The Boy Who Inspired The Exorcist: What Really Happened
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The Boy Who Inspired The Exorcist: What Really Happened
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About this listen
Welcome to Weird After Dark, where we dive deep into the latest Weird Darkness episode. Today we're unpacking Darren Marlar's episode, "The Boy Who Inspired The Exorcist: What Really Happened." In January 1949, an exterminator stands in a Maryland bedroom hearing scratching sounds inside the walls – but finds no droppings, no nests, no evidence any animal was ever there. Over the next four months, forty-eight witnesses including Jesuit priests, doctors, and hospital staff document a thirteen-year-old boy displaying strength requiring five grown men to restrain him, speaking in voices that don't match his own, and developing scratch marks forming words in places he cannot physically reach. Father William Bowdern loses forty pounds and develops oozing boils across his body while performing up to thirty exorcism sessions, keeping a meticulous 26-page diary of every detail. Coming up on Weird After Dark... how does the boy at the center of America's most documented exorcism case grow up to become a NASA engineer whose heat-resistant technology helps put men on the moon – spending seventy years insisting "I was just a bad boy" while living in terror that colleagues would discover his secret? We break down Darren's deep dive into the evidence, the witnesses, and the question that divides believers and skeptics to this day.
NOTE: Some of this content was created with assistance from AI tools and voices, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.
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