The Rev. Francis Cleary, Missouri’s ‘Exorcist Historian,’ dies at 81

As a former Catholic school boy, there was one movie we were all taught to treat less as a horror show and more as a legitimate warning sign of the very real possibility that at any second Satan himself would take control of your body. That was The Exorcist. Zombies probably weren’t going to eat me, but the devil might make me cut myself up with a crucifix. Priests have a way of explaining things so that they sound reasonable.

The Rev. Francis X. Cleary, who was just a Jesuit seminarian when Jesuits allegedly performed an exorcism on a 14-year-old boy in St. Louis, which would inspire William Peter Blatty‘s 1971 novel.