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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.

0:00:10
Celestia Ward: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange, everybody. I’m Celestia Ward and with me is…

BR: Oh, that’s my cue. I’m Ben. Ben Radford.

CW: Yes. Welcome to Episode 87. It is the beginning of March. We are going to be going into part two of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s exploits in the ghost hunting, demon busting racket that they had going on for quite some time.

BR: Racket’s a good word.

CW: Yes. But before that, we’ve got an interesting swayso, and it kind of rhymes this week, doesn’t it? It’s a Momo swayso. We like to call the first segment sometimes swayso, meaning, So, what are you skeptical of?

(MUSIC)

0:01:27
BR: It’s very clever. So this week, it’s been sort of an ass kicking past couple weeks for skepticism, in fact.

0:01:34
CW: Yes.

0:01:35
BR: We’ll be talking a little bit about that later and of course with Susan Gerbic and her sting on the psychic which we discussed in the last episode. But the more recent one that sort of popped, sort of unbidden into my world and onto my desk was the Momo Challenge, which probably anybody under 17 or over 17 has heard about. If you’re at all online, you probably know what the hell I’m talking about.

0:02:01
CW: Yeah, it’s been everywhere. We’ve had peak Momo saturation, even though Momo, it was out in July of last year. It just resurfaced in a big way.

0:02:11
BR: Right. So for those who don’t know, and of course, people may be listening to this episode years or centuries from now. If so, good luck. The most recent outbreak was, as I mentioned, the Momo Challenge, and it’s a new online deadly danger. One more thing for parents to be afraid the kids are getting into.

0:02:32
CW: Yes. Hide your kids, everybody.

0:02:34
BR: Yes. Momo’s lurking around. You know, we could do an entire show on online suicide games, and a lot of this folds back into stuff we discussed in previous episodes, including the Blue Whale Game. Yes. So, again, we could do a whole show on that, and we’re not going to go into it in too much depth. But basically, these are sort of updated versions of moral panics where society gets concerned about what kids today are doing and, you know, the music they’re listening to and the D&D games they’re playing and what evil, satanic, corrupt influences are out there, particularly online. And in this particular case, it was again the Momo challenge, and the figure called Momo was this creepy sort of bug-eyed reptilian thing that was always accompanied by this challenge. And just to sort of set the stage, the challenge was there was this online figure that would approach kids and try and get them to do different challenges, do a series of self-harming activities. In some cases there would be threats, you know, if you don’t do this then, you know, we’ll come get you. Either Momo will show up at your house and kill you or there’ll be some sort of online extortion type thing. So that’s, again, the overview. But one of the creepiest parts was Momo herself.

0:03:56
CW: Yes, and that caught my eye, as my husband put it, the reject from the Dark Crystal movie image. Now, I thought it was actually a really awesome sculpture, and it certainly, you know, gets the hairs tingling on the back of your neck. When the Momo Challenge came out, you know, sometime last year, around July, I think it started popping up, the artist originally credited in a lot of the articles was Midori Hayashi, which I’m finding out is a very common Japanese name. It’s like their version of James Smith or something, but it’s been clarified. The actual artist is Keisuke Aiso. A-I-S-O. He’s 43. He’s a special effects artist with a Link Factory, which is a shop just outside of Tokyo. According to the Japan Times, well, this poor guy’s been getting a lot of hate mail since this has gone around, saying, how could you create such a horrible thing? Blah, blah, blah. And he’s like, no, I’ve got little kids. I just this is just part of a little art show like three years ago. He said it’s a sculpture that was part of a grudge girls collection. And it’s based on Ubume, which is a yokai. I’m sure you know what those are, Ben. Creepy supernatural entity. This one in particular is a child harming entity. It could possibly be the ghost of a pregnant woman, somebody who died in childbirth, etc. And I’m seeing some reports saying that, oh, the artist has destroyed the Momo sculpture. Momo sculpture has been destroyed. The artist says it will never harm anyone. He’s lifted the curse. And what the artist actually has said is, like, this was not a high profile piece of artwork, it didn’t get sold for a lot of money. It ended up wrapped in plastic, getting out in the elements, you know, in the back of a warehouse, and it was eventually just so destroyed that he tossed it out into the dumpster. So, like, a year-

0:05:51
BR: It was not in response to this to break a curse.

0:05:53
CW: Yes, so I think he is quoted somewhere in some British article saying, children don’t have to worry, Momo is dead. And so people, you know, various other writers have latched onto that saying, you know, the artist has, you know, ritualistically murdered his own creation because of the horror that it has caused. No, no, no. It just, you know, like a lot of pieces of art, it just ended up, ended up like old Christmas trees, just kind of getting recycled.

BR: As, as happens. Yeah. So if people are interested in other yokai, of course, one that we talked about on the show before is Kuchisaki-onna, the slit mouth woman. And there are of course, lots of parallels there. So if people are interested, they can check out that back episode. But yeah, so basically what happened, as you mentioned, the Momo challenge began circulating in mid 2018. It was originally linked, I believe, to the death of an Argentine teenager who apparently killed herself. And as with the Blue Whale game, there was an assumption, either by police or parents or friends or whoever else, that there was some sinister connection to an online game, which has never been proven, at least not so far. And then, so again, it circulated for a while and there were stories about it. And then it got picked up by the British tabloids, who are always looking for something lurid and sensational. They do like their gossip. They do like their gossip and so they went right into that and then that’s sort of how these things circulated. In some ways, it’s sort of similar to the Slender Man story and then it really burst into certainly the American consciousness in February just recently when it was just all over the place and I first heard about it, I got a phone call from Rolling Stone magazine who wanted to interview me about the Momo Challenge and particularly its connection to the Blue Whale Challenge which of course I had written about and presented on. So anyway, again we don’t have time to go into all the sort of details about it but basically the Momo Challenge was very clearly copied and lifted almost directly from the Blue Whale game. They both involve alleged suicide games, conspiracies, evildoers online, trying to lure children into doing terrible things either to each other or in this case, suicides. What was interesting, particularly interesting about this case was sort of seeing the rise and fall of it. Again, we sort of touched on the rise of Momo, as often happens with these sort of online legends and rumors, people take bits and pieces, right? So initially, as you mentioned, there was no connection between the sculpture, I think it was originally entitled Mother Bird because it shows a creepy bird figure.

CW: Yeah.

0:08:42
BR: There’s no connection at all. So this is how these things go online, is someone has an idea, someone Googles something and says, oh, here’s a creepy image and just latches onto it. And then that sort of gets cemented into the public’s consciousness and association. So that’s that’s sort of how these things start. What’s this what’s been especially fascinating over the past week or two is sort of the fall of MoMo.

0:09:04
CW: Yeah. And it’s been pretty quick.

0:09:06
BR: It was it was it was sort of again, there was there was about a week, week and a half where it was sort of gathering steam and it was being reported on with Rolling Stone and then The Atlantic had a headline titled, it was beautiful, it was just refreshing and simple. The Momo Challenge is not real. Yes, this is how you accurately tell people what’s real or not. Thank you, The Atlantic, thank you, Rolling Stone.

0:09:32
CW: This whole how it played out really kind of warmed my skeptical heart because I read the Rolling Stone piece, of course, because you posted it out, you were quoted, and it was immediately up. Didn’t you say you got hate mail within 20 minutes or something after it posted?

0:09:46
BR: I did, yeah. Within about under half an hour, I got hate mail from somebody who had seen me quoted in the Rolling Stone piece and was accusing me of being insensitive and not caring about the victims of this online suicide game, which makes me wonder, did you read the article?

0:10:06
CW: Well, what I was really impressed with is, you know, headlines are often just sensational, grabby, hey, look, there’s a danger here in big red flashing lights. The headlines I was seeing, not just with Rolling Stone, I thought, okay, Rolling Stone took an early skeptical look at it, great for them.

0:10:24
BR: Which is especially good because Rolling Stone has a history of being less than skeptical at times.

0:10:28
CW: Yes, there is that. But I was thinking at first, okay, Rolling Stone might be the only ones that actually interview somebody like Ben and talk about the urban legend quality to this. And then bang, bang, bang, just one after the other. And Gadget had a headline, the bogus Momo challenge internet hoax explained. And CNN said, Momo challenge, please don’t worry about it, here’s why. And Huffington Post, the Momo challenge is a hoax, but it’s still putting kids at risk. And it talks about the risk of spreading these things that are bogus. But just seeing these words like hoax and bogus and don’t fall for it and don’t worry about it and urban myth, seeing these things in headlines was refreshing.

0:11:24
BR: Yeah, it’s honestly the first time I can think of off the top of my head when there’s been this fairly quick skeptical backlash. as most skeptics and psychologists and social scientists know, these rumors, they go around the world in minutes. You know, the sorts of rumors and stories and urban legends that decades ago would take weeks or months or years to circulate, again, they go around the world in minutes because of the nature of the Internet. A lie can spread around the world while truth is still putting its shoes on.

CW: Yes, exactly.

0:11:59
BR: And that’s typically the case. And again, this is well known, is the initial alarmist, sensationalist, terrifying headlines are screaming all over the place. And then when there finally is the sort of more sober, skeptical, evidence-based follow-up, it’s sort of a small mention on page 16 at the bottom of the page. Or it’s, you know, somebody happened to quietly whisper something else. So always the sensationalism gets the huge headlines. And in this case, it was this sort of the rare exception where due in part to the widespread news media coverage, much of it was was anomalously skeptical and quoting folklorists and sociologists.

0:12:41
CW: Yeah, yeah. And this, of course, comes right on the heels of the big New York Times magazine write up with Susan Gerbic and Mark Edwards and the pizza roll sting operation of psychics. And you’re right, it was a really good month. February was a fantastic month. And, you know, I think I know why, because Russ Dobler made February skeptical month for adventures in poor taste. That’s probably what it is.

0:13:04
BR: I assumed it was because Mercury was in retrograde, but

0:13:07
CW: Did you say Marie Curie was in retrograde? Yes, that’s the Nobel Prize winning chemist. What? How did she do that?

0:13:16
BR: Well, no, and it’s yeah, and frankly, we should point out that, you know, a lot of the credit, I think, for the Momo being debunked goes in part to Susan Gerbic and the skepticism on Wikipedia.

0:13:29
CW: That’s right, yeah, that popped up right away, the Momo hoax on Wikipedia.

0:13:33
BR: Yeah, and I mean, that was brilliant on her part, and her editors did a fantastic job because when people are reading about these things, they see the rumors, maybe they go to Snopes, but they go to Wikipedia and Susan was right on top of it. Probably within hours or certainly a day or two, there was a slug on the Wikipedia page about the Momo Challenge that was basically pouring cold water on and saying there’s a folklore aspect to it, there was lots of good skeptical content on there and not only just for the average person but for journalists.

0:14:05
CW: Yeah and journalists are paying more attention to Wikipedia now because it is no longer the fringe not very trustworthy source of information. It’s pretty heavily curated these days and it’s a good source for people and for journalists alike nowadays. Of course, you double check everything. Skeptical rule number one is double check everything, but but you certainly have a list of great sources at the end of any Wikipedia entry.

0:14:30
BR: And the rejoinder to it – again so we talked a little bit about the the rise of the Momo challenge and how it was patterned after the blue whale game very clearly and all the different angles into it and then how it rose but not only did it plummet pretty quickly But you saw something even more interesting in some ways, which is that this boogie woman got defanged within about a week and was basically a punchline by the end of the week.

0:14:57
CW: Oh yes, the memes. Oh, so many memes.

0:14:59
BR: Yes. Yeah, and this was just fascinating to watch because not only did you have Momo going from a supposedly genuine, scary, legitimate, horrifying face of an online conspiracy, suicide, teen cult thing.

0:15:15
CW: Wow, that’s a mouthful.

0:15:17
BR: There you go. Thank you. Now, not going from that to all of a sudden, Momo is being seen meeting the Queen of England. She’s breaking down the Berlin Wall. She’s walking on the moon. She’s making yo mama jokes – or rather yo Momo jokes.

0:15:30
CW: I saw a Billy Idol one where he’s with the rebel yell. He’s singing Mo Mo Mo.

0:15:36
BR: Exactly. That was one with Jason Momoa. I mean, it was it is just fascinating from a folkloric point of view just to see not only the pretty rapid debunking, but soon the mocking and the satirizing of this figure that only a few weeks earlier was genuinely thought of as being this online genuine threat.

CW: They had police officers and schools issuing warnings. I had quite a few people I know saying, oh, God, we got a warning from my child’s school about this. Don’t they understand it’s a hoax? And so, yeah.

0:16:16
BR: I think the humor angle is especially important here because it’s not making fun of any person. It’s not a punching down or punching up or whatever. It’s a case of where something that was supposed to be a threat is exposed as a threat. It’s sort of a emperor’s new clothes moment where people are saying, hey guy, this is bogus. Everyone’s saying it’s bogus. And so there was sort of a tipping point where people said, not only is this not a threat, but it’s funny. And we’re gonna mock it. You haven’t really seen that same sort of mocking angle so much with Slender Man for example or with the Blue Whale game.

0:16:54
CW: Not yet, not as widespread anyway. I mean there’s people that make fun of everything but not as widespread.

0:17:01
BR: And the other aspect is that if we’re going to compare Slender Man to Momo, I would point out that certainly as of recently, Momo was considered to be a genuine threat. I mean in the case of Slender Man, it was widely acknowledged as being fictional. I mean, the guy that created it, Victor Surge, flat out said it was never meant to be real. It’s always been fictional, blah, blah, blah. And the fact that two Wisconsin teenagers who had mental illnesses sort of thought it was real doesn’t mean that much of the online community thought that Slender Man was real. Contrast that with Momo Challenge, in which many teens did and presumably still do genuinely think that Momo is real. Not necessarily the creepy bird figure seen in the photo, but some online evildoer behind a screen.

0:17:49
CW: I did see Slenderman raised as a counterpoint to the dangers of spreading a hoax. The writers of a couple of these articles dredged up Slenderman and the attempted murder case that stemmed from people reenacting Slenderman type, what do you call that again? Ostention?

BR: Ostention.

CW: Where they’re play-acting these these folkloric trends and they mentioned that if the Momo thing becomes super popular and is constantly repeated by parents who are giving it, parents or authorities, people in power who are giving it legitimacy and weight and just freighting all this importance to it, then you do have a higher danger of kids getting into some kind of trouble based on Momo, but not in the way you think.

0:18:39
BR: Right, exactly. I mean, you’re exactly right about the issue of legitimacy. We saw this, for example, in the phantom clown panic in 2016, where there were reports of clowns threatening to shoot up schools. There were clown lockdowns. And it was taken very seriously. There were not just urban legends and rumors, but there were actually in some cases real teenagers who were posing as clowns, making joking threats about shooting up schools. And again, this was taken seriously. And because it was taken seriously, what would happen of course is that parents and school teachers and police would get what is legitimately a school threat. Whether it’s plausible or not, it is a threat to a school and they take that very seriously.

0:19:26
CW: I had the perfect little microcosm happen during the clown panic. One of the schools that a friend of mine works at, in fact I’ve done some mural painting school, a middle school across town, they had a some kid yelled clown during the lunch break and it was a packed courtyard area by the cafeteria and kids just started running because somebody yelled clown and this is in the middle of the clown panic and you know they may have been jokingly running, they may have been pretending to be in an uproar or there could have been some but for whatever reason two kids were pretty seriously injured. One of them had to go to the hospital, you know, after getting trampled or falling off of a table or something during this this uproar over some kid yelling clown and that’s that’s a perfect example of how spreading a false panic can lead to other issues that do indeed end up harming children.

0:20:19
BR: Absolutely, and there’s there’s countless cases of that. We’ve talked about about modern witch hunts. There are people who have been attacked and even killed, burned to death, accused of being witches. And we’re not talking the 1700s in Europe, we’re talking a few years ago in Brazil and in Pakistan and India. Rumors of these types really can have consequences and that’s one important message to take.

0:20:46
CW: Well, at least the Momo Challenge doesn’t have the face of a real person on there to be wrongfully persecuted. Although, she does look a little bit like Shelley Duvall, but I hope that actress will remain safe from the panic-stricken people. Well, thanks for bringing your folkloric expertise and thanks for informing that Rolling Stone article. That was one of the early ones. And you know, the early stories do influence how the later stories report so thanks for doing your little part to help help us remain calm.

0:21:21
BR: I’m happy to and really the the thanks goes out to the journalist that reached out to me and and that was one of the things I told her she said you know how can how can parents and others help prevent these sorts of things I said by doing exactly what you’re doing which is contacting folklorists and contacting skeptics and contacting people who know about this and put this in perspective. So there’s credit all around. Credit goes to Susan Gerbic. Credit goes to the journalist that actually took an extra few minutes to track down a folklorist to talk about it.

0:21:49
CW: It doesn’t have the same ring to it. Who are you going to call? Folklorists! Not quite the same, but I definitely agree with the sentiment. And up next, we have Eric Christopher Myers joining me and Ben to talk about Ed and Lorraine Warren. We’ve got, we’ve saved some of the best cases for last.

0:22:08
BR: Stay tuned, folks.

(MUSIC)

0:22:11
CW: Hey, and now we are back ready to discuss some serious, meaty ghost lore and the purveyors of ghost lore, namely Ed and Lorraine Warren. This is part two of an examination of the lifetime achievement of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Ghost hunters, demonologists, clairvoyants, door-to-door salespeople, you name it. And we have with us again Erik Kristopher Myers.

0:22:50
EM: Hey guys, are you sick of me yet?

BR: Nope, not yet.

0:22:53
CW: You have not overstayed your welcome, not by a long shot.

0:22:55
EM: Well then this episode shall be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

0:23:00
BR: I love your diligence, sir.

0:23:02
EM: I’m a hardworking guy, what can I say?

CW:  Okay, well for those intrepid listeners who are listening back to back here, you probably recall, we talked about Ed and Lorraine Warren and gave you a little bit of backstory, but Ben, why don’t you give us a quick, like, thrilling 30-second ride through Ed and Lorraine’s careers here so that people understand who they are.

0:23:22
BR: Well, Ed and Lorraine Warren are probably best known, at least more recently, by the general public for their appearance in the allegedly based on true story, he says advisedly, films such as The Conjuring and Annabelle, and there’s other ones as well. Ed is dead and Lorraine Warren is, last I heard, still hanging on. She claims to be a psychic medium clairvoyant and they both come from a strong Roman Catholic background in which any weird sound or voice or anything even remotely odd is almost certainly demonic and is needing natural attention, hopefully with their name on it.

0:24:04
CW: With royalties.

0:24:05
BR: With royalties, that’s my soundbite. What’s yours, Erik?

0:24:09
EM: I’m just sitting here and asking myself whether or not they still communicate.

0:24:14
BR: I’m sure we will never know, but we will delve into the Warren Odyssey Oddity Part Two.

CW: Yes, and we saved, for this time, we saved some pretty big cases, namely one that most everybody has probably heard of. It sort of was the patient zero for a lot of based on a true story horror movies. We’re talking about Amityville.

0:24:35
BR: Yes, the Amityville horror. Now, to be clear, we’re not we’re not doing an entire episode on this. You know, entire books have been written about it. Entire podcasts have been done about it. So we’re not going to go into every little last claim in detail. And I witnessed back and forth. There are lots of places you can do that. We’re just going to be giving the overview, primarily focusing on the Warrens role in perpetuating it. So basically the Amityville story really began in 1977 with the Jay Anson book The Amityville Horror, A True Story. Note the subtitle, A True Story, which is almost always a flag that is not a true story.

0:25:15
EM: Well, also keep in mind this is following the wake of the exorcist and that had as much of an impact as it did due to the fact that it was allegedly based on a true story. So everyone wanted to roll out their true account.

0:25:28
BR: Exactly. And I’m glad Erik brought that up because that’s actually one of the key parts to sort of seeing how these fit together is that these sorts of claims and stories, they don’t occur in a vacuum. They occur in a very specific cultural and social milieu, to misuse a word and mispronounce a word. So what you had, you had, you know, The Exorcist came out in December 73, and of course that was based on William Peter Blatty’s novel, and then that, of course, directed by William Friedkin, became sort of the classic horror film. That did not go unnoticed by Jay Anson and the Warrens when it came time, when it came their turn to try and sort of talk up a horror film and a haunted house story.

0:26:12
EM: Yeah, and I mean, this was also the era of In Search Of and, you know, the mysterious monsters and all of this sort of speculative entertainment that was being put out there. Bigfoot, Nessie, UFOs, they were really, really becoming a big thing. And so anything that could be sort of spun as being real took on a slant that it hasn’t really had since, I would think.

0:26:35
BR: No, that’s it. And that’s absolutely right.

CW: Is there a term for that? Is it called like spookotainment or something?

EM: I think that now we have a term for it.

0:26:43
BR: There you go. Coined here and now, folks. You heard it. Spookotainment. So let’s sort of go real quickly into the true story behind the Amityville story because unlike many of the other cases that the Warrens were even personally involved in, we know there is some kernel of truth to it. That is, not necessarily that anything particularly terrifying happened regarding the Lutzes, the family that later said all this happened to them, but instead to the DeFeo family. Their story begins in November 1974 when six members of an Amityville, New York family were killed. The parents, Ronald and Louise DeFeo, were shot in bed while they slept along with their two sons and two daughters. The remaining son, Butch DeFeo, was arrested for the crime and he was later sentenced to prison. So that is a true story. That is not made up. It’s been embellished by many people, but the murders actually happened. That’s been well documented. And again, this is in the context of a haunted house story. It’s classic. It’s now classic horror fodder. But keep in mind that murders happen all across the country, murders and double homicides and mass murders, they often happen indoors. They’re not always outside in parks. So my point here is that there’s nothing inherently, incredibly bizarre or rare or unusual about even a quadruple homicide in a home. It happens.

0:28:20
CW: Yeah. When I right before I moved into my new house, gosh, 15 years ago, there was a triple homicide just down the street at one of the houses here. I have I have yet to see any ghosts, but I mean, murders, they do happen. I don’t not trying to minimize it or belittle it. It’s a terrible, terrible thing. But human beings sometimes kill each other.

0:28:36
BR: They do. And in this case, it was the address was as as famously known, 112 Ocean Avenue. And actually, I have several friends who are realtors and I’ve had discussions about them. It’s like, what do you do when you’re trying to sell a house that people have died in and whether it’s natural causes, homicide, whatever else, and it is sort of a tricky situation, right? Because you can’t ethically and legally cover it up. On the other hand, people may or may not want to move in. In this particular case, there was no supernatural activity associated with that house after the DeFeo murders. It was just, wow, that happened. They’re all dead. Butch is in prison. No, no big deal. Until a year later, when the Lutz’s moved in, they moved into the six bedroom house. And all of a sudden, hell broke loose.

0:29:25
CW: Well, out of curiosity, during that year, was anybody else living there? Or was it just empty? Do you know?

0:29:31
BR: My understanding is that it was essentially empty. That they were the first family that had moved in. Keep in mind that, of course, you know, the house was owned by the DeFeos and all of them except Butch were dead. And given that he’s in prison, he’s in no he’s in no situation to inherit the place. So I think it basically…

CW: It  probably took that long just with legalities and everything to get right.

0:29:53
So at this point, again, I’m giving you sort of the alleged true story behind behind the Amityville story. And as with all these cases, there’s always this game of telephone. There’s always this avalanche of bullsh**, right? So there’s what kind of happened and there’s the written up version of what happened and there’s the script version of what happened and there’s the film version of what happened and there’s a TV version of the film. So there’s – of course, the further you get from the source material, the more exaggerated it gets. So they claimed that all sorts of things were happening. There were green slime oozing from the ceilings. There was biblical scale swarm of insects that attacked the family. A demonic face with glowing eyes peered into the house at night, because of course it did. There were cloven hoof prints in the morning snow, just to give a little urban legend-y twist to it, right? We thought it was all fake, but then the next morning, cloven hoof prints by the window.

0:30:53
CW: That sounds like the Jersey Devil is doing some moonlighting in New York.

0:30:56
BR: It does. It does. So this was the story. This is the story that the Lusses came up with. And soon, as happens in these cases, certainly today and as happened in the mid 70s for the reasons that Eric talked about earlier, TV crews are interested in this. And this is when the self-styled ghost hunters came out of the woodwork, including Ed and Lorraine Warren. They were among the various psychics that were drawn to the house after the case attracted some notoriety. And keep in mind, this is not uncommon. You see this, for example, in missing persons cases, where there will be a high profile missing persons case, you know, Holly Bobo is missing or Natalie Holloway and all of a sudden these self-proclaimed psychics, oh I had a vision last night, I had a dream, I saw it on the news, they just you know contact the family, they contact the police, sometimes they want money, sometimes they want fame, sometimes they’re just trying to help. So that, keep in mind that the things so far are by themselves not that unusual. And so Ed and Lorraine came in and they said, oh my God this house is, of course this house is haunted, there’s demons everywhere. Basically you had Lorraine Warren confirming the statements made by the Lutzes, and of course soon afterwards Jay Anson was hired. I don’t know exactly who hired him, I just don’t have the notes in front of me, but it was either by the Lutzes and or the Warrens, I would expect the Warrens had a lot to do with it, but somebody hired Jay Anson to write the true story. He says in air quotes that later became the script later became the film. So that’s that is sort of the overall true-ish story. The allegedly true story that the film is based on.

0:32:41
CW: You know what I’m thinking here? Wouldn’t it have been awesome if when Ed and Lorraine Warren showed up to the house to look for these demons which they of course found. It would have been great if somebody could have just taken them to the wrong house first. Just two doors down.

0:32:57
BR: Well, as it happens, as it happens, Randi told me a story about this. And I don’t know if it was a profitable, I mean, he told me the story. It wasn’t clear whether it was him, but the story goes, and Erik I’m sure you know the story, and Lorraine Warren and other psychics as well, they weren’t the only ones that were there, they were just the ones that sort of in the end ended up profiting most from it in terms of publicity. The story is that they actually did accidentally go to the wrong house at first, and Lorraine Warren was like, ah, I feel the demons. They’re everywhere. They’re attacking me. Oh God, there’s pure evil everywhere. And then the producer was like, oh, hold on. 112. No, 112 is down the road.

CW: Oh man.

BR: That’s a story that Randi tells. I don’t know if it’s true, but I love it and I’m passing the line anyway.

EM: The demons were throwing their voices or their mana or whatever.

0:34:03
CW: So those demons are tricksy tricksy things.

0:34:05
EM: No one’s always perfect. You know, I mean, Sylvia Brown, you know, we’re not always…

0:34:10
BR: And we don’t always have a record clean of felony convictions in case of Sylvia Brown. Anyway, so this was the basic story. And as with all these cases, it was touted as a true story. And again, the Lutzes and the Warrens, of course, were well aware that several years earlier there was a mega hit film called the Exorcist that was also based on a true story, depending who you talk to, and they said hey, there’s their dollar signs there.

0:34:34
EM: And if you believe the story, I mean the Lutzes cooked this story up over a couple of bottles of wine, I think is what William Weber, the defense lawyer for Ronnie DeFeo Jr. said.

BR: Exactly.

EM: And so it was something they brainstormed. They came up with this template. And I say template because if this is the case that catapulted the Warrens to superstardom in their field, you’ll notice that every single case, almost every single case that follows, whether it’s the Perron family, whether it’s the Snedeker’s, the Smurls, whatever, it’s always starting off with a family moving into a house and it is a house that has some sort of history.

BR: Yeah.

EM: And you see the same plot points pop up over and over again.

BR: It’s almost like they just sort of developed a little horror film template and they just fill in the details like a Mad Libs.

0:35:34
EM: Well, if you were a cynic then you would think that, yes.

0:35:37
BR: Well, as it happens, if you’re interested in the – I just gave you the allegedly true story. If you’re interested in the true story, I’ve written about it, other people have written about it as well. There’s a researcher named Rick Moran, M-O-R-A-N, who’s done a very good book and he compiled a list of over 100 factual errors and discrepancies between Anson’s true story and the truth. My colleague Joe Nickell, I have not personally been to the Amityville house. It’s now actually been redone so that mostly because of course you have horror fans and and and other aficionados wanting to go and get their photos taken. It’s very much like the the Breaking Bad house here in Albuquerque. They just get tired of gawkers coming by. So you can you can find 112 Ocean Avenue although they’ve changed the numbers and it’s harder to find.

CW: But people live there today.

0:36:31
BR: People live there today, and in fact, Joe Nickell did some research on this, and he, when interviewed the woman that lives there today, he found that there were several points in the Luxus story, as told by Jay Anson, that were not only dubious, but that could not be true. For example, in the book, Anson details, for example that there was extensive damage to the homes doors and hardware in the windows including the doorknobs and the locks with demonic forces blowing doors off and things like that But when Joe went to look he in fact found that the original locks and hardware and hinges were actually untouched. They were they were clearly original to the house and they were not damaged in any way and they – The things that were being described as you know, the front door being blown off violently simply didn’t happen. And there’s other things, again, there’s far too much to go into here, but another one I mentioned earlier, the demonic, satanic footprint in the snow. Well, as it turns out, it hadn’t snowed the night before, so there was no snow. little things like that. Over and over, big claims and small claims all sort of fell apart. And the other issue is that the lots as they claim stayed in the house about a month, I think 28, 30 days or something. And we talked about this on the last podcast. I mean, if you really are in a home that you’re genuinely feeling physically threatened by, leave! I mean, who stays in a literal hellhouse for a month? It’s not just…

0:38:06
EM: Well again, you know we start to see these recurring themes and everything you just said in terms of trying to verify The claims that are made and not being able to find any supporting evidence you know another thing that is constantly happening in these stories is the families are apparently calling the police for help. And it turns out that police officers have no record of this ever happening, whether at Amityville or any of the other cases. And it’s funny how new tenants or new owners move in and there are absolutely no reported problems afterwards.

0:38:43
BR: Yeah, it’s curious. Let’s just take a second to talk about the horror trope of that and why that does work. I was thinking about that. I was interviewed for a TV thing recently and I was reviewing the notes on this. And it occurs to me that there’s a classic horror context in which you have a person out of their element, right? It’s a fish out of water thing, right? You’re in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it’s these crazy kids going into deep redneck Texas. You have the hills have eyes. You have people being taken or going out of their element into a new surrounding for them. And that’s inherently the situation with a new house, right? You have a family who is literally and figuratively going into a new environment. It’s a preexisting home, and as with anything else, it has a history, right? Cars have histories. You can maybe not check that with Carfax. Houses have histories, people have histories, etc. But I think there’s something narratively resonant with these sorts of, exactly as Erik said, family goes in, their life is happy, their marriage has never been better, and and then hell breaks loose, right? And then it’s the whole story of redemption and, you know, maybe in some cases it’s faith in God, sort of, you know, with their salvation. There’s a whole sort of series of beats.

0:40:10
EM: Well, I mean, you see these tropes over and over again, and you have to ask yourself when you’re looking at these true cases, that this is all following the aftermath of the exorcist and with Anton LeVay and the Church of Satan and all of these movements and happenings that were occurring in the 1970s, which was a very, very tumultuous time. You know, you’re looking at Vietnam, you’re looking at Watergate, you’re looking at Nixon and a lack of trust in our powers at large. We’re seeing the generation gap. It seems like, you know, society is moving away from religion and it became this period in which people were standing on shaky ground in so many different ways. And so then you start bringing in these old world beliefs into a modern society. The Exorcist, again, really set that off with the notion of perhaps evil exists in this spiritual form, but if there’s evil, perhaps there’s goodness. And it seems very much that the Amityville case and other cases like it were drawing from horror cinema because you have The Exorcist, which again, allegedly is based on a true story. It spawns all sorts of carbon copies, whether it’s blacksploitation films, spaghetti horror films, or movies like The Omen. And a case like the Amityville sort of takes all the best conventions of the typical haunted house story and cherry picks pieces of demonic possession or other things that we’ve seen in the movies. And then you have true case after true case that follows and you also have movie after movie that follows and you have to start wondering where the overlap is. What is inspiring what in that case?

BR: Absolutely.

CW: Yeah, and it’s also very relatable as I think we touched on this during part one. The families involved were all urban, white bread, you know, 2.5 kids. Dad’s got a nice blue collar job, works hard, you know, upstanding community members.

EM: Churchgoers. That’s important.

0:42:32
CW: Churchgoers. And they’re moving, they’ve moved into a new house, which is something most all of us have done in our lives. So it’s unfamiliar, but at the same time familiar, and it resonates. And moviegoers or novel readers can identify with somebody pretty instantly in a situation like that.

EM: Because it could happen to you.

0:42:56
BR: Yeah, and that ties in with the folklore of, for example, urban legends. I mean, urban legends are by definition told as true. That is one of the characteristics of an urban legend. And so you don’t have urban legends about aliens, for example. You don’t have urban legends about Martians. You have urban legends about common everyday situations. Going to Mexico and buying a poodle that may or may not be a rat. Going shopping and there’s a psycho killer underneath your car ready to slash your ankles. Vanishing hitchhikers. Urban legends are about everyday people and their everyday experiences. I think you see the same thing with these sorts of horror films. Now, that’s not to say that you can’t have a horror film set somewhere else. Like, for example, I think of Alien. Like, I don’t… Alien, the film Alien, it’s kind of a horror film, kind of a science fiction film, but it still involves people in, you know, spaceships and alien environments. But I think there’s sort of there’s a distinction there between the sorts of the true story haunted haunted house stories and the sort of more fantastic outlandish horror films.

0:44:12
CW: I think Ed and Lorraine Warren would have had a lot a lot tougher of a time selling an alien based horror story that they investigated.

(MUSIC)

0:44:21
CW: So the Amityville horror sort of set the tone for what would become a series of things that Ed and Lorraine investigated in quotation marks and certainly promoted. The demon murder case, I read a little bit into that one and that’s messing with a whole lot of dangerous stuff. We aren’t just talking about a family moving into a house. There’s definitely some not quite typical stuff going on with the demon murder case. And Erik, why don’t you walk us through that?

0:45:14
EM: The demon murder case is my favorite Ed and Lorraine Warren case, and it’s probably my favorite true haunting, with finger quotes. Like any great shaggy dog story, it kind of goes on and on a bit, but in order to really appreciate the ending, which is the truly relevant part, you have to sort of, you know, get the entire gist and there’s a little backstory that’s important.

BR: Set the stage for us.

EM: Setting the stage. So, the demon murder case, it’s often misreported by writers or podcasters or whomever else due to several reasons, and that would be the conflicting information that’s been put out there to the public. The first major source is a largely fictionalized account that was made into a TV movie in 1983 produced by Dick Clark of all people. It was called the Demon Murder Case and it starred Andy Griffith as Ed Warren.

0:46:15
BR: I did not know that.

0:46:21
EM: Now the character, all the characters I’m assuming for legal reasons were renamed. So Ed Warren becomes Guy Harris, but it’s Andy Griffith as Ed Warren. It also has Cloris Leachman and a very young Kevin Bacon right before Footloose.

0:46:36
CW: Oh, wow.

0:46:37
EM: And the second source of information that’s drawn from is an episode of the TV show, A Haunting. And this particular episode is called Where Demons Dwell, and it features teachers, members of the real-life cast, the individuals that were involved in the demon murder case, and yet this account completely eliminates the most important element of the story, the murder, for reasons that make absolutely no sense. Now, if you want the most complete historical account, you’ll find it in Gerald Brittle’s book, The Devil in Connecticut, which went out of print shortly after it appeared in the early 80s and was subsequently re-released in 2006 and led to a lawsuit and acrimonious public falling out between members of the Glatzel family who the book allegedly chronicles. And I’ve had an opportunity to speak with several of the Glatzels, both over the phone and via email, and reading between the lines, the story is far more interesting and compelling than Demon’s Possession or Exorcism. But with that long-winded intro aside, here’s what Brittle’s book tells us. So in 1980, a 27-year-old woman named Debbie Glatzel was preparing to move into a rental home just outside of Brookfield, Connecticut, where she grew up. She was planning to live with her boyfriend, Arnie Cheyenne Johnson, who was significantly younger than she. He was about 18 or so at the time. And they were going to be living also with Arnie’s mother and younger sisters. So they show up to the rental property, which they hadn’t seen in advance, but had already made a hefty deposit on. And they find that not only is it a total dump, but a previous tenant is still occupying the home until the end of the month. And this might seem trivial, but one could make an argument that it’s the inciting incident that led to the claims that followed more so than any tales of demonic activity, you know, buyer’s remorse and all that. So while moving in, 11 year old David Glatzel, who’s Debbie’s younger brother, he has come along to help. And while alone in a room containing a waterbed that was left behind by a previous tenant, David claimed that he was assaulted by a mysterious old man in a flannel shirt who threw him onto the bed, pointed at him, and intoned, beware. So David spends the rest of the afternoon outside, sulking underneath a tree, and Debbie and Arnie, they’re just thinking the kid’s being lazy and, you know, they think nothing of his story about the old man until they take him home to the Brookfield house where David and Debbie live with their parents Carl Sr. and Judy Glatzel and younger brothers Alan and Carl Jr. So David continues talking about this mysterious old man who apparently had followed them all home to the house from the rental property. The entity then begins to manifest as a tall red-skinned creature with horns, a goatee, and cloven hoofs. He’s basically Satan from South Park

0:49:43
BR: That’s that’s the best they could do really I mean…

0:49:46
EM: Well, you know it’s it’s it’s an 11 year old kid so all right fair enough David is calling this manifestation the beast and the beast who is invisible to everyone, but David David, begins hitting and kicking and choking and stomping and biting and forcing David to do sit-ups until he pukes. The Beast also repeatedly stabs David with an invisible knife, shoots him with magic bullets from a demonic gun, makes a toy dinosaur come to life, and levitates-

0:50:20
BR: I’m skeptical of this there there’s something I can’t put my finger there’s something in what you’re describing that is… implausible.

EM: Well  you didn’t let me get to the best part.

BR: I’m sorry okay

0:50:32
EM: The Beast levitates a birthday cake off the counter so that the frosting was ruined by contact with the underside of a cabinet.

BR: Okay, I believe that that’s that sounds legit

0:50:45
CW: Okay, right now. This is this is like hopscotching between an imaginary friend Schizophrenia and just a rotten kid.

0:50:51
EM: Well, it goes to the next step because this ultimately culminates in full-blown Possession with David’s body inhabited not only by the beast but by the beasts 42 member entourage all of whom…

0:51:15
CW: 42?

0:51:16
EM: 43! Yeah I mean that’s that one extra body it’s like trying to fit all the clowns in a car you know and these demons all cause David to levitate to spin his head around backwards and you know if you if you watch the TV movie he begins speaking in the voice of Harvey Fierstein. So, in other words, it’s, you know, it’s the exorcist repackaged by people without any imagination. Except for the cake bit, that’s awesome. So, according to the story, this is where the Warrens get involved. And you have to consider everything here suspect until we get to the end and look backwards and really, you know, examine why the Warrens were here at this point. So allegedly, after the Catholic Church threw roadblock after roadblock at the Glatzels, Judy, the matriarch, she calls Ed and Lorraine, and Ed and Lorraine, they rush over, and immediately, within five minutes, confirm, yup, there are demons in the house. So while this is happening, Debbie, again, the eldest daughter in the Glatzel family, and her boyfriend Arnie, they’ve elected not to move into the demonic rental property. And instead, they stay at the Glatzel home to assist with David’s affliction, which is happening every night and, you know, going till dawn and he’s screaming and ranting and, you know, Linda blaring it up. If Brittle’s book and the Warren’s account is to be believed, then Arnie, who the book takes great pains to repeatedly foreshadow and describe as heroic in every respect, he goes full Jason Miller, and he holds the kid down, and he’s you know screaming at him you know take me come into me leave the boy and Ed jumps in he’s like whoa slow down son whatever the movies tell you that’s the worst thing you can do in this sort of situation and the demons they’ll take you up on your offer in ways that you can’t expect.

0:53:14
CW: Well, it’s good that Ed was the voice of reason there, you know, you don’t want to get out of hand.

0:53:18
EM: Well, Ed was always the voice of reason because, you know, what happens next is the murder part of the demon murder case. Debbie and Arnie, they move out of the Glatzel house because, you know, hashtag too much evil and Debbie gets a job…

0:53:34
BR: Just so you know, that’s going to trend right away.

0:53:36
EM: I demand a nickel every time it’s used. So they didn’t move into that rental property. Instead, Debbie, she gets a job as a dog groomer at a local kennel for a 40-year-old man named Alan Bono. And Bono throws in a rent-free apartment over the kennel to sweeten the deal. So Debbie and Arnie, they’re living there in this place over her place of work. And Arnie is simultaneously working as a tree surgeon and carrying knives around in his pocket. This is important and it’s then that Ed’s prediction begins to you know come true and Arnie is now showing signs of demonic affliction. He’s growling, he’s having outbursts in church and stuff like that And while that’s going on the Warrens are still assisting in facilitating church sanctioned deliverances and exorcisms for David, the 11-year-old, and Lorraine is having premonitions of a terrible tragedy. That tragedy occurs in early 1981. So it’s February 16th and Arnie calls in sick to spend the day with Debbie at the kennel. Alan Bono, he invites all of them out to lunch and allegedly he gets smashed on wine. Now some sources say that Arnie himself was three sheets to the wind as well, though Brittle’s book denies this, always painting Arnie as being perfect and upstanding.

BR: Of course. We need a good hero for a good villain.

EM: You need to know. You need to have that underlined based on what’s about to happen. At any rate, they all return to the apartment over the kennel where Bono continues to drink and insists on playing records too loud while continuing on his journey toward, you know, like a blackout drunk. Debbie, she takes the two young girls and goes out for pizza, even though they had just come back from a restaurant. We don’t know for a fact what transpired between Arnie and Alan Bono while they were alone in the apartment. But what we do know is that when Debbie and the kids return, Bono was becoming agitated and belligerent, and Debbie decided, you know, hey, this isn’t an appropriate place for the kids. And she takes them from the apartment, or tries to. But Bono bars the way and begins manhandling the children. Suddenly, at that exact moment, the beast manifests inside of Arnie and now in the throes of demonic possession causes him to take one of the knives he uses as a tree surgeon from his pocket and deliver what were called four or five tremendous wounds, mostly to Alan Bono’s chest, and one that stretched from stomach to the base of his heart. Arnie flees the scene, Alan dies on site, Arnie is picked up shortly after and arrested for the first murder in the history of Brookfield, Connecticut.

0:56:31
CW: Wow.

0:56:32
BR: Wow.

0:56:33
CW: That, that, wow. That, that, parts of that remind me of an episode of The Incredible Hulk, you know, don’t make him angry.

0:56:40
BR: And of course, there’s lots of parallels to the Amityville case as well.

0:56:44
EM: Right. And part of that is the Warrens step immediately into the limelight. They’re in front of reporters and camera crews, and they’re stating publicly that Arne Johnson is innocent by virtue of demonic possession. And they’re already announcing the book and the movie that will be made from the story. And Johnson’s lawyer, Martin Minnella, he sniffs, you know, and gets a sense of publicity, you know, here on the rise. And he begins consulting with attorneys in England who had used a similar defense. And between Manila and the Warrens, this turned into a media firestorm for about five minutes that ultimately went absolutely nowhere when Judge Robert Callahan called the defense unscientific and refused to hear it. And as such, Johnson had to go with self-defense and was found guilty of first degree manslaughter and sentenced to 10 to 20 years, of which he served.

CW: Now, see, that’s what strikes me as the most, well, okay, one of the most unbelievable things about this story, this case. The incident you described with two young children being placed in harm’s way by a very drunk man, self-defense seems like the go-to thing. Even if he were to, say, trump up the details a little bit, like maybe he didn’t grab her by the wrist, maybe he grabbed her by the throat, you know, maybe it was a very dangerous situation and he had to get those girls free and oh, he reacted a little too strongly, but it was clearly to save the children. That sounds a lot more like something a jury would be prone to believe and side with than I got possessed by this demon that has been possessing me lately.

0:58:20
EM: Well, absolutely. I mean, he had a built in defense right there, you know, even if he ended up serving some time or whatever the penalty was, he had a built-in defense. Now, what I’ve been able to suss out, because it’s important to note that when the book came out in 1983, I believe it was, 82 or 83, and detailed this entire story, it went out of print almost immediately afterward and the Warrens cooked up this huge public conspiracy theory about the book reveals too much that the Catholic Church is trying to hide from the public, which you know the church is saying, you know, that’s ridiculous, but the book was re-released in 2006 and when it was a now-grown David Glatzel, you know, remember possessed kid who was ultimately freed from the grip of evil, a grown David and his brother Carl Jr. and Carl Jr. is painted throughout the book as being afflicted by demonic influence in the form of bad behavior and hostility specifically toward the Warrens and the Exorcists. David and Carl, they filed a lawsuit against Gerald Brittle, the author, and the Warrens for violating their right to privacy and for libel and for intentional affliction of emotional distress. At the same time, Debbie has married Arnie while he was spending that five years in prison. And now they’ve gone forth into the world, repeatedly claiming that it’s true and Debbie has actually become a professional demonologist. She’s followed in the footsteps of Ed and Lorraine and it’s caused this break in the family over this book and the movie that was made and having spoken to members of that family. What I’ve been able to suss out is that apparently the Warrens came to the family following the murder, even though the history tells us that the Warrens were involved beforehand. The Warrens allegedly came to the family following the murder and said, look, you got this guy locked up and he’s going to go away for life because he murdered somebody. We got this story and if you tell the story, not only will it get him off, you guys are going to be millionaires in the process. And apparently they were pissed off because they saw very little money out of it. Arnie still went to prison and the Warrens were able to catapult to the next level.

1:01:05
CW: Wow. So the family members you talked to pretty much were saying that Ed and Lorraine Warren, they weren’t beating around the bush, they were like, we’re going to feed you this story, just play along and there’ll be multiple benefits for you.

1:01:19
EM: Yeah. And again, you have to take it with a grain of salt because you’ve got the matriarch and the patriarch of the Glatzel family and Carl Sr. just passed away within the past year. But then you’ve got three brothers and a sister and her husband, the husband being the demonic possessed killer. And there are all these different factions and they fight publicly about it. They fight on message boards, they fight on Amazon. If you go to the book for the devil in Connecticut and you go to the Amazon page, they argue in the comments section. It’s very, very, very contentious and it’s hard to tell exactly when the Warrens really came in because the book takes great pains to not only, you know, again present Arnie as being this heroic person who made a bad choice in telling the demon to take his body and then, you know, paid the for that. But the book also contains a centerpiece of photographs that allegedly show 11-year-old David while he was in the throes of demonic possession and whatnot. And all of these pictures make a point to have the Warrens there in the background. But the pictures are all clearly sort of taken on the same day and don’t look particularly convincing. It just raises an eyebrow and makes you go, huh, you know, really, at what point did Ed and Warren become involved with this? Because as we know from other cases, you know, like the Enfield poltergeist, which I know we’ll touch on, they they kind of came sniffing around something that was in the works.

1:03:16
CW: Well, and I’m just I’m doing I’m doing a little time travel reset in my brain here, hypothetically speaking. If Ed and Lorraine Warren did not get anywhere near this family, I’m thinking about how this might’ve played out. Rather than doing some cockamamie demon murder defense, maybe Arnie would have been pushed right over to the self-defense defense, and maybe he would have still served five years or two years or even 10 years but he would have come out and he would have had his family would still be together the family wouldn’t be divided he wouldn’t be in this backed into this corner living a life as a demon possessed murderer.

1:04:05
EM: And it goes an extra step because David who you know the story begins with him becoming possessed. He and his brother have since stated publicly, particularly during the 2006 lawsuit, they’ve stated that David had emotional problems during that period and he had a learning disability and he became obese and was having violent outbursts due to these issues that he had, that ultimately had him examined very thoroughly and I believe in, you know, hospitalized for a period of time. After that, he apparently grew up to lead a normal life, became a businessman. He and Carl Jr. both work in and or own construction companies. And this book and this TV movie and this story, this stigma has followed them throughout their entire lives. Which is why they became so incensed when the book was re-released in 2006 because you know, they they sensed the vultures were circling again And there was already whispers of it being turned into a major Hollywood movie So, you know, yeah, it’s Arnie and it’s the family But you know, you also have to look at the kids and say, was their, you know, whatever their issue they were dealing with in their lives mutated into something else in order to package a story.

1:05:23
CW: Man, that’s that’s tragic.

1:05:25
BR: It’s just, you know, it’s I think it really points out the the issue that, you’re dealing with real people and you’re dealing with real individuals who in some cases may be mentally ill, may be disturbed. People have families. When I researched the chemo theater haunting here in Albuquerque, a theater here in Albuquerque that is said to be haunted by the spirit of a young boy who was killed in an explosion. And his name is Bobby Darnall. After I wrote about it, I was actually contacted by a member of Darnall’s family who expressed some irritation that their dead brother, who died 1953-54, was being used as a cute child ghost in this haunted theater that he didn’t even die at. And I saw the same case, for example, with Annie Palmer, the white witch of Rose Hall and the stories that in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and the stories that have arisen around her, in some cases using the real names of real historical people who were innocent, who were not evil or satanic or demonic in any way. But the legends have grown up around them and they’re now viewed in a malicious light.

1:06:52
CW: Yeah. And you can you can sort of say that. I mean, certainly Arnie and the adults involved in the demon murder case, they were complicit in telling whatever story they were going to tell. But the kids, you’re talking about an 11 year old boy. That’s just a victim there. He’s purely a victim.

EM: Right. And, you know, it’s something that has always been very interesting to me and that is that the siblings have been pointing fingers at one another Debbie and Arnie there they’re perpetuating the myth because you know Arnie doesn’t want to be labeled a murderer for the rest of his life and Debbie can be a demonologist and they can make money off of this and go to Hollywood etc And you know Debbie and Arnie are pointing fingers back at David and Carl and Alan and or whoever else and saying Oh, you’re just complaining. You don’t want to tell the truth, blah, blah, blah. But the parents always seem to be left out of whatever that equation is. And ultimately, the parents are the ones that, with the exception of Debbie, who was an adult, the parents, Judy and Carl Sr. had to be the ones who signed the life rights over. They had to be the ones that went along with this. And yet they were not mentioned in any lawsuits and they don’t ever seem to come up in the conversation.

1:08:06
CW: Interesting. If I could circle back, there is one thing that’s bugging me and I wonder if listeners are curious.

1:08:12
EM: Just one thing? Only one thing?

CW: Well, there’s there’s one particular thing that’s that’s bubbled to the top of what’s bothering me here. And you had mentioned that there the defense lawyer for Arnie clamped onto the demon murder or the demonic possession defense to use because he’s because you said it had been done in England before? Was it successfully done in England? I mean, do you know anything about about how that that happened over there?

1:08:39
EM: My understanding based on research is that these I think it was used twice But it never went so far as to actually be used in court. But it was something that was entered and it was accepted. But then the cases either were settled in a different way. I can’t find all the details on that. But apparently they had at least been accepted as being something that would be heard in court.

1:09:08
BR: And keep in mind, of course, that that was one of the aspects. I mean, we touched on it very briefly with Amityville, but that was one of the aspects of the Amityville story was that the idea was that Butch DeFeo’s defense lawyer, Weber, who Eric mentioned, that that was going to be part of the story. The demon, the devils made him do it. The demons made him do it. And so that was going to be, I don’t think that actually ended up actually working, as Erik points out. But I think my understanding is that was part of why it was cooked up between, as I said, over a couple of bottles of wine with the Lutzes and DeFeo’s lawyers because the Lutzes had nothing to lose by it and everything to gain because if they can tie in the demons with this real-life murder case and they’re talking with Ron Butch, DeFeo’s lawyer, hey, maybe we can talk about the demons that are still there and maybe the demons made him do it and they’re like, hey, why not? Why not exploit that real life murder?

1:10:04
EM: Exactly. And, you know, keep in mind in the case of Arnie Johnson, that was their defense, you know, not, not guilty by virtue of demonic possession. However, you know, the judge very prudently threw it out and refused to listen to it. But at that point, the damage had already been done. The fact that that was what the plea was going to be made headlines. And for Ed and Lorraine Warren and for for Manila, the lawyer, I mean, that that’s all that was really necessary.

1:10:35
CW: Dang. Well, I wonder I wonder if anybody has tried or will try the same demonic possession defense in the future. There’s got to be some courtroom in Florida where it’s going on right now.

1:10:46
BR: Florida man claims! Well, I mean, look, keep in mind that, and I was actually thinking about this recently, is that defense lawyers can and will dream up any defense that they can for their clients.

1:10:59
CW: That’s their job, yeah.

1:11:01
BR: That’s their job. And in fact, every now and then I’ll see a news headline, like, well, somebody claims that this happened, they got off, for example, I thought of the Twinkie defense and the the affluenza kid Whose lawyer claimed that well, you know, I think he Killed somebody think it was drunk driver or something And his lawyer made the argument that well, he couldn’t have known it was wrong because he grew up affluent Well, it’s it’s ridiculous. It’s arguably ridiculous claim But the defense lawyer has every right to make it sometimes it’s misleading because people say well, this is this is ridiculous, right? This kid only got six months probation and his lawyer argued X. Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean the judge or jury believed X. There could be any number of reasons why that happened with the outcome. And so, the mere fact that a defense lawyer, of all people, who’s expected to ethically and legally do everything they can to help their client. The mere fact that they come up with some cockamamie scheme doesn’t mean anything. It just means that that’s something they threw up against the wall to see what sticks.

1:12:13
CW: I can’t imagine being disbarred or having having your credibility as a lawyer questioned if you pass on the whole idea of a demon murder defense.

1:12:22
BR: Yes, I would think so.

(MUSIC)

1:12:24
CW: Well, Erik, that was fantastic. You brought a wealth of knowledge and sources that listeners can look into and primary sources. You actually talked to the family members. That was awesome.

1:12:49
EM: Well, I wonder how they’ll react if and when they hear this episode.

1:12:52
BR: Well, hopefully they’ll feel like you did them justice.

1:12:55
EM: I hope so. I do.

1:12:56
CW: Well, moving right along, the next on the list for Ed and Lorraine’s conquests here, we have The Conjuring movies, which were loosely based on some other activity that they did. I mean, how do you want to describe that? Now, full disclosure here, I I have actually not seen the Conjuring movies because I can’t sit through movies like that. I’ve tried. It’s physically impossible for me.

1:13:22
EM: They’re very well made. It’s very well made bullshit. You know, I’m immediately as a horror movie fanatic. You know, I’m in theory drawn to these films and, you know, and also being into the, you know, the true stories behind. And yet there’s something about the Conjuring movies, and it’s probably because I know too much about Ed and Lorraine Warren, that really turns me off, and that is that Ed and Lorraine are presented almost as superheroes of the faith, superheroes of the church who are out there battling these forces, but there’s no pretense at this being fiction. It is being presented as literal fact. And so you’ve got Ed, you know, living there in his museum of evil dolls and haunted Dungeons and Dragons manuals and whatnot, locking everything up and making sure that nobody touches anything. And, you know, you’ve got Lorraine, who’s constantly saying, I feel something, Ed. I feel something, Ed. He’s like, no, you can’t go investigate this case after what happened to you last time when the demons tried to take it’s just such bullshit. It’s it’s just so hard to take it seriously when you know what? Simple con artists.

BR: Yeah, I mean keep my you’ve got you’ve got good actors Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga and they’re portraying. I I feel exactly the same way that Erik does.

EM: You know, they should be wearing capes in these movies, they should be wearing capes.

BR: I obviously they need their cooperation. I’m sure they sold the rights to it. I mean, they’re there. It’s their story. They’re, they’re making money off it. So it’s not going to demonize them. But it is offputting, to say the least, to see this pair portrayed as heroic, brave, caring, honest, ghost investigators that are just trying to do the right thing. When if you know even a smattering of the true story, if you know even a bit about their history of injecting themselves into people’s lives and exploiting them, for lack of a better word, you know, either partially, sincerely or not, I don’t know, who knows, they’ve done damage to real people’s lives and it’s disconcerting to see them, oh, all the big heroes in the capes. It’s like, well, that’s one part of the story.

1:15:41
CW: So let me get this straight. You guys have no problem suspending your disbelief to encompass a whole supernatural realm where demons pop up from hell and terrorize normal people and ghosts are haunting the areas where they died and all this other rigmarole for spooky, scary horror movie ghost stories. But the one thing you can’t suspend your disbelief for is that Ed and Lorraine are decent human beings.

1:16:10
EM: Well, I mean, I have the same problem with the Conjuring movies that I had with the exorcism of Emily Rose. That was another film where in both the advertising and marketing and in the film itself, the title cards, you’re being told this is a true story. And the exorcism of Emily Rose is not. It is an Americanized version of the story of Anneliese Michel, who was a German girl who essentially starved to death while her family and priests performed a series of events that led to a girl with serious physical and mental and emotional disorders to die. And the exorcism of Emily Rose pretends to tell that story, but cowards its way out and gives you the conclusion that the girl really was possessed. And it’s offensive. And I guess that’s how I feel about the Conjuring films. Yes, they are very, very well-made horror films. They exist as entertainment, and they fulfill that function. But if you know anything about the true stories, and just how intrusive and manipulative Ed and Lorraine Warren really were, it just is such a turn off.

1:17:37
CW: Well, let’s go through real quick and just, you know, give us your perspective and cliff notes on Conjuring 2 was the most recent one out. What real life story was the Conjuring 2 based on?

1:17:51
BR: So the Conjuring 2 actually begins at Amityville, if I’m not mistaken, in a bait and switch, in a classic bait and switch move. We’re going to start with Amityville and then it quickly shifts across the pond and several years to North London, England. The real events are known as the Enfield Poltergeist case and happened in 1977 through 1979. It was an ongoing case. It was about a single mother who was raising four children alone in a house plagued by a ghost. As often happens, and we could do a whole show on this, as often happens the poltergeist activity centered around young girls, in this case two teenage girls. They were, I think, 11 and 13 at the time. And there was a variety of sort of classic poltergeist-y things going on. There were strange knocking sounds, for those who are familiar with the Fox sisters and the history of spiritualism, which began in Hydeville, New York. You’ll recognize the raps and knocks and mysterious things like that. You have moving furniture, toys and objects being levitated and thrown across the room, doors opening and closing, slamming on their own, you know, knives being upended, that sort of thing. The Enfield Poltergeist case is a complex story and we don’t really have time to go into all the nitty-gritty details, but essentially it was investigated by several people, including SPR, the Society for Psychical Research, by a guy named Guy Lyon-Playfair, who was there and he was one of the investigators there. And, of course, the Warrens showed up at one point. I’ll come to that in a minute. When the first phenomena began happening, the investigators noticed that it was odd, but the poltergeist activity only seemed to happen when the girls were around. For example, things would only fly in the room if a girl was nearby and the object was nearby and she she said, look over there! What was that? So, very…

1:19:52
CW: Well, obviously the poltergeist was just attached psychically to the girls, right?

1:19:57
BR: Clearly, clearly. So the the SPR and other people made an attempt to make a credible investigation and there were also newspaper reporters as well and if you watch Conjuring 2, there are some references to that. So you had sort of this blend of people, again the SPR, you have tabloid newspapers, you have people, journalists who are actually trying to figure out is this a real story, is this bullshit and then of course you have the Warrens showing up. And the investigators, again, they made some reasonable efforts to try and investigate the whole thing. So, they would be cameras set up, video cameras, still cameras, etc. What they found was that, oddly, the things were only happening when the cameras were off. So, as soon as the girls noticed that, okay, we’re done filming, put your cameras away, that’s when everything started happening. Then, to put the cameras back on, well, everything well everything goes away or if the camera happened in another room or had their backs turned that’s when things happened. There’s actually a series of photographs taken at the time in which one of the girls claims to be levitating and you can clearly see her jumping on the bed.

1:21:06
CW: I saw this one on the internet and I’m like that’s a girl jumping on a bed.

1:21:11
EM: I used to levitate from my parents bed all the time when they weren’t in the house.

1:21:15
BR: When was a teenager, a friend of mine had a trampoline and I would levitate. You wouldn’t believe the levitation happened!

1:21:30
EM: It’s crazy.

1:21:32
BR: So long story short, the girls were widely suspected, not only suspected, but admitted to faking it.

1:21:40
CW: Oh, they admitted it?

1:21:42
BR: They admitted it. And it’s fascinating because if you watch The Conjuring 2, the fakery and fraud was so clear and so evident that the scriptwriters couldn’t ignore it. I’m sure even there, they’re like, oh, man, we, yeah, we, we, uh, okay. So the girls, the girls admitted faking it, but they said, no, but they only faked it when the ghosts weren’t cooperating.

1:22:06
CW: Oh, well, of course. Yeah, that makes total sense. Well, you know, I would go see this movie, if you can promise me that, you know how, like at the end of every Marvel movie, there’s like a little after the credits scene where, you know, something gets revealed. If there’s an after the credits scene of The Conjuring where it’s the girls going, hi, it’s us, we made everything up, we just were throwing s*** around our house and jumping off hard things.

1:22:28
EM: No, they are marveling it up in that, you know, the first Conjuring film ends with a tag sort of setting the stage for the Amityville horror. And as Ben said, the second Conjuring opens up with the Amityville case. They’re building essentially a Marvel-style shared universe all built around the Warrens, which is why we had the Annabelle movies. Also, we have all these spinoffs happening.

1:22:53
CW: I think we have our episode titles, the Warren verse.

1:22:56
BR: So you had you had these girls, these teenage girls who, again, were initially suspected and later flat out were so inept at faking that they. It’s also there’s also the Columbia poltergeist case with Tina Rash. And we should do a show on that at some point. But there’s a whole series of these in which there’s poltergeist activity often centered around a teen girl who’s troubled and for whatever reason there always seems to be little or no actual evidence. So again, they admitted that yes, we faked it, but we were faking it because you guys just aren’t around when the real stuff is happening, which of course raises the question, well, why would you fake it anyway? If you genuinely have ghostly paranormal super-dense activity around you, why bother to make it up? I mean, it’s just…

EM: It’s the Cottingley fairy defense. You know, it’s the same thing. Well, we faked some of them because thefairies wouldn’t belong there.

1:23:55
BR: The other fairies, the ones that weren’t around when we were photographing with cutouts, those are real, but because people wouldn’t believe us, we wanted to go ahead and do this.

1:24:05
CW: So I’m starting to feel like I missed out on an essential part of girlhood here. I never know.

1:24:12
BR: So so let’s touch a bit more on the Warrens. So if you believe the Warrens, he paused pregnantly and you see the Conjuring films and you read there. They make it sound like they were involved from day one. They were here, there and everywhere. They were taking the investigators. They were in the middle of everything. Well, Playfair, who I mentioned earlier with the SPR, he says that they showed up uninvited. They stayed for only about a day and that they basically manufactured their own paranormal evidence just to make money out of it. I mean he’s very clear about that. He was interviewed on Darkness Radio. If people are interested, you can find Darkness Radio. And again, his last name is Playfair. Play and Fair. It’s pretty simple to do. And, again, it’s, you know, he was there. He did the actual investigation. And he says, again, the Warrens showed up hoping to cash in on it. They hung around for a day.

1:25:10
CW: Out of one day invested in working on this case, they are essentially the superheroes of a two hour movie.

BR: Yes.

CW: Wow.

EM: Yes. In real life, as they drove away, they were probably muttering that he didn’t play fair with them.

BR: I’m oversimplifying the Poltergeist case, but that’s that’s that’s a thumbnail sketch. sketch, you can find more on it. Even the believers will admit that the girls faked it, they hoaxed it, I mean they admitted that. But they will say, yeah, but, and it reminds me of the days of spiritualism when skeptics such as Harry Houdini and others would catch these mediums faking, like in the act. I mean it was crystal clear that they were doing these bogus things with ectoplasm and seances and this and that. And their believers, including people in SPR, would say, okay, yeah, maybe they were, okay, maybe, yeah, they faked a couple of seances, but they just, again, it’s because the ghosts weren’t cooperating, or they weren’t really feeling up to it. And that’s just such a disingenuous, bullsh** answer. I mean-

1:26:22
CW: They only fake things on Wednesdays.

1:26:23
BR: Right, no, you were there on a Thursday!

1:26:26
CW: All the others were totally legit.

1:26:28
BR: Right, it’s like, you know, it’s just so, it’s just so silly. I mean, I just, if you, if you, if you can, if you seriously can contact the dead, if you seriously can bring the spirits around you and do all these things, then you should be able to do it. You shouldn’t need to be able to resort to fraud and trickery to show that.

1:26:47
CW: Well, I’m trying to imagine a parallel situation in some field of science where say a drug manufacturer fakes a bunch of results of a drug working better than placebo and when it’s found out that they faked all these instances, they’re like, well, yeah, we faked those. But really all the other ones that you haven’t looked closely at, those are all legit. Yes. Now, give us our FDA stamp of approval and we’ll start marketing our drug.

1:27:16
BR: Great analogy.

1:27:17
CW: I’m sure that would work.

1:27:19
EM: And again, this is the heyday of all of these sorts of stories being on television for kids to be able to see it all hours of the day and night. I mean it is again a mix of the Exorcist, the Cottingley Fairies and the Fox Sisters.

CW: I wonder if anyone has done any sort of gender psychological survey study meta-analysis of… Because kids act out in different ways. I mean, just, you know, look at what’s going on today. Your average young man who’s troubled is going to end up in a lot of fights, drinking and fighting and just getting into a lot of physical altercations. And girls tend to internalize things and they look for attention in other ways like, oh, I don’t know posing provocatively on Instagram or pretending there’s a poltergeist in your room I’m just I’m just totally just off the cuff generalizing here, but I’d be curious to see some sort of meta-analysis of different ways that young people act out.

1:28:16
BR: I’m sure that could be done. I think that it’s been a while since I looked at the literature I’m certainly not the first person to notice that poltergeist activity often centers around teen girls. That is a known thing. I’m sure that there are some studies, I don’t know how good they are, they could have been sort of a… It’s the sort of topic that, you know, you’re talking about haunted people and, you know, poltergeist. So this is not going to be published in JAMA. But that would be curious to look into.

1:28:52
CW: Any intrepid listeners out there if you’re looking for an interesting master’s thesis, go for it. Take the idea. Run with it.

(MUSIC)

1:28:59
CW: So that was the Conjuring 2, the most recent one. What went on in the Conjuring 1?

EM: Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this before. Family moves into a house.

1:29:15
CW: Nope, never heard it. No, that’s totally original. Let’s run with it.

1:29:18
BR: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

1:29:19
EM: Hang on, hang on. Hang on.

1:29:21
BR: I’m sitting down.

EM: There’s supernatural activity that begins to center around their kids. What?

1:29:39
CW: You had me. You had me at family moves into house. Here’s your money.

1:29:42
EM: The difference in this story is that there were five kids and they were all girls.

CW: Wow.

BR: OK, you’re just asking for trouble.

EM: OK, so it’s different now. It’s different.

CW: OK, so, OK.

1:29:55
EM: The story of The Conjuring is you have Roger and Carolyn Perrin. They move into a 14-room farmhouse. It’s in Rhode Island. It was built in 1736, and it sat on 200 acres of land.

1:30:13
CW: Holy crap. Are there even 200 acres of land in Rhode Island?

1:30:16
EM: I think it was just Rhode Island. They moved into Rhode Island.

1:30:19
CW: Oh, wow. The king and queen of Rhode Island. I have heard this story.

1:30:22
EM: So five daughters, and their names in descending order of age, Andrea, Nancy, Christine, Cindy and April. And as with all of these stories, they started off being the focus of the supernatural activity. So when it started off, apparently, according to the girls, these spirits were all friendly and they were playmates of a sort. There was ghostly Mrs. Arnold who tucked the girls in at night, and Johnny Arnold, you know, who’s a kid who just happened to hang himself in the attic of the farmhouse in the 18th century.

BR: As one does.

EM: Yeah, as one does. There were girl spirits and boy spirits and a ghost that, you know, was sweeping the floor and they could hear the broom and, oh, you know, spirits of the house and then stuff got creepy. Apparently at 5:15 a.m. nearly every night slash morning and this differs from Amityville where it was 3:15 a.m. It’s a new genre it’s the 5:15 a.m. genre. There were the smells of rotting flesh that would, you know, waft into the bedrooms and their beds were being tossed around and disembodied screaming and dead soldiers were in the walls. Just basically it was like every sort of, you know, horror movie and throwing pieces against the wall to see what would stick. But apparently the big bad mama spirit of the house was named Bathsheba Sherman. And she was a witch and her whole backstory involves, you know, a dead baby and according to the movie, you know, Bathsheba hanged herself. And again, all of these sort of tropes and conventions of the genre.

1:32:15
CW: It sounds a little bit like a La Llorona of Rhode Island.

1:32:20
EM: A little bit, a little bit. And this is something that in the movie, you know, they, they collapse down to a period of, I don’t remember a couple of months or whatever in real life. It went on for about a decade and at some point can’t find a date on it. Ed and Lorraine Warren show up and Lorraine, of course, within five minutes walks in and immediately senses evil in the house and she identifies it as being Bathsheba and she’s pointing to mom’s leg and saying, Bathsheba, you know, she left her mark on you. And a bunch of bullsh**. I keep using that word bullsh**, but that’s as much as I can come up with in regards to the Warrens. And of course, the movie sensationalizes it. You know, scene where a chair fell over, turns into a chair, you know, levitating to the ceiling and spinning around and Warren stuff.

1:33:48
CW: So this stuff took place over the course of, like, 10 years in real life. And then it was amped up in the movie telling. And, you know, again, it’s just more of the same. The movie even manages to shoehorn Annabelle the doll into the story. Despite the fact that Annabelle, as we’ve already discussed, is not that creepy, scary doll from the movie. It was a haunted, supposedly haunted, Raggedy Ann doll, and had absolutely, there was not involved in the slightest bit with the Perron case. But-

1:34:21
CW: This is like the Marvel universe, where you have little cameos that float back and forth into different different movies.

EM: Absolutely. This is the movie that sets up Spider-Man. And in this case it’s set up Annabelle.

CW: It’s a quick jump cut to Howard the Duck in the in the after the credits scene. Isn’t that great?

EM: No, Howard the Duck was not in The Conjuring. Howard the Duck was in The Conjuring 2.

CW: Now that would have been scary though.

EM: It would have been scary awesome.

CW: Okay, I have a question. Was Bathsheba a real person? Was she, like, is there any evidence that a person like that existed with that name Bathsheba Sherman?

EM: Yeah, apparently Bathsheba was, according to the story, Bathsheba was a witch. And, you know, there have been a lot of people that have tried to dig up the true account of what really happened. And of course, like with all of the Warren stories, it’s a bunch of nonsense. However, there are people that have become very incensed by it and the way that Bathsheba was represented in the film. You know, she was somebody who lived in Rhode Island in the 1800s. She had a couple of kids. And again, like I said, there was the death of an infant. There was an accusation of murder. Supposedly, there was an incision in the back of the child’s head. And the neighbors were the ones who were saying that Bathsheba was a witch. It was just stories that went around.

1:35:55
CW: But it was a real person. I mean, this is not some urban legend of some, you know, folklore figure that they’re just ascribing the name Bathsheba Sherman to. This is that she actually was a resident of Rhode Island who lived and died there.

1:36:05
EM: She was. And according to the accounts, she spent the rest of her days pretty upset by the accusations that had been pointed at her. But again, the Warrens take this grain of truth and then they just amplify it and turn it into the next thing, which then, you know, the filmmakers then take what the Warrens put out there, and of course they sensationalize that and make that something else as well.

1:36:29
BR: Yeah, it’s this sort of, you see this with all these cases, with the Exorcist case, the true Exorcist case, with the Amityville case, with all these cases, the pattern is this exponential amplification of exaggeration. And you have a few little details here or there, I mean, a real person’s name, a real address, whatever else. And with each iteration, with each, you know, person tells their story, and then they have the writers come in, and then the warrens come in and crank everything up to 11, and then the screenwriters come in and crank that up, and then the filmmaker, and it’s just this whole… And then you have a blog about the filmmakers, and so it’s That’s the thing people need to keep in mind is that the and not not all I mean a lot of it is cynical A lot of it is what the Warrens did which is they want attention they want money, but a lot of it is it’s the process of Dramatization right I mean filmmakers know What audiences want or at least they try to know what audiences want. They want drama. They need contrast. They need tension. You need all these things, and same with writers, right, fiction writers. So it’s not necessarily that they’re cynicism, although they often is. Part of it is just inherent in the process of making something that is watchable and entertaining.

1:37:56
EM: Well, I think this came up in the last episode, but if we’re going to vilify Ed and Lorraine Warren for concocting these stories You know how much responsibility do the authors have how much responsibility do the filmmakers have? Because in each iteration if the Warrens are taking something that really happened and then they’re blowing it up into something You know more sensational and then the authors take that and make it more sensational and the filmmakers make it even more sensational You know it who has the responsibility I’ve mentioned that the demon murder case film Used fictional names for real people told you know a sensationalized version of the true events But changed their names in the case of the conjuring in the case of the conjuring 2 in the case of all of these films Amityville Horror that we’re using the real names, and it’s one thing if the parents sign that contract and say, OK, that’s cool. What happens to little David or little Andrea when they grow up and they have the stigma of something that they were a bystander to essentially?

CW: Well, as you described, actually happened with that young man, David, who was was exploited for supposedly being possessed by like forty two, forty forty three demons in in the demon murder case. That’s absolutely harmed that kid. And yeah, you’re right, it’s a systematic enabling of what the Warrens were doing by the filmmakers. And I don’t know, it seems like it’s folklore with real names attached, and that’s where the problem is. Like, you were talking about the fact that you can’t even stomach the idea of the exorcism of Emily Rose because of the way they changed it from a tragic death of a girl with a lot of problems and disorders into a real demonic possession case. If they had just left off the title, the true case of Emily Rose, if they had just, if whoever wrote that screenplay had just been mildly Inspired by what he read about Emily Rose and instead decided to write a fictionalized account of a totally different girl Who is fictional it would be it would be a watchable movie

1:40:15
There was actually a fantastic movie that came out not long after the exorcism of Emily Rose. It was a German film called Requiem which told more or less the same story but from the perspective that the girl had overbearing religion in her family and had serious physical and mental issues. And of course, no one here has seen that movie.

1:40:35
BR: I have not seen it. It’s on my Netflix list. I think it’s number 38 or 39.

1:40:40
EM: But Emily Rose, everyone’s seen that movie because that’s the one with the splashy Hollywood stuff.

1:40:44
BR:  Well, I saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose a couple of weeks ago, and I generally agree with you it was interesting in so far as it was an unusual courtroom drama about an exorcism. So many films you know they want to work in the word exorcism or possession usually grade B stuff and it’s it’s focused on you know the turning head the spatter this and that And the Emily Rose film was interesting insofar as it was simplified and exaggerated, but it was an interesting look at sort of where the rubber hits the road, right? Where the fantasy hits the courtroom. That to me was the most interesting part about the film was that you had ideas of faith and belief being argued, not terribly effectively, my dad, but being argued within a courtroom setting. I think it could have been better done, but that to me is the sort of redeeming aspect of that film is that it is scary and it does sugarcoat what actually happened, but it does take at least a somewhat fresher angle rather than just blood and gore and guts. It’s also about, you know, sort of legal defenses and things like that.

EM: But how much more compelling would that same story have been if it had been about an overzealous clergy and an overzealous family?

BR: Absolutely, it could have been much better.

1:42:17
CW: Erik, I think I’ve just come up with your next movie. Have you now? You and I’m actually I’m totally 100 percent serious about this. You need to do a movie about Ed and Lorraine Warren, take at least one of their cases, and recreate it from the perspective of looking behind the scenes of the con here. And see-

1:42:40
EM: It’s interesting because that’s actually how I first came into contact with the Glatzel family. Because I was interested in doing just that.

1:42:49
CW: Oh, OK.

1:42:50
EM: But then The Conjuring happened or The Conjuring was in the works at the time. And, you know, suddenly all of the Ed and Lorraine stories were sort of fair game to be made into a very profitable Hollywood film. So I at least wanted to have conversations if for no other reason than to get some information that might inform an original work that would be along those same lines.

CW: Exactly you could have yeah, you could absolutely tell the story just once removed.

1:43:21
EM: Exactly. Yeah good idea Would you like to be my producer?

CW: Well, what were you what were you telling me? Oh, you were saying the producers job is just to sit back and collect all the money. I will totally do that.

EM: Awesome!

CW: Unfortunately. I’m if that’s the case though. I’m totally not being a very good producer with squaring the strange I I’m I’m missing the boat on that.

1:43:40
EM: Well, you do know the producer has to come up with the money first.

1:43:52
CW: I do buy I do buy all the swag for the skeptic rates that we send out every month. Check our patreon page everybody everybody. Okay, well, we should probably wrap up and say goodbye to Erik. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your stories of Ed and Lorraine Warren and all the various ways they have concocted stories.

1:44:11
EM: As always, I love to be here and I’m sorry you had to beat me. Next time you won’t have to bleed me out. No, it was it was. Wait a minute, didn’t I say at the beginning that this was going to be the time? This is going to be the last one?

1:44:44
BR: And if somehow you aren’t aware of what Erik’s done, he’s made several films, most recently Butterfly Kisses.

1:44:52
CW: Getting lots of accolades right now.

1:44:54
EM: It’s doing all right.

1:44:55
CW: OK, well, thanks again, Eric. Love having you.

1:44:59
BR: Bye bye.

1:45:00
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1:45:05
If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here in Strange Studios and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a five-star review.

1:45:30
Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again, strangers.

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Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio, LLC. Copyright 2018. Theme music by Shriekback. Additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pasqual Romero. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, Robert Sundin, and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Head Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

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our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

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you

Transcribed with Cockatoo