A presentation by America’s Top Ghost Catchers Friday night apparently was too frightening for about 50 audience members, who left the Student Center ballrooms in a hurry as the presenters prepared to play a recording of demons’ voices.

Ed and Lorraine Warren have spent 29 years as university speakers and, for 45 years, have studied 5,000 cases involving supernatural phenomena.

In the darkened Student Center ballrooms underneath dimmed red lights, the Warrens shared their stories with a standing-room audience of a few hundred people.

[Studying the supernatural] really deeply affects you, said Lorraine, one of the country’s leading clairvoyants. Only when you’ve had such an encounter can you respect what it’s worth.

ABC is piloting a show this year, The Warren Files, based on the couple’s experiences. They have appeared on 20/20, Entertainment Tonight and Good Morning America.

The audience thinned considerably when Ed warned those who were sensitive to leave before he began playing recordings of demons, whose voices he said came out of thin air. The scratchy voices had answered a few of Ed’s questions, before one began wailing Help.

So many things occurred in this home [where the voices were], Ed said. They tried to strangle the mom and would break windows.

Ed instructed those with tape recorders to not record the voices.

We’ve had college students record these sounds, and we’ve had to go to their dorms later, he said.

The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror movies were spawned by the Warrens’ studies, and clips from these movies, along with a slide show, were presented Friday with what the Warrens called evidence of supernatural activities.

The Warrens studied one house in London in which 44 suicides were committed. Much like The Amityville Horror, Ed said houses can possess an evil that affects the residents.

Some of them (houses) are so violent, so bad, that we just tell the people to leave, he said.

In 1990, the Warrens set a precedent in court by proving that a house was haunted, and the owner could not be sued for breaking the lease.

This kind of house you should lock it up, Ed said. It’s a house of evil.

One of the stories the Warrens shared involved a demonic spirit they say inhabits a Raggedy Ann doll.

This could be Chuckie’s sister, Ed said, drawing laughs by comparing the doll to the evil doll in the movie Child’s Play.

But the audience’s laughter soon died as Ed described the doll’s history, which began when a woman gave her 28-year-old daughter the doll as a present.

The doll’s arms reportedly levitated one day, which intrigued the woman and her roommates. A medium came to the house, and a seance took place. The woman believed the doll to be inhabited by the spirit of a 6-year-old child killed in a car accident nearby.

They treated it like a child, Ed said. They bought it jewelry and took it for rides.

But Ed said the doll actually is inhabited by a diabolical spirit pretending to be a child.

Scratching sounds started emerging from the walls, ceiling and under the beds, Ed said. The fiancee of one of the women wanted them to get rid of it; he had a nightmare it was strangling him.

Ed said the boyfriend made a mistake by throwing the doll into a corner.

Psychosomatic slashes appeared out of nowhere on his body, Ed said. Things started busting and breaking.

It took many months of counseling to straighten out these people’s minds.

The Warrens blame the doll, now locked in a case in the Warrens’ museum in New England, for the death of a man and the near-deaths of several others. Ed said people who taunt the demonic doll succumb to tragic fates.

The Warrens told several other stories, including the well-known story of the lady in white, a ghost believed to haunt Union Graveyard in Connecticut. In the last three decades, more than 50 people, including police, firefighters and businessmen, have reported encounters with the ghost.

The black spirits seem to not allow her to pass on, Lorraine said.

Although Lorraine said she has not been able to help the lady in white, she has helped many people pass over, and that is why she chose such a profession.

Lorraine recalled one case in which a Catholic woman killed her baby and then committed suicide. For years afterward, a weeping woman and crying baby could be heard in that house until Lorraine said she spoke with the woman and helped her.

The Warrens also showed photos they say are evidence that ghosts and apparitions exist. On first glance, the photos appeared ordinary. But then the couple would point out inexplicable images.

In one somber wedding photo, the wedding party is standing in front of the church. The bride’s mother had just died. Just over the bride’s should is the image of the mother.

It was such photos that impressed Bob Bertolani, a senior in elementary education from Lombard.

The pictures had me freaked out, he said. There were a lot that I thought weren’t real, but there were a lot you can’t explain.

Bertolani did not believe the presentation provided evidence of the supernatural.

It’s not that I don’t believe, he said. I haven’t found any proof to believe. [The Warrens’] hard evidence I didn’t see as hard evidence.

But Errin Turner, an undecided freshman from Edwardsville, is not as skeptical.

I thought I’d come here in the spirit of Halloween, she said. It’s interesting because if you believe in it, it demonstrates there’s something out there other than us.