Demonic voices. Ghastly images in photographs. Things that go bump in the night. This is the norm for husband and wife team, Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Often said to be “America’s Top Ghost Hunters”, the Warrens packed the Gonzaga Auditorium on Friday, Oct. 17, lecturing in the college circuit as they have for the past 35 years.
Ed Warren, 77, while on the bill for the evening, was unable to show up. Ill for the past two years, bed-ridden Mr. Warren can no longer walk or talk. The Warren’s son-in-law, Tony Spera, came in his stead.
Spera began the evening by offering some background on Lorraine Warren, who stood by him and smiled.
“Lorraine Warren can see, hear and feel things beyond the normal senses,” Spera said and added that Warren, 76, can see a person’s aura. “The aura is a supernatural glow that eminates from every living thing.”
Many in the audience of over 400 people raised hands when asked if they believed in spirits. “Everyone here will live on forever,” Spera said, “But you will never ever die.”
After a brief video, Warren began the slide presentation, showing ghastly images of local hauntings. White mists swirled into the shapes of humans or even detailed faces, drawing gasps from the audience with each new, eerie image.
Union Cemetary in Easton, Conn. and its legendary White Lady was the subject for many of the photographs.
“What you’re looking at is how the energy works,” Warren said, explaining that the mists in the photo were a gathering of energy pulled from nature. “Spirit does not have energy, and it has to draw it from somewhere; trees, animals, anything that lives.”
“Where there is one [ghost],” she said, “there is more. There is rarely ever just one.”
As if the audience wasn’t already captivated, Warren presented another video, moving away from the “human” ghost-syndrome events as were photographed, and moved on to a video and an audio tape; what she called “inhuman and demonic; having never walked the earth.”
The video Warren presented after the slide show was of an exorcism, and appeared to be filmed on a mid 80’s camcorder as the quality was no better than in “The Blair Witch Project.” However, this was no fake documentary done in Hollywood, and this was not the “Exorcist.” This was real.
The exorcism in the video took place in 1985, and it was of a Massachusetts farmer Maurice Theriault, who’s father cursed him before he died. Theriault’s father, who practiced beastiality, made Theriault partake in the activity when he walked in on his father, discovering him in the act. The father pulled him out of school in the third grade.
The video starts with a headshot of Theriault, around 40 at the time, talking to someone off camera. Tears of blood well in his eyes, and then the exorcism begins.
Theriault’s face contorts. Boils bubble up from underneath his skin. His spittle drools from his mouth, turning to blood once it falls upon his white t-shirt.
He blinks three times, then does not close his eyes again for over three minutes, and as the camera zooms in on his face, one sees that his eyes have become serpent-like; the pupils closing to slits similar to a snake or a house cat.
The priest performing the ritual asks him questions, and he answers backwards-in Latin. Theriault, a humble farmer who spoke broken English and had only a third-grade education, spoke Latin backwards before his eyes rolled back into his head.
Theriault and his father shared the same demise. The elder Theriault shot and killed Theriault’s mother, and then himself in the mouth. Theriault shot his wife’s arm off before taking his own life. Numerous exorcisms hadn’t cured him.
At the close of the video, some members of the audience were in tears. And the night wasn’t done yet.
Warren claimed to have demonic voices from out of this world on a small cassette from a house disturbance in the United Kingdom that took place years ago. Warning the audience to shut any and all recording devices off because “of problems that might arise,” Spera and Warren told the audience that it was OK if the squeamish wanted to leave.
Warren said that in this particular case, two girls levitated many feet off the floor, and one of them dematerialized for up to 14 minutes at a time, during which she “moved through a fire-wall.”
As for the demonic voices, of which only about four minutes of tape were played, one sounded like Golum from “The Lord of the Rings.” It barked, it joked, it said it had a name. It might have been from hell, and it even said it knew the devil, calling it by name.
As unbelievable as it sounds, Warren and Spera said that all of this really happened. And even skeptics re-evaluated their beliefs, such as Jon Ruseski, 07, who enjoyed the presentation. “The photographs were rather compelling,” he said, “and [they] provided crucial evidence to myself as a skeptic.”
Jillian Grant, ’05 and vice president of programming for FUSA, who was in charge of bringing the Warrens here, said, “It was very good and the turnout was good.”
Fellow FUSA member Desirae Brown, ’07, agreed. “It was so breath-taking. It’s so undescribable, the stuff that they showed; any non-believer would be transformed, or at least I think so, because the footage was so surreal.”
“It’s just undescribable,” Brown said, “You have to see it to believe it.”
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