TV Ghost Hunter Buys 'The Devil's Rocking Chair'

MONROE, CT — The infamous "Devil's Rocking Chair," which featured prominently in one of the late Monroe paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren's most renowned cases, is bound for Vegas.

Zak Bagans, arguably his generation's most famous ghost hunter, purchased the piece of fearsome furniture for installation in his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, TMZ is reporting. Bagans' current Travel Channel series, "Deadly Possessions," follows the investigator's ectoplasmic adventures as he searches for items sufficiently nefarious to add to his museum's collection.

The rocking chair was at the center of one of the supernatural's — and the US legal system's — most famous trials. In the 1981 case heard in Superior Court in Danbury, Arne Cheyenne Johnson was convicted of first-degree manslaughter for the killing of his landlord. The defense, bolstered by testimony from local demonologists Lorraine and Ed Warren, upheld that the accused should be absolved of personal responsibility in the crime as he was possessed by an evil spirit at the time.

That demonic entity was the same one that the Warrens claimed they helped drive out from a possessed 11-year-old boy named David Glatzel through a series of exorcisms. But the body-snatching Babadook left Glatzel and moved into Johnson, the ghost hunters testified, causing him to kill his landlord months later. The chair that Bagens bought was the one in which Glatzel sat during the exorcisms (it still has holy water stains on it, TMZ reported) and would even rock on its own, unoccupied. The Warrens claimed to have seen the devil sitting in it.

The circumstances in the case were the subject of author Gerald Brittle's "The Devil in Connecticut" and the NBC movie "The Demon Murder Case."

Bagens purchased the chair from Carl Glatzel, David's brother, for $67,000. The storied rocking chair will join other objets d'spooky in Bagens' museum of the macabre — including Dr. Kevorkian's "Death Van," where the euthanasia enthusiast dispatched his clients, and the famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons Dybbuk Box, the inspiration for the 2012 movie "The Possession."

TMZ notes that Bagans bought the "Devil's Rocking Chair" from Glatzel just hours before Lorraine Warren died last week. Scary stuff...