The Peoria Exorcism of Father Theophilus Riesinger

The case that brought Father Theophilus Riesinger to international notoriety occurred in Earling, Iowa, in 1928. Less well known is the fact that Riesinger, a Capuchin friar of German extraction, had already conducted at least one substantial exorcism five years earlier in the diocese of Peoria, Illinois, on a young woman whose ordeal foreshadowed in striking ways what he would later describe at Earling. The Peoria case has never been fully documented in print. What survives comes from Riesinger’s own private correspondence with his superior, fragmentary references in the diocesan archive, and a handful of pages in the diary of a parish priest who assisted him.

Background

Riesinger had been received into the Capuchin order in 1898 and was ordained in 1899. By 1920 he had developed a reputation, primarily among German-American Catholics in the Midwest, as a priest with an unusual ministry to those believed to be afflicted by demonic forces. He had performed several exorcisms in Wisconsin and Minnesota during the 1910s, working under episcopal authorization and following procedures laid down in the Roman Ritual. The Peoria case came to him in late 1922 through the petition of a rural pastor whose parishioner, a twenty-three-year-old woman identified in the surviving documents only as “Margaret W.,” had begun manifesting behaviors that local physicians could neither diagnose nor treat.

The Manifestations

According to the parish priest’s diary, Margaret had been a devout and reserved young woman, the eldest daughter of a German immigrant family who farmed land east of the Illinois River. In the summer of 1922 she began suffering convulsions that arrived without warning and lasted between twenty minutes and several hours. During these episodes her voice changed register, deepening to a tone the family found impossible to attribute to her. She reportedly spoke phrases in Latin and in what witnesses identified as Plattdeutsch, the Low German dialect of her grandparents, though she had no formal training in either tongue. She would not enter the family chapel and reacted with extreme violence to the presence of holy water or blessed objects brought into her room.

Two physicians from Peoria examined her in the autumn of 1922 and disagreed sharply. One diagnosed hysteria of a severe kind, then a recognized clinical category, and recommended hospitalization. The other suspected epilepsy complicated by religious mania. Margaret was admitted briefly to a Catholic hospital in the city, but the staff requested her removal after two attendants reported being struck by objects that had not been thrown by any visible hand.

The Exorcism

Riesinger arrived at the family farm in February 1923, accompanied by an assistant priest. He examined Margaret over three days before formally requesting authorization from the bishop of Peoria. Once granted, he began the rite, which according to his correspondence extended over twenty-two sessions across roughly seven weeks. The accounts that survive describe phenomena consistent with patterns Riesinger would later report at Earling: foul odors that clung to the room and could not be aired out, intervals during which Margaret’s body became, in the priest’s own words, “as cold as iron in winter,” and prolonged exchanges in which voices speaking through her identified themselves by traditional demonic names.

Skeptical writers have noted that these patterns appear in the Roman Ritual itself, which lists them as signs to look for. A priest schooled in the rite might unconsciously cue subjects to produce them, and a young woman in a state of severe psychological crisis might unconsciously oblige. Riesinger himself acknowledged in a letter to his provincial that he could not always tell where genuine diabolical phenomena ended and ordinary illness began, but maintained that the Latin phrases and the responses to concealed relics fell outside what mental disturbance alone could explain.

Aftermath

Margaret was reportedly delivered from her affliction in late March 1923. The parish priest’s diary describes a final session in which she lay quietly for several hours, then woke as if from a long sleep, asking for food and weeping when told what month it was. She returned to ordinary life, married within two years, and died in 1968 at the age of sixty-eight. The diocese never publicized the case. Riesinger himself rarely spoke of it after Earling eclipsed it in the public mind, though Carl Vogl’s 1935 booklet Begone Satan! contains a single oblique reference that scholars have identified as alluding to the Peoria episode.

Skeptical Analysis

Modern reviewers tend to read the case through the lens of conversion disorder and dissociative phenomena, which were still poorly understood in 1923. The “languages” Margaret was reported to speak may have been fragments retained from childhood exposure to elderly German relatives, surfacing under extreme stress in altered states. The convulsions and apparent insensitivity to pain are consistent with what was then called grand hysterical seizure. The objects reportedly thrown in the hospital have no independent corroboration beyond the secondhand testimony of two staff members.

The Peoria case remains a footnote in the larger history of American exorcism, worth recovering chiefly because it illuminates the developing practice of one of the most active exorcists of the early twentieth century. It stands as a precursor to the better-known Earling exorcism of 1928 and bears comparison with the Watseka Wonder of 1877 in the same Midwestern Catholic milieu.

Sources

• Vogl, Carl. Begone Satan! (Schwabach, 1935; English edition TAN Books, 1973).
• Diocese of Peoria archive, miscellaneous correspondence, 1922–1924.
• Cuneo, Michael. American Exorcism. Doubleday, 2001.
• Goodman, Felicitas. How About Demons? Indiana University Press, 1988.