The True Story Behind The Conjuring Universe

Who were the real Ed and Lorraine Warren?

Now that the latest film in The Conjuring franchise, titled The Conjuring: Last Rites, is playing in theaters, it’s the perfect time to learn more about Ed and Lorraine Warren, the couple of paranormal investigators and self-proclaimed demonologists behind the “true” (?) stories of the films.

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As is more or less portrayed in the movies, Lorraine claimed from a young age that she could see people’s auras and those of other entities, as well as fall into a sort of trance that revealed things beyond ordinary human vision. Ed, on the other hand, while not having similar abilities, claimed to have lived in a haunted house, which led him to become a self-taught demonologist. Once they became a couple, armed with their faith in God, they dedicated themselves to hunting demons and evil spirits. In 1952, having gained some “experience” in investigating paranormal cases, they founded the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR), an organization that, apart from clergy, reportedly also included lawyers, doctors, and police officers in an attempt to provide “scientific” documentation of cases. By the end of their lives, they claimed to have studied more than 10,000 hauntings and possessions.

The cases that inspired the popular Conjuring franchise largely date back to the 1970s and 1980s, when their work reached peak popularity.

The most famous of all, the Annabelle doll, was linked to a 1970 case. It all began when a young nurse received the doll as a gift. Days later, the doll started moving to different places, writing messages like “help” on sheets of paper that hadn’t existed in the house, and worst of all—oozing blood! The first medium the young woman and her roommate consulted told them the doll was possessed by the spirit of a little girl, Annabelle Higgins. The Warrens, however, had a different assessment: behind the doll lurked something demonic. To save the two young women, they removed the doll from the house—something the doll clearly didn’t like, since, according to their account, their car broke down multiple times on the way. The Warrens had to douse the doll with holy water so it would allow them to take it to their home and, specifically, their Occult Museum.

Yes, the Warrens’ Occult Museum really exists. There they placed all the “cursed” objects they had acquired from the cases they had “resolved.” Among them, the most famous was Annabelle, locked in a glass case with a sign: “Do not touch.”

Other dark cases the Warrens were involved in also fueled the Conjuring franchise. The haunted Perron family house—where, according to the Warrens, the spirit of a 19th-century satanist/witch named Bathsheba Sherman was to blame—inspired the first film of the series in 2013. In reality, however, the story ended not with an exorcism as shown in the film, but with the much less dramatic solution of the family moving to a new house.

Of course, the cases they took on, which could be dramatized, were countless. One case, however, stood out: the Warrens did not hesitate to put the devil himself on trial. In 1981, when Arne Cheyenne Johnson was charged with murdering his landlord, he declared in court that he had been possessed during the attack. The Warrens, who had been called before the murder to investigate the supposed demonic possession of Johnson’s fiancée’s brother, had no problem confirming Johnson’s own possession. Unfortunately for Johnson, demonic possession was not recognized as a legal defense, and he was sentenced to 10–20 years in prison.

Naturally, the Warrens’ credibility was questioned many times over the years, and evidence that came to light was often unfriendly to their claims. Their most famous case, the 1975 Amityville haunting—in which the Lutz family claimed to suffer violent spiritual attacks—is one of the most heavily challenged. The Warrens visited the house, “confronted” the hauntings, and claimed to have captured the image of a young boy’s ghost on camera. The case inspired the horror film The Amityville Horror (1979) and the book two years earlier. Skeptical paranormal investigator Benjamin Radford revealed that the Warrens’ claims were contradicted by both eyewitnesses and forensic evidence. In 1979, lawyer William Weber admitted that he and the Lutz family had concocted the story over several bottles of wine.

Another blow to the Warrens’ credibility came from Ray Garton, who co-wrote with them the 1992 book In a Dark Place, about one of their cases. The book became a bestseller and inspired the 2009 horror movie The Haunting in Connecticut. Garton later said that much of what was in the book was fabricated—something the Warrens not only knew but encouraged.

None of this, however, stopped the Warrens from continuing to investigate cases, give lectures, publish books, sell tickets for tours of the Occult Museum, and sell the rights to their stories to movie studios.

The darkest case of all, however, concerns the couple themselves. In 2014, Judith Penney alleged that she had lived in the Warrens’ home for 40 years and had a sexual relationship with Ed that began when he was 27 and she was just 15. According to her account, when she became pregnant, Lorraine persuaded her to have an abortion to avoid scandal and to claim she had been raped by an intruder. She also alleged she had witnessed Ed physically abusing Lorraine.

Ed had already died in 2006. Lorraine, who died in 2019, denied the allegations and included in her contract for The Conjuring films a clause forbidding depictions of herself and Ed involved in extramarital affairs or sexual relations with a minor.