youth of the day and the apostate preachers of the original church”.

Anneliese continued to deny eating, but now she made sure that it was her selection, not the choice of the devils inside her. In her weakening state, Anneliese appeared down with Pneumonia and a fever. She became bony, dropping under 100 pounds. Still, the two preachers continued the sessions.

The final exorcism was done on June 30, 1976. Anneliese, too frail to conduct the genuflections herself, was allowed by her parents. In the tape, Anneliese speaks for the final time. She says Renz and Alt to “beg for absolution” then spins her thinking to her family. Through tears, Annelies says “Mother, I’m afraid”.

On the morning of first July, Anneliese Michel died of malnutrition and dehydration. According to the coroner’s news, she weighed just 68 pounds. Hurting from broken knees due to continuous genuflections. She was powerless to walk without assistance and was noted to have contracted pneumonia. 

After an inquiry, the state prosecutor maintained that Michel's death could have been avoided even one week before she died.

In 1976, the state charged Michel's parents and preachers Ernst Alt and Arnold Renz with negligent killing. During the case, Michel's corpse was exhumed and tapes were played to the court of the exorcisms over the eleven months which brought her death. The parents were defended by Erich Schmidt-Leichner; their lawyers were funded by the Church. The state approved that no involved parties be jailed; instead, the recommended penalty for the priests was aine, while the prosecution decided that the parents should be free from the sentence as they had "suffered enough", which is an example in German penal law, cf. 60.

After the case, the parents asked the administrations for approval to exhume the remains of their daughter. The official reason presented by the parents to governments was that Michel had been buried in a hurry in an ordinary coffin. Almost two years after the funeral, on 25 February 1978, her remains were replaced in a new oak coffin striped with tin. The official news state that the corpse bore the signs of constant decay. The accused exorcists were prevented from seeing the remains of Michel. Arnold Renz later noted that he had been discouraged from entering the mortuary. Her burial became and remains a pilgrimage site.