“These are things I have personally experienced. But let me remind you,” Ed goes on, “that this kind of gross phenomena is definitely reported in other exorcisms, ones in which I have had no part. In 1977, for example, about a year before Pope Paul VI died, an unaccountable spate of possessions apparently occurred to a number of Vatican nuns and priests. In those cases, the possessed not only took on grotesque forms, they regurgitated nails, broken glass, bile, and live animals.” Ed flips open a book entitled Begone Satan. “And here's what happened to the woman in Earling, Iowa, during a twenty-three-day exorcism in 1928.”
Countless brats of devils also interrupted the process of exorcism by their disagreeable and almost unbearable interferences. As a result of these disturbances, the woman's face became so distorted that no one could recognize her features. Then, too, her whole body became so horribly disfigured that the regular contour of her body vanished. Her pale, deathlike and emaciated head, often assuming the size of an inverted water pitcher, became as red as glowing embers. Her eyes protruded out of their sockets, her lips swelled up to proportions equalling the size of hands, and her thin emaciated body was bloated to such enormous size that the pastor and some of the Sisters drew back out of fright, thinking the woman would be torn to pieces and burst asunder. At times her abdominal region and extremities became as hard as iron and stone. In such instances the weight of her body pressed into the iron bedstead so that the iron rods of the bed bent to the floor.
“This is what our friend the devil does to people,” Ed says in obvious contempt. “Still, no matter how intense and irrational the phenomena might become, it is unthinkable that the exorcist would ever break during the process. Working in the interest of good, the exorcist and those around him must contend with repulsive physical phenomena that would make even the most hardened individual recoil in shock and disgust But yet the exorcist endures, and keeps on repeating the ritual over and over again, sometimes to the point of near-death, until finally the possessing entities identify themselves and leave in the name of God.
“When the exorcist steps in,” Ed concludes, “he confronts the real thing. After the whole sorry process is over, the individual is freed from an alien spirit that, by its own admission, seeks to dominate man and bring about his total ruin and destruction. For the exorcist, though, the ordeal really isn't over at all. No exorcist ever comes away from a confrontation with the Awful One unscathed. He forever remains alone, apart from other men, feeling the sting and biting hate the devil reserves for God. That is the true nature of major exorcism!”
What is the worst case Ed and Lorraine ever investigated?
“That is something I never, ever talk about,” admits Ed, suddenly turning quite serious. “The case was almost the end of us, that's for sure. We found ourselves taken to a place out of this world that you'd never believe existed, even if I were to describe it. Every minute, every second of those long hours was so unbelievable, so incomprehensibly horrible, that I believe I now know the true meaning of hell, and the value of life on earth.”
*Vrais et Faux Possedes, 1956.
XIV
The Enfield Voices
“Anyone alive in that car down there?” the Pennsylvania state trooper wanted to know.
The black Ford LTD had careened off the highway, rolled down a steep embankment, and came to rest some thirty feet below the road surface in a pile of ice and snow.
“Everybody’s okay,” said the driver,
After the trooper called a tow truck, he flipped open his leather notebook and asked, “What happened?”
A tractor-trailer driver told him: “I was trailing the car about a half mile behind. For no apparent reason, it went out of control. The back end swung from left to right, right to left, until the driver got it back under control. A couple of seconds later, the car went into a full spin. But the spin wasn’t normal: it looked to me like the wheels of the car weren’t even on the road—that the car was actually spinning in the air! And then, while it was in the air, it seemed to be pushed from the side, before it went off the road, over the ridge, and down the embankment.”
“Who’s the driver?” the trooper asked next.
“I am,” said Ed Warren. “The car went out of control twice. The second time I wasn’t able to steer it...”
What really happened, though, was a different matter—something few policemen would have understood even after a lengthy explanation.
“Everything was fine,” Ed recalls. “It was a clear day. Lorraine and I had been talking about the status of a number of cases we were involved in at the time. Two or three minutes before the accident we got to talking about the Amityville case which as it goes, was no different or more violent than the other cases we’d been going over. Suddenly the car went out of control.
“Now, I drive fifty thousand miles a year, so I can handle my own car. But this was unnatural; it felt like an immense hand belted the car from behind. The first time the rear of the car lifted off the ground. The second time the whole car went up! We traded ends once or twice, and the next thing I knew we were flying down an embankment at fifty miles an hour, backwards. The only thing that kept us from crashing at the bottom was the snow the car plowed up while it was going down.
“Incredibly, there was no damage, except for some bent car trim, A wrecker towed the car up the hill and we were on our way within an hour. The strange thing is,” Ed puts in, “the night after we were in Amityville and the swirling black entity con fronted me, it projected a vision of that automobile accident Ironically, the incident happened in the Poconos, in a place they call the Lord’s Valley!”
Next to exorcism, demonology is perhaps the most dangerous business on earth. Therefore, no case is ever routine to the Warrens. Indeed, with each succeeding year, and each additional case, the Warrens live in even greater peril. For after devoting their whole lives to the study of the supernatural, Ed and Lorraine Warren risk their lives each and every time they become involved in a case where more than earthbound human spirits are active. And though they may face down vile, blasphemous forces or help resolve a disturbance so the tenants can live in peace, one way or another the spirits they encounter continue to plague them for years to come. It is an unpleasant, though real, hazard of their work.
An exorcist goes through elaborate preparations before confronting the demonic. Is there anything special the Warrens do to guarantee their own safety?
“Before we go forward with a serious case,” answers Lorraine, “we take a number of precautions. First, we thoroughly assess the people we’re dealing with. We won’t put our lives in jeopardy for someone who’s going to turn around again and bring in the same spirits a week later. So we start by looking for sincerity and need on the part of the person or family who’s called on us. After that, we examine our own motivations and conscience. Are we the right people to take on this case? Could someone else—perhaps the clergy—do a better job right from the beginning? However, we’ve never once backed out of a case because it was too difficult or dangerous.
“Now, if we decide to go ahead with an investigation, then we take additional precautions,” she goes on. “We’re Catholic, and I’ll usually spend an afternoon or longer in church, praying for our safety and effectiveness. I use a rosary. Those of us in this work are aware of the very real power of the rosary. If it’s a bad case, we’ll have a number of priests praying for us, and many times we’ll also have a Mass said. Some might think this strange, but from experience we know there is no other way: it takes more than good intentions to be effective in this work. Let’s not mince words. We’re not dealing with an idea, or a concept, or an illusion. We’re dealing with the real, physical manifestation of the devil in one of his many powerful forms.
“As for what protects us,” Lorraine concludes, “that’s something else entirely. When we finally do go into a home where these negative spirits are at work, we wear special, blessed holy medals, and we carry a relic of a saint. Against demonic forces, these s
piritually positive items carry a lot of metaphysical weight. But we never really go in a home alone: many others go in with us in spirit. Beyond that, we find we do have the help of positive spirits in particularly difficult cases. As a clairvoyant I am also able to communicate with spirit guides who give us both protection and guidance. Ultimately, Ed owes his safety to Saint Michael, whose presence is sometimes shown to us in positive symbolic signs.
“In short, you don’t get to do this work and stay alive all at the same time without help from above; and I mean sometimes physical help from above. There are occasions where total mayhem is occurring inside a house when Ed is about to go in. Then an impenetrable force will either surround the house, or two strong ‘hands’ will push Ed back, to prevent him from going in. We know the presence is of a positive—-perhaps even angelic—nature because the smell of perfume or fresh flowers is projected at the very same time. So, you see, we don’t just stroll into some hell-house and challenge the devil or his legion. Instead, if we’re successful in our work, it’s based on our knowledge of the supernatural, along with the prayers, concern, and guidance of all those who support us. If we didn’t take these precautions, or approached our work only out of curiosity, then there’s no two ways about it: we’d be dead by now!”
With that, Ed picks up the discussion. He’s just returned from England the day before. His trip to the United Kingdom was to visit a family in whose home inhuman spirit phenomena have been occurring with increasing regularity over the past three years. It was Ed’s third visit to Enfield in the last year alone. This time, the purpose of his visit was to gather evidence of the phenomena occurring in the house which could be used as proof for the need to exorcise the premises.
“This Enfield case makes Amityville look like a playhouse,” says Ed. “I mean that truly. The Lutzes were able to move out after twenty-eight days of terror; this is a case where the people can’t move out for economic reasons, and have had to put up with the disturbance for three years. Those who are being victimized, as the London press has exhaustively reported, are a divorced fifty-year-old woman and her three children who live together in a government-supported council house in the north London suburb of Enfield. In the family there are two girls, aged fifteen and twelve at this time, and a boy of eight. Though phenomena first erupted in August 1977, the case began in 1976, when the two girls drew inhuman entities into the house after playing with—you guessed it!—a Ouija board. The girls had no sinister purposes in using it: they simply had nothing else to do, and were playing with the board as a game. Unfortunately for them, London is a spiritually active place. As a result, the girls made contact with a demonic spirit that did its thing, and wrangled permission out of the girls to enter the house. A few weeks later, this spirit infested their home, but it didn’t come alone: it brought six buddies along! Those six spirits are present in the home right now as I am speaking.
“When the spirits were first drawn in, the usual run of infestation phenomena erupted: knockings, rappings, scratchings, poundings, and so forth. As time went on, the phenomena upgraded Objects materialized, people levitated—especially the girls—and a number of black forms manifested and floated around the house at night. After the mother reported the problem to the local police constabulary, the police investigated the complaint, but to no avail. In no time at all, however, the press got wind of the case and reporters and psychic researchers descended on this brick rowhouse, and between 1977 and 1978 they not only put the family in the public eye, they thoroughly documented the reality of the phenomena occurring there. Then they went away, without anyone once telling these people how they could get rid of the disturbance. In fact, it seems no one even knew what was happening. The case had been dubbed a so-called ‘poltergeist attack,’ and was left at that. When I was in England in the summer of 1978, the case was brought to my attention, and I visited the family.
“At that time,” Ed goes on, “I spent a week in Enfield. I thoroughly interviewed all the members of the family, separately and together, while witnessing the phenomena go on around me in the house. As a demonologist, I was able to see that these individuals were being systematically oppressed, and sometimes even possessed, by inhuman spirits. For example, the girls would levitate off the floor, crisscross in the air, and then be set back down again in a display of inhuman power. Every week, in fact, it seemed one or the other of these two girls would be subject to levitation, often in the company of witnesses. The mother told me she has walked into the girls’ bedroom and found her younger daughter sound asleep, levitating in midair. On other occasions, she has witnessed her daughters rise up and down on the bed, ‘like a yo-yo’ as she says, with none of them able to control the activity. The children also spoke about a black mass that manifests itself in their bedrooms at night and terrorizes them with its presence.
“Even as I talked with the family, things would rise up in the air and float around the room. One evening a wooden chair lifted up in the air, stayed still for a moment, then exploded. On another occasion, a big, hefty rock the size of a softball manifested out of thin air in the middle of the living room and slammed to the floor with a thud! I later took that rock to a geologist at the University of London, without telling him where I got it I simply asked the professor to tell me where the rock could have come from. ‘The stone is indigenous to only one place in the British Isles,’ he told me. ‘That place is the Isle of Wight.’ The Isle of Wight is of course located in the English Channel, some seventy-five miles southwest of London, as the crow flies.
“More serious than the outward phenomena,” Ed continues, “is what’s happening to the children in this home. The girls, in particular, are coming under episodes of possession where they take on the features of an ‘old dead woman,’ according to the mother, ‘and have the strength of an Amazon.’ The most dangerous feature of the possession episodes is that one of the daughters is often caused to attack her mother and attempts to kill her with her bare hands—and a number of times she’s almost succeeded. A few weeks before I arrived, one of the girls came under possession. After the possessing entity stalked around the house, it put the girl in a state of agitated frenzy. The mother was forced to bring the daughter to a local hospital, where doctors worked for six or seven hours trying to bring her out of it The incident suddenly stopped after the spirit withdrew from her body, at which time she got up and simply walked out of the casualty ward.
“By far, though, the most compelling aspect to this case is the physicalized voice manifestations that occur in the house. The voices of six different spirits talk out loud in the room. It’s as though there were six invisible people present. It’s incredible: you can’t believe it even when you’re there!
“Even while the family is eating in the kitchen, the voices are speaking in another room! The British Society for Psychical Research—who worked on the case before I came in—went over the house with a fine-tooth comb, and determined that in no way were the voices being projected by loudspeakers or by any other electronic means.
“The voices themselves speak with a distinct cockney accent. The demonic spirit is a mimic, so here it speaks in cockney because the family can understand it although one of the spirits does lapse off into German when it prefers. And these voices are not a matter of some occasional phrase or sentence they talk all the time. These spirits not only talk out loud to the people in the room, when no one is addressing them, they talk to each other! They talk more than the people do.
The British Society for Psychical Research have their own recordings of these spirit voices, but because their organization is private, the evidence has so far not been made available to the general public. I went there for the express purpose of getting these voices on tape which could be used to document the need for exorcism.”
Did Ed get a recording of the voices?
“You better believe it,” he replies, tapping a pair of cassettes before him on the table. “Although it’ll take some time before the content of these tapes can
be analyzed, the evidence is right here. And in my estimation, it represents some of the most important evidence yet on the existence of the inhuman spirit I’ll play them now....”
The tapes run for well over three hours; what comes across on them is something truly incredible. The recordings were made while Ed and his two assistants, Paul Bartz and John Kenyhercz, interviewed the mother and her three children in the Enfield home. While the three men were questioning the family, other voices—those of spirits—can be heard speaking out loud in the room at the same time: “Let’s put the lights out”; “Go pull the wallpaper down”; “Throw the table”; “Stop him from going into that room” were among the many comments the voices made when not being addressed by human beings in the house. Once every so often, a bizarre parrot-like voice interjected itself saying only, “Hello.” Sometimes the other spirits joined the parrot voice in a round of hello’s. Not all the sounds produced by the spirits were in the form of language, though. Fully ten percent of the recording is taken up with grunts, moans, “yeccchs,” and the imitation of animal sounds, of which the most often repeated is that of a barking dog.
As for communicating with these spirits, there was no evident problem. Sometimes the spirits addressed the people in the room; sometimes the people in the room addressed the spirits. The quality of the voices is extremely raspy, and gutteral. The elocution is definitely cockney—in fact, so cockney it’s quite hard for the American ear to sort out. The quality of the spirits’ statements would place them low on a scale of human intelligence, though they’re far from ignorant. Most every question put to the spirits was answered.
The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren Page 26