You're Wrong About

Ed and Lorraine Warren with Jamie Loftus

November 08, 2021 Michael Hobbes & Sarah Marshall
You're Wrong About
Ed and Lorraine Warren with Jamie Loftus
Show Notes Transcript

Special Guest Jamie Loftus tells Sarah about Ed and Lorraine Warren (of The Conjuring and Annabelle fame). Topics of interest include Connecticut as a locus of scary happenings, New England uncles, and psychic communication with a tearstained Bigfoot. 

Here's where to find Jamie:

The Bechdel Cast [podcast] My Year in Mensa [podcast] and Aack Cast [podcast] 

Support us:

Bonus Episodes on Patreon

Donate on Paypal

Buy cute merch

Where else to find us:

Sarah's other show, You Are Good 

[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase

Links:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-the-bechdel-cast-30089535/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-my-year-in-mensa-55379945/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-aack-cast-by-jamie-loftus-83922273/
http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com


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Ed & Lorraine Warren

Sarah: If you want to splurge on a weird ghost hunting adventure and it's at all possible for you to do so, do it while you can, because ghosts can't take you hunting for other ghosts. It would be a conflict of interest.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, where we tell the stories behind Halloween movies sometimes. Hello, Jamie Loftus. 

Jamie: Hello, Sarah Marshall. How are you?

Sarah: I am so excited about this episode you and I are about to jump into. I don't know what verb tense to use, because we recorded it in the past, but you are hearing it in the very near future if you're listening to this now. 

Jamie: We're in the liminal space of this episode existing. 

Sarah: Which is a little spooky, which is fitting with what we're talking about today. Because we're going to either the realm of spirits, or the realm of weird New England marriages. 

Jamie: I feel like we're really going to meet exactly in the middle and find two people who, if nothing else, really seemed to find each other.

Sarah: I love the subject matter for this episode. You are going to tell me about Ed and Lorraine Warren, who have made a cottage industry out of ghost hunting, and now are continuing to be monetized after their deaths. 

Jamie: Yeah, I think it's an interesting case of a very carefully guarded. I do not know, when your life becomes IP and very, very valuable IP, what happens to the reality of what you actually did and what actually happened.

Sarah: To me the takeaway here is that there doesn't have to be conclusive proof of ghosts for a story to be scary. Anyone who listens to the show knows that I love to find new ways to be scared. I love scary stories. I love spooky stories, I love creepy stories. and this is for the people who can't just shut their spooky sense off on November 1st. This is for you, we got you.

Jamie: Yeah. The ones that gently come down from the Halloween spirit, Ed and Lorraine are there for you. 

Sarah: You are coming to us from another neighborhood in podcast land. You do a ton of amazing work. Where else can people find you these days?  

Jamie: I have movie podcast that I've done forever with my friend Caitlin Durante called, The Bechdel Cast. And then I have a couple of solo podcasts that I've done that are deep dives on things that I think are interesting, that are heavily influenced by you I would say. 

Sarah: Really. 

Jamie: Yeah, oh my gosh, yes. Sorry to tell you on mic, but it's true. They’re called, My Year in Mensa, which was exactly what it sounds like. It's about slowly learning about the eugenic history of Mensa, while being harassed by people in Mensa on Facebook.com. There's Lolita Podcast, which is just like a full taxonomy of Lolita as a cultural idea, and the book as well. And then I just finished a podcast called Aack Cast that's all about the Cathy Comics and how they were good, actually. 

Sarah: Yeah. Thank you for your work in all these sectors.

Jamie: Thank you for your work. 

Sarah: We are going to get into, not the ghost world necessarily, but the things that people do when they are making money and making careers. And I just love this episode.

Jamie: And just monetizing fear. 

Sarah: Monetizing fear, yes, I love that. 

Jamie: That's my little buzz phrase. 

Sarah: If you want to hear more of Jamie and me talking about stuff, you will have more down the road. But for now we're doing a Patreon episode this month where I tell Jamie about the Pinkerton Detectives, which is one of my favorite subjects right now.

Jamie: It gets a little ghosty there, too. 

Sarah: Right. Here's what I'll say. There is a ghost in this. The ghost turns out to be more substantiable, if that's a word, than some of the other ghosts we're talking about. So, you can figure that out on your own or listen to the episode. 

Jamie: We really made a meal of it throughout October I would say. We really did it. 

Sarah: I am a Halloween kid. Halloween is like McRib season, it's not over until I say it's over. 

Jamie: Exactly.

Sarah: And you can't stop me. You can find us on Twitter at You're Wrong About, you can find us on Patreon. We have bonus episodes. Those have been not quite once every month, as we're going through this transitional time that I've been doing more newsletters for people over there. If that's something that sounds fun, go take a look. Jamie, where can people find you?

Jamie: You can find me on Twitter, unfortunately, at @jamieloftusHELP and Instagram at jamiechristsuperstar

Sarah: I don't tweet very much anymore, but every so often I think of a joke that makes me wish I could tweet it and stop my self-imposed embargo. The best one of all of these that I want to share with you now is, ‘still crazy after all this year’.

Jamie: No, no.

Sarah: Jamie Loftus my guest, my explainer today. So again, like this show is undergoing a process of changing and growing, and I know that the way that we normally do this is for me, as the person who is getting this explained to me by you, to tell you what my perceptions of the Warrens are thus far. 

Jamie: I was curious what your experience with them were because I feel you probably a week ago knew more about this topic than I did, because you know, so much about the Satanic Panic, and Ed and Lorraine are kind of existing in that context. What do you know about them, I guess, in the abstract? 

Sarah: The first time I ever heard of them was from actually a previous You’re Wrong About guest, Candice Opper, who is a good friend of mine and a wonderful writer. And one of the main things about her is that she's from Connecticut. I know that the Warrens are also of Connecticut. And I imagine figures that kind of show us how Connecticut is like a really interesting place that is more than just scary women wearing pearls. But then I think the context I first heard about them was that Candice knew someone who had taken their ghost hunting class or their ghost hunting tour. Boy, if I had a bunch of money lying around, I'd go learn from the Warrens how to find ghosts or demons or whatever.

The next I heard of them was when The Conjuring came out. Which I remember, I haven't seen that movie since it was in theaters, but I really liked it because I love a classic haunted house story. I think there's not enough of those in horror and those just make me happy. Isn't it cool that these people I've heard about are in a movie? 

Jamie: Have you ever seen any video footage of the real Warrens?

Sarah: No. 

Jamie: I definitely saw the first Conjuring movie when it came out, because I have had a crush on Patrick Wilson since I was like 11 years old. If you watch video footage of the real Ed Warren, he's I think as opposite from Patrick Wilson as a person can be. But Ed Warren is such a like New England uncle. He reminds me of my uncles. He is like, “So here is the thing about ghosts”. He has a thick accent. He's not this sexy, swarthy guy. I don't know. 

Sarah: I am imagining him as someone who either literally or spiritually had a nice, big sprig of chest hair out at any given time.

Jamie: Yes. He's like the one button open kind of guy, always leaning back crotch forward.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Jamie: Part of what really fascinated me and broke my brain about doing research on the Warrens, is how specific the vision of them in the Conjuring movies is, and how by design that is, and how that kind of chafes with their real life dynamic, allegedly. 

Sarah: I feel like the Warren's at this point - because now we have multiple Conjuring, multiple Annabelle’s - they kind of have a little posthumous empire going. I would kind of connect to these movies based on the concept of demon hunting to what I feel is the laundering of some of the ideas that contributed to the Satanic Panic into exorcism movies, starting with The Exorcist, which I think helped create the Satanic Panic. I've talked in a previous episode of the show about how it like created a consumer demand for exorcisms, which was met by various people, various religious professionals. 

Jamie: There is an old timeliness to this. Many would argue grift, but there's kind of an old purity about it that I appreciate. parts of like a good old fashioned psychic story. 

Sarah: Like 19th century spiritualism, but just in the seventies and eighties.

Jamie: Right. Yeah, but with like fun outfits and WWII PTSD. 

Sarah: Where, to you, does the real story begin?

Jamie: Ed and Lorraine are both from Connecticut. They were childhood sweethearts, and that is kind of the image of them that is aggressively pushed in the Conjuring franchise. I truly cannot overstate how much information there is about these people out there and how most of the information is from them. So, I'm going to try to touch on some of their biggest cases, but there's just like no human way to fact check a lot of what they say. I mean, every Conjuring movie is tangentially based off of something they maybe did.

They were onsite of like The Amityville Horror. They did Annabelle. They did the Arne Johnson, Devil Made Me Do It defense. They did The Haunting in Connecticut. They were just all over the place. Ed was born in 1926, Lorraine was born in 1927, and was the son of a very Catholic state trooper. Which just sounds like a negative vibe.

He says in all of his interviews and his thick, New England accent that Patrick Wilson doesn't have, he grew up in a house that was haunted. And so he has all of these memories from, I think it's from age 5 to age 12, that he said he would see ghosts regularly. They would never hurt him, but he would notice them. And if he ever brought it up to his dad, his dad would say, “I know. Don't tell anyone about it.” On Lorraine's end she was from somehow an even more Catholic family, but they would regularly make that distinction where they're like, well, Ed was Catholic, but Lorraine was “Catholic.” 

Sarah: Connecticut is a kingdom where each family is more Catholic than the last. 

Jamie: So their dynamic is, Ed is the demonologist. Which I think in this relationship kind of boils down to like the logistics guy, and Lorraine is the psychic. 

Sarah: He's the managing editor and she is the editor in chief. 

Jamie: Exactly. Most of the stuff that they do is set up by Ed a lot of the time but relies on what Lorraine brings to the table in order for it to actually be pulled off. There's a series of aesthetically perfect interviews that Ed and Lorraine did with their son in law, Tony, in this basic cable studio that I think that they rented in the 90s and early 2000s, where he would just interview them about their lives. He would never disclose that they were related to each other, which I had to figure that out on my own. But Lorraine said in the early 2000s that she realized that she could see peoples’ auras. She could hear thoughts. I guess she had an experience at school where she looked at a sapling on Arbor Day when the students were planting a tree, and she could see the tree, it was going to become. And she told a nun she could see the tree it was going to be, and that was not a Catholic enough thing to say, and he got in trouble and was told that is black magic and to never bring it up again. 

Sarah: Oh dear. Can I tell you really quick one of my theories about people who either say that their psychics are witches or who get accused of that kind of thing through history?

Jamie: Please. Yes. 

Sarah: Especially in male dominated societies or religious hierarchies or what have you. I think there's often very little room for comprehension of emotional intelligence. Because I think patriarchal structure really flourishes in a world where its leaders have as little emotional intelligence as possible. My key piece of evidence is America right now. 

Jamie: Your honor, Exhibit A. 

Sarah: The ability to kind of put your finger to the wind and understand what's happening in a way that people around you have no idea how you got there. I think that can seem like sorcery to people, especially if it allows you to figure things out that people would prefer for you not to know, because you're supposed to be stupid.  

Jamie: Right. It's such a bummer to hear those stories about kids being kind of forced to compartmentalize something that is like an inherently positive thing. I don't know. She's like, I can see a tree that's growing. Who is that hurting? 

Sarah: Right. 

Jamie: Okay. So they're growing up they're vaguely interested in these very spiritual things, in ghost, and visions, but they don't meet until they're teenagers. On the official website for the organization that the Warrens will eventually found in 1952, the New England Society for Psychic Research, which is run by, you guessed it, Tony. 

Sarah: That's great. Keep it in the family. 

Jamie: Tony has graciously put together a timeline of the Warren relationship on the NESPR website, that once you know it was put together by their son in law, is detailed to an extent that is kind of creepy. He wrote this incredible blog post about how Ed and Lorraine met; it is riddled with typos. They meet at the movie theater, Lorraine is 16 and Ed is 17. He's working as an usher. She's going to see a James Cagney movie with her gal pals. Here's how Tony describes it in a blog post. 

At the time, Lorraine showed little interest in boys, as she stated in later years. ‘I was concentrating on my schoolwork, and besides, boys were rough, not gentle, like my brother Jim. Boys were too rough around the edges for me.’ But inside the girls introduced her to the energetic, young usher. His name was Ed. When she saw Ed, she thought to herself, “Gee, what a nice-looking young man”. She related later how spiffy he looked with his sharply creased pants and perfectly quaffed hair. She recalled that he smelled like Noxzema.”

Anyways, they met at a movie theater. He gets her an ice cream soda, and Lorraine says that she has a vision as he's walking her home, and she looks to the side, and she can see him as an older man. She's like, I'm going to spend my life with this person. Very romantic. 

Sarah: I really love that we got to know how everybody, or I guess mostly how Ed smelled. So rarely do people remember to describe how a scene smells, but it's so important.

Jamie: He was all clean and she had a vision, and this is going to be her husband. By this time, it's towards the end of WWII, Ed enlists in the Navy while they're still dating. Really early into the Navy, the boat that he’s stationed on hits an oil tanker, and he uses his survivor's leave to get married to Lorraine. He stays in the Navy until the early fifties. They have one kid named Judy, I think, in the early 1950s. Ed tells Lorraine, I'm really interested in ghosts, I believe in ghosts. I want to chase ghosts when I get out of the Navy. And Lorraine tells Ed that she thinks that she has some clairvoyancy, and he actually believes her. 

Sarah: To me there's something so exciting about like you fall in love, and you live in this society that so far has discouraged you from even talking about this. You're like, you know, “I really like ghosts”, and then you both get to share that. Like, that's really romantic. 

Jamie: That is what they want you to think, Sarah. 

Sarah: Oh no. 

Jamie: I don't know. I mean, that did seem to be true. That was a huge bonding thing where Lorraine was always very impressed that Ed believed her about that and also encouraged her to do stuff with him. And, you know, whatever. Which I guess in the early fifties wasn't nothing. He wanted them to collaborate. 

So once he's out of the Navy, they decide that they're going all in on ghost stuff. For about like 10 to 15 years Ed would work kind of odd jobs to support the family, and they would spend all of their free time doing ghost things. In 1952, they founded the New England Society for Psychic Research. 

Sarah: Sounds very legit.

Jamie: The issue is they had no experience and they had no one who was willing to give them access to allegedly haunted houses. The way that they worked around this was that Ed had been to two years of art school and he liked painting. The plan was, it sounds like a Nathan For You episode, but it worked for them. They would drive around to places that they had heard might be haunted, and Ed would set up an easel outside of the house and would start frantically sketching the house. Then as he described it in one of these Tony interviews, he would then send Lorraine with his sketch of the house to the door and she would knock on the door and say, “Hey, my husband's an artist and he just drew this picture of your house. Do you want to buy it, and can we come inside?” I guess that this worked, Ed was selling these sketches and paintings and that's how they would gain access to the house to gain the trust of the family and learn about hauntings.

Sarah: People really did used to be more trusting, didn't they? 

Jamie: I was like, this sounds like a recipe for disaster. But yeah, Ed was like, I just sent my wife up there with her Irish personality. It seems like they got access to a ton of places then and started to build this reputation for being local haunted house lovers.

Sarah: My modern true crime brain says that sending your wife to force her way into a stranger's home is a great way to get her to become the ghost that is haunting it.

Jamie: Right. I don't love Ed, but I do have a soft spot for Lorraine. Lorraine also maintains that during this early period, she was still relatively skeptical of what Ed wanted to do. I think that Lorraine was like, oh, I'm a very intuitive person. I feel like I can see things before they happen sometimes. The more I thought about it. I'm like, well, that doesn't necessarily translate to wanting to go to any random haunted house that your husband wants to go to, but that's how it ended up for them.

Sarah: I do feel like marriage at that time, I can imagine being exciting because as a single woman, there's so many spaces that you can't go into unattended and so many things that you just can't do. Then if you marry some madcap guy, then like suddenly you're on madcap adventures all the time and it's appropriate because it's not your idea and you're supposed to do whatever he wants. 

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

Judy is very supportive of her parents' legacy to this day. She's still alive. She's married to Tony, the whole bit, but she said that she didn't know what her parents even did for a living until she was a teenager. 

Sarah: Oh, wow. 

Jamie: It sounds like she didn't get to know them very well until she was an early adult, which is around the time they got famous. She would have been whatever a teenager or young adult, and Judy is not very chatty and doesn't seem to want to discuss much. We may never know, but it sounds like she just didn't grow up around them. Ed is trying to develop this pseudo-science of how ghosts appear. It's a lot of vague ghostbuster language to the point where it's been speculated that a lot of eighties media is pulling from stuff that Ed Warren said in the fifties and sixties, where it is in places that are highly electromagnetic. You're more likely to see a ghost and vibrations in the air is what makes it possible to hear a ghost versus not. He needs to justify his place in the NESPR. 

Sarah: I feel so conflicted about ghosts, because a part of me wants there to be ghosts. But a bigger part of me is like, the ghost must be pretty unhappy and bored if they are hanging out. I don't want them to be dealing with that.

Jamie: 4 in 10 Americans believe in ghosts, is what I read on a website I'd never heard.

Sarah: I'm actually amazed it is not higher. I feel like there have to be people who kind of believe in ghosts, but are too embarrassed to say. One of the things that I think is kind of silliest about a lot of American ghost media is this house is scary because people died in it. And it's like, well, people have died everywhere. It’s a fraction of the ghosts that should be here. If you had some small percentages of dead people walking around as ghosts, then it would just be like ghost grand central station. We talk about ghosts inhabiting structures and being stuck in kind of particular places, and then there's stuff like the Titanic.

Jamie: Now we're talking.

Sarah: We are like, as human beings, our little brains have a hard time finding language or emotions to describe to ourselves the space around mass tragedy and just the concept of a place being haunted. I do not know. I feel like that's another way of calling something sacred or showing respect for the dead or the way that people died. In my heart, I believe in ghosts in one way or another, but also, I feel like the human obsession with haunted places I don't want to push that away, because I feel like we're trying to use that constructively a lot of the time.

Jamie:  Right. By the late sixties the Warrens had effectively built up this reputation as local ghostbusters, and they start doing lectures at colleges.

Sarah: Will they evict the ghosts from your house? Do you call them, or do they just diagnose, what are they doing? 

Jamie: It kind of depends. They always claim that they never sought out haunted places. They would wait for people to come to them, which that's already not true, but whatever. But there would be a lot of people that would say, “Hey, I think something's going on at my house. Can you check it out?” They would talk it through and if they thought it was a good case for them, they would drive over to your house. Their business model was that they don't charge the family. If they have to travel, you have to pay for their travel and lodging, but it doesn't cost anything to do. They made their money via lectures, and book deals, and life rights, and all this other stuff.

You would call them up and be like, “Hey, my daughter's foaming at the mouth and she's the devil, can you come over?” They would say, “Yes”. Ed's the demonologist. He would go over and figure out if there's demons afoot. If someone's actively possessed, or if things are actively moving around, they would bring recording equipment. They would do kind of the whole ghost hunter thing. And then in other cases, there were a lot of cases of them describing law enforcement calling them or the church. They were constantly colluding with the police and the Catholic church, which is just incredible. The two most reliable, perfect systems that exist.

The police would call them and say, “Hey, we are trying to find out more information about this woman who was murdered .” And as they tell it, Lorraine would go in, she would touch some of the objects or evidence and would try to lead them somewhere. It kind of depended on what the situation called for. If it was a demon situation, Ed's going to take the lead. If it's a dead lady situation, Lorraine's going to take it. 

Sarah: I find police psychic so interesting. In the research that I've done on it, there's a lot of charlatanries. But I feel like, especially in the sixties and the seventies when effectively, there were either no women on a local police force or no women who are being listened to. Maybe the only way that you would have insight from a woman about a female victim in an investigation would be if you called a psychic. And she was like, I sense that the victim rejected the killer’s sexual advances, and he felt humiliated and enraged and strangled her. It's like, yeah, that's reasonable. That's the kind of thing an FBI profiler would say. 

Jamie: Right. The tricky thing is that it's just so hard to verify what they were actually doing. If what they're saying is true and that Lorraine was able to go to these very agro, skeptical police stations and give some insight into like, here is what happened to this woman. This comes up in the Conjuring movies a fair amount, forcing law enforcement to empathize with women who have been killed. It's not just because of what her skills were. She was like, not only is this what happened, this is how she was feeling when it happened, and she would feel fear in objects. I hope that's true because that does seem like one of the more positive contributions. The other thing that it seems like, even if they are complete charlatans, there are certain families that it seems like they very cleverly lifted out of poverty by potentially manufacturing a haunting there. 

Sarah: Really?

Jamie: Yeah. There are some theories of double collusion of, in theory, inventing a haunting. It isn't hurting anyone, right. So, I'm in my apartment and I'm like, oh shit, I can't afford to stay here. What am I going to do? Then I decide, okay, I'm going to say that a demon is choking me every single night and I am going to post about it online. I'm going to tell everyone I know about it and get all of this press, and then I'm going to get a book deal and then I'm going to be able to afford to stay in this apartment. That was kind of the thinking, which is kind of brilliant. And as those kinds of conspiracy theories go, Ed and Lorraine are a great way of validating that's happening.

Sarah: Right, oh my God, yeah.

Jamie: They would be like, oh yeah, definitely. She's getting choked by a demon. This is so awful. So that gets you more press.

Sarah: It's like, how are you accredited? How were any expert witnesses accredited? It's a very unregulated system in some places and times.  

Jamie: Then they write a book about it, and they get money. It kind of forks out for everybody. 

Sarah: Wow. That feels a very Connecticut in that way of like, let's collaborate and work some angles. 

Jamie: Yeah. But there are theories around a few of their cases, including Amityville, where they're like, that is a strong possibility of what happened here. Of a family that was about to lose a house that a crime had occurred in, and then, okay, what are we going to do to be able to afford to stay in this house? Or in some cases move to a different house that's nicer. 

Sarah: It is so brilliant and so sad that like sometimes the surest way to avoid eviction in America is demons. 

Jamie: I totally agree. In certain cases, it is brilliant and I'm like, wow, even if they're complete and total liars, I'm rooting for them in this scenario. Their first few big cases where the Annabelle the doll case, which is three movies about now. 

Sarah: It is very impressive like to my knowledge, she doesn't talk. Does she do very much at all? She just sits there, right? 

Jamie: She definitely moves. I only watched one of the Annabelle's because there's one Annabelle that revolves around Judy Warren getting stuck at home while her parents are investigating. She was stuck at home with a babysitter for the weekend and Annabelle tortures her and the babysitter. What makes me laugh about Annabelle is you can picture the doll in the movies, likethe very  scary movie doll.

Sarah: She looks like she is made out of wood, a gritty Chucky energy.

Jamie: Yeah. She very much does. The real Annabelle was a Raggedy Ann doll. It was just a regular Raggedy Ann doll. I feel like making it a doll that everyone has. That was what was fun about Chucky is like, Chucky was this mass-produced doll. 

Sarah: Right, and that he's supposed to be so cute.  

Jamie: Right. The museum that may not exist anymore at the Warren's house. That whole room full of haunted objects is a real place that they had and that you could tour. And the most prominently displayed object is a Raggedy Ann doll with a red-light bulb hanging over her head in like a locked box with a sign that was like, ‘do not open under any circumstances’. You're like, they're kind of geniuses.

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Jamie: The story of Annabelle it is their most major case that is also completely impossible to verify. A woman in Connecticut in Hartford gave her daughter, who was a 28-year-old nurse, a Raggedy Ann doll second hand as a cute gift. The reason you can't verify it is no one has ever said who the nurse is, who the women were, who had the Raggedy Ann doll. You can never find out. The nurse had the Raggedy Ann doll, she was roommates with another nurse. She also had a boyfriend and the roommate started joking around and they would like to sit the Raggedy Ann doll at the table. I guess weird stuff started happening. Things were moving around, it wasn't super sinister. 

But one day the Raggedy Ann doll arms started moving on their own. The nurses got freaked out enough that they called a local medium, not the Warrens - I don't know, someone they found in the phone book - who came over and communicated with the doll and said that the doll said that her name was Annabelle. Her spirit was trapped in the doll, and she was a six-year-old girl who had died in a car accident. The nurses did some research, and it turns out there was a girl named Annabelle who had died in a car accident at age six. So then they became more attached to the doll, and they were like, “We love Annabelle. She is our friend and we're going to protect her.” And I guess once they decided they really loved her and they believed that, the story goes that Annabelle’s behavior got scary and all of a sudden there would be violent stuff happening. There was like a case where the nurse’s boyfriend, it sounds like he just kind of had it, and he was like, “I am sick of Annabelle she sucks, she's not a person.” Then he woke up with like all these scratches all over him because Annabelle didn't like that.

Sarah: Then you are like, how is she scratching him with her soft, little, fabric hands that are soft Raggedy Ann body. 

Jamie: This is something that Ed Warren calls ‘psychic knives’. 

Sarah: I'm an idiot. 

Jamie: The boyfriend got scratched up with psychic knives. Then the Warrens come in and their narrative is, “Oh, well that other medium said that the doll said her name is ‘Annabelle’. But it's because there's a demon inside the doll. The demon is lying to you. The demon says it's Annabelle, so you'll trust it and love it, and it's actually the devil and it's going to kill you.” 

Sarah: Which I remember from Satanic Panic stuff is a theme, I think, where demons prey you as like someone influenced by hippies or your Ouija boards or what have you, because they're like, “I'm a ghost”. And you're like, “Oh, that's nice”. And then they're like, “Just kidding. I'm a demon, you've been punk’d.” 

Jamie: That is like such a thing that especially Ed Warren brings up over and over like distinguishing ghosts, which are just like misguided people with unfinished business that will generally not bother you too much. Then like demons, and the only way you can get rid of a demon is by hiring the Warrens and letting them write a book about it and give you no money. 

So, Annabelle is their first big case. They have another case where they get a lot of press when they're called to solve a haunting at West Point in 1972. Lorraine is wandering the halls of West Point, and she's saying, “There's JFK. Was JFK ever there?” And West Point was like, “Yes, he was”, and she was like, “Well, there he is.” They're just doing kind of a lot of like funny harmless peacocking ghost kind of work and they're slowly becoming a national entity. They solve this thing at West Point.

Sarah: Because it is like a fun story. I feel like if I'm a journalist and I'm writing for the Bridgeport Times or whatever, I know people are going to read my local ghost hunter couple story. 

Jamie: Right. And they on the surface seemed like such a normie couple doing this very weird thing. It's being kind of validated by these larger and larger establishments as time goes on. Where I feel like a lot of the fascination with them was like, isn't it wild that the police need their help, or the military, West Point can't get rid of a ghost. But we're going to invite these people to do it. 

Sarah: Yeah, and it feeds this idea that not just ghost believers, but Catholics really know what's going on and how to heal America. 

Jamie: Right.

Sarah: Which I imagine it was popular with other Catholics. 

Jamie: I mean, I guess you can't really have an exorcism story without it being really, really steeped in religion. But the Conjuring movies are more religious than I feel like most movies are in 2021. 

Sarah: Right. Can you talk about that for people who don't have the time or the inclination for the wannaverse? 

Jamie: So the Conjuring movies, that's the gigantic franchise that use the Ed and Lorraine case files basically, that's how they're building out their universe. And they portray Ed and Lorraine as a couple that's very much in love. Lorraine is the gifted clairvoyant; Ed is the sensitive demonologist. Any case that the Warren’s are tangentially involved in, these movies essentially rewrite the story to make Ed and Lorraine the protagonist and the most important people in the story. Which I think shows the most in the most recent installment, which has the best title, The Conjuring III, The Devil Made Me Do It.

It's like built around this case with this guy, Arnie Johnson, who killed his landlord and was the first person to, I guess in the U.S., to attempt to claim he did the crime because he was possessed in court. There was all this press of, wow, he's saying the devil made him do it and then the judge was like, I'm not accepting that. It was shut down right away. He went to jail for manslaughter. But the way that the movie rewrites it, that I feel like is very like of this franchise, they kind of rewrite this story to be like Ed and Lorraine need to be able to prove that demons are true in court, or a man will be sent to the electric chair. This man will die unless we can prove that demons are true in court. Just this totally bizarro, like rewritten, I am the protagonist narrative.  

Sarah: I feel like making something a courtroom drama gives it a patina of legitimacy somehow. 

Jamie: Well, we're talking about The Devil Made Me Do It is a wild one. I was thinking of you as I was learning more about it, because it is so Satanic Panic. Where this is like an early 80’scase that they did. Arnie Johnson killed his landlord, whose name was Bono, which is funny. He killed his landlord Bono, but months before the Warrens had already known that family because Arnie's girlfriend's little brother appeared to be possessed by a demon. So, the Warrens had already been brought over to their house to conduct a seance. Ed is an accredited demonologist, which is very unusual if you're not a priest, but he can't do an exorcism. That's against the rules. He can do a seance, but he can't do an exorcism. You got to get a priest for an exorcism.

Sarah: And like that is a rule that he needs to follow. That's one of the laws he respects. 

Jamie: That's the one thing that Tony, who is the keeper of the keys, Tony's like, “That would never happen. Ed would never do an exorcism. He respects the rules of ghosts.” But so anyways, they had already met this family because they interacted with this kid. After that, the extent of the Warren's contact was that Lorraine called the police and was like, “I don't have a good feeling about what happened with that little boy, David. I don't think that's going to end well.” And then the police were like, “Okay, Lorraine, thank you”, click. 

Several months later, Arnie Johnson, in a fit of rage and also his landlord was being very drunk and handsy with Arnie's little cousin, stabbed him and killed him. Once Lorraine finds out that Arnie Johnson killed someone, she plays a game of 40 Chests immediately. She calls the police back and is like, what did I tell you? Something bad happened. The demon went from that little boy, David into Arnie and Arnie killed that guy because it was like the transit of demon property or whatever.

Sarah: Yeah. I don't know. That feels somehow more irresponsible to me than making a straight up, this house is haunted movie. Giving legitimacy to a time when we were trying to bring demons into the courtroom, essentially when people were like really working hard in a somewhat systematic way to do that. 

Jamie: I feel like their haunted house cases are the most famous ones, but they've dabbled in like kind of anything supernatural adjacent that was going to guarantee them a lot of press that was in the New England area.

Sarah: Huh. 

Jamie: One that I did some research on that was one of their more famous early ones because it took place in their hometown in Bridgeport, Connecticut was the Lindley Street Poltergeist of 1974. This is one of their only big cases that has no movie adaptation to it. 

The story behind it is a couple that was friends of friends of the Warrens, Gerard and Laura Goodin, lived in this little house. They had lost a young son, they'd lost a seven-year-old son, and then they adopted a daughter who is of indigenous descent. She is a first nations kid named Marcia in 1968, and they moved into this house. Marcia was one of the only kids at her school that wasn't white, and she was getting bullied a lot. She is staying home from school because she had been beat up and wasn't doing physically great. Allegedly some versions of the story also say she'd recently seen The Exorcist and was going through a very emotionally traumatic time. She becomes quote, unquote “possessed”. The parents are scared, and it becomes this town-wide obsession of at one point there were 2,000 people in front of this kid's house thinking that she's possessed by a demon.

So, the Warrens get called over. The Warrens do what the Warrens do, and they're like, this is totally legit. As the record goes over a course of months, it says that there were 77 independent witnesses to stuff going on at this house. Although later on many people took back what they said and they were like, oh, I think that it was just a traumatized child that lived in that home. It became not a national thing, but a local sensation, that there is this kid that lives in Bridgeport who is possessed. And no one ever talked about how she was being bullied and had just seen The Exorcist

Sarah: Because people I feel really wanted to have a possessed girl in town.

Jamie: Right. I do think it's interesting that the majority of these Warren stories involve a young girl becoming possessed. It's a lot of mothers and young girls that are possessed by these spirits. And Marcia Goodin, it sounds like she had a really difficult life after this and was equally traumatized by all of this negative attention on her from her entire town. She kind of went off the grid and left town and cut off contact with her family in her teens and early twenties. She passed away relatively young, she died in 2015. She was going to Canada to see if she could find her birth family, unclear if she was successful. But when she passed away, no one wanted her ashes because they thought that they were haunted.

Sarah: Oh, that's so horrible. 

Jamie: There's fun ones and then there's ones where it does seem like there's clearly someone who's been exploited, and often that person is very young or marginalized or just extremely vulnerable. She was extremely hard to track down and seemed to like very much not want to talk about or comment on that period of her life at all. It just seems like it was just like only a source of upset. There's no way to really verify what actually happened. There are some cases the Warrens worked on, including the case in England that The Conjuring 2 is based on. Where its later kind of became clear that it was a young girl kind of acting out because she wasn't getting a lot of attention at home. Which could potentially be, I mean, a contributing factor for Marcia Goodin. But there's just kind of no way of knowing. And I don't know, that one like broke my heart. It felt like a very seventies thing to be doing, especially in a place that is so aggressively Catholic and white as Connecticut. Could you set up a kid for failure anymore? 

I read this book called Ghost Hunters, that was co-written with Ed and Lorraine and some guy that didn't sue them, which some of them did. Each chapter was really short, and it was about a different case that you couldn't verify with a gun to your head. One of them, I jumped as I was walking to the grocery store, because it was like “Chapter five, Lorraine and Bigfoot.” The story was so funny. Ed and Lorraine get a call from, they say, quote unquote, “the hill people”. This book was written in I think the early eighties, and they're like, “Bigfoot is out here.” We're afraid Bigfoot is around. 

Sarah: So, they go to Stone Mountain, Georgia where Kenneth Purcell is from, I assume.

Jamie: They go to the personal residence almost right away. She sees Bigfoot from a distance, and his foot is big Sarah, because it's injured. It's not naturally big. She starts to telepathically communicate with Bigfoot, and she realizes that Bigfoot is very intelligent, and he's been through a lot. She offers more empathy to bigfoot than she does to children that are real. Bigfoot telepathically informs her that he has a wife, and he wants to be reunited with her, but he's injured.

Sarah: The Bigfoots have marriage. 

Jamie: No, there's a colony of big feet. He got lost from the pack because he cut his foot. So then Lorraine telepathically says, “Come here Bigfoot, they're just afraid because they don't understand you. And come to the village and I will show everyone and will heal you, and then you can go see your Bigfoot wife.” Unfortunately, a college student blows an air horn and Bigfoot runs away crying, crying, crying, because he thought Lorraine was his friend and then she scared him. She watched him walk all the way up a mountain with his injured foot, and that's the story of Lorraine and Bigfoot.

Sarah: I feel like Lorraine does better when she like makes up a story completely, with like her and just a made-up character, as opposed to a real person who has to have a demon put in them. 

Jamie: That one really rocked my world. You can just tell they need to sell books and they're filling space. They write entire chapters about just abnormal people they've met, and it kind of has nothing to do with demons. Where they're like, “We went to this funeral guy's house, and he admitted to having sex with people who had died. Ed said, ‘You've got to stop that’, and he said, ‘You're right’.” That's kind of like the whole chapter. 

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Jamie: It has nothing to do with anything. It's just a person that they met, who did something terrible. So unfortunately, this is the biggest, most serious allegation that comes up with the Warrens. There is a huge Hollywood Reporter article that came out about this in 2017. There was a woman that Ed Warren knew named Judith Penny, who has at least started a lawsuit against the Warren estate and also Warner Brothers who makes the conjuring movies, essentially for damages for erasing her from this franchise entirely. Because as she tells it, she's now in her seventies, but in the early 1960s, Ed Warren was her bus driver while she was in high school. They began some sort of affair while she was still underage. She ended up living with the Warrens and assisting them and remaining in a relationship with Ed. 

Sarah: Oh no. 

Jamie: Which Lorraine, I guess, completely knew about for four decades. Then on top of that, it sounds like she assisted in a lot of the work they were doing for 40 years. She lived at their house. 

Sarah: Was this like Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, or was it like Abraham and Hagar? Was this a throuple or?

Jamie: It wasn't a throuple. It sounds like Lorraine and Judith didn't like each other. 

Sarah: Oh my God.

Jamie: Yeah. It just sounds like Ed Warren kind of had his wife and then his secret wife, and they just kind of had to deal with it. 

Sarah: And they just all have to go demon hunting together until they all fall down dead.

Jamie: I kind of wonder like how much Judith Penny was taking care of their kid, whose name was also Judith. She put all this forward in 2017 after the Conjuring movies were already on the way to making a billion dollars. And such a huge element of those movies is this image of like Ed and Lorraine Warren as this very pious, monogamous couple, that the strength of their love is what extracts the demons from the random people in Connecticut.

Okay, so this was the paragraph that I was just like, okay. It says, “Even in 1963, a teenage girl did not move in with a married man without attracting notice. That year, Judith Penny was arrested after someone reported her relationship with Ed to local police. According to her November 2014 declaration, she spent a night in the North End Prison in Bridgeport while police tried to persuade her to sign a statement admitting to the affair. After Penny refused to cooperate, she was ordered by the court to report to a delinquent youth office for the next month. According to Penny's account, Ed picked her up from school every week and drove her to the mandated meetings.”

Sarah: Jesus. 

Jamie: Yeah, like it's really bad. 

Sarah: Yeah. He's just like, “Well Judith, it's time to serve your nickel, because I need to keep having you be my secret ghost hunter girlfriend.”

Jamie: A teenage kid and I don't know. I feel like the conversation of how Lorraine factors into this kind of is out of my depth because who knows. There are like allegations that Ed was physically abusive towards Lorraine at different points in their relationship. And what it boils down to is, it doesn't seem like Ed was a very good person. It's interesting because Ed dies in 2006, he never sees The Conjuring Universe, Lorraine does. 

Lorraine died in 2019. So when Tony is helping facilitate the life rights so that the Conjuring movies can be made, I think what kind of tipped people off to something is not quite right here, is that the way the life rights were sold and described to Warner Brothers was so particular. Lorraine Warren, when they were selling these life rights to New Line Cinema in like the early 2010’s, her deal was to serve as a consultant on the movies. Which she did for all of them, because I think that the production on the one that just came out wrapped before she died. There were all these stipulations. The films couldn't show her or her husband engaging in crimes, including sex with minors, child pornography, prostitution, or sexual assault.

Sarah: Lorraine!

Sarah: Neither the husband nor wife could be depicted as participating in an extra marital sexual relationship. Then there's like all these talent attorneys that are like, that's not a standard contract. ‘Just make sure that you don't show my husband cheating on me with a minor’, it's very, very specific. I don't know. I'm very inclined to believe Judith Penny. She lived with them for 40 years. I mean, she didn't break things off with Ed until 2003, when he was very sick and she wanted to marry someone. 

Sarah: Oh, Judith. 

Jamie: And that was when she left. 

Sarah: Wow. It's a funny kind of intersection of genre. There's like the juggernaut of whatever horror franchise is able to keep making money in a given time, and then there's the ethics of representing real people. Those things don't normally cross paths, right? I can't think of anyone filing suit against the makers of paranormal activity because their life story and their trauma has been erased from those movies. 

Jamie: Right. The third player in this very messy lawsuit is someone who had written a book with the Warrens who also had, I mean, not an allegation of like abuse and also living with them for four decades, but basically it was The Conjuring is adapting all this work I did that I know is fake because I wrote it with Ed and Lorraine Warren. That's what they were telling me, and it wasn't true. I feel like I'm entitled to some money here because they're adapting the lie I wrote down for them. 

I feel like ‘based on a true story’ is always a good selling point for a horror movie, but that's also where all of their problems have come from. But it’s like as a horror movie viewer, I don't think anyone's going to the Conjuring thing being like, I expect to the letter details. Who's going to know, you want to see a haunted house movie, but then also I'm like, well, but if I'm Judith Penny, I would be pissed off.

Sarah: For me as a horror viewer. I always want to not know how much is true and is not true. I expect it to be like very loosely based on some little kernel effect.

Jamie: Right. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's like, how do you sort out liable in a horror movie where like everyone agrees, ‘please lie to me’. I guess it's like the ghosts don't have to be real, but the depictions of the ghost hunters have to be at least recognizable. 

Jamie: At least adjacent to the truth. I wasn't able to find if that lawsuit had settled. I know that the author and the producers’ lawsuits fell through, but I'm not sure what happened with Judith.

Sarah: I’m so for cheesy horror movies, and I just feel like there have to be some non-problematic ghost hunters out there to make movies about.

Jamie: You would think. I don't doubt that they cared about each other. I don't doubt that they loved their daughter. But there was definitely a lot of other stuff going on. 

So for this one, The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It, there are some players in the story that are like, “Yes, this is exactly how it happened. Thank you for telling our story on HBO Max”.  And those people are paid consultants on the movie. Arnie Johnson is still alive. He was released from prison after five years. 

Sarah: Oh, wow. 

Jamie: He married his girlfriend, Debbie. And Debbie was hired as a consultant, along with Lorraine Warren, on The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It. Of course, she's going on any channel that will have her saying, yes, this is exactly what happened. 

One of the daughters from the first Conjuring story, which is a haunting that happened in the early seventies in Rhode Island. One of the daughters is still very much carrying the torch of like, yes, there was a little bit of freestyle jazz in terms of how it was adapted, but for the most part, it's completely true. And it's not like anyone can truly prove her wrong. Her career now is writing horror novels and whose writing stories about haunted houses. So, it behooves her to be ‘the Conjuring girl’, you know. 

Then in the case of the Arnie Johnson case, the little boy David, who was said to have been possessed, sued the Warrens. 

Sarah: Yeah. You're going to get some of that. 

Jamie: He filed a lawsuit a couple of years ago saying that he's moved on. He didn't want the movie to be made. It violated his privacy, libel, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Which I think is like a pretty fair thing. If you were told as a kid that you were possessed and then now you're 40 years old and you're seeing that played back at you, even though you no longer believe that's true and you can't do anything about it and you don't get even compensated for it, that sucks.

Sarah: Yes. And again, it feels revealing that you can be depicted as a possessed child in a movie against your will. 

Jamie: Right. Like that sounds wrong. I don't know.

Sarah: If we're speculating about the dead, we can't harm them in nearly the same way we can harm the living, by making up a bunch of stuff.

Jamie: Right. If they do the Conjuring 3 1/2, Maybe The Devil Didn't Make Me Do It. The end of the Warren's lives, they stop actively investigating stuff in the early nineties, and they kind of pivot to legacy building. 

Sarah: The Warren Presidential Library. 

Jamie: Well, I guess it's like their Annabelle room. They're a cult museum that becomes a big thing starting in the nineties and they're always hanging out there and talking to people and they do a lot of lectures. They do these taped interviews. They write a lot of books where it just seems like kind of building a nest egg without constantly going to people's houses about ghosts anymore.

Ed dies in 2006. Lorraine is like unofficially retired, and then all the Conjuring stuff kicks up in the early 2010s, and Lorraine is a paid consultant. Judith Penny, from the beginning of this story who lived with the Warrens forever, was suing Lorraine for the cost of her salary as a consultant on the movie, which I thought was a good poetic justice move. She was making $150,000 per Conjuring movie to just be like, make me nice. She died in 2019, and now Tony is in charge of everything. Judy wants nothing to do with anything. And Tony's whole thing is making YouTube videos where he's filming himself from an up angle. Where the New England Society for Psychic Research under Tony's rein, it seems like it's more of what I would want it to be. 

Sarah: That's great.

Jamie: He's a goofy, weird guy who really, really believes that ghosts exist. He wants people to pay him a small fee to talk to them about it, which is like how Ed and Lorraine started. But I feel like they were so in the right place at the right time where they happened to be working, at a time where all of a sudden interest in the occult just went up massively. Then they did a bunch of, I think, questionable stuff to deal with that and kind of get their bag in that context.

Sarah: As people who at least presented themselves as very religious and very devout and like good upstanding people, they were able to ride this wave of ideas about demons and possession in a cult stuff. Definitely becoming trendy in a way that a sensibly really just people, or at least Christians in America were being like, no, that's bad. It's very bad, don't do it. They're able to profit off of a trend by seeming like they're against demons, but it's like the demon seemed to really mostly show up where they go. 

Jamie: Right. 

Sarah: I feel like there's nothing, no dream more American, than creating value where once there was none. And then a step above even that is doing that by just making something up and then getting people to buy that. I mean, that feels very topical. 

Jamie: I was hoping that it would be like more a victimless crime situation than not. But it just seems like a very mixed bag with the kind of stuff they were doing in a way that was like opportunistic. And sometimes it would be like a silly, Bigfoot thing, and it's like the funniest thing I've ever heard. Then sometimes there would be someone clearly suffering, but they took the money where they could get it. 

Sarah: After having kind of gone on this research and emotional journey, what do you think about this franchise? Is it ethical to keep enjoying Conjuring movies? 

Jamie: Yeah, I don't feel great about watching an Ed Warren character be hailed as this sensitive, incredible, romantic hero, when that is demonstrably not true. But that said, I will probably watch the next Annabelle movie. I don't know. How do you feel about that? I'm very, very conflicted about it. 

Sarah: I know. Well, and it's funny because I am someone who has to explain my love of horror movies fairly often. What people say often is like, why make or watch horror movies because they glorify violence? One of my answers is that violence is something that maybe can seem alluring in a way that exposure can take away. Then movies can be maybe a way to exercise your imagination without encouraging it to grow, or actually to be like, oh these are really horrible things.

I'm curious about it because I'm a teenager and I feel indestructible, and I need to be shown that's not true because the fact that especially adolescents seek out horror for a chance to encounter the concept of death. That's something that people need. I mean, I need it clearly and personally last year when I was feeling kind of some of my most paralyzed and depressed feelings about being stuck in a pandemic, the Saw movies and other horror movies really did it for me. I guess needed to be in part reminded that even though everything felt meaningless and in stasis that like my actions had meaning and consequences and that this was happening because we all really want to stay alive and help other people stay alive.

Jamie: Right. 

Sarah: Ethical horror movies are a thing that exists and it's not just a lawless field. Annabelle, I feel spun out enough to be another degree of separation from the Warrens themselves, which kind of launders the whole thing a bit. But yeah, I agree with you. I feel like there's documentary and there's fiction and this idea of taking real lives and depicting them in a bio pic. That gets really weird, really fast, especially with like a big Hollywood movie where the goal is to make money. 

I think the trend is toward being kind of conservative and storytelling and leaning on what structures tend to work and are profitable. And then people are either going to seem better or worse than they really were. I don't understand how Hollywood law works, but it seems to me that it would make that much harder, if not impossible, for someone else to make an unrelated Warren's movie to try and kind of close the circle and be like, here's the real horror of the Warrens, it was having an underage, unpaid, secret mistress, ghost intern the whole time.

Jamie: They should just give Judith Penny the money she wants. If she does want the story out there, then great. If she doesn't, then just let her live her life. 

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like the twist here is that the villain was really a shitty guy, and ultimately a deceptive couple, who abused some of the very real people in their past. Thank you so much, Jamie, this was wonderful. This was everything that my creepy, little heart needed today. 

Jamie: Thank you for having me on to talk about this weird couple. I love the show so much. Thank you for having me.

Sarah: I'm so happy that you're a part of it now, and you will be back. And I will be telling you about more scary stuff that starts off scary one way and becomes scary another way, perhaps predictably, who knows. And I love your show so much and I would be happy to have you on any old time. But I think especially in this exciting time, when we're growing and changing like a rouged, haunted Raggedy Ann doll all by myself on a plane across America.

Jamie: You have your own expanded universe. You are flying first class, baby.