The Tragic, True Story Behind “The Exorcism of Emily Rose”
Both medicine and religion failed the real victim.
Published in
5 min readNov 1, 2020
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The movie “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” is based on the true and tragic events that befell Anneliese Michel.
Were her hellish hallucinations due to epilepsy or demonic possession?
Who was Anneliese Michel?
Anna Elisabeth Michel, who went by Anneliese, was born in 1952 in West Germany. Anneliese had three sisters, and her parents, Josef and Anna, were very strict Roman Catholics. It’s said that they went to church twice a week and three of her aunts were nuns.
The First Signs of Illness
Anneliese was only 16 years old when she had her first seizure. She was diagnosed by neurologists as having temporal lobe epilepsy, and then, shortly after that depression.
