This is the story of what happened in Loudun, France, in 1632, when an entire convent of nuns was found to be possessed by demons. The events described below really happened, although people over the intervening centuries have interpreted them in many different ways—and you will, no doubt, have your own ideas. There are three people at the center of the story: a Mother Superior, an exorcist, and a priest. By the end, one of them will be famous, one will be insane, and one will be dead.

In the beginning, the nuns reported strange happenings in the convent: they saw evil spirits wandering the halls, and one day, a huge black ball came rolling through the refectory, knocking some nuns over. Then they began to manifest the telltale signs of possession: convulsions, visions, eerie strength, revulsion towards sanctified things, and anger towards their confessors. They heard voices, laughed uncontrollably, cried, screamed, fainted, convulsed, and seemed to be slapped by invisible hands.

An exorcist was called in, and it quickly became a public spectacle. Day after day, the nuns were brought to a scaffold in the center of town, while crowds gathered to watch. Tied to chairs, they writhed while the exorcist called forth the demons within them and tried to force the evil spirits to reveal their names.

Soon it emerged that this was no simple case of possession, but of witchcraft too. Specifically, the nuns pointed a finger at Urbain Grandier—a local priest and their confessor. He was a controversial figure, for the pamphlets in which he shared his unorthodox opinions, his outspoken criticisms of church leaders, and his dalliance with the daughter of a local bigwig.

Grandier, it seems, had made too many powerful enemies. When the nuns produced a contract between him and the Devil (a copy of the original, apparently, which was signed in his own blood and stored in the bowels of Hell), he was done for. He was tried for witchcraft, found guilty, and burnt at the stake.

Grandier’s horrible fate has drawn much attention to the events at Loudun over the years. But the truth is, in the scheme of things, mass possessions in convents weren’t all that usual. Religious historian Moshe Sluhovsky has identified at least forty-five distinct cases, most of them little known. Most took place in orders that had recently undergone some kind of dramatic reform. In the 1490s, for instance, a group of Florentine nuns began to show signs of possession following the imposition of strict new rules with the rise of the charismatic ascetic Savonarola. When the rules were relaxed, the demons departed.

During the two decades before the mass possession at Loudun, the Ursulines, originally a very active and public order, had been forced into the cloister. We have one very interesting primary source on the transition: a demon, recorded during another mass possession event, in this case among the Ursuline sisters at Aix, in 1611. Sluhovsky writes that the demon announced he was

angry with those who live in chastity in their monasteries; but the Ursulines make me more furious, because they save many souls… All the demons have tried with all their might to persuade them to desert their vocation; we explained to them that monastic walls were most suitable for women, and that they were wrong, that their vocation was not approved.

Possession, in this instance, might have offered the nuns a chance to speak—though with demonic voices—on the changes that were being pressed upon them.

As Sluhovsky notes, another complicating factor is that there wasn’t always a clear line between ecstatic visions and demonic possession. He considers it

of utmost importance to realize that once a possession took place, it was not immediately clear to the nuns, their mothers superior, their confessors, or other theologians who were witnessing the events what the nature of the possessing agency was, and whether it was divine or demonic. It is equally important to realize that the discernment of spirits was not an intellectual or abstract, scholastic exercise but rather a social practice, one that involved the possessed nuns themselves, their friends and their enemies, their sisters, abbesses, spiritual directors, confessors, and outside experts.

When a spiritual oddity presented itself, then, who got to decide what it meant? How do you determine who is a holy mystic and who is afflicted with devils? And what do you do when the devils refuse to play by the rules?

After Grandier was executed, the Mother Superior at Loudun, Jeanne des Anges, continued to be tormented by demons. A new exorcist was called in, a monk named Jean-Joseph Surin.

Surin had a different approach to exorcism. It would no longer be a spectacle. Rather, he would sit quietly with the afflicted nun, read her prayers, and whisper in her ear about finding a place of inner peace. His desire to save her was so overpowering, that, as Surin himself recalls (using the third person for himself),

he could not keep from offering himself to the divine Majesty to be burdened with the evil of that poor girl and to participate in all her temptations and suffering, to the point of asking to be possessed by the devil…

Jeanne went into a fit of convulsions. When she emerged, her hands were marked in bloody crimson with the names Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and Father Sales (the saint who had developed the form of prayer Surin used in his exorcisms). The demons were banished, but, as Surin wrote afterwards, “During my ministry, the devil passed from the body of the possessed person and entered into mine.”

Jeanne des Anges quickly became a celebrity, traveling across France to exhibit her miraculously inscribed hand. Jean-Joseph Surin, on the other hand, was tormented for the next twenty years with maladies that he attributed to Jeanne’s demons: suicidality, horrific physical pain, delusions, catatonia that ultimately left him unable to speak, and intense spiritual despair. He didn’t recover until the last few years of his life. One of his final acts was to record the whole story in his memoirs.

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