You're Wrong About - Ed and Lorraine Warren with Jamie Loftus

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Special Guest Jamie Loftus tells Sarah about Ed and Lorraine Warren (of The Conjuring and Annabelle fame). Topics of interest include Connecticut as a locus of scary happenings, New England uncles, and psychic communication with a tearstained Bigfoot. Here's where to find Jamie:The Bechdel Cast [podcast] My Year in Mensa [podcast] and Aack Cast [podcast] Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-the-bechdel-cast-30089535/https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-my-year-in-mensa-55379945/https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-aack-cast-by-jamie-loftus-83922273/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

If you want to splurge on a weird ghost hunting adventure and it's at all possible for you to do so, like do it while you can because ghosts can't take you hunting for other ghosts. It would be a conflict 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 verb tends to use because we recorded into the past, but you are hearing it in the very near future

if 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

after their deaths. Yeah, I think it's an interesting case of a very carefully guarded, I don't know, when your life becomes IP and very, very valuable IP, what happens to the reality of what you actually did and what actually happened? To me, the takeaway here is that there doesn't have to be conclusive proof of ghosts for a story 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.

This 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 Bechtel Cast. And then I have a couple of solo podcasts I've done that are deep dives on things that I think are interesting that are heavily influenced by you, I would say.

Yeah. 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 slowly learning 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 idea in the book as well. And then I just finished a podcast called AcCast that's all about the Kathy comics and how they were good actually. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for your work in all these 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,

I 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 where I 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 ghosts we'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.

I'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 as we're going through this transitional time, but I've been doing more newsletters for people over there. So if that's something that sounds fun to you, go take a look. Jamie, where can people find you? You can find me on Twitter, unfortunately, at Jamie Laftis Help and Instagram at Jamie Christ Superstar. I don't tweet very much anymore, but like every so often I think of a joke that makes me wish I could tweet it and stop my self-imposed embargo. The best one of all of these

that 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 process of changing and growing. And I know that the way that we normally do this is for me as the person who's getting this explained to me by you to tell you what my perceptions of the Warrens are thus far. I was curious what your experience with them were because I feel like you probably a week ago knew more about this topic than I did because you know so much about the satanic panic and Ed and Lorraine are kind of existing in that context. What do you know about them, I guess, in the abstract? The first time I ever heard of them was from actually a previous

you'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 are also of Connecticut. And I don't know, I imagine figures who kind of show us how Connecticut is like a really interesting place that is more than just scary women wearing pearls. But then I think the context I first heard about them was that Candace knew someone who had taken their ghost hunting 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 them was when the Conjuring came out, which I remember, I haven't seen that movie since it was in theaters,

but I really liked it because I love a classic haunted house story. I think there's not enough of those in horror and those just make me happy. Isn't it cool that these people I've heard about are in a movie? Have you ever seen any video footage of the real Warrens? No. I definitely saw the first Conjuring movie when it came out because I have had a crush on Patrick Wilson since 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 New England 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

know. I'm imagining him as someone who either literally or spiritually had like a nice big sprig of chest hair out at any given time. Yes, he's like the one button open kind of guy, always like leaning back, crotch forward. Yeah. It was part of what really fascinated me and like kind of broke my brain about doing research on the Warrens is how specific the vision of them in the the Conjuring movies is and how by design that is and how that kind of shapes with their real life dynamic. Allegedly. I feel like the Warrens at this point because now we have multiple Conjuring multiple Annabelle's, they kind of have a little posthumous empire going. I would kind of connect these movies based on the concept of demon hunting to what I feel is the laundering of some of the

ideas 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 about how it like created a consumer demand for exorcisms, which was met by various people, various religious professionals. There is like an old timeliness to this, many would argue grift, but there's kind of an old purity about it that I appreciate parts of like a good old fashioned psychic story. Like 19th century spiritualism, but just in the 70s and 80s. Right. Yeah. But with like fun outfits and World War two PTSD. Where to you does the real story begin? Ed and Lorraine are both from Connecticut. They were childhood sweethearts. And that is kind of the image of them

that is aggressively pushed in the Conjuring franchise. I truly cannot overstate how much information 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 human way to fact check a lot of what they say. I mean, every Conjuring movie is tangentially based off of 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.

And he says in all of his interviews and his thick New England accent that Patrick Wilson doesn't have, he grew up in a house that was haunted. And so he has all of these memories from, 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 somehow an even more Catholic family. But they would regularly make that distinction where they're like, well, Ed was Catholic, but Lorraine was Catholic. Connecticut is a kingdom where each family is more Catholic than the last. And so their dynamic is Ed is the demonologist,

which 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 what Lorraine brings to the table in order for it to actually be pulled off. So there's a series of aesthetically perfect interviews that Ed and Lorraine did with their son-in-law Tony in this like basic cable studio that I think that they rented in the 90s and early 2000s where he would just interview them about their lives. He would never disclose that they were related to each other, which I had to figure that out on my own. But Lorraine said in the early 2000s that she

realized that she could see people's auras. She could hear thoughts. I guess she had an experience at school where she looked at like a sapling on Arbor day when these students were planting a tree and she could see the tree it was going to become. And she told a nun she could see the tree it was going to be. That was not a Catholic enough thing to say and she got in trouble and 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're psychics or witches or who get accused of that kind of thing through history? Please, yes.

Especially in male dominated societies or you know religious hierarchies or what have you. I think there's often very little room for comprehension of emotional intelligence because I think patriarchal structure really flourishes in a world where its leaders have as little emotional intelligence as possible and my key piece of evidence is America right now and your honor exhibit a the ability to kind of like put your finger to the wind and understand what's happening in a way that people around you have no idea how you got there. I think that that can seem like sorcery to people especially if it allows you to figure things out that people would prefer for you not to know because you're supposed to be stupid.

Right. It's such a bummer to hear those stories about kids being kind of forced to compartmentalize something that is like an inherently positive thing. I don't know. She's like 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 in ghosts and visions but they don't meet until they're teenagers. On the official website for the organization that the Warrens will eventually found in 1952 the New England Society for Psychic 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

the Warrens relationship on the NESPR website that once you know it was put together by their son in law is detailed to an extent that is kind of creepy but he wrote this incredible blog post about 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 movie with her gal pals. Here's how Tony describes it in a blog post. At the time Lorraine showed little interest in boys. As she stated in later years I was concentrating on my school work and besides boys were rough not gentle like my brother Jim. Boys were too rougher on the edges for me but inside the girls introduced her to the energetic young usher. His name was Ed.

When she saw her Ed she thought to herself gee what a nice looking young man. She related later how spiffy he looked with his sharply creased pants and perfectly quaffed hair. She recalled and 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 can see 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

towards the end of World War II Ed enlists in the Navy while they're still dating. Really early into the Navy the boat that he stationed on hits an oil tanker and he uses his survivor's leave to get married to Lorraine. He stays in the Navy until the early 50s and I have one kid named Judy I 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 she has some clairvoyancy and he actually believes her. To me there's something so exciting about like you fall in love and you live in this society that so far has discouraged you from even talking about this. You're like you know I really like ghosts and then you both get to share that like

that's really romantic. That's what they want you to think Sarah. I don't know. I mean that did seem to be true is like that was like a huge bonding thing where Lorraine was always very impressed that Ed believed her about that and also encouraged her to do stuff with him and you know whatever which I guess in the early 50s wasn't nothing is that he wanted them to collaborate. So once he's out of the Navy they decide that they're going all in on ghost stuff. So for about like 10 to 15 years Ed would work kind of odd jobs to support the family and they would spend all of their free time 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

to give them access to allegedly haunted houses. So the way that they worked around this was that Ed had been to two years of art school and he liked painting. So the plan was that it sounds like a Nathan For You episode but it worked for them. They would drive around to places that they had heard might be haunted and Ed would set up an easel outside of the house and would start frantically sketching the house and then as he described it in one of these Tony interviews he would then send Lorraine with his sketch of the house to the door and she would knock on the door and say hey my husband's an artist and he just drew this picture of your house. Do you want to buy it and can we come inside? And I guess that this worked. Ed was selling these sketches and paintings and

that's how they would gain access to the house to gain the trust of the family and learn about hauntings. People really did used to be more trusting didn't they? I was like this sounds like 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 for being local haunted house lovers. My modern true crime brain says that like sending your wife to like sort of force her way into a stranger's home is a great way to get her to become the ghost that is haunting it. Right. I don't love Ed but I do have a soft spot for Lorraine. Lorraine also maintains that during this early period she was still relatively skeptical of what Ed wanted

to do. I think that Lorraine was like oh I'm a very intuitive person I feel like I can see things before they happen sometimes the more I thought about it like well that doesn't necessarily translate to wanting to go to any random haunted house that your husband wants to go to but that's sort of how it ended up for them. I do feel like marriage at that time I can imagine being exciting because as a single woman like there's so many spaces that you can't go into unattended and so many things that you just can't do and then if you marry some madcap guy then like suddenly you're on madcap adventures all the time and it's appropriate because it's not your idea and you're supposed to do whatever he wants. Right where it sounds like this went on for a couple of years where they

would spend a lot of time on the road sometimes they would be living hand to mouth on like whether Ed could sell one of his and I say this with love not very good paintings Judy their very small child is not there for any of this which I think is like the first thing that poked a hole in the conjuring presentation of Ed and Lorraine for me where they are presented in the franchise like Judy is a part of the story to the point where Judy is the star of one of the Annabelle movies they're presented as this kind of ideal religious pious nuclear family that happens to hunt ghosts but Judy didn't really grow up around her parents very much it sounds like that they were off chasing ghosts and she lived with her grandmother Judy is very supportive of her parents legacy to this

to this day she's still alive she's married to Tony the whole bit but she said that she didn't know what her parents even did for a living until she was a teenager oh wow and it sounds like she didn't get to know them very well until she was an early adult which is around the time they got famous she would have been whatever teenager or young adult and Judy is not very chatty and doesn't seem to want to discuss much so we may never know but it sounds like she just didn't grow up around them Ed is trying to develop this pseudoscience of how ghosts appear it's a lot of vague ghost bustery language to the point where it's been like speculated that like a lot of 80s media is pulling from stuff that Ed Warren said in like the 50s and 60s where it's like

you know in places that are highly electromagnetic you're more likely to see a ghost and vibrations in the air is what makes it possible to hear a ghost versus not and he needs to justify his place in the NESPR. I feel so conflicted about ghosts because a part of me like wants there to be ghosts but a bigger part of me is like the ghosts must be pretty unhappy and bored if 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 of believe in ghosts but are too embarrassed to say. One of the things that I think is kind of

silliest about a lot of American ghost media is like this house is scary because people died in it and it's like well people have died everywhere. Right. If a fraction of the ghosts that should be here if you had like some small percentage of dead people were walking around as ghosts then it would just be like ghost grand central station. We talk about ghosts inhabiting structures and being stuck in 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 to like 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

for the dead or the way that people died. In my heart I believe in ghosts in one way or another but also I feel like the human obsession with haunted places I don't want to push that away because I feel like we're trying to use that constructively a lot of the time. Right. So by the late 60s the Warrens had effectively dealt up this reputation as local ghost busters and they start doing lectures at colleges. Will they evict the ghosts from your house like do you call them and they like or do they just diagnose what are they doing? It kind of depends. They always claim that they never sought out haunted places they would wait for people to come to them which that's already not true but whatever but there would be a lot of people that would say hey I think

something's going on at my house can you check it out. They would talk it through and if they thought it was a good case for them they would drive over to your house. Their business model was that they don't charge the family if they have to travel you have to pay for their travel and lodging but it doesn't cost anything to do. They made their money via lectures and book deals and life rights and all this other stuff but yeah you would call them up be like hey my daughter's foaming at the mouth and she's the devil can you come over and they would say yes Ed's the demonologist so he would go over and figure out if there's demons afoot if someone's like actively possessed or if things are actively moving around they would bring recording equipment

they would do kind of the whole ghost hunter thing and then in other cases there were a lot of cases of them describing law enforcement calling them or the church like they were constantly colluding with the police and the catholic church which is just incredible the two most reliable perfect systems that exist. The police would call them and say hey we are trying to find out more information about this woman who was murdered and as they tell it Lorraine would go in she would touch some of the objects or evidence and would try to lead them somewhere so it kind of depended on like what the situation called for if it was a demon situation Ed's going to take the lead if it's a dead lady situation Lorraine's going to take it. And I find police psychic so interesting and the research

that I've done on it like there's a lot of charlatanry but I feel like especially you know in like the the 60s and the 70s when like effectively there were either no women on a local police force or no women who were being listened to like maybe the only way that you would have insight from a woman about a female victim in an investigation would be if you called a psychic and she was like I sense that the victim rejected the killer's sexual advances and he felt humiliated and enraged and strangled her and it's like yeah that's reasonable that's the kind of thing an FBI profiler would say. Right right the tricky thing is that it's just so hard to verify what they were actually doing if what they're saying is true and that Lorraine was able to go to these very

agro skeptical police stations and give some insight into like here is what happened to this woman like and this comes up in the conjuring movies a fair amount forcing law enforcement to empathize with women who have been killed and it's not just because of what her skills were she was like not only is this what happened this is how she was feeling when it happened and you know she would like feel fear in objects and I hope that that's true because that did seem like one of the more positive contributions and then the other thing that it seems like even if they are complete charlatans there are certain families that it seems like they very cleverly lifted out of poverty by potentially manufacturing a haunting where really yeah there are some theories of like

double collusion of in theory inventing a haunting isn't hurting anyone right so I'm in my apartment and I'm like oh shit I can't afford to stay here like what am I gonna do and then I decide okay I'm going to say that a demon is choking me every single night and I'm gonna post about it online I'm gonna tell everyone I know about it and get all of this press and then I'm gonna get a book deal and then I'm gonna be able to afford to stay in this apartment yeah like that was kind of the thinking which is kind of brilliant yeah and as those kind of conspiracy theories go Ed and Lorraine are a great way of validating that that's happening right oh my god yeah and they would be like oh yeah definitely she's getting choked by a demon this is so awful so that gets you more press and

it's like how are you accredited how are any expert witnesses accredited it's a very unregulated system in some places and times and then they write a book about it and they get money so it like kind of works out for everybody wow that feels very Connecticut in that way of like let's collaborate and work some angles you know yeah but there are theories around a few of their cases including Amityville where they're like that is a strong possibility of what happened here of like a family that was about to lose a house that a crime had occurred in and then okay what are we gonna do to be able to afford to stay in this house or in some cases move to a different house that's nicer it's so brilliant and so sad that like sometimes the surest way to avoid eviction in America is

demons I totally agree uh in certain cases it's brilliant and I'm like wow even if they're complete in total liars I'm rooting for them in this scenario right their first few big cases were the Annabelle the doll case which three movies about now it's very impressive like to my knowledge she doesn't talk does she do very much at all she just sits there right she definitely moves I only watched one of the Annabelle's because there's one Annabelle that revolves around Judy Warren getting stuck at home while her parents are investigating she was stuck at home with a babysitter for the weekend and Annabelle tortures her and the babysitter I know what makes me laugh about Annabelle is you can picture the like the doll in the movies like at the very scary movie doll

she looks like she's made out of wood like a gritty Chucky energy yeah yeah she she very much does the real Annabelle was a raggedy and doll it was just a regular raggedy and doll I feel like making it a doll that everyone has that was what was fun about Chucky is like Chucky was this mass produced doll right and that he's supposed to be so cute right the museum that may not exist anymore at the Warren's house like that whole room full of haunted objects is a real place that they had and that you could tour and the most prominently displayed object is a raggedy and doll with a red light bulb hanging over her head in like a locked box with a sign that was like do not open under any circumstances if you're like they're kind of geniuses oh my god the story of of Annabelle

it's their most major case that is also completely impossible to verify a woman in Connecticut in Hartford gave her daughter who was a 28 year old nurse a raggedy and doll second hand as like a cute gift and the the reason you can't verify it is no one has ever said who the nurse is who the women were who had the raggedy and doll so you can never find out hmm so the nurse had the raggedy and doll she was roommates with another nurse she also had a boyfriend and the roommates started like joking around and they would like sit the raggedy and doll at the table and I guess weird stuff started happening things were moving around it wasn't super sinister but one day the raggedy and dolls arms started moving on their own so the nurses got freaked out enough that they called

a local medium not the warrants I don't know someone they found in the phone book who came over and communicated with the doll and said that the doll said that her name was Annabelle her spirit was trapped in the doll and she was a six-year-old girl who had died in a car accident the nurses did some research and it turns out there was a girl named Annabelle who had died in a car accident at age six and so then they became more attached to the doll and they were like we love Annabelle she's our friend and like we're gonna protect her and I guess once they decided they really loved her and they believed that the story goes that Annabelle's behavior got scary and all of a sudden like there would be violent stuff happening there was like a case where the nurse's boyfriend

it sounds like it just kind of had it and he was like I'm sick of Annabelle she sucks she's not she's not a person and then he woke up with like all these scratches all over him because Annabelle didn't like that and then you're like how is he scratching him with her little soft little fabric hands with her soft raggedy and body this is something that Ed Warren calls psychic knives oh okay thank god I'm I'm an idiot so so the boyfriend got scratched up with psychic knives then the Warrens come in and their narrative is oh well that other medium said that the doll said her name is Annabelle but it's because there's a demon inside the doll the demon is lying to you the demon says it's Annabelle so you'll trust it and love it and it's actually the devil and it's

gotta kill you which I remember from Satanic Panic Stuff is a theme I think where like demons like preying you as like you know someone influenced by hippies or your your Ouija boards or what have you because they're like I'm a ghost and you're like oh that's nice and then they're like just kidding I'm a demon you've been punked that is like such a thing that especially Ed Warren brings up over and over like distinguishing ghosts which are just like misguided people with unfinished business that will generally not bother you too much and then like demons and the only way you can get rid of a demon is by hiring the Warrens and letting them write a book about it and give you no money so Annabelle is their first big case they have a another case where they get a lot of press

when they're called to solve a haunting at West Point in 1972 so Lorraine is wandering the halls of West Point she's saying there's JFK was JFK ever there and West Point was like yes he was and she's like well there he is and like they're just doing kind of like a lot of like funny harmless peacocking ghost kind of work and so they're slowly becoming a national entity so they solve this thing at West Point right because it's like a fun story like I feel like if I'm a journalist and I'm writing for you know the Bridgeport Times or whatever I know people are going to read my local ghost hunter couple story right and and they on the surface seem like such an enormous couple doing this very weird thing and it's being kind of validated by

these larger and larger establishments as time goes on where I feel like a lot of the fascination with them was like isn't it wild that like the police need their help or like the military like West Point can't get rid of a ghost but we're going to invite these people to do it yeah and it feeds this idea that like not just ghost believers but Catholics really know what's going on and how to heal America right which I imagine was popular with other Catholics I mean I guess you can't really have an exorcism story without it being really really steeped in religion but the conjuring movies are more religious than I feel like most movies are in 2021 right and can you talk about that for people who who don't have the time or the inclination for this for the one

averse so the conjuring movies yeah they're that's the gigantic franchise that use the Ed and Lorraine case files basically that's like how they're building out their universe and they portray Ed and Lorraine as a couple that's very much in love Lorraine is the gifted clairvoyant Ed is the sensitive demonologist any case that the Warrens were tangentially involved in these movies essentially rewrite the story to make Ed and Lorraine the protagonists and the most important people in the story which I think shows the most in the most recent installment which has the best title the conjuring three the devil made me do it it's like built around this case with this guy Arnie Johnson who killed his landlord

and was the first person to I guess in the US to attempt to claim he did the crime because he was possessed in court there was all this press of like wow he's saying the devil made him do it and then the judge was like I'm not accepting that and it was shut down right away and then he went to jail for manslaughter but the way that the movie rewrites it that I feel like is very like of this franchise they kind of rewrite the story to be like Ed and Lorraine need to be able to prove that demons are true in court or a man will be sent to the electric chair whoa this man will die unless we can prove that demons are true in court just this totally bizarro like rewritten I am the protagonist narrative I feel like making something a courtroom drama like

gives it a patina of legitimacy somehow well we're talking about the devil maybe do it as a wild one and I was thinking of you as I was learning more about it because it is so satanic panic where this is like an early 80s case that they did arnie johnson killed his landlord whose name was bono which is funny he killed his landlord bono but months before the warrens had already known that family because arnie's girlfriend's little brother appeared to be possessed by a demon so the warrens had already been brought over to their house to conduct a seance like ed is an accredited demonologist which is very unusual if you're not a priest but he can't do an exorcism that's against the rules he can do a seance but he can't do an exorcism you got to get a priest

for an exorcism and like that's a rule that he needs to follow that's one of the laws he respects that's the one thing that tony who's like the keeper of the keys tony's like that would never happen ed would never do an exorcism he respects the rules of ghosts but so anyways they had already met this family because they'd interacted with this kid and after that the extent of the warrens contact was that lorraine called the police and was like I don't have a good feeling about what happened with that little boy david I don't think that's going to end well and then the police were like okay lorraine thank you click several months later arnie johnson in a fit of rage and also his landlord was being very drunk and handsy with arnie's little cousin stabbed him and killed him

once lorraine finds out that arnie johnson killed someone she like plays a game of 40 chess immediately she calls the police back and is like what did I tell you something bad happened the demon went from that little boy david into arnie and arnie killed that guy because it was like the transit of demon property or whatever yeah I don't know like that feels somehow more irresponsible to me than making a straight up this house is haunted movie yeah giving legitimacy to a time when we were trying to bring demons into the courtroom essentially like when people were like really working hard and a somewhat systematic way to do that I feel like their haunted house cases are the most famous ones but they dabbled in like kind of anything supernatural adjacent that was

going to guarantee them a lot of press that was in the new england area one that I did some research on that was one of their more famous early ones because it took place in their hometown in bridge port connecticut was the lindley street poltergeist of 1974 this is one of their only big cases that has no like movie adaptation to it the story behind it is a couple that was like friends of friends of the warrens gerard and laura gooden lived in this little house they had lost a young son they'd lost a seven-year-old son and then they adopted a daughter who is of indigenous descent she was a first nations kid named marsha in 1968 and they moved into this house marsha was one of the only kids at her school that wasn't white and she was getting bullied a lot she was staying home from

school because she had been like beat up and like wasn't doing physically great allegedly some versions of the story also say she'd recently seen the exorcist and was going through a very like emotionally traumatic time she becomes quote unquote possessed the parents are scared and it becomes this like town-wide obsession of like at one point there were 2000 people in front of this kid's house you know thinking that she's like possessed by a demon and so the warrens get called over the warrens do what the warrens do and they're like this is totally legit as as like the record goes over a course of months it says that there were 77 independent witnesses to stuff going on at this house although later on many people took back what they said and they

were like oh i think that it was just a traumatized child that lived in that home so it became like not a national thing but like a local sensation that it's like oh this there's a kid that lives in bridgeport who is possessed and no one ever talked about how she was being bullied and had just seen the exorcist because like people i feel like really wanted to have a possessed girl in town right i do think it's interesting that the majority of these warren stories involve a young girl becoming possessed it's a lot of like mothers and young girls that are possessed by these spirits and yeah marcia goodin like it sounds like she had a really difficult life after this it was equally traumatized by all of this negative attention on her from her

like entire town yeah and so she kind of went off the grid and like left town and cut off contact with her family and like her teens and early 20s she passed away relatively young she died in 2015 she was going to canada to see if she could find her birth family unclear if she was successful but when she passed away no one wanted her ashes because they thought that they were haunted oh that's so horrible there's fun ones and then there's ones where it does seem like there is clearly someone who's been exploited and often that person is very young or marginalized or just extremely vulnerable and it just she was extremely hard to track down and seemed to like very much not want to talk about or comment on that period of her life at all it just seems like it was just

like only a source of upset so there's no there's no way to really verify what actually happened there there are some cases the warrens worked on including the one that the the case in england that the conjuring two is based on where it later kind of became clear that it was like a young girl kind of acting out because she wasn't getting a lot of attention at home which could potentially be i mean a contributing factor for marsha gooden but there's just kind of no way of knowing and i don't know that one like broke my heart but it's like that felt like a very like 70s thing to be doing especially in a place that is so aggressively catholic and white as kinetic it like could you set up a kid for failure anymore i read this book called ghost hunters that was co-written with

ed and lorraine and like some guy that didn't sue them which some of them did each chapter was really short and it was about a different case that you couldn't verify with a gun to your head and one of them i like jumped as i was like walking to the grocery store because it was like chapter five lorraine and bigfoot but the story was so funny like ed and lorraine get a call from they say quote unquote the hill people this book was written in i think the early 80s and they're like bigfoot is out here we're afraid bigfoot is around so they go to stone mountain georgia where kenneth parcel is from i assume so they go to the parcel residence almost right away she sees bigfoot from a distance of course and his foot is big syrup because it's

injured it's not naturally big oh and she starts to telepathically communicate with bigfoot and she realizes that bigfoot is very intelligent and he's been through a lot like she offers more empathy to bigfoot than she does to children that are real bigfoot telepathically informs her that he has a wife and he wants to be reunited with her but he's injured and the bigfoots have marrying no that's but there's a colony of big feet he got lost from the pack because he cut his foot oh and he's so then lorraine telepathically says come here bigfoot they're just afraid because they don't understand you and come to the village and i'll i'll show everyone and we'll heal you and then you can go see your bigfoot wife and then unfortunately a college student blows an air horn

and bigfoot runs away crying crying crying because he thought lorraine was his friend and then she scared him she watched him walk all the way up a mountain with his injured foot and that's the story of lorraine and bigfoot i feel like lorraine does better when she like makes up a story completely with like her and just a made up character as opposed to like a real person who has to have a demon put in them that one really rocked my world you just tell they're like they need to sell books and they're filling space they write entire chapters about just abnormal people they've met and it kind of has nothing to do with demons where they're like we went to this funeral guy's house and he admitted to having sex with people who had died and edd said

you've got to stop that and he said you're right and that's kind of like the whole chapter like has nothing to do with anything it's just like a person that they met who did something terrible and so okay so unfortunately this is the biggest most serious allegation that's come up with the warrens there was a huge hollywood reporter article that came out about this in 2017 there was a woman that ed warren knew named judith penny who has at least started a lawsuit against the warren estate and also warner brothers who makes the conjuring movies essentially for damages for erasing her from this franchise entirely because as she tells it she's now in her 70s but in the early 1960s ed warren was her bus driver while she was in high school

they began some sort of affair while she was still underage and she ended up living with the warrens and assisting them with and like remaining in a relationship with edd oh no which lorraine i guess completely knew about for four decades oh my god yeah and then on top of that it sounds like she assisted in a lot of the work they were doing for 40 years she lived at their house and it was just like professor marston and the wonder women or was it like abraham and hagar like was this a thruple or there's a no it no it does it it wasn't a thruple it sounds like um lorraine and judith didn't like each other oh my god yeah so it just sounds like ed warren kind of had his wife and then his secret wife and they just kind of had to deal with it and they just all have to go demon hunting

together until they all fall down dead and i kind of wonder like how how much judith penny was like taking care of their kid whose name was also judith she put all this forward in 2017 after the conjuring movies were like already on a way to making a billion dollars and such a huge element of those movies is this image of like ed and the rain warren as this very pious monogamous couple that like the strength of their love is what extracts the demons from the random people in connecticut right okay so this was the paragraph that i was just like okay it says quote even in 1963 a teenage girl did not move in with a married man without attracting notice that year judith penny was arrested after someone reported her relationship with ed to local police according to her november

2014 declaration she spent a night in the north end prison in bridgeport while police tried to persuade her to sign a statement admitting to the affair after penny refused to cooperate she was ordered by the court to report to a delinquent youth office for the next month according to penny's account ed picked her up from school every week and drove her to the mandated meetings Jesus yeah like it's really bad yeah and he's just like well judith like time to serve your nickel because i need to keep having you be my secret ghost hunter girlfriend right like a teenage kid and and i don't know i feel like the conversation of how lorraine factors into this is like kind of out of my depth because who knows there are like allegations that ed warren was physically

abusive towards lorraine at different points in the relationship and what it boils down to is it doesn't seem like ed was a very good person it's interesting because ed dies in 2006 he never sees the conjuring universe lorraine does lorraine died in 2019 and so when tony is helping facilitate the life rights so that the conjuring movies can be made i think what kind of tipped people off to like something is not quite right here is that the way the life rights were sold and described to water brothers was like so particular lorraine warren when they were selling these life rights to new line cinema in like the early 2010s her deal was to serve as a consultant on the movies which she did for all of them because i think that the production on the one

that just came out wrapped before she died and there were all of these like stipulations the films couldn't show her or her husband engaging in crimes including sex with minors child pornography prostitution or sexual assault lorraine like neither the husband nor wife could be depicted as participating in an extramarital sexual relationship and then there's like all these talent attorneys that are like that's not a standard contract to be like just make sure that you don't show my husband cheating on me with a mind like it's very very specific i don't know i'm very inclined to believe judith penny she lived with them for 40 years i mean she she didn't break things off with ed until 2003 when he was very sick and she wanted to marry someone oh juda and that was

when she left wow it's a funny kind of intersection of genre because there's like the juggernaut of whatever horror franchise is able to keep making money in a given time and then there's the ethics of representing real people and like those things don't normally cross paths right like i can't think of anyone filing suit against the makers of paranormal activity because their life story and their trauma has been erased from those movies right the third player in this very messy lawsuit is someone who had written a book with the warrens who also had i mean not an allegation of like abuse and also living with them for four decades but basically was like the conjuring is like adapting all this work i did that i know is fake because i wrote it with ed and lorraine warren and that's

what they were telling me wasn't true so i feel like i'm entitled to some money here because they're adapting the lie i wrote down for them i feel like based on a true story is always a good selling point for a horror movie but that's also where all of their problems have come from but it's like as a horror movie viewer i don't think anyone's going to the conjuring being like i expect to the letter details because it's like who's gonna know like yeah you want to see a haunted house movie but then also i'm like well but if i'm judith penny i would be pissed off for me as a horror viewer i always want to not know how much is true and is not true and i expect it to be like very loosely based on some little kernel effect right yeah it's like how do you sort out libel in a

horror movie where like everyone agrees please lie to me i guess it's like the ghosts don't have to be real but the depictions of the ghost hunters have to be at least recognizable at least like adjacent to the truth i wasn't able to find if that lawsuit had settled i know that the author and the producers lawsuits fell through but i i'm not sure what happened with judith i'm so for cheesy horror movies and i just feel like there have to be some non-problematic ghost hunters out there to make movies about you would think yeah i don't doubt that they care about each other i don't doubt that they love their daughter but there was definitely a lot of other stuff going on so for this one the conjuring three the devil made me do it there are some players

in the story that are like yes this is exactly how it happened thank you for telling our story on HBO max and those people are paid consultants on the movie so like arnie johnson is still alive he was released from prison after five years oh wow and then he married his girlfriend debbie and debbie was hired as a consultant along with lorraine warren on the conjuring three the devil made me do it right of course she's going on any channel that will have her saying like yes this is exactly what happened one of the daughters from the first conjuring story which is a haunting that happened in the early 70s in rhod Island one of the daughters is still very much carrying the torch of like yes there was a little bit of freestyle jazz in terms of how it was adapted but for the most part

it's completely true and it's not like anyone can truly prove her wrong right her career now is writing horror novels and who's writing stories about haunted houses so it behooves her to be the conjuring girl you know and then in the case of the arnie johnson case the little boy david who was said to have been possessed sued the warrens yeah you're gonna get some of that he filed a lawsuit a couple of years ago saying that he's moved on he didn't want the movie to be made it violated his privacy libel an intentional infliction of emotional distress which i think is like a pretty fair thing yeah if you were told as a kid that you were possessed and then now you're 40 years old and you're seeing that played back at you even though you no longer believe

that's true and you can't do anything about it and you don't get even compensated for it like that sucks yes and again like it feels revealing that you can be depicted as a possessed child in a movie against your will right like that sounds wrong i don't know if we're speculating about the dead like we can't harm them in nearly the same way we can harm the living by making up a bunch of stuff right i hope they do the conjuring three and a half maybe the devil didn't make me do it so the end of the warrens lives they stopped actively investigating stuff in the early 90s and they kind of pivot to legacy building the warren presidential library well i guess it's like they're anabelle room like they're a cult museum becomes a big thing starting in the 90s

and they're always hanging out there and talking to people and they do a lot of lectures they do these taped interviews they write a lot of books where it just seems like they're kind of building a nest egg without constantly going to people's houses about ghosts anymore ed dies in 2006 Lorraine is like unofficially retired and then all the conjuring stuff kicks up in the early 20 tens and Lorraine is a paid consultant judith penny from the beginning of the story who lived with the warrens forever was suing Lorraine for the cost of her salary as a consultant on the movie which i thought was a good poetic justice move so she was making a hundred fifty thousand dollars per conjuring movie to just be like uh make me nice you know like and she died in 2019 and now

tony is in charge of everything judy wants nothing to do with anything and tony's whole thing is making youtube videos where he's filming himself from an up ankle where the uh new england society forsaking research under tony's reign it seems like it's more of what i would want it to be oh that's great he's a goofy weird guy who really really believes that ghosts exist and he wants people to pay him a small fee to talk to them about it which is like how ed and Lorraine started and but i feel like they were so in the right place at the right time where they happened to be working you know at a time where all of a sudden interest in the occult just went up massively and then they did a bunch of i think questionable stuff to deal with that and kind of get their bag

in that context as people who at least presented themselves as very religious and very devout and like good upstanding people like they were able to ride this wave of ideas about demons and possession and occult stuff definitely becoming trendy in a way that ostensibly religious people or at least christians in america were being like no that's bad it's very bad don't do it and like they're able to profit off of a trend by seeming like they're against demons but it's like the demons seem to really mostly show up where they go right and again it's like i feel like there's nothing no dream more american than creating value where once there was none and then a step above even that is like is doing that by just making something up and then getting people to buy that i mean that

feels very topical i was hoping that it would be like more a victimless crime situation than not but it's very it just seems like a very mixed bag with the kind of stuff they were doing yeah in a way that was like opportunistic in sometimes it would be like a silly bigfoot thing and it's like the funniest thing i've ever heard and then sometimes there would be someone clearly suffering but they took the money where they could get it after having kind of gone on this research and emotional journey like what do you think about this franchise is it ethical to keep enjoying conjuring movies yeah i don't feel great about watching an ed warren character be like hailed as this sensitive incredible romantic hero when you know that that is demonstrably not true but that

said i will probably watch the next anabelle movie i don't know how do you feel about that i'm very very conflicted about it i know well and it's funny because like i am someone who has to explain my love of horror movies fairly often what people say often is like why make or watch horror movies because like they glorify violence that one of my answers is that violence is something that maybe can seem alluring in a way that exposure can take away then movies can be maybe like a way to exercise your imagination without encouraging it to grow or actually to be like oh like these are really horrible things and i'm curious about it because i'm a teenager and i feel indestructible and i need to be shown that's not true right because the fact that especially adolescents

seek out horror for a chance to encounter the concept of death that's something that people need i mean i need it clearly and personally last year when i was feeling kind of some of my most paralyzed and depressed feelings about being stuck in a pandemic the saw movies and other horror movies like really did it for me because i just needed to be in part reminded that like even though everything felt meaningless and stasis that like my actions had meaning and consequences and that this was happening because we all really want to stay alive and help other people stay alive right ethical horror movies are a thing that exists and it's not just a lawless field anabelle i feels spun out enough to be another degree of separation from the warrens

themselves which kind of launders the whole thing a bit but yeah i agree with you i feel like there's documentary and there's fiction and this idea of taking real lives and depicting them in a biopic like that gets really weird really fast especially with like a big hollywood movie where the goal is to make money i think the trend is toward being kind of conservative and storytelling and leaning on what structures tend to work and are profitable and then people are either going to seem better or worse than they really were right i don't understand how hollywood law works but it seems to me that it would make that much harder if not impossible for someone else to make an unrelated warrens movie to try and kind of close the circle and be like here's the real horror of

the warrens and it was having an underage unpaid secret mistress ghost in turn the whole time they should just give judith penny the money she wants and if she does want the story out there then great if she doesn't then just like let her live her life yeah i feel like the twist here is that the villain was really a shitty guy and ultimately a deceptive couple who abused some of the very real people in their path thank you so much jamie this was wonderful this was everything that my creepy little heart needed today thank you for having me on to talk about this weird couple i love this show so much thank you for having me i'm so happy that you're a part of it now and you will be back and i will be telling you about more scary stuff stuff that starts off

scary one way and becomes scary another way perhaps predictably who knows and i love your shows so much and i'm you know i would be happy to have you on any old time but i think especially in this this exciting time when we're growing and changing like a low haunted raggedy and all all by herself on a plane across america you have your own expanded universe you're flying first class baby