The true story behind “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” involves a young German girl named Anneliese Michel, born on September 21, 1952 in a small village in Bavaria. She was a young, beautiful woman on her way to a career in elementary education.
According to court findings, she experienced her first epileptic attack in 1969, and by 1973 was suffering from depression and considering suicide. Soon she was seeing the faces of demons on the people and things around her, and voices told her she was damned.
The first person to recognize that Anneliese Michel was possessed by demons was an older woman accompanying the girl on a pilgrimage. She noticed that Anneliese would not walk past a certain image of Jesus, refused to drink water from a holy spring and smelled bad — hellishly bad.
Under the influence of her demons, Michel ripped the clothes off her body, compulsively performed up to 400 squats a day, crawled under a table and barked like a dog for two days, ate flies, spiders and coal, bit the head off a dead bird and licked her own urine from the floor.