Dear Ryan:

We know little about him as he lived and died in the 16th Century. There are few records, but I found some information about him from a fella who got the information from a German website. Whether or not the information is credible I have no idea. Anyway according to this German Website, Fleishmann was a disgraced German Priest from the 16th century from the parish of Ettleben in Bavaria.

Little is known about hims other than he was mentioned in the parish records of Ettleben -- where Father Ernst Alt, of the two priest who performed the exorcism on Anneliese (The Exorcism of Emily movie), found his name.

Father Ernst Alt came to the parish of Ettleben near Klingenberg (the small Bavarian town where Anneliese lived) in spring of 1974. He found the parish in a very bad condition and ordered for the church to be restored. While examining the records he came across the name of Valentin Fleischmann, who had been priest in Ettleben from 1572 to 1575. In the records Fleischmann was called a "concubinarius" and "vino addictus", the Latin euphemisms for "womanizer" and "drunkard."

It said that he was a ruffian, once beating a man to death in the vicarage. It is said that he beat one of his female companions so badly that she had to have barber surgeon in Wuerzburg take care of her for several months.

He had four children, other sources tell about six. The tombstone of his daughter Martha can still be visited as it is set into the front of the oldest building of Ettleben.

One night in autumn of 1975 Father Alt came over to see Anneliese for another session of exorcism. When they had a break he talked to some other man present and he mentioned that there had been some really bad characters in the line of Ettleben's parsons and that he hoped he won't become one of them. It was meant as a joke but Anneliese reacted fiercely to the name Fleischmann, a reaction that she would show whenever this name was mentioned.

Two weeks later, during another session, the demon in Anneliese revealed that Fleischmann was the "sixth devil" inhabiting her. She knew details from his life that stunned Father Ernst Alt, because he had mentioned the name of Fleischmann but never the more detailed facts about him. Some researchers claim that Anneliese had read the records, an allegation denied by Father Alt who had sent them to the archivist of the diocese in Wuerzburg immediately after having examined them himself.

It is unlikely that a damned human spirit possessed Anneliese. There is only one other case of this that I am aware of — the case in Iowa detailed in the book, "Begone Satan".

Demons often impersenate people and this could be the case in these exorcisms. What I find odd in the story of Anneliese is that it never occured to the priest that how Anneliese could know information about Fleishmann is that demons could have informed her. 

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary