The Exorcist house

A house in Bel-Nor, a suburb of St. Louis, widely said to be where a boy's exorcism began. Mount Rainier has a competing local story, and Opsasnick places the boy's home in Cottage City.

Saint Louis University's Universitas magazine said in 2014 that the exorcism began at the home of the boy's relatives in a suburb northwest of St. Louis, widely believed to be Bel-Nor. After some disturbed nights the priests moved him to the Alexian Brothers Hospital in the south of the city. The Riverfront Times reported in 2005 that the haunting story attached to one Bel-Nor house was an open secret among its neighbours.

Mount Rainier has its own version. The Hyattsville Wire says a Post story of the time called the teenager a Mount Rainier boy, and that gave rise to a long-lived local belief that his house had stood on Bunker Hill Road, on a spot now used as a little park with a gazebo. Mark Opsasnick wrote in Strange Magazine in 1999 that from the early 1980s teenagers from Prince George's County gathered at what was then an empty lot there, drank, put up wooden crosses and shouted until police moved them on.

Opsasnick placed the boy's home in Cottage City. In 2021 the Hyattsville Wire reported on a couple who bought a house off Route 1 without knowing of its reported tie to The Exorcist.