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Grab a crucifix and burn some sage! Jamie and Bambi (finally) wrap up the enigmatic tale of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Learn how a historically accurate version of The Conjuring would have ended with Ed getting punched in the face and thrown out of the Perron family home. Visit the most famous haunted house in the world—the Amityville Horror—which taught the Warrens the value of book and movie deals. Meet the author who dedicated his life to discrediting the Warrens. And learn the dark secret that Lorraine Warren tried to hide when she signed the deal for The Conjuring.

In this episode recommend people donate to Feeding America to address growing food insecurity in our country. We also express support and solidarity with the Atlanta Forest Defenders and encourage you to learn more and help stop Cop City.

Hey, you know, I need the drugs in order to be able to tolerate the shit and the life

and especially, you know, even just the topic, so let's go for it.

We start with a song this time.

The Catholic and kooky, their allegations are icky, their parenting is iffy, the Warren

family.

Yeah, that was clunky and it didn't rhyme.

And I defend that because those two do not deserve any more effort.

I have just, you just try shit and keep blazing forward.

That's the Ed Warren way, the way that I'm giving you today.

All right.

So I know you're just delighted that we get to rejoin the romantic, supernatural adventures

of Eduardo, the exorcist and his psychic sidekick Lorraine.

Yeah.

I mean, she's psychically sensitive, which now I'm like, even if I wanted to believe

that before, now I don't.

Well yeah.

And I, if you keep watching the conjuring movies, Lorraine's powers grow with each movie

to where she's just a straight up X man in the third one.

Like she is just doing like crazy ass, full vision, psychic shit.

Okay.

Cause in the conjuring, she just seemed to get like, it was more mild and more understated.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, I can feel things.

I'm starting to not feel good.

I have this whole, I, you know, and then Patrick Wilson was always like, there's a danger,

you know, she could get too connected to something.

Well, yeah.

Like he was like, he, he wanted her out of there.

Like he was the caring husband.

He couldn't afford for anything to happen to her most precious thing in the entire world.

Madly, madly in love that they've been since they were 16 years old, since they were kids.

All right, everybody.

Welcome.

Welcome to Chainsaw History, the podcast where we rummage around in haunted houses and Scooby

Doo our way, just showing that they're, it's all bullshit.

It's all smoke and mirrors.

It's just the old man who owned the abandoned amusement park the whole time.

I am your host, Jamie Chambers, and this is my sister Bambi.

Hello.

We're a comedy podcast.

I'm not a historian, but I did watch the real Ghostbusters every afternoon and drank Ecto

Cooler.

So, so you have diabetes.

I'm legit.

Yes.

That is where the 50 extra pounds came from.

Because that was like just pure sugar and dye.

diabetes.

If you go to chainsawhistory.com, you can find ways you can support the show.

Find our back episodes and bonus content like the value of series where Bambi reads children's

history books to me that we were forced to endure in the 1980s.

And we also have a series called No Time for Love, Dr. Jones, where we explore the historical

adventures of a young Indiana Jones.

Well eventually all the way to old Indiana Jones, but

I was about to say there was some old man Indian in there and I don't recommend it.

I know you miss my young, my old indie voice soon.

But today we're going to get back to the real life ghost banishing and demon fighting duo

Ed and Lorraine Warren.

Oh yeah.

So in our last episode, we mostly talked about their background and early start.

So to recap real quick, in the official story, Ed and Lorraine were Catholic school sweethearts,

a normal all-American couple in the 1940s, except he'd been dealing with and learning

about spiritual entities since he was about five years old.

And Lorraine has X-man powers to see through time and to read the auras of the living and

the dead.

You forgot that also the power to get headaches spontaneously and to randomly feel things.

After Ed survived his boat exploding in World War II, the pair became traveling hobo artists,

drawing and painting a collection of haunted houses, grabbing stories about demonic possession.

Over time, they had kind of established themselves as the reigning experts of the spiritual and

the demonic at a time as America became more and more interested in that sort of thing.

So and then that would eventually go straight into the satanic panic of the 1980s.

One of my favorite times I lived through.

Oh yeah, it's definitely my favorite moral panics.

So we also talked about one of the earliest notable cases and first Conjuring Cinematic

Universe villain, Annabelle, who in real life is a 1970 era Raggedy Ann doll from a department

store that was probably maybe allegedly paired with a half-assed story stolen from the Twilight

Zone.

No, it was straight up ripped off from the Twilight Zone.

So now we're all caught up, ready to go and dive into it even more.

So yes, just think fondly for just one more moment about Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga,

the nice cinematic warrens that are kind of cool.

I find it very hilarious that the doll that I have, Millie, that sits in my living room

looks creepier and closer to the cinematic Annabelle than the little fluffy pillowy.

We could tart that doll up into a like a ghost doll if we wanted to.

I would never want that so much.

But I would never do that to Millie.

So just like last time, the research on this one was a lot of articles and interviews and

I'll link to all of this in the show notes.

Did watch the documentary Devil's Road on Max and I read the authorized sort of biography

called Demonologist by Gerald Brittle, who later on sued the warrens and Warner Brothers.

And in fact, a bunch of people sued the warrens and Warner Brothers once there was a lot of

money on the line for a lot of this stuff.

Yeah, I'm sure and I hope they won.

Yeah, please don't read his stupid book.

I did it for you people.

And one other thing I have to do is offer a content warning, unfortunately, referring

to grooming and sexual assault and abuse.

So if those topics bother you, you might either want to skip this one or at least skip toward

the end.

I'll let you know when that stuff's coming up.

Well, does that mean I can leave?

Sadly, no, you're stuck here.

Well, but those things bother me.

So I guess I'm taking one for the team.

They bother me too, but I have to learn about them.

That's the thing.

I didn't go looking for this.

This wasn't what I wanted.

This was supposed to be a fun story about haunted house grifters.

So before we jump back into the ridiculous case histories, I think it's worth taking

a moment to consider the worldview that shapes how these two approach and discuss the paranormal.

They are not Sam and Dean Winchester using crosses and rock salt and whatever works just

because of like folklore and trial and error.

Okay, for the record, I would much rather see Jensen Ackles shoot ghosts with a sawed

off shotgun full of rock salt, than like the real Ed Warren just yelling and throwing-

Throwing a crucifix and running like a bitch.

Oh dear.

So yeah, Ed Warren is aggressively Catholic.

Maybe one of the most aggressively Catholic dudes I've ever like encountered in, you know,

both real life, like in person or just learning about them.

And of course, Lorraine is his most fervent and loyal supporter.

So while Ed says he believes in documenting cases and capturing evidence, he is quick

to point out that he is a demonologist, not a parapsychologist.

Much spirit phenomenon is invisible and unmeasurable.

The outward manifestation represent only a part of the much bigger picture that can't

be measured with testing instruments.

Though parapsychology has given us much data on unusual phenomenon and its link to man,

it is still never approached in understanding of the true principles of metaphysics governing

most spirit phenomenon.

In fact, as a rule, the parapsychologist does not believe in the existence of spirits, sometimes

even to the point of being ridiculous."

Okay, so he's going to talk about other people being ridiculous.

Yes.

He's like the people who are trying to do any kind of science because he says that's

just an illegitimate approach.

You can't apply natural law to the unnatural world, the supernatural world.

He's like, duh, you dummies.

You can't, like he even said at one point, like they want me to catch a ghostie in a

bottle.

Did you do that?

I mean, that's kind of the way you talked about it.

So in the Warren way of thinking, any approach that doesn't acknowledge Catholic doctrine

as the literal truth of this way to deal with these things, you're just getting in your

own way.

It's not, it's not my fault.

My religion that I was born into and raised in was just happens to be the objectively

correct one.

And it is one of the funny things.

Like if you actually think about the conjuring movies and you were to like assume this is

a parallel world where this is like in this world, everything's right.

In that world, the Catholic religion is objectively true because they, you know, you had saved

that woman who floated off the ground and was going to murder her own kids by speaking

some by doing an exorcism that he admitted himself.

He wasn't authorized to do.

And the real Ed Warren, it has been said many times, like all, like Lorraine was almost

offended that they portrayed at doing an exorcism by himself in that movie because he would

never take the authority of a priest.

In fact, they usually had like four of them around when they were doing that sort of thing.

So once again, it has to be the Catholic way.

Any non-religious approach is illegitimate.

He's also clear that making things right with God is the best way forward and to avoid anything

even hinting of the occult.

So my Dungeons and Dragons playing ass is screwed.

Well, you know, I have like, you know, moles and skin tags and things.

And you know, some of the, I have an actual, a large mole on my breast, so I would have

been burned.

Well, we're going to be talking about, so we're going to be talking about a witch soon

enough.

We're coming up on the witch because we're going to be talking about the conjuring the

actual story in a minute.

So anyway, the demonologist describes the Warrens helping the foster family who accidentally

summoned a dark spirit with a Ouija board that got from like seers or whatever.

Ed's solution was to spray everything with holy water and wave around a crucifix and

threatened the spirit with exorcism.

So it ran away.

Okay.

Get the fuck out of here, demon.

The name of Jesus.

He then gave his instructions to the family, quote, everything depends on your future actions.

Ed explained once they came in.

Any improvements you may have thought about making in your lives ought to begin right

now.

Certainly, he told Meg, there should be no more rituals of any sort.

All the occult books and conjuring paraphernalia that were in your bedroom belong in the garbage.

He then recommends a priest blesses their house like immediately to prevent the spirit

from sneaking back in once Ed's back is turned, quote, the sneaking back in the spirits are

always creeping right back in.

Okay.

So this is, okay, so this is some Scooby Doo shit, quote, most of all, Ed stressed your

best protection in the coming weeks and months is to develop positive interests as a shield

against the negative.

If you're religious minded people consider going to church as a family once a week as

a show of sincerity, unquote, cause you know, what's going to church always means never.

I've never had a negative emotion in a church, never once in my life.

And you know, everyone there is full of positivity and sincerity at all, speak the truth, never

abuse anyone.

I have no idea what's going on in Ed Warren's head or heart.

I can only make my guesses.

So this is all my opinion, allegedly.

He believed, or, and so he, I'm telling you, he commits knowing hoaxes and frauds throughout

this whole story.

Nice.

Like with the Annabelle thing we just talked about, made this bunch of shit up.

But I believe he kind of rationalized it in his head is because he saw increasingly that

people being afraid of the devil made them run straight to the loving arms of Jesus and

mother Mary.

Okay.

So he could tell himself that by scaring the crap out of people, he was saving souls and

bringing people into mother church.

I'm saving lives.

Yeah.

I'm saving souls.

And if he just happened to make a few bucks along the way, you know, a man's got to eat.

Honestly, that would be the true Catholic way.

From the documentary Devil's Road, Ed had this to say, you would be shocked at how many

Catholic priests don't even believe there's a devil.

It's all in the Bible.

Within every 10 words, you have a psychic word, apparition, ghost, devil, demon, evil.

People say Ed Warren hides behind his beliefs of Catholicism.

I don't hide behind them.

I use them because I've seen and I've heard and I've felt the things that it's talked

about unquote.

That's the Ed Warren mindset.

The Catholic is shit way.

Oh, dokey.

So now with all that other way, you want to talk about some fucking haunted houses?

Finally.

Let's do it.

I'm really into haunted houses.

And this is the house from the movie you watched.

This is the Perrin family.

On the Nesper website quote, in January, 1971, the Perrin family moved into a 14 room farmhouse

in Harrisville, Rhode Island, where Carolyn, Roger and their five daughters began to notice

things happening almost immediately after they moved in.

It started small.

Carolyn would notice the broom went missing or seemed to move from place to place on its

own.

She would hear the sound of something scraping against the kettle in the kitchen where no

one was there.

She'd find small piles of dirt in the center of a newly cleaned kitchen floor.

The girls began to notice spirits around the house, though, for the most part, they

were harmless.

There were a few, however, that were angry.

Unquote.

Okay.

So wait, there were spirits going around sweeping the floors?

Apparently piling up dirt.

Well, it's easy to put in a dust pan.

It seems like I was about to say, can I get that ghost?

Can I get the house cleaning ghost?

The Roomba ghost?

The one that likes to, you know, dust and sweep that'd be fucking fantastic.

Now they said like the day they moved in, they saw the apparition of an old man who

vanished that they multiple people saw some old dude that was, that was the first ghost

sign that they got like on move in day to the, this farmhouse in Rhode Island.

Okay.

So an old man that likes to do housework.

That was the thing.

So this of course, like, this is the story that inspired my house, old man, this is the

story that inspired the conjuring.

And so over time, the phenomenon got more intense.

The documentary Devil's Road declares the parents, quote, desperately seek help from

Ed and Lorraine, who are known for their paranormal investigations and doing battle with the demonic,

unquote.

A local reporter named Laura Didio said, quote, the mother, Carolyn, seemed to be the focal

point of, with a lot of negative energy.

I remember coming here once with the Warrens and Carolyn said, and this always stuck with

me and still does, years later, she went to cut open an orange and blood spurred it out,

unquote.

I heard that.

And my thought was, was it a blood orange?

Mom was also seeing apparitions.

Yeah, this is the seventies.

Maybe then she just never seen a blood orange before she picked up the wrong kind of orange

at the grocery store, but she was a fucking yokel.

Right.

So over time they saw that old man on move in day, but they mostly mom started reporting,

seeing the apparition of an older woman.

So this is an, uh, from an August, 1977 story published in the Providence journal, the local

newspaper in Providence, Rhode Island, quote, Mrs. Perrin said she awoke before dawn one

morning to find an apparition by her bed, the head of an old woman hanging off to one

side over an old gray dress.

There was a voice reverberating, get out, get out.

I'll drive you out with death and gloom, unquote.

Yeah, I guess that'd be scarier than the old man.

Just an old man hanging around.

The old man who sweeps the floors.

Doors started slamming or they become stuck open.

A disembodied childlike voice would cry, mama, mama.

So Andrea Perrin, the oldest of the five girls who apparently like at least about 10 years

ago was living here in the Atlanta area.

And I guess Carolyn, the mom was living with her here too, had been the most vocal about

telling the story.

So Andrea is the oldest of the five daughters.

She at this point has three, a trilogy of self-published books about living in this

house.

And you learn later that it turns out she was one of the consultants and turned over

notes and got paid money, money, money for the conjuring.

Okay.

Yeah.

So credible witness.

Although I have to say, mom, personally, if I had like gone nuts and tried to kill my

family, I wouldn't want to go tell like the world about it, but here's like keeping that

shit to myself.

Here's the good news.

She never tried to kill her family in that part was just made completely made up for

the movie.

Like a lot of this stuff was, the movie was very fictionalized even by what the Warren's

and the parents like actual story is.

So it's like, even if you believe that the story was bullshit, the conjuring is one extra

layer of bullshit.

Cause it doesn't even try to stick to the official events.

It just takes the best little pieces of it and then makes up the rest to make a more

compelling movie.

Well, I mean, that's, that's how the best stories are going to go.

So, but right now we're going by what Andrea, the oldest daughter is having to say.

So she published these books.

She even hints that some of the ghosts abused the family sexually quote, let's just say

there was a very bad male spirit and five little girls unquote.

That's all she'll say about that.

I mean, that's usually more of a dad thing.

So none of this is good.

And there was plenty to tell.

So in the movie, the conjuring, the family moves in and like over an implied period of

like weeks, maybe a month, this stuff starts building up until the Warrens have to like

really intervene or these families screwed because mom's going to kill the kids.

But in real life, they moved in the house in 1971 and stayed until 1980 to literally

nine or so years.

Yeah.

You can tell how scared they were.

And the supernatural allegedly fucking with them pretty much daily, according to Andrea.

Well, that's the thing.

It's like, if it were just like, get out as they swept the floors, I could see them being

like, yeah, however, it's like, if you want to say that five children were being molested

in that house by ghosts, wouldn't you want to get your kids out?

So that's just one thing to think about that they did stick around for nine years at one

point financial difficulties they had apparently, because when they moved in, it wasn't just

that house, they had a shitload, like hundreds of acres of land that came with it.

And they sold off a big chunk of it during that nine years to get by during hard times.

Then why wouldn't they like have sold the house with that chunk, kept the other chunk

and built a nicer, not haunted house?

That's an interesting question.

I mean, maybe I'm just a problem solver.

All right.

So from a July 2013 issue of the Providence Journal, quote, in the movie, Carolyn seeks

the help of the Warrens, but Andrea said the Warrens were brought in by a paranormal group

in Rhode Island and one day just arrived at the front door.

Mrs. Warren came into the house knowing nothing, Andrea said, but she added, she stepped in

the kitchen and said, I feel a dark presence and her name is Bathsheba.

The Warrens later concluded the Harrisville house was haunted by Bathsheba Sherman, who

had lived there in the 19th century.

She had been a practicing Satanist, according to the Warrens account in the journal, who

had murdered her young daughter as a sacrifice to Lucifer so that she might remain on the

premises to haunt the house forevermore.

The woman followed as established black rituals and took her own life.

She hanged herself, hence her apparition to Mrs. Perrin, according to the Warrens, unquote.

Heavy emphasis on those last words, according to the Warrens.

I was about to say, uh, didn't they say it was an old man?

Well, it started as an old man, but then the Warrens literally basically sort of the official

morphed it.

The story sort of comes to the point, like when I say real with the biggest air quotes

or whatever, but the official Warren approved story that kind of matches up with Carolyn

and Andrea Perrin is that there's this witch and then there was these, these benign spirits,

but the witch was also using the benign spirits to torment the family too, cause she was the,

the head ghost or whatever, if that makes sense.

Oh my God.

So even when you die, you can get like bullied into like having a, you have still have to

go to work and have a boss.

You don't like, all right, old man ghost, you must now sweep the floor in a creepy pile.

That'll really fuck with her.

Now touch the little girl.

They'd do anything quite as dramatic as like the fucking thing on top of the wardrobe that

jumps down, scares you shit out of you because this is one of the few things the conjuring

was good about not doing a lot of straight up jump scares, but that was one of the few

cheap ones and it kind of earned it because at that point it was just setting all this

mood and then finally when it did, there's like, Oh God, that's not good.

And you're looking inside.

You're thinking it's going to jump out from inside and said, it's on top of the goddamn

thing.

Fuck you, James Wan.

Yeah.

And what it was was very unsettling.

It was, it was a very unsettling moment.

Like I was ready for it.

And do you still know he did a good job of making you ready for it and it's still getting

you.

It was a good one.

He's a good director.

He made the insanity of Aquaman at least still entertaining.

All right.

We established this as they, so they've identified this suicide murder, which is the head ghost

is the reason why the parent family are all messed with.

So this is all part of the official story.

So the Warrens barge into the house one day and begin asking questions, poking around,

making declarations about what's going on.

Lorraine's like doing her trance medium thing as she roams around, reading the auras.

So Ed decides the next move is to hold a seance to contact any spirits hanging around and

see what's up.

So Carolyn, the mom is instantly on board for all this, but Roger, the truck driver

dad ain't so keen on any of what's going on.

So he sort of reluctantly dragged into this.

Well, I mean, if you were molesting your daughters and spirits were being blamed, you would be,

you wouldn't feel good about being exercised.

It's like, what the fuck are you doing?

So what are these weirdos doing here?

So they ought to hold hands and sit around the table.

So Lorraine does her psychic medium thing where she's like presence, you know, reveal

yourself, give us your name, doing, you know, talking to, you know, the unseen.

And then while, while she's doing all this and suddenly things got real weird, real fast.

So Andrea Perrin describes this experience to USA today in July, 2013, all part of this

promotional blitz for the conjuring quote.

So there's, she's saying that she was hiding, watching the seance.

She wasn't supposed to be there, but she was like, she's hiding behind a corner quote.

I thought I was going to pass out.

Andrea says, my mother began to speak in a language, not of this world, her chair levitated

and she was thrown across the room unquote now from the devil's road documentary quote.

Roger's petrified for his wife.

Something's happening to her that he's never seen anything like this.

So he runs to her, but Ed stops him.

Ed believes she's under demonic attack and that if Roger intervenes in any way he could

put himself in danger.

At that point, Roger's furious and he punches Ed in the face because he's hell bent on helping

his wife.

And then Roger kicks Ed and Lorraine out of the house and they're not allowed back in

again.

Unquote.

Yep.

So imagine if the conjuring had ended with Ron Livingston punching Patrick Wilson in

the face and telling him to fuck off and never come back.

That's how it would have ended if we'd match the real story.

Yeah.

So far you haven't sold me on ghosts.

You possibly have sold me on like pedophilia though and mom might be a little nuts.

So yeah, we're going to get into some of that and like, you know, whether mom, like she

said her mom's chair levitated, like they turned that into the scene in the basement

at the end of the movie where a chair lifts it up and turns literally fucking upside down

a little bit more dramatic than her chair flew back and then fell to the floor and then

she started speaking in tongues.

The movie version of course had Ed saving Carolyn and cleansing the house by performing

an exorcism and as we established, real Ed would never step on a priest's frock like

that.

That and apparently in order to cleanse a house, you have to like get permission from

someone?

I'll do that a little bit too in a minute.

So instead the family just lived there for like almost a decade.

Like as long as I was in Wisconsin, those people lived in that haunted house and then

when they moved, apparently everything just stopped both in the house and with them, it

was just over.

When asked the obvious question of why the family didn't move, you know, the one you

asked at the very beginning, because remember they were like, according to Andrea here,

that oldest daughter, they wake up every morning to their bed shaking and like the stench of

rotting meat.

She said, Andrea said, quote, I hear that question most every day.

I think we were supposed to have this experience and share it with the world unquote for some

sweet, sweet residuals from Warner brothers.

This was supposed to happen because now I'm rich off this bullshit.

Well, if not rich, at least made some money.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Again, if spirits were molesting my children, I'd move.

That's a really good point, especially when you can sell like, so they were able to sell

a hundred, like hundreds of acres of land and they could have just sold the whole thing.

Yeah.

There's a, there's definitely an argument to be made if this is all for real, because

it really seems like some of the families kind of kept their mouth shut.

But Carolyn, the mom and Andrea, the oldest daughter, the ones who were like talking about

all this.

And they were the ones who were very much participatory in the promotion of the conjuring

and as they were seriously financially benefiting, no dad wasn't a child molester, not at all.

So I, you know, I am not here to, uh, slander or rely on this is all just speculation.

No.

And again, I don't think that dad was molesting his daughters either.

I think that this is just a bunch of fucking horse shit.

So continue.

So you know, I would love nothing more than do like extensive historical research to confirm

or debunk the specific claims made by the Warren's and Andrea Perrin's books.

But you know what?

You don't have to because a hero fucking legend stepped into this story that I was

not expecting, um, who did all of the work, even if she did it all in self-defense because

she's just a fucking frustrated old lady.

So let me introduce you to this, this little side story.

So when the conjuring came out in 2013, so we're 10 years into the conjuring cinematic

universe at this point, uh, Warner brothers really wanted to lean into this whole based

on a true story angle and the fact that the Warren's really have had a reputation ever

since Amityville, at least for people are into that sort of thing.

Like I'd heard of the Warren's when I was, since I was a teenager and they were always

in like the inquirer and shit.

So the Warner brothers really wanted to like lean into this whole, you know, this is, this

is, you know, maybe a little bit exaggerated, but it's still based on the true story of

what happened.

And so it's why the conjuring films always roll the credits over photographs of the real

people in places.

Every conjuring movie ends with the real pictures and little clips and little bits and pieces

to kind of sell the legitimacy of the story.

It also means that they didn't want to change the names of the real people or places, which

made it really easy for anyone interested to look up at the real conjuring farmhouse.

And they did so paranormal researchers, YouTubers, looky loos and other weirdos just constantly

showed up on the property wanting to snoop around the barn, look in the windows or just

bug the owners and ask them questions about, you know, ghosts.

Now this owner, these owners, um, who are a retired couple, who have lived in this house

for decades, suddenly because of this fucking movie, people are, and the fact that no, no

one even made a bother to protect their privacy in any way.

Just suddenly people are showing up day and night and fucking with them and making them

feel unsafe.

Lovely.

I hope these people sued the shit out of someone.

So these poor old couple had to, for the first time in decades, had to say the way to post

our house, they'd have put no trespassing signs, ropes and chains up everywhere that

they didn't want.

And even still, like she said, she didn't, she didn't, she used to like going out into

her gardener, sitting on her fucking porch and enjoying the fact she lives in a beautiful

place in this historic hundreds years old farmhouse.

And instead these, these fucking assholes coming in from everywhere because they watch

this movie and it makes them interested in the paranormal and they want to do their TikToks.

See, this is why we can't have nice things.

So however, this lady, Norma Sutcliffe, my new fucking hero, is she, she's like a retired,

I think a therapist, like a counselor, I believe from what she said, decided to roll up her

sleeves and call everyone out on their bullshit.

She worked with a local journalist and spent months pouring through historical records,

genealogical information and old newspaper files.

Norma did the work and produced the receipts.

So and I know this is going to shock you, but it turns out the Warrens and the Perrons

are completely full of shit.

No.

You mean there wasn't a witch?

So yeah, no, was not a witch.

So Norma took her research and put out a one hour and four minute YouTube video discussing

this and just putting the screenshots of all of her research on the screen as she's talking.

This is just an old lady just laying it out fact by fact.

So yeah, I fucking love Norma.

She claims that Carolyn Perron desperately wanted to move and started and concocted.

She was the first one that came up with this Bathsheba Sherman, the witch story, just taking

a person that she found out about who had lived in the area.

So this is quoting Norma's video.

She claimed that Bathsheba had been an Arnold.

She was not.

That she had lived in our home.

She did not.

She claimed that Bathsheba, when she was young, killed an infant with a knitting needle and

according to her, a hearing was held to see if there was enough evidence to bring her

to trial for murder.

No evidence of the death or of a hearing anywhere has ever been found, including the Superior

Court records.

Carolyn claims the community knew all about it and that the townspeople ostracized Bathsheba

for actually murdering the infant for sacrifice in a satanic ritual because she was really

a witch.

That Bathsheba had made a pact with the devil to keep her beauty.

No evidence in any historical record or from any local historian's.

So yeah, it turns out that Bathsheba not only didn't hang herself in the barn, but

she never even lived directly like in that house.

Was there even a lady named Bathsheba?

Oh yeah, there was a real lady named Bathsheba Sherman.

That's what it was.

She clearly picked for having that kind of witchy, neat name.

So yes, there was indeed a woman named Bathsheba Sherman.

The only real unusual thing about her is she married in her 30s, which is kind of unusual

for the 1800s.

She had several kids.

Most of them died of your typical childhood horrific illnesses that were all over the

place back then.

But she did have one son that grew to adulthood, had his own family.

So this poor woman died after a stroke as an old lady just a few years after her husband.

She literally lived to be in her 80s.

She did not hang herself.

So this is a bunch of slander.

And not only that, but her funeral was presided over by a prominent local Baptist preacher.

Oh, so you slander in the Catholics now too.

Just like those poor old ladies that Matthew Hale sentenced to death back in our Trial

of Witches episode, poor Bathsheba is another innocent old lady falsely accused of witchcraft

by assholes.

Well, at least she was not actually hung.

She just got to live her life being a person.

And despite just having a witchy name, she was just a normal ass person doing normal

ass things.

The tragedy of her life is just she lost several children, but said, you know, it's like that

was very common back then, especially if you're a kind of a semi backwoods, you know, 1800s

family living in Rhode Island.

Well, I mean, it's not super uncommon to lose a pregnancy now.

That's it now.

But then it was turned into, she murdered her own children, even though one of them

was fine and got married and all that, but whatever.

It's all, it's all bullshit.

So anyone who wants to check out Norma's incredible work in the sake of skepticism, I'll be linking

to her video in the show notes.

I literally watched the entire thing last night.

Listen to every word she had to say, which she ended on a diatribe about science and

reason should be our guideposts.

And I'm like, rock on Norma.

Wow.

I hope she's still doing okay.

This video is, you know, it's like nine years old.

I do know this, that they did give up and I don't know the circumstances.

Um, they did move, you know, whether whatever happened to Norman or husband, Jerry hope

they're okay.

Hopefully just move somewhere where nobody would bother them.

But apparently whoever owns the property now, it just turned into a tourist trap.

They're like, if people are going to, it's going to be good for any people are going

to be showing up anyway, charge them fucking money.

That's what I say.

That's why they filmed part of that documentary in that house, because that's, those people

are now like, yeah, just pay us money.

You can do whatever the fuck you want then this totally yes for real haunted house.

Sure.

Sure.

Sure.

But, uh, so yeah, she totally rips it apart and proves that the Warrens and Andrea was

just incredible liars and very clearly for profit.

I mean, at least for profit lying is a lot more explainable than non than not for profit

lying.

But speaking of which, so this is, this is this early story and this is when the, or

the Warrens, like, you know, when they did investigate the parents, this is when they

were just starting to do like their college lecture bit.

This is before their, the idea of even selling the stories has kicked in because this is

the one where they learn their lesson.

Let's talk about the Amityville horror.

Funny enough.

Do you know, I've never seen the Amityville horror.

I've seen it so long ago.

I only have vague memories of the actual movie and I didn't watch any of the remakes.

I didn't watch any of the spinoffs, but, um, but as you know, still like just by reputation.

Yeah.

I know.

I know what happened.

The most famous haunted house in America, maybe even the world and, and the brave priest

that takes in the demon at the, into his own body and then throws himself out the window.

That was the exorcist.

Is that the exorcist?

The exorcist has nothing to do with the Warrens directly, but also incredibly important.

I was about to say there were so many flashes of movies.

I believe this is the case that launched the Warrens down the path that would eventually

lead them to starring characters in their own film franchise.

Is the Amity, the Amityville horror.

That's the dude that killed his sibling, his family, his whole family.

Yes.

We're about to talk about that.

There we go.

Yep.

I knew I'd get there eventually.

Stroke brain.

The horror started very real, as you just said, because near the end of 1975, the very

year I was born, a guy named Ronald DeFeo went by Butch, you know, Long Island, New

York.

He was arrested for murdering all six members of his family in their Long Island home, whom

he shot in the back of the head with a rifle during the witching hour, three o'clock in

the morning.

Just over a year later, George and Kathy Lutz purchased the Dutch colonial house at the

bargain price of 80 grand.

This is like big house in a nice neighborhood right there near the water of Long Island.

When a bunch of people get slaughtered.

When a family annihilators kills a shitload of people, including kids that tends to drive

down the property value.

Yeah.

I mean, so the Lutz family move in.

And then a month later they announced to the world they were abandoning the house because

it was haunted as fuck.

Okay.

So according to the Nesper website, a priest was brought in to bless the Lutz's new home

because they're Catholic.

And here's a little spoiler for you.

Every single family we've talked about are Catholic.

Now you might remember if you watch the conjuring, she's like, Oh, we're not religious.

Yeah.

She was like, we're not really religious.

We totally have five kids because we're not Catholic.

No, the fucking parents were Catholic as shit and all of them were, and it's sort of almost

not always a requirement for the Ed and Lorraine thing.

Because once again, this is having it, you have to accept the Catholic belief system

to make this work.

They're not going to mess with non Catholic ghosts.

Yeah.

Now even then, once again, there's not all the Warren's have an actually minor role in

the whole Amityville thing, but it has a much bigger role in their lives and their story,

which is why I like, you know, you didn't, if you watch the Amityville horror movie or

even read the book, um, by, um, by Anson, either I mentioned even at once, but, uh,

we'll get there.

So anyway, so they move into the house and they're a month later, they run away saying

the house is haunted.

So according to the Nespur website, a priest was brought into Bletts to bless the Lutz's

new house.

And he heard the words, get out in an upstairs room.

Sounds familiar.

Yeah.

And then the family suddenly was like getting into a bad mood, like everybody's mood change,

especially dad getting angrier and angrier.

Um, mom and dad started having health issues.

Um, there's foul odors in the air, nasty stains that would appear out of nowhere.

This is middle of December, but it's like clouds of flies would appear.

And then there was Jody quote, the Lutz's daughter began spending all her time in the

room playing with an imaginary friend.

She described as red eyed pig called Jody who could transform not only shape, but size

at times being larger than the house.

Jody also claimed she could not be seen by anyone unless she wanted them to unquote same

rule as Pete's dragon, Elliot, you know, you can only see him if you want to.

He's just invisible right now.

And yes, Jody, the, the, the magic spirit pig can be bigger than the house.

Okay.

There was also this incident quote, George also woke one night to witness his wife transform

into a 90 year old hag.

And the next night she began levitating over the bed unquote Dana Barrett, Ghostbusters

style.

Okay.

So less hot.

She became a 90 year old shrieking hag apparently, uh, after the Lutz got the hell out of Dodge,

a local reporter called the Warren's.

So they get the story out about this spooky multiple murder house turned haunted house.

Um, and cause at this point the Warren's were, you know, there were a couple of years

into this, Oh, they speak at colleges.

They give, they're the people to call when you want to get an extra story out of this

sort of thing.

So the Warren's are called in, uh, the book, the demonologist describes Ed and Lorraine

to conducting a walkthrough of the abandoned home and then scheduling a seance a few days

later, uh, Lorraine and walking through the home is dramaticized at the beginning of the

conjuring too, by the way, other tellings of their first visit or more dramatic.

This is Lorraine quoted in devil's road quote, the media asked me to go onto the second

floor and to tell them what I felt.

And as I was going up the stairs, I reached a point where it felt as if a force of water

was coming against my chest, almost like a waterfall.

It was the worst feeling I stopped on the landing and held tight to the relic that was

in my hand and asked for strength and direction and going forward.

It felt ominous to me.

There was something in human or very, very negative unquote.

Meanwhile, Ed was down in the basement, waving around a crucifix and yelling at demons quote,

as is my custom as a religious demonologist, I took out a crucifix and commanded in the

name of Jesus Christ and the blood of Christ, uh, what there was there to reveal itself.

I never had such a quick reaction.

I felt as though I was underneath a waterfall.

That's how terrific the pressure was on my head and shoulders forcing me down to the

floor.

I went into a religious resistance and then envisioned myself in Christ's light.

And again, I commanded it to leave in the name of Jesus Christ.

It immediately lifted off unquote.

This was the point at which, uh, Ed decided they were dealing with a demonic presence

in the house.

The Nesper website claims, as do the books and movies about the house, that the property

was once owned by a black magician.

And that is a practitioner of the dark arts, not a like an African American, like guy does

card tricks.

Okay.

So this was a guy named supposedly named John Ketchum, whose cursed bones were supposedly

buried on the property.

There's also a story about native Americans who died tragically, they're like trapped

and died and in some story, so soaking the place in negative juju, the, the, the, the

always sort of the pop culture thing is, Oh, this was buried on an Indian burial ground

is what they would say.

But it's, it was, it was supposed to have these, this other story that I have no idea

if there's any basis in it or not.

I just don't know.

Either way, there's supposed to be like multiple reasons why this house is just evil.

The house itself hates them.

The house is evil.

So, and then of course now multiple murders and is it a chicken or egg thing?

Did the murders make things worse or were the murders inspired by a demonic force in

the first place?

Why would Butch kill everyone, including his little brothers and sisters?

The Warrens held a seance at the Amityville house with local reporters, but nothing happened

other than people feeling, a few people felt sick and a cameraman experienced chest pain

after walking up a flight of stairs and you know,

Couldn't he have just been old and fat?

I have no idea.

Quite possible.

Ed and Lorraine recommend what else?

An exorcism.

But instead of that, the bank foreclosed on the property and the Lutz family moved out

to the West coast.

They moved the tombstones but didn't move the bodies.

Then a guy named Jay Anson wrote a massively best-selling book about the haunting that

got turned into a hugely successful movie that still spawns slocky spinoffs to this

very day.

So, IMDB describes the 2021 film Amityville in the hood, quote, an East side gang uses

the Amityville property to grow marijuana when they're attacked by a rival gang and

their drugs stolen.

Soon it's unleashed on the West side streets of Compton where anyone who smokes it suffers

one killer buzz.

Unquote.

So Amityville has literally reached the point where it's a, it's a South side LA haunted

weed story.

The house itself moved?

It changed locations?

No, they just grew, apparently they just grew, they grew weed there and then the weed got

stolen and taken out to LA for reasons cause they can't get weed out of California.

That's hilarious, but just, but again, this is a stupid movie.

It was made for like $500.

Ed and Lorraine weren't mentioned in either the book or any of the movies, but their connection

to the case, like in the newspapers and magazine articles and, and like little like interviews

on news shows and stuff, it massively raised their profile.

This super famous case, suddenly their stock was hugely on the rise and they learned that

giving college lectures and tours of their cluttered basement was fine, but that the

real money is what that guy Anson did, uh, that, you know, it's book deals and movie

rights.

From this point forward, the Warrens were going to get paid.

And yeah, and they did.

They sure fucking did.

God.

I mean they're dead when the mother thing, now they're dead as the true money is rolling

in on their daughter.

Good.

So, uh, as for the reality of the Lutz home haunting, of course it was bullshit.

Turns out that the lawyer for Ronald DeFeo had pitched the whole haunting scheme to the

Lutzes to share in this lucrative story rights and would provide his client with a kind of

novel defense saying that, you know, he was inspired by, you know, demons or demonic possession.

And even though that didn't go anywhere, uh, it's not the last time that will be tried.

So in the end, however, the Lutzes wanted a bigger share.

They didn't want to split it a third ways.

So they just went straight to this author Jay Anson and the Lutzes split the, uh, the

deal 50 50, um, to sell their story.

So then a series of petty lawsuits followed between like all of these people involved.

Huh?

See that, that's the criminal show we need.

Have that many series.

Here we're going to have a cranky judge named, uh, law and order paranormal unit judge Weinstein

of the Brooklyn U S district court dismissed a lawsuit by the Lutz family against a good

housekeeping magazine stating quote, based on what I've heard, it appears to me that

a large extent of the book is a work of fiction relying in a large part in the suggestion

of Mr. Weber unquote Weber being Ron DeFeo, the murderer's defense attorney quoted in

September 7th, 1979 issue of people magazine Weber said, quote, I know this book is a hoax.

We created this horror story over many bottles of wine unquote.

These aren't good people.

These are all terrible people.

Remember there's actual dead people in the story.

They're dead children.

I refuse to let Ed and Lorraine Warren take up more than two episodes.

We're going to kind of do a bit of a speed round so we can end with some important and

awful stuff.

Okay.

So after Amityville, the Warren's were kind of in demand, not only with more cases than

they could ever possibly investigate, but an increasingly profitable series of speaking

engagements, interviews, and talk show appearances.

This is where you start seeing them on television first on local news and then later on in national

programs and eventually like in fucking Sally Jessie.

There's an Ed and Lorraine episode of Sally Jessie where Ed almost gets into a fistfight

with a skeptic.

It's great.

Hi.

Okay.

So, uh, they could charge even more for their college lectures, like actual tuition money

going to Ed Warren, ranting about demons for a couple of hours.

That has to be a very amusing class.

Um, I hope that there were students and you know, they got good grades.

Well, did you notice in the conjuring it showed that that classroom they were in was like

packed to the gills, like every seat was filled.

I mean, I guess if the, if the weird paranormal couple looked like Patrick Wilson and Vera

Formica, I also would go check it out.

I mean, it's gotta be, it's spending an afternoon listening to a couple of weirdos talk about

ghosts is at least amusing as opposed to like doing math.

Right.

And usually they would get all these, you know, typical, you know, 19 year old questions

from the audience.

Yeah.

What you get, do you get like a credit for that?

And of course Ed is thinking, I'm scaring these kids to Christ.

Uh, so they learned the lesson of Amityville, that there's gold in them, the haunted houses,

uh, and so they began hiring authors to write stories based on their case files.

It's where we get the books such as the haunted ghost hunters, werewolf graveyard, deliver

us from evil and in a dark place, more on that last one in a minute, that's an important

one.

And some of these stories get option and eventually get made into major motion pictures.

So next in the timeline, uh, the conjuring two is very loosely based on the haunting

and possession reported in the UK in a town called Enfield in the late summer in 1977,

there was increasing disturbances that caused the single mother to panic and she had runs

her neighbor's house at one point in the middle of the night saying, shit's going on with

her daughter.

She has, uh, she's two daughters and she's all by herself, doesn't have a man.

It led to a local paranormal society spending like extensive time with the family and possibly

this like codependent relationship because one of these investigators is like this guy

who's teenage daughter died in a car crash.

And then this girl, young girl, Janet is this has the same name as his dead daughter and

she has their father ran out on them.

So like, Oh, there's like emotional, like he seems like he genuinely cared and want

this family.

Like it doesn't seem like it came from a bad place, but it also means he's not objective

at all.

Uh, like the longest, right?

In fact, if you, any fans of the last podcast on the left, they did a nice series on this

one, uh, like talking about this haunting and, and all this stuff.

So, um, so ultimately, uh, some of the evidence that includes, there's photographs that supposedly

show that Janet was levitating, but if you actually put them in sequence, it just shows,

she's just jumping off the bed.

You can turn them into a flip book of a girl jumping off a bed.

It's, it's not even like very convincing.

And also some of the girls were caught bending spoons because that was one of the things

like the ghosts were supposedly bending spoons in the other room and the girls were caught

faking shit.

Uh, later on, Janet claimed quote, Oh yeah, once or twice, and I'm not even gonna do a

British accent once or twice, we fake things just to see if Mr. Gross and Mr. Playfair

would catch us.

Unquote.

Ed and Lorraine did not in fact save the family from the evil of the nun, but rather showed

up uninvited and hung around for a single day before leaving on their whirlwind tour

of England.

So literally them being the hero of the conjuring movies is hilarious because these other people

spent like two years often like with this family and Ed Lorraine were there for a day

and now they're made into a movie where they like save these little girls from this, from

this demon.

The nun was completely made up as a way to have a new spinoff villain for movies, just

like Annabelle.

So they turn them, they just married this made up story with this real reported story

of a, of a haunting and this little girl getting possessed by this old blue collar

worker who died of a stroke in his chair.

So then there was the Smurl family of Pennsylvania and they claimed their little house was haunted

for some 15 years with disturbances starting small and increasing in violence.

Lorraine used her mojo and conclude and quote concluded that the Smurl shared their home

with four spirits, a harmless elderly woman, a young and possibly violent girl, a man who

suffered and died in the home and a demon that used the other three spirits to destroy

the Smurl family, unquote, the Smurl family, the Smurl family, uh, while multiple priests

are on the record saying that nothing unusual happened when they were performing blessings

inside the home that did not stop the Warren's from putting out the book, the haunted that

was made into a 1991 TV movie, I think it was on Fox.

And then we get to the subject of the conjuring three and honestly it would, that movie is

kind of a bait and switch, uh, because the conjuring three, the subtitle is the devil

made me do it, which is based on one of this famous little, uh, pieces where the Warren's

a touch with the legal system because it was the first time a possession was demonic possession

was used as a defense in a murder trial or at least attempted.

It wasn't actually, it was not allowed to even be entered as a plea.

The US court system was like, absolutely not, but so like you go into it, even the marketing

for the conjuring three makes it look like, Oh, this is going to be like a courtroom drama

mixed in with a conjuring thing, but instead, no, no, no, they literally just use that part

of it to book in the beginning and the end of the movie and then just have write a completely

fictional adventure in the middle about the Warren's doing battle with a Satanist witch

chick.

Uh, and Lorraine literally, this is the one where she fully turns to an X man where instead

of this subtle bits and getting a headache, she's like seeing full visions and running

through the woods, witnessing visions of murders and almost run straight off a cliff that seems

ridiculous.

Um, it was also, uh, we're, um, and the book where it's not when you just need to get fucked

up and enjoy the train wreck that's about to happen.

It's the first core conjuring movie, not directed by James Wan.

It's definitely the weaker of the three.

It's sillier.

It's not as scary.

I still enjoyed it cause I liked the characters and it wasn't bad, bad.

It just wasn't as graded on a curve.

It's just not as good as the first two, but it's also, like I said, a little bit sillier.

It turns them more into like a superhero story.

However, one little side note, I didn't even put this in the script, but uh, in the, in

the movie as part of the events, Ed ends up having a heart attack.

Now it's brought on by a demon in the movie.

The demon triggers the heart attack, but then it has nothing to do with his cholesterol

fat that you've looked at Edward and it's like, of course that guy had a heart attack.

Did he go up a flight of stairs?

So anyways, if Patrick Wilson has a heart attack at the beginning of the movie, he spends

the rest of it like walking with a cane and having to pop nitroglycerin pills when he

gets all stressed out and everything.

Um, so later on people who worked with a new war, apparently Ed Warren, every time he needed

to sell that a place was really scary or haunted when he's getting oppressed by the evil energy

or if they're having a seance, it's supposed to be really scary.

He would fake a heart attack like red Fox on Sanford and sons and be like, Oh, the devil's

coming for me.

So this is the thing he was doing.

So now it makes watching that movie particularly hilarious as Patrick Wilson's grabbing his

chest and reaching for his pills.

Oh my goodness.

They started out, it's like, okay, well she gets a headache and then it was like, he gets

a heart attack.

Run.

Well, it's like part of the idea is like in the first two movies, Ed is sort of like the

physical protector of brain.

And now this one sort of reverses the roles and fucks with that a bit so that Lorraine

is charging a head wall and sort of like weakly shuffling behind because now she's dark Phoenix.

Yes.

Cause she's, her true powers are starting to come in because now we've got to fight

a Satanist.

He has a demonic altar and tunnels underneath the ground.

Okay.

So anyway, so now we're going to go jump back to the supposed real story, at least the official

version that is very loosely inspired the movie because once again, the movie just pretty

much ignores the story for most of the movie.

It just does at the beginning and the end and is the only time it even bothers with

anything based on the official version.

Okay.

Then so, um, so this is the real, the real story again, giant air quotes.

So it goes something like this.

A desperate mother calls the Warren's in to help with her son.

His name is David Glatzel, uh, and the Warren's guess what?

And he's possessed by a demon, uh, months later, the boyfriend of David's older sister.

So David's a possessed little boy, he has an older sister, that girl's boyfriend dabs

his landlord to death in a fit of rage.

So he's charged with manslaughter and this guy, Arnie Johnson's lawyer, uh, decided to

enter a brand new defense at trial, not guilty by reason of demonic possession, which of

course was recommended very strongly by Ed Warren.

Now this is all part, now this is, Ed has had a long standing, this predates this trial

by many years of trying to get a court to kind of officially accept some kind of supernatural

shit as part of a ruling or as part of evidence that's accepted in something because it'll

prove the existence of the supernatural.

If it's accepted by law, kind of like, remember how in the miracle on 44th street, 34th street,

how they accepted Santa Claus because he, they took mail that was kind of like Ed Warren's

like, if I can just get him to accept ghosts even once I got him.

So this was part of his obsession.

So he got this in, um, I would legitimize his spooky soup, you know, Catholic beliefs

through legal precedent.

So, and while I'm not usually a fan of the American court system, I am happy to say the

judge instantly rejected this attempted plea, uh, saying it was irrelevant and unprovable.

The answer, he was like, no, correct.

Yeah, no fuck off.

However, like they were smart enough on the, the lawyer on the Ed Warren lawyer for Arnie

Johnson side to do it like on a Friday, get in front of all the cameras and get a bunch

of press to do, yeah, this is the plea.

And it took until Monday for the judge to tell them to go fuck themselves.

And so, uh, so it got a bunch of, so that all over the newspapers, all over the country

were like, the devil made me do it was like the top headline.

It was a big story, though it was bullshit.

And which is why of course, because that was the headline.

That's why the subtitle of the movie, despite the fact they didn't really care about that

story very much in the movie, you do get to see a guy stabbed to death.

It's great.

Judge was like, no, absolutely not.

I mean, you can't have the, you know, the lawyer, it's like, I plead not guilty by the

fact that my lawyer's insane, but yeah, I got the headlines in the slew of interviews

he was looking for and Johnson went to prison and we got a silly movie like all these years

later.

Hooray.

So now Carl Glatzel was the older brother of the possessed little boy, David.

He claims claimed a few years back to and claims to this day, the whole thing was a

hoax under the Warren's or Grifters, even David who still claims that he truly was possessed

as a kid is quoted as saying, quote, Lorraine told me I was going to be a rich little boy

from this book deal.

And that was a lie unquote.

So let's jump to a haunting in Connecticut in 2009, a based on a true story horror movie

hit the screens titled a haunting in Connecticut.

It was in turn based on the book in a dark place by Ray Garton and in turn based on the

case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, this is I think the fourth book in the Ed and Lorraine

like book series they were doing at this point.

This is the story of the Snedeker family.

Why do all these people have like weird ass last names?

It's all part of the charm that the Smurls, the Perrons, the Glatzels.

Uh, yeah, their name isn't even Warren.

Yeah, the minies.

And then now we got the, so now we've got, uh, the Snedeker's the Snedeker family.

So we've got mom, dad, and a whole bunch of kids because guess what Catholic and they

don't believe in them that birth control, they believe in fucking, they believe in having

an irresponsible number of children.

So they moved into this rental duplex and discovered to their horror that the building

had previously been a funeral home hack.

Uh, who cares from the Nesper website quote in the basement, they found various mortuary

items, including a hoisting apparatus for coffins, a medical gurney, blood drains and

toe tags.

Soon enough, the Snedeker's were reporting all kinds of evil, including sexual attacks,

apparitions and abrupt violent personality changes in the oldest son who is undergoing

treatments for Hodgkin's disease.

Unquote.

So I got this kid with cancer, his personalities, uh, has nothing to do with the chemo and the

hormones and the fucking, uh, steroids and all this shit has nothing to do with all the

cancer and all the treatments and all the emotional problems that go along with having,

you know, cancer.

So they discover all the, the, the more, the funeral home shit in the basement and the

drain for the blood.

So at different points, the poltergeist activity and sexual attacks escalated to ghostly, anal

penetration of both mom and dad.

And then the goat shoved his finger in my ass.

They literally said like, they like threw their clothes because this is ghost dick.

Raw.

Eh.

Yeah.

So one day mom got a wedgie and was like, see ghost.

So of course they go begging for the demon hunting badasses and Lorraine to come take

care of business.

So when they concluded, you got to get out that wedgie Lorraine.

So when the Warrens concluded their investigation and did their hocus pocus, uh, they hired

Ray Garton, this, uh, horror author who'd had a couple of, uh, ma, you know, decently

selling books under his belt, um, and to write the book, uh, that would be turned into, uh,

a dark place and then later adapted in the movie, a haunting in Connecticut.

So his novel came out and he was instantly unhappy with it because it was put in the

non-fiction section.

He has since used every opportunity on the internet to tell people about his experience

with the Warrens and writing his book.

He has never shut the fuck up about this since the day the book came out.

He wants everyone to know this book is full of shit.

I made this up.

I was never anally penetrated by this is just the writer.

The writer is taught to talking about his experience.

So this was posted now he's, I could have quoted any number of interviews and podcasts

and I heard like five of them, but this is going back to the news group.

I remember news groups, internet, uh, alt.folklore.ghost slash stories on April 27th, 2000 Garton claims

the family had serious problems with alcoholism and drug addiction and that he, they could

never, uh, and he could never determine that the son ever even had cancer and he also just

couldn't get their fucking story straight quote.

I went to Ed Warren and told him my problem.

He told me not to worry that the family was crazy.

I was shocked.

He said, all these people who come to us are crazy.

You think sane people would come to us?

He knew that I'd written a lot of horror novels prior to that.

So he told me to just make up a story using whatever details I could incorporate into

the book and just make it scary unquote.

Wow.

Okay.

So.

Okay.

Unable to get out of his contract without legal ramification, if he couldn't afford

Garton just said, I'll just talk shit about him until the end of time.

So he goes on quote of the two Lorraine is the sanest she's an enabler years ago before

their career in the supernatural began, Ed suffered from mental illness.

It was bad enough to keep him from working and the only way he could make money was to

hand print haunted houses on dinner plates and sell them door to door.

Once Ed decided that Lorraine was psychic selling the haunted house plates eventually

led to investigating haunted houses.

At first they found ghosts, but after the tremendous success of the exorcist, both the

novel and the movie ghosts suddenly became demons unquote.

And now he concludes with this mic drop quote, not only are the Warren's frauds, not only

do they give a bad name to people who are seriously investigating paranormal phenomenon.

I think they're evil because of the way they exploit families already deep in despair and

ready to shatter.

I had ignore.

I can ignore a simple con job, but the Warren's are actually damaging people who are already

damaged who are desperate and vulnerable, using them for the sake of a book, maybe a

lucrative movie sale or another story to add to their traveling dog and pony show.

Before I worked on that book, I'd followed the adventures of Ed and Lorraine Warren faithfully

since I was a little boy, I was excited to work with them.

Boy, was that a big disappointment.

It's nice to believe there's a smiling grandparently couple out there chasing demons, but not when

you know, they're hurting people for the sake of publicity and the almighty dollar

unquote.

Yup.

Fuck these people.

Oh, and this is one that didn't get into my script, what I'm actually going to show you.

So this is from, do you remember the old news magazine show called a current affair?

Yes.

All right.

So this is from an old episode of a current affair talking about the very case we're talking

about and their journalist actually does some journalism and uh, so like I'm skipping past

this.

You can see in the screenshot, this was them talking to the woman.

So they lived in a duplex.

They had an upstairs fucking neighbor who literally lived right above them who if all

this shit was going on, wouldn't know about it.

She also said they totally knew it was a funeral home.

The family lived there.

All the, they're talking about how full of shit it was.

And then this is what happens.

You can hit play.

This is the journalist actually talking to Ed.

At this point, I asked for the name of a priest to the Warren's claim had visited the house.

We wanted to speak to him as an independent source.

There is no peace.

There is no this.

There is no that.

What is this?

Because of this nut up here almost ran down.

Hey, this is, this is baloney.

Come on.

Let's get out of here.

I'd like to discuss it some more if we can.

I'm not discussing anything any further.

I think your credibility is in the strike here.

I don't care about credibility pal.

He said there were no plans for an exorcism.

He did say however, he felt a strange pressure upon entering the house.

So that was the real Edward and how he dealt with even a slight question of like, Hey,

if a priest did this, uh, you know, this thing, can I just talk to him?

And he immediately pitches a fit and grabs Lorraine and runs off.

He's like, but this will go to your credibility.

I don't care.

And you can also tell my Ed Warren isn't actually all that far off from the way he really sounded

his eye.

I really, I mean, I love Patrick Wilson's like Pepperidge farm accent.

He does when he's doing Ed Warren, but it's so does not sound like the real guy sounded

like an asshole.

That's hilarious.

And he was, but now remember that content warning I put at the beginning of all this?

Oh, I thought we'd already know with sexual assault.

You thought we were talking about, you thought that the ghost anal, I'm talking about real

shit, not, not bullshit.

Unfortunately, this is the real kind, not the fun ghost, not ghost rape.

Well, I mean, I guess if the, I hope that the molestation of those little of those girls

didn't happen.

Well, that is just speculation on our part.

Um, and that other family claims they were anally raped.

That's their story.

That's their story.

But yeah, I really wish that like Ray Garton talking about them exploiting people and just

being awful was the worst thing about the Warrens.

Oh, it's bad enough that they're liars and grifters and exploiting

screwed up family for fame and fortune.

But there's, well, this.

So in the book, the demonologist, which I told you was published in 1980, it references

a woman who works as an assistant to Ed and Lorraine.

So in this situation, a man called named Pete is calling regarding a case.

It's not important to our purposes here, quote, Pete telephoned the Warrens and spoke with

Judy Penny, a young woman who works as a liaison when Ed and Lorraine are out of town.

Judy has heard of some hair raising tales over the phone, but this one particularly

scared her unquote.

Now this only becomes relevant because of a December 13th, 2017 article in the Hollywood

reporter, which has this to say, quote, Ed Warren was in his mid thirties when he allegedly

met 15 year old Penny having not yet gained enough fame as a self-trained demonologist

to pay the bills in the early 19 sixties, Ed was working as a city bus driver in Monroe,

Connecticut.

Penny was a student at central high school in the nearby town of Bridgeport who rode

his bus.

The two began an amorous relationship.

Penny said in a legal declaration that she gave in November, 2014, according to that

document, as well as newly obtained recordings of Penny's recollections of events by 1963,

she had moved into the Warren's home for the next 40 years.

She said she had a sexual relationship with Ed, with Lorraine's knowledge.

At first Penny stayed in the bedroom directly opposite the one occupied by the married couple,

but eventually she moved into an apartment built for her up above the home.

One night he'd sleep downstairs.

She said in a recording one night he'd sleep upstairs, unquote, so he's in his thirties

driving a bus and this teenage high school 15 year old girl starts riding his bus.

And then he talks her into sex and a relationship and literally working for them as a sort of

weirdly indentured servant.

And so yeah, and his wife was just, it's just cool.

So all accounts say Ed and Lorraine portrayed Judith as a niece or like a charity case.

To this day, their daughter, Judy Espira and Tony, the husband maintained that this woman

just lived with the Warren's for four entire decades out of the kindness of their hearts.

Cause like the fact that she lived with them for that long is just indisputable.

Everybody knows that.

And like the book says, Judith was the one running the office while the Warren's were

off being important.

She wasn't just a sex slave.

She was literally there.

Yeah, she was a sex-writer.

She was running the thing.

And here's the other little detail that I didn't even put in the script that I meant

to.

Judy wouldn't know what was going on in that house because that, you know, that whole bit

in the conjuring where, where she was at home and grandma watched her while they were

off helping the parent family in Rhode Island, Judy didn't live with her parents.

She lived with her grandmother at grandma's house because they were too busy being Ed

and Lorraine Warren to raise their own daughter.

So nice.

So Judy, I don't fault her for wanting to believe the best, but she literally wasn't

there.

She doesn't know what her parents were really like because she only saw them, you know,

for visitation and holidays and, you know, spill stuff, but most of the time she wasn't

around.

This lady, Judy, which Judith, that's the thing.

Both of them went by Judy, which is sort of disturbing all by itself, the fact that she

was half Ed's age and the fact that he became a father like in his late, yeah, it's, it's

all kinds of fucked up.

So quote, Penny also claimed that Ed was sometimes abusive to Lorraine.

Early on, she said she witnessed him backhand his wife so hard she lost consciousness.

Oh my God quote, and this is quoting her inside the quote.

Sometimes Ed would actually have to slap her across the face to shut her up.

Penny said in one recording, some nights I thought they were going to kill each other.

Unquote want to know how just how great a Catholic, um, couple Ed and Lorraine really

were.

Oh, well, I mean they already had an in-house sex slave.

In 1978, Judith, Penny got pregnant, quote, Lorraine persuaded her to have an abortion

because the birth of a child could become public and any scandal could ruin the Warren's

business.

Though Lorraine is claimed to be a devout Catholic, Penny said her quote, real God is

money and a tearful recording obtained by the Hollywood reporter.

Penny recalled, they wanted me to tell everyone that someone had come into my apartment and

raped me and I wouldn't do that.

I was so scared.

I didn't know what to do, but I had an abortion.

The night they picked me up from the hospital after having it, they went out and lectured

and left me alone.

Unquote.

Track.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's right.

Fucking trash.

Yep.

So here's the thing.

Now, ultimately, now, even though these are like sworn depositions and statements and

stuff, there's still, you know, this is one woman saying, we know she lived with them

and it was like, you know, I am inclined to believe a war, you know, a story, especially

knowing that the undisputable details of her age and when she started living with them,

that's the fact that she was clearly groomed and some shit was going on.

Yeah.

Which is really sad and which is the reason she was there for four decades.

So, and, but her stuff is corroborated by their information, including lawsuits by multiple

parties.

And it would take a long time and get tangled to get into all of it.

But let's just say it gets backed up a couple different places because once again, everybody

started suing once a bunch of money was on the line with these movies.

So so like people, the words were like the, the, the guy who wrote the demonologist.

He sued them, this movie producer who was involved with making the original conjuring

movie sued over the depiction of the Warrens based on the stuff he knew about.

So here's one last detail that'll help you kind of maybe decide your, your opinion about

what to believe or what not to believe.

Because you see when Lorraine Warren signed her deal with New Line Cinema to serve as

a consultant for the conjuring and get her, her piece of that sweet, sweet pie, it included

some unusual provisions.

Quoting one more time from the Hollywood Reporter quote, the films couldn't show her or her

husband engaging in crimes, including sex with minors, child pornography, prostitution,

or sexual assault.

Neither the husband nor wife could be depicted as participating in an extramarital sexual

relationship talent attorney Jill Smith says she's never seen such specific language barring

such depictions unquote it's like weirdly specific language Lorraine and you gotta remember

that that contract was done before this woman came forward yeah so she was protecting something

by insisting on that being there and that's why like you know this depiction of the Warrens

is the most wholesome in love married couple good example as Catholic some great parents

with mom with the daughter waiting for them at home instead of the teenage sex slave yeah

for it later on just woman who'd been groomed and was just living with them Judith Penny

never received a penny for anything related to the conjuring and its spin-offs she clearly

hated Lorraine but had weirdly warm feelings for Ed right up until the end and stayed in

touch with him like right up until he died she is quoted as asking herself lots of times

I think about why did I do this why did I screw up my life like this sometimes I get

angry thinking about it how so much was taken away from me unquote yeah well it was taken

away yeah you were a teenage girl you were groomed yeah the life you could have had yeah

if you just took a different fucking bus without that loser in it so yep so that's where we're

gonna leave things with Ed and Lorraine Warren how do you feel about them now well I mean

I started out just thinking that they were regular shitty people either crazy or liars

or yeah but no no they're there no no I'm really really grossed out thanks Jamie no yeah

no Ed actual not have nice thing fucking you know pedophile groomer and but still convinced

he was a good person because he was scaring people with his lies in order to take to get

him to go to church so good for good for fucking you Ed yeah well you know now that

he's in hell so well thank you everyone happy Halloween at this point if you're hearing

this is why Halloween's over and appreciate Kevin and Raven Sound Studios for hosting

us and making us sound good absolutely thank you Kevin be sure to visit our website chainsawhistory.com

to check our back catalogue get our other episodes of shows like the value of a no time

for Dr. Jones articles transcripts bonus content and more just like last time I would encourage

you to give to the feeding America charity by going to feedingamerica.org and support

local food pantries just like those goofballs who were hanging out with Annabelle on the

live stream the other night and yeah and just like last time I and previously and now

until we stop Cop City it's stopcopcity.org let's stop a police from training in urban

warfare yeah I believe that's the way to go so you can also look up the Atlanta Solidarity

Fund if you want to help people who get arrested because they're just exercising their rights

to protest this nonsense going on in our backyard but until then maybe and I are gonna go I

think I got a new strategy for us we should start podcast recording on the sidewalk in

front of somebody's house describing it in detail and then use the recording as a way

to bribe ourselves in and get more information about the haunting yeah or about just lay

out of your home can I know and the in order to fight the ghost we're gonna need the number

the security code for your alarm system and the pin number to your ATM who you're gonna

call the grifters so we'll see you next time everybody all right bye later