Roland Doe

A 14-year-old boy who, Catholic sources said in 1949, had been freed from possession by the devil by a priest. His case inspired the novel The Exorcist.

In 1949 the Washington Post reported, citing Catholic sources, that a priest had freed a boy of 14 from Mount Rainier from possession by the devil. The Post ranked it among the most striking such cases in modern church history. The boy is known in later writing as Roland Doe.

Saint Louis University's Universitas magazine said in 2014 that on 18 April, the day after Easter, the exorcism seemed to have worked. It quotes a diary kept by a man it names as Bishop, who wrote that there had been no sign of the devil since 11 p.m. on Monday.

The case became the seed of the novel The Exorcist. The AFI Catalog says its author, Blatty, heard of it while at Georgetown University and based his bestseller on it. The AFI puts the exorcism in Silver Spring.

Where the boy lived is itself disputed. Mark Opsasnick went back over the story. The Baltimore Sun reported in 2000 that he found nobody had ever spoken to the boy, his neighbours or his childhood friends, and that the boy had never lived in Mount Rainier. The Washington City Paper said in 1999 that Opsasnick believes a priest of St. James Catholic Church steered the press to Mount Rainier to protect the boy, who in Opsasnick's account lived in Cottage City.