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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I am your host Ben Radford along with…

Celestia Ward: Hey it’s Celestia Ward.

BR: Yes we have we have there’s just been an explosion of skeptical awesomeness to talk about. So we’ll be talking about that. This is episode 86.

0:00:54
CW: 86, yeah, we’ve got a lot on our plates today. We’re gonna be discussing Ed and Lorraine Warren, the dynamic demonologist duo, or at least that’s what they sure want to be remembered as. But before that, we have got a scoop. Ben, tell the listeners about our scoop.

0:01:12
BR: We have a special guest. It’s an old friend of mine. She’s awesome. I’ve called her the Energizer Bunny of skepticism. It is Susan Gerbic.

Susan Gerbic: Hello, everybody. I love your show.

0:01:20
CW: Welcome, Susan. Now, a lot has been happening this week. People on our Facebook, on Squaring the Strange Facebook, have been privy to this. I’ve posted some links. John Oliver started the week off wonderfully with his amazing takedown of psychics and he didn’t use the word grief vampire. I wish he had, but he did. He did call it ventriloquizing the dead, which I love that. That was a great phrase. And so he’s got a tremendous reach. And I can’t think of anything that would have even a greater greater reach than John Oliver except for maybe the New York Times. New York Times! And who do I tell? Tell us about what’s been happening with you with the New York Times.

SG: Oh, well, it took two years to get this out. We’ve done a couple stings. We caught a psychic or two. Well, we caught one for sure twice, the same guy, in hot reading. Now, anybody who’s listened to all of our Okay, so a cold read is whenever they use generalities about a person, you know, things that are typical of a person of that age or that appearance or, you know, that culture they’re in. Whereas a hot read is whenever they have some information on you. Either they’ve Googled you or they’ve looked at your social media or maybe even they said, my brother’s going to get a reading from you. Let me tell you about his problems And then this medium already knows about it going in.

CW: Yeah, and and we’ve and from even going back before the days of technology and social media. We’ve heard about people filling out prayer cards and such in the lobbies before the show with all their information and then the psychic just uses that information that they filled out ten minutes before the show?

SG: Absolutely. I mean there were some that would go to a town and do a pre-show beforehand. They’d come into the town, listen to the gossip in the town, who had recently died, go out to the graveyard, see who’s got you know fresh flowers in the grave, and then the psychic would come into town a few days later and he’d have a whole bunch of information that he could just relay back to the audience.

0:03:30
CW: Wow.

BR: And of course one of the most famous examples of that was exposed by the amazing Randi with Peter Popoff, who was getting his information through an earpiece and his wife had got knowledge about people who were in the audience and she was communicating him via radio. I think it was 38.5 megahertz.

0:03:51
CW: Petey, Petey, Petey dear, I hope you can hear me.

0:03:57
BR: Exactly.

0:03:58
CW: If anybody who has not seen that clip on the Johnny Carson show, go check out that clip on Johnny Carson with James Randi exposing I think it’s the only time that that Johnny Carson swore on air because he just couldn’t hold it in.

0:04:12
BR: Susan in your piece you wrote for skeptical inquirer website You wrote a piece called operation pizza roll and you really sort of lay this out and I encourage everybody Go go read the full article. It came out a couple of days ago. It’s really interesting and you do talk about the difference between cold reads and hot reads and you make a really important point is that it’s very difficult to catch a psychic in a hot read. Now in the case of Randi, I mean he had audio equipment. It’s difficult to catch them in these things but that’s exactly what you guys did.

0:04:48
SG: Right. So what we did is we created fake Facebook pages. And on those fake Facebook pages, we put them into a secret group. It was called the Pizza Rolling Group. So it’s pizza rollers. And there was a group of people all over the world that were managing these accounts. And for 10 days, they went back and forth talking about meeting each other in high school and what happened at work today and what kind of food they had today and checking into places in Hollywood, you know, Starbucks or Applebee’s or whatever and putting up cat memes. But what they would do is they would at times they would talk about the two main characters. The main characters were Susanna Wilson and Mark Wilson. That was myself and Mark Edward. And we were going to go to the show in Hollywood to see Thomas John. But we were going to go as a married couple, which we’re not. And we were going to go in with absolutely no knowledge what was going on on our Facebook pages.We were locked out of these pages.

0:05:39
SG: Now, yeah, that double blind aspect of it, you had mentioned it, and please, yeah, absolutely explain what double blind means and how you managed to make this apply. Because psychics, I have seen them defend themselves by saying, well, yes, the person came in with a fake story, but they had that fake story in their brain, you know, and I was picking up on their thoughts.

0:05:58
SG: Right, and you know what? Nobody’s ever done this before. I’ve been watching stings for a long time, but they always know what’s going on in the sting. And it’s Sterling, my son Sterling, who came up with the idea of double blinding it. So kudos to him. But what we decided to do is that – and I’ll explain the reason why in a second – is that they gave me a backstory. They knew that we were going to be going on a certain day to this event in Hollywood area. And so they started talking to each other amongst themselves in this small closed group that were locked Facebook pages. Nobody else could see them. And they started talking about how I was, I wanted to see my twin brother who had died a few years ago of pancreatic cancer. His name was Andy, by the way. And I’ve been having dreams about him and hearing special music and things that we enjoyed together. And I really have been having a lot of trouble sleeping and I feel like he has a message he wants to give me. I was going to drag my husband there, my husband Mark, and he was going to see, he says, I’d like to talk to my dad because I’m worried that I’m going to start having heart issues like my dad did years ago because I’m getting up to about the same age he was. He went and had some tests and he’s really been stressing about it. That’s all we knew. Mark and I walk into this event and we are told that much information we sit down in the VIP seats, which are 161 dollars a piece up in front there’s about 50 people you have to be VIP There’s no way the psychics gonna call in somebody’s paid 50 bucks, right? So if you’re gonna do this, you got to do it right. So we went and sat up front first reading was a woman sitting across from us in green who was crying, but Mark said she’s not crying. And another very accurate reading. And then he came to me and he said, I’m getting a twin who wants to reach out to his sister. And I raised my hand and with a choking in my voice, I said, I think that’s me. They brought the microphone over to me and they told me that my brother was kind of making making fun of me because I was at this reading and that something to do with the stomach was it pancreatic cancer and I’m like yes and so he went on and told me more about my brother that does not exist and he went to Mark and told Mark about his father and all the things that were on the Facebook page that we knew. It was a 15-minute reading. He went between us for 15 minutes. It’s all recorded. It’s all up on my website, SusanGerbich.org, and also the screen captures of all the Facebook pages. And you can see that what he’s saying on the stage are all things that are on the Facebook page. But double-blinding it, what was important is that after he got past the part where I had a dead twin brother who died of pancreatic cancer and Mark had a father who had died of heart disease, we’re lost. We don’t know anything else. So whenever the medium starts talking about Buddy, Steve, who stopped smoking, who’s Maria, what’s this to do with a box, what’s going on with Michigan, have you guys lived overseas? We don’t know what to say. We’re just nodding our heads and just pretending, I’m pretending to cry and dabbing at my eyes with Kleenex and acting all fuddled and just trying to agree with him on everything he said. And I’m sure it looks suspicious, but we don’t care. Because the moment he got on that stage and he said, I’m seeing a twin brother who wants to reach his sister, and I raised my hand, we had him.

CW: Yeah.

SG: Because I think, I mean, unless he read my mind, that anything beyond that was gold and he went on and on and on for 15 minutes about all these things on the Facebook pages that mark and I had no knowledge of.

CW: Yeah, so he can’t say he was reading your mind at that point it the only place that and he wouldn’t have reached out Hundreds and thousands of miles away and read the person’s mind who made the fake Facebook page.

SG: Absolutely. One of them’s in Humpty Do Australia  all the way up there by a ninja. I don’t think that he’s reading her mind, you know. She’s probably asleep at that point.

CW: Yeah, I think it was a stroke of genius for you to pick a twin brother because, you know, that’s one of those little mysterious, like, oh, the twin connection. And I cannot imagine a psychic not going for that shiny bobble.

SG: Absolutely. Right. So when we walked into the venue, I just texted the pizza rollers and I said I’m in the venue and they said fantastic and they checked us in on to Facebook. So that’s how you’re using it, we’re saying hello, we’re here, please read our profiles because we opened up the profiles at that point so that somebody would be able to read them and we’d also contacted them on Facebook. I think they had sent him a private message saying, you know, we’re hoping to be at your show and then they would go on to the Facebook event area and they got to know people on the page and were making comments and saying, oh I hope I’m going to be able to reach Andy, you know, whatever they were doing, I’m not even really sure because I wasn’t purview to all that. So what happens is a woman comes over after and she says to me, oh I’m so glad that you got a reading, you look so nice and I said, oh didn’t you get a reading also? And she said, yes, this time my grandmother came through. And I said, this time? And she said, yeah, I got a private reading from him just a couple of weeks ago and the same people came through, but this time it was my grandmother. I’m thinking that’s a hot read. And then we went, we had VIP passes, right? So we get a meet and greet with Thomas John. We go backstage and the woman in green was there and she had had a reading and we get in the back and they’d handed us all a copy of his book and she hands it back to him and she – he’s autographing everything and she said something to the effect of spell it right this time.

CW: Oh.

SG: I thought okay and then at the very end of the meet-and-greet which is only like 20 minutes I raised my hand and I said is there anybody that you you know, you respect as a medium? And he says, oh, this person, that person. And then he said, and I have some very gifted students. I’m like, students? You have students? And he put his hand on right on that woman in the green and said, yes, I have some very talented students. And then there was another woman in the room too, as a student. So I think there was about, I think there was 10 readings that night, maybe 10. I know one, two, three, three for sure, maybe four were hot reads and the others probably could have been as well, I don’t know. Then I left, we walked out because we can’t reveal anything because we’re not there to get to the audience, we’re there to get to him. We don’t care about the audience, we’re not going to change their minds, I don’t want to call them stupid, I don’t want to have any problem with them, I’m just going to leave quietly and I don’t know what’s on the Facebook pages, so I don’t know what he got right and what he got wrong. It could have been total something else.

CW: Well, yeah, yeah. The people there that night, unless they’re students of his, in which case they paid even more money, but they’ve already put down their money for their ticket. You’re not going to do anything about them. But by getting the information out, by publishing these results, by having these stings, you have the information out there for people who might be his future victims.

0:13:19
SG: Well, that’s a possibility. We’re just hoping to make him so uncomfortable that he’s going to have to stop doing hot reads. And I hope that he’s standing in the audience, I mean, standing on the stage next time and looks out over the audience and starts thinking he sees me. And no, that’s exactly what I’m looking for. I want to shake him up. I want him to say, and he, it doesn’t have to be me. We did an Operation Peach Pit, which was in the New York Times article, I’m at home in Salinas, California, and I sent a team from, that live in Connecticut, Kenny Biddle, we sent him and his wife and four other friends in Connecticut, or was it Pennsylvania, can’t remember, but somewhere in the East Coast, to see a psychic. I don’t have to be there, I could do it in Australia, I could do it in New Zealand, I could do it in South Africa, wherever I want. Because it’s just the internet. You’re using the internet.

0:14:06
CW: It’s psychics beware. Susan can be anywhere.

SG: So that’s the idea. That’s the idea. I don’t have to be there. They don’t have to look out and look and see if they see me. I might not be there. In fact, I probably will not be there. But I’ll be there.

0:14:19
BR: Or will you?

0:14:19
SG: Or will I? But I’ll be renting it from somewhere else.

0:14:22
BR: Well, right. And I want to touch on that, because I think that’s a really important part of this whole project is that it’s very 2018, 2019. This couldn’t really have been done 15 years ago. It certainly could have been done decades ago. It’s just interesting, basically use their desire for exposure against it, right? Because as you mentioned, you were allowed to audio record the thing. And part of it’s because I’m sure that he was hoping and expecting that people who were in his audience would just be amazed and share their experiences on social media and look, oh look, you know, here’s him giving this amazing thing, these amazing reads, and you turn around and use that back against him. And I just think it’s a really interesting and clever dynamic that you guys used, using the platform of social media and sort of the digital version of hot reading. It’s a really, really interesting approach.

0:15:14
SG: And it is very novel, as you said, and it is very perfect storm. And it is really hard to do. It’s not like this is going to work every time. You really have to put the bait in there and you really have to watch how the team that ran this, the pizza rollers. Oh, my gosh, they’re amazing. Some, like I said, were in Australia. One was in New Zealand. They had to watch the spelling of words, make sure they weren’t using Australian context. They had to post during times that people in LA would be awake. They created elaborate stories, amazing things that they did. They were just incredible. And then when we did Operation Peach Pit, the same thing. Operation Bumblebee, same thing. Operation Ice Cream Cone, same thing. But all those other ones, we only got cold reads. You really have to find a psychic that’s hungry, somebody who’s on social media and is using it a lot, you know, Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and posting a lot, somebody old-school like James Van Praag or Chip Coffey, they’re not hardly doing that kind of stuff. They just cold read or they just rely on the fans in the audience to just, oh she was at my show two days ago, I guess I’ll read her again.

BR: Well, as you know, Celestia and I, you know, we went to one of John Edwards.

0:16:30
SG: That was a wonderful episode, you guys. I loved that.

0:16:34
BR: Thank you. It was, but it was just fascinating, you know, when I was reading your stuff, it was just, again, they’re using so many of the same techniques. And so it was just fascinating just to sort of be in the audience and exactly as you said, we were there to disrupt the, to disrupt the event, to stand up and call him a liar, hoaxer. That wasn’t why we were there, just to sort of be in the moment and see for ourselves how they do this. It really is an experience you have to be there for. You can hear someone talk about cold reads, you can hear someone talk about these things, but unless you’re in the audience and in that dynamic and seeing the reactions and how they play the crowds, you really don’t get it.

0:17:15
SG: Absolutely, I think it’s required for everybody in the skeptic community to attend one of these.

CW: Yeah, and unfortunately that will mean that they get our money a little bit, but reading what the writer, it was Jack Hitt, H-I-T-T, for anybody who wants to look it up to Google it, the way that he described the palpable grief that just filled the room really took me back to when I attended that John Edwards show because yeah, and you’re describing you were mentioning that it was not your objective or your desire to stand up and just just poopoo on the whole thing while it was happening because Honestly, I couldn’t imagine doing that when I was there because these people are in the grips of it. It would be it would seem almost Disrespectful to their grief to yank them out at that particular moment and the writer did a good job of expressing how this public saturation of palpable grief just overtakes a lot of people there and even if you’re there on pretense, even if you’re there as a skeptic, it reminds you of people that you’ve lost. Everybody understands grief, it’s a universal thing and if you haven’t had anybody close die yet, you will someday. It’s universal. I found it very interesting reading the article how the reason behind you naming this operation, Peach Pit Operation, it’s a way to not interrupt the moment somebody in the midst of their grief because it’s not a good time to do that. But if you leave those calling cards, tell us about the reasoning behind that.

0:18:32
SG: Right, so one of the goals of all the operations I’ve done, I’ve listed a whole bunch of goals to the people who join me and they’re not always the same people each time. I get different volunteers all the time, whoever’s around. I just post on Facebook and say, I’m going to be doing a sting, it’s going to take two weeks, it’s going to take six months. You will be lying to a psychic, you will be lying and possibly creating people in the audience to believe more in the psychic. We’re also going to give them money. If you have problems with any of those things, bow out now. That’s my rules. And so then one of the things I tell them straight up at the beginning is, if we catch this person, that’s wonderful. If we don’t, that’s fine too. The goal is to create a more cohesive skeptic community where people will learn to do stuff together. We have our own voice. It’s like, you know, we’re ants. If we all stand up together, we can take on those, those grasshoppers, you know, yeah, but when we’re just a single ant out there, it just seems like we’re gonna get steamrolled. So my idea is, is that somebody in a skeptic group somewhere or by themselves could see a psychic that’s appearing somewhere. And let’s say Sylvia Brown, because that’s Ben and I did, Sylvia Brown, and Mark Edward and others that one of the amazing meetings one year is Mark Edward wrote out the most egregious misses that Sylvia Brown had. This is on YouTube. He wrote it on green paper, four to a page. He cut them out and all it said was the name of these huge misses. Then we just handed them to everybody. We left them in the bathroom. We left them all over the place because somebody is going to pick it up and go, what the heck is this? They are going to possibly Google it. So I’m using the same idea. If somebody anywhere wants to take a psychic on that’s doing a live reading, they could go through and say Operation Pizza Roll, Operation Peach Pit, Operation Tater Tot, which is Tyler Henry, Operation Ice Cream Cone. Put those on a card and just hand them out. Just leave them in the bathroom, leave them in the seats, anywhere you want. Put them on a bright piece of paper and then walk away. And what people are gonna do is they’re gonna Google that and they’re gonna go, oh, oh, what, what, what, what? You know? And even if they put a card away, they’ll remember the name, it’s so easy.

0:21:06
CW: And often you have, you’re also arming a whole nother segment of the audience that I think people don’t consider. You had Mark go with you as the quote unquote reluctant husband. There are a lot, there are a lot of reluctant spouses that get dragged to this. I was talking to my auto mechanic and he told me his wife had gone to the John Edwards thing like five times and he just rolled his eyes and is like, oh, she’s wasting money on it, but she likes to do it. Blah, blah, blah. Makes her happy. And you get one reluctant husband or reluctant wife or reluctant cousin or whatever, they pick up that card, they might be able to have some really meaningful conversations bolstered with your evidence later on.

0:21:40
SG: Right, but it’s even farther than that because remember my whole goal is to bring our skeptic community together to do more things, to stand up and do things together. And the second thing is you got to get to the psychic. They’re just performers. That’s all they are. And if you mess with a performer, then their whole thing comes down. They everything just falls I mean they get antsy they think there might be a skeptic in the room and if you’ve got bright green or orange papers that are laying all over the place and the psychic goes into the bathroom and they find them in there They’re gonna go. Oh s***, there’s a skeptic here What and so their whole performance is gonna come down it’s gonna be more negative. The mood is lost.

0:22:28
BR: I was going to say, do you remember when you mentioned where we were following Sylvia Brown around and I made those banners that say, convicted felon Sylvia Brown, convicted felon this way. And we were actually protesting outside of, do you remember what happened? It was fascinating because Sylvia Brown actually sent her people out to like photograph us and video record us, should try and intimidate us.

0:22:52
SG: Yes, they came out and they called the security on us and it’s all in the video, you guys. You gotta check this video out. It’s on my YouTube channel, Susan Gerbic. But I tell you what, it was hilarious because you’re shaking them up. And that’s the goal. The first goal is to bring our community closer together to actually doing stuff and quit complaining about how, oh, they’re so awful…. No, no, no, no. Don’t do that around me, because I’m going to give you a lecture. I’m going to raise my eyebrow and put you in the corner. I’m a mom, OK? Second thing is, you’ve got to get to the psychic. You’ve got to get to the psychic and the venue. The venue is not going to want to have people back if there’s a protest out in front.

0:23:34
CW: Well, yeah. And honestly, the thing that will stop people from going to multiple Multiple showings of stuff like this is if it ends up not being that good of a show I have I have heard people say oh I tried it once but you know, it wasn’t that good They didn’t do any good readings or whatever and if you can throw them if you can throw their their mojo a little bit that that’s a great I mean you talk about the community building aspect, that is a great idea for skeptics in the pub all you skeptics out there at any city in the US or beyond, if you read that a prominent psychic is coming to give readings at the local Marriott or Motel 6 or whatever, make a night of it, schedule a skeptics in the pub nearby and right before you go to the pub, bring a stack of little green cards that say Operation T-Roll or Operation Tater Tot and scatter them around the area where you know the audience will be and then go drink your drinks and talk skeptically.

0:24:30
SG: Absolutely, you might even know the people at the venue. It might be somebody you went to high school with and they’ll get you in and they’ll put one on you.

CW: So Susan, this article in the New York Times Magazine is already out online. It’s gone all around the blogosphere and everything and back and you’re doing the junket now talking to everybody and it’s going to be coming out in print on the New York Times magazine in print on Sunday, correct?

0:24:57
SG: Yes, only like maybe 200 million, 2 million views I think is what they tell me. Only.

CW: Oh wow.

0:25:05
SG: Only 2 million.

0:25:08
CW: It’s only been a couple of days, you know. Give it time. Now this did really remind me as Ben has mentioned of the Peter Popov sting and you’re taking something familiar, which is Facebook, and back in those days radio was very familiar to people, but they didn’t think it would be used as a weapon against them by the psychic. And Facebook, likewise, you’re turning it around and you’re showing people how that can be used as a weapon by a psychic. Have you talked to Randy about this? Has he given his blessing?

0:25:43
SG: Yes, I sent them an email right when I knew that it was going to be coming out. Because one of the things the New York Times checks everything. It’s fact checked. They even talk to the psychics. Jack Hitt from the New York Times did try to reach out to Matt Fraser, and that’s a psychic in Operation Peach Pit, and talked to his publicist, I guess that’s what it’s called. And the publicist said, no, he will not be speaking to you. And I have to mention his publicist is his mom.

0:26:05
CW: Oh!

0:26:08
BR: He’s eating dinner right now, but maybe he’ll get back to you later.

0:26:13
SG: And so, and Thomas John was furious. He was absolutely, they said he was furious, threatening to sue, and it’s like, oh yeah, sue the New York Times, right? So they all knew about it, but, you know, the New York Times wanted to talk to Randi also, so I had to give them an email. I sent Randi and Davey an email and said, Hey, you might be hearing from the New York Times. Then when the article came out, that was almost my first email I sent was a link to James Randi and Davey, his husband. I got a response from them saying, ìWoohoo! That’s amazing! We love you!

0:26:51
BR: High praise.

0:26:52
SG: Yeah, I value that, trust me.

CW: Yes, that is good to get some approval from the master there, excellent. But you mentioned that the New York Times reached out to many people, including the psychics, and I thought I remember reading in the article that John Thomas.

SG: No, Thomas John.

0:27:10
CW: Thomas John. I remember reading in the article that Thomas John had tweeted Winky Winky at you or something. Have you heard anything more from him?

SG: Yes, I did. No. Just today, I have received a couple tweets from him. I haven’t responded and I probably won’t. It probably will wig him out and make him really, really upset that he’s not hearing from me. But one of the things he said was, Susan must be a bit psychic herself because she named her project Operation Pizza Roll and I consider myself a great lover of pizza or did she check my Facebook profile? To which Kenny Biddle replied well if she checked your Facebook, then she must be just as psychic as you.

CW: That Kenny Biddle he’s pretty awesome.

SG: Yeah, he’s pretty awesome. We love Kenny and he was phenomenal rounding up people to go to the Operation Peach Pit event and it was in Pennsylvania. But the publicity has been very, very good. The publicity is gone all over the place and when it comes out on Sunday, it’s going to go even further. I’m hearing from reality TV shows like somebody put blood in the water or something. It’s not funny. I’m not kidding. Mark Edward has told me how this works, you know, how to deal with these people. But I’m looking at the credits these reality shows have and oh my gosh, they’re putting out paranormal reality shows.

CW: Definitely, definitely pick and choose. Listen to Mark, talk to Ben, he knows the whole world.

0:28:46
SG: You know, they don’t understand. They are part of the reason why we are in this problem. People, all these stupid reality shows, it’s just ridiculous. They had one called Haunted Rent-O-Vations. What the heck? This world we live in where everybody has a reality show. I mean, somebody picks out your belly button lint and they’ve got a television show. You know, it’s just so dumb. I know, but people are raised that way thinking that reality shows are real.

CW: Yeah, well that’s the ironic thing about calling them reality shows, they’re anything but.

0:29:18
BR: And in this case of course, the psychics met their match. I mean, they run up against Susan Gerbic and of course Mark, who has written a book titled Psychic Blues, came out a couple years back, people should check that one out. So amazing things can happen when skeptics unite and actually come together for a common cause.

0:29:34
CW: Yeah, and Susan, you’ve sung the praises of your team, just as you have been on here before singing the praises of your Wikipedia cabal. You are obviously the common denominator here as a good leader to shepherd all these people and heard the cats as they say.

SG: I’m herding cats and I love herding cats. And I love cats.

CW: I was going to ask you if you had taken in any more strays into your herd of cats since this has broken.

0:30:05
SG: We have one more that came in today. I’m trying to be a little more suspicious in checking them out and before they come into the GSOW project right now, because we don’t want to get infiltrated with somebody that we should not probably be a good fit for the group.

0:30:25
CW: Well, it’s a selective process, everybody, but if you would like to join Susan on these endeavors, look her up, she’s fantastic. Well, Mrs. Wilson, thank you so much for your time. It was great hearing your story.

SG: I’d like to talk to my twin brother, Andy, and tell him I’m thinking of him.

CW: All right, well, fantastic. Keep fighting the good fight, Susan. And thanks for all that you do and also for being a friend of the podcast. We love that you’re a loyal listener and that you sing our praises when you can. We appreciate that.

SG: I love your show. I love, love, love my Skepticrates too.

CW: Oh, yay. All right. Well, we’re going to be back soon. We’re going to let Susan go because she’s busy these days. And we’re going to pick back up with Erik Kristopher Myers, filmmaker extraordinaire, and talk about some people who are pretty big on getting into films themselves, Ed and Lorraine Warren.

0:31:19
BR: Yes.

(MUSIC)

0:31:23
CW: Well, Susan has left us, but Ben and I are still here, as well as special guest co-host Erik Kristopher Myers.

0:31:37
EM: And I, too, am here.

0:31:39
BR: Awesome.

0:31:39
CW: Welcome.

0:31:40
BR: We are collectively here. Awesome. Well, this episode, we wanted to take a look at a curious pop culture ghost hunting demonologist. Footnote isn’t the right word, but it’s a curiosity. And that is the Warrens, Ed and Lorraine Warren.

CW: Ah, the pop supergroup of ghost hunting.

BR: They are, yes, most recently lionized in the The Conjuring films and others. And we’ll be talking about some of the ways in which the Warrens have sometimes…

EM:  become infamous.

BR: Yes, thank you. Thank you for promoting or contaminating, if you will, some well-known horror stories, particularly the ones that were filmed, ranging from the Amityville Horror to the Conjuring films to the Enfield Poltergeist case.

0:32:34
CW: So yeah, you often want to say as seen on TV, but with the Warrens, we’re going to be discussing as not as seen on TV, because what you see on TV or on DVD or on the big screen about the Warrens is often not exactly who they were.

0:32:49
EM: Particularly if you’re only familiar with them via the Conjuring films, which presents a very, very different representation of who they are and were.

0:32:58
CW: And we should note that Lorraine Warren is still among the living. She is like 92 now. She was…

EM: 91.

CW: 91.And as of as of the taping of this episode, she was still with us. But Ed Warren passed away in 2006.

0:33:14
BR: Yes, so for those listeners who aren’t familiar if you if you see a film or really anything Presented as the true story of Edwin Lorraine Warren put a big huge asterisk next to based on a true story. Just not just a grain of salt several pounds of salt.

0:33:32
CW: Yes, I I had fun kind of romping through the various representations online. One of them actually focused on the fact that Ed was an artist before he became a demonologist or paranormal ghost exterminator or whatever title they were using at the time.

EM: That’s actually how Ed would work his way into people’s homes. He would sit outside and he would paint or sketch people’s houses with ghosts emerging in the drawing.

CW: That struck me as so incredibly invasive and creepy. I work in a field where you hear horror stories about people saying they went on vacation somewhere and this artist sketched them while they were walking along this Parisian boulevard and then ran up and said, hey, buy my sketch of you. And that’s incredibly invasive and rude. And I also know people who do sketches of people’s homes for but it’s always by commission. You get hired by the realtor. You get hired by the person who owns the house. You don’t just set up in front of somebody’s house and sketch their house without their permission. That’s weird.

0:34:37
BR: That’s just sketchy.

0:34:38
CW: And then you add ghosts to it as well.

0:34:40
EM: And then he’d send Lorraine to the door with a picture and say, Hi, I’m clairvoyant. Take a look at this picture. Have you seen these ghosts?

BR: Right, right.

CW: Wow.

0:34:48
BR: You had Lorraine Warren, who claims to be a psychic clairvoyant, and she would medium and communicate with the ghosts. And it’s interesting, there’s a tradition in spiritualism where people will go to psychic mediums and they will have a sitting and they’ll have a portrait done, including what would today be called extras, or certainly were considered extras back in the days of ghost photography. And I saw this when I was at Lilydale in western New York at the spiritualist camp there and so there would be drawings of everyday normal people, but then behind them or next to them in the drawing was an illustration of their spirit guide, often an Indian.

0:35:31
CW: So this is like, it’s like spirit writing or…

0:35:35
BR: It’s, yeah.

0:35:36
CW: It’s like the artist claims that they were sort of given this vision or something.

0:35:39
BR: Right. Well, I mean, the artist’s job in that case is actually to depict for the client which spirit on the other side they’re communicating with, which spirit guide. So it’s this really interesting dynamic.

0:35:51
CW: But anyway, this is almost like having somebody draw your D&D figure.

0:35:54
BR: It kind of is.

CW: We put an asterisk, you know, let’s let’s do a future episode on that whole thing, because now I’m interested in that. But to get back to our main topic, the Warrens.

0:36:05
BR: Yeah. So Ed was a World War Two vet, and I think he was a former police officer, if I’m not mistaken.

EM: Yes.

BR: And and, you know, he and Lorraine were together for many years. And in 1952, they founded the New England Society for Psychic Research, original ghost hunting group. And what else am I missing here?

0:36:25
EM: Well, I think it’s important to sort of break down who Ed and Lorraine were in their respective fields. So they were a duo who were investigating paranormal encounters or paranormal claims. And what Ed was, was a demonologist. So he considered himself an expert on all things related to exorcisms and that sort of thing. He ultimately became, I guess, sort of a liaison for the Catholic Church and when he would step into supposed hauntings or demonic activity, he’d be the guy that would bring in the priests and he wouldn’t just bring them in, he would be instructing the exorcists on what they should or should not be doing.

0:37:10
CW: Huh, now did he have any formal training with the Catholic Church? Was he connected in any way? What were his did he have any lettered credentials behind that title of demonologist?

EM: No, he was completely self-taught. He was a self-professed demonologist, but you know, he made the right connection. He made the right connections and he made the right friends. And, you know, it’s sort of, you know, I’m sure we’ll get into it a little bit later, but it was kind of a racket for the Warrens. And so we sort of have to wonder how savory his relationships with certain individuals in the Catholic Church really were. Lorraine, on the other hand, she was a self-professed clairvoyant. That meant that she was able to use extrasensory perception to have visions of the past, visions of the future, or remote viewing, things that are happening right now outside of the range of normal perception. So together, they worked to help families or individuals in crisis.

0:38:17
CW: Help with quotation marks around the word help.

0:38:19
EM: Help, exactly. They would help these families or individuals get book and movie deals.

0:38:26
CW: Now I saw a number of instances where Lorraine was described as a light clairvoyant. Do either of you guys know what that means? Does that mean she was like not heavily clairvoyant? She was just kind of lightly clairvoyant? Or did it have something to do with actual light?

0:38:43
EM: I don’t think so. I think she claimed to be a clairvoyant and a light transmedium.

0:38:48
CW: A light trance medium.

0:38:49
BR: My understanding is that many mediums make a distinction between being a light trance and a heavy trance. So for example, a heavy trance medium, and I’m just, I haven’t researched this, this is my belief, is that a heavy trance medium would be much more into almost sort of like being possessed by the spirit of a dead person sort of acting out, whereas a light trance medium is more able to convey messages from the other side without getting too deeply involved in the character. I could be totally wrong. That’s my understanding.

0:39:24
CW: So if you want to hang up a sign out front and become a medium and you don’t want to have to fake a funny voice or soil your trousers in the process, you should say you’re a light trance medium, not a heavy trance medium, right?

0:39:38
BR: Something like that.

0:39:39
EM: If I’m good at impressions or voices, yes.

0:39:41
CW: Okay.

0:39:42
BR: That’s well put, right. Well, you know, from my recollection, they claim to have investigated, I think it was over 10,000 cases.

0:39:50
CW: Wow.

0:39:51
BR: Yeah, which if you do the math on that, that’s, well, it’s impossible. So let’s just be honest. I think there’s maybe a couple dozen that I know of, there may be a couple hundred, but I’m pretty sure that somebody was lying when they said they investigated 10,000 cases.

0:40:08
EM: Well, you also have to keep in mind that Ed Warren was somebody who made a lot of claims for which there was no evidence whatsoever.

0:40:14
BR: What?

0:40:15
EM: Well, you know…

0:40:16
BR: Hold on.

0:40:18
EM: He said he… I’m holding. Look, he said he had video evidence or he had audio recordings or what have you that proved supernatural or demonic activity. He also made claims that he proved demonic activity in a court of law. None of these claims could be substantiated. There was there was always a reason why the evidence wasn’t there. So I think we could probably whittle the 10,000 cases down to the handful that have been made into theatrical or TV movies of the week.

BR: I’m starting to get skeptical of this duo. I’m not sure.

0:40:50
CW: Well, that brings me to a question I had while we’re doing our little our while we’re familiarizing the listeners with the Warrens. They seem to be the most, quote unquote, famous paranormal investigators or demonologists or what have you in terms of just being represented on the big screen. There’s a ton of different cameos they have on various movies. Various actors have portrayed them, they’ve written all these books. Why do you think that is? What makes them the go-to duo to write about or make a movie about?

0:41:20
EM: Probably because they have been involved in more cases. You know, everything that we’ve seen in the past few years, you know, the Conjuring movies, the Annabelle films, and then going back, other TV movies like the Demon Murder Case or The Haunted, they’ve been involved with so many, and of course, the Amityville horror, you know, we have to obviously name that, but they’ve just been involved with so many things that it’s easy to build a franchise around them. And, you know, so in real life, if you examine the facts, there are skeptics who will say, well, look, they were con artists and they had a certain template that was being used for various families to tell similar stories about haunted houses or possessed people or possessed children. And then you look at something like The Conjuring movies and Ed and Lorraine Warren are sort of presented as being like a two-man X-Men. She’s got the clairvoyance and psychic powers and you know he’s got the acumen for – it’s – they’re sort of shown as being these almost demonology superheroes.

0:42:29
BR: And keep in mind that marketing is their forte. That’s what they did. They hired people, professional writers to tell these stories. So it’s not surprising to me that the Warrens have been able to get themselves, well of course Ed’s dead, but they’ve been able to get themselves and build up a cottage industry and get themselves being well-known and in many cases well-regarded by people who, you know, they say, oh, from the true files of the Warrens and they go, wow, yeah, if you don’t look beyond the superficial then it’s all plausible. But they were marketers, they were self-promoters and of course, it’s bearing fruit.

0:43:11
EM: Absolutely.

CW: For whichever reason, they had, they’ve got a good recipe for popularizing the occult.

0:43:12
EM: They had a habit of showing up and being able to wedge their way into situations, and then very strongly influence the individuals involved. And again, like I said before, they sort of presented a template. This is what happened in the Amityville horror. So, you know, let’s, this is what happened in The Exorcist, which again was allegedly based on a true story that didn’t bear much real fruit once you start examining the particulars. They always sort of showed up or in the case of the Enfield poltergeist, which was turned into The Conjuring 2, they’re depicted in that film as being, you know, the protagonists of the story, when in reality they were they showed up on the scene completely uninvited and were turned away.

0:44:06
BR: Yeah, they did. They did almost nothing. It was a great interview by Guy Lundin Playfair, who was actually there. You know, people who were actually involved in the Enfield Poltergeist case, exactly as Erik’s saying, they, yeah, they showed up. They were there for like a day or something. They left and they had virtually no role whatsoever.

0:44:27
CW: And so maybe that’s how they did 10,000 cases.

0:44:31
BR: That helped if you just do that.

0:44:34
EM: Absolutely.

0:44:35
CW: Now, moving beyond just the pop culture, and I hate to ask both of you to speak for the whole paranormal community, but Ben, you’ve dipped your toes into that community a lot. What do the people there think of the Warrens nowadays? Lorraine has a museum dedicated to all the haunted items that they’ve collected. Is that museum a sort of mecca for paranormal enthusiasts or does half the ghost hunting community think of them as frauds?

EM: It is for me. I can’t wait to attend to that. I really can’t.

0:45:04
BR: You know, it’s interesting. From the ones I’ve talked to, there seems to be a general reverence for them. I can’t speak for all of them, of course. It seems to be divided between the Ghost Hunters team, the TAPS crew, who of course are legitimate because they had a TV show and they were on TV for a decade not finding ghosts.

0:45:29
CW: So they’re sort of the grandparents of the field in that way.

0:45:32
BR: Right. And then you have people like Zach Bagans and his museum. And so you have the other people that are sort of jostling for their little position in the in the niche world of demonology ghost hunting then there’s also people like Hans Holzer, for example, who even many, you know ghost hunters Look at his work and they think they just you could just look at it. You know, it’s not credible So it’s it’s really sort of a hit or miss and keep in mind that that most of the ghost hunting field and the deem knowledge in particular, there’s lots of self-proclaimed experts, there’s lots of self-styled, you know, oh, buy my DVD, oh, I’m speaking at the New England Paranormal Conference and like, you know, it’s just, there’s no shortage of these people coming out of the woodwork and the one thing that warrants half of them is the name. They’ve got Hollywood rights, I mean, I’m sure she’s getting huge royalties from all the stuff and so there’s that angle to it. And to be clear, I never met either one of them. Several of my friends have worked with the Warrens. My colleague Joe Nickell spent some time with Ed and he said it was a very unpleasant guy. I think they were, Joe tells a story of being back show at a TV show and they were just a foul mouth, just a real piece of work.

EM: Sally Jessie Raphael.

BR: That’s right, Sally Jesse. And I have worked with, I’ve met their nephew, John Zaffis, who’s a ghost hunting guy. And I did, for a TV show, Mystery Quest, I worked with a protégé of theirs, a demonologist named Dave Considine. I can talk about that later. But so I have, and it was interesting talking to him because it was clear that his method for demonic ghost hunting was very clearly informed, I mean he said as much, by the Warrens and he seems very sincere in his beliefs that what he’s doing, the sort of Roman Catholic based belief system is all about his worldview. We can’t know how sincere they were or are, I mean we can certainly guess, but we can also talk to people who have written books with him. In the case of, for example, the Amy Little Horror Case, there was a writer named Jay Anson and he published a book that was widely, became the basis for the film. In the case of several of the other cases, there was a writer named Ray Garton and I know Ray and I’ve met Ray and I have some quotes from him. him and Ray was certainly unimpressed by the Warrens and he said that they just told him to make stuff up and that he told me that if Lorraine Warren told him the sun would rise tomorrow, he’d ask for a second opinion.

0:48:15
EM: Well, didn’t Ed tell him as well, hey, you know, the individuals involved with this case that you’re writing about, they’re crazy, they’re all crazy. So you know, it doesn’t matter that their testimony or whatever quotes you’re trying to pull from them in your research are contradictory It’s all BS. So just make stuff up make a good solid scary story.

CW: Wow

0:48:35
BR: So with the case of the Warrens as Erik mentioned they were involved in Well by their count tens of thousands by anyone else’s count maybe a couple dozen And by a realistic counts in terms of actually doing anything, maybe half dozen, I don’t know. But there’s lots of high-profile cases. We’re going to save two of the best-known ones, the Amityville Horror Case and the Demon Murder Case, for another episode because there’s really interesting parallels between the two. I’m pretty familiar with the Amityville case, as is Erik, but Erik is especially familiar with the other one. So we’re going to save that for another episode so we can do a deeper dive into it.

0:49:18
EM: Yes, the devil made us do it.

0:49:19
CW: As we started making notes for this episode, it was clear that there would be far too much to discuss in any one sitting. So we’re going to split it up like that for you guys.

0:49:28
BR: Because we respect how sore your butts get listening to us.

0:49:32
CW: Because we know all of all of you listeners just kind of set your your computer or your phone right in front of you and you sit down and you just focus on what we’re saying. It’s so enthralling that you must pause everything you’re doing. Anyway, so the first thing we are going to be talking about is The Haunting in Connecticut, the popular movie that was based on something the Warrens kind of sort of did. Is that right?

BR: Had some at least tangential connection to, yes.

0:50:03
EM: Based on a true story with finger quotes.

0:50:06
BR: Wink wink, nudge nudge, yes.

0:50:07
CW: Truly based on a story.

0:50:09
BR: Somebody is based on something that somebody said. So in that regard, everything is based on a story. Yeah, I’m not going to go into the whole case, the whole truth of the case. I’m just going to sort of touch lightly on the outlines of the case and in particular the Warrens’ association with it. So the Haunting in Connecticut film tells the story of the Snedeker family, who in 1986 rented a house in Southington, Connecticut. They moved in with their daughter and three young sons, and as happens in scary movies, he said knowingly, strange things began to happen. They found strange items in the basement. Can you guess what they were?

0:50:50
CW: Found footage.

0:50:52
BR: Oh, that’s good. That’s a great idea for a movie. Erik, get on that.

0:50:56
EM: Yeah, I know. I’m on it. I’m on it.

0:50:59
BR: No, they found they found morticians tools. And they later found out to their horror that their home had apparently once been used as a funeral parlor, which, you know…

CW: You mean, you know, parlors exist and are things that they are things?

BR: Yes. And I know this sounds counterintuitive, but when when there’s a business that’s a funeral parlor and they go out of business, they don’t necessarily destroy the building. It may be used for other things. It may be an ice cream parlor. It may be massage parlor. It could be a house. Who knows? But that’s not the worst of things, right? You’re thinking, oh, whatever, morticians, tools in the basement, who left these here, wah, wah. Well, things were getting weird because the parents both got raped and sodomized by demons.

CW: Whoa.

BR: Yeah, that escalated quickly, right?

0:51:49
EM: I’ve heard of being raped by a demon, being sodomized by a demon, that’s, you know, that’s news.

0:51:58
BR: Well, you know, I’m shuddering to remember my close encounter with a Popobawa, but fortunately I escaped. But yes, there’s a story that Carmen, the mother, says that she was mopping the kitchen floor and the water suddenly turned to blood and smelled of decaying flesh and so on. So there’s all sorts of things. So who did they call? Just take a wild guess who they called to come in and help with their case.

0:52:28
EM: Ben Radford.

0:52:29
BR: Yeah, no, no, they should have. Damn, of course, in 86, I was.

0:52:34
CW: Geraldo Rivera, he was around.

0:52:36
BR: That would have been just as that would have been nearly as useful and probably slightly less exploitative.

EM: He was busy at the time covering the satanic panic.

BR: That’s right. He was busy whipping people into a frenzy about Satanists.

CW: Opening Al Pacino’s vault and finding beer bottles.

BR: No, they called Ed and Lorraine Warren who came in and said they looked around and of course Lorraine being a light trance medium and a clairvoyant confirmed for them yes indeed you were right when you thought you were being sodomized by a demon the other day damn right you were. His name is Fred he’s actually very nice. No, apparently it was a whole thing and so they confirmed their house was in fact infested with demons. The story, of course, as these stories do, it then went on to the national talk show circuit, it was the TV show films. And I have not personally investigated this case, so let me just be clear, I have not actually gone and knocked on the doors, however my colleague Joe Nickell has and he wrote about it in Skeptical Inquirer magazine and he went and interviewed, for example, the Snedeker’s landlady, who said the whole thing was ridiculous. She said that nobody before or since had had any problems in the house, and there was nothing weird going on. It was a perfectly ordinary house that may or may not have formerly been a funeral parlor.

0:53:57
CW: Now let me guess, in the movie, the landlady was the first one to be killed by the demon, right?

0:54:01
BR: I believe so. Yes, as happens. But the weirdest thing about this case, and I’ll just say I’ll just put this out there. So keep in mind, all these weird things are happening. You know, you’re mopping in terms of blood, you’re being buggered by demons. There’s there’s all sorts of horrific things going on. So they waited two years before leaving.

EM: And keep in mind, they didn’t claim to have been raped and assaulted once.

0:54:25
BR: No, no, no, no, this, no, you’re right, this went on and on. So like, this is, this is a recurring thing. It’s like, oh, I guess it’s time to get buggered by a demon.

CW: Wait, wait, wait, for, see, because I read some other, you know, overviews of these things, and I’m hearing about families that are, you know, oh, we have a poltergeist, and there’s, you know, sounds, and my kid got thrown up against a wall, and they stay there for like 10 years because they say they can’t afford to move or something. You’re saying that people were claiming they were they were anally raped.

BR: Yes. Assaulted and yeah and on a regular basis. And apparently apparently that wasn’t good enough reason to break the lease.

0:55:09
CW: And and they still kind of it was still home sweet home for years.

0:55:13
BR: That’s my understanding.

0:55:15
EM: It’s interesting. I listened to an interview with Karen Smurl and we’ll talk about the Smurls later on, but she was part of the Smurl case that the Warrens were involved with. And she was asked on a radio show just recently, within the past two or three years, why she did not or why she or her family did not simply move out of the home when they were being attacked and assaulted sexually as well by demons. And she made an argument that, you know, I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt. She made a very compelling argument that some people simply can’t pick up their lives and leave where they are, you know, when you’re people that own a home or you’re paying rent or mortgage or whatever. You’ve got kids in school. It’s hard to get up and leave. And you know, for a minute there, I was like, I’m trying to imagine what I would do if I were told tomorrow I needed to completely relocate my life. Just needed to, you know, flee out the front door. How would I be able to continue to exist? And then I started thinking about being groped by a demon.

0:56:26
CW: Yeah.

0:56:27
EM: And that kind of changes everything.

0:56:28
CW: I was about to say, a demon starts taking me from behind. I’m gone that hour, not even that hour, that minute I’m out the door. I have a credit card, I can go stay at the Motel 6, we can hire some movers to get the rest of the crap out of here, or even if you’re in a financial situation where you can’t afford movers, I would rather be homeless than be raped by demons on a daily basis.

BR: Yeah, if you’re seriously, I mean, I get her argument, but again, it sort of falls apart here. I mean, if you’re if you’re concerned about you being killed and violated and assaulted, get out of the house. I mean, this is not it’s I just it just doesn’t make sense.

0:57:09
CW: I think there were some popular stand up bits, especially by I think I’m remembering Eddie Murphy saying, you know, why are these white people staying in the houses? The house is like, get out! And okay, I’m out of here!

0:57:19
BR: So the Snedeker story actually first came to light in a novel by Ray Garton, who I mentioned earlier, in 1992 book titled In a Dark Place, the story of a true haunting. And you’ll notice the word true in there. And there was, in an interview with a magazine called Horrorbound, Garton discussed the true story behind the haunting Connecticut story. And he said that he was hired by Ed and Lorraine to work with them to tell about their true story. So again, it was, Garton says that it was presented to him as a true story, that the Warrens wanted him to help basically dramatize and because Ed Lorraine aren’t writers and the Snedeker’s aren’t writers and he is a professional writer and so it was like, okay, help this person tell a story, sort of like you would have a ghost writer, right? So you have a professional tennis player who wants to tell their story and their rise to fame. They spent their life playing tennis. They’re not professional writers, so you get someone in to help. And so Gartner went in there and he said, okay, fine. So he interviewed all the family members and he says, he says, he soon realized there was a problem. And this is a quote from me. He says, I found the accounts of the individual syndicators didn’t quite mesh. They couldn’t keep the story straight. I went to Ed with the problem. He said, you’ve got some of the story. You just have to use what works and make the rest up. Just make it up and make it scary.

0:58:50
CW: Huh.

0:58:50
BR: So, keep in mind, Garten had accepted the job, thinking that he was going to be telling the true story of this actual thing that’s going on. He starts interviewing people there. He’s basically assuming the role of an investigator, and he’s realizing that this whole thing is falling apart. There’s contradictions. There’s either mistakes or lies or something, and he said at the end, he says, well, I did what I was told. I used what I could. I made up the rest and I tried to make it as scary as I could.

0:59:18
CW: Well, now just as an interrupting question here, he didn’t go to the Warrens to get information to write about. The Warrens hired him, so they sought him out.

0:59:29
BR: That’s my understanding. Right. So keep in mind the chain of events here. So the Snedekers had, well, again, depending on how you’ve, depending on how retroactively had well again Depending on how you depending on how retroactively we analyze these things the Snedeker’s brought in Ed and Lorraine Who you know again? Well, they were that’s you know this happened in 86 so by this time they’d established themselves as you know hey, if you have a you know scary place going on possible demon in possession call us up. So they this is when they were known for this. This is certainly long after Amityville. They go in there and once again, in the same way that Jay Anson was hired to tell the novelization of Amityville, Garton was hired to tell the novelization of this case. And then once he starts looking into it, he finds there’s nothing there and then he tells Ed, there’s some, these people are crazy, this isn’t making sense. And he’s like, yeah, I know they’re crazy, just make it up. So we don’t have a recording of this. I have no reason to doubt what Garten is saying and it certainly fits with everything else. He voiced his concerns about the credibility of the story. The Warrens said, hey, they’re crazy, I know, just make it up and make it scary. So he did. But at the end of the day, there seems to be little or no evidence that anything supernatural happened at the house. It’s not based on any actual hard evidence that I’m aware of. It’s all these stories and in many cases conflicting accounts that the Snedekers came up with, probably exacerbated by the Warrens.

1:00:58
CW: I’d be really curious to know if there were any non-disclosure agreements that they considered or had anybody sign.

1:01:05
EM: I’m sure there were. And it’s it’s interesting to sort of, you know, Ray Garten was hired to do a job, but at the same time, did he have a certain ethical dilemma there when he is writing a book that he knows is going to be put out there with based on true events, you know, splashed across the cover or what have you, if he knows that it’s bullshit?

1:01:28
BR: That’s a fair question. You’d have to ask Gray. I mean, you know, when I talked to him, you know, he was he said, look, I’m a fiction writer. I’m a writer. I write horror stuff. I mean, that’s, you know, I mean, I can see both sides of this. On one hand, I personally would have difficulty writing something that I knew was not factually accurate, expecting or with a very strong likelihood that it would later on be portrayed as being based on a true story. At the same time, I mean, I could see him or another writer saying, look, I it’s not my job to be the arbiter of truth. I’m hired to do a job. I did the job, you know, what Penguin or Random House or whatever they want to slap on the title. Not my not my bag.

1:02:14
CW: Well, it sounds like he’s walking the line here because obviously he wrote the he wrote the book. He participated. He paid his rent that way for a while and but he’s also not sticking to the story. He’s also coming out and being public about the fact that he was told to make stuff up.

1:02:32
BR: Yes. And to his credit, absolutely. I mean, to his credit, I mean, Ray Garten has and and I’m not sure. I mean, you can Google his name and, you know, see his comments about the Warrens. I mean, he’s been very clear and very consistent in his descriptions of the Warrens as being unethical, as being much more concerned about getting publicity than uncovering a truth, or unfortunately with actually helping the people.

1:02:57
EM: But at how long after the publication of the book was he making these claims? You know what I mean? It’s sort of easy in hindsight to be able to say, oh yeah, well it was total BS. But it’s the same argument that you could throw, you know, at James Fry with a million little pieces I mean he was he was crucified for the fact that that became the Oprah book of the month or whatever. And that it was touted as being a true story when it was almost entirely fabricated.

1:03:24
BR: Yeah, and in fact, I’ve I’d like to do a show on that at some point. I’ve always been fascinated by Literary hoaxes. I have a friend every now and then I post something about fake stories and she says well, I love million little pieces it really moved me and she said that a couple times and and you know, I thought about how to react to that I mean, well, I’m glad that it moved you but if it’s not true, then then just it then it shouldn’t be portrayed as a true story and there are reasons anyway. We’ll do a show on that at some point, but yeah, I’ll add it to the list.

1:03:57
CW: I’ll put it on the list.

BR: But now now Erik you had to tell us more about the Smurl case that you mentioned.

EM: Well, you know, it has some very interesting parallels to the case we just discussed. The Smurl case is told in a 1988 book called The Haunted by Robert Curran. And the I’m holding the book right now and on the cover, it says Robert Curran with Jack and Janet Smurl and Ed and Lorraine Warren.

CW: Oh, so they’re they’re given credit as co-authors.

EM: Oh yes, and this book very, very much deep dives into Ed and Lorraine’s history and their methodology, references all of their prior work as demonologists. It’s a very, very fascinating read. But it’s a 1988 book, you can probably find it on eBay for a few cents, and most people have encountered the story via a made-for-TV film of the same name from 1991. And both allegedly tell the very now familiar story of a family who move into a new home and inexplicable activity begins. In this case, we’re dealing with Jack and Janet Smurl, who along with their four daughters, moved into a duplex in West Pitson, Pennsylvania. And the other unit was inhabited by Jack’s parents. And so you can guess what happened. Strange sounds, odors, voices, doors that are opening and closing on their own. And of course this begins to escalate and the family dog is thrown across the room by unseen forces that eventually begin to materialize and commit all sorts of lewd and lascivious activity.

1:05:38
BR: I like it already. I mean, what? That’s disgusting.

1:05:42
EM: You can sell tickets to this place if you’re into that. These activities include, but are not limited to, pinching butts, late night fondling, fondling in the shower, and in the most famous scene from the book and movie, Jack Smurl is raped by a succubus.

CW: Wow.

EM: And again, you know, this goes back to the case we just discussed. You start to see all of these parallels in all of the cases that Ed and Lorraine become involved with. Now, of course, their argument is, well, this is demonic activity. They they like to do the same things. They like to rape people.

BR: That’s just how demons are.

EM: But then you can make a counter argument. Well, you know, it also helps to get that book and movie deal.

1:06:26
CW: Well, yeah, I also noticed a similarity not just in the the demons, but in the people attacked. It was always some, oh, work a day, you know, working class Pennsylvania family or New York family or, you know, New Jersey family. In fact, they had one of the it might have been Mr. Smurl or was it the Perrons? Or it was one of the fathers saying, oh, well, we were fine, upstanding members of the community before this and we you know we’re just trying to live our lives and it was a it’s always a white working-class family with kids totally it gets attacked and it’s almost like the central casting let’s look for a relatable family that people will want to see on the big screen.

EM: Blue-collar salt-of-the-earth type. Churchgoers pillars of the community those types. And we see that in just about every case. You’re absolutely right. The thing that’s really interesting for me, you can make all sorts of arguments for, you know, this was fabricated, this was based on Amityville, this was based on this, that, or the other thing. What is very interesting to me in the Smurl story, particularly the alleged rape by succubus is apart from the later revelation that Jack Smurl had had to undergo brain surgery at an earlier date.

CW: Oh How close how how close the surgery to the rape?

1:07:51
EM: I’m not sure that a date was ever put on that. But he had had a brain surgery at one point That was due to water in his brain. Oh, it was in 1983. He’d been experiencing short-term memory loss due to a case of meningitis in his youth. So that was in 1983 the book was released in 1988 as I said, so you can see that you know this was in close proximity There’s you can make the argument that perhaps his memory or his perception of things was colored by personal issues that he had, physical issues, neurological issues. But what may or may not also be important to the rape story is that it typifies the night hag phenomenon of sleep paralysis, in which an old woman appears and often will sit on the sleeper who is immobilized. Now, Jack’s story is that he was dozing in his living room chair one evening. When an old woman with the body of a nubile young woman caused him to become completely paralyzed while mounting him and raping him, resulting in Jack’s genitals being covered in, and this is a quote, a sticky substance. And I think that most teenage boys would have been able to corroborate this as a normal thing to wake up to. But I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, it sounds like he had a combination of sleep paralysis and a wet dream. I mean, that’s what it sounds like to me. But this particular anecdote in the Smurl story is probably the most popular one. It’s the one that’s most often retold. You can find clips of that scene in particular on YouTube from the film, but yeah It’s it’s just one of those things that strikes me as being very very explainable and I’m not under I’m not understanding why it’s you know this sensationalized part of the story.

1:09:51
CW: It strikes me that the Warrens had they not been interested in making everything based on a true story, so to speak, they could have made a ton of money writing porn.

1:10:02
BR: Yes, I agree.

1:10:03
EM: Absolutely. 100% demon porn. Demon porn.

CW: Yes, that would.

1:10:08
BR: We did a show on that. We talked about about Kesha and her sexy time with the ghost.

CW: And yeah, well, that Kesha believes it happened to apparently. But but yeah, if the Warrens had just wanted to make a series, you know, backdoor ghosts three or something, they could have been in every adult bookstore out there.

1:10:29
BR: Hey, if they can make a movie titled Clown Porn, they can do that.

1:10:33
CW: Hey, how do you know that there’s a movie titled Clown…? Oh wait, never mind.

1:10:37
EM: They would have had, the Warrens would have had a real issue with the title Backdoor Ghosts because ghosts are shapeless and formless. Okay, apparitions are the ones with detail.

1:10:52
CW: Apparitions has too many syllables for the average renter of these movies. So maybe backdoor demon sluts 3.

1:11:00
EM: Well, that’s why it’s called based on a true story. We take some liberties.

1:11:05
BR: Libertine liberties, if you will. Well, let me talk briefly about my dealings with one of the protégés of the Warrens, as I mentioned, Dave Considine. I was involved in a TV show called, I think it was Return of the Amityville Horror in 2009, and it was an investigation into a place called Wolf Manor, and we at some point will do a show on that, but I was the sort of token skeptic, and Dave and, they called him the Boo Crew. And it was, that wasn’t my nickname for them, that was what the cast and crew called.

1:11:44
CW: The Boo Crew.

1:11:46
The Boo Crew, and they showed up. And it was Dave Considine and I think he had a woman and two other compatriots there. I’ve forgotten their names, they’re a nice lot. But they were sort of the, what you would think of as the classical ghost hunters. And so they showed up on the location in Carson, California, or Clovis, California. One of the two, I think it’s Clovis. Anyway, they unloaded their van. They had, you know, just probably $50,000 worth of equipment and gear and infrared cameras and all sorts of stuff. And they’re setting us up and they’re just taking out. I’m just getting exhausted watching them with all their other alleged demon haunting stuff. And so they again, they were sort of doing what TV audiences would think of as the classic TV ghost hunter stuff, you know, the cameras and this and that. But what was interesting to me was the rituals that they surrounded themselves with. So, for example, they looked for ghosts, but they were very concerned with what other people at the location were doing, including there was a medium who was on the second story trying to communicate with ghosts. She wasn’t using a Ouija board, because that would have really freaked them out. They probably would have run terrified had someone brought out a Ouija board. But they were genuinely concerned about the safety of everyone at the location because of what portals she might open, for example. I watched them as they did this and said they would walk around and they would look for ghosts and they had holy water with them so they would do these what they called provocations. So they would go to a place where they believed a demonic entity was and they would yell at the ghost that they thought was there and they would throw holy water and they would have rosaries and there was a whole thing and they would do these prayers. It was really interesting meeting with them. Obviously, I was the skeptic, but we actually got along pretty well. We were fairly respectful, but it was kind of unnerving to see people, at least from my perspective, were sincerely convinced that there was sinister spirits behind every door. In their worldview, there were demons lurking behind every door, just waiting for someone to think in pure thought or to say the wrong thing or to invite Satan into their lives. I had seen that sort of mentality, for example, with people who were concerned about the occult during Halloween. People were like, oh, don’t dress up as a ghost or a witch because you’re inviting Satan in, this sort of fundamentalist concerns about it. But it was another thing to actually be face to face and in conversation with somebody who sincerely seemed to be almost haunted in a way. I don’t mean that, but just who was just psychologically haunted and just thought that weird things are going on.

1:14:45
CW: Well, your mention of all these rituals that they had, from what you’re saying, kind of invented around the ghost hunting types of work that they were doing, informed by the Catholic Church. That makes total sense. If you’ve ever been to a Catholic service, there’s a lot of ritual attached. And so that’d be interesting to sort of what they bring in terms of holy water, incense, the trappings of the old Catholic church, and how that differs from your typical crew of plumbers who go out and do it.

1:15:24
EM: Well, that was Ed and Lorraine’s, that was their bag.

1:15:26
CW: Yeah.

1:15:27
EM: All of their protégés, that was their thing. They were Catholic demonologists. And so, yeah, exorcism, holy water, all of that.

1:15:35
BR: Absolutely, in fact, I have in front of me an interview with Dave from the October 2010 Paranormal Underground. And I’ll just read a quick section here. And it’s an interview with him. They’re asking him about how demonology differs from paranormal investigation. And constantly he says, please keep in mind that a true religious demonologist has to study for years and has to have been trained directly by another religious demonologist. I was trained under Ed Warren and F. Rama Kumaran Swami, MD, among others. Also, a religious demonologist has to be given his title under the authority of a Catholic bishop in standing, including letters of recommendation from the bishop. And he says, I operate under the authority of five different Catholic bishops in five different countries with exceptional authority to work anywhere in the world.

1:16:28
CW: I’d be really curious to double check all these…

1:16:31
BR: I’m just passing along the information, but it is interesting. The religious demonologist flavor, if you will, of Ghost Hunter is a really curious lot.

1:16:44
CW: It’s an interesting subset, yeah.

1:16:46
EM: He also trained under Father Malachi Martin, who wrote the book, Hostage to the Devil. And there was recently a documentary about him on Netflix that’s worth checking out. And Hostage to the Devil is very notable for the fact that it seems both to inform and respond to the Warrens and their ilk’s methodology. The way that sort of the stages of possession or demonic infestation are broken down, really seems to have first been put in print in hostage to the devil.

1:17:20
CW: Good to know. Good for any listeners who want to check out some of the source material that is informing your opinions here, guys.

1:17:27
BR: Well, and it also goes back to the issue of expecting attention, right? The worldview of assuming that anything, any sound is a ghost, any missing keys, any sudden migraine, anything weird or unexplained, particularly unpleasant is, you know, or certainly in the context of a haunting can be considered demonic or these things. I will give you one quick example. When we were at the Wolf Manor, they were walking around the house and they found one spot on the wall that was warmer than the surrounding wall. You can see this in the TV documentary, of course it made the air, why wouldn’t it? They’re like freaking out. They actually believe, or at least one of them suggested there might be a portal to another dimension because there was this warm spot on a wall. What else could it be, right? In fact, I did a little poking around. I went on the other side of the wall, it was an interior wall, and there were dead bees near that wall. And so it was very likely to actually be a bees nest inside the wall that was creating, it wasn’t like 200 degrees, it was slightly warmer than the surrounding thing. The fact that there were actually dead bees suggests there’s a dead bees nest, suggests there’s a bees nest there. But again, it’s just a case, it was just interesting to see the mindset, right? Oh, warm spot on a wall. This must be a portal to evil spirits. Well, maybe, maybe not.

1:19:02
EM: Or perhaps the bees were psychically drawn to the portal.

CW: Maybe they came from the portal. Maybe they were alien portal bees.

BR: That is likely.

EM: And this plane of reality caused them to die upon entry.

1:19:17
CW: Clearly. So again, in looking into this, we have the Warrens are the grandparents of all these pop culture references to demonology and hauntings and paranormal cases. They’ve been responsible for conjuring one and two and aren’t there future conjuring movies on the way out to I remember reading there’s one plan for 2020 right?

1:19:39
BR: If there’s money to be made Hollywood will make it.

1:19:44
EM: There have been rumors that it’s either going to be the demon murder case or the Smurl case.

CW: Ah well we’ve talked about the Smurl case and we will do another episode that talks about the the conjuring cases a little bit more in depth and the Amityville and the demon murder case so yeah look forward to that.

BR: Stick around for a part two. There’s so much to dig into.

CW: But now, why does it matter that we have the Warrens out there doing this? What sort of effect does it have on society in general, you think?

BR: Well, I think to my mind, one of the main things is that people don’t get their ideas about what ghosts are, demons are in a vacuum. They get it from TV, they get it from from films. And even though, you know, the average person realizes that, for example. The Exorcist, it’s not a documentary. So they realize that’s an actor and this is a script and these are lights and special effects. But yet, because they are framed as and sold as based on a true story, that helps to reinforce their beliefs about these things. For example, the Ouija board is a cult and can bring in things like that. So it’s important to remember that the Amityville story, for example, didn’t occur in a vacuum. There are actually elements of it that borrowed from the exorcist, which came out a couple years earlier. When people report their experiences with ghosts, keep in mind a ghost is a label for an experience. We don’t know what a ghost is. We can’t poke at it and define it and look at it in a museum. So to my mind, the label of ghost, the word ghost, is best operationalized as a label for an experience, right? I had something weird happen to me, X, and it could be a wide variety of things. And for whatever reason, I’m thinking I’m going to call it a ghost. And one of the consequences is that people who report real-life encounters with ghosts often take their cues from fictional accounts. Oh, that’s what a ghost was supposed to look like. Oh, I watched the Paranormal Activity movies. That’s what’s supposed to happen. There’s supposed to be something weird or anywhere else. There’s many ways in which, as I mentioned, TV shows and movies and also novels really inform and in many ways influence people’s expectations and assumptions about ghosts.

1:22:00
CW: Well, even if you mentioned fictional accounts, if the accounts are presented as non-fiction, then that’s going to have even more of an effect.

1:22:10
BR: I would think so.

1:22:11
EM: The 70s and the 80s were the hotbed for this sort of topic. It really took off with the release of The Exorcist, the novel and the film, and the claims made by William Peter Blatty that it was based on a true story. And again, going back to the Satanic Panic, that was something that erupted in the 1980s. And talk shows and 2020, and you’ve got all of this stuff on the television, talking about all of these speculatory sort of topics, you know, shows like In Search Of, and you didn’t have the Internet at that point. If you were going to get your information on the sort of cases that, you know, say Ed and Lorraine Warren were involved with or other similar claims You would see one side of the story or if you went to your bookstore and you picked up the the haunted or you picked Up, you know Ed and Lorraine Warren’s book the demonologist Co-written by Gerald brittle you if you pick those things up. You’ve got the one side of the story now We’ve got the internet now we have the internet and we can fact-check just about yeah and get the other side of the story. You know, it was very, very easy for this to become as big as it was and for people like the Warrens to capitalize on it during that time.

1:23:20
CW: You know, I didn’t really, I haven’t really ever conceptualized it fully here before, but the 70s, 80s and early part of the 90s were this, it was this golden age of sensationalism because you had cable TV was coming on the scene. You had a bunch of infotainment shows, you had Sally Jessie Raphael and all these other shows, you know, whereas, you know, instead of just, you know, Ed Morrow telling us the news on the radio or something, you had a wide variety of outlets, but it wasn’t so democratized as it is today, where you have people fact checking, you have Wikipedia, you have stuff like that. The most sensational stories had the greatest reach and the most legs. And so we really kind of came of age in this. I don’t want to call it a dark age, a sensational age.

1:24:09
BR: Yeah, I would think so. And yeah, and the other thing, keep in mind, when we sort of take a step back and look at the role of the Warrens in promoting many of these cases and again, we’re going to have a part two and we’re going to cover some of the other cases. But just to take three, for example, you have the 1977 Amnityville case. And again, we’ll talk about this next episode. That was later revealed to have been largely, if not entirely, faked. I mean, the people, the Lutzes admitted making it up. It was a non-thing. You look at the Snedeker case, the haunting in Connecticut. There’s no real evidence that any of that happened. You look at the Enfield Poltergeist case from the Conjuring 2. Clear evidence that it was faked. Right, it was kids faking things. And so, which is odd, which might be odd, but I’m trying to figure out how to frame this. But I mean, it’s telling that the Warrens have promoted these cases as being true stories when we know for a fact or with near certainty that several of them were outright faked and other ones had no evidence for them whatsoever.

1:25:20
EM: Well, think about it this way. The Warrens were not charging the families for their time. So where does their revenue stream?

1:25:26
CW: Oh, you know that old saying, if the product or service is free, then you are what is being sold.

1:25:34
EM: Exactly.

1:25:35
BR: Deep wisdom, I like that. That’s a fortune cookie.

1:25:38
CW: Now, the Warrens also typify something that I know Ben, you have fought against, and that is exploitation of either a tragic memory or real live living people, especially children. Do you guys have any thoughts about the exploitative nature of the Warrens’ legacy?

1:25:57
EM: I’m going to save my thoughts on that for the demon murder case, because that is entirely what that situation was all about.

1:26:04
CW: Oh, OK.

1:26:05
BR: Yeah, I agree with with Erik. I mean, it’s just I would just encourage people to keep in mind that these beliefs are in many cases harmful and damaging. And it’s not you may be entertained by seeing the Conjuring films and oh, this is a true story of us. Well, keep in mind that in many cases, there are real-life people behind that who may be emotionally disturbed. They may be sincerely thinking that something is going on. They may be being ripped off and sensationalized. There is a human aspect to it that I would encourage people to keep in mind.

1:26:41
CW: Well, thanks for joining us, listeners and Erik and of course, Ben, to talk about Ed and Lorraine Warren, really, really personas that loom large in all of the ghost stories that we see now have been kind of informed by the template that they, I don’t want to say invented, but popularized, or maybe we should say invented, a little, half a dozen of one, six of the other.

1:27:07
EM: I think they invented and then popularized.

1:27:09
CW: Oh, there we go. Yes, yes. If any listeners have actually been to Lorraine Warren’s museum, where is Lorraine’s museum? What part of New England is that?

1:27:20
EM: It’s Monroe, Connecticut.

1:27:24
CW: Okay. Any folks who’ve been up to Connecticut and actually seen her museum, which as of this recording, I think it’s still open, write us on our Facebook page. We want to hear about your visit.

1:27:33
BR: Absolutely. I think if it’s anything like Zach Bagans’ museum in Vegas, it’s got lots of little trinkets that may or may not be haunted.

1:27:43
EM: Such as a cursed Dungeons and Dragons manual.

1:27:47
CW: Oh, well, that might be interesting. I actually recall seeing one of the many bits you can find on YouTube. Lorraine is taking somebody on a tour of her haunted museum, which she has priests go through regularly and cast protection spells. I guess they’re not spells, they’re priests, so it’s protection prayers, not spells. I’m thinking D&D here. And she pointed out the Annabelle doll, the little raggedy Ann doll that has caused so much uproar, the most haunted object in there. And she’s like, oh, I don’t even, I won’t even look the doll in the eye. Don’t, don’t be very careful of the doll. Like really making out like this doll is one of the most dangerous things in the room. You know, be very careful with it. And I’m looking at it and it’s in this very carefully constructed display case with a red light shining down on it. I was like, okay, if you really feel that way about an object you don’t spend that much time presenting it in the right kind of lighting with the perfect box.

BR: Don’t even look at it. It’s just so terrifying.

CW: I realize that I’ve presented this to you in the perfect photo op, but I mustn’t look!

1:28:54
EM: That’s why they’re that’s why they completely redesigned it for the films. You know, I mean, it’s ginger shaming!

1:28:59
BR: Wow…

1:29:00
CW: We will be doing part two next time. So Mark your calendars and we’ll be back with some more thoughts on the specific Warren cases of The conjuring movies one and two the Amityville horror and the demon murder case.

1:29:17
EM: Looking forward to it.

1:29:18
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1:29:22
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1:29:55
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1:30:18
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