The Warrens: Paranormal Power Couple

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Welcome to Stuff You Should Know a production of iHeartRadio

0:15Hey and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is Stuff You Should Know We're into 2026 now Chuck What do you think about that? How do you feel? Uh, I have high hopes for this year Yeah Oh man Do I really? I don't know. I think you should. Okay. Why? You should have high hopes for every year. And we can be let down, sure, but, you know, you could still have high hopes. I guess I have my cynical hat on, so that was a bad time to ask me that question, because we're talking about Ed and Lorraine Warren. As Julia said, who titled this one, I'm using this title even. It's great.

0:53Paranormal Power Couple that you might know if you've ever seen movies like the Amityville Horror. So we talked about them in that episode for sure. Or The Conjuring. Yeah. Or was it The Haunting in Connecticut? Yep. Was another one? Mm-hmm. They made a lot of money scamming people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's really no, well, I want to say there's no other way to put it. Plenty of people on the internet put it differently. They were the real deal, legit. Ghostbusters, demon hunters. it just if you add up all the evidence and you're incredulous and skeptical you probably not only suspect the Warrens were frauds but you might actually have a little disdain for them I say we kind of present both sides even though I feel like it's pretty clear where we land maybe okay have you seen K-pop Demon Hunters no is it good yeah I figured you guys would have seen that I figured Yumi would be into that What is it?

1:54Is it on Netflix? Because we don't have that anymore. Yeah, it's Netflix original. Okay. No, I haven't seen it. Although they did show it in theaters. They had sing-alongs in the theaters and stuff. Oh, cute. I got to see that. Yeah, I just didn't know. It's a legit sensation. It's funny that we, I don't know what we were talking about, but The Conjuring came up not too long ago, and you said you hadn't seen it. Have you still not seen it? Since last week, I have not seen The Conjuring. Do you remember how it came up? I mean, I think we were talking about Raggedy Ann doll. That's right. And the doll's up.

2:29Great memory. So, okay. I still say The Conjuring, the first one, is a legendary, classic, great ghost horror movie. It's just fantastic. So nothing changed since last week? No, but it could have because learning more and more about the actual backstory behind it and just how exploitive it was and how historically bent it is. Yeah. It could have really affected how I view it, but I decided not to. Well, you can separate art from the ragdoll. For sure. I can, and I'm going to by God. Let's do that right now. All right. So Ed and Lorraine Warren, they founded in 1952 the New England Society for Psychic Research in Connecticut.

3:14Ed said, you know, self-described demonologist. Lorraine, self-described clairvoyant, and transmedium. And they formed that in Connecticut because they were both from Connecticut. And looking at their list of greatest hits, did a lot of ghostbusting in Connecticut. Yeah, one of the things you can credit them for is they made the idea of, like, ghost hunting mainstream. All of the terrible, terrible TV shows that are around today all owe their existence to the Warrens, essentially. There were ghost hunters and psychical research societies and everything around before them. But they were so huge into publicity and getting their stories out there that they kind of put it on the map as far as as far as at least America is concerned.

4:04Yeah, for sure. So credit or scorn, they were the OGs. Ed was I guess Warren was his middle name because he was born Ed Warren Miney. in 1926 in Bridgeport. He says that he grew up in a haunted house, so that's where he got his first Jones for this kind of work. And his wife was born Lorraine Moran. Moran? I think Moran. Moran. Later, Moran, obviously. In 1927, just a few months later, also in Bridgeport, grew up very, very Catholic, and that'll play a part in their careers because it all had a Catholic bent. Yeah. And they met as teenagers, got married in 1945 when Ed was on leave from the Navy, serving World War II.

4:50And then they had a little girl, Judy, and Ed went to art school. And ironically, that's where they got their start ghost busting because they were traveling around selling, hocking his wares as an artist. And they said, well, while we're here, we might as well do some paranormal investigation because that's what you do. Right. Right. And if you are familiar at all with The Conjuring series, you're like, I already know all this. And that is because the largest horror franchise in history, The Conjuring series, is based on the Warren's files, the books they wrote, the interviews they gave, the TV shows that they consulted on.

5:28And if you put it all together, all of the Conjuring movies that started in 2013 have grossed at least$2.3 billion. Wow. All based on the malarkey that the Warrens came up with from the 50s to the, I guess, I think it really kind of tapered off in like the 90s. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of crazy to think, right? This just sort of average couple from Connecticut who were doing their thing. Like, I don't think anyone, I mean, they certainly saw dollar signs, but nothing like that. No, we have to say they never charged a dime from anybody in need that they were helping. They didn't make their money that way.

6:07They made their money through lectures, through selling their stories, other people's stories, frankly. They had a museum that they charged money to come in and see, you know, entry. but they never charged the people that they were helping, which I think is definitely worth pointing out. Yeah, they didn't show up and say, what do you got? You got a demon and you got a ghost. That's, let me see, carry the one. We can get rid of that thing for five grand. Yeah, exactly. So let's get into this. Oh, I thought you did. I said it was, you know, sort of very Catholic. Their encounters were very much steeped in Catholic dogma.

6:45we're talking I mean it's I say it's right out of a horror movie because it literally was people would speak in different languages supposedly there were alleged like hoof prints appearing in the snow levitating beds levitating kids foul smells exorcisms furniture you know that furniture is moving all over the place by itself doors are shutting without any wind blowing right just shutting for sure yeah I mean this is a 50-something year career. They founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952. So they've been doing this for quite a while. But their all-time huge cases didn't really start to pick up until the 70s.

7:30I think the first one that people point to is like the first big deal case was actually became the basis for that first Conjuring movie. It was the Perrin family haunting with Carolyn and Roger Perrin. And they had five daughters and they moved into a house in Rhode Island, an old farmhouse that was built in the 1750s, I think, maybe. 1667 Round Top Road. It was also known as the Old Arnold Estate. And they moved in and they stayed there for 10 years. But during that 10 year time, they had some really hard occurrences, according to them. That's right. That's a great way to say allegedly because I've been thinking about how to mix that up.

8:13According to them? Yeah, yeah, that's good. Yeah. I'm going to use that. Yeah, the children were the first ones to sort of get the haunt and the parents didn't really believe that was going on. They told their daughters like, no, you know, you're just being little girls, of course, and seeing ghosts that aren't there. But the parents soon got on board and said, yeah, something's happening here. The beds are levitating. There's that awful smell. They did a little self-research before they called the Warrens and found that there had been apparently a lot of really gruesome deaths over the history of that home, which is not unusual for a super old farmhouse.

8:48So that's when they picked up the phone. They called the Warrens. I can't imagine. What year was this? 1971. Like how? I mean, this is in Rhode Island. And I guess word just gets around or maybe they see a newspaper article or something because, you know, before the Internet, it was amazing to me that all these people just knew who to call. I was wondering that as well. And I think in some cases they didn't call. It's just people have written that because there's so many cases and they're so convoluted and they're so just, you know, there's so much BS around them that people just take total liberties with it.

9:23So it's not entirely clear who called whom. But let's just say they call the Warrens, right? The Warrens showed up. They held a seance. And in the seance, Carolyn is thrown across the room. But first, she starts speaking in tongues. I think her daughter, Andrea, later wrote that this was, she was speaking in a language that no, that never existed on earth. I think assuming that this is a demon, that kind of thing. and they trace the whole thing back to the spirit of a witch, a dead witch. And we established in the Bell Witch short stuff that a witch ghost is the worst kind of both. And she had lived in the house in the early 1800s.

10:03And not only was she a witch, she was a child murderer. She had murdered an infant with a knitting needle. And so they had the seance. Carolyn gets thrown against the wall. Nothing changes, nothing's solved. and the Warrens are like, see ya, thanks for the story. You know, when the Warrens left, the haunting hadn't ended, but the Perrons stuck it out or Perrons stuck it out for 10 years total. And then when they moved out, the haunting stopped. That's right. And, you know, what we're going to do here, we're going to go over some of their greatest hits, as told by the Warrens and others. And then maybe we'll come back later and sort of pick them apart a bit.

10:47Maybe, if we feel like it. The next one, of course, is Annabelle. We talked a little bit about the doll and the dolls episode. This is the early 70s in Hartford, Connecticut, when a nurse got a Raggedy Ann doll as a gift, and the doll came to life, started doing some cute things, like, hey, I'll leave a little note for the nurse, or you're going to put me down in this chair, but I'm going to really go over in this room, just so you know that I'm fully animated and alive. Like elf-on-the-shelf kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. And the nurse was like, all right, this is fine, because I think this doll was haunted by a little girl who died in the house named Annabelle Higgins.

11:25And so I kind of feel bad because it's just a little girl ghost. But eventually her friend, she had a friend that was physically attacked by unseen forces, I guess, you know, via Annabelle the doll. And Ed Lorraine says we're called in, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't minding the news and making some calls themselves. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, for sure. That would be my guess. Because this is an era, the 70s, man, you could call a newspaper and be like, I've got a haunted doll. My house is haunted. There's a ghost witch and a newspaper reporter would show up and write a story about it, right?

12:01Totally, yeah. So, yes, these stories did pop up in the newspaper. And I'm quite sure that the Warrens were reading papers for this. One way or another, they showed up and they determined, no, this is not the ghost of a little girl named Annabelle Higgins. This is a demon hanging around a doll pretending to be Annabelle Higgins in order to get close enough to Donna, the nurse whose doll it is, so that she can possess her soul. And that was the story that they told. What do you do when you got a demon, Chuck? You bring in an exorcist. And that's what they did. And this is my favorite part of this whole article is this sentence.

12:39It's unclear if it was successful since the doll continued to cause problems. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say that didn't work then. And the Warren said, all right, we'll just we'll take that doll since the doll's not the problem. And one day we shall make a lot of money from this doll. Yeah, they put it in their museum under glass. And apparently they said a prayer of containment to keep the doll and its attendant demon behind the glass. And I think it's worked because you know what? Apparently that doll just sits there behind the glass. Yeah, staring. But they said that the last people who mocked it, somebody who was visiting the museum, died in a motorcycle crash right afterwards.

13:23Do you want to move on to the Lutzes? Because I love the Lutzes. and what they did and said. Yeah, I mean, we did a whole episode on this, so I don't think we have to get super detailed, but the Lutzes were the Amityville horror family. They're at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. This is in the mid-1970s. And a real tragedy happened here in 1974 at about 3 o 'clock in the morning when the guy who lived there, Ronald DeFeo Jr., killed his whole family, his parents, his four younger siblings. He killed them all as they slept by gunfire. And then a year later, the Lutz family moves in and they don't make it 10 years.

14:08They make it about a month before they realized that mortgage was way too much. Yes, exactly. They said that afterward, they went to the press and said that they had experienced terrible odors. Both George and Kathy, the parents, had been possessed-ish, maybe light-possessed. That their daughter had made a friend named Jody with red eyes, who was actually some sort of pig ghost demon that no one else could see. Although I think somebody caught sight of it. Flies swarmed out of nowhere and almost made Rod Steiger throw up. This one's the creepiest. I love it the most. Hoofprints came out of nowhere in the snow outside of the house.

14:51And you know it has hoof prints and walks upright. A talented goat? A talented goat, a pig ghost demon, or Satan himself. That's right. So the Warrens are there. I'm going to just stop saying called in. They just appear out of the ether. They do their investigation. And they said that they at first confirmed the presence of a child ghost, but then did a little more digging and said, actually, this is not a haunted house, everyone. And the Lutz's went, oh, thank God. And they said, this is haunted land. The very land under this house is evil. It was built on Native American Cemetery where they had some dark rituals in the past.

15:37And this is what led Ronald DeFeo to kill his whole family. So sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you guys are in bad trouble. Yeah, this is a one-time seance that they held where they found all this stuff out. And they actually, one of the most famous photos of a ghost ever produced, it's called the Ghost Boy photo from the Amityville house, came out of this investigation, this one-night investigation the Warrens had. If you've never seen the Ghost Boy photo from Amityville, go type that in and check it out. It is a really great, creepy, unsettling photo. especially if you compare it to John DeFeo.

16:16I think he was the youngest brother of the DeFeos who were murdered by the oldest brother. It looks an awful lot like him. So a lot of people are like, there you go. The Warrens had it figured out. There's a ghost. There's Indian burial ground is now a trope thanks to them. And we can thank them for poltergeist as a result. That's right. I say we take a break, yeah? Yeah. And we'll talk about three more of their more famous investigations right after this. This is fun.

17:08All right, we're back. I guess it's not too far past Halloween. So in our minds, you know, it's not early January. So we're sort of in that spooky mood. So this is sitting quite well with us. But we need to talk about the Enfield haunting because this is not in Connecticut, my friends. This is in London, England in 1977. And Enfield is a suburb of London. And at the time, one Peggy Hodgson and her daughters were, what were they? They were terrorized by unseen forces, just like the rest. They move into this place, banging sounds coming from the daughter's room. Peggy bursts in and sees this dresser creeping across the floor by itself, seemingly going toward the door to block it.

17:55And Peggy was like, I got to get that dresser. It's out of control. But by the time she got to it, it was like it was glued. She couldn't even move this thing. No. This is the basis for The Conjuring 2. also a truly great ghost movie, especially for a sequel. Was it London? Yeah, yeah. Was it English? I mean, it's based on this. This is a very famous case that was also investigated by the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded all the way back in 1882, 70 years before the Warrens founded their society. But they showed up because the Hodgson's, or I should say Peggy Hodgson, couldn't get any help from the police.

18:35and she had basically reached the end of her rope because one of her daughters, Janet, I think the youngest daughter, started falling into trances and apparently was possessed by a ghost named Bill Wilkins who said that he had died in that same house, actually in a chair in the corner, and that he wanted everybody out because this was his house. And if you see that movie, it's really well done and super creepy. Have you seen all those movies? I have seen those two. Oh, okay. That's the extent of it. How many are there? Good God. How many things have they conjured? So with The Conjuring, I think they're up to four, maybe.

19:13Oh, okay. But then there's a whole other, like, sub-franchise with the Evil Nun. I think I've seen one of those. Spinoffs and stuff? And then the Annabelle stuff, too. But I've only seen the first two Conjuring. And they're good. They're good movies. They're hokey in a lot of ways. But, like, a good, decent, even mediocre ghost movie is so few and far between. There's so many terrible ones that, like, you know, I'll take whatever decent table scraps can be tossed at me. Yeah, I hear you. Okay. I'll check it out. Okay. So, like you said, the Society for Psychical Research, is that right? Psychical?

19:53Yeah. They come in. They're competitors of the Warren, of course, over there, I guess. and they observed, you know, all the stuff they were talking about, like things levitating, furniture moving, of course, fires erupting out of nowhere, apparently cups just filling up with water when there is no water around. Supposedly, one of the researchers had a curtain that was slowly creeping around his neck as if to choke him. Yeah, this is a skeptical society that believes in the possibility of ghosts and poultry guys and stuff, but they're not just credulous ding-dongs. Oh, that society? What are they?

20:29The Psychological Society? The SPR. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, that's good. Ed and Lorraine maybe investigated, maybe didn't. This is where it gets a little dodgy, and we're going to talk about that in Act 3. But at any rate, in 1978, they said, you got a poltergeist. That's what the deal is. And, you know, New Line Cinema, you want to buy this story? We'll sell it to you. Yeah. And they did. That's right. There was a really cool documentary I saw where the, so the SPR made tons of audio tapes, reel-to-reel audio tapes of this. And somebody made a docu, I guess a docudrama or whatever, where they used the tapes as all of the audio and then they hired actors to act out the stuff and the dialogue was the tape.

21:14So these people had to lip sync with the tapes and it was all done in period costumes and all that stuff from the seventies. It's really good. I can't remember the name of it, but I'm pretty sure that's the only documentary to attempt that. So if you can find that, watch it. Did you ever watch that Zoom call horror movie that I recommended? Yeah, it was pretty decent. Yeah, not bad, huh? Yeah, I was really uncomfortable when they started making light of it in front of the psychic medium. That was the thing that got me the most. It was awkward. Oh, yeah. Yeah, plus you know that they're going to get it even worse because of that.

21:49What was it called? I think it was called Host. I thought it was very well done. You know, pretty clever COVID movie when, you know, they were shooting stuff in as creatively as they could because of the restrictions. Yes, it was a good movie. All right, let's move on. We got a couple of more here. The case of Arnie Johnson, also in Connecticut, very conveniently located in Brookfield. This was in 1981. And this one is interesting because there was a 19-year-old named Arnie Johnson who stabbed his landlord, Alan Bono, 20 times. And in his trial, he says, I'm not guilty. And they said, temporary insanity?

22:28And they said, no, no, no, demonic possession. And the court went, oh, boy, here we go. I think this is the first time anyone ever tried that. Yeah. The reason he said that is because he said, I really am possessed by a demon. And my fiance, Debbie, her little brother, David, has been possessed by a demon for a while. And we had an exorcism. And during the exorcism to help David out, I dared the demon to inhabit me instead. Well, he did. And when I got into that argument with the landlord, that demon is the one who really stabbed him, not me. That was his defense. But I think the Warrens showed up before all of this, before the stabbing even.

23:10and they took a look at David, and Ed looks at little David up and down. He's like, yeah, you still got demons attached to you. You still got 43 demons. That's right. He counted them. That's why they had that exorcism is the Warrens came in and said, because initially they thought it was a ghost, you know? Yeah. And they, you know, the Glatzels, that was Debbie's last name, the girlfriend, they brought in clergy from the Catholic Church to bless young David. That didn't work, so that's when the Warrens show up, And they're like, no, it's demonic. It's not a ghost. And you need that exorcism. And during that exorcism is when Arnie Johnson's like, oh, yeah, come into me.

23:47I dare you. Right. And then the murder happens and the guy ends up in trial, Arnie Johnson. I think he went by Cheyenne, his middle name. And so the judge is like, I'm not even going to accept that as a defense. What else you got? And they're like, self-defense. And they tried him on self-defense and he got five years in prison for manslaughter. So I guess they believe that to an extent. That's not the end of that case. But that's a huge legendary case, too. And then there was also there was a movie called The Haunting in Connecticut. It's awful. And it was made kind of outside of the Warren's purview.

24:25But this was a case that's largely associated with them that involved the Snedeker family. That's right. That was also very conveniently located in Salvington, Connecticut, right there on Meriden Avenue. And this is a case where two people, Carmen Reed and Alan Snedeker, they got their kids. They had four of them and a niece. They brought them there to live because their son, Philip, needed nearby medical care, kind of long-term medical care. And it made it more convenient. So they moved in there. They move in. And, of course, things start going down. Philip, who is the young sick son, he starts seeing a threatening young man with long, dark hair who would just repeat his name over and over.

25:10And then Carmen, I believe was the mom, was in the basement. And she was like, wait a minute. There are toe tags and there's embalming equipment here and photos of dead people. I wonder what this house used to be. And everyone said, duh, it was a funeral home. Yeah, the Hallahan Funeral Home for decades, I think pretty much right before it became a home for rent. And it turned out that Philip's room was once the display room for caskets. When they sold you the caskets, you know, they have like half caskets on the wall, that kind of thing. This is where Philip was sleeping. The embalming room was just down the hall.

25:51The thing is, Philip needing this constant care of treatments for Hodgkin's lymphoma type of cancer, they couldn't move. They couldn't leave the house. So they had to kind of stick it out. And things just kept getting worse and worse. Finally, Philip started to change and became very violent and was, I think, forcibly taken to a mental hospital for observation and stayed there for a couple of months, I think. and was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia. He moved out. He avoided the house again. And I don't remember if the haunting continued or not. But one of the big things that came out of this was an appearance on Sally Jesse Raphael.

26:35The title of the episode is I Was Raped by a Ghost. Because Carmen said that she was repeatedly raped by a ghost and the niece was fondled by a ghost. And the Warrens also show up on that episode. You can find it online. It's a it's a Sally Jesse Raphael episode for sure. Yeah, you said that to me and I did my best to scrub through and hit the highs. Right. Shall we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. All right. We'll take a break and kind of wrap up with what's going on with the Warrens and all these cases right after this.