In 1971, a Chicago family’s private nightmare became a public curiosity when an NBC crew entered their two-flat to film what many later called a televised exorcism. The segment is short, grainy, and strangely incomplete, yet it anchors one of the most discussed paranormal cases of its era: the Becker haunting. On State of the Unknown, we track what the surviving broadcast actually shows, what Edwin and Marsha Becker reported living through, and why a few minutes of old TV footage can still shape how people talk about haunted houses, exorcisms, and paranormal investigation today.
The Beckers’ story begins like many “haunted house” accounts, with small disruptions that can be explained away. A phone receiver ends up off the hook. Objects go missing and reappear. Edwin later describes a garage key bent into an L shape, and Marsha reportedly sees an electric mixer lift. Then the harder-to-ignore details arrive: a woman’s voice crying at night and what sounds like an argument that returns with eerie timing. The uncertainty becomes its own stressor, especially in a multi-unit building where neighbors, sound travel, and daily routines can mimic the supernatural. When tenants also report crashes and unsettling moments, the haunting narrative starts to feel less like coincidence and more like a pattern.
As fear grows, the Beckers search for meaning, and meaning often arrives as backstory. A neighbor shares tales of prior residents, deaths, and strained family ties, and Edwin begins connecting the reported voices to specific people who once lived there. That link is emotionally compelling, but it’s also a reminder of how paranormal claims can form: ambiguous experiences meet a story that organizes them. After a parish priest’s blessing ends abruptly and the priest refuses to return, the Beckers look beyond their parish to psychics and investigators. Names emerge that become central to the case, including psychic Joseph Deloise and Reverend William Durrell Davis of Chicago’s Independent Spiritualist Church, with reporter Carol Simpson documenting the event for NBC.
The televised “cleansing” is the core artifact, and it’s revealing in ways that go beyond whether spirits exist. The footage shows a room crowded with people wearing crucifixes, a medium entering a trance, and a ritual using communion, blessed salt, and a mirror said to demonstrate that a spirit has no reflection. A gust of air moves curtains and blinds, and disagreement begins right there: the reporter attributes it to an open window, while Edwin later insists the windows were closed. The camera captures reactions and atmosphere, but not clarity. Viewers at home hear scratchy audio and rely on narration to interpret what is happening, which is exactly how a public mystery is born from partial documentation.
Decades later, Edwin Becker publishes True Haunting and reframes the ending: the quiet reported on TV does not last, the disturbances continue, and the family eventually moves out. Then comes the detail that keeps the story alive online: Becker rewatching the tape and pointing to a brief shape in a doorway, calling it an apparition. Later skeptical analysis, including a 2024 Skeptical Inquirer review, suggests the “figure” could be a curtain and questions parts of the claimed house history using genealogy records. The result is not a neat debunking or a neat confirmation. It’s a case study in how evidence, memory, media editing, and later retellings can fuse into one enduring question: when a camera records a moment, what exactly does it preserve, and what do we project onto the blur?