The Blood of Satan: The 1974 Michael Taylor Exorcism

Early on a Sunday morning in 1974, a vicar’s wife picks up the phone to call a doctor, and all she gets is the unobtainable tone. She and her church group have been up all night praying over a man named Michael. They believe they pulled dozens of demons out of him. They’re worried about what’s still in there. And they’re worried about his wife.

Ossett, West Yorkshire: A Wool Town Running Out of Work

Ossett is a small town in West Yorkshire, England, and for a long time it ran on wool. A big piece of that was shoddy, which is old wool that gets shredded up and spun back into new cloth, and the town had a whole trade built around it, plus coal mining. By the early 1970s the big local pits had closed and the shoddy business had about disappeared. If you were a working man in Ossett, the ground was moving under your feet.

Michael Taylor lived there with his wife, Christine, in Havercroft. Michael was 31. Christine was 29. They had 5 kids. Michael had worked as a butcher, and then he hurt his back, and after that work got hard to find, and the coroner said he would get depressed about it. That same coroner described the Michael from before all this as healthy and hard-working.

Christine is harder to find. The record keeps her age and her kids, and past that it goes blank, and a lot of what you’ll hear in this story is about Michael, because courts and doctors spent months writing about him.

The Exorcist opened in London in March 1974. People lined up for it, and some local councils banned it outright, including Wakefield, right up the road from Ossett.

The Church of England also used to have a rule called Canon 72. It said a priest needed his bishop’s permission for an exorcism. The church scrapped that rule in 1969. After that, nothing on the books said a vicar had to ask first.

The Christian Fellowship Group and Marie Robinson

Friends were worried about Michael. He was low and pulling away from people, and they got him into a Christian fellowship group. This crowd was on the charismatic end of things, so you’d get speaking in tongues and meetings at people’s houses, the Taylors’ house included, and within days Michael was speaking in tongues right along with everybody else. A historian who studied the case wrote that the group’s leader was a 22-year-old named Marie Robinson.

Christine came to the meetings too. A psychiatrist named Dr Hugo Milne later testified that Marie became a dominant person in Michael’s emotional world, and that all this happened during the same few weeks his mental health was starting to go.

One day at the Taylor house, with Christine out, Michael kissed Marie. Marie told the inquest she recoiled and told him he loved Christine. She said later on he turned threatening and hit her in the face, and Christine was there for that part. Marie said the two women called on the name of Jesus together, and she believed that’s what kept Michael from killing her. You can decide for yourself why he stopped. In Marie’s telling, Christine was right there beside her.

The All-Night Exorcism at St Thomas’s Church in Gawber

The group decided Michael was possessed. On the night of October 5, they brought him to St Thomas’s Church in Gawber, near Barnsley. The vicar there was Peter Vincent, and his wife Sally took part, and so did a Methodist minister named Raymond Smith and his wife Margaret, along with a few others. It went all night. The accounts can’t agree on how many hours it lasted.

By the end, they believed they had cast dozens of demons out of him. Nobody agrees on the count. One version says 40. Another says 43. You’ll find 48 in some places. One telling rounds it all the way up to 50.

Margaret said she got a word from the Lord that a spirit of murder would break out, and she brought up Christine. Peter told the inquest that by the end he could see murder in Michael’s eyes, and he named murder as one of the spirits still inside him, and he said the rest of the group came to that same fear on their own. You’ve got a room full of people who just spent the whole night praying over this man, and they come out of it scared for his wife.

Phone Calls at Sunrise: The Ossett Exorcism Warnings

The ritual ended around 5 in the morning. By about 7, the church group was saying out loud that Christine was in danger. Sally tried to call their doctor. The line came back with the unobtainable tone.

A teacher named Julia Gilby got on the phone for the group and called the Medical Officer of Health, and he said he wouldn’t come out unless the Taylors’ family doctor had approved it or at least knew about it. Julia called West Yorkshire Police next. The police saw it as a medical problem, and they had very little to go on. They had the name “Mike” and a vague address. A senior detective later told the inquest police did all they could with that much.

You can follow the whole chain of calls on paper, and every call ended up pointing at somebody else. Christine was in the middle of it, helping where she could. She agreed the kids could be taken into care. She would not agree to being separated from Michael. The clergy let the two of them go home.

Sunday Morning in Havercroft, October 6, 1974

Nobody kept the two of them apart, and Sally’s call never went through, and the health officer wanted the family doctor first, and the police had a first name and a vague address, and Michael and Christine went home to Havercroft together that Sunday morning.

Michael attacked Christine with his bare hands around 10 that morning. Years later, a prosecutor told a courtroom she died very quickly. Michael also killed a poodle that belonged to Christine’s mother.

He walked out into the street. He was naked and covered in blood. He was shouting that it was the blood of Satan. Police took him into custody.

Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity: The Michael Taylor Trial and Inquest

The case went to Leeds Crown Court the next spring. On March 25, 1975, the jury returned the special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Under the law back then, you only got that verdict if the jury accepted Michael did it and found he was insane when he did it. He was sent to Broadmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital.

The inquest wrapped up about a month later in Wakefield. The coroner recorded Christine’s death as misadventure and said there was no criminal element left to decide. He said people who tried exorcism without experience were playing with fire.

The psychiatrist testified there too. He said Michael had started showing signs of mental illness in the weeks before, and he called the exorcism the “ultimate trigger-mechanism,” and he explained that if you breathe fast and hard for hours, it can change your consciousness and lead to behavior you can’t control, and he believed that happened during the ritual.

Somebody asked Peter about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s view that exorcism belonged under church authority. Peter said his authority came from the New Testament and Jesus Christ. Nobody from the church was ever charged.

How the Ossett Exorcism Changed the Church of England

The Church of England got pushed from both sides. A group of 65 academics urged it to keep exorcism from getting any official status. That summer, Archbishop Donald Coggan laid out his own set of principles. There were 5 of them.

Exorcism had to be done in collaboration with doctors, and it had to be done by experienced people with the authorization of the diocesan bishop, and it had to come with prayer and sacrament, and it had to stay private, with pastoral care afterward. The bishop’s sign-off, the exact thing Canon 72 used to require, was back. If you look at the Church of England’s guidance today, it still calls those same core principles its foundation.

Michael Taylor After Broadmoor

Michael spent 2 years at Broadmoor. Then he spent 2 more on a secure ward in Bradford before he was released.

He landed back in Leeds Crown Court in 2005. He was 61 by then. He pleaded guilty to 2 charges of sexual assault for indecently touching a teenage girl. The court heard that the psychiatric problems from 1975 had come back after a week in custody, and that they cleared up again once he got bail, and his lawyer told the judge about a cut wrist and a jump from a bridge that hurt his back and his legs. He asked police, “Am I going to Broadmoor for murdering my wife?” The judge said Michael had tried to take his own life 4 times because of his distress over what he did. The sentence was a 3-year community order with psychiatric treatment.

If you pull up the Wakefield Express story on it, the paper still ran the old line about 40 demons cast out of him, with “it was claimed” tucked in front.

Where the Ossett Exorcism Case Stands Today

Michael would be 82 this year. I couldn’t find a reliable record of whether he’s still alive, and what became of the 5 kids never made it into the public record either. People have written the demon count down at least 4 different ways over the years, and you can find every one of them in a single search, and I never found Christine’s maiden name written down once.