1949—Jesuit Priests from SLU assist a teenage boy, Robbie Mannheim, believed to suffer from demonic possession. The boy's experience serves as the basis of the documentary In The Grip Of Evil and is dramatized in the 1971 novel The Exorcist followed by the 1973 film film The Exorcist.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Louis_University
Walter Halloran SJ (September 21, 1921 – March 1, 2005) was a Catholic priest[1] of the Society of Jesus who, at the age of twenty-six, assisted in the exorcism of Roland Doe, a thirteen-year-old Lutheran boy in St. Louis, Missouri[2] This was the case that William Peter Blatty was inspired by when he wrote his novel The Exorcist.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Halloran
Article from 15 Oct 2013 about the Hospital building on St Louis Univ was torn down .. Alexian Brothers Hospital torn down sometime in the past . . .
http://m.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/book-blog/slu-revisits-famous-exorcism/article_a215b03a-07b1-5288-8921-510b811dc5ec.html?mobile_touch=true
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THE DEVIL IN ST. LOUIS
When Robbie left the Alexian Brothers Hospital, Brother Rector Cornelius went to the fifth floor corridor of the old wing, had a statue of St. Michael removed from Robbie's room, turned a key in the door and stated that the room was to be kept permanently locked. From that day on, the Alexian Brothers in St. Louis maintained the secrets of the exorcism. The existence of Father Bishop's diary also remained a secret and a copy of it had been placed inside of the room when it was sealed. Everyone who worked in the hospital though knew why the room was locked. For years after the exorcism, people who were involved in the case, or who worked at the hospital, shared stories of things they heard and saw during the several week ordeal that occurred in the psychiatric wing. Orderlies spoke of cleaning up pools of vomit and urine in the boy's rooms.
Staff members and nurses claimed to hear the sounds of someone screaming and the echoes of demonic laughter coming from Robbie's room. Most especially though, they spoke of the cold waves of air that seemed to emanate from the room. No matter how warm the rest of the hospital was, the area around the door to the boy's room was always ice cold.
And even after the exorcism ended, something apparently remained behind. Was it some remnant of the entity that possessed Robbie or perhaps the impression of the horrific events that occurred in the room? Whatever it was, the room was never re-opened. Electrical problems plagued the surrounding rooms and it was always cold in the hallway outside the door to this particular room. The entire section of the hospital was eventually closed but whether or not this was because of the "exorcism room" is unknown.
As the years passed, tales about the locked room were passed on to new Brothers who came to serve at the hospital. They knew that the room was located in a wing for extremely ill mental patients but did not understand why one room was kept sealed - until they heard about what had happened there. The Brothers who had been on the staff in 1949 would not soon forget what they had seen and heard.
Other Alexians had their own stories to tell - of banging sounds on their doors at night, voices calling in the darkened corridors, and more. Staff members would continue the stories in the years to come and I have personally spoken to more than a dozen nurses, maintenance people, orderlies and doctors who have dark and distinct memories of the old wing and the locked room on the psychiatric floor. Some of them have told me that sometimes - even after all of these years - they still dream about that wing and that one locked door.
In May 1976, work began on a new Alexian Brothers Hospital and in the first phase of the construction, some of the old outbuildings were torn down and a new six-story tower with two-story wings was built. In October 1978, the patients were moved out of the original hospital building and the contractor ordered the structure to be razed. It was done, but not without difficulty. Workers on the demolition crew claimed to be unable to control the wrecking ball when that floor was taken off. The ball swung around and hit a portion of a new building but luckily did not damage. This incident seemed to further enhance the legend of the room - which continued to grow.
Before the demolition was started, workers first combed through the building for old furniture that was to be taken out and sold. One of them found a locked room in the psychiatric wing and broke in. The room was fully furnished with a dust-covered bed, nightstand, chairs and a desk table with a single drawer. Before removing the table, the worker curiously opened the drawer to see what was inside. He found a small stack of papers inside but neither he nor anyone else would ever learn how or why the report was in the drawer in a room that had presumably been locked since 1949.
The furniture, including all of the items in the locked room, was sold to a company that owned a nursing home a short distance away from the hospital. All of that which was salvaged from the hospital was locked in a room on the fourth floor of the nursing home and was never used. The nursing home itself was later torn down and many of these demolition workers, like the staff people and the city inspectors who had come through, refused to go on the fourth floor - and were never able to explain why. What became of the furniture from the locked room is unknown.
Or at least that's one version of the story…
The full version of the 1949 story appears in Troy Taylor's Upcoming Book, THE DEVIL CAME TO ST. LOUIS -- Available Summer 2006!
http://www.prairieghosts.com/exorcist.html
