LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Anneliese Michel
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For the first 22 years of her life, Anneliese Michel was an unremarkable young woman--a teacher in training and part of a devout Roman Catholic family in Germany. She ... happened to be an epileptic, and prone to the seizures that often accompany that condition. Somehow, though, her parents convinced themselves that Satan had gotten hold of her soul. They called two local priests, who spent 10 months trying to exorcise the young woman's demons. To avoid interfering with the exorcism, the parents even halted her treatment for epilepsy. Michel finally died, in 1975, at the age of 23, withered and weakened to just 31 kilos from being denied food and water during the exorcism.
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Anneliese Michel (September 21, 1952 – July 1, 1976) was a Catholic woman from Germany who was said to be possessed by six or more demons and subsequently underwent an exorcism. Two motion pictures, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Requiem are loosely based on Anneliese's story.
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, Anneliese Michel enjoyed the life of a normal, religiously nurtured young girl. Without warning, her life changed on a day in 1968 when she began shaking and found she was unable to control her body. She could not call out for her parents, Josef and Anna, or any of her 3 sisters. A neurologist at the Psychiatric Clinic Wurzburg diagnosed her with "Grand Mal" epilepsy. Because of the strength of the epileptic fits, and the severity of the depression that followed, Anneliese was admitted for treatment at the hospital.
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When Anneliese Michel died at the age of 23 in Klingenberg, West Germany, in the summer of 1976, she was little more than a skeleton, weighing a mere 68 Ibs. Yet shortly before she died, her parents said, Anneliese performed an astonishing 500 deep knee-bends in one day. The source of her power, her parents believed, was nothing less than the devil himself. Anneliese's release from evil spirits came only with death, after she starved herself during a nightmarish ten-month series of Roman Catholic exorcism rituals. Two weeks ago, a court in Aschaffenburg found two priests and Anneliese's parents, wealthy Mill Owner Josef Michel, 60, and his wife Anna, 57, guilty of negligent homicide in her death. The four, who last week appealed their convictions, drew six-month suspended prison sentences.
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Anneliese Michel was born in 1952 at Leiblfing, a small village in Bavaria. She was raised in the small Bavarian town of Klingenberg am Main, where her father operated a sawmill. Her parents were devout Catholics and she grew into a deeply religious person. In 1968, Anneliese began suffering from seizures and was diagnosed as epileptic at the Psychiatric Clinic in Würzburg.
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BERLIN -- 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. An exorcist in a nearby town examined Michel and returned a diagnosis of demonic possession. The bishop issued permission to perform the rite of exorcism according to the Roman ritual of 1614.
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Anneliese Michel