A “possessed” child is believed to be the culprit behind the death of the Irish priest who inspired “The Exorcist,” a new documentary claims.
Malachi Martin went to perform an exorcism on a 4-year-old girl in Connecticut in 1999 – but mysteriously died soon after when he was pushed by an invisible force.
In the Netflix documentary “Hostage to the Devil,” Martin’s pal and former CIA agent Robert Marrow recalled how when Martin went to greet the girl at her home, the child said to him: “So you’re Malachi Martin, and you think you can help her?”
Marrow frequently drove Martin to carry out exorcisms and said he was there the day of the creepy interaction, according to the Mirror.
“Robert is a former CIA agent and this is the most disturbing thing he’d ever seen in all of his years working for the US government,” the documentary’s producer/writer Rachel Lysaght told the Mirror.
Martin died at age 78 after suffering from head trauma in the fall, the Daily Mail reported.
The doc, which debuts Sunday, takes a look into Martin’s work as a Jesuit priest, professor, author and, most notably, an exorcist – a career he turned to after moving to New York in 1966, according to the Mirror.
“When he left the church he moved to New York in 1966 and he had various jobs including taxi-driver, waiter and as a writer too, but really he saw that there was a need there for people to be assisted and to be given support in terms of relief, I suppose, from some sort of either demonic infestation of someone themselves or their home and felt that the church wasn’t providing that support anymore,” said Lysaght.
Martin’s decades of work as a spiritual healer inspired the cult classic 1973 movie “The Exorcist.”