HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Just let me know when you're ready, boys! My sweet, sweet boys.
MARCUS PARKS
My testicles are descended.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah excellent.
ED LARSON
Mine are bigger than regular.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's not good. Call the doctors. In the testicular area means cancer.
ED LARSON
Last time I looked, I called the doctor about my testicles. They looked at them and they were like whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you. Hey, how you doing? It's me, it's Ed Warren. Hey, you might know me for my paranormal adventures and various different sundries I've been selling. But I've gotta say it is extremely difficult to find love when you're a paranormal investigator in such ways that I am. Because all day I spend looking for the various numerous demonic diabolical intelligences. I go out to various areas in Connecticut and I don't got time to find somebody to love. That's why you gotta come down to Warren's wife farm. What we do right here, Ed Warren, me, especially as a farmer. I get in there, I raise your wife to your very speculations. We got a wife coming straight from the field, made with specially made wife seeds so that you can pick and choose how she reacts when you're angry, how she reacts when you want amorous attention. Locally sourced wives! Come on down. If you see them grow, you don't gotta see them go.
MARCUS PARKS
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Marcus Parks, here with the new sponsor is Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's hard to find a locally sourced wife.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Especially if they all just keep running away.
ED LARSON
I had to get mine from states away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course Ed Larson.
ED LARSON
Hello!
MARCUS PARKS
We're here. We're here at the Warrens part three, the conclusion of the series, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the difficult one.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it is. We're gonna be talking about some difficult topics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So this is the after school special episode.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If we could get some form of responsible after school music.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, this is your watch out for the bus driver episode.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely. Watch out for your local suspendered paranormal investigator. They will charm you out of your pants.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
More like your bloomers.
ED LARSON
You know the Spike Lee movie Get On The Bus?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Have you seen it?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all about going to the Million Man March and all that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Don't get on the bus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. If it's Ed Warren driving the bus.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
On our last episode we covered the most well known cases that involved Ed and Lorraine Warren. Your Annabelles, your Amityvilles, and your 'devil made me do it's. But in our conclusion we're gonna be covering the lesser known aspects of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Mostly we'll be covering some of their lesser known cases. But we're also gonna talk about the allegations made about the Warrens' personal life, which that personal life is quite different from what one should expect from god's chosen warriors and the never ending battle against Satan and his minions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, why? Why should it be any different? They're so tired of being good all day. Sometimes you burn out.
MARCUS PARKS
Sometimes when you're good all day, you gotta be bad at night.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude, you burn out.
ED LARSON
Yeah, they were just practicing for the priesthood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you have any idea how physically difficult it was for Ed to walk up and down the stairs from his wife to his childlike mistress to her upstairs apartment that they built by hand for her? Do you have any idea how difficult that is for a 60 year old man?
ED LARSON
(gasping)
MARCUS PARKS
But before we get into all that, let's start with the story of the Smurls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These fucking guys. Now one of the main characteristics of these smaller stories I will say is that they are really over the top.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they do coincide with the more they actually did their job. So see these are actually kind of like the later on, this is their Neil Young electronic album.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like this is their weird, these are the off brand stuff where you notice he gets more and more insane.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because like the one thing he kept saying about this is... Now look, we'll begin the tale of this and I'll pepper with other things he dropped in.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean it does tend to be the case that the more involved the Warrens get in a case, the crazier it gets and the more out of hand it gets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
So in 1973, Jack and Janet Smurl moved into a duplex in West Pittston, Pennsylvania just outside of Scranton.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What are they fucking bragging? All right, we get it. You love a duplex.
MARCUS PARKS
In tow were their four daughters. And for almost 10 years the Smurls experienced nothing out of the ordinary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nothing! Not a story.
MARCUS PARKS
Nothing. But in 1985, just as they were preparing for their daughter Janet's confirmation, the activity supposedly began for this Catholic family when a light suddenly fell from the ceiling for seemingly no reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not just because the landlords of Pennsyltucky suck.
MARCUS PARKS
From there the phenomenon quickly escalated to mysterious voices, like when Janet said she was doing the laundry and heard a strange woman's voice when no one else was seemingly around.
ED LARSON
(whispering) Your panties are dirty. Get me out of this dryer. I'm stuck in the dryer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(whispering) Get me out of the dryer, I'm still moist. I'm still moist. That is called magical mumbling.
MARCUS PARKS
Magical mumbling?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
According to Ed Warren.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's a lot of that. Because demons love to do it. Have you ever been in the background of a musical?
ED LARSON
The background? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watermelon, watermelon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Watermelon, hamburger, watermelon.
MARCUS PARKS
Watermelon, rhubarb.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. You say those words to look like you're talking. And that's all the demons are doing, they're just going like (whispering) hamburger, rutabaga, watermelon, hamburger, rutabaga, watermelon. And he's like that's magical mumbling. That's how you know. Because I do non magical mumbling. That is my life force.
ED LARSON
What you got here is a chorus ghost.
MARCUS PARKS
Soon after, lights started turning on and off by themselves, doors would open and shut on their own, knocks rang throughout the house, and the family began seeing shadows prowling in their peripheral vision. Standard shit. But most bizarrely, I'd never heard of this one before, the Smurls' dog would suddenly find itself teleported from the inside of the house to the outside. Just poof.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's gotta be very confusing for the dog.
MARCUS PARKS
(yelps)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(yelps) Going through the fucking afterlife like in Poltergeist, sliding through that like wet gunk tunnel that is heaven and hell. (barking) What's wrong, boy? You get in something dumb?
ED LARSON
Between the dog ending up outside and no one knew it and shit falling off the ceiling, just seems like a badly put together house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Smurls were not on top of it. But they also said that they had problems too. Ed Warren was also describing issues that he has had with several spectral animals. He said one of the main issues of the Smurl family haunting was that yes, they had their own German shepherd but they were also getting harassed by a mysterious giant black dog that would start pawing at their windows.
MARCUS PARKS
Very common. Big black dogs, very common.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very common. He said he ran into it several different cases they had worked in the UK. But what I found really, really interesting was his term for what a dog does. He says, I couldn't believe this, I rewound it three times to make sure I heard what I heard. And he was just like and you wouldn't believe that outside, the dog, he's banging at the window, banging on it, just tooting and tooting and tooting. You know how dogs toot? When they toot when you don't pay attention to them.
MARCUS PARKS
Does he mean farting?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I think he means barking.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that a Connecticut thing?
MARCUS PARKS
Never heard anyone describe a dog barking as toots.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As tooting? Because you gotta be like hey, he was tooting up a storm. Tooting and tooting and tooting and tooting. I was like what in the living fuck are you talking about? And then I literally was like oh, barking.
MARCUS PARKS
No, tooting is farting.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I'm saying.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, tooting or pooting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pooting.
ED LARSON
Pooting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also heard our fucking most desperate enemy. But he said the problem was little black creatures. And he said that he also noticed that one time was that these little creatures do show up. He was like one time I was outside in the museum and I'm coming back into the house and next thing you know I see this little thing. Because the shadow ghost is the most dangerous type of ghost because they could be thick as concrete. You can walk right into it and not even know. You can fall back. Bump into a shadow ghost, super thick like William the Fridge, that guy. Right? But they said that one of the worst things that he saw, a little creature resembling an evil woodchuck appear in front of him in front of the house.
ED LARSON
How does a woodchuck look evil?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That it was entirely, entirely raven black. Like it was a Jojo Siwa, the evil karma is a bitch fucking woodchuck that he saw outside of the house. And he was like whoa, that's too edgy! Whoa.
ED LARSON
Woodchuck with brass knuckles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He says that was-
MARCUS PARKS
Menacing.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One of those things that happened to him. That was a part of what came out of this case is these weird little black creatures following him everywhere.
MARCUS PARKS
Just like a goth magical forest?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well right after the dog started teleporting, Simon and the rest of the family soon found themselves thrown against walls, dragged out of bed, scratched and slapped. This was all paired with screams, moans, and horrible stenches. On one occasion Jack Smurl reported, in a rare case involving a man, that he had been the victim of non consensual spectrophilia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He said that he was paralyzed and raped by a 70 year old ghost woman with serpentine, snakelike scales. An actual succubus. And afterwards Jack said he was covered in a pungent, smelly fluid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
He said he didn't like it because he got caught.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he said that he... Jack Smurl was a very, very well put together man and he was like-
ED LARSON
With the last name Smurl?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
You have to be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You have to be. We're Smurls, damnit! Can you imagine saying that to your children?
ED LARSON
You have disgraced the family name!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wait a second, you graduated from high school? How dare you, son! We're Smurls! We're Smurls!
ED LARSON
To properly pronounce it you have to puke while you're saying it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Smurl! How dare you, son? Never kiss a woman with her permission, son! So he said that talking about this really grossed him out. But he said one of the things that he knew was that when he was having sex with this succubus, which obviously Ed Warren is so afraid of, he's extremely afraid of succubuses.
MARCUS PARKS
Really?
ED LARSON
It's so old.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's something about too, I think it's also because we now know one thing that is Ed's weakness is the penis.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so when the succubus comes, he doesn't want to deal with it. He's very, very spooked out by the concept of the succubus. But Jack Smurl would not talk about the details. It took a long time for him to say that she shot ectoplasm squirt all over him when she fucked because he said the one little detail he let slip, he's like I knew that whatever it was, the entity was orgasming by the way it was twitching on top of me. Which also is like humble brag.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it also could be faking. You don't know. But I guess it's squirting.
MARCUS PARKS
It's squirting.
ED LARSON
If it's squirting, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If it's squirting-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, evidence.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now once the Smurls decided that there was something hanging around their house that was beyond their abilities to fix, they went to the Scranton Diocese who contacted a professor, exorcist, and paranormal expert named Father Alphonsus Trabold. Now Father Trabold, affectionately known as Father Al, he actually taught a course on parapsychology and religion at St. Bonaventure University in western New York. He was well liked, trusted, soft spoken, and reported... This is adorable. He literally laughed with an endearing tee-hee.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate that. That is not endearing.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he's like tee-hee.
ED LARSON
Especially when he has his collar on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
MARCUS PARKS
A man in a priest collar going like tee-hee.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I hate that.
ED LARSON
Although Al Bundy used to tee-hee and I loved when Al Bundy tee-heed.
MARCUS PARKS
See? Exactly. Tee-hee.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's Al Bundy. It is not a frocked priest. I feel like that's like a thing you learn. Tee-hee.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's Michael Jackson's noise.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you're supposed to be looking at Hooters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(giggling)
MARCUS PARKS
That's all to say that if you were possessed by a demon in Buffalo, that's where Father Al made his home base, he's the guy to call.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I guess Doug Flutie should have called him.
MARCUS PARKS
All right. You wanna give it to him?
ED LARSON
I mean why did Doug Flutie need it? He was a very successful champion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Never got the ring.
ED LARSON
Well he got the college ring.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who gives a shit?
ED LARSON
Remember Flutie Flakes?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Flutie Flakes.
ED LARSON
It supported his autistic child. And then when Marino was playing with Jimmy Johnson and the Dolphins beat the Bills, Marino also has an autistic child, Jimmy Johnson grabbed a box of Flutie Flakes and tore it up in front of Dan Marino. And he's just looking at him shaking his head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Football is filled with stand up people.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when I looked up Father Al, I found a feature article about the man himself in which Ed and Lorraine Warren are mentioned but not explicitly named. Instead they're referred to only as a husband and wife team of traveling psychic investigators who had profiled themselves as demon conquerors. Can't be anyone else in the world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
From how Father Al told it, and this is a story outside of the Smurls, this is just sort of a character reference type thing; a troubled local family had attended one of the Warrens many talks at local colleges in the 70s and asked them if they could help with the daughter that they believed was possessed. Apparently the Warrens tried delivering the girl themselves but only managed to make things worse. The family then called the local exorcist, Father Al. Now Father Al had experience both in psychology and parapsychology. And upon examining this young girl, he decided that it was a case of the former. There was some sort of mental illness going on here, no demons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Father Al, he really is, this is the whole nouveau priest thing. The idea of being like we're cool, we follow science. We just also believe that when gay men have sex with each other it creates demonic energy that destroys Christ's love. But other than that, we're on it.
ED LARSON
It is good to see an exorcist just be able to say nah, she crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She crazy. Holy shit, this woman's crazy. Oh yeah, you're very crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean he was able to calm things down all by himself. But the Warrens were soon promoting themselves as Father Al's routine collaborators, even referring to themselves as his fellow exorcists. Off Father Al's reputation, the Warrens were able to get more attention and were able to make even more messes, much to Father Al's dismay. In fact while this feature article was all about how nice and beloved Father Al had been, the closest he came to talking shit was when it came to the Warrens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It takes a lot to get a genteel priest to fucking toss shade.
MARCUS PARKS
About Ed and Lorraine, Father Al said that he was eventually forced to politely ask them please stop using my name.
ED LARSON
Keep my name out your mouth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very true. I think-
MARCUS PARKS
He left it at that. He's like and that's all I'm willing to say about those people.
ED LARSON
What a nice gentleman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He really did, he did well. For a Father, he's one of the good ones. I mean as far as I know. But they were manipulators-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Users. Every single person that got attached to them, they sucked them dry.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that was kind of their MO, it kind of just got worse and worse and worse with each case.
MARCUS PARKS
It did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then the more and more they just added people to their sort of like tool bags. They used them as ways to bolster their own salesmanship.
MARCUS PARKS
They used people as props.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Everything was props, every single thing was appearances to the both of them. As you can see with Lorraine Warren, as she becomes longer, more fetus-like, her psychological and psychic abilities become greater. Her hair gets bigger, her abilities to feel feelings gets wider. I don't know why. Lorraine just becomes more and more psychic. By the end she's like-
ED LARSON
Closer to death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She believes she's in the upside down. Yeah. Like I think that that's a part of it, that's what Ed Warren says. Ghosts love old people and children.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because old people are closer to the spirits and children, they can suck out the life force.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Because I mean before you're alive you're dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
That's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just come.
ED LARSON
You know what's good about them like back then, what really helped them out? Because I feel like if they were like 20 years earlier, if they were like in the 90s or the early 2000s, their car would have had like an obnoxious wrap around it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, they basically had that.
ED LARSON
Would have been able to spot them a mile away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They basically had that.
MARCUS PARKS
Ed and Lorraine Warren, sponsored by Monster Energy drink! The most extreme paranormal investigators!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Monster Energy drink would be cool it turned out it just destroys demons.
ED LARSON
Scared to go to sleep? Drink a Monster.
MARCUS PARKS
But getting back to the Smurls, Father Al was the first person brought to the scene. And while he said that he definitely believed that the Smurls were sincere in their belief that something demonic was happening, he quite diplomatically said that he couldn't conclusively say that there was a demonic presence in the house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one can.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Ed and Lorraine... Well Ed and Lorraine, they came on the scene and said there are conclusively demons at the Smurl house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But since Father Al had washed his hands of both the Warrens and this case-
ED LARSON
I'm just glad he's washed his hands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're always rubbing them around the wine and then you gotta suck the wine out of the cup while he's sucking on the wine like it's Lady and the Tramp. It's all mouths in the Catholic church.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the Warrens brought along their own priest, Father Robert McKenna. Now Father McKenna was a longtime ally of the Warrens and was considered a rogue priest in the Catholic church because of his rejection of Vatican II.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just can't handle me, dude! I'm uncontrollable! I'm outside the box! I'm outside the love of Christ!
ED LARSON
Where is Vatican II?
MARCUS PARKS
Well Vatican II, if our listeners will remember from our Anneliese Michel series, it was a series of reforms instituted in 1962 that tried to bring the Catholic church into the 20th century. It really was like the sequel to Catholicism.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This isn't Catholicism, this is Catholicism 2, bro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah and they cast Chris Pratt as John Paul II.
ED LARSON
Yeah. They already believe in the sequel to the bible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They do.
MARCUS PARKS
Well hardliners within the church believe that changing Catholic doctrine in such a way would not only ensure that the world would become the domain of the devil but that it would also make god angry on the scale of the Old Testament. Ed and Lorraine Warren's exorcism partner, Father McKenna, he was one of the priests who had rejected Vatican II, as were the men who killed Anneliese Michel during her fatal exorcism 10 years before the hauntings of the Smurls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is just more evidence that shows that Ed and Lorraine Warren's main goal is to roll back time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like they want the concept of the medieval abilities of the church to be... That is what they're fighting for.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Make exorcism great again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And that was their main objective as they went was using their Christian quote unquote "superpowers" as an example of what you need to live a safe life. Ed Warren was like, he'd always give this advice about how if you see a ghost, the whole thing you're supposed to do is make a large crucifix with your right hand and then go in the name of Jesus Christ, how can I help you? Like you're fucking customer service.
ED LARSON
Unless you're a Smurl and then you just fuck the shit out of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Then you just cram jam that shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it was sort of like a circular logic type thing where they say okay, if we put in this Vatican II thing, then demons are gonna run loose on earth. And then of course that happens in 1963 and during the 70s exorcism skyrockets, hauntings skyrocket, all this belief in the paranormal skyrockets. And so they can say, these priests and all of these extremely religious people can say like oh yeah, the reason why we're getting so much of this shit is because-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Demons! Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's because of Vatican II and demons have been let loose on Earth. But they're also the ones that are perpetuating the belief in all of these demons and exorcisms. And they're the ones that are going to these people and making it worse and worse and worse, wherein we see when these people are left alone, they just kind of peter out, it just sort of ends on its own. So they're perpetuating their own myth.
ED LARSON
Yes. I haven't heard of an exorcism in a really long time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They are actually more prevalent than ever.
ED LARSON
Really?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they really are.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
They're more prevalent than ever. In the last 10 years, it's just fucking, it's out of this world how many exorcisms are performed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And much like how TikTok has done a lot of things of giving people false confidence of what to do, there is a whole world of people that just do kind of exorcisms over social media.
ED LARSON
Is there an exorcism TikTok?
MARCUS PARKS
There's an exorcism YouTube. This dude Bob Larson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
That's my boy! My daddy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. Is that your dad's name?
ED LARSON
No, no, my dad's Jerome.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I believe Bob Larson is dead now. I believe he's dead. His daughters took over.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But yeah, Bob Larson used to do Skype exorcisms and he was actually pranked by a guy once who went on and like did this whole thing about like acting like he was demon possessed and all that. And then like at the end of it he was like nah, just fucking with you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Got you, bro.
MARCUS PARKS
And then it went out and Bob Larson of course explained it away by saying it's like this is further proof that he was possessed by a demon because only a demon would do something so diabolical to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The diabolical agency of the devil.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But yeah, no. And he is actually still alive.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And also in in Africa exorcisms are a massive, massive, massive thing.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
So yes, more exorcisms around the world are being done than possibly ever at any other point in human history.
ED LARSON
Oh we'll have to go check one out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I'd love to. Honestly it's so hard to get a ticket. I have to see if Debbie has a box we can use.
MARCUS PARKS
Now from what Ed claimed, he faced the Smurls' demon on his very first evening in the Smurl home. After using the name of Jesus Christ, a crucifix, holy water and holy oil, the temperature supposedly dropped 30 degrees, a dark mass formed 3 ft in front of him, and a rattling sound from behind startled him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's what they call globules. Ghost globules.
MARCUS PARKS
What's a ghost globule, the thing that startled him?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a big floppy chunk of plasma in front of you that forms.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh that's the dark mass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Yeah. It's called a ghost globule.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's not a shadow person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't understand the difference.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Globules shaped like a globule as you'd imagine a globule is shaped.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A floating globule.
MARCUS PARKS
So you mean like the creature in The Herculoids that went like (turkey gobble sound). That's the globule.
ED LARSON
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. That's a globule.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then a shadow person, shape of a person.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
ED LARSON
Could just be floaters in the eyeballs, little dots floating around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. Absolutely not. Incorrect. Floaters do not respond to the crucifix.
MARCUS PARKS
Well items then began jumping off the bureau and the mattress in the Smurls' bedroom started jumping around too, all while Ed commanded whatever it was in the home to leave in the name of Jesus Christ.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You get out! You get out!
MARCUS PARKS
None of this of course was caught on camera. And if it was, Ed Warren never made it public.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All I want is to hear the ASMR track of a microphone outside just hearing Ed Warren wrestle-
ED LARSON
(heavy breathing)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's James Gandolfini walking to crafty. That's the sound of the body. Ed Warren comes in, then you just go like ah, I got your demon. I'm over there, I'll get you! In the name of Christ, how can I help you? How? Hey, oh! Oh, I'm slipping on oil! Wow-wow-wow-wow!
ED LARSON
Careful Ed, be careful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shut up, Lorraine!
ED LARSON
I'm just saying, the demon seems mean.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the Warrens spent months investigating the Smurl home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
His polyester suit just soaked.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh god, it's powder blue, man. You can really see the sweat stains on a powder blue leisure suit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He looks good.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the Warrens spent months investigating the Smurl home and in the meantime, as was now routine for the Warrens, the haunting drew massive media attention to the point where CNN was camping out in the Smurls' front yard. This is 1985 so we're about 10 years out from the Warrens being a very established presence in the media as the paranormal experts.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Local teenagers and families would hang around outside the Smurl home to see if they could catch any paranormal activity. A local biker gang showed up just to see what the fuck was going on. And before long, a bar had set up party buses on their street, a food truck parked down the block selling pizza and hoagies, and the whole thing just became a big to do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So it reminds me of an email I got where I was correctly probably admonished for my ironic embracement of Marvin Heemeyer and the Killdozer situation.
MARCUS PARKS
The Killdozer.
ED LARSON
Killdozer man, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
About how the Killdozer 20th anniversary is starting to arrive and that small town where it took place in Colorado is inviting the National Guard come and protect them because there are a lot of people talking about arriving for this big anniversary of Killdozer day. And I kind of see it like this.
ED LARSON
Killdozer was 20 years ago?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And we're gonna go ahead and say don't go to this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, don't go.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't do this. Don't do this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But at the same time if you are a local Korean taco truck, this is a good way for you to kind of make some money. People show up there. If you want to make some T-shirts and you're local and you're arriving, that's how you kind of get that juice going. If there's a bouncy house shaped like a backhoe that you guys can make or something.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't try to fucking justify this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying that why not-
ED LARSON
Yeah, the bed and breakfast, come kill your dozing here. Doze off, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If we just turn it into joy and freedom. See?
ED LARSON
You can celebrate your Killdozer at home. And the best way to celebrate your Killdozer at home is to build one.
MARCUS PARKS
Just don't do it in the town where they are. It's already been done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
They've been killdozed enough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. And then yes, there was near misses to many deaths. I know that now.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hear you. I hear that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well at one point at the Smurl home, even the dude who played Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist drove over to the Smurl home because he lived in Scranton.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Scranton was his hometown.
ED LARSON
He had a bunch of 8x10s he had to sign.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you imagine this guy just showed up being like tell me, do you guys need an actor?
MARCUS PARKS
Actually I found out that he was a very successful playwright.
ED LARSON
Really?
MARCUS PARKS
That was actually his real thing that he was a very successful playwright.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And I saw a picture of him in front of the Smurl home, showed up wearing like a Green Bay Packers jersey and a fucking leather jacket, looking real haggard and like kind of embarrassed that the local newspaper are taking a picture of him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I didn't expect all this attention.
ED LARSON
I'm here as a fan.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know why he was there. Maybe a little moral support. Maybe he was just curious and wanted to know what was going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tom Cruise thinks he's like a fucking superhero. He like lifts cars out of ditches and stuff and Sean Penn met El Chapo.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's right, yeah.
ED LARSON
That's fun.
MARCUS PARKS
But as the pattern went, the only people who ever saw anything paranormal in that duplex were the Smurls and the Warrens. See people were suspicious of the fact that the house had suddenly become haunted 10 years after the Smurls had moved in. They were equally suspicious that the publicizing of the haunting coincided with the release of Amityville II, which as we said on the last episode featured consulting credits from Ed and Lorraine Warren.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is incredible cross promotion.
MARCUS PARKS
Locally people weren't sold on the Smurl haunting either. Two women from the Smurls' parish said quite succinctly that all the Smurls wanted was to get a movie made in West Pittston akin to what the Lutzes had accomplished in Amityville.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, this is about local commerce.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now Janet Smurl decided she had enough in August of 1986 and asked all reporters to leave her home. And a priest who stayed in the home for two nights the following October reported nothing unusual during his stay. All that however didn't stop the Warrens from writing a book about the Smurl experience with writer Robert Curran called 'The Haunted'. As expected, the story told in the book wildly differed from what the Smurls had already told reporters while the haunting was happening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Remember that each one of these hauntings, I believe they have 10 total books.
MARCUS PARKS
Nine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is it nine? Ed Warren and Lorraine Warren worked with various authors. There was a couple of guys. Gerald Brittle was one that was like one of the major ones. But there were a couple that they worked with, so each one of these has a whole fucking book. And guess what each one is filled with? Padding. So much of these books from them could be so honestly much better used as lining for an Easter basket or like a something for a gerbil.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean the story itself is a blog post.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not a book.
ED LARSON
No, it's meant to buy when you're at the grocery store. Right? Because remember they used to sell novels right at the register.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember that.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah. This is probably one of the novels you would see there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'd have to read a lot of pages to read trash back in the day when we were children.
MARCUS PARKS
Well before the publication of the book, Janet Smurl said that she thought that the voices she heard were probably just her sister screwing around. But this isn't even mentioned in 'The Haunting'. In fact the sister is rarely mentioned. Likewise while the Smurls said again and again that nothing happened before 1985, it was kind of like one of the main points of the story, 'The Haunting' claimed that the paranormal activity began as soon as they moved into the house in 1973 and it slowly ramped up. Jack Smurl meanwhile constantly promised evidence that never materialized which some speculate Smurl either made up or was holding back for some sort of movie adaptation for their story. And adapted it was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But not in big budget form. Yeah, instead of being a fucking huge movie with James Brolin and Margot Kidder, they got a made for TV movie that aired on Fox in 1991.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that's probably also because of their own personal opinion. Ed Warren called the Smurl haunting a 4/10. That is true. And he said the Amityville haunting was 22/10.
MARCUS PARKS
Ah, 22/10. Wow, that's intense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
But even before that TV movie aired, a woman named Deborah Owens who'd bought the supposed haunted house from the Smurls reported that she never experienced any supernatural activity. Likewise the man who lived on the other side of the duplex, remember the whole time-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a duplex.
MARCUS PARKS
This is a duplex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They're sharing a wall with a man. He said he never experienced anything aside from the massive inconvenience the Smurls' claims ended up being to the neighborhood. But even so, one of the Smurl daughters, Karen, she said that it was ludicrous to think that her parents, two working class Catholics, would ever dream up a haunting con. From what she said, the Smurls never made any money off the book or the TV movie. But it won't come as a surprise as to who did, Ed and Lorraine Warren.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. That is what they were experts at. It was getting the demon-based bag.
MARCUS PARKS
And cutting out the people who actually experienced it as much as they possibly could.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My call on the Smurl family is that... So the first call, it came from a telephone call. So the Smurl family called and said the daughter saw a creature in the closet that looked like a tall old lady. And then she went hi!
ED LARSON
I'm gonna fuck your father.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna fuck your father tonight! Please, my father;s so uptight. And then later on, then we know the spectrophilia happened.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like that's according to Jack Smurl. I feel like something like that might have happened. There was a couple of things that sort of happened in that house during the time period.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure. I'm sure some paranormal activity happened. I'm sure almost in many of the Warrens' cases some paranormal activity happened.
ED LARSON
I'm not so sure he Smurled til he pearled but you know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We can't all be. We can't all be! But then I think it's got a lot to do with her menarche, right? Because if you notice she said all this started happening around the time that she was getting confirmation, which is menarche time.
ED LARSON
That's a little past menarche.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it depends on how like-
MARCUS PARKS
Well confirmation is what, 14?
ED LARSON
15 for me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. But if the girl's skateboarding, right, like isn't she cooler? You can get your period earlier if you're cool.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you're right. Yeah, that's how it works.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you're a rad chick, don't you get your fucking period super early?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, all you rad chicks out there, let us know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just want to know. But that seems to all be connected. So it feels like there are a couple of spots and then they just came in. And at this point they're so good at quickly packaging. They walk in, they're like yes, yes, yes. I'm gonna go fake doing my demon thing downstairs. They'll hear through the wall of the duplex, so they can hear it so everybody knows that this is a super fucking haunted place. And then we'll leave and then we'll package this whole thing with our authors after the fact.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the story of the Smurls can be told with a little bit more of a clear head because there was so much coverage of the supposed haunting while it was happening. And you also had a levelheaded church official involved, Father Al. That however is not the case with the so-called Werewolf of London, Bill Ramsey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I thought it was Warren Zevon.
ED LARSON
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah, bro. Bill Ramsey. But see despite many claims that this story was covered extensively in the UK press, our researchers were able to only find small mentions in the newspaper archives. And so this story comes directly from the Warrens and their son-in-law Tony Spera.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's never been a son-in-law who has loved his family more than Tony Spera.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Besides Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's son. In terms of a son loving a father so much that they'll do whatever it takes to continue that father's legacy. Tony Spera wasn't even the biological son.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he's the son-in-law.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He loved Ed Warren so much.
ED LARSON
He was Lorraine's son?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he was their daughter's husband.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh okay, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which she was never supposed to have. They told Loraine Warren when she was a little girl she would never be able to have a child or if she had a child she would have to have it super young. Which is why when she met Ed Warren and she told him that, being like I need to be impregnated super young, that he was gonna go to WWII, right. And instead he like fucked it, he got married to her ahead of the time and put a baby inside of her when she was a bit of a teenager in order to get it out. So that by the time he was back from Italy, she would already have popped out the child.
ED LARSON
He's a hero.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. American hero.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Super cum. It's that easy.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as the story goes, Bill Ramsey was born in the Essex community of South End in 1943. He claimed to have first felt symptoms of lycanthropy at the age of nine, during a day in which he was playing in his family's garden. He said he began to feel strange when an icy cold blast of air swept around him. He smelled something foul and vomited and suddenly all he could think about was wolves and for some reason running away to live a life on the beach.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That sounds like a lot of like anti-work subreddits. Like I feel like that's most people.
MARCUS PARKS
All I wanna do is live on the beach and be a wolf.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all I wanna do. I wanna hang out with dogs, I wanna hang out with my pack, I wanna fucking just live in a tent. I think honestly it makes sense.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I'm a fucking good boy.
MARCUS PARKS
That, Ramsey said, is when he forever changed. Throughout his adolescence, Bill Ramsey was cursed with what sounds like an overactive adrenal gland and uncontrollable rage, which is said to be due to his latent lycanthropic symptoms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
ED LARSON
Did they have to put him down?
MARCUS PARKS
Nope, nope, they just went inside. And any time when Bill would have a lycanthropic flare up, he said he'd feel that same icy wind that he felt when he was nine years old. In one case when Bill was presumably a teenager, he uprooted a fence post that was still attached to the fence, very difficult to do. And in another incident he was so filled with rage that he gnawed on wire meshing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Seriously. There were like three of these in my niece's class.
MARCUS PARKS
And when this happened, no, they didn't put him down, they just locked him outside until he calmed down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like a dog! They treated him like a dog.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what you do. You're like well he's got zoomies.
MARCUS PARKS
He's a bit of a goofball, like put him out in the backyard.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's crate train him.
ED LARSON
Did you hit him in the nose with the newspaper?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's bad, you gotta do it with treats. You gotta do positive validation. Look at me, find it, find it. Look at me.
MARCUS PARKS
But after adolescence passed, Bill's lycanthropy went dormant for 15 years. When he got married and fathered three children however he became plagued by nightmares in which he was chasing his wife as she looked behind in terror.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god. You're fucking talking about like all my buddies.
MARCUS PARKS
Those dreams continued for two years then abruptly ended. But 18 months later Bill woke up to the sound of panting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(panting)
MARCUS PARKS
Like a wild animal was in the room. And he quickly realized that it was he himself who was making the noise.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm a self panter. (panting)
ED LARSON
How pantalizing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tee-hee.
MARCUS PARKS
Tee-hee.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tee-hee! Just a little priest laugh.
ED LARSON
I'm with you on that rug.
MARCUS PARKS
But then came another 15 years with no wolfy behavior.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a long time to not be a wolf.
ED LARSON
So there's 30 years of no wolf going on here?
MARCUS PARKS
There's like 15 years and then a little bit of wolf and then another 15 years.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, well I guess it comes up later like diabetes.
ED LARSON
How old is he?
MARCUS PARKS
He's in his 40s. Like late 40s, 50s at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
So the wolf shit started when he was a kid.
MARCUS PARKS
When he was nine, yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nowadays that's when they become like a standup. You know what I mean? You hit 45 and you don't know what to do anymore, you leave your big time job. He just decided I'll be a werewolf.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that all changed during a drinking session one night at the pub with his friends.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In 1983, Bill said the icy feeling overwhelmed him once again. And when he went to the bathroom to calm down, he was horrified when he looked in the mirror and saw a wolf staring back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hell yeah, I finally got the vaccine out of me.
MARCUS PARKS
That's when Bill decided it was time to go home. But according to his designated driver-
ED LARSON
I mean that's good self awareness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, buddy. Hey, listen. I gotta cut myself off here. I looked in the mirror.
ED LARSON
I've gone full dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right, I swear to god. I looked in the mirror, the first thing I saw was a fucking Datsun with a Jets hat on. I gotta get out of here.
MARCUS PARKS
Well according to his designated driver, Bill's fingers turned to claws in the car. Then Bill tried biting his friend's leg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh we've dealt with this with you.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it is a problem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You and I have done this to each other.
ED LARSON
You are delicious.
MARCUS PARKS
It's weird to me that he went down. Because someone's sitting down, to bite their leg in a car, like you're going for, it sounds like he's going for the genitals.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All of this sounds like Bill tried to have sex with his best friend that night because what he meant by quote unquote "I saw a wolf staring back" was what he saw-
MARCUS PARKS
Oh okay. Like a (howling).
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
(panting) That kind of wolf.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Tex Avery wolf.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he went full gay werewolf. He was trying to suck dick and that's hard if you got a button fly.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I'mma scratch at your pants.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I want.
MARCUS PARKS
Well perhaps accustomed to the unpredictability of the intoxicated Englishman, the driver calmly pulled over, threw Bill out of the car, and drove off. That same year Bill started experiencing chest pains and was taken to the hospital. But while he was in the emergency room, he lost control and sank his teeth into a nurse, then ran around the hospital in a blind rage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This guy's just fucking, he's just liking this now.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It seems like a Nic Cage kind of move, doesn't it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, it does. Yeah. To randomly bite a nurse is unfair.
MARCUS PARKS
And then run around the hospital.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. (screaming) (barking)
ED LARSON
Yeah, if he was running around on all fours, I'd believe him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a character. Then you're doing something fun. You're being a wolf. Right now I'm not seeing any tooting.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's not tooting. Why isn't he tooting?
MARCUS PARKS
Well according to witnesses or so the Warrens claim, Bill's fingers were curled like talons, his shoulders were hunched, and he bared his teeth like a rabid animal. Finally the hospital staff stabbed him with a needle full of tranquilizer and he calmed down. Two months later he was back in the hospital when the same thing happened. He threw the attending nurse to the side and lunged at an orderly. But it just so happened that four policemen were visiting the hospital at that very moment. As they surrounded him, he lunged and growled. And one police officer allegedly had to spend four days in the hospital from injuries he sustained from the Werewolf of London.
ED LARSON
Was he a big guy?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, actually he was a pretty big guy. He actually looked like a werewolf.
ED LARSON
Okay. Hell yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He actually looked like a very wolfy man. It worked.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Afterward when Bill was handcuffed in the back of a police car, he was asked if he preferred admission to a psychiatric institution over jail. But he denied the offer-
ED LARSON
How about the pound?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I prefer to go to the bark.
MARCUS PARKS
But he denied the offer of fearing the stigma of such a choice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How British is the police giving you the option?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How British is that? Being like (British accent) you feeling sick? You wanna go to hospital then? You wanna go to hospital?
MARCUS PARKS
Nah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so nice.
ED LARSON
If this was America we would just shoot you.
MARCUS PARKS
He would've been shot down, yeah. Fucking running crazy around a hospital? Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Talk about getting put down.
ED LARSON
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely. Or at least tazed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now Bill also seemed to be a bit of a busybody because he soon showed up back at the same police station with a woman in tow. Apparently Bill had made a citizen's arrest on a sex worker and had forced her to come with him to the police station.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Woof! This woman made me have sex with her. Woof! Bark! Toots!
ED LARSON
She's my bitch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bark!
MARCUS PARKS
But as soon as he pulled up, the sex worker ran from his truck into the police station because Bill was going through another transformation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you imagine that? Being so frightened that a sex worker runs into the police station away from you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. After a dozen officers supposedly held him down and injected him with another sedative, Bill spent 10 days going through countless MRIs, X-rays, and psychiatric tests.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Apparently what he needs is some cheese, a little bit of chicken, some belly rubs, and he calmed right down.
MARCUS PARKS
This man needs an enema!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
An enema! Remember that? Dracula Dead and Loving It. The only good joke.
MARCUS PARKS
There was also look at me, Renfield, I'm drinking wine and eating chicken!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this was when Bill's story made it to British TV. And the airing of that story just happened to coincide with one of Ed and Lorraine Warren's vacations to England. Now Lorraine immediately believed that this was a case of demon possession so she called the local police and told them so. Apparently this was enough for the police to get into contact with Bill so he could be connected to the Warrens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just don't want to deal with him anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. After surmising that Bill was indeed possessed by some sort of wolf demon and always had been-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always had been.
MARCUS PARKS
Since he was nine. The Warrens convinced him to travel to Connecticut from England so he could be exorcised by their man Father McKenna.
ED LARSON
So he just got an airplane?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Put the werewolf on the fucking tube that is literally 35,000 ft above the sky and then take him to Connecticut. Talk about like what an issue. Like talk about the idea of like oh we have problems with immigration. Yeah, dude. Leave your werewolves in Europe.
ED LARSON
Well he was in a kennel down below, he wasn't with everyone else.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it took about a year for Bill to save up enough money for the trip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This whole time he's a fucking... So you need to tell me-
MARCUS PARKS
They're not gonna pay for the werewolf to come.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a hyper dangerous werewolf. He has to go take a second job to pay money to go get cured of being a werewolf. There is no application anywhere for him to get a subsidy for him to go to Connecticut to not be a werewolf anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
Hey man, the Warrens will take care of you once you fucking get there. But it's your job to get there, bro. Does a hospital pay for a sick person to travel to the fucking hospital to get treatment?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes! No, they don't.
MARCUS PARKS
No, they don't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus Christ.
MARCUS PARKS
So why the fuck should you expect the Warrens to pay for this man's lycanthropy? Are you some kind of fucking socialist?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying I used to get flown for auditions so I feel like getting flown... Because Ed and Lorraine Warren are making money on this.
MARCUS PARKS
Unfortunately actors get treated better than sick people in this country.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of nice. I really appreciate it honestly.
MARCUS PARKS
Well when the night before the exorcism came, Bill allegedly tried to strangle his wife in her sleep. But once the exorcism began, Bill's face contorted and his hands turned into claws. But when Father McKenna demanded that the wolf demon leave, it did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's exactly what I'm talking about. That's why we bring you here to Connecticut because we got the best shit here and it's nice. No more tooting. Hear that? Not a single toot.
ED LARSON
What we did was we left the back door open and threw a pork chop out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. And I leave the back door open because he comes and we wants to go in and go out, go in, go out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah and then we put him in a car, we drove him out to the country and let him out. Never saw him again. It's fucking some farmer's problem now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god, Bill showed back up! It's incredible. It's like Homeward Bound.
MARCUS PARKS
That's how we ended up with seven fucking dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because people used to just drive out to the country and drop their dogs off and all of a sudden dog's at our house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At least it wasn't guys who thought they were dogs. Because that's weirder.
ED LARSON
Hold up, so people really do bring the dogs to a farm upstate?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Dude. Well I mean that's the thing-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they let them go to die.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing is what they do is they just drive out into the country, they throw the dog out of the door and then just kind of leave it. Like oh yeah, dog will fend for itself, he'll find some kind of food. No, the dog shows up to the closest house and starts eating that dog's food, the dog that you got. But then you got another dog. And sometimes it's really nice-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Because I got this dog Wilma through that that way and Wilma was the best little dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that's cute. But you probably got some bad dogs.
MARCUS PARKS
Got some really bad dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Really, really bad dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this was again all supposedly caught on camera, the whole exorcism. But no one outside of the immediate Warren circle has ever come forward to say that they've actually seen the exorcism of Bill Ramsey. Now even though nobody has seen the exorcism of Bill as far as we know, some of you may have seen the movie adaptation to our next story, although the Warrens weren't featured in that adaptation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was an episode of the Tony Spera led Ed and Lorraine Warren series that used to be available on tape, used to buy on tape. Now it's all on the internet. And I was watching one where they went through all of their quote unquote "proof", right. They were like we'll show you a bunch of videos and pictures, stuff that we've never shown anybody. And it's all orbs. Every single picture is orbs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Which orbs that are coming from them turning the flash up too high on the camera.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And none of this... I was like this is when you show that stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. If you have videos of-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now is the time!
MARCUS PARKS
Because The Conjuring of course starts with the Warrens are introduced with them giving that talk and they're showing a video of an exorcism and it's super creepy and it's really weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They never did that.
MARCUS PARKS
They never, ever, ever, ever, once ever did anything like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They showed some pictures.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And some stuff but it was all orbs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. All orbs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nothing that compelling. Nothing as compelling as what I will show at Contact the Desert this weekend.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course. Highly compelling footage. Well let's get into the story of the Snedekers which was highly fictionalized in the movie 'The Haunting in Connecticut'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost so fictionalized there's no point in watching the movie if you're trying to get information about the Snedekers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. So as the story goes, the Snedeker family comprised of spouses Alan, Carmen, their three sons, their daughter and two nieces, they all moved into a rental house in Southington, Connecticut in 1986. The move was ostensibly because their son Philip had Hodgkin's lymphoma and the family was moving closer to where Philip was being treated. Now the apartment they moved into was inside a large converted colonial home. But since there were so many kids, the Snedekers got permission to convert two rooms in the basement into bedrooms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Basement room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love basement rooms.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
They are fun.
MARCUS PARKS
But from what the Snedekers claimed, they were shocked to find that the basement was filled with mortician equipment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Like coffin handles, a chain and pulley casket lift, and a fluid drainage pit.
ED LARSON
Toys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I think it's fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Obviously their new residence had formerly been a funeral home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I feel like funeral homes have to be one of the least haunted establishments ever.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Same thing with cemeteries. I never understood the cemetery thing. They're there resting.
ED LARSON
Yeah, they showed up dead. They didn't die there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They didn't die there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's like I've kind of heard that, people talk about that. Like ghosts do sometimes... Like cemeteries have a sort of a reputation for being haunted but normally they're not super haunted.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's like calling a dump a restaurant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It depends on what you want.
MARCUS PARKS
There's food there!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's food there!
MARCUS PARKS
But since I suppose they had no choice, the Snedekers went ahead and built their children's bedroom in the funeral home basement anyway. Now for some reason they put the sick kid in the basement and from the very first night Philip claimed to hear strange voices and sounds. And this is very like Haunting of Hill House. He saw apparitions, like a man in a pinstriped suit with white hair who would watch him as he slept.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
ED LARSON
It was just this kid coughing though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. (coughing)
MARCUS PARKS
So terrifying was this room that Philip apparently begged to sleep at the hospital. But at the same time Philip was also going through a personality change. He started wearing leather, started reading all kinds of shit about the occult. And I'd say that's pretty par for the course for a kid sleeping in a converted mortuary prep room.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But pretty soon Philip grew violent towards his family and allegedly stole a gun from their neighbor so he could shoot and kill his dad. After that, Philip was sent to live elsewhere in the hopes that getting him away from the house would improve his behavior. But instead of following Philip, the dark entities of the Snedeker home turned to other family members. The other children heard voices and footsteps and smelled rotten meat and feces throughout the house. And the mother even once saw a bucket of mop water turn into a bucket of blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could do that pretty quickly. Not to brag.
MARCUS PARKS
In a more direct assault, the mother claimed that she was taking a shower when the curtain allegedly wrapped itself around her neck so tightly that she couldn't move. But from there, the haunting took a cinematic turn. Just before an assault, both the mother and father claimed that they would hear music that sounded as if it was from the 1930s coming from one of the bedrooms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(ragtime trumpeting)
MARCUS PARKS
(singing) Anything goes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Hey, we might be the Nazis but we're lying about what we believe.
MARCUS PARKS
(singing) Anything goes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Anything goes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now what's interesting about this to me is that the people who lived in the haunted house in my hometown, they would say that they would hear the same thing coming from radios that were unplugged during the worst of their haunting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very common. It's what's called during the infestation period. That's kind of what they use, these various things that get you afraid. Because the idea is that you being afraid of the demons doing all the stuff is what gives them power within the house.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Not just that, ghosts like the party.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They like radio.
MARCUS PARKS
They like radios, they like music from the 1930s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For some reason that's all they like. They like Tiny Tim, they like slowed down versions of old happy songs. (slow whisper singing) Imagine me and you, I do. I think about you day and night. It's only right.
MARCUS PARKS
You know the words to Happy Together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) So happy together.
MARCUS PARKS
(singing) So happy together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) I can't see me loving nobody but you for all my life!
ED LARSON
When you're with me, baby the sky will be blue, for all my life!
MARCUS PARKS
That's why y'all are actors and I'm not. Because y'all can remember that stuff.
ED LARSON
It's The Turtles.
MARCUS PARKS
It's funny about that family from my hometown, they also, this story like from when I was a kid, it kind of makes me believe a little bit more in haunted houses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Because the family actually fled the house in the middle of the night. One of those very cinematic moments. They left behind all their possessions in such a fright that we as teenagers years later would go to the house and find clothes in the closet with the tags still on them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they were shoplifting?
ED LARSON
Yeah. They couldn't even wear the clothes they bought?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, what do you mean?
MARCUS PARKS
You buy clothes and you come home, you put it in the closet, you don't take the tags off because you might return it later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's true.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I'm willy nilly with those tags, man. I rip them off immediately.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nah, dude.
ED LARSON
This is mine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes I'm pending on weight gain because it's like I know I'm gonna be heading towards a fat time period.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I have to kind of see how tight it's gonna be.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But the family in my hometown, they were taking a gamble anyway. Because y'all say that cemeteries aren't haunted but the children's cemetery in my hometown, there was some shit going down there.
ED LARSON
Well those kids were buried alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also feel like things happen at those places after the ghosts are buried.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And pictures of that cemetery by the way will be in our next newsletter which you can sign up for at lastpodcastontheleft.com. I was going through some old pictures last night and came upon them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And they're really fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I bet.
MARCUS PARKS
At least as fun as children's graves can be. But as far as the Snedekers went, after the music was heard one of the family members say that they would soon expect to be assaulted or outright sexually molested. In one example, the mother claimed to flee the house with her niece but the entity followed them and according to the mother, quote, "sodomized the niece the whole way down the road".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's hard.
MARCUS PARKS
That's very difficult and very weird. This is what we're saying about these later cases. They're so fucking weird. Like the claims are so outlandish.
ED LARSON
Definitely make you run faster.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I mean but it's weird because I feel like they also notice they become more sexual.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes they do. That's interesting. I didn't pick up on that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These stories become more sexual as they go and I don't know necessarily why. And they do involve the kids. But also it's weird that Ed, he's telling them.
ED LARSON
He's writing it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's writing the story as they go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well this of course is around the time that Ed and Lorraine arrived. They spent nine weeks with the Snedeker family describing, as Lorraine put it, a haunting rated at 9 on a scale of 1-10.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh.
MARCUS PARKS
The house was infested with demons. So the Warrens organized an exorcism and an exorcism was had, the demons went elsewhere, and the Snedekers moved to another home where they quickly began collaboration on a book about their experience with the Warrens and made numerous television appearances with their new paranormal pals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the truth is a lot of times with exorcisms, according to them, they just work. And one exorcism they can do is you don't even have to be home. You leave and the exorcism is done on the house while you're gone. They go in, they fumigate it with holy incense, a priest walks around from room to room to room and it has to be a pious priest.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like it's fucking bedbugs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They get your house tented.
ED LARSON
Yeah, they plug up the gas leak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They literally, that's what they do. And then they say that sometimes they can fumigate the home with all the Catholic bullshit and then leave and then the demons will be gone because they can't stay in there.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. Now according to the Snedekers' landlord, a guy named Darrell Kern, the Snedeker story is a complete hoax. According to him, and this is if you trust a landlord-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
ED LARSON
Oh hey, come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The lack of belief that he felt in defending a landlord.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Oh hey, come on, please, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, hey, please. No, not the landlords.
MARCUS PARKS
The Snedekers, according to the landlord, were fully aware that the house was a former funeral home because when they first looked at the house there was a big sign next to the front door that said Hallahan Funeral Home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also imagine when you go to purchase a home-
MARCUS PARKS
Well they were renting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well still, it looks like a funeral home.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Funeral homes do have a specific look. But this is Connecticut and those colonial houses all look like funeral homes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They all look like funeral homes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The Snedekers however countered by saying that the sign was nailed over with plywood when they went and looked at the house. But the landlord struck back, saying that the paranormal activity conveniently began just around the time that the Snedekers were falling behind on their rent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that's a good lesson for our listeners if you're having problems with your rent. Because I do believe, I might be wrong on this, sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. But I do believe there is a precedent for hauntings in your home and not having to pay rent. I believe.
MARCUS PARKS
There is absolutely not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I believe that there might be. I think that there was a case that they tried to set this up. Where they have to tell you if it's haunted.
MARCUS PARKS
You can't even stop paying your rent if your heat doesn't work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like that's us using the evangelical edge of the judicial system in our benefit.
ED LARSON
Well you still gotta pay rent but minus one third for the ghost.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For the ghost.
MARCUS PARKS
Well neighbors who shared the home with the Snedekers likewise said that they never experienced any paranormal activity, that the Snedekers knew they were moving into a formal funeral home, and that the claims of paranormal activity coincided with the late rent. In fact, and this could just be busybody neighbors, they thought that the Snedekers had the haunting story planned from the word go. The most talkative neighbor was a woman named Sandy. From what she said, all of this began when the Snedeker mother confided in Sandy that she was having nightmares. The mother soon escalated the situation by saying that her father was haunting her home and that she was planning on calling the local demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She just wanted to call Ed and Lorraine Warren.
MARCUS PARKS
For some reason. Ed Warren however said the only reason why the neighbors said any of this is because the landlord bought them off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you ever thought of or heard of a landlord giving anybody money they didn't need to?
MARCUS PARKS
I guess it's so maybe... The only reason I could possibly ascertain is that the landlord wanted to rent out the apartment without the stigma of the haunting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a commercial for the apartment. A lot of people are gonna come in and rent the apartment because it's haunted.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
No way!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
ED LARSON
Who wants that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Me! Many people. I am not alone. There are many people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like that's a literal advertisement.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just simply for the bump up of it and simply because you could probably charge either more or less, depending.
ED LARSON
That's everything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That is true.
MARCUS PARKS
But Ed did sort of lose his shit on television when he was pressed for more details about the Snedeker haunting during an interview. When faced with the fact that nobody could prove that any exorcism took place, nor could Ed provide the name of the priest who performed the exorcism, Ed angrily said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"I don't have to give you anything!"
MARCUS PARKS
Losing his shit on television, not a good look.
ED LARSON
Why not say it was McKenna, the guy who works with them?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because McKenna was probably like please stop including me in your stories.
MARCUS PARKS
I think McKenna was really close. Like I think McKenna liked the celebrity of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, sure.
MARCUS PARKS
I think he liked being the celebrity exorcist. Well Ed said that the evidence of a priest being there could be proven by official records but the local archdiocese reported that no sanctioned exorcisms ever took place in the Snedeker home. But now let's get to the most damning story of all that was told by a horror writer named Ray Garton. Now Garton was hired to write the book about the Snedeker haunting and he became quite vocal over the years about how frustrating it was to work with both the Snedekers and the Warrens. Garton by the way died just last month and deserves an RIP.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have fun being dead, Garton!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he wrote some like 60 horror books, highly respected in the scene.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
See Garton was hired directly by the Warrens to write a book about the Snedekers. But when Garton talked to the family, he found that each member had a different story to tell that didn't match up with any other family member.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is really when the wheels were just falling off.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like they didn't give a fuck anymore.
ED LARSON
Get your story straight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just they didn't care.
MARCUS PARKS
They didn't, I don't think they cared at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were printing money. Nobody gave a fuck.
MARCUS PARKS
When Garton approached Ed Warren with these inconsistencies, Ed, according to Garton, said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"They're crazy. All the people who come to us are crazy. That's why they come to us. Just use what you can and make the rest up. You write scary books, right? Well make it up and make it scary. That's why we hired you."
ED LARSON
I mean...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's kind of dead to rights. They're all crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now from what Ray Garton said, the Snedeker family was an absolute mess and possibly criminals. Garton claimed that the mother was running an illegal interstate lottery scam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
That she urged Garton to not mention in the book.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My whole lottery scam, if you could not put that in the book, that'd be pretty sweet. How do you even run a lottery scam?
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know. He wasn't specific on it. He was just like this woman, she had some shit going on. He was like some sort of scam with the lottery and different states.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very Northeast. It's very Northeast.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, going across the borders. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's something about getting a bunch of scratch offs and then selling them. Like stealing boxes and scratch offs and selling them.
ED LARSON
Don't write about the lottery scandal. And if you want, I can sell you some tickets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You want some tickets? I got this new Monopoly game, there's four winners in every 10.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as Philip went, the kid who supposedly kicked off this whole haunting, Garton never met him and was only allowed to briefly speak to him on the phone once.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Played by our friend Sam's brother.
MARCUS PARKS
Sam brother?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, my friend Sam's brother plays the little kid, plays the dude. He's actually a very famous actor.
MARCUS PARKS
No shit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's the son in The Haunting in Connecticut.
ED LARSON
Oh that's nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Well during that conversation, Philip said that the things he saw and heard in the house went away after he got on medication. And that's when the mother stepped in to put an end to the phone call. Even more wild is the possibility that Philip might have never even had cancer. When Garton spoke to the mother, she didn't seem to know much about Hodgkin's lymphoma, nor did she know much about treating the disease. And remember the whole reason why they moved into the house was supposed to be because the kid was getting his treatment.
ED LARSON
Probably just coughed it away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, worked it out in the system.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got it out.
ED LARSON
Yeah, go for a walk. Everything's fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Sometimes honestly if I have cancer I party real hard one night-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Little brandy knocks it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes I've knocked it right out. It's easy to do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And none of the neighbors ever heard anything about cancer from the Snedekers. And the Snedekers were a family who fucking talked about everything. What's worst though is the story behind the alleged ghost molestation. Allegedly Philip confessed that he was the one who had done all the fondling and groping and this was the real reason why he was removed from the house.
ED LARSON
So he was sodomizing his sister down the street?
MARCUS PARKS
No, that story wasn't true. That story was fucking bullshit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No but other things were maybe happening.
MARCUS PARKS
It was just that yeah, he was getting inappropriate.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He was obviously having mental problems.
ED LARSON
He was doing more than humping the corner of the couch.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Gotcha.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who's doing that?
ED LARSON
Lots of little kids.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. A lot of kids do that.
ED LARSON
They love fucking the couch.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they really do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't you get hit with the newspaper for that or sprayed with a bottle?
ED LARSON
That's bad for him, you're supposed to give him treats.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here, here, eyes up here.
MARCUS PARKS
Now of course the Warrens said they had recorded evidence of supernatural activity but they refused to show it to Ray Garton, who was really the one man in the world who should have seen it because he was writing a book about the alleged supernatural activity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well again, Ed was so jealous of his stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He didn't want anybody to look at his stuff because he thought you'd have something over on him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Well also anything that Garton came up with would be scarier than-
MARCUS PARKS
Orbs. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, orbs. Globules.
MARCUS PARKS
In fact Garton was never even allowed inside the house itself because the people who moved in after the Snedekers wanted nothing to do with the haunting or Ed and Lorraine Warren. The new tenant said they never experienced any paranormal activity but Ed said of course they didn't because the priest had already exorcised all the demons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's already done. It's been worked out.
ED LARSON
Those fucking demons were so out of shape before they got there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddietunes.com.
MARCUS PARKS
You can find him on the internet. Now Ray Garton was ostensibly hired to write a horror novel based on the Snedeker's accounts. He was not commissioned to write a nonfiction book about a haunting, it was a horror novel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is one of those where I feel like I understand what he's saying. But you were working with the Warrens, you know that's a part of the gig. So he's doing this after the fact because they were all... He signed up to write a fake nonfiction book about this haunting. I do agree. I do believe that. And then you find out after the fact everybody's a fucking scam artist. Oh this is actually really bad, I don't want my name attached to this.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he was highly dismayed to find that the book was marketed as nonfiction when it was released.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
He did not expect this to be... He wrote a fucking novel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He didn't write a nonfiction book. And looking at the Amazon reviews, people are still taking Snedeker's book 'In A Dark Place' as purely nonfiction.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well just watch that movie because then you could see that nothing happened that happened in the movie. Nothing happened.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Ray also spoke with other authors who'd written books for Ed and Lorraine and they all to a one confirmed Ray's experience with the Warrens. All of them had the opinion that the Warrens were total frauds or at least they were when it came to their books. Finally Garton said that when he interviewed the Snedekers, it was almost always the mother who did most of the talking. And after the book was out she reinvented herself as a spiritual advisor who had always had the so-called gift. She's even worked with Ed and Lorraine's nephew, John Zaffis. This nephew supposedly told Garton that he's not really a paranormal investigator but is rather just working for what he calls the family business.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ed also talks a little bit and reveals a little bit that they franchised their paranormal investigation company. So what he would do too is that yes, it would be quote unquote "Ed and Lorraine Warren", this is how they bumped their numbers, Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated your house. They'd send John Zaffis, they'd send these people that were literally just children. They would send like people that he hired that were his like little so-called outreach teams that would go and cover it for him. He'd roll in, he'd make up, he'd redo all the story editing. This is kind of where it went from. It's so interesting to see how Ed and Lorraine Warren went from that truly very homespun weird version of paranormal investigation that was kind of interesting, like the idea of like staying outside of the haunted houses, painting them, kind of organically getting these stories, beginning to build their own interest in the paranormal investigative world and build their quote unquote "skill set". And then now they're at this point where it's like they went from fucking what was his name? Roy McDonald to Ray Kroc very, very quickly.
MARCUS PARKS
So now that we're here, let's get into the family business.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yay!
MARCUS PARKS
Starting with just what sort of family life the Warrens had. Now their daughter Judy had nothing more untoward to say about her parents other than that they were never around. She pretty much was raised by her grandmother. She also had no idea what they did for a living because Ed lied to her and said that he was a landscape artist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just so you know, they did have a daughter Judy and they dumped her, they literally got rid of her.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So soon as they got busy doing this, she was completely raised outside of the home.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Who raised her again?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The grandmother.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But as Judy grew older, she learned from others what her parents did and she started hearing the criticism that they were liars, grifters, and cynical opportunists. And while I do still think even after all the stories we've told today that they were sincere in their belief in the paranormal, I do find it hard to come to any other conclusion than that they were at best dishonest people. That's the best thing you can say about the Warrens.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know if it's not about not having a belief in ghosts, it's that their belief in their religion-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is what was their bottom. That was their base was that they were "very, very, very pious Catholics". Quote unquote.
ED LARSON
Well also they had a standard of living that they needed to keep up and it's not like every ghost is real and they gotta keep pumping out the stories.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when their daughter Judy was 21 she met a cap named Tony Spera who was instantly drawn to Ed and Lorraine. He began attending their lectures and Judy soon had someone to talk to about her frustrations concerning the public opinion of her parents. Tony bought into the act completely and soon he and Judy were married.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Does that not give... Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. Does it not give you the ick if your partner's like a bigger fan of your parents than you are? Like a fan? Like if you have somebody where your parents do something in a public aspect and they're like super excited.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean you gotta like them like a little bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Say, yeah, if you're dating like Billy Joel's daughter, you gotta like at least Piano Man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You better.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. How else are you gonna get horny every single time you put on Just The Way You Are when you're having sex with his daughter?
ED LARSON
Man, I tell you what though. I went and saw Billy Joel on his 70th birthday over at Madison Square Garden and it was New York State of Mind time and you know who came out and sang it? His daughter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I always will be mad about this.
ED LARSON
Go fuck that shit. I was so mad. In New York!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That fucking... Her name's like Stephanie?
ED LARSON
Fuck that. I don't care!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get outta here, Stephanie. Nobody gives a shit!
ED LARSON
Yeah, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while the occult scared the hell... I'm with you. I'm 100% with you on that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm with you, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while the occult scared the hell out of Judy, Tony was fascinated and he was soon assisting Ed and Lorraine in their investigations. When Ed died in 2006, Tony took over the occult museum and when Lorraine died in 2019, Tony took over everything having to do with the Warrens' paranormal history. But when it comes to Ed and Lorraine Warren's legacy, it's quite possible that Ed may have pulled a bit of a Jimmy Savile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay. See this is my thing, man.
ED LARSON
But Jimmy Savile, he's funny. Right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly. And you're talking shit-
MARCUS PARKS
Jingle jangle jewelry, from de bumby bumby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You are fucking talking shit about the number one child molester of all time. All right? Don't compare Ed Warren to Jimmy Savile. Jimmy Savile changed the child molesting game.
MARCUS PARKS
I said a bit of a Jimmy Savile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because it shares some similarities.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like comparing me to Richard Pryor. You know what I mean?
ED LARSON
Even though you look like Richard Dreyfuss.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't share his opinions though.
MARCUS PARKS
Well just as Jimmy Savile died before any of his crimes came to light, it was alleged that Ed had groomed and engaged in an ongoing sexual relationship with an underage girl with Lorraine's full awareness and complicity. But that only came out a good 13 years after Ed died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Judith Penney, sometimes referred to as Ed's assistant or liaison-
ED LARSON
She had the same name as his daughter?
MARCUS PARKS
No. Yeah.
ED LARSON
That's creepier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! No, they were the same name.
ED LARSON
That's what makes it worse.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Yeah it does. Well she met Ed Warren in 1963 when she was 15 and he was 37.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sexy.
MARCUS PARKS
This however was not Ed Warren the famous paranormal investor. This was Ed Warren the bus driver.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dog. He didn't need that fucking money to have that swag.
MARCUS PARKS
And Judith Penney rode Ed's route to her high school every day. That's how they met, Ed was her bus driver.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh god.
MARCUS PARKS
City bus driver though, not school bus driver.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody sit down! Everybody! I will fucking, I will pull this bridge! I will pull this bus into the fucking ocean!
MARCUS PARKS
Allegedly Judith moved into Ed Lorraine's home when she turned 16 because from what they said she had a terrible family life, she was trying to escape, didn't really have anything, they took her in. But she soon began a sexual relationship with Ed that lasted until his death in 2006, all with Lorraine's knowledge and consent.
ED LARSON
That's how Sandusky got his victims. He would take underprivileged kids that had a bad time at home and he would pick them up and bring them to a camp.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that is exactly how he did it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's how a lot of molesters do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It seems to be like almost a way that they groom them in a large kind of almost big batch.
ED LARSON
Are you saying there's a pattern?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Do you remember Sandusky's nickname?
ED LARSON
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Tickle monster.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tee-hee!
ED LARSON
Oh yeah. And then his book-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tee-hee! Ha-ha!
ED LARSON
Remember the book?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
Touched'.
MARCUS PARKS
Ugh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's better than Groped. That would have been too on the nose. But yeah, she was... So in this home, Judith, I'm gonna call her Judith instead of Judy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Judith was a kind of like the sex wife and Lorraine was the business wife.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well from her sworn statement, Judith Penney originally lived in a bedroom directly opposite the Warrens but Ed soon built an apartment for her above their home. And Ed would spent alternate nights between Judith and Lorraine. Furthermore Judith claimed that she became pregnant by Ed Warren in 1978 when Judith was 30 years old. Fearing what this might do to their reputation at the height of their fame, this is like right after Amityville, the very Catholic Lorraine Warren allegedly pressured Penney to get an abortion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Listen.
ED LARSON
Catholics don't like abortions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie! Eddie, you're being crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow! Wow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's also weird because he was just so excited about the Amityville thing that he had to fucking cum inside.
MARCUS PARKS
He just did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All this time. He could have done anything else. He could have cum on the belly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
On the head.
MARCUS PARKS
By this time he would have been in his late 50s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Or late 40s, early 50s. Somewhere around there. Still shooting. Well this pressure came after Ed and Lorraine tried to get Judith to tell people she'd gotten pregnant after being raped. And when she refused to do that, when she refused to lie, she got the abortion instead. And after that Ed and Lorraine gave her a stern lecture presumably about doing what she was told., presumably about being grateful. Now unlike many of the Warrens' cases, Judith Penney's story does line up with police reports. When Judith moved in with Ed and Lorraine in 1963, their relationship raised eyebrows even then and they were soon reported to the police. Judith said that she spent a night in jail where police tried to persuade her to sign a statement that would result in Ed Warren's arrest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is a time period when that shit was barely, barely like sought after or punished.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like that's wild to me that the cops-
MARCUS PARKS
No, people saw like this is fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, this is fucking weird. Like at this time period no one even thought of crimes against children truly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Jerry Lee Lewis just married his 13 year old cousin.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I actually wonder why they were so mad about this one. Right? Elvis Presley married a 14 year old.
ED LARSON
They were probably just looking for a way to take these people down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just didn't like him?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean at this point he's a bus driver, who cares?
ED LARSON
That's a good point.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Weird.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean they had been doing the paranormal stuff for a bit but way under the radar. Like they're still hobbyists at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But Judith Penney, like I said, she'd come from a hard life and she had nowhere else to go. So she refused. Instead she was ordered by the court to report to a delinquent youth officer for the next month and in an act of extreme arrogance, it was Ed Warren himself who drove her to the mandated meetings. But concerning whether or not Lorraine was really cool with this arrangement or if it was something that Ed forced upon her, Judith claimed that Ed was often verbally and physically abusive towards Lorraine, once backhanding her hard enough to knock her unconscious. In other words, this is all a far cry from god brought us together for a reason. Now this story didn't do a bit of damage to the Warrens' reputation nor did it dissuade anyone from making more Conjuring movies. I would be surprised if even a small minority of you listening out there have even heard these stories.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This story broke in 2017. And since then we've had The Nun, Annabelle Comes Home, The Nun II, and The Conjuring 3. The Conjuring 4, by the way, is set to start filming in Atlanta any day now. And the subject of this one is gonna be the fucking Smurls and the rapacious old lady snake ghost.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I hope it's played by Jennifer Lawrence!
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, give her a shot!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And I also noticed upon looking at his IMDB, James Wan, who directed the first two Conjuring movies, incredible director, Furious 7, Saw, all that shit, both the first two Insidious movies, Conjuring 2 was the last Conjuring movie he directed. And since then has kind of settled into a and producer role for any of the Conjuring universe movies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He does do that though. Because the last movie he directed I believe was Malignant. And then he is more of an executive producer/showrunner kind of thing.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he directed the Aquaman movies, he directed Malignant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's trying to get away from that.
MARCUS PARKS
He's directing a lot. Actually his next movie is a Cthulhu movie. No, dude is like directing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh why is he getting a Cthulhu movie?
MARCUS PARKS
He's good!
ED LARSON
Someone has to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It should be Guillermo del Toro, it's the only thing he might make not boring.
ED LARSON
He just made two fucking water movies, he's ready.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Guillermo del Toro, he's technically the Cthulhu guy even though all of his stuff's not interesting.
ED LARSON
What are you talking about? He makes great stuff!
MARCUS PARKS
He makes incredible movies.
ED LARSON
You don't like Pan's Labyrinth? The Shape of Water?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I like Pan's Labyrinth. I fell asleep during The Shape of Water.
ED LARSON
Shape of Water's good.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a real good movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I fell asleep.
ED LARSON
Shape of Water's real good.
MARCUS PARKS
Outvoted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, that's America.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm with you, Ed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's America. I lose.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it also didn't damage The Conjuring's reputation when Judith Penney admitted that the ghost in Ed Warren's famous Union Cemetery video, the one video that he would show, it was just her wandering around in a white sheet like so much Scooby-Doo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's pretty damning. That one was pretty rough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But she also... Because what's weird too is that she never had anything wrong to say about Ed Warren. She was one of those where she was like yeah, it was all like this but technically I loved him for decades.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But when it comes to the Warrens' estate's claims that there's no truth to Penney's claims, there were some very interesting provisions in Lorraine Warren's contract with New Line Cinema concerning the Conjuring movies. These provisions said that the films could not show her or her husband engaging in crimes including sex with minors. Furthermore neither Ed nor Lorraine could be depicted as participating in an extramarital sexual relationship. Now clauses similar to this aren't uncommon when people sell the rights to their stories but according to one talent attorney quoted in the Hollywood Reporter story about Judith Penney, rarely if ever are provisions in these contracts so specific.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well the thing is is that it's because he was having sex with minors and he did have an extramarital sexual relationship. So they had to put that in.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they had to put that in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I think a lot of people that are having sex with minors don't want it in their biopic.
MARCUS PARKS
Usually.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Most of the time.
MARCUS PARKS
But rarely is it so specific.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unless again it's Jerry Lee Lewis.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Elvis.
MARCUS PARKS
Elvis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess in the new Priscilla movie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was like a rough one but that was like the serious one.
ED LARSON
Well that was about Priscilla.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But this attorney said it's pretty common to say like don't show me doing any crimes, nothing illegal, anything like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But very rarely is it like don't show me fucking children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because very rarely does the other person, unless they're Woody Allen, have a very long public marriage to a former child.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
If you-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even though we all are.
ED LARSON
Former children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Former children.
ED LARSON
Yes, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You have to wait for them to not be one anymore.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the whole reason why Penney's story surfaced was because of a legal battle over The Conjuring's profits that started even before the first movie was released.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Gerald Brittle, author of 'The Demonologist', claimed that his book was used as the plot for The Conjuring but he was not compensated in any way whatsoever. Now the whole reason why Penney's story surfaced was because of a legal battle over The Conjuring's profits that started even before the first movie was released.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because they fucked over everybody that they touched.
MARCUS PARKS
Gerald Brittle, author of 'The Demonologist', claimed that his book was used as the plot for The Conjuring but he was not compensated in any way whatsoever. The studio meanwhile claimed that because the movie was explicitly stated to be based on a true story, they didn't need to pay copyright claims to Gerald Brittle. Interestingly, according to Brittle, the screenwriters for The Conjuring were told specific to not read 'The Demonologist' to avoid a scenario such as this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you're telling the story that this story is based upon which is featured entirely word for word constructed by Ed and Lorraine Warren in 'The Demonologist'. So there's no fucking way anything that you do that is going to be dissimilar enough to 'The Demonologist' for him not to sue you. It was going to happen because he was the one that was given the Ed and Lorraine story. And then they decided to try to take that away from him and give it to somebody else because they didn't want him to have that money. They wanted to have all the money.
ED LARSON
This would have been his chance to have been like it was all bullshit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He didn't want... Or if they would have just paid him, he would have just kept his fucking mouth shut which is the issue here. So then he did sue, he did settle outside of court.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He sued for $900 million.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
That's a lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they settled.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they settled.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he made-
ED LARSON
For $900.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Here's some McDonald's money, that's good at any McDonald's.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the lawsuit is convoluted as lawsuits always are but basically Brittle and an ex-producer who was pushed out wanted their cut. And when the studios didn't give it to them, they went public with the sworn statement from Judith Penney. Although in the end it obviously did not fucking matter. Now Ed and Lorraine Warren made a lot of money over the course of their career. Even though they never charged a so-called client, they co-authored nine books, constantly toured the paranormal lecture circuit for 30 years, and they worked as consultants on multiple movies. According to Judith Penney, even though she said she loved Ed Warren, Ed and Lorraine's real god was money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck yeah, dude. Pink Floyd said fucking watch that shit. Money, dude. Grand corrupter, man. Gotta think about that.
MARCUS PARKS
But while the Conjuring movies may very well be good superhero fun, it's really a game of ratios. In my opinion the gulf between fantasy and reality concerning the Warrens in these movies is just as large as the difference between what their actual appearances were when compared to dreamboats Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
In other words, when you hear based on a true story, a more accurate statement would be vaguely based on a story from some guy kinda. And I would also advise you to take everything making such claims with a massive grain of salt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So thank you for listening to this series that was based on a true story. Absolutely accurate.
MARCUS PARKS
100%.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
100%. I don't care what anybody says. I do kind of feel like bad that I can't ask Ed Warren for marriage advice because between him, Woody Allen, and Jimmy Savile, they made their marriages work. And that's important.
MARCUS PARKS
I actually don't think Jimmy Savile ever married.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he was a bachelor.
MARCUS PARKS
He was a confirmed bachelor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Married to the lifestyle. See, it's just hard to talk about him. So patreon. com/lastpodcastontheleft, go and see us talk about this in person, flopping or jaws on a camera. Got to TikTok @LPontheleft, help China. Get on there. Go to lastpodcastontheleft. com, buy tickets for us live. We're everywhere.
ED LARSON
Seattle, baby! June 8th, we're coming for you fuckers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're coming.
MARCUS PARKS
Seattle, we're actually very close to selling out Seattle. So if you want tickets, if you wanna come see us, get your tickets now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please do that.
MARCUS PARKS
I got Washington DC, here in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, we're coming near the end of the year. And of course we've got our dates in London and Reykjavik in October.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's in addition to our big, big, big tour throughout Australia in August.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Keep that volcano pumping, Iceland. I wanna see it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm so scared.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
What are you scared of? He said fucking a football field away. You're like that's cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're not scared of a volcano?
ED LARSON
No, not the Iceland ones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What about when we're flying above them?
MARCUS PARKS
No, this one's fine. This isn't that kind of volcano.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pompeii.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean yeah, it probably is gonna destroy the town of Grindavik and it might destroy the Blue Lagoon which is one of their biggest tourist destinations. But otherwise-
ED LARSON
Did we fucking miss the Blue Lagoon?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't worry, there are actually better hot springs to go to outside. The Blue Lagoon is a tourist trap.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
There are much cooler places to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shots fired. They need a Six Flags.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I'll take y'all to some cool ones outside of Reykjavik.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well this was great. So next week we're gonna have a one off little true crime story that I think is gonna be really disgusting. And then we are doing another long form series that I also find fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS
Very fascinating. This is gonna be a story with a lot of ins, a lot of outs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And not like John Holmes.
MARCUS PARKS
This is a story that I've been wanting to tell for a long time. But it's a complicated story, it's a fascinating story. For me it's one of the great stories of the 1970s. So I'm really excited about this.
ED LARSON
You've been talking about doing this one ever since I joined the show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Been waiting to be ready for this one because it's like this one we wanna fucking get right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah. So excited.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. This is gonna be great. And also this is... Just remember, there's nothing wrong about being a con person if everybody's having fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right? And then also cut people in. That's my thing is that if you want to run a proper con, pay the right people out. Right? Like you gotta give the people that help you. Help them, help you, help them.
MARCUS PARKS
And make sure everyone is above the age of 18.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Key. Because then it don't matter. Because them big floppies can be out no matter what because that's not a little girl, that's a woman.
ED LARSON
I say 21. 21 is a good number.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think 21 is safer, yes. Because then you can go to a bar.
ED LARSON
Yeah, then you can go to a bar with them and have a good time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
24 is probably even better because then they can start developing their brains and have a decent conversation with you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That seems to be a hassle, Eddie.
MARCUS PARKS
All right, 24.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very good.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And to also respond yes, I am quite like Richard Pryor in terms of my scope and abilities as a scope and abilities as a comedian.
MARCUS PARKS
Scope and abilities. So you're to Richard Pryor what Ed Warren was to Jimmy Savile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Great.
ED LARSON
Even though you look like a cross between Richard Dreyfuss and Richard Moranis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. I take that as a compliment.
MARCUS PARKS
Not bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
ED LARSON
Hail Contact in the Desert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. See you there, bro!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
ED LARSON
I'm so excited.
MARCUS PARKS
It'll be fun.
ED LARSON
I can't wait for this.
MARCUS PARKS
Goodbye.