Rhoda Derry was born on October 10, 1834. She was the daughter of a farming family and the youngest of 7 children. She was beautiful with a promising appearance.
This is a love story. Well… not so much, more like that’s how it started.
We present to you the dark story of how this woman ended up in her worst nightmare that lasted 40 years:
As she grew up, Rhoda became interested in the son of a wealthy family from a neighboring farm. This was a love story, but the boy’s mother noticed Rhoda’s feelings and did not approve of her relationship.
In an attempt to prevent the young couple from getting married, the boy’s mother threatened Rhoda and told her that if she did not stay away from her son, she would perform a satanic ritual curse on her.
Days later Rhoda began to become paranoid and act very strangely. At night she would run and scream saying that something was chasing her and it would hurt her.
According to the known version, one afternoon after dinner, an ‘invisible and unknown force’ took Rhoda and slammed her repeatedly against the walls inside the house. If you ask me, I think it was more of a direct attack by people who didn’t want her in her life.
Time went by and Rhoda only got worse, she became aggressive and her appearance changed. A lot.
She seemed deformed, everyone thought she was possessed. Her parents abandoned her and decided to leave her at the Poor House psychiatric facility in Adams Illinois.
The years she was in that place she was treated in the most cruel and inhuman way, she didn’t even speak English, she only muttered strange dialects, she was violent and she mutilated herself. She had gone completely crazy.
Only one person could calm her down, Dr. George A. Zeller, it is said that in one of her lucid moments, she told Zeller that what was haunting and hurting her was an entity that took the form of a goblin, she called it “Old Scratch.”
The darkest side
In the psychiatric hospital they kept her locked in a wooden cage, justifying that this decision was due to her behavior. Something curious is that Rhoda suffered from a syndrome that caused her legs to grow enormously. It isn’t known if it was genetic or part of the curse that had been cast on her.
Even so, despite the enormousness of her legs, they did not move her, causing her legs to become even more deformed and preventing her from walking like a normal person.
Rhoda scratched and hit her face compulsively, she did it so hard that she accidentally one day cut out her eye and knocked out 2 teeth. In the cage she lost the ability to walk or stand because she had to keep her head pressed against her chest and her legs bent toward her jaw.
The cage also had some holes at the bottom for her urine and feces. This attracted rats and cockroaches, which made nests near Rhoda’s body, so that her babies could feed and stay warm. She lived like this for 40 years.
A Better Place for Rhoda?
In 1904 she was moved to Bartonville Asylum where she was treated better. There she would spend her last days crawling through the hallways, since her deformed legs were no longer useful due to the pressure of the cage.
In 1906 Rhoda suffered a severe attack of epilepsy that lasted for many hours, she became violent, she couldn’t be contained and her sedatives had no effect.
So a doctor chose to murder her, and so it was, they slit Rhoda’s throat making it pass as a suicide.
Rhoda was murdered on October 9, 1906, one day short of her birthday, she was 71 years old, she was buried at Peoria State Hospital in Bartonville.
Dark Confessions
Years later, 2 of the nurses confessed to everything that happened, but still no one was arrested.
People say that those who visit Rhoda’s grave feel a pull on their leg… There are testimonies that affirm that before the demolition of the asylum, things were seen in the place, other patients already deceased and Rhoda crawling through the corridors. The Catholic Church studied the case of Rhoda Derry and concluded that she was not mentally ill, but rather that she was a victim of demonic possession.
