After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Truth about the Conjuring's Ghost Hunters

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

Ghost hunting couple Ed and Lorraine Warren transformed twentieth century America into an enchanted land dotted with haunted houses, cursed objects, and portals to hell. Their exploits are the basis for the Conjuring movie franchise. They are the originators of the Annabelle doll. They are the most famous demon hunters ever. Who were the Warrens? Did they make it up? Or did they believe it all?Maddy and Anthony's guest today is Professor Joseph Laycock from Texas State University. He was our guest last week on our episode about the Amityville Horror. Joseph is the author of: The Penguin Book of Exorcisms and co-author of The Exorcist Effect: Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief.Edited & produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's February 1976. A few weeks ago, George and Kathy Lutz abandoned their new home at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, in horror. They began desperately seeking help, or rather, but we know them better now, desperately seeking for people to amplify and authenticate the tales they would tell. winter morning, and now, standing at the bottom of the drive of that same 112 Ocean Avenue, are a middle-aged couple, Ed and Lorraine Warren. Ed is a heavy-set man with sunken eyes and a white jacket. Lorraine holds herself very straight, although there's a hint of nervous energy about her. At first glance, they seem ordinary, predictable even, respectable, certainly.

You would never guess that they will become some of America's most famous demon hunters. Despite their somewhat bland appearance, the Warrens are master storytellers who understand well the power of their trade. Beside them now is a local news crew along for the ride. In the decades that follow, cameras will continue to document the Warrens and their strange, shared occupation. And they welcome it, acting out their mission. made for TV lives under the scrutiny of the lens. Over the course of their careers, they will unearth untold numbers of so-called demons

and cases of alleged possession, catch supposed ghosts on camera, and testify in court to the presence of the devil. They'll amass a museum's worth of haunted memorabilia, help launch a multi-billion-dollar film franchise, and answer thousands of cries for help from families across America. But who were the warrants? Were they cynical con artists? Or did they, in fact, believe it all? Hello and welcome back to After Dark.

My name's Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And guys, before I do my proper actual job and introduce this topic and our guest, this is wild to me because I would count myself as a horror film fan. And I think I know the odd thing or two about horror films. But actually, what I'm learning is that these all feed into one another, all these American in big 70s movies that have so shaped how we understand horror today, they're all inherit from one another

and they're all kind of part of the same moment. But anyway, look, I need to get off my job and then we can talk about all of those things. So last week, you know, we spoke about the story of Amitifil, the most haunted house in America. We talked about the murders that took place in that house and how those murders then went on to secure

a legacy of haunting for the location. But in today's episode, we are going to be talking about a story that's connected to that, but by two names in particular, and they are husband and wife, ghost-busting duo Ed and Lorraine Warren. Now, we learned in our Amityville episode about how the exorcist had had such a huge impact

on American paranormal beliefs. And when we're looking at the progression of those beliefs, the Warrens are the very next step in that story. And I'd like to give you a quote here. And then I'll introduce the person who's written that quote, but I just think it's so interesting, and it's not something I was aware of. So let's go with this first. So the quote says, to understand how a new American mythology formed in the decades following the exorcist, it is important to know as much as possible about who the Warrens were. They transformed 20th century America into an enchanted land dotted with haunted houses, cursed objects, and portals to hell. That is from our guest today and our guests in the previous episode, Dr. Joseph Laycock, who is the Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University and author of, as we've said in our last episode, the most well-titled books, The Penguin Book of Exorcisms

and co-author of The Exorcist Effect, Horror, Religion and Demonic Belief. Joseph, thank you so much for joining us once again. Thanks so much for having me back. So excited to get into the Warrens, because as Anthony said, I do think they are absolutely fascinating. I'm looking at an image and I think this kind of sets the tone so I'm going to describe it and it is from a case that we're going to get into later on in the episode

but I just want to give listeners a flavour of what to expect. This is wild. Yeah, so I'm looking at a photo of what looks like the interior of a large, maybe a church, maybe a museum space in America and there are people lined up in a cute most of them are just looking at their phones and there are barriers, metal barriers,

to keep them in place. And there's a table that's draped in cloth And on that table is, well, what I can only really describe as the stable from your grandma's nativity kit. It's got a crucifix below these little wooden eaves. And it's probably, I don't know, about half a meter high, half meter wide, something like that. And there's another crucifix inside. And inside there's electric light that's kind of pinky purply. And the surprise object.

Wait for us. Drum roll. Not a baby Jesus. But a very large, very plastic dinosaur. It's, that's the tone. That's where we're going in. I'm absolutely gripped already. So, Joe, not only welcome back to After Dark, but what on earth is happening? So I've seen that plastic dinosaur with my own eyes, and it was at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut at the Ed and Lorraine Warren Paracom. So this was an all-day event sort of celebrating the Warrens put on by their

son-in-law. It was attended by about 5,000 people. And the main attraction were these supposedly cursed objects from the Warren's cases that had been brought out from their museum of cursed and haunted objects in Connecticut. Absolutely phenomenal. I'm very jealous that we didn't go to that. I know. We need to do something like this, ASAP. So, Joe, if we met Ed and Lorraine Warren at the height of their fame, at the height of their powers, who were they? What kind of people would we come across?

So they presented as this ideal American couple, you know, a devoted Catholic husband and wife. Ed presented himself as a demonologist with this sort of advanced training and expertise on the nature of demons and ghosts and other types of supernatural creatures. And Lorraine presented herself as a psychic. She actually claimed that she had been tested for psychic abilities at the University of California and Los Angeles and that she was sort of an off-the-chart psychic. And so the division of labor is she would come in and get impressions about the types of history and entities going on in your house. And then Ed would apply his expertise and say, ah, Lorraine detected this, therefore this is the nature of your problem, and this is how we're going to fix it together. Do we know exactly how many cases they were involved with? Because it seems that the scale of this is pretty phenomenal.

Yeah, they were very, very busy. We don't know, and I'm sure they exaggerated. So by 1972, they were already claiming that they had had 2,000 cases. And in a tabloid column that they had, they even said, send us your cases. And we have a cash prize if we like your case the best. So currently, the Conjuring franchise has been taking their cases and making them into movies. This is currently a billion-dollar franchise, a billion with a B.

and they have no danger of running out of stories about the Warrens anytime soon. So I think it's going to continue to be lucrative for a very long time. So, Joe, tell us who the Warrens are because they don't start off their careers, their careers together as paranormal investigators, do they? They have a slightly different artistic bent, let's say. So the Warrens are from Bridgeport, Connecticut. They actually met at a movie theater where Ed Warren was working as an usher. Ed went off to go fight in World War II.

They got married while he was still enlisted. And then in the 1950s, they tried to make a career as artists. And Ed's favorite subject to paint was haunted houses. So they would drive around New England and find spooky-looking houses. And Ed would paint it. And then Lorraine would sort of charm the owners and try to sell them a painting of their own house. And also see if there were any sort of spooky stories or phenomenon associated with the house. They formed the New England's Society for Psychical Research, which I'm not really sure

it did much, but it sounded kind of scientific. And then after the exorcist came out, there was this huge demand of people who wanted an exorcism, who thought they were fighting something demonic in their house, but the Catholic Church was not in a place to help and would sort direct them to therapists or mental health services instead. So this really created the marketplace for the Warns to thrive. So they became, as lay Catholics, not priests, the people that you could go to if you thought you needed help with the supernatural. And I'm looking at one of their early paintings. Now, I will say this painting is quite evocative in one sense. It's relatively rudimentary. If you know the Red Barn murder mystery, think of a building like that. It's red,

it's wooden, it's quite peaked. It's covered in snow and there's some mud on the roads. It's not a bad painting. I wouldn't say by any stretch of the imagination. It's a masterpiece, but it's a very big leap from a plastic dinosaur in a case. And it just, I don't know, there's something in this that says storytelling, whereas the other thing seems exploitative. So what I'm interested in, I suppose, Joseph, is what's the context that they go from these painters of houses to demon hunters?

What's the context for this in the 1960s? Yeah, so we should talk a bit about Vatican 2, but Vatican 2 from 1963 to 1965 totally changes the Catholic Church. So prior to that, all Catholic Masses would have been in Latin. And they also probably would have begun with a prayer to St. Michael to cast out Satan. And after that, they changed a lot of things. So mass is now done in whatever language the community speaks. And a lot of the things that were deemed superstitious by the public, so things like rosaries, cult of the saints, and so forth, this was all toned down. And they said everybody is

probably going to go to heaven, even if they're not Catholic. So for progressive Catholics, this was great. For more traditionalist Catholics, which included the Warrens, they really felt that their religion and their way of life was under attack, and especially on the issue of the devil and demons. So Ed Warren was one of the Catholics who said, I can't believe that I went to a Catholic priest, the person charged with protecting us from evil, and he told me Satan isn't real. He told me Satan is a metaphor. So we have to get everybody to believe in the devil again. And when I saw that plastic dinosaur at the Mohegan Sun Casino, the enclosure said, accept the existence of the devil. Those words were written above the plastic dinosaur.

So a big part of what the Warrens were doing was this kind of pushback from lay Catholics, that no, no, no, the devil is very real, and it's the job of the church to protect us from the devil. It's really interesting that what we're seeing with the Warrens is in some ways similar to the Amitaville horror story that we have discussed in our previous episode, Joe, in that there is religious belief, there's superstition mixed in with that, separate and overlapping, and then there's popular culture, and it's what we see again with the Warrens, and when they become involved in Amityville, that they are, as you say, kind of part of this traditional Catholic faith, but they utilize television and modernity in order to get that

message out. So can you tell us a little bit about how they become involved in that case and what they do? And because they take a TV crew around with them, don't they? This seems like a pretty bold step forward from just itinerantly painting haunted houses and attempting to sell them to the owners. So the Warrens absolutely wanted to be famous. They wanted everyone to know who they were and about all their cases and so forth. And they got involved with the Amniville horror because they were already in contact with a journalist who thought, you know, what would make this an even better news story is if I could invite the Warrens out here and they could perform a seance inside the Amityville house. So that's what happened. They came out and they did a

seance in front of news cameras. And Lorraine Warren said that she was not only a Catholic, but that she was a psychic. And so she could kind of use her psychic abilities to learn something about the nature of the disturbances in the house. So that really became one of their biggest cases. And when they made the Amityville Horror 2, the Warrens were consultants on that film. And I really think they spent a lot of the rest of their careers looking for a similar sort of media events, right? What could be the next Amnifil horror? And by the end of their careers, you know, they had flyers if they were going to come give a lecture and that said that they were, you know, chief investigators in the Amityville horror case. So they really, really hitched their wagon to

that story. And of course, we've done an episode previously on the Enfield poltergeist. And they were momentarily, I suppose, not very involved in that case, but they did show up. They did a day, I believe it was, at Enfield, but came away with very little. But this, in one sense, you could say, Joe, that all of this is a little bit harmless, that, you know, they're turning up, they're claiming to be whatever. But there is a darker, more exploitative side to this. And it feeds back to, as everything does eventually, that haunted dinosaur in the case, Maddie described at the top of this episode. Can you tell us a little bit about this? It's the case of David Glatzel. Am I saying that correctly? Yeah, the Glatzels. Yeah, it's a complicated case,

but you have these brothers called the Glatzels, and the whole family had just watched the exorcist on cable. This is in the 1980s. And the youngest, David begins to act strange, and his mother interprets that this is a sign of demonic possession. And the mother and her A daughter had also attended a talk recently by the Warrens. So they start to try to get the Catholic Church to perform an exorcism. And by the 80s, the Catholic Church is sort of in this transitional period where they're saying, well, okay, we're starting to do exorcisms, but it's still very kind of embarrassing and we don't want to, you know, overdo it.

And you need the permission of a bishop to perform a true exorcism. But there are loopholes to this. And so they began performing what they called minor exorcisms. So they said, I don't have the permission of my bishop, so I can't do a proper one like you see in the movie The Exorcist, but I can really strongly pray for you and bless you and try to protect you from evil. So they start doing these kinds of off-brand exorcisms over David. And what skeptics have said is if you tell a small child there's a demon inside of you over and over again, you are psychologically priming them to behave in very strange ways. So it's almost a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. The other thing that makes this case very complicated is there is a young man named Arnie Johnson who is living with the family and who is dating the Glatzel's daughter and is very much in love with her. And she gets into an altercation with her boss and Arnie Johnson ends up stabbing the boss

in this kind of argument where the boss is very drunk. And so he goes to the Warrens and the Warrens sort of come up with the story that, the demon has jumped out of David Glatzel and into Arnie Johnson, and that's what made him commit this murder, and that this happened because Arne Johnson challenged the demon, that well, David was thrashing, told the demon, leave that boy alone, come into me. If you have seen the exorcist, this is literally what happens at the end of the exorcist, and now it was happening in real life. So the Warrens try to go to Arne Johnson's murder trial, and they actually find a lawyer who tries to say, my client is not guilty by reason of demonic possession.

And a judge says, you cannot plead that in American law. And the Warrens begin saying, well, we have all these Catholic priests who can come in and testify. And the judge says, you don't understand. You could have the actual demon here on the witness stands, right? There is no mechanism in our court for this. And so they finally decide to plea insanity instead. And actually, Arnie Johnson turned out to be a model prisoner. And I think only served five years of his sentence, married his fiancé, and has been, you know, a model citizen ever since. It's fascinating, isn't it, that, again, that intersection of now we've not only got popular culture and real life kind of interplaying in that way, but now we've got the law as well. And the discussion around whether you can claim demonic possession in legal terms.

terms of the warrants turning up at that trial, Joe, do you see that as a publicity stunt? Do you think they had genuine interest in the case and wanted Arnie to be let off for the murder? Did they see him as genuinely having been possessed by a devil and therefore innocent of a crime? Or was their presence just a way of bolstering their own popularity and their own profile? Well, I don't think it has to be one or the other. You can't see beliefs, but I have no evidence to think that they didn't really believe Arnie Johnson was demonically possessed. But certainly, Ed Warren expressed being very excited that this is it. We're finally going to get to prove in the court of law, this is all real. And I think for him this was very personal, right? Because lots of people said,

you know, the Warrens were just con artists and that this was all sort of silly and they were tricking people. And even people from Ed Warren's own church, right, said there isn't really a devil. So I think he saw this as an opportunity to really prove all of these people wrong. in the most sort of authoritative way that he could. There were loud voices who were very much saying that they were manipulative and that they were abusive. I have another quote here from horror author, Grady Hendricks, and it's quite interesting. Grady Hendricks says, for the record, I could not have a lower opinion of a human being than I have of Ed and Lorraine. I don't think they were well-intentioned. I don't think they were good people.

I think they saw situations and exploited them, and I think they did untold harm to people. You can't go into a place where people are undergoing the kind of emotional and psychological and even physical trauma that people who are in some, of these situations are, and say, oh, yeah, well, I know the answer, these are demons. It's quite a damning, it's quite a damning insight, you know, depending on what side of this argument you were to take. Yeah, Greg Hendrix was not a fan of the Warrens. And a lot of people that we spoke to who knew them personally, kind of regarded them as being cynical con artists. The Glatzel brothers had a plan to write a book, basically saying that, you know, the Warrens kind of ruined our lives, right? You know, one of us had sort of minor mental health crisis, and the Warren's

made that exponentially worse, and it kind of tore our family apart, all so that they could make a buck. Now, recently, there was a Netflix documentary about the Glatzels, and I think that they decided not to publish their book and that they had kind of better sort of financial opportunities working with Netflix. So that's one example of this. There was also a book written about the Warren's cases called Satan's Harvest, about a very disturbed individual that they were trying to treat for demonic possession, who ended up actually murdering his wife and was arrested for basically sexually molesting his daughter. And Ed Warren tried to say, well, but that was not really this man. That was an incubus demon in his shape. To me, that really seemed like a smoking

gun, that they were kind of sometimes using a belief in demons to excuse, pretty inexcusable a behavior. So that line was certainly crossed in a few cases at least. Yeah, I mean, their ethics seem at best very questionable. Joe, I want to ask you about evidence because we've seen the presentation of the haunted dinosaur and we know that they took film crews with them. Did they ever fake evidence or did they simply put forward the idea that something invisible that you couldn't tangibly prove was happening? I'm thinking in particular about a photograph of a ghost that they are associated with? Yeah, they did fake evidence, right?

So Ed's first book that he put out, it came out in 1973, the year the exodus came out, and he said, because I am such a highly respected demonologist, the church has shown me secret documents about the actual true story that the exorcist is based on and begins to say, and I know who this girl actually was and so forth, well, we now know it wasn't a girl, it was a boy, right? So there's no charitable interpretation of that. He was simply lying and saying

that he had access to things that he did not have. One of the sort of trophy photos that the Warrens really were proud of and felt proved that their investigations were uncovering something is a photo from a seance at the Amniville horror house of what looks like a sort of pale child's face poking out. And they say that this is a ghost that they've sort of captured on camera. What skeptics say is this is probably a neighbor's child who has ventured into the, into the seance because there were a bunch of news vans parked out front. I spoke with Matt Baxter, who accompanied Ed Warren for the show sightings in the 90s. They were an allegedly haunted house, and they were saying, can you hear things on the roof? I think the demons are dropping things on the roof. And he sees this rock

roll off the roof, and then Ed Warren comes around from the other side of the building. And he finally says, This is not a proper investigation. I think people are faking evidence. I think you threw a rock on the roof. And Matt says that Ed took him aside and said, listen, all these people are crazy. They would never have called us in the first place unless they were crazy. So just play along. So there are lots of cases like this where I think they probably faked evidence.

They may have also actually believed that supernatural things were happening. So this could be a case of what's sometimes called a pious fraud, right? where they said, well, it's so important that people know the truth about the supernatural and about demons that it's actually worth it to occasionally fake evidence if that is the lie that will help them see the truth. There seems to be, and also in popular culture, Joe, there seems to be a never-ending array of cases that are linked to the Warren somehow. We talked about Enfield, we talked about the Amateurville. They're all coming back to the Warren somehow. Is there a particular case that you find sticks out a bit for you?

The case that baffled us the most is probably their most famous, and that's Annabelle, this allegedly haunted doll. Annabelle is on display in their museum, and the actual Annabelle is a sort of off-the-rack, raggedy Ann doll, and it's in another one of these enclosures like the plastic dinosaur. It has a devil tarot card taped to the glass for some reason, and it says, you know, warning never ever opened this. So Annabelle was brought to the Mohegan Sun Casino, and that was what everybody wanted to see. It was sort of throngs of people trying to get as close as possible to Annabelle. And they were actually selling Annabelle vodka, which was vodka that had been put in the basement with Annabelle. And the door that says never ever opened, they opened that up so that these bottles could sort of absorb as much evil energy from Annabelle as possible. And it was selling for $200 a bottle.

the bottle came with gloves to protect yourself from the evil, but then if you proceed to drink it, that would seem to defeat the purpose of the gloves. But people were purchasing them. The story of Annabelle is that these nursing students were experiencing kind of haunting phenomena, and they came to believe that this was a sort of lost spirit of a child living in their house. The spirit asked them using a Ouija board if they could, if it could live inside. this doll, if it could live inside Annabel. And then things only continued to get worse. And people were reporting scratch marks when they visited the home. And Annabel was moving by itself. And when the Warrens were called in, they said, this was never a dead little girl. This was always a demon.

It tricked you. You used the Ouija board. You violated the law of invitation because it asked permission to live in a doll. And you gave it that permission. So now we're going to have to come and we're going to have to take this doll to our museum where we can house things like this and sort of get all the evil out of your house. This was the only case that we looked at by the Warrens where we simply could not confirm that any of this ever happens. All of the other cases, these are at least real people. They're real locations. But with Annabelle, you know, we looked at different versions of the story and the names are inconsistent. There's no locations. There's nothing to anchor this to reality. So we were forced to,

at least suspect that they maybe just went to a toy shop and bought a doll and invented this entire story from Holcloth. But there are other dolls in Ed Warren's museum. We even found an old article from 1980s where he is talking about cabbage patch dolls, which were a big fad toy in the 1980s, and saying that these are conduits for evil and that he's had to exercise and and bury numerous cabbage patch dolls. But in a way, I think that Ed Warren, as an artist, kind of saw a potential here, right? That I can't be the only one who thinks dolls are creepy,

and he was quite right about that. It really is fascinating, because we come to a lot of these histories from, you know, middle ages up to relatively modern histories and stories. And, you know, the podcast is called After Dark, and there's always this dark element to the history that we look at, But sometimes the darkness lies in places that we don't necessarily start out looking. So, for instance, in this case, we talk about demons, we talk about and we think that's the darkness.

We think, you know, the Amityville horror ghosts and slime coming through the walls, that's the dark. But when you drill down into it, sometimes it's the human actions and interactions and exploitative elements to people's nature. and sometimes that's the actual real dark underlying some of these human histories. But keeping that in mind, Joe, I'd love to know what you think the Warren's legacy is because it's really profound, actually. We're left with this very pop culture, you know, ghost-busting duo image of them from the conjuring movies, let's say, or from whatever iterations they've also come across in the 21st century.

But what do you think their legacy is in terms of that? kind of historical paranormal world? I think that the Warrens have really changed the way that we think about the folklore of things like haunted houses and demons. So when Ed Warren said he was a demonologist, he did not do any sort of formal study of theology or history. And he admitted that. He said, my training is from the School of Hard Knocks, right? But he would sort of come up with these ideas about how demons work. So one of these is what he called the law of invitation. So he said, if demons are harassing you, it's always your fault. You did something to invite them in. And often that would be the Ouija board or something like this, right? That's still a way that a lot of

modern Americans think about demons. The other thing that they would do is if you thought you had a haunted house, that there was maybe a spirit of the dead in your house, Lorraine would say, the spirit here has never walked the earth in human form. And that was how she described demons. So that actually made your situation much, much scarier to bring the warrens thing. It's not grandma is looking for her lost glasses or something. It's a demon. It's the worst thing that you can imagine.

And so this kind of image of Ghostbusters sort of crossing the country, hitting all of these locations where demons are on the loose or there are portals to hell and then using this elaborate toolkit of sort of Catholic folk religion and psychic powers and fringe science to stop them. You know, this is kind of a new folklore. So when I watch shows like supernatural about two brothers crossing America in a black Impala fighting monsters, I think this is all the legacy of the Warrens. I think they have sort of created a unique idea of America as a supernatural, haunted landscape. The thing that most interests me about the Warrens is how sort of charismatic, I suppose,

they must have been. And I mean, I'm very interested in hoaxes anyway. I'm writing a book at the moment about hoaxes in the 18th century. And in the cases that I'm looking at, it's very much personality and individual led. It's about stepping into the sort of internal logic of the worlds that these people occupy it. They believe are real. And often, as you've kind of laid out, Joe, are capable of producing a hoax and carrying out a hoax, but also believing elements of it. And it's not one or the other often. And I just wonder what it was, in your mind, about the warrants that drew people to them and that allowed them to operate in this way. Because as we heard in the opening introduction of this episode, you know,

they didn't look particularly unusual. They looked like many, many other ones. middle-class, respectable people in America. So what was it about them that allowed them to step into this role, into this, I was going to say light, but it's into the darkness, really. What everyone who met the Warren said was they remind you of your parents, right? That they're sort of Rockwellian, sort of American nuclear family. And that's how they presented themselves and they cultivated that image very, very well. And I mean, literally everybody said this.

So I spoke with people who had worked with the Warren's writing books for them. And even if they came away with very negative feelings about the Warrens, said, you know, when I first met them, they truly seemed like the perfect American a couple. And I even knew someone from college who met Lorraine Warren near the end of her life and said the same thing that these were sort of my idealized parents. And I'm a child of divorce. and they seem kind of like, you know, the perfect parents that I never had. So, you know, if you're frightened as a child who comes in and chases the monsters away, as your parents. So there's almost a kind of psychological element to the way that they were able to help people who were actually, in many cases, quite scared and didn't really feel like they had anyone else to turn to. And therein, I suppose, is the place to wrap this particular conversation up.

If you've enjoyed this episode, please go back and listen to our previous episode. with Joe where we talked about the Amateurville horror in more detail. It really feeds into some of the discussion we've had in this episode too. Tell your friends about After Dark and leave us a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts because that helps other people to find us. Until next time, happy listening.