The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren (35 page)

Did Ed get a recording of the voices?

“You better believe it,” he replies, tapping a pair of cassettes before him on the table. “Although it’ll take some time before the content of these tapes can be analyzed, the evidence is right here. And in my estimation, it represents some of the most important evidence yet on the existence of the inhuman spirit I’ll play them now....”

The tapes run for well over three hours; what comes across on them is something truly incredible. The recordings were made while Ed and his two assistants, Paul Bartz and John Kenyhercz, interviewed the mother and her three children in the Enfield home. While the three men were questioning the family, other voices—those of spirits—can be heard speaking out loud in the room at the same time: “Let’s put the lights out”; “Go pull the wallpaper down”; “Throw the table”; “Stop him from going into that room” were among the many comments the voices made when not being addressed by human beings in the house. Once every so often, a bizarre parrot-like voice interjected itself saying only, “Hello.” Sometimes the other spirits joined the parrot voice in a round of hello’s. Not all the sounds produced by the spirits were in the form of language, though. Fully ten percent of the recording is taken up with grunts, moans, “yeccchs,” and the imitation of animal sounds, of which the most often repeated is that of a barking dog.

As for communicating with these spirits, there was no evident problem. Sometimes the spirits addressed the people in the room; sometimes the people in the room addressed the spirits. The quality of the voices is extremely raspy, and gutteral. The elocution is definitely cockney—in fact,
so
cockney it’s quite hard for the American ear to sort out. The quality of the spirits’ statements would place them low on a scale of human intelligence, though they’re far from ignorant. Most every question put to the spirits was answered.

Although the inhuman voices usually supplied straight, rational replies, much of what they said was also nonsensical and capricious. There
is
a predominating voice
in
the crowd, and on this occasion, the spirit took on the identity of “Fred.” It was to Fred that Ed Warren addressed most of his questions. What follows is an extract of that interrogation.

“All the while I was talking to these spirits,” Ed notes during the lull in the tape, “things were flying around the room. That’s what those crashing and bumping sounds are in the back ground. Chairs and tables were lifting and dropping. Small, little objects would whiz across the room and bounce off the wall. In the dining room, the wallpaper was peeling away from the walls as we watched. A butcher knife materialized in the lap of my assistant, Paul. A nail was also produced out of thin air. And, as has come to be expected in the house, the spirits left a pile of excrement on the mother’s bedroom carpet upstairs at three in the afternoon.”

When the spirits on the recording weren’t going through a it of random insanity, they seemed to amuse themselves by filling the room with grunts, quacks, barks, shrieks, and a variety of other animal sounds—the most annoying being that of a shrill, screeching cat. One particular spirit put out a tortuous, unworldly howl which brought on another interchange.