Danny is so full of *beep*

While I agree that he's full of *beep* it is not uncommon for someone to remember (or THINK they remember) traumatic events in their lives with great clarity for decades....

He clearly has emotional issues. I think the end of the film clearly illustrates the dilemma. When talking to the therapist, he touches on just wanting to be believed. Wanting anyone to believe his story, and he mentions several times he never got to say his part as a child. What this indicates to me is that George Lutz was possibly a very abusive person, and Danny is trying to tell people George is not the nice guy people think. So Danny himself is now twisted into the paranormal stuff when what he really wants/needs is closure on the neglect and abuse from both his parents and possibly the boarding school he was left at while his parents went on tour. And since all anyone asks him about is the paranormal story, he's now resentful and angry and doesn't know how to separate the stories himself. So when Danny is speaking of supernatural stuff, deep down he's trying to say George.

I believe that supernatural occurrences happened to them while he was in the house. If this was all just a scheme to make money, I think he would've said so. From what I gather, it was George's idea to go public with the story. If George was as much of an abusive scumbag as Danny said he was, I do not believe that he would've corroborated his story at all. He hated George and was happy when he died, so if this really was just a scam for George to get rich off of, Danny would've contradicted his story any way he could. That's one of the reasons why I believe his story is true.

I've been waiting for you, Ben.

I agree. That guy is a effin' weirdo. I think he's smoked a few bowls too many. If I was the camera guy at the end I would have punched him.

What is so curious to me and eye opening is that so many people are quick to call "bull" on any story of possession no matter what and it's not hard to see why.

I think that it comes down to this. If you are a spiritual person of any faith you believe that possessions and paranormal are absolutely possible because you believe that there is a force of evil just as you believe in a force of good.

However, I can almost guarantee that every single person who is calling Daniel a/an (expletive deleted) is either a person of weak faith or an outright atheist. You don't want to believe it is true because if even one sliver of it is true then it proves that there is more to existence than what our senses can perceive. If there is more to existence than sensory experience then there is a chance your atheism is misguided.

It's pretty easy to see that all of you who bash this guy (who may be full of it...I honestly can't say either way with certainty and neither can any of you) are basing your unbelief in him solely on the fact that you yourselves don't believe in a spiritual realm...in short, you call him an outright liar automatically because of your own lack of faith...not because of anything he has said or done.

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"Live every week like it's Shark Week."

Danny contradicted himself at least a couple of times in his stories in really strange ways. It wasn't like he said one thing and then contradicted himself later on in the interview. He practically did it in the same breath. When he was telling the story about the flies upstairs, he said that his mom came in and saw them and started screaming in freaking out. He then says that he started smashing the flies, but suddenly he claimed his mother was downstairs in the kitchen. He says he went down and told her what happened, but when she went upstairs with him there were no flies to be seen and she didn't seem to believe him. He said all this so quickly and without pause that you could easily miss it, but he tells two completely different stories of the same event as if it was one story.

He also seemed to be contradicting himself about when he left home. I still don't know what age he left home because that seemed to change so many times back to back.

As for his belief that his bed was floating, his memory of the event could be easily explained. Imagine you are 10 years old and sound asleep and suddenly your parents rush into the room screaming and freaking out. You're gonna wake up in complete shock having no idea what's going on, and your parents are telling you your bed was just floating and slamming against the ceiling or whatever. You're gonna believe them and freak out and be scarred by this memory. Eventually you'll even believe that you remember it happening.

Anyway, he definitely has some serious unresolved family issues. It doesn't help that he was thrust into fame at such a young age and was probably subject to manipulation by his parents who were trying to convince him all these things happened so he wouldn't ruin things for them. Even if he didn't believe these things happened at one time, he may have convinced himself along the way to try to escape the pressure and possible abuse from his parents.

Of course this is all theory as to why he had turned out the way he is (obviously disturbed). I don't know what his mom and stepfather were or were not like, but listening to him it seems like there are some really deep issues there relating more to his family than to supposed supernatural occurrences.

While I don't believe the stuff he says, I'm not as sure that Danny's "lying." I think <b>he</b> believes what he's saying. That doesn't mean it's true; it just means that he believes he experienced it and therefore isn't a liar or "full of ****."

Danny and his family were religious, and very religious people can convince themselves of all sorts of crazy things. I work with a woman who literally believes "demons" come and bother her whenever she's got a conflict of what to do about a situation. She's not just using figurative language -- she sees and hears these "demons." Of course, there are no such things, but since she really believes in them, she interprets things as being "demonic," confuses dreams with reality, imagines things and later thinks they actually happened, etc. She's not completely sane, but she's not "crazy," either - she's functional and not on meds or anything (although, honestly, it might help her if she was).

This happens to her with other events besides "demons." For instance, one day I saw some cops helping a guy up off the sidewalk in front of our workplace and mentioned it to her. She never saw it, and I didn't know what had happened to the guy, if he just tripped and fell or what. Well, she decided - just from me saying I saw the guy getting picked up - that he'd gotten hit by a car, and the car drove off without helping him, and we should all be on the lookout for this hit-and-run car, etc. It was a scenario she had completely made up. By the end of the day she was telling people she'd seen the car hit this guy. And the weird thing is, she <b>believed</b> that she had. She'd played this made-up scene over and over in her mind so many times that she'd convinced herself that it was true and she'd witnessed it.

Also, I used to work at a radio station that aired religious programs. One woman who came in used to speak in tongues and start crying during her show, and her strange "fits" would go on for another ten, fifteen minutes after the show was over. And she'd say she saw devils and angels in the corner, etc. She truly believed she was seeing them, but, of course, they weren't there. She was a very nice lady and she wasn't trying to lie... she just made up stories in her head that she wanted to believe and convinced herself they were real. And she really thought they were.

I think Danny's probably doing that. I don't think he's trying to hoax anybody, and I don't think he's saying much that he doesn't firmly believe is true. But, that doesn't mean that what he thinks happened actually happened... it's just something he's convinced himself of.

The mind's a strange thing... it can get programmed, often by one's own self, to believe things that have no basis in reality. I'm sure we all have relatives who tell stories about things that happened in the past and we know they're not true because we were there... but our relatives swear those things happened. They remember it wrong and believe it, so it's not a "lie," even though it's not true, either.

Which is another reason why he became extremely hostile to the interviewer right before the credit roll.