The Borșa Exorcism Case

In the late autumn of 1985, in the small mountain town of Borșa in northern Romania, a twenty-three-year-old woman named in subsequent parish records only as M.B. was brought by her family to the local Orthodox priest with symptoms that her relatives interpreted as demonic possession. Over the following five months, in a sequence of consultations and rites that took place across three parishes, a series of priests attempted to intervene in the case. The episode was documented in handwritten notes kept by the senior priest involved, a man named Father Vasile Ardelean, and the notes survived because they were stored in a parish chest that was not examined by the Communist authorities until after the fall of the regime in December 1989. The Borșa case has since been studied by Romanian religious scholars and folklorists, and although it has never been the subject of formal ecclesiastical inquiry, it constitutes one of the better-documented twentieth-century European exorcism files and an unusual surviving record from the Romanian Orthodox tradition.

The Setting

Borșa lies in the Maramureș highlands, in a region of northern Romania famous for the persistence of pre-modern social and religious forms. The town and the surrounding villages preserved, well into the late twentieth century, a complex of religious practices that combined Orthodox Christianity with older Carpathian folk traditions. The Communist regime had nominally suppressed religious activity but had, in the more remote parts of the country, settled into a practical accommodation that allowed parish life to continue at a reduced level. Maramureș, with its difficult terrain and its small populations of religiously observant villagers, was one of the regions where this accommodation was most extensive.

The local Orthodox tradition retained, in 1985, a fully developed liturgical apparatus for the treatment of demonic affliction. The Molitvele Sfântului Vasile cel Mare, the prayers of Saint Basil the Great, were and remain the standard Orthodox text for cases of possession, and the priests of the region were experienced in their use. The treatment of the possessed was understood, in this milieu, as a routine if difficult pastoral function, distinct from the more elaborate Roman Catholic procedures of the Anneliese Michel case of less than a decade earlier, but conceptually parallel.

The Onset Of The Symptoms

According to Father Ardelean’s notes, M.B. had been a healthy and unremarkable young woman until the late summer of 1985. The first reported symptoms began in September: she became withdrawn, refused food, and reported nightmares of a kind her family considered unusual. Within weeks, the symptoms had broadened to include episodes of involuntary speech in what her family described as a male voice, episodes of physical contortion that her mother and sisters could not restrain, and a graduated aversion to religious objects, particularly the consecrated chrism oil. Her family first consulted a local doctor, who referred her to a regional psychiatric clinic in Sighetu Marmației. She was diagnosed there with what would now likely be classified as a dissociative disorder with possible psychotic features and prescribed neuroleptic medication, which produced no observable benefit. By late October, the family had concluded that the problem lay outside the medical frame, and Father Ardelean was asked to attend.

The Pastoral Response

Father Ardelean was sixty-one years old at the time and had served the parish at Borșa for more than two decades. His notes indicate a careful and reluctant approach: he describes the symptoms in detail and reserves judgment on their underlying cause. He visited M.B. three times in the first week, conducting standard prayers of healing, before concluding that the case warranted formal recourse to the prayers of Saint Basil. He requested the assistance of a second priest from the nearby village of Vișeu de Sus.

The two priests began the formal sequence in early November, following the standard liturgical structure of Psalter readings, prayers of exorcism, anointing with consecrated oil, and ritual sprinkling of holy water. The notes describe M.B.’s reactions in clinical detail, including episodes of violent contortion, speech in the male voice, and episodes in which she could not recall what had occurred. Two specific moments are recorded in detail: an occasion in late November when M.B. correctly named, in the male voice, a relative of one of the assisting priests who had died years earlier in circumstances the priest had never publicly disclosed; and an occasion in early December when she described the contents of the locked church safe with a precision the priests could not reconcile with any ordinary means of knowledge. Ardelean’s notes decline to interpret these moments, in keeping with an Orthodox pastoral tradition that discourages the theatrical engagement characteristic of some Western Catholic cases.

Resolution And Aftermath

The rites continued through the winter of 1985–1986. By March, M.B.’s symptoms had substantially diminished. The episodes of contortion had stopped, the male voice had not been heard for weeks, and she was able to enter the church and participate in the liturgy. By April, Ardelean considered the active phase concluded, although he continued to visit her family for several months. M.B. resumed work in a local textile cooperative and, in 1988, married a man from a neighboring village. She had two children, and died in 2012 of unrelated causes, having never publicly discussed the events of 1985–1986.

The Documentation And A Cautious Reading

Ardelean’s notes were stored in a parish chest at Borșa and were rediscovered in 1991 during a routine inventory conducted after the regime’s collapse. They were examined by Father Ioan Bunea, the Maramureș diocesan archivist, who brought them to the attention of the Romanian religious-studies scholar Mircea Păcurariu. Păcurariu published a measured account of the case in 1996, drawing on the notes and on interviews with the surviving priests and with members of M.B.’s family. The folklorist Gail Kligman has emphasized that the local Orthodox tradition treats possession as a recognizable pastoral category and that the categories of Western Catholic possession literature should not be imposed on the Borșa file.

The case sits at the intersection of several frameworks that the available evidence does not allow to be cleanly separated. M.B. was a real young woman who suffered real symptoms, was assessed by a real psychiatrist, treated by real priests, and recovered in a manner sustained for the rest of her life. Whether the underlying disorder is best described in psychiatric, religious, or some other vocabulary is a question the case itself does not settle. What the file does demonstrate is the persistence of a specific Orthodox pastoral practice into the late twentieth century, and the existence of at least one instance in which a surviving documentary record permits that practice to be examined with some care. The case stands alongside the Anneliese Michel case and the Aix-en-Provence possessions as a reference point for the modern study of possession, although it has been almost unknown outside Romanian-language scholarship.

Sources

• Ardelean, Vasile, parish notes, Borșa, 1985–1986, manuscript held in Maramureș Diocesan Archives.
• Păcurariu, Mircea, “A Possession Case from Maramureș,” Studii Teologice, Bucharest, 1996.
• Kligman, Gail, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania, University of California Press, 1988.
• Bunea, Ioan, archival memorandum, Maramureș Diocese, 1991.