In the late 1940s, in the United States, priests of the Catholic Church performed a series of exorcisms on an anonymous boy, documented under the pseudonym "Roland Doe" or "Robbie Mannheim".
"[4] According to author Thomas B. Allen, Jesuit priest Father Walter H. Halloran was one of the last surviving eyewitnesses of the events and participated in the exorcism.
Allen wrote that a diary kept by attending priest Father Raymond J. Bishop detailed the exorcism performed on the pseudonymously identified "Roland Doe" aka "Robbie".
"[5] When asked in an interview to make a statement verifying that the boy had actually been demonically possessed, Halloran responded saying, "No, I can't go on record.
During their stay, Roland's cousin contacted one of their professors at Saint Louis University, Bishop, who in turn spoke to William S. Bowdern, an associate of College Church.
Together, both priests visited Roland in his relatives' home, where they allegedly observed a shaking bed, flying objects, and the boy speaking in a guttural voice and exhibiting an aversion to anything sacred.
"[8] In his 1993 book Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism, author Thomas B. Allen offered "the consensus of today's experts" that "Robbie was just a deeply disturbed boy, nothing supernatural about him".
[9] Author Mark Opsasnick[1] questioned many of the supernatural claims associated with this story, proposing that "Roland Doe" was simply a spoiled, disturbed bully who threw deliberate tantrums to get attention or to get out of school.
Opsasnick also questioned the story of Hughes' attempts to exorcise the boy and his subsequent injury, saying he could find no evidence that such an episode had actually occurred.
Nickell dismissed suggestions that supernatural forces made scratches or markings or caused words to appear on the teenager's body in unreachable places, saying, "A determined youth, probably even without a wall mirror, could easily have managed such a feat - if it actually occurred.
The tantrums, "trances", moved furniture, hurled objects, automatic writing, superficial scratches, and other phenomena were just the kinds of things someone of R's age could accomplish, just as others have done before and since.
Indeed, the elements of "poltergeist phenomena", "spirit communication", and "demonic possession"—taken both separately and, especially, together, as one progressed to the other—suggest nothing so much as role-playing involving trickery.Nickell also dismissed stories of the boy's prodigious strength, saying he showed "nothing more than what could be summoned by an agitated teenager" and criticized popular accounts of the exorcism for what he termed a "stereotypical storybook portrayal" of the Devil.