Ed and Lorraine Warren with Jamie Loftus
00:00If you want to splurge on a weird ghost hunting adventure and it's at all possible for you todo so, like do it while you can because ghosts can't take you hunting for other ghosts. It would be aconflict of interest.Welcome to You're Wrong About, where we tell the stories behind Halloween movies sometimes.Hello, Jamie Loftus.Hello, Sarah Marshall. How are you?I am so excited about this episode. You and I are about to jump into, I don't know what verbtends to use because we recorded into the past, but you are hearing it in the very near future
00:47if you're listening to this now.We're in the liminal space of this episode existing.Which is a little spooky, which is fitting with what we're talking about today,because we're going to either the realm of spirits or the realm of weird New England marriages.I feel like we're really going to meet exactly in the middle and find two people who,if nothing else, really seemed to find each other.I love the subject matter for this episode. You are going to tell me about Adam Lorraine Warren,who have made a cottage industry out of ghost hunting and now are continuing to be monetized
01:28after their deaths.Yeah, I think it's an interesting case of a very carefully guarded, I don't know, whenyour life becomes IP and very, very valuable IP, what happens to the reality of what youactually did and what actually happened?To me, the takeaway here is that there doesn't have to be conclusive proof of ghosts for astory to be scary. Anyone who listens to the show knows that I love to find new ways to be scared.I love scary stories. I love spooky stories. I love creepy stories.And this is for the people who can't just shut their spooky sense off on November 1st.
02:04This is for you. We got you.But yeah, the ones that gently come down from the Halloween spirit,Adam Lorraine, are there for you.You're coming to us from another neighborhood in podcast land.You do a ton of amazing work. Yeah, where else can people find you these days?I have a movie podcast that I've done forever with my friend Caitlin Durante called The BechtelCast. And then I have a couple of solo podcasts I've done that are deep dives on things thatI think are interesting that are heavily influenced by you, I would say.
02:38Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yes. Sorry to tell you on mic, but it's true.Yeah. The Call of My Year in Mensa, which was exactly what it sounds like. It's about slowlylearning about the eugenic history of Mensa while being harassed by people in Mensa on facebook.com.There's Lolita podcast, which is just like a full taxonomy of Lolita as a cultural ideain the book as well. And then I just finished a podcast called AcCast that's all about theKathy comics and how they were good actually. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for your work in allthese sectors. Thank you for your work. We are going to get into not the ghost world necessarily,but the things that people do when they're making money and making careers. And I just,
03:30I love this episode. And just like monetizing fear. Monetizing fear. That's, yes, I love that.That's my little buzz phrase. And if you want to hear more of Jamie and me talking about stuff,you will have more down the road. But for now, we're doing a Patreon episode this month whereI tell Jamie about the Pinkerton Detectives, which is one of my favorite subjects right now.And it gets a little ghosty there too. Right. Here's what I'll say. There is a ghost in this.The ghost turns out to be more substantiatable if that's a word than some of the other ghostswe're talking about. So you can figure that out on your own or listen to the episode.We really made a meal of it throughout October, I would say. We really did it.
04:18I'm a Halloween kid. Halloween is like McRib season. It's not over until I say it's over.Exactly. They can't stop me. And you can find us on Twitter at your wrong about,you can find us on Patreon. We have bonus episodes. Those have been not quite once every month aswe're going through this transitional time, but I've been doing more newsletters for peopleover there. So if that's something that sounds fun to you, go take a look. Jamie, where can peoplefind you? You can find me on Twitter, unfortunately, at Jamie Laftis Help and Instagram at JamieChrist Superstar. I don't tweet very much anymore, but like every so often I think of a joke thatmakes me wish I could tweet it and stop my self-imposed embargo. The best one of all of these
05:08that I want to share with you now is still crazy after all this year.Jamie Laftis, my guest, my explainer today. So again, this show is undergoing a processof changing and growing. And I know that the way that we normally do this is forme as the person who's getting this explained to me by you to tell you what my perceptionsof the Warrens are thus far. I was curious what your experience with them were because I feellike you probably a week ago knew more about this topic than I did because you know so much about thesatanic panic and Ed and Lorraine are kind of existing in that context. What do you know aboutthem, I guess, in the abstract? The first time I ever heard of them was from actually a previous
06:04you're wrong about guest, Candace Opper, who is a good friend of mine and a wonderful writer.And one of the main things about her is that she's from Connecticut. And I know that the Warrens arealso of Connecticut. And I don't know, I imagine figures who kind of show us how Connecticut islike a really interesting place that is more than just scary women wearing pearls. But then I thinkthe context I first heard about them was that Candace knew someone who had taken their ghosthunting class or their ghost hunting tour. Boy, if I had a bunch of money lying around like, yeah,I'd go learn from the Warrens how to find ghosts or demons or whatever. The next I heard of themwas when the Conjuring came out, which I remember, I haven't seen that movie since it was in theaters,
06:49but I really liked it because I love a classic haunted house story. I think there's not enoughof those in horror and those just make me happy. Isn't it cool that these people I've heard aboutare in a movie? Have you ever seen any video footage of the real Warrens? No. I definitelysaw the first Conjuring movie when it came out because I have had a crush on Patrick Wilsonsince I was like 11 years old. If you watch video footage of the real Ed Warren, he's,I think as opposite from Patrick Wilson as a person can be. But Ed Warren is such a like NewEngland uncle. He reminds me of my uncles. He's like, so here's the thing about ghosts,like he just like he has like a thick accent. He is like not this sexy, like swarthy guy. I don't
07:41know. I'm imagining him as someone who either literally or spiritually had like a nice bigsprig of chest hair out at any given time. Yes, he's like the one button open kind of guy, alwayslike leaning back, crotch forward. Yeah. It was part of what really fascinated me and like kindof broke my brain about doing research on the Warrens is how specific the vision of them in thethe Conjuring movies is and how by design that is and how that kind of shapes with their real lifedynamic. Allegedly. I feel like the Warrens at this point because now we have multiple Conjuringmultiple Annabelle's, they kind of have a little posthumous empire going. I would kind of connectthese movies based on the concept of demon hunting to what I feel is the laundering of some of the
08:40ideas that contributed to the satanic panic into exorcism movies, starting with the exorcist,which I think helped create the satanic panic. I've talked in a previous episode of the show abouthow it like created a consumer demand for exorcisms, which was met by various people, variousreligious professionals. There is like an old timeliness to this, many would argue grift, butthere's kind of an old purity about it that I appreciate parts of like a good old fashionedpsychic story. Like 19th century spiritualism, but just in the 70s and 80s. Right. Yeah. But withlike fun outfits and World War two PTSD. Where to you does the real story begin? Ed and Lorraineare both from Connecticut. They were childhood sweethearts. And that is kind of the image of them
09:34that is aggressively pushed in the Conjuring franchise. I truly cannot overstate how muchinformation there is about these people out there and how most of the information is from them.So I'm going to try to touch on some of their biggest cases, but there's just like no humanway to fact check a lot of what they say. I mean, every Conjuring movie is tangentially based offof something they maybe did. They were on site of like the Amityville horror. They did Annabelle.They did the Arnie Johnson devil made me do it defense. They did the haunting in Connecticut.They were just all over the place. Ed was born in 1926 Lorraine was born in 1927.Ed was the son of a very Catholic state trooper, which just sounds like a negative vibe.
10:31And he says in all of his interviews and his thick New England accent that Patrick Wilsondoesn't have, he grew up in a house that was haunted. And so he has all of these memoriesfrom, I think it's from age five to age 12 that he said he would see ghosts regularly.They would never hurt him, but he would notice them. And if he ever brought it up to his dad,his dad would say, I know, don't tell anyone about it on Lorraine's and she was from somehowan even more Catholic family. But they would regularly make that distinction where they'relike, well, Ed was Catholic, but Lorraine was Catholic. Connecticut is a kingdom where eachfamily is more Catholic than the last. And so their dynamic is Ed is the demonologist,
11:22which I think in this relationship kind of boils down to like the logistics guy.And Lorraine is she's the psychic. He's the managing editor and she's the editor in chief.Exactly. Most of the stuff that they do is set up by Ed a lot of the time, but relies on whatLorraine brings to the table in order for it to actually be pulled off. So there's a series ofaesthetically perfect interviews that Ed and Lorraine did with their son-in-law Tony in thislike basic cable studio that I think that they rented in the 90s and early 2000s where he wouldjust interview them about their lives. He would never disclose that they were related to eachother, which I had to figure that out on my own. But Lorraine said in the early 2000s that she
12:17realized that she could see people's auras. She could hear thoughts. I guess she had anexperience at school where she looked at like a sapling on Arbor day when these students wereplanting a tree and she could see the tree it was going to become. And she told a nun she could seethe tree it was going to be. That was not a Catholic enough thing to say and she got in troubleand was told that that is black magic and to never bring it up again.Oh dear. Can I tell you real quick one of my theories about people who either say that they'repsychics or witches or who get accused of that kind of thing through history?Please, yes.
12:58Especially in male dominated societies or you know religious hierarchies or what have you. Ithink there's often very little room for comprehension of emotional intelligencebecause I think patriarchal structure really flourishes in a world where its leaders haveas little emotional intelligence as possible and my key piece of evidence is America right nowand your honor exhibit a the ability to kind of like put your finger to the wind and understandwhat's happening in a way that people around you have no idea how you got there. I think thatthat can seem like sorcery to people especially if it allows you to figure things out that peoplewould prefer for you not to know because you're supposed to be stupid.
13:46Right. It's such a bummer to hear those stories about kids being kind of forced tocompartmentalize something that is like an inherently positive thing. I don't know. She'slike I can see a tree that's growing. Who is that hurting? Right.Okay so they're growing up they're vaguely interested in these very like spiritual things inghosts and visions but they don't meet until they're teenagers. On the official website forthe organization that the Warrens will eventually found in 1952 the New England Society forPsychic Research which is run by you guessed it Tony.That's great keep it in the family. Tony has graciously put together a timeline of
14:31the Warrens relationship on the NESPR website that once you know it was put together by their sonin law is detailed to an extent that is kind of creepy but he wrote this incredible blog postabout how Ed and Lorraine met. It is riddled with typos they meet at the movie theater.Lorraine is 16. Ed is 17. He's working as an usher. She's going to see a James Cagney moviewith her gal pals. Here's how Tony describes it in a blog post. At the time Lorraine showedlittle interest in boys. As she stated in later years I was concentrating on my school workand besides boys were rough not gentle like my brother Jim. Boys were too rougher on the edgesfor me but inside the girls introduced her to the energetic young usher. His name was Ed.
15:23When she saw her Ed she thought to herself gee what a nice looking young man. She related laterhow spiffy he looked with his sharply creased pants and perfectly quaffed hair. She recalledand he smelled like Noxima. Anyways they meet at a movie theater. He gets her an ice cream soda.Lorraine says that she has a vision as he's walking her home and she looks to the side and she cansee him as an older man and she's like I'm going to spend my life with this person. Very romantic.I really love though that we got to know how everybody or I guess mostly how Ed smelled.So rarely do people remember to describe how a scene smells but it's so important.So he was all clean and she had a vision and this is going to be her husband. By this time it's
16:15towards the end of World War II Ed enlists in the Navy while they're still dating. Really early intothe Navy the boat that he stationed on hits an oil tanker and he uses his survivor's leaveto get married to Lorraine. He stays in the Navy until the early 50s and I have one kid named JudyI think in the early 1950s. Ed tells Lorraine I'm really interested in ghosts. I believe in ghosts.I want to chase ghosts when I get out of the Navy and Lorraine tells Ed that she thinks that shehas some clairvoyancy and he actually believes her. To me there's something so exciting aboutlike you fall in love and you live in this society that so far has discouraged you from even talkingabout this. You're like you know I really like ghosts and then you both get to share that like
17:10that's really romantic. That's what they want you to think Sarah. I don't know. I mean that did seemto be true is like that was like a huge bonding thing where Lorraine was always very impressed thatEd believed her about that and also encouraged her to do stuff with him and you know whateverwhich I guess in the early 50s wasn't nothing is that he wanted them to collaborate. So once he'sout of the Navy they decide that they're going all in on ghost stuff. So for about like 10 to 15years Ed would work kind of odd jobs to support the family and they would spend all of their freetime doing ghost things. So in 1952 they found the New England Society for Psychic Research.Sounds fairly good. The issue is they had no experience and they had no one who was willing
18:13to give them access to allegedly haunted houses. So the way that they worked around this was thatEd had been to two years of art school and he liked painting. So the plan was that it sounds likea Nathan For You episode but it worked for them. They would drive around to places that they hadheard might be haunted and Ed would set up an easel outside of the house and would start franticallysketching the house and then as he described it in one of these Tony interviews he would thensend Lorraine with his sketch of the house to the door and she would knock on the door and sayhey my husband's an artist and he just drew this picture of your house. Do you want to buy it andcan we come inside? And I guess that this worked. Ed was selling these sketches and paintings and
19:07that's how they would gain access to the house to gain the trust of the family and learn abouthauntings. People really did used to be more trusting didn't they? I was like this soundslike a recipe for disaster but yeah Ed was like I just sent my wife up there with her Irish personality.It seems like they got access to a ton of places then and like started to build this reputation forbeing local haunted house lovers. My modern true crime brain says that like sending your wife tolike sort of force her way into a stranger's home is a great way to get her to become theghost that is haunting it. Right. I don't love Ed but I do have a soft spot for Lorraine. Lorrainealso maintains that during this early period she was still relatively skeptical of what Ed wanted
19:58to do. I think that Lorraine was like oh I'm a very intuitive person I feel like I can see thingsbefore they happen sometimes the more I thought about it like well that doesn't necessarilytranslate to wanting to go to any random haunted house that your husband wants to go to but that'ssort of how it ended up for them. I do feel like marriage at that time I can imagine being excitingbecause as a single woman like there's so many spaces that you can't go into unattended and somany things that you just can't do and then if you marry some madcap guy then like suddenly you're onmadcap adventures all the time and it's appropriate because it's not your idea and you're supposedto do whatever he wants. Right where it sounds like this went on for a couple of years where they
20:40would spend a lot of time on the road sometimes they would be living hand to mouth on like whetherEd could sell one of his and I say this with love not very good paintings Judy their very small childis not there for any of this which I think is like the first thing that poked a hole in theconjuring presentation of Ed and Lorraine for me where they are presented in the franchise likeJudy is a part of the story to the point where Judy is the star of one of the Annabelle moviesthey're presented as this kind of ideal religious pious nuclear family that happens to hunt ghostsbut Judy didn't really grow up around her parents very much it sounds like that they were off chasingghosts and she lived with her grandmother Judy is very supportive of her parents legacy to this
21:34to this day she's still alive she's married to Tony the whole bit but she said that she didn'tknow what her parents even did for a living until she was a teenager oh wow and it sounds like shedidn't get to know them very well until she was an early adult which is around the time they gotfamous she would have been whatever teenager or young adult and Judy is not very chatty anddoesn't seem to want to discuss much so we may never know but it sounds like she just didn'tgrow up around them Ed is trying to develop this pseudoscience of how ghosts appear it's a lot ofvague ghost bustery language to the point where it's been like speculated that likea lot of 80s media is pulling from stuff that Ed Warren said in like the 50s and 60s where it's like
22:28you know in places that are highly electromagnetic you're more likely to see a ghost and vibrationsin the air is what makes it possible to hear a ghost versus not and he needs to justify hisplace in the NESPR. I feel so conflicted about ghosts because a part of me like wants thereto be ghosts but a bigger part of me is like the ghosts must be pretty unhappy and boredif they are hanging out and like I don't want them to be dealing with that.Four in ten Americans believe in ghosts is what I read on a website I'd never heard of.I'm actually amazed it's not higher I feel like there have to be people who are like who kind ofbelieve in ghosts but are too embarrassed to say. One of the things that I think is kind of
23:11silliest about a lot of American ghost media is like this house is scary because people died init and it's like well people have died everywhere. Right. If a fraction of the ghosts that should behere if you had like some small percentage of dead people were walking around as ghosts then it wouldjust be like ghost grand central station. We talk about ghosts inhabiting structures and being stuckin kind of particular places and then there's stuff like the Titanic. Now we're talking.We're like as human beings our little brains like have a hard time finding language or emotions tolike describe to ourselves the space around mass tragedy and just the concept of a place being haunted.I don't know I feel like that's another way of calling something sacred or showing respect
24:01for the dead or the way that people died. In my heart I believe in ghosts in one way or anotherbut also I feel like the human obsession with haunted places I don't want to push that awaybecause I feel like we're trying to use that constructively a lot of the time. Right. So bythe late 60s the Warrens had effectively dealt up this reputation as local ghost busters and theystart doing lectures at colleges. Will they evict the ghosts from your house like do you call themand they like or do they just diagnose what are they doing? It kind of depends. They always claimthat they never sought out haunted places they would wait for people to come to them whichthat's already not true but whatever but there would be a lot of people that would say hey I think
24:50something's going on at my house can you check it out. They would talk it through and if they thoughtit was a good case for them they would drive over to your house. Their business model was that theydon't charge the family if they have to travel you have to pay for their travel and lodgingbut it doesn't cost anything to do. They made their money via lectures and book deals andlife rights and all this other stuff but yeah you would call them up be like hey my daughter'sfoaming at the mouth and she's the devil can you come over and they would say yesEd's the demonologist so he would go over and figure out if there's demons afoot if someone'slike actively possessed or if things are actively moving around they would bring recording equipment
25:39they would do kind of the whole ghost hunter thing and then in other cases there were a lot of casesof them describing law enforcement calling them or the church like they were constantly colludingwith the police and the catholic church which is just incredible the two most reliable perfectsystems that exist. The police would call them and say hey we are trying to find out more informationabout this woman who was murdered and as they tell it Lorraine would go in she would touch some ofthe objects or evidence and would try to lead them somewhere so it kind of depended on like whatthe situation called for if it was a demon situation Ed's going to take the lead if it's a dead ladysituation Lorraine's going to take it. And I find police psychic so interesting and the research
26:30that I've done on it like there's a lot of charlatanry but I feel like especially you know inlike the the 60s and the 70s when like effectively there were either no women on a local policeforce or no women who were being listened to like maybe the only way that you would haveinsight from a woman about a female victim in an investigation would be if you called a psychicand she was like I sense that the victim rejected the killer's sexual advances and he felt humiliatedand enraged and strangled her and it's like yeah that's reasonable that's the kind of thing an FBIprofiler would say. Right right the tricky thing is that it's just so hard to verify what they wereactually doing if what they're saying is true and that Lorraine was able to go to these very
27:27agro skeptical police stations and give some insight into like here is what happened to thiswoman like and this comes up in the conjuring movies a fair amount forcing law enforcement toempathize with women who have been killed and it's not just because of what her skills were she waslike not only is this what happened this is how she was feeling when it happened and you know shewould like feel fear in objects and I hope that that's true because that did seem like one of themore positive contributions and then the other thing that it seems like even if they are completecharlatans there are certain families that it seems like they very cleverly lifted out of povertyby potentially manufacturing a haunting where really yeah there are some theories of like
28:21double collusion of in theory inventing a haunting isn't hurting anyone right so I'm in my apartmentand I'm like oh shit I can't afford to stay here like what am I gonna do and then I decide okayI'm going to say that a demon is choking me every single night and I'm gonna post about it onlineI'm gonna tell everyone I know about it and get all of this press and then I'm gonna get a book dealand then I'm gonna be able to afford to stay in this apartment yeah like that was kind of the thinkingwhich is kind of brilliant yeah and as those kind of conspiracy theories go Ed and Lorraine are agreat way of validating that that's happening right oh my god yeah and they would be like ohyeah definitely she's getting choked by a demon this is so awful so that gets you more press and
29:13it's like how are you accredited how are any expert witnesses accredited it's a very unregulatedsystem in some places and times and then they write a book about it and they get money so it likekind of works out for everybody wow that feels very Connecticut in that way of like let's collaborateand work some angles you know yeah but there are theories around a few of their cases includingAmityville where they're like that is a strong possibility of what happened here of like afamily that was about to lose a house that a crime had occurred in and then okay what are we gonna doto be able to afford to stay in this house or in some cases move to a different house that's nicerit's so brilliant and so sad that like sometimes the surest way to avoid eviction in America is
30:01demons I totally agree uh in certain cases it's brilliant and I'm like wow even if they're completein total liars I'm rooting for them in this scenario right their first few big cases werethe Annabelle the doll case which three movies about now it's very impressive like to my knowledgeshe doesn't talk does she do very much at all she just sits there right she definitely moves I onlywatched one of the Annabelle's because there's one Annabelle that revolves around Judy Warrengetting stuck at home while her parents are investigating she was stuck at home with ababysitter for the weekend and Annabelle tortures her and the babysitter I know what makes me laughabout Annabelle is you can picture the like the doll in the movies like at the very scary movie doll
30:53she looks like she's made out of wood like a gritty Chucky energy yeah yeah she she very much doesthe real Annabelle was a raggedy and doll it was just a regular raggedy and doll I feel likemaking it a doll that everyone has that was what was fun about Chucky is like Chucky was this massproduced doll right and that he's supposed to be so cute right the museum that may not exist anymoreat the Warren's house like that whole room full of haunted objects is a real place that they hadand that you could tour and the most prominently displayed object is a raggedy and doll with ared light bulb hanging over her head in like a locked box with a sign that was like do not openunder any circumstances if you're like they're kind of geniuses oh my god the story of of Annabelle
31:46it's their most major case that is also completely impossible to verify a woman in Connecticut inHartford gave her daughter who was a 28 year old nurse a raggedy and doll second hand as likea cute gift and the the reason you can't verify it is no one has ever said who the nurse is who thewomen were who had the raggedy and doll so you can never find out hmm so the nurse had the raggedyand doll she was roommates with another nurse she also had a boyfriend and the roommates startedlike joking around and they would like sit the raggedy and doll at the table and I guess weirdstuff started happening things were moving around it wasn't super sinister but one day the raggedyand dolls arms started moving on their own so the nurses got freaked out enough that they called
32:40a local medium not the warrants I don't know someone they found in the phone book who came overand communicated with the doll and said that the doll said that her name was Annabelle her spiritwas trapped in the doll and she was a six-year-old girl who had died in a car accident the nursesdid some research and it turns out there was a girl named Annabelle who had died in a car accidentat age six and so then they became more attached to the doll and they were like we love Annabelleshe's our friend and like we're gonna protect her and I guess once they decided they reallyloved her and they believed that the story goes that Annabelle's behavior got scary and all of asudden like there would be violent stuff happening there was like a case where the nurse's boyfriend
33:29it sounds like it just kind of had it and he was like I'm sick of Annabelle she sucks she's notshe's not a person and then he woke up with like all these scratches all over him because Annabelledidn't like that and then you're like how is he scratching him with her little soft little fabrichands with her soft raggedy and body this is something that Ed Warren calls psychic knivesoh okay thank god I'm I'm an idiot so so the boyfriend got scratched up with psychic knivesthen the Warrens come in and their narrative is oh well that other medium said that the doll saidher name is Annabelle but it's because there's a demon inside the doll the demon is lying to youthe demon says it's Annabelle so you'll trust it and love it and it's actually the devil and it's
34:22gotta kill you which I remember from Satanic Panic Stuff is a theme I think where like demonslike preying you as like you know someone influenced by hippies or your your Ouija boards or what haveyou because they're like I'm a ghost and you're like oh that's nice and then they're like justkidding I'm a demon you've been punked that is like such a thing that especially Ed Warren brings upover and over like distinguishing ghosts which are just like misguided people with unfinishedbusiness that will generally not bother you too much and then like demons and the only way you canget rid of a demon is by hiring the Warrens and letting them write a book about it and give youno money so Annabelle is their first big case they have a another case where they get a lot of press
35:12when they're called to solve a haunting at West Point in 1972 so Lorraine is wandering the hallsof West Point she's saying there's JFK was JFK ever there and West Point was like yes he wasand she's like well there he is and like they're just doing kind of like a lot of like funnyharmless peacocking ghost kind of work and so they're slowly becoming a national entityso they solve this thing at West Point right because it's like a fun story like I feel likeif I'm a journalist and I'm writing for you know the Bridgeport Times or whatever I knowpeople are going to read my local ghost hunter couple story right and and they on the surfaceseem like such an enormous couple doing this very weird thing and it's being kind of validated by
36:02these larger and larger establishments as time goes on where I feel like a lot of the fascinationwith them was like isn't it wild that like the police need their help or like the militarylike West Point can't get rid of a ghost but we're going to invite these people to do it yeahand it feeds this idea that like not just ghost believers but Catholics really know what's goingon and how to heal America right which I imagine was popular with other Catholics I mean I guessyou can't really have an exorcism story without it being really really steeped in religion butthe conjuring movies are more religious than I feel like most movies are in 2021 right and canyou talk about that for people who who don't have the time or the inclination for this for the one
36:48averse so the conjuring movies yeah they're that's the gigantic franchise that use theEd and Lorraine case files basically that's like how they're building out their universeand they portray Ed and Lorraine as a couple that's very much in love Lorraine is the giftedclairvoyant Ed is the sensitive demonologist any case that the Warrens were tangentiallyinvolved in these movies essentially rewrite the story to make Ed and Lorraine the protagonistsand the most important people in the story which I think shows the most in the most recentinstallment which has the best title the conjuring three the devil made me do itit's like built around this case with this guy Arnie Johnson who killed his landlord
37:40and was the first person to I guess in the US to attempt to claim he did the crime because hewas possessed in court there was all this press of like wow he's saying the devil made him do itand then the judge was like I'm not accepting that and it was shut down right away and then hewent to jail for manslaughter but the way that the movie rewrites it that I feel like is very likeof this franchise they kind of rewrite the story to be like Ed and Lorraine need to be able toprove that demons are true in court or a man will be sent to the electric chair whoa this man willdie unless we can prove that demons are true in court just this totally bizarro like rewrittenI am the protagonist narrative I feel like making something a courtroom drama like
38:33gives it a patina of legitimacy somehow well we're talking about the devil maybe do it asa wild one and I was thinking of you as I was learning more about it because it is so satanicpanic where this is like an early 80s case that they did arnie johnson killed his landlord whosename was bono which is funny he killed his landlord bono but months before the warrens had alreadyknown that family because arnie's girlfriend's little brother appeared to be possessed by a demonso the warrens had already been brought over to their house to conduct a seance like ed is anaccredited demonologist which is very unusual if you're not a priest but he can't do an exorcismthat's against the rules he can do a seance but he can't do an exorcism you got to get a priest
39:25for an exorcism and like that's a rule that he needs to follow that's one of the laws he respectsthat's the one thing that tony who's like the keeper of the keys tony's like that would neverhappen ed would never do an exorcism he respects the rules of ghosts but so anyways they had alreadymet this family because they'd interacted with this kid and after that the extent of the warrenscontact was that lorraine called the police and was like I don't have a good feeling about whathappened with that little boy david I don't think that's going to end well and then the police werelike okay lorraine thank you click several months later arnie johnson in a fit of rage and alsohis landlord was being very drunk and handsy with arnie's little cousin stabbed him and killed him
40:16once lorraine finds out that arnie johnson killed someone she like plays a game of 40chess immediately she calls the police back and is like what did I tell you something bad happenedthe demon went from that little boy david into arnie and arnie killed that guy because it waslike the transit of demon property or whatever yeah I don't know like that feels somehow moreirresponsible to me than making a straight up this house is haunted movie yeah giving legitimacy to atime when we were trying to bring demons into the courtroom essentially like when people were likereally working hard and a somewhat systematic way to do that I feel like their haunted house casesare the most famous ones but they dabbled in like kind of anything supernatural adjacent that was
41:02going to guarantee them a lot of press that was in the new england area one that I did some researchon that was one of their more famous early ones because it took place in their hometown in bridgeport connecticut was the lindley street poltergeist of 1974 this is one of their only big cases thathas no like movie adaptation to it the story behind it is a couple that was like friends of friendsof the warrens gerard and laura gooden lived in this little house they had lost a young son they'dlost a seven-year-old son and then they adopted a daughter who is of indigenous descent she was afirst nations kid named marsha in 1968 and they moved into this house marsha was one of the onlykids at her school that wasn't white and she was getting bullied a lot she was staying home from
42:01school because she had been like beat up and like wasn't doing physically great allegedlysome versions of the story also say she'd recently seen the exorcist and was going through a verylike emotionally traumatic time she becomes quote unquote possessed the parents are scared and itbecomes this like town-wide obsession of like at one point there were 2000 people in front of thiskid's house you know thinking that she's like possessed by a demon and so the warrens getcalled over the warrens do what the warrens do and they're like this is totally legit as as like therecord goes over a course of months it says that there were 77 independent witnesses tostuff going on at this house although later on many people took back what they said and they
42:55were like oh i think that it was just a traumatized child that lived in that home so it became likenot a national thing but like a local sensation that it's like oh thisthere's a kid that lives in bridgeport who is possessed and no one ever talked about how shewas being bullied and had just seen the exorcist because like people i feel like really wantedto have a possessed girl in town right i do think it's interesting that the majority of thesewarren stories involve a young girl becoming possessed it's a lot of like mothers and younggirls that are possessed by these spirits and yeah marcia goodin like it sounds like she had a reallydifficult life after this it was equally traumatized by all of this negative attention on her from her
43:46like entire town yeah and so she kind of went off the grid and like left town and cut off contactwith her family and like her teens and early 20s she passed away relatively young she died in2015 she was going to canada to see if she could find her birth family unclear if she was successfulbut when she passed away no one wanted her ashes because they thought that they were hauntedoh that's so horrible there's fun ones and then there's ones where it does seem like there isclearly someone who's been exploited and often that person is very young or marginalized or justextremely vulnerable and it just she was extremely hard to track down and seemed to like very muchnot want to talk about or comment on that period of her life at all it just seems like it was just
44:37like only a source of upset so there's no there's no way to really verify what actually happenedthere there are some cases the warrens worked on including the one that the the case in englandthat the conjuring two is based on where it later kind of became clear that it was like a young girlkind of acting out because she wasn't getting a lot of attention at home which could potentially bei mean a contributing factor for marsha gooden but there's just kind of no way of knowing andi don't know that one like broke my heart but it's like that felt like a very like 70s thing to bedoing especially in a place that is so aggressively catholic and white as kinetic it like could youset up a kid for failure anymore i read this book called ghost hunters that was co-written with
45:29ed and lorraine and like some guy that didn't sue them which some of them dideach chapter was really short and it was about a different case that you couldn't verify witha gun to your head and one of them i like jumped as i was like walking to the grocery store becauseit was like chapter five lorraine and bigfoot but the story was so funny like ed and lorraine get acall from they say quote unquote the hill people this book was written in i think the early 80sand they're like bigfoot is out here we're afraid bigfoot is around so they go to stone mountaingeorgia where kenneth parcel is from i assume so they go to the parcel residencealmost right away she sees bigfoot from a distance of course and his foot is big syrup because it's
46:28injured it's not naturally big oh and she starts to telepathically communicate with bigfoot and sherealizes that bigfoot is very intelligent and he's been through a lot like she offers moreempathy to bigfoot than she does to children that are real bigfoot telepathically informsher that he has a wife and he wants to be reunited with her but he's injured and the bigfoots havemarrying no that's but there's a colony of big feet he got lost from the pack because he cut hisfoot oh and he's so then lorraine telepathically says come here bigfoot they're just afraid becausethey don't understand you and come to the village and i'll i'll show everyone and we'll heal youand then you can go see your bigfoot wife and then unfortunately a college student blows an air horn
47:23and bigfoot runs away crying crying crying because he thought lorraine was his friend and thenshe scared him she watched him walk all the way up a mountain with his injured footand that's the story of lorraine and bigfoot i feel like lorraine does better when she likemakes up a story completely with like her and just a made up character as opposed to like areal person who has to have a demon put in them that one really rocked my world you just tellthey're like they need to sell books and they're filling space they write entire chapters aboutjust abnormal people they've met and it kind of has nothing to do with demons where they're likewe went to this funeral guy's house and he admitted to having sex with people who had died and edd said
48:12you've got to stop that and he said you're right and that's kind of like the whole chapter likehas nothing to do with anything it's just like a person that they met who did something terribleand so okay so unfortunately this is the biggest most serious allegation that's come up with thewarrens there was a huge hollywood reporter article that came out about this in 2017there was a woman that ed warren knew named judith penny who has at least started a lawsuitagainst the warren estate and also warner brothers who makes the conjuring moviesessentially for damages for erasing her from this franchise entirely because as she tells it she'snow in her 70s but in the early 1960s ed warren was her bus driver while she was in high school
49:09they began some sort of affair while she was still underage and she ended up living with the warrensand assisting them with and like remaining in a relationship with edd oh no which lorraine iguess completely knew about for four decades oh my god yeah and then on top of that it sounds like sheassisted in a lot of the work they were doing for 40 years she lived at their house and it wasjust like professor marston and the wonder women or was it like abraham and hagar like was this athruple or there's a no it no it does it it wasn't a thruple it sounds like um lorraine and judithdidn't like each other oh my god yeah so it just sounds like ed warren kind of had his wife and thenhis secret wife and they just kind of had to deal with it and they just all have to go demon hunting
50:07together until they all fall down dead and i kind of wonder like how how much judith penny was liketaking care of their kid whose name was also judith she put all this forward in 2017 afterthe conjuring movies were like already on a way to making a billion dollars and such a huge elementof those movies is this image of like ed and the rain warren as this very pious monogamous couplethat like the strength of their love is what extracts the demons from the random people inconnecticut right okay so this was the paragraph that i was just like okay it says quote even in1963 a teenage girl did not move in with a married man without attracting notice that year judith pennywas arrested after someone reported her relationship with ed to local police according to her november
50:592014 declaration she spent a night in the north end prison in bridgeport while police tried topersuade her to sign a statement admitting to the affair after penny refused to cooperate she wasordered by the court to report to a delinquent youth office for the next month according to penny'saccount ed picked her up from school every week and drove her to the mandated meetings Jesus yeahlike it's really bad yeah and he's just like well judith like time to serve your nickel becausei need to keep having you be my secret ghost hunter girlfriend right like a teenage kid and and idon't know i feel like the conversation of how lorraine factors into this is likekind of out of my depth because who knows there are like allegations that ed warren was physically
51:43abusive towards lorraine at different points in the relationship and what it boils down to isit doesn't seem like ed was a very good person it's interesting because ed dies in 2006 he neversees the conjuring universe lorraine does lorraine died in 2019 and so when tony is helpingfacilitate the life rights so that the conjuring movies can be made i think what kind of tippedpeople off to like something is not quite right here is that the way the life rights were soldand described to water brothers was like so particular lorraine warren when they were sellingthese life rights to new line cinema in like the early 2010s her deal was to serve as a consultanton the movies which she did for all of them because i think that the production on the one
52:34that just came out wrapped before she died and there were all of these like stipulations thefilms couldn't show her or her husband engaging in crimes including sex with minors child pornographyprostitution or sexual assault lorraine like neither the husband nor wife could be depictedas participating in an extramarital sexual relationship and then there's like all thesetalent attorneys that are like that's not a standard contract to be like just make sure that youdon't show my husband cheating on me with a mind like it's very very specific i don't know i'm veryinclined to believe judith penny she lived with them for 40 years i mean she she didn't break thingsoff with ed until 2003 when he was very sick and she wanted to marry someone oh juda and that was
53:24when she left wow it's a funny kind of intersection of genre because there's like the juggernaut ofwhatever horror franchise is able to keep making money in a given time and then there's the ethicsof representing real people and like those things don't normally cross paths right like i can'tthink of anyone filing suit against the makers of paranormal activity because their life storyand their trauma has been erased from those movies right the third player in this very messy lawsuitis someone who had written a book with the warrens who also had i mean not an allegation of like abuseand also living with them for four decades but basically was like the conjuring is like adaptingall this work i did that i know is fake because i wrote it with ed and lorraine warren and that's
54:17what they were telling me wasn't true so i feel like i'm entitled to some money here becausethey're adapting the lie i wrote down for them i feel like based on a true story is always a goodselling point for a horror movie but that's also where all of their problems have come from butit's like as a horror movie viewer i don't think anyone's going to the conjuring being like i expectto the letter details because it's like who's gonna know like yeah you want to see a haunted housemovie but then also i'm like well but if i'm judith penny i would be pissed off for me as a horrorviewer i always want to not know how much is true and is not true and i expect it to be like veryloosely based on some little kernel effect right yeah it's like how do you sort out libel in a
55:02horror movie where like everyone agrees please lie to me i guess it's like the ghosts don'thave to be real but the depictions of the ghost hunters have to be at least recognizable at leastlike adjacent to the truth i wasn't able to find if that lawsuit had settled i know that the authorand the producers lawsuits fell through but i i'm not sure what happened with judith i'm sofor cheesy horror movies and i just feel like there have to be some non-problematic ghosthunters out there to make movies about you would think yeah i don't doubt that they care abouteach other i don't doubt that they love their daughter but there was definitely a lot of otherstuff going on so for this one the conjuring three the devil made me do it there are some players
55:47in the story that are like yes this is exactly how it happened thank you for telling our story onHBO max and those people are paid consultants on the movie so like arnie johnson is still alive hewas released from prison after five years oh wow and then he married his girlfriend debbie and debbiewas hired as a consultant along with lorraine warren on the conjuring three the devil made me do itright of course she's going on any channel that will have her saying like yes this is exactlywhat happened one of the daughters from the first conjuring story which is a haunting that happenedin the early 70s in rhod Island one of the daughters is still very much carrying the torch of likeyes there was a little bit of freestyle jazz in terms of how it was adapted but for the most part
56:40it's completely true and it's not like anyone can truly prove her wrong right her career now iswriting horror novels and who's writing stories about haunted houses so it behooves her to bethe conjuring girl you know and then in the case of the arnie johnson case the little boy david whowas said to have been possessed sued the warrens yeah you're gonna get some of that he filed alawsuit a couple of years ago saying that he's moved on he didn't want the movie to be madeit violated his privacy libel an intentional infliction of emotional distress which i thinkis like a pretty fair thing yeah if you were told as a kid that you were possessed and then nowyou're 40 years old and you're seeing that played back at you even though you no longer believe
57:32that's true and you can't do anything about it and you don't get even compensated for it like thatsucks yes and again like it feels revealing that you can be depicted as a possessed child in a movieagainst your will right like that sounds wrong i don't know if we're speculating about the deadlike we can't harm them in nearly the same way we can harm the living by making up a bunch of stuffright i hope they do the conjuring three and a half maybe the devil didn't make me do itso the end of the warrens lives they stopped actively investigating stuff in the early 90sand they kind of pivot to legacy building the warren presidential library well i guess it'slike they're anabelle room like they're a cult museum becomes a big thing starting in the 90s
58:22and they're always hanging out there and talking to people and they do a lot of lectures they dothese taped interviews they write a lot of books where it just seems like they're kind of buildinga nest egg without constantly going to people's houses about ghosts anymore ed dies in 2006Lorraine is like unofficially retired and then all the conjuring stuff kicks up in the early20 tens and Lorraine is a paid consultant judith penny from the beginning of the story who livedwith the warrens forever was suing Lorraine for the cost of her salary as a consultant on the moviewhich i thought was a good poetic justice move so she was making a hundred fifty thousand dollarsper conjuring movie to just be like uh make me nice you know like and she died in 2019 and now
59:18tony is in charge of everything judy wants nothing to do with anything and tony's wholething is making youtube videos where he's filming himself from an up ankle where the uh new englandsociety forsaking research under tony's reign it seems like it's more of what i would want it to beoh that's great he's a goofy weird guy who really really believes that ghosts exist and he wantspeople to pay him a small fee to talk to them about it which is like how ed and Lorraine startedand but i feel like they were so in the right place at the right time where they happened to beworking you know at a time where all of a sudden interest in the occult just went up massivelyand then they did a bunch of i think questionable stuff to deal with that and kind of get their bag
01:00:11in that context as people who at least presented themselves as very religious and very devout andlike good upstanding people like they were able to ride this wave of ideas about demons and possessionand occult stuff definitely becoming trendy in a way that ostensibly religious people or at leastchristians in america were being like no that's bad it's very bad don't do it and like they're ableto profit off of a trend by seeming like they're against demons but it's like the demons seem toreally mostly show up where they go right and again it's like i feel like there's nothingno dream more american than creating value where once there was none and then a step above eventhat is like is doing that by just making something up and then getting people to buy that i mean that
01:01:02feels very topical i was hoping that it would be like more a victimless crime situation than notbut it's very it just seems like a very mixed bag with the kind of stuff they were doing yeahin a way that was like opportunistic in sometimes it would be like a silly bigfoot thing and it'slike the funniest thing i've ever heard and then sometimes there would be someone clearly sufferingbut they took the money where they could get it after having kind of gone on this research andemotional journey like what do you think about this franchise is it ethical to keep enjoyingconjuring movies yeah i don't feel great about watching an ed warren character be like hailed asthis sensitive incredible romantic hero when you know that that is demonstrably not true but that
01:01:51said i will probably watch the next anabelle movie i don't know how do you feel about that i'm veryvery conflicted about it i know well and it's funny because like i am someone who has to explainmy love of horror movies fairly often what people say often is like why make or watch horror moviesbecause like they glorify violence that one of my answers is that violence is something thatmaybe can seem alluring in a way that exposure can take away then movies can be maybe like a wayto exercise your imagination without encouraging it to grow or actually to be like oh like theseare really horrible things and i'm curious about it because i'm a teenager and i feel indestructibleand i need to be shown that's not true right because the fact that especially adolescents
01:02:43seek out horror for a chance to encounter the concept of death that's something that peopleneed i mean i need it clearly and personally last year when i was feeling kind of some of my mostparalyzed and depressed feelings about being stuck in a pandemic the saw movies and otherhorror movies like really did it for me because i just needed to be in part reminded that likeeven though everything felt meaningless and stasis that like my actions had meaning andconsequences and that this was happening because we all really want to stay alive and help otherpeople stay alive right ethical horror movies are a thing that exists and it's not just alawless field anabelle i feels spun out enough to be another degree of separation from the warrens
01:03:27themselves which kind of launders the whole thing a bit but yeah i agree with you i feel likethere's documentary and there's fiction and this idea of taking real lives and depicting themin a biopic like that gets really weird really fast especially with like a big hollywood moviewhere the goal is to make money i think the trend is toward being kind of conservative and storytellingand leaning on what structures tend to work and are profitable and then people are either going toseem better or worse than they really were right i don't understand how hollywood law works but itseems to me that it would make that much harder if not impossible for someone else to make anunrelated warrens movie to try and kind of close the circle and be like here's the real horror of
01:04:11the warrens and it was having an underage unpaid secret mistress ghost in turn the whole timethey should just give judith penny the money she wants and if she does want the story out therethen great if she doesn't then just like let her live her life yeah i feel like the twist here isthat the villain was really a shitty guy and ultimately a deceptive couple who abused someof the very real people in their path thank you so much jamie this was wonderful this was everythingthat my creepy little heart needed today thank you for having me on to talk about this weird couplei love this show so much thank you for having me i'm so happy that you're a part of it nowand you will be back and i will be telling you about more scary stuff stuff that starts off
01:05:00scary one way and becomes scary another way perhaps predictably who knows and i love yourshows so much and i'm you know i would be happy to have you on any old time but i think especiallyin this this exciting time when we're growing and changing like a low haunted raggedy and all allby herself on a plane across america you have your own expanded universe you're flying first classbaby
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