exorcism memorabilia trip!!!

One regret of my not having email is that sometimes I want to write an entry, but by the time I'm online next, my enthusiasm is gone... I feel that's the case with this entry...

I had been reading up on great exorcisms of the 20th c., and of the 2 most famous (one Iowa, one Missouri), the 2nd inspired the novel and then the movie. When I had visited my one Dutch friend in St. Louis, he had suggested that we visit the hospital there, but the online information at 1st suggested that the exorcism happened in the D.C. area, so I just glanced to see what book the information was gathered from and stopped looking...

And when I got home and was reading the book a couple weeks later, I realized the exoricism really did happen in St. Louis.

-BUT-

I discovered the religious order who owned the now-demolished hospital had their appointment-only provincial archives in my city, so I wrote ahead and scheduled a time with the archivist to come in and see their archive in general - including the statue of an archangel that was brought into the kid's room for the climactic final week of the exorcism.

I didn't say that straight up, because I didn't want the archivist to think that I was one of "those kind of people".

But, when I biked out to the commuter rail line and then hopped it to the 'burbs, and there were (white) businessmen reading papers, and this done-up middle-aged Greek woman with too much makeup and a short haircut who was the kid of the owners of the cafe where I got a chicken salad sandwich and older (white) ladies were lunching, and at the library there were tons of (white) moms with little kids running around and in strollers, and I kept thinking to myself, "These people have no idea that in their town there's a record of cosmic evil breaking into the universe."

Because, after all, the archivist also had the secret case files of the exorcism, which have never been released.

When I got there - I brought my bike on the train so I could bike out; the archives were a few miles outside of the downtown center where the train dropped me off - I was soaking wet.

But, the archivist was very cordial after I checked in with the desk guard and met her in the little side office with two rooms, one of which had display cases and one of which had the office where she and another woman worked.

"And why were you interested?", she was like, and mentioned my being a ph.d. student in a relevant area and asked if I was perhaps interested in archival research or something.

"Oh, I had come across the account of the St. Louis exorcism," I said - and I paused, to let that hang there - "and I had never heard of your order and saw your had a museum, so I decided to come to educate myself, like I had when I was in other cities in the past and saw that different orders I wasn't familiar with had museums.

"Oh," she was like, and mentioned the statue, as well as a window that a brother had saved from the hospital when it was demolished.

She gave me the tour, though, and the work of the order was *fascinating*, and I peppered her with questions about the different stuff in the cases, and mentioned intersections with what I had learned from my studies, my great being a nun, etc.

Then, when we got to the statue, she mentioned several things:

- she gets a ton of calls from journalists around Halloween.
- the museum is mostly for the brothers, not outsiders.
- people have wanted to take pictures of the statue.

About that last point, I was like, "Why not? If it has special powers, I don't see why it's any different from a relic, and why deny access to it. Maybe you should put it in a chapel or something so people can pray to it, without telling anyone what it is, to keep away people with the wrong intentions."

She also said that the book that everyone reads about the case in is inaccurate, since it incorporates old newspaper articles like they're the truth, instead of sorting through it against eyewitnesses.

"Gotcha," I was like. "It's almost like the telephone game, where stuff gets distorted, but there's really something there at the beginning..."

"Exactly!", she was like.

She also said it was a shame that the brothers who were attendants were dying, since no-one would ever know the real story, and she hinted that she indeed knew it...

"That's true in one sense," I was like, "But even if you get all that down and publish it, you don't know what people are going to do with that information. It's a story of the victory of Christ over dark forces, but I bet a lot of people are interested in it because it proves that things are out there that they can contact, and do you really want that? Maybe it's just better to let it die..."

At that she made a face, and then said that when the brothers were clearing out the hospital before it was demolished, they found that someone had entered the room and set up candles and pentagrams to do a ritual there.

I totally called that.