Memories of St. Louis (6 of 6): An exorcist’s grave.

During the two days I was in St. Louis, me and my one (Dutch) friend visited the 4 sites associated with the exorcism case there that had inspired the book and movie “The Exorcist” (and through that, had helped revive and institute the practice of  exorcism among American Pentecostals and Catholics during the last quarter of the 20th c., continuing into the present) (in order of our visiting them):

- the site of a rectory where some exorcism of the kid had taken place.

- the site of a hospital psych ward where most of the exorcism had taken place and finished.

- the house where the kid’s relatives lived, and where some exorcism of the kid had taken place.

- the grave of the Jesuit who was the exorcist.

The grave was tough to find, but luckily, the plot # was given online.  After a while in that plot, my one (Dutch) friend found the part where all the Jesuits were buried, and then it was just a matter of reading through 5 rows of simple stones, many with 2 names (Jesuits were buried doubled up, perhaps for simplicity, or perhaps since they ran out of room?).

Interestingly, and, as both of us thought, very coolly, the memorial to that province’s founders that towered over the plot included the name of 3 slave couples, with the explicit recognition that their labors were not given of their own free will.

Later, we fortunately stumbled across the graves of Tennessee Williams and William Tecumseh Sherman, who we knew were buried somewhere in the cemetery, but no idea where at all since plot #s weren't available online, so we hadn’t bothered looking for them.

When we were standing in front of Tennessee Williams’s grave, this (fatter) (middle-aged) (white) woman cruises by in her SUV, her (fattish) (middle school-age) son in the passenger seat, and she asked us something about directions to graves, and then we started talking to her, and it turns out that she lives in St. Louis, and the last few weekends she had been going around to graveyards, as well as sites associated with the exorcism that inspired “The Exorcist”, so we told her how to go find the Jesuit grave.

Then, she started talking about how the other weekend she and her son had gone to the kid’s relatives’ house (which is currently a private residence), and they had gotten out of the car and taken like 4 photos of her son, and 1 photo without.

“So I was uploading them to Facebook,” she was like, “And you know how that feature zooms in so you can tag people?  I tagged my son, and tagged my son, and tagged my son, and then the last picture, he’s not in it, but there’s something in the window, like a ghoul face, and Facebook zooms in and asks me to tag it.”

She paused to gulp and wet up her throat, and was like, “So, I put ‘Scary’, because it was!”

Then, after a short pause, she was like, “But when I went back to that picture, there was no tag there, and no ghoul face!  It was gone!”

Later, she was talking about a vanishing hitchhiker who appears outside the cemetery, and my one (Dutch) friend said that was a common story, and then she went to say farewell, and I joked that her car would vanish as she drove away.

“Go back to [my city name]!” she said with a grimace, and swatted her hand at me.