The Exorcist Family Never Lived in Mount Rainier

The 1949 case behind The Exorcist was pinned on a Mount Rainier house. The family lived next door in Cottage City, and the house was someone else's.

Show Notes

In August 1949, a Washington newspaper reported that a priest had freed a Mount Rainier, Maryland, boy from possession by the devil. For years, the story behind The Exorcist pointed to a lot on Bunker Hill Road. The family never lived in Mount Rainier at all.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2026/10/29/exorcist-1949-mount-rainier-cottage-city/

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

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Short episodes, most around ten minutes. Each one is built on the historical record and tied to a full post with photos and sources at ghostsofdc.org.

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Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.

For years, starting in the early nineteen eighties, if you went looking for the real house behind The Exorcist, people sent you to one lot in Mount Rainier, Maryland. It's a little park now, with a gazebo. The family never lived there. They never lived in Mount Rainier at all. That mistake goes back to one line in a Washington newspaper, in August of nineteen forty-nine. So how did a boy from one small Maryland town end up haunting the one next door? And how did his story end up on a staircase in Georgetown? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. This is one of our most requested stories. It comes from sixteen sources, from a pastor's letter in March of nineteen forty-nine to a twenty twenty-five Maryland State Archives entry on Cottage City. They're all on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

Start in January of nineteen forty-nine, in a small house in Prince George's County, just over the line from Northeast Washington. A family starts hearing scratching in the walls and the attic. It seems to follow their thirteen-year-old son. Then the furniture starts to move. So the family goes to their pastor, the Reverend Luther Schulze, of St. Stephen's Lutheran Church on Brentwood Road. Schulze wants to see it for himself. On the night of February seventeenth, he has the boy sleep over at his own house. About a month later, he writes to J B Rhine, who ran the parapsychology lab at Duke University. Here's one line from that letter. Chairs moved with him and one threw him out. A Lutheran pastor typed that. On church letterhead. He also passed along the family's claim that words had appeared on the boy's body. Schulze and his own doctor looked, and they saw no words. Just rashes that looked like scratches. Rhine wrote back with interest, and with a more down-to-earth theory. The most likely explanation, he said, was that the boy was creating the effect himself, and might sincerely believe it. By then, the family had taken the boy to St. Louis, where his parents came from. And that's where the Jesuits come in.

Nothing about any of this is in the papers until August. That's when Schulze describes the case to about forty members of a local society of parapsychologists, and the Evening Star writes it up the next day. Here's how the Star opened. For about five months, Washington had a poltergeist right in its own backyard. No names. The family is Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, the boy is Roland, and all the Star will say is that they live in a Washington suburb. Nine days later, church sources tell the Star that a priest has performed an exorcism, and the boy is free. And this time, the paper names a town. Here's the first line. A Catholic priest has successfully freed a fourteen-year-old Mount Rainier, Maryland, boy of reported possession by the devil. The next morning, the Washington Post puts it on the front page, under the headline, Priest Frees Mount Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip. That afternoon, the Star adds the details people still repeat. The rite was performed more than twenty times. The Jesuit who led it lost about fifty pounds, living on bread and water. And at the climax, church sources said, the boy broke into a stream of curses, mixed with Latin. The rites that ended it happened in St. Louis. But here's how that second Star story signed off. Since that time, the boy has had no recurrence of the mysterious influences, which slid furniture across the room, set up a violent shaking of his bed and accounted for scratchings in the walls of the Mount Rainier home. The Mount Rainier home. That's all it took. Because there was a house in Mount Rainier. It just belonged to somebody else.

Mount Rainier sits right on the D C line, next to Northeast. And for years, the story attached itself to one house there, on Bunker Hill Road. A local historian named Mark Opsasnick went looking for where that address came from, and the trail led to a local paper, the Prince George's Sentinel, which pointed to a lot on Bunker Hill Road in nineteen eighty-one. Thirty-two years after the exorcism. Then he looked up who had actually lived in the house. A man named Joseph Haas. He died there in nineteen fifty-one. He had no children. And the house itself is long gone. Opsasnick found it was burned down on purpose in March of nineteen sixty-two, as a fire training exercise. One book puts it two years later. The lot became a little park with a gazebo. Around town, people called it the Exorcist lot. So if the boy didn't live there, where did he live?

One town over. Cottage City, Maryland, which borders Mount Rainier. Opsasnick found the family on Fortieth Avenue there, from nineteen thirty-nine until the father sold the house in nineteen fifty-eight. And the neighbors told him the family had always lived in that house on Fortieth Avenue. The census agrees. In April of nineteen fifty, the census taker lists the household on Fortieth Avenue in Cottage City. A machinist. His wife. Their fourteen-year-old son, Ronald. And Ronald's grandmother. Ronald was born in Washington. His parents were both born in Missouri, which fits what the pastor wrote about St. Louis. Later accounts trace the whole thing back to an aunt who was interested in spiritualism, and a Ouija board the boy reportedly used to try to reach her after she died. So how does a story from Cottage City end up on a staircase in Georgetown?

Those same nineteen forty-nine stories said the boy had been examined at Georgetown University Hospital, and later tellings added a failed exorcism there by a local priest. Opsasnick found no written record of it. But a Georgetown student was paying attention. William Peter Blatty, class of nineteen fifty. He heard about the case from a Jesuit professor, and he read the Post's coverage. In nineteen seventy-one, Blatty turned it into a novel, The Exorcist. And he moved the whole thing to Georgetown. In the fall of nineteen seventy-two, the film crew shot on campus and on Prospect Street, where they built a temporary wing onto a house, and the movie came out in December of nineteen seventy-three. The long stone stairway from Prospect down to M Street became the Exorcist steps. In October of twenty fifteen, Blatty was there when the city dedicated a plaque. Which leaves the boy himself.

From nineteen forty-nine until twenty twenty-one, he was Roland, or later Robbie. Never his real name. In twenty twenty-one, a skeptics' magazine identified him as Ronald Hunkeler, the fourteen-year-old in that census entry. He had died the year before, in May of twenty twenty. News reports said he went on to a long career as an engineer at NASA. A companion said he worried his whole life that colleagues would find out. And that he made a point of not being home on Halloween. Hard to blame him. The legend is still sitting in a little park, in the wrong town.

So that's the boy from Cottage City, and the Mount Rainier house that never had him. The Evening Star pages, the pastor's letter and the census sheet are all on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org. Thanks for listening to this one. If you'd like the next story as soon as it's out, follow Ghosts of DC wherever you get your podcasts. And if you can, leave a rating. It helps other people find us. We go looking for the stories this city forgot, and sometimes the ones it got wrong. This has been Ghosts of DC.