Best Of: Hauntings
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Hey everybody, how you doing? It's your boy, the Ham Daddy, Ed Larson here, talking to you. The boys are on vacation. Henry and Marcus, they're doing nice stuff with their families. They love each other, and they love their families, and it's good, and I'm happy for them. I...

Stay at home. Australia was enough for me, but I'm in the studio with Rob today and he cut together this really cool best of the hauntings episodes since I've joined. Now, I got to tell you, I love all you people. It's been this has been amazing. It has been overwhelming this past year. It's almost a year.

I've been doing this show. You believe that? And the response has been overwhelmingly positive. You know, I love you guys. This has been a treat for me. It's emotional, to be honest with you. But, you know, if you get your emotions too worked up,

That's when the ghosts come in. So today, we're going to take a trip through our hauntings episodes this year, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did. It's been a real treat doing these shows and learning more about ghosts. And when I was a kid,

you know i used to have a lot of weird ghost things happen in my in my family and my life you know and i've talked about them on the show before i did i talked about them on open lines and stuff but um you know this you know so the haunting stuff i was really curious about but nothing's happened to me really in a long time and i think it's because i smoke enough weed

to keep the ghosts at bay, to keep them scared of coming around big old Eddie Toons because I'm going to get hungry and I'm going to eat you ghosts. Or maybe there have been ghosts and I just thought that it was the pot smoke that was deforming around me and it was the shadowy figure. It was actually the weed smoke I was building. So maybe that's what happens. That's it. The weed that I smoke, the smoke comes out

The ghost is there. The weed smoke kicks the shit out the ghost and the ghost goes bye-bye. Well, here are some episodes where the ghost did not go bye-bye. And I love you guys. This is Last Podcast on the left. We're on vacation. Thanks for listening to a best of episode. We love you, baby. And we'll be back soon.

But perhaps it's said that the Madame returned to New Orleans because many believe that her spirit still haunts her former mansion. See, since the LaLaurie family sold the mansion in 1837, it's had countless tenants and has gone through multiple incarnations.

After it was sold to a man named Charles Caffin, he renovated and expanded the mansion, giving it a third story and the severe fortress-like appearance it has today that honestly makes it look even scarier than it did when Madame LaLaurie owned it. It's almost as if the house itself grew into its reputation. It's awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he did it right. He really did. No, he I mean, it feels like he made it spooky on purpose. Oh, yeah. I did look at a diagram on the inside. It's beautiful. Yeah. It would be so nice if it wasn't all full of all that rage death. You know, you go through it's got the courtyard of the middle is nice. It's got a little fountain in their house has a courtyard in the middle. Me, too. It's really pretty. Yeah, it is. It's very European.

But it wasn't until 1889, with the publication of a book called The Haunted House in Royal Street, that the Lawlery Mansion began to build its current reputation.

That book included many of the stories we still hear today, like the ghost of the little girl named Leah who jumped off the roof to escape Madame LaLaurie, who can sometimes be seen teetering on the edge, deciding what to do next. There were also reports of knocks, whispers, groans, the clanking of chains, and the shuffling of feet. But perhaps hoping to trade on this notoriety, the LaLaurie mansion briefly became, of all things,

A furniture store in 1892. Went retail. Yeah. People need their furniture. Now, they would see the ghost of the little girl up top of the house. Yes. That is still seen to this day. So do you think that you could call that a gargoyle?

Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl. Quite possibly. Yes. Thank you. Someone just made a new burlesque troupe. Roller derby. Yeah.

Now, we don't know if this is true because it's in the more sensational LaLaurie book, but it was said that the chairs and sofas in this furniture store would regularly be found torn up and splattered with filth. I've heard this a couple of times. There's another book. They talk about this story. This is one of the big LaLaurie mansion hauntings. Supposedly, each time a new piece of inventory into the house, it would be covered with urine, feces and blood by the next morning. And this continued even after they posted a guard with a shotgun.

Other sources, however, say that this splattering of human waste only happened a couple times and could very well have come from all too human sources. I do want to ask our listeners, sidestorieslpotl at gmail.com, that run retail on the first floor on Royal Street. I've run, but they have great art galleries over there. There's really cool spots over there. How many times have you had to deal with the

Rivers of shit. Slopping all over your stuff. It could just be people looking to get a deal. You know? His shirt's soaked with shit. His hands are covered in piss. I'm not paying full price for this. You should have let me sit down.

That's on you. Now, over the years, it's been said that whoever came into possession of the house was soon haunted not just by ghosts, but personal misfortune. Oh, yeah. In 1893, the house was sold to an Italian immigrant named Fortunato Greco. Should have named my man on the Fortunato.

And this is my wife, a misfortune. Oh, wow, that's good. That's two of those in one word. Word jokes. His nearby grocery store was never able to turn a profit. They said that's the curse of the LaLaurie Mansion. But in a story that runs contrary to that curse, Greco flipped his luck when he noticed that the house was becoming a tourist attraction due to the popularity of the book about the LaLaurie Mansion.

So Greco started charging people a dime so they could take their own personal ghost hunts. Oh, yeah. And then he just opened it up to everybody. Yeah. It was like a boarding house. And then it was like that was what they say is the true misfortune here was the fact that they just came in and a bunch of us.

Chitheads, tourists arrived and destroyed the whole fucking house. Just ripped up the floors. Just really destroyed it from the bottom down. And this is like what, the 1920s? No, this is 1890s. Oh, okay. Yeah, he set up concessions. He started selling merch.

You know, like all the because back in the day, like you could get really ghoulish souvenirs from places like this. Like sometimes like if you if you like I remember when they dug up the Bell Gunness house, like you could go and I think you could buy like pieces of bone from her victims. I just weird shit like that. There was also pictures of bodies was very common shit like this. Yeah, you could you probably walk away with something really awful.

All right. Cool. Yeah. Man, stupid regulations. Sounds like this guy was successful. He was. I mean, by 1895. By leaning in. Yeah, he leaned in. He opened a saloon on the ground floor. He called it the Haunted Exchange.

Stayed open for a good 15 years, which I think in New Orleans bar life, 15 years is a good run. It was a good run, but I think it's because you leaned into the thing and you let the ghosts be employed. You know what I mean? Give them an opportunity. Now, they're a part of the industry. The buy-in employees things, what do you say with that idea where you have the employees? Shareholders? Yeah, they're shareholders. Mm-hmm.

But once the neighborhood became home to more Italian and Sicilian immigrants, many of the older buildings were turned into tenement housing, and the Lollary Mansion was no exception.

It was during this period that a tenant in the LaLaurie mansion was reportedly murdered in his room in a most brutal fashion. It was suspected to be a robbery gone bad because his room had been ransacked, but nothing of value was taken. Very much like poltergeist activity. Interestingly, though, one of his friends claimed that the victim had complained of being bothered by quote unquote sprites before straight up saying that there was a demon in the house that would not rest until the victim met a bloody end. And

And soon after, that's exactly what happened. Apparently, this is kind of where a lot of the ghost stories got legitimized, was during the tenement house days of the little lorry mansion, where a lot of people said they saw stuff that was, you know, just straight up constant ghost activity. Yeah.

I imagine that's probably true, but it's still New Orleans. People get murdered. It's still also... You don't need a ghost to kill people in New Orleans. And just being a tenement house in and of itself makes the house sort of kind of crazy. The atmosphere is kind of crazy. You never know what's going on. People bring chains from Italy. Mm-hmm.

Now, the LaLaurie mansion remained an apartment building for most of the 20th century. But in 1969, a doctor named Harry Russell Albright bought the building outright and lived there for 30 years, where he said he never saw or heard anything that could be considered paranormal. I just feel like that's a guy in one of those, like, latex bubble suits. You know what I mean? Where it's just like...

yeah, I didn't see anything crazy in the shower. Meanwhile, he's got like a dozen roses jammed up his ass. He's choking himself to sleep every night. Nothing weird here. Yeah, I drink piss. Normal house. This buckle doesn't make me bleed as much as this buckle.

Completely normal house. But in 2006, the Lollary Mansion was purchased by none other than one of our finest actors, Sir Nicholas Cage. Please, Mr. Cage, please tell anybody out there in podcast land, we've been trying to reach you. We know that you have a form that you have to fill out to reach you. What do we have to do to get that form on the top of the

pile. I want to meet you. Yes. By the way, I like that you called him Sir Nicholas Cage because I feel like he's an American knight. Oh, yes. I feel like he's American royalty. Oh, he is. Very much so. He's very important to us.

I was hoping he'd pick up on that. Reportedly, Cage wanted to use the Lollary Mansion to write, quote, the next great American horror novel. Although he admits he never got that far with the book. Actors can't read. But that's not their fault. Their jobs are to emote. They can read. They just can't write. They can't write. Yeah. They have to read the scripts. There's not like some sort of like script man who just tells lines to actors. No, that's what Ken does.

If Ken calls me, he goes over the lines. I have an earpiece whenever I do it. Recently, I put an index card on the people on the other side. That's great. That's all acting is done. Yeah. You just put the blinders on them like a bunch of horses. Someone bring him a salad. Is this sweet greens here? What?

I can't go without 20 cc's of chia seeds. Well, according to Nicolas Cage, he didn't experience anything either, but he also refused to sleep in the house. He did, however, make a fun joke when he bought it. He said other celebrities, they got beachfront property. I got ghost front property. That means I got ghost front property. Thank God this book was never written. He's not a writer.

He's not a writer. Can you not do it like the Cage, though? I mean, like, you know, some people. It's ghost front property. But in the end, Cage admitted that he bought the mansion pretty much because he'd been obsessed with the haunted mansion since he was a kid. We know why you bought the mansion. Where did he sleep?

Anywhere else. He had many homes. He had many homes. In New Orleans? Yeah. I mean, no, he had, he owned, he bought the Lothery Mansion in a haunted church. Oh, okay. So he slept in the haunted church. He was covering his fucking, he was covering all his angles. I sleep next to the bells. My problem is with this place is it's too insulated. Now, it's said that Nicolas Cage came to great misfortune during the three years he owned this house and that his career hit the skids for a bit.

But after checking out his IMDB page, the years 2006 to 2009 were pretty standard fare for Nick Cage. But it was the beginning of the dip of his box office numbers. That's the key here, man. Not quite. I don't know. Not quite. While 2006, admittedly, that was Wicker Man. Not the B! Not the B! Not the B!

He did get to punch several women. He did. He punched, what, six or seven women? All of the cult members as he walked down the line, you know? Yeah, he punched a lot of people. Yeah, and that was fun. And it could be argued that Wicker Man, over time, is a net positive for Nicolas Cage because we all talk about it all the time. It's not a great film. It's a horrible film. It's not even that fun to watch for kitschy purposes. No, worst thing to happen to Wickerson's fat grandpa. Yeah, man. Yeah.

But he also had a massively successful National Treasure sequel in 2007. That's fine for the numbers and Ghost Rider, though, which was a flop. It was a flop. Ghost Rider was a flop. But in 2009, he got to work with Werner Herzog on Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans. Fucking love this movie. Top three Nick Cage movie. Probably one of the lowest performing movies that he had ever done. I read it did quite well. It did better than expected. Did you ever use my lucky crap?

pipe my lucky crack pipe that's what i'm saying shoot him again his soul still dance through my favorite lines in the movie i love that lieutenant what really wiped out nicholas cage during this time was that he had a crooked manager who stole all his money plus he got fucked pretty hard by the stock market crash in 2008 that can't be leveraged neither of those things can be blamed on madame dollory you know

And he had to sell all his comic books. Yeah. That was sad for him. That was sad. He had to sell, he got that illegal dinosaur skull and he had to sell that back. Yeah. Because it turned out it was illegal. Man, how is a dinosaur skull illegal? It's because it belongs in a museum. Who gives a shit? The museum. Yeah, the museum cares. I think it was stolen from a museum. Oh, it was stolen from, I thought they, oh, okay. Basically, there's a lot, Hobby Lobby, uh,

goes through this. I want to do a whole episode about this. Maybe we will, but it's a lot. Talking about the illegal antiquities market is very interesting because there's a whole world on selling shit that is not supposed to be sold to anybody because those are all supposed to go to scientific research for the most part because that's who's paying to dig it up. So they're supposed to go in various places, but then these guys come in, they basically steal it or they do their own illegal archaeological digs, which is fucking a great...

concept the idea of being in one of those is really fucking cool how is it illegal I guess if you're on like a national park or something it's not your land well you have to sneak into a place that's largely either government owned or you have to or it's kind of some kind of a

national park, like some kind of endowed place that you're not supposed to be there for. I don't know all the rules. Side stories, LPOTL at gmail.com. Please, if you are a student of archaeology, explain to me why it's bad to pirate bones. You can't download a skeleton. Palaeontology.

Yeah, I want to fuck him. Please, any one of you nerds. However, it is rumored that during the years that Cage owned the home, he was suffering from terrible nightmares that he attributed to the curse of the Lollary Mansion. He

He went to a medium who told him that the only way to break the curse and stop the nightmares was to buy a grave as close to Marie Laveau's as possible. Yes, it's true. His grave is beautiful. Now, this is prime graveyard real estate in New Orleans. This is St. Louis Cemetery number one. This is arguably some of the most sought after graveyard real estate this side of Père Lachaise in Paris. It's a nice. It is a nice. You go down there. That's how you know you are New Orleans celebrity status. Or at least it would be a royalty status.

People wanted... That's just...

That's one of the places, if you get St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, you're a place in New Orleans history is assured. Like Drew Brees is going to be there. I don't know if he will. I don't know if he wants to be there. I don't know if he'll make it. He brought a Super Bowl back there. No, no, Drew Brees, if Drew Brees wanted to be buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, I think they'd let him. At least Kermit Ruffins. Can I get buried? I'm going to look this up. Terry, can I get buried?

in St. Louis, Terry, number 21. Oh, book. No, no, it's for tours. Okay, no, you can't just book it. I don't think there's going to be protocol on the internet for it. Like, there's not going to be a form to fill out. How me buried St. Louis cemetery. Nothing. It'd be cool if there was like trombone shorty got one. It was just like half a trombone sticking out the top. Yeah, that'd be incredible.

You're just not letting Imagineers in. But in the end, Cage was somehow able to convince the diocese in charge of St. Louis No. 1 to make room for the nine-foot-tall pyramid memorial that will one day be Nicolas Cage's final resting place. Oh, yes. They built it ahead of time. It's sitting there. Like, this big ass... It's huge. I think the Latin saying is, like, out of everything, one, or out of...

It is very, it is absolutely gorgeous. It's a giant pyramid. Have you seen it? Yeah. It's awesome. It's cool. Eventually, the bank foreclosed on Cage's house and the other haunted property owned in New Orleans, the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Chapel. But he still held onto the pyramid only because the IRS can't legally take cemetery plots. Dude, and this is why we discovered this right before the show. Where?

We're going to do our 2006 style movie living in a cemetery where if we all open up a morgue, like the three of us, we open a morgue and stuff. We ain't never got to fucking pay nobody ever again. We just live in a cemetery, dog. Just come over to your mausoleum drawer and knock on it. You roll out. That's my house. I get a flat screen in there. We're running cable from across the street. Yeah.

You got it made in the shade, brother. You know, we fucking put ice out. It's nice and cool. Fucking pop a Sigur Rós song in the cemetery on the soundtrack. Like, no, if we're going straight 2006, we got to pop like a Shin song in there. Oh, yeah. Mr. Brightside. Yeah. Definitely. We have to invite Zach Brad.

Yeah, you have to know. He has to come once a year. This is going to be a vibe. Think about Schmidt meets Little Miss Sunshine. When you get the vibe, put it together. You know, sprinkle some Seth Rogen in there. Yeah. We got some inappropriate. We got a guy farting.

That's going to be big. Some weed. Comedy. Some gay jokes that don't age very well. We get to live in the cemetery. You know what I mean? This is our lives, bro. This is past the pitch. This is what we're going to do. No property taxes. King fucker. What are you going to do? Government? I'm so sick. You know, so sick.

Now, after the bank foreclosed on the LaLaurie Mansion, it was bought by a Texas businessman named Michael Whelan, who still apparently owns the house to this day, but has a very small footprint on the Internet. Couldn't find out much about him. Yes. And this is also the story. I love it. We got one of the listener emails that was talking about a lady was on the French Quarter Phantom tour and she was walking on the, you know, you go through the you get to the end and all of a sudden you hearing all the story about the LaLaurie Mansion and it's when

freaks the fuck out. She starts calling. She says like, did you pay them? Have you been paid to say this? Have you been paid to say this about this house? And they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. And they say, watch her walk away, make a call. And basically you find out that she is personal friends with Michael Whalen. And they and her family were told to stay at the Lori mansion for the weekends and had never heard the story about what fucking happened in there. And so she's like, we are getting a fucking hotel.

he's getting a hotel i'm like freaked out oh it's haunted oh how risque yeah and then you find out like because that's the thing haunting stories are haunting stories sure but then this is the fucking worst level of a haunting story it's like you show up and i'm like oh yeah you're staying at john wayne gacy's house tonight you know like have fun welcome to death's plains i mean same time

I know you. I know you would do it, but if you're just a regular fucking person. Now, would you stay in the floorboards? Uh-oh, too big. Yeah, one listener who actually attended a party at the LaLaurie Mansion, they said that the current decor was, quote, sentient cocaine. That's awesome. Yeah, it's just very tacky, extraordinarily tacky. On the same block, I was looking it up, there's a place called the Haunted Hotel where you can go and people say that they've been seeing ghosts there. I don't know if I believe them. There's a Google

reviews. It's probably just a guy in a sheet. Yeah, this one lady said she went with her mom and she didn't tell her mom it was haunted and she was mad. She said they wouldn't call it haunted because the ghost was very nice. Oh, that's very cute. It's shared. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like when you do an Airbnb and there's like a guy living in the back house and you just got to live with him for a while. Yeah. He's just always out there hosing things down. Like, why are you out there trying to sleep? You come out here. I'll hose you down too. I know you will. I know you will.

But as the years have gone by, so too have the stories of Madame LaLaurie's cruelty grown beyond the realm of the grotesque. And now they sometimes include her husband as a sort of Dr. Mengele type accomplice. I am innocent! What the hell?

I am innocent. I'm not going to break the bank. Yeah. What did you call him, Henry? Mississippi Mengele? Yeah. Mississippi Mengele. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and the stories are outlandish. I mean, they claim that, you know, Dr. LaLaurie broke a woman's bones and refashioned her into a crab woman. Cool. Another says as a claim to like turned a woman into an armless, legless worm. Like, have you ever seen Todd Browning's Freaks? No, but I have seen Freaked.

And I really like that movie. Freaked is a great movie. Freaked is awesome. Top Browning's Freaks. There's a guy in the movie that's just a torso. And he can roll his own cigarettes with his own lips. That's pretty cool. I mean, it's upsetting for him, but it's very cool that he can do it. He flipped it and reversed it. He was living a pretty good life. Yeah, he figured it out.

for himself that's what you gotta do that's what you gotta do he's in that fucking final awesome scene where they're all like they're all about to fucking take down the acrobat and they're all like crawling through the mud and the rain and like he's got a fucking dagger in his teeth it's such a great fucking movie remember the worm guy from Freaked oh yeah it's nothing about it he's like would you wipe my ass would you wipe my ass oh my other favorite line is from Randy Quaid the fiddle fat

Love that fucking movie. The floor of the chamber in this story was permanently slick from puddles of fresh gore. Buckets of body parts were strewn about the room. Helter skelter. That's the worst part. It's not organized. You get a fucking container store employee. Is that what helter skelter means? All over the place, yeah. Willy nilly. It's a scarier version of willy nilly. Oh my god, imagine if they wrote willy nilly all over the walls of blood. Like,

It would have taken the temperature down. Like, actually, maybe the hippie movement's still alive. Oh, man, it would have taken them so long to figure out, like, I want to see, like, the detective that's like, willy-nilly, what's another name for it? Did Caesar do this? Sorry to cut you off. I don't know, I'll always concede the Florida said Caesar joke. The willy-nilly, goo-goo, gaga, baby pants murder? Yeah.

I don't know if that works.

But really, there's no need to make Madame LaLaurie worse than she already was. Even without the more extreme claims, Madame LaLaurie is still one of the great villains of American history. The star of a particularly evil chapter in a book that is itself already evil enough. Well, thank you for that! Spooky! Spooky! Sorry, that's my very rare occurrence of my Madame LaLaurie voice. I will take a bow!

She was very bad, man. She's bad. Bad bitch. Yeah, she was awful. Glad she's fucking dead. Yeah. We're all happy she's dead and not an immortal being. No, I mean, God knows.

She could still be there. You think so? I don't know. Yeah, maybe. We don't think that happened. It is good that she's a ghost if she is a ghost. You know, tortured. Yeah, she should be stuck there. Yeah, it'd be good. It's a beautiful piece of property, though. Yeah, it's a shame. It's worth like three point. I think Nicolas Cage bought it for three point seven million. Damn. Yeah, it's a hard at the fucking Royal Street's probably one of my favorite streets. Yeah. And all that.

in that area. There's a good African restaurant next door. I was looking for food. I got to go now. We are. We're going to go. We can't wait. We're doing it up. I'm very excited about our return in New Orleans.

Every brothel in New Orleans has got a different flavor. They got a bunch of different things. They got a bunch of different styles. You know, like one which he said, I want you to guess. He said he would say every other form of sexuality possible. But then the one thing they would never name that was always forbidden was sex in the French fashion. And so he's like, let me guess. Can I add any of you guess what the French?

fashion is and we're all like uh pissing in a dead woman sucking out the piss carving the eyes out of an infant shit and all the infant dead infant space and fucking the infant and eating shit you take the shit out of a dead man's ass and you and you stuff it inside a lady you eat the shit out of the ass and he's just like no no no no it's um it was oral sex we're like oh oh okay you asked us

You asked me. So that's French style, huh? Oh, yeah. Oh, oral sex. I thought it was when you shove a wedge of brie inside of a dead girl and then you look to see if you could see it in her mouth. It's like, no, no, no. People were unhygienic. It was blowjobs. And I was like, oh, interesting. And so he tells us this story and he's like, so this room has been has gotten some activity and I have various tools. And he put out a ghost box, which we always kind of feel like.

I was just looking to have fun. I was expecting nothing. He's bringing out toys and letting us play with them. That's it. That's what it was. He was like, we're walking around. Not guiding us. Not really. Just giving us toys. We had a couple of EMF readers. We had a couple of things that were like they would light up for various temperature changes and EMF changes. And there was a ball. They could put a ping pong ball out. But one of the things that he used, which I had never seen before...

which is two sets of dowel rods. And so what they were were two metal, kind of like sleeves. You call them diviner, yeah. Diviner tools. But they weren't traditional diviner tools, which are done in sort of like a stick. They're not dowsing rods. Yeah, it's not a dowsing rod, but it's these two things, these two sort of things. So they were metal rods in an L shape that would go in two little tubes that you would hold in your hands. And they're kind of loose. The two little L-shaped things are kind of loose. They swing. They're able to swing back and forth. Yes, and so basically,

he said, we like to set up a series of parameters, which goes on in this room. So we set up our like, okay,

stuff for, you know, like we'll turn on the ghost box and we'll let that roll. And what we'll do is we'll kind of generally talk and introduce ourselves and hang out in this room and see what happens. And these doweling rods will set up this idea that we'll ask questions and the doweling rods, if they swing wide opposite wise, it means yes. But if they cross over each other, it means no. I'm like, all right. So we kind of like thought

futz around for a while and do very shit. And then Jared, one of the members of Murderfist, he picks up the doweling rods and he's fucking with it. And he notices that they stand straight. So it's like you kind of balance them so they stand straight. But the one thing is, is that they didn't stay straight for everyone. No. I couldn't use them.

I had them and they were flopping all around. I was just like, I can't do this shit. There were a few people who grabbed them and they're flopping all over the place. But, you know, some people, you grab them and they just go straight forward. He went pin straight. And so he started asking questions and the thing started working.

So we asked several questions defining what they were talking to. You know, we said, is this an entity that's attached to this property in some way? I mean it. They just open to yes. Started asking, like, are you the person that's the subject of the story? Close.

to X to know. And he said that not only were they and I watched it, I have pictures of it. I'm standing in front of him reacting to it. I mean, there went white as a sheet. There are 15 people watching him. Yes. Not only went white as the sheep, it started sweating. Yeah. Yes. And so he said when they crossed, he said that he couldn't pull them apart whether he wanted to or not. They sort of link like they were fucking magnets. And then he linked across and we all sat there.

I mean it. It was wild. Other things started going off. Like, Natalie was holding an EMF reader in her, like, on her lap. And it bounced off. And Jared then said, did you just try to speak to Natalie? And it went swung open. Yes. We all fucking freaked out. Everyone's just like, holy fucking shit. Then he's like, there's weird kind of garbled stuff coming through the ghost.

The, the, the, the radio box is running this entire time. Mumbling's coming out. And our leader was like, see, the thing here is like, so it's, it's, it wouldn't just say random things. If it says stuff like there's something trying, struggling, either coming through or something's,

pinging this machine. It's doing something. Jared then asked the question, are you having problems using some of the high-tech toys that we're using right now to communicate with us? And I swear to fucking the devil himself. And I will attest to this as well, as will everybody else in the room. I had scares on the back of my neck standing up. The ghost box said, kind of. Like, it came out clear as a fucking die. It just came out.

And up until that point, it had been all garbled. Because that was one of the things that I sort of misunderstood about spirit boxes is that I didn't realize how fast they ran. Yeah, you see it's running through the channels at an extremely high rate. Yeah, I didn't realize how fast. Like, I thought it ran through a little bit slower. So every once in a while, like, so you're just getting, you know, everyone's like, yes, oh, hi. No, it is just, it's bringing, like, just these garbled messages that are running through so fast. And it really was clear as day.

Kinda. And then we sat there and we're like, okay. And then we asked her the question. She's like, what's your favorite drink? And then when it said vodka, I mean it, it said vodka. The ghost thing said vodka. We went downstairs. We got a shot of vodka. We put it back on the table. We put the EMF meter next to the vodka shot. The thing started shooting off. It was...

Truly wild. I finally saw something the way that Newkirk's described it. Whatever was in that room was trained like a fucking dog. It was like, that was wild. He said that he had not experienced anything like that in the last couple of trips. Because for a while, there was a little bit. Because once I started watching everybody get into it,

I will allow myself to step back from the skeptics to the skeptic side. Right. Because now I'm like, OK, good. I got all these people that are really believing it. But now there's a part I'm starting to ask the questions. Can he fake this? Yeah. What are the parlor tricks in which that he could possibly fake this? I watch him do like you can't control the ghost box because I've used one of those before.

And dude, that specific is fucking wild. And I don't know how he does that. The stuff with the... The only way you could fuck with those bars is with a magnet. Which, I mean, again, I don't know if he is David Coppafil or not. You know, because there's only one of those. But they're everywhere. They're possibly secret. Magicians, they always kind of lie about what they do in their private homes. But then...

After Jared was done. See, this is why Marcus is on the show. So, of course, right? All my years talking about this fucking horseshit. All of the years I spent, all the reading, all the things I've shown Marcus. Marcus is always just like, yeah, well, it's certainly not the Stooges. Or like he's got somebody he's just like thinking about music and something else. But it touched you.

after Jared was done so he puts down the rods and we've got we had like 45 minutes in this room and everyone's like at this point everyone's very satisfied like we've come to New Orleans we we shared a paranormal experience with a bunch of people uh and so everyone at this point like we're just we've got 10 more minutes in that room and everyone's got their EMF meters and everyone's just kind of talking about how crazy that was and I figured I'm

fuck it yeah let's pick up the rods yeah you never do that kind of stuff anyway i mean like i went to crescent city uh conjuring which was another great store i had a fucking psychic moment this is this whole trip was wild yeah and so i went and i picked up the rods and you know i got took them like a really nice like steady position and you know i had watched other people like them flip them around but with me i picked them up and again straight forward

It's like, oh, okay, cool. I was like, well, and I asked, am I communicating with anyone right now? And they just went.

Yeah. And they went to yes. Yeah. And that's the thing is that I was off in the corner with Carol. It was just me and Carolina off in the corner by ourselves. Tour guides talking to somebody else. Everybody else is like doing their own thing. And then I'm just like, and I just like, did you see that? She's like, yeah, I saw that. And so I started asking it more questions. Like I asked it, like, are you from new Orleans? And it's like, yes. Yeah.

And I asked it like, do you like having us around? Yes. Yeah. It was like getting excited. It was weird. It was doing stuff where it was like, do you like hanging out with people? And Jared asked that and it went to yes. And we're like, it started really, the energy kicked up in a way that I did not expect. Yeah. And every time that it answered a question of fucking chill went up through my entire body and I started feeling like,

Like, I started feeling what I was talking to. Like, I felt like I was speaking with someone very friendly. You got hard? Yeah.

Somebody who could make me hard. But then it's nice that Carolina's there so she could finish the ghost job. Am I right? All couple the benefits of their marriage license, that's one. Continue. So I felt that it was a very warm, friendly presence. And I felt that it was a woman. I felt it was like a female presence. Nice. And I felt like she was somewhat bawdy. Like,

Like kind of friendly. Like it's a sex worker. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Someone, somebody like a party lady. Yeah. So, yeah, who was like kind of fun. Like I didn't feel not for a single moment. Did I feel like scared or apprehensive or anything like that? That room made me feel none of that. Nothing like that. But the part that the part that made me that sent a chill up my fucking spine was I asked, are you ready to move on?

And it swung out to yes. And then I asked, is there anything we can do to help? And it went, no. Oh, yeah, dude. There was one. Oh, man. And it just, and I was like, oh, man.

It was crazy, dude. Oh, my God. And that's when, like, Jackie saw me. She's like, are you talking to a fucking ghost? I'm like, I'm talking to a ghost right now, Jackie. And that's when, like, everybody else in the room kind of started paying attention. It's like, guys, I've been talking to a ghost for, like, five minutes now. This is incredible. And if I...

And the picture, you can actually go to my Instagram at Marcus Parks. You can see the moment. And you can see the rods in the yes, like going into the yes position. And I honestly, y'all know me. Y'all know me. Y'all know what I stand for. All right. And yeah, I can be considered gullible. I consider me an experimental person.

person of thought that just kind of dives in and I don't know. I don't really even care. I don't care what's real or what's not real because all I fucking know is dog is fucking... I think I might have died in that fucking car accident or almost got into it in the way of Disneyland the other week. Nice. But that's just me. That's my own fucking problem. It's a mental problem I have. I think it's called Cotard Syndrome. I saw...

something happened that was extremely physical in a room and it happened right in front of me and I had several other ghost tour guys that were like, yeah, it's fucked up. It's happened. They're all like seeing about

Probably between like 10 to 20 of these. And I was just like, it's interesting because now I kind of know where you're, if you're, if you're walking through that type of scenario, it may sound credulous to you that we're outside of that room. I totally understand. We sound like crazy people, but I saw something, man. And I was fucking sober. Yeah. As sober as I could have been. Yeah. Because I got, I had gotten drunk earlier and then I went to sleep. I had a nap.

And then I got, I woke back up and I sorted myself out. Yeah. I was sober as well. Yeah. Uh, like I had like, that's the thing is that I can say that that night I both saw and experienced something truly paranormal for the first time. I experienced the paranormal, whatever the fuck it is. I don't know if it's an actual person, an actual spirit. I felt an actual presence, something,

speaking through me. Yes. I, uh, and I want to thank French quarter fantasy. Thank you. Jesus. For popping my hymen. Thank you for making my butthole big for those. So I, you know, I didn't experience it myself. I just saw from the side. I don't know what you'll experience. If you take a ghost tour, uh,

But especially that kind of environment, I expected nothing to happen. I expected absolutely nothing. I expected us to fucking wander around a room with a bunch of toys for 30 minutes and then make a bunch of jokes, get a drink and have a good night. That's all. Just have fun doing that and scaring each other. But no, it was a genuine contact. Genuine contact. So go check out French Quarter Phantoms. Also, Crescent City Conjures.

I went there and I had a very magical experience. An absolutely mesmerizing woman by the name of Tom Janee grabbed me and she's like, the color green is something that you need. And I was like, okay, you know, whatever. And then I go out to see Tank and the Bangas last night, the night, that night. And I didn't know that the theme of it was their album, the green album. And there was green everywhere. And then I went back there to go get to go talk to the lady again. And she wasn't in. But then I talked to the guy who owned the store was just

big, crazy looking dude with a head wrap and two huge dogs and like several chickens. And then I had to go back behind the store with him while he drank wine and we talked about magic for an hour. Honestly, it was great. Wow. It was cool. He's very frightening. But man, New Orleans. Woo.

Dude, the city's so good, they only made it once. Yep, and I can also say Euclid Records, also a fucking fantastic, incredible record store. I wish I could have spent two days in that place. Dude, can't wait. And, you know, we will be back, New Orleans. That is false or don't. I get it now. I finally get New Orleans. Right from your grave.

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But because we didn't give haunted dolls their full due, we're going to cover a slew of haunted dolls today. Starting with what inspired today's episode. My boy. Robert. The haunted doll. Bobby. You guys are fucking up right at the beginning. You're fucking up immediately. What? You can't call him Bobby. You call him Robert or you call him nothing. Robert, I'm sorry. Yes. Good. Ed. Sorry, Robert. There are a lot of rules.

Robert the Haunted Doll is the soup Nazi of haunted objects. He's very popular. He's very popular. There's a lot of work in there, but if you want to get that muscatani, you're going to have to play by the rules. You guys ever seen Robert?

Not in person. No. I've had friends see Robert before because it's a Florida doll. He's from Key West. Yeah, Key West. And they all say he's fucking terrifying. Oh, it's very scary. Robert the doll was the subject of an entire book by an author of The Paranormal named David Sloan, who first met Robert the doll in 1996. Sloan, by the way, makes it a point.

to say in his book that he was investigating the paranormal before it got popular. Yeah, it was like a total scene back then, but you know, yeah, it's totally different now because back in the day, like Bigfoot would like hang out, you know, like you could fucking talk to Loch Ness would like, he'd just like be there or fucking whatever, you know, you'd have to pay for a meeting group.

Pre-Ghostbusters. Oh, yeah. Well, more like pre-paranormal, like pre-Ghostbro. Pre-Ghostbro because also, remember, Dan Aykroyd started Ghostbusters because he was one of us. He was a total obsessive with this content, but it was not

It was not popular. Yeah. Have you ever read the original like screenplay to Ghostbusters or heard about like the original ideas? I just know it was supposed to be Belushi. No, it's well, yeah, it was supposed to be Belushi. But the original concept, like the original script to Ghostbusters is insane. It's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. But it make it's fucking crazy. I'm going to make that movie at once.

Which is honestly, that was probably a good creative choice. The proton pack is honestly more fun. That's more iconic. Futuristic. Yeah. Well, author David Sloan became obsessed with Robert the doll after visiting a man named Daryl Meyer, who owned the house where Robert the doll had lived for a number of years, mostly in the attic.

Now, Meyer was skeptical that a doll could cause any sort of paranormal activity. But when David Sloan asked to see the attic where Robert had spent so many decades, a nearby rotary phone flew off the receiver. And that was one of those things that happened regularly around Robert the Haunted Doll. Yeah. Well, rotary phone, they shook, you know, the phone could have fell off. That's bad. That's bad wiring. Yeah. It flew though. It shouldn't just be shaken. But the homeowner shrugged it off as if this was something that just happened all the time.

But even though he didn't believe in the paranormal, the homeowner still let David Sloan, a total stranger, rummage around in his attic. Sloan found that the room still held several pieces of child-sized furniture, all built for

for Robert the Doll. And that was real. That was before Robert the Haunted Doll became, like, publicized or whatever. They did create a whole area where this doll could just live. Yeah. Now, admittedly, Robert the Doll very much looks like a cursed object. Its face is pockmarked and nearly featureless, and it somewhat resembles the prosthetic faces that were given to disfigured soldiers during World War I. It also has the definition of a doll's eyes, lifeless eyes, black eyes.

Eddie, you actually did some good Google searching right before here, but it is important to remember we did learn this. When you type in Robert the Sailor doll, you need to include Robert.

Haunted. Because if not, it brings up a whole twink universe that I didn't know was there. There was a lot of happy trails in that search. He's in Key West. Definitely. Robert the Sailor doll out of Key West.

I've met that guy. Yeah, lots of roommates, never a girlfriend. Close talker. Yeah. His belt buckle touched my belt buckle when he hugged me. Robert is also surprisingly large. It's child-sized. It's three feet tall, but only weighs about six pounds. It's a unit.

Covering his felt and wire body is a yellowed four-piece sailor suit that replaced his original costume of a pink and green harlequin outfit that was replete with pom-poms. So he was a cheerleader.

No, Harlequin. Not pom-pom. A little tiny pom-pom. Wibble wobbles. Yeah, but wibble wobbles. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I actually find the sailor costume to be creepier than a Harlequin costume. Oh, easily. Because Harlequins I'm not fazed by. Well, it's hack at this point. But yeah, a tiny haunted sailor is terrifying. Yeah, because I know a lot of big adult...

Haunted sailors. We live through Fleet Week many a time in New York City. Oh, yeah. They got a story to tell and they got a boat that doesn't go anywhere.

As far as where Robert came from, we know he was crafted in Germany near the turn of the century by the Steiff Company. And it's believed that Robert was an expensive window display piece that was sent to Key West by family that was still living in Germany. When did it get to Key West? 1900. So it could have known Ernest Hemingway.

It was in the same neighborhood. He probably spilled a couple of beers on it. But soon after, Robert arrived dressed in his original clown outfit. What if Robert the Sailor doll was his inspiration for the guy with no penis in that fucking book?

Robert Adal has no penis. Have we checked Robert's penis? No, it's got no penis. They said none. Yeah, no. They would have said. There was a whole chapter in it on the book. Yes, there is. And it describes every inch of Robert the Haunted Doll. None of it. There's none. There ain't no penis. Quit checking. Quit asking. No spaghetti, no weenie. We are going to call the Haunted Doll SVU unit, sir, if you ask one more question about Robert Genitalia.

But soon after Robert arrived dressed in his original clown outfit, those clothes were replaced with its current sailor suit. That suit had once belonged to Robert the doll's first owner, the long suffering Gene Otto. No, I'm just blown away. I gasped. Yeah.

Now, at the turn of the century, it was quite normal for boys to play with dolls. So Gene and Robert soon became inseparable. But the nature of Gene's obsession is speculated to have less to do with a child's normal attachment to a beloved toy and more to do with good old fashioned voodoo. You know, even just the obsession, because that's what they said is that in this obsession continued throughout Gene Otto's life. Yeah, which we'll get into. This is a the conundrum.

There's something attached to this. He saw something in this doll and his...

That's kind of what they talk about. It's because it's about our relationship with the object. Yeah. It's the, what does it mean to us? You know, there are certain objects that, you know, when I was talking to the Newkirks, they talk about trauma. Like I brought it up before, but the idea that like you're in a room where something traumatic has happened to you, your focus was an object while you're in that room, while something traumatic is happening to you. And it's like, you shoot you at it, right? You make it filled with this kind of energy where something like this, it's like, you're really lonely.

Because that's another one of those like deep, dark, especially when you're a little boy and you don't know what to do. Because your emotions are stronger when you're a little kid. You're a little bit more, maybe, you know, you're not more in tune, but you're definitely more vulnerable and sensitive. And the idea of like you becoming obsessed with this other thing and it's sort of like implanting your personality on it.

it oh I was extraordinarily attached to my little monster doll yeah my little monster yeah the big fat one with the long nose and all that no I was attached at the hip to that thing I loved it I love my baby tugs Care Bear nice he was a good guy now do you think Key West throwing out some theories here

Lots of Haitians in Key West. Especially back in the day. Straw market. Mom could have yelled at someone at the straw market. I curse you. Curse the dog. Here's the thing. Concerning that, Gene Otto's grandfather was a doctor named Joseph who had a servant from the Bahamas named William. So it's still West Indies. And William was married to a fellow Bahamanian named Emmeline.

Dr. Joseph Otto went blind in his later years and William cared for him until Joseph died from internal injuries after suffering a fall. It was really nice, honestly, their relationship. Yeah. But once Dr. Otto was dead...

Thomas Otto, Gene Otto's father, hired William to work as a clerk at his drugstore. Soon after, Thomas Otto began an affair with William's wife, Emily. Oh, yeah. As is evidenced by journal entries written by Gene Otto's mother, Minnie. And also further proven by the fact that Minnie Otto specifically requested not to be buried in the Otto family plot after her death. She actually had her name to be changed to the Minnie Cooper.

Here, of course, is where the curse comes into play. See, Emmeline gave birth to a child during her affair with Thomas. It was Thomas's child. And this is evidenced by a lawsuit that she filed against the Otto family. Tragically, the child died. And it's said that Emmeline used voodoo to trap her dead child soul inside Robert the doll. Wow.

Wow. Yeah, dude. Okay, so yeah. It's a lot of... There's going to be a lot of spite talked about today. Okay, cool. That makes a lot of sense. Spite is one of the...

really powerful emotions that we have. I mean, that's why we're here. It's why we're sitting here today. No, this whole network has been fueled by spite from the beginning. Yes. It's nice because like it's, but you know, it does create problems. You have to be careful because if you're seeking revenge, it ends up coming back on you. And also like if you put that in someone's head, they're going to, like you said earlier, help it manifest. Yes.

Well, this, author David Sloan speculates, is why Gene developed a lifelong attachment to the doll, because Gene intuitively sensed that the soul of his dead half-brother was encased within. I mean, it's a big jump, but it is interesting. It's a very large jump. The idea that you maybe even as a kid have heard these things. Like, I like to kind of... Something along these lines... Um...

And I'm going to continue on, even though my mic just cut out. It's definitely not because that I maligned Robert the Haunted Doll. No. Right? No, no, no. Because I didn't. And I want to say I'm sorry again, Robert the Haunted Doll, because that genuinely creeped me the fuck out. Yeah, it genuinely creeped... I mean, it's not due to the fact that this Scarlet already has one input to chat out, and we just went through a studio move, and these things just don't really last for a long time. And you spit constantly into the microphone. It better not be. I just want to say, again...

I'm sorry, Robert. And I love you. Well, them remodeling Herb's entire house from the ground up, that might be why the house itself and the surrounding property is the scene of a well-documented and honestly quite compelling haunting.

This haunting was extensively chronicled in the book Horror at Fox Hollow Farm by Richard Estep and Robert Graves, which is our main source for today's episode. If I was you two, I would go look up, obviously, the Ghost Adventures episode with Zach Bagans. It is entertaining. It is very entertaining. My God, that show should be fucking 16 minutes. Bro! Dude, a lot of energy in here, bro! Wait a second, what's that?

No, I farted. No, I farted. I thought I could understand. There was kind of a celestial sort of structure on the night vision here and the temperature gauges. It was just my fart. Yeah.

You're going to have to go, Bonzo. It's just I have never watched that many episodes of Ghost Adventures. And the way they cut back to statement said before to repeat the exact thing that they just said. Like, for example. The man in the red shirt was right here. And they go, the man in the red shirt was right here. Right here. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, we may be talking about the most prolific American serial killer of all time. I think he may have been the most prolific American serial killer of all time. That's because, unfortunately, sometimes the audience doesn't pay attention. Yeah, you ever watch Shark Week? They do the same shit all the time. You know, it's all Discovery Channel crap. Yeah, but then I get to see sharks again, and that's fine. Yeah, sharks are cool, but I like ghosts. I like smudges. I like his glasses. I like Zach Bagans' look.

Now, who's having the adventures? Him or the ghost? Him. It is him. It's absolutely him. The ghosts do not like him there. But the documentary I would recommend is The Haunting of Fox Hollow Farm. It is legitimately scary. This entire haunting story is legitimately very creepy to me.

Now, in 2008, a normal, albeit wealthy man named Robert Graves purchased Fox Hollow Farm with his wife, Vicki, and their two young sons. The mansion had been sitting empty for five years, and it was in even worse shape than it was when Herb died. And when I say mansion, I mean mansion. Oh, yeah. This place is massive. It's beautiful. It actually reminds me a little bit of what Neverland looked like.

Same Tudor, because it was a Tudor house. Yeah. Neverland was a Tudor mansion. Same style. Yeah, but it didn't have the grandma wallpaper that Neverland had. Yeah. No, it doesn't have the style of Neverland. Or Bubbles. Yeah. No, no Bubbles. Bubbles would have stopped all this shit. Yeah, they were in the pool. Give him a compact.

You know, you fucking just want to end in two seconds. I don't know. If you teach Bubbles how great it is to come while getting choked. He does like to eat lips. He's a beautiful house, but this guy is very funny. Did you read the actual, I was reading through the book and Robert Graves, he's like, now I have people know about me. I'm a horse man. My wife's a horse woman.

Most people call us horse people. And what people don't know about horse people is that it's every horse man's dream that he would look out while drinking a cup of coffee in his kitchen and look out the window and see his beloved horses. And that's what he saw when he went to Fox Hollow Farms. He was just like, our horses can live everywhere out here. There's a horse living room right here. There's a horse dining room. There's a horse bath.

A horse swimming pool? When you see their house, it is full of, like, horse memorabilia. Like, horse paintings, horse statues, or not statues, but horse sculptures. And they do have a beautiful little, you know, horse stable. They realize their dream. It's beautiful. And they held on to this fucking place. I think they still live there. Yes, it's the same family. Yeah, they've been living there for, God, I mean, almost 20 years now. Imagine...

if you loved horses so much that you lived in a place which just haunts you on a daily basis. Also, what are the horses? I don't know if it's good for the horses. Are the horses getting terrified out in the field seeing phantom men blow each other? Fly from your grave.

Well, since the previous owners accepted an offer well under the asking price of $2.8 million, the Graves family spent the extra money on remodeling the mansion completely to restore it to its former glory. That's before Herb ruined it with his hoarding and murder most foul. Yeah, he did ruin the house. And the raccoon piss. The raccoon piss. The raccoon technically ruined the house. Yeah. He more ruined the vibe.

Well, the raccoons made it better for raccoons. Yeah, of course. They made the buy better for raccoons. It's all about perspective. Now, Robert and his wife were informed of the full history of the house the first time they toured the home, but they weren't told of any paranormal activity. In fact, it was probably not known that there was paranormal activity because the

previous owner had never actually lived there and had only ended up owning the property in what he said was a real estate deal gone wrong. I just think he meant that he had to buy that house at an extreme loss and then lost money again when they negotiated for three years, which is what the Graves did very, very importantly because they were like, no one's buying this house. And they were like, they knew

No one's buying this house. No one's coming for this house. So they paid basically just market value for the land. We have to live here. Our last name is Graves. Yes. I need to be next to some. And they are the most normal fucking people you can imagine. Yeah, just like our horses. And honestly, I like the skeleton. Sometimes the bread goes missing.

Who cares? No breakfast. No, Robert wasn't really a believer in the paranormal, and his wife was in fact a full skeptic because she came from a scientific background. She was a pathologist. Neither one of them were squeamish either. So they decided that Fox Hollow Farm was just the fixer upper they wanted and the perfect home for their beloved horses.

I just want to make sure that the horses are okay. All right? And that the horses have got a place to be. There is a clue that holds the place together. Hey, hey, hey. Anytoons.com.

E-D-D-I-E-T-U-N-E-S. Available for booking. Now, the paranormal activity started as it usually does in small increments. The first odd occurrence came when Vicky was vacuuming and the cord was suddenly pulled out of the socket. She plugged it back in, but actually watched as it

Flew out again on its own as if it was tugged by someone or something you're gonna stay dirty bitch

Now, even though Vicky was, as I said, a skeptic, this was too weird to ignore. And she said that she suddenly got the strong sense that she wasn't alone in the house. And whatever it was that was there with her didn't want her to stay. And all she heard was the sounds of... Would that be her? Yes. Yeah, that was her plating a horse. He's saying no! It's rape!

Now, a few months after the renovations were finished, Robert and Vicki invited a friend, Joe LeBlanc, to rent the apartment above the garage like so much Fonzie. But he wasn't. He was more a Ron Howard than a Fonzie. That is true. I would say he was a bit more of a Potsie. Yes. Oh, yes. Well, like Robert and Vicki, the history of the home didn't bother Joe at all. Oh, wow. The first thing I heard, as soon as he heard about it, he was like, oh, no.

Oh, no shit, huh? Great. Oh, wow. You're telling me I get to live above a whole garage? That's incredible. I get to share a bathroom with a horse? Unbelievable. This is incredible. I was just living in a trash can. Yeah, I'm from Sesame Street. It was a massive, it was a 4,000 square foot garage. That's beautiful. It was huge. It's great. But in Joe's first night in the apartment, he had a horribly vivid nightmare.

In the dream, Joe said that he was running through the woods behind the house, convinced that something terrible and extremely dangerous was chasing him. When he woke up, he was... I can't fucking get my rhythm going when you're fucking doing that. Stop it! Are you good?

When Joe woke up, he was still in flight mode, so his body involuntarily leapt out of bed and he slammed into a door frame. That's his fault. Yeah, that's it.

After that, residents of the house claimed to have started seeing literal full torso vapors, like the librarian in Ghostbusters. Your whole plan was getter? One afternoon, Vicky saw a young man that she thought was a trespasser walking through the trees, wearing a bright red t-shirt and jeans. Don't you take up any room for our horses! You can't come in here! That's a horse's lawn! Ha ha ha!

She couldn't make out the face, but she kept watching as this apparition walked through the woods. Soon she realized that there was nothing but empty air from the thighs down. The man in the red shirt had no legs, but before Vicky could say anything, he disappeared. Bye!

That's what my dad's ghost looks like. Yeah? Now, because he lost his leg. But also, what's funny is that his legs are their own ghost. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're in a whole other town. That's cute. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fun for them. Still in Reno? Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah, yeah. He can't leave Reno. No. No, no one can leave Reno, unfortunately. There's a pink gate on the town.

About a month later, Joe, the guy who rented the apartment above the garage, saw the same apparition, except he saw him at night.

See, Joe had a dog named Fred, and they'd go on nightly walks together in the woods behind the house, the same woods where Herb Baumeister had burned dozens of corpses and spread their bones. I know I would, but, like, can you just imagine a regular person just doing this? Like, this is not cute. I mean, most... Like, the story's not cute. It was, like...

literal boneyard. I mean, I know from our live shows, most of our listeners are just regular people. I know. I love cemeteries. I love boneyards. Yeah. Dogs love bones too. Don't fucking take that away from them. Friends are having a great time. But it's bad for their teeth if they snap into a human bone. It'd be bad. And then the fragments will go down their throat. It's actually bad for dogs. Well, unless if they were cooked, they would be. Yeah. A lot of them were burnt. That's interesting. Yeah, that's actually very true. Yeah, they were cooked. Technically. They were cooked. They were roasted.

Oh, doggy, you got spit juice in his belly. Don't let Rambo go out there. Oh, he'll eat the fuck out of those bugs. He's got a thick throat. If we want to find more victims of her Baumeister, we should take Rambo out there. I mean, he can't walk too good, so we gotta use the wagon. Yeah, we use the wagon. You know what I caught Frankie eating the other day? What? A rock. Yeah, buddy. Dogs love rocks. Dogs love rocks. Anything to make you question.

Yeah. Your whole life. Here's a little tip for you dog owners. If you're walking your dog and it really wants something, that means it's going to kill it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what's nice about having dogs and cats and not kids is that I'm not worried about going in and seeing Wendy like with a big like blueprints of her school and a bunch of scopes. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's nice. And the other thing is if like the dog dies, I don't go to prison.

Depends on what you did to it, what happened. Depends on how the dog dies. Well, that night, the night that Joe saw the apparition, he heard something moving around in the trees, and Fred took off in a sprint towards the sound. That's when Joe saw the man with the transparent legs moving through the woods. Joe said,

Bye.

So you think it's Alaska from Drag Race. That experience, however, didn't stop Joe from running the deer trails at night because as time went on, Joe seemed to have become strangely comfortable or at least familiar with the spirit world. Yeah, these guys don't say anything about my personal hygiene. They don't say anything about my attitude or my aggressive style of playing Risk.

For the fact that I live above a haunted garage. There's a lot of people that seem to be deterred by the many birds underneath my rented apartment. But to them, I say, fie. I am a lover of men and women.

To the point of Joe being comfortable with the darkness. He didn't stop running at night. You could just see him being like, yeah, me and the ghosts, my only friends, hanging out here amongst the bushes, just like the slippery slingsnakes of the night. Oh, I gotta go get the milk for the graves.

Joe didn't stop running at night even after he saw a tall, thin, dark figure, blacker than black, moving in an inhuman way from tree to tree. Meanwhile, Joe's apartment was showing classic signs of a poltergeist infestation. During his first week, he was at the kitchen sink when he heard a knock at the door. Thinking it was Robert or Vicky, Joe called, Could you stop fucking doing the...

Trying to tell a story and you're sitting there slurping on a goddamn half-empty ice coffee.

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Now, anyone who's seen a Conjuring film knows about the infamous paranormal museum that is in the Warrens' home.

For the uninitiated, the basement of Ed and Lorraine Warren's house is filled with artifacts from their many paranormal investigations. Hundreds of objects that were, in some way or another, cursed, touched, or inhabited by demon kind. Over here we got the lamp that Aladdin rubbed or something. I don't fucking know. Over here we got this parking meter where I got a ticket. Ha!

Two fucking weeks ago, I got my jackhammer and I pulled it out of the goddamn ground. Is the museum open? Can you go to it? From what I've read, you can, but it costs a lot of money. I think, to be honest, it was just closed. I believe it was closed in 2019 when Lorraine Warren died, but I'm not quite certain. I think, we'll talk about this more in the future, but I'm pretty sure that the son-in-law...

of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Keeps the torch going with his own brand of Annabelle vodka. Yeah, wow, wow, merchandising. Nothing I like more than a doll that drinks liquor. Ha ha ha!

Annabelle vodka. Even a haunted doll could get divorced. Well, when the two men from Ness went down into the basement, they were warned not to touch anything inside. Anyone who went down into the basement said, don't touch anything. Because if they did, Ed said that he would have to purify their auras so they wouldn't be left vulnerable to demonic possessions or interference.

For proof of this claim, Ed told the men that on one visit, a man started banging on the case holding the infamous haunted doll known as Annabelle, demanding her to do something to prove her existence. For those who don't know, Annabelle is a haunted Raggedy Ann doll that's locked in a glass case in the Warren's basement, guarded by a sign that says, Spooks.

positively do not open. And it's crushing in the box office. Yes. Annabelle has no idea. No. Has no idea that all of this money is being made on her fucking back. She has no idea. She's what they, it's what they did to Tupac. It's what they're doing to Annabelle. Annabelle needs a nice Jewish lawyer. Yeah.

Here's the case where I keep Annabelle's Jewish lawyer and knock on that. Unfortunately, every time I knock on that, it's $150 an hour. Let's go. All right, next thing.

Well, according to Ed, the young man and his girlfriend left on their motorcycle and were soon mocking the doll and the Warrens like they were characters in a fucking Chick tract. Do you know Chick tracts? No idea. They're these horrible little Christian comic books. They're driving like, ha ha ha, can you believe how stupid that doll and those people are? Ha ha ha. Oh no, I am losing control of my motorcycle. Oh no, I am now in this motorcycle accident and I am now dead and I am now in hell.

Well, have you ever seen Tijuana Bibles? No. It's stuff like that. It's like, you know. I got a book of Tijuana Bibles I need to show you. Man, if you have a library you need to show me. Yeah, you should go to his home. Well, suddenly, as I said, the young man lost control of his vehicle and drove directly into a tree. The man, Ed said, was killed instantly while the girl was hospitalized for a year, all because they mocked Annabelle. And you know what? In the end...

I laughed. I'd love to see that. It's just a thing. That's just a thing that's nice. Annabelle, you still got it. I gave him a $10 tip. I said, thank you, Annabelle. Good work, Annabelle. As Ed put it, you do not challenge evil the way that this unfortunate young man challenged it because no man is more powerful than the fallen angel that is Satan.

Of course, except for Dio. Yeah. Yeah, Dio could challenge Satan all day long. Didn't matter how tall he was. Nope. Five foot two of just pure power. Vocal range. Talent.

Now, the veracity of this story of the man in the motorcycle and Annabelle is impossible to check out because I don't think Ed ever gave the name of the couple in order to give the date of the accident. But every time a visitor entered his basement, Ed did treat each object as if it could potentially curse or kill anyone who touched it.

That's just good showmanship. It is. You're selling tickets to a haunted museum. You want it to be creepy in there. Yeah. Put gloves on, you know, be scared. Oh yeah. Zach Bagans is doing it like fully to the hilt in Vegas right now. It's like a three hour tour. You can give it, say what you want about it. It's scary in there. Now,

Now, the way the basement is portrayed in the Conjuring movies is a master class and spooky set design. Each object perfectly dusty, mysterious and impressive. Yeah. You have the incredible face of Patrick Wilson next to it. Yeah. He's extremely handsome. He's so charming. He's extreme. Talk about the puddles. I get my dick gets wet.

Looking at Patrick Wilson. I don't like that. I don't want him to have that effect on me. You're really attracted to him. I've seen you mention this. He's got a big head. He's got an Easter Island head. Also, he's from my part of Florida. My drama teacher used to talk about how wonderful Patrick Wilson was in the States. And he did Broadway. And if you could see, if you saw him on Broadway, you, my friend, would also be trying to fuck him against his will. Because he is a singular talent. Yeah.

Well, back to the objects in the museum. So, yeah, it sells the museum. Yeah. Yeah. And according but according to writer Stefan Beck, who toured the actual real museum in 2005, the Warren's Occult Museum is a little chintzier than how it's portrayed in the movies.

Reportedly, amongst other items, one can find an air horn, an LP of Black Sabbath's album Paranoid. I don't know what pressing, but it's one of them. It's there. It got a rubber frog. Very frightening. A haunted organ? No, is it the liver or the kidney?

Various Halloween decorations, a lot of Halloween decorations. A gray coupon jar labeled Black Magic Witchcraft Items. Quick, get the mustard! Ha!

Excuse me. Do you have any gray Poupon? And of course they have a haunted copy of the advanced Dungeons and Dragons guide. Unfortunately, it's not even haunted.

It was just a... I researched a little bit about the museum. Oh, really? It's just he thought Dungeons & Dragons was scary. Yeah. A lot of the people in the 70s thought that Dungeons & Dragons, for some stupid fucking reason, they thought that it was the gateway to hell and demons and the practice and worship of the occult and all that. People thought that you would take acid, do D&D, and, like, jump out the window because you thought you were an elf. Yeah. They thought that that would happen. And then we were like, now we have, like, television that are strapped to our eyeballs and...

And you don't say anything. You don't say anything at all.

Well, there's also a fair amount of crude paintings. They include works like paintings of hissing cats, paintings of haunted houses, a painting of a bald red woman in a green cloak, and a Frazetta-style painting of a naked woman wielding a sword. Probably was a Frazetta. It might have been a Frazetta, actually. I mean, he better have had... If you're going to fucking... You're not going to have an original one thing in this house? No. I feel like a lot of this is an example of...

Remember that? They talk about how the first special effects where the train coming towards the camera and people screamed. They were like, ah! It was the scariest thing. It blew their minds, right?

I think that their basement, now, if we went into their basement, you'd see it. It would look like a shitty thrift store. Like, it would look like a big pile of shit. It would look like that. It was one place we went into New Orleans. It was called, like, Factory of the Weird, where it was, like, way, way overpriced, and everything was just kind of, like, scattered everywhere. It was, like, fine, but I think now, at the time, that was viewed as very...

Yeah, it could be. And it was time has now passed and now we don't find that scary anymore. Yeah, Black Sabbath was much scarier back in the 70s. The first album, though. Yeah. Oh, the first album was super creepy. Yeah, that's the scary one. The other ones is just parents

Yeah, Paranoid is just a guy with a sword. It's about war. And the cover is a guy with a sword and a bicycle helmet. Yeah, I don't know why they thought that was evil. I think it was Black Sabbath. And also, yeah, they were all into the backwards masking stuff. At that point, the rats are eating salad. The fairies are wearing boots. Ozzy's rhyming masses with masses. Dude, it's good. It's good.

It's good. It works for him. From back to the museum, like, fucking the real Annabelle looks super fucking lame. Yeah. It's just a big raggedy Ann doll. Now, was it in a glass case at the movie? Oh, very much so. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. It was in a glass case. A curio cabinet. My mom had Yadros in those things. Yeah, yeah. We had all the weird little fishing boys. Yeah. But it's not the porcelain nightmare like it's portrayed in the movie. It's a cloth raggedy Ann doll. These are my haunted Hummels. But I will always find that scarier. I know.

I find that scarier. I hate scary dolls in movies. I hate when they over set deck on the, on the scary things. I think it's stupid because no way. And like, to me, the actual raggedy and doll that is Annabelle is way freakier. If it's actually doing the things that saying that it's doing, why not set it on fire? Because we've talked about this. It's a very bad idea because, uh,

If you do that, you just destroy the vessel. You don't destroy the demon. You're doing Patrick Wilson doing Ed Warren. If I'm doing Patrick, he's like, because if you do that, you just destroy the vessel. I just destroy the demon. It's hard to do that, yeah, because it's the stupid accent. It's a bad accent. But it's Patrick Wilson being so charming. Yeah, I'm just looking at his mouth. I believe everything that he says. See, I'm turned on to Vera. See, I find her in this film. Por que no los dos? But I feel like...

She is not the sex in that movie. No, she's not the sex. He's the sex in the movie. She's more the maternal, like, comforting presence. But she's the sex in everything else she's in. Yeah, but I can't apply it to Lorraine. I liked her in Moonlight Miles, the bartender. Yeah, getting me drunk and shit because I'm sad.

Now, the Warrens claim to have extensive photographic evidence of paranormal phenomena, but the bulk of the photographs that they have allowed the public to see, it's just blobs of light.

Now, there are a lot of ways that this can happen, especially with film. But usually these light blobs are created when the light from a camera flash is reflected back at the lens, causing an overexposed, hazy blob to appear in the finished product. In other words, the Warrens just didn't know how to take a fucking picture, and they took their mistakes as proof of the paranormal.

See, this is what you don't fundamentally understand. This is coming from Ed Warren. And I like it because he talks about this, why it looks like globules. You know, glance around the dark room. You see two bluish orbs of light, roughly the size of golf balls, floating near each other about five feet off the floor. As you watch, you might also see streaks of light flash away from your body. This is electromagnetic energy being drawn from your aura. In no time at all, these two balls of light come together and they merge into a larger ball, about the size of a grapefruit.

The ball will then elongate into a tall cigar-shaped size of a human being. Instead of the orbs of light, other people report seeing hundreds of tiny pinpoints of light in the cluster that, like the orbs, blend into a larger cylindrical globe. In other cases, when in this tall bioluminescent globe,

The defiable features of a person will begin to emerge until the spirit is manifested as much as it possibly can. And to be accurate, by the way, it's called the ghost. If the features are not recognizable to the viewer, if the features are recognizable to the viewer, it's an apparition. Either way, you got to visit her.

Your impression is like he's doing a set of bench presses. To me, it sounds like he's trying to work through a really big pastrami sandwich. You don't think he is? Look at him. He's going, hey, hey. Come on. Hey. You can't get me now, ghost. I'm not going to be with you now, ghost. I can't sit in that chair if you ain't got a pillow on it. Oh, no.

Oh my God, you have active ghosts in here. No, that's Ed getting up from the couch. Well, as of 1997, when this article was written by the Skeptical Society, the Warrens had posted on their website that using flash makes capturing a ghost more likely, meaning that they probably weren't even aware that they themselves were creating the conditions for their alleged ghost photography. How else are they supposed to know they're getting their picture taken?

You want these ghosts to fucking show the good side of the camera so you can show the scientists a lot of money. It's all right. It's very expensive companies. That's why you gotta get in there. Oh, I know. I saw the ghost said, oh, you gotta take their picture. They're so...

The Warrens also claim to have video evidence of the paranormal, the most famous being Ed's White Lady of the Union Cemetery video. In it, a human figure is seen skulking behind some tombstones, but the video is taken from such a distance and it's such low resolution that it's impossible to determine any details about it.

Furthermore, Ed Warren almost never let anyone take any of his evidence or make copies for further analysis. Also, Ed could control the narrative completely when it came to his and Lorraine's investigations. That might be the reason why we have no definitive giant story.

like theoretical discussion about the quote unquote capital P phenomena is because of what you'd call compelling material gatekeeping that they, this is across the board. Every single source I have ever read, you know, arts parts,

You got this stuff that's hanging out somewhere that nobody gets to see. George Knapp's got stuff that we can't see. Jacques Vallée's got stuff that we can't see. NIDS has got stuff that we can't see. Robert Bigelow has got information that we can't have. And it's all just like, if you guys all just fucking got together,

and showed everybody your fucking horse shit, you might get some legit money from the government to resource it. And guess what? You guys all get to fucking, you'll make your money and shit. You'll get all your stuff. But it's like without, with you not, we got to see it. You see this one big problem there, Henry, is that it's just, it's not there.

But they just don't have it. Launch across the table. You never know, though. I'm still holding out. I see compelling footage every day. Some of it, this one recent one I watched, and it was... Is this a ghost? No, no, it's a ghost. It was like this woman was...

getting caught into a... Back office of some kind. Did she steal something? Yes. These ghosts are so naughty. These ghosts are thoroughly searched by these store owners.

Well, in the only video the men from Ness were allowed to take from Ed's private collection, a man was purported to dematerialize. The subject enters the room, stands in front of a mounted camera, scratches his head, and seems to disappear. And after he disappears, a ghostly white light follows. And as Ed and the two Ness investigators watched the video, Ed said, matter-of-factly, quote, That kid disappeared.

Can you imagine? Like, it's the same. It's like, you know, when you try to show your friend a funny video or video you think is funny on YouTube and you're like, yeah,

Like as they're watching it and they're like, thanks. You know, you could imagine just his big fat head, sweat pouring into his ass. Like going like, eh, ghost? Eh, see? Eh? Look right there. Ghost? Eh? You're supposed to talk them into it before they see it. Eh? Right there. Huh? You're watching it. Eh? Here with me, Ahmed.

Lorraine's over there. Hi. Hey, you like that? That kid. He's not there anymore. Hey, where is he? I don't know. I don't know. It's a ghost, right? Fucking crazy, right? Give me $100. Live from Northland.

But whatever the case, this Raggedy Ann doll was massive. It was three feet tall with long dangling legs. It was a grippable doll. Oh, it was super grippable. It was kissable. Yeah. Kissable and huggable. I actually don't, I think that they were all that big for a period of time. Yeah. I think the people like

bigger dolls back in the day. Those old G.I. Joes were huge. Yeah. Well, made of cloth and stuffing, this doll wore bloomers and a paisley shirt and had the trademark red yarn hair of every Raggedy Ann doll as well as the printed face featuring the large black eyes and the triangle nose.

Now, within days, Donna, her roommate Angie, and Angie's fiance, Lou, they all noticed that there was something off about this doll. At first, there were just small movements, like changes in the positions of its limbs. Sometimes the doll would be found with its arms crossed. Or... Or it would be found standing upright on its own feet. It's me. I'm up. Hi. Hi.

Take me outside to pee. Oh, no, I'm shitting. The upright position was particularly disturbing considering how Raggedy Ann was a floppy sort of doll. It didn't have any internal wires that could make an upright stance possible. But soon after the changes in position, Donna and Angie would come home to find that the doll had moved to an entirely different room, seemingly of its own volition.

On one occasion, Donna left the doll on the couch when she went to work, but when she returned, the doll was on her bed, and the door to her bedroom had been closed. I'm changing my wetted bloomers. I'm sorry I made my bloomers wet. Told you to take me outside. I hate this doll.

Why did we get this doll? Where's the nurse? Donna and Angie claimed, or should I say the Warrens claimed, that a month after the activity began, they began finding messages on parchment paper clearly written by a child that read, Help Us or Help Lou, referencing Angie's fiancé.

From there, the activity escalated after the doll had once again moved itself to another room. But this time... Can you imagine trying to go take a shit, and you open up the door, and Annabelle's just sitting on the toilet? Just like, that's scary. Like, first of all, like, that's just scary. And then it's also like, uh, you don't pay rent here. Yeah. But it has a fucking bathroom. You think someone's got to pay rent in order to use a bathroom? As far as I'm going, yay, my home. Yeah, oh yeah, that's right, I forget you get the pay toilet in your home. Ha ha ha ha.

But this time, when Donna picked up the doll, she found what appeared to be drops of blood on the back of the doll's hands and chest. Quite concerned by this point, Donna and her roommate engaged in the services of a spirit medium. The medium immediately called for a seance, and during the ritual, the medium said that she had contacted the spirit of a young girl who had once lived on the property where Donna and Angie's apartment building had been constructed.

The spirit's name was Annabelle Higgins, and her lifeless body had been found on the very land where Donna and Angie lived when Annabelle was just seven years old. But the spirit said she felt safe with Donna and Angie, and therefore wanted to stay. So, despite warnings from Angie's fiancé Lou that the doll was in fact evil and Annabelle was not what she claimed to be, Donna and Angie gave Annabelle permission to inhabit the doll permanently.

After that, the situation escalated again. Spirits love being squatters. Yeah, they love being invited. Yes. Now, perhaps because he'd sounded the warning bells, Lou became Annabelle's focus.

He began having recurring nightmares, and one night awoke to find himself completely paralyzed. Sleep paralysis. Standing at the edge of the bed was who else but the floppy, raggedy and all with the big black eyes named Annabelle. Hi, you sleeping? Yeah, you trying to sleep? From what Lou told the Warrens, or at least what the Warrens said Lou told them, Annabelle slowly glided up Lou's body. It's a nice leg. Strong shin, huh?

Thick thigh. Oh, you're not stink. You may want to watch some of that. Seven-year-old.

No. I mean, a ghost is legal. I know. I noticed you're now speaking like Michael Jackson. He's ignorant. Every child's safe with me. I have a dream about every child. Before Lou knew it, the floppy doll was choking him with so much force that he blacked out. Came his pants. God, wow. Wow.

The next day, Lou and Angie were in the apartment studying maps for an upcoming road trip when the apartment got eerily quiet. Rustling was heard coming from Donna's bedroom. That's not rustling. That's rustling. Yeah. Where's that rustling coming from?

Thinking it might be a burglar, Lou and Angie apprehensively checked the room. There, they found only Annabelle, tossed on the floor in a corner. As soon as Lou got close to the doll, though, Spread Eagle. he felt like someone was behind him, and in a split second, Lou was doubled over in pain.

This was a lie. No. It was mysterious. Mysterious, as Henry said. Also, seven doesn't make sense. We're going to get there. Yes, it does, because it's a special number.

Like how three, see three, and any time you see threes, it's a mockery of the trilogy. Trinity. The trilogy. No, it's the Die Hard trilogy. Any single time you see three dots, it's a mockery of the Die Hard trilogy. I thought there were four Die Hard movies. Don't count the other two. I don't count anything past Die Hard for the Vengeance. The first three are obviously the best ones. The other two were money grabs because Bruce Willis was having more and more advancing dementia.

And so I don't count those. But when it's seven, it's a phone number. But yeah, but claws are four or three. So I guess maybe one hand had four and the other one had three. And the fourth didn't get you. Yeah. Okay. All right. I can deal with this. Cool. Yeah.

Now, after the physical attacks, Donna contacted an Episcopalian priest who contacted another priest who contacted Ed and Lorraine Warren. Yeah, can you imagine hitting up an Episcopalian priest and asking him to do jack shit? He'd be like, uh, call a Catholic. I don't do anything. We don't get paid. Yeah, this shit is chill. That's the whole reason why we're here. Yeah, I'm one of the nice ones, kind of. And the Warrens immediately knew that this was the sort of case they prayed for daily. Oh, yeah, they were like, fuck.

Yes! They love this shit. And this is local. And again, this is when they're still just trying to make their nut. This is their first... The last one we just heard, this is just them... When we were kind of hearing them, they were just revving up their ghost hunting industry. This is like their first real big get. 1970.

During their first meeting, Angie suggested the possibility of moving to escape the entity. But as Ed would say again and again to the folks he claimed to help, moving would be a futile gesture because the spirit had already attached itself. When he knew immediately that it wasn't a spirit because he walked in there and like, you know, because the thing about Ed Warren is that it's all about style.

So he walks in, total control, total calm. Walks in, be like, hey, how you doing? It's nice to see you. Oh, hey, this is a, got a little ghost doll situation here. Don't worry, we're going to handle this. You don't have to worry about it. All right, we're going to take this all down. You got coffee?

Do you got any Pepsi? I got to take the two at the same time because if not, I throw up. All right. So I went down the belly. We're looking at it. Right. So she's jumping back and forth. And that's what he was saying is that human spirit has no power to move things. So the first thing he says, gotta be demon. Gotta be. Because it's moving things back and forth. No way would he fuck with you if he wasn't. Right. Especially you wouldn't get physically hurt. Yeah. As soon as he heard the scratches. That's it.

that's a demon. Right? Boom. Immediately. But what he said truly was like, so what you guys did was you set up a bad situation. But the way we know that you are definitely not like, it's also smells. It's like farting. The dolls fart. It's weird shit's going on back and forth. And he was like, you are, you're haunted by demons. Think about demons though. They don't, they don't haunt places. They haunt

Plus, if they move, it makes his commute worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're real close to me right now. No, no, no, no, I don't want to take the highway. When they asked if they could just destroy the doll, Ed said that didn't help either. What the fuck is wrong with you? And that's always how they react. They're like, what?

Because the problem was not the doll itself. I mean, the doll was a doll like any other. Like, it was just another Raggedy Ann doll, but it had become a vessel for a demon. If it helps, it's more or less Chucky, but with a demon instead of a serial killer. There's nothing special about that good guy doll. It was just that that was the good guy doll that Brad Dourf chose to inhabit. By Ed's estimation, if these people had waited another two or three weeks, one of them would have become possessed.

But one way or another, what was going on with Annabelle was the fault of the people who might have become possessed, because for Ed, demonic possession was always about blame. That's the most Catholic thing that you could kind of see. It really is. Not only are you fucked, but it's your fault. He said that the responsibility for this whole scenario was on Donna and Angie, because they'd given the entity recognition in the first place after the mysterious movements of the doll, which...

Which I don't really get, because what is he saying? That if a doll is fucking flitting around the house, you're supposed to ignore it? Yes. That is literally what he says. He says it's on you. You gotta ignore it. You have to literally just act like it's... You don't even talk about it at all? Do not acknowledge it at all. That is what he says. It's how you deal with ghosts and trolls, where you do not give... And rats. Anything. You give them nothing. You're supposed to be bored.

Like, what they want is, because, again, it's a demon. Because if it was a human ghost, it would be communicating with you in a more direct way, in a peaceful way, looking for, like, a lot of times it's through something, whether through a Ouija board or, like, a pendulum. But he also said the Ouija boards were evil. He did not. He did not. I have clarification on that. Really? He said there's nothing wrong with a Ouija board. It's just that the Ouija board, more often than not, if you don't know how to use it, leads to issues with you. Again, it's on you. You're the problem. You're the problem.

You're not doing it right. The Parker brothers send instructions. There's a whole thing. It's an ancient mechanism. It's an ancient mechanism. So he feels if you see any sort of activity, this is called the infestation period. Things are sort of building up and

And he believes that you're literally not even supposed to look at it. You're just supposed to act like it's that. If you engage with it at all, you're giving it a hold into this world. Because all it wants is your attention, Marcus. It's all sitting there no matter what it's doing. It's flicking back and off because it wants to say hello. It wants you to shut the light off, back and forth. It's playing with drinking balls. It wants you to say hello. Yeah. All right? But you can't let it. You can't let it. Yeah, because then otherwise it becomes the oppression section. Like you can't even mention it to your wife. Nothing. Nothing.

Jack shit. So what happens if it's playing with your dick in the balls and you're ignoring it, but you still cum?

Yeah. Blame it on your thoughts. Say, oh, I must have rubbed it on my jeans hard earlier today. Well, he said they'd given the entity recognition in the first place. That was bad. They made it worse by holding the seance. But the worst mistake they made was giving the entity permission to enter the doll. In Ed's words, doing this was like handing a maniac a loaded gun.

And so Ed and Lorraine, it's very hyperbolic. And so Ed and Lorraine took Annabelle the doll into their custody. Although I'm a little unclear on how this works because Ed had just told the girls that the demonic energy was attached to them in particular and moving wouldn't help. Oh, it's because there's a bit of a jump here where he did bring in an exorcist. So when he came in with Annabelle, they had their first meeting. Sure. It was all like, you know, he talked to Annabelle. He's like, what are you doing, Annabelle? You want to fuck?

with me. And then nothing happened, right? But then he came back with the priest. They exercised the doll. They did it all like they had a whole process inside of it. They exercised the doll. They exercised the lady. They went and they did all they squirted holy water around because that's all he does. Because that's the thing with Ed Warren is that he also says he's immune to the phenomenon. He can't see it. It does not engage with him, right? More often than not. That's why he has to do what he calls, he's got to do religious provocations.

Normally. Which we'll get to the next story. But he cleared it. So technically he fixed them. He fixed them. But then he took the doll. Being like, well, you guys essentially can't be responsible with this doll anymore. So I'm going to take it. Okay. But they can just get any doll and offer it up to Annabelle. I think this was, again...

It's all about salesmanship. Yeah. Ed Warren, more than anything. Like, Natalie was looking over my shoulder and there's like a picture of it. Through all the YouTube content, he's doing, like, Ed Warren is leading a tour of his little museum in his house. And he's got the sunglasses inside. He's got the big scarf on, green and purple light on him. And like, I'm sitting there and I'm like, you know, would you believe that some people think that this guy's a carny? And Natalie's like,

That's a carny unlike any carny I've ever seen. Like, that is the lord of carnies. Yeah, he's a jerk. Yes. And so he wanted that doll to be a part of his collection. Yeah. Now, as far as possessed objects go, does it have to be something that looks like a human or could it be like a bottle of Coke or a lamp? It could be anything. But we learned when we did our haunted dolls redux recently that it is just more, quote unquote, powerful to use a human-shaped doll. Yeah. Okay.

Well, from how they told it, the demon immediately tried killing the Warrens on the drive back to their home in Monroe. Shit! By causing the car's power steering and brakes to fail. Meanwhile, like, cutting to him eating a crawler, like, you know, like, you know, like, 44-ounce pumpkin with him with, like, four bear claws being like, I ain't even got time to sit down for fucking lunch. Shit!

How to date oil change sticker. Engine light going off. Annabelle is stuck in the wheel. But right after Ed threw some holy water in the backseat, like a father absentmindedly slapping at his noisy kids during a road trip. Back to Winnipeg. The Warrens were able to get home without further incident.

Now, Ed and Lorraine claim that for weeks afterwards, Annabelle's abilities expanded to levitation and it continued movement around their house. Don't you fold, Annabelle. Listen, I'm going to sit here and I got to write a letter. I got to write a letter to Jimmy Carter and ask him, honestly, what's going on. But what I need you to do is not do nothing. Annabelle, you sit in that chair. You quit floating down, Annabelle. I'm going to fucking tie you to the chair. You're scraping me out.

It's like a guy with a bad Bichon frise. You get down, Annabelle! Well, true to form, once the Warrens were the only witnesses, they claimed that Annabelle could make an ethereal black cat appear, which would just as quickly disappear.

Now, after a year of putting up with Annabelle, during which the doll supposedly tried killing a priest and caused a necklace to explode, all while terrorizing the Warrens' real cat... That fucking cat has just got to just be the most traumatized cat seeing phantoms ever.

Like just all day long, just devils and witches and haunted brides. And it's just like, listen, I'm already a black cat. Do you think my dreams aren't scary? Get out of here.

Well, after a year, they finally locked her away in the infamous positively do not open case where she has remained ever since. Well, that fucking that priest did treat Annabelle disrespectfully. He did pick up Annabelle. He's like because he tried to show that there's no power in the doll. And he picked up Annabelle and he's like, you have no power here, Annabelle. And he threw it across the room. And Ed Warren was like.

you're not going to like that. You're not going to like what she does now. And so he got into a car accident. She said, Lorraine was like, be careful when you're driving on your way home. And then the priest almost got into an accident and then he called later on. He's like, why did you tell me to be careful on the road? And Lorraine was like, ah, flapped her tits around. Fly from your grave. Were you scared? Are you able to sleep tonight, mom?

Yes. The ghosts are real. You know, England's running out of ghosts. They don't deserve them. What are you going to do? Listen.

Thank you for hanging out with us. Go and check us out on Patreon. That's patreon.com slash LPOTL. We love you over there. That's patreon.com slash last podcast on the left. Side stories coming to Chicago on September 13th. Henry and I are hitting the Windy City the night before the sold out show at the Riviera. But Henry and I, September 13th at 530.

the park West theater. Come get into it, baby. Last podcast and a left sold out. You missed it too bad. So sad side stories. Come and get some. We still got a couple of tickets left and I love you guys. And I know you want to come party with Henry and I, and then afterwards I'm going to get sick on all your horrible food. I mean, horrible as in delicious, but,

but horrible as in like it's horrible for me and if i stay there any longer than a couple of days my heart will explode okay so i'm gonna come i'm meeting i'm going to wiener circle i'm getting the dogs i'm going uh whatever the what's the what's the one what they put the the the pizzas in a like a

in like a French onion soup crock and you flip it upside down that weird little spot. I'm gonna eat that shit. Okay. So fucking come hang out with Henry and I, we're going to be there. Last podcast on the left is touring. We're going to be hitting up Iceland. Reiki Vic. There's some tickets left in London. Come see us there. New York, the King's theater and, um, we'll turn on, uh, November 2nd.

So come check that out in Los Angeles. We have a lot of more shows that are going to come. We're going to keep going next year. Nothing's announced yet, but keep your ear to the ground, man. We'll see you next week with a very special episode of...

Last podcast on the left. I'm really excited for y'all to check this out. And eddytoons.com, baby. Go get that Ham Daddy merch. I love you. Listen to the brighter side and be good to yourselves. And hail Ham!

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