DECEMBER 26, 1973
SILVER SPRINGS, MARYLAND
DAY
A secret life is about to be unmasked.
The now thirty-eight-year-old NASA engineer works at the Goddard Space Flight Center in nearby Greenbelt, Maryland. Ronald Hunkeler holds college degrees in chemical engineering and psychology. Since beginning his employment with the space agency, he has worked to put men on the moon as part of the Apollo project. He is the married father of three children, of whom the oldest is named Michael, for the archangel.
The Exorcist arrives in theaters today. In the twenty-four years since his possession, Ronald Hunkeler has largely been able to shut the trauma out of his mind when he is in public. However, in private, he is prone to unexpected rages that are affecting his marriage and child-rearing.
Ronald’s wife and a few close colleagues do know the exorcism occurred, but it is not something he speaks about. However, the success of William Peter Blatty’s book has resurrected demon possession as a topic of worldwide conversation. And now the movie can only add to that awareness.
It is known that the film was produced in nearby Washington. Newspapers are reporting that the movie and book are based on a 1949 exorcism that occurred in this area. Ronald Hunkeler’s name is still not public, but he lives in dread that it soon will be. This anxiety is affecting him deeply. It is almost as if the Devil is back.
Everyone is talking about The Exorcist.
“In a quiet Beverly Hills, California, neighborhood, residents have been awakened at dawn as thousands of people gather for an 8 a.m. showing at a theater seating 1,450. Every day 5,000 moviegoers stand in the long queue wrapped around the Sack 57 Cinema in Boston. Four Manhattan theaters have lines extending for blocks from noon to midnight,” reports Time magazine.*
“I want to see it before it’s banned,” one Bostonian tells Time.
The real exorcists, Father William Bowdern and Father Raymond Bishop, live long enough to see their exploits on film. They will attend the premier, quietly admitting that the terrors on the screen are far less scary than what actually happened.†
All over the world, the film is scaring the hell out of those who see it. Some audience members faint or become hysterical. “I think it’s part of the religious trend that’s going on, the craving for the supernatural, the interest in the nonmaterial,” states the Most Reverend Arthur Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury.
After each screening of The Exorcist ends, fear continues. Televangelist Billy Graham states, “There is a power of evil in the film, in the fabric of the film itself.”
Graham believes that watching The Exorcist is an open invitation to demonic possession.
William Peter Blatty disagrees. “There has been a devil theory that sinister forces were annoyed by the film. I don’t attach any significance to it. Still, I would like to think that somebody down there doesn’t like me.”
Much to Ronald Hunkeler’s chagrin, the exorcism phenomenon grows. High school teenagers in the town of Mount Rainier come out at night, flocking to a vacant lot at the corner of Bunker Hill Road and Thirty-Third Street. The house that once stood here was burned down after a firefighting exercise in 1962. However, the kids think this is the site where Hunkeler’s exorcism took place.
In fact, this is not the true location. But the revelers do not care. They drink beer and build wooden crosses, apparently celebrating the exorcism. Even though police shoo them away, the teenaged crowds keep returning, sure in their belief that the Devil once dwelled where they are standing.
The actual Hunkeler homestead in nearby Cottage City, Maryland, is the scene of many violent disturbances. Father Frank Bober, a former pastor of Saint James Catholic Church in Mount Rainier, is approached by reporters from the Washington Post in 1985. They have questions about unexplained phenomena near the home. “Not far from where the boy and his parents lived, police found a woman in a plastic bag, her body decomposing,” the priest remembers. “A couple doors away from that house, a guy went crazy and decapitated his mother. A few doors down, children were arrested for hacking off appendages of their parents. So that entire area there seemed to be plagued by very bizarre criminal elements.”
Father Bober, who was a good friend of Father Albert Hughes, the priest attacked by Ronald Hunkeler at Georgetown University Hospital, then tells about a letter he received from a convicted felon after the Washington Post’s 1985 story. The man is serving a life sentence for murdering his mother. “I did this and I loved my mom,” the killer admits, adding that there is “something extraordinarily uncomfortable” about the area around the Hunkeler home.
“Some power just took over me and I hacked her to pieces.”
Ronald Hunkeler’s life unfolds but his personal demons become too much for his wife, who divorces him in 1986. Also, two of his children will not speak to him. It is a tragic situation.
In 2001, after forty years with NASA, Ronald retires. He now has a female partner, who worked with him at the space agency. The two buy a house, approximately forty miles from his boyhood home. But Hunkeler cannot escape his legacy.
In fact, on occasion, strangers still approach Ronald Hunkeler asking if he was the exorcism boy. Flustered, he denies being involved with anything like that.
But his youthful trauma continues to haunt the grown man.
There is no escape.