7. Urbain Grandier
Father Urbain Grandier was a French Catholic Priest in the 1600s. He began to go to tons of exorcisms in order to cast the devil out of someone who had been possessed. Normally, a priest was alone with the possessed person during the ceremony. We now know that demonic possessions were usually mental and physical diseases. If the exorcism did not work, they thought it was because of a particularly strong demon, and not because of a persistent illness.
According to records, there was a strangely high number of demonic possessions in the town surrounding the St. Pierre Du Marche monastery, and Father Grandier was assigned to take care of them. At the monastery, a nun picked up a bouquet of roses, smelled them, and then collapsed and started convulsing as if she was having a seizure. The mother superior picked them up and did the same exact thing.
Instead of realizing that the roses had been sprinkled with some sort of poison or neurotoxin, the priests believed that the nuns had fallen under a spell. One of the nuns was acting full-on possessed, and a priest named Father Mignon did an exorcism with two helpers at his side as witnesses. He asked the demon for its name, and she said, “Astaroth.” When he asked how it was possible that the demon got into such a holy place, it replied that it was through the roses, and that Father Urbain Grandier let him in.
The truth behind this incredible story was that Urbain Grandier was corrupt, but not with the Devil. He refused to take a vow of celibacy, and he would seduce the nuns into having sex with him. It is very possible that this nun agreed to pretend to be possessed by a demon in order to get revenge on Urbain Grandier for rape, or because her own reputation had been threatened. Grandier was found guilty of witchcraft, and burned at the stake. From then on, the Catholic Church no longer allowed priests to do exorcisms alone, for fear that they were inviting more demons down to Earth, instead of expelling them.